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8] Studies published in 2007 and 2008 dismissed evidence of arsenic poisoning, and confirmed evidence of peptic ulcer and gastric cancer as the cause of death.[214]
Religion
Reorganisation of the religious geography: France is divided into 59 dioceses and 10 ecclesiastical provinces
Napoleon's baptism took place in Ajaccio on 21 July 1771; he was piously raised as a Catholic but he never developed much faith.[215] As an adult, Napoleon was a deist. Napoleon's deity was an absent and distant God. However he had a keen appreciation of the power of organised religion in social and political affairs, and paid a great deal of attention to bending it to his purposes. He noted the influence of Catholicism's rituals and splendors.[215] Napoleon had a civil marriage with Joséphine de Beauharnais, without religious ceremony. Napoleon was crowned Emperor on 2 December 1804 at Notre-Dame de Paris in a ceremony presided over by Pope Pius VII. On the eve of the Coronation ceremony, and at the insistence of Pope Pius VII, a private religious wedding ceremony of Napoleon and Joséphine was celebrated. Cardinal Fesch performed the wedding.[216] This marriage was annulled by tribunals under Napoleon's control in January 1810. On 1 April 1810, Napoleon married the Austrian princess Marie Louise in a Catholic ceremony. During his brother's rule in Spain, he abolished the Spanish Inquisition in 1813. Napoleon was excommunicated by the Catholic Church, but later reconciled with the Church before his death in 1821.[217]
Concordat
Leaders of the Catholic Church taking the civil oath required by the Concordat
Seeking national reconciliation between revolutionaries and Catholics, the Concordat of 1801 was signed on 15 July 1801 between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII. It solidified the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church of France and brought back most of its civil status. The hostility of devout Catholics against the state had now largely been resolved. It did not restore the vast church lands and endowments that had been seized during the revolution and sold off. As a part of the Concordat, he presented another set of laws called the Organic Articles.[218][219]
While the Concordat restored much power to the papacy, the balance of church–state relations had tilted firmly in Napoleon's favour. He selected the bishops and supervised church finances. Napoleon and the pope both found the Concordat useful. Similar arrangements were made with the Church in territories controlled by Napoleon, especially Italy and Germany.[220] Now, Napoleon could win favor with the Catholics while also controlling Rome in a political sense. Napoleon said in April 1801, "Skillful conquerors have not got entangled with priests. They can both contain them and use them". French children were issued a catechism that taught them to love and respect Napoleon.[221]
Arrest of Pope Pius VII
In 1809, under Napoleon's orders, Pope Pius VII was placed under arrest in Italy, and in 1812 the prisoner Pontiff was transferred to France, being held in the Palace of Fontainebleau.[222] Because the arrest was made in a clandestine manner, some sources[223][222] describe it as a kidnapping. The Pope was only released in 1814 when the Allies invaded France. In January 1813, Napoleon personally forced the Pope to sign a humiliating "Concordat of Fontainebleau".[224] The 1813 document was later repudiated by the Pontiff.[225]
Religious emancipation
Napoleon emancipated Jews, as well as Protestants in Catholic countries and Catholics in Protestant countries, from laws which restricted them to ghettos, and he expanded their rights to property, worship, and careers. Despite the anti-semitic reaction to Napoleon's policies from foreign governments and within France, he believed emancipation would benefit France by attracting Jews to the country given the restrictions they faced elsewhere.[226]
In 1806 an Assembly of Jewish notables was gathered by Napoleon to discuss 12 questions broadly dealing with the relations between Jews, Christians and other issues dealing with the Jewish ability to integrate into the general French society. Later, after the questions were answered in a satisfactory way according to the Emperor, a "great Sanhedrin" was brought together to transform the answers into decisions that would form the basis of the future status of the Jews in France and the rest of the Empire Napoleon was building.[227]
He stated, "I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France, because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country. It takes weakness to chase them out of the country, but it takes strength to assimilate them".[228] He was seen as so favourable to the Jews that the Russian Orthodox Church formally condemned him as "Antichrist and the Enemy of God".[229]
One year after the final meeting of the Sanhedrin, on 17 March 1808, Napoleon placed the Jews on probation. Several new laws restricting the citizenship the Jews had been offered 17 years previously were instituted at that time. However, despite pressure from leaders of a number of Christian communities to refrain from granting Jews emancipation, within one year of the issue of the new restrictions, they were once again lifted in response to the appeal of Jews from all over France.[227]
Personality
Napoleon visiting the Palais Royal for the opening of the 8th session of the Tribunat in 1807, by Merry-Joseph Blondel
Historians emphasize the strength of the ambition that took Napoleon from an obscure village to command of most of Europe.[230] In-depth academic studies about his early life conclude that up until age 2, he had a "gentle disposition".[29] His older brother, Joseph, frequently received their mother's attention which made Napoleon more assertive and approval-driven. During his early schooling years he would be harshly bullied by classmates for his Corsican identity and control of the French language. To withstand the stress he became domineering, eventually developing an inferiority complex.[29]
George F. E. Rudé stresses his "rare combination of will, intellect and physical vigour".[231] In one-on-one situations he typically had a hypnotic effect on people, seemingly bending the strongest leaders to his will.[232] He understood military technology, but was not an innovator in that regard.[233] He was an innovator in using the financial, bureaucratic, and diplomatic resources of France. He could rapidly dictate a series of complex commands to his subordinates, keeping in mind where major units were expected to be at each future point, and like a chess master, "seeing" the best plays moves ahead.[234]
Napoleon maintained strict, efficient work habits, prioritizing what needed to be done. He cheated at cards, but repaid the losses; he had to win at everything he attempted.[235] He kept relays of staff and secretaries at work. Unlike many generals, Napoleon did not examine history to ask what Hannibal or Alexander or anyone else did in a similar situation. Critics said he won many battles simply because of luck; Napoleon responded, "Give me lucky generals", aware that "luck" comes to leaders who recognize opportunity, and seize it.[236] Dwyer states that Napoleon's victories at Austerlitz and Jena in 1805–06 heightened his sense of self-grandiosity, leaving him even more certain of his destiny and invincibility.[237]
In terms of influence on events, it was more than Napoleon's personality that took effect. He reorganized France itself to supply the men and money needed for wars.[238] He inspired his men—Wellington said his presence on the battlefield was worth 40,000 soldiers, for he inspired confidence from privates to field marshals.[239] He also unnerved the enemy. At the Battle of Auerstadt in 1806, King Frederick William III of Prussia outnumbered the French by 63,000 to 27,000; however, when he was told, mistakenly, that Napoleon was in command, he ordered a hasty retreat that turned into a rout.[240] The force of his personality neutralized material difficulties as his soldiers fought with the confidence that with Napoleon in charge they would surely win.[241]
Image
Napoleon has become a worldwide cultural icon who symbolises military genius and political power. Martin van Creveld described him as "the most competent human being who ever lived".[242] Since his death, many towns, streets, ships, and even cartoon characters have been named after him. He has been portrayed in hundreds of films and discussed in hundreds of thousands of books and articles.[243]
When met in person, many of his contemporaries were surprised by his apparently unremarkable physical appearance in contrast to his significant deeds and reputation, especially in his youth, when he was consistently described as small and thin. Joseph Farington, who observed Napoleon personally in 1802, commented that "Samuel Rogers stood a little way from me and... seemed to be disappointed in the look of [Napoleon's] countenance [face] and said it was that of a little Italian." Farington said Napoleon's eyes were "lighter, and more of a grey, than I should have expected from his complexion", that "His person is below middle size", and that "his general aspect was milder than I had before thought it."[244] A personal friend of Napoleon's said that when he first met him in Brienne-le-Château as a young man, Napoleon was only notable "for the dark color of his complexion, for his piercing and scrutinising glance, and for the style of his conversation"; he also said that Napoleon was personally a serious and somber man: "his conversation bore the appearance of ill-humor, and he was certainly not very amiable."[245] Johann Ludwig Wurstemberger, who accompanied Napoleon from Camp Fornio in 1797 and on the Swiss campaign of 1798, noted that "Bonaparte was rather slight and emaciated-looking; his face, too, was very thin, with a dark complexion... his black, unpowdered hair hung down evenly over both shoulders", but that, despite his slight and unkempt appearance, "His looks and expression were earnest and powerful."[246] Denis Davydov met him personally and considered him remarkably average in appearance: "His face was slightly swarthy, with regular features. His nose was not very large, but straight, with a slight, hardly noticeable bend. The hair on his head was dark reddish-blond; his eyebrows and eyelashes were much darker than the colour of his hair, and his blue eyes, set off by the almost black lashes, gave him a most pleasing expression... The man I saw was of short stature, just over five feet tall, rather heavy although he was only 37 years old."[247]
Napoleon's death mask. Musée de l'Armée, Paris
During the Napoleonic Wars he was taken seriously by the British press as a dangerous tyrant, poised to invade. Napoleon was mocked in British newspapers as a short tempered small man and he was nicknamed "Little Boney in a strong fit".[248] A nursery rhyme warned children that Bonaparte ravenously ate naughty people; the "bogeyman".[249] At 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 m), he was the height of an average French male but short for an aristocrat or officer (part of why he was assigned to the artillery, since at the time the infantry and cavalry required more commanding figures).[250] It is possible he was taller at 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m) due to the difference in the French measurement of inches.[251] Some historians believe that the reason for the mistake about his size at death came from use of an obsolete old French yardstick (a French foot equals 33 cm, while an English foot equals 30.47 cm).[250] Napoleon was a champion of the metric system and had no use for the old yardsticks. It is more likely that he was 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 m), the height he was measured at on St. Helena (a British island), since he would have most likely been measured with an English yardstick rather than a yardstick of the Old French Regime.[250] Napoleon surrounded himself with tall bodyguards and was affectionately nicknamed le petit caporal (the little corporal), reflecting his reported camaraderie with his soldiers rather than his height.
When he became First Consul and later Emperor, Napoleon eschewed his general's uniform and habitually wore the green colonel uniform (non-Hussar) of a colonel of the Chasseur à Cheval of the Imperial Guard, the regiment that served as his personal escort many times, with a large bicorne. He also habitually wore (usually on Sundays) the blue uniform of a colonel of the Imperial Guard Foot Grenadiers (blue with white facings and red cuffs). He also wore his Légion d'honneur star, medal and ribbon, and the Order of the Iron Crown decorations, white French-style culottes and white stockings. This was in contrast to the complex uniforms with many decorations of his marshals and those around him.
In his later years he gained quite a bit of weight and had a complexion considered pale or sallow, something contemporaries took note of. Novelist Paul de Kock, who saw him in 1811 on the balcony of the Tuileries, called Napoleon "yellow, obese, and bloated".[252] A British captain who met him in 1815 stated "I felt very much disappointed, as I believe everyone else did, in his appearance... He is fat, rather what we call pot-bellied, and although his leg is well shaped, it is rather clumsy... He is very sallow, with light grey eyes, and rather thin, greasy-looking brown hair, and altogether a very nasty, priestlike-looking fellow."[253]
The stock character of Napoleon is a comically short "petty tyrant" and this has become a cliché in popular culture. He is often portrayed wearing a large bicorne hat with a hand-in-waistcoat gesture—a reference to the painting produced in 1812 by Jacques-Louis David. In 1908 Alfred Adler, a psychologist, cited Napoleon to describe an inferiority complex in which short people adopt an over-aggressive behaviour to compensate for lack of height; this inspired the term Napoleon complex.[255]
Reforms
Napoleon instituted various reforms, such as higher education, a tax code, road and sewer systems, and established the Banque de France, the first central bank in French history. He negotiated the Concordat of 1801 with the Catholic Church, which sought to reconcile the mostly Catholic population to his regime. It was presented alongside the Organic Articles, which regulated public worship in France. He dissolved the Holy Roman Empire prior to German Unification later in the 19th century. The sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States doubled the size of the United States.[256]
In May 1802, he instituted the Legion of Honour, a substitute for the old royalist decorations and orders of chivalry, to encourage civilian and military achievements; the order is still the highest decoration in France.[257]
Napoleonic Code
First page of the 1804 original edition of the Code Civil
Napoleon's set of civil laws, the Code Civil—now often known as the Napoleonic Code—was prepared by committees of legal experts under the supervision of Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, the Second Consul. Napoleon participated actively in the sessions of the Council of State that revised the drafts. The development of the code was a fundamental change in the nature of the civil law legal system with its stress on clearly written and accessible law. Other codes ("Les cinq codes") were commissioned by Napoleon to codify criminal and commerce law; a Code of Criminal Instruction was published, which enacted rules of due process.[258]
The Napoleonic code was adopted throughout much of Continental Europe, though only in the lands he conquered, and remained in force after Napoleon's defeat. Napoleon said: "My true glory is not to have won forty battles... Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories.... But... what will live forever, is my Civil Code".[259] The Code influences a quarter of the world's jurisdictions such as that of in Continental Europe, the Americas and Africa.[260]
Dieter Langewiesche described the code as a "revolutionary project" which spurred the development of bourgeois society in Germany by the extension of the right to own property and an acceleration towards the end of feudalism. Napoleon reorganised what had been the Holy Roman Empire, made up of more than a thousand entities,[quantify] into a more streamlined forty-state Confederation of the Rhine; this helped promote the German Confederation and the unification of Germany in 1871.[261]
The movement toward national unification in Italy was similarly precipitated by Napoleonic rule.[262] These changes contributed to the development of nationalism and the nation state.[263]
Napoleon implemented a wide array of liberal reforms in France and across Continental Europe, especially in Italy and Germany, as summarized by British historian Andrew Roberts:
The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.[264]
Napoleon directly overthrew remnants of feudalism in much of western Continental Europe. He liberalised property laws, ended seigneurial dues, abolished the guild of merchants and craftsmen to facilitate entrepreneurship, legalised divorce, closed the Jewish ghettos and made Jews equal to everyone else. The Inquisition ended as did the Holy Roman Empire. The power of church courts and religious authority was sharply reduced and equality under the law was proclaimed for all men.[265]
Warfare
Statue in Cherbourg-Octeville unveiled by Napoleon III in 1858. Napoleon I strengthened the town's defences to prevent British naval incursions.
In the field of military organisation, Napoleon borrowed from previous theorists such as Jacques Antoine Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert, and from the reforms of preceding French governments, and then developed much of what was already in place. He continued the policy, which emerged from the Revolution, of promotion based primarily on merit.[266]
Corps replaced divisions as the largest army units, mobile artillery was integrated into reserve batteries, the staff system became more fluid and cavalry returned as an important formation in French military doctrine. These methods are now referred to as essential features of Napoleonic warfare.[266] Though he consolidated the practice of modern conscription introduced by the Directory, one of the restored monarchy's first acts was to end it.[267]
His opponents learned from Napoleon's innovations. The increased importance of artillery after 1807 stemmed from his creation of a highly mobile artillery force, the growth in artillery numbers, and changes in artillery practices. As a result of these factors, Napoleon, rather than relying on infantry to wear away the enemy's defenses, now could use massed artillery as a spearhead to pound a break in the enemy's line that was then exploited by supporting infantry and cavalry. McConachy rejects the alternative theory that growing reliance on artillery by the French army beginning in 1807 was an outgrowth of the declining quality of the French infantry and, later, France's inferiority in cavalry numbers.[268] Weapons and other kinds of military technology remained static through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, but 18th-century operational mobility underwent change.[269]
Napoleon's biggest influence was in the conduct of warfare. Antoine-Henri Jomini explained Napoleon's methods in a widely used textbook that influenced all European and American armies.[270] Napoleon was regarded by the influential military theorist Carl von Clausewitz as a genius in the operational art of war, and historians rank him as a great military commander.[271] Wellington, when asked who was the greatest general of the day, answered: "In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon".[272]
Under Napoleon, a new emphasis towards the destruction, not just outmanoeuvring, of enemy armies emerged. Invasions of enemy territory occurred over broader fronts which made wars costlier and more decisive. The political effect of war increased; defeat for a European power meant more than the loss of isolated enclaves. Near-Carthaginian peaces intertwined whole national efforts, intensifying the Revolutionary phenomenon of total war.[273]
Metric system
The official introduction of the metric system in September 1799 was unpopular in large sections of French society. Napoleon's rule greatly aided adoption of the new standard not only across France but also across the French sphere of influence. Napoleon took a retrograde step in 1812 when he passed legislation to introduce the mesures usuelles (traditional units of measurement) for retail trade,[274] a system of measure that resembled the pre-revolutionary units but were based on the kilogram and the metre; for example, theABSTRACT. THE PATH OF THE ICE-9 REACTION.
Determinism of the ice-9 reaction after a decade of growing experimental & theoretical proofs.
From time to time we will bring in this post the relevant new records and new forms of quark strange liquids produced by the Industry of Accelerators, which sooner than latter will start up an ice-9 reaction that will ‘freeze’ into a 15 km. rock mother Earth… And some other strange news about the obsession with genocide of nuclear physicists and its faked, ‘great research’ flukes on the meaning of it all.
Now to set the record straight; the argument of our extinction by strangelets in the next decades with near certainty unless the Industry of Accelerators is decommissioned, has become in a decade since LHC started far more clear for two reasons. At galactic level the mounting evidence that pulsars are strange stars and the dark matter of the halo is made of strangelets (Witten’s Hypothesis) has become so strong that now both ideas are mainstream, albeit treated with ‘pinheads’ not to ‘offend’ CERN (that is, never relating them to the experiments on strange matter at the LHC).
Paradoxically CERN has strongly contribute to this clarification by two avenues:
First, because it has NOT found any relevant particle outside the standard model, making quite evident that the symmetry between the 3 type of quarks of growing mass and the 3 parts of the galaxy of growing mass (ud-light stars, our matter, heavy strangelet halo of strange quarks, ‘our future’ and top quark stars – aka black holes of maximal density in the center), is the sound-sound theory that respects ‘economicity’ (Mach’s principle of physics) and Occam’s razor and Einstein’s work on black hole as frozen stars, (not to speak of all my work on the scalar fifth dimension)… So as today this IS the only hypothesis that makes epistemological and practical sense. We have 3 regions in the galaxy of increasing mass, 3 families of stars of increasing mass (light stars strange pulsars and top quark black holes) and economicity laws. And so the ‘concept’ that strange quark matter does NOT exist, the main alibi of CERN’s decades old ‘safety report’ never updated to new data is gone,
Second, because LHC is a quark matter factory obviously it has with each upgrade produced new forms of strange matter, which shows to ‘grow exponentially’ against all their predictions. That is at higher energies more of our matter transforms into strange quark matter. So we have resolved the conundrum on what is needed to make a strangelet with LHC’s growing work in strange matter.
Indeed, now we have the chain of particles in place, and some are already being produced at LHC:
The progression… to get the ‘crystalline state’ recently discovered for strange quark stars is a ternary progression… hyperons (usd)->dibaryons (usd-usd) >Alpha quark strangelet-> (3 dibaryons: 18 quarks) -> Accumulation of Alpha quarks at Earth’s center, where they fall as the most massive particle on Earth, till they start to attract through gravitation the mass of the Earth-> ice-9 reaction…
Again all this follows all the known known laws of epistemology and experimental evidence. The alpha quark MACHO (MAssive Cold HalO object) IS the minimal unit of QSM (quark strange matter); and all the other particles of the chain are extremely stable, as all systems of nature have ternary patterns of growth, from genes to scales of nature, and as we all know the triangle and hexagon are also the most stable forms of Nature from Domes to causal triangulation in quantum gravity, from honey bees cells to tree cells to graphene cells…
We know, as Eric Penrose took time doing those calculus with information coming from CERN (due to the obvious connections of his family with the establishment of physics, he was able to access information of those experiments, before retiring from activism) that the industry of accelerators has already produced a stream of hyperons and dibaryons and it is searching also at RHIC for the ‘alpha quark MACHO’, which I baptized the ‘Devil’s particle’ far more relevant to our future than the God’s particle. We know the LHC is hunting for it with a ‘secret calorimeter’ to detect strangelets, and in the last news, aware that is producing a stream of neutral heavy-quark particles that escape the accelerator, wants to design a new strangelet detector, Mathusla (for long lived particles, as the biblical similar name indicates).
So it is likely that at the Earth’s center the accumulation of neutral, heavy strange quark particles has started. And the only question which CERN could tell us easily if it opens all its information, but we cannot access anymore after Penrose retired from activism is this: when there will be enough triplets of dibaryons (alpha quark machos) to start the crunching on the Earth?
A few thousand suffice; as I and Walter were explained in a series of recent emails to the few people still interested in the death of their sons till the seventh generation:
FROM: fe_: Dear Walter Do you believe that neutral strangelets could grow too but slower than negative ones? Best regards, N.
FROM: luisancho: Yes the neutral which are the stable will need a ‘gravitational lump’ as they will act only on gravitational grounds and basically occupy a very tine 10ˆ18 nucleus space, BUT REMEMBER THEY ACCUMULATE IN THE CENTER OF THE EARTH AS THEY FALL, so all clump in the center… That has been always the scenario.
What you need is a few thousand quark alpha MACHOs to form a point of growing gravitational force the size of an atom… (being neutral they need gravitational force to start the process). An atomic diameter should be enough for the crunching to start, as density is huge in the Earth’s center. So the ice-9 reaction will then start up as all ‘reproductive radiations’ extremely fast – imagine the biological equivalent of a bacteria reproducing in exponential fashion, 1->2->4->8->16->32->64->128->256->512->1024; every ’10 times’ it grows exponentially 10³ times. So in a period of 50 cycles you get a quintillion… That is why Novas are so fast creating a strange pulsar star or black hole, likely a top quark star (mediated by the Higgs field as they have just discovered and we advanced for decades in 5D physics).
So if i had the data of dibaryon production i could tell you roughly the day you will die.
FROM: Walter: Initial growth of neutral strangelets would be slower than charged strangelets, but as Luis says, once they reach the size of an atom, they would grow just as rapidly.
So what you will find in this decade old article with updates in reverse order is exactly what this web is all about: a ‘Chronicle of a foretold death’ as deterministic as your death will be with enough time, only that our time is getting closer by the day…
The sociology of human suicidal collective behavior.
‘Among individuals insanity is rare, among nations and institutions is the rule’ Nietzsche
We shall not hardly enter in any other ‘sociological argument’ here as why the human species is suicidal. So I explain them now, as i put it in other letter:
Humans do NOT solve their existential problems. They just silence them, deny them, keep a short-term myopic selfish coward view and handle them to the next generation to die.
Once a new menace is found, strangelets, black holes, military robots, nano-bacteria, absurd wars; there is a first argument among scientists and society, asking to stop the process but the military-industrial complex that benefits from the process brings paid-per-view scholars, ad hominem & hate memes, P.R.ess censorship to the issue while it keeps making money with the machines-weapons that endanger us; till the development of the Industry (new weapons, AI, robotic weapons, accelerators, metal-nano bacteria) is so profitable and extended that the only thing left to do is to say it is ‘unavoidable’, it is ‘evolution’, it is ‘history’, and then silence the humanist, deny the dangers, and bring ‘Experts’ from the field as the only ‘authoritative’ voice, with is selfish agenda of profits and messianic peer zeal to dismiss all humanist warnings, as ‘we are the only that know’. Indeed, this is the drill in all those tragedies: when we need a war for profits, we only hear military people and corrupted politicos paid by the industry and hate memes. Diplomacy is silenced.
And of course the military want war and we get war. 30 years ago in the book ‘the extinction of man’ c. 92, I explained in the models of 5D organisms that the XXI c. would be the age of ‘organic machines-weapons’, iron nano-bacteria, military AI, and self-feeding bombs, (Black holes and strangelets). And that both robots and accelerators had to be forbidden. Nobody wanted to publish the book so i had to self-publish, but they took note and I had ever since to struggle with my scholar career. Then it was ‘science fiction’. Which is always the drill – SCIENCE IS ABOUT PREDICTING the future long term. Industrial technology is about DENYING all collateral effects and have a myopic short term benefits view to keep working. If I chose activism against LHC and not the military, or robots as explained in that book was because this was the easiest most dangerous of the 3 singularity weapons: it was carried by the supposed ‘humanist European culture’, in a lab, relic of the cold war ended, paid by European tax payers, the scenarios were deterministic, ‘totalitarian’, clear and proved by science and the risks were now, as AI robots and nano-bacteria still need a decade or so. So i reasoned, if I have to sacrifice my career for a human cause, at least this one is ‘rationally and ethically’ so evident that we do have a chance.
Well, we didn’t and now that is done, and it is obvious, IT IS NO LONGER talked about, because the ‘time of reflection has passed’, the money is invested, the machine done and all what matters as when a war has started, or in the case of military robots when they already are the main investment of all armies to write a ‘chronicle of death foretold’ because humans will NOT reason, NOT care for their sons, NEVER had in the halls of fame, money and power. But still the chronicle must go on… even if only the ‘experts’ in funerary ceremonies, the physicists at CERN, the robotists of silicon valley, the military of DARPA are allowed to defend their jobs, knowing perfectly that their short term goals imply the genocide of mankind in the middle-term.
In that sense to mention those arguments just work with the ‘sheeple’, who ‘trusts’ the system. So it is enough to tell them 1) we are experts (never mind they know so little about strangelets, reason why they research them) 2) we care (never mind industries of death and war have always been defended by ‘experts who pretend to care’) 3) Our lies are truth – the absurd lie that strangelets are ‘cosmic rays’, which hit the earth all the time – cosmic rays are photons and lonely atoms, nothing to do with the massive quark bunches of LHC experiments or else we just would build infinitely cheaper cosmic rays detectors 4) The people who criticize us are ‘ad hominem’ silenced and ridiculed in global P.R.ess 5) and of course we make ‘new physics’, ‘new money’, new ‘jobs-contracts’, new ‘technology’.
The sheeple thus is easy to convince, the experts care for the day, each other social group mind their own business and then one day, war breaks, the planet dies, you get a heart attack because you didn’t ‘prevent’ your death not poisoning your body with the wrong products and the Universe just hears another ‘what the bleep you know’ big-bang boom.
So, this is the foretold chronicle of the strangelet extinction of the hominid. For the black hole case, we shall build the chronicle on the posts that falsify Black hole evaporation and the posts on the Higgs, which is the particle that reproduces top quarks whose lump will create according to Einstein’s hypothesis the frozen top quark black hole star, down the blog (since 1) is less probable, 2) requires some new physics from 5D, unlike strangelets, which are absolutely clear, with standard physics and the very same experimental history of the LHC:
January 2019 – who will get first to extinction size: China Or Europe.
https://www.sciencealert.com/cern-has-just-described-its-next-gen-particle-smasher-and-it-s-a-monster
The machine might be updated to a new threshold of risks, but what they won’t update is the safety report. That task of the growing evidence of extinction through strangelets of black holes seem to fall only on this blog…
June 2018: Mathusla – a detector’s hunt for Devil’s particle: quark alphas
Walter found out CERN is designing a new detector for the increasing surplus of heavy, neutral quark matter appearing at LHC. This was the news:
Hi All… This article essentially details some of what I said before. If neutral strangelets are produced and semi-stable (live longer than the transit time from collision/point, which is the point of creation, to the detectors a few meters away), they won’t be detected. The detectors only detect charged particles, or the charged decay products.
So they now propose to build a new detector much further away to look for the decay of longer-lived neutral particles that they might be creating, such as neutral strangelets.
This is exactly one of the dangerous scenarios we described – neutral strangelets that are sufficiently long-lived to escape from their point of creation and collide with other matter to grow (or, in the case of this detector, to decay and be detected). Walter
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https://www.livescience.com/62633-lhc-stray-particles-mathusla-detection.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180523-ls
Nuclear Detectives Hunt Invisible Particles That Escaped …
Hi All… They are doing for sure, as Eric Penrose calculated it, ‘neutral’ dibaryons, usdusd hexaquark particles… the seed of strangelets.
Those, they don’t ‘see’ and they are falling to the center of earth as the heaviest most stable, so it is just a question they lay there in enough numbers to do an ice-9 reaction.
What dibaryons will become, once they start an ice-9 reactionm will be a strangelets, much bigger lumps with an excess of strange negative particles as there is an already proved tendency in jets to have an excess of strange quarks (Graph above). So strangelets will be negative, and once formed, converting the earth into a 15 km. rock, they will likely migrate with its higher angular momentum to the halo forming the ‘negative’ cover of the ‘galaxy’ akin to the electron cover in the quantum scale.
The fact they are building a detector for neutral heavy particles means they are fully aware the production of dibaryon is stepping up with their new high energy upgrades, as the graph shows – the conversion of normal matter into strangelet matter increases exponentially, so each new upgrade brings us closer to ice-9; as those strange quad ensembles are already long-lived and escaping the facilities, some obviously down the centre of the earth…
But all they care is ‘to detect them’ and bring ‘new physics’ – pure automaton behaviour; ‘this is what we do, detect, detect’ don’t ask anything else – from the article:
“these researchers think that the best hope for detecting long-lived particles lies in the woods on the French-Swiss border. MATHUSLA, essentially a 65-foot-tall (20 meters) warehouse full of particle detectors sitting on top of the LHC, would study particles that escaped the LHC entirely.”
If we can get data on dibaryon detection by MATHUSLA, calculating the solid angle of detection, which will be narrow, we can multiply the results to get the whole spherical volume of the experiment and know finally the data on how many dibaryons survive and fall to the Earth’s center, which Penrose tried to calculate for earlier experiments. This will be now easier: Mathusla will detect dibaryons, fully stable, as they have escaped the LHC ball of fire already. So the number detected multiplied by the sphere to solid angle ratio will give us all the dibaryons that come out stable. As all of them will be trapped in the gravitational field due to its huge mass, fall and finally land at the exact center, where the ‘strangelet ball is growing’ as we speak.
Then we can make a more precise calculus of when there will be a bag of strange quarks big enough at the Earth’s centre to collapse the planet. So for once I am with CERNIES on this – they should get the 60 million $ and construct MATHUSLA. So our ‘mole’ can give us the real data, and we can tell the |
gap in the area’s dining options and give residents more choices within walking distance.
For Kat Gassmann, who lives down the alley from the Taco Authority and has been “waiting desperately for months” for the restaurant to open, walkability is particularly crucial when it comes to tacos.
“With tacos, you want to be able to walk downstairs in your pajamas,” Gassmann said. “I want my taco stand within walking-outside-in-my-pajamas distance.”
Mike Tritt, who moved to the neighborhood a few years ago and lives a block and a half from the restaurant, said businesses like Chicago Taco Authority add to the area’s appeal.
“This neighborhood, it’s in the city, but it’s like a slice of suburbia. I have a house, I have a yard, but it is still Chicago, there are still things you can walk to,” Tritt said. “I’m excited to see something else move in.”
During its opening phase, hours at Chicago Taco Authority are 5 to 10 p.m., seven days a week. Bustos said he will add lunch hours, serving the same menu, and breakfast could eventually follow.Taking pleasure in the misfortune of others is a human trait (because we are all basically monsters) that may start earlier than you might think. A new study shows that children as young as two years old can take delight in watching something bad happen to someone else.
Parents might respond to this news the same way I did, which is to say, “Duh.” I would submit that schadenfreude can be seen in children even younger than two, but my limited sample size of one human baby laughing whenever I pretend to fall down is admittedly limited.
The actual scientific study was done by placing a child and their mother in a room with another child. In one instance the mother read a book out loud while the kids played, and was signaled to “accidentally” spill water on the book. In the other instance, the mother read the book out loud with the other child on her lap while her own child looked on. She again spilled water on the book.
In the instances where the mother’s child had to watch their mother read with the other child on her lap, the child showed signs that they enjoyed seeing the water spilled. The researchers speculate that it’s because the spill ends the experience of seeing the mother’s attention be placed on someone else.
I’d be willing to speculate that it’s also because it’s funny seeing people spill water on things, but the children only seemed to take pleasure in the spill when their mother was reading with another child on their lap. That could indicate that while young children are capable of schadenfreude, it takes a little bit more to get the reaction from them than from a cynical adult.
The study was published in PLOS ONE earlier this month.
(PLOS ONE via Discover Magazine, image via Arielle Calderon)
Previously in
Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, & Google +?As people cheer the presence of two women on the just-released list of presidential and vice presidential debate moderators, another question is lingering in the air: why are the hosts all white?
On Monday, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that Candy Crowley, Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer have been chosen to moderate the three debates in October between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. ABC's Martha Raddatz will host the vice presidential debates.
The selection of Crowley and Raddatz was music to the ears of people who had demanded the inclusion of women on the list. Yet, as Tampa Bay Times television writer Eric Deggans noted, it will be the first time since 1996 -- when Lehrer moderated every single debate -- that there has been no person of color questioning any of the candidates for the White House.
Moreover, while Carole Simpson, the former ABC journalist, drew most attention for being the last woman to moderate a debate, her stint in 1992 was also the last time an African-American was at the helm for a presidential forum. She is one of just two black journalists ever to get the top job (Bernard Shaw hosted a 1988 debate between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis). PBS' Gwen Ifill, who moderated the 2004 and 2008 vice presidential debates, was passed over in 2012. There has never been an Asian or Latino moderator. In a country that is diversifying as rapidly as the U.S., these facts stick out.
UPDATE: Simpson joined HuffPost Live Tuesday afternoon to discuss this story. Watch clips of her appearance above.
Politico reported that CNN's Soledad O'Brien was considered by the CPD, but rejected. It's unclear whether other prominent journalists of color in the industry -- NBC's Lester Holt or Ann Curry, for instance, or Univision's Jorge Ramos -- were considered. Nor, of course, did the CPD reach beyond the television world.
The CPD has never been noted for its willingness to stretch. The presence of Lehrer -- who, though a trusted and capable figure, has hosted 11 debates and was chosen even after he swore he didn't want to do the job anymore -- is evidence enough of that. The selection of two new faces in Crowley and Raddatz counts as something of a leap.
And the dearth of moderators of color reflects a broader lack of diversity within the industry, as study after study repeatedly shows.A former developer at Ubisoft and current developer at Capybara Games, Charles Randall, decided to blame “toxic gamers” for developers not being more open and talkative about game development. He went on a Twitter rant about how gamers are the reason we can’t talk about game development.
In his rant Randall states…
“… gamer culture is so toxic that being candid in public is dangerous. […] “Any dev who talks candidly about the difficulty of something like that just triggers a wave of people questioning their entire resumé. “Questioning” here being an absurd euphemism for “becoming a target of an entire faction of gamers for harassment or worse.” … while I’d talk candidly about certain big topics right now — I know doing so would lead to another wave of assholes throwing shit at me. (And of course I face almost nothing compared to women/PoC/lgtbq+ folk) “But here’s the rub: all the stuff you ever wanted to know about game development would be out there if not for the toxic gaming community. We *love* to talk about development, the challenges we face, the problems we solve, the shortcuts we take. But it’s almost never worth it.”
So “toxic gamers” were the reason Ubisoft couldn’t candidly talk to the community beforehand about Assassin’s Creed: Unity launching unfinished, bug-ridden, and broken? How does that even work?
Randall is definitely wrong about why gamers get angry, and there are plenty of examples that highlight why the outrage occurs; most times it has to deal with a lack of honesty rather than a developer wanting to talk candidly.
For instance, a perfect example of how wrong Randall is comes from none other than No Man’s Sky. Everyone was psyched for the game and hung onto every word Sean Murray had to say. However, the backlash, the anger, the rage, and the review bombs all came spilling out when they realized that a lot of what was talked about ahead of release wasn’t necessarily what made it into the release version of the game. In on case Murray insinuated that multiplayer would be present in the game…
Thank you Crowcat.
Multiplayer was not present in the full version of No Man’s Sky at launch. A “lite” version of multiplayer made it into the game… a year later.
It’s not that gamers were just ready to rage and tear Murray apart, it was that they felt lied to and that Murray wasn’t upfront and honest about No Man’s Sky from the get-go.
Hey, look, talk all you want about your game but just don’t lie to people about it because they will get pissed.
Another example is the upcoming Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. Gamers have become incensed at the idea of a $60 game having cash shop microtransactions to boost XP, unlock rare items via loot crates, and stack your army by purchasing AI companions.
Eurogamer asked Shadow of War’s design director Bob Roberts why put loot boxes into a $60 game at all. Here is what Roberts had to say…
“Yeah, in the game you earn resources at a regular pace and the systems are tuned to that so you don’t need another option. At the same time, it’s there as a player choice. It’s there, from my perspective, for people who are protective of their spare time and scared when a massive game comes along that they’re not getting to see the full experience.”
That is a lie.
You see, people hate being lied to. It’s not about a player’s choice and it has nothing whatsoever to do with people who are “protective of their spare time”. If Monolith Productions (and by proxy, Warner Bros. Entertainment) were so concerned about people not having time to grind through their game, why not just allow them to use cheat codes to get what they want when they want it, just like games used to do before microtransactions became standard?
Eurogamer wasn’t going to ask that question and Roberts was never going to answer, but he sure was going to talk around and about, deflecting from the fact that bad practices like microtransactions in $60 AAA titles is just one of the many reasons gamers get peeved. Things are always made worse when developers want to soapbox about design philosophies on public platforms while skirting issues, deflecting from questions, or talking down to their potential customers as if they can’t see the shoes standing by the lever behind the curtain working the “magic”.
Randall, however, is convinced that gamers are simply toxic and being fed lots of misinformation about the way the industry works, especially by those pesky YouTubers. He mentions at the bottom of his rant…
“I did a public talk a couple weeks ago to a room full of all ages kids, and afterwards, a kid came up to me and was talking about stuff. And I shit you not, this kid (somewhere between 13-16 I’d guess) starts talking about how bad devs are because of a youtuber he watches. He nailed all the points, “bad engines”, “being greedy”, you name it. I was appalled. “[I] did my best to tell him that all those things people freak out about are normal and have justifications. I hope I got through a bit. But I expect he went back to consuming toxic culture via youtube personalities, and one day he’ll probably harass a dev over nonsense.”
So first all, “being greedy” is an issue… see the example above about Shadow of War.
I would love for someone to justify why that feature isn’t greedy after the team spent time and energy implementing an elaborate cash shop when all of that could have just been implemented via a cheat system?
I would also love for someone to explain why paying for maxing out your character levels in various games via DLC isn’t considered greedy?
Is there a justification why people can no longer use codes to max out their character level and instead have to pay not to play the game they paid for? Is that not a monetary practice that fits the very definition of being greedy?
How about Street Fighter X Tekken with the disc-locked content? Was that not a bad practice locking 12 characters behind a paywall after they were already completed and stored on the disc before it went gold? Was Capcom’s response of attempting to get gamers to rat out the hackers who were playing with the characters on Xbox Live ahead of their unlock date just “talking candidly”? Were we supposed to bend over and say “Ouch” and “Thank you”?
There’s even a Wikia list that tracks the occurrence of disc-locked content for those of you who were interested in games that had (or currently have) substantial amounts of DLC locked away on the retail disc that requires payment to access.
Randall attempts to hoist gamer culture as the reason developers can no longer talk lovingly about their craft, even though in reality all of this rage and anger and uproar from the community usually spawns first from the bad practices exhibited by publishing studios.
Whose fault is it when gamers ask honest questions on social media and get the runaround because PR have to protect the shareholders’ interest?
Whose fault is it that when gamers pepper developers with questions on forums that they have to deflect and deter because publishers have a monetary model in place that they know won’t go down well with the public if they discuss it honestly?
Whose fault is it that when gamers are inquiring about missing features in new games that used to be standard in past games — like dedicated servers and server administration tools — they’re told that the newer and less reliable features are “optimized” for the player experience even when it’s not?
Why shouldn’t gamers get angry when they’re being sold shoddy features and then told that it’s done for their own good?
How did the faults of corporate culture become the fault of gamers?
This does nothing but make Randall’s argument both dishonest and a deflective case of sophistry.
Would anyone really call Bethesda’s VP of marketing, Pete Hines, taking to Twitter to talk about the Creation Club an “honest discussion”? Was that really something you would label as a developer willing to talk openly about something that many gamers were leery about from the start? And did it really assuage the concerns? Not really, no. Did it resolve the bloatware issue? Nope. Did it address the fact that it’s made managing mods more cumbersome than before? Nope. And most importantly, did it make people stop review bombing Fallout 4? Heck no.
The issue, of course, isn’t that the Creation Club exists, it’s that Bethesda wasn’t honest about why it exists. It’s a cash grab and it’s as simple as that. People are (rightfully) angry that Bethesda has used PR-speak to talk around and about as to why the Creation Club exists. I can’t even believe anyone would need this explained to them.
There are countless other examples of studios supposedly being “open” about development, when in reality the platform is oftentimes being used to deceive gamers with demulcent soothe-saying and redirection.
With all that said, gamers love hearing about game development. What gamers don’t like is being lied to and they don’t like being deceived. As Gabe Newell once said…
“One of the things we learned pretty early on is ‘Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet – because they will catch you”
TL;DR: Randall is wrong, and he’s venting because in reality gamers love to know more about game development and the openness of it, but they absolutely hate being lied to or given the run-around with hackneyed PR-speak, backpedaling, false promises, and goal-shifting blame-games.
(Main image courtesy of CEC Military)The Virtus.pro Dota 2 revamp is complete with some surprises for their finalized roster.
In just about a week from their preliminary roster announcement, CIS based Esports Organization Virtus.pro has already finalized their new Dota 2 roster with some of the rising names in the CIS Dota 2 scene today.
Disbanding the team as well as firing people from their Dota 2 department early last July, Virtus.pro previously announced that they are considering a lineup around famed carry and TI1 Winner Alexander “XBOCT” Dashkevich and bringing back the PGG prodigy Sergey Alexandrovich “G” Bragin who was also part of Virtus.pro prior to the Dota 2 team’s disbandment.
Now, the organization has officially revealed their final roster, but without both XBOCT & G, but instead reeling in former Team Empire‘s Roman “RAMZES666” Kushnarev, who is also bound to receive a new keyboard, and Pavel “9pashaebashu” Khvastunov. Virtus.pro also labels the squad as their Fall 2016 roster.
Virtus.pro Dota 2 RosterPolice found a man and woman dead in Pico Rivera in what police said appears to be a murder-suicide. Angie Crouch reports for the NBC4 News at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2015. (Published Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2015)
A man and woman were found dead Tuesday in Pico Rivera after a report of a shooting that authorities said appears to be a case of murder-suicide.
The bodies were found in the 9600 block of Kruse Road. The deaths appear to be a case of murder-suicide possibly involving a couple going through a divorce, according to a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
The bodies were discovered in the home's kitchen by a relative at about 10 a.m. in a residential area just west of Pico Rivera Golf Course. During an argument, the 68-year-old man shot his 73-year-old wife the night before, then shot himself, according to sheriff's investigators.
"It's just something that you can't believe is going to happen to you," said the woman's aunt, Helen Chavez, after hearing about the slayings.
Investigators say the couple, identified as Antonio Sancho and wife Gloria Sancho, was scheduled to go to court Tuesday for a divorce proceeding. Relatives said Antonio Sancho didn't want the divorce and had refused to leave the home, which was up for sale.
"I knew she wasn't happy these last six months," Chavez said. "I don't know, she did apply for a divorce."
Neighbors said Antonio Sancho often argued with neighbors over parking issues and once tore down a neighbors fence with a hammer.
Investigators said Gloria Sancho's son, a man in his 50s who is severely disabled, was found inside another room unharmed and apparently unaware of the killings. He was being cared for at a hospital.
Correction: The couple's ages were incorrect in an earlier version of this report.If you’ve ever worked in the service industry, you have at least one horror story to tell. Here are eight of them.
1. Chris Kaysen—Philippe, New York City
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“There was this man who showed up in shorts and a marathon runner’s bib, jogging in place, super sweaty. He said he had to get back to the race and asked me to seat him as soon as possible, so I did. He kept asking for more and more water, gulping it down furiously. He never ordered anything. He stayed until closing, about eight hours, his legs constantly moving up and down under the table.”
2. Jenna Weitz—Stinson’s, Austin
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“A table of five got maybe $90 of food, which is a lot for our diner. But when I came back with the bill and noticed they were gone, I ran to tell my manager. She was gone too. I ran outside and the streets were empty…cars idling in the road with no drivers. No one left. Everyone was gone.”
3. Ronda Ishida—Sushi Nakazawa, New York City
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“So, I’m going around confirming people’s orders, and when I get to this woman I say something like, ‘And you had the salmon roll?’ That sets her off. She goes, ‘Yes, the salmon roll. Was I unclear? S–A–L–M–O–N. Salmon. You make sure you remember that.’ Then she takes out a tape recorder and speaks into it: ‘Just for the record, I ordered a salmon roll. I want salmon.’ When I bring the salmon, she says she ordered tuna! I tell her I’m sure she said salmon roll. She says she’s positive she said tuna. I say, ‘Well, what about the tape recorder?’ ‘Tape recorder?’ she says, like she’s confused. I say, ‘You know, the tape recorder you used to record your order?’ Then she’s like, ‘Oh, you mean this tape recorder?’ She gets it from her pocket and shoves it in her mouth and bites down with just incredible force. Obliterates it. She tried to talk through her mouthful of metal and cords. I think what she said was ‘Here’s your goddamn tape recorder.’”
4. Martin Turner—Rustic House, Chicago
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“This guy wrote on the tip line, ‘TL;DR’ and on the total line he wrote ‘whatever.’ I ended up just throwing the whole bill out.”
5. Will Keller—Cleo, Los Angeles
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“It was a boy no older than 4 or 5. He shook my hand and told me he was 48 years old and worked for Michelin. At first, I gave him a skeptical glance, but then I recovered my composure and took his order. The boy ate more food than I’ve seen someone consume in one sitting before or since. He was glaring at me the entire time, and I started to wonder if he was telling the truth. Had my skeptical glance offended him? Sure enough, three weeks later, Michelin released its one-time special edition guide of the worst waiters in America, and there I was on the front cover with that squinty look on my face.”
6. Josephine Dunlop—Barbacco, San Francisco
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“The worst was the blindfolded man who crashed through one of the windows and staggered around the restaurant, knocking over tables, trying to lick the food off the floor, and demanding to speak to the manager the entire time.”
7. Diana Chen—Southwest Diner, St. Louis
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“A local jazz quartet would come in every Saturday night at 2 a.m., after their show or whatever. They asked for food according to their instruments: The drummer wanted drumsticks, the pianist wanted the Piano Burger, the saxophonist wanted the Saxophone Special, and the trumpet player wanted the Trumpet Tater Tots. I would always tell them that only the drumsticks were a real item on the menu, and the other three would get up and leave the drummer to eat in peace.”
8. Rebecca Bernard—Rico’s American Grill, Phoenix
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“This has only happened once, but there was one smug asshole who, instead of asking, ‘Please, may I have the fries?’ had the audacity to just say, ‘I’ll have the fries.’ Like it was his right. Some people.”Last year, North Carolina football fans had two choices of jerseys to buy from Nike: No. 12 and No. 3. Those numbers, conveniently, matched the numbers of starting quarterback Marquise Williams and star receiver Ryan Switzer.
This year, the options are a little more curious: No. 89 (worn by sophomore Jared Worley), and No. 16 (which belongs to two players, redshirt freshman quarterback Manny Miles and redshirt freshman safety Stephen Albright).
According to North Carolina Assistant Athletic Director for Communications Kevin Best, the numbers were chosen for reasons other than the player wearing them: No. 16 because of the 2016 season and No. 89 because it was the year (1789) UNC was chartered.
“In this day and age of player likeness being a controversial subject,” Best said, “we decided it would be best to go this direction with the No. 1 and the No. 89 and the No. 16.”
Football isn’t the only sport at North Carolina affected by the change in philosophy. Best said the basketball team plans to offer the No. 1 and possibly one other number, likely a retired number -- like Tyler Hansbrough’s No. 50 -- changed on a season-by-season basis.
Jersey numbers and jersey sales have long been a point of contention with active college players with regard to lack of compensation. Former University of Michigan basketball player Chris Webber infamously recounted a story of seeing his jersey sold by vendors for $40 while he didn’t have money for lunch.
Lawyers for Ed O’Bannon in O'Bannon v. NCAA also cited jersey number -- along with height, weight, hair style, skin tone, and dominant hand -- as evidence O’Bannon’s likeness had been used in a college basketball video game without compensation.
The debate surrounding jersey and player likeness hasn’t gone unnoticed by North Carolina players either.
Last Christmas, Switzer retweeted 16 pictures from fans who had received the North Carolina No. 3 football jersey as a present. The final tweet from @herdcontrarian featured a picture of a young man wearing a No. 3 jersey with the name Switzer printed on the back by a third party: "@Switz03 oh no?! How did that jersey get a playmakers name on it? Thanks Santa! #sadlynoproceedstoryan"
Switzer still won’t get his proceeds but the decision does help protect the likeness of the amateur athletes who are not allowed to profit from their status. It also allows North Carolina to step away from a serious blurred line with regard to amateurism.
New @TarHeelFootball Jerseys now in stock! Get Ready for the new season today! https://t.co/7q6CMN1vBP pic.twitter.com/podDCIG9Dp
— Johnny T-shirt (@JohnnyTshirt) July 18, 2016With the NAMM trade show just around the corner, leaked details of Roland’s new product releases hint at models inspired by analogue classics.
A new promotional video and leaked images and model numbers suggest that Roland is set to launch new products based on the legendary TB-303 bassline synth and TR-808 drum machine.
Roland’s official video describes the AIRA as “the evolution of the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Machine” and shows Roland engineers using the TR-808 as a major reference point in the product development process. The video also features other vintage Roland models including the SH-101, TR-909, Space Echo and TB-303.
There have been rumours for months that Roland was set to join Korg in jumping back on board the analogue bandwagon. The Volca series, Monotron/Monotribe range and the reissued MS-20 Mini have all been major successes for Roland’s main rival over recent years.
Roland has traditionally been very reluctant to look back to past glories – and even more reluctant to turn back the clock and begin redeveloping analogue hardware – but there appears to be high demand for official reissues of some of the company’s iconic models.
Our suspicion is that the TR-08 and TB-03 will turn out to be newly developed digital models rather than analogue reissues (the leaked TR-08 image, if genuine, at least shows that the unit will look significantly different to the 808). The video’s assertion that “musicians want new and exciting things so the time has come to take the next step” suggests we’re looking at an evolution of the TR-808 concept rather than an exact replica.
There are also clues elsewhere in Roland’s product range. The Jupiter-80 (which draws on the look and spirit of the Jupiter-8) and GAIA SH-01 (very loosely based on the SH series of analogue monosynths) demonstrate Roland’s current policy of referencing models from the analogue era when naming new digital products. Older producers will also remember the MC-303 way back in 1996, and the disappointment when it turned out not to be the ‘modern TB-303’ many people expected it to be.
So, what’s it to be? Analogue or digital? Expect full details to emerge at NAMM or on Roland Connect and AIRA pages over the coming week.
RelatedSan Francisco - May 26, 2015 - Double Fine Productions, developer and publisher of the successfully-crowdfunded games Broken Age and Massive Chalice, is adding another game to its list of self-published titles. Iron Brigade on PC will now be published under the Double Fine label. The developer has also regained ownership of the intellectual property.
Double Fine is releasing an update to the Steam version of the game. In addition to bug fixes and improvements, the original matchmaking system has been removed and replaced with matchmaking via Steam.
“The great thing about this change is that now there are no obstacles to us creating the best possible experience for players,” said the game’s creator, Brad Muir. “We have fixed all known issues as well as provided a great matchmaking experience for multiplayer. Vlad and his Monovision Menace are on the move again! In the best possible way!”
Originally released in 2011, Iron Brigade was popular among players for its unique combination of tower defense and mech shooter gameplay. IGN called Iron Brigade, “the best downloadable game [they’ve] played all year.” Going on to say “Its skillful blend of witty writing, fun shooting, and tactical tower defense makes for hours of replayable gameplay.”
The update was released today for PC via Steam. To celebrate, the game is currently available for 80% off.
There are currently no plans to rename the game, “Trenched.”
About Double Fine Productions. Double Fine Productions is a San Francisco-based game developer that makes games with a focus on creativity, characters, and fun. Since its founding in 2000, it has produced the award-winning titles Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade, Once Upon a Monster, Kinect Party, Middle Manager of Justice, The Cave, Broken Age, and Massive Chalice.. Learn more about Double Fine at http://www.doublefine.com and on Twitter @DoubleFine.
About Brad’s New Baby. In addition to Massive Chalice and the Iron Brigade update, Brad Muir has also produced a child, Gibson, in conjunction with his wife, Cate. The baby is expected to update itself regularly.118 shares
A review of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy’s educational accreditation has prompted the Middle States Commission on Higher Education to issue a warning to the school that its accreditation may be in jeopardy for non-compliance in certain areas, although the Academy says it is already working to rectify the issues.
The warning was issued by the MSCHE following a mandatory self-study review and MSCHE evaluation team visit during the 2015-16 academic year.
“Today the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) issued their expected determination regarding accreditation, and while they found the Academy’s academic foundation is sound, and in many ways exemplary, they issued a warning with recommendations regarding two broad areas separate from academics: combatting sexual harassment and assault, particularly during Sea Year; and governance of the USMMA,” the Academy wrote in a reaccreditation update released June 30.
Accredited institutions are required to engage in an 18-24 month period of self-study at least once every 10 years intended to demonstrate institutional compliance with accreditation standards and to promote institutional improvement.
The warning was provided in a letter by the MSCHE to Superintendent Helis stating in part:
At its session on June 23, 20 16, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education acted: To warn the institution that its accreditation may be in jeopardy because of insufficient evidence that the institution is currently in compliance with Requirement of Affiliation 7 (Institutional Planning), Standard 2 (Planning, Resources, and Institutional Renewal), Standard 3 (Institutional Resources), Standard 4 (Leadership and Governance), Standard 5 (Administration), and Standard 9 (Student Support Services).
At this time the Academy remains accredited while it “works with MSCHE to address the requirements and recommendations, and ensure the highest caliber education for the Academy’s Midshipmen.”
A reaccreditation update from the Merchant Marine Academy continued:
The MSCHE Evaluation Team’s assessment also found “noteworthy achievements in the following areas: admissions; achievement of the licensing component of the institutional mission; the Advisory Board’s assessment reports; the Sea Year; progress on developing a formal and integrated leader development program; and assistance provided to department and course-level assessment.” In fact the most recent incoming classes at USMMA are the most diverse in its history, and the most qualified. Further, in each of the last three years, Kings Point graduates have had record “pass” rates in the grueling four-day U.S. Coast Guard Merchant Marine Officer licensing exam.
The Academy said it has two years to reach compliance, adding “we are confident that we can return to compliance within that span of time.”
The MSCHE has requested a monitoring report due March 1, 2017 documenting evidence that the Academy has achieved and can sustain compliance with the requirements cited in the warning letter.
An earlier letter from Superintendent Helis to the President of the MSCHE, Dr. Elizabeth Sibolski, written in response to a MSCHE draft report, stated:
We have already begun to implement the requirements and recommendations in the final Evaluation Team Report necessary to improve the Academy’s performance and meet the MSCHE standards for accreditation. In particular, the incidences of sexual assault and harassment have been of acute concern to me and my leadership team since I arrived at USMMA in 2012. While we have established a program based on best practices from the other Federal academies and across higher education, we recognize the need to bring fundamental change to the culture of USMMA and create a safe environment and an atmosphere of mutual respect that allows each Midshipman to grow and thrive.
The warning comes amid USMMA’s move to suspend Sea Year for Midshipmen as part of a wider effort to combat sexual harassment and sexual assault both on campus and off, and to ensure “an appropriate training and work environment for the Midshipmen,” a USMMA spokesman wrote in an email to gCaptain earlier this month.
Additional Resources:In 1939, the first Major League Baseball game was broadcast on TV—a double-header between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers—at a time when American TV was still very much an experiment. But this broadcast was a long time coming. In fact, years before practical TV tech had even been demonstrated, people were already dreaming about how they’d be able to watch America’s pastime from the comfort of their own homes.
“In this illustration we behold how future audiences will see a baseball game thousands of miles away,” the July 1922 issue of Science and Invention magazine promised.
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The illustration above was a sci-fi fantasy in 1922. The magazine imagined four cameras (the first televised Major League game had only two) and a person sitting at a control booth switching between camera angles while the signal beamed out to the masses. None of the wireless camera technology pictured above, let alone a TV channel, was available at the time.
The most fascinating aspect of all this is that when this illustration was published, even radio wasn’t yet fully established as a broadcast medium. Much like TV, radio had struggled to emerge as media that people viewed as being broadcast (one point to many) rather than simply point-to-point. Radio was slowly getting there, but futuristic visions of TV, of which there were relatively few, still imagined television as something more like videophone technology.
But this 1922 look at baseball broadcasting got a lot right. Things that we take for granted in TV production today had to be invented more or less from scratch or borrowed from early cinema and sports newsreels; techniques like cutting from different perspectives, which is much more difficult during a live TV broadcast than edited film.
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The easiest and most sensible thing to do with longform sports broadcasting was to simply plant a camera that could see the entire field. But live cuts to different perspectives — including the close-up — were understood even this early as essential parts of keeping viewers interested.
From Science and Invention:
The operators of the telephot transmitters A, B, C and D “shoot” the interesting parts of the game, but they do not do this simultaneously. They merely point the telephot transmitter into focus while the radio operator at his instrument switches from one to the other in order to get those close-ups which he wishes. The distant audience then will see whatever close-ups are selected by the radio operator.
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The wireless broadcast of moving pictures even adopted the terminology of its predecessor — they called it television by radio. And much like the behind-the-scenes production details that still had to be worked out, in-home viewing still hadn’t adopted the norms we know today. The front cover of that issue of Science and Invention had plenty of strange and failed ideas about the future of watching baseball at home. Perhaps the most important being that men would wear suits to do it — nary a sweatpant in sight.
[The fifth and sixth paragraphs were edited to clarify: As a commenter points out below, the early TV futurist thinkers were likely borrowing some techniques from the longform baseball films shown in movie theaters at the time, like the 1919 World Series.]
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Images: Scanned from the July 1922 issue of Science and Invention magazineOmarosa Manigault, a top adviser to President Trump, said she has a recording of a recent contentious exchange with a White House reporter.
April Ryan, a veteran White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks (AURN) told The Washington Post she was “physically intimidated” by Manigault after an exchange last week.
"She stood right in my face like she was going to hit me,” Ryan told the newspaper. “I said, 'You better back up.' "
Now, Manigault says she has a recording of the dispute that was also shared with some other reporters, according to the Post.
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Ryan said she did not know she was being recorded during the incident.
“I didn’t know she was taping it,” she said. “This is about her trying to smear my name. This is freaking Nixonian.”
Manigault told the Post that the White House press staff records interviews with reporters "all the time."
“When you come into [the press staff’s offices], you’re on the record," she said.
The District of Columbia has a “one-party consent” law, making it legal to record a conversation or call if just one person in the conversation has consented.
The former “Apprentice” candidate said another White House “colleague” made the recording.
“She came in [to the White House press area] hot,” Manigault said, according to the Post.
“She came in with an attitude. For her to characterize me as the bully — I’m so glad we have this tape … because it’s ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’ ” she added.
Ryan and Manigault are former friends, the Post reported.
In describing the exchange on Monday, Ryan said Manigault told her she was one of many African-American journalists who are the subject of White House “dossiers.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer denied that the Trump administration was doing any such thing at Tuesday’s press briefing.
"That is absolutely not true. There are no dossiers being kept," Spicer said.
Fox News’s White House reporter said he was one of the journalists with whom Manigault shared the recording. He told the Post that he heard a discussion, but did not characterize it as a “confrontation,” the Post reported. He also said he did not hear any mention of a “dossier.”
Ryan defended her initial description of the confrontation.
"She wants to spin it like it’s a catfight, but she edited that tape,” Ryan said. |
considering along with a pair of bolt cutters and trying to steal your own bike. “But be sure to keep the receipt on you, in case someone thinks you're actually stealing it,” he says. Buy a crappy bike, or disguise a good one Apart from keeping it inside, Smith says the only foolproof way to ensure your ride's safety is to buy “a f…ing ugly bike”. Fit a sticker that identifies your bike as being an inexpensive brand. Failing that, he suggests wrapping electrical tape around the frame so it's easier to identify and therefore harder to sell.
If all else fails, just keep it close Oddly enough, the best protection may be using none at all. “A bike left outside a store with no lock is the easiest way to get caught because the owner will report it in less than 10 minutes,” he says. “Locked bikes are the best to steal because you know the owner might not be back for a long time.” He says if you stop somewhere for longer than 10 minutes, it's best to bring a friend to wait outside. And if none are available? “Then your bike is mine.” Vocativ is a leading US-based website that specialises in deep web reporting. The award-winning site publishes trending worldwide stories and documentary-style videos for broadcast online and on television.Toronto police have released a composite sketch of man wanted in connection with an aggravated assault and robbery investigation in Lawrence Park last weekend.
Police said officers responded to a call around noon Saturday about a stabbing in the Weybourne Crescent and Dinnick Crescent area.
Police allege a 19-year-old woman was walking alone through the park when a man approached her from behind and demanded money.
The suspect then produced an edged weapon and slashed the woman’s face before he fled the area.
The woman was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The suspect is described as being a man in his 20s, 5’7″ with a thin build and a small face. He has either dark brown or black greasy or unwashed hairs, prominent eyebrows and a sparse pencil-thin mustache. He was wearing a black over-sized hoodie with pockets and black baggy sweatpants with elasticized bottoms.
Police believe the suspect to be armed, extremely violent and dangerous. If located, do not approach and call 911.
Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 416-808-5300 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-TIPS (8477).900 million users and a likely valuation of over $100 billion, yup, Facebook's days are numbered. Click here to find out why.
I know, I get it. To talk about Facebook, worth an estimated $100 billion with 900 million users, like its some sort of on-the-rocks basket case might seem like nonsense. Laughable even, but hear me out. Here's why Facebook won't survive the decade.
Facebook, despite all the impressive numbers, just isn’t a very effective moneymaker. According to their IPO documents, Facebook made $3.7 billion revenue in 2011. Not too shabby at all, but in December 2011 they had 845 million users. Assuming they averaged 700 million for the whole year, that’s just over $5 per user per year. And that’s revenue, not profit. Given that 15% of its revenue comes from one social game developer, Zynga, suddenly the whole system seems a bit fragile. Its current revenue model isn’t very effective at creating, y’know, actual revenue. I can’t remember the last time I clicked on a Facebook ad. Can you?
Revenue
Facebook certainly doesn’t have anything to worry about in the short term. By opening up in new markets, like Brazil and India, it can boost user numbers and hopefully revenue. But its ability to squeeze money from users is sorely lacking. As mentioned, its ads are rarely clicked. Anecdotally, they’re badly targeted and the creative they use looks so woefully amateur I‘m surprised any brands use them. Indeed, General Motors recently pulled their entire Facebook advertising budget. Not everyone agrees with them for sure (least of all Ford), but if one of the world’s leading brands doesn’t spend ANY money with you, frankly you’ve got problems. Has any large advertiser said that about any other medium ever? Imagine if they said the same thing about TV? It’s unthinkable. Facebook will doubtless continue to experiment with ad formats but, almost ten years after its inception and countless billions of venture capital funding, shouldn’t they be doing a better job?
And then of course, there’s the cell phone. Facebook users in the United States now spend more time on Facebook on their mobile than their desktop computer Great news for the user, but terrible news for Facebook. There are fewer ads on the mobile site. Fewer ads mean less money.
So what can they do about it? The recent app store development should help. Brands will surely pay to use the Facebook API to create social experiences with their customers. But that doesn’t mean anyone will use them.
The simple fact is, just one percent of users interact with brands at all. It’s difficult to see how, even with Facebook’s data goldmine at their disposal, any brand could create something meaningful, that offered more than just 5 minutes of distraction. And then there’s privacy. Why would I volunteer to give corporations more information about me, just so they can sell me things I don’t need?
Aging users
Facebook is still growing rapidly. It recently became the top social network in Brazil and may or may not expand into China. But what about its growth closer to home? Once Facebook becomes mainstream, it’s numbers stabilize and even start falling. From March 2011 to March 2012, Facebook lost 300,000 users in the US. And its worldwide profit was down too by almost $30 million.
Facebook was built for college students. (A face book, for those outside the US, is a photo album of your peers that you’re given before you start college). But those college students who were the early adopters (eg, me) are grown up now. Some of us have kids, mortgages, even jobs. Sure, we might post the odd comment, a video we like, but certainly we’re not the avid Facebookers we once were.
But that’s OK, right? I may have left college but there’s a new generation of college kids on the way surely? Well, no. According to Nielsen, the under 18s are the demographic that’s least likely to go on any social network. Isn’t this a bit odd? You only have to be 12 to have an account and we all know how much children like mimicking adult behaviors, so if Facebook was cool, a desirable thing, wouldn’t they all be clamoring to get an account? You don’t need to prove your age after all, so shouldn’t elementary schools be filled with kids who have given a fake birth date just to get on? Facebook was designed for college kids, but you’re more likely to have an account if you’re over 65 than under 18. Isn’t that just weird? My dad’s on Facebook, my little sister isn’t. Says it all really.
Why has this happened?
Doubtless, the ‘gentrification’ of the first generation of college kids has contributed. Likewise, the loss of a novelty factor means that, for most people, it’s not something they get excited about. This then leads to the loss of a ‘network’ effect. If no one you know is on Facebook, you have no reason to join. This is uniquely Facebook’s weakness that its competitors don’t suffer from. Twitter, which now has 500 million users and is growing rapidly, is much more about following people who interest you, rather than having a personal connection. Pinterest, still tiny, is as much about organizing ‘your’ web than it is about sharing. Flickr is for publishing photos and LinkedIn is, ultimately, an aid to help you find work. Facebook is the only network for friends to connect to each other. That’s great, but it only works if everyone does it. And nowadays, there are just too many alternatives.
For people of my generation, we’re busy, we have jobs, and our cell phone bills are not problems like they used to be. So if I want to contact my friends, I email them when I'm at work or call them when I‘m not. The only thing I really ‘need’ Facebook for is to keep in touch with my acquaintances. A nice thing to be able to do, sure, but not something to get upset about if I couldn’t, and certainly not something I can’t get outside Facebook.
When I was at college, we were still the generation that would take digital cameras on a night out then lovingly post the photos on Facebook the next day. Smart phones have destroyed that culture. Not just because they rendered cheap digital cameras unnecessary (and at any rate, we now just call them cameras), but the sheer volume of photos now on everyone's phones means that people no longer need to photograph themselves on a night out. It’s just not exciting anymore. Consequently, one of Facebook’s most appealing uses has been lost. I might just be getting old, perhaps the college kids still do this, but if Facebook wants to keep on growing, it has to find a way to stay relevant to its early adopters (me) whilst also attracting the next generation. If it doesn’t, the pattern we’re beginning to see in the US will be replicated worldwide. Regardless of the billions of users Facebook may or may not get, if it can’t hold on to them for more than five years or so, the whole thing begins to look rather unsustainable.
Instagram
And so we arrive at the elephant in the room, Facebook’s purchase of the retro photo-sharing app for a cool billion dollars. Instagram, for the record, doesn’t make any money. I don’t mean money as in profit, I mean money as in revenue. If you’ve ever had a job, you’ll have made more money than Instagram. If your kid has ever had a job, they’ll have made more money than Instagram. All the money Instagram have ever spent has come from venture capital investments. Debt, in other words.
So why would Facebook spend so much money on an essentially valueless product? Partly it was defensive. Instagram was looking for a buyer and Facebook knew that Twitter was interested and wanted to maintain its position in the photo-sharing market. And of course culturally, old companies that are worried about their future often buy younger ones for over-inflated prices. See AOL’s purchase of Huffington Post, or News Corp’s purchase of MySpace for other examples.
But then again, why shouldn’t Facebook buy Instagram? I mean, it’s not their money either. For all its millions of dollars of profit, Facebook doesn’t have a billion just lying around in the bank, it’s taken on a debt. A big one.
The problem with bubbles is that they eventually burst, and the bigger the bubble is, the louder the pop. It’s possible I’m wrong, that Facebook looks back at Instagram’s billion-dollar price tag and thinks it worth it. Or that investors, having paid $38 per Facebook share, get a decent return on their investment, but there’s no denying that the stakes are getting higher. Can Facebook, with revenues of fewer than 4 billion really be valued at over 100? With profits of around $200 million a quarter, it would take 125 years for investors to get their money back. That’s assuming Facebook pay out 100% of their profit as dividend 100% of the time, which even they say is unlikely. (Read the IPO documents, they’re a little terrifying).
Yes, there is growth potential, but it’s not guaranteed. It could all just be one big fad.
The McDonald's effect
Of all the businesses in the world, very few have successfully marketed themselves to everyone. There are, at most, a handful, but the most successful in my view is McDonald's. Here is a company that successfully attracts children and their parents, students and lawyers, the list is endless. Some groups will be over-represented for sure, but no one, from Shanghai to Seattle, Paris to Pakistan, feels unwelcome in McDonald's. This, truly, is one of the great business success stories.
But it’s also a trap. Businesses often feel they can pull off the same trick, but they can’t. Facebook was once exclusively for college kids (you had to have a.edu email address). They then expanded internationally, so other suffixes were allowed (eg,.ac.uk for the UK). Progressively, they loosened the restrictions and made themselves available to everyone. They became like McDonald's.
But I'm not sure it’s working. As mentioned, Facebook is becoming less and less relevant to my life and the lives of my friends. Where once, despite the lack of smartphones or even laptops, everyone I knew was on there every day, now only a handful are. And increasing numbers are dropping out altogether, without being replaced. The younger generation just aren’t as excited as we were.
So what’s next?
Facebook’s much-delayed IPO will be interesting when it actually happens. What sort of return will investors expect? Which staff members will stick around having just become millionaires a hundred times over? What sort of revenue-generating tricks does Facebook have up its sleeve? Social gaming I’m sure will continue to be a money-spinner in the short and medium term. Apps likewise, might boost the bottom line, and 1 billion users will probably happen. But I’m still skeptical. I don’t think it can avoid Myspace’s fate.
Nowadays I can contact anyone I want instantly and for free in a thousand different ways. If I want to play games socially, there are apps (and websites) for that. And there are endless ways to take and share photos. Facebook was once the only and best place for these things, but it’s not anymore. It’s become an outdated gimmick. When I graduated in 2007, the first thing I did (almost) was post my graduation photos on Facebook. Will the class of 2020 do the same? Maybe they will in Sao Paolo or Beijing, but on the campuses of Harvard or Columbia? I very much doubt it.Is there a place name that exists in all 50 U.S. states? It depends on what you count as a city, town, or village—for example, whether a township name counts as a town and whether you'll count county names as well, as they also contain populations. Sources vary widely as to what is the most prolific place name throughout the United States. This piece follows World Atlas's numbers for count and MSN for the largest city with that name.
Washington (88)
Although Springfield is commonly thought of as the most prolific place name in the United States, Washington is the most common, according to World Atlas, with 88 place names. There are even more if you count places where Washington is only a portion of the name.
Springfield (41)
Springfield is in second place, coming in with 41 cities and towns named it, the first being in Massachusetts, naturally, in 1636, after a city in England. It's a long-running debate among fans of the animated TV series "The Simpsons" as to which state the family actually lives in, because Springfields are seemingly everywhere and the TV series makes a point never to specify which state they're in.
Franklin (35)
Third is Franklin, with 35 cities and towns named after founding father Benjamin Franklin, who was integral in the Declaration of Independence, served as an ambassador to France, and helped establish the U.S. Postal Service. The most populous Franklin city is in Tennessee and has 68,549 residents as of 2017.
Greenville (31)
A lot of city and town founders must have enjoyed the scenery where they put down roots, as the name Greenville is next, with 31 U.S. instances. The name appears coast to coast. One of the first founded was in South Carolina, in 1786.
Bristol (29)
If there are any city names that sound as if it were plucked straight out of Britain, the place name of Bristol has to be at the top of that list. It has 29 cities and towns named after it in the United States, and in Britain, it's historically been a commercial center and important seaport.
Clinton (29)
The first tie on the list comes up here, with the moniker of Clinton also notching 29 instances in the United States. New York state alone has three Clinton place names, the village, town, and county of. The most populous city by that name is in Maryland, with more than 39,000 inhabitants, and the city in Arkansas wasn't named after its governor turned president but after New York governor DeWitt Clinton.
Fairview (27)
Fairview might be popular around the country as a name, but the cities across the United States must be fairly small if the most populous is the one in New Jersey at just over 14,000 residents. Founders of these cities must have liked the scenery around their location and realized that the name Greenville was already taken.
Salem (26)
Of the 26 Salems in the country, the one in Massachusetts is where the infamous 1692 witch trials were. The city in Oregon is the largest, though, coming in at just over 160,000 in population.
Madison (24)
Known for his work on US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, fourth president James Madison has 24 place names sprinkled throughout the United States that carry his surname. The largest city is the capital of Wisconsin, which has 243,122 people living there.
Georgetown (23)Most of us recall back when Barack Obama ran for the White House in 2008 and there was a group of school children that were being indoctrinated about Obama through song. Comparisons were made between Obama and Hitler at that time and throughout his time in office. Now, it seems that Obama's Common Core curriculum has its own praise poem titled "We learned more with Common Core" and North Carolina students are now reciting it.
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The Blaze first reported on the poem. Erica Ritz wrote, "A substitute teacher in North Carolina recently sent Glenn Beck a copy of a poem that she claims roughly 80 fifth-grade students recited for their promotion ceremony (like graduation) at a school near Raleigh."
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The ceremony took place in June of this year and 80 fifth graders recited the poem.
The text of the poem reads:
Text genre, features & theme to explore
We learned more with common core.
Fractions, decimals, journal prompts galore
We learned more with common core.
RUNNER & CUBES are strategies for
Learning more with common core.
Vocab words like (clouds, organs, force), & omnivore
We learned more with common core
Economy, government, Revolutionary war
We learned more with common core.
So many new concepts to explore
We learned more with common core.
Beck took it to his radio show on Friday. "That doesn't sound like you're indoctrinating kids at all!" Beck's co-host Pat Gray said sarcastically on radio Friday. "Like it's Soviet Russia? No, not at all!"
Beck spoke with the teacher, who wished to remain anonymous.
"If you're not saying anything, the parents aren't going to know, because nobody's telling them anything," she said.
The school was not named by the teacher, but she did indicate that it is in Wake County in The Raleigh, North Carolina area.
Michelle Malkin wrote that the Common Core standards "undermine local control of education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested, mediocre, and incoherent pedagogical theories on America's schoolchildren." I would encourage you to read what many authors and educators have written here at Freedom Outpost on Common Core.What has given the team great confidence is their exceptional defensive effort against the Springboks last weekend, which was rated by numerous former Wallabies as among the best in the team's history. Their defence held up and saved them, effecting exceptional tackle after exceptional tackle to keep the Boks out.
The Springboks had enough ball to win the game by plenty, but the Wallabies determined defence - including that of Pat McCabe, James Horwill, Will Genia and Adam Ashley-Cooper - gave them no leeway. Wallabies team management said this was a strong sign that their attitude was fixed on winning this tournament after suffering the early jolt of losing to Ireland during the pool stage, which made their course through the finals treacherous. The Wallabies have also remained focused, with no off-field issues - unlike the All Blacks and England, whose tournaments have been marred by player behaviour problems.
Wallabies assistant coach and selector David Nucifora yesterday emphasised how important their Springboks triumph was.
''The players had to stick at it against the Springboks. And it would have only taken one mistake for that game to be lost. That type of discipline and level of concentration gives the team a lot of confidence going into the next big match,'' he said.
''Still they need no reminding of the fact that it is going to go up a number of levels against the All Blacks. It was a great defensive effort last weekend and the work around the contact area was very good. But there were areas in our game, in particular our attack and lineout, which need to improve. I suppose if we take our defensive effort from the weekend, and the first 40 minutes in Brisbane against the Kiwis, we will be getting close to a good performance.''Faced with falling prices and weak demand in a slowing economy, coal companies will find it an opportune time for mergers and acquisitions, industry experts said on Tuesday. [Photo/China Daily]
Non-core businesses being sold to pay off debts as mining group reels from continued losses
The largest coal mining group in Northeast China is cutting 100,000 jobs within the next three months to reduce its losses - one of the biggest mass layoffs in recent years.
Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group Co Ltd, which has a 240,000 workforce, said a special center would be created to help those losing their jobs to either relocate or start their own businesses.
Chaiman of the group Wang Zhikui said the job losses were a way of helping the company "stop bleeding".
It also plans to sell its non-coal related businesses to help pay off its debts, said Wang.
The State-owned mining group has subsidiaries in Jixi, Hegang, Shuangyashan and Qitaihe in Heilongjiang province, which account for about half the region's coal production.
China's coal mining industry has been struggling with overcapacity and falling coal prices since 2012.
Last year, Longmay launched a management restructuring and cut thousands of jobs to stay profitable, amid the overall industry decline.
However, the company still reported around 5 billion yuan ($815 million) in losses.
It has been a dramatic fall from grace for the company, which in 2011 reported 800 million yuan in profit with annual production exceeding 50 million metric tons.
Experts said staff costs remain a major reason for the company's continued heavy losses.
Last year its coal production stood at 49 million tons, just 10 percent that of Shenhua Group Corp Ltd, China's biggest coal producer. But Longmay's workforce remains well above that of Shenhua's 214,000 in total.
Official data show that average annual production per head at Longmay is about 250 tons, against a national industry average of between 500 to 600 tons.
Longmay also has 180,000 pensioners to take care of, with life-long payments covering pensions and medical insurance, which are also considered a huge financial burden.
"Personnel is probably its largest cost," said Deng Shun, an analyst at Shanghai-based energy consultancy ICIS C1 Energy.
"Actually many traditional State-owned coal enterprises are facing the same kind of problem. It has become more severe as the industry remains on a downward trend."
Deng also cautioned on the social problems that massive layoffs may cause, suggesting a reduction in welfare or salaries might be a better way to cut back on costs.The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has released INFO 225 Initial coin offerings to offer guidance on the potential application of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) to businesses seeking to hold an initial coin offering (ICO). This guidance notes that the Corporations Act applies regardless of whether the ICO was created and offered from Australia or overseas.
Key issues
In keeping with the view expressed by regulators around the globe including the United States Securities and Exchanges Commission, the Canada Securities Administrators and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, ASIC has indicated that the legal status of an ICO depends on the ICO’s structure and operation, and the rights attached to the tokens offered in the ICO.
Broadly, the tokens offering during the ICO may trigger particular licensing and disclosure requirements under the Corporations Act if the tokens represent financial products (ASIC considers relevant financial products which tokens could fall within include interests in managed investment schemes, shares, derivatives or non-cash payment (NCP) facilities). Any company operating a cryptocurrency exchange will also be required to hold an Australian Market Licence (AML) if the tokens traded on the exchange constitute financial products.
Even if the ICO is not governed under the Corporations Act, it may still be subject to the general law and Australian consumer laws in relation to the offer of services or products. For instance, Australian consumer law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct in a range of circumstances. Care must be taken with ICO promotional materials to ensure that they do not mislead or deceive potential investors.
Determining if a token is a financial product
Is your ICO a managed investment scheme?
Similar to the Howey test in the US for testing investment contracts, ASIC’s view is that if the ICO involves investors contributing assets, including digital currency, in a common enterprise to obtain a financial benefit or interest in property but without those investors having day-to-day involvement in the operation of the common enterprise, then this may be classed as a managed investment scheme (MIS) that would fall within the scope of the financial services regulation in the Corporations Act.
Companies holding an ICO may seek to frame the entitlements or interests received by contributors as a receipt of a purchased service and therefore not within the definition of a MIS. However, ASIC has clarified that where the value of the tokens acquired is affected by the pooling of funds from investors or use of those funds under the arrangement, however the ICO will most likely be subject to Corporations Act requirements regarding disclosure, registration and licensing of MISs.
In determining whether an ICO amounts to a MIS, ASIC has noted that the rights attaching to tokens are to be interpreted broadly. This will include rights that may arise in the future or on a contingency, and rights that are not legally enforceable. This interpretation of the Corporations Act appears intended to capture a wide breadth of ICOs within the scope of existing regulation.
Is your ICO an offer of shares?
Shares are a collection of rights relating to a company, including ownership, voting and some right to future profits. If the tokens offered during the ICO have these features, based on the whitepaper, and are issued to fund a company or an undertaking resembling a company, the company holding the ICO will need to comply with the same disclosure requirements as for initial public offerings, such as the requirement to prepare a prospectus.
ASIC notes that while investor protections exist in relation to defective IPO prospectuses (ie, investors may have capacity to withdraw their investments), no such protection exists for ICOs made without a prospectus.
Is your ICO an offer of derivatives?
Generally, derivatives are financial products that derive their value from an underlying instrument or reference asset. This underlying instrument could include a share, a share price index, a pair of currencies or a commodity, including other cryptocurrencies.
ICOs offering tokens that derive their price from other financial products, or underlying market or asset prices moving in a certain direction before a particular time or event, may indeed be derivatives and subject to obligations under the Corporations Act. ASIC has suggested that the use of smart contracts may alleviate tokens from being classified as derivatives in some instances.
When are tokens issued under an ICO a NCP facility?
A NCP facility is an arrangement through which a person makes payments, or causes payments to be made, to more than one person other than by physical delivery of currency. While tokens offered under an ICO are unlikely to be NCP facilities, an ICO may involve a NCP facility if the arrangement facilitates payments to numerous payees in non-cash form or payments initially in non-cash form are converted to fiat currency to complete the payment. Coin offerors who propose an ICO which will facilitate transfers constituting an NCP facility will need to do so under the authority of an Australian financial services licence which permits the licensee or its representatives to operate a NCP facility.
This position has been longstanding, in 2014 ASIC publicly stated that facilities by which digital currency is used to pay for goods and services may be classified as NCP facilities.
Do you need an AML to conduct an ICO?
You do not need an AML to conduct an ICO. However, if the tokens offered are found to be financial products, any platform enabling token holders to buy or sell their tokens may involve the operation of a financial market and will need an AML or an exemption from the requirement to hold one.
Distinguishing ICOs from crowd-sourced equity funding
ASIC has also warned consumers that while ICOs may be informally referred to as “crowd funding”, ICOs are not “crowd-sourced funding” (CSF), which has different obligations under the Corporations Act. We have examined CSF regulation for public and proprietary companies in earlier updates. It may be misleading or deceptive to describe ICOs as crowd-sourced funding when it is not operating under that regime in the Corporations Act.
Insights
Generally, an ICO should be conducted in a manner that promotes investor trust and confidence, and complies with the relevant laws. ASIC has recommended that companies wishing to hold an ICO contact the Innovation Hub for informal assistance reflecting ASIC’s willingness to engage with proposed coin offerors.
ASIC’s cooperative and transparent approach follows that of Canadian regulators, which has led to Quebec’s securities regulator recently accepting an ICO into its regulatory sandbox. These are important steps by ASIC towards providing regulatory certainty and building greater investor confidence around tokens as an asset class.
Importantly, noting the exception of the Chinese ban on ICOs, ASIC’s regulatory guidance is in line with the position of other regulators from around the globe. For instance, the financial regulator in Hong Kong, like ASIC, has also outlined situations where a token may be a financial product in its recent regulatory guidance.
For offering entities, ASIC’s comments are applicable even to ICOs where the offering entity is based outside of Australia. For entities wishing to target Australian investors, conducting an ICO may subject you to Australian consumer law even where the token is not a financial product. The financial services regulatory regime may also be triggered where a token that is a financial product is being offered from another jurisdiction into Australia. Whether this will impact the scope of tokens which Australian investors are currently investing and trading in will be observed in the near term.
ASIC’s regulatory guidance is a milestone towards establishing regulatory certainty for ICOs. It may prove influential in legitimising tokens in the eyes of the investment community.Quick Vote When do you plan to retire? Before age 65
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Discount retailer Dollar General Corp. on Thursday filed to sell up to $750 million worth of stock in an initial public offering.
The Goodlettsville, Tenn.-based chain, which was bought by private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 2007, opperates 8,362 stores in 35 U.S. states.
The $750 million estimate was calculated solely for the purpose of registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the actual amount sold could vary. If the company raises the estimated amount, it would be one of the biggest IPOs this year.
KKR will underwrite the offering along with Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) and J.P. Morgan (JPM, Fortune 500), among others.
The filing did not say when the offering would take place.
Dollar said it will pay a "special dividend" of $200 million to existing shareholders using cash generated from operations. It will also pay a $64 million fee to KKR and Goldman for management and advisory services.
The offering comes as the stock market has rallied broadly over the last several months, raising bets that a revival in the IPO market is on the horizon after demand evaporated in the credit crunch last year.
The company has fared well during the recession as consumers have become increasingly more bargain-minded.
Dollar's profits surged to $83 million in the quarter ended May 1 from $5.9 million a year earlier.130 Shares 0
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The Sabra and Shatila massacre was the slaughter of between 762 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese Shia Muslim civilians, by a Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia assisted by the Israel Defense Forces, in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon.
The massacre was presented as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the Lebanese Kataeb Party. It was wrongly assumed that Palestinian militants had carried out the assassination.
On September 15th, the Israeli Defense Forces had already surrounded the camp, and controlled the entrances and exits. It also occupied several multi story buildings that they deemed would serve as observation posts. Ariel Sharon and his chief of staff Rafael Eitan informed the phalangists that the PLO was behind the attack and invited them to enter the camps to take their revenge.
1,500 militiamen assembled at Beirut International Airport, then occupied by Israel. Under the command of Elie Hobeika, they began moving towards the camps in IDF suppliedJeeps, following Israeli guidance on how to enter the camps.
For the next 36 to 48 hours, the Phalangists massacred the inhabitants of Sabra and Shatila, while Israeli troops guarded the exits and continued to fire flares at night. Later on, a militiaman radioed his commander Hobeika and asked what to do with the women and children in the refugee camp. This was overheard by an Israeli officer, who heard Hobeika's reply: "This is the last time you're going to ask me a question like that; you know exactly what to do." Phalangist troops could be heard laughing in the background.
The Phalangists did not exit the camps at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday as ordered. They forced the remaining survivors to march out of the camps, to the stadium for interrogations; this went on for the entire day. The militia finally left the camps at 8:00 a.m. on September 18.
Between 1200 and 3500 people were killed, around quarter of which were Lebanese, in the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps between September 16 and 18, 1982.
Many of the bodies found had been severely mutilated. Many boys had beencastrated, some were scalped, and some had the Christian cross carved into their bodies.
Janet Lee Stevens, an American journalist later wrote:
“I saw dead women in their houses with their skirts up to their waists and their legs spread apart; dozens of young men shot after being lined up against an alley wall; children with their throats slit, a pregnant woman with her stomach chopped open, her eyes still wide open, her blackened face silently screaming in horror; countless babies and toddlers who had been stabbedor ripped apart and who had been thrown into garbage piles.”
On December 16, 1982, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide.Toonami Asia announced on Monday that it will premiere the Dragon Ball Super television anime series in Southeast Asia and India on January 21. The show will have a "sneak peek" preview airing of the first episode on December 17. The airing will be the series' international English dub premiere. Toonami Asia is streaming a clip from the first episode with an English dub, but the video is region-locked and is only viewable in Asia (except in Japan) and Australasia.
Bang Zoom! Entertainment confirmed on Monday that it is producing this English dub for Toonami Asia.
Toonami Asia had announced in November 2015 that it would show the "English-language world premiere" of Dragon Ball Super in Southeast Asia and India in mid-2016, but Toonami Asia's official Twitter account reported that it had no new information as of August.
Dragon Ball Super premiered in Japan in July 2015 on Fuji TV and other channels.
Crunchyroll, Daisuki, and AnimeLab began simulcasting the series in various regions starting on October 22 with the Future Trunks Arc (episodes 47-63). Funimation has licensed the series in North America, with an English dub planned.
Update: Bang Zoom! Entertainment confirmed on Monday that it is producing this English dub for Toonami Asia. Thanks, emory.The newest Teen Mom 2 star just couldn’t wait to make her entrance into the world!
The Ashley can confirm that Corey and Miranda Simms have welcomed a daughter, Remington Monroe, this weekend. She was not due until January 1, but it appears to be healthy, despite her early arrival.
Corey and Miranda posted a family photo to their private Facebook account this afternoon, showing Miranda and Corey holding their new daughter. Another post stated that “Remi Monroe decided to make an early arrival.”
Remington was given the middle name “Monroe,” because it is the middle name of Miranda’s father. She reportedly weighed 4 lbs. 11 oz. at birth.
Remi is Miranda’s first child and Corey’s third. (He shares twin daughters with his ex-wife, Leah Messer.) The couple has been married since June 2013 and recently gained full primary custody of Corey’s twins.
It is not known if Remi was born today or yesterday, but Corey’s father, Jeff Simms, hinted yesterday that the baby’s arrival was rapidly approaching (possibly because Miranda was already in labor?)
“Won’t be much longer until we are blessed with another miracle from |
chance to play his game and not worry about much else.
“He’s great, you guys know the type of player he is, he’s easy to play with,” Corrado boasted of Hamhuis. “He makes the game easy for you and I just want to reciprocate that and make the game as easy as I can for him and be a good partner.”
The shoes Corrado has to fill are quite large, yet he isn’t putting the weight of becoming Bieksa on himself.
That being said, Bieksa played 21:16 a game, including almost two minutes shorthanded. Bieksa was also third on the team in both hits and blocks, not to mention the leadership he provided in the dressing room.
Corrado said a full-team defensive effort will help the Canucks get by without Bieksa.
“You just have to play your game when you get the chance and show what you can do. At the end of the day it’s about the team winning, so if you can contribute to that, you’re doing well.
“The team is obviously going to miss Kev, he’s a big part of the team and does so much in the dressing room and on the ice for us, but it’s up to the whole D-core to fill that void and that rests upon all of us, not just one player.”
The test begins Tuesday when Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry, Ryan Kesler and the Anaheim Ducks come to town.The middle-aged American in the green anorak is clearly thrilled. He's just started to peruse the bottles on sale at Cave à Bulles, a beer shop close to the Centre Pompidou in the heart of Paris. "So many of these aren't on my list!" he exclaims, waving a thick wad of carefully annotated A4 paper at the beer bottles – all of them French – on the shelf in front of him.
You don't have to be quite such an aficionado, though, to enjoy beer in Paris. Despite the French government's introduction of a punitive 160 per cent tax rise on beer (which could increase the price of a small beer by a quarter), Parisians are increasingly interested in the quality of the beer they drink. Good beer has arrived in Paris.
That much is clear from just five minutes spent nosing around Cave à Bulles. Although some of the labels may be distinctly homemade – this is bière artisanale, after all – it's clear there's a real passion for beer in France now. The beer itself is increasingly good, too, says the shop's owner Simon Thillou. "The quality and consistency of the beers keeps on improving," he says.
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Those searching for a Parisian beer among the 100 or so French breweries represented at Cave à Bulles will be disappointed, however. France may have more than 400 breweries now, but the capital could, until recently, boast only a selection of fairly uninspiring brewpubs and a handful of breweries (most notably Outland in Bagnolet) just outside the city. The reality is that Paris – constrained as it is by the Boulevard Périphérique – is too expensive for most brewers.
That hasn't stopped Thierry Roche, who has recently opened Paris's first real craft brewery in La Goutte D'Or, one of the city's working-class neighbourhoods. The brewery itself (named after the area, which can be found to the north of Gare du Nord) is housed in a former restaurant and doubles as a shop where you can buy the beer – and it's well worth doing so. Roche's brews are inspired by the area around him (and named after nearby streets, such as Château Rouge and Charbonnière), so expect beers flavoured with ingredients popular with La Goutte D'Or's African and Arabic inhabitants, such as peppers, dates and ginger.
Roche, 40, says he makes the beer he wants rather than the beer that he knows Parisians will drink. The problem in France is that too few people recognise that beer can be a sophisticated, complex drink. "For most people here, beer is just for slaking your thirst," he bemoans. The uninitiated might think this has always been the case in Paris, but the city once had a vibrant beer culture. Brasseries are now mainly known for their magnificent interiors and so-so renditions of classic dishes such as choucroute garni and coq au vin, but the name brasserie gives away their original intent: it means brewery.
The first brasseries were opened towards the end of the 19th century by Alsatian immigrants, who brought their love for beer to the capital. At some stage, though, this tradition was lost and it's clear that some Parisians feel the lack of a brewing tradition deeply. Two beers have recently been launched onto the French market bearing the names of long-gone Parisian breweries: Gallia and Demory. Neither of them are brewed in the city, although both producers have plans to do so.
To add insult to injury, the handful of mediocre beers that are available tend to be eye-wateringly expensive: it is not unusual to pay €4.50 for half a pint of beer in Paris. The upside of this, of course, is that a place like La Fine Mousse (a craft-beer bar on Avenue Jean Aicard, which served its first beer in the summer) can afford to compete on price with their rivals despite offering a far superior product.
The bar is owned by four friends, three of whom have hosted an irregular beer event called Les Soirées Maltées on a boat on the Seine for the past few years (the other is Thillou). It boasts what is almost certainly Paris' biggest craft-beer range (another new bar, Le Supercoin, on Rue Baudelique, has a much smaller selection while Brewberry, which opened in 2010 on the Rue du Pot de Fer, concentrates on bottles), with 20 taps and more than 150 bottles on offer. Pleasingly, many of the beers available are French – in stark contrast to most of Paris's longer-established beer venues, which are Belgian beer-focused.
This focus on Belgian beer has led to a fair bit of confusion, says Romain Thieffry, one of La Fine Mousse's owners. "'There are a lot of men who think they know beer because they know a little about Belgian beer, and women who think they don't like beer," he says. "It's enjoyable to challenge their preconceptions: 'Oh, OK, I didn't know beer', or 'I do like beer.'"
Some beers (which are served in 25cl glasses, and mostly cost €3.50 – although that may soon increase given the rise in taxes) at La Fine Mousse will challenge, or perhaps reinforce, a few preconceptions, too. Volceleste Blonde, a beer made not far from Paris at the Brasserie de la Vallée de Chevreuse, is nothing like your average bland French lager: it's certainly refreshing, but there's an elegance, a balance of honey and citrus about it, that seems totally natural for a French beer.
La Fine Mousse ("the delicate foam") may be focused on promoting excellent French beer, but its ambiance is different from the classic bar-brasserie. Thieffry says that the beer taps were deliberately placed on the back wall in order not to put a barrier between the customer and the server, while the room is arranged to encourage more interaction. Every little helps in the battle to convince Paris that beer is not just for quenching your thirst.
Will Hawkes is the author of 'Craft Beer London' (Vespertine Press, £10)
Travel essentials
Getting there
Will Hawkes travelled as a guest of Eurostar (08432 186 186; eurostar.com) which operates daily services from London St Pancras to Paris Gare du Nord. Returns from £69.
Drinking there
Cave a Bulles, 45 rue Quincampoix (00 33 1 40 29 03 69; caveabulles.fr).
Brasserie de la Goutte D'Or, 28 rue de la Goute d'Or (00 33 6 18 53 77 70; brasserie lagouttedor.com).
La Fine Mousse, 6 avenue Jean Aicard (00 33 9 80 45 94 64; lafinemousse.fr).A Swedish economist, researcher, and business professor has calculated the total cost of the migrant crisis for 2015 for Sweden, and has reached a “conservative” lifetime estimate of around 600 billion Swedish Kronor (£48.3 billion).
Stockholm University associate professor Jan Tullberg has looked beyond the immediate costs of merely receiving migrants and their initial impact — extra policing, higher social benefits — and claims to have found the true cost of just one year’s migration. Taking the claims of the Swedish government at face value has calculated what these ‘new Swedes’ will cost the state from now until they leave the country or die, which ever comes first.
Using best case scenario figures to generate what he calls a “conservative” estimate, he believes the 2015 intake will eventually cost the Swedish taxpayer kr 583,000,000,000 — or 583 billion. Swedish new-media news service Friatider (Free Times) reports a summarised version of the maths used to reach this figure, starting with the number of migrants who arrived in 2015.
Accepting the government’s claim that 60,000 of the 163,000 asylum claimants who arrived last year will be rejected and deported, Dr. Tullberg bases his initial calculations therefore on 103,000 new benefit claimants — or taxpayers — to assess the likely number of family reunifications. Sweden, like many other European countries observes the EU mandated human right to family life, allowing migrants granted residence to apply then to have the government bring over their families.
Because this right is often more rigorously enforced for unaccompanied minors, this allows one young man in his late teens to fight his way to northern Europe then exercise his rights to have his family flown over to catch up with him, all of whom then receive residency. Dr. Tullberg predicts with the new Swedish rules presently being worked on to tighten up this loophole — although he notes it has been deliberately worded to continue to allow almost all migrants to claim — will bring the total immigrants in the equation to 200,000.
The first cost Dr. Tullberg calculates therefore is the processing costs at the Migration Bureau, which shuffles paperwork, houses, feeds, and gives pocket money to each new arrival for an average of 414 days before they are signed off and legally permitted to start looking for work. However as Dr. Tullberg notes according to past experience it can take an average of eight years before migrants find any job,a nd many never find work at all and so stay on these benefits, at kr 150,000 (£12,500) a year.
The “establishment costs” therefore for 200,000 people Dr. Tullberg surmises could in his best-case estimate be around kr 240 billion (£20 billion).
Next comes the additional expense for so-called unaccompanied minors — under-18’s who have arrived in Sweden without their parents or family — which are so inflated Dr. Tullberg remarks “the costs for this group is almost bizarre”. He says these young arrivals are given “a government allowance of 1,900 kronor per person per day just for food and lodging. I put the cost at kr 800,000 per person per year”.
Deducting the kr 150,000 establishment cost, and multiplying the figure by both the approximately 28,000 under-aged arrivals last year and the average three years they will spend in this care, Dr. Tullberg finds an additional cost of another 55 billion kronor (£4.5 billion).
Although to this point the calculations have dealt with the costs of the immigrants given asylum status, those forced to leave still cost the state. Although the legal and practical costs of deportation are already high many will abscond, costing the state as undocumented migrants, and others will return to Sweden after the four year limitation period for apply for their residency permit again. Dr. Tullberg believes “a conservative estimate is [kr] 300,000 per person… rejection cost would be 60,000 people x 300,00”, giving an additional migrant crisis cost of 18 billion kronor (£1.5 billion).
Having considered the direct costs, the economist then turns to the gains from migrants, the tax they pay once they get through the asylum system and find jobs. But here the government is still paying out, as Dr. Tullberg finds migrants are on average a third less likely to have a paid job than native Swedes, and are unable to cover the cost of their own state pensions in tax contributions.
Basing his figures on a 2006 study which put the cost of a 15 year pension to age 80 at kr 3.4 million, and not even accounting for the fact the migrants in his study will earn less over their lifetimes than their native counterparts and therefore pay less tax, and that the pension age will rise in time, Dr. Tullberg estimates a pension cost of 204 billion kronor (£17 billion).
The academic’s final calculations are the costs of raising children, which based on the same assumptions of migrant employability again must be borne by the state. This Dr. Tullberg believes, with the high migrant birthrate will cost an additional 66 billion kronor (£5.4 billion).
The report claims the final figure of 583 billion kronor, which compared to the Swedish defence budget of 40 billion kronor a year, works out at around 14 years of defence for one year of open borders. The figure also works out at three million kronor per average migrant (£248,000), a figure Dr. Tullberg claims “is comparable to other studies, providing a basis for fair consideration”. One such study is a 2012 report which found the cost of “non-European immigrants to Norway” was some four million Norwegian krone.
In addition to the costs of migration, the Norwegian study also found migrants from outside Europe and the Anglosphere (North America, Australia, New Zealand) were more likely to settle permanently, rather than eventually going home, and had significantly more children.
Sweden is not the only country now thinking of the long term costs of the migrant crisis. Breitbart London reported this week on the projections being made about the healthcare costs of new migrants in Germany, who present experience is showing require more dental and healthcare than their native hosts. While the migrant crisis drags on German private healthcare providers are being forced to foot the bill for new customers who themselves are not asked to pay into the pot.
The German government is responsible for paying their bills but so far, has not been meeting the full cost. By 2017, the hundreds of small insurers and providers that make up Germany’s healthcare system are forecast to be facing a one billion Euro deficit.[For more background information, go to http://links.org.au/node/1168 and http://links.org.au/node/1175.]
Ventnor Blog -- August 5, 6pm, 2009 -- With Mike Godley having left yesterday, we spoke to Mark, one of the six who are still inside at the Vestas sit-in. We discussed how they had to reorganise themselves now four people have left.
He said that that morale was still good and how they’ll “still be fighting Vestas”. Mark explained that “It was strange to have that many people leaving at once.”
It’s unclear if Vestas have applied for bailiff papers to have them removed from the building. Vestas have issued a statement that they are very patient and that they can wait. Mark said, “They did ask us yesterday that if we wanted to leave the door open they would come in and get us. We replied ‘No’.”
Those inside had thought that the bailiffs might have gone in last night, but nothing happened in the end.
Mark said that “When they do come to get us, we will leave peacefully.”
Listen for yourself here:
or at http://ventnorblog.com/vestas-sit-in-day-16-phone-call-to-the-inside-podcast/
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The British Guardian reports late on August 6:
Six workers who have been staging a sit-in at Britain's only major wind turbine factory for more than two weeks called today for a national day of action to support their attempt to save it from closure with the loss of more than 600 jobs. The men, who say they are determined to remain inside the Vestas Wind Systems plant on the Isle of Wight until bailiffs come to remove them, want people around the country to show support on Wednesday August 12 by downing tools for an hour, holding a rally or hanging up a banner. Meanwhile many of the workers who left the occupation yesterday of their own accord returned to the site, on an industrial estate outside Newport, to support their colleagues from the outside. Asked what the experience inside had been like, Chris Ash replied: "The Big Brother house." He explained: "You've got to ration all the tobacco, all the food, you've got to wash stuff in the sinks. It's really tough. Being away from your loved ones, not being able to do normal stuff. "When you came out on the balcony and could see your friends and family outside, that was hard. You'd think, 'Can I do this?'" Since leaving, Ash said he had had a shower, a shave, seen his cats and treated himself to some fish and chips. After that it was straight back to the plant, where he spent yesterday evening and has been since early this morning. "I plan to stay here for the forseeable future," he said. "The lads inside are doing a tremendous job. I couldn't physically do it any more." Like Big Brother housemates, the occupiers have gone to some lengths to keep themselves amused. Michael Godley revealed that he and another worker who has come out had written a musical about the occupation using alternative words to well-known songs including Michael Jackson's ``Beat It'' and Gloria Gaynor's ``I Will Survive''. The men have acted it out and filmed it, ready to screen when they have all left the building. Godley called on people around the country and on the Isle of Wight to show their support to the men left inside. It is thought the company will not act quickly to remove them. "We need more islanders to get involved, especially the other workers", Godley said. "There's 600 of them who have already got two weeks' extra pay and more redundancy money because of what we've done. We need them to get on board." On August 4, Vestas won a repossession order allowing it to remove the men. Four then left of their own accord, while the others vowed to stay on. Another five activists are occupying the roof of another site owned by the Danish company, in East Cowes. They have set up a climate camp on the steep sloping surface complete with tents, a kitchen and a toilet.
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By Daniel Coysh
August 4, 2009 -- Morning Star -- Six defiant Vestas workers have vowed to continue their battle for green jobs and energy after bosses at the threatened wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight won a possession order. As workers prepared for the arrival of bailiffs, they urged the British people to stage a day of action this weekend and pledged to continue their campaign even if they were forcibly evicted.
"We are just waiting now to see what happens", said one of the activists from a factory balcony. "But we will not stop our protest, we will merely move down the road until we get results." Not far from the factory on a mini-roundabout, green campaigners have established a climate camp, with colourful banners hung from nearby walls -- including one condemning "Mandelson's green failure".
The group of 11 workers have barricaded themselves into the Newport factory since July 20. So far, the occupation has prevented its closure -- which was meant to take place on July 31 -- but Vestas bosses successfully applied for a possession order at Newport County Court yesterday (August 3) morning.
Judge Graham White said he was satisfied that legal papers had been served on the occupying workers, as scores of RMT union members and green activists gathered outside in solidarity with the workers and jeered him for siding with the employers. Many of them then marched to the Newport factory in a show of solidarity with the workers. Protesters gathered outside the plant and chanted: "We will fight back."
One of the occupying workers addressed them from a balcony, praising their solidarity and calling for a national day of action on August 8 and again on August 12.
"We are asking people to down tools or hold a rally to support us. We want the protest to continue but we also want it to remain peaceful", he said. "We believe this place has a future and we shall not give up on that."
RMT general secretary Bob Crow was in court for the hearing and pledged his union's ongoing support for the workers. He also slammed the Labour government's hypocrisy.
"Although the company has won a technical legal victory, the workers have won a moral and industrial victory through their sheer determination to save 625 jobs in green manufacturing", he said. "It is an absolute disgrace that, while the government preaches about greening the environment and creating jobs, not a single representative from Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband downwards have had the common courtesy to meet with workers involved in this important fight.''
"Regardless of the court action today, the workers will continue to receive the full support of the RMT," Mr Crow insisted.
Earlier in the day, worker and climate camp activists occupied the roof of a nearby Vestas factory in Cowes and unveiled banners attacking ministers and bosses in a fresh show of solidarity with the Newport protesters. They also hung a banner above the island's ferry port saying: "Vestas Workers -- Solidarity in Occupation. Save Green Jobs."
Cowes worker Sean McDonagh told reporters that there was little chance of finding another skilled job on the island if the wind turbine business shut down. He revealed that there were just 145 job vacancies on the Isle of Wight at the moment, with 60 people chasing each and every last one. McDonagh went on to accuse ministers of "lying" about creating green jobs, slating the Brown government as "a complete sham".
The Newport occupiers said that they were now waiting for bailiffs to arrive but there was no information about when any move might be made to end the sit-in. Later in the day, following a discussion among the occupiers, several workers left the plant to join the protesters outside. Discussion continues inside and outside as to the tactics to adopt following the eviction order.
Message from the Vestas workers
August 4, 2009 -- Ventnor Blog -- Once everyone had returned from the court hearing in Newport, the lads on the balcony gave their speech to the crowd of supporters and media outside the Vestas factory. Sebastian Sikora (or ‘Seb the Celeb’ as he has become more fondly known) made an address over the PA system.
Speaking on behalf of all the workers on the balcony, he called for a national day of action this coming Saturday (and Wednesday next week). He suggested that you down tools of an hour or do something for your community to show your support.
He went on to say that the workers inside wanted to make the point that the security and police had been good to them and that they were just ordinary good people making a living and had families to feed - they were not the enemy.
He went onto say that the managers felt that Vestas factory had no future, but the workers begged to differ. “Changes should be made for the people, not for the money.”
Apologies for the wind disturbance.
Appeal to supporters to respect workers' wishes
August 4, 2009 -- Ventnor Blog -- Some people in the crowd were suggesting that others should occupy the Vestas building. The Vestas workers wanted this protest to continue in the peaceful way it started and has continued. RMT official Richard stepped forward and asked that the wishes of the workers inside be respected.I love music and I've always loved to dance. Ever since I was a teenager all I wanted was to hear my kind of music as loud as possible. In school I stood out because of my love of gay disco, but I didn't care. In the late 80s I dabbled with speed to give me the energy to dance all night and started going to the London gay club, Heaven. I wasn't gay and I never got propositioned. I just wanted to dance. So I did.
Then came acid house and ecstasy. Suddenly, there was music that I loved complete with its own drug that let you dance like there was no tomorrow. When taking ecstasy the worst aspects of clubbing melted away: the sweat dripping from the ceiling, berks spouting rubbish, the interminable queues. You simply closed your eyes and danced your arse off. Bliss.
As for the warnings against the drug, such as the campaign that followed the death of teenager Leah Betts, they didn't bother me. Everyone knew she died because she drank too much water and her brain swelled up. She listened to the government scaremongering about the effects of ecstasy. Besides, I reasoned, I wasn't feckless. I combined my juvenile behaviour with very responsible jobs - until last year I was a manager with a charity. Also, as I got older I naturally went clubbing less and less.
Then, last year I went to see the Pet Shop Boys play a benefit gig at Heaven. I hadn't been to a club for four years and after turning 40 had promised myself that I would grow up and start acting my age. But the Pet Shop Boys had provided the soundtrack to my life. It seems I was not quite ready to embrace the questionable delights of middle age.
So, that evening I got home from work and got changed. And that's it. That's all I remember. A month later when I woke up I didn't even know I had left the house. I felt like the gig was about to start. I knew nothing about being in a coma, or my mum and brother deciding not to turn off my life-support machine. I didn't hear the discussions about what might happen if I woke up. I certainly did not know about my mum and brother being told on three occasions that I might die.
It transpired that I had taken powdered ecstasy, or MDMA, before going into Heaven. No one knows how much, except me, and I can't remember. The friend who was with me that night, and who ultimately saved my life, recalls me dancing oddly and being a bit unsteady. Thankfully, she had the sense to get me outside and call an ambulance. Soon I was unable to stand and, to all intents and purposes, I lay dead in her arms outside Heaven.
The ambulance took me to St Thomas's A&E department in south London. The MDMA had induced a toxic reaction in my brain, heating it up to 41 degrees. My cerebellum - the part of the brain that tells the body how to balance, how to make sounds recognisable as words and remembers how to write and hold a pen - was fried. Despite this I was incredibly lucky. I later found out that I was one of four people in the hospital that weekend to have taken an E - and the only one to survive. My friend was told by a consultant that you could take E or MDMA 100 times and suffer no ill-effects or you could take it only once and that would be it.
I was moved to Guy's hospital as all my vital organs packed up one after the other.
The doctors decided against giving me a liver transplant, but my lungs collapsed twice. I only had one kidney, as the other was removed when I was 16, which complicated the situation.
I spent a month in a coma before waking and being transferred to the high-dependency unit. In there I became convinced the doctors were out to kill me. In fact in my deluded state I even begged for a knife so that I could cut away at the plastic sheet I thought the mortuary assistants would bind me in. Next, I spent a week in a neurological ward before I was given a place at a rehab unit five minutes from my house, which I had passed by for 17 years without ever noticing.
I was sure my situation was a cruel practical joke and kept waiting for someone to say they could cure me with a quick injection. However, I quickly got used to the routine. Up at 8am, a compulsory shower and then nothing but endless therapy sessions - physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, psychotherapy. When I woke and realised it would be another day of not walking and another day of hearing the sound of my life being flushed down the toilet, what made it unbearable was that it was my hand that had pressed the flush.
My steady stream of visitors saved me. My partner, who worked in a hospital in Glasgow took time off. My best friend - my mum - came to see me at least three times a week and never once mentioned the terrible emotional strain I must have caused her. My brother travelled from Ireland whenever he could. I realised, for the first time, what real, genuine, friendship means and that I had it in abundance. Some friends played Scrabble with me. Some gossiped with me, as much as my limited Dalek voice would allow. Another arranged for me to have a haircut. You can't credit how much all this means or how small your world becomes when you are in a wheelchair and measure everything by how far the nearest toilet is.
As the weeks turned into months the unbelievable truth slowly dawned on me that I might not walk or dance again. I had plenty of time to dwell on how much a moment of selfish, thoughtless pleasure, that I can't even remember, had cost me. I felt a mounting and inescapable sense of anger but I couldn't blame anyone but myself. I wasn't in pain, but I was frustrated and bored. My cognitive and intellectual functions were intact, but the lack of fine motor skills meant that I could not stand, balance or talk. I still had the same thoughts but my body disobeyed me. Everything I once took as a given was gone in the time it took me to collapse.
Now the weekends gave boring a new, more boring, meaning. There were no therapies, nothing other than being woken up at 8am and the interminable wait until you fell asleep that night. The weekends seemed to last for an eternity. You see yourself becoming dependent on others, and while they chat away about plans, hopes and fears, you realise that yours mean nothing.
Eventually my discharge date focused my mind on the immediate future. The NHS, which had spared no effort or expense in saving my life, now began issuing me disclaimer letters to sign before I could go on weekend leave. Everything I did was at my own risk. On no account would the NHS countenance me even trying to walk upstairs. It felt as if it was more concerned with minimising the threat of litigation than in my learning how to walk.
Fortunately, my two housemates were incredible. They not only visited whenever possible, but saw this risk-averse attitude as an affront to commonsense. They devised their own walking practice - pushing me to a practice area, where I would stand up and hold on to their shoulders. One would then get in my chair and I would push it.
They have also endured the carers - strangers - coming into the house four times a day and leaving the house keys in a keysafe in the front garden for easy access. We moved and the same hardships they tolerated at the old house travelled with us. This could have been the perfect excuse to say: "We liked living with the old you, it's just that the new you comes with so much extra baggage. Besides, we've found somewhere, have you?" But they never did.
Most of the time I do feel devoid of any hope. I never thought that I would think, let alone write this, but I really hate being me. However, I am slowly learning to walk again and I practise every day. Recently a Bristol academic, Professor David Nutt, was quoted comparing the dangers of taking ecstasy with horse riding, but my life has been ruined.
I used to go out walking in the rain for no other reason than I could but you can't do that in a wheelchair. Taking ecstasy nearly killed me, and hadn't I always thought it safe?I've never been a fan of the cockpit view in racing games – it's always seemed to me like the reserve of aficionados and gear-heads. I've always preferred the third-person perspective and the larger field of view it offers, which helps counter how terrible I tend to be at these games. After playing Driveclub VR however, it's safe to say I've been converted.
Driveclub VR makes most sense in the cockpit view (there is a third person view if you wish to use it) and it's because of everything VR offers that it works so well. The one-to-one head movement and tracking makes it feel more natural. The use of rear view and wing mirrors occurs organically because of the uncanny sense of physicality. It just feels right.
It controls like most conventional driving games, making the virtual reality aspect purely about perspective. This means Driveclub VR is one of the most natural and easy-going of PSVR's launch titles, and a great entry point for those who haven't used a quality virtual reality headset before.
The smoothness of the image, presented in 60fps but effectively 'upscaled' to 120fps thanks to asynchronous time-warp (explained here, thankfully), is incredible. Being able to look around the cockpit, lean out the window and crash without feeling nauseous is incredibly valuable in such a high-speed game.
However, this being one of the more processor-intensive PlayStation VR titles, the visuals do suffer considerably versus high-end, non-VR driving games.
This is to be expected of all VR games due to the need to render separate images to each eye, and gives Driveclub VR the appearance of an early PS3 game. Car models and interiors are lovingly recreated, as you'd expect, but in races other cars appear blurry unless you're nose to tail, and sometimes it's hard to tell which way you're supposed to turn on the few corners that aren't well sign-posted (literally, and in the design of the tracks).
The tracks themselves can look a little threadbare if you focus on anything but the road ahead (as with most racing games) but there are some nice wider views that give them life: cruising over a Highland bridge, through snow-capped peaks or between two overhanging blossom trees. The weather effects that took so long to arrive for the original version of the game, but which were warmly received once they did, are also understandably absent.
Likewise the sound design seems to have been stripped back to accommodate 3D audio. The effect sounds more like a collection of sound bites than one audioscape. When you collide with another car or skid around a corner, it sounds as though the same barely-distinguishable sound effects play over and over.
The port brings over a great deal from the 2014 original, with some new tracks to boot. It is certainly one of the more feature-rich VR games available at launch, and also boasts the most depth. Online racing and the ability to create clubs with friends are both present, and there's plenty in the career mode to master too.
Consoles are currently in the midst of a push for computing power above all else with the PS4 Pro and Xbox's Project Scorpio ushering in a new era of 4K gaming. So, the visual downgrade of PSVR will lose the device a lot of fans, especially considering the widespread expectations that racing games are showcases for graphical prowess.
It's understandable that many will find complaint, but the actual experience of virtual reality overwhelmingly compensates for this loss in visual flair.
Our verdict Driveclub VR Virtual reality racing has an enormous amount of potential. Racing games are often visual delights however, so what Driveclub VR lacks in this department is notable despite the sense of presence that makes it so fresh.
For all the latest video game news follow us on Twitter @IBTGamesUKSenators next week will hear a bill allowing guns in classrooms, airports and government meetings
Buy Photo Guns on campus is an idea that blossoms every spring time in Tallahassee (Photo: Democrat files)Buy Photo
Gun advocates in Florida didn’t take a break over the holiday weekend. Florida Open Carry Inc. began rallying its troops New Year’s Eve with a mass email in support of “the most important pro-Second Amendment rights bill of the 2017 legislative session.”
SB 140 repeals laws forbidding guns on college campuses, in airports terminals, and at government meetings. Sen. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, will introduce the measure to the Judiciary Committee Tuesday. Florida Open Carry Inc. urged its members to call lawmakers and tell them to line up behind Steube’s proposal.
Campus carry and open carry measures have died in the committee the past two years when the chair failed to schedule it for a vote. Advocates believe 2017 will be different because Steube is the committee’s new chair. He served the past six years in the Florida House where he was one of the Legislature’s fiercest opponents to gun-free zones.
“If you want to kill as many people as possible before the cops arrive then you are likely to go to a place where law-abiding citizens can’t carry,” Steube explained when he filed the bill last month. “That’s what we’ve seen, time and time again and why I think we shouldn’t have them.”
The Campus Carry provision is opposed by university and college presidents, police chiefs and faculties. In a 2016 address, Florida State University President John Thrasher vowed to continue the opposition if the idea resurfaced in the Legislature.
“I opposed it. I killed it,” Thrasher recalled to the faculty about 2014 when he was a senator and lawmakers considered a campus carry bill. “I have worked against it since then and you have my promise that I will work against it this year also.”
Since he has been out of the Senate for two years, Thrasher can now lobby his former colleagues on behalf of FSU and the State University System.
In the House, Rep. Scott Plakon’s, R-Seminole, campus carry bill has yet to be assigned a committee. Rep. Evan Jenne, D-Broward, observed the gun bill has become a legislative perennial among conservatives. He said it is unusual for lawmakers to keep championing a proposal universally rejected by affected communities.
“I am not aware of one iota of data that |
the race on both sides, the contest between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel seemed tailor-made to measure the demographic shifts in wealthy suburbs and the staying power of the Trump message.
This past week, the race became a referendum specifically on the America Health Care Act. Ossoff put out a statement after the House vote deploring the bill. “I strongly oppose this bill, which allows discrimination against Georgians with pre-existing conditions and would make health insurance unaffordable for millions of families,” he said. “This bill puts Georgians’ lives at risk. Congress should put aside partisan politics and work to make affordable insurance and quality care available to all Americans.”
Handel did not even question the absence of a Congressional Budget Office score. Her office gave the Washington Examiner a statement: “Karen would have joined with the Republicans in the Georgia delegation in voting in favor of the bill. She believes that the status quo is unacceptable and that this legislation, while not perfect, represents just the first step in replacing Obamacare with patient-centered healthcare.” Of note, she didn’t bother to defend it on the merits. Had she been in the House, she would have been one more dutiful foot soldier for Trump.
Ossoff also got a big win in court this past week. The Associated Press reported:
A federal judge on Thursday ordered Georgia officials to reopen voter registration in a suburban Atlanta congressional district ahead of a heated special election that’s seen by many as a test of President Donald Trump’s influence.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten ruled in favor of civil rights advocacy groups who argued that Georgia violated federal law by preventing more new voter registrations before the June 20 runoff.
Georgia had set the registration deadline on March 20, 30 days before the first round of voting in April. … Batten, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush in 2005, ordered the state to extend the deadline to May 21 and to allow any district resident registered by that day to cast a ballot in the runoff. Democrats were delighted with the result, which offered them the chance to find new voters in the wake of the health-care vote. (AP: “Emory University political science professor Alan Abramowitz said … Republicans will be older, longtime residents and more likely to be registered already. Democrats can cultivate a growing number of Latino or Asian-American residents who have moved into the district in recent years but aren’t yet registered.”) In response to the ruling, Ossoff released a statement: “Voting rights are constitutional rights. I encourage all eligible voters to ensure that they are registered and make their voices heard on June 20th and in all elections, regardless of their party or political persuasion.”
Meanwhile, Ossoff has reserved $5.2 million of TV and radio ad time while Handel is relying in part on the president. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported:
The former congressional aide reported raising more than $8.3 million through the end of March, but this ad buy suggests he’s added millions more to that fundraising haul in the weeks since the last filing deadline. Handel’s campaign, meanwhile, has taken in at least $1.75 million since she landed the No. 2 spot in the matchup – a total that includes about $750,000 from Donald Trump’s visit on Friday [April 28]. The Republican hasn’t aired a TV ad since the election, but she’s had ample back up. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC with ties to Paul Ryan, said it was pouring in another $3.5 million into the contest and has already reserved nearly $3 million in ad time.
Handel seems to believe there is no risk in appearing with and supporting the president. Perhaps she is right, and sticking close to Trump is the only way to turn out regular GOP voters. If, however, voters are souring on Trump, then Ossoff may be the first but certainly not the last Democratic beneficiary of the anti-AHCA backlash.Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders made his case to the student body Monday at Liberty University, a leading evangelical Christian college founded by the reverend Jerry Falwell that is located in Lynchburg, Virginia. The Vermont Senator worked to build what he called “common ground” with the students, who greeted Sanders “politely,” reported the New York Times.
“I believe from the bottom of my heart that it is vitally important for those of us wwho hold different views to be able to engage in a civil discourse,” Sanders told the crowd.
“It is easy to go out and talk to people who agree with you… It is harder, but not less important, to try to communicate with those who do not agree with us on every issue.”
Although that sentiment was greeted with applause, the audience presented a unique challenge for the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist; a title that has drawn a fair amount of ire from the conservative right, a group that also tends to collectively disagree with Sanders’ positions on gay rights and abortion.
Both of these topics, along with a variety of other issues that are central to the Bernie Sanders campaign, such as income inequality, childhood poverty, climate change, raising the minimum wage and healthcare, were addressed during the speech and subsequent question and answer period, reported MSNBC.
“I understand that the issues of abortion and gay marriage are issues that you feel very strongly about. We disagree on those issues,” Sanders said during the speech.
“But let me respectfully suggest that there are other issues out there that are of enormous consequence to our country and in fact to the entire, that maybe, just maybe, we do not disagree on and maybe, just maybe, we can try to work together to resolve them.”
Bernie Sanders is one of the only (if not the only) major liberal presidential candidate to visit Liberty University, although Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Martin O’Malley have all been invited.
Also on Monday, Sanders struck back at a Wall Street Journal article posted Sunday that claimed his social agenda would cost upwards of $18 trillion over the course of 10 years. The article claims this number comes from “a tally by Wall Street Journal” after the publication examined a suite of proposals put forth by the Bernie Sanders campaign, but the candidate himself is determined to set the record straight.
“They significantly exaggerated the cost,” Sanders told Andrea Mitchelll of NBC News/MSNBC. Mr. Sanders is proposing a number of tax increases on the wealthy and on large corporations to pay for his social agenda and other proposals, instead of adding to the deficit.
“We are going to demand that the wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country do start paying their fair share of taxes.”
Sanders went on to condemn massive income and wealth inequality, which he has dubbed as one of the “great moral issues of our time.” He stated that 58 percent of all new income is currently going to the top 1 percent and called out major corporations that pay nothing in federal income taxes.
“Yes, we need real tax reform to bring in substantially more revenue.”
[Photo by Win McNamee / Getty Images]NEW YORK, April 27, 2016 — Guard Wayne Ellington of the Brooklyn Nets has won the 2015-16 J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award as selected by the Professional Basketball Writers Association. The honor, named after the NBA’s second commissioner, is presented annually by the PBWA to the player, coach or athletic trainer who shows outstanding service and dedication to the community.
The other finalists for the award were guard George Hill of the Indiana Pacers, forward LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers, guard Chris Paul of the Los Angeles Clippers and guard John Wall of the Washington Wizards.
After his father, Wayne Ellington Sr., was shot to death on Nov. 9, 2014, in Philadelphia, Ellington, a native of Wynnewood, Pa., decided to channel his grief into action by becoming an advocate for gun-violence prevention.
On Sept. 21, 2015, Ellington was the featured speaker at Peace Day Philly’s “March for Peace” before a crowd of mostly schoolchildren, many of whom lost a loved one to gun violence. His speech was a primary attraction at the fifth annual Peace Day Philly, which was the culmination of a weeklong series of peace-oriented events. Also in September, Ellington joined Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas and other current and former NBA players to help run the fourth annual Chicago Peace League Basketball Tournament, which aims to reduce gang violence in the city.
Ellington has continued his outreach efforts by creating the “Power of W.E.” campaign. In addition to filming a PSA for one of the only hospital-based violence-prevention programs of its kind in the country (in conjunction with Temple University), Ellington plans to host the Philadelphia Peace Games in August. For that event, rival gang members in Philadelphia will come together for a basketball game played on a court built and customized with Power of W.E. messaging for community use.
“Wayne Ellington’s efforts to curb gun violence are inspiring,” said PBWA President Josh Robbins of the Orlando Sentinel. “His message resonates.”
Ellington also connected with The Rens, a grassroots children’s basketball program in New York City. The Rens became the first basketball team in the country at any level to wear orange patches on their jerseys as a statement against the crisis of gun violence after multiple incidents of gun violence involving the team’s members. Ellington provided them with tickets to attend two Nets games. Through the Brooklyn Nets Assist program, Ellington also donated more than 2,000 tickets this season to various youth basketball programs, non-profit organizations and schools throughout New York City.
The PBWA is composed of approximately 175 writers and editors who cover the NBA on a regular basis for newspapers, online outlets and magazines.
Below is the list of all-time winners of the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award:
J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award winners
1974-75 Wes Unseld, Washington
1975-76 Slick Watts, Seattle
1976-77 Dave Bing, Washington
1977-78 Bob Lanier, Detroit
1978-79 Calvin Murphy, Houston
1979-80 Austin Carr, Cleveland
1980-81 Mike Glenn, New York
1981-82 Kent Benson, Detroit
1982-83 Julius Erving, Philadelphia
1983-84 Frank Layden, Utah
1984-85 Dan Issel, Denver
1985-86 Michael Cooper, L.A. Lakers, and Rory Sparrow, New York
1986-87 Isiah Thomas, Detroit
1987-88 Alex English, Denver
1988-89 Thurl Bailey, Utah
1989-90 Doc Rivers, Atlanta
1990-91 Kevin Johnson, Phoenix
1991-92 Magic Johnson, L.A. Lakers
1992-93 Terry Porter, Portland
1993-94 Joe Dumars, Detroit
1994-95 Joe O’Toole, Atlanta
1995-96 Chris Dudley, Portland
1996-97 P.J. Brown, Miami
1997-98 Steve Smith, Atlanta
1998-99 Brian Grant, Portland
1999-00 Vlade Divac, Sacramento
2000-01 Dikembe Mutombo, Philadelphia
2001-02 Alonzo Mourning, Miami
2002-03 David Robinson, San Antonio
2003-04 Reggie Miller, Indiana
2004-05 Eric Snow, Cleveland
2005-06 Kevin Garnett, Minnesota
2006-07 Steve Nash, Phoenix
2007-08 Chauncey Billups, Detroit
2008-09 Dikembe Mutombo, Houston
2009-10 Samuel Dalembert, Philadelphia
2010-11 Metta World Peace, L.A. Lakers
2011-12 Pau Gasol, L.A. Lakers
2012-13 Kenneth Faried, Denver
2013-14 Luol Deng, Cleveland
2014-15 Joakim Noah, Chicago
2015-16 Wayne Ellington, Brooklyn
This press release was written by the NBAOn Sunday at Madison Square Garden, Phish drummer Jon Fishman donned a bishop's costume atop his trademark mumu to take lead vocals for a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning." He "blessed" the crowd with "holy" water and a censer because, ya know, Sunday morning. It was a gag that had been going all week. Phish gave out thousands of donuts to each audience member for every show of this 13-night MSG run. They're calling it Baker's Dozen. The joke has layers, too. The flavor of donut handed out each night dictates that show's setlist. Sunday's was red velvet (get it?). Themes so far have been coconut, strawberry, powdered (that set included a cover of Neil Young's "Powderfinger") and—wait for it—jam-filled, with two songs reaching the 30-minute mark. Five nights in, the Baker's Dozen has proven to be one of Phish's most elaborate and amusing experiments ever. It's the band in Peak Wonka Mode, and it couldn't be more fun—which just so happens to be the group's reason for being.
I've attended all of the Baker's Dozen gigs thus far. I only planned on the first three shows, but I couldn't help going back for more. I don't want to miss a moment. Sure, some would say I have sort of an addiction: Wednesday night marked my 71st show. But who's counting (besides my concerned mother, father, and girlfriend)? The Baker's Dozen is Phish's latest attempt to give the audience just what they're looking for: a fantastic time. It's them boiled down to an essence, a simple seed of an idea that has grown into one big ol' beanstalk. The Garden's decor makes it look like a cartoon pastry shop, adorned with puns like "Glaze On" (one of Phish's recent songs is called "Blaze On") and inventive merchandise. It's like a theme park with drugs and easy access to public transportation.
It's that distillation of the band's MO that is so noteworthy. Phish shows are, in essence, about enjoyment. Inside of one (and somewhat depending on the venue), rules are about as loose as they get in American society. You can forget about what's going on outside of the walls, three hours at a time. There's all manners of substance abuse. You can dance like an ass or hurl a glow stick or punch a giant balloon. Sometimes there's nudity. Usually there are bare feet. Mommy and Daddy don't make you shower and put on a collared shirt. And as I walk the concourses at MSG, it doesn't take tattered t-shirts from tours of yore to note that much of the fan base is making some connection to a simpler, more care-free time in their lives. At its core, going to a Phish show will always be like the adult version of not having to brush your teeth before bed.
Look, I'm not the first person to posit that rock bands and their rabid fans—and hippies and counterculturists writ large—seek to delay reality, shirk jobs, avoid responsibility, and even regress to childlike behavior. But Phish takes it up a notch with Seussian lyrics that conjure myriad images of psychedelic other worlds, a drool-worthy light show, and antics like full album "costumes" for Halloween.
Getty
And, now, there's the Baker's Dozen. I'll admit that I underestimated them this time. I figured that the feat of having a summertime residency in the heart of New York City was special enough. They'd play shows like any other summer tour—some would be exceptional, others wouldn't. But, here's the thing about Phish that many detractors don't understand: They go into overdrive—technically and creatively—to please. Before the tour started, they rented out Milwaukee's main basketball arena to practice for a whole goddamn week. On Wednesday night, the band expertly maneuvered through the wide-ranging styles of Fleet Foxes, Ween, Prince, Led Zeppelin, and Neil Young for covers. In the same show. They've put in the work, and it's paying off.
I've been writing professionally for 12 years, and Phish has always been a touchy subject among the taste-making crowd. In my experience, many of those who write Phish off—out of the gate and without much reason—take music, and often themselves, too seriously. It's probably a case of backlash to the backlash ad infinitum at this point, but to be clear: Nobody is demanding you stop worrying and love Phish. If you don't like the music, I get it. If you just think it's fun to make fun of people wearing patchwork corduroy pants that haven't been washed in ages—well, I guess I get that, too.
What's more difficult to stomach is criticisms that conflate Phish with stereotypes of its fans. The four members aren't lazy stoners. Yes, Trey Anastasio struggled with substance abuse and, yeah bro, they met in Vermont. They also are some of the best musicians in rock music who have a deep knowledge of its history and form. The group has also demonstrated an unparalleled business acumen, racking up eye-popping numbers in tour and merch sales all while paving the way for the modern music festival.
Trey Anastasio has always been the group's reluctant leader, with the band and its fans looking to him as a compass. And, no doubt, there were some dark days. But now, Anastasio is one of the most remarkably happy people I've ever seen in the flesh, his head bobbing throughout a performance as he's sporting a trademark, ear-to-ear smile. So, what's he telling us up there? That he's having so much fun.2017 appeared to be crucial in the history of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies development. It was eventful right from the beginning: cryptocurrency adoption or ban in various countries, ICO breakneck advance, a sharp increase of cryptocurrencies and total cap, etc. Let’s cast back to the beginning of this year and see the changes in the global crypto market throughout 2017.
Bitcoin became an official payment means in Japan
On April 1, 2017, the Japanese government came to be the first to accept bitcoin as official money equal to other currencies. The country primary currency remains yen while bitcoin is regulated in the same way foreign currencies are. This move became a milestone in cryptocurrency rocketing.
According to the Fuji Chimera Research Institute, in 2015, cryptocurrency turnover in Japan was $1.67 bn, and it would rise tenfold by 2020. Taking into account the sharp increase of cryptocurrencies after the new governmental regulation, this prediction is likely to come true.
U. S. financial regulator equated ICO and IPO
On July 25, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decided the status of ICO. Right from this date, the American jurisdiction claims initial token offering and initial public offering (IPO) the same mechanisms. Thus, all released tokens, issuers, and investors will be regulated by the existing legislation regardless of what they use to buy securities: fiat or cryptocurrency.
Companies that establish assets on blockchain are to register deals. If not, the sanctions will be imposed. Moreover, cryptocurrency exchanges were also obliged to register.
Bitcoin split
On August 1, 2017, a hard fork was conducted on the block 478558 of the bitcoin chain. The world met the first block of the new chain called Bitcoin Cash.
There have been many talks on hard fork of its supporters and opponents. However, this idea became reality. It was a mining pool ViaBTC that generated a block for the split. By the way, ViaBTC had always been for hard fork as a way of increasing the speed of transactions.
The first Bitcoin Cash was traded at $293.88. By the end of the year, the rate went up. Many members of the crypto community explain this phenomenon more by its relation to bitcoin than its boosting popularity.
China prohibited ICO
This announcement appeared the most shocking during this eventful year. On September 4, the Chinese government officially banned companies under the Chinese jurisdiction from ICO investing. ICO was declared illegal.
What is more, companies that finished ICO were to return all the collected funds to the investors.
Tezos and Filecoin raised the record-breaking amount by ICO
On July 14, 2017, the company Tezos set a world record publishing collected ICO funds – $232 mn compared to the previous one by Bancor – $150 mn. The secret of the Swiss Tezos lies in an almost unattainable upper limit of the proposal: they established a two-thousand-transaction block.
Unfortunately, Tezos celebrated the top position only for a while. In two months, on 7 September, the Californian project Filecoin owned by Protocol Labs took the first place. The project was created as far as 2014 to store data in IPFS, an HTTP successor. ICO Filecoin total amount of investments outperformed Tezos by $25 mn reaching $257 mn.
Bitcoin rate surged over $7000
The state of things we have now should be regarded in terms of psychology. On November 2, the average weighted exchange rate of the most popular cryptocurrency surpassed $7000. The rate was near this amount on the basic exchanges Bitfinex and Bitstamp. Here, bitcoin was traded for $6966 and $6961 correspondingly. However, the average rate set an all-time record.
It is a South Korean exchange Bithumb where bitcoin surged over $7300, which is the maximum rate. At that moment, the total cap of bitcoin reached $117.3 bn with a daily turnover of $3.5 bn.Leber reports: "Scientists presented the latest evidence tying the disposal of wastewater from shale gas hydrofracking to increased earthquakes."
A Cabot Oil and Gas hydraulic fracturing site in Springville, Pennsylvania, 01/17/12. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Studies Link Earthquakes to Fracking
By Jessica Leber, MIT Technology Review
The link between a recent rise in earthquakes and wastewater disposal from shale gas wells grows stronger, though skeptics remain.
t the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last week, scientists presented the latest evidence tying the disposal of wastewater from shale gas hydrofracking to increased earthquakes.
Some U.S. states, including Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado, have experienced a significant rise in seismic activity over the last few years, coinciding with a boom in fracking - a process that forces gas from hard-to-reach underground deposits by injecting water and chemicals into shale rock. Fracking produces huge quantities of wastewater that is typically disposed of in deep wells. But the degree to which the disposal of wastewater from fracking operations has caused the unusual seismic activity is still up for debate among scientists.
The question matters because most states don't consider earthquake risk when allowing gas drilling companies to dispose of large volumes of chemical-laden drilling water.
Hydrofracking produces far more wastewater than conventional oil and gas drilling. So how to dispose of this waste safely is becoming a bigger question as fracking expands.
Scientists believe that wastewater injection wells, which are often the cheapest disposal option for drilling companies, are the main quake culprit. Today, 90 percent of fracking wastewater in the U.S. is disposed of in injection wells, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
Since 2010, Oklahoma residents have felt more than 250 of them - many more than the one to three reported each year in previous decades.
The largest ever in the state's history, a magnitude 5.7 quake in 2011 that damaged some 200 buildings, was "likely caused by fluid injection," concluded University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, and U.S. Geological Survey scientists in presenting their data at the conference. They used aftershocks to map fault patterns and show how pressure built over time as water from fracking was disposed of as close as 250 meters away from the resulting quakes.
Other USGS scientists looked at a series of earthquakes since 2001 in Colorado and New Mexico's Raton Basin (including a 5.3 earthquake last year). They also presented their results this week, and concluded that these quakes were the result of wastewater injections. The likelihood that the rise in the rate of larger earthquakes, greater than magnitude 3.0, would occur naturally is extremely low, the study said.
The larger picture is complicated, however, because even before hydrofracking became common in the last decade, oil and gas drillers and mining companies have used tens of thousands of injection wells in these regions.
Austin Holland, a seismologist with the Oklahoma Geological Survey, says that clearly some of the recent earthquakes could be caused by wastewater disposal from fracking activities. But his data on Oklahoma suggests that "no changes in oil and gas activities are immediately apparent that could explain the dramatic rise in earthquake rates."
University of Texas at Austin geophysicist Cliff Frohlich said at the meeting that it's difficult to pinpoint the causes of the trend because most studies have looked at individual earthquakes, rather than doing broader surveys. His study of a portion of the Dallas-Forth Worth area, in the Barnett Shale, found that nearly all earthquakes were within two miles of high-volume injection wells. However, many other wells seemed to trigger no quakes at all.
Discerning the reasons for these differences will be important for officials who are considering regulation, Frohlich says. Regulations could reduce the risk of earthquakes by more closely dictating where wells can be located and how they are built and used. Ohio, for example, put in place a moratorium on new wastewater injection permits after a series of earthquakes last year, but recently started approving them again after putting more standards in place.
There are also alternatives for wastewater disposal, such as processing the water at existing or dedicated treatment plants. The U.S. EPA is now evaluating national standards for treating water in this way, and this option may be more often considered if earthquake concerns continue to grow, and if scarcer supplies make water itself a more valuable resource, Frohlich says.
Manmade earthquakes, triggered by underground injections, have been known about for a long time, at least since the 1960s, when an Army waste disposal well triggered an earthquake that caused major damage in Denver.
Overall, however, experts seem to believe the "seismic hazard" in many shale gas states is growing: "The future probably holds a lot more in induced earthquakes as the gas boom expands," says USGS Earthquake Science Center researcher Art McGarr.County Says It Won’t Move School Buses to Controversial Rockville Sites
Ike Leggett announced decision in Thursday memo to council president
By Aaron Kraut
The Shady Grove school bus depot on Crabbs Branch Way Aaron Kraut
Montgomery County will no longer consider parking school buses at two controversial Rockville sites, according to a memo from County Executive Ike Leggett delivered Thursday to the County Council.
“This will inform you that I have directed Executive staff to finalize a plan that will not include the Carver or Westmore sites,” Leggett wrote in the memo to council President Nancy Floreen.
Leggett was referring to a proposal for 100 buses to be parked on an interim basis on a parking lot at the Carver Education Services Center on Hungerford Drive and another approximately 100 buses on an empty lot the county recently agreed to purchase nearby at 1000 Westmore Ave.
The county considered the sites in order to vacate the existing Shady Grove school bus depot, home to 410 buses on Crabbs Branch Way in Rockville. The county selected developers LCOR and NVR to buy the site and other adjacent county property for a mixed-use residential project near the Shady Grove Metro station. But it has long struggled to find sites for parking the buses and accommodating maintenance and driver-training facilities.
Leggett’s announcement Thursday comes after a Tuesday council hearing in which council members said they would vote to stall the formal process for allowing the county to sell the land to the developers. In his memo, Leggett wrote he has withdrawn his request for the council to approve a Declaration of No Further Need for the Shady Grove bus depot site.
Department of General Services Director David Dise told Bethesda Beat Tuesday the county has not finalized a General Development Agreement with LCOR and NVR for the site. He said there is no deadline of January 2017 to move the buses—an assumption the Board of Education was working under while considering the Carver site.
Council members said they didn’t feel comfortable allowing the county to get rid of the land until a permanent bus depot replacement option was identified.
“Once approved by me the plan will be presented to the County Council,” Leggett said of any future attempts at selling the current bus depot property. “Until then the current site will remain for school bus parking and maintenance.”
Members of the Carver Coalition, a group of residents near the Carver site, attended Tuesday’s council hearing. City of Rockville elected officials joined them to protest buses on the Carver and Westmore sites as being too disruptive to surrounding neighborhoods and local traffic.
While council members didn’t discuss other potential sites for the buses Tuesday, they did recognize it’s possible any option will draw criticism from nearby residents.How are we to understand the persistence of alternative medicine beliefs? Despite the absurdity of many of the claims of the various superstitious medicines, we see very entrenched positions amongst believers, hostility to criticism and an imperviousness to external mainstream views. Why do people fervently lock themselves into such positions?
Over the past few years, as I have researched the the world of alternative medicine, one of the most striking aspects I have found is how few progressive views there are amongst practitioners. Particularly in the world of homeopathy, it is difficult to find people who express beliefs about their practice that take on board the criticisms that have been made over many years, and attempt to reformulate their ideas in light of modern views of science and health.
Instead, we see people dogmatically fused to positions usually taken by the founders of their belief system, and absolute hostility to anyone who dares question them.
I would not be the first to suggest that believers in alternative medicine often display the traits of members of cults. I have been in correspondence recently with a chiropractic student in the UK who describes how the abusive approach of tutors and huge fees for an MSc course ensured that students felt ‘locked in’ to following a commercial approach that they might otherwise be highly doubtful of.
Of all alternative medicines homeopathy, to me, looks the most cult-like.
But, it might be argued, this situation might also apply to more general vocational degrees. For cult-like pressure to apply to students, other factors may be required.
Homeopathy demands a strictly alternative philosophical approach to mainstream medicine. There is nothing ‘complementary’ about its views. Indeed, it defines itself in opposition to what it calls ‘allopathy’ and in doing so creates a straw man of what medicine is today. It lives in an “Us versus Them” world. Followers slavishly follows the ‘teachings’ of its founder, Samuel Hahnemann with the only internal debates being about how to interpret his words. They are zealous in their need to tell people that they hold the One Truth about medicine and people who question that are branded as corrupt shills for the conspiratorial pharmaceutical companies.
Over the past year, I have been in conversation with perhaps the only homeopath I know that has been part of that world, has undertaken a full training, and yet decided to walk away and reject what it stands for. Her name is Wendy.
Wendy says she felt lost to her family for a while. Talking about these things is obviously painful to her, but her words are powerful in that they directly convey the trauma of her homeopathic experience. She has agreed for me to post some of her words. They are a small fraction of what I know she has to talk about, but they directly address this aspect of the cult-like nature of undertaking a homeopathic education. Wendy wishes that others, tempted to invest in a similar experience, have some insight into what others have gone through.
Wendy describes life inside the cult of homeopathy, a term she uses to describe the experience,
Homeopaths live in the same space as you but are in a different world, and they ‘know’.
It is like living in a different culture. Have you read some of these historical crime novels where they try to get you into how people thought then? Margaret Doody is particularly good – Aristotle series. Completely different assumptions and completely different ‘knowledge’. Homeopaths live in the same space as you but are in a different world, and they ‘know’. To come out of that world is a complete revision of assumptions, thought systems and thinking style. It is very hard to do. I think I’ve been trying to say that for a long time. The larger the numbers have grown the easier it is for people to live in that world with others like them.
Wendy talks about how the training for homeopaths is vital for creating the cult-like mentality. Very early on she realised that questioning was highly discouraged. On her training, she says,
I wrote that I think that by month 3 or 4 I was buying into stuff I would not ordinarily buy into. I never bought into soul or vital force but I’d lost any ability to challenge it within 6 months. I did challenge homeopathic prophylaxis once, and did not get a satisfactory answer. In homeopathy it would be ‘judgemental’ to say anyone is doing it wrong or say an idea is useless, which is why anyone can do what they like. It would be judgemental to, for instance, campaign that prophylaxis has no backing in Hahnemann, or that the petrochemical miasm is just a figment of someone’s imagination. Remember [tutor] pointed it out – you can not criticise or challenge how people operate or what they do. If they say it works for them – anything goes. So you have this bunch of people, all working differently, solely around whatever ideas they get in their head. As we say – ‘whatever works for you’. And no one ever discusses their results. If they say it works, who are you to question. If they say it works for them – anything goes. My critical abilities were silenced within the first year – not by others – but because it would be considered judgemental in that society.
The discouragement of critical thinking left Wendy with no tools to evaluate good from bad. The authority of the tutors was paramount and critical thought was replaced with a general ‘New Age’ approach to reasoning which appeared to dominate the British lay homeopathy mind-set.
It is as if my left-brain got disconnected for a long time. Ability to evaluate what ideas seem good to me and what looks like rubbish, went – including evaluation of my own ideas. The drama/wind-ups/illusions/influencing of the [tutor] period seems to have particularly geared there as I feel as I still had some common sense when I went in but it went quickly.
Self-belief – that your first stupid idea is the best one, is what happens – because you only see good results (and part of the American New Age philosophies emphasises the positive) there is loss of reflection and insight. This isn’t just the natural ‘looking for success’ that we all do – it is emphasised by the ‘positive-thinking’ philosophy. I see it as a form of intellectual wanking – because there is no relating back to reality; and people now pay £40 an hour to their homeopath for that.
I have sometimes written the homeopathy might be able to reform itself into a more progressive form by recognising that its strengths lie in it being a form of counselling. Wendy takes issue with this,
You’ve said they might make counsellors – but they’re not trained as counsellors – they are doing amateur psychology based on reading a bit of Joseph Campbell or Jung or Louise Hay or whoever is fashionable this week. Once again, whatever the first idea in their heads is what get addressed with a remedy.
Wendy has found the current sceptical blogging about homeopathy on the internet a useful tool in ‘de-programming’ and re-engaging with a critical approach to examining the claims of homeopathy. I know she does not agree with all that I might write, but the fact that we discuss and debate is important for her.
It’s great to have a bit of sense in my head again and it’s good that you lads [the sceptics] disagree with one another sometimes because I get a chance to engage in some critical thinking and evaluation. Something that was missing for a long time. Also, it was as if I got stuck there historically. When I came round I hadn’t moved on to 2009, I was still trapped in some issues that existed in the 90s but are no longer relevant. I feel as if I lost a decade. Somehow I got trapped in a world that wasn’t mine and it was very uncomfortable. As I say, I now see homeopathy as the disease. I think it is a form of madness. I feel adversely affected. I feel as if I lost a decade. Somehow I got trapped in a world that wasn’t mine and it was very uncomfortable. I have had to work hard to rid myself of cult thinking and am still in that process but I feel that I have support and the Cult Information Centre are very useful.
I feel as if I lost a decade. Somehow I got trapped in a world that wasn’t mine and it was very uncomfortable.
I have never argued that homeopathy should be banned, or that people, in most circumstances, should be denied the choice of taking homeopathy. But it is testimony like this that makes me wonder what the limits of tolerance should be to such matters. Homeopathy appears to be unreformable, and it would appear to be unlikely that any progressive and modern form the practice could emerge from its current lay membership. Homeopathy is so strictly defined by its opposition to modern mainstream medicine that it will always lie at the fringes in a pseudoscientific bubble. It will always cling to its core dangerous beliefs of its universal claim to the True Medical Knowledge and its panacea-like approach to the world. In doing so, it must attack and denounce alternatives – such as scientific medicine – without any form of compromise.
I believe that understanding homeopathy requires a mental model that describes it as a pseudo-medical and superstitious cult. This model best describes its practices and the behaviours of its members. The cult model explains why virtually no homeopaths have condemned the murderous practice of using sugar pills to treat fatal diseases like HIV and malaria. The first treatment Hahnemann tried was for malaria. There is no question that he could have been wrong. It is why we see such a strong and universal anti-vaccination stance among homeopaths. Hahnemann believed mainstream medicine was the cause of disease, not its cure. The dogma persists in the thinking of the cult.
It is worth noting, in this light, that its practices are still provided by the NHS and some universities still teach it as fact. Homeopaths are lobbying government to make it statutorily regulated. Any decisions made in these areas need to take into account the cult-like dark side of homeopathy if people are to be protected from its harms.Coldplay honor Gene Wilder with ‘Pure Imagination’ Cover
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a certain more or less elastic zone for its approximate location, just as in ordinary market competition for prices, when negotiations are carried on with covered cards, traders less experienced or less shrewd commit errors in sizing up inside marked situations, so that actual prices are caused to fluctuate over a wide range around the "ideal" market price.
Let us now turn to the other case, equally interesting and complicated, the influence of "control" exerted by labor unions, through the use of their instrument of power, the strike. Let us retain all previous assumptions with the same figures as above: $5.50 for the value of the product of the "last" worker, $1.50 as the personal valuation to the workingman of his unsold labor, $3 as the minimum of existence, etc., and introduce into our assumed case only one novel element, namely that the workers of the industry under discussion do not compete against each other, but that they be unionized, and thus be in a position to enforce their joint demand for higher wages by means of a strike.
Now I do not for a moment deny that this coming into play of "power" on the part of the workers may profoundly influence the price of labor. It might even raise it not only above the level of $4.50, reached in the case of reduced competition among the monopolists, but even beyond the level of $5.50, which would have been attainable under perfect competition. This last fact is particularly noteworthy and striking, for hitherto we had regarded the value of the marginal product of labor, precisely that $5.50, as the upper limit of the economically possible wage, and at first sight it might look as if "power" could actually accomplish something in contradiction to the price formula of the marginal-value theory, something that did not conform to this law, but disproved it.
Here now enters into our explanation the distinction between marginal utility and total utility, i.e., the fact that the value of a total aggregate of goods is higher than the marginal utility of each unit, multiplied by the number of units contained in the total. The fundamental question in the evaluation of a commodity or an aggregate of goods is always how much utility may be derived from the command over the good to be valued. Under the assumption of competition among all the workers, the thing to be evaluated by the employer is always the labor-unit of each worker. If the employer had in his employ, for instance, 100 workers, his negotiations with each one of the 100 workers over his wages would merely hinge upon the question of how much additional profits the employers would make by employing that one additional worker, or how much he would lose by not employing this one last worker. In that case we were fully justified in arriving at the marginal utility of each unit of labor, that is, the increase in output which the labor of the last one of the 100 workers adds to the total output of the enterprise, or $5.50.
But now this is different: in the case of a joint strike of all the 100 workers, the point in question for the employer is no longer whether he is going to run his enterprise with 100 or 99 workers, which to him would mean a difference in the output of $5.50, but whether he is to keep his enterprise going with 100 workers, or not at all. On this depends not 100 times $5.50, but obviously much more than that, if for no other reason than that labor is what is called a "complementary" good, a good which cannot be utilized by itself alone, without the necessary other "complementary" goods, such as raw materials, equipment, machinery, etc. If only one man out of a hundred withdraws from the enterprise, the utilization of the complementary factors will, as a rule, be little disturbed. One single operation — the one which can be dispensed with most easily — will be omitted, or replaced, as far as possible, through a slight change in the division of labor, so that with the deduction of one man, not more is lost than the marginal product of one day's labor, namely $5.50.
The withdrawal of ten men would cause a more serious disturbance. But a changed disposition in the use of the remaining ninety workers would probably make it possible to find some way for at least the most important functions to continue unhampered, and the loss again to be shifted to that place where it is least felt. A continued depletion of the complementary good, "labor," would make itself felt more and more severely. While the withdrawal of the first worker would have caused a decrease in the daily production of only $5.50, that of the second might amount to a diminution of the output by $5.55, that of the third by $5.60, and that of the tenth by as much as $6. If, as would be the case in a strike, all the 100 men walked out, there would be caused a loss, not only of the specific labor product of those 100 men, but additional productive goods would cease to be utilized. The machinery would have to stand still, the raw materials would lie idle and depreciate, etc. The loss in the value of the product would increase out of all proportion, far beyond a hundred times the last laborer's marginal product.
The loss, of course, would be subject to great modifications, according to the actual conditions existing in each case. If the idle machinery and capital do not suffer any other damage by being idle, the additional loss would merely consist in a postponement of the completion of the respective products from the capital goods, temporarily not utilized on account of the lack of the complementary factor of labor. Their produce will be obtained in an undiminished amount only at a later period, after the resumption of production. This loss must at least equal the interest on the dead capital for the period of idleness. It may amount to more, if the delay should involve added losses, such as the inability to take advantage of favorable business opportunities, whereby indirect depreciations may be incurred.
But the damage would be still further increased if the specific character of the idle capital goods should not only cause a temporary delay, but a definite curtailment in the profits, as for example in the case of perishable raw materials, such as beets in an idle sugar refinery, or agricultural products that cannot be harvested owing to the worker's strike, unused animal power, such as horses, or the water power of an electric power plant. The enforced shutdown may also threaten the fixed capital investments, as in mines, where ventilation and water pumps must not stop, lest the entire plant be destroyed.
How does all this affect the fixation of wages in the case of a strike?
Let us realize, first of all, that although the wage disputes are formally concerned with the per capita wages for each individual worker, to the manufacturer it is always a question of obtaining, or not obtaining, the total labor of these 100 workers. He will either get all of the workers, or none, according to whether the negotiations lead to an agreement, or to a break. The decision as to how much wages he can pay at most will thus hinge on the value that the hundred workers represent to him jointly. The per capita wage is a secondary item, and is determined by dividing the total value by the number of workers. To him, this quota represents only an arithmetical concept, not a value; to him it does not represent the value of a unit of labor.
But how high is the total value? This is explained by the theory of imputation. The value of that aggregate of labor is derived from the value of that amount of products which may be ascribed to the availability of that particular total of labor, and this again is identical with the amount of the product of labor.
Here comes into play a remarkable phase of the theory of imputation, which I recently had to defend in detail against differing opinions. For if the withdrawal of that amount of labor, whose value we are trying to ascertain, not only prevented the use of that labor itself, but also stopped the use of other, complementary goods, the utility of these goods would have to be added to that of labor, regardless of the fact that under certain circumstances the use of labor might have to be imputed to its corresponding complementary good, without which the products could not be obtained.
I shall merely recapitulate here without detailed discussion the various steps of the argument leading to this conclusion. Fundamentally, the total value of a whole group of complementary goods is dependent upon the amount of the (marginal) utility which they possess jointly, and thus, in case of complementary productive goods, upon the value of their common product.
The distribution of this total value among the various units of the complementary group may take different directions, according to the different causation. If none of the units admits of any other use than joint use, and if, at the same time, no one member contributing toward the joint use is replaceable, then every single member has the full total value of the entire group, while the other members are valueless. Each complementary unit is equally capable of holding either one of the two valuations, and it is solely the outside circumstances that determine which one of them shall be worth "everything," by being absolutely essential in the ultimate completion of the group, or which one is worth "nothing" through its isolation.
In our case of an impending strike of all the hundred workers, the employer is threatened with the total loss of the joint gain arising from the use of the two complementary groups, labor and capital, to the extent stated above, and this is why in that case he would have to attribute to labor that total joint utility, including that part which under other conditions might have to be attributed to the complementary capital goods. His subjective valuation of labor must be based upon all these things.
Consequently, the upper limit for the highest rate of wages will advance. For all the hundred workers jointly it will rise beyond the hundred-fold amount of the single value of each day's labor, that is, beyond 100 times $5.50, at least by the amount of the interest of the capital left idle and perhaps even above this, by the amount of the actual loss from perishing or deteriorating complementary capital goods. Thus, for instance, in case there be merely a postponement or loss of interest, it would rise above $550, up to, say, $700 for each day; in case of a direct loss in the utilization of the complementary goods, it would rise in proportion to the extent to which an actual loss takes place, perhaps to $1000, perhaps even to $2000 per day. And the maximum of the economically possible wage level for each individual worker would thereby rise from $5.50 to $7 or even to $10 or $20. This means that with any wage level remaining below this maximum, the entrepreneur would, at least for the time being, fare better than if he were to cease employing all the hundred men.
This "faring better" need, however, not imply actual profits to the entrepreneur, but merely a smaller loss than he would incur in the other alternative — the "lesser evil," which is, of course, to be preferred to the greater one. This rise of the last possible per capita wage to $7 or to $20, on the other hand, does not represent the subjective valuation of one day's labor to the entrepreneur. This has already been stated in the foregoing and it can hardly be sufficiently emphasized. The employer would never pay that wage, if it were a question of employing one laborer only. It represents the hundredth part of the total value of 100 laborers, which is a very different unit from the individual value of each unit of labor.
In the wage negotiations between an employer and a labor union the range would thus be limited by the value to the laborer of his unsold labor (i.e., the amount of $1.50 as his lowest limit), and by the per capita quota of the total value of all 100 laborers at the rate of $10 as upper limit, to take one of the three figures as an illustration.
In our imagined case, direct competition being absent on both sides, entrepreneur and workers would meet each other within their limits on similar grounds, just as the two parties of buyers and sellers meet in the case of isolated exchange.
In theory, it would not be unthinkable nor impossible for the rates to be fixed at any single point within the wide range between $1.50 and $10. We have, of course, come to know some circumstances that make it appear rather unlikely, though not altogether economically impossible, that the wages be fixed within the lowest section of the zone lying between the absolutely lowest limit and the minimum of existence of unskilled labor; and for reasons of similar nature, it is not very likely that the wage rate would be raised up to a point near the upper limit of $10. That it could not be kept at such a point for any length of time I shall try to demonstrate in a future investigation which I consider of special theoretical import. But not even temporarily will it readily be pushed so high. For any wage level substantially exceeding the output of the "last worker" would meet with a strong and increasing opposition on the part of the employers as involving a loss to them. Before granting such a wage rate, they would probably prefer to risk the decision of the supreme trial, consisting in fighting matters out in a lockout or strike; although an intermediate wage, approximating the actual service of the last worker, might conceivably be granted by the employers, anxious to avoid the risk of the certain losses involved in a strike, and the added uncertainty of its outcome. Nor would workers find it to their advantage to push the wages up to level actually causing losses to the entrepreneur, for this again might threaten them with a restriction, or suspension, of work, and force them out of their jobs. Thus there enters the question about the permanency of wages, which will be investigated later.
On the other hand, the workers' difficulties will become all the greater by the strike, the more excessive wage demands they make. The threat from strike breakers or "scabs" from other branches of industry will increase with the more favorable terms which the entrepreneur can still grant below the refused rate of wages. If the striking workers should insist on a wage rate of $9, a wage of $7 may perhaps already contain a very tempting premium to scabs and substitutes, who in other occupations requiring similar qualifications may obtain only a wage of $5.50, corresponding to the output of the last worker. And once substitutes are employed, the cause of the strike is usually lost, whereas, in the other alternative, the outcome is by no means certain.
In a strike, that party wins, as a rule, which, popularly speaking, can "hold its breath" for the longest time. To the worker, the strike means unemployment. For the time being the worker may meet this loss by means of savings accumulated for this purpose, by subventions from strike funds, by consuming his property, by selling or pawning dispensable goods, or by incurring debts as far as his credit will permit. With the longer duration of the strike, these savings will become smaller and smaller until they are used up. During the period of gradual diminution of savings, the marginal utility of the rapidly decreasing means of subsistence goes up, more and more of essential wants go unsatisfied, and more and more of the vital necessities are neglected, with the increasing shortage of funds.
Finally the point is reached at which the very maintenance of life depends on a renewal of income through work, if only at a modest wage: at this point even the most obstinate resistance of the strikers is broken — provided, of course, that the resistance of the opposite party, the employer, is not crushed beforehand.
In the ranks of the employers there are the same phenomena. With the increasing duration of the strike, the desire for a settlement becomes more and more intense. The idle plant produces no income. Some of the costs of production and at least the personal living expenses of the manufacturer continue, and have to be met. If the entrepreneur has a large fortune, these expenses may be covered from that. If not, then the pressure of the strike will be felt much more rapidly and intensely. In any case, there are here two very distinct phases of the effects of the strikes that should be distinguished. The successive and increasing lack in the means of subsistence may first threaten the business of the entrepreneur, and then, if there are no funds left for the most urgent living expenses, his personal existence.
This latter, more intense effect of strikes, will normally arise only in the most exceptional cases. Nor is it likely, for these and similar reasons stated before, that in a strike wages will be fixed at the most extreme — neither at the very lowest nor at the very highest — marginal regions of the wide range "economically possible," at least for the time being. In our illustration this zone was assumed to extend from $1.50 to $10, and a wage rate below $3 would be just as unlikely as one above $8, although, as I want specially to emphasize, such extreme wage rates are not unthinkable, nor altogether economically out of question for a short period of time.
Most of what has been said so far is based on obvious and almost trivial facts and observations which have become sufficiently familiar through common experiences with strikes. I have merely restated these matters, so to speak, in the terms of the marginal-utility theory, in order to make plain the essential point of the theoretical principle under discussion, namely, that the "influence of power" in the case of strikes, so familiar to all engaged in industry, is not altogether distinct from, or opposed to, the forces and laws of the marginal utility theory, but wholly in conformity and in harmony with these, and that every deeper analysis of the question, through what intermediate agencies and to what marginal points "power" may control the course of events at all, must lead into the more specific exposition of marginal utility, in the theory of imputation, where the ultimate explanation is to be sought and found.
There is another far more interesting question: When will the terms of distribution, obtained through means of power, be of lasting effect?
This question is all the more interesting, in that it is by far the most important one. Even the most ephemeral fixation of prices or wages may have considerable importance to that group of individuals or for that short span of time that happens to be affected by it. On the other hand, these temporary fixations mean little or nothing for the permanent economic welfare of the various social classes; just as the classical economists have held long-trend prices to be far more important and challenging than momentary fluctuations; thus Ricardo hardly touched upon the latter, and found it worthwhile only to elaborate the theory of long-trend prices. Similarly, in the theory of distribution, paramount importance is attached to the permanent trends according to which the shares of the various factors of production tend to be distributed as distinct from all ephemeral and temporary fluctuations. Even the most ephemeral phenomena must also be understood and explained, if for no other reason than that the laws controlling them are, in the last resort, not different from those determining their permanent effects; but it goes without saying, that that phase of our theory which covers those cases outlasting the others in time and space will be far more important to us than the explanation of rapidly passing exceptions.
But there is a second reason why it seems to me that the consideration of the influences of "power" deserves greater attention from the viewpoint of their permanency, for, as far as my knowledge of economic literature goes, this most important phase of the subject has never been investigated.
While the problem of the influence of power on prices as such has hitherto been only scantily treated, and never in a systematic manner, in economic theory, fundamental investigations into the permanent effects of such influences of power seem to be totally lacking, so that here we enter, in a certain sense, upon literary virgin land.Image copyright AFP
Philip Seymour Hoffman has become the latest celebrity to die from a drugs overdose, which is a growing problem in the US.
Between 2000 and 2010 the number of people that died from drug overdoses more than doubled from 17,000 to 38,000, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2009, for the first time in US history, more people died from drugs overdoses than from traffic accidents or firearms, although that is partly because the numbers of gun deaths and road deaths are both decreasing. So what is causing this epidemic?
The data suggests the number of people overdosing from pharmaceutical - or prescription - drugs has trebled over that decade, just as the quantity of prescription painkillers sold to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors' offices has quadrupled over the same period.
As a result in 2010, prescription drugs killed more than 22,100 people in the US, more than twice as many as cocaine and heroin combined.
Explaining the rise, Dr Len Paulozzi of the CDC says: "The use of opioid pain relievers has been increasing since the early 1990s and that increase has been driven by a change in the attitude of health care providers about the effectiveness of those kind of painkillers.
"Initially painkillers were reserved for people with terminal conditions such as cancer and what has changed is an increasing willingness on the part of the prescribers to use pain relievers for a variety of common but chronic conditions such as lower back pain or arthritis. There has been a parallel increase in overdoses involving that class of drugs."
There is also a huge black market for these drugs and in 2012, an estimated 12.5 million people reported using prescription painkillers without supervision from a doctor.
More or Less: Behind the stats Listen to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, or download the free podcast Download the More or Less podcast More stories from More or Less
Interestingly, there is no correlation between the states that sell the most prescription drugs with the states that have the most deaths. For example, New Mexico has the highest number of overdoses but is ranked 32nd in terms of drugs sold. Oregon is ranked 4th in drugs sold but only 31st on death rate.
New York has tighter rules on the dispensing of prescription drugs than most other states and has a lower death rate.
"New York City in particular has become much more aggressive in terms of things like asking their providers to check the states prescription monitoring programme before they prescribe the drugs," says Dr Paulozzi. "They're mapping that data to establish where there are unusual patterns or excessive amounts of drugs being prescribed."
Looking at overdoses from illegal drugs, there is no geographic pattern. Virginia has one of the lowest death rates in the country but its neighbour West Virginia has the highest rate of all.
Opioids Medications that relieve pain
Reduce intensity of pain signals reaching the brain and affect those brain areas controlling emotion
Includes morphine, methadone and fentanyl
"Opiods are very similar to heroin in terms of their pharmacological effects on the brain - they bind to the same receptors," says Dr Paulozzi.
They address pain but have a euphoric effect and in high doses can stop people breathing, he adds
The data does show that some of the more rural, less populated states like Nebraska and the Dakotas have the lowest rates of drug overdose deaths - which experts attribute to accessibility and supply.
Hoffman had talked openly in the past about his misuse of prescription drugs, although it is thought that he died from a heroin overdose, just as the Glee star, Cory Monteith, did last year.
The number of heroin users in the US has doubled in the last five years and one reason is thought to be the rise in prescription drugs, because heavy users of pain relievers are more likely to start using heroin. And attempts to clamp down on the distribution of prescription drugs may have had an foreseen consequence.
"The DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] has reported a dramatic increase in the amount of heroin being imported into the US across the Mexican border," says Dr Paulozzi. "It may be for some people who began using prescription pain relievers and became dependent on them that heroin is more available, more potent and cheaper than prescription pills on the black market."
This trend is in contrast to what's happening in Europe where heroin use is on the decrease in many of the 30 EU countries. Data also shows that the number of drug overdose deaths dropped by 20% between 2007 and 2012.
"The European trend is very much driven by what we see in the UK, Germany and Spain. They have seen a decrease in heroin use and overdoses," says Isabelle Giraudon, a scientific analyst at the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
"Smaller countries in Northern and Eastern Europe like Romania, Slovakia and Latvia have observed increases, however their weight in the EU total is very small."
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Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on FacebookSeveral weeks ago, The Intercept published a story on an English-speaking Islamic State fighter featured in one of the group’s propaganda videos. Now, the FBI is looking for him. In a statement taken from an agency press release:
“In the video, a man whose face is obscured by a mask alternates seamlessly between English and Arabic in pro-ISIL pronouncements intended to appeal to a Western audience. Dressed in desert camouflage and wearing a shoulder holster, the masked man can be seen standing in front of purported prisoners as they dig their own graves and then later presiding over their executions. “We’re hoping that someone might recognize this individual and provide us with key pieces of information…No piece of information is too small.”
The individual in question first came to attention when the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, released its latest feature-length film entitled “Flames of War”. He can be observed in several scenes speaking in fluent English, narrating details of recent ISIS operations to the camera. A linguistics professor contacted by The Intercept suggested that his accent indicated a likely origin somewhere in the region of Minnesota, North Dakota, or Canada. The FBI release seems to take a similar position, positing that the man has a “North American accent.”
The FBI also said that “about a dozen” Americans are known to be fighting in Syria with ISIS. When you add in fighters in Iraq and Canadians, perhaps dozens of North Americans are believed to have left to join conflicts in Iraq and Syria. But the identity and national origin of this individual remain unknown, and it remains unconfirmed whether he spent a protracted period in Canada or the northern U.S. as a preliminary analysis of his accent seemed to indicate. Although he does not appear to make specific threats against Western countries, judging by his actions in this film alone it’s clear that the wanted individual committed war crimes. In one scene he can be seen taking part in the execution of several captive Syrian Army soldiers, while promising more conflict ahead.
The issue of foreign fighters is one that is the subject of fierce debate today. As recently discussed in this publication there is reason to believe the actual threat posed by such individuals is overstated.
Nonetheless, the participation of this man in a propaganda film calibrated to attract Western recruits has now put him in the crosshairs of Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Although we don’t know who he is today, we may soon find out.Unidentified hexagonal structures at Fiery Cross, Subi, and Mischief reefs. CSIS/AMTI/Digital Globe/Amanda Macias/Business Insider In addition to China's lightning-fast construction of military aircraft hangars on reefs in the South China Sea, mysterious facilities have also emerged.
Satellite imagery published by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), a unit of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, shows several unidentified hexagonal structures on Fiery Cross, Subi, and Mischief reefs.
The formations are always oriented toward the sea and started to appear in May, according to experts at AMTI.
"I'm afraid I can't comment just yet," Gregory Poling, director of AMTI, told Business Insider about the hexagonal designs. "But the reason we put them out like this is to collect opinions from other experts in the field."
It has been nearly a month since the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration invalidated Beijing's vast territorial claims in the South China Sea. All the while, Beijing has maintained the ruling has no bearing and continues to build in the region.
All photos republished with permission from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Health insurance companies funneled thousands of dollars into fake grassroots organizations to discredit Michael Moore’s film Sicko, according to the former vice president of corporate communications for the insurance giant Cigna Corp.
In an interview with Democracy Now, Wendell Potter says health insurance companies set up front groups to criticize the film Sicko because they worried it would create support for a single-payer health care system in the United States.
“We felt that this movie would have such an impact that it would really pave the way for legislation to be passed that could be very detrimental to the insurance industry,” said Potter. “So it was very important for the insurers to attack this movie as fiercely as possible.”
“In this case, there was a front group that was set up called Health Care America, and the sole purpose for it to be set up was to attack Michael Moore and to attack the notion of a single-payer system in this country,” he added.
Health Care America claimed to be “representing consumers” but was funded entirely by insurance companies and run by the public relations firm APCO Worldwide.
The front group was never exposed by any journalists and was quoted extensively, says Potter.
In June of 2007, for instance, the New York Times quoted a Health Care America spokesman as saying that Sicko represented a move toward socialism, but the report did not mention Health Care America’s funding.
The goal of the insurance companies campaign against Moore was “to make sure that people saw him as a Marxist, as a socialist, and that he was going to be destroying the American Dream,” Potter said.
Moore said the interview “is a chilling look inside how easy it is to manipulate our mainstream media — and just how worried the health insurance companies were that the American people might demand a true universal health care system.”
In an interview yesterday, Potter said that while he is disappointed the health care reform bill recently passed did not include a public option, President Barack Obama had “no choice” because of the power of the insurers.
The insurance companies are “unbelievably influential on Capitol Hill,” said Potter.
“What I’m trying to do as I write and speak out against the insurance industry I was a part of for nearly two decades is to inform Americans that when they hear isolated stories of long waiting times to see doctors in Canada and allegations that care in other systems is rationed by ‘government bureaucrats,’ someone associated with the insurance industry wrote the original script,” Potter wrote at CNN in 2009.
In related news, it was reported that health insurance companies gave $86.2 million to the US Chamber of Commerce last year to oppose the health care reform bill while promising to support reform.
Potter is now a senior fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy.The present results show a clear distinction between the level of athletic performance and corresponding fundamental mental capacities for learning an abstract and demanding dynamic scene task. How would this exceptional ability translate to specific real-life situations? For athletes, it is obviously related to their high levels of competitive sport performance. But what actions can we predict are enhanced by such a specialised ability for learning dynamic complex scenes? It would make logical sense that high-level athletes should be superior for achieving biological motion perception skills for instance. This is supported by the fact that cortical thickness of STS, an area known to process socially relevant cues and biological motion perception5, is greater and linked to training experience in athletes4. In other populations such as healthy older observers it has been shown that training with the 3D-MOT results in a direct subsequent transfer benefit to biological motion perception abilities at distances critical for collision avoidance14. The 3D-MOT speed task strongly engages several attention and mental skills that should carry over to other functions. To achieve high levels on this task one requires exquisite selective, dynamic, distributed and sustained attention skills for brief yet intense periods. Such abilities are certainly necessary when engaged in activities requiring the integration of simultaneous inputs such as when driving, crossing busy streets or when engaged in sporting activities. We have previously shown that the condition of testing can influence the learning curve3. This was demonstrated by the fact that if the professional players were standing as opposed sitting down for the initial consolidation training, the growth curve was reduced, which argues for shared resources. It remains to be determined whether this is specific to professional athletes or whether it can also be observed in other populations, as there clearly is something special about professional athletes. They appear to be able to hyper-focus for short periods of time resulting in extraordinary learning functions for the 3D-MOT task. We cannot determine here whether this superb ability to learn to process random and complex dynamic scenes has evolved by experience or stems from an innate predisposition. Prospective outcomes of athlete performance based on initial measures should prove very interesting in the future. The 3D-MOT method has been used to profile athletes for both the NHL and NFL combines where the best prospects for the entry draft are evaluated on a series of test batteries. It will be interesting to see whether these initial scores predict future performance outcomes. It is clear that individual performances on this task will be affected by many factors other than athletic skill including, sensory, physical, and psychological makeup so we should not expect a direct one to one relationship. It is clear that individual performances on this task will be affected by many factors other than athletic skill including, sensory, physical, and psychological makeup so we should not expect a direct one to one relationship. Nevertheless, our results do suggest that rapid learning in complex and unpredictable dynamic contexts is one of the critical components for elite performance.
In conclusion, we have demonstrated that professional athletes as a group have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning unpredictable, complex dynamic visual scenes that are void of any specific context. It is clear from these results that these remarkable mental processing and learning abilities should be acknowledged as critical elements for world-class performance in sport and potentially elite performance abilities in other dynamic contexts.Buy Photo “Survivor: Cambodia - Second Chance” contestant Ciera Eastin, wearing a buff from the “Blood vs Water” season of “Survivor,” is photographed at the home of her mother, Laura Morett, also a former “Survivor” contestant. Eastin will be hosting a “Survivor” premiere party at the Half Penny Bar & Grill on Sept. 23 when the new season starts. (Photo: BRENT DRINKUT / Statesman Journal)Buy Photo
Salemite Ciera Eastin’s second chance has come.
The 26-year-old stay-at-home mom of two spent the beginning of her summer in Cambodia filming the CBS competitive reality TV series “Survivor: Cambodia - Second Chance.”
But this was not her first “Survivor” experience. Two years ago, Eastin, along with her mother, Laura Morett, was a competitor on “Survivor: Blood vs. Water,” where she finished fifth place.
“Survivor: Cambodia - Second Chance” is about just that. Each of the 20 competitors on the show are returning players picked by fans through online voting.
“I think the viewers are really going to love it because they voted these people in,” Morett said.
Eastin learned she would be officially returning to the show when it was announced during last season’s finale on May 20. A few days later, she flew out of Los Angeles to film in Cambodia.
“Both experiences were incredible — both very different,” Eastin said. “When you play with a loved one, you have a sense of security, at homeness. It’s very comfortable. You look around and can see somebody that is there for you. When you are by yourself, not only do you have all these players who have played before, they are extra thirsty for the win. It’s cutthroat.”
Eastin noted that for her second time around, the game play was more fast paced. The game was on from the get-go, she said.
“Right out the gate, right into a challenge. It definitely set the pace,” Eastin said. “The first challenge kind of sets the tone for at least how the first portion of the game is.”
“The conditions weather and food wise were way worse than my first time,” Eastin added. “The first time I thought it was hard. This time it was unreal... brutal weather from hot to pouring down monsoon rain.”
Eastin also noted that there was less food in Cambodia than the Philippines, where “Survivor: Blood vs. Water” was filmed.
Buy Photo “Survivor: Cambodia - Second Chance” contestant Ciera Eastin, right, with her mother and former “Survivor” contestant Laura Morett surround items from their past seasons on the show. (Photo: BRENT DRINKUT / Statesman Journal)
But less food was not the only challenge Eastin faced.
“For me, at night time, laying there in pouring-down rain. Everything you own is wet — it doesn’t even have time to dry. You have time to miss your loved ones. Constantly thinking about my two kids. Thankful for all these small things you take for granted at home: shelter, a bed, warm clothes, a pillow. I am so fortunate,” she said.
“Even when there were days off, there was constant strategizing going on,” Eastin noted. “There was never a time when it wasn’t. It was very different from my first season, which was a lot of downtime, enjoying each other.”
“CBS really stuck to the theme of second chances,” Eastin said. “A lot of the challenges you are going to see are challenges that maybe one person has done before and lost or won. It’s a second chance to prove you are the winner and win it again, or if you lost that you can win it.”
“This is a season full of surprises and twists,” Eastin added. “They really have stuck to the theme in more ways than just that throughout the season.”
Eastin, thankful for her second chance, noted that she has had two years to revisit, ponder and question her moves the first time she was on “Survivor,” but for some players, such as Kelly Wigglesworth who was second runner up in season one, it has been 10 years.
“There is no perfect mathematical equation on how to win ‘Survivor,’ ” she said. “I went into it with such unfinished business. I felt like, I really just wanted to come in and go all out, leave it all on the island. I probably won’t get a chance to play again. I didn’t want to have regrets this time. My first season, I definitely had them. A lot came down to being timid. I was scared my first season until about halfway through the season.”
“I definitely feel like as far as the theme ‘second chances’ goes, it was my perfect theme season,” Eastin said. “It’s a perfect time and perfect theme to describe my situation and my story.”
“This time I can definitely leave the experience saying I played fearlessly,” Eastin said.
Eastin and her mother will be hosting a premiere viewing party 7 p.m. Wednesday, |
subsidizes more down payment. Which tends to stabilize the housing market. What we do is, because we have to do it through the back door, we do the only thing that we can do, which is subsidize instability, by subsidizing leverage. Russ: Yeah. GuestC: So, the point is, there are some flaws, I would say--I don't want to be too judgmental here, but there are some flaws in the way we address certain problems that kind of push us, as Steve was pointing out, in the direction of using this hidden stuff; and it's always coming through the financial arrangement. Russ: Just to echo that back: I find it remarkable how little we've learned from the Financial Crisis in terms of these back door, hidden subsidies. The Left has pushed back against any attempt to stop subsidizing mortgages; basically right now we have the Federal Reserve financing the mortgage market of the United States. This is not exactly what the founders of the Federal Reserve had in mind; it's not what most people would say is good economic policy. But it's politically very attractive to do that. And it's nuts--it seems to me.
48:38 Russ: But let's talk about the Crisis. Because I want to let you put your explanation on the table and then I do want to push back a little bit. You put a lot of stock, to my surprise, in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and the Government-Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They certainly were part of the problem. But you don't talk much about the large private investment banks that issued private mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which were enormously a large part of the run-up in the early 2000s. And to me, without that we would have maybe an unpleasant system; we might have had Fannie Mae go broke. But a lot of the loans that were made were not made by loans that were under the Community Reinvestment Act. And it seems to me the moral hazard problem is a bigger problem as a cause. And to me the housing market is just the place it oozed out into. But it was something else. Defend yourself. Who wants to go first? GuestH: I'll start and Charlie will finish. I think it's important to get the chronology of the facts straight. As you mentioned, the private investment banks get in, in the early 2000s, into the MBS market. Russ: With two feet. GuestH: Oh, yeah. They see a market opportunity that Fannie and Freddie blazed for them going back to the 1992 GSE Act. That Act has several curious features. One of which was it told Fannie and Freddie that they had to repurchase loans from banks that met Affordable Housing standard criteria. Russ: They had to lend a lot of money to poor people, in bad neighborhoods that weren't getting-- GuestH: Up until 1992, total CRA lending is only $8.8 billion. A lot of agreements between activist groups and banks, but very little lending. Beginning in 1992--and incidentally this is legislation which is crafted under the first Bush Administration--be clear here; there is not a Democrat/Republican issue. The basic problem that the community groups have is they want to get access to more credit, channeled through their organizations to their constituents. Quite reasonably. That's their stated job. Russ: That's what they are trying to do. GuestH: Banks want to merge. In order to get approval for mergers. I think from the vantage point of today we don't have a sense of how rapid fire and dramatic these mergers are. Bank of America is essentially the amalgamation of 37 different banks in the 1990s. So in order to get approval for these mergers, they have to go before the Federal Reserve Board. Community activists show up at those merger hearings, and said that they can block them. And in fact community groups even write handbooks on how to block a merger. You can download them off the web. Banks backward induct, and they partner with the community groups and agree to channel credit through them. But they don't want to hold those loans if they don't have to. And they tell the community groups, the activist groups: There's a limit to what we are going to do. The activists, particularly ACORN but also the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, go to Congress and they push. Particularly ACORN. And there are Senate hearings in 1991. So this is a full decade before the investment banks get in. This is a story that people like to tell, which is Fannie and Freddie followed private banks. Well, they followed in the sense that they are dragged in kicking and screaming into this deal. They don't want to buy these CRA loans that banks are making. The activists push in Congress to basically make them do it. And the thing that Fannie and Freddie extract in return is two crucial features. First, they are going to be subject to regulation not by the Fed; they are going to be subject to regulation by a unit of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Russ: Their own regulator. GuestH: Their own regulator. Russ: It sounds bad. It's actually-- GuestH: worse than it is. It sounds bad and it's worse. Russ: Good [?] for them; bad for us. GuestH: Second, they are given capital requirements that are about 60% of--about 40% below those of--commercial banks. Russ: They are allowed to be highly leveraged. GuestH: Right. That means that Fannie and Freddie can get into the following business. You are a commercial bank; you sell me a loan. You had to put $4 in capital behind that loan while you held it, as a prudential reserve. I, as Fannie or Freddie, only have to $1.60 [?] in capital behind that same loan, because I have a different capital standard. If I now create a more mortgage-backed security out of a bunch of these loans that you sold me, that Charlie sold me and others have sold me, and put a guarantee on it--which I have to charge $.45 per $100 for--I can now create a mortgage-backed security essentially now being back by $1.60 in capital against the mortgage-backed security plus the $.45 for $2.05. And then sell it back to you. This creates tremendous incentive for me as a government GSE to be in the business of buying your bad loans and selling it back-- Russ: I understand-- GuestH: The banks only lead Fannie and Freddie in the extent that it's in their interest that Fannie and Freddie get into this business. Fannie and Freddie extract concessions. Later on, once this process is well underway, and once mortgage standards have been written, once this sort of basic game has been organized, that's when the investment banks get into the game. It is no accident that when the Crisis occurred, well over half and perhaps as much as two-thirds of all the toxic assets are sitting inside Fannie and Freddie. Russ: I don't know if that number is true. I know there is some controversy about it. The fact is, though, a lot of it is sitting inside privately-run, not-subject to the CRA, privately invested in highly leveraged investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were, and some of it is even held by J.P. Morgan and Goldman--people treated it like [?] they stood aside; they didn't stay aside. They also were doing it. They didn't do it as much. They were a little more cautious. But hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities were packaged. They all had their own lending arms, originators. So, Charles, how do you explain their--let me ask it a different way: Okay, so Fannie and Freddie could have gone broke because they made a lot of bad loans under this political pressure we were talking about--which I think is true. And it would have been expensive. But to get a collapse of the shadow banking system to something else, it seems to me. GuestC: There are really two different issues here. Your first question was: Weren't there a lot of private players using their own money, these investment banks and Citigroup? Russ: Well, not their own money. GuestC: Well, their stockholders' money. Russ: Yeah. Kind of. GuestC: And the taxpayers' money. Both. Russ: Yeah, implicitly. GuestC: Weren't they also making some decisions here? So that's one question; I want to turn to that. Then there's a second question. The key thing to recognize is, if Fannie May and Freddie Mac were the 800 pound gorilla in the mortgage market and they were giving effectively what people regarded as a pretty good put option--in other words, they were the secondary market where mortgage-backed securities and mortgages could be dumped--this was especially important if you talked to people in the industry for explaining why there were so many violations of the various limitations on the portfolios that were being structured. Because as long as Fannie and Freddie were willing to give it a wink and a nod, it really didn't matter what the rules were because you knew you could sell these securities. The thing that people[?] didn't really know was the total amount of crappy stuff that was being originated. And the reason that they didn't know it was because there was no correct aggregation going on that you could turn to and figure it out. Only after we started seeing the default experiences in some of the categories of mortgages did we realize that they were effectively sub-prime quality. And the reason was, starting in 2004, the rise of the so-called Alt-A, non-documented mortgages. And we didn't really know how severe those risks were until we saw it starting in 2007. So people were actually very convinced; and that put option would have been good if there had only been half a trillion of these crappy mortgages. In fact, though, as we know from the SEC's (Security and Exchange Commission) settlement with Fannie and Freddie, they were holding $2 trillion of those mortgages. So that put option, as we know from having bailed them out was no longer good. So I think a lot of the explanation for why private parties were willing to engage in this so much was they didn't realize that that put option was going to disappear. The second explanation, of course, and we do get into this in the book, is that actually you are probably right. That is, there was other stuff going on. It wasn't all the story that we're telling. But we think that that's the dominant thrust of the story. There are other narratives out there having to do with monetary policy which we think also contributed. But we think that we wouldn't have had the two requirements to have a banking crisis, which are: Extreme risky assets that banks are holding, and tolerance for extreme leverage of the banks and the GSEs--if there hadn't been that political deal that underlay it all. And just one final sentence about this: the key thing is, Fannie and Freddie, when they relaxed their underwriting standards, they didn't relax it just in the affordable housing area. They relaxed them for everyone. Because they said: if we just relax them in this area, they couldn't have defended it. They had to pretend that they were not doing something imprudent. And that's what opened the floodgates for everyone.
59:14 Russ: I wish we could talk more about this, but we are almost out of time. So I want to try to sum up a little bit. Which is that--2008 was a really bad experience, for the United States and lots of countries. How much of that was due to bad social policy, expectations of creditor bailout--which I think was hugely important, which incentivized the investment banks and the GSEs and everybody to be imprudent with the money they were able to borrow, which they otherwise wouldn't have been able to borrow. We tried to fix it a little bit. Most economists think that our attempts to fix it have been a failure; that we are standing on the edge of another crisis in the next x years--we don't know what x is but things are not good. Where does that leave us? A cynic would say: Well, that's just the way it is; we just have to go from crisis to crisis. They seem to be accelerating, actually, worldwide. You have any reason for optimism? Or, do you have any hope for a different set of political incentives? Part of the theme of your book is: This is the way it is, folks; you may wish it were otherwise; you might have a better idea, but the political incentives don't let you do it. So it doesn't really matter. So that could lead to a very unrosy view of the future. But I don't think that's your view. So, one of you is an optimist and one of you is a pessimist. Which one's the pessimist? GuestH: I'm more pessimistic than Charlie. Russ: Okay, you go first, because I want to end on an optimistic note. GuestH: I want to be clear, however, the difference between optimism and pessimism is I say things that are pessimistic and Charlie says things that are pessimistic, but he smiles more while he says it. So, one of the reasons why we wrote this book is not just because we wanted to understand how things work. We wanted the public to understand how things work. And to be able to come away from reading this book with some heuristics for detecting when the financial system is heading off a cliff and they should start to become worried. Not just the public in general, but also financial journalists. And I would end here by saying if there's a lesson--there's two lessons the public could extract from this book. First, if you are counting on your elected representatives to be watching out for your financial interests as an average taxpayer, think again. The second is that any time a politician tells you that he's found a way to create a free lunch and that there's going to be this marvelous subsidy, and nobody is going to pay for it, reach for your wallet. Especially when that subsidy is coming through the banking [?]. Because what's going to happen is what happened in the years leading up to 2008. It's not that I think the CRA was a bad idea. It's that the logic of the CRA coupled to the mega-merger movement gave rise to incentives for Fannie and Freddie to lower their underwriting standards. And once that happened, they had to lower them for everybody. The whole society could pile into deals that literally were too good to be true. One of the reasons we wrote this book is to make it clear to the public: Any time a politician says, I have a deal that's too good to be true, or what Bill Clinton called 'the third way', it's time to get very nervous and think about voting for somebody else. Russ: And I would just add to that, that the push in the 1990s through both Republican and Democratic Administrations to raise the homeownership rate--[?]--'and it won't cost us anything.' Slightly overly optimistic. Russ: Charles, finish this off. GuestC: Well, I guess I would say, to try to end on an optimistic note, is: It is true we can't just throw away our institutions and history and constitutions and pretend that we are Canada, because that's not going to work. But what we can do is learn. And democracies do actually learn. Even very populist democracies. So, we've already mentioned, the United Kingdom for example became effectively a unicameral legislature, no separation between executive and the legislature, so we would say in some sense very populist. And particularly after WWII. And they nationalized all their industry[?] and they had extremely high tax rates. But that created some pressures on the economy. And in the 1970s and 1980s we saw extremely high inflation, very low growth; and guess what? It was unpopular. The rise of Margaret Thatcher was not just about Thatcher's leadership. It was about the fact that the median voter in that populist country was sick of it. And it's an interesting testament that the changes that were wrought under Thatcher were persistent and now are part of the mainstream status quo being endorsed by Edward Miliband and others. So I think the key thing is we're optimistic in the sense that we are spending a lot of effort hoping that the education of the people eventually leads to some sort of positive response. It's very hard in finance because it's very arcane. It's all too easy for politicians to give you the flim-flam. But let's be optimistic. Why not? Russ: More educated readers, who read your book, will be less susceptible to the flimflam.
1:05:05 Russ: Okay, we are going to open it to Q and A. And then we are going to have a little food and drink. Please when you are called on, identify yourself by name if you could. And use the microphone if you could. Audience1: I'm Arnold Kling. I'm trying to figure sort of what makes Canada's banks stable, and the thing that comes to mind is charter value, that the--you only have 5 of them, and they are profitable, and so they don't want to lose their charter, and so maybe that stabilizes things. First, I wonder if you agree with that. And secondly, if you do, what are the forces that keep that from happening in the United States? I think you mentioned the populist sentiment--people don't want banks to be profitable. The government wanted to use banks for redistribution purposes. Should we be trying to head toward a system where banks have valuable charters and if so, how could we head that way? GuestC: Okay, I'll take a first stab at it. So, first of all, I want to be very clear here. Banks have charter value for two reasons. One is because they run a business very well; and the other is because they are endowed with some monopoly, non-competitive rights. In the case of Canada, there is a lot of evidence that the second is not true, and has not been true. Despite the small number of large banks. By the way, of course there are thousands of banks in Canada, but there are only 5 that are very big. But the literature on competition among the banks has uniformly found that the banks are extremely competitive. But there is an element of importance to what is being limited in the chartering in Canada, and that is the exclusion of the Yankees. That is a very important part, we believe, of the bargain; and we aren't the first ones to point this out. Because, look at it this way. First, the Canadian Banking Act is re-made every 5 years. And the banks' charters expire every 5 years. Banks are on a fairly short leash in Canada in that sense. Also, part of the banking law effectively excludes U.S. banks and other foreign banks from competing on equal footing with the Canadian banks. So, we think that that is a system that's very conducive to the banks' also behaving well in the eyes of the regulator. And so long as the regulators act in the public interest, which it has consistently in Canada, that's also helping things. So, I actually think that the charter exclusion that actually matters in Canada is not one that is creating monopoly rents within the domestic system, but one that is creating a vested interest in the Canadian banks in not messing up their deal to exclude the American banks. Audience1: [?] a way to create some kind of charter value in the United States, or you don't think that's what you would? GuestC: I have a recent paper on looking at charter values of U.S. banks. And most of it is dictated by whether they know how to run certain businesses better than other banks. There's not really a lot of monopoly rent to be allocated. It's really about being able to do your business relatively, in certain areas, better than other banks.
1:08:54 Russ: Another question? Yeah. Audience2: Hi. Benjamin Kaye [?]. So, my question is: so, financial crises can be optimal in the sense that perhaps the cost of stopping them prevents real projects from being funded, positive NPD[? Maybe NDP, National Domestic Product?-- Econlib Ed.] projects from being funded. And so one thing that was not in the discussion from the last hour was basically what if any price in terms of the efficient allocation of capital does Canada pay for the decisions that they make in the industrial organization of their banking industry? Russ: Good question. GuestH: So, it's an interesting question and it creates a sort of technical problem because you would have to be able to model what Canada would look like if it had more expansive banking policies and therefore had sort of more volatility in credit. We can't observe that Canada. We can observe the Canada that does exist. And what has always struck me about Canada--that's an exaggeration; it hasn't always struck me about Canada; it struck me about Canada from the time I realized as a New Yorker that it was a separate country. What has struck me about Canada is the fact that this is a country with a very small swath of land that you can actually grow anything. You get 100 miles north of the border and it's too cold to actually grow anything. There are pockets of natural resources. Russ: Except hockey players. GuestH: Except hockey players. Right. Pockets of natural resources sprinkled here and there separated by vast distances. Nevertheless, Canada is a country with a tremendously high GDP (Gross Domestic Product), by world standards. And in fact has accomplished that even though it's mostly a primary-product producer, which means it's subject to big fluctuations in its terms of trade. A lot of that I think is due to the stability of the Canadian financial system. So I would be hard-pressed to make an argument that Canada could have done better had it had the U.S. financial system, which would have created much more volatility. They've done remarkably well given the resource base that they have. Just to give you a sense of this: the state of Iowa has more farmland suitable for growing corn and wheat than the entire country of Canada. So it's really remarkable what they've done, given the constraints they have. Russ: I want to just follow up on that question though, because I think it raises an important point that I wanted us to get to, which we didn't get to earlier. Which is: we have this obsession with never having any kind of crisis. And I think the right analogy is the forest fire analogy. So, forest fires are unpleasant. They are awful. Things die. It's not good. Your house can burn down. You can be killed. So there's a natural tendency to say forest fires are bad; we won't have any. When you do that what happens is that the kindling and tinder and other stuff, undergrowth, builds up to such an extent, because there's never a forest fire, that there eventually comes a fire that you can't put out. And it's so much work compared to having a lot of little fires. And that's what has happened with our financial system. We publicly say we are trying to find the perfect way to keep there from being any crises or distress. And as a result, it works really well--until it doesn't. And then we have the Yellowstone fire, which is unbearable, unpleasant, high-cost situation. And I think--Arnold Kling asked a good question, asked it the right way; I can't say it as well as Arnold, but we should have a system that, when it breaks we can cope with it rather than one that never breaks. [?] breaks can't happen, but we have this ideal that it can't happen, and it's a mistake.
1:12:57 Russ: Any other questions? Yeah. Audience3: Drew[?] Kennedy. So, one of the themes, I take it, from the earlier part of the book is that Federalism has not always functioned as a check and balance the way we think of it in that it prevents bad policies, but that sometimes it enables just other types of bad policies. And my question is: Do you think that's unique to finance, or as the country is continually debating national government versus states' rights types of issues, and health care and everything else--is that unique to finance or do you think this is a more generalizable issue? GuestC: It's a great question. I think that it's not unique to finance. But I think it may be somewhat related to how complex the issues are in the particular area. So, it's interesting to me that one thing that we also discovered was that monetary policy in Canada has also been better than in the United States. In terms of the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s, its level and its volatility, Canada also managed to have a better experience there. I think in trade policy you could also point to superior outcomes in Canada relative to the United States. So I'm not sure. I do think that there are these general kinds of issues that apply to other policy areas. But I want to take them one at a time. GuestH: I would add to that: I think that you bring question for political scientists to address. I don't think that there is a consensus answer to that question because the question has never been framed quite the way you put it. In most of the literature about Federalism it's all about market-preserving Federalism. Federalism is always good. There is this flip side of it, and I think it's been under-researched. So I think graduate students thinking about a dissertation project, this should be sort of a marvelous area to jump into.Norway has been named as the most prosperous country in the world for the seventh year running, according to a new report.
The 2015 Prosperity Index found that the Scandinavian nation ranked highest out of 142 countries based on its performance across eight criteria, including economy, education, personal freedom and health.
Switzerland ranked second, brought down by a weaker score for its education system, while Denmark came third overall despite ranking 16th for its healthcare.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
The US came 11th overall, while the UK dropped two places since 2014 into 15th. The top economy in the world – Singapore – slipped to 17th because of weak scores for personal freedoms and social cohesion.
Shape Created with Sketch. The 10 most prosperous countries in the world Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The 10 most prosperous countries in the world 1/10 10. Ireland 2/10 9. Finland 3/10 8. Netherlands 4/10 7. Australia 5/10 6. Canada 6/10 5. Sweden 7/10 4. New Zealand 8/10 3. Denmark 9/10 2. Switzerland 10/10 1. Norway 2008 Getty Images 1/10 10. Ireland 2/10 9. Finland 3/10 8. Netherlands 4/10 7. Australia 5/10 6. Canada 6/10 5. Sweden 7/10 4. New Zealand 8/10 3. Denmark 9/10 2. Switzerland 10/10 1. Norway 2008 Getty Images
The index, which has provided a ranking of the relative “success” of countries since 2009, praises Norway for the strength of its “social capital”, personal freedoms and health system.
But the country has fallen down on its economy from first place in 2013 to fourth this year – and the index’s authors suggested the way it reports unemployment figures could be masking deeper problems.
Nathan Gamester, a spokesman for the Legatum Institute which produces the index every year, said researchers came across something strange when digging down into Norway’s labour statistics.
He said Norway ranks a large swathe of its long-term unemployed as qualifying for either a disability pension or early retirement – increasingly even in cases involving people aged 20-24.
It means Norway’s official unemployment level – already struggling compared to its neighbours since the 2008 global crash – is artificially low.
Should Norway really be top?
“We look into these data all the time, so this really took us by surprise,” Mr Gamester said. “We’ve always been very positive about Norway, so when this year we found they had slipped down in the economy category we decided to look a bit further.
“The higher official [unemployment] rates don’t even tell the whole story – so it’s sort of a double whammy.”
The index features an essay from the London-based free market economist Nima Samandaji, who said “much of the true level of unemployment is hidden in the system”. He compared Norway’s response to the financial crisis to Sweden, which has improved its employment rate since 2008.
“We include unemployment as an important part of the economy index, so if true statistics were available for Norway it would fall down,” Mr Gamester said.
“It would depend on other countries because it’s a relative ranking, but a worse score could have knocked Norway off the top spot.”
What about Britain?
The UK achieved its best score in the “entrepreneurship” index, showing Britain is one of the best places in the world to start a business.
It also jumped from 28th to 19th on the economy, which Mr Gamester suggested shows the Government’s focus on its “long term economic plan” was working.
But it has come at a cost to education, where Britain slipped from 20th to 25th, and personal freedoms, where the UK slipped out of the top 10.
Mr Gamester said: “We’ve seen a big increase in employment in Britain among people in the poorest fifth of society.
“But the benefit of an index like this is that you can look across the board. The Government can see that relative to its peers, the UK is falling behind.”
Mr Gamester said the index was designed with the goal of “redefining what it means for a country to be successful”.
“Look at China – it ranks down in 52nd overall. It does very well on its economy but comes 120th for personal freedoms. It’s the same situation with Saudi Arabia – and we would say you have to look at these types of things if you are talking about how successful countries are.”
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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Subscribe nowShare. Director and franchise vet replace Michael Arndt. Director and franchise vet replace Michael Arndt.
Exit Theatre Mode
Star Wars: Episode VII has a new writing team: J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan. The pair takes over on the script from Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3), who was announced as the screenwriter of the sequel a year ago.
As per StarWars.com, Kasdan and Abrams “have assumed screenwriting duties for the film.” Kasdan, who co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, had been serving as a consultant on Episode VII. Abrams, of course, is also directing the film. (Kasdan has also been rumored to be working on one of the standalone films set in the Star Wars world.)
"I am very excited about the story we have in place and thrilled to have Larry and J.J. working on the script," says Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy in the company’s announcement. "There are very few people who fundamentally understand the way a Star Wars story works like Larry, and it is nothing short of incredible to have him even more deeply involved in its return to the big screen. J.J. of course is an incredible storyteller in his own right. Michael Arndt has done a terrific job bringing us to this point and we have an amazing filmmaking and design team in place already prepping for production."
Exit Theatre Mode
The story adds that location scouting, production design, casting, and costume design are already underway on the film for a Spring 2014 shoot at Pinewood Studios and an “expected” 2015 release. “Expected”?
It’s unclear how much (if any) of Arndt’s script will be utilized by Abrams and Kasdan, but it seems unlikely that this is just a polish. A studio wouldn’t announce its two biggest names associated with a project for such a thing… which raises the question: If Star Wars: Episode VII is getting a serious rewrite, how do-able are those production start and release dates?
The following personnel are also now confirmed to be onboard the film:
Director of photography Dan Mindel (Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness)
Production designers Rick Carter (Lincoln, Avatar, Forrest Gump) and Darren Gilford (Oblivion, TRON: Legacy)
Costume designer Michael Kaplan (Star Trek Into Darkness, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Fight Club)
Special effects supervisor Chris Corbould (Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception)
Sound designer Ben Burtt (Lincoln, Wall-E, Star Wars: Episodes I-VI)
Re-recording mixer Gary Rydstrom (Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Toy Story, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol)
Supervising sound editor Matthew Wood (Star Trek Into Darkness, The Master, There Will Be Blood) of Skywalker Sound
Visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett (Star Trek Into Darkness, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith) of Industrial Light & Magic
Producers Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, and Bryan Burk
Executive Producers Tommy Harper (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Jack Ryan, Star Trek Into Darkness) and Jason McGatlin (Tintin, War of the Worlds)
Composer John Williams
Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottIGN, on IGN at scottcollura and on Facebook.Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
We have to admit, the build up to this year's Glastonbury festival has been unusually quiet. (Maybe that's what happens after you let U2 be the headliners). But that doesn't mean we're not all incredibly excited here on guardian.co.uk/music. So excited, in fact, that we fought off the BBC this year so that we could provide you with unrivalled live video coverage of the festival. The stream you can see (mobile users click here) is aimed towards the Pyramid stage (in fact, from our cowshed eyrie, it's just visible to the right) and will remain there for the duration of the weekend – you'll have to watch a short advert but then it's uninterrupted viewing pleasure.
Half an hour ago a quite big bird flew past and at one point we heard one of our picture editors shout "Oh look! I think that's a tractor!". This alone already makes it three times as thrilling as Neil Young's set back in 2009. And although Michael Eavis has remained tight lipped on the bill this year, we're sure that he will declare it "the best one ever" by the time Glastonbury 2012 has reached its debauched conclusion...
Can't make it to Pilton? Worried that this stream is little more than an office joke gone too far? Do not desert us – for also this weekend the Guardian is providing coverage of the BBC's Hackney Weekend, more opera from Glyndebourne, plus live streams of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra's gig in London and Imogen Heap's performance in A Room for London.DES MOINES, Iowa — Conservative state lawmakers threatened Thursday to withhold state funding for an Iowa community college if the school spends tax dollars on a conference for gay youths.
The Des Moines Register reported that 16 Republican lawmakers released a statement threatening to vote down funding for the Des Moines Area Community College, which sponsors the Iowa Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ Youth.
Over 600 students and educators typically attend the conference, which seeks to end bullying of gay, lesbian and transgender students. But legislators say the event uses taxpayer dollars to encourage dangerous behaviors that distort Bible teachings.
Sen. Dennis Guth (R-Klemme) says by signing the statement, those lawmakers have agreed to propose amendments to the state education budget blocking funding for DMACC.
“This is not a proper use of taxpayer funds,” he said.
Guth hopes that the Republican majority in the House will have enough power to push such a measure.
“We cannot in good conscience vote to give taxpayer dollars to people or groups who pervert the Bible, teach our youth to engage in dangerous behavior,” the statement said.
It’s signed by Sens. David Johnson, Mark Segebart, Mark Chelgren, Dennis Guth, Bill Anderson, Kent Sorenson and Rick Bertrand; and Reps. Dwayne Alons, Greg Heartsill, Dean Fisher, Robert Bacon, Tom Shaw, Jason Schultz, Larry Sheets, Ralph Watts and Sandy Salmon.
The Family Leader, a conservative Christian group, called upon Gov. Terry Branstad Thursday to remove his title from the conference, though it was started by Gov. Tom Vilsack. They made a similar request of Branstad last March and he issued a statement on his website reaffirming his support for the conference.
Chuck Hurley, vice president of the group, said Thursday the conference uses “evil propaganda” on children.
“Stop twisting the Bible and stop using our tax dollars to do it,” he said.
The conference is set for April 3 at Prairie Meadows in Altoona.
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This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
This Story Filed UnderItalian voters set to reject the prime minister's mayoral candidates both in his home city and in Naples
Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, suffered a humiliating and politically ominous defeat in his home city of Milan on Monday when his party's choice for mayor, Letizia Moratti, was ousted in a runoff by a local leftwing lawyer, Giuliano Pisapia.
There was yet more bad news for the right in Naples where the candidate of the fiercely anti-Berlusconi Italy of Principles party, Luigi De Magistris, stormed home with more than 65% of the votes.
Berlusconi was defiant despite the results that some political adversaries said marked the beginning of the end of his ascendancy in Italy's public life.
"This time we didn't win, but we continue. I am a fighter. Any time I have lost, I tripled the effort," he told reporters in Romania |
't a partisan broadcaster censoring '60 Minutes' and lying to its paying audience warrant an investigation by the TV industry regulators? It certainly would here in Britain.
COMMENT #28 [Permalink]
... JUDGE OF JUDGES said on 3/1/2008 @ 9:00 am PT...
Dredd & Ms. ~ I assume you know where I was coming from, A good place, only! Universal Soldier is a classic in my book.
COMMENT #29 [Permalink]
... JUDGE OF JUDGES said on 3/1/2008 @ 9:07 am PT...
P.S. ~ Dredd & Ms. ~ I wish you's all the Best Luck in the world!!!
COMMENT #30 [Permalink]
... Dredd said on 3/1/2008 @ 5:18 pm PT...
JoJ #29 Your father forgives understands you... just don't tell my wives about my girlfriend... ;P...
COMMENT #31 [Permalink]
... Dredd said on 3/5/2008 @ 4:39 am PT...CNN Works Directly with Pedophiles And Encourages Presidential Assassinations
Jacob Schwartz and Kathy Griffin — What is wrong with CNN?
Jason Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 30, 2017
Update from CNN below. Why did it take so long? Why did it take 26 hours for them do terminate their agreement?
Two big stories have come out and many may not be aware of one of them. The first, Jacob Schwartz, (former) President of the Manhattan Young Democrats was arrested for child pornography. Then Kathy Griffin, failed comedian, decided to depict President Trump in an ISIS style beheading attack.
Update: Griffin’s statement. Too little too late in my opinion. There are some things that cross the line and they know better.
Update from Anderson Cooper:
Update from CNN which is also just as disgusting. This translates into: “We hope you will forget about this by the new years.”
Disgusting
The worst part about Griffin’s “art,” is that it comes just after several ISIS attacks and the most notable attack (in my opinion), is what happened in Manchester, where many young girls were injured and killed. As we can see in the image above, ISIS is frequently photographed in the exact same style as Griffin when they behead someone. She knew exactly what she was doing when she did it.A couple were left stunned after their nine-year-old daughter managed to pass through Turkish customs officers - with a passport identifying her as a UNICORN.
Emily Harris had taken a toy passport she had made for her toy unicorn, Lily, on holiday with her.
And when the family passed through customs at Antalya airport to start their one-week holiday, flustered mum Nicky accidentally handed over the toy's passport instead of Emily's.
But they were stunned when they later realised their mistake - and discovered passport officials had even STAMPED the unicorn's passport, granting it access to the country.
Nicky, 43, from Cwmbran, South Wales, said: "I didn't realise until I was putting the passports away. There was a moment of panic when I thought someone would come chasing after us, but nothing.
The fake passport came with Emily’s Design-A-Bear toy. (Becky Matthews/Caters News Agency)
"The passport doesn't even look real - it's got gold teddy bears on the front and was a completely different size from mine and my husband, Allen's.
"The man even asked Emily how old she was, and she told him nine, before he stamped it."
It was only when they got outside that Nicky realised that instead of handing in Emily's passport, she had shown her daughter's Bear Factory passport for a Unicorn toy called Lily Harris.
"The picture ID wasn't even of Emily, it was of a pink unicorn.
The Turkish customs official allegedly asked Emily her age then stamped her unicorn’s passport. (Caters News Agency)
"And to make it worse, the unicorn wasn't even on holiday with us.
"We saw the funny side, and laughed at the fact that the officer had even stamped the passport.
"But at the same time, it's a worry to any parent, how easy it would be to smuggle a child through customs and into another country."
Sign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing!Vector art and comics are a match made in heaven. Because of this, it's no surprise that many vector illustrators would love to illustrate their own comic or graphic novel one day. To help you reach this goal, here are 10 priceless comic-book illustration lessons from a star-studded group of industry legends.
1. Be inspired and develop the work of previous character artists – Dan Scott
Dan Scott is a freelance illustrator located near Kansas City, Missouri. He has worked on projects with Dark Horse Comics, Warhammer 40k, Wizards of the Coast and DC Comics. Dan Scott is widely know for his CG artwork and illustrations using computers to create his digital art. In an interview with 3D Total, he outlines his process of researching the characters he is working with in order to develop the key features that have been laid down in the past:
With a painting that shows an iconic character like him [Superman], I felt I needed to first research how he had been depicted in the past. Quite often there’s a little bit of research time that needs to be put in before you even put pencil to paper (or maybe I should say stylus to tablet), whether it be to see what kind of plants are found in the jungle scene you’re going to paint, or to make sure you know the proper musculature on that horse you’re getting ready to depict. In this case I dug out several trade paperbacks I had to see how other artists had shown him. I made mental notes of what I liked and disliked about them and regurgitated it all into my own personal take on the character.
Read the full article
2. Develop and fine-tune your style of character illustration as the issues progress – Brian Denham
Brian Denham worked as the illustrator behind the X-Files comics based on the popular TV series. As a comic book based on real life characters the recreation of the likenesses of Mulder and Skully proved to be a challenge. In an interview Brian Denham talks about how he tunes his style across the issues to get closer to a realistic depiction of his subjects:
I think Mulder is the hardest. I drew an awesome shot of Mulder in #1 but a page later it's not as good. Things like that will work themselves out as I go.
I've got a grasp of Scully early on, but I noticed what looked good in black and white didn't look so good colored. So I changed some things about how I draw Scully. I try not to draw so much black shadows in her lips as I did in the zero issue. The likenesses were off on the last page as you can see. I'll drop some things as I go and it gets to a more fine-tuned version of the characters.
Read the full article
3. Collaborate and discuss ideas with the Editor, using sketches and pictures as references – Simone Bianchi
Simone Bianchi is an Italian comic book illustrator who is the current artist for the X-Men character Wolverine and has produced some outstanding cover art for Detective Comics. In an online interview from the 2007 New York Comic Con he describes how he works alongside the Editors during the artwork creation before he even begins sketching. This helps ensure all the work done is something that the editor is going to want to use and minimizes the amount of work that is scrapped in the final edit.
The average process is that I talk my Editor Peter Tomassi, we throw some ideas together through the phone and I start sketching around taking some pictures as reference and drawing the cover.
Read the full article
4. Focus on the storytelling not just the comic book art – Mark Brooks
Mark Brooks is a professional illustrator for Marvel comics who as a penciller interprets the story and creates the characters in each sequence. He has recently worked on Ultimate Fantastic Four and the X-Men Annual. When asked at the New York Comic Con he made a point about creating art that relates closely to the story:
I’ve learned that it’s a lot more to do with the storytelling than just pretty art … Comics are a lot more than art, I see a lot of up and comers that get into comics in the same position I was in and I see them focusing very heavily on the way they draw and doing covers and pin-ups and things like that and I don’t see a lot of focus on storytelling, which is something I’ve really tried to focus on in the last few years. I think if anyone can learn from my experience, focus on that just as much as focussing on your art.
Read the full article
5. Use facial expressions to convey emotion and subtext– Alex Toth
Alex Toth is a master of comic book art active through the 40’s through to the 80’s. His most recognizable work includes projects with Hanna-Barbera, Super Friends, and Space Ghost. In an interview at TwoMorrows he talks about his use of facial expressions to convey emotion in his art:
First of all, romance was very special. It dealt with emotions in a different way than the slam-bang adventure stuff. There are a lot of things under the surface... a line of dialogue could say "this," but the expression of the person would say "that." Maybe only the camera/us/the reader's viewpoint would reveal the truth when she said, "I love you, too, George." Her face, eyes were saying something else! And the reader knows that, but "George" doesn't! He can't see that! So, there were all of these little nuances of line readings, acting, reacting, interpretation, layers of character personality, integrity, etc., people bouncing off each other... that was suddenly very grown-up, as opposed to the slam-bang... It was a whole new ballgame, and it forced me to really pay attention, and look, learn and listen.
Read the full article
6. Don’t portray an action and a consequence in the same frame if you can avoid it – Lee Sullivan
Lee Sullivan is British comic artist who has worked on titles including Transformers, Thundercats, Doctor Who and Robocop. When interviewed with SciFi Pulse he touches on a tip when portraying action sequences in comic format:
I think one of my least favorite situations is when a writer asks for action and consequences to happen in the same frame; for example: first guy comes through door, second guy hits him and first guy crashes into table. You might get away with the last two actions combined, but you can’t really show them combined with the first. That’s another panel!
Read the full article
7. Be true to your own talent rather than follow trends – Tony O’Donnell
Tony O’ Donnell is a talented comic artist who has worked on titles including Ghostbusters from Marvel UK and DC Thomson’s Starblazer. In an interview for the British Comics fanzine Vicious he offers his advice for aspiring comic illustrators:
Keep a sketchbook and use it! Don't try to imitate the current 'fave' artist - maybe by the time you can draw just like him or her that style is out of fashion. Try to be true to your own talent and draw to please yourself, rather than follow temporary trends. All of this advice is difficult to follow and I wish I'd followed it myself. Still, better late than never! In the past I've overworked my pencils in order to make them as 'good' as possible, whereas I now believe it's best to adopt a looser approach and perhaps to have more self-belief in your own personal style. I was given the same advice in 1982 by Steve Dillon, who I think believes that being a perfectionist can take the 'fun' out of drawing comics.
Read the full article
8. Draw what you really want to see as a reader – Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud is a comic artist and writer who has not only produced illustrations for DC Comics, but has also released a number of industry related books. More recently he produced the press release comic strip for the Google Chrome browser. In an interview in 2006 he was asked what advice he would give to upcoming artists:
Write and draw what you really want to see as a reader. Don't try to write and draw what you think others will buy or what others want to see, because if you're not as interested in the subject matter that you're telling us about, then that's going to show. And that lack of enthusiasm is going to weaken your work. You have to care deeply about what you're doing. If you do, then there will always be at least someone else out there who cares as deeply about it as you. But if you're trying to sell out, if you're trying to create the kinds of stories you think other people like, you're always going to come in second behind others who have a more genuine love for that material. So you might as well just write what you love.
Read the full article
9. Don’t rely on the mainstream incarnations of popular characters as a base for your work – Lee Bermejo
Lee Bermejo has had very recent success as an artist alongside writer Brian Azzarello with the release of the Joker graphic novel. There were striking resemblances between his interpretation of the Joker and that of the popular movie release The Dark Knight, despite being well underway with his illustrations of the joker character before Heath Ledger was even cast. In an interview he was asked whether it is important for artists to incorporate visual elements from films to bridge the gap with comic books:
I think the only thing that really matters is that the essence of the characters remain the same regardless of the medium. The surface elements and some psychological issues are fun to play around with and bend a bit, but you just need to give people what they know is that character in order for various audiences to "get it." I prefer to see people's personal approaches to mainstream characters. It's just something that I enjoy and would rather see a thousand different takes on these guys than have everything start to adapt to the current, most successful incarnation.
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10. Showcase only your best work – Lee Sullivan
Lee Sullivan, as featured above has also compiled an extremely useful guide to writing and drawing for comic books on his website. Covering extensive areas of the industry and including many helpful tips it’s a great read for anyone with an interest in comic illustration. One such point he presents is how to present your work:
Getting your work seen is very hard and very dispiriting - editors rarely have time to look at your stuff and most wouldn't recognize good work if it jumped up and bit them on the nose, at least, that's how it seems. Very few people can make the leap between what you have in your folio and what they are scouting for. A tip here about portfolios - chuck out everything you're even slightly dissatisfied about in terms of quality - it ALWAYS lets everything else down. You're often judged by your worst work!
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If you found this post useful, please give it a Digg below. Cheers!Despite the protests of residents and a lack of approval by Toronto city council, Metrolinx is aiming to push forward with a three-storey rail overpass near Davenport Road north of Bloor Street.
The bridge – affectionately called the Gardiner Expressway for GO trains – will allow all-day, two-way service on the Barrie line.
But Davenport residents say a tunnel would be less disruptive to the community than a $120 million, 1.5-kilometre rail bridge from Bloor to Dupont St.
So, should the Davenport bridge be built as planned?
We asked two members of the City newsroom to weigh in.
Thomas Bink: Absolutely it should move forward. Look, I totally understand the NIMBYism of Davenport residents. I would hate to have a giant rail line running through my back yard, too. But the city has to keep moving and growing, and it’s the responsibility of every resident in the city to support the city’s growth. If residents don’t want to live near the bridge, they can move. The city has to keep growing. We shouldn’t stand in the way of progress.
Mike Ongarato: You can fight city hall (not a pleasant experience). You can fight progress (although often futile). You CANNOT fight history. It always wins. And history has something to say about this project. History showed us the mistake of pushing something through just to make things work. The Gardiner Expressway was constructed as a makeshift project so that construction could be completed on Lake Shore Drive. Decades later, look at the mess we have been left to deal with on a daily basis. This project does not take in account the long term interests of our city, or the neighbourhood in which it is being constructed. An open rail line? In winter? Metrolinx can’t get its switches to work right now. The SRT is a prime example of how elevated rails don’t work in this city during the winter. The need is right, the plan is flawed.
Bink: I agree, there have been mistakes in the past. I don’t think anyone who takes the Gardiner every day would say it was a mistake, but I’m sure we would agree that Mel Lastman’s Sheppard ‘subway to nowhere’ qualifies. Still. I think about all the internal navel-gazing that has crushed good plans in the past. Imagine how much better the city would be if the Spadina Expressway was completed. Imagine how much better public transit would be if council could have agreed on a plan for the Scarborough subway 10 years ago. Toronto professes to be a world-class city. World-class cities make tough decisions and push forward with growth, even if it upsets some special-interest groups along the way.
Information about the proposed Davenport bridge. VIA YONGESTREET MEDIA
Ongarato: Then do not commit another mistake. The proposed plan does not take into account the needs of the many, the few, or even the one. Spend the appropriate amount of money to build a PROPER system. Isolate it from outside elements. Make it aesthetically work in the community for which it will live FOREVER. A rail line needs to be built. There is no argument to that. But build for the future; not for the moment. The Gardiner is a black hole of tax money, an eyesore for our city, and has created more problems than it has solved. Learn from history. Or prepare for history to hit you with a very big bat. And history is the biggest homerun hitter in, well, history.
Bink: I’ll put a little faith in Metrolinx’s engineers that the proposed plan is the best plan – for now and the future. I don’t think Metrolinx is in the business of band-aid fixes, and I totally believe that a tunnel option would cost four times as much, which simply isn’t reasonable or feasible. The Gardiner withstood a lot of punishment beyond its original lifespan – a lifespan that was reasonable in terms of cost and technology when it was built in 1955. The Davenport bridge is a reasonable project, so let’s get on with it.
Ongarato: Engineers build objects, they don’t build cities. Cities are a living, breathing entity. Stop this mentality of “building something that works”, and instead create something that will LIVE. People do not marvel at adequacy. “Make do” does not stand the test of time. If we are to be a world class city, act like one. Build neighbourhoods that are works of progress, instead of shoving something down our throats. For once, in this god-forsaken mashup of urban sprawl, rise above the rush of need, and offer a glimpse of what we are to become.
Bink: Enough navel-gazing and second-guessing, let’s get shovels in the ground. Agree to disagree.
Thomas Bink is senior manager for digital news. Mike Ongarato is manager of news promotion.Claims over global warming are not accepted by all
A POINT OF VIEW
In a light-hearted essay, Clive James takes a look at Montaigne, golf-ball crisps and our attitude towards climate change sceptics. What do I know? Montaigne asked himself, and in answering that question during the course of several volumes of great essays he touched on many subjects. But he never touched on the subject of the golf-ball potato crisp. As far as I know, this essay I am writing now is the first ever devoted to the subject of Montaigne's relationship to the golf-ball potato crisp, and my essay starts from my certain knowledge that he never ate one. Or anyway my almost certain knowledge. There's a difference, which I shall try to bring out. FIND OUT MORE... A Point of View is on Fridays on Radio 4 at 2050 GMT Or listen to it here later But more of the golf-ball potato crisp in a moment. Let's get back to Montaigne and his attitude to knowledge. He was a sceptic. He didn't want to take things just on trust. As it happened, there were lots of things he did take on trust. If he liked the sound of an ancient legend, he would refer to it as if it must have been true. He thought astrology had something to it, and his position on the religious quarrels of his own time was that all this Lutheranism could undermine the church and lead to atheism, substance abuse and the contemporary equivalent of reality television. From our viewpoint, he often doesn't seem very sceptical at all. But at the time he seemed sceptical enough to excite a whole generation of readers with the idea that some falsehoods might masquerade as facts, and that an enquiring, critical attitude was the one to have. Shakespeare was only one of his many readers who caught fire at that idea. Shakespeare knew Montaigne's writings inside out. They helped set the standard for the way our greatest playwright separated what he knew from what he didn't know. But not even Shakespeare had an opinion about the golf-ball potato crisp, because it had not yet arrived in the world. What remained constant was my scepticism, which is surely, as a human attitude, more valuable than gullibility
Clive James Or it had probably not yet arrived in the world. There may well have been, at the time, some form of sliced and roasted potato, specially prepared for the king, that you could have called a crisp. And there was possibly some primitive form of French golf already in existence, in which a ball of some kind was hit with some kind of stick towards some kind of hole. Peter Alliss, then in his first days as a commentator, might have said something like: "Typically delicate stroke there from the Duke of Guise. Finely judged. Taking full advantage of the new oblong ball, and it does roll much more smoothly than the old square one." But the chances against the existence of an actual golf-ball potato crisp were overwhelming, because it needed a particular conjunction of circumstances. The golf-ball potato crisp had to wait until our own time before it could come into being. What you must have is a golf course, and, nearby to the golf course, a potato field in which potatoes suitable for making crisps are mechanically harvested. Potato errors? And part of the mechanism must be an enormous machine that sorts through the plucked-up potatoes and removes any stones or other roughly potato-shaped objects that are not wanted. Apparently this machine, though highly sensitive to the presence of foreign objects, is not yet sensitive enough to detect a golf ball that has flown in from the adjacent golf course and settled among the potatoes. The mistakenly harvested golf ball goes to the crisp-making factory along with the correctly harvested potatoes and in the factory it encounters another machine which, also unable to tell a potato from a golf ball, slices the golf ball as if it were a potato. Apparently a golf ball yields precisely 18 slices. All 18 slices of the golf ball, along with the thousands of slices of potato, go into the cooking process and emerge at the other end as something hard to distinguish, visually, from crisps. Mmmm, golf balls Indeed statistics indicate that some people, when they chance across a golf ball crisp in a packet of potato crisps, eat it, thinking, well, that one was a particularly crunchy crisp. Why don't you try one, darling? They're the ones with the dimpled edges. Really, really chewy. I am not certain whether I myself have never done this. Famous in my family for eating anything, I usually think something is alright if I can swallow it. But some people have complained, with the result that the more responsible crisp manufacturers are now faced with the task of further developing the initial potato-sorting machine, the one out in the field, so that it can detect a golf ball. The machine might need visual sensors, so it can read. If the object bears the brand name Tiger Woods Ultraflite Thunderball Mk 56, plus a short paragraph explaining how it was designed to be simultaneously long off the tee and responsive on the green, the machine will toss it back onto the golf course. Such a development is not only possible, it is likely, in line with the standard progression by which the unforeseen deleterious effects of technology, once they are detected and protested against, are cured by further technology, just as it was the cleaning up of industry, and not the abandonment of industry, that brought fish back to the Thames. Terminal trouble If anyone said the infestation of packets of genuine crisps by golf-ball crisps was unstoppable, I would be sceptical, just as I would have been sceptical about the existence of a golf-ball crisp until I was presented with solid evidence. Indeed, as I have suggested, I would probably have remained sceptical even after I ate one, thinking it to be the kind I like best, with a bit of tough skin in it for extra texture. But once I heard the facts - from my son in law, who has important contacts within the potato crisp industry - I altered my opinion. What remained constant was my scepticism, which is surely, as a human attitude, more valuable than gullibility. In fact, in everyday life, everyone is sceptical. Even if they believe that the supreme being is watching over them personally, they still want to read the fine print before they sign their house away. Montaigne wheeled out the odd legend as fact In Montaigne's day you could get into terminal trouble for taking scepticism too far, which is probably one of the reasons why not even he pushed it on the subject of religion. Since then, a sceptical attitude has been less likely to get you burned at the stake, but it's notable how the issue of man-made global warming has lately been giving rise to a use of language hard to distinguish from heresy-hunting in the fine old style by which the cost of voicing a doubt was to fry in your own fat. Whether or not you believe that the earth might have been getting warmer lately, if you are sceptical about whether mankind is the cause of it, the scepticism can be enough to get you called a denialist. It's a nasty word to be called, denialist, because it calls up the spectacle of a fanatic denying the Holocaust. In my homeland, Australia, there are some prominent intellectuals who are quite ready to say that any sceptic about man-made global warming is doing even worse than denying the Holocaust, because this time the whole of the human race stands to be obliterated. Really they should know better, because the two events are not remotely comparable. The Holocaust actually happened. The destruction of the earth by man-made global warming hasn't happened yet, and there are plenty of highly qualified scientists ready to say that the whole idea is a case of too many of their colleagues relying on models provided by the same computers that can't even predict what will happen to the weather next week. In fact the number of scientists who voice scepticism has lately been increasing. But there were always some, and that's the only thing I know about the subject. I know next to nothing about climate science. All I know is that many of the commentators in newspapers who are busy predicting catastrophe don't know much about it either, because they keep saying that the science is settled and it isn't. Speaking as one who lives at sea level, I don't relish the prospect of my granddaughter spending her life on a raft 30 feet above where she now plays in the garden, but I still can't see that there is a scientific consensus. There are those for, and those against. Either side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on that scale, you can't call it a consensus. Climate change can be a worrying idea for sea level dwellers Nobody can meaningfully say that "the science is in", yet this has been said constantly by many commentators in the press until very lately, and now that there are a few fewer saying it there is a tendency, on the part of those who still say it, to raise their voices even higher, and harden their language against any sceptic, as if they were protecting their faith. Sceptics, say the believers, don't care about the future of the human race. But being sceptical has always been one of the best ways of caring about the future of the human race. For example, it was from scepticism that modern medicine emerged, questioning the common belief that diseases were caused by magic, or could be cured by it. A conjecture can be dressed up as a dead certainty with enough rhetoric and protected against dissent with enough threatening language, but finally it has to meet the only test of science, which is that any theory must fit the facts, and the facts can't be altered to suit the theory. The golf-ball crisp might look like a crisp, and in a moment of delusion it might taste like a crisp, and you might even swallow the whole thing, rather proud of the strength it took to chew. But if there is a weird aftertaste, it might be time to ask yourself if you have not put too much value on your own opinion. The other way of saying "What do I know?" is "What do I know?" That shade of different meaning wasn't there in Montaigne's original language, but it is in ours. A selection of your comments appears below. I'm not sure a general argument for scepticism is all that useful when applied to the climate change debate. Most people understand there is uncertainty involved in climate modelling, the real issue is deciding how certain we need to be before we start taking action, given the potential risks involved. A large majority of climate scientists agree global warming is occurring now, is driven by human action, and has potentially devastating consequences. Waiting for absolute certainty is probably not the smart choice.
Mark Ancliff, Bucheon, South Korea "In fact the number of scientists who voice scepticism has lately been increasing." Any source for that??
Jay, London Clive James demonstrates, yet again, why he is one of my favourite social and political observers.
Murph, Blackheath Predicting next week's weather is a totally different computing problem from predicting climate change over decades. The fact that CJ argues from one to the other makes me fairly sceptical about his level of scientific understanding.
George Hale, London UK You are right about the science not yet being conclusive, but you fail to mention benefit of caution in this situation. If man-made climate change is not as bad as we think, then the worst that environmentalists have done is cleaned up some pollution and made our fossil fuels last longer. However if man-made climate change is real, then the worst we can do is make the planet much more difficult to live on. Caution dictates that we should consider climate change to be real, until proven otherwise once and for all.
Daniel Walker, Brighton, UK Clive James says: "I still can't see that there is a scientific consensus. There are those for, and those against. Either side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on that scale, you can't call it a consensus." Now, to use your own example, this is also true of the Holocaust. There are those for, and those against. I think, nevertheless, that there IS a consensus that it actually happened. There is a difference in the quality of the argument expounded by each side. To treat them as equal, and give them equal air time, is not "sceptical", it is biased.
Erica, London, UK Clive James for Strictly Come Dancing - his ability to twist, bend, and ignore the vast majority of specialists (watch out Judges!) should make for great viewing. So, not all the scientists agree about Climate Change - ahh, I know, let's wait until they all do There will be loads of time to avoid massive hardship (at the least) for millions if not billions.
Headoutofthesand, Dumfries, Scotland The pinnacle of this piece was this: "I know next to nothing about climate science." Unfortunately, there were bottomless ravines either side. It's a pity to see such a respected voice parroting concocted talking points about climate change. From one Aussie to another: You've been sucked in, Clive.
Gaz, Sydney Australia Clive James invokes the skepticism of Montaigne ("What do I know?") in opposition to scientific consensus regarding climate change, while, at the same time, buying in to the canard that climate modelling is invalidated by the inability to predict the weather. He should know better. He said, she said...
Steve Sturgill, Phoenix, Arizona, USA Very nice to read this article based upon common sense and lack of dogmatic belief in the currently fashionable global warming religion.
Dr Know, Glasgow I believe that the moon is made of green cheese. A lot of scientists (I'm too busy now to list them) also believe that the moon is made of green cheese. In fact, if anything, the balance of opinion has recently been shifting towards this view. While the general thrust of this article is admirable, the specific ground chosen upon which to make this stand does not look very solid to me. The idea that humanity's responsibility for climate change is still unsettled by science, is not itself as settled as the article relies upon. Does not "settlement" occur when the contrary arguments, although perhaps more numerous than ever, are increasingly loony, isolated, and easily disproved? Surely we are at that point now? Despite the existence of ever more imaginative counter-theories about sunspots and killer bees, I cannot settle on the idea insisted upon here that this debate is not yet meaningfully settled. I'm afraid, in the light of it all, I feel compelled to take a more sceptical view.
Richard Lanun, Swansea
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionThe city of Prince Albert, Sask., activated its emergency operations centre on Saturday afternoon to put together a contingency plan after noting that a boom set up to contain an oil spill upstream on the North Saskatchewan River had been breached.
A pipeline break, reported by Husky Energy on Thursday, resulted in an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 litres of oil reaching the North Saskatchewan, entering the water near Maidstone, Sask.
Booms had been initially setup in that area to try to contain the spill.
Prince Albert, among other communities which use the river as their source of water, has put together plans to close its intake valves. According to the city, a boom had been breached and the oil spill continues to travel downriver.
In an email Saturday night, Mel Duvall, a spokesman for Husky Energy, said the company's containment and cleanup efforts in the wake of the spill are ongoing.
He did not specifically address the issue of whether a boom had breached, but did note that a boom deployed near the Paynton River ferry crossing was experiencing some difficulty.
"While containment has been challenged by high water levels and resulting floating debris, recovery operations continue," Duvall said, adding that "additional actions" were being implemented.
A provincial official said in a media briefing Saturday that some oil had moved past that boom.
"Not all of the oil was contained at the surface," said Wes Kotyk, executive director for the environmental protection branch of Saskatchewan's Ministry of Environment.
Officials noted more booms were also being placed in the river at other strategic locations.
Prince Albert officials said the oil plume could reach the city as early as Sunday.
Emergency water storage
In a statement late Saturday, the city said had it enough potable water stored to supply the city for 48 hours, adding that that could be extended by using another storage system.
"The potential use of a secondary retention pond... could potentially extend the duration of the city's water supply until the end of the week," the city said. Officials were exploring long-term options "to ensure that there is a reliable, long-term source of clean, potable water until the situation is resolved."
People and businesses were urged to minimize water usage.
"Any non-essential use of water must cease and desist immediately," the statement said. "Residents are encouraged to minimize flushing of water and shower usage. Residents are asked to not water their lawns or wash their vehicles until further notice."
Further information was expected to be provided during a news briefing on Sunday.
A meeting of Prince Albert's city council was also set to take place Monday, with a bylaw to impose emergency water conservation measures on the agenda.
Provincial officials say the oil plume has already reached North Battleford and the oil is not one continuous mass. Some of it is floating on the surface of the water and some is suspended in the river.Here's the art book blurb in full, with the relevant release info highlighted.
The official Mass Effect art book from Dark Horse releases in the UK on March 23 and the US on March 21, with a new blurb on the book's Amazon.com listing stating it will launch "simultaneously with the game".
"The award-winning Mass Effect series captured the renegade hearts and paragon souls of gamers everywhere with it's memorable characters, stunning visuals, and visceral combat! Now, journey to a new galaxy with Dark Horse's The Art of Mass Effect Andromeda- featuring never-before-seen art of the hotly anticipated game's characters, arsenal, locations, vehicles, and more! This deluxe hardcover is an essential addition to any gamer's collection!
"Dark Horse will release The Art of Mass Effect: Andromeda simultaneously with the game!
"Exclusive never before seen concept art from the making of Mass Effect Andromeda!
"The comprehensive companion to the wildly anticipated Mass Effect Andromeda!"
Amazon.co.uk's(?) listing for the book doesn't contain this information, and the game carries a March 31 release date, which is most likely a placeholder.
Thus far EA has only really committed to a Q1 2017 release, with more info expected on Mass Effect Day (November 7).
Releasing towards the end of March 2017 would give the space RPG a bit of breathing room following the March 3 release of Horizon Zero Dawn, and the March 7 |
inmates needlessly after an attempted escape from Cummins. Another prison mediator charged that the abuse of inmates had increased under Lockhart and that he had obstructed efforts at prison reform.
Health Management Associates wins a contract to provide health services to state inmates, including running a blood plasma donor program.
The Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization establish that AIDS is a blood-borne disease. CDC recommends testing and sterilization of donor blood. The warning is widely ignored and, as a result, according to WHO, some one million people become infected. Twenty-two countries will eventually have to pay compensation as a result.
FDA asks US companies not to buy prison plasma since, due to unsafe sexual and drug practices by many inmates, the blood has a high risk of carrying the AIDS virus.
JUNE 1983
HMA tells FDA that 38 units of plasma from four inmates of the Grady prison should not have been collected because the prisoners had once tested positive for hepatitis B despite a test at the time of collection being negative. HMA sees the hazard as slight and thinks there is no need to recall the plasma. The Canadian Krever Commission will later report that "by 1983, however, an association had been identified between hepatitis B and AIDS; most persons with AIDS had also been infected with hepatitis B. There was a greater than average risk that the 38 units of plasma from the four inmates could transmit AIDS. Four of the units ended up in Canada, the others were sold to corporations in Switzerland, Spain, Japan, and Italy."
AUGUST 1983
HMA decides to withdraw the 38 units from circulation and FDA concurs. This is the first time that Connaught, the Canadian blood firm, has heard of any problems. The shipping papers had only shown that the blood came from "ADC Plasma Center, Grady, Arkansas."
By this time, however, the blood is already in circulation and only 417 of 2409 vials are retrieved.
The same month HMA tells the FDA of a fifth inmate with similar problems. He had given 34 units in less than a year.
SEPTEMBER 1983
Connaught reviews its approvals for receipt of plasma from US centers and finds that twelve have never been properly approved. One is the prison center in Grady, Arkansas. Other questionable blood has come from four prisons in Louisiana. Canadian Red Cross nullifies its contract for the blood the same day it finds this out.
FEBRUARY 1984
FDA suspends plasma production at the Grady facility where an average of 550-600 inmates have been giving blood since 1967. UPI regional wire reports that FDA finds overbleeding of inmate donors, disqualified donors, lack of documentation of testing, and inadequate storage. It also notes inaccurate and incomplete storage, instances of intentional and willful disregard for proposed standards, alteration of records and files to conceal violations, as well as inadequate training and ineffective supervision of the plasma center staff. Within months, however, HMA successfully applies for a new license after blaming the problems on a corrupt clerk.
1985
A UPI story recounts how the largest inmate donor program in the country -- in the Louisiana state prison -- is coming under increased federal scrutiny because of what is dubbed the "AIDS scare." Says the state's secretary of corrections: "We have no intention of shutting it down. It would have the same impact as a major industry shutting down in a small town: economic chaos." The president of a plasma company is quoted as saying, "There is no scientific evidence that prisoner plasma is worse than street plasma." The programs had, in fact, been shut down for six months but were reinstated after the prison discovered foreign markets to replace a dwindling US demand. Says the plasma company president, "I'd say 70 to 80 percent is going overseas. There's a good market for it over there, and they don't ask where it came from."
FDA finally requires testing of donor blood. Tainted blood distribution will continue inside the US until 1986. Thereafter, contaminated blood stocks will still be shipped from US companies to other countries.
Prosecuting attorney Wayne Matthews, after a two month state police probe, finds no evidence of drug trafficking in the Arkansas prison system. The allegation is that HMA employees are diverting drugs from the department's pharmacy and selling them to inmates, and that prisoners who 'knew too much' about drug trafficking were killed or allowed to die. "There's just absolutely no evidence whatsoever," says Matthews.
JANUARY 1986
The Corrections board agrees to have HMA's contract reviewed by outside parties. A media account notes that "HMA has been frequently in the news lately because of allegations by inmates of improper medical treatment." Among the charges: HMA hired a Mississippi doctor who was refused a permanent license in Arkansas. The doctor had lost his Mississippi license for "habitual personal use of narcotic drugs."
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports: "Governor Bill Clinton recently asked the Department to review health care services provided by HMA after allegations were raised that several inmates died because of a lack of medical care and that the leg of at least one inmate was amputated as a result of improper care. Department Director A. L. (Art) Lockhart, who earlier said HMA was doing a'satisfactory' job, said Thursday a review of HMA could reveal some problems. ~~~ During the discussion of HMA and the allegations that have been made against it, [Corrections] Board member Don Smith of Pine Bluff excused himself because his law firm represents HMA."
MARCH 1986
Clinton tells a radio audience that there is no solution to problems with running a prison, only the process of dealing with the problems as they arise. He also says that "there is no evidence of systematic abuse for which the administration is responsible that I can see. If I did, I'd try to do something about it."
State Representative Bobby Glover charges that inmates are forced to participate in homosexual activities, that there have been gang rapes, that marijuana is openly smoked and that "home brew" is being sold for $7 to $10 a gallon. He disputes a recent prison department report that claimed only 6 per cent of the inmate population was participating in illicit drug use. Glover says he also is looking into reports of gambling, the theft and personal use of department property by employees, bid rigging, three questionable deaths, the lack of medical services, the physical abuse of inmates by guards and other prison officials, and bribes to obtain work release assignments or favorable classification.
Sandra Kurjiaka, director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Arkansas, says that there is a "real slavery problem" in the state correction department and that changes need to be made. Kurjiaka says an attitude exists that allows inmates to be raped and brutalized and that it exists with the consent of the governor, the correction board and the public.
APRIL 86
Clinton tells State Police chief Tommy Goodwin to begin a full scale investigation into reports of criminal conduct within the prison system. Says he finds them "very disturbing." Clinton makes his announcement after meeting for an hour with Goodwin and Rep. Glover. "Rep. Glover has communicated to me and Col. Goodwin some very serious allegations." Clinton says the state police "has resources" to investigate and Goodwin promises to assign at least eight investigators.
MAY 1986
Stories circulate about an alleged $25,000 bribe being paid to a prison board official to obtain a new contract for HMA. One witness tells the state police that the HMA board was angry about the extortion. This is all denied in a series of state police interviews with HMA and prison officials. It is claimed that the story arose from the attorney Richard Mays being hired for that same amount to serve for two years as an ombudsman for HMA. No contract or other written evidence of this agreement is ever produced.
What did Mays do in this job? According to HMA medical director Francis Henderson in a state police interview, "Mr Mays has thus far performed his duties in a very capable manner. He has met with us on three or four occasions and has mediated in some problem areas we have had. He has met with inmates and worked out some difficulties they had in the form of grievances with medical treatment services."
Henderson also describes his efforts to obtain a buyer for the plasma: "Historically this [was] the worst possible time to do it. I called all over the world and finally got one group in Canada that would take the contract."
Corrections board chair Woodson Walker is also interviewed by state police. According to the interview notes, he states that "he had had direct contacts with Governor Clinton throughout the selection process and that the Governor was deeply concerned with HMA's past performance and the deficiencies found by both the State Health Department and the Arkansas State Police Investigator of [sic] late 1984." Asked by Clinton for his recommendation, Walker states that after "taking everything into prospective [sic] he advised the Governor that he had decided to go with HMA ~~~ but only if a safeguard in the form of an ombudsman was included. The ombudsman was completely my idea and Governor Clinton advised me that he definitely approved. I was asked to make several suggestions as to who this ombudsman might be and among others recommended Judge Richard Mays and Judge David Hale, both of Little Rock. Hale was white and Mays was black but races was not a major consideration in these recommendations. As it turned out, Judge Hale declined... "
Hale would later become famous in the Whitewater scandal. Mays would also crop up again several times in the Clinton saga. A long-time Clinton supporter, he would gain posts both on the state supreme court and on the prison board. More curiously, he would show up as David Hale's attorney when the FBI got a subpoena to raid Hale's files for Whitewater documents -- issued on July 20, 1993, the day Vincent Foster died. [For yet another Mays link to Clinton, jump to 1994]
From state police notes of an interview with former Cummins guard Jackie Cummings:
"Jackie Cummings further stated that he had been dismissed from his job at the Cummins Unit because he had not been a 'team player.' When asked to provide additional information that would help investigators look into a situation such as his, Cummings stated that he would say no further, but that he only wants to 'get my job back.' Cummings advised both investigators that he had gone to the Office of Governor Bill Clinton and had met with him personally and was told by Clinton that he could do nothing about the situation at the Cummins Unit because it would cause him political harm."
Leonard Dunn, president of HMA, is interviewed by state police. Investigator S. R. Probasco notes that Dunn explained that he "was the financial portion of the corporation as well as the political arm. Dunn advised that he had been a former member of the State Claims commission under Governor Pryor and that he was close to Governor Clinton as well as the majority of state politicians presently in office. Mr. Dunn explained that he was very fond of politics and that he was very active.
"Dunn stated to these investigators that the entire matter of trying to obtain a contact for HMA was considered to him to be part of negotiation and not in any form of pressure by the State Corrections Board or the Governor's Office. When asked specifically about contacts from the Governor's Office, Mr. Dunn stated that he did have conversations with both Governor Clinton and Mrs. Betsey Wright to assure them that HMA wanted to what was right. ~~~ Dunn stated that he was advised that the Governor's office was very concerned about problems HMA was having but was told to compete like anyone else if they wanted the penitentiary contract."
Incidentally, Dunn is chair of a holding company that will later purchase two branches of Jim McDougal's failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association. He will also be named to the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission.
JUNE 27, 1986
The Institute for Law and Policy Planning, asked by the corrections board in March to study allegations of malfeasance in the prison system, presents its report to Governor Clinton and the board. The report states that that HMA has "consistently failed to provide the management system and medical services specifically called for in the contract." It also states that HMA and ADC "have only recently developed protocol and procedures for handling AIDS cases, and are currently developing a refined approach to AIDS screening and testing." Among numerous deficiencies, ILLP finds HMA has failed to provide the required number of doctor hours, the head of HMA is too overcommitted to give proper medical supervision, the enforcement of the medical contract has been inadequate, the program "fails to meet many significant professional standards," HMA has not followed state requirements, it has used inmates in prohibited medical jobs, and its record-keeping has been lacking."
JULY 30 1986
HMA is cleared of wrong-dong by the State Police. Prison officials are charged with just two misdemeanors and one felony.
JULY 31, 1986
The corrections board finds HMA in violation of its two year contract and placed on 90-day probation. The contract will eventually be taken over by Pine Bluffs Biologicals.
AUGUST 1986
Clinton decides not to ask A.L. "Art" Lockhart -- director of the state prison system -- to resign. He also denies being directly involved in the renewal of the contract for HMA. He says he didn't talk with Dunn until after the decision was made to give HMA the contract again. All he told Dunn, Clinton claims, is that HMA should be willing to accept an outside monitor and should work to improve patient care.
Rep. Glover, who has asked for Lockhart's resignation, says he has shown "a complete lack of administrative abilities." Clinton refuses to respond to Glover saying he should have taken the matter up with the Board of Corrections. He said he had "bent over backwards to try accommodate" Glover and accuses him of refusing to accept the state police investigation because "he had decided how it was suppose to come out before it was done."
1987
The last year improperly treated blood and plasma is distributed in Canada. The government provides compensation for harmed patients.
1989
The Committee of Ten Thousand -- named for the estimated 10,000 Americans infected with HIV by the blood industry -- is formed. Writing in POZ seven years later, COTT's president Corey Dubin says, "For years the manufacturers of blood products and the regulators at the FDA persuaded the hemophilia community as well as the general public that their infections were a 'tragic yet unavoidable mistake.' We now know that this is absolutely not the case and that doing business as usual from 1982 to 1985 consigned thousands of people with hemophilia to the ravages of AIDS. ~~~ Internal drug company memos demonstrate that officials understood the impact that blood tainted by this pathogen could have on people with hemophilia as early as mid-1982, but they failed to warn either our doctors or us. The industry was also targeting for plasma collection groups with a high incidence of hepatitis B -- gay men and prisoners -- that the CDC had by then identified as likely to have AIDS."
MAY 1993
Two separate tainted blood probes -- one by a California investigator and another by the Canadian government -- lead to the door of the Arkansas governor's office, now occupied by Jim Guy Tucker. Both are informed that all the governor's papers were removed when he left office and that they should contact the White House legal counsel's office. What happens next is not known but presumably they make contact with Vince Foster, the man in the legal counsel's office who knew Arkansas and who had been involved in the prison system and who may, at one point, have represented HMA.
JULY 1993
Vince Foster dies under mysterious circumstances.
A day or two after Foster's death, the New York Post will report much later, someone calls a little-known phone number at the White House counsel's office where Mr. Foster worked. "The man said he had some information that might be important," writes columnist Maggie Gallagher, who did not name her source or identify the official who took the call. "Something had upset Vince Foster greatly just days before he died. Something about 'tainted blood' that both Vince Foster and President Clinton knew about, this man said."
1994
Richard Mays, the "ombudsman" in the 1980s prison health scandal, crops up again, as described in a report from the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee:
"Charlie Trie was first solicited to contribute to the DNC in connection with the June 22, 1994, Presidential Gala in Washington, D.C. Trie was solicited to give $100,000 to the DNC, even though he had never made any significant political contributions previously. No one at the DNC demonstrated any concern about taking $100,000 from an obscure Arkansas restaurateur with little apparent wealth. Trie was rewarded with an immediate entree into the world of Washington insiders and presidential intimates, and the DNC was rewarded with badly-needed campaign cash. "Trie was solicited to make his first contributions to the DNC by Richard Mays, a close friend of the President from Arkansas. Mays had been appointed to the Arkansas bench by Governor Clinton, and was also a longtime major DNC donor and fundraiser. Mays claims that he knew Trie from patronizing his restaurant in Little Rock. Mays claimed not to recall the exact circumstances of his solicitation of Trie, but did state that he 'had the distinct impression that [Trie] was in a position to contribute, and wanted to make a contribution.' Mays says he based his conclusion that Trie was in a 'position to contribute' to the DNC on the fact that Trie was traveling between Little Rock and Washington, D.C.: "Question: When you say "in a position to contribute," do you mean he had sufficient money to contribute? "Mays: I felt he did. "Question: And how did you get that impression? "Mays: I don't know how I got that impression, but frequently, he seemed like he was traveling extensively, you know, I knew he owned that Chinese restaurant down there, and he apparently had engaged in some business, other business interests. I really didn't have a specific judgment that, in fact, he could, but I certainly thought it was worth talking to him about it. *** "Question: Would you ever see him anywhere other than D.C. or Little Rock?
"Mays: I don't recall that I have. I mean, I am not saying I haven't, but I don't recall." "Mays asked Trie what he could contribute, and Trie told him $100,000. Mays claims that he was not surprised by Trie's offer of $100,000, even though this was the largest contribution he had ever solicited. Trie's $100,000 contribution was used for the DNC's Health Care Campaign, which was a public campaign to promote the President's health care legislative proposal. "At this point, Mays claimed he still had no concern that a political novice with little apparent wealth had pledged $100,000 to the DNC. Rather than conducting any background research of Trie, or looking into the source of Trie's funds, he introduced Trie to Terry McAuliffe, then the Finance Chairman of the DNC. Mays set up a breakfast meeting between McAuliffe and Trie. At this meeting, Trie confirmed that he would make a $100,000 contribution to the DNC, and asked only that he be prominently seated at the June 22 gala. When asked if he ever had a concern about the source of Trie's contributions, Mays responded, 'Why would I have some concern?'"
1994
Arkansas finally stops selling prisoner's plasma.
1995
Four blood company officials are convicted in Germany of distributing HIV tainted blood and derivatives. The government admits a cover-up. The former owner of a plasma testing lab goes on trial for murder in the deaths of three people treated with AIDS-tainted blood products.
1996
Japan, which has never discarded its contaminated blood and plasma, criminally charges a pharmaceutical company and a government adviser for the distribution of tainted blood matter.
1999
"This I know. Without the governor's support and protection, this disease-ridden system would have been shut down by 1982" -- Mike Galster to Suzi Parker
TAINTED BLOOD
While the US media continues to ignore the 1980s blood scandal involving Clinton's Arkansas prison system, at least four countries -- France, Japan, Germany and Switzerland -- have engaged in high profile prosecution of public and private figures responsible for similar deadly practices. A former prime minister and two members of his cabinet are currently on trial in France on charges of manslaughter for the mishandling of blood supplies. It is believed that possibly 4,500 persons died there because of contaminated blood.
In Canada, where the Arkansas blood wound up, an estimated 2,000 recipients of blood and related products got the AIDS virus between 1980 and 1985. At least 60,000 Canadians were infected with the hepatitis C virus between 1980 and 1990.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has a staff of 24 working on the case. So far, investigators have interviewed about 600 people including in the U.S., Germany and the Netherlands. According to the Ottawa Citizen, the team has more than 30,000 documents
TAINTED BLOOD
While working at the White House, the ubiquitous Linda Tripp stumbled on something she wasn't meant to know anything about. She received a phone call from someone who mentioned the "tainted blood issue." The phrase meant nothing to Tripp and when she tried to find out more from a White House computer, the database denied her access. Testifying in a Judicial Watch deposition recently, Tripp said, "It had been alarming to me that when I tried to enter data from a caller that I was working with on a tainted blood issue, that every time I entered a word that had to do with this particular issue, it would flash up either the word 'encrypted' or 'password required' or something to indicate the file was locked."
At the time, Tripp was working as executive assistant to Bernard Nussbaum, chief White House counsel. Also on the staff: deputy counsel Vince Foster. The Ottawa Citizen has since learned that Foster had tried to protect the Arkansas firm shipping tainted blood from prison inmates in a lawsuit. The New York Post has also reported that Foster may have been worried about the tainted-blood scandal at the time of his death, citing a mysterious phone call about the matter shortly after Foster died.
The Citizen notes that W. J. Clinton was governor of Arkansas "when the Canadian blood supply was contaminated in the mid-'80s. He was generally familiar with the operations of now-defunct Health Management Associates, the Arkansas firm that was given a contract by Mr. Clinton's own state administration to provide medical care to prisoners. In the process, HMA was also permitted by the state to collect prisoners' blood and sell it elsewhere.
"HMA's president in the mid-1980s, Leonard Dunn, was a personal friend of Mr. Clinton's and a political ally. Later, Mr. Dunn was a Clinton appointee to the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission and he was among the senior members of Mr. Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial re-election team.
"The contaminated prisoners' plasma is believed to have been infected with HIV and hepatitis C. Any information linking Mr. Foster to HMA and its blood program is bound to raise more questions about how much Mr. Clinton knew."
OTTAWA CITIZEN
FRENCH OFFICIALS HIT WITH CHARGES
IN CASE ECHOING ARKANSAS BLOOD SCANDAL
In a case with strong echoes of the Arkansas deadly blood scandal, a former French prime minister (now speaker of the lower house) and two other former cabinet members are on trial for manslaughter and criminal negligence. The case, like the Arkansas one, stems from the handling of government blood supplies in the mid-1980s, permitting HIV-tainted blood to be used. Former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and the others are accused of letting unsterilized blood remain in supplies used to treat hemophiliacs for several months and negligence in enforcing screening regulations. About 4,000 persons became infected with virus and some 40% have since died.
The seriousness of the French action is in stunning contrast to the blasé reaction in this country to accounts of deadly blood being shipped out of the Arkansas prison system during the Clinton regime in the mid-80s. Although the story has gotten a lot of attention in Canada -- where the blood ended up -- and while about 1,000 hemophiliacs have filed a $660 million class action suit in Toronto over the shipments, American corporate media have suppressed the story.
Those involved in the commercial operation that sold deadly blood from Arkansas prisoners had close ties to the Clinton machine.
JANUARY 1999
HMM...
[From the Judicial Watch deposition of Linda Tripp]
Q Now the bit about the screen flashing up encrypted, Mr. Klayman asked you, again this is on page 139, is that an accurate recitation of what you told Lucianne Goldberg and you responded no.
A No, it's not. Let me just clarify, it's not that, it appears to be a compilation of two different issues confused in the recitation. The word encrypted, if I used it at all, did not have to do with FBI files. It had to do with another issue on Deb Gorham's machine when it was located in the West Wing prior to its being moved. What I had told Lucianne Goldberg at the time was that it had been alarming to me that when I tried to enter data from a caller that I was working with on a tainted blood issue, that every time I entered a word that had to do with this particular issue, it would flash up either the word encrypted or password required or something to indicate the file was locked.
BLOOD VICTIMS COMING TO DC
Canadian tainted-blood victims, so far ignored by the American media, are coming to Washington next month to demand an investigation into how contaminated blood from Arkansas and Louisiana got into their country's supply. The Ottawa Citizen reports:
"As well, they will announce they are exploring the possibility of suing
those in the U.S. who played a role -- including the companies that
collected the blood and the state governments that allowed it to happen. "Their actions come in the wake of a series of investigative stories by the
Citizen last fall that revealed how a U.S. firm with links to President
Bill Clinton collected tainted blood from Arkansas prison inmates and sold
it abroad."
DECEMBER 1998
THE ARKANSAS BLOOD SCANDAL
Among blacked-out stories about Clinton is the tale of how his Arkansas prison system sold tainted blood to Canadian sources well after inmate-originated blood was banned by American blood companies. Some 7,000 Canadians have died or are expected to as a result of contaminated blood, some of it from the Arkansas prison system.
According to Mara Leveritt in the Arkansas Times, in 1984, "the U.S. FDA revoked the [Arkansas Department of Corrections'] license for manufacturing source plasma, citing a litany of potential hazards. Among other things, the FDA said that HMA, the Arkansas company administering the program, was using inmates who had been previously disqualified because of a history of hepatitis; had failed to note on the plasma whether testing had been done for signs of hepatitis and syphilis; kept inaccurate and incomplete records; altered records; and had shown willful disregard of standards. The license was quickly reinstated, however, and the bleeding of inmates continued.
"By the end of the 1980s, all U.S. prison systems had quit drawing inmate plasma-- all, that is, except Arkansas's. When I interviewed John Byus, the ADC's medical director, in February 1991, I asked him how long the department intended to continue the practice, in light of the fact that the National Hemophilia Foundation, the International Red Cross, and the World Health Organization all considered the risks inherent in it too great. Byus replied, 'We plan to stick with it to the last day, to the last drop we're able to sell.' Our state ended the program later that year, but not from any sense of responsibility. The scandal had left its mark. There was simply no one left on earth willing to buy what we had to sell."
One year later, Bill Clinton, then governor of a state with the greatest number of inmate complaints in the country, began running for president. Clinton had shown far more impatience than concern with inquiries into prison conditions, claiming that they had been "studied to death." He also tried to bring a state police investigation of the prison system to a quick end saying in words whose spirit would become familiar in another context, "I told them to get it done and get it over with." Further, a couple of those most closely connected to the prison scandal were close to Clinton including Leonard Dunn, who served as president of the blood company with the prison contract. Dunn was a senior member of Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial campaign and bought Jim McDougal's Guaranty Savings and Loan that same year.
Proving the persistence of redemption, by far the best American media story we've seen is in the heretofore heavily pro-Clinton Salon Magazine.
SALON MAGAZINE ARTICLE
http://www.salon1999.com/news/
NOVEMBER 1998
TAINTED BLOOD FOR "POCKET MONEY"
The men who ran the 1980s tainted blood program in Arkansas have told the Ottawa Citizen that the program was justified because the inmate-donors needed "pocket money."
Writes Mark Kennedy: "That excuse has sparked outrage from Canadian victims who received the prison plasma which is believed to have been infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and with hepatitis C."
"I don't really feel that we did anything wrong," said John Byus, medical director for the Arkansas Department of Corrections. "Does our conscience bother us? I'm sorry, I think our conscience was led by the reality of what we were trying to do. The reality was trying to maintain a program."
Dr. Francis "Bud" Henderson, medical director of Health Management Associates (HMA), the private firm that ran the blood program for the state, told Kennedy there were concerns prisoners' morale would be harmed if they couldn't donate.
Although the tainted blood story has been ignored in the US, it is a major scandal in Canada and the target of an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned in the early 80s that prison plasma carried a high risk of being contaminated. Says Kennedy, "At the request of the FDA, U.S. companies that fractionate blood products stopped buying prison blood in late 1982. But HMA found a willing buyer in a Montreal blood broker which resold it to Toronto-based Connaught Laboratories. From there, the plasma was pooled and turned into a special blood product and then sent to the Canadian Red Cross, which distributed it to hundreds of hemophiliacs.
"The prison-plasma pipeline was suddenly capped in the summer of 1983 when
it was discovered that plasma from several Arkansas prisoners should not
have been collected..... The products were recalled, but not quickly enough, leaving 3,933 vials to be injected into the arms of unsuspecting hemophiliacs. The Red Cross immediately cancelled the Connaught contract."
Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas at the time the tainted blood was being collected from the state's inmates.
OTTAWA CITIZEN
http://www.ottawacitizen.com
OCTOBER 1998
BAD BLOOD
Canadian media, including the Calgary Sun and Ottawa Citizen, are reporting that tainted blood from Arkansas prisons made its way to a Montreal blood broker in the 1980s when Bill Clinton was governor. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are investigating. At the time, American sources were not accepting prisoners' blood because of possible HIV contamination.
OTTAWA CITIZEN
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/national/980911/1996882.htmlConservative media are once again hyping the amount of oil in the U.S. by including oil shale, ignoring that oil companies have found no profitable way to develop that resource.
The most recent flood of misinformation came after testimony by the Government Accountability Office's Anu Mittal about "oil shale," a sedimentary rock that when heated at high temperatures can produce liquid fuels (except gasoline) with a larger carbon footprint than conventional liquid fuels. While some conservative outlets claimed it was major news, the testimony -- which was based on an October 2010 GAO report -- contained no positive developments for oil shale, which has long been known to exist in large amounts in the U.S. but is not commercially viable. Earlier this year, energy expert Robert Rapier wrote, "It is not at all clear that even at $100 oil the shale in the Green River formation will be commercialized to produce oil." Even an editor at the right-wing blog The American Thinker acknowledged that "any large scale operations" for oil shale development would be "prohibitively expensive at this time." And just recently, Chevron gave up its oil shale lease in Colorado.
Mittal noted in her testimony that no technology to develop oil shale "has been shown to be economically or environmentally viable at a commercial scale." But Fox News' nightly news show and CNSNews.com, a project of the conservative Media Research Center, failed to mention that oil shale is not currently commercially viable. Breitbart.com and Investor's Business Daily incorrectly suggested that oil shale is not being developed because of Obama administration policies, rather than economic considerations. And Powerline suggested that oil shale is in fact viable because of the "advance of extraction technology," seemingly confusing oil shale with tight oil from shale rock, which can be extracted via horizontal drilling and hydrofracking.
It's interesting to see that the same people who dismiss the enormous potential of solar and wind power and attack investment in renewable energy are hyping the potential of oil shale. A December 2011 Congressional Research Service report, which classified oil shale as a "sub-economic" resource, stated that "despite government programs in the 1970s and early 1980s to stimulate development of the resource, production of oil shale is not yet commercially viable."The controversial Westboro Baptist Church tried to take on J.K. Rowling on Tuesday over the issue of gay marriage. And they lost.
The battle began when the Harry Potter author posted a celebratory Tweet on Friday after Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.
“Sitting here watching the Irish make history,” she wrote. “Extraordinary and wonderful.”
When a fan wrote that they hoped that her fictional character Professor Dumbledore (who Rowling revealed was gay) and all witches and wizards would feel welcome in Ireland, she posted a pic of Keanu Reeves that was captioned, “What if Dumbledore and Gandalf were gay together.”
“Then they could get married IN IRELAND!” she added.
The church, which is known for its hate speech against gays, responded to her on Tuesday, Tweeting, “So @jkrowling wants Dumbledore & Gandalf to marry in Ireland; if it happens WBC will picket!”
That prompted Rowling to reply, “Alas, the sheer awesomeness of such a union in such a place would blow your tiny bigoted minds out of your thick sloping skulls.”
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.@WBCsigns Alas, the sheer awesomeness of such a union in such a place would blow your tiny bigoted minds out of your thick sloping skulls. — J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 26, 2015
After one of her followers expressed concern that responding to the church and giving them attention was “counterproductive,” Rowling then won our hearts even more, writing, “I don’t care about WBC. I think it’s important that scared gay kids who aren’t out yet see hate speech challenged.”
I don't care about WBC. I think it's important that scared gay kids who aren't out yet see hate speech challenged. https://t.co/XumjDmEjuw — J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 27, 2015
Rowling: 1. WBC: 0.A woman in Fort Myers said she found part of an iguana in her 14-ounce jar of pizza sauce.
"It was definitely an appendage," the woman said to News-Press. "It was rubbery and fleshy."
>>Why are so many iguanas in Palm Beach County right now? Here’s why
Suzanne Abercrombie bought Mantia's pizza sauce in November, and said after she consumed it with pizza she fell ill, according to News-Press
At first she did not associate her illness with the sauce, but when she made another pizza an unusual object came out of the jar.
>>‘Mean’ non-native lizard plaguing Florida
"When I used the rest of the jar, that's when it fell out," Abercrombie said to News-Press. "It was about three-and-a-half inches long and looked like an arm."
A consumer affairs specialist for the company that produces the sauce told Naples Daily News that the “reptile appendage” was not an iguana arm--just mold. The specialist also said the jars are doubled-checked at the plant, “but sometimes things happen after they are shipped,” News-Press reports.
Abercrombie wrote a letter to the company about the incident and they responded stating the substance "did not come from any Reptile, Amphibian, and or small Mammal. It is moldy tomato sauce,” News-Press reports.
Company says Fort Myers woman's claim of iguana leg in jar of pizza sauce was just mold https://t.co/HuT0dpgj5j
— The News-Press (@TheNewsPress) July 25, 2017
Read more at news-press.comAsteroid, definition and study. A-Z index of Cognitio.
Asteroid, definition and study. A-Z index of Cognitio.
Name, introduced in 1802 by Herschel, planetary stars, solar system components, said today preferably small planets.
An asteroid is a similar celestial body for the composition to a terrestrial planet but smaller, and generally devoid of a spherical shape; generally, it has a diameter of less than km, although there are large bodies because technically also very massive bodies recently discovered in the outer solar system asteroids are considered. It is thought that the asteroids are the protoplanetary disk residues that have not been incorporated into planets during the formation of the system.
Most asteroids are located in the main belt, and some have satellites of asteroids. Often characterized by a high eccentricity orbits. very small asteroids, with the size of a boulder or even less, are known as “meteoroid”. Asteroids composed for the majority of ice are known instead as comets.
Some asteroids are remnants of old comets that have lost their ice in the course of repeated approaches to the Sun and are now composed mostly of rock.
The fateful |
time doctors could prescribe the drug on a "named patient basis" for those who could not manage their pain with alternatives but as it is unlicensed they did so at their own risk. Study leader Professor Keith Hawton, director of the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University, said before the restrictions co-proxamol was responsible for a fifth of all drug-related suicides. By the 2007 deadline, prescribing of the drug had fallen by 59%, his analysis showed. Over the two-year period, deaths from co-proxamol fell by 62%. Specifically there were 295 fewer suicides and 349 fewer deaths from the drug including accidental overdoses. The research also showed that had been no increase in deaths from other painkillers, despite large increases in their use. Initiative 'effective' Professor Hawton said authorities in the US were now considering withdrawing co-proxamol, which is a mixture of paracetamol and an opioid drug. "This marked reduction in suicides and accidental poisonings involving co-proxamol during this period, with no evidence of an increase in deaths involving other analgesics, suggests the initiative has been effective," he added. In 2008, there were 380,831 prescription items for co-proxamol, showing some GPs are still prescribing the drug. A spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said prior to its withdrawal co-proxamol was involved in 300-400 self-poisoning deaths each year, of which around a fifth were accidental. "Co-proxamol is extremely dangerous in overdose - only a small overdose can be fatal, and death can occur very rapidly - before medical attention can be sought." He added: "There is no robust evidence that co-proxamol offers any advantage over paracetamol or ibuprofen at normal doses." But Federico Moscogiuri, head of policy and campaigns at Arthritis Care, said many people who used to be prescribed co-proxamol were now struggling to control their pain. A survey done last year by the charity found most people could no longer get prescriptions of the drug from their GPs and many said they had not found an effective alternative. "For them, co-proxamol makes the difference between being able to perform simple everyday activities and living in chronic, debilitating pain. "This is an intolerable situation for a society committed to high quality care for all. "If the named patient system is to work, GPs should feel supported in prescribing co-proxamol for patients who really need it."
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionA defiant President Donald Trump on Thursday insisted that he asked Michael Flynn to resign because of Flynn's statements to Vice President Mike Pence. The president also denied that he told his key national security advisor to discuss sanctions with a Russian official.
"He didn't tell the vice president of the United States the facts and then he didn't remember, and that's just not acceptable," Trump told reporters at the White House at his first solo news conference as chief executive.
"I fired him because of what he said to Mike Pence."
Trump added that he had no problem with Flynn making the calls because he was "doing his job."
Flynn resigned Monday as national security advisor following revelations that he made contradictory statements to Pence about whether he discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the United States. However, when press secretary Sean Spicer later said that the White House was warned on Jan. 26 that Flynn may have misled Pence, it raised questions about why it took more than two weeks for him to resign.
Trump maintained that he asked Flynn to resign only because of the statements he made to Pence, not because they were made public in a Washington Post report.
"I asked for his resignation. He respectfully gave it," he said.
"With all that being said, I think he's a fine man."
He stressed that he did not think Flynn did anything wrong by talking to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Trump also denied that he directed Flynn to talk about sanctions and played down any connections Flynn had with Moscow.Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A black MP today revealed how she suffered racism in parliament after a fellow MP thought she must have been a cleaner.
Labour’s Dawn Butler recalled the incident which took place in a Members'-only lift at the Palace of Westminster.
Asked on BBC Five Live’s Piennar’s Politics if she had ever experienced racism in parliament, the Brent Central MP replied: “Yes - God, there are so many incidents.
“There was a time when I was in the lift. It was a Members’ lift that Members of Parliament use specially in cases (where) we have get to places quickly.
Read more:
“I was in the lift and some other MP said, ‘This lift really isn’t for cleaners’.”
She refused to name the MP.
In 2008, Ms Butler wrote an article describing how former Tory minister David Heathcote-Amory confronted her as she went to sit in the Members’ section on the terrace.
“He actually said to me, ‘What are you doing here? This is for Members only’,” she wrote.
“He then proceeded to ask me, 'Are you a member?' And I said, ‘Yes I am, are you?‘ And he turned around and said to his colleague, ‘They’re letting anybody in nowadays.’
“This man could not equate the image he saw in front of him with that of an MP. It was quite upsetting for my team and so we had to take it further.”
(Image: Ealing Gazette/Grant Humphreys)
At the time, Mr Heathcote-Amory rejected the allegation his remarks to Ms Butler in September 2006 were racist.
“It is quite absurd,” he was quoted as saying.
“What she is actually objecting to is that I didn’t recognise her as a new MP.
“I simply asked her what she was doing at that end of the terrace, and they are quite sensitive about this kind of thing, they think that any kind of reprimand from anyone is racially motivated."Democrat Doug Jones's triumph, the result of a vigorous turnout of the party's traditional voters and of Republican splintering in a deeply conservative state, sent a thunder clap across the national political landscape that Democrats hope will signify an emerging comeback at the start of the 2018 midterm election campaign.
In the immediate aftermath, Democratic leaders are eager to leverage a narrowed Republican majority in the Senate to try to stall the Trump agenda, including the GOP's $1.5 trillion tax package.
And they plan to use the defeat of firebrand Republican Roy Moore, who faced allegations of sexual misconduct, to escalate their criticism of Trump's character, believing the Alabama race may show that even the president's core voters are growing wary of political figures dogged by claims of inappropriate behavior. Trump, who endorsed Moore, has been accused by more than a dozen women of groping or touching them without their consent, which he has denied.
More than anything, there was joy. After more than a year of partywide bickering in the wake of Hillary Clinton's defeat and months of uncertainty over how to win back voters who abandoned the party in 2016, Democrats found solace in a stunning feat — beating a Trump-style Republican in one of the most ruby-red states in the nation.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama speaks to his election-night party in Montgomery after losing the special vote. Moore refused to concede victory to Democrat Doug Jones in the hours after the vote. Moore waits to be introduced at the watch party. Moore supporters at the party pray as they await updates. Moore was accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls when he was in his 30s. Moore supporters watch results come in. Moore voters sing as returns start to come in. Jones and his wife, Louise, wave to supporters at his election party in Birmingham before speaking after victory was declared for the Democrat. Jones greets supporters during his election night gathering at the Sheraton Hotel in Birmingham. Jones will claim the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Jones greets supporters. Supporters celebrate at Jones’s party. Jones voters celebrate. Supporters cheer the upset, Alabama’s first election of a Democrat to the Senate since 1992. Jones supporters embrace. A Moore supporter at a party in Montgomery, Ala., prays as news outlets begin to call the election for Jones. Moore looks at election returns with staff during the party. Roy Moore, right, is greeted by supporters as he arrives at his election night party in Montgomery. Moore arrives and greets supporters as results begin to come in, at the RSA Activity Center in Montgomery. A supporter awaits the arrival of candidate Moore for his election night party in Montgomery. Supporters attend Moore’s election party. A Jones supporter holds a campaign sign. People mingle at Jones’s election gathering. Frannie James, left, talks with Connor Welch at the Jones party. A Jones partygoer flaunts his support. Jones casts his ballot in Mountain Brook, Ala. Jones greets supporters after casting his ballot in Mountain Brook. David Watson waves in a Santa suit as he holds a Jones sign in Florence. Jones, center right, shakes hands with a voter outside a polling location in Bessemer, Ala. Roy Moore makes his way to the polls after arriving by horse to vote at the Gallant Volunteer Fire Department in Gallant. Moore and his wife, Kayla, walk with their horses after voting at the Gallant Volunteer Fire Department in Gallant. Moore and wife Kayla Moore talk to members of the media after voting and arriving by horse at the Gallant Volunteer Fire Department in Gallant. Moore rides off on his horse after voting at the Gallant Volunteer Fire Department in Gallant. Moore, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, speaks to reporters at an election-night rally after declaring victory in the primary runoff Montgomery, Ala. Moore and his wife, Kayla, greet supporters at a rally in Montgomery after the primary runoff. Jones, the Democratic Senate nominee in Alabama, campaigns at Niki’s West restaurant in Birmingham, Ala. Former vice president Joe Biden hugs Jones, right, before he speaks at a rally in Birmingham. Biden urges voters in Birmingham to cast their ballots for Democrat Jones. Moore speaks at an endorsement event in Montgomery. Protesters await Moore outside the Mid-Alabama Republican Club’s Veterans Day program in Vestavia Hills. Moore and his wife, Kayla, arrive for the Mid-Alabama Republican Club’s Veterans Day program. Protesters gather outside as Moore appears at a Mid-Alabama Republican Club’s Veterans Day event in Vestavia Hills. Moore walks amid media representatives in Vestavia Hills. Moore greets supporters in Vestavia Hills. Jones speaks to the media in Birmingham. Moore greets children before speaking during a campaign event at the Walker Springs Road Baptist Church in Jackson, Ala. Former Alabama Chief Justice and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore speaks at a church revival, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, in Jackson, Ala. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson) Moore speaks during a campaign event at the Walker Springs Road Baptist Church in Jackson. Jones speaks to the media in Birmingham, Ala. Jones speaks at a fish fry campaign event at Ensley Park in Birmingham. Jones greets a baby after speaking at a fish fry campaign event in Birmingham. Jones, second from right, meets with supporters and voters at a Mexican restaurant in Talladega. Jones speaks to the media about his role in the prosecutions of two Ku Klux Klan members charged in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham in 1963. Moore speaks to a crowd of supporters during a campaign rally at the Henagar Event Center in Henagar. Attendees listen during a campaign rally for Moore in Henagar. Moore speaks at a rally in Henagar. Jones speaks to members of the media following a tour of the Northport Medical Center in Northport, Ala. Jones, right, checks in volunteer Chyrl Willis along the campaign trail in Montgomery. Moore speaks at a campaign rally in Dora. People attend a campaign rally for Moore at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope, Ala. Moore kisses his wife, Kayla, at the rally in Fairhope. A person protests as Moore speaks in Fairhope. Moore speaks at a campaign rally in Fairhope. Jones takes a group picture with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), right, and Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.), third from right, and supporters during a campaign event held at Alabama State University in Montgomery. Jones speaks during a campaign rally in Birmingham. Supporters stand outside encouraging for people to vote after Jones spoke at a campaign rally in Birmingham. People set up before the arrival of Republican senatorial candidate Moore for a “Drain the Swamp” campaign rally at Jordan's Activity Barn in Midland City. A man sells flags and buttons bearing President Trump’s name before Republican U.S. Senate candidate Moore speaks nearby at a “Drain the Swamp” campaign rally in Midland City, Ala. A supporter poses with Jones at a rally at Old Car Heaven in Birmingham. Former NBA basketball player Charles Barkley speaks to the crowd in support of Jones, during a rally at Old Car Heaven in Birmingham. Jones stands with his wife, Louise, as he speaks to supporters at a rally in Birmingham. A poster of President Trump is seen before Moore arrives to speak at a “Drain the Swamp” campaign rally at Jordan’s Activity Barn in Midland City. Supporters arrive before Moore arrives to speak in Midland City. Volunteers place stickers on supporters as they arrive before Moore arrives to speak in Midland City. Supporters bow their heads for a prayer before Moore arrives to speak in Midland City. Former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon speaks before Moore in Midland City. Moore speaks in Midland City. Moore with his wife, Kayla, by his side, departs after speaking in Midland City.
Photo Gallery: Republican Roy Moore, who has been accused of sexual misconduct, faced off against Democrat Doug Jones in a special election.
"The recriminations have been tough and stupid, the Bernie Sanders people arguing with the Hillary people has been counterproductive. Jones sends a powerful signal not to do that," said Robert M. Shrum, a longtime Democratic consultant who teaches at the University of Southern California. "It was a repudiation of Trump, despite the special circumstances, and we're looking at a wave election next year."
Amid the celebration, however, there were notes of caution in casting Jones's success as a harbinger of the Democrats' chances in next year's elections, when many Senate Democrats will face difficult reelection contests.
Veteran strategists described the result as a crucial if fleeting thrill, and a crippling moment for a fractured Republican Party that is straining to hold its congressional ranks together.
"It's a hard thing to generalize since Moore was such a singular figure," said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. "The practical implication in the Senate is that the Republicans' margin slips to 51 seats, and it's now very difficult for [Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell to navigate. Democrats will certainly have a role to play in moderating any legislation that comes through."
Pointing to last month's elections in Virginia, where Democrat Ralph Northam was elected governor and Democrats made surprising gains in the state legislature, Axelrod said that the "exodus of voters in suburban areas away from Republicans" remains the biggest takeaway from the elections in Alabama and Virginia this year. "Was it because of resistance to Trump? That's what we've got to figure out before we know if the pattern will continue."
Trump's vulnerability in the fallout dominated Democrats' discussions late Tuesday, especially on the issue of conduct. Exit polls in Alabama showed that most women and independents considered the allegations against Moore to be true, making Democrats wonder whether the resurgence this week of the accusations against Trump could damage the president's political standing and burden the GOP.
"This shows that the president is a huge drag on Republicans," Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said in an interview. "Suburban voters and moderate Republicans have had it — from New Jersey to Virginia to Alabama."
A crowd of Democrats in recent days has called on Trump to leave office because of the allegations against him. That call comes as influential men across industries are being held accountable for alleged misconduct.
Lifting Democratic spirits nationally were the glimmers of a lurching electorate on Tuesday. Even white Republican voters in Alabama demonstrated that they were uneasy with Moore and perhaps with the Republican Party's direction generally. Exit polls showed Jones won far more white voters than recent Democratic presidential nominees in Alabama, nearly 3 in 10 statewide.
"There is an incredible opportunity in some of these red states to compete," said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). "Flipping a red seat energizes and excites the base. It fuels fundraising and it puts races that people weren't thinking about playing in on the map and makes states like Arizona more important as people look ahead."
Kofinis said Jones's campaign also exposed unexpected GOP weaknesses.
"They showed how the Republican brand is more broken than people thought," Kofinis said.
Jones's mobilization of African American voters was critical to his victory, and Democrats saw in his turnout emphasis a model for how the party must mobilize its essential voter coalitions in the coming year. In the final weekend of the campaign, Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) and other prominent black Democrats rallied for Jones.
Geoff Garin, a pollster who advised Northam and worked on past Clinton campaigns, said "it's arithmetic. Midterms in the past haven't always been good for Democrats, and they've lost seats because good Democratic voters stayed home. Simply having a strong ground game isn't enough. You can't only look at swing voters. In the age of Trump, you have to get out your base."
That includes women, said Boston-based Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh, who said she expects a "flood" of women to run for office next year.
"You see this building from the women's march in January to [Sen. Kirsten] Gillibrand [D-N.Y.] to the Jones win," Marsh said. "Women are taking control, and that includes politics. You're looking at a tidal wave in 2018, with the Senate and House poised to be taken over by Democrats if this trend keeps on building."
Jones repeatedly appealed to women in the closing stretch of the race, courting them on the issue of decency in light of the allegations against Moore, even if they did not share his support for abortion rights. That stance remained an obstacle for him in his outreach to Republicans until the end.
"I want to make sure that when my granddaughters grow up, they don't have to endure the kinds of things that those girls in Etowah County did and sit silent for 30 or 40 years. I want to make sure that we send a message of who we are and what we are, because we're much better than that," Jones said Sunday in remarks at Progressive Union Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville. He was joined by Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Trump allies acknowledged that Jones's victory was a blow and blamed Republican infighting as much as Moore's controversies. A key Moore backer, for instance, was former Trump adviser and Breitbart executive Stephen K. Bannon, who is vowing to undercut establishment Republican leaders in Congress.
"You've got to have a good candidate and unified party. You can't have Steve Bannon going one way with Trump and the Republican Senate committee going another way," said Ed Rollins, an adviser to the pro-Trump Great America Alliance super PAC. "It's going to make everything more difficult. Everyone is going to start panicking."
Philip Rucker contributed to this report.
Related: Read more at PowerPost
Robert Costa is a national political reporter for The Washington Post. He covers the White House, Congress, and campaigns. He joined The Post in January 2014. He is also the moderator of PBS's "Washington Week" and a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
Post RecommendsClient System Administration tool 1.0.2 Rich Prescott ACSA was built with the Helpdesk administrator in mind. Troubleshooting desktop issues requires a vast array of tools and knowledge. ACSA brings those tools together in one central location and adds additional functionality. Featured PowerShell
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Habitat biologists are calling the conditions "almost a perfect storm," but don't believe the die-offs will have lasting effects on fish numbers in Southcentral Alaska.
"It will have some impact but in the long term for species that return multiple age classes, I wouldn't characterize it as a disaster," said Mike Bethe, Mat-Su area manager for the Habitat Division of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Fish and Game biologists have reported water temperatures as high as 74 degrees in Jim Creek -- a small tributary of the Knik River. Some dead salmon have been found near the river's weir, where Fish and Game staff count incoming fish to monitor and manage the run. Dead fish have been turning up in other Mat-Su streams, including Lucille Creek, Fish Creek and Cottonwood Creek.
This summer has been among the warmest on record for much of Southcentral Alaska, and a lack of winter snow and summer rain have contributed to low water levels.
However, salmon don't all return to freshwater at the same age, even among the same species. Some come back a year early, others a year late. Different age classes of fish returning to a river system each year helps mute the effects of single-year weather conditions that can kill fish -- even if most of them die.
And even with record water temperatures in some Mat-Su streams, many of the fish are still surviving. Bethe said biologists are still recording large numbers of viable salmon swimming up area streams. The returns have been so good for silver salmon that the department has increased the bag limits on the Little Susitna River and many area streams are near or at their escapement goals for the year.
Fish and Game biologists say the water temperatures are coming down from their highs earlier this month.
"Hopefully this weather pattern has changed," said Sam Ivey, Mat-Su area biologist for Fish and Game. "They are reporting that salmon are happier, and looking better."
Fish and Game said that a closure of Jim Creek to all fishing on Mondays an Tuesdays should help the salmon migrate upstream more successfully.
In Anchorage, Fish and Game said that over the weekend of Aug. 8-9 about 500 recently-stocked Arctic char died after water temperatures crested 70 degrees at Little Campbell Lake.
Arctic char are not native to Southcentral Alaska. The fish -- which spawn in lakes in the state's northern areas -- don't do well in warm waters. The state doesn't usually stock Arctic char in Anchorage lakes because, as Fish and Game has learned, the waters are too shallow to remain cold enough for the fish to thrive.
"There was another Arctic Char die-off due to warm water conditions in 2003 at DeLong Lake," said Kristine Dunker, a research biologist with Fish and Game.
But Little Campbell Lake, which covers 8.6 acres inside Kincaid Park in West Anchorage, has a large area that gets up to 18 feet deep. For years, it has been one of the best urban lakes for char fishing, regularly putting out 3-pound fish.
This year, though, surface temperatures into the 70s sucked much of the oxygen from the lake's cooler depths.
"They (the Arctic char) had nowhere to go," Dunker said. "It was either too hot or there was not enough oxygen for them to survive."
Dunker said rainbow trout are doing better in the lake because they can handle warmer water.
And, despite dozens of dead char floating in the lake, several fishermen were still trying their luck on Wednesday.
"I think everything is cyclical," said Josh Witham, 35. "I don't think we need to get freaked out about every little thing."
Witham's fishing partner for the day, 53-year-old Glenn Brown, was more concerned.
"I wonder if the Lower 48 weather is coming our way?" Brown asked. "I hate to see fish dying like this."
Fish and Game officials are less concerned about the warm water fish kills in the Mat-Su and in Anchorage.
"It's just a natural occurrence," Bethe said. "It has happened in the past and it will happen again in the future."The recent court decision tossing out a rule setting federal position limits in commodities markets probably shouldn’t have come as a shock.
After all, the legal battle pitted two of Wall Street’s biggest, deep-pocketed lobbying groups against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has been frequently depicted as cash-strapped and understaffed by its chairman over the past two years.
The lawsuit was argued by Eugene Scalia, the son of a Supreme Court justice and, according to his profile “one of the industry’s go-to guys for challenging financial regulations.”
Scalia led the industry’s successful effort to have the Securities and Exchange Commission proxy access rule overturned by a federal appeals court in July 2011.
In addition, legal sources have targeted position limits as the rule most likely to be overturned by a court since President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law in 2010.
Even when it was approved in October 2011, then-Commissioner Michael Dunn, a Democrat and ultimately the deciding vote for the rule, said position limits were likely unnecessary and may do nothing to control market volatility.
“This is the law,” Dunn said before casting his reluctant vote. “The law is clear, and I will follow the law.”
In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal Wednesday (link here, but it’s behind registration), Scalia pointed to this as an example of “an agency failing to deploy expert judgment,” and one of the key reasons this and other recent financial regulations have been overturned in court.
“When the rule was adopted, a majority of CFTC commissioners said it was likely to harm consumers,” Scalia wrote. “But the commission adopted it anyway, saying that Dodd-Frank required it. The court disagreed and faulted the agency for failing ‘to bring its expertise and experience to bear.’” Scalia said instead of blaming the courts for recent decisions against regulations, Democrats should look to “badly written regulations.”
In December, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association filed their lawsuit to overturn the limits and by February US District Court Judge Robert Wilkins told a courtroom of lawyers and reporters that he would decide “quickly” on whether the block the imposition of these limits.
Some expected a decision from Wilkins in days, but days soon became weeks and weeks became months. By the time the CFTC set October 12 as the start date for its first phase of the limits, many were confident that position limits would be taking place as the CFTC had planned.
Then on Friday, shortly after US markets closed and just two weeks before the limits were scheduled to take root, Wilkins’ decision shocked many.
CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton, the agency’s most public position limits proponent, called the decision “deeply flawed,” “tough news” and “clearly a setback” in ridding commodity markets of excessive speculation.
US Representative Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat, called the ruling a “blow to consumers and a setback in the broader effort to stabilize energy markets.”
US Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, called the decision “another victory for Wall Street speculators who have been given a green light to rip off the American people at the gas pump.”
“Wall Street wins, consumers lose,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.
CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler, who said the agency has made no decision on how to proceed, said he was “disappointed” by the decision and repeated his frequent claim that the limits were mandated by Dodd-Frank.
Wilkins, in his 50-page decision, overturned the limits since he claimed the agency did not make a finding that position limits were necessary to curb excessive speculation.
For a more detailed take on Wilkins’ decision, check out a detailed analysis by Craig Pirrong, a finance professor at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business, here.
But is the battle over position limits over? Chilton this week called for the agency to appeal the decision while simultaneously working on a new rule, but Gensler has said the CFTC, which committed to getting position limits in place, is still considering its options.
But legal sources believe this will likely be an uphill battle for the agency.
Paul Pantano, the head of the energy and commodities group at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, told Platts this week that the chances of a judge granting such a stay, particularly of a rule that is not in effect, are “probably nonexistent.”
Pantano said any appeal process would likely take 10 months to a year.
Congress could always pass new position limits legislation, this time without a requirement for the CFTC to prove their necessity, but getting such a controversial bill through aRepublican-controlled House, even in the lame duck session following next month’s election, is seen as an extreme longshot.
Senator Sanders, for example, has proposed a bill which would require the CFTC to use its “emergency powers” to impose the position limits in the natural gas, crude oil and gasoline markets. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Senate’s Democrats, said such trading limits would diminish the influence of speculators and help lower the price of gasoline, but said this week that the bill was no closer to a vote than when it was introduced in March.
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ShareWhenever you hear, “That currency is not backed by anything!,” it’s almost always meant as criticism. Hard-money enthusiasts are quick to point out the horrible track record of fiat currency. Nearly without fail, currencies “backed by nothing” get heavily devalued through inflation, and they often collapse within decades.The best solution, so far, has been to tie currency to a commodity whose supply can not be arbitrarily inflated by governments or central banks, or to use that commodity directly as a currency. Gold and silver have served this purpose best, and they have been used successfully for millennia. Backing any currency in precious metals restrains the possibility for inflation.But, when we look deeper, the connection between being “unbacked” and being at risk for inflation is not a necessary connection. It’s a reasonable connection to make, especially given the history of fiat currency, but it’s conceivable to think of a currency which is inflation-proof and not backed by anything. It might sound fanciful, but thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto, it’s not just possible - it currently exists, and it’s called “Bitcoin.”Bitcoin is not backed by anything; you can’t “redeem” your Bitcoin for gold at a bank. And it’s not even “backed” by declaration of law. To hard-money folks like myself, that sounds like a recipe for inflationary disaster. But, as implausible as it sounds, Bitcoin is not susceptible to arbitrary inflation. It was intentionally designed this way.Inflation ultimately happens for one reason: central control over the power to create new money - whether it’s a government trying to pay its debts, or a central bank trying to ease monetary policy. This is one reason why Bitcoin avoids arbitrary inflation: its supply is not controlled by any central authority. The supply is regulated by software and mathematics, not politics. Power in the Bitcoin world is decentralized over an enormous network of computers.In fact, the software is so precise, we can predict a hundred years into the future almost exactly how many bitcoin will be in existence. You can’t say that about any other currency which is “not backed by anything.”But it’s not only the production of Bitcoin which is decentralized; it’s also their record of ownership. Every single Bitcoin which has ever been created can be traced back to its inception - including every transaction and change of ownership. This ledger, called “the blockchain,” is publicly viewable, and it is practically set in stone. The ledger is not stored on a central server; it’s not controlled by a few gatekeepers. It is stored on every single computer serving as a node around the entire globe. I’d suggest there’s nothing else you can own which comes with such a clear proof of ownership.All put together, this means you can’t forge Bitcoin records; you can’t fake ownership; and you can’t create new Bitcoin out of thin air. And it’s all possible through complex mathematics - no trust in a third party, government or corporation is required. In a sense, if Bitcoin is backed by anything, it’s backed by the strength of clever mathematics.Bitcoin might represent the first currency which is not backed by a physical good and still prevents arbitrary inflation. It has expanded the limits on our traditional conception of money. So, next time you hear “Bitcoin is not backed by anything!” understand it as a deep compliment to the ingenuity of Satoshi Nakamoto.WASHINGTON ― A combative Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee |
Agile Methods
Mike Cohn describes a simple way to get a shared understanding of the level of effort represented by a story point before the team plays planning poker.
Johanna Rothman introduces the concept of Rubber Duck Debugging, which is explaining a problem to someone who doesn’t understand it and isn’t in management.
Muhammed Irfan Azam explains how Clear Code Day can put the focus on the Scrum team, rather than the ScrumMaster of product owner.
Bob Tarne describes the “sponsored user” – someone assigned to the development team when you need to hear the voice of the customer at all times.
Samantha Webb introduces the #pubretro movement, not necessarily because you should be drinking, but because getting out of the office might make all the difference.
Ryan Ripley interviews Jason Womack, author of “Get Momentum.” Just 15 minutes, safe for work.
Tony Ponton and Craig Smith interview James Shore, author of “The Art of Agile Development.” Just 43 minutes, safe for work.
Applied Leadership
Art Petty explores the Least Bad Option – which usually involves exposing the decision maker to greater risk.
David Bicknell excerpts a few examples from “The Dead Presidents’ Guide to Project Management,” by Jim Johnson.
Seth Godin says reading more blogs will help us become “smarter, more effective and more engaged in what’s going on.” If you are reading this, you agree.
Peter Landau posts the annual ProjectManager.com roundup of the best project management and leadership blogs.
See Tech Like an Exec
Mary Shacklett bullet points the critical considerations for running an internet of things project.
Tara Seals trots out some sobering statistics: information security issues are slowing or halting the majority of Big Data projects.
George Leopold reports on the next big constraint for Big Data: legal hassles, like the recent tussle between Apple and the FBI.
Jesus Rodriguez reports on the business side of artificial intelligence – not the applications, but the race to secure market share and future profits.
Enjoy!
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Daydream-compatible standalone headsets are coming, revealed on stage at Google I/O yesterday, but the big question remains: how much is one of these inside-out positional tracking headsets going to cost? Google tells that although prices are dependent on the individual manufacturers, they expect it to cost about as much as a PC VR headset like Oculus Rift or HTC Vive.
Being able to pull a singular, bespoke VR headset out of a backpack—with no added wires or sensors—is pretty awesome, but the addition of inside-out positional tracking, or the ability to physically move your head forward, backward and side-to-side, is an even bigger step for mobile VR.
We sat down with Google’s VR team at a press briefing to learn more about how much the convenience (and immersion) was going to cost.
“It will vary by OEM, depending on what screens they decide to go with and so on,” a Google spokersperson told us. “I would expect the price-point to be around the same as you have with the desktop VR headsets today – minus the cost of the PC, drilling holes in your wall, and all that kind of stuff.”
This falls in line with what we’d expect, considering the guts of a standalone headset need to pack as much as (if not more than) the graphical horsepower of a VR-ready flagship smartphone like those already taking part in the smartphone-focused Daydream program. In any case, running acceptable frame rates while tracking the world around you in real-time didn’t exactly sound cheap to begin with.
For reference, the Oculus Rift when bundled with Touch costs just under $600. HTC prices the Vive at the higher end of the spectrum at $799 for their PC VR system. There’s no telling which end of the price spectrum the first two headsets, made by Lenovo and HTC, will take. HTC maintains their standalone headset will launch sometime later this year, so we’re sure to get a better idea closer to launch.
This of course doesn’t include the startup cost of a VR-capable PC, which although cheaper than ever thanks to software updates and cheaper GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA, is still a pretty large investment.In the 1940s, many Yankees-Red Sox contests hinged on whether Williams and Bobby Doerr could drive in Dom and Johnny Pesky more times than Joe and Tommy Henrich could drive in Phil Rizzuto and Snuffy Stirnweiss. Joe was known for fierce competitiveness, and that was never more true than when opposing Dom, who never backed down when facing his brother.
After the war, “Joe and I picked up right where we left off in our brotherly competition,” Dom wrote in “Real Grass, Real Heroes,” his 1990 book with Bill Gilbert. During a game at Yankee Stadium in May 1946, Dom hit a ball to deep center field. Joe raced after it and climbed the wall to make the catch. When the inning ended and the brothers crossed paths behind second base, Joe called out, “It’s 32-21,” referring to the number of times one of them had taken a hit away from the other. Only they knew that Dom was leading the competition.
The Yankees and the Red Sox battled to the wire for the pennant in 1948. Dom and his fiancée, Emily, had set their wedding for Oct. 7, but that would not work if Boston made it to the World Series. Joe told his mother, Rosalie, “I will personally see to it that Dom is free to get married on the 7th.”
The Red Sox missed the pennant by one game. The Yankees finished two and a half games out.
On Aug. 9, 1949, Dom took a 34-game hitting streak into a game at Yankee Stadium, where it had begun July 4. Down to his last at-bat, he sent a screaming line drive to the outfield that Joe caught, preventing Dom from coming any closer to Joe’s record 56-game streak.
That October, the Red Sox arrived in New York in first place by a game with two games to play. Joe was in a hospital with pneumonia, but he left his bed in time for the first game. It was Joe DiMaggio Day at Yankee Stadium, and Dom emerged from the Boston dugout to help him stay upright during the pregame ceremony.
Joe’s presence helped lift the Yankees to the two-game sweep, and they won the pennant by one game. He had gotten the better of Dom one more time.
After he retired, Dom became a successful textile manufacturer who gave a lot of time to raise millions of dollars for charities in the Boston area. Although smaller than Joe in stature and in the baseball record books, Dom cast quite a long shadow himself.$\begingroup$
Your concern is exactly the concern that underlies a great deal of the current discussion in science about reproducability. However, the true state of affairs is a bit more complicated than you suggest.
First, let's establish some terminology. Null hypothesis significance testing can be understood as a signal detection problem -- the null hypothesis is either true or false, and you can either choose to reject or retain it. The combination of two decisions and two possible "true" states of affairs results in the following table, which most people see at some point when they're first learning statistics:
Scientists who use null hypothesis significance testing are attempting to maximize the number of correct decisions (shown in blue) and minimize the number of incorrect decisions (shown in red). Working scientists are also trying to publish their results so that they can get jobs and advance their careers.
Of course, bear in mind that, as many other answerers have already mentioned, the null hypothesis is not chosen at random -- instead, it is usually chosen specifically because, based on prior theory, the scientist believes it to be false. Unfortunately, it is hard to quantify the proportion of times that scientists are correct in their predictions, but bear in mind that, when scientists are dealing with the "$H_0$ is false" column, they should be worried about false negatives rather than false positives.
You, however, seem to be concerned about false positives, so let's focus on the "$H_0$ is true" column. In this situation, what is the probability of a scientist publishing a false result?
Publication bias
As long as the probability of publication does not depend on whether the result is "significant", then the probability is precisely $\alpha$ --.05, and sometimes lower depending on the field. The problem is that there is good evidence that the probability of publication does depend on whether the result is significant (see, for example, Stern & Simes, 1997; Dwan et al., 2008), either because scientists only submit significant results for publication (the so-called file-drawer problem; Rosenthal, 1979) or because non-significant results are submitted for publication but don't make it through peer review.
The general issue of the probability of publication depending on the observed $p$-value is what is meant by publication bias. If we take a step back and think about the implications of publication bias for a broader research literature, a research literature affected by publication bias will still contain true results -- sometimes the null hypothesis that a scientist claims to be false really will be false, and, depending on the degree of publication bias, sometimes a scientist will correctly claim that a given null hypothesis is true. However, the research literature will also be cluttered up by too large a proportion of false positives (i.e., studies in which the researcher claims that the null hypothesis is false when really it's true).
Researcher degrees of freedom
Publication bias is not the only way that, under the null hypothesis, the probability of publishing a significant result will be greater than $\alpha$. When used improperly, certain areas of flexibility in the design of studies and analysis of data, which are sometimes labeled researcher degrees of freedom (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011), can increase the rate of false positives, even when there is no publication bias. For example, if we assume that, upon obtaining a non-significant result, all (or some) scientists will exclude one outlying data point if this exclusion will change the non-significant result into a significant one, the rate of false positives will be greater than $\alpha$. Given the presence of a large enough number of questionable research practices, the rate of false positives can go as high as.60 even if the nominal rate was set at.05 (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011).
It's important to note that the improper use of researcher degrees of freedom (which is sometimes known as a questionable research practice; Martinson, Anderson, & de Vries, 2005) is not the same as making up data. In some cases, excluding outliers is the right thing to do, either because equipment fails or for some other reason. The key issue is that, in the presence of researcher degrees of freedom, the decisions made during analysis often depend on how the data turn out (Gelman & Loken, 2014), even if the researchers in question are not aware of this fact. As long as researchers use researcher degrees of freedom (consciously or unconsciously) to increase the probability of a significant result (perhaps because significant results are more "publishable"), the presence of researcher degrees of freedom will overpopulate a research literature with false positives in the same way as publication bias.
An important caveat to the above discussion is that scientific papers (at least in psychology, which is my field) seldom consist of single results. More common are multiple studies, each of which involves multiple tests -- the emphasis is on building a larger argument and ruling out alternative explanations for the presented evidence. However, the selective presentation of results (or the presence of researcher degrees of freedom) can produce bias in a set of results just as easily as a single result. There is evidence that the results presented in multi-study papers is often much cleaner and stronger than one would expect even if all the predictions of these studies were all true (Francis, 2013).
Conclusion
Fundamentally, I agree with your intuition that null hypothesis significance testing can go wrong. However, I would argue that the true culprits producing a high rate of false positives are processes like publication bias and the presence of researcher degrees of freedom. Indeed, many scientists are well aware of these problems, and improving scientific reproducability is a very active current topic of discussion (e.g., Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012; Nosek, Spies, & Motyl, 2012). So you are in good company with your concerns, but I also think there are also reasons for some cautious optimism.
References
Stern, J. M., & Simes, R. J. (1997). Publication bias: Evidence of delayed publication in a cohort study of clinical research projects. BMJ, 315(7109), 640–645. http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.315.7109.640
Dwan, K., Altman, D. G., Arnaiz, J. A., Bloom, J., Chan, A., Cronin, E., … Williamson, P. R. (2008). Systematic review of the empirical evidence of study publication bias and outcome reporting bias. PLoS ONE, 3(8), e3081. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003081
Rosenthal, R. (1979). The file drawer problem and tolerance for null results. Psychological Bulletin, 86(3), 638–641. http://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.86.3.638
Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1359–1366. http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417632
Martinson, B. C., Anderson, M. S., & de Vries, R. (2005). Scientists behaving badly. Nature, 435, 737–738. http://doi.org/10.1038/435737a
Gelman, A., & Loken, E. (2014). The statistical crisis in science. American Scientist, 102, 460-465.
Francis, G. (2013). Replication, statistical consistency, and publication bias. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 57(5), 153–169. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmp.2013.02.003
Nosek, B. A., & Bar-Anan, Y. (2012). Scientific utopia: I. Opening scientific communication. Psychological Inquiry, 23(3), 217–243. http://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2012.692215
Nosek, B. A., Spies, J. R., & Motyl, M. (2012). Scientific utopia: II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 615–631. http://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612459058SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- The life expectancy of a baby born in Manhattan increased at twice the rate of a baby born in Syracuse between 1980 and 2014, according to a new study.
Life expectancy has increased everywhere in New York, but the amount of improvement depends on where you live in the state, the study by the University of Washington shows.
The study, published today in JAMA Internal Medicine, tracked life expectancy changes for every county in the U.S.
Life expectancy in New York County, or Manhattan, rose from 71 years in 1980 to 81.8 years in 2014, an increase of nearly 11 years or 15.2 percent, the third biggest increase in the nation.
Onondaga County saw its life expectancy go up from 74.2 years in 1980 to 79.7 in 2014, an increase of 5 1/2 years.
Average life expectancy in New York state is 80.36 years, slightly better than the U.S. average, 79.08 years.
Dr. Ali Mokdad, an author of the study, attributed New York County's dramatic improvement in life expectancy to New York City's aggressive public health programs designed to prevent disease. Those efforts include forcing restaurants to post calorie counts on menus and eliminate trans fats from food, banning smoking in public areas, building bike lanes, installing hybrid buses to reduce air pollution and expanding HIV testing and treatment.
"New York City initiated lots of public health initiatives that leveled the playing field and made it easier for people who were left behind to improve their health," Mokdad said.
The study says obesity, lack of exercise, smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and socioeconomic factors such as poverty and education contribute to variations in life expectancy among counties.
Rockland County had the state's highest life expectancy in 2014 -- 82.54 years, while Sullivan County had the lowest, 78.03 years. Oswego County had the state's second lowest life expectancy, 78.3 years.
Oglaga Lakota County in South Dakota, a county which includes the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, had the nation's lowest life expectancy in 2014 at 66.8 years - comparable to countries like Sudan (67.2), India (66.9) and Iraq (67.7)
Summit County, Colorado had the nation's highest life expectancy at 86.8 years.
The study found life expectancy decreased in 13 U.S. counties, most of them in Kentucky, between 1980 and 2014. For example, life expectancy in Owsley County, Kentucky, was 72.4 years in 1980, down from 70.2 in 2014.
Mokdad said what surprised him most about the study is the degree of health disparities in the U.S. "Many people are going backwards instead of forward," he said.
When it comes to life expectancy, the U.S. is falling behind other developed countries, even though the U.S. spends significantly more on health care, he said.
The U.S., with a life expectancy of 79.08 years, spent $9,237 per person on health care in 2014.
By comparison, Australia, which spent $4,032 per person, has a life expectancy of 82.3 years. Japan, which spent $3,816 per person, has a life expectancy of 83.1 years.
Contact James T. Mulder anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-470-2245Hear the radio version of this story.
Nashville's public school employees have a 26,000-square-foot fitness gym and walk-in clinic that they can now use for free. The perk is meant to be the first of several wellness centers. And it's part of a larger effort to drive down insurance costs.
The facility in Berry Hill is across the parking lot from the Metro Schools headquarters on Bransford Ave. It's part health club, part pharmacy and part primary care clinic. And the hours are meant to accommodate educators — whose schedules lack flexibility.
"You don't get one single minute during your day," says Jill Peeples, a former teacher who now works in the central office. "So the idea of coming here, either before or after, it's really optimal."
Appointments with nurse practitioners, a physical therapist or even a psychiatric nurse can be made anytime between 7 am and 7 pm. There are also Saturday hours.
There's no co-pay. And the fitness equipment and health coaching is no charge.
To top it off, the facility wasn't built directly with tax money. The funding came from the district's insurance program, which has built up excess reserves because of a program that incentivized teachers to get their primary care in school clinics. Roughly 40 percent of the district's 10,000 staff members have made their medical home at a school-based clinic, staffed by Vanderbilt medical personnel.
The $7 million wellness center is supposed to help the insurance program build up yet another surplus by improving health and providing less expensive primary care. David Hines is the district's director of benefits and says the money may be spent on another center in Madison.
"Before we move again, we'll put the money back in the bank — the savings —because we'll save based on this," he says.
The insurance savings could be returned to teachers in other ways, like reducing monthly insurance premiums. But Hines says he sees the wellness centers as a better long term investment in their health.Androgens are mainly prescribed to treat several diseases caused by testosterone deficiency. However, athletes try to promote muscle growth by manipulating testosterone levels or assuming androgen anabolic steroids (AAS). These substances were originally synthesized to obtain anabolic effects greater than testosterone. Although AAS are rarely prescribed compared to testosterone, their off-label utilization is very wide. Furthermore, combinations of different steroids and doses generally higher than those used in therapy are common. Symptoms of the chronic use of supra-therapeutic doses of AAS include anxiety, depression, aggression, paranoia, distractibility, confusion, amnesia. Interestingly, some studies have shown that AAS elicited electroencephalographic changes similar to those observed with amphetamine abuse. The frequency of side effects is higher among AAS abusers, with psychiatric complications such as labile mood, lack of impulse control and high violence. On the other hand, AAS addiction studies are complex because data collection is very difficult due to the subjects' reticence and can be biased by many variables, including physical exercise, that alter the reward system. Moreover, it has been reported that AAS may imbalance neurotransmitter systems involved in the reward process, leading to increased sensitivity toward opioid narcotics and central stimulants. The goal of this article is to review the literature on steroid abuse and changes to the reward system in preclinical and clinical studies.
Introduction
Anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) are synthetic compounds derived from testosterone, which is the main male hormone. The binding of testosterone to androgen receptors has anabolic and androgenic effects. During puberty, the increase in testosterone levels contributes to linear growth augmentation, as well as muscle mass accumulation (Bhasin et al., 1996, 2001; Brower, 2002; Kuhn, 2002) by inducing hypertrophy without changes in the absolute number of both Type 1 and 2 muscle fibers (Sinha-Hikim et al., 2002). Testosterone also acts by increasing the number of muscle progenitor cells (Sinha-Hikim et al., 2003) and promoting their myogenic differentiation (Singh et al., 2003, 2006). Testosterone promotes mitochondrial biogenesis, improves net oxygen delivery to the tissue by increasing red cell mass and tissue capillarity, and facilitates oxygen unloading from oxyhemoglobin (Coviello et al., 2008; Gupta et al., 2008). The idea of designing and developing steroids with anabolic properties arose during the 1930s soon after the identification and isolation of the hormone androsterone by the German investigator Butenandt, who collected this compound from thousands of liters of pooled human urine derived from a number of military service volunteers. Most of the AAS used before the 1990s were pharmacological agents approved for medicinal or veterinary use. By the 1990s, various androgen precursors became nutritional supplements. Androgen precursors are either inactive or weak androgens that the body converts into potent androgens. These include naturally occurring precursors to testosterone, such as 4-androstenediol, 5-androstenediol, 4-androstenedione, and dehydroepiandrosterone, as well as precursors to synthetic AAS including 4-norandrostenedione, 4-norandrostenediol, and 5-norandrostenediol, which the body converts to nandrolone (Pope et al., 2014). Other synthetic AAS, such as 17-desmethylstanozolol, methylclostebol, and methyltrienolone have been recently introduced into the market as dietary supplements. These “designed” steroids have not undergone toxicological or safety testing in humans or animals. Thus, they potentially represent an even more serious health risk than the more traditionally used AAS.
Medical Use
From a clinical standpoint, AAS are commonly prescribed to treat several disorders, such as the androgen deficiency syndromes (Conway et al., 2000), hereditary angioedema, hematological disorders (Shahidi, 2001), catabolic conditions, such as some types of cancer-related cachexia (Langer et al., 2001), metabolic dysfunctions induced by severe burn (Hart et al., 2001), inflammatory pulmonary diseases (Ferreira et al., 2001), radiation therapy, and AIDS-associated malnutrition (Basaria et al., 2001; Polsky et al., 2001). Less common medical uses of AAS deal with heart and renal failure (Basaria et al., 2001). Contrasting data exists in the literature regarding the use of AAS in the treatment of androgen deficiency in aging males, infertility, sexual dysfunctions or impotence, as well as post-menopausal syndrome in women. Thus, while a review of Morley (2001) points toward therapeutic effects on libido and menopause-induced sarcopenia, Conway et al. (2000) consider their therapeutic application in these pathological conditions as ≪misuse of androgens≫. Hence, according to the state of the art presented in their review, they reported no indication for androgen therapy in male infertility because of its suppressing effect on spermatogenesis. Importantly, there is no evidence in available literature that AAS abuse or dependence might develop from the legitimate medical use of AAS.
Non-medical Use
The use of AAS for non-medical intentions can easily determine abuse and lead to dependence. When used by athletes, AAS can improve performance to levels obtainable by virtually any other combination of non-chemical solutions provided by modern sport techniques (Noakes, 2004). Generally, supra-pharmacological doses of AAS act either by a direct mechanism, promoting an increase in mass, force, speed of muscular contraction, and recovery after intense physical exercise (Tremblay et al., 2004) or by an indirect pathway through erythropoietic stimulation, leading to increased synthesis of 2,3-diphospholglycerate and tissutal oxygen transfer facilitation (Shahidi, 2001). Consumption of high doses of AAS typically consists in 6–12 week cycles, followed by a 6–12 week period of wash-out. These patterns of AAS use may easily precipitate in periods of continuous consumption without any AAS-free intervals due to the fact that abusers try to assure their muscle gains while avoiding withdrawal symptoms (Brower, 2002; Kuhn, 2002). Several other drugs are frequently associated with the use of supra-pharmacological doses of AAS by abusers that are designed to increase their effects, diminish side effects or avoid detection by urine testing (Wichstrom and Pedersen, 2001). The abuse of other illicit drugs, such as amphetamines and opioids, has also been shown to be strengthened by AAS use (Arvary and Pope, 2000). Moreover, such abuse might reinforce the occurrence of adverse substance interactions. In particular, in the case of AAS and amphetamine association, the overdose potential appears to be increased, due to cardiotoxicity (Thiblin et al., 2000). The contemporary consumption of AAS and bromocriptine, used to rapidly reduce body fat and total weight, has been described as the cause of a syndrome characterized by syncopal episodes and atrial fibrillation (Manoharan et al., 2002).
Populations of adolescents and young adults have been the subject of several clinical studies that explore the prevalence of AAS misuse and abuse. Irving et al. (2002) conducted a study on a population of 4746 middle and high school students from public schools of Minneapolis completing surveys and anthropometric measurements as part of a population-based study of eating patterns and weight concerns among teenagers (Project EAT: Eating Among Teens). They observed that steroid use was more common in non-Caucasian males and in middle school students as compared to high school. In males, steroid use was associated with poor self-esteem, higher rates of depressed mood and attempted suicide, poor knowledge and attitudes about health, greater participation in sports emphasizing weight and shape, greater parental concern about weight, and higher rates of eating disorders and substance abuse. In a study by Wichstrom and Pedersen (2001), a representative sample of 8877 Norwegian youths (15–22 years of age) was surveyed. Results showed that AAS use did not vary according to sport involvement or demographics. Moreover, AAS use was associated mainly with the abuse of marijuana, aggressive-type conduct problems and eating disorders.
Adverse Effects
The severity and impact of side effects induced by AAS abuse depend on a wide range of factors, such as dose, duration of administration, possible consumption of a combination of AAS, as well as gender and age of the abusers. Data on the impact of sustained administration, failed to show any documented adverse events associated to a single episode of acute consumption of supra-pharmacological doses of AAS. Their abuse has been shown to be associated to greater effects on physical performance in younger individuals and women, together with increased incidence and risk of developing serious side events (Kindlundh et al., 1999). Few data exist on the risk of side effects linked to long-term use of high-dose of AAS for non-therapeutic purposes (Parssinen and Seppala, 2002). Cardiovascular complications have been widely described in AAS abusers, including the occurrence of arrhythmic events (Furlanello et al., 2003). In a recent post-mortem study that compared 87 deceased men positive for AAS with 173 control subjects (Far et al., 2012), AAS users showed significantly greater cardiac mass.
In another clinical investigation, ventricular hypertrophy, associated with fibrosis and myocytolysis, was detected after cardiac death in four AAS users (Montisci et al., 2012). Also, controlled studies realized by echocardiography (Krieg et al., 2007; Hassan et al., 2009; Baggish et al., 2010) or by cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (Luijkx et al., 2013) have demonstrated lower ventricular ejection fractions and reduced diastolic tissue velocities in AAS users.
Pathological effects on urogenital and reproductive systems have been reported. In particular, hypogonadotropic hypogonadism with consequent testicular atrophy in men and development of inhibitory mechanisms for FSH and LH production in women have been described in selected populations of AAS abusers (Anderson and Wu, 1996; Dohle et al., 2003). Increased virility and lowering of voice tone, irregular menstruation with infertility, decreased breast size, hypertrophic clitoris, and increased sexual desire have also been described in a population of female AAS abusers (Franke and Berendonk, 1997; Kutscher et al., 2002). Other complications include liver damage and hepatitis (Tanaka et al., 2000), insulin-resistance secondary to glucose intolerance with alterations of thyroid function (Yesalis et al., 2000), increased risk of infectious diseases caused by inappropriate use of syringes and non-protected sexual relations among AAS users (Aitken et al., 2002). Although several studies point toward a reversibility of undesirable AAS-induced effects following suspension, they can become irreversible complications with prolonged AAS abuse (Kutscher et al., 2002).
Psychiatric Effects
AAS are universally recognized to have psychoactive effects (Yates, 2000). Although some spared studies have reported their therapeutic use in depression to improve mood and anergia (Rabkin et al., 2000), most evidence points toward the association of AAS with depression, mania, psychosis, suicide and increased aggression leading to violence and, in extreme cases, to homicide (Pope and Brower, 2000; Pope et al., 2000; Thiblin et al., 2000). Indeed, suicide and homicide have been shown to be the main cause of premature deaths among steroid users and, in particular, in the teen population (Thiblin et al., 1999b). Although this does not imply that all steroid users will suffer crippling depression or homicidal rage, steroids appear to strongly contribute to psychiatric dysfunctions in susceptible individuals.
Globally, the prevalence of AAS-induced psychiatric disorders has been hard to evaluate and determine, because of sampling biases in clinical case reports. In a review of Pope et al., (Pope et al., 2000), summarizing four prospective, placebo-controlled trials, it has been reported that at least 5% of AAS users will experience AAS dose-dependent maniac or hypomaniac episodes (Pope and Brower, 2000). However, this estimated percentage appears to be influenced by the fact that in most controlled trials, it is not possible to completely mimic the extreme doses and combinations of AAS taken by abusers for ethical reasons. Thus, estimated rates of AAS-induced psychiatric alterations are probably even higher. This is also due to the fact that other factors can increase the likelihood of psychiatric consequences of AAS abuse, such as the presence of a positive psychiatric anamnesis, alcohol, or other drug use (Dean, 2000) as well as other medical comorbidities. For example, in a case-report of Morton et al. (2000), the authors described the case of a man suffering from Axis II psychopathology, who developed severe psychosis after receiving therapeutic doses of an anabolic steroid for burn injuries in combination with lorazepam and opioids.
Psychological motivations contributing to anabolic steroid use and abuse have received little attention in psychiatric literature. Clinical studies demonstrate that steroids are used in part to deal with an earlier trauma, such as childhood physical or sexual abuse (Porcerelli and Sandler, 1995).
Effects on the Brain Reward Function: Dependence and Addiction Potential
The data in the literature show no documented cases of dependence induced by AAS use at therapeutic doses. This suggests that dependence is likely associated to the use of higher doses of AAS (Long et al., 2000; Thiblin et al., 2000; Haupt, 2001; Brower, 2002; Kutscher et al., 2002); Figure 1 graphically represents this hypothesis. However, molecular mechanisms leading to AAS-induced dependence are still unclear.
FIGURE 1
Figure 1. Main clinical observations linking AAS consumption to AAS addiction.
In a review of the scientific literature published between 1988 and 1998 (Brower, 2000), AAS dependence was defined as a diagnosable mental disorder. Between 1999 and 2000, two more diagnostic studies of AAS dependence were published (Midgley et al., 1999; Brower, 2000).
A “withdrawal syndrome” induced by AAS abuse has been clearly described, consisting mainly of depressed mood, fatigue, AAS craving, restlessness, anorexia, insomnia, and decreased libido lasting for several weeks or months (Brower, 1997, 2000). In the 1980s, Tennant et al. (1988) described a case report on which a model of a biphasic course of withdrawal was proposed. The initial phase of the AAS-induced withdrawal (lasting for about 1 week) seemed to be comparable to opioid-induced withdrawal, while the second phase was mostly characterized by clear depressive symptoms and craving (Tennant et al., 1988).
Considerable evidence suggests that AAS dependence might share crucial mechanisms of opioid dependence in humans. In 1989, Kashkin and Kleber (1989) posited that AAS dependence might partly arise via an opioidergic mechanism, through which AAS might enhance the activity of central endogenous opioids, and AAS withdrawal would lead to a decrease in this activity and a subsequent acute hyperadrenergic syndrome (Kashkin and Kleber, 1989). This posited link between AAS and opioids was later confirmed by a large number of observations indicating that AAS users seem to be particularly at risk for developing opioid abuse or dependence (McBride et al., 1996; Wines et al., 1999). Additional clinical studies provided evidence that AAS might decrease the analgesic action of both metamizol and morphine (Philipova et al., 2003).
In 2009, a study by Kanayama et al. (2009) added further evidence for a relationship between AAS and opioids. In the population included in that study, opioid abuse or dependence began either before or after the onset of AAS use, suggesting the possibility that these forms of substance abuse might arise from a common molecular pathway (Kanayama et al., 2009). However, in a study of Negus et al. (2001), authors could not detect any withdrawal phenomena following administration of high doses of AAS (Negus et al., 2001).
AAS seem to act through a more modest reinforcement mechanism compared to cocaine or heroin and resembles the reinforcement mechanism described for caffeine, nicotine, and benzodiazepines. In 2002, Brower (2002) proposed a 2-stage model of steroid dependence. In Stage 1, anabolic effects of AAS provide the initial input and motivation for AAS consumption. Stage 2 deals with consequent chronic use, following which physiological and psychological dependence may develop, thereby making it increasingly difficult for users to quit. Psychoactive effects, such as mood changes and increases in aggressive behavior, characterize this stage of dependence. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for AAS dependence are met and users are not able to stop or discontinue AAS consumption. In Stage 2, addiction treatment may be required, especially when AAS abuse is associated with other substance dependence, such as alcohol, opioids, or amphetamine abuse (Brower, 2002). Arvary and Pope (2000) investigated this phenomenon in a clinical study, including 227 patients admitted to a private facility for dependence on heroin or other opioids. Results of this study strongly suggested that these patients were introduced to opioids through AAS use and bodybuilding physical activity. In particular, 81% of them first purchased opioids from the same drug dealer who had sold them AAS; 67% were introduced to opioids by a fellow body-builder; 86 |
available.”
As well as depression, he mentions fibromyalgia, neural pain and status epilepticus as serious health problems that might be treated with electricity. Depression is the area where he has seen the most encouraging results. “That’s why I’m not comfortable waiting 15 years for us to work out all the scientific questions. There are people suffering today who could benefit from this technology. Their lives are shattered by their diseases and it’s so unfortunate that something that might – big ‘might’ – be able to help them, and is considered so safe that we’ll use it on college students, is not available.”
But he is confident this is going to change very soon. “What is needed is clinical-grade tDCS, which should be made available for people to use at home. That path needs to open up and I think it will later this year.”
In April, I attend the Magstim Neuroscience Conference 2015 at Oxford University. (Magstim is a company specialising in transcranial magnetic stimulation devices, so tDCS is on the agenda.) I meet Nick Davis, a lecturer in psychology at Swansea University, who is studying the effects of tDCS on motor control. I ask him how we can use brain stimulation to improve performance in sport.
Davis gives tennis as an example, and the length of time tennis players spend getting their serve right. Imagine if they could use tDCS to reduce this. “It could free up their time to do other things and make them better players,” he says.
Of course that raises a question of ethics. Would we count that as cheating? Would we put it in the same category as using steroids? And what of the difference between sport and artistic performance?
“Say I give you cocaine and you run faster in a sprint; we would consider that cheating,” he says. “But if I give you cocaine and you write a better song, we don’t think that’s cheating – we just think that’s being in a band. We don’t care that an album was made on drugs. In sport, we care about the effort people put in so anything that improves your effort is cheating.”
The comparison between cocaine and electricity leads me to wonder how addictive tDCS could be. Most of us resort to drugs when we want to change our mood, whether it’s caffeine, a glass of wine or something stronger. I am conscious that my interest in tDCS is triggering a kind of appetite for or excitement about a potential new way of hushing my racing head and balancing my mood. But Davis doesn’t think that electricity could be addictive: “In the same way as performing a ritual can become not addictive but part of your behaviour, there is that potential. Is it addictive in the same way as nicotine and alcohol? I don’t think so.” Bikson agrees, describing the doses being used currently as “baby aspirin” level.
Bikson’s talk at the Oxford conference, “Are We Ready To Go Home?”, is about taking tDCS into people’s houses safely. He argues that it is deployable, simple and safe, that there is considerable patient demand for it, and that we need to stop people resorting to home-made kits, as even low-intensity stimulation can cause harm when applied with bad technology.
The numbers Bikson quotes are persuasive: 40,000 tDCS sessions have taken place over the past 15 years, with no serious adverse effects documented in nearly 1,000 studies published.
He suggests some ways to regulate over-the-counter devices: single-use electrodes, single-position headgear, or one dose stored on a single physical module. A code that unlocks the device could act like a safety lid on a bottle of Calpol.
Finally, Bikson advocates making tDCS freely available in the interests of science. As Davis says, “No one wants to stop people innovating: it’s how things happen. But you’ve got to think about people’s safety.”
For people who want to try tDCS, such as the musician St Vincent, who tweeted in December that all she wanted for Christmas was a tDCS machine, how close is this to reality? “That ship has sailed. It’s just a case of accelerating it,” says Bikson. “People have to get used to the idea of using electricity instead of pills.”
The Thync System, which went on the market in June, might be the first big step. It doesn’t make medical claims: it’s a cognitive enhancement tool (costing $299) that promises “to deliver pulsed neurostimulation waveforms to modulate psychophysiological arousal for lifestyle or wellness applications”. The manufacturers are quite cagey with information but say the devices “use neuro-signalling to induce shifts in energy and calm states within minutes”. Bikson is a product adviser and a fan, though he struggles to find the words to describe Thync’s effects: “It’s not how coffee or wine makes us feel, it’s the way electricity makes us feel.”
Although tDCS is already being used in a couple of private hospitals in the United States it won’t be available on prescription from your GP yet. NICE, the UK health regulator, is developing guidance on its use for depression; two pivotal multi-centre trials for treating depression with tDCS are also under way.
The two recurring themes in my conversations with scientists are optimism about tDCS as a tool for treatment, on the one hand, and concern about people experimenting at home on the other. Davis is wary of the activity of DIY enthusiasts. “It’s dangerous,” he says, “but they tend to know it’s dangerous.” Contributors to the busy DIY tDCS forum on Reddit, a bulletin-board-type website, discuss recent studies and share personal experiences and tips about which “montages” – how the electrodes are positioned – to use. That way, you can stimulate the specific parts of the brain governing anything from numerical reasoning and improved socialisation to migraine pain and the reduction of cravings. It is mainly a practical forum for individual users. “Best electrode to avoid skin burn?” is a typical query.
***
I visit a hackspace in east London to meet Andrew Vladimirov, a Russian neuroscientist who runs a computer security business. He’s a member of Brain Hackers, a group of neuroscientists, electronics engineers and hobbyists. It is a step up from the Reddit DIYers; this group strives to enhance the field of neurostimulation and make it available to others.
There’s an old arcade game in one corner and a tuck shop selling penny sweets and Space Raiders crisps, next to an area filled with brewing apparatus. Experts and amateurs interested in hacking, gaming, science, technology and innovation mill around surrounded by sewing machines, 3D-printed octopuses and other animals, Rubik’s Cubes, lab coats, old computers, new computers and a laser cutting machine. Outside, guys fly drones next to a caravan for “Robotics”. The bookshelves read like poetry: Practical Ruby Projects, Drupal, The Definitive Guide to Grails, The Klingon Dictionary, In Code.
Soon after Vladimirov arrives it becomes clear that he views tDCS as boring and is more interested in other ways of altering the brain, such as magnetic fields, lasers, ultrasound and alternating current. He seeks to measure brain activity simultaneously through electroencephalographic (EEG) devices, including the readily available, consumer-friendly Muse and MindWave, as well as more hackish, DIY headgear.
There is talk of nootropics (smart drugs). Vladimirov wears a locket-type container around his neck containing a couple of doses of piracetam for emergencies. Like many others in London’s DIY neurostimulation community, he is a transhumanist: one who strives to enhance human life with science, health research, technology and innovation.
I ask Vladimirov if I can try something and he applies a combination of transcranial, pulsed magnetic-field and laser stimulation at alpha-band frequency to the back of my head for ten minutes. He is using a machine produced by a friend in Ukraine (where this device is apparently used to treat depression and anxiety). Afterwards, my vision seems slightly sharper and I have a bit more energy; but I am paranoid I’ve damaged my brain.
We talk about safety and Vladimirov allows that it would be possible to get into a state you didn’t want to be in – say, highly alert, or very mellow – and not be able to get out. I don’t think I’ll be rushing to buy a kit on the internet. Later, I have strange dreams. I feel nauseous for the rest of the evening and the next day, though this could be from something I ate.
I catch up on the tDCS Reddit and find a plea from a bipolar patient desperate to find a montage to help him study psychology: “I read a post here, of a guy who used tDCS day before exam, couldn’t study earlier because his grandpa passed away or something. Anyway. He aced on the tests. Tried finding it to know what montage he used. Can’t find it,” he says, asking for a “partner in this journey”.
Various users offer advice, and then there’s a breakthrough. “Hey, that’s me!” says the guy whose grandfather’s illness caused him to miss classes. It turns out he’s J D Leadam, the 25-year-old chief executive of Neurolectrics and creator of the Brain Stimulator – the machine used by, among others, Lee and Katie in Leeds. He gives details of the montage he uses and links out to his own Brain Stimulator site.
In a way, Leadam the young entrepreneur, Bikson the eminent scientist and Vladimirov the hackspace pioneer are all coming from the same place: if we can improve the brain, why shouldn’t we?
This article is published simultaneously in the “Brain” season of The Long + Short, Nesta’s free online magazine of ideas and innovation. thelongandshort.orgSpread the love
Richland Township, PA — In the famous Supreme Court case of Texas v. Johnson in 1989, a five-justice majority ruled that desecrating the American flag was protected speech under the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Despite this ruling, Americans from sea to shining sea continue to call for the arrest, or even death, of those who’d dare express their opinion through the use of the Old Glory.
The very essence of freedom is tolerating peaceful forms of expression, no matter how uncomfortable they make us feel. Sadly missing the point, however, are folks who fail to understand that burning or desecrating a flag without fear of punishment from one’s government, is what liberty is all about.
That being said, when police are called in to investigate a photo of a high school student standing on a flag, as if a crime has taken place, liberty for all is under attack.
When a photo was posted to social media this week, of a high school student standing on a flag while another student stuck out her middle finger, a firestorm of controversy blew up. Immediately, the school issued a statement decrying the photo.
A statement on behalf of the Richland School District’s solicitor was posted on Facebook, as well as the district’s website, promising a “timely and thorough” review, reported CBS Pittsburgh.
“The Richland School District has become aware of this unfortunate and unpatriotic picture posted by some of its students,” the statement read. “This type of picture does not represent the opinion of the District or of its overall student population.”
While this act may be offensive to some and possibly against school policy, it is by no means a legal matter. However, it has become one, and police are now involved.
According to WTSP, the Richland Township Police Department also released a statement in regards to the incident, according to CBS Pittsburgh. They are aware of the “disrespectful” photo and are currently investigating.
“We have been in contact with the Richland School District and will work with them in resolving this issue, the police statement read. “Thank you to everyone who took time to notify us of this situation.”
In the Land of the Free, people are calling the police to report a child standing on a flag!
From the Superintendent of Schools on behalf of the Richland School District Solicitor:The Richland School District… Posted by Richland School District on Sunday, February 14, 2016
When armed agents of the state are called in to “investigate” an act of free speech, because they found it “disrespectful,” something in this Land of the Free has gone horribly wrong.
On Wednesday, the students returned to school for the first time since the photo caused patriotic heads to explode. Instead of standing up for free speech, the students in the photo were forced to apologize, and they and their families were chastised by the rest of the school.
Police were out in full force as well, vaguely hinting that a photo of a student stepping on a flag is somehow a security threat.
According to the Tribune-Democrat, Richland Township Police were parked or on foot on all sides of the school as buses arrived around 7:20 a.m.
Other officers circled the campus and its parking lots.
“Everyone made it to school OK,” Richland Police Chief Michael Burgan said. “It was a quiet morning. But it was better to be safe than sorry.”
The students in the photo now know what happens to those who challenge the status quo — they are cast out, rejected and singled out for their personal expression. Get in line
When a society becomes more concerned with a piece of cloth than the freedom it is meant to represent, it’s time to wake up.
As a former member of the USMC, I am unoffended when I see flag set ablaze or stepped on — because I see it as an act of expression by a group who feels oppressed. Those who feel oppressed must never be silenced.
Throughout history, the ‘patriotic’ majority has been responsible for most of the atrocities committed against our fellow humans. Only because of a handful of irate freedom loving individuals, unafraid to challenge the status quo, do we have any semblance of liberty in America today.
A true patriot is never a member of the majority who calls for their opposition to be silenced with state force because their views are ‘offensive.’ No, a true patriot is the one who refuses to be intimidated in the face of this violently obstinate collective.
In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. -Mark Twain
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world.
Follow @MattAgoristIt was revealed Monday that President Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice allegedly ordered the unmasking of the identities of Trump campaign aides who were reportedly being surveilled during the 2016 election.
The recent reports further prove, at least in part, President Donald Trump’s claims that senior Obama officials had collected intelligence on Trump aids and disseminated it throughout the government. Rice’s involvement — as it relates to her reported role in the unmasking of Trump aids and circulating sensitive information — places the longtime Obama operative at the center of another major political scandal.
Below are five facts from Susan Rice scandals every American should know.
1. Susan Rice allegedly ordered surveillance of Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign aides as part of a political intelligence operation.
Rice allegedly maintained spreadsheets of Trump aides’ telephone calls “one year before the 2016 presidential election,” according to the Daily Caller.
The Daily Caller reports:
“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday. “The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”
2. Rice claimed that climate change was responsible for the deadly civil war in Syria.
“In the years prior to civil war breaking out in Syria, that country also experienced its worst drought on record,” Rice said in October 2015, during a speech at Stanford University. “Farming families moved en masse into urban centers, increasing political unrest and further priming the country for conflict.”
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed in the conflict since President Barack Obama drew his infamous “red line” in 2012, promising to retaliate against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime if it used chemical weapons on its own people.
3. Rice once declared that there is “no military solution” to the raging conflict in Yemen.
“As in Syria, there is no military solution to the crisis in Yemen,” Rice said in April 2015, during a speech at the Arab American Institute’s Kahlil Gibran Gala.
Seven months before Rice’s speech, President Obama had called his administration’s drone strike-driven military operation in Yemen a success story.
President Trump, however, ordered more airstrikes against al-Qaeda in Yemen in February than any year in Obama’s presidency.
4. Susan Rice said accused deserter Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl served “with honor and distinction.”
In March 2015, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was charged with treason for allegedly deserting his fellow soldiers and abandoning his Afghanistan outpost in 2009.
In a June 2014 broadcast of ABC’s This Week, Susan Rice defended Bergdahl, saying he “served the United States with honor and distinction. And we’ll have the opportunity eventually to learn what has transpired in the past years.”
As Breitbart News reported, six soldiers lost their lives searching for then-Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl after he abandoned his outpost.
5. Susan Rice was the driving force behind a misinformation campaign about the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi terror attacks.
Then-UN Ambassador Rice, acting as the Obama White House’s spokeswoman, appeared on five Sunday morning talk shows and repeatedly claimed that the Benghazi attacks had been caused by an anti-Islam video.
Rice appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, and CNN and regurgitated talking points purporting that the protests that had erupted “spontaneously” near two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya and were a result of a “hateful video” that was offensive to Islam.
But government documents, released following a Judicial Watch lawsuit, reveal that government officials monitoring the attack in real-time did not cite an anti-Islam video as an explanation for the paramilitary attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
In May 2015 interview, former Obama CIA Director Mike Morell said Rice’s Benghazi talking points blaming an anti-Islam YouTube video crossed “the line between national security and politics.”
“I think the line in there that says one of our objectives here right on the Sunday show is to blame the video rather than a failure of policy,” Morell said on Fox News’ Special Report. “And as you know, I say in the book that I think that that is crossing the line between national security and politics.”
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudsonThe Sony Xperia E4 quietly sneacked onto the stage yesterday and the announcement was so quick we didnt even get a launch date and a price. Clove UK has answered both of these questions by putting the new handset on pre-order.
It's priced at £100 and will be available in late March. Clove also cleared up the OS situation the Xperia E4 will launch with Android 4.4.4 KitKat and get 5.0 Lollipop later. Note that the price is for the single-SIM version, there's another one with two SIM slots but there's no price for it yet.
Expansys is also accepting pre-orders but hasnt listed a price or a launch date. We couldnt find it in other stores for now. Three UK has a post about it, which just speculates on price but points to mid-February as the launch window.
SourceGolden State Warriors' superman Stephen Curry will probably be crowned the most valuable player in the NBA this year. But it was Miami Heat center Hassan Whiteside who had the most valuable contract for his team.
Whiteside had the best Player ROI, a new tool developed exclusively by CNNMoney to evaluate the big salaries paid to professional athletes -- from Best Bang for the Buck down to Really Overpaid.
Of course, Curry had an amazing season on the court -- one of the best ever. But his four-year contract pays him an average of $11 million a year.
Whiteside didn't make nearly Curry's impact. But he was paid a mere $1.8 million over the last two seasons, an average of $875,615 a year, according to salary tracker Spotrac.
CNNMoney's Player ROI analyzes a player's salary against the "game score," a weighted average of 14 common basketball statistics tracked by Basketball-Reference.com and compiled by STATS LLC. That means things like points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots, as well as negative stats such as turnovers, fouls, turnovers and missed shots.
Curry's total game scores for the season came to 1,942, as he led the Warriors to a record 73 wins. He easily outdistanced the second most productive player in the league, the Houston Rockets' James Harden, who had 1,794 game score points.
Despite his big salary, Curry is paid less than half of what the league's top-paid players bring in. So he qualified as a Good Bargain in our Player ROI.
Whiteside had a far more modest 1,072 game score points, but that total, combined with his modest salary, lifted him to the league's best Player ROI.
Check out Player ROI for the NBA playoffs
CNNMoney will be tracking the Player ROI during the NBA postseason, comparing their regular season salary to their performance each night in the playoffs.
So far Whiteside has been at the top of the heap in the playoffs as well. Meanwhile, an injury has sidelined Curry during the playoffs and likely will knock him into the lower reaches of the rankings for the rest of the postseason.
Top paid players such as LeBron James and Chris Paul, who are among the top five players in terms of game score performance during the season, were ranked as Overpaid in CNNMoney's Player ROI for the regular season.
That obviously doesn't measure the effect big-name players like LeBron have on ticket sales, television ratings and other money-making ventures that make owners happy to sign fat paychecks, no matter the ROI.
Related: NBA to feature ads on jerseys
And a good ROI doesn't always translate into wins for the team. See this year's Philadelphia 76ers.
Philly gave much of its playing time to inexperienced, and cheap, players. Four of them -- Ish Smith, Isaiah Canann, T.J. McConnell and Jerami Grant -- ran up their game scores with shots, assists and rebounds. Combined with their paltry salaries, they had among the best Player ROI rankings in the league. But the 76ers won all of 10 games, having one the worst seasons in league history.
By the way, low pay doesn't necessarily ensure a good Player ROI. The lowest category in our new metric, Really Overpaid, has its share of players who are paid at or near the league minimum, but who produced little on the court.
At the other end of the Really Overpaid spectrum this year was one of the best players of his generation: Kobe Bryant. He was paid $24.3 million and retired at the end of the season.Corey Lewandowski, who managed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the primary season and recently launched his own lobbying firm, appeared on “The John Fredericks Show” this week to discuss the incoming administration.
Lewandowski was upset by Rep. John Lewis’ comments that Trump is not a legitimate president due to Russian interference in the election, suggesting that Republicans would never dare question President Obama’s legitimately.
“You’ve seen that the Democrats are trying to say that he’s not a legitimate candidate,” he said. “Can you imagine just for a second if a Republican congressman would have gone out and said this about Barack Obama and continued that narrative? It would be an uproar in the mainstream media.”
Of course, Trump spent years questioning whether Obama was a legitimate president, implying that he was born outside of the U.S. and therefore not constitutionally eligible to hold the office of president, saying as recently as January of last year that he would one day reveal his “own theory” about the president’s birthplace.
And Trump was far from the only Republican politician who questioned Obama’s legitimacy.
Later in the interview, Lewandowski declared that Trump had “the largest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984.” In reality, not only did Trump lose the popular vote, he won by a smaller margin in the Electoral College than did Obama in 2008 and 2012, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and George H.W. Bush in 1988.The famous Polar Vortex has come and gone in North America. Then, it came back. What a jerk.
As I write this the outside temperature is 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and tomorrow morning’s Bus Stop Temperature promises to be about –25F windchill here in central Minnesota. Meanwhile my Twitter stream is polluted with climate science denialist tweets pointing out that it is too cold outside to believe in global warming, even though the entire land area of the United States, where this cold is being experienced as a cultural and physical phenomenon, is about one and half percent of the planet Earth, and the Northern Hemisphere has just experienced its fourth warmest January during the period known as “Since Records Began” which in this case is about 1880 to the present.
Releasing the Carbon Kraken
There are multiple dimensions along which denialists either get it wrong (because they are not paying attention or don’t understand the data) or making it wrong (because they have an interest in misdirection and misleading others). One is pretending that the weather outside their window is the climate. The other is pretending that climate change only started after Al Gore said it did, or after some other recent date, ignoring the fact that we have been releasing the Carbon Kraken since the early or mid 19th century, when industrialists figured out they could make more money using coal, rather than water, to run their ever expanding acreage of dark satanic mills.
It is hard to say exactly when Anthropogenic Global Warming began because at the start any signal from this effect may have been swamped by non anthropogenic (sometimes called “natural”) variation. The available data suggest that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million (ppm) in the 18th century, and started to rise during the last half of the 19th century. After World War II, the rate of rise increased significantly. We know added CO2 increases the global surface temperature and the temperature of the oceans, and melts glacial (and sea) ice through the greenhouse effect. This graph, from here, combines various data sources to show the increase in CO2 emissions over time:
When we look at temperatures over time, we see a close relationship between CO2 and temperature, and we see a slow rise prior to World War II with a more rapid increase after. Another graph, from here:
The increase in temperatures are slow and steady but measurable prior to World War II, and much steeper thereafter. It would be nice to see a graph like this that goes back a little farther in time to match the CO2 graph, but the “instrumental record” mostly post dates the Civil War, and really, the better quality record post dates about 1880. There are records that go way back, tens of millions of years, but they are “proxy” records of a different scale and it is hard to get them on the same graph.
People who (unbelievably) deny that global warming is a real thing will often point to climate events earlier in the 20th century that may resemble modern day events that we think could be related to warming, and say “see, it happened then, so there is no global warming now.” There are several reasons that is wrong. First, often, older records of spectacular weather events may be wrong, incomplete, or not measured like we would like them to have been measured, so going back to old newspaper accounts and such is highly unreliable. So this means that people are criticizing a carefully assembled and verified set of data (recent changes in CO2 and temperature) and complaining that it is no good because of cherry picked observation from “data” that is not controlled or verified. The second reason this is wrong is that there have been very few weather events that could not, really, have happened any time. This does not apply so much to sea level enhanced weather events. If sea level rises then sea or estuary flooding can happen in places it could never have happened before, so that is a qualitative, or base-line, difference. But for the most part, a major cold snap, a high precipitation event, drought, or other event can happen at any time. Climate scientists do not think that there are very many weather events that happen now that could never, ever have happened in the past. Rather, there is concern that some of these classes of events are happening with significantly greater frequency now than in the past.
Was Kansas Not In Kansas Any More For A Decade Or Two?
A third reason this is wrong, which is rarely pointed to but I think important, is that we really don’t know what the association is between two important factors and weather events. First, just how much new CO2 added to the atmosphere does it take to change the weather? Since CO2 records show an increase that started prior to the better quality instrumental record, the entire instrumental record is potentially affected by higher CO2, though of course, this effect would be much less prior to World War II than during more recent times. Second, and related, is this: There may be weather related effects that come not from the specific amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, but from changes in the CO2. The warming effect of added CO2 is not instantaneous, but rather, takes a long time during which time climate or weather related things may change. Adding a specific amount of CO2 to the atmosphere is like turning the stove on under a pot of tap water. The water starts out cool, and over time heats, then it eventually reaches boiling. After that, the temperature does not change; due to the boiling point, the pot of water has reached a new equilibrium and has stopped increasing in heat. But before equilibrium is reached there are constant changes in the heat level of the water inside the pot as well as other things the water is doing, such as pushing out various gasses, forming bubbles, and circulating thermally in the pot. That is a very simple analogy; there may be either simple or complex changes that happen in the Earth’s heat circulation system that occur as a result of added CO2, that involve changes over time, then reach an equilibrium of some sort and stop happening. Perhaps this occurred during the early days of increased CO2.
I have a hypothesis that I’m not aware has been examined. During the 1920s and 1930s, in the US at least, there seems to have been a handful of extreme weather events, including some major tornadoes, big hurricanes, an historic and history changing drought, and a few other things. The Wizard of Oz, the writings of John Steinbeck, and other cultural phenomena are a very interesting proxy for those climate events, in a way. I’m afraid that at the moment the data required to examine this period are not sufficient. But I wonder, looking at the above graphs, if the earlier part of the 20th century saw a metastable shift – changing from one equilibrium to a new and different equilibrium – in weather patterns, caused by CO2 induced warming, the effects of which arose for a while then faded away.
The possibility that extreme events may have happened during some period of a couple of decades early in the 20th century due to anthropogenic global warming does not explain all, or even a majority, of the denialist claims. Most of those claims are probably references to incorrect data or cherry picking of events. The largest and most frequent weather related effects of global warming probably date to the last 20 years. Weather events are known of over many decades before that, and to some extent, even centuries into the past. Therefore, the historical bowl of cherries from which denialists may choose is large. That ratio, between the expanse of historical information and the more limited recent past, is large enough that there are dozens of past events that can be cited, as misrepresentations of reality.
Bicycles Going Backwards
You wouldn’t think it easy to ride a bicycle backwards but it turns out it is. Climate science denialists are good at it, and they can use multiple bicycles at once.
In a recent twitter conversation, an Australian MP challenged John Cook with the false assertion that several studies confirmed that global temperatures have stayed steady or gone down over the last decade or so. When Cook asked for the studies, the MP replied not with any studies, but with a comment about climate models. When pressed further for the studies, the MP claimed he had not promised any such studies and when pressed further changed the conversation to the last 150 years of data. When that did not work he shifted to mention of work that he claimed defied the nearly perfect consensus among both scientists and their peer reviewed papers about climate science. When that did not work he shifted to references in a non-peer reviewed anonymous blog, and then to perceived problems in the peer reviewed process. About that time another climate science denialist attempted to shift the conversation to the alleged (and non-existent) inability of alternative energy sources to work when it is really cold out.
If you have one thing to say that is wrong, it is hard to sustain argument. If you have ten things to say that are wrong, you can sustain the argument by shifting among them as each falsehood is effectively challenged. That form of argument does not advance understanding, but it does sustain the argument, but in a rather vacuous form. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. Science denialism thrives in a vacuum.
Fighting With Words
Another dimension along which climate science denialists operate is linguistic. The terms “global warming” and “climate change” mean different things. The former is part of the latter, and in fact, “global warming” is not exactly the same as “anthropogenic global warming.” Within science, we sometimes see extended discussions of the meanings of specific terms. What is a gene? What exactly is the relationship between “founder effect” and “genetic drift?” When is an “adaptation” really an “aptation” or an “exaptation?” These conversations have three characteristics. First, they reflect changes in understanding, or sometimes, conflict between perceptions of natural phenomena that arose independently and then crashed into each other in the literature or at conferences. Second, they are useful conversations because they can expose uncertainties or ambiguities in our actual understanding of nature. Third, despite their short term utility, they eventually become boring and misleading and scientists move beyond them and get back to the actual science, eventually.
But terminology has another use, and that is obfuscation. It is often said by denialists that scientists changed from using the term “global warming” to “climate change” for one or another nefarious reasons. We also see denialists claiming that scientists used to study “climate change” and that included both global warming and global cooling, but then changed to global warming because they could make more money on it. (I wish I knew how that worked!) Recently, Rush Limbaugh, the intellectual leader of the American right wing, claimed that scientists made up the term “Polar Vortex” in order to advance tax and spend liberal ideas. The famous NBC weatherman, Al Roker, and others, noted that the term “Polar Vortex” was already there, as a term referring to a real thing, and Roker even showed the term in use in his meteorology textbook from the mid 20th century. Indeed, here is a Google Ngram Viewer result of a search for the term “Polar Vortex” in all the books Google has indexed:
Note that the term is way old, predating 1950, and had a peak in usage druing the late 80s and through the early 90s, probably related to an increased rate of study of this phenomenon that happened because of concern over the Ozone Hole.
Fighting with words was codified by, if not invented by, the Ancient Greeks. It is called sophistry, or at least, is a subset of that practice, whereby arguments are made in large part on the basis of rhetorical style or method. You see people do this all the time. If someone you know is in a grumpy mood, or does not want to admit they’ve made a mistake, they may resort to a sophistic argument.
“Sorry I’m late, I got lost because they changed what’s on the corner of your street and it confused me.”
“They never changed what’s on the corner of my street.”
“Yes they did, there used to be a coffee shop, now it’s a pet grooming place.”
“Yeah, but it’s still the same building, they never changed what’s on the corner. You got lost because you don’t like me any more.”
That sort of thing.
Science denialists look silly when they do this sort of thing, but apparently they don’t know that. And, the method is related to the backpedalling bicycles. You can always shift the conversation to the apocryphal shift between the terms “global warming” and “climate change,” implying a conspiracy among scientists, when the going gets tough.
This seems to happen a lot with hurricanes. When the Bush Administration wanted to avoid taking responsibility for a poor response to Katrina, someone actually said that the major damage done to New Orleans was not due to Katrina, but rather, to flooding. This idea was bolstered by noting that the hurricane had made landfall at a different time and place than the flooding. That, in turn, was based on the idea of “landfall” being related to the location of the eye of the storm; but the eye of a hurricane is tiny compared to the entire storm, which may be hundreds of miles across. We saw this again with Sandy. Sandy was a pretty bad hurricane, but it lost its hurricane status just before making “landfall” (though the leading edge of the storm had been on land for a long time already). Just before hitting land, Sandy integrated with another storm system, which actually made the thing a super storm with much more impact than just a hurricane, but in so morphing changed enough that it no longer fit the definition of a hurricane. Then it hit New Jersey and New York. So, those who wish to deny the importance of hurricanes simply claim that when Sandy flooded Manhattan and the New |
600 cities today that are acting in synchronization in the world’s first global protest. Thanks to everybody for being here.”
Travis House, protestor setting up his tent:
Why are you here and how long do you plan to camp out?
“I want to stay all night and into tomorrow but I’ve got to go back to work on Monday so I won’t be able to stay much longer than that. But I definitely wanted to come down and show my support and hold up some signs. This doesn’t happen very often, especially with this kind of group, so you’ve gotta seize the opportunity.”
What do you think of an Occupy protest in St. John’s in the context of what’s going on everywhere else?
“I know a lot of people are saying, is this really relevant in Canada? We’re not in as bad of a crisis as the States and, you know, we’re kind of more regulated in terms of our financial industries. But it’s totally relevant because there’s no countries, no borders — we’re all people and we have to look out for each other. And if that means that all countries stand together and do the Occupy protests, then that’s a great thing.”
What do you hope to accomplish by camping out tonight at Harbourside Park?
“To show that we actually do care. We’re not as apathetic as everybody might think. We’re definitely committed, and that’s important to show everyone else, that the issues cannot just be brushed under the table. We’re serious about this. We’re setting up our tent in the bloody rain. We want to make this clear: We care.”
Piotr Trela, protestor:
“Hello. I just want to make a short point. Harper, in the last election, got 39.6 per cent of the vote. He now wields 100 per cent of power for four years. So what’s wrong with this picture? We need proportional representation because otherwise this is not democracy.”
Crowd, in unison:
“Show us what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”
and “The corporate attack we gotta beat back! The corporate attack we gotta beat, beat back!”
Female protestor, speaking about the content of an economics university-level text book:
“Firstly, it tells you that our economic system is based on self-interest. Self-interest is the core of our current economic model, and altruism is considered irrational behaviour. This is text book economics. Secondly, looking at where money comes from—yes, it is created out of thin air. It is based on nothing. And that process has been privatized. Private banks create money out of nothing as debt and loan it into existence at interest. It’s a system that is bound to fail and bound to collapse while those who have the power to create money grab up all the world’s resources.
“There is a movement around the world for communities to create their own money. It can be done — money is just a unit of measurement, just like an inch or a pound or a foot. To say that we don’t have enough money to provide for our community’s needs is like saying we don’t have enough inches to build a house. It’s that absurd. There are many examples of complimentary currency systems around the world that are working. In fact, even at the large scale corporate level, there are international barter networks that are doing billions of dollars worth of trades between corporations. So it’s not a fringe idea, it’s very mainstream and it works. In Switzerland there is a business-to-business community currency that has been in operation since the Great Depression. It’s been on the go for about 60 yeas, but it’s credited with stabilizing the entire Swiss economy because it acts as a shock absorber for the global economy — people have an alternate means of exchange of goods and services. The (local community currency project) has been on hiatus for a few years but we’re hoping to bring it back in the near future.”
“When we look at reforming the system and allocating money and policies and all that, that’s all great. But we have to go deeper, we have to look at where the money comes from, and how can we exchange goods and services with each other using our own community-based medium of exchange.”
Protestor on recap of day:
“The postal workers had a word today and we also marched to Scotia Square.”
“People have donated $300 out of pocket so far to keep people warm, dry and hydrated.”
“We had people coming together and discussing great ideas and trying to discuss resolutions to the difficulties that we face right now.”
How long will this go on for now?
“As long as it takes. A lot of us are dedicated in our passion and I myself will be staying here at the very least (for) five, six, seven or eight days — whatever it takes. I’m willing to give up some basic comfort and amenities for a greater cause because this is much bigger than I or our community. It’s a global thing, so we’re committed to doing whatever we have to do to have our voices heard.”
Father Mark Nichols of St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Upper Gullies:
“I came because I am really concerned about the growing gap between rich and poor, certainly in Canada in general. But as a province (we’re) the richest we’ve ever been and we’re not going to be this rich again because the oil’s going to run out. If you look at the Religious Social Action Coalition, the information we’re providing—that the gap between the highest 20 per cent of income (earners) and lowest 20 per cent of income (earners) in 1992, when the cod moratorium started, (compared to) 2009. It increased by 37 per cent. This is the richest we’ve ever been and the gap between the rich and the poor is growing, and my concern is what’s it going to be like when the oil runs out and they’ve got to start slashing things, right?
“There’s just something not right here…and I know there are many issues that are drawing people out to the Occupy Newfoundland protest and the Occupy movement in general, but that’s certainly one of them. So I wanted to come out to show my support, and I wore my clericals because I wanted (people) to see that the Church does care about this even though you don’t usually see too many of us out at these. But this matters, because so many Canadians aren’t aware, or maybe they don’t care (and) are blissfully unaware I guess, that this is serious. The oil belongs to everybody in this province and everybody has to have a share of it. As a priest, in my last parish on the southeast coast of Labrador, one of the communities I served was the last one to get electricity—and that was in the mid-1980s—and they still don’t have treated drinking water. They’re drinking straight out of a pond. Like, today! It’s not right.”
“Oil royalties (is) temporary money and they need to do some things. If they were spending it on infrastructure to level the playing field in the province, or if they were taking some concrete actions to make life better for the have-nots. I mean, we’re a have province now but we have the highest low-income, according to the Conference Board of Canada, rate in the country at 13.2 per cent (and) 13.1 per cent in St. John’s. So you can’t say it’s rural Newfoundland skewing the statistics, right? It just doesn’t seem right to me — it seems like the government could do a little bit better than that.
“And nationally I am concerned about how corporations seem to have more sway with the government than disadvantaged people, whether it be aboriginal communities or special needs people or senior citizens. In my ministry I see a lot of seniors — I take home communion to seniors and things like that. And one of the things I’ve seen in southeast Labrador is, these senior citizens up there—you know, 65-plus, who had worked harder than you or I will probably ever work in our lives—just trying to survive in the fishery. You know, they don’t have investments in Goldman Sachs or any of these big corporations. All they have is Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security, guaranteed income supplement — and they’re trying to survive on that in places where heating oil is increasingly expensive. And this province, especially in St. John’s area, is not a cheap place to live. So I’m really worried about the seniors that were the ones that built this province, and how we’re saying thank you to them.”Rapper and businessman Sean "P. Diddy" Combs said blacks got "shortchanged" under Barack Obama's presidency in an interview with Al Sharpton on Sunday. Combs told the black community to hold on to their vote. He said, "make them come for our vote."
"My number one thing, to be honest, is black people," Combs said to Sharpton on MSNBC. "I feel like we put President Obama in the White House and when I look back I just wanted more done for my people because that is the name of the game, it's politics. Put somebody in office. You get in return things that you care about for your communities."
"I think we got a little shortchanged," Combs said, adding "and that's not knocking the president." There is a lot going on. He's done an excellent job, but I think it's time to turn up the heat because the black vote is going to decide who is the next president of the United States."
Combs said he hoped Hillary Clinton "starts to directly talk to the black community" and advised the black community, "don't pacify yourself, really revolutionize the game. Make them come for our vote."
"Hillary Clinton, you know, I hope she starts to directly talk to the black community," Combs told Sharpton. "It really makes me feel almost hurt that our issues are not addressed and we're such a big part of the voting bloc."
Combs said black voters should "hold their vote" because he doesn't believe in any candidate.
"I honestly thing that the heat has to be turned up so much that as a community we got to hold our vote. Don't pacify yourself, really revolutionize the game. Make them come for our vote. It's a whole different strategy but I think we need to hold our vote because I don't believe in any of them."August 22, 2011; Source: Detroit News | The Maya Archaeology Initiative (MAI), a cultural-defense project associated with the California-based World Free Press Institute, is being threatened with legal action by Kellogg Co. for using a toucan as part of its logo. Kellogg says that the image is too close to the Toucan Sam image used on its Froot Loops cereal boxes.
In a letter to MAI’s attorney, Kellogg also expressed concern that the initiative’s logo uses Mayan imagery, “given that our character is frequently depicted in that setting.” The fact that that setting is, of course, the home of actual people and a culture and the Toucan in question does not seem to be of any importance to Kellogg, which apparently believes that they have appropriated the bird for all eternity.
In Kellogg’s defense, the law requires a trademark owner to vigorously police any possible infringement, lest it be deemed to have “abandoned” the mark. But lawyers more acquainted with the real world understand that there is a fine line between trademark policing and bullying. I’m not sure that there is much to be said here that might more clearly illuminate the appalling tone-deafness of the situation. One might wonder if there are no shared values between Kellogg Co. and the Kellogg Foundation, which is now devoting much of its grantmaking to anti-racism work.
As MAI’s Francisco Estrada Belli told the Detroit News, “This is a bit like the Washington Redskins claiming trademark infringement against the National Congress of American Indians.”
What say you, NPQ readers: Could these images be mistaken for one another?—Ruth McCambridgeI am a huge fan of the Peanuts, pumpkins and all things Halloween, so it should come as no surprise that “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” tops the list as one of my favorite movies. I have it on VHS, Blu-Ray and an awesome iPad version of the book. If this is already sounding weird, I should probably refrain from mentioning that I also spent a couple of years dancing as Peanuts character at Knott’s Berry Farm. I will add that I especially love this movie because it features Linus who is essentially me as a child (maybe as an adult too.) Like Linus, I have a deep appreciation for pumpkin patches and blankets and I believe both deserve to be treated with utmost respect.
While these cookies would be an excellent addition to my annual viewing of the movie or my pumpkin party I didn’t actually make these cookies for me. A couple of months ago I signed up to be part of a really amazing event: The Go Bo Foundation Bake Sale! Cookie artists from all over the world will be donating cookies to benefit the Go Bo Foundation, an organization that funds research, supports treatment, and helps families of children with life-threatening medical conditions. When deciding what type of cookies to donate, it only made sense to channel a little bit of Linus and create the most sincere pumpkin patch possible.
I’ll admit that it’s my favorite set of cookies to date. Did I also mention that they are pumpkin spice cookies?
And now I give you “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” told in cookies.
Excited for Halloween everyone prepares their Halloween costumes and prepares for the big Halloween party.
“A Person should always choose a costume that is in direct contrast to her own personality.”
Everyone except Linus that is, who is too busy thinking about the arrival of the Great Pumpkin.
“There are three things you should never talk about: religion, politics and the great pumpkin.”
While everyone else heads out for “tricks or treats,” Sally and Linus wait in the pumpkin patch.
“The great pumpkin chooses the pumpkin patch that is most sincere.”
Despite all of the great candy and gum everyone else gets while trick or treating, Charlie Brown ends up with a bag full of rocks.
“I got a rock”
On his way home from the Halloween party, Snoopy stops by the pumpkin patch. His silhouette reflects against the moon making Linus think that the Great Pumpkin has come.
Linus and Sally are startled by Snoopy and Linus passes out thinking the Great Pumpkin has arrived.
Sally realizes that the Great Pumpkin is never coming and demands restitution. She leaves Linus in the pumpkin patch where he falls asleep. He vows to wait again next year.
As part of the set for Go Bo, we were asked to include one butterfly cookie. I of course had to stick with the theme, so I made a jack-o-lantern butterfly.
I love these cookies for several reasons: the theme obviously, the pumpkin spice flavor and the good cause they are going to. I hope they spread joy in Door County, Wisconsin where they are headed off to tomorrow.Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.
Let's talk about writing tales.
The highest aspiration of any tale author — outside of being a joy to read — is to write with clarity and boldness in a style that is uniquely their own. But what do we mean by 'clarity'? By 'boldness'? Or even'style'?
Since you're probably not going to read the excellent (and vastly superior) Elements of Style (by White and Strunk), I've written this essay to boil down some of the most relevant bits — and add a few SCP-specific flourishes. We'll start by taking a chunk of prose and editing it in accordance to a few basic principles of style.
Let's begin.
Excerpt
The prose we'll be editing is the introduction for a story I've been writing. I've made it bad so we can work together and make it good:
"You our new merlin?" He asked. The speaker resembled a plump, bearded, silver-haired viking. He stood at the bottom of the airplane's stairway, cheerily grinning up to the tiny figure of Yara Toma. She gave him a carefully guarded smile. Yara was comparatively tiny. She was a petite brown-skinned woman with a head shaved as smooth as glass. She had a face full of iron piercings. Yara drew her thick and heavy coat close around her and descended cautiously. The man looked like a hugger. "Sargeant Matthieu LaPierre, I presume? Yes, I'm your new esoteric specialist — Yara Toma." Please don't be a hugger, please don't be a— He hugged her. "Just call me Yorkie." He had a pleasant scent. She stepped back after he released her, following his enormous arm with her eyes. He swept it out toward the snow-draped mountains that surrounded them. "Welcome to Antarctica, Ms. Toma." "Thank you, sergeant." Yara's nerve endings throbbed from the contact she did not want. She tightened her grip on her coat and disguised the pain as a shiver. "Could we—" "Right, right. Chilly as a frost giant's nuts out here. Can't imagine the flight was much better. This way." She was led toward a bright blue trailer.
Let's dig in.
Active vs Passive Voice
When the subject of a sentence is also the noun that's acted upon, the sentence is passive.
She was led toward a bright blue trailer.
Who's leading Yara Toma to the trailer? Is she leading herself? Are wizards leading her? Our subject ('She') is acted upon by our verb ('led'). Therefore, this is the passive voice. To make this the active voice, we must add a subject which is doing the leading.
Yorkie led her toward a bright blue trailer.
Our subject (Yorkie) performs an action (led) upon another noun (her).
The active voice is clear and explicit; the passive voice is subtle and implicit. When you use the active voice, we know who is doing what to who. When you use the passive voice, things simply occur — we aren't told who or what was responsible.
Use the passive voice when you want your prose to sound distant and powerless; things occur and we don't know why. This can be great for SCP articles. Use the active voice when you want your prose to sound clear and bold; we know precisely who's doing what to whom.
When you're unsure which voice you're using, there's a simple trick you can perform: Add 'by zombies' after the verb.
She was led by zombies toward a bright blue trailer.
This works, because it's passive.
Yorkie led by zombies her toward a bright blue trailer.
This doesn't, because it's active.
Be mindful: This trick will not work in all cases. But for most cases, it works just fine.
Positive Statements
Affirmations of what is true are usually stronger than affirmations of what is false.
Yara's nerve endings throbbed from the contact she did not want.
Let's change this to:
Yara's nerve endings throbbed from the unwanted contact.
Shorter and punchier. Our brains don't have to spend extra time inverting the meaning of the word 'want' via the modifier of 'not'. Instead, we immediately know how Yara's nerve endings felt about this contact: It was unwanted.
For this reason, use the word 'not' carefully. Readers prefer being told what something 'is'. Consider:
He is not honest.
He is dishonest.
That is 'not' to say there is no place for 'not'; furthermore, other negative words can carry a substantial punch:
He is never on time. She never found him useful. He is never honest.
Concrete over Abstract
Straight from Elements of Style: "Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract."
White and Strunk provide an excellent example of this from Herbert Spencer's Philosophy of Style:
In proportion as the manners, customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the regulations of their penal code will be severe.
In proportion as men delight in battles, bull-fights, and combats of gladiators, will they punish by hanging, burning, and the rack.
Specificity of detail — particularly transforming the abstract into the concrete — is how readers become immersed in your prose. If you want to convince someone that they're lost inside the Bastille, do not merely tell them they are lost inside the Bastille. Begin by describing the smell.
How can we apply this to our prose?
He had a pleasant scent.
Let's expand this by getting specific:
He had a particular scent. Vanilla and licorice, with just a lingering trace of his breakfast. Noodles? Ramen, maybe.
Now, instead of just trying to imagine a 'pleasant scent', the reader is prompted with things that are familiar to them — words which will evoke memories of scents they themselves know. Whether these scents are pleasant are left up to the reader's discretion.
Brevity
Omit everything that is unnecessary. What remains will become stronger for it.
The speaker resembled a plump, bearded, silver-haired viking. He stood at the bottom of the airplane's stairway, cheerily grinning up to the tiny figure of Yara Toma. She gave him a carefully guarded smile. Yara was comparatively tiny. She was a petite brown-skinned woman with a head shaved as smooth as glass. She had a face full of iron piercings. Yara drew her thick and heavy coat close around her and descended cautiously. The man looked like a hugger.
By clipping out redundant words and phrases, we increase the force of what's left over:
The speaker resembled a plump, bearded, silver-haired viking. He stood at the bottom of the airplane's stairway, cheerily grinning up to the tiny figure of Yara Toma. She gave him a carefully guarded smile. Yara was comparatively tiny. She was a petite brown-skinned woman with a head shaved as smooth as glass. She had a face full of iron piercings. Yara drew her thick and heavy coat close around her and descended cautiously. The man looked like a hugger.
'Cheerily' is out, because it's hard to imagine the speaker's grin as anything but.
'Tiny figure of' is out, because we describe her (Yora's) tininess in the very next paragraph.
'Carefully' is needless adverb-ing, and also implied by 'guarded'.
'Brown-skinned' can be reduced to 'brown'; it's bolder and tells us more about her. She isn't just 'brown-skinned'; she's brown — it's part of who she is.
A thick coat is almost certainly 'heavy'.
What's 'necessary' in prose can be a tricky subject: Maybe you think I'm cutting too much. Maybe you think I'm cutting too little. In regards to what to cut (and what to leave in), there are no hard and fast rules; you need to learn to trust your own ear. Just remember that the more you cut, the more punch everything else has.
Also, notice that most of the things I removed are adverbs. Regard any adverb (and, in fact, any word that ends with -ly) with deep suspicion. 'Loudly', 'cheerily', 'happily','sadly','sorrowfully' — these are all words that modify what you want to say. Whenever possible, write prose that says precisely what you mean. Apply adverbs (heh)'sparingly'.
If you need a resource to help identify adverbs in your prose, here's a simple one. You might not agree with the style this editor promotes, but it's an excellent way to identify just how much you're relying on adverbs to get your meaning across.
One more thing. While we're discussing redundancy, I want to point out that there are some phrases — particularly in SCP articles — that just need to leave the goddamn room:
Evidence suggests that this effect is temporary. This effect is likely temporary.
It is currently believed to be impossible. It is likely impossible.
This effect primarily causes blindness. This effect causes blindness.
Generally, this effect is negative. This effect is negative.
Don't be timid and don't be vague. Whenever you can get away with saying what something is — rather than what it may be — then say what it is.
Non-Homogeneous
Elements of Style provides the following example of a 'homogenous' sentence:
The third concert of the subscription series was given last evening, and a large audience was in attendance. Mr. Edward Appleton was the soloist, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra furnished the instrumental music. The former showed himself to be an artist of the first rank, while the latter proved itself fully deserving of its high reputation. The interest aroused by the series has been very gratifying to the Committee, and it is planned to give a similar series annually hereafter.
Thump, and whump. Thump, and whump. Thump, and whump. Each sentence is two or more beats (two clauses connected via conjunctions). The paragraph takes on a banal, predictable rhythm. There are no surprises.
Break these sentences up: Split compound sentences into simple sentences to create something with vigor and variety.
However, if you go too far, you will encounter the same problem — merely inverted:
The third concert of the subscription series was given last evening. A large audience was in attendance. Mr. Edward Appleton was the soloist. The Boston Symphony Orchestra furnished the instrumental music. The former showed himself to be an artist of the first rank. The latter proved itself fully deserving of its high reputation. The interest aroused by the series has been very gratifying to the Committee. It has planned to give a similar series annually hereafter.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Each sentence is simple; each delivers a single data-point. This is just as predictable as the first example. The correct solution, then, is to mix simple sentences with compound sentences — going so far as to even vary your usage between conjunctions, semi-colons, and hyphens:
The third concert of the subscription series was given last evening; a large audience was in attendance. Mr. Edward Appleton was the soloist — the Boston Symphony Orchestra furnished the instrumental music. The former showed himself to be an artist of the first rank, while the latter proved itself fully deserving of its high reputation. The interest aroused by the series has been very gratifying to the Committee. It has planned to give a similar series annually hereafter.
The content might still be boorish, but at least the pacing is varied and complex. It's livelier and harder to predict, which makes it easier to read.
Note: Do not over-use hyphens and semi-colons. They are the devil's punctuation, and should be applied sparingly.
How can we apply this to our prose? Let's look at the paragraph where Yara is described:
She gave him a guarded smile. Yara was comparatively tiny. She was a petite brown woman with a head shaved as smooth as glass. She had a face full of iron piercings. Yara drew her thick coat close around her and descended cautiously. The man looked like a hugger.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Boring, predictable, sing-song. This doesn't sound like prose. It sounds like a list.
Let's break it up:
She gave him a guarded smile. Yara was comparatively tiny — a petite brown woman with a head shaved as smooth as glass and a face full of iron piercings. She drew her thick coat close and descended cautiously. The man looked like a hugger.
Notice all I did was combine three sentences (the second, third, and fourth) with a hyphen and a conjunction ('and'). Just by doing that, it goes from reading like a boring list to an actual chunk of prose.
Note: Don't get too hung up on this. Two or three sentences in a row with a similar structure is fine. It's when you go past 'two or three' that you start getting into trouble. Also, as always, there are exceptions.
Sometimes, repetition is good. Sometimes, you want repetition. Sometimes, repetition is the whole point.
Get it?
Parallel Construction
Elements of Style provides this excellent example of parallel construction:
Formerly, science was taught by the textbook method, while now the laboratory method is employed.
Formerly, science was taught by the textbook method; now it is taught by the laboratory method.
The first sentence appears timid; the second is stronger. Why? Because the second presents two contrasting ideas in the same framework: "X was done via Y method; now, X is done via Z method". Present similar ideas in similar ways. This allows the reader to better admire their differences.
This is parallel construction. Contrast it with non-homogeneous prose: The flow of your sentences should be lively and unexpected, but the way you present the ideas in those sentences should not distract. The point is to compare the ideas — not the presentation.
Here's another example that's unpredictable, but also unpleasant:
It happens in all four seasons: The spring, summer, the fall, and winter.
That 'the' in front of 'fall' is hard to predict, but not in a good way — it's distracting us. Compare it to the far more satisfying:
It happens in all four seasons: The spring, summer, fall, and winter.
Or, even better:
It happens in all four seasons: Spring, summer, fall, and winter.
How can we apply this to our prose?
(Truth be told, it doesn't really apply. I couldn't find a way to work it in. Sorry!)
Implicit over Explicit
John is hanging for dear life to a length of rope dangling over a pit. The rope is moments from giving. Once it does, John will fall down the pit and die. Which of the following passages conveys this information with greater gravitas?
John clung to the rope. It snapped; he fell to his death.
John clung to the rope. It snapped.
Readers don't need you to tell them everything. In fact, the more you can convey by not telling them, the more force your prose will carry. Implicit moments — moments that are not explicitly stated, but implicitly conveyed — deliver a wallop.
Here's another example:
John threw the pebble into the pit and waited for a sound. After ten minutes, he stopped waiting.
Rather than say 'he heard nothing after ten minutes', we just tell the reader he stopped waiting after ten minutes. This creates a gap in the reader's understanding — a tiny'micro-mystery'. Why did he stop waiting? The reader fills the gap, solving the mystery near-instantly: Because he didn't hear it land.
This is more satisfying than the (explicit) alternative:
John threw the pebble into the pit and waited for a sound. After ten minutes, he heard nothing.
No gap, no mystery.
How can we apply this to our prose? How about right here:
"Sargeant Matthieu LaPierre, I presume? Yes, I'm your new esoteric specialist — Yara Toma." Please don't be a hugger, please don't be a— He hugged her. "Just call me Yorkie."
On one hand, I like the way this reads ('please don't be someone who does x' — 'does x'). On the other hand, it's a great opportunity to show how we can be creativity implicit, implying a hug without saying it:
"Sargeant Matthieu LaPierre, I presume? Yes, I'm your new esoteric specialist — Yara Toma." Please don't be a hugger, please don't be a— —ngh. Yep. Definitely a hugger. "Just call me Yorkie."
We imply the hug happened, which gives the hug that much force. We also continue Yara's inner monologue, which helps keep the reader in her head.
We feel the hug — and her despair regarding it — rather than merely being told that the hug 'happened'.
Dialogue Tags
This is incorrect:
"You our new merlin?" He asked.
The 'H' should be lower-case. This is because 'He asked' is clearly not a complete sentence, and hence a clause dependent on the opening quote. The question mark should be treated as a comma. In other words, grammatically, this sentence is identical to:
"You're our new merlin," He said.
Which is clearly wrong.
This, however, would be correct:
"You're our new merlin." He smiled.
Because it is clear that in this case, 'He smiled' is the start of a new sentence. Hence the quotation is a self-contained sentence.
Regarding dialogue tags ("he said", "she yelled", "they cried"): Do not be afraid of relying on'said'. There's nothing wrong with the word. It's so commonplace that it's nearly invisible to the reader's eye.
However, don't be afraid to avoid using tags at all. When dialogue occurs between two parties, we can follow who's saying what by nature of the alternating quotes. When more are present, the reader can be reminded who is speaking via the content of the words or simple proximity of the speaker's name:
"This won't do." John shook his head and sat up in his chair. "We need to act quickly." "Why?" Julia frowned. Jack laughed, shaking his head as he left the room. "Idiots." Julia pressed on: "Why, John? Why do we need to act?" "Because we're running out of time."
Notice — none of the dialogue above has been tagged. Nevertheless, you know precisely who said what.
Sidenote: When your characterizations are so strong that we know who's speaking regardless of the prose, you're in a good place. If I can tell who said something merely because I know it's what they'd say, you've succeeded in getting across your character. Aim for this.
How can we apply this to our prose? Right at the opening:
"You our new merlin?" he asked. The speaker resembled a plump, bearded, silver-haired viking.
The fact that we call the guy'speaker' leaves no confusion over who this quote belongs to, so the tag is completely unnecessary:
"You our new merlin?" The speaker resembled a plump, bearded, silver-haired viking.
Final Draft
Let's see what we've gone from, and what we have now.
Here's what we started with:
"You our new merlin?" He asked. The speaker resembled a plump, bearded, silver-haired viking. He stood at the bottom of the airplane's stairway, cheerily grinning up to the tiny figure of Yara Toma. She gave him a cautious, guarded smile. Yara was comparatively tiny. She was a petite brown-skinned woman with a head shaved as smooth as glass. She had a face full of iron piercings. Yara drew her thick and heavy coat close around her and descended cautiously. The man looked like a hugger. "Sargeant Matthieu LaPierre, I presume? Yes, I'm your new esoteric specialist — Yara Toma." Please don't be a hugger, please don't be a— He hugged her. "Just call me Yorkie." He had a pleasant scent. She stepped back after he released her, following his enormous arm with her eyes. He swept it out toward the snow-draped mountains that surrounded them. "Welcome to Antarctica, Ms. Toma." "Thank you, sergeant." Yara's nerve endings throbbed from the contact she did not want. She tightened her grip on her coat and disguised the pain as a shiver. "Could we—" "Right, right. Chilly as a frost giant's nuts out here. Can't imagine the flight was much better. This way." She was led toward a bright blue trailer.
After all our corrections and changes, here's what we've got now:
"You our new merlin?" The speaker resembled a plump, bearded, silver-haired viking. He stood at the bottom of the airplane's stairway, grinning up to Yara Toma. She gave him a guarded smile. Yara was comparatively tiny — a petite brown woman with a head shaved as smooth as glass and a face full of iron piercings. She drew her thick coat close and descended cautiously. The man looked like a hugger. "Sargeant Matthieu LaPierre, I presume? Yes, I'm your new esoteric specialist — Yara Toma." Please don't be a hugger, please don't be a— —ngh. Yep. Definitely a hugger. "Just call me Yorkie." He had a particular scent. Vanilla and licorice, with just a lingering trace of his breakfast. Noodles? Ramen, maybe. She stepped back after he released her, following his enormous arm with her eyes. He swept it out toward the snow-draped mountains that surrounded them. "Welcome to Antarctica, Ms. Toma." "Thank you, sergeant." Yara's nerve endings throbbed from the unwanted contact. She tightened her grip on her coat and disguised the pain as a shiver. "Could we—" "Right, right. Chilly as a frost giant's nuts out here. Can't imagine the flight was much better. This way." Yorkie led her toward a bright blue trailer.
Where the first draft felt stilted and flat, this one bounces. It's got some pep and vinegar; it's got kick. It's got moxie.
And that's it, for now! I hope some of this helps you. The point isn't to enforce a monolithic style; the point is just to get you thinking about how style works so you can make your prose snappy and strong.
Remember, there are no real rules in writing, save one:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. - Dean Koontz
Never waste the reader's time.
Alright, then — presuming this goes over well, the next essay is where we'll talk about pacing in tales: Sentences, paragraphs, and scenes as units of composition — how to pace a story while controlling a reader's knowledge, interest, and expectations.
See you then!
ResourcesHearthstone can single-handedly be thanked for blowing open the digital card game market on PC. It's a great CCG, and without it most of the games listed below probably wouldn't even exist—despite the fact that none of them will likely ever see the same level of success. As someone who can't help but play every card game I can get my hands on, I noticed most of these competitors were often written off as dead or dying in the shadow of Hearthstone without even getting a chance to prove themselves.
Whether you like it or not, we're in a golden age for CCGs on PC, and there's a lot of fantastic flavors to try. Even better, since Hearthstone is the top dog by a mile, |
carried in a backpack" and assembled and deployed within a matter of minutes. One news report AV touts is headlined "Drone technology could be coming to a Police Department near you", which focuses on the Qube.
But another article prominently touted on AV's website describes the tiny UAS product dubbed the "Switchblade", which, says the article, is "the leading edge of what is likely to be the broader, even wholesale, weaponization of unmanned systems." The article creepily hails the Switchblade drone as "the ultimate assassin bug". That's because, as I wrote back in 2011, "it is controlled by the operator at the scene, and it worms its way around buildings and into small areas, sending its surveillance imagery to an i-Pad held by the operator, who can then direct the Switchblade to lunge toward and kill the target (hence the name) by exploding in his face." AV's website right now proudly touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves the "Switchblade" and how it is preparing to purchase more. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target - say, a sniper. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."
What possible reason could someone identify as to why these small, portable weaponized UAS products will not imminently be used by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the US? They're designed to protect their users in dangerous situations and to enable a target to be more easily killed. Police agencies and the increasingly powerful drone industry will tout their utility in capturing and killing dangerous criminals and their ability to keep officers safe, and media reports will do the same. The handful of genuinely positive uses from drones will be endlessly touted to distract attention away from the dangers they pose.
One has to be incredibly naïve to think that these "assassin bugs" and other lethal drone products will not be widely used on US soil by an already para-militarized domestic police force. As Radley Balko's forthcoming book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" details, the primary trend in US law enforcement is what its title describes as "The Militarization of America's Police Forces". The history of domestic law enforcement particularly after 9/11 has been the importation of military techniques and weapons into domestic policing. It would be shocking if these weapons were not imminently used by domestic law enforcement agencies.
In contrast to weaponized drones, even the most naïve among us do not doubt the imminent proliferation of domestic surveillance drones. With little debate, they have already arrived. As the ACLU put it in their recent report: "US law enforcement is greatly expanding its use of domestic drones for surveillance." An LA Times article from last month reported that "federal authorities have stepped up efforts to license surveillance drones for law enforcement and other uses in US airspace" and that "the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it had issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007, far more than were previously known." Moreover, the agency "has estimated 10,000 drones could be aloft five years later" and "local and state law enforcement agencies are expected to be among the largest customers."
Concerns about the proliferation of domestic surveillance drones are typically dismissed with the claim that they do nothing more than police helicopters and satellites already do. Such claims are completely misinformed. As the ACLU's 2011 comprehensive report on domestic drones explained: "Unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life."
Multiple attributes of surveillance drones make them uniquely threatening. Because they are so cheap and getting cheaper, huge numbers of them can be deployed to create ubiquitous surveillance in a way that helicopters or satellites never could. How this works can already been seen in Afghanistan, where the US military has dubbed its drone surveillance system "the Gorgon Stare", named after the "mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them". That drone surveillance system is "able to scan an area the size of a small town" and "the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence that [can] seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity". Boasted one US General: "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."
The NSA already maintains ubiquitous surveillance of electronic communications, but the Surveillance State faces serious limits on its ability to replicate that for physical surveillance. Drones easily overcome those barriers. As the ACLU report put it:
I've spoken previously about why a ubiquitous Surveillance State ushers in unique and deeply harmful effects on human behavior and a nation's political culture and won't repeat that here (here's the video (also embedded below) and the transcript of one speech where I focus on how that works). Suffice to say, as the ACLU explains in its domestic drone report: "routine aerial surveillance would profoundly change the character of public life in America" because only drone technology enables such omnipresent physical surveillance.
Beyond that, the tiny size of surveillance drones enables them to reach places that helicopters obviously cannot, and to do so without detection. They can remain in the sky, hovering over a single place, for up to 20 hours, a duration that is always increasing - obviously far more than manned helicopters can achieve. As AV's own report put it (see page 11), their hovering capability also means they can surveil a single spot for much longer than many military satellites, most of which move with the earth's rotation (the few satellites that remain fixed "operate nearly 25,000 miles from the surface of the earth, therefore limiting the bandwidth they can provide and requiring relatively larger, higher power ground stations"). In sum, surveillance drones enable a pervasive, stealth and constantly hovering Surveillance State that is now well beyond the technological and financial abilities of law enforcement agencies.
One significant reason why this proliferation of domestic drones has become so likely is the emergence of a powerful drone lobby. I detailed some of how that lobby is functioning here, so will simply note this passage from a recent report from the ACLU of Iowa on its attempts to persuade legislators to enact statutory limits on the use of domestic drones:
"Drones have their own trade group, the Association for Unmanned Aerial Systems International, which includes some of the nation's leading aerospace companies. And Congress now has 'drone caucuses' in both the Senate and House."
Howie Klein has been one of the few people focusing on the massive amounts of money from the drone industry now flowing into the coffers of key Congressional members from both parties in this "drone caucus". Suffice to say, there is an enormous profit to be made from exploiting the domestic drone market, and as usual, that factor is thus far driving the (basically nonexistent) political response to these threats.
What is most often ignored by drone proponents, or those who scoff at anti-drone activism, are the unique features of drones: the way they enable more warfare, more aggression, and more surveillance. Drones make war more likely precisely because they entail so little risk to the war-making country. Similarly, while the propensity of drones to kill innocent people receives the bulk of media attention, the way in which drones psychologically terrorize the population - simply by constantly hovering over them: unseen but heard - is usually ignored, because it's not happening in the US, so few people care (see this AP report from yesterday on how the increasing use of drone attacks in Afghanistan is truly terrorizing local villagers). It remains to be seen how Americans will react to drones constantly hovering over their homes and their childrens' schools, though by that point, their presence will be so institutionalized that it will be likely be too late to stop.
Notably, this may be one area where an actual bipartisan/trans-partisan alliance can meaningfully emerge, as most advocates working on these issues with whom I've spoken say that libertarian-minded GOP state legislators have been as responsive as more left-wing Democratic ones in working to impose some limits. One bill now pending in Congress would prohibit the use of surveillance drones on US soil in the absence of a specific search warrant, and has bipartisan support.
Only the most authoritarian among us will be incapable of understanding the multiple dangers posed by a domestic drone regime (particularly when their party is in control of the government and they are incapable of perceiving threats from increased state police power). But the proliferation of domestic drones affords a real opportunity to forge an enduring coalition in defense of core privacy and other rights that transcends partisan allegiance, by working toward meaningful limits on their use. Making people aware of exactly what these unique threats are from a domestic drone regime is the key first step in constructing that coalition.
Harms from the Surveillance State
One of the most difficult challenges in all discussions of privacy rights is articulating what most people instinctively already know: why privacy is so vital and why a ubiquitous Surveillance State is so destructive. Here is the speech I gave last year in Chicago in which I attempted to articulate those reasons:America's Catholic bishops are meeting to wage another battle against LGBT people and same-sex marriage.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is meeting this week and rewriting the Catholic Church's voters' guide to include a massive assault on LGBT people and same-sex marriage. Even though the issue has been decided by the Supreme Court, America's Catholic bishops have decided to increase the mention of same-sex marriage literally tenfold - it was mentioned only once in the most recent edition (2007) - and to include it in the section that deals with "intrinsic evil."
"Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship," published by the Catholic Church in America, offers advice to voters on how to decide for whom to vote.
"Catholics often face difficult choices about how to vote," the 2007 edition notes. "This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter's intent is to support that position."
Now, as Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter writes, same-sex marriage will be included in the section on "intrinsic evil," and in examples of "intrinsic evil," such as abortion or racism.
Noting that "Pope Francis did not think it necessary to mention the issue directly even once during the six days he was here in the U.S.," Winters says the Bishops "should have the honesty to rename it 'Forming Consciences for Fighting Same-Sex Marriage.'"
He also says, "at a time when racial tensions are at their worst in my adult lifetime, the proposed text equates same-sex marriage with racism, calling them both intrinsic evils, even though civil same-sex marriage is not, and cannot be, an intrinsic evil."
"Even within the section on intrinsic evil, it is shocking that same sex marriage now gets more ink than abortion."
Current USCCB president Joseph Edward Kurtz has likened same-sex marriage to abortion, saying in 2010 of Prop 8, "today is like 1970 for marriage," and asking, "If you had seen Roe v. Wade coming three years out, what would you have done differently?"
After the Supreme Court's June ruling on same-sex marriage, Kurtz called it "a tragic error that harms the common good and most vulnerable among us, especially children."
Image via United States Conference of Catholic Bishops/Facebook
See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected]The 2016 political campaign, heretofore marked by concerns over Republican Donald Trump's temperament and knowledge to be president, has suddenly pivoted to whether Hillary Clinton's health is up to the same challenge.
Her forced interruption to her campaign over the weekend dramatically focused attention on a question that Mr. Trump had sought to make a central issue: whether Ms. Clinton lacks the stamina for the job.
In purely political terms, her failure to disclose that her doctor had diagnosed her with what is called walking pneumonia only underscored her penchant for personal secrecy, which has long plagued her political career.
Aides sought to defend that failure as evidence of Ms. Clinton's gritty determination to "power through" the immediate difficulty and continue her strenuous schedule, despite medical advice to take a few days off the trail to recuperate.
But by keeping her traveling press companions in the dark for several hours about her whereabouts and condition -- and accordingly the American people -- her campaign compounded the negative public perception of the woman's cloak of privacy, sheltering an unavoidably public life.
David Axelrod, President Obama's former White House political strategist, offered pointedly: "Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia. What's the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?"
Also unavoidably, the development has increased pressure on Mr. Trump, at age 70, two years older than his opponent, to release more information about his own physical health and medical records. Ms. Clinton's call for Mr. Trump to release his recent tax returns as well have had little value.
During her continued campaign, she committed a damaging gaffe in sarcastically labeling half of Mr. Trump's supporters as "a basket of deplorables": "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic -- you name it."
To attuned political ears, it was a reminder of Mitt Romney's 2012 dismissal of "47 percent of Americans" on federal welfare who would never vote for him.
Mr. Trump's campaign predictably pounced on Ms. Clinton's remark, and the Clinton campaign was obliged to undertake damage control for a candidate previously regarded as a cautious expert in political self-preservation.
Prior to her stumbling departure from the 9/11 memorial service, Ms. Clinton was scheduled to embark on a California schedule of fund-raisers and public events. Instead, she was obliged to break off to recuperate, with husband Bill Clinton filling in for her.
Her resumption of campaigning inevitably will be under sharper scrutiny now, and speculation about her health will continue. Attention will continue to focus on Clinton's politically unwise dig at Mr. Trump's broad base of supporters rather than on Trump's qualifications for the presidency, as she might have hoped.
Beyond the immediate ramifications of Hillary Clinton's oratorical gaffe is the imperative that both nominees come clean in detail about the state of their health and their abilities to serve the next four years in the Oval Office.
The most regrettable history of illness in the White House was the shielded incapacity from 1919 into 1921 of President Woodrow Wilson, after a massive stroke that paralyzed his left side. His wife Edith forbade disclosure of the seriousness of his condition to the point that even Vice President Thomas Marshall was not informed and was barred from his sick room.
Finally informed of the facts by a White House reporter, J. Fred Essary of the Baltimore Sun, Marshall vowed he would do nothing to intervene. He told his secretary: "I am not going to seize the place and then have Wilson, recovered, come around and say, 'Get off, you usurper!' " He told his own wife: "I could throw this country into civil war, but I won't." Wilson, still infirm, served out his second term.
In 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack and in 1957 a mild stroke. Vice President Richard Nixon was immediately notified, and Ike signed a draft letter of resignation in the event he were to become disabled, stating Nixon would become acting president pending Eisenhower's recovery.
In the present circumstance, the voters have the right to know now whether the two nominees are fit to serve, and each should be fully forthcoming in the matter.
Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist and former long-time writer for The Baltimore Sun. His latest book is "The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power" (Smithsonian Books). His email is juleswitcover@comcast.net.The guardians of clear and concise writing in government awarded top honors Tuesday to the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and the Securities and Exchange Commission for the best job last year turning bureaucratese into plain writing for the public.
Based on 126 documents submitted by the agencies, the Center for Plain Language graded them on writing, visual presentation and compliance with a 2010 law called the Plain Writing Act, which requires the government to, to put it plainly, write better.
“We’re seeing some significant progress,” said Annetta Cheek, a retired federal worker from Falls Church, Va., and longtime evangelist for plain writing who leads the government affairs committee for the Center for Plain Language, a Northern Virginia-based advocacy group.
“It’s hard to write plainly,” Cheek said. “The result looks easy. But writing bureaucratically is a lot easier.”
“There are some people who think, ‘If it’s not legalistic and bureaucratic, it’s not official,”’ she said, describing good writing as “counter to the culture of the government.”
One of the winning entries comes from the Transportation Security Administration, which shows visual agility with this missive for security requirements at airports:
The poor performers landing at the bottom of the 2014 Federal Plain Language Report Card were the Interior, State and Education departments. Interior and State didn’t submit writing samples, and their programs are anemic, the report said, while Education earned passing grades for writing and design but a “D” in compliance with the law.
State Department spokesman Jeffrey Rathke declined to comment. At the Education Department, Deputy Press Secretary Raymond Charles said in a statement:
“The U.S. Department of Education is dedicated to writing in plain language for all of its various audiences, including teachers, parents, education organizations, researchers and the general public. We are committed to continuous improvements and are taking steps to be in full compliance with the law.”
The jargon-filled entry below, in contrast with the TSA instructions, comes from the U.S. Coast Guard:
Here’s another example of plain-language failure, this time from the Education Department. It features a couple of winding, seemingly never-ending sentences full of jargon. And it concludes with, “The study cannot rigorously disentangle these components.” We cannot “rigorously disentangle” this writing.
The law requires federal officials to translate their forms, letters, directives and other documents into “clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.”
Official communications must now employ the active voice, avoid double negatives and use personal pronouns. Agencies must appoint a senior official to oversee the law’s implementation, among other steps.
The law was slow getting off the ground. But last year, 19 of 22 large agencies were complying, finally.
Cheek noted that even the top performers submitted some flawed writing. Spelling and grammatical errors accounted for 18 percent of the problems flagged by a linguistic analysis tool that the plain language center used to analyze the samples. Subject/verb agreement errors, incorrect verb forms, passive verbs, complex or long words: These were some of the common errors that made even some winning entries unclear.
Some poor writing examples from last year’s entries, annotated by the Center for Plain Language:
Hidden verbs: take a look (should be just “look”), make adjustment (should be “adjust”), take into consideration (should be “consider”), take action (vs. “act”), conducting an investigation (vs. “investigate”)
Noun clusters: National Electric Transmission Congestion Study, Recovery Act Interconnection Transmission Planning, Electricity Policy Technical Assistance Program, User menu global search
Sentences that are too long: During this year, which marks the 20th anniversary of Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice, we must continue our focus on urban, rural and economically disadvantaged communities to ensure that everyone – regardless of age, race, economic status or ethnicity – has access to clean water, clean air and the opportunity to live, work and play in healthy communities. (57 words)
Named after two former U.S. senators, Sherman Minton and Homer Earl Capehart, the eight-story Minton-Capehart Federal Building is located in the central business district of Indianapolis across from Memorial Park and within blocks of the Birch Bayh Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse. (44 words)The Welcome Message
The first day I arrived was a Monday afternoon. I was greeted by a big sign asking you to take off your shoes. I felt like I was entering a Japanese restaurant.
The unit was the size of a basketball court inside an industrial building. Two long rows of desks were in the open office space. Meetings rooms, washrooms, and other functional rooms were on the side.
Athena, who coordinated with me, showed me a special white desk that I could use for the day.
It’s their usual coffee, snacks, and random stuff table. I have no problems working with that.
1pm. Easing In
I was feeling kinda awkward as a stranger who just sat down to work without people knowing why I was here. So I started walking carefully and greeting old friends I saw in the office because I was worried to disturb the people I didn’t know.
I remembered how my friends told me they got an offer from this company when we graduated from the same university five years ago. They are still here today.
After a while, I settled at my desk and got into the zone.
It didn’t seem like I’ve disturbed them at all. People kept talking, keyboards kept clicking, headphones kept playing. No one seemed to freak out because I was here, I think.
2pm. Story Time
After a bit of work, I asked if I could talk to someone and got introduced to Ten, a growth hacker for the company’s in-house product, Skygear.
She told me that the project actually began two years ago as a backend for internal use to help the company’s developers save time. Later, they decided to fully open-source it on Github to make it available for the developer community. For those of you who’ve heard of BaaS, it’s like Firebase by Google, or Parse by Facebook.
She knew I was interested in developer tools, so she asked for my feedback. In addition to giving my initial impressions, I drilled down into their development process and asked why they made certain product decisions. She had no problem sharing. For example, even though open-sourcing made Skygear harder to control and monetize, the company believed it was more important to enable the developer community to customize, contribute, and self-host on their own servers.
There was a lot of idea sharing. I don’t know. Maybe that’s why they offered a desk for free — to gather ad hoc feedback about products.
I’m also really impressed with their take because they are almost sacrificing business for being community and developer-friendly. This is a story of David vs many Goliaths.
3pm. Coffee Break
Preparing coffee with a Chemex
The company also has a “part-time barista” who prepares coffee when she’s onsite.
All the coffee lovers came over. They waited, talked, laughed without reserve. Their discussion ranged from their current projects to politics.
Most company might have instant or capsule coffee machines, but pour-over is only for the serious. You need to measure the exact grind amount, water, and the temperature. People shared beans they bought from around the world. Apparently, the CTO once proposed opening a cafe instead that only served developers.
4pm. Work Hour
After the coffee break, I went back to check off a few more tasks. One random visitor sat down with me.
His name is “花生” (“Faseng”, means peanut, like the colour of his fur).
There were four cats in the company (Chima, Faseng, Milk Tea and Coffee). Frank, the company’s lead designer, made the latest company T-shirt with their avatars.
5pm. Bug Investigation
I overheard an engineer sitting beside me muttering about an issue on an iPhone app they were developing. He noticed I was looking over, and openly invited me to join the discussion.
We went through the issue together, started the debugger, added some logs, killed the process, and repeated. After several attempts, we were able to conclude that two issues were happening:
The debugger was failing. We had to use logs manually. Xcode version freaking 8, seriously?! The app fell into a strange state where the network request could come back without a response nor an error.
It was fun and fulfilling to be able to participate in some problem-solving investigation, where I learned something new too.
6pm. Happy Hour
A few people started gathering around a small area of the company. Rick invited me to join them and proudly pointed to his cabinet of alcohol. There were lots of different kinds — Whiskey, red wine, Japanese sake, and bottles I couldn’t name.
Normally office workers would be leaving for dinner around 7. But surprisingly some Oursky members stayed back and started hitting the keyboard again! I remembered Rick saying “Alcohol boosts productivity!”. Turns out, he was not kidding.
People seemed to enjoy their wine as much as their work.
9pm. Wrapping Up
I worked past 8 that day. My coordinator had already left, but no one was pushing me to leave.
Everyone had been friendly and casual, and I enjoyed my stay overall — the coffee break, the random discussions, the knowledge exchanges, and the observation on how the team worked together, etc.July 31, 2017 Hilary, Irwin to enhance surf along Southern California during US Open of Surfing
By Faith Eherts, AccuWeather meteorologist July 31, 2017, 2:55:03 PM EDT
Hilary and Irwin, both former hurricanes, will enhance surf for the U.S. Open of Surfing, but beachgoers will face dangerous conditions.
The eastern Pacific Basin has produced a series of strong, long-lived hurricanes this season, and currently there are two tropical cyclones parading westward between southern Mexico and Hawaii.
In the East Pacific, Hilary and Irwin are swirling over the open waters. Neither storm will have direct impacts to land. In fact, Hilary is now only a tropical rainstorm. Irwin will follow suit at midweek.
“Despite weakening and remaining well away from the coast, these systems are still expected to bring an extended period of rough surf along the coast of Southern California through Tuesday,” Root said.
Some may view this as great timing. The U.S. Open of Surfing will take place at Huntington Beach, California, this week and professional surfers will generally find the increase in wave action pleasing. The major surfing event is expected to bring hundreds of thousands of people out to the beach.
This event, combined with heat across inland Southern California, will make for a potentially busy weekend at the beaches.
"Surf will average 4 to 6 feet through Tuesday," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Kristina Pydynowski. "There can be occasional sets to 8 feet, mainly on south-facing beaches and occurring into Monday night."
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However, for inexperienced surfers and swimmers, the increase in swells can be quite dangerous.
Beachgoers will need to be vigilant if they decide to swim in the ocean. Strong rip currents will threaten anyone who enters the water, so it will be important for swimmers to remain in areas patrolled by lifeguards, or to not enter the water at all. Those planning on going to the beach will want to check for any beach or coastal advisories beforehand.
As Hilary and Irwin dissipate over the open waters of the Pacific Ocean by midweek, surf will decrease and by the end of the week should be back closer to normal.
This will lower the threat for rip currents and dangerous swells at the end of the week. Those hoping to cool off from the building heat across the West will find beach conditions to be more enjoyable.
Report a Typo“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
-Henry Adams
Municipal buses have always had an uncanny knack for attracting civil unrest.
Be it in Birmingham, London, Baghdad, or downtown Beirut – public buses often act as giant motorized canaries for the fumes of civil disorder and discontent. Why buses serve this function is a complex issue, it’s likely a combination of the physical role they play packing a large number of people into one uncomfortably close environment, and their role as a vital means of the mass transportation that every modern society relies on.
Whatever the reason, throughout modern history harbingers of civil unrest have been among the city bus’s most important passengers. And on April 13th 1975 in East Beirut, a city bus would serve – not for the first time and not for the last either – as the point of nucleation for a savage civil conflict.
In retaliation for the deaths of four Christians who were shot leaving a Maronite church earlier that day, Christian militiamen turned their guns on a bus full of Palestinian refugees on the way back to their ramshackle refugee camp located in East Beirut within the Christian neighborhood they were traveling through. The attack killed everyone onboard except one passenger and the driver, leaving 29 dead, and is widely referred to as the massacre that officially marks the start of the Lebanese Civil War.
And so the 1970s weren’t a tumultuous time just for the hemp-weaving free-loving acid-dropping flower-children of America. While our society was slowly rending itself apart along generational and racial cleavages, over in the Middle East an entire culture – a piece of an entire civilization – was consuming itself with much less subtlety.
This societal decay gave way to the broad social forces which tilled and softened the region for the growth of Islamic fundamentalist terror. During the 1970s every single Arab nation in the Middle East was ruled by one autocratic form of government or another, and it was nearly impossible to find a group of citizens who felt empowered to better their situation through means offered by the state.
So they turned to terrorism.
The unrest of the 1970s set the stage for everything from Saddam’s rise to power, the targeting of Israel by generations of suicide bombers, the emergence of an alphabet soup of terrorist groups ranging from AMAL to Zeal, the Iranian revolution and the US Embassy hostage crisis, the events of 9/11, as well as, the emergence of the Islamic State. To understand our current state of affairs, you must first understand Middle Eastern society as it was in the 1970s, and what made it unique. With that, you can then understand the implications of the social decay that was redoubling with every passing year.
There isn’t one instance of Islamic fundamentalist terror that’s occurred since that can’t be tied back to that decade. From founding new techniques and approaches to inspiring the ideology that would drive future groups, the 1970s lay at the crossroads of everything that we’ve come to call terrorism.
It was during this time, that: in the words of Fawaz Gerges, who was raised in the midst of the most dramatic and deadly civil war the region has ever hosted: “religious fervor in the Arab world fed into rage over economic social, and political impotence,” and “more and more Muslims turned to religion for spiritual sustenance and as a refuge from and a response to the seemingly unstoppable Westernization of their societies and oppressive political authoritarianism.”1
One of these Muslims was Osama bin Laden, who came of age during these angry years, and developed his own ideas about Islam because of them. The story of the Middle East is very much the story of Islam. A religion today that is more tightly bound to a distinct people than any other, Islam is the only religion ever to become the sole uncontested basis of an entire civilization.
While the West has social mores and laws that draws from its predominately Judeo-Christian religious heritage -this isn’t the sole source of Western culture. The Western world was built upon the ruins of very pagan Greek and Roman systems of government, art, culture, and ideals – and was further distanced from religion’s influence by the Enlightenment, which promoted rationality and logic well past spiritualism, making them the cornerstones of Western civilization.
On the other hand, within the Arab-Islamic world the tenets of Islam attempt to govern all aspects of life: from art and social mores to law and local elections. So before you can understand the story of the Middle East in the 1970s, a brief foray must be made into the story of Islam.
Unlike any other major world religion, the holy book of Islam, the Koran, managed to codify not only laws, precepts, mores, and traditions – but an entire language. And in the process it would establish the basis for Arab identity, the exact definition of which is open to debate, but is most often defined as being fluent in some form of the Arabic language.
It’s this sense of Arab cum Muslim identity that’s at the crux of the emergence of modern Islamic terror. To have any chance of understanding today’s terrorism, you must first have some idea of when and where the terrorists themselves get their sense of identity. A few hundred years after he explained Mary of Nazareth’s predicament to her, Muslims believe the angel Gabriel appeared to the prophet Muhammad, grabbed him in a holy bear-hug, and related in the most divine language words which would be recorded by Muhammad’s own hand and, over time, be compiled as the Holy Koran.
The divinity of the angel Gabriel’s speech is an important aspect of the early days of Islam and influences its status today. Muslims are certain that the lyrically perfect nature of the language in which the Koran was recorded is proof of its divinity – no fool mortal could’ve concocted words of such eloquence and internal harmony.
And Mohammad isn’t viewed as just another mortal receptacle of Gabriel’s word.
The miraculous nature of the Koran, encoded entirely by Mohammad’s hand, is enforced by the fact Mohammad is believed by some sects of Islam to have been an illiterate before penning Islam’s holiest book. A work with the lyrical symmetry of Shakespeare was penned, Muslims believe, by the hand of an illiterate dune-dwelling desert merchant (peace be upon him) – and therefore can only be the divinely inspired word of Allah.
Today this means that the Koran can only be truly comprehended in its original Arabic, and so part of becoming a devout Muslim is learning the Arabic language. This presents a predicament for the millions of immigrants in the West and others outside the Middle East not fluent in Arabic, a problem which will later be explored. At the time of Islam’s origins, the divinity of Gabriel’s message meant that the language of those who fell under Islam’s sword was grafted onto Arabic because you couldn’t be a proper Muslim without knowing some Arabic
Becoming Muslim wasn’t exactly physically forced on a population, but conversions happened at a high rate in societies conquered by Islam due to the economic and social benefits it would bring – benefits which would remain out of reach without linguistic and religious assimilation. The results of this grafting have persisted, witnessed by the fact that defining Arabic, as a language, presents something of a quandary.
Al-Jazeera is the closest most Americans have come to spoken Arabic, although calling it “spoken” Arabic is a bit of a misnomer. The language spoken by Al-Jazeera anchors is referred to by Americans as either written or Modern Standard Arabic, and called by Arabs themselves fusah, or classical, written Arabic because of its origins in the Arabic of the Koran.
It is the language written and spoken in academia, in governmental settings, and in the media – but oddly to us in the West, spoken conversationally pretty much nowhere else.
As Islam spread across the deserts, peninsulas, coasts and plains of the Middle East the Koran and its language spread with it. When a foreign people had been conquered by early Muslims most of the population became obliged to convert to Islam, and part of that deal was learning the language needed to read and resuscitate the Holy Book of Islam.
And so the Arabic of the Koran became the primary written language of all the lands won by Islam, an influence that bled into the local spoken dialects. The written language of the Koran mixed with every native spoken dialect that it touched – whether Hebraic, Phoenician, Aramaic, or Turkish in origin – as an intrinsic and vital element of Islam is the communal reading of the holy texts aloud. Over the centuries, this mixing resulted in the mutation of a native spoken language into an informal codification of what eventually became each distinct local dialect of spoken “Arabic” that is recorded only on the minds and tongues of those who speak it, from Lebanese to Egyptian to Iraqi.
The intricacies of Written Arabic are taught to Arab students just as we formally learn English grammar here, and Arabs the world over all read and write this common script. But there are no official grammar books – taught in Arabic at least, Westerners have made some effort to create them – written to teach the localized spoken dialects. Each dialect is simply learned as a child grows up within the society, and is much more a distinct language than dialects of Spanish or French. Linguistically, every dialect of Arabic is best considered a language unto itself and not a regional vernacular.
Today there are overarching Gulf, Levantine, and North African dialect sets – separate groups of languages really – which have in each of them a general consensus about conjugation, prepositions, and other syntactical rules. But within each of these sets there are many different accents and idioms that vary from country to country, and within North Africa there’s a Moroccan dialect that Arabs elsewhere only grudgingly refer to as Arabic at all.
And each dialect set is mutually incomprehensible to the other unless one has traveled or otherwise encountered those who speak it, although in recent years wide exposure to other dialects via programming on satellite television has started to change this by giving speakers of one dialect an idea of what someone who speaks another dialect will and won’t understand.
The relationship between fusah, or Written Arabic, and each local dialect is softly analogous to the relationship between Latin and modern French, German, or English. Common etymological roots are shared, and just as those Western languages fall within an Indo-European family, all of the Arabic dialects belong to the Semitic family. And yet an Arab running around speaking fusah on the streets of any Arab city would be greeted by the same sorts of looks as an American speaking Shakespearean English in Cincinnati.
So a Westerner stating that they speak Arabic is a rather vague statement, whether they mean the written fusah derived from the Koran or one or many dialects would remain unclear. But among Arabs there is still a feeling of shared identity from a shared mother-tongue that is rooted in a sacred text. So long as you grew up speaking one of the Arabic dialects and learning fusah in school chances are those around you will consider you an Arab, and share a sense of community with you. And, much more often than not, this coincides with a shared |
switching from gasoline-fueled vehicles to electric vehicles will drive total electricity consumption much higher.
How much higher? Well, one gallon of gasoline equates to about 34 kilowatt-hours. Average American gasoline consumption is roughly 392 gallons per person and 1,000 gallons per houshold.
This means switching one household's gas-powered cars for electric ones would require about 34,000 more kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Right now, the average residential utility customer uses less than 11,000 kilowatt-hours a year. In other words, dispensing with the internal-combustion engine would quadruple the typical household's electricity consumption. If solar energy provided all that new juice, then Virginia alone might need something like 4,000 square miles of solar arrays—taking up an area almost three-fourths the size of Connecticut. (And that's for Dominion customers only.)
Note that so far, we haven't even touched on issues such as environmental permitting—or cost. Environmentalists often point out that nuclear power plants are hugely expensive, and they are right about that. But the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that a quarter-century from now, the levelized cost of solar energy—that is, the total cost of all inputs over time—will remain roughly twice that of nuclear energy. Offshore wind will be another 50 percent more expensive on top of that.
For years, global-warming skeptics have accused global-warming activists of acting in bad faith. The activists don't really want to save humanity from catastrophic climate change, the skeptics argue—they really just want to expand government's reach and impose their own quasi-religious vision on the rest of society. Activists retort that this is nonsense: The fate of the planet hangs in the balance, and if mankind does not take radical steps soon, then we are all in extremely serious trouble. How those activists confront the need for more nuclear power could offer a good indication of who is telling the truth.
This article originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.Media playback is not supported on this device World Cup moments: Suarez bites Chiellini
Barcelona manager Luis Enrique says striker Luis Suarez could play a "few minutes" in a friendly against Mexican champions Club Leon on Monday.
Suarez's four-month ban for biting an opponent was upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) last week.
But the Uruguay striker, 27, can now train and play in friendly matches, and Enrique said on Sunday: "He has been working hard when training alone.
"So I think he can have a few minutes tomorrow in front of the fans."
Luis Suarez controversies June 2014: Banned for four months from any football-related activity, plus nine international matches, for biting Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini April 2013: Apologises for biting Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic and receives a 10-game ban Dec 2011: Given eight-match suspension and fined £40,000 for racially abusing Manchester United's Patrice Evra Nov 2010: Given seven-match ban for biting PSV Eindhoven's Otman Bakkal on the shoulder while playing for Ajax
Suarez, who has had two training sessions with his new Barca team-mates, has not played since biting Italy's Giorgio Chiellini during Uruguay's World Cup group match in Brazil on 24 June.
Media playback is not supported on this device Luis Suarez will change says Barcelona president
A full explanation of the Cas ruling, which still prevents him from playing "organised" matches but now allows him to take part in all "football-related activities", will be published at a later date.
Suarez will still have to serve the remaining eight games of his record nine-match ban in competitive international matches, while his competitive Barcelona debut is likely to be at La Liga rivals Real Madrid on 26 October.
Suarez is due to be officially presented as a new Barcelona player on Monday at the Nou Camp.PSP survived the year selling small pockets of quiet releases. Now that the beefed up Vita is hogging the handheld spotlight (the PSP settles for whatever it can get and the 3DS receives more hate mail than Paul Christoforo) and soon your wallet, the afterthought that was the PSP has become old news entirely. But if you do own a PSP, even if you keep it at the bottom of a drawer, you might want to say your goodbyes with five games from this past year that actually managed to carve a nook in the PSP's library.
5. Corpse Party (PSN download only)
A harmless night of fun and ghost stories turns into a nightmare from hell. When fellow students create a charm to remember their friend's last day, an earthquake bores through the school and separates the group. They soon discover that they're walking the halls of Heavenly Host Elementary School, a demolished building that once stood in place of the school they attend now. Corpse Party is a horror-themed visual novel, a largely unknown genre here in the West, with glossy anime scenes, an emphasis on exploration, and more possible endings than you can shake a bone at. While gamers might groan in frustration over the minefield of unexpected dead ends, the chilling experience outweighs any wasted efforts and unskippable scenes.
4. Dissidia 012: Duodecim Final Fantasy
Duodecim Final Fantasy marks the second game in the Dissidia series despite the number twelve in the title. The game takes the fighting genre and embeds it with rich RPG elements, resulting in a unique blend of action and customization. Dissidia leans more toward a gravity-defying style than the traditional type of combat you'd find in most fighting games. Characters can, for example, ostensibly fly through the air. You can level and armor up characters, unlock bonuses, and tough it out in dungeons. It's one of the more creative experiments in the Final Fantasy line and certainly one of the best titles under the name to come out in years.
3. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
Recently, handhelds (especially the PSP) have served as a good platform for dropping RPGs. Considering our previous two picks originate in some manner from the genre, it shouldn't be a surprise that the number three title on this list is a true-to-form role-playing game. The Legend of Heroes is already an established franchise, but Trails in the Sky represents the first of a new trilogy. Strong in story and gameplay, Trials in the Sky landed with barely a thud to catch gamers' attention, but its generous length, endearing characters, and strategic combat make it a sure buy for RPG lovers.
2. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
A big hit this year for the PSP was the new Tactics Ogre game, associated with brands like Ogre March and Ogre Battle. Let Us Cling Together is—surprise, surprise—a tactical RPG (notice a recurring theme here?) and a remake of the Super Famicom original. Existing gameplay has survived dutifully enough for fans, as the PSP version was received with reams of praise. Any changes made after port to port (to the Sega Saturn and then the PlayStation and now Sony's aging handheld) have benefited the title, as well. Let Us Cling Together is an easy favorite for 2011.
1. OMG-Z
What, you thought I was going to choose an RPG? Guess again. This PSP Mini (free for PlayStation Plus subscribers) gets extra points for rejuvenating the overworked and frequently uninspired zombie genre. From television to games to movies, zombies aren't just the same shambling monstrosities they used to be, and most of us are more eager about reloading our shotguns and competing for headshots than we are afraid of a good bite in the neck. Whatever novelty surrounded zombies has long wore off, and they've become sheep—common, ugly, mindless sheep.
OMG-Z lets us have the best of old and new: It gives us a reason to be excited about zombies without sacrificing the contemporary appetite for blowing their brains out without losing a friend or loved one first. Killing zombies is now the pastime equivalent of baseball. If picking off one zombie at a time sounds fun to you, then setting off combustible chains of the undead is going to blow your mind—err, brains. Not all zombies react the same way to a bullet in the face, so strategy is just as important to your arsenal. Whatever your plan for survival, one thing's guaranteed: You're going to make a great, big, bloody mess.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
July 1, 2011, 1:02 PM GMT By Cari Nierenberg
Many of us can hardly wait for summer to arrive, but a small number of people are much happier when it's over. You've no doubt heard of SeasonalAffectiveDisorder, the wintertime mood disorder -- but some get SAD in the summer.
As hot weather approaches, those with summer SAD sleep less, eat less, and lose weight. They're extremely irritable and agitated. (It's the reverse for people with winter SAD, who sleep more, gain weight and crave high-carb foods, and tend to slow down and socially hibernate from late fall to early spring.)
Summer-onset depression is thought to affect less than 1 percent of the population, making it much rarer than the winter variety experienced by an estimated 5 percent of people.
In its most severe form, people with summer seasonal depression may be more at risk for suicide than cold-weather SAD, says Dr. Norman Rosenthal, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School, who has studied both types and first helped discover their existence. "Suicide is more of a concern when people are depressed and agitated rather than depressed and lethargic," he explains.
When summer depression was first recognized in 1986, Rosenthal said that mental health professionals suspected the cause was the heat and humidity. That, he said, lent itself to the idea that a cold shower, air conditioning, swimming in cold lakes or heading North would relieve symptoms. Although these treatments for hot-weather depression are useful for some, they lack the staying power that light-box therapy has on winter SAD.
'The light is cutting though me like a knife'
A person with summer SAD can stay inside, crank up the AC, and darken the room but then go outside into the heat and it's as if they've never been treated, explains Rosenthal, the author of "Winter Blues."
Another idea is that it might be the light itself that's aggravating sufferers, whether it's the intensity of sunlight or the angle it's coming at people. One of Rosenthal's summer depression patients describes it as "feeling like the light is cutting though me like a knife."
Still another possibility is that there may be two kinds of warm-weather depression, says Dr. Alfred Lewy, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. He suggests there might be one group of people who have an unpleasant reaction to the heat and humidity -- a discomfort with the climate. But even in Portland where summers aren't that hot or humid, he's seen patients struggle with summer depression.
Lewy suspects the cause in a second group might be that the body's natural clock, it's circadian rhythms, are misaligning in summer. Instead of cueing to dawn, the longer daylight is causing some vulnerable people to cue to dusk. Cueing to dusk shortens the typical body clock and delays a person's sleep-wake cycle. This mismatch, theorizes Lewy, may be triggering depression.
He successfully treated a person with summer depression with a combination of getting early morning sunlight (30 to 60 minutes daily), which shifts the body clock forward, and low-dose melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep-wake cycles. Severe symptoms may also benefit from antidepressants.
Do you secretly -- or perhaps not-so-secretly -- loathe the summer months? What helps you get through them?Researchers at Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency have come up with a new method of processing seawater to extract lithium—an element that plays a key role in advanced batteries for electric vehicles and one that, if current predictions for the EV market prove accurate, could be in short supply before the end of the decade.
Writing in the new issue of the journal Desalination, Tsuyoshi Hoshino, a scientist at the JAEA’s Rokkasho Fusion Institute, proposed a method for recovering lithium from seawater using dialysis. Still years from commercialization, the system is based on a dialysis cell with a membrane consisting of a superconductor material. Lithium is the only ion in the seawater that can pass through the membrane, from the negative-electrode side of the cell to the positive-electrode side.
The method “shows good energy efficiency and is easily scalable,” Hoshino writes.
Hoshino’s work joins a long tradition that includes both novel ways of recovering lithium and the wider dream of mining the sea for valuable minerals. People have “mined” salt from the sea for eons. The history of sea-floor mining stretches back to 1872, when the HMS Challenger, a British oceanographic vessel, discovered manganese on the ocean floor. By the mid-20th century people had begun to try to extract the vast mineral wealth dissolved in seawater—a difficult task given the low concentrations of the minerals being recovered. Today a thriving industry extracts magnesium from seawater, but the economical production of lithium from the sea has proved elusive. The element is found in extremely low concentrations in the ocean and already has an established supply chain, mostly from salt lakes in South America.
If Hoshino’s method proves efficient and economical, it could transform a market that has seen lots of investment and supposed innovation in recent years but has remained stubbornly resistant to new technologies and new sources of supply. Most lithium is still recovered today in the way it has been for half a century: by evaporating brine collected from salt lakes in enclosed valleys in parts of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.
Predictions of lithium supply crunches have appeared with increasing frequency in recent years. Many analysts, though not all, believe that rising demand from makers of batteries for electric vehicles—particularly Tesla, whose forthcoming Gigafactory is expected to nearly double world lithium demand—is sure to strain supplies from traditional sources.
“I think we will see shortages,” says Simon Moores, head of the minerals and mining consultancy Benchmark Intelligence. “New supply is needed now, and it will be in the future, even if a fraction of the planned expansions in battery production happens.”
Benchmark’s tracking of lithium prices shows a steady rise over the last few years, and Moores doesn’t foresee prices falling anytime soon. That is fueling R&D at the most basic level, as with Hoshino’s work, and it’s driving new investment in salt lakes that could produce lithium—particularly in Nevada, where Tesla is building the Gigafactory. (See “Tesla’s Massive Nevada Factory Will Need Massive Results to Pay Off.”)
Vancouver-based Dajin Resources recently released lithium assay results from its Alkali Lake property in Esmeralda County, Nevada, showing promising concentrations of lithium. The company also owns acreage in the Teels Marsh region, in Mineral County. Dajin plans to recover the lithium using conventional methods, says president Brian Findlay.
“There are a number of different and interesting technologies, but they all start with high-concentration brine,” says Findlay. “And the simplest proven technology is evaporation.” Indeed, it’s hard to compete with a natural process.
That is not stopping entrepreneurs and researchers from trying. One of the more interesting methods is reverse osmosis, a technique that could, in theory, extract lithium much faster than the 18 to 24 months required for brine evaporation. (One of the structural problems of the current lithium production industry is that because of the long lag time needed for evaporation, it’s hard to ramp up production quickly in response to new demand.) Simbol Materials, based in Pleasanton, California, wants to use reverse osmosis to remove lithium from the wastewater coming from the Featherstone geothermal plant near California’s Salton Sea. It would be an elegant solution, combining clean power generation with lithium recovery for EV batteries. But Simbol is reportedly seeking a buyer, and in February it laid off the majority of its workers. (Simbol representatives did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) So far, at least, reverse osmosis looks like another promising technology that has failed to find traction.
That brings us back to the world’s largest repository of lithium: the sea. In recent years novel processes and materials, including graphene, have shown promise in making mining the sea a reality. Researchers at the University of North Carolina, for instance, designed a metal-organic framework to collect uranium-bearing ions from seawater. Hoshino believes his seawater dialysis cell for recovering lithium could be commercialized within five years.
It’s clear that as the advanced battery sector expands, these efforts will continue. For now, though, it’s still hard to compete with natural processes.USA basketball players accidentally visit brothel
Keep clicking for a look at athletes who have been in Brazil for training. Team USA basketball players DeMar DeRozan (left) and Kyle Lowry share a laugh.
Keep clicking for a look at athletes who have been in Brazil for training. Team USA basketball players DeMar DeRozan (left) and Kyle Lowry share a laugh. Photo: Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle Photo: Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close USA basketball players accidentally visit brothel 1 / 42 Back to Gallery
A number of the US basketball Olympics team accidentally walked into what they thought was a spa.
READ MORE: U.S. men's basketball team will stay on cruise ships during the Olympics
DeAndre Jordan of the Los Angeles Clippers, DeMarcus Cousins of the Sacramento Kings and DeMar DeRozan of the Toronto Raptors were among the players spotted walking into Termas Monte Carlo, a high-end Rio brothel.
The mistake seems understandable, as TMZ reports that the brothel will tell customers over the phone that the spa has a bar, plays music and is only for males.
READ MORE: Leading man: Anthony embraces role as US team's leader
The players were said to leave quickly after learning about the spa's real business.Joshua Hampton saw the big black police truck from down the block. He saw the lights, and the officers in military garb clinging to the sides. He wasn’t worried. It was around 2 a.m. Sunday, two hours after the new curfew mandated for Ferguson, Mo., but Hampton was sitting in his own car, smoking a cigarette in his aunt’s driveway. He thought he was obeying the law.
But the truck stopped and suddenly, Hampton says, his car was surrounded by police. “Put your [expletive] hands up!” he says they told him.
And then Hampton and his friends became among the seven people arrested the first night after Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) declared a state of emergency in the St. Louis suburb. Nixon’s decision came a week after 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed in an officer-involved shooting, sparking protests in the community.
“They kept telling me to get out of the car, but I didn’t want to make any kind of movement,” Hampton, 30, told The Post in a phone interview Sunday.
The officer by his window had a gun pointed at his chest, says Hampton, who provided a copy of his arrest report to the Washington Post. He wanted to make sure the police could see his hands at all times, and he was afraid to reach down for the door lock. Finally, the officer reached in through the open window and opened the door himself.
Hampton’s girlfriend and her friend also were in the car. The three of them had gone to a Justice for Mike Brown march earlier that evening and had returned to Hampton’s aunt’s house, where they decided to take a cigarette break.
Hampton, who owns a T-shirt-printing business, says they discussed just standing in the yard but worried it might look as if they were loitering passersby. So the trio went to his car to smoke, figuring that a private car on a private lawn would not fall under the curfew.
Instead, he says, the police ordered all three of them into the police truck, taking them first to a nearby command post.
“I just kept asking, ‘Why am I being arrested for sitting in my aunt’s driveway?’ ” Hampton says. “They said, ‘Curfew’ — and I said, ‘But I’m sitting at my aunt’s house.’ ”
The police transferred them to another vehicle, Hampton says, and drove them to the county jail, where they were photographed. Ultimately, he says, police told him that he would be released with a pending charge of “failure to disperse,” which confused Hampton. He didn’t know where he was supposed to disperse to, given that he was already on a relative’s private property.
Calls to St. Louis police officials confirmed that seven people had been arrested, but did not yield additional information on Hampton’s arrest.
Hampton grew up in Berkeley, Mo., not far from Ferguson. A few days before Brown was shot, Hampton’s cousin was also shot — a stray bullet while she waited at a bus stop. This is why Hampton was in Ferguson this week: He wanted to be with his family, to check in on a cousin who had been told she might never walk again.
After about five hours, Hampton and his girlfriend were told they could leave, he says. Of the seven who were arrested, five — including Hampton and his friends — had been at the protest march, according to Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment. Hampton will be out again Sunday night, he says.
“People need to see that we can, as a people, make a change,” he said.HOUSTON (Reuters) - As Monday’s total solar eclipse sweeps from Oregon to South Carolina, U.S. electric power and grid operators will be glued to their monitoring systems in what for them represents the biggest test of the renewable energy era.
FILE PHOTO -- An array of solar panels are seen in Oakland, California, U.S. on December 4, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo
Utilities and grid operators have been planning for the event for years, calculating the timing and drop in output from solar, running simulations of the potential impact on demand, and lining up standby power sources. It promises a critical test of their ability to manage a sizeable swing in renewable power.
Solar energy now accounts for more than 42,600 megawatts (MW), about 5 percent of the U.S.’s peak demand, up from 5 MW in 2000, according to the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), a group formed to improve the nation’s power system in the wake of a 1964 blackout. When the next eclipse comes to the United States in 2024, solar will account for 14 percent of the nation’s power, estimates NERC.
For utilities and solar farms, the eclipse represents an opportunity to see how well prepared their systems are to respond to rapid swings in an era where variable energy sources such as solar and wind are climbing in scale and importance.
Power companies view Monday’s event as a “test bed” on how power systems can manage a major change in supply, said John Moura, director of reliability assessment and system analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
“It has been tested before, just not at this magnitude,” adds Steven Greenlee, a spokesman for the California Independent System Operator (CISO), which controls routing power in the nation’s most populous state.
CISO estimates that at the peak of the eclipse, the state’s normal solar output of about 8,800 MW will be reduced to 3,100 MW and then surge to more than 9,000 MW when the sun returns.
CISO’s preparation includes studying how German utilities dealt with a 2015 eclipse in that country. Its review prompted the grid overseer to add an additional 200 MW to its normal 250 MW power reserves.
“We’ve calculated that during the eclipse, that solar will ramp off at about 70 MW per minute,” said Greenlee. “And then we’ll see the solar rolling back at about 90 MW per minute or more.”
Power utilities say the focus will be on managing a rapid drop off and accommodate the solar surge post the eclipse. Utility executives say they do not expect any interruption in service, but are prepared to ask customers to pare usage if a problem arises.”We want to assure our customers that we have secured enough resources to meet their energy needs, even with significantly less solar generation on hand,” said Caroline Winn, chief operating officer at utility San Diego Gas & Electric Co.
In the Eastern United States, utilities will have more time to watch the results of their Western counterparts. PJM Interconnection, which coordinates electricity transmission among 13 states from Michigan to North Carolina, says non-solar sources such as hydro and fossil fuel can easily supplant the 400 MW to 2,500 MW solar loss, depending on the cloud cover.
For small-scale solar providers, the eclipse is a drop in the revenue bucket. Ron Strom, a North Carolina real estate developer, sells the power from a 58 kilovolt system atop a commercial property in Chapel Hill to Duke Energy.
“The event may cost me eighteen cents or thereabouts if my panels don’t produce solar for three hours,” said Strom.Over the weekend I described the process I’m using to simulate MLS seasons, and the odds that a team reaches the playoffs. After using this tool for most of this year, I’ve recently tried extending this work to look at how team projections change during a season.
Every run of the prediction tool generates 10,000 sets of possible final standings – each starts from the current standings, and incrementally picks a result for every remaining game. The output looks a little like this:
By reading across each row, we can determine what the final table looks like in each simulation. By reading down each column we can get a sense for what each teams’ final points total might be.
All of this, however, is just a snapshot – valid only until the next game ends.
It feels obvious, then, to want to look at how these projections change over the course of the season. Teams like Orlando or Chicago have seemed unbeatable at various points this season, only to slump later and be eclipsed by the Toronto juggernaut. Can we use a tool like this prediction script to get a sense for these shifts? I believe that we can.
This, then, has been the focus of my work over the last week or so. By adding another layer of iteration to the process, I’ve been able to generate a plot that looks like this:
How to read these plots
This approach starts from the day the season starts, and generates a set of 10,000 predictions for each day on which games are played – a total of 91 match days so far this year. Every set of simulations is then plotted in a column, reading from left (March 3rd, the day the season starts) to the latest match day (October 8th in this case).
The MLS schedule doesn’t follow a regular cadence – some weeks have games on Wednesdays, while others don’t. Some weekends there are games on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, while others don’t. In order to help call out the weekly structure of the schedule, I’ve added alternating shading on the timeline at the bottom of the plot that groups individual match days into different weeks. The months of the year are also displayed for easier comprehension.
The vertical axis contains possible point totals that a team can earn, ranging from 10 to 89 points. This spans the range of possible outcomes generated by all the various simulations that have been run. Combining these two axes, you can inspect the chart for Chicago and see that the simulation for Wednesday, July 19th (the beginning of week 21) came up with 823 times (out of 10,000 runs) where the Fire was predicted to finish with 61 points.
Because 61 points was the outcome that appeared most often, that point total is called out in the plot with a red box. This highlight of the most-frequent-outcome helps the eye read the changing fortunes of the team, particularly during the early portion of the season where there is still so much uncertainty in these predictions.
The uncertainty in those early weeks is visible in several aspects of the chart. For one, the colors on the left side of the chart are much more muted, while on the right side of the chart they get much more intense. As the number of remaining games gets smaller, the range of possible outcomes also gets smaller – meaning that those 10,000 simulation runs are concentrated in a smaller and smaller number of outcomes.
Second, the spread of possible point totals gets much smaller. The simulation from March 4th (the second match day) returned point totals for Chicago that ranged from a low of 18 points to a high of 75. Compare that with the simulation from September 20th, which included a range of point totals that only stretched between 48 and 63 points.
An example: summarizing the Chicago Fire
Let’s look again at the Chicago Fire:
Chicago held fairly stable during the first two months of the season, with most simulations predicting that they would finish with just under 50 points at the end of the season.
Their fortunes improved – dramatically – as summer arrived however. The high water mark came in the middle of July, with predictions from that period briefly suggesting that they would finish just over 60 points. That 10-point swing was fueled by the team winning eight of nine games between May 13th and July 1.
Following that charge up the standings, the team then hit a very rough string of results. Between July 5th and August 26th the team won only once in eight games, losing six. This skid dropped their projected points tally all the way down to 51 points going into the first match day in September. Chicago has since rebounded somewhat, and as of this writing they sit on 55 points.
All the teams
The following gallery includes plots for every team in Major League Soccer. Each tells a story that can be read, similar to the Chicago Fire example above. Take a look, and let me know what you think.
Can the plots be made clearer? Would an interactive version be interesting?Two young men apparently drowned in cold Sierra waterways, including one man who was practicing face-down meditation in the Yuba River.
Yoav Timmer, a 33-year-old Israeli citizen, died Friday on the Yuba River at Rice’s Crossing, northwest of Nevada City.
Nevada County sheriff’s deputies were called about 4 p.m. Friday to the river, where Timmer and a friend had been.
“Based on statement’s from his friend, Mr. Timmer was practicing a type of meditation where he floats face down in the water for an extended period of time,” said Nevada County Sgt. Mike Sullivan. “His friend was doing his own meditation. A while later he went to check on Mr. Timmer and noticed he was unresponsive in the water.”
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The friend tried life-saving measures and contacted 911, said Sullivan, the sheriff’s department’s chief deputy coroner. However, he was later pronounced dead when deputies responded.
On Sunday, another drowning occurred in the Sierra when Jairus Johnson-Neal of Reno died in the South Yuba River at the Hampshire Rocks campground. He was last seen floating downstream by friends who unsuccessfully tried to pull him to safety from the swift, cold water, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office.
Divers later found Johnson-Neal, 21, about 12 feet down. Rescuers had to maneuver in hazardous conditions due to numerous tree snags in the rushing water.
A word of caution for swimmers was posted on the Placer County Sheriff Office’s Facebook page:
“The past two people who’ve drowned in our area were both physically fit young adults. The cold temperatures and swift water were the major factors in their deaths.”Json-builder is capable of serializing aeson’s mandatory data structure at almost exactly the same speed as aeson itself. This is no accident, but rather it was a conscious implementation goal; in fact I managed to very substantially improve on aeson’s performance in a few minor corner cases (such as generating character escapes) and then shared what I discovered with Bryan O’Sullivan, who then improved aeson in turn.
One of the more interesting tricks in json-builder is the Monoid instances for Array and Object types. Those instances have been through 4 major revisions, with an interesting pattern of mistakes.
Now, a value of each type is conceptually represented by a Json string without the opening and closing delimiters. So for example, the row "x" 3 is represented by the string "x":3. The outer braces are added by ‘toJson’ function when it converts the Object to a value of the ‘Json’ type.
The delimiters are left off because a client can both append and prepend additional rows to the object, and we cannot efficiently remove the opening and closing brace from a Builder. It may help to pretend that an adversary is trying to break and abuse your interface. However, once the object is converted to a Json value, no such adversary can append and prepend rows; after all, a Json value isn’t necessarily even an Object.
However, when two objects are appended, we need to insert a comma between them. One might be tempted to write:
newtype Object = Object Builder instance Monoid Object where mempty = Object mempty mappend a b = Object (a ++ "," ++ b)
However, this is incorrect; in fact, it isn’t even a monoid. An adversary could produce syntactically incorrect Json simply by appending or prepending a mempty value. For example, here’s some sample expressions and the syntactically incorrect fragments they would generate:
toJson (row "x" 3 ++ mempty) {"x":3,} mconcat [ row "x" 3, mempty, row "y" 4 ] "x":3,,"y":4
Now, this adversary wouldn’t need to be very sophisticated, in fact these problems would almost certainly be discovered by a casual programmer. And a friendly programmer would find it excruciatingly painful to work around this broken implementation. But thinking like an adversary tends to lead to the best code; within reason, you want to minimize an adversary’s best move.
So, we need a way treat the empty Object specially. Also, we cannot simply append or prepend a comma to every singleton object, which would leave an superfluous comma either at the beginning or end of the object.
My first solution was to use the strict state monad to track whether or not we’ve emitted a singleton. Then row knows whether it needs to prepend a comma or not. In essence, my implementation was:
newtype Object = Object (State Bool Builder) instance Monoid Object where mempty = Object (return mempty) mappend = Object (liftM2 mappend) row k v = Object $ do first <- get put False let str = toBuilder k ++ ":" ++ toBuilder v return $ if first then str else "," ++ str instance Value Object where toJson (Object m) = Json ( "{" ++ evalState m True ++ "}" )
But some months later, as I was fleshing out other aspects of json-builder, it occurred to me that the first solution was overly strict; I couldn’t incrementally serialize something like toJson [1..10^9] for example. So, my second solution was conceptually the following code, albeit the actual code was special-cased and simplified slightly:
newtype Object = Object (ContT Builder (State Bool) ()) instance Monoid Object where mempty = Object (return ()) mappend = Object (>>) row k v = Object $ do first <- get put False if first then return () else write "," write (toBuilder k ++ ":" ++ toBuilder v) where write b = mapContT (b ++) (return ()) instance Value Object where toJson (Object m) = Json ( "{" ++ run m ++ "}" ) where run m = runState (runContT m (\_ -> return mempty)) True
But then I started benchmarking json-builder against aeson. Although I was in the right ballpark, I discovered a noticeable performance gap when serializing objects and vectors. So I started thinking about how to improve the Monoid implementation, and soon realized I really didn’t need a full blown monad. My third implementation was much prettier and closed the performance gap:
data Object = Empty | Comma Builder instance Monoid Object where mempty = Empty mappend Empty y = y mappend x Empty = x mappend (Comma a) (Comma b) = Comma (a ++ "," ++ b) row k v = Comma (toBuilder k ++ ":" ++ toBuilder v) instance Value Object where toJson Empty = Json "{}" toJson (Comma x) = Json ( "{" ++ x ++ "}" )
But, I soon realized that I had replicated the same mistake from the first solution, namely that this implementation was insufficiently lazy for incremental serialization. Fixing that was a simple matter of applying a standard and well-known code transformation to mappend:
instance Monoid Object where mempty = Empty mappend Empty x = x mappend (Comma a) x = Comma ( a ++ case x of Empty -> mempty Comma b -> "," ++ b )
However, this transformation reintroduced a performance gap, which was closed by adding a strictness annotation (<– worth reading) on the data constructor:
data Object = Empty | Comma!Builder
And that my friends, is the story of how the CommaBuilder got its spots.
AdvertisementsIt looks like “Doctor Who” star Peter Capaldi will be driving the TARDIS for Seasons 9 and 10 of the BBC series. According to showrunner Steven Moffat, the 56-year-old actor has officially signed on to continue as the iconic science fiction character.
“Yes, he’s confirmed,” Moffat told The Hollywood Reporter at a London press event for the Season 8 DVD release. Meanwhile, there is no word on whether or not Jenna-Louise Coleman will return for Season 9. Coleman has played The Doctor’s companion for two years, one year longer than Capaldi has been with the show.
Rumors have been circulating through the U.K. press that Coleman would be departing the series after Capaldi’s first run. In September she temporarily put the rumors to rest in an interview with Radio Times.
“There’s lots of rumors,” she said. “We’ve sat down with [showrunner] Steven Moffat and we’ve all decided we don’t want anyone to know which way it’s going.”
According to the outlet, she later added, “If you know I’m in the next series -- or if you know I’m off -- you’ll know how the story ends.”
That excuse seems to have satiated fans for now. The final episode of Season 8 is over, and Clara is alive and well, albeit separated from The Doctor. Her character returning does not |
of comedies and action film goes back years. But Fox has never taken that step with an X-Men film, until now.
The Wolverine, from director James Mangold and starring Hugh Jackman, hits disc formats on December 3, and Fox is giving fans an incentive to buy the tricked-out 4-disc blu-ray by featuring an extended, unrated cut of the film, only on that release. There are a bunch of good extras on that four-disc set beyond the new cut (including a commentary from Mangold) and you can read about those below.
Following are all the specs for three editions: 4-Disc Blu, regular Blu, and the fairly bare DVD. The Wolverine will be available on Digital HD on November 19, and these disc formats hit onDecember 3.
THE WOLVERINE Unleashed Extended Edition – Blu-ray 3D/Blu-ray/DVD
The Extended, Unrated Cut – the first for the X-Men franchise!
THE WOLVERINE Unleashed – more violent and hardcore than ever before
The Path of the Ronin – an immersive feature following the journey of a hero without a past
Alternate Ending
Audio Commentary by Director James Mangold (only on the unleashed extended)
Sync with The Wolverine Second Screen App for an interactive Second Screen experience
X-Men: Days of Future Past Set Tour
Theatrical Trailer
THE WOLVERINE Blu-ray
THE WOLVERINE – Theatrical Version with special features:
Alternate Ending
X-Men: Days of Future Past Set Tour
The Path of the Ronin – an immersive feature following the journey of a hero without a past
Sync with The Wolverine Second Screen App for an interactive Second Screen experience
Theatrical Trailer
THE WOLVERINE DVD
THE WOLVERINE – Theatrical Cut
Inspiration – A Ronin’s Journey
So what will the extended cut feature, and how far beyond a PG-13 will it go? The “unrated” aspect doesn’t have to mean much — there’s no standard metric by which “unrated” cuts like this are measured, and in reality the version to be presented on this disc may not be much more violent or bloody (or whatever) than the theatrical. The “extended” part is more interesting, and we can probably expect a lot more Wolverine-on-ninja action.US action along the Pakistan border has raised tensions Pakistan says its troops fired warning shots at two Nato helicopters as they crossed the border from Afghanistan. It is the first time the Pakistan army has admitted opening fire near US or Nato forces, as tension grows over cross border military action. Nato said its aircraft were not in Pakistani airspace when shots were fired over Khost province. The Pentagon said they were US helicopters and that Pakistan would have to explain what had happened. Chief Pakistani military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said that the helicopters had "crossed into our territory in Ghulam Khan area". "They passed over our checkpost so our troops fired warning shots," he said. He added that the matter was being taken up with the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Kabul. 'Flares' fired However, Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari, appeared to contradict his military spokesman, insisting that his troops had only fired "flares" to warn the helicopters they were near the Pakistan border. The BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan, in Islamabad, says that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is very unclear. There is an imaginary border called the Durand line which each side marks differently. Our correspondent says that, in reality, the border is marked by a 3-4km (1-2 mile) stretch of no man's land. Pakistan says that this is its territory and Afghanistan makes similar claims. In a statement, Isaf said its helicopters had received small-arms fire from a Pakistan military checkpoint along the border near Tanai district, Khost, on 25 September "while conducting routine operations in Afghanistan". "At no time did Isaf helicopters cross into Pakistani airspace," it added. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said: "The flight path of the helicopters at no point took them over Pakistan." He said US and Nato officials were speaking to their Pakistani counterparts to determine what had happened and to ensure there was no recurrence. "The Pakistanis have to provide us with a better understanding of why this took place," he said. Local tribesmen in the area told the BBC that two helicopters were trying to cross into Pakistani territory near Ghulam Khan, in North Waziristan, when Pakistani troops at posts near the border fired at them. There are currently two Western military operations in Afghanistan - a US-led coalition and the Nato-led Isaf mission. It appears the helicopters involved in Thursday's incident were US OH-58 reconnaissance aircraft operating under the Nato flag. The BBC's Martin Patience, in Kabul, says it is believed to be the first time Nato helicopters have been fired on in this fashion. BORDER TENSIONS 3 Sept: First reported ground assault by US troops in Pakistan - Islamabad responds furiously 15 Sept: Pakistani troops reportedly fire in air to stop US troops crossing in S Waziristan 17 Sept: Top US military chief Adm Mike Mullen visits Pakistan to calm tensions 16 Sept: Pakistan says it was not told of fresh US missile strike 22 Sept: Pakistani troops in fresh firing to deter US incursion into N Waziristan, officials say 25 Sept: Pakistani troops fire warning shots at Nato helicopters on border with Khost
The Afghan-Pakistan militant nexus US attacks raise stakes in Pakistan Correspondents say there is growing anger in Pakistan at US forces in Afghanistan allegedly violating Pakistani sovereignty. The remote Afghan-Pakistani frontier is rife with militant groups. BBC defence correspondent Rob Watson says the US doubts Pakistan's capability - and even willingness in some quarters - to tackle Islamic extremists. There has been growing tension between the two countries since 3 September when the US conducted its first ground assault in Pakistani territory on what it said was a militant target in South Waziristan. Pakistan reacted angrily to the action, saying 20 innocent villagers had been killed by US troops. Local officials have said that on two occasions since then Pakistani troops or tribesmen have opened fire to stop US forces crossing the border. The claims were not officially confirmed. On Wednesday, a drone believed to be operated by the CIA crashed inside Pakistan. The US and Nato have called on Pakistan to do more to curb militants operating in the border area.
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So I'm gonna put this in my Shadowborn Apostle deck. Sac my dudes, get a demon, then this and do it again. Report Abuse Posted By: Zudzlee (5/12/2013 6:41:54 PM) Rating:
I've been having a lot of success with decks heavy on white 2 CMC creatures. In a deck with 16-20 such creatures and maybe 2 or 3 of these, I no longer have to worry about board wipes. However, there is a lot of graveyard hate in standard right now, so one has to be prepared for that too. Its definitely one of my favorite rares of the set so far. Report Abuse Posted By: joeah100 (1/22/2013 11:28:01 PM) Rating:
This seems like a very powerful way to regain card advantage after a sweep. That's the obvious application for it, but isn't that good enough? You don't have run a fair amount of creatures with the same mana cost, but even if you run lots of 1-drops, they are usually less effective after a sweep and when the game is in the mid or late phases... so only getting the more relevant creatures isn't so much of a drawback. Hell, getting even 2 creatures back is still good.
Of course, ETB effects will make this guy even more abusive. Report Abuse Posted By: RiftenBlack (1/23/2013 1:52:46 AM) Rating:
I can see this being played in a Boros deck. All those haste creatures and enter the battle field triggers. I think it's appropriately costed because if it was any cheaper it would be ridiculous. And I love seeing any and all reanimate effects in Standard. Report Abuse Posted By: Dream_Twist (1/23/2013 8:14:56 AM) Rating:
One sided recursion is always a good effect. It's expensive, but if you want mass reanimation I'd imagine there will be more small fries in the graveyard than big ones. You use other spells for bigger targets.
Soul Sister deck, comes to mind... Report Abuse Posted By: Cyberium (1/23/2013 1:03:19 PM) Rating:
I choose three for Biovisionary Report Abuse Posted By: lorendorky (1/23/2013 4:32:32 AM) Rating:
I wish this card costed one less w/b, but i guess 4 cmc would be undercosted for bringing back all my little 2cmc pretties :|
A closeup of the guys from Debtors' Knell I wish this card costed one less w/b, but i guess 4 cmc would be undercosted for bringing back all my little 2cmc pretties :| Report Abuse Posted By: EmptyMirage (1/25/2013 6:08:38 AM) Rating:Carlo "Don Carlo" Gambino ( Italian: [ɡamˈbiːno]; August 24, 1902 – October 15, 1976) was a Sicilian-American mobster and boss of the Gambino crime family, which is still named after him. After the 1957 Apalachin Convention, he unexpectedly seized control of the Commission of the American Mafia.
Gambino was inconspicuous and secretive; he was convicted of tax evasion in 1937 but had his sentence suspended. He lived to the age of 74,[1][2] when he died of a heart attack in bed "in a state of grace," according to a priest who had given him the Last Rites of the Catholic Church.
Early life [ edit ]
Carlo Gambino was born in the city of Palermo, Sicily, in 1902, to a family that belonged to the Honored Society. The Honored Society was slightly more complicated than the Black Hand of the United States, which was often confused with the American Mafia. The Black Hand, much like the pre-1920s Mafia, was a highly disorganized version of the real European Mafia. Once Benito Mussolini chased a large number of real mafiosi out of Italy, Italian-Americans such as Gambino benefited from the new, better-organized Mafia. Gambino began carrying out murder orders for new mob bosses in his teens. In 1921, at the age of 19, he became a "made man" and was inducted into Cosa Nostra. He was later known as an "original." He was a cousin and brother-in-law of Gambino crime family mobster Paul Castellano. He had two brothers, Gaspare Gambino, who was never involved with the Mafia, and Paolo Gambino who played a major role in his brother's family.
Immigration [ edit ]
Gambino entered the United States on December 23, 1921, at Norfolk, Virginia, the lone passenger aboard the ship SS Vincenzo Florio, and an illegal immigrant.[3] He ate nothing but anchovies and wine during the month-long trip and joined his cousins, the Castellanos, in New York City. There he joined a crime family headed by Salvatore "Toto" D'Aquila, one of the larger crime families in the city. Gambino's uncle, Giuseppe Castellano, also joined the D'Aquila family around this time.
Gambino also became involved with the "Young Turks," a group of Americanized Italian and Jewish mobsters in New York which included Frank "Prime Minister" Costello, Albert "Mad Hatter" Anastasia, Frank Scalice, Gaetano "Tommy Three-Finger Brown" Lucchese, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, and Charles "Lucky" Luciano, one of the future's most powerful mob bosses. The crew became involved in robbery, thefts, and illegal gambling. However, with their new partner, Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein, they turned to bootlegging during Prohibition in the early 1920s. Gambino also made a sizable profit during World War II by bribing Office of Price Administration (OPA) officials for ration stamps, which he then sold on the black market.
Castellammarese War [ edit ]
By 1926, Luciano was considered to be a powerful gangster on the rise. His immediate superior, Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria, was coming into conflict with Salvatore Maranzano, a recent arrival from Palermo who was born in Castellammare del Golfo. When Maranzano arrived in New York in 1925, his access to money and manpower led him to become involved in bootlegging, extortion and gambling operations that directly competed with Masseria. On October 10, 1928, Masseria eliminated his top rival for the coveted title of capo di tutti capi ("boss of bosses"), Brooklyn boss Salvatore D'Aquila. However, Masseria still had to deal with the powerful Maranzano and his Castellammarese clan. Gambino was thrown right into the line of fire.
Masseria demanded absolute loyalty from the other criminals in his area and killed anyone who failed to comply. In 1930, Masseria demanded a $10,000 tribute from Maranzano's then-boss, Nicolo "Cola" Schirò, and supposedly got it. Schirò fled New York in fear, leaving Maranzano as the new leader. By 1931, a series of killings in New York involving Castellammarese clan members and associates caused Maranzano and his family to declare war against Masseria and his allies. D'Aquila's family, now headed by Alfred Mineo, sided with Masseria. In addition to Gambino, other prominent members of this family included Luciano associates Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalice. The Castellammarese clan included Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno and Stefano Magaddino, the Profaci crime family, which included Joe Profaci and Joseph Magliocco – Bonanno's cousin – along with former Masseria allies the Reina family, which included Gaetano "Tom" Reina, Tommaso "Tommy" Gagliano, and Gaetano "Tommy" Lucchese.
The Castellammarese War raged on between the Masseria and Maranzano factions for almost two years, devastating the Prohibition era operations and street rackets that the five New York families controlled along with the Irish and Jewish crime groups. The war cut into gang profits and, in some cases, completely destroyed the underworld rackets of crime family members.
Several Young Turks on both sides realized that if the war did not stop soon, the Italian families could be left on the fringe of New York's criminal underworld while the Jewish and Irish crime bosses became dominant. Additionally, they felt that Masseria, Maranzano, and other old-school mafiosi, whom they derisively called "Mustache Petes," were too greedy to see the riches that could be had by working with non-Italians. With this in mind, Gambino and the other Young Turks decided to end the war and form a national syndicate. On April 15, 1931, Masseria was gunned down at Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in Coney Island by Anastasia, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, and Bugsy Siegel. Maranzano then named himself capo di tutti capi. In the major reorganization of the New York Mafia that followed, Frank Scalise was appointed by Maranzano but demoted & replaced by Vincent "The Executioner" Mangano on orders from Luciano. Mangano took over the Mineo family, with Anastasia as his underboss, brother Phil as Consigliere, and Gambino as a capo. They kept these posts after Maranzano was fatally stabbed and shot on September 10, 1931.
The Commission [ edit ]
In 1931, after the killings of Masseria and Maranzano, Lucky Luciano created the Commission, which was supposed to avoid big conflicts like the Castellammarese War. The charter members were Luciano, Joseph Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Tommy Gagliano and Vincent Mangano.
Gambino married his first cousin, Catherine Castellano, on December 5, 1926. They raised four children – sons Thomas, Joseph and Carlo, and a daughter, Phyllis. Gambino became a major earner in the Mangano family. His activities included loansharking, illegal gambling and protection money from area merchants. Despite this, Gambino was low-key by inclination. He lived in a modest, well-kept row house in Brooklyn. The only real evidence of vanity was his license plate on his Buick, CG1.
Vincent and Philip Mangano [ edit ]
Vincent Mangano led his family for 20 years, even though he and Albert Anastasia never saw eye-to-eye. Mangano was displeased with Anastasia's friendship with Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, especially since they frequently used Anastasia's services without his permission. Anastasia had been, since the 1930s, the operating head of the syndicate's most notorious death squad, Murder, Inc., which was allegedly responsible for 900-1,000 murders. Mangano and his brother, Phil, supposedly confronted Anastasia several times, in front of Gambino. Eventually, Anastasia stopped asking permission for "every little thing," further angering the Manganos.[4]
On April 19, 1951, Philip Mangano was found murdered and Vincent himself vanished the very same day and was never found. It is widely presumed that Anastasia killed them both. Though Anastasia never admitted to having a hand in the Mangano murders, he managed to convince the heads of the other families that Mangano had been plotting to have him killed, a claim backed up by Costello, the acting boss of the Luciano crime family.[4] Anastasia was named the new boss of the family, with Gambino as his underboss. Gambino was now one of the most powerful mobsters in the business, with a crew making profit of extortion, illegal gambling, hijacking, bootlegging and murder. Shortly afterward, Gambino's cousin and brother-in-law, Paul Castellano (Giuseppe's son), took over as capo of Gambino's old crew.
Anastasia, Genovese, and Gambino [ edit ]
While Gambino's family enjoyed increased profits, other mobsters, most notably Vito Genovese, grew concerned about Anastasia's violently erratic behavior. In 1952, Anastasia ordered the murder of a young Brooklyn tailor's assistant named Arnold Schuster, after watching Schuster talking on television about his role in the capture of bank robber Willie Sutton. In killing Schuster, Anastasia had violated a Mafia rule against killing outsiders; as Bugsy Siegel once quaintly put it, "We only kill each other." The murder brought unnecessary public scrutiny on Mafia business. Luciano and Costello were horrified by the killing, but they could not take action against Anastasia as he was needed in their power struggle against Genovese.[4] Genovese did not get along with Anastasia, believing he had murdered Mangano. Due to Joseph Bonanno's efforts, the pax Bonanno was made & war was avoided between the two families. However, Genovese continued to resent Anastasia.
In 1957, Genovese convinced Gambino to side with him against Anastasia, Costello, and Luciano. On Genovese's advice, Gambino told Anastasia that they were not making enough money from casinos in Cuba, which belonged to Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky. After confronting Lansky, Anastasia seemingly threw his support to the Genovese-Gambino alliance.[4] Shortly afterward, Genovese moved against Costello by hiring Vincent "Chin" Gigante to assassinate him. While the attempt failed, it frightened Costello enough to ask the Commission for permission to retire, which they granted. Genovese took over the family and renamed it the Genovese crime family.
With Costello gone, Genovese and Gambino elected to make a preemptive strike against Anastasia. Gambino gave the kill order to Joe Profaci, who then gave it to the Gallo crew, headed by Joseph "Crazy Joe" Gallo, and they allegedly shot Anastasia on October 25, 1957, in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.[5] Gambino then became the new boss of the Mangano crime family, which was renamed the Gambino crime family.[6][7]
No one was ever charged in the murder. Some sources claim that Gambino gave the kill order to "Joe the Blonde" Biondo, who selected Stephen Armone, Arnold "Witty" Wittenberg, and Stephen "Stevie Coogin" Grammauta to carry out the hit.[8][9]
The Apalachin and Genovese's fall [ edit ]
Genovese now believed that with Costello and Anastasia out of the way and Gambino supposedly in his debt, the way was clear for him to become "boss of bosses." However, Gambino had his own mind, and secretly aligned himself with Luciano, Costello and Lansky against Genovese. The Costello-Lansky-Luciano-Gambino alliance gained further strength after the Apalachin Conference, supposedly set up to formally crown Genovese as "boss of bosses," ended in disaster with several prominent mafiosi being arrested. Soon afterward, Costello, Luciano, and Lansky met face to face in Italy.
In 1959, Genovese was heading to Atlanta where a huge shipment of heroin was arriving. However, when he arrived, Genovese was surprised by local police, the FBI and the ATF. He was convicted for selling a large quantity of heroin and was sentenced to 15 years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Genovese would later die in prison of a heart attack in 1969.
Don Carlo [ edit ]
In the early 1960s, Gambino slowly moved against the prominent Anastasia loyalists, headed by caporegime Armand "Tommy" Rava. With Joseph Biondo as a solid underboss, Joseph Riccobono as Gambino's own consigliere, and with his top caporegimes, Aniello "Mr. Neil" Dellacroce, Paul "Big Paul" Castellano, Carmine "The Doctor" Lombardozzi, Joseph "Joe Piney" Armone and Carmine "Wagon Wheels" Fatico, the remaining Anastasia loyalists could never make a move.
Gambino quickly expanded his rackets all over the country. New Gambino rackets were created in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Gambino also, to regain complete control of Manhattan, took over the New York Longshoremen Union, where more than 90 percent of all New York City's ports were controlled. It was a great time, when the money rolled in from every Gambino racket in the U.S. and worked its way up to become America's most powerful crime family. Gambino also made his own family policy: "Deal and Die." This was Gambino's message to every Gambino family member; heroin and cocaine were highly lucrative, but were dangerous, and would also attract attention. The punishment for dealing drugs, in Gambino style, was death.
In the 1960s, the Gambino family had 500[10] (other sources have 700[11] or 800[12]) soldiers, within 30 crews making the family a $500,000,000-a-year-enterprise. In 1962, his eldest son Thomas Gambino married the daughter of fellow mob boss Tommy Lucchese, the new head of the Gagliano crime family, whom Gambino would become close to as a partner, friend, and relative. More than 1,000 people, relatives, friends, and amico nostro ("friends of ours"), were present during the wedding-ceremony. It has been rumored that Gambino personally gave Lucchese $30,000 as a "welcome gift" that same day. As repayment, Lucchese cut his friend into the airport rackets that were under Lucchese control, especially at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where all unions, management, and security were controlled by Lucchese himself. After Joseph Bonanno was forced into retirement by the Commission, Vito Genovese died of a heart attack, and Tommy Lucchese died of a brain tumor, Gambino's status and power on the Commission was elevated almost immediately. While the Mafia had abolished the title of "boss of bosses," Gambino's position afforded him the powers such a title would have carried, as he was now the boss of the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful crime family in the country and was the head of the Commission, a position only Luciano had held before Gambino.
Profaci, the Gallos, and Gambino [ edit ]
In February 1962, the Gallo brothers kidnapped a number of prominent members of the Profaci family including underboss Joseph Magliocco and capo Joseph Colombo. In return for their release, the brothers demanded changes in the way profits were divided between crews, and at first Profaci appeared to agree, following negotiations between the captors and Profaci's consigliere, Charles "The Sidge" LoCicero, but Profaci was simply biding his time before taking revenge on the Gallos. Gallo crew member Joseph "Joe Jelly" Gioelli was murdered by Profaci's men in September, and an attempt on Larry Gallo's life was interrupted by policemen in a Brooklyn bar. The brothers set about attacking Profaci's men wherever they saw them as all-out war erupted between the two factions. Plus, Gambino and Lucchese were putting pressure on the other bosses to convince Profaci of stepping down from his title and family, but on June 6, 1962, Profaci lost his battle against cancer. He was replaced as boss of the family by Joseph Magliocco, a man very much in the Profaci mold. Accordingly, Gambino and Lucchese gave their support to the Gallo crew, where Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno, the longtime Don of the Bonanno crime family, gave his support to Magliocco and the Profacis.
The Gallo crew gave up later that year. With their caporegime Joseph "Crazy Joe" Gallo behind bars for racketeering and murder, the Gallo crew from Red Hook didn't have enough manpower to continue the war against the rest of the Profacis. Magliocco and Bonanno had won the Gallo war, and intended to "take care" of their "boss of bosses," Carlo Gambino.
Conspiracy against the Commission [ edit ]
With the Gallos out of the way, Magliocco was able to consolidate his position and concentrate on the business of running the family's affairs. However, Joseph Bonanno hatched a plot to murder the heads of the other three families, which Magliocco decided to go along with. The assassinations went to Profaci capo, Joseph Colombo, who realized that the plot would never amount to anything, and warned Gambino about Magliocco and Bonanno's conspiracy against the Commission. Bonanno and Magliocco were called to face the judgement of the Commission. While Bonanno went into hiding, Magliocco faced up to his crimes. Understanding that he had been following Bonanno's lead, he was let off with a $50,000 fine, and forced to retire as the head of the family, being replaced by Joseph Colombo. One month later, Magliocco died of high blood pressure, but Gambino had other plans for Bonanno.
The Bonanno War [ edit ]
After Magliocco's death, Bonanno had few allies left. Many members felt he was too power hungry, and one, a boss from Florida, Santo Trafficante, Jr., once said in anger, "He's planting flags all over the world!"[13] Some members of his family also thought he spent too much time away from New York, and more in Canada and Tucson, where he had business interests. The Commission members decided that he no longer deserved leadership over his family and replaced him with a caporegime in his family, Gaspar DiGregorio. Bonanno, however, would not accept this result, breaking the family into two groups, the one led by DiGregorio, and the other headed by Bonanno and his son, Salvatore "Bill" Bonanno. Newspapers referred to it as "The Banana Split."
Since Bonanno refused to give up his position, the other Commission members felt it was time for drastic action.
Gambino was the one who would give the order to have Bonanno killed, but took pity on him and decided to give Bonanno one last chance to retire while he had his life. In October 1964, Bonanno was kidnapped by Buffalo crime family members, Peter and Antonino Magaddino. According to Bonanno, he was held captive in upstate New York by his cousin, Stefano "Steve the Undertaker" Magaddino. Supposedly Magaddino represented the Commission and Gambino, and told his cousin that he "took up too much space in the air," a Sicilian proverb for arrogance. After much talk, Bonanno was released and the Commission members believed he would finally retire and relinquish his power.
Eventually, DiGregorio promised a peace meeting on whatever territory Salvatore wanted. It was an ambush. DiGregorio's men opened fire with rifles and automatic weapons on Salvatore and his associates, who were armed only with pistols. The police estimated that more than 500 shots were fired but remarkably, no one was hurt. The war went on for another two more years. The Commission originally thought they could win, but when Joseph Bonanno returned, their hopes were dashed. Bonanno sent out a message to his enemies, saying that for every Bonanno loyalist killed, he would retaliate by hitting a caporegime from the other side. Just as the Bonanno loyalists were sensing victory, Bonanno suffered a heart attack; he decided that he and his son would retire to Tucson, leaving his broken family to another capo, Paul Sciacca, who had replaced DiGregorio. Gambino stood as the victorious and most powerful mob boss in the US. Having the reputation of Gambino's "mercy," made him even more respectable in front of the Commission.
Lucchese's death [ edit ]
Gaetano "Tommy" Lucchese led a quiet, stable life until he developed a fatal brain tumor and died at his home in Lido Beach, Long Island on July 13, 1967. His funeral at the Calvary Cemetery in Queens, was attended by more than 1,000 mourners, including politicians, judges, policemen, racketeers, drug pushers, pimps, hitmen and Gambino, who allegedly arranged the whole funeral. Lucchese was succeeded as boss by Antonio "Tony Ducks" Corallo.[14]
Colombo assassination [ edit ]
It has also been theorized that Gambino went so far as to organize the shooting of Joseph Colombo, head of the Colombo crime family, on June 28, 1971. Colombo survived the shooting, but remained in a coma until his death in 1978. The other theory is that Joe Gallo organized the attack himself. It seems that the rest of the Colombo family believed the latter theory, as Gallo was famously gunned down himself not long after. Colombo's increasing media attention was definitely not liked by the other Commission members; that Lucchese withdrew support was evidenced by capo Paul Vario rescinding his membership from the Italian-American Civil Rights League. However Gambino resorting to killing Colombo seems unlikely as there was no substantial benefit for Gambino in it. Gallo and his crew had already started one war against Profaci, during which time they had kidnapped Colombo, and as Colombo had allegedly carried out a number of hits during that war it seems understandable that Gallo would not like him and have designs on becoming boss himself.
However, the theory that Gallo was responsible ignores several pertinent factors. It is true that many powerful members were angry with Colombo for having founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League and glorying in publicity. Gambino hated publicity, always preferring to work in the shadows, and was said to have been quite upset with Colombo about this. As was his style, Gambino did not make a public show of his anger. Gallo had recently been in prison where he had formed close associations with black prisoners who could serve as muscle, a fact that was well known to Gambino. Colombo was shot at a Congress of Italian-American Organizations rally, which was an umbrella organization that included Colombo's Italian-American Civil Rights League, by a black man who was almost instantly shot and killed. As a result, Gambino was rid of a publicity seeking thorn in his side and he got the Colombo family to eliminate Gallo, whose propensity for disruptive violence also displeased the Don. It was also the way Gambino operated: very intelligently, very quietly, but with final brutality.
The police were happy to accept the Gallo theory, as was the Colombo crime family, but as time went on, the theory of Gambino as the mastermind gained currency within the "mob." Though it is unknown who was truly responsible for the deaths, they ultimately improved the stability of the Gambino empire as the old Don faded.
Luciano's death [ edit ]
Gambino was also the only mob boss of the Five Families who attended the burial of longtime friend, Charles "Lucky" Luciano. On January 26, 1962, Luciano died of a heart attack at the age of 64 at Naples International Airport. He was buried in St. John Cemetery in Queens in February, 1962 due to Luciano having another funeral in Italy and for the time it took to transport his body back to the US. More than 2,000 mourners attended his funeral, where Gambino gave his own speech in memory of Luciano, his friend and companion.
Tommy Eboli murder [ edit ]
After the imprisonment of Vito Genovese in 1959, Thomas "Tommy Ryan" Eboli was made acting boss. He kept his position after Genovese died in jail in 1969, but believing that he would need an infusion of money to re-organize the Genovese crime family, Eboli borrowed $4,000,000 from Gambino. Eboli's ability to repay the funds was hindered by the subsequent arrest of and imprisonment of his crew; the arrests were allegedly arranged by Gambino because he wanted his friend Frank Tieri at the head of the Genovese family. When the loan came due, Eboli refused to repay Gambino, claiming that he didn't have enough money. Eboli was murdered on July 16, 1972 – a crime that remains unsolved – and, under the influence of Gambino, the selection of Frank Tieri as boss of the Genovese crime family was made.
Constant surveillance [ edit ]
In December 1972, a van marked "Organized Crime Control Bureau" began to park outside Gambino's home in Brooklyn. In the van, the FBI's mob squad monitored events inside the house using cameras, lip-readers, and audio-surveillance equipment, including microphones and wire-taps that were planted in Gambino's home. The FBI maintained 24-hour standby in the van, hoping to connect Gambino to organized crime. However, Gambino continued to conduct business in the home using a combination of silent gestures and coded language. According to FBI officials they once recorded a meeting between Gambino, Aniello Dellacroce and Joseph Biondo, where Biondo said only, "Frog legs," and Gambino simply nodded. The recording tapes came out empty. It was also determined by the OCCB that Antonio Mangotti and Carlo Gambino had not uttered a single word to one another for two years until the birth of his son Antonio "Jovanni" Mangotti on August 29, 1972. It is said that the only words uttered were "Complimenti" and "Grazie"
Emanuel "Manny" Gambino's kidnapping and murder [ edit ]
In May 1972, Gambino's nephew Emanuel "Manny" Gambino was kidnapped by James McBratney, "Crazy" Eddie Maloney, Warren "Chief" Schurman, Richie Chaisson and Colombo crime family associate Thomas Genovese (a distant relative of Vito Genovese). The gang had previously kidnapped a Lucchese crime family capo, Frank "Frankie the Wop" Manzo. They received a ransom of $150,000 for Manzo's safe return.[15] For Manny Gambino, the kidnappers asked for $350,000, but his brother claimed he could only come up with $40,000.[16] On June 2, 1972, Manny's car was located at the Newark Airport parking lot. On January 26, 1973, his corpse was found to be stiff from rigor mortis before being buried in a sitting position in a New Jersey dump near the Earle Naval Ammunition Depot.
On December 4, 1972, Robert Senter was arrested and charged with Gambino's murder. Senter was a gambler and had fallen in debt with Manny Gambino. On June 1, 1973, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Along with confessing to his participation in the kidnapping and murder, he revealed the identity of his two accomplices, Chaisson and Schurman.
Gambino, seeking revenge, hired John Gotti, a known heavy hitter, on the advice of his underboss, Aniello Dellacroce. Gotti met with Gambino, Dellacroce, consigliere Joseph Armone and Gambino's own brother-in-law and top caporegime, Paul Castellano. Gotti was given the assignment of killing James McBratney, the kidnap-for-ransom gang's leader, who played a large role in Manny Gambino's murder. Castellano |
Julia used it for entirely personal purposes until late 2015 and still uses it more personally than David. We see these differences immediately in this plot exploring word frequencies, and they will continue to be obvious in the rest of this chapter.
7.3 Comparing word usage We just made a plot comparing raw word frequencies over our whole Twitter histories; now let’s find which words are more or less likely to come from each person’s account using the log odds ratio. First, let’s restrict the analysis moving forward to tweets from David and Julia sent during 2016. David was consistently active on Twitter for all of 2016 and this was about when Julia transitioned into data science as a career. tidy_tweets <- tidy_tweets %>% filter (timestamp >= as.Date ( "2016-01-01" ), timestamp < as.Date ( "2017-01-01" )) Next, let’s use str_detect() to remove Twitter usernames from the word column, because otherwise, the results here are dominated only by people who Julia or David know and the other does not. After removing these, we count how many times each person uses each word and keep only the words used more than 10 times. After a spread() operation, we can calculate the log odds ratio for each word, using \[\text{log odds ratio} = \ln{\left(\frac{\left[\frac{n+1}{\text{total}+1}\right]_\text{David}}{\left[\frac{n+1}{\text{total}+1}\right]_\text{Julia}}\right)}\] where \(n\) is the number of times the word in question is used by each person and the total indicates the total words for each person. word_ratios <- tidy_tweets %>% filter (! str_detect (word, "^@" )) %>% count (word, person) %>% group_by (word) %>% filter ( sum (n) >= 10 ) %>% ungroup () %>% spread (person, n, fill = 0 ) %>% mutate_if (is.numeric, funs ((. + 1 ) / ( sum (.) + 1 ))) %>% mutate ( logratio = log (David / Julia)) %>% arrange ( desc (logratio)) What are some words that have been about equally likely to come from David or Julia’s account during 2016? word_ratios %>% arrange ( abs (logratio)) ## # A tibble: 351 x 4 ## word David Julia logratio ## <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> ## 1 words 0.00377 0.00378 -0.00334 ## 2 science 0.00653 0.00648 0.00771 ## 3 idea 0.00577 0.00594 -0.0279 ## 4 email 0.00251 0.00243 0.0330 ## 5 file 0.00251 0.00243 0.0330 ## 6 purrr 0.00251 0.00243 0.0330 ## 7 test 0.00226 0.00216 0.0454 ## 8 account 0.00201 0.00189 0.0612 ## 9 api 0.00201 0.00189 0.0612 ## 10 sad 0.00201 0.00189 0.0612 ## # … with 341 more rows We are about equally likely to tweet about words, science, ideas, and email. Which words are most likely to be from Julia’s account or from David’s account? Let’s just take the top 15 most distinctive words for each account and plot them in Figure 7.3. word_ratios %>% group_by (logratio < 0 ) %>% top_n ( 15, abs (logratio)) %>% ungroup () %>% mutate ( word = reorder (word, logratio)) %>% ggplot ( aes (word, logratio, fill = logratio < 0 )) + geom_col ( show.legend = FALSE ) + coord_flip () + ylab ( "log odds ratio (David/Julia)" ) + scale_fill_discrete ( name = "", labels = c ( "David", "Julia" )) So David has tweeted about specific conferences he has gone to and Stack Overflow, while Julia tweeted about Utah, Census data, and her family.
7.4 Changes in word use The section above looked at overall word use, but now let’s ask a different question. Which words’ frequencies have changed the fastest in our Twitter feeds? Or to state this another way, which words have we tweeted about at a higher or lower rate as time has passed? To do this, we will define a new time variable in the data frame that defines which unit of time each tweet was posted in. We can use floor_date() from lubridate to do this, with a unit of our choosing; using 1 month seems to work well for this year of tweets from both of us. After we have the time bins defined, we count how many times each of us used each word in each time bin. After that, we add columns to the data frame for the total number of words used in each time bin by each person and the total number of times each word was used by each person. We can then filter() to only keep words used at least some minimum number of times (30, in this case). words_by_time <- tidy_tweets %>% filter (! str_detect (word, "^@" )) %>% mutate ( time_floor = floor_date (timestamp, unit = "1 month" )) %>% count (time_floor, person, word) %>% group_by (person, time_floor) %>% mutate ( time_total = sum (n)) %>% group_by (person, word) %>% mutate ( word_total = sum (n)) %>% ungroup () %>% rename ( count = n) %>% filter (word_total > 30 ) words_by_time ## # A tibble: 326 x 6 ## time_floor person word count time_total word_total ## <dttm> <chr> <chr> <int> <int> <int> ## 1 2016-01-01 00:00:00 David #rstats 2 315 205 ## 2 2016-01-01 00:00:00 David broom 2 315 34 ## 3 2016-01-01 00:00:00 David data 2 315 148 ## 4 2016-01-01 00:00:00 David ggplot2 1 315 37 ## 5 2016-01-01 00:00:00 David time 2 315 56 ## 6 2016-01-01 00:00:00 David tweets 1 315 46 ## 7 2016-01-01 00:00:00 Julia #rstats 10 437 116 ## 8 2016-01-01 00:00:00 Julia blog 2 437 33 ## 9 2016-01-01 00:00:00 Julia data 5 437 105 ## 10 2016-01-01 00:00:00 Julia day 1 437 43 ## # … with 316 more rows Each row in this data frame corresponds to one person using one word in a given time bin. The count column tells us how many times that person used that word in that time bin, the time_total column tells us how many words that person used during that time bin, and the word_total column tells us how many times that person used that word over the whole year. This is the data set we can use for modeling. We can use nest() from tidyr to make a data frame with a list column that contains little miniature data frames for each word. Let’s do that now and take a look at the resulting structure. nested_data <- words_by_time %>% nest ( - word, - person) nested_data ## # A tibble: 32 x 3 ## person word data ## <chr> <chr> <list> ## 1 David #rstats <tibble [12 × 4]> ## 2 David broom <tibble [10 × 4]> ## 3 David data <tibble [12 × 4]> ## 4 David ggplot2 <tibble [10 × 4]> ## 5 David time <tibble [12 × 4]> ## 6 David tweets <tibble [8 × 4]> ## 7 Julia #rstats <tibble [12 × 4]> ## 8 Julia blog <tibble [10 × 4]> ## 9 Julia data <tibble [12 × 4]> ## 10 Julia day <tibble [12 × 4]> ## # … with 22 more rows This data frame has one row for each person-word combination; the data column is a list column that contains data frames, one for each combination of person and word. Let’s use map() from purrr (Henry and Wickham 2018) to apply our modeling procedure to each of those little data frames inside our big data frame. This is count data so let’s use glm() with family = "binomial" for modeling. We can think about this modeling procedure answering a question like, “Was a given word mentioned in a given time bin? Yes or no? How does the count of word mentions depend on time?” library (purrr) nested_models <- nested_data %>% mutate ( models = map (data, ~ glm ( cbind (count, time_total) ~ time_floor,., family = "binomial" ))) nested_models ## # A tibble: 32 x 4 ## person word data models ## <chr> <chr> <list> <list> ## 1 David #rstats <tibble [12 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 2 David broom <tibble [10 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 3 David data <tibble [12 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 4 David ggplot2 <tibble [10 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 5 David time <tibble [12 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 6 David tweets <tibble [8 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 7 Julia #rstats <tibble [12 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 8 Julia blog <tibble [10 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 9 Julia data <tibble [12 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## 10 Julia day <tibble [12 × 4]> <S3: glm> ## # … with 22 more rows Now notice that we have a new column for the modeling results; it is another list column and contains glm objects. The next step is to use map() and tidy() from the broom package to pull out the slopes for each of these models and find the important ones. We are comparing many slopes here and some of them are not statistically significant, so let’s apply an adjustment to the p-values for multiple comparisons. library (broom) slopes <- nested_models %>% unnest ( map (models, tidy)) %>% filter (term == "time_floor" ) %>% mutate ( adjusted.p.value = p.adjust (p.value)) Now let’s find the most important slopes. Which words have changed in frequency at a moderately significant level in our tweets? top_slopes <- slopes %>% filter (adjusted.p.value < 0.05 ) top_slopes ## # A tibble: 6 x 8 ## person word term estimate std.error statistic p.value adjusted.p.value ## <chr> <chr> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> ## 1 David ggplot2 time_floor -0.0000000807 0.0000000200 -4.04 0.0000523 0.00162 ## 2 Julia #rstats time_floor -0.0000000450 0.0000000111 -4.04 0.0000541 0.00162 ## 3 Julia post time_floor -0.0000000514 0.0000000149 -3.46 0.000546 0.0158 ## 4 David overflow time_floor 0.0000000696 0.0000000223 3.12 0.00181 0.0490 ## 5 David stack time_floor 0.0000000738 0.0000000219 3.37 0.000751 0.0210 ## 6 David #user2016 time_floor -0.000000817 0.000000155 -5.27 0.000000139 0.00000445 To visualize our results, we can plot these words’ use for both David and Julia over this year of tweets. words_by_time %>% inner_join (top_slopes, by = c ( "word", "person" )) %>% filter (person == "David" ) %>% ggplot ( aes (time_floor, count / time_total, color = word)) + geom_line ( size = 1.3 ) + labs ( x = NULL, y = "Word frequency" ) We see in Figure 7.4 that David tweeted a lot about the UseR conference while he was there and then quickly stopped. He has tweeted more about Stack Overflow toward the end of the year and less about ggplot2 as the year has progressed. Me: I'm so sick of data science wars. #rstats vs Python, frequentist vs Bayesian…
Them: base vs ggplot2…
Me: WHY WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON — David Robinson (@drob) March 23, 2016 Now let’s plot words that have changed frequency in Julia’s tweets in Figure 7.5. words_by_time %>% inner_join (top_slopes, by = c ( "word", "person" )) %>% filter (person == "Julia" ) %>% ggplot ( aes (time_floor, count / time_total, color = word)) + geom_line ( size = 1.3 ) + labs ( x = NULL, y = "Word frequency" ) Both the significant slopes for Julia are negative. This means she has not tweeted at a higher rate using any specific words, but instead using a variety of different words; her tweets earlier in the year contained the words shown in this plot at higher proportions. Words she uses when publicizing a new blog post like the #rstats hashtag and “post” have gone down in frequency.Those Dutch elections were in March and it took them 6-7 months of ‘polderen’ but with results. A new Dutch government is slowly but surely releasing details of all kinds of groundbreaking policy rehauls. Let’s have a look at the new Dutch governmental policies on gender issues.
The new government will no longer unnecessarily register if a person is a man or a woman. The four parties that will form the new coalition want all branches of government to work as gender neutral as possible, as the NOS states. The measure is one of the ways in which the new coalition strengthens the rights of LGBTQ-people. The idea is also that Article 1 of the Constitution, everybody being equal and no discrimination, is supported this way.
Gender registration in practice
The municipalities, provinces and the empire are not meant to ask for the gender anymore if it is not necessary, for example, think about municipal letters about taxes and such. In some cases it is necessary, such as the passport.
D66 and the VVD have signed the Rainbow Voting Poll Agreement with several other parties (but not the two coalition partners!). This agreement is in favour of policy allowing kids with more than two (regular) parents, such as gays or a donor or mother-in-law who would like to be legally older. They also aim to alter Article 1 in a way that it will explicitly prohibit discriminating because of sexual preference or gender.
When it comes to other ‘gay rights’ issues in parliament the CDA and the Christian Union are expected to vote against, but will not force their coalition partners D66 and the VVD to do so too.
A big step for the coalition, as this was one of the principal points dividing the Liberal and Christian parties. What do you make of this new approach to gender registration by the new Dutch government?Daniel Sturridge has been named among the substitutes for Liverpool's final pre-season match this summer, against Celtic in Dublin – follow the action live from 5pm BST.
As with all of the Reds' preparation games for 2013-14, LFC TV Online subscribers can watch the clash with the Scottish champions live on this website.
After returning to full training earlier this week, Sturridge is fit enough to take a place on the bench, while Andre Wisdom plays in central defence in the absence of new vice-captain Daniel Agger.
The Reds team in full is: Mignolet, Enrique, Wisdom, Toure, Johnson, Lucas, Gerrard, Allen, Downing, Aspas, Coutinho.
Substitutes: Jones, Alberto, Assaidi, Henderson, Sturridge, Coates, Borini, Sterling, Kelly, Flanagan, Ibe.
Click here to follow all of the action from the Aviva Stadium with our live minute-by-minute updates and accompanying audio commentary.
For more information about our clash versus Celtic, follow @dublindecider. To find out what else is going on in Dublin while Liverpool are over in Ireland, visit www.thegatheringireland.com.UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks called for a new investigation Friday into the strength and conditioning program of Cal football amid criticism over a 2014 inquiry that cleared the program of wrongdoing.
That 2014 inquiry was conducted by investigators who had personal connections to Cal athletics staff and who interviewed students selected by athletic program administration, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Dirks’ move to launch a new probe into the strength and conditioning program came in response to a letter from the Berkeley Faculty Association, which requested that Dirks not renew Cal football strength and conditioning coach Damon Harrington’s $150,000 yearly contract until a new investigation determined whether the coach took actions that contributed to two separate incidents of player harm.
The first incident occurred in 2013, when UC Berkeley freshman and Cal running back Fabiano Hale was injured in an altercation with one of his teammates. The other incident in 2014 saw campus junior and Cal football player Ted Agu die after a rigorous teamwide training run.
“We intend to identify and appoint an independent investigator to assess the current state of the program and the efficacy of the many changes we have made in recent years,” Dirks said in a letter to the Berkeley Faculty Association co-chairs. “We will also ask for and expect recommendations to address any gaps that may be found between our practices and best practices.”
According to one of the association’s co-chairs, campus sociology professor Michael Burawoy, the investigation will not assess the culpability of Harrington specifically, but is instead confined to evaluating the larger program. Burawoy said this decision not to focus on Harrington was “disappointing,” particularly in light of the fact that the campus admitted to negligence in Agu’s death in January of this year.
“If it is claimed that Harrington did nothing wrong, why did the university pay out $4.75 million after admitting negligence in the civil suit brought by Agu’s parents?” Burawoy said in an email.
Burawoy added that the move “suggests that the university is in thrall to its athletic department, or more precisely to the revenue it is supposed to bring.” He noted, however, that he was grateful the chancellor was “taking the matter seriously.”
The original 2014 “Tanji report” into the program cleared the program of wrongdoing in four separate areas, including the use of punitive and abusive practices during drills. The report did disclose that its investigators had ties to Cal athletics but added that “these relationships did not color the outcome of the requested investigation.”
Campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof confirmed that Dirks had ordered an investigation on the program and said it was expected to begin soon. He added, however, that many steps still need to take place before the investigation can be fully launched.
“We have to find an expert to do it, we have to see who’s available, we have to set up interviews,” Mogulof said. “So it’ll take some time.”
Check back for updates.
Logan Goldberg is the executive news editor. Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @logangoldberg.It is important to keep in mind that Russia is not acting in a vacuum. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s belligerence over the last few years is not entirely about whipping up a nationalist fervor to improve his political fortunes. As Pepe Escobar points out in a recent Op-Ed on Zero Hedge, it’s also about U.S. foreign policy in effect forcing Russia, China and Iran into a military alliance against the West.
Russia selling Iran S-300 anti-aircraft missiles is a game changer
Russia’s decision to sell the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to Iran is clearly a game-changer, and reflects changing geopolitics and the new world order. Jane’s Defense Weekly has been saying for years that Israel would have great difficulty penetrating Iranian airspace, and that will certainly be true soon. Keep in mind that following the S-300s, Iran will almost certainly be offered the yet more sophisticated S-400s, which China is already slated to receive.
Escobar explains the implications of Russia’s decision: “The unspoken secret behind these game-changing proceedings actually terrifies Washington warmongers; it spells out a further frontline of Eurasian integration, in the form of an evolving Eurasian missile shield deployed against Pentagon/NATO ballistic plans.”
Eurasian military alliance
A possible glimpse of the future was offered at the Moscow Conference on International Security in April of this year.
Iranian Defense Minister, Brigadier-General Hussein Dehghan, unabashedly stating that Iran wanted BRICS members China, India and Russia to jointly oppose NATO’s eastward expansion, and calling NATO’s missile shield as an existential threat to their collective security.
At the same conference, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan noted that their military ties are an “overriding priority”, and Iran and Moscow also emphasized that they’re working together in their push towards a new global order.
NATO versus Russia/China/Iran
The battle lines are becoming more clearly drawn between NATO and Russia/China/Iran, so it’s not surprising the three nations are cooperating more than ever before. Of note, Iran is an observer at the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and is virtually certain to join the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) within the next year or two.
Given Russia is providing S-300 systems to Iran and S-400 systems to China, and developing the S-500 systems, which can supposedly intercept supersonic targets, it’s clear the current NATO /U.S. military domination is at least threatened.
On a related note, despite its small fleet in the area, China symbolically announced joint naval exercises with Russia in the Mediterranean last week.
More over, as Escobar points out, this “budding military Eurasia integration is a key subplot of the New Great Game that runs parallel to the Chinese-led New Silk Road project.”
He argues that this Eurasian military alliance was almost inevitable given Beijing is confronted by U.S. and allies encroachment via the Asia-Pacific; Russia by encroachment via Eastern Europe; and Iran by encroachment via Southwest Asia.
This means the multi-vector Russia-China-Iran strategic alliance is a reality for the foreseeable future. And despite whatever may occur with the nuclear negotiations with Iran this summer, ‘Iran is bound to remain — alongside Russia — a key US geostrategic target.”
Moreover, it is clear Moscow and Tehran have easily identified the U.S. government’s hidden agenda of using a “rehabilitated” Iran to sell oodles of oil and gas to the EU, undermining Gazprom’s dominant position.
Pentagon Long War prosecuted against enemies, fabricated or otherwise, all across the “Muslim world”
Some years ago a RAND report described U.S. Middle East policy as the “Long War”. It boils down to the fact that the U.S. will continue to support the Saudi Arabian-led Gulf Cooperation Council “petrodollar racket” no matter what in the interest of containing Iranian power and influence. According to Escobar, the U.S. “diverts Salafi-jihadi resources toward “targeting Iranian interests throughout the Middle East,” especially in Iraq and Lebanon, hence “cutting back… anti-Western operations”; props up al-Qaeda — and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh — GCC sponsors and “empowers” viciously anti-Shi’ite Islamists everywhere to maintain “Western dominance”.”
He points out that the idea of the Long War was first formulated several years ago by the Highlands Forum, a right wing linked Pentagon think tank. Of note, the RAND Corporation is a major partner of the Highlands Forum. Moreover, notorious Long War practitioners such as current Pentagon big wig Ashton Carter, his deputy Robert Work, and intelligence chief Mike Vickers are now in charge of the “Don’t Do Stupid Stuff” Obama administration’s military strategy.Charges: Mom pours gasoline on daughter, flicks lighter, for bad grade 'It's my daughter and I can do as I please!'
A 44-year-old mother is accused of dousing her teen daughter in gasoline and threatening to light her on fire because of what the victim claimed was a bad test grade, charges say. A 44-year-old mother is accused of dousing her teen daughter in gasoline and threatening to light her on fire because of what the victim claimed was a bad test grade, charges say. Photo: Tyler Packer / EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm Photo: Tyler Packer / EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Charges: Mom pours gasoline on daughter, flicks lighter, for bad grade 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
A 44-year-old mother is accused of dousing her teen daughter in gasoline and threatening to light her on fire because of what the victim claimed was a bad test grade, charges say.
The woman also reportedly struck the 14-year-old girl with a tire jack and whipped her with a phone charger cord before the teen ran away to seek help from neighbors, reports say.
Lisa Kyles was charged Nov. 16 with attempted first-degree assault and felony harassment, both with domestic violence qualifiers. She pleaded not guilty to the crimes Tuesday in King County Superior Court.
Federal Way police were called to an apartment complex in the 31200 block of 20th Avenue South Nov. 10 on reports that a mother threatened to light her daughter on fire with gasoline before taking off in a van, according to Detective Richard Kim. The 911 caller also reported that the mother returned and threatened to light the caller's apartment on fire.
While police were on their way to the apartment complex, they learned that the woman left the area on foot. They arrived to find five to seven people gathered near the complex and smelled gasoline.
A 14-year-old girl "appeared to be visibly shaken and was crying" and told police that her head and hand hurt from being assaulted by her mother, Kim wrote.
The girl told police that about 5:30 p.m. she was in her Kyle's parked van with her 22-year-old brother when the brother berated her for a grade she earned on a school test. While the mother was organizing the van, the older brother reportedly hit the 14-year-old girl 18 to 20 times in the head over a period of three hours, Federal Way police reports indicate.
The brother left for work about 8:30 p.m. and allegedly told Kyles, "You handle this!" Kyles then argued with the girl about her grades and hit her three times on her right knee and shin with a tire jack, Kim wrote. The girl also claimed her mom hit her on the left hand with the tire jack five to eight times.
Reports say that Kyles then grabbed a phone charger cord and jumper cable and whipped the girl on her right shoulder.
Kyles went on to grab a gas canister from the back seat and doused her with gasoline, covering her clothes and arm, police reports say. The woman then allegedly flicked a lighter near the girl's clothing and threatened to light her on fire. Fearing for her life, the girl, opened the van door and ran toward the apartments.
The girl reportedly ran toward two women in the parking lot, yelling, "Help me, she's trying to set me on fire!" and "She's gonna kill me!" according to Kim's report. Kyles tried to chase after her daughter, but one of the witnesses reportedly stowed the girl away in her apartment to wait for police.
One of the witnesses told police she confronted Kyles about pouring gasoline on the girl, but Kyles threatened to set the witness and her apartment on fire and said, "It's my daughter and I can do as I please!"
Authorities found that the girl suffered a swelling forehead from being punched by her older brother, reports say. The teen also reported pain to her right leg and left palm from the tire jack blows.
The girl was taken to St. Francis Hospital for treatment before Child Protective Services took custody of her.
Officers arrested Kyles the next day. Kim wrote that Kyles admitted to striking her daughter with a closed fist on her head, but denied pouring gasoline on her, whipping her with a cord or striking her with a tire jack. She also claimed she didn't threaten anyone else, reports say.
Kyles told detectives she argued with her daughter over photos she found in the girl's phone.
She is held in King County Jail on $150,000 bail.
Correction: This story was updated to say the 22-year-old sibling was the alleged victim's brother.
Related:Adobe's Director of Product Security and Privacy, Brad Arkin, has summarised the current state of his company's investigations into the inappropriate use of Adobe certificates in a blog post. Unknown intruders are thought to have hacked an internal server in order to provide specific malware programs with a valid digital signature. These tools were then apparently used for targeted attacks.
One of the signed programs is the pwdump7 tool that allows password hashes to be extracted from a Windows system so they can then be cracked on a more powerful system. The second sample is an "ISAPI filter". These filters are special extensions for Microsoft's IIS web server software that can add almost any kind of functionality to the web server – such as the ability to intercept its communication with users. Arkin doesn't specify who was attacked or what happened as a result. However, the extent of the attackers' efforts points towards a high-profile or at least a lucrative target.
Arkin also neglects to answer the question of how the attackers intruded into Adobe's systems. What is known is that they compromised an internal build server that had the ability to issue code-signing requests. This server and the complete code-signing infrastructure have now been decommissioned. Arkin said that the private key that is associated with the compromised certificate was not stolen because it is kept in a hardware security module that was not breached. No other information or source code appears to have been stolen.
On Thursday 4 October, Adobe plans to respond by revoking the affected certificate for any software that was signed after 10 July 2012. The revocation affects Adobe applications on the Windows platform as well as three Adobe AIR applications that are available for Windows and Mac systems (Adobe Muse, Adobe Story AIR Applications and Acrobat.com Desktop Services). The company has provided more detailed information about the affected software on a dedicated support page. The certificate revocation will not affect the majority of customers, promised Adobe.
Arkin discourages users from manually adding the affected certificate (issued to "Adobe Systems Incorporated", serial number 15 e5 ac 0a 48 70 63 71 8e 39 da 52 30 1a 04 88) to the Windows Untrusted Certificate Store. The executive explained that, while this doesn't stop an attack, it will have "a negative impact on the user experience" of Adobe software users.
(djwm)Abstract Bioluminescence is primarily a marine phenomenon with 80% of metazoan bioluminescent genera occurring in the world’s oceans. Here we show that bioluminescence has evolved repeatedly and is phylogenetically widespread across ray-finned fishes. We recover 27 independent evolutionary events of bioluminescence, all among marine fish lineages. This finding indicates that bioluminescence has evolved many more times than previously hypothesized across fishes and the tree of life. Our exploration of the macroevolutionary patterns of bioluminescent lineages indicates that the present day diversity of some inshore and deep-sea bioluminescent fish lineages that use bioluminescence for communication, feeding, and reproduction exhibit exceptional species richness given clade age. We show that exceptional species richness occurs particularly in deep-sea fishes with intrinsic bioluminescent systems and both shallow water and deep-sea lineages with luminescent systems used for communication.
Citation: Davis MP, Sparks JS, Smith WL (2016) Repeated and Widespread Evolution of Bioluminescence in Marine Fishes. PLoS ONE 11(6): e0155154. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155154 Editor: Erik V. Thuesen, The Evergreen State College, UNITED STATES Received: July 10, 2015; Accepted: April 25, 2016; Published: June 8, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Davis 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. Data Availability: Data accessibility. Alignment available in S1 Text. The previously published nuclear genes come from a diversity of studies. Sequences of Sagamichthys abei, Xenodermichthys copei, and Yarrella blackfordi were taken from DeVaney [34]. Sequences of Archoplites interuptus, Elassoma zonatum, and Percopsis omiscomaycus were taken, in part, from Near et al. [35]. Sequences of Albula vulpes, Aldrovandia affinis, Alepocephalus agassizii, Ameiurus natalis, Amia calva, Ammodytes hexapterus, Anguilla rostrata, Antennarius striatus, Aphredoderus sayanus, Aplochiton taeniatus, Archoplites interuptus, Argentina silus, Argyropelecus gigas, Assurger anzac, Astyanax mexicanus, Ateleopus japonicus, Barbourisia rufa, Bathylaco nigricans, Bathylagus euryops, Bathypterois atricolor, Bothus lunatus, Callionymus bairdi, Caranx crysos, Chaetodon striatus, Chanos chanos, Chaunax suttkusi, Chelmon rostratus, Chitala chitala, Chologaster cornuta, Conger oceanicus, Coregonus clupeaformis, Coryphaena hippurus, Cromeria nilotica, Cyclothone microdon, Cyttopsis rosea, Denticeps clupeoides, Echeneis naucrates, Elassoma zonatum, Elops saurus, Esox lucius, Eurypharynx pelecanoides, Fistularia petimba, Galaxias maculatus, Galaxiella nigrostriata, Gephyroberyx darwini, Gnathonemus petersii, Gonorynchus greyi, Gymnorhamphichthys petiti, Halieutichthys aculeatus, Halosauropsis macrochir, Helostoma temminckii, Heteroconger hassi, Heteromycteris japonicus, Himantolophus sagamius, Hiodon tergisus, Histiophryne cryptacanthus, Hypomesus pretiosus, Hypoptychus dybowski, Ijimaia loppei, Lates niloticus, Lepidogalaxias salamandroides, Lepidogobius lepidus, Lepomis macrochirus, Luvarus imperialis, Macropinna microstoma, Macroramphosus scolopax, Megalops atlanticus, Melamphaes polylepis, Mola mola, Monocentris japonica, Nansenia ardesiaca, Neochanna burrowsius, Neonesthes capensis, Neoscopelus microchir, Ogcocephalus nasutus, Opsanus pardus, Opsariichthys uncirostris, Osmerus mordax, Pachypanchax playfairii, Paratrachichthys sajademalensis, Percopsis omiscomaycus, Polypterus ornatipinnis, Porichthys notatus, Psettodes erumei, Rachycentron canadum, Ranzania laevis, Retropinna semoni, Rondeletia loricata, Saccopharynx ampullaceus, Salvelinus alpinus, Samariscus latus, Scopelengys tristis, Searsia koefoedi, Selenotoca multifasciata, Sphyraena barracuda, Stokellia anisodon, Stylephorus chordatus, Symphurus atricaudus, Syngnathus fuscus, Tetraodon miurus, Thymallus brevirostris, Trachipterus arcticus, Triacanthus biaculeatus, Umbra limi, Xiphias gladius, Zanclus cornuta, and Zeus faber were taken in whole or in part from Near et al. [20]. Sequences of Aeoliscus strigatus, Anarhichas lupus, Aplodinotus grunniens, Apogon lateralis, Arrhamphus sclerolepis, Aulostomus maculatus, Betta splendens, Brotula multibarbata, Cataetyx lepidogenys, Centropomus undecimalis, Cephalopholis argus, Chromis cyanea, Cottus carolinae, Cubiceps b |
93, 94, and the two slow ones are changeups, not breaking balls. No wonder Demeritte was late on the last two heaters–that’s Alex Claudio-level speed separation, and Morris sells it well with his deceptive over-the-top delivery which the charting pitchers behind me noted looks uncannily like an outfielder’s throwing motion. The deception makes both pitches play up, and the fastball brings some cutting action to the party. The changeup actually doesn’t appear to have a whole lot of movement, but the velocity separation alone makes it a plus pitch because he sells it so well. Morris also throws a slider at 79-80 mph that lags behind the other two pitches but has some potential.
And, of course, we can actually talk about potential with Morris, who is 21 and has some room to fill out his athletic frame. There’s definitely some Fernando Rodney potential here if he can find a way to keep the ball around the zone at higher levels, because that motion and that changeup is going to present a tough look in short stints to batters at even the game’s top level. Unlike a lot of deception-oriented pitchers, Morris has enough heat that he can get the ball by batters, and that also means he’s more likely to get away with stuff up in the zone than, say, the aforementioned Claudio.
So, all told, there are pretty good reasons Alvarez and Morris are throwing so well–the real question is why they’re still in Savannah. With Alvarez, the answer is partially that he got stretched out to start after a few weeks in relief, though really, both guys need to be moved up very soon. Neither pitcher necessarily projects to be completely lights-out like this in the big leagues, but both could evolve into very useful relief pieces–in Alvarez’s case, he might already be a decent bullpen arm. Not bad for a couple of guys who broke camp this year in a Low-A bullpen buried on the organizational depth chart.NEW DELHI: The government has cleared for take-off a more liberal civil aviation policy, kick-started consolidation among public sector banks by backing SBI’s proposed merger of five associate banks with itself and approved 10% stake sale in HUDCO in a fresh push to reforms.The big Cabinet decisions on Wednesday came a day after the government moved decisively on GST, igniting stock markets that celebrated the steps that were widely anticipated after the recent assembly polls and Rajya Sabha elections.The new aviation policy junks the so-called 5/20 rule and gives a leg up to greater connectivity by providing incentives for flying to cities that are not on the air map.SBI had sought the government’s nod for merging five associate banks — State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala and State Bank of Travancore — and Bharatiya Mahila Bank with itself.“The government has taken note of the merger proposal,” a senior government official told ET, requesting not to be identified. The proposal does not need to be approved by the Cabinet, he said. The government’s support nonetheless puts the process on fast track, signalling the beginning of the process of consolidation among state-run banks.The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved 10% disinvestment in Housing & Urban Development Corporation Limited (HUDCO) through an initial public offering, or IPO.SBI’s stock rose 3.9% on the Bombay Stock Exchange compared with the previous close while its listed associates rallied 20% on a day the BSE Sensex ended the session with a gain of 1.25%.Airlines including Vistara and AirAsia India will soon be allowed to start overseas flights under the new policy that allows airlines to fly international even before they complete five years of domestic operations.ET had on March 9 first reported the rules that would replace the 5/20 norm. Under the new civil aviation policy, any domestic carrier can now fly international if it has a fleet of at least 20 aircraft and maintains about 20% of total capacity in the domestic sector at all times.The earlier rule required domestic airlines to have a fleet of at least 20 aircraft and five years of domestic flying experience to launch overseas flights. “The 20 aircraft rule will ensure that domestic connectivity in the country is not compromised even after airlines fly international,” said Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju. “According to the earlier rule, any airline would have taken all its capacity in the international sector but mandating them to maintain 20% capacity in India will ensure that domestic connectivity is never compromised,” he said.Officials said it was a tough task to find the middle ground because the incumbent carriers and the new airlines were ranged against each other and took opposing stands on the policy.While Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, took early aim by tweeting on February 22 that the older airlines were seeking “protectionism” and “preferential treatment”, the Federation of Indian Airlines, the main lobby group representing IndiGo, Jet Airways, SpiceJet and Go-Air, reacted strongly, claiming “reverse discrimination” if the 5/20 norm was removed. IndiGo founder Rahul Bhatia even accused Tata of “subverting the law”.With the new policy, the Modi government also intends to provide connectivity to smaller cities across the country at a fare of Rs 2,500 per hour of flight. This will be achieved through subsidy, 80% of which will be provided by the Centre and the rest by the state governments.“There are a dozen defunct airports across the country where flight connectivity can immediately begin through regional flights,” said Aviation Secretary RN Choubey. The Cabinet cleared the civil aviation policy after a threehour meeting.Analysts welcomed the new policy. “As far as amendment to 5/20 rule is concerned, it should attract new entrants,” said Dhiraj Mathur, partner (aerospace and defence) at PwC India. “The requirement of 20 aircraft is reasonable because this issue was holding up policy release and the government has taken a call. Second, one can’t start international operations with one or two aircraft,” he said.The abolition of the 5/20 rule will not only augment supply and increase investments in the aviation sector but also create more choice for consumers, Mathur said.Andrew Luck and Russell Wilson had help. Let's be clear about that. But in leading their teams to Week 9 comeback victories against nearly impossible odds, they became common denominators in a staggering NFL equation. Teams are 5-59 since the start of last season when falling behind the way Luck's Indianapolis Colts and Wilson's Seattle Seahawks fell behind last week. Here is the staggering part: That includes 2-0 for Luck, 2-0 for Wilson, 1-1 for Peyton Manning and 0-58 for everyone else.
Manning is Manning, of course, but what makes Luck and Wilson so well-equipped to prevail under the direst situations so early in their careers? It's not just that they are 4-0 in situations when the rest of the league, minus Manning, has gone 0-58. Luck and Wilson are also tied for the NFL lead in fourth-quarter comeback victories this season. Each has three. Luck has a league-high seven and Wilson is tied for second with six since both entered the league as 2012 draft choices. Filtering only for games when quarterbacks trailed by 1-8 points in fourth quarters, Luck and Wilson are a combined 13-9. The rest of the league is 83-184.
Surely these facts say something about these young QBs, but what is it about them that might give them an edge?The mission has been condemned for its violence, as well as for missing the satirical mark
Grand Theft Auto V, one of the most expensive computer games ever made, has caused outrage among human rights groups for including a torture scene in which the player must pull teeth and electrocute an unarmed man.
Freedom from Torture joined Amnesty, teachers' union the ATU and MP Keith Vaz in condemning the scene, just two days after the release of the game.
Players of the 18-rated game become career criminal Trevor Phillips, and in a mission within the game called 'By the Book' are commanded by the FBI to torture an alleged terrorist for information.
Players must complete the scene to finish the game and are offered a selection of torture implements, including sledgehammers and electric cables to use on the victim. If his heart stops, a shot of adrenaline restarts it.
Following the scene, the character drives the witness to the airport while lecturing his victim on how torture is a technique for exerting power.
Grand Theft Auto 5 includes a graphic scene where the player is asked to torture a victim. Photograph: /Eurogamer
“Rockstar North has crossed a line by effectively forcing people to take on the role of a torturer and perform a series of unspeakable acts if they want to achieve success in the game," said Freedom from Torture chief executive Keith Best.
"Torture is a reality, not a game and glamourising it in popular culture undoes the work of organisations like Freedom from Torture and survivor activists to campaign against it.
Labour’s Keith Vaz added that he was “astonished at the level of violence depicted”, while the release also prompted Alison Sherratt, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, to warn that young children watching their siblings play may not be able to tell that it is fictional.
'Young children watch GTA too'
“The graphics are so realistic that little ones don’t think what they’re watching is a game," she said. "Four to five-year-olds have a tendency to copy what they see on TV, whether it’s this or Fireman Sam putting out fires.
“ATL is not calling for a ban on these games, or censorship at all. What we are asking is for parents to become aware that the little ones are seeing these things.”
But the most recent instalment has faced a different level of protest with critics arguing that the series, normally cynical and satirical in tone, misses its mark at times
As the main protagonist trevor Phillips, players are sent on a mission by the FBI that involves electrocuting a victim. Photograph: /Eurogamer
The Grand Theft Auto series isn’t new to criticism, being a frequent target of attacks by campaigners who claim its content is violent and sexist.
Jack Thompson, a now-disbarred attorney in the state of Florida, brought several lawsuits against Take Two, the game’s publisher, calling GTA IV “the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio”.
'Hardly the biting satire of GTA past'
Jeff Gerstmann of gaming site Giant Bomb claims that much of the writing “feels expected and unadventurous, hardly the biting satire that it felt like in past outings”.
In the runup to the launch, reviewers discussed a strain of misogyny that runs through the game.
In one in-game mission set in a strip club puts players have to grope strippers while avoiding the bouncer’s attention. In a review, editor of gaming site Gamespot Carolyn Petit argues that defending the scenes under the guise of satire is wrong-headed.
“Yes, these are exaggerations of misogynistic undercurrents in our own society, but not satirical ones. With nothing in the narrative to underscore how insane and wrong this is, all the game does is reinforce and celebrate sexism.”
Petit also said the game was undermined by its moments of "hypocrisy and inconsistency", and said the suggestion with the torture scene was that it was a comment on the use of waterboarding and interrogation techniques by the US.
"But the fact that Trevor tortures the man regardless, and that he does end up spilling more information as a result, sends a very different message."
GTA is 'the go-to bad example'
Game designer, theorist and academic Ian Bogost is one who has defended attacks on the game. "GTA is the easy, go-to bad example in discussions of games as culture," he said.
"It's certainly a characterisation that underestimates the meaning and impact of the series, but nevertheless, among the general public GTA is a shorthand for prurience and abhorrence."
Freedom from Torture's Best is unimpressed with whatever satirical comment Rockstar has attempted to make.
"This adds insult to injury for survivors who are left physically and mentally scarred by torture in the real world," he said.
"If Rockstar North’s message is a satirical critique of the practice of torture, it’s lost on us.”
Rockstar was contacted for comment.Online ticket sales will close at 11.59PM on Friday, Dec 15th. However, tickets will be available at the door of Becketts on Saturday, Dec 16th
100+ Attendees. 5 Bars. 1 Street.
Welcome to the 5 Bars of Stone Street! On December 16th, 100+ crawlers will descend on Stone Street decked out in Holiday Sweaters, lights and anything else you can think of to crawl through 5 pre-arranged bars. The crawl will start at BECKETTS Bar & Grill at 3:30PM (Check in here to get your wristband and official bar crawl hat) and from there we will bar hop our way up and down Stone Street to the 4 other bars). Bring whoever you like - all friends welcome!
The Route:
Becketts (Stone Street Entrance) | 3.30pm
Stone Street Tavern | 5pm
Route 66 | 6pm
Bavaria Bierhaus | 7pm
The Dubliner | 8pm
What drinks will be on offer?
$4 Beers | $5 Red & White Wine | $5 Well Drinks | $4 Shot Specials
Bar 1: Becketts: $4 Bud/Bud Lite | $4 Woo Woo Shot
Bar 2: Stone Street: Tavern: $4 Stone St Pilsner | $4 Whiskey Shot
Bar 3: Route 66: $4 Pilsner | $4 Bourbon Shot
Bar 4: Bavaria Bierhaus: $4 Hefeweizen | $4 Jager Shot
Bar 5: The Dubliner: $4 Bud/Bud Lite | $4 Kamikaze Shot
The Fun Stuff:
- Holiday attire encouraged! Sweaters, Antlers, Bells, Lights, Etc.
- Exclusive drink specials in each bar (only with bar crawl wristband)
- Prizes/Giveaways for best dressed
- 100+ attendees!
Bar Crawl wristbands will be $5 for a limited amount of initial signups. We will reserve a limited amount of wristbands for the door.
A portion of all proceeds from the event will go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (https://www.bcrf.org/)
Get your wristbands now and we will see you on Stone Street on December 16th!A man who was putting on a “conceptual art performance” in the middle of Ennis, claiming the Holocaust was a hoax, has been sent to jail.
Dermot Mulqueen (49) of Steele’s Terrace, Ennis, was jailed for five months for breaching Section 9 of the Firearms Act and two months for breaching Section 6 of the Public Order Act.
The offences took place at lunchtime on January 23rd when Mulqueen put an axe through a television at the Daniel O’Connell monument in Ennis town centre.
In evidence at Ennis District Court, Mulqueen told Judge Patrick Durcan: “I never realised you could get arrested for swinging an axe into your own TV.”
He said the performance art show, entitled Liberation of the Mind, was carried out to launch International Holocaust Hoax Day.
Sentencing him, Judge Durcan said Mulqueen “may have a view and an interpretation of history, but it is an historical fact that the Holocaust was the greatest crime perpetrated against a section of mankind in the history of mankind”.
By his actions, he said, Mulqueen “behaved in the most offensive way, not merely towards a particular section of society but towards society generally”.
Abhorrence
“Mr Mulqueen was reckless and offensive in the extreme. He was gratuitously insulting not merely to a section of society who we know were most directly affected by the Holocaust but he was gratuitously insulting to most reasonably minded men and women who maintain civic society.”
He added: “I am only surprised that he has not been charged with other offences.”
Mulqueen’s solicitor, Patrick Moylan, said his client was “ not in any way racist and has no problem with the Jewish community. His views are based on something he has read and now believes and he created a work of art on the back of that”.
Twitter and Facebook
Gardaí were monitoring the event through CCTV and moved in to arrest Mulqueen after he smashed the TV.
Mr Moylan said his client “was taken aback” to be arrested in the first place. He said Mulqueen was single with no children, had no previous convictions and was on social welfare after previously working in Dublin as a taxi driver.
In his statement to gardaí, Mulqueen said: “I found out that the Holocaust was a hoax in August 2013 after coming across a video by David Cole on Auschwitz on YouTube.”
He added: “I am not a racist but I have found out that the Holocaust was a hoax and I wanted to highlight this.”
After sentence was imposed, Mulqueen was released on bail pending an appeal to the circuit court.Columnist
Seems Roy Moore, the Ten Commandments Judge and very likely the next U.S. senator from the state of Alabama, has been playing a bit fast and loose with the whole thou-shalt-not-bear-false-witness thing.
My Post colleagues Shawn Boburg and Robert O'Harrow Jr. reported this last week that Moore, who claimed he did not take a "regular salary" from the Christian-values charity he founded, in fact received $180,000 a year — more than $1 million from 2007 to 2012 — in compensation, much of which the charity did not disclose.
Still, Moore is in better shape, in terms of biblical injunctions, than Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), who is giving up his seat in Congress after admitting to an adulterous affair with a woman half his age. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the married congressman, a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus, appeared to have asked his mistress to have an abortion.
Then there's Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, coming up a bit short in the love-thy-neighbor category. After his shooting at a congressional baseball practice stunned the nation, he graciously praised Capitol Police special agent Crystal Griner — a lesbian who is married to a woman — and the other officer who saved his life as "heroes" and "part of our family." But on Friday, Scalise was scheduled to speak at the Family Research Council, which proudly proclaims that "homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed."
And, on the topic of double standards, let us not forget the president. During the Harvey Weinstein fallout, Donald Trump Jr. and Kellyanne Conway have gleefully attacked private-citizen Hillary Clinton for failing to denounce Weinstein more quickly than she did — even though they vigorously defended the elder Trump when he was found to have boasted of sexual assault.
Such behavior seems uncharitable, if not downright hypocritical. But maybe I am using the wrong standard. The Bible is, after all, foreign law; none of it was written in America. It would, therefore, be in order for President Trump to revise biblical law by executive order — much as he used one this last week to dismantle Obamacare without an act of Congress. He could place a copy of the order, etched in a 2 ½ -ton stone monument, in the White House Entrance Hall.
Some proposed revisions:
In Luke 6:31, strike "as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise," and substitute: "Do ye unto men as ye would like."
In Mark 12:31, after the phrase "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" insert: "Thou shalt not interpret anything in Section 12:31 as applying to residents of Puerto Rico."
In Matthew 5:5, after the phrase "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth," insert the phrase: "The meek shalt not necessarily inherit health insurance."
In Matthew 6:24, after the phrase "Ye cannot serve God and mammon," insert: "But ye can hire private air charters and military aircraft at thine own discretion."
In Exodus 20: 1-17, popularly known as "The Ten Commandments," the following deletions, revisions and additions are to be made:
After the phrase, in 20:4, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image," insert the language: "Exempt from the term 'graven image' will be: (a) Time magazine covers, actual or simulated; and, (b) life-size portraits of the president purchased at auction with charitable funds."
The phrase, in Exodus 20:8-11, is hereby revised to state the following: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Acceptable remembrances of the sabbath include (a) any golf played in Bedminster, N.J., (hereafter referred to as The Land of Milk and Honey); (b) any golf played at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla. (hereafter referred to as the Garden of Eden)."
In Exodus 20:12, in the phrase "Honor thy father and thy mother," insert: "Inasmuch as they hath given thee a very, very small loan of $14 million."
In Exodus 20:13, after the phrase "Thou shalt not kill," insert the following: "Thou mayest, however, totally destroy North Korea, which thou shalt accomplish by expanding thy nuclear arsenal tenfold."
In Exodus 20:14, following the phrase "Thou shalt not commit adultery," insert: "What thou has done with thine previous wives is thine own business."
In Exodus 20:15, after the phrase "Thou shalt not steal," insert: "Exempt from section 20:15 shall be 'emoluments' as defined in the U.S. Constitution."
In Exodus 20:16, the phrase "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is to be amended with the following: "No Pinocchios, nor Pants-on-Fire, nor any other description of false witness by the Fake News Media shall be judged as evidence thou violated clause 20:16."
In Exodus 20:17, after the phrase "Thou shalt not covet," insert: "but thou canst grabbest whomsoever by whatsoever part, if thou art a star."
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It’s a testament to both the centrality and complexity of the mother-daughter relationship that, for many unloved daughters, the recognition of their wounding and its source comes late in life. Some women are in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and even 60s—and, often, mothers or even grandmothers themselves—before they finally begin to understand how their mothers’ treatment of them in has affected—and continues to shape— their lives.
I know this because I hear from them—at Psychology Today, on, and via email. They always write a variation on of “How could I not have known for all this time?”
Some unloved daughters know at a very young age—as I did—that their mothers didn’t love them. They “know” it long before they can even put it into words. I was no older than three or four; others say they knew at six, seven, or eight. These daughters don’t know why their mothers don’t connect to them; in fact, they are very likely to blame themselves for whatever might be wrong. Additionally, their perceptions don’t stop them from trying to become the kind of daughter their mother would or might love. But they know deep inside nonetheless and, as they get older, they begin to wrestle with the problem. Note the word begin because this is a long process, even with.
Why the Mother Wound is Denied or Rationalized
What gets in way of a daughter's seeing her mother’s behavior as hurtful, destructive, or even willful? Part of it is certainly the hardwired need for a mother’s love and approval which is part and parcel of every infant’s being. This need doesn’t appear to have an expiration date; it lasts long into adulthood and, perhaps, the entire life span. This is what one daughter wrote, reflecting on her mother’s death, and capturing many of the feelings an unloved daughter has:
"She was on her deathbed and someone said, 'Do you want to tell Linda you love her?' My mother answered 'no.' Of course, I rationalized her behavior because it felt better than thinking I was unloved. I rationalized her behavior for years but it never helped my pain. I would tell people she behaved that way because she was'sick,' because she grew up with a detached mother herself, because she was abused…. I barely cried when she died and cried more when I had to put a beloved dog to. Why did I rationalize? Who wants anybody to know that they were unloved by their mother? I think that on some level I felt that if my mother couldn’t love me, how could anyone else?"
That —that her mother is right, that she is ultimately unlovable—underlies much of a daughter’s denial. You can mix that in with a sense of at being “the only girl in the world whose mother doesn’t love her”—an easy conclusion to reach when the culture preaches not just the idealization of motherhood but insists that maternal love is “instinctual,” which it is not.
Trying to Find a Reason
Because the world of a child is small and the interactions that go on in it are familiar, most daughters begin by accepting their mothers’ treatment as “normal.” That’s reinforced by the fact that the mother doesn’t just rule that little world but dictates how actions and interactions in it are to be understood. Harsh words and castigation are labeled "discipline" that is “necessary” for building a daughter’s character. Even if her mother treats other children in the house differently, the daughter is likely to believe that, somehow, it must be her fault that she’s treated one way and her siblings another—and, besides, she remains hopeful that, somehow, she’ll be able to change things. The effort to make sense of things—especially for adolescents and young adults who don’t seek counsel from either or a therapist—is emotionally turbulent and confusing, and can keep a daughter locked into the patterns for years, as another daughter wrote:
"I rationalized how my mother behaved toward me my whole life until last year. (I’m 37.) I wanted there to be a reason for her behavior that I could actually get my head around. I don’t think you ever want to admit what’s really going on when you want so desperately to be loved by your mother."
Sometimes, the wake-up call—the moment when the rationalization and denial finally stall out—comes when the pain of rejection becomes too much to bear or the daughter’s own patterns of behavior learned in response to her childhood experiences have begun to wreak too much havoc. That was certainly true for Deidre, whose A-ha! moment happened in her late 30s:
"I was in two serious and, in hindsight, both were abusive. I left the man who abused me emotionally and made me feel like nothing—pretty much as my mother did—and then married a man I thought was different. He wasn’t. Once we were married, he tried to control my every move—as my mother did—and eventually moved from being verbally abusive to physically threatening. A light went off in my head. I went into therapy and finally saw the pattern: I was going back to Mom. My mother denied it and so when I divorced my husband, I divorced her, too. Sad to say, my relationship to her thrived on denial but it could not survive an ounce of truth. She wouldn’t allow it and I couldn’t go back."
Sometimes, it’s a third-party intimate—a friend, a lover, a spouse—who opens the door to seeing the pattern, as Jenn’s story makes clear:
"I was living with the man I ended up marrying and we invited my mother to dinner to celebrate my getting my master’s degree. He’d met her before but never one-on-one in this way, in an intimate setting. It was the same old thing with her but when she left, he turned to me and said, 'Was this Beat Up Jenn day? I thought we were celebrating.' He then went on to rattle off every criticism and lousy thing she’d said about me—my flat looked slovenly, I’d gotten fat, did I think I was really going to succeed outside of?—and I burst into tears because I realized I was so used to her being that way that I just sponged it up. He encouraged me to go into therapy and I did. Unfortunately, my mother didn’t want to take responsibility for anything so we are long estranged. It’s a pity, really."
Is it any wonder that unloved daughters deny in order to unconsciously protect themselves from recognizing such a painful truth? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.
Denial and the Code of Silence
There’s more that feeds into the dance of denial, of course. All children want to fit in and the unloved daughter who already feels as though she’s an outsider in the one place she’s supposed to belong (yes, home) is unlikely to share her feelings with anyone, especially if she feels—as she does—that she’s the only daughter on the planet whose mother doesn’t love her. The irony here is that the daughter is not altogether wrong; even when she moves out of the stage of life where she wants to be like “everyone else,” she’s not always likely to find a sympathetic audience.
Rationalization is fed by other people’s responses—the people who tell you, as they tell me, that “It couldn’t have been so bad because you turned out just fine” or “Stop complaining. You were fed and clothed, weren’t you?” My own, thoroughly unscientific take is that people want so badly to believe that one kind of love is immutable, unconditional, and never wavering—given that we all know love in the world is hard to get and harder to hold on to—that they’re resistant to giving up that. An unloved daughter’s story challenges that pastel-tinted vision of the all-loving mother—and there’s the Biblical commandment to boot.
Speaking up and recognizing the truth of a mother’s behavior may be made harder by other family members who prefer to continue to deny, as one daughter wrote:
"My mother’s behavior is still excused by my siblings and they hate it and get triggered when I name it. My mother and my family explain and excuse her behavior by painting her as the victim due to her upbringing. I still doubt my own impressions and thoughts daily because of this. And I'm still afraid of being punished in some way because of what I think of my mother. All I can do is try to trust the feeling of disconnection and lack of secure base I experience, but it’s hard because I end up questioning my impressions even though they’re definitely real."
Because the unloved daughter has her view of the dynamics in the family challenged throughout her life, she often doubts her perceptions and. To let go of denial, she has to rise to the challenge of believing in herself, which isn’t always easy.
Ending Denial and Confronting the Self
The moment at which the daughter stops denying and starts looking is the first step of what is a long journey—unraveling the ways in which her own behavior was shaped in childhood and how it stands up to scrutiny now. It’s a journey of self-discovery that can belie chronological age, as Gillian’s experience testifies:
"I rationalized and excused from a very young age and from early on, the only constant in my life was the huge question mark hanging over my head: What was wrong with my family? My mother blamed my father in order to hide her own responsibilities, as well as her past. Now, 25 years after her death, I realize I never knew my mother as a woman or a person—only as a dysfunctional and ineffective figure who inflicted her own pain on her children. While my counselor thinks it’s important not to 'dwell' on the past, the things I’ve learned about my mother since her death have brought understanding, and put pieces of the puzzle together, though not. What appalls me is how like her I am, while spending my life in search of what I thought was a different way of being. So much still not understood but it helps me to grow."
Coming to terms with the self and experience requires self-compassion, insight, and emotional fortitude—which, of course, denial does not—and a decision about how to use and process both the information gleaned and the experience. This is what Laura came to understand:
"I rationalized my mother’s behavior all of my life. I always had an excuse or rationale for why she said or did things. This was all about minimizing me, because if there were a ‘reason’ for her behavior, somehow it was OK. Eventually, after getting out of the blame cycle and ignoring all the New Age garbage about ‘forgiveness,’ I decided on honesty and accountability. As long as I was excusing/rationalizing her behavior, I was discounting what it did to me, condoning it as OK because I didn’t deserve any better. A-ha! It took a while to figure this one out—I’m 59. I’m a mother myself so I’m tired of being on a pedestal or in the gutter."
It’s not just that the unloved daughter truly gets to see her mother once she stops the dance of denial, but that she is finally afforded the opportunity to see herself in full, unobscured by the second-guessing, self-doubt, and shame which looking away from the real problem induces. For many, it’s a hard path but it is a hopeful one, as Alicia wrote:
Source: Photo by Brooke Cagle. Copyright free. Unsplash.com
"We are filled with so much self-doubt that loving ourselves and having belief in our worth is so hard. For so long we believed the trouble lay within ourselves. As a mother myself now, there isn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for my kids and I won’t put a price tag on it. Loving my kids unconditionally has let me see that I am actually a much more capable and stronger person than I ever knew."
The dance of denial is born out of many impulses, fueled by the need to be loved and supported by the women most central to our young lives. It’s a dance that may keep us going for a while, but when the music stops and we reflect in stillness, it’s the moment we begin our own re-imaginings—no longer hers but belonging first and foremost to ourselves.
Merci beaucoup to my readers on Facebook who spoke up with courage and brilliance.
Photo by Brooke Cagle. Copyright free. Unsplash.com
Copyright 2016 Peg StreepTHIS IS AN ARTICLE, by Luke Maiers who is a member of Team Joey Freshwater.
There is nothing like the home court advantage, especially when it comes to college basketball. The roar of the crowd, the obscene chants from the student section, and of course, storming the court after a big win. Aside from places like Cameron Indoor and the Dean Smith Center, the Big Ten has the best home courts in the game. One of the more memorable games I can remember is watching Indiana splash a left wing three for the win over a top ranked Kentucky team and seeing a sea of red storm the court. There is nothing like it, and if you don’t get goosebumps from moments like that, you don’t love college basketball enough. I ranked the top eight Big Ten home courts, and here is the list.
Top Eight Big Ten Arenas:
1. Assembly Hall-
That win over Kentucky will forever be fried into my brain. The pull up jumper highlights what is so great about this arena. What makes Assembly Hall so amazing is the set up of the seating. The seats are stacked up on the sidelines with basically no seating behind the hoops so there is only one direction for all of the sound to go, and that is right to the floor. Along with that, you will have trouble finding a more historical building in the Big Ten and the nation.
2. Kohl Center-
If you have never attended a game at the Kohl Center, you should. This arena feels like it is an NBA arena. The size of this building is unreal. When I went to a game there, I sat as high up as you could go, and I still liked my seat. Plus, having the student section right behind the hoop opens up an endless amount of possibility to heckle the opposing players. And since I can’t remember the last time the Badgers were a bad team, this building has been loud.
3. Williams Arena (The Barn)-
With a nickname like The Barn, how can’t you love this building. This place looks like it is loud. Throughout the years at this arena, Minnesota has been able to pull out many upsets over some very good teams. The way the building is shaped, which is like a lowercase n, the acoustics on the inside are great for diehard fans to scream their little hearts out. This building rocks with the best of them in the Big Ten.
4. Breslin Center-
The Spartans have given their fans a lot of reasons to cheer since Tom Izzo took over at Michigan State. What makes the Breslin Center so cool is how the students line up behind the benches, kind of like Cameron Indoor. Having the students that close to the bench allows for the home crowd to get into the head of the visiting team. The fans are right on top of the floor, keeping them involved throughout the whole game.
5. Carver Hawkeye Arena-
If you have never been to Carver, it is just a big hole in the ground. You walk in on ground level and the only direction you can go is down. This also allows for the sound to have no place to go. Another good description of it is picture the crowd as a wave in the ocean. Once the wave starts moving, there is no stopping it. The fans cheering is that wave, and it is hard to get them down. Also, Iowa fans don’t treat the officials the greatest.
6. Mackey Arena-
Purdue’s recent success has revealed the monster that is their home floor. Mackey Arena can hang with the best arenas especially when the Boilermakers are lighting it up from deep. This arena is in the shape of a circle, pointing all the fans towards the floor. Unlike the Koh |
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CommentsWhoa nelly, that is a mouthful. It has been hot in the Seattle area. Hotter than most of us are equipped to deal with. With many stretches of days in the 90s, the idea of turning on the oven, and frankly even using the stove has been far from appealing. I have set up shop on our covered back deck and doing the vast majority of my cooking out there. We have a little plug-in induction burner that I’ve been using extensively. We also have the Weber grill and my somewhat ghetto fabulous styrofoam cooler lined with a black trash bag that I’ve been doing sous vide cooks in. It’s super efficient so we’re using a lot less power to cook stuff. As is my true summer style, I’ve been slacking pretty phenomenal at avoiding meal planning, and that has resulted in pretty sad improvised dinners and lots and lots of breakfast sandwiches (I haven’t told you about the new chickens yet, but we’ll get there).
I really needed to get back on the wagon and start pretending to be a grown up who is actually capable of managing their own life and feeding themselves and their family, so I came up with a meal plan for the week. One of my favorite make-ahead breakfast items is quiche. Crustless if I’m being lazy or otherwise avoiding extra carbs. Unfortunately, part of making quiche involves turning the oven on. Sometime last year I read post about making personal sized cheesecakes in jars. Makes sense, you use a water bath to regulate the temp of cheesecake in the oven anyway. I imagine that you’d get an even more even perfectly silky texture with a sous vide style water bath. That got my wheels turning and I decided to try my hand at making personal size crustless quiches in the water bath, and damnit, they are fantastic! They are creamy and custardy (totally set) but not dry or runny.
Sous Vide Crustless Quiches (Ingredients for one, easy to scale)
Equipment:
Sous Vide temperature controller, immersion circulator, etc
1/2 pint wide mouth jars
immersion blender (useful but not necessary)
Ingredients (per quiche – if you have a calculator or basic math skills, scaling up is pretty easy)
22g frozen broccoli florets, defrosted & drained
27g mushrooms, sautéed (just a few slices)
15g shredded cheddar cheese
1 slice thick cut bacon, fried then chopped
1 large egg
30g heavy cream
salt & pepper to taste
Instructions:
Prep your jars – for easy cleanup, spray or rub with a neutral oil of some sort. This isn’t necessary though.
Portion out broccoli, mushrooms, cheese, and bacon into each jar. Everything can be capped and refrigerated for up to 3 days at this point if you’re not going to have the time to do your cook right away. My poor little Anova has a heck of a time getting my water bath up to 172F, so I did this on separate nights.
Preheat your water bath to 172 degrees. While it is heating, crack your egg(s) and add in cream. I made a batch of 6 quiches, so used 6 eggs and 180g heavy cream. Add salt and pepper to taste. Either whisk thoroughly or just blitz it for a few seconds with your immersion blender. The IB will give you a more consistent texture.
Divide your egg mixture evenly among all jars and cap them. You want to tighten the lid finger tight. Firm but not so firm that extraneous air can’t escape. If you’ve ever canned anything, think that tight.
Place your jars in the water bath at 172 degrees F. Bubbles will likely escape as they sink. If they don’t sink, let them float and cook. No harm no foul. Cook for 1-2 hours. Remove from bath. To do this, I use my canning jar grabber, and with the depth of this bath, I also use a dishwashing glove so I don’t burn my hand. Verify that your egg mixture is set. I tilted my jars to pour off the water that’s accumulated on the lids and keep an eye on the filling to see what it does.
Allow to cool for 15 minutes on a towel on the kitchen counter, then transfer to a bowl with ice water to cool more. Refrigerate overnight.
I imagine that these are actually pasteurized and as such would last some time in the fridge, but since I am no scientist, and frankly, they’re delicious, mine aren’t going to last all that long. Safe refrigerated for a week.
Nutritional Breakdown if that matters to you:
Per Quiche:
320 calories
25g fat
4g carbohydrates
2g fiber
16g proteinFrom online bullying to Twitter takedowns, shame is becoming a dominant force in the West. Thankfully, the Bible is full of language about shame. It's just that most Westerners don't see it.
O f the many new words that bubbled up from our technological culture in 2014, perhaps the most unsettling is doxxing.
Typically carried out by anonymous online users with axes to grind and little to lose, doxxing involves making someone’s private information public. That includes home addresses, phone numbers, financial histories, medical records—anything that can be found in the endless databases available to canny hackers.
Doxxing can be a drive-by prank on most anyone who draws attention. But more often its targets are singled out for humiliation. In a series of events last year that came to be called GamerGate, certain active video gamers targeted journalists, mostly women, who had criticized the outright misogyny found in many popular video games. The backlash began with the bilious insults that have become astonishingly common online. But it quickly escalated to “revenge blogs” purporting to reveal those journalists’ past indiscretions, and doxxing attacks.
Doxxing is extreme and rare. But it marks the limit of a trend that affects every one of us: aspects of our lives that were once private and fleeting can now be publicly, and permanently, exposed.
An American 13-year-old today has never known a day without the Internet, mobile technology, and social media. He or she started kindergarten the year the iPhone was released and Facebook opened its site to the public. In a single decade, the omnipresence of media has rewritten the boundaries of public and private, exterior and interior. Chap Clark, chair of the youth, family, and culture department at Fuller Theological Seminary, points out that it used to be that high-school students “would leave school and go home, and could leave that high-pressure atmosphere behind. Now, with smartphones and tablets, kids take that social environment into their bedrooms.”
'On Facebook, others’ perceptions of us are both public and relatively permanent.... People tag you, people talk about you. And if no one comments, that can be just as much a source of shame.' ~ Kara Powell, Fuller Youth Institute
Clark’s colleague Kara Powell, executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute, recalls a moment of shame from her adolescence. “There were maybe five kids sitting in a car across the street,” she says, recounting how she tripped and fell. “I remember them laughing at me as I picked myself up. But that was in front of five kids, and it was over in five minutes. Today, if someone caught a moment like that on a smartphone and shared it on social media, that shame could live with the kid for the rest of high school.
“On Facebook, others’ perceptions of us are both public and relatively permanent,” Powell says. “You post something and everybody comments on it. People tag you, people talk about you. And if no one comments, that can be just as much a source of shame.”
The personal screen, especially with its attached and always-available camera, invites us to star in our own small spectacle. As our social network chimes, blinks, and buzzes with intermittent approval, we are constantly updated on our success in gaining public affirmation. But having attracted us with the promise of approval and belonging, the personal screen can just as easily herald exclusion and hostility, as the targets of GamerGate found out and as nearly every teenager in the West knows from experience.
And oddly enough, this contemporary fusing of public and private is reconnecting us to one of the most striking features of cultures we consider traditional and premodern: the importance of shame.Loudspeaker Directivity:
An Ongoing Experimental Survey
This work is sponsored by the Sony Corporation of America
Introduction
Loudspeaker directivity is the extent to which loudspeakers focus the sound in a particular direction (typically towards the listener) instead of broadcasting it in all directions around the room. Highly directive loudspeakers are ideal for 3D audio with crosstalk cancellation (XTC), since room reflections (which are weaker when using more directive loudspeakers) directly degrade the level of XTC. Consequently, the 3D3A Lab is conducting detailed measurements of the directivity of various loudspeakers using the lab's anechoic chamber. This study on loudspeaker directivity is also important for our ongoing Sony-sponsored research on head-externalization of 3D sound through headphones, since some of the relevant techniques rely on emulating the radiation characteristics of real loudspeakers.
Table of Measured Loudspeakers
To generate the table, begin by choosing a "Sort" option.
Sort:
Descending Ascending
Click here to download a.zip file containing all measured impulse responses (in.mat format), directivity plots, and a.csv file containing the tabulated values of all directivity metrics for all measured loudspeakers. (242 MB, last updated May 26th, 2016)
For a description of the how the data files were generated and the storage format used in the database, please also read this manual. (Last updated May 25th, 2016)
Measurement Notes
All directivity measurements are carried out in the anechoic chamber of the 3D3A Lab using a B&K Microphone Type 4189-A-021. The loudspeaker is placed on a rotation stage in the chamber and rotated in increments of 5°. At each orientation, the loudspeaker's impulse response is measured with, unless otherwise noted, an exponential sine sweep at a sampling rate of 96 kHz. To align the microphone, the loudspeaker is placed at 0° (facing straight ahead) and the microphone is positioned such that the barrel of the microphone points straight at the center of the loudspeaker cabinet (or some other logical alignment point). Due to the physical limitations of the anechoic chamber, a time-window is applied to each measured impulse response to remove any reflected sound. The measured data are processed and plotted using custom software developed in-house at the 3D3A Lab.
The measurements shown above have been made by Lukasz Mosakowski, Tim Matchen, Joe Tylka, Rahulram Sridhar, Tony Jin, and Gianfranco Colombi under the direction of Prof. Edgar Choueiri.
If you know of any loudspeakers that may have particularly high directivity, please inform the 3D3A Lab. We will try to acquire these loudspeakers and measure their directivity.
Publications:
R. Sridhar, J. G. Tylka, and E. Y. Choueiri. Metrics for Constant Directivity. In Audio Engineering Society Convention 140, May 2016. (pdf, poster)
J. G. Tylka, R. Sridhar, and E. Y. Choueiri. A Database of Loudspeaker Polar Radiation Measurements. In Audio Engineering Society Convention 139, October 2015. (pdf, poster)
J. G. Tylka and E. Y. Choueiri. On the Calculation of Full and Partial Directivity Indices. Technical report, 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics Laboratory, Princeton University, November 2014. (pdf)New DNA evidence uncovered by attorneys representing Ted Bradford in a federal lawsuit now links the rape to the victim’s brother-in-law. They’re hoping the Yakima County prosecutor and police act on it.
After a lengthy interrogation by Yakima police, Ted Bradford falsely confessed to a rape and spent nearly 10 years in prison.
His 1996 conviction was later vacated in Yakima County Superior Court after the Innocence Project Northwest intervened on his behalf. Bradford then was acquitted during his second trial in 2010, largely because of DNA evidence that proved another man’s skin cells were on a key piece of evidence.
But even then, Bradford’s attorneys say there are plenty of people — including Yakima police and the Yakima County prosecutor — who have remained convinced of Bradford’s guilt.
Thanks to Bradford’s team of dogged Seattle attorneys, a private investigator and saliva picked out of the garbage, a new suspect was identified almost two weeks ago after DNA sent to a private lab was matched to evidence left behind at the crime scene.
The match confirmed what Bradford’s lawyers had come to suspect: The DNA belongs to the victim’s brother-in-law.
“They can’t deny it anymore. The city, the state, they’ve tried to deny this year after year and they can’t continue to deny this,” Bradford said last week of the ongoing effort to clear his name. “It’s a great feeling to know we finally have the truth.”
While he’s relieved to finally have definitive proof someone else was responsible for the rape, Bradford feels terrible for the victim and what the revelation of her brother-in-law’s alleged involvement will do to her and her family.
“I feel so bad for this woman who has had to live with this for this long. It was just horrible what happened to her,” said Bradford, now 44. “I think the system has failed her as well. For over two decades, she never got justice.”
Yakima County Prosecutor Joseph Brusic said Monday he’s duty bound to evaluate the new evidence and has been in contact with Yakima police.
But the DNA results alone aren’t enough to point the finger at someone else, he said. Under the statute of limitations, Brusic’s office now has one year to decide whether to potentially pursue criminal charges against another suspect.
“Just because DNA is found on some piece of evidence doesn’t mean it was put there by the perpetrator,” he said.
As for Bradford’s acquittal during his second trial, Brusic noted “innocence versus not guilty are two different concepts. When a jury finds a reason to acquit someone, they do so for many different reasons.”
Asked if he still considers Bradford guilty of rape, Brusic said, “Based on the information we have to date, yes.”
The Seattle Times is not naming the woman because the newspaper does not typically identify victims of sexual assault. Her brother-in-law is not being named because he has not been charged with a crime.
While the victim has been notified of the DNA evidence that allegedly implicates her brother-in-law, it’s unclear whether Yakima police intend to investigate him in connection with the rape. Police spokesman Mike Bastinelli said he can’t comment on the case because Bradford has filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the detective who led the rape investigation that resulted in Bradford’s conviction.
The lawsuit, filed in 2013, accuses Detective Joseph Scherschligt of using abusive investigative techniques and fabricating and concealing evidence during Bradford’s first trial in 1996.
Phone calls to Scherschligt’s attorney, Bob Christie, were not returned.
Bradford is also seeking compensation from the state for the years he spent in prison and the time after his release when he was required to register as a Level 3 sex offender.
Since this past summer, the state Attorney General’s Office has argued in court that Bradford isn’t entitled to compensation under a 2013 law because he didn’t file a timely claim and didn’t file documentation to verify his claim as a wrongly convicted person, court records show. Those arguments were rejected by the court and a bench trial is scheduled for October.
If he prevails, Bradford could receive more than $500,000.
Brionna Aho, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Bob Ferguson, said the office is reviewing the new information from Bradford’s attorneys and will decide in the next month or so on how to proceed.
However, the Attorney General’s Office is not weighing Bradford’s guilt or innocence, but whether his request for compensation complies with the law, she said.
Stocking over head
On a September morning in 1995, the 24-year-old Yakima woman saw her husband off to work, took her young son to school and returned home to feed her newborn. She was holding the baby when a man appeared in her kitchen doorway:
“When I first glanced at him, I remember thinking is this a joke. Because his build reminded me of my, my brother-in-law but he was much taller than my brother-in-law but it was real,” the woman told Scherschligt and Detective Rod Light a few days after the rape, according to a transcript of her statement to Yakima police.
The man had longish, dark hair, wore gloves and a nylon stocking over his head, and whispered in an apparent attempt to disguise his voice, the woman told police.
“And I don’t know how I ended up on the floor and he was on top of me. And he kept trying to cover my face but I wasn’t looking at him, I was trying to get my baby away cause he was on top of me and I tried moving the baby away so he wouldn’t hurt the baby,” she said in her statement.
The man eventually let her place the baby in a crib.
He dragged her downstairs to the basement, forced a mask with tape covering the eyeholes onto her face, handcuffed her hands behind her back and raped her, the woman told the detectives.
She still wore the mask when he led her back upstairs to soothe her crying baby, and she heard him leave in what sounded like a large truck, her statement says.
Interrogation
Six months later, Bradford, a 22-year-old married father of two, was arrested on misdemeanor charges of lewd conduct for exposing himself to women in the same neighborhood where the rape victim lived.
He was booked into jail and was supposed to go before a judge the next morning. Instead, he was driven across town, where he was interrogated by police for nearly nine hours.
“The questions became more intense as the day went on,” Bradford said. “They made it clear I wasn’t leaving this room until I told them I had did this crime.”
Hours into the interrogation, Bradford finally confessed, convinced he’d be cleared by the forensic evidence the detectives said was left at the scene.
“I knew I was innocent and I knew the tests wouldn’t come back to me,” Bradford said of the DNA evidence. “I just wanted out of that room. It was intimidating. It was horrible.”
The hourslong questioning by police wasn’t recorded, but Bradford’s confession was — and it’s riddled with nearly 30 errors based on the facts of the crime, including Bradford’s repeated insistence that a baby hadn’t been present, said Mike Wampold, one of Bradford’s attorneys.
Wampold said Bradford also had a solid alibi: He’d been at work at the time of the rape.
Bradford was charged with first-degree rape and first-degree burglary and went on trial in June 1996. Though the victim wasn’t able to identify the attacker, the state’s star witness, one of the victim’s neighbors, testified she’d seen Bradford driving around the neighborhood and staring at the victim’s house.
At the time, Scherschligt, the Yakima police detective, didn’t disclose to Bradford’s defense attorney that the woman had provided earlier statements that conflicted with her testimony at trial.
“Her story got better every time it was told. It became more incriminating and more specific to Ted,” Felix Luna, one of Wampold’s law partners, said of the neighbor.
Bradford was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The Innocence Project Northwest got involved in Bradford’s case about six years into his prison term.
The project, which started at the University of Washington in 1997, is part of a national network that works to exonerate wrongly-convicted people through DNA testing and other, newly discovered evidence.
In 2002, Jackie McMurtrie, a University of Washington law professor and the project’s then-director, assigned two law students to Bradford’s case. They were able to persuade Yakima’s prosecuting attorney to have evidence from the case retested.
“It took a long time because they (police) couldn’t find the mask, which turned out to be the critical piece of evidence,” McMurtrie said.
It was eventually found in an old evidence room and tested in 2005, when male DNA was found on the front of the mask and on the tape stuck across the eyeholes.
“Ted’s (DNA) profile wasn’t anywhere on any article of evidence,” McMurtrie said. “It was clear to us the person who put the tape on the mask was the perpetrator.”
Bradford served his full sentence and was released from the Stafford Creek Corrections Center near Aberdeen on Aug. 25, 2005.
Armed with the new DNA evidence, McMurtrie enlisted the help of Luna, one of her former law students, to file a motion to have Bradford’s conviction vacated. A Yakima County judge agreed the DNA evidence would likely have changed the outcome of his 1996 trial.
In September 2008, the Yakima County Prosecutor’s Office refiled rape and burglary charges against Bradford, this time adding aggravators that, if proved, would’ve likely sent him back to prison for years, his attorneys said.
He went on trial a second time in early 2010, and the jury deliberated for three hours before returning not-guilty verdicts.
“It was so great to finally get that acquittal,” Bradford said. “We have it framed in our living room.”
Bradford’s first wife divorced him while he was in prison, but he remarried in 2013 and lives with his wife, Jolene, in Yakima. He’s unemployed but works with Innocence Projects here and in other states and plays bass guitar for The Exoneree Band, whose members are all men who were wrongfully convicted of crimes.
Frustrated by what they saw as a refusal by police, prosecutors and the attorney general to acknowledge Bradford’s innocence, Bradford’s Seattle lawyers drew up a list of seven possible suspects. They hired a private investigator, who obtained DNA evidence that ruled out one suspect before they focused on the victim’s brother-in-law.
After months of failed attempts to collect the brother-in-law’s DNA, the private investigator staked out his house and took a bag of garbage that had been left on the curb, according to Bradford’s attorneys. Among the discarded items was a plastic water bottle with saliva on the rim.
That was in May.
The lawyers sent the bottle off to a private forensic lab in Virginia, where a DNA profile from the saliva was compared to the unknown DNA profile that the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab had generated years earlier from male skin cells left on the mask.
On July 19, Bradford’s attorneys learned the DNA profiles were a match.
The next day, Wampold wrote a letter to Yakima’s police chief, Brusic, the county prosecutor, and Ferguson. He included an affidavit from the private investigator detailing how the evidence was obtained and the lab report showing the DNA match.
“As part of our representation of Mr. Bradford, we have continued to investigate suspects and theories that were ignored by the investigative agencies,” he wrote. “As part of this investigation, we have obtained DNA evidence that conclusively shows that the rape was committed … by the crime victim’s brother-in-law.”
His letter also called on authorities to reinvestigate the rape.
Wampold said the work Yakima police did on the rape case wasn’t just sloppy but egregious.
“When the police make a mistake like this … the ripple effect is huge,” he said.
McMurtrie agrees: “It’s horrific, it’s heartbreaking and it shows the cost of wrongful conviction isn’t confined to the person who has been wrongly accused and convicted,” she said. “It has a terrible effect on victims and their families because the actual perpetrator is still out there.”So that’s the tax piece. And the spending piece? We knew that part already: Romney has pledged to cap federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product, while reserving 4 percent of GDP for defense spending. The result, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, would be massive cuts to programs that would be larger than even the ones the House Budget Committee, under Paul Ryan, approved.
In the speech, Romney suggested that he’d protect the needy and preserve important programs – that, in the near term, he’d hit his targets by eliminating programs like Amtrak funding and handing safety net programs over to the states. But, as Ezra Klein rightly notes, it’s that second part, the cuts to safety net programs, where Romney would have to get the big savings. And, to do that, he’d have to decimate the programs.
The story with Medicaid is particularly telling. Even if you believe that turning Medicaid over to the states would result in substantial new efficiencies – and there’s no good reason to believe that – people who depend on the program would suffer, given the magnitude of the spending reductions Romney has in mind. I’m not just talking about the children and their parents who now depend on the program for basic health insurance. I’m also talking about the elderly and disabled who depend on the program to fill the gaps in Medicare and cover the costs of long-term care, including nursing homes. (For more on Medicaid spending, see this excellent post by Aaron Carroll.)
And that’s just for the immediate future. In his speech, Romney made clear that, like Paul Ryan, he intends to transform Medicare into a voucher program, starting in 2022. He hasn’t specified how big the vouchers would be but, again, it’s unlikely he could achieve the savings he has in mind without reducing the value of the vouchers to the point where significant numbers of seniors could not get the care they need.
Romney would do a few other things, like freeze federal pay, and he counts on economic growth from his tax cut to make the budget balancing easier. Most economists I know don't think the math adds up, but leave that aside. Even if you accept Romney's assumptions, the end result is the same: The rich would benefit disproportionately from the tax cuts, because they pay more in taxes. The non-rich would suffer disproportionately from the spending cuts, because they depend more on public programs.Pennsylvania officials sought a motive on Thursday for a stabbing rampage at a high school where a 16-year-old student was accused of wielding two knives and wounding nearly two dozen people.
The attacker stalked through Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville near Pittsburgh on Wednesday, stabbing victims in the torso and slashing their arms and faces with 8-inch steel blades before being tackled by an assistant principal, officials and students said.
Sophomore Alex Hribal was taken into custody and charged with attempted homicide and aggravated assault, Murrysville Police Department Captain Rob Liermann said.
The teen had no psychiatric or disciplinary problems, and his family described him as a good student who mingled well with others, family lawyer Patrick Thomassey said in television interviews.
"He was not a loner," he told CNN on Thursday.
Thomassey said he met with Hribal for 20 minutes before his arraignment on Wednesday, but could not identify a motive.
"We're trying to figure that out," Thomassey told CNN. "This is a nice young boy. I mean, nobody would expect this. This is not a dysfunctional family. They're like the 'Brady Bunch.' His parents are active with their two sons."
Hribal's parents were horrified and sent their condolences to the victims and their families, he said.
Hribal was charged as an adult, but Thomassey told CNN he would try to move him into the juvenile court system.
Twenty-one students and a security officer were stabbed in the incident, said Dan Stevens, a spokesman for Westmoreland County emergency management.
While the United States has seen a series of large-scale shootings in public places in recent years, including schools, movie theaters and shopping areas, mass stabbings are less common.
Police and the FBI on Wednesday searched the suspect's home. Neighbors said both parents work, and the teen has a brother who also attends Franklin Regional High School.
The high school will be closed, probably until Monday, while police conduct an investigation, officials said.
Murrysville Police Chief Tom Seefeld told CNN that authorities were investigating a report of a threat made the night before the stabbings, but had no evidence to support that.
The victims were aged mostly 14 to 17 years.
Among the most seriously injured was a 17-year-old boy, who remained in critical condition at UPMC Presbyterian hospital early Thursday following surgery, a hospital spokeswoman said. A knife had passed through his liver, diaphragm and some major blood vessels, but missed his heart and aorta.
The knife missed the boy's heart and aorta by millimeters, said Dr. Louis Alarcon, director of trauma surgery at UPMC Presbyterian, where the boy was being treated. He was on breathing machines and sedated, Alarcon said at a news conference.
"Patients who are stabbed in the abdomen and chest by definition have life-threatening injuries," said Chris Kauffman, director of trauma at Forbes Regional Hospital, where some of the injured were treated.
At least seven other teenage boys were recovering overnight in two other hospitals
On Wednesday evening, community members held candlelight vigils for the wounded.
Hribal faces four counts of attempted homicide and 21 counts of aggravated assault, police said. He was ordered to face a preliminary hearing in seven to 10 days.
'Screaming bloody murder'
Freshman Josh Frank said he did not initially realize that anyone had been stabbed, but fled when he heard screaming.
"He did it so stealthily that at first no one knew what was happening," Frank said. "We heard a girl scream bloody murder. Then two seniors were running down the hall and we followed them out of the school."
The attacker used a large knife, based on the wounds suffered by at least one of his victims, said a doctor who had operated on a 17-year-old student with a large chest wound.
"Apparently it was a large knife of some sort, because it was a large injury to his abdominal wall and went through his liver, diaphragm and major blood vessels," said Dr. Louis Alarcon of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Doctors also said a female student helped save a male schoolmate by applying pressure to his wound until emergency responders arrived.
"She displayed an amazing amount of composure to help that friend who was having pretty significant bleeding at that point," said Dr. Mark Rubino, of Forbes Regional Hospital.
One apparent student victim, Nate Scimio, posted a widely circulating selfie from the hospital of himself in a gown, smirking and pointing to a bandage on his forearm.
Reuters and the Los Angeles TimesThis Sunday, December 7, at 1pm, Highland Park will present the 70th annual NELA Hollywood Parade. Come watch local drill teams, marching bands, equestrian units, celebrities, musicians, floats, dancers, and even Santa. Of course there will also be some wacky participants from the neighborhood.
If you are not content to watch, and want to BE the parade, a number of neighborhood groups welcome friendly participants. They will be gathering beforehand between 11am and 12 noon to prepare for the parade. Join the fun with socially conscious Recycled Resources who ask that you wear purple and arrive early to make banners. If you have a furry friend, you and your dog can join the Santa Paws as they pull Santa’s sled.
The parade starts at Avenue 60 and Figueroa and continues south to Sycamore Park. Take the Gold Line to the Highland Park station. Have a couple tacos at Estrella’s too while you’re at it.
Please follow and like us:CLOSE Israel began removing metal detectors from entrances to a major Jerusalem shrine early Tuesday morning to defuse a crisis over the site that angered the Muslim world and triggered some of the worst Israeli-Palestinian clashes in years. Time
Israeli police officers walk next to the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Thursday, July 27, 2017. (Photo: Mahmoud Illean, AP)
Prayers by Muslim worshipers at a contested shrine in Jerusalem went ahead peacefully Friday, after police were put on high alert following two weeks of protests.
Firas Dibs, a spokesman from the Jordanian body that administers the holy site — known as the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims and the Temple Mount to Jews — said that tens of thousands of people attended Friday prayers.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the prayers ended without incident, although there were some sporadic low-level altercations between Palestinians and Israeli forces nearby.
In the West Bank, Israel's military said a Palestinian was shot dead after he ran at troops armed with a knife. It said no soldiers were injured.
The military said Palestinian protesters threw rocks and fire bombs and rolled burning tires at soldiers who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets at several protests in the West Bank.
Earlier Friday, Israel banned men under the age of 50 from the holy site. Rosenfeld said the ban was introduced after some Palestinians barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque at overnight so they could join protests later. Rosenfeld said the would-be protesters were removed.
Clashes erupted Thursday between police and Muslim worshipers shortly after the site in the Old City reopened following an 11-day prayer boycott over metal detectors and other security measures Israel installed at the site.
Israel placed the metal detectors at the entry gates to the Esplanade of the Mosques last week after Arab-Israeli gunmen killed two Israeli police guards near the shrine on July 14. The detectors sparked mass prayer protests by Muslims outside the Old City and protests by Palestinians elsewhere.
Israeli police and Palestinian protesters clashed a week ago outside the Old City as young men threw rocks and improvised Molotov cocktails, while officers responded with water cannons and stun grenades. Thousands of Muslims prayed just outside the security zone. Muslim men under 50 were also barred from entering the Old City that day.
The detectors were removed earlier this week and Israel instead installed security cameras and barricades. Those measures have also been dismantled and Muslim leaders urged worshipers to return Thursday to the site to pray.
Israel had said the security measures were necessary to prevent further attacks, but Palestinians believe Israel was trying to expand its control over the site.
The compound, the third-holiest site in Islam and the most sacred in Judaism, houses the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques. About 50,000 Muslim worshipers typically descend on the Old City for prayers every Friday.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2w5GuGFFourteen people were “functionally cured” of HIV through rapid treatment after early diagnosis, giving hope to those infected. The French study results come less than two weeks after a baby was effectively cured after early treatment in the US.
Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Pasteur Institute’s unit for regulation of retroviral infections in Paris studied a group of 70 people who began a course of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) between 35 days and 10 weeks after becoming infected with HIV.
The patients took the drugs for an average of three years before stopping treatment completely. Although most of the patients relapsed when their treatment was interrupted, 14 people – known as the ‘Visconti cohort’ – were able to stay off the ARVs without the virus resurging.
The four women and 10 men still have traces of HIV in their blood, but at such low levels that their body can keep it in check without drugs. The 14 adults have been off medication for an average of seven years. One person has gone 10.5 years without drugs.
“It’s not eradication, but they can clearly live without pills for a very long period of time,” Sáez-Cirión told NewScientist magazine. While Sáez-Cirión warned that rapid treatment does not work for all patients, the new study stressed that early intervention is absolutely necessary.
“There are three benefits to early treatment,” Sáez-Cirión said. “It limits the reservoir of HIV that can persist, limits the diversity of the virus and preserves the immune response to the virus that keeps it in check.”
Researchers are working to identify factors that could explain why early intervention functionally cures some people, and not others. “This whole idea is fascinating, and we’ve been looking very closely at issues of early initiation of treatment, and the potential for functional cures,” said Andrew Ball, senior adviser on HIV/AIDS strategy at the World Health Organization.
Further analysis showed that the 14 adults were not super-controllers – the 1 per cent of the population that is naturally resistant to HIV – because they lacked the necessary protective genes. Natural controllers also rapidly suppress their infections, whereas members of the Visconti cohort had severe symptoms which lead to their early treatment.
“Paradoxically, doing badly helped them do better later,” Sáez-Cirión said.
The news came less than two weeks after a baby girl born with HIV in the US state of Mississippi became the first person to be functionally cured through the use of anti-AIDS drugs. During the child’s first 30 hours of birth, doctors applied potent, accelerated treatment to the baby.
The child responded well for 18 months, at which point the family temporarily stopped treatment. When they returned 10 months after treatment stopped, only tiny amounts of the virus were found in the child's blood.
However, not every HIV patient has the opportunity to be treated so early – the majority of infected individuals are not usually diagnosed until the virus has fully infiltrated their bodies.
"The big challenge is identifying people very early in their infection," said Ball, adding that many people resist testing because of the stigma and potential discrimination. "There's a good rationale for being tested early, and the latest results may give some encouragement to do that."UKIP announced plans for a policy of mandatory annual medical checks for schoolgirls in “at-risk minority” groups for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and prosecutions for parents of anyone who has undergone the procedure.
As part of its “integration agenda,” UKIP announced mandatory annual FGM checks for girls in schools. It wants to “implement school-based medical checks on girls at high risk of suffering FGM. These should take place annually and whenever they return from trips overseas.”
#UKIP new policies incl recurrently examining small girls for possible #FGM offences pic.twitter.com/nP9QzaJtzk — Joana Ramiro (@JoanaRamiroUK) April 24, 2017
The party is also calling for parents of girls who |
the village of Politania in 1810. Father Francisco Dumetz named the church San Bernardino on May 20, 1810, after the feast day of St. Bernardino of Siena. The Franciscans also gave the name San Bernardino to the snowcapped peak in Southern California, in honor of the saint and it is from him that the county derives its name.[4] In 1819, they established the San Bernardino de Sena Estancia, a mission farm in what is now Redlands.
Following Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, Mexican citizens were granted land grants to establish ranchos in the area of the county. Rancho Jurupa in 1838, Rancho Cucamonga and El Rincon in 1839, Rancho Santa Ana del Chino in 1841, Rancho San Bernardino in 1842 and Rancho Muscupiabe in 1844.
Agua Mansa was the first town in what became San Bernardino County, settled by immigrants from New Mexico on land donated from the Rancho Jurupa in 1841.
Following the purchase of Rancho San Bernardino, and the establishment of the town of San Bernardino in 1851 by Mormon colonists, San Bernardino County was formed in 1853 from parts of Los Angeles County. Some of the southern parts of the county's territory were given to Riverside County in 1893.
Geography [ edit ]
The Arrowhead natural feature is the source of many local names and icons, such as Lake Arrowhead and the county's seal.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 20,105 square miles (52,070 km2), of which 20,057 square miles (51,950 km2) is land and 48 square miles (120 km2) (0.2%) is water.[9] It is the largest county by area in California and the largest in the United States (excluding boroughs in Alaska).[10] It is slightly larger than the states of New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It borders both Nevada and Arizona.
The bulk of the population, roughly two million, live in the roughly 480 square miles south of the San Bernardino Mountains adjacent to Riverside and in the San Bernardino Valley. Over 300,000 others live just north of the San Bernardino Mountains, agglomerating around Victorville covering roughly 280 square miles in Victor Valley, adjacent to Los Angeles County. Roughly another 100,000 people live scattered across the rest of the sprawling county.
The Mojave National Preserve covers some of the eastern desert, especially between Interstate 15 and Interstate 40. The desert portion also includes the cities of Needles next to the Colorado River and Barstow at the junction in Interstate 15 and Interstate 40. Trona is at the northwestern part of the county west of Death Valley. This national park, mostly within Inyo County, also has a small portion of land within the San Bernardino County. The largest metropolitan area in the Mojave Desert part of the county is Victor Valley, with the incorporated localities of Adelanto, Apple Valley, Hesperia, and Victorville. Further south, a portion of Joshua Tree National Park overlaps the county near the High Desert area, in the vicinity of Twentynine Palms. The remaining towns make up the remainder of the High Desert: Pioneertown, Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, Landers, and Morongo Valley.
The mountains are home to the San Bernardino National Forest, and include the communities of Crestline, Lake Arrowhead, Running Springs, Big Bear City, Forest Falls, and Big Bear Lake.
The San Bernardino Valley is at the eastern end of the San Gabriel Valley. The San Bernardino Valley includes the cities of Ontario, Chino, Chino Hills, Upland, Fontana, Rialto, Colton, Grand Terrace, Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino, Loma Linda, Highland, Redlands, and Yucaipa.
Adjacent counties [ edit ]
National protected areas [ edit ]
Cadiz Dunes Wilderness
There are at least 35 official wilderness areas in the county that are part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. This is the largest number of any county in the United States (although not the largest in total area). The majority are managed by the Bureau of Land Management, but some are integral components of the above listed national protected areas. Most of these wilderness areas lie entirely within the county, but a few are shared with neighboring counties (and two of these are shared with the neighboring states of Arizona and Nevada).
Except as noted, these wilderness areas are managed solely by the Bureau of Land Management and lie entirely within San Bernardino County:
Demographics [ edit ]
2011 [ edit ]
Population, race, and income Total population[11] 2,023,452 White[11] 1,240,228 61.3% Black or African American[11] 176,209 8.7% American Indian or Alaska Native[11] 20,762 1.0% Asian[11] 126,991 6.3% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander[11] 5,984 0.3% Some other race[11] 364,236 18.0% Two or more races[11] 89,042 4.4% Hispanic or Latino (of any race)[12] 984,022 48.6% Per capita income[13] $21,932 Median household income[14] $55,853 Median family income[15] $61,525
Places by population, race, and income [ edit ]
2010 [ edit ]
The 2010 United States Census reported that San Bernardino County had a population of 2,035,210. The racial makeup of San Bernardino County was 1,153,161 (56.7%) White, 181,862 (8.9%) African American, 22,689 (1.1%) Native American, 128,603 (6.3%) Asian, 6,870 (0.3%) Pacific Islander, 439,661 (21.6%) from other races, and 102,364 (5.0%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1,001,145 persons (49.2%).[22]
2000 [ edit ]
As of the census[23] of 2000, there were 1,709,434 people, 528,594 households, and 404,374 families residing in the county. The population density was 85 people per square mile (33/km²). There were 601,369 housing units at an average density of 30 per square mile (12/km²). The racial makeup of the county was 58.9% White, 9.1% African American, 1.2% Native American, 4.7% Asian, 0.3% Pacific Islander, 20.8% from other races, and 5.0% from two or more races. 39.2% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 8.3% were of German, 5.5% English and 5.1% Irish ancestry according to Census 2000. 66.1% spoke English, 27.7% Spanish and 1.1% Tagalog as their first language.
There were 528,594 households, out of which 43.7% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 55.8% were married couples living together, 14.8% had a female householder with no husband present, and 23.5% were non-families. 18.4% of all households were made up of individuals, and 6.6% had someone 65 years of age or older living alone. The average household size was 3.2 people, and the average family size was 3.6 people.
The number of homeless in San Bernardino County grew from 5,270 in 2002 to 7,331 in 2007, a 39% increase.[24]
In the county, the population was spread out—with 32.3% under the age of 18, 10.3% from 18 to 24, 30.2% from 25 to 44, 18.7% from 45 to 64, and 8.6% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 30 years. For every 100 females, there were 99.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 97.2 males.
The median income for a household in the county was $42,066, and the median income for a family was $46,574. Males had a median income of $37,025 versus $27,993 for females. The per capita income for the county was $16,856. About 12.6% of families and 15.80% of the population were below the poverty line, including 20.6% of those under age 18 and 8.4% of those age 65 or over.
Government and policing [ edit ]
County government [ edit ]
The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors has 5 members elected from their districts:[25]
Robert A. Lovingood (First District),
Janice Rutherford (Second District),
Dawn Rowe (Third District),
Chairman Curt Hagman (Fourth District), and
Vice Chair Josie Gonzales (Fifth District).
State and federal representation [ edit ]
In the United States House of Representatives, San Bernardino County is split between 5 congressional districts:[26]
In the California State Assembly, San Bernardino County is split between 8 assembly districts:[27]
In the California State Senate, San Bernardino County is split between 6 districts:[28]
Policing [ edit ]
Sheriff [ edit ]
The San Bernardino County Sheriff provides court protection, jail administration, and coroner services for all of San Bernardino County. It provides police patrol, detective, and marshal services for the unincorporated areas of the county.
Municipal police [ edit ]
Municipal police departments in the county are: San Bernardino, Rialto, Fontana, Ontario, Upland, and Barstow. The San Bernardino County Sheriff provides contract law enforcement services to 14 incorporated county cities and towns: Adelanto, Apple Valley, Big Bear, Chino Hills, Grand Terrace, Hesperia, Highland, Loma Linda, Needles, Rancho Cucamonga, Twentynine Palms, Victorville, Yucaipa, and Yucca Valley. Also for the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. The Sheriff's Commanders assigned to these stations acts as each municipality's Chief of Police.[citation needed]
Politics [ edit ]
Voter registration [ edit ]
Cities by population and voter registration [ edit ]
Overview [ edit ]
San Bernardino County vote
by party in presidential elections[30] Year GOP DEM Others 2016 41.5% 271,240 52.1% 340,833 6.4% 41,910 2012 45.0% 262,358 52.3% 305,109 2.7% 15,463 2008 45.8% 277,408 52.1% 315,720 2.2% 13,206 2004 55.3% 289,306 43.5% 227,789 1.2% 6,181 2000 48.8% 221,757 47.2% 214,749 4.0% 18,387 1996 43.6% 180,135 44.4% 183,372 12.1% 49,848 1992 37.2% 176,563 38.7% 183,634 24.0% 113,873 1988 60.0% 235,167 38.6% 151,118 1.5% 5,723 1984 64.8% 222,071 34.0% 116,454 1.2% 4,180 1980 59.7% 172,957 31.7% 91,790 8.7% 25,065 1976 49.5% 113,265 47.9% 109,636 2.6% 5,984 1972 59.7% 144,689 35.5% 85,986 4.8% 11,581 1968 50.1% 111,974 40.0% 89,418 9.9% 22,224 1964 42.8% 92,145 57.1% 123,012 0.1% 243 1960 52.0% 99,481 47.5% 90,888 0.5% 944 1956 56.9% 86,263 42.8% 64,946 0.3% 443 1952 57.3% 77,718 41.8% 56,663 0.9% 1,153 1948 48.6% 46,570 47.7% 45,691 3.7% 3,577 1944 46.5% 34,084 52.6% 38,530 0.9% 646 1940 44.3% 30,511 54.5% 37,520 1.2% 847 1936 39.0% 22,219 59.6% 33,955 1.5% 842 1932 44.6% 22,094 50.2% 24,889 5.2% 2,565 1928 74.7% 29,229 24.1% 9,436 1.1% 447 1924 56.9% 15,974 9.4% 2,634 33.7% 9,453 1920 62.8% 12,518 28.2% 5,620 9.0% 1,783 1916 50.7% 11,932 39.9% 9,398 9.4% 2,215 1912 1.1% 172 38.0% 5,835 60.9% 9,336 1908 52.9% 4,729 30.0% 2,685 17.0% 1,526 1904 58.2% 3,884 23.6% 1,573 18.1% 1,213 1900 52.2% 3,135 39.1% 2,347 8.8% 529 1896 48.5% 2,818 47.2% 2,740 4.3% 247 1892 48.7% 3,686 33.7% 2,546 17.6% 1,335
San Bernardino County is a county in which candidates from both major political parties have won in recent elections. Democrat Hillary Clinton carried the county by a majority and by double digits in 2016. The Democratic Party also carried the county in 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama won majorities of the county's votes, and in 1992 and 1996, when Bill Clinton won pluralities. Republican George W. Bush took the county in 2000 by a plurality and in 2004 by a majority. The county is split between heavily Latino, middle-class, and Democratic areas and more wealthy conservative areas. The heavily Latino cities of Ontario and San Bernardino went for John Kerry in 2004, but with a relatively low voter turnout. In 2006, San Bernardino's population exceeded 201,000, and in 2004, only 42,520 votes were cast in the city; in 2006, strongly Republican Rancho Cucamonga had over 145,000 residents, of whom 53,054 voted.
According to the California Secretary of State, as of May 2009, there were 806,589 registered voters in San Bernardino County. Of those, 324,857 (40.28%) were registered Democrats, 306,203 (37.96%) were registered Republicans, with the remainder belonging to minor political parties or declining to state.[31]
On November 4, 2008, San Bernardino County voted 67% for Proposition 8, which amended the California Constitution to ban same-sex marriages.[32]
Public safety [ edit ]
Law enforcement [ edit ]
The current district attorney is Michael Ramos.
The county's primary law enforcement agency is the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. The department provides law enforcement services in the unincorporated areas of the county and in 14 contract cities, operates the county jail system, provides marshal services in the county superior courts, and has numerous other divisions to serve the residents of the county.
Sergeant Phil Brown of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department has said that gangs are growing more violent in the farthest reaches of the county, including the High Desert. Racial tensions among Chicano gangs and African-American gangs have increased dramatically in the Inland Empire, affecting even the most rural areas. "It's getting out in more remote areas," Brown said. "They go gang against gang. There's more gang violence to the general public and it's becoming more random..."[33]
Fire rescue [ edit ]
The county operates the San Bernardino County Consolidated Fire District (commonly known as the San Bernardino County Fire Department). The department provides "all-risk" fire, rescue, and emergency medical services to all unincorporated areas in the county except for several areas served by independent fire protection districts, and several cities that chose to contract with the department.
Crime [ edit ]
The following table includes the number of incidents reported and the rate per 1,000 persons for each type of offense.
Cities by population and crime rates [ edit ]
Education [ edit ]
Colleges and universities [ edit ]
Libraries [ edit ]
The San Bernardino County Library System consists of 33 branches across the county. The library system also has inter-library loan partnerships with libraries in College of the Desert, Moreno Valley, Murrieta, and Victorville.[36] Library services offered vary from branch to branch, but include internet access, children's story times, adult literacy services, book clubs, classes, and special events.[37] The library system also offers e-books, digital music and movie downloads, free access to online learning through Lynda.com, and many other digital services.[38]
City-sponsored public libraries also exist in San Bernardino County, including A. K. Smiley Public Library in Redlands, California, which was built in 1898.[39] Other public libraries in the County include: The San Bernardino City Public Library System, Rancho Cucamonga Public Library, Upland Public Library, Colton City Library, and the Ontario City Library.[40] These libraries are separate from the county system and do not share circulation privileges.
Transportation [ edit ]
Major highways [ edit ]
Public transportation [ edit ]
Airports [ edit ]
Environmental quality [ edit ]
California Attorney General Jerry Brown sued the county in April 2007 under the state's environmental quality act for failing to account for the impact of global warming in the county's 25-year growth plan, approved in March. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society also sued in a separate case. According to Brendan Cummings, a senior attorney for the plaintiffs: "San Bernardino has never seen a project it didn't like. They rubber-stamp development. It's very much of a frontier mentality." The plaintiffs want the county to rewrite its growth plan's environmental impact statement to include methods to measure greenhouse gases and take steps to reduce them.[42]
According to county spokesman David Wert, only 15% of the county is actually controlled by the county; the rest is cities and federal and state land. However, the county says it will make sure employment centers and housing are near transportation corridors to reduce traffic and do more to promote compact development and mass transit. The county budgeted $325,000 to fight the lawsuit.[42]
The state and the county reached a settlement in August 2007.[43] The county agreed to amend its general plan to include a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Plan, including an emissions inventory and reduction targets.
Communities [ edit ]
Cities [ edit ]
Census-designated places [ edit ]
Unincorporated communities [ edit ]
Indian Reservations [ edit ]
Ghost towns [ edit ]
Population ranking [ edit ]
The population ranking of the following table is based on the 2010 census of San Bernardino County.[45]
† county seat
Places of interest [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Newspapers, past and present [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Other = Some other race + Two or more races ^ Native American = Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander + American Indian or Alaska Native a b Percentage of registered voters with respect to total population. Percentages of party members with respect to registered voters follow. ^ Only larceny-theft cases involving property over $400 in value are reported as property crimes.
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:Lena Dunham Sits 'Shiva' For Hillary Clinton
November 17, 2016
L ast week, feminist royalty Lena Dunham made the shocking Donald Trump victory even sweeter for Republicans by chronicling her Lenny Letter. There were tears; there was denial; and there was pure hysteria. ast week, feminist royalty Lena Dunham made the shocking Donald Trump victory even sweeter for Republicans by chronicling her insane meltdown over the Hillary Clinton election loss in her feminist newsletterLenny Letter. There were tears; there was denial; and there was pure hysteria.
Here's a sample:
The modeling had been incorrect. Watching the numbers in Florida, I touched my face and realized I was crying. “Can we please go home?” I said to my boyfriend. I could tell he was having trouble breathing, and I could feel my chin breaking into hives... At home I got in the shower and began to cry even harder. My boyfriend, who had already wept, watched me as I mumbled incoherently, clutching myself. "It wasn’t supposed to go this way. It was supposed to be her job. She worked her whole life for the job. It’s her job."
But it turns out that Dunham is taking the "loss" even harder than we thought. The Girls star is sitting Shiva—the week-long Jewish tradition of properly mourning the death of a loved one—for Hillary, and apparently our country.
On Friday, Dunham posted a message from Rabbi Joel Simonds to Instagram as a way to inform the world of her suffering...over a democratic election...which she On Friday, Dunham posted a message from Rabbi Joel Simonds to Instagram as a way to inform the world of her suffering...over a democratic election...which she actively helped to tank for her candidate.
"Today marks the seventh day of grieving and sitting Shivah for the loss of our country and the woman who inspired us," begins the melodramatic post. Now, we know Hillary is as about inspiring as watching paint dry, but we're pretty sure she's talking about the former secretary of state here.
"As Judaism teaches us, after seven days of Shivah we stand up, we emerge from the darkness, we do not have to accept, we do not have to move, but we stand up!" it continues. "So today we emerge from the darkness. We are taught that the righteous do not complain of the darkness but rather create light. Today we being to create light and we do so as the resistance and we fight and fight and fight and fight for good, for love and for justice."
So, good news, America, Lena is back and ready to "fight"!Computer simulations of physical systems are common in science, engineering, and entertainment, but they use several different types of tools.
If, say, you want to explore how a crack forms in an airplane wing, you need a very precise physical model of the crack’s immediate vicinity. But if you want to simulate the flexion of an airplane wing under different flight conditions, it’s more practical to use a simpler, higher-level description of the wing.
If, however, you want to model the effects of wing flexion on the crack’s propagation, or vice versa, you need to switch back and forth between these two levels of description, which is difficult not only for computer programmers but for computers, too.
A team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Adobe, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Toronto, Texas A&M, and the University of Texas have developed a new programming language that handles that switching automatically.
In experiments, simulations written in the language were dozens or even hundreds of times as fast as those written in existing simulation languages. But they required only one-tenth as much code as meticulously hand-optimized simulations that could achieve similar execution speeds.
“The story of this paper is that the trade-off between concise code and good performance is false,” says Fredrik Kjolstad, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on a new paper describing the language. “It’s not necessary, at least for the problems that this applies to. But it applies to a large class of problems.”
Indeed, Kjolstad says, the researchers’ language has applications outside physical simulation, in machine learning, data analytics, optimization, and robotics, among other areas. Kjolstad and his colleagues have already used the language to implement a version of Google’s original PageRank algorithm for ordering search results, and they’re currently collaborating with researchers in MIT’s Department of Physics on an application in quantum chromodynamics, a theory of the “strong force” that holds atomic nuclei together.
“I think this is a language that is not just going to be for physical simulations for graphics people,” says Saman Amarasinghe, Kjolstad’s advisor and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). “I think it can do a lot of other things. So we are very optimistic about where it’s going.”
Kjolstad presented the paper in July at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Siggraph conference, the major conference in computer graphics. His co-authors include Amarasinghe; Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of EECS; and Gurtej Kanwar, who was an MIT undergraduate when the work was done but is now an MIT PhD student in physics.
Graphs vs. matrices
As Kjolstad explains, the distinction between the low-level and high-level descriptions of physical systems is more properly described as the distinction between descriptions that use graphs and descriptions that use linear algebra.
In this context, a graph is a mathematical structure that consists of nodes, typically represented by circles, and edges, typically represented as line segments connecting the nodes. Edges and nodes can have data associated with them. In a physical simulation, that data might describe tiny triangles or tetrahedra that are stitched together to approximate the curvature of a smooth surface. Low-level simulation might require calculating the individual forces acting on, say, every edge and face of each tetrahedron.
Linear algebra instead represents a physical system as a collection of points, which exert forces on each other. Those forces are described by a big grid of numbers, known as a matrix. Simulating the evolution of the system in time involves multiplying the matrix by other matrices, or by vectors, which are individual rows or columns of numbers.
Matrix manipulations are second nature to many scientists and engineers, and popular simulation software such as MatLab provides a vocabulary for describing them. But using MatLab to produce graphical models requires special-purpose code that translates the forces acting on, say, individual tetrahedra into a matrix describing interactions between points. For every frame of a simulation, that code has to convert tetrahedra to points, perform matrix manipulations, then map the results back onto tetrahedra. This slows the simulation down drastically.
So programmers who need to factor in graphical descriptions of physical systems will often write their own code from scratch. But manipulating data stored in graphs can be complicated, and tracking those manipulations requires much more code than matrix manipulation does. “It’s not just that it’s a lot of code,” says Kjolstad. “It’s also complicated code.”
Automatic translation
Kjolstad and his colleagues’ language, which is called Simit, requires the programmer to describe the translation between the graphical description of a system and the matrix description. But thereafter, the programmer can use the language of linear algebra to program the simulation.
During the simulation, however, Simit doesn’t need to translate graphs into matrices and vice versa. Instead, it can translate instructions issued in the language of linear algebra into the language of graphs, preserving the runtime efficiency of hand-coded simulations.
Unlike hand-coded simulations, however, programs written in Simit can run on either conventional microprocessors or on graphics processing units (GPUs), with no change to the underlying code. In the researchers’ experiments, Simit code running on a GPU was between four and 20 times as fast as on a standard chip.
“One of the biggest frustrations as a physics simulation programmer and researcher is adapting to rapidly changing computer architectures,” says Chris Wojtan, a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. “Making a simulation run fast often requires painstakingly specific rearrangements to be made to the code. To make matters worse, different code must be written for different computers. For example, a graphics processing unit has different strengths and weaknesses compared to a cluster of CPUs, and optimizing simulation code to perform well on one type of machine will usually result in sub-optimal performance on a different machine.”
“Simit and Ebb” — another experimental simulation language presented at Siggraph — “aim to handle all of these frustratingly specific optimizations automatically, so programmers can focus their time and energy on developing new algorithms,” Wojtan says. “This is especially exciting news for physics simulation researchers, because it can be difficult to defend creative and raw new ideas against traditional algorithms which have been thoroughly optimized for existing architectures.”
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency SIMPLEX program.DEEP in the jungle of North Kivu, a lawless province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a new road is being cut through the canopy. As birds chirp, hand saws cut noisily through trees. Men with shovels dig out roots and flatten the ochre-red earth. A sturdy new log bridge crosses a stream. On it stands Boris Kamstra, a South African in a plaid shirt and bucket hat. “This is great road-building material,” he booms, gesturing at the stones.
Mr Kamstra is the boss of Alphamin Resources, a Canadian-funded company that is trying to build perhaps the most improbable mine in Africa. The site, on a hill called Bisie, is about 60km (37 miles) from the nearest settlement of any size, a town called Walikale. Before Alphamin arrived there was no road connection: anyone hoping to reach it faced a full day’s hike. Getting to Goma, the nearest border crossing, would take another two days on a road lorries cannot use. In the immediate area are three armed rebel groups. The nearest government post is at Walikale—and consists of one rather squat office.
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Congo’s soil is bursting with buried treasure. Its long civil war, which ravaged the east for the best part of a decade, was financed largely by metals extracted from hills like Bisie (see article). Congo’s tin, tantalum and tungsten are used in electronics around the world. Although some of these minerals come from big industrial copper mines in Katanga, Congo’s south, and a gold mine in South Kivu, there is not yet a single modern mine in North Kivu.
Tin, tin in the Congo
Until now the province’s metal has been dug out almost entirely by hand. Yet Alphamin hopes to show that it can run a modern industrial mine in a part of the world that scares other modern miners away.
Alphamin says that the investment is attractive—even at a time of low commodity prices—because the ore that it plans to extract is richer than that found anywhere else in the world. Behind the company’s camp on the hill are stacks of carefully ordered cylinders of rock drilled out to map the riches beneath the mountain. (Like almost everything else in the camp, the drill rig had to be lifted in by helicopter.) The ore they contain is 4.5% grade. That means that for every 100 tonnes of ore extracted, the firm will be able to sell 3.25 tonnes of tin (not all the tin can be extracted from the rock). Most other mines would be happy to produce 0.7 tonnes.
Such a rich deposit ought to make Bisie a very cheap producer, but its advantages are offset by the other costs and risks of working in eastern Congo. These are hefty, even before the first load of tin has been extracted. The helicopter “makes confetti of $100 bills”, jokes Mr Kamstra. Exploratory drilling costs more still (roughly $250 for every metre, of which the company has drilled 40,000 to prove to investors that it has lots of tin in the ground). Building a new road 32km through the bush is not cheap: it involves 450 workers. The firm is also rehabilitating an existing road to Goma so that it can carry lorries.
Once exploration is completed it will take some $135m to build the mine. Recouping that investment may not be easy in a place as insecure as North Kivu. Congolese authorities granted a permit for exploratory drilling in 2006. But the firm was not able to operate until 2012 because there was too much fighting nearby. Since then its base camp has been attacked by armed groups four times. In 2014 a police officer was killed and research work worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was wrecked. The camp now has 30 police officers living on site. UN peacekeeping helicopters sometimes keep a watchful eye on it, too.
If the gamble pays off Alphamin’s investors will make juicy returns. But to do so they may have to convince locals that the project is in their interest. If not, they risk protests and sabotage.
In 2007 some 18,000 people lived at Bisie, working the site with pickaxes and shovels. They produced some 14,000 tonnes of tin that year—or perhaps 5% of world production. To get it to market people carried concentrated ore on their heads through the jungle to an airstrip where small planes could land to carry it out. It was back-breaking work but lucrative for many Congolese. That era began to come to an end in 2011, thanks in part to an American law.
Under the Dodd-Frank act, a law aimed mainly at tightening bank regulation, firms operating in the United States must be able to show where the minerals used in their products came from. The idea was to stop rebels in poor countries from selling gold and diamonds to fund wars. The law all but shut down artisanal mining in much of eastern Congo.
Elsewhere in eastern Congo artisanal mines have gradually reopened thanks to a verification scheme under which the UN and the government check mines and allow certified ones to “tag and bag” minerals. The site at Bisie has, however, never been certified. And although Alphamin will provide some well-paid jobs to locals, as well as pay taxes to the central government, its mechanised operations will never employ anything like the thousands of people who once toiled there with pick and shovel. Alphamin has promised to fund local projects, such as a new school, that are intended to benefit 44 villages.
The mine could help local people indirectly, too, by bankrolling a cash-strapped government. When production begins a truck carrying tin ore will rattle every day from Bisie towards Goma. Each one will pay both a toll for the road as well as royalties to the provincial government. For the first time, the government will have a financial incentive (and some revenue) to provide security in the area. Insecurity is not just the biggest threat to Alphamin’s investors; it is also the biggest cause of suffering to the locals.
In much of Africa having natural resources has often proved to be a curse. Gems and minerals have funded rebel armies and kept conflicts burning. Governments that can raise big bucks from oil or mineral royalties, rather than by fostering broad-based growth and taxing people’s incomes, have had little incentive to govern well. The ruling class have devoted their energies to divvying up the easy money rather than actually governing.
In eastern Congo the state has all but collapsed, leaving vast tracts of territory lawless. The locals have discovered that even bad government is better than no government at all. It will take more than a tin mine to change that, but you have to start somewhere.What did President Trump do this week?
President Trump welcomes German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House on March 17, 2017. (Photo11: Clemens Bilan, European Pressphoto Agency)
It's the weekend once again, OnPolitics readers. And what a week to end. Let's get to it.
Saturday: Advisers who lunch
It was a relatively quiet day for President Trump, who met with aides at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va. In attendance: White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steve Bannon, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and his wife, and Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and his wife. Sometimes, you just need a working lunch, you know?
Trump-adjacent: There was fallout from the announcement that the Trump administration had asked for the resignation of 46 U.S. attorneys. Organizations reported the Secret Service arrested a California man who hopped the fence at White House.Alec Baldwin's take on Donald Trump returned (and Scarlett Johansson introduced us to Ivanka Trump).
Sunday: Quiet day
Nothing official on the books. Even presidents need a day to breathe, y'all.
Trump-related: Administration officials started spreading the word that the Congressional Budget Office's budget estimate for the Obamacare replacement might be questionable at best. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway talked about surveillance and microwaves.
Monday: Let's get less wasteful
The president signed "the Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch." The plan: to eliminate unnecessary federal agencies. The details: White House budget director Mick Mulvaney has a year to come up with proposals what the federal government can cut. The |
, tons of shopping. We finally did it, we finally got the shopping implemented. We’ve been working on it for months, there’s about 36 items I think, that you can customize your player with. Everything from shoes to pants to hats, so shirts, jackets. I’m sure the players are just having a blast with and there’s I think there’s seven new space suits that we put in with the helmets.
SG: Alright and did you do some of that?
FS: I did my best to help everybody that was involved, it was a big team effort and everything from character riggers to character artists to tons of tech that had to built to allow us to do the item port stuff. So yeah it took a lot of different people to create… it seems like such a simple thing, put on a hat and take off a hat, but it’s just so much more to that, there’s so much under the hood that needs to happen so it’s super exciting for us.
SG: Your title keeps changing so I’m not sure what you do [Laughs]. He does a lot here for us, does a lot here.
FS: I have seven drop titles.
SG: And he’s been with us along time. With the most recent PTU we added a smaller more focused wave of testers call the Evocati.
FS: Yeah I heard they’re doing an awesome job. The issue council reports are blowing up and so thank you everybody that’s involved, I hear it’s going awesome.
SG: Yeah that was actually what I was mentioning before [laughs]. But I didn’t know we called them the Evocati
FS: I didn’t know that until either, evocati. I tell you what I won’t forget it now.
SG: In other news, the April Monthly Report went out this Friday so if you would like to have a very detailed read of all of the reports from all of our studios you should check it out.
FS: Yeah I heard there’s a ton of new relayed 2.4 images in there.
SG: Oh, there you go, get to it folks and maybe even a nice shot of an upcoming Starfarer Gemini for those who want to look closely.
FS: Which I haven’t seen.
SG: Well, there you go, maybe you should read it too.
Last week the Prospector sale ended and as part of that sale, citizens were invited to write their own biographies for their miner characters.
FS: Yeah there’s like 35,000 entries I think.
SG: 35,000 really?
FS: 35,000 yeah.
SG: I thought it was, okay. 35,000 entries and there you go. Next week we’ll pick our five favorites so everybody is up for 24 hours until then looking at all the entrants and we will pick five favorites who will win an RSI Orion mining platform.
FS: Oh I’m so excited about winning that.
SG: Yeah [Laughs]
FS: Why not? Oops..
SG: You’re not eligible
FS: Sorry, cut, start over.
SG: And as a special thanks to everyone that entered we are going to send out another five dollar coupon to those who submitted a biography for their miner. These coupon codes will be going out by email tomorrow to keep your eye out.
FS: Which I will win, hopefully.
SG: [Laughs] He wanting to win everything.
With that let’s check in with our studios from around the world and see what’s happening in this week’s News From Around The Verse.
News From Around The Verse
Los Angeles
Eric Kerion Davis (EKD) : Hey everybody and welcome back to Los Angeles. I’m Eric Kieron Davis and I have a special visitor with me…
Emre Switzer (ES): Emre Switzer.
EKD: From the Austin office! He’s out here working on several things and we got a couple updates for you this week. But i’m going to let Emre, what are you working on?
ES: This week i’ve been finalising Nyx, going over the technical environments with Sean. Sean Tracey of course. And also nailing down the lighting pipeline going forward we need to make sure that all the lighting is uniform across all our locals. I know we’re doing stuff in similar ways, so that we don’t have a tonne of things out of sync. So just nailing down the technical aspects of lighting here in L.A.
EKD: It’s really cool ‘cause Emre’s got a kind of technical knowledge in lighting so it’s not just the artistic side of lighting it’s like: “How do you achieve that within the CryEngine?”. It’s really interesting. Him and Sean are working really closely together it’s been great having him out here. And then on the other side, we’re still working on the Caterpillar pretty actively on the Art Team. manned modules being worked on.
The big thing on the Engineering side is Item System 2.0. We continue to chew on that master system. It’s going to make a lot of changes, a lot of upgrades and we’re really excited about it. And then we’ve been working on the asset validator tool, Matt Intrieri been working on that. So a lot of work’s been done this week, and we’ve made a lot of great progress. So I think that’s all the updates we have for you, unless you have something up your sleeve you want to give updates on?
ES: Not sure. Working on quite a few ships right now. Redoing the lighting, Constellation probably soon.
EKD: A lot’s going on here in L.A. We’re glad to have Emre out here
ES: It’s great to be here
EKD: Alright cool. Alright guys until the next time. See you later.
Austin
Jake Ross (JR): Hey guys Jake Ross here, Producer of the Austin studio, and I want to give you an update of what’s going on here in Austin. First off we have 2.4.0 on PTU, YAY! We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from our first wave of PTU testers and we are operating on that feedback and iteration now. So we’re taking your considerations into heart and running those by Chris, when and where needed and tasking those up. So hopefully we can make the best experience possible before we push this thing out to live. So thanks again for your feedback guys and keep it coming.
We are also looking ahead towards analytics. I’ve mentioned it a little bit in the past, we want to be able to track a lot of different things going on in the game. We’ve now officially established Pete Mackay here in Austin as the Lead Designer on that. So he’s going to be heading up Analytics and he’s learning a lot about that. Kind of setting the course for tracking all that stuff. So we’re happy to have Pete in charge of that he’s going to do a great job. So that’s it for the Design side.
On the Animation side we have a love mo-cap shoot going on right now in the U.K. Back in Imaginarium doing some pick ups from Squadron 42, and our Animators here in Austin are doing some support on the metric side, when things arise on set with Chris, and Hannis and those guys run into issues with metrics and things like that they’ll blast out and say “Hey we’re having an issue with this thing”. And our guys here in Austin will react and they’ll adjust and they’ll document things they needed documented. It’s a cool little thing where at the end of the day, we’ll kind of have this cycle of “Hey we ran into these issues”. And then we come in in the morning and we tackle those issues, and then they have those fixed for the next day. So it’s nice to be able to have that cyclical schedule, even in as something as massive as complex as a mo-cap shoot, it’s nice to have that.
Looking a bit farther ahead. We’re looking at Dumper’s Depot. We have a couple shops opening up in 2.4. Specifically Cubbie Blast and Casaba Outlet as well as a couple new shops in Port Olisar. Dumper’s Depot will not make it to the first release but we’re hoping to roll that out very soon after. So we’re setting up that shop specifically, Behaviour’s kind of tweaking a little bit of the environment art where we’re honing on the terminal purchasing. Purchasing via kiosk or a terminal, so you can actually buy ship components and ship weapons in the shop. So that design will be fleshed out here pretty soon and we’ll get that into implementation phase. I think that’s it for this week guys. Thanks we’ll see you around.
Foundry 42 UK
Mici Oliver: Hey everyone this is Mici over in the U.K. Today i’ve got John Reilly with me.
JR: Hey!
MO: So John do you want to tell us what you do here at Foundry 42?
JR: Sure. I’m Senior Character Artist here working on Squadron 42 and all the rest that goes with. Currently i’m responsible for working on the Vanduul. Previous to that i’ve done characters like Graves and so forth. So yeah been quite lucky.
MO: How long you been here as well?
JR: Think it’s getting on for six months. It’s flying by. Very busy!
MO: Yeah? Good. And what did you do prior to this job?
JR: Everything from paper round to working in a restaurant! No, no. I’ve got quite a bit of experience as i’ve been doing this professionally for about 15 years. Started at a company called Bizarre Creations, worked on the PGR series. Then I did some time at Sony Liverpool with the Wipeout franchise. TTFusion to a couple of the Lego games but then I went off, to London, worked on film. Worked with Dean egg on films like Total Recall, Skyfall, Thor 2, Antman etc.
Then I was fortunate to work for another company called MPC to work on Jungle Book that’s out at the moment in the cinema. Working with some great talent on characters like Shia Khan and just a massive amount of animation and characters and work there. More recently i’ve been doing the quarter scale collectible statues that you can get at like Forbidden Planet and so on. They cover franchises like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, He-Man. It’s pretty much if it’s need doing I can do it and then at some point and now i’m here to do it here.
MO: That’s cool, that’s awesome, I think that’s all we’ve got time for so we’ll see you in the ‘Verse
JR: Cheers
MO: Bye
Foundry 42 Frankfurt
Brian Chambers: Hey everyone Brian from Frankfurt. This week instead of gving a detailed report across every discipline which I do most week or bring somebody in I just wanted to take the time to, thank you guys for enabling and letting us do what we do, which is make cool games. Walking around the office today amongst everything else I was busy looking at the people on the floor and the team and the size of the team and how everybody’s gelling and working and vibing off each other, it’s pretty cool.
A year ago when we moved into this place less than a year ago, we were all crammed in a small corner. We’re now almost to capacity we’re at 45 people here. As I look out the door right now I can see Steve Bender with Todd Pappy and the Design Team. They’re all huddled, they have guns in their hands. Fake ones. Going through motions talking about systems and different designs and movement. I was just talking with the tech guys looking at the progress on procedural stuff. Which you guys will see an update on pretty soon here, and it’s just across every department, every discipline that we have here in Germany, and it’s all because of you guys.
So next week i’ll come back with detail and i’ll give the line item, discipline by discipline because I know there’s a good amount of people that like that. But sometimes you just need to stop and say thank you letting us work on this. We all are looking forward to playing this together just as much as you guys are, and every day we’re getting a bit closer actually making that become a reality, which is pretty cool to be a part of. Yeah so thanks again and i’ll try to mix it up next week. Thanks.
ATV Behind The Scenes: Voice Attack & HCS Voice Packs
Jared Huckaby: Thank guys, on this week’s episode of AtV Behind the Scenes, we’re sitting down with some of the creators of the voice attack and HCS voice attack profiles, if I’m saying that right, Paul and Gary. Gary, Paul, how you guys doing man?
Gary Magenheimer: Howdy.
JH: So…
Paul Watson: I’m good, thank you.
JH: So, let’s start off with introductions here. Gary, who are you and what do you do?
GM: Gary Magenheimer, I’m the creator of voice attack, it’s been around since about 2009, that’s pretty much all I do.
JH: All right, so it’s been going well for you then.
GM: It’s been going pretty well.
JH: Paul, what do you do? Who are you and what do you do?
PW: I’m Paul Watson, I’m the producer of HCS voice packs and I work very closely with Gary in bringing you the most immersive production ever made, yeah.
GM: Agreed.
JH: So, for those Star Citizens who may not be aware of what voice attack is, why don’t you give us the quick run down, Gary.
GM: Oh ok, voice attack in a nutshell is an application that basically turns your voice commands into macros and scripts and it’s got a little bit more to it, there’s variables and things that help you to control flow of those macros and scripts and give you more of an immersive feel.
JH: All right, now how do people get voice attack?
GM: You can go to voiceattack.com, go to the download section and just download and install. It’s got a 21 day trial and it’s limited, you can’t do everything. Like you can’t, I’m sorry, it’s limited… you only have one profile with twenty commands and that should give you a pretty good taste on what it can do.
JH: Gotcha. Now we don’t usually do pseudocommercials for third party products but voice attack has gained a lot of popularity within our community, so we thought we would at least take the opportunity to share what you’re doing and how folks can find your product and see how that works.
GM: Thank you.
JH: Now Paul, you work for HCS voice packs, now tell us what that is.
PW: HCS voice packs, they are the responses from various actors, both celebrities and non-celebrities, and it’s those responses that you get in a huge catalogue with educational material as well as the immersive sound responses you see in a lot of the videos online.
JH: Ok, now I understand we have a clip so let’s take a look at the clip and we’ll come back and talk about what we saw.
[Voice Attack product clip]
TheNoobifier: Hello Citizens, this is TheNoobifier. HCS has asks me to prepare a short demo of how the Orion voice pack is used within Star Citizen. Here we go. I’m coming back on board.
Voice Attack: Affirmative, stand by. Securing the ship. Pressurizing. Welcome back, Commander. All systems ready to go.
TN: Landing mode.
VA: Gear down.
TN: Request landing.
VA: Request for docking sent.
TN: Automated landing.
VA: Automated landing enabled.
TN: Front shields 25%.
VA: Forward shields.
TN: Reset shields.
VA: Shields equalized.
TN: Display power.
VA: Displaying power.
TN: Reset power.
VA: Power equilibrium restored, reset.
TN: Display overview.
VA: Affirmative
Ship AI: You’re approaching simulation boundary.
TN: Nearest enemy.
VA: Nearest hostile.
Ship AI: Warning you’re approaching simulation boundary.
TN: Zoom out.
VA: HUD out.
TN: Lock missiles.
VA: Locking onto target.
TN: Send it.
VA: Missile launched.
TN: Next target.
VA: Next hostile.
TN: Lock missile.
VA: Locking onto target.
TN: Send it.
VA: Target missile launched.
TN: Next target.
VA: Next hostile.
TN: Zoom in.
VA: HUD forward. Reading you loud and clear.
JH: So, that was a clip that was put together by one of our own Star Citizen’s, Mr. Noobifier, or is it TheNoobifier, Mr. Noobifier… it’s TheNoobifier.
PW: It’s…yeah, Noobifier.
JH: Noobifier. Now we saw a little bit of… you’ve got three voice packs that are coming out, why don’t you takes us through what each one of the three are.
PW: All right, so we’ll kick off with the Star Trek legend from the original series, William Shatner, I’m pretty sure most people will know who he is. He plays and performs Orion and there’s some flavoured content in there just to justify the existence of that particular AI or not an AI, you’ll have to buy the pack and work that one out.
Secondly, we’ve got Star Trek The Next Generation’s, Brent Spiner who played Data in that, and his character is called Vega. He was found in an old but of junk somewhere on a planet, an old buggy or something. You know, residing in the computer and he also used to reside in a coffee machine on a space station somewhere and this sort of thing.
Then we’ve got Midnight, who is…his backstory is he’s a snapshot of a human mind and it’s been integrated with this AI and he believes he’s from elsewhere. So, you’ve got this whole backstory to them to justify their existence as well as the responses and quite a lot of flavoured responses in there as well and there’s some fun stuff in there and this sort of thing. So, quite a… in the three packs there’s something for everybody.
JH: Who plays Midnight?
PW: Midnight is played by the legendary, Tom Baker, he used to frighten me as a kid in fact. Dr. Who, yeah, he’s in there.
JH: Alright now we … you expect those voice packs to go up Friday we’re thinking?
PW: Well all the profiles have been completely tested by Ken who put them together. His handle is Zhoriax, he’s one of the backers. He’s really dedicated, he’s done a lot of hard work with the profile. He sends them off to people like Noobifier and they test them and come back with feedback and we fix stuff. Everyone has been really, really supportive of giving us as much feedback so that we can get this right. We don’t want to put it out until it is right and we’ll continue to improve it. It’s ready now really we’re just waiting for launch, waiting for the right day, probably tomorrow or the next day.
JH: Alright, so by the time folks see this video anyway. Where can they go to download these?
PW: hcsvoicepacks.com. There’ll be a section there … there is a section there for Star Citizen. They’re clearly labelled: they’ve got the Star Citizen logo on the front and they’re officially licenced by CIG now. So, yup, brilliant.
JH: Which is why we’re doing this segment guys. And of course Gary would be very unhappy if I didn’t put … say this: you do need VoiceAttack to run the voice packs. This is a combo deal, so you can get your VoicePack from VoiceApack … VoicePack? … VoiceAttack from voiceattack.com. Then you go to HCS VoicePacks to get your Orion, your Vega, or your Midnight. I’ve got to be honest my love of Star Trek kind of cancel each other out, I think I’d probably go with the Tom Baker just so I didn’t have to chose Brent Spiner and William Shatner. So that’s probably what I’m going to end up doing. You may have cancelled the Star Trek nerd out of me.
PW: There is the option to use all three Jared. We do have tripple profiles that we do build so that you can use all three characters. We’re just working on those now. They’ll come out, probably, about a month after release. So if you wanted to have all three on board you’d be able to have one manage power, an other one manage thrusters and somebody else doing comms and maybe some other stuff that you want to do. But as you saw in Noobifier’s video there’s plenty of stuff in there for three characters to do so we’ll make sure that’s available inside a month.
JH: Well that was such a sick … slick segue it’s almost like we did it on purpose. We didn’t. We didn’t. Alright, so Gary and Paul before we let you go is there anything … final words you want to give to the Star Citizen community?
GM: thank you for your continued support. VoiceAttack’s success has been largely due to the fan base of Star Citizen. I do appreciate that. Thank you guys.
PW: Absolutely I’ll second that Gary because, as you know, I backed Star Citizen before Elite Dangerous. And, yeah, it’s fabulous. It’s great to be a part of all of this. Yeah, thanks to the community: they’re the ones that support us. Thank you.
JH: Alright guys. Well that was Gary, creator of VoiceAttack; Paul, creator of HCS VoicePacks; I’m Jared, I just work here. Back to you guys.
PW: Thank you.
ATV Rewind: Early Spaceport Concept
Spaceport Concept
Wonderful World Of Star Citizen: INN
Erris: Hello Citizens, my name is Erris. [Video Stutter] Breaking news on INN tonight as we come to you from inside INN [Video Stutter] studios.
Erris: Hello everyone at INN. We’re here with Chris Roberts.
CR: Very nice to meet you guys and welcome. You guys do great coverage on Star Citizen. So…
Erris: So, I first have to ask, you have heard of INN?
CR: Oh yes, absolutely.
CCT: You know what would be really great? If there was a podcast that discussed the lore from the beginning …
FFFFFF: [Gasps]
CCT: All the way through…
Erris: Would, would that… wait, I’ve got a great idea…
CCT: It would be in all one place for the viewers.
FFFFFF: We could call it …
Erris: Lore …
FFFFFF: Lorecast [Shoves Erris Over]
CCT: [Guffaws]
Erris: Well, we’ve got Captain_Richard.
Erris: Start by talking Stellar dot fashion.
Erris: Here…
CCT: Yes.
Erris: AKA TheAstroPub.
Erris: We have GrayHeadedGamer on.
Erris: And joining us in an already successful effort to replace Dolvak’s beard, we have Disco Lando’s beard.
Erris: And later, the Sataball scandal. The Arrows could face huge fines or even suspension after allegations that they scrambled opponents’ comm systems. Can the struggling team stay above the scandal or are they destined to sink? All that and more, this week on INN. Your team. Your news. Your Verse.
DL: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wonderful World of Star Citizen. I’m your host Community Manager, Jared Huckaby. And if you’ve never seen the Wonderful World before this is where we take a look at the podcasters, the livestreamers, the arts and craft makers, the art makers, the people who make these tiny action figures of people who work here. Seriously that’s a thing that happened, I saw it once. On this week’s episode we’re sitting down with David Alloggia, one of the members of the Imperial News Network. David, how are you doing man?
Erris: I’m doing pretty well. How are you?
DL: I’m doing well. Thanks for asking.
Erris: You’re welcome. We Canadians like to ask things like, “How are you?”
DL: You’re so polite!
Erris: And I’m sorry. I apologize in advance.
DL: Are you sorry for being so polite?
Erris: Yes, I do apologize for my politeness.
DL: [Chuckles] Alright, the Imperial News Network… you know what? I’m not going to bother explaining it. Why don’t you tell people what the Imperial News Network is.
Erris: That’s a bit difficult to do. The Imperial News Network …
DL: That’s the only reason you are here, so hopefully you can do it.
Erris: I’m horrible at this part.
DL: Do it… do it.
Erris: The Imperial News Network started out basically as a way to keep track of content. Mainly coming from the subreddit that there was a whole bunch of content that got lost. Mainly because there was… I mean you guys put out so much every week that it’s hard to keep a track of. So, we started doing things like transcripts.
We started covering everything we could about Star Citizen and that’s where INN started and now we try and make sure we’re a home for transcripts, for fan fiction, for videos, tutorials, basically anything Star Citizen related that needs a home and somewhere that it won’t get lost like on the subreddit. That’s what we try to do.
DL: Okay, and for those of you… those people who may not know what the subreddit is?
Erris: The subreddit is a [long exhale]
DL: Those people exist. There are some people who have gone their entire lives on the internet without experiencing Reddit.
Erris: I was… I had gone my entire life without experiencing Reddit until Star Citizen, and I found the Star Citizen subreddit. I found transcripts done by Nehkara, who transcribed everything you guys said in your videos, and it was the most wonderful place ever and now I can’t spend a day off the subreddit. But the subreddit is just… it’s a place for people to talk about Star Citizen. It’s a bit more open than the official forums on the Robert Space Industries site, but it’s also a bit more chaotic than the official forums. It gets a bit crazy in there, but it’s pretty fun.
DL: Alright, so back to INN. Who are some of the people that are involved in INN.
Erris: Oh, wow. INN started… was basically founded because of someone named Nehkara, and Nehkara is one of my good friends. He’s another Canadian like myself and he started transcribing every … all the videos that you guys would put out from Around the Verse, Reverse the Verse, the 10 for the Chairmans. He’d make transcripts and notes of what was said in those, so he was basically the founding impetus for INN and around him we’ve got… we’ve amassed a pretty good group. We’ve got CanadianSyrup who now runs our transcript team. We’ve got StormyWinters who runs our fiction. Shiver Bathory is our european correspondent, our Director of European Relations. We’ve also got JakeAcapola… Acappella, I’m gonna butcher his name. JakeAcappella, he’s our video and general gaming director. We’ve got PapaDolvak who used to run the subreddit actually and we’ve got a bunch of other people as well. Lesser people who do transcripts and fiction and it’s… I think we’ve got about 30 to 35 different members at any one time, and people come and they go. It’s a… we’ve also got Firespikez. He hangs out and talks with us a lot as does Fastcart and…
DL: We’ve also got Firespikez. He hangs out.
Erris: [Laughing] No Fire… Fire… [Laughs]
DL: [Gives Double Thumbs-Up] No, perfect. [Waves Off] Leave it there. Firespikez… he hangs out. [Gives Single Thumbs-Up] Now besides the transcripts what can folks … what else does INN do? I know you do a couple of livestreams.
Erris: Yeah, we do a… right now we just do one livestream a week basically, it’s on Saturdays at 2:30 PM Eastern. Which is… basically we talk about the Star Citizen news of the week and then we answer questions, between the transcript team we know entirely too much about the game. I like to say that we’re second only to the devs in our knowledge of Star Citizen, so people like to ask us questions when they can’t get a hold of actual CIG employees.
We’ve got fiction every Wednesdays. We transcribe 10 for the Chairman, Bugsmashers, Around the Verse, Reverse the Verse, any of the special Reverse the Verses, the monthly subscriber ones. We do Monthly Report summaries. We’ve also got hosted fiction on Sundays. Nehkara does concept sale analysis. I’m running out of… there’s more and I just can’t remember it all, because there’s so much every week and now a bunch of our members have started streaming. So, JakeAcappella and PapaDolvak are off their own… they’re gonna stream on their own. We’ve also started doing general gaming news and reviews as well. It’s… there’s too much.
DL: Alright, I know that Ben is a big fan, because INN tends to remind him of his own WCNews website that he started for Wing Commander back in the day. So…
Erris: I have… I have to say one of the highest compliments I’ve been paid was Ben saying that INN reminds him of WCNews and that was… yeah.
DL: [Chortles]
Erris: It was … it was nice!
DL: Well said, well said, well said. Well said, David.
Erris: I’m an author. I don’t do the speaking thing.
DL: I’m sorry?
Erris: I’m an author, I write things. I don’t do this whole speaking, talking.
DL: Alright. Well, any final words for the community from INN before we let you go.
Erris: For the community, thanks to everyone that’s stuck with us. Thanks to everyone who uses our transcripts to settle arguments. Thanks to everyone who comes and checks out INN. And more importantly thanks to everyone who supports what you guys do, cause we wouldn’t exist without Star Citizen itself. And we’re fans too so like… yeah, thank you guys.
DL: Alright guys, that was David Loggia from INN. No relation to Robert Loggia, which was the conversation before we got started here, I can see him shaking his head at me. Robert Loggia was cool man. I’m a big fan of Robert Loggia.
Erris: I have no idea who this person is…
DL: [Hold Forehead With Thumb As If With Headache]
Erris: I feel like I should find out.
Hennessy: [Off Camera] Just google Family Guy with Robert Loggia.
Erris: Family Guy with Robert Loggia. I will do that.
DL: [Long Sigh] Back to you Sandi.
Erris: Did we derail?
MVP w/Tyler Witkin
Tyler Witkin (TW): Hey there, Tyler Witkin here, Community Manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week’s MVP
A big congratulations to TheMikeBerg for his Star Citizen cell shaded ships. These are pretty awesome and the most exciting part about it is he plans to do one for every ship in the entire game. So congrats again to you sir, you’re this week’s MVP. Back to you guys.
Back to Studio
FS: Yeah I love those cartoon spaceships
SG: I hear we might an offical use for those in the future so thank very much Tyler.
FS: And Sandi, what’s this Britizencon I’m hearing about.
SG: I’m glad you asked Forrest. It is a fan based event that is being organised by some fans. It is in Manchester on July 23rd and we are doing a little bit of participation on our side through Foundry 42 and doing a panel and maybe some other Foundry 42 folks are going. So I have Erin rounding up some devs right now
FS: Oh cool so we’ll have..
SG: to do like a design panel. So yeah check it out, they’ve spruced up their website.
FS: Oh that’s exciting.
SG: And they have a quite a few people going so far.
FS: So we’ve got a bunch of CIG staffers showing up, definitely show up to that.
SG: Yeah, we do, check it out.
ATV Fast Forward: Piping System
Of course each week we take a look at something that’s still in development for Star Citizen’s future so let’s take a look at ATV’s FastForward
Prototype piping system
Outro
FS: And be sure to tune in to Reverse The Verse tomorrow, 11am Pacific time on Twitch.
SG: Yay. Will you be there?
FS: I will be. I will be to answer all of the question.
SG: There you go. Alright. And do you ATV and want to show us? If so hit “Like” and “Subscribe” below. It does help us out. We just hit over 200,000 YouTube subscribers.
FS: Awesome. That is fantastic.
SG: Yay! And thank you as always to all of our Subscribers for making this show possible.
FS: Yes.
SG: We will see you next week on Around The Verse.Russ Hepler reports Hillary gets $20 million from Planned Parenthood:
It is no huge surprise that Planned Parenthood – the nation’s largest abortionist and dead baby organ trafficker – is supporting Hillary Clinton for President.
Hillary has always been a loyal soldier in the destruction of unwanted babies.
But, despite being kindred spirits, Planned Parenthood has decided to take things to the next level this election in their support of Hillary.
One News Now explains:
At a Sunday rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton officially accepted Planned Parenthood’s endorsement in her bid for the Democratic ticket in the 2016 presidential election — to energize her base in the name of women’s “reproductive rights.” This move is unprecedented, making it the first time the world’s largest abortion provider has ever endorsed a presidential primary candidate — with both sides looking to profit. For Clinton’s unwavering support, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund declared that it will spend $20 million toward her campaign for president, with a focus on battleground states in the U.S. Senate race, LifeSiteNews reports.
So, Planned Parenthood has decided to go “all in” with Hillary by not only officially endorsing her, but also providing her campaign with big bucks.
It is not known at this time how much of the $20 million is actually coming from U.S. taxpayers; given the fact that we are currently bankrolling Planned Parenthood’s killing operation to the tune of over $500 million a year.
But, just like with anything the Clintons and their allies do, rules and laws don’t matter.
One News Now has more:
This opinion that Clinton would supplant Obama as the most pro-abortion president in history also holds true for Planned Parenthood. “We’re proud to endorse Hillary Clinton for President of the United States,” Planned Parenthood Action announced in a statement. “Hillary Clinton holds the strongest record on reproductive rights of all presidential contenders in not just this election, but in American history.” Besides Planned Parenthood, Clinton is also endorsed by the NARAL Pro-Choice America political activist group, which appreciates the fact that she supports taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand, as does Sanders.
To these abortion groups, it is obvious that they view Hillary as “the angel of death” when it comes to protecting their murder operations.
If Hillary gets elected President, she will increase their funding and put a stop to these pesky revelations about them selling dead baby body parts to the highest bidders.
No wonder they want to give her truckloads of money!
One News Now reveals more:
Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards drew the line between Republicans and Democrats in the 2016 presidential election, as well, noting that the future of abortion is at stake. “Everything Planned Parenthood has believed in and fought for over the past 100 years is on the ballot,” Richards expressed to the New York Times. Planned Parenthood’s recent selling of baby body parts scandal has reportedly done little to put a dent in Clinton’s pro-abortion activism. “Clinton added that she is ‘proud’ to have Planned Parenthood’s endorsement, despite footage showing its officials cavalierly discussing harvesting and selling aborted babies’ body parts,” LifeSiteNews’ Ben Johnson informed. “Just days after she called the undercover footage ‘disturbing’ last summer, Hillary Clinton said she is ‘proud to stand with Planned Parenthood.’”
Now, anyone who has followed the Clintons knows that they are basically soulless. Money and power are the only things they hold dear.
Forget common decency for human life, “no interfering lives matter” when it comes to the Clintons’ ambitions.
Maybe Hillary is the perfect “poster girl” for Planned Parenthood – they both have no regard for humanity and the innocent among us.
Facebook has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers' newsfeeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share to your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you.For her mother Esther Allen Howland (1801-60), cookbook writer, see Esther Allen Howland
Esther Howland Valentine card, "Affection" ca. 1870s
Valentine by Esther Howland
Valentine by Esther Howland
Valentine by Esther Howland
The house where Esther Howland Lived
Esther Howland (1828–1904) was an artist and businesswoman who was responsible for popularizing Valentine's Day greeting cards in America.
Early life [ edit ]
Esther Allen Howland, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, was the daughter of Southworth Allen Howland (1800-1882) and Esther Allen Howland (1801-1860). The sister of Charles, Edward, and William Howland. Her mother wrote the cookbook, The New England Economical Housekeeper and Family Receipt Book, which was published in 1844 (and for the next ten years) by her father S. A. Howland.
Her father, Southworth Howland, operated S.A. Howland & Sons.[1] the largest book and stationery store |
the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
Overnight interbank lending rates soared Friday, though rates were still well below Lehman levels. And the cost of insuring debt issued by European banks approached that seen at the height of the financial crisis.
In response, representatives of the European Central Bank held a conference call with commercial bankers on Friday to discuss risk, according to a person with knowledge of the talks who was not authorized to discuss them with the news media. The central bank would not comment.
Photo
European leaders also agreed late Friday to take steps to address the growing debt crisis in Europe and to provide aid to Greece.
Though doubts have risen about the creditworthiness of large economies like Spain and Italy, most investors say they do not believe either country will default, said Stefan Kolek, a debt analyst at UniCredit in Munich. Rather, the risk is that government austerity programs provoke double-dip recessions.
Banks that have lent money to businesses in the region might then see a surge in nonperforming loans, analysts said, and would be more reluctant to lend elsewhere.
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“The risk is that the periphery pulls down the rest of Europe,” Mr. Kolek said. “That’s not our main scenario, but the risk is there.”
Signs of a tight credit market already are being seen. This week has been the slowest for the issuance of corporate debt since May 1990, with just $2.5 billion of global investment grade corporate debt brought to the market, according to Thomson Reuters.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Investors took little notice Friday of tentative indications that the European economy was improving over all. German industrial production rose 4 percent in March, raising expectations that the economy grew modestly in the first quarter of 2010. Analysts will be watching closely Wednesday when the European Union reports growth for the first quarter.
The automaker Daimler said Friday that it would return all its German factories to full-time production in June, a month earlier than planned. Since last May 96,000 workers have put in shortened shifts, with corresponding pay cuts.
Daimler’s rival BMW said Wednesday that sales had increased recently even in Portugal and Spain. “Markets are developing better than expected,” BMW’s chief executive, Norbert Reithofer, said in a conference call.
But Mr. Weinberg of High Frequency Economics said a tight credit market could crush the still-fragile recovery.
“Don’t get excited about those numbers,” he said, referring to the German economic news. “This credit crunch just takes all these risks that already exist and cubes them.”File this under 'Awesome': Mariah Carey is a huge "Game of Thrones" fan.
Nick Cannon and March of Dimes hosted a “Daddy’s Day Out” on Thursday for new fathers who have had children in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and the "Americas Got Talent" judge talked with omg! about what a typical family night is like in the Cannon/Carey household.
"My favorite thing to do is lay in bed with my son, daughter, wife, and a bowl of popcorn and watch whatever," Cannon told omg!. "Seriously, [Mariah and I] have memorized every Shrek from 1 to 4. We will watch 'Shrek the Halls' in summer. 'The Lion King' is on all the time. You know we will see 'Monsters University.' But when the kids fall asleep, my wife will watch our shows. We love 'Boardwalk Empire,' 'Scandal,' and 'Homeland.'"
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We told Cannon that the fact "Game of Thrones" is not on that list is a problem.
"Oh, my wife is into 'Game of Thrones'! I'm not into it yet," Cannon laughed. "She loves it. She'll stay up late watching it. I tried watching it a couple times when she watches it. She's into 'The Tudors,' 'Game of Thrones' - it's all the same show to me. I'm like, 'Is Henry VIII in this one?' I know I have to get into it, because she loves it."
Carey, 43, and Cannon, 32, celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary last month by renewing their vows at Disneyland, and the couple has been going strong ever since they began secretly dating in March 2008 and married two months later.
So, what has been the key to maintaining a successful marriage?
"We are always busy, and I think that is one of the keys to it," Cannon told omg!. "Before we were married we were always working hard and on the go. We understood career is a priority. So, then when you can have a family with someone like that who is so understanding, it makes those times when you are together even more special. It's like wow, 'I know how much your career means to you, but nothing means more than our family.' It's almost this potent, concentrated time when we are all together."
Carey gave birth to daughter Monroe and son Moroccan, in April 2011. So are the twins in their terrible 2's stage yet?
"They are people now!" Cannon exclaimed about what milestones they have crossed. "Before they were babies, now they are people running around and talking, getting into everything. They both love music. My son really loves sports."
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Not to mention fashion (anyone who follows Carey and Cannon on Twitter or Instagram knows this).
"Their swag is all the way together," laughed Cannon. "They have everything from Jeremy Scott shoes to designer glasses that my daughter wears. They are a stylish duo."
With Father's Day on Sunday, it seems that Cannon is the only one in the family who isn't filled in on his plans just yet.
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Location: Toronto
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Now I realize this is going to be very competitive, I mean who wouldn’t want to carry my casket? So below is more details on how to apply.Now in order to my friend you'll have to meet the following conditions and requirements:-Must make an appearance at my funeral to carry my casket-Must be able to lift 1/6th of the weight of my body inside a casket-Being my friend is only secondary to your role as my pallbearer, in the case that I start to actually like you as a friend, that role may be switched to a secondary priority.-This will be STRICTLY friendship. You must not fall in love with me. I don't need a coffin straddler at my funeral because it will make the casket that much heavier to carry. Besides it's not proper custom the spouse to be a pallbearer anyway-In the case that you die before I do I will be your pallbearer-In the case I changed my mind and decide to be cremated then you are hereby relieved of your duty as pallbearerThe interview process may subject you to tests such as heavy lifting, ability to cry, and proper funeral dress. Training will be provided for all successful applicants in proper lifting technique, crying when you really don't care, and how to dress for a funeral.I thank all applicants for applying but only those that I am interested in will be contacted for an interview.In case you're wondering, I'm not dieing. Therefore until the day I do maybe we can be friends? So please would somebody commit to this task? I could die any day now…please hurry.Growing up in Australia, I loved to lie on the grass, immersed in the scent of wattles, and stare up at the sky. A sky like no other; a deeper, richer shade of blue than anywhere else I have been – and I’ve travelled on all seven continents, including Antarctica. Australians speculate that the colour of our sky results from its unusually thin ozone layer, a physical anomaly leading to sensory saturation.
Everyone agrees that the sky is blue, but how could I know that what I experience as blue isn’t what you experience as red? Philosophers have long been similarly perplexed. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke wondered if ‘the same object should produce in several men’s minds different ideas at the same time; for example, the idea, that a violet produces in one man’s mind by his eyes, were the same that a marigold produced in another man’s, and vice versa.’ Now known to philosophers of mind as the inverted spectrum argument, Locke’s query points us to the mystery of subjective experience and its attendant problem of ‘consciousness’.
Objectively speaking, physicists have an explanation for what blue is. According to Maxwell’s equations, blue is ripples of electromagnetism with a wavelength of between 450 and 495 nanometres. A triumph of modern science, the wave understanding of colour allows us to determine the makeup of stars that are billions of light years away and assay the chemical compounds for their constituent elements. Yet the very success of this explanation highlights a conundrum; for while any spectrometer can register blue precisely on a dial, few of us would say that it is conscious. A spectrometer does not perceive blue. So what then, does it mean to be ‘conscious’ of colour?
First coined in 1995 by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, this ‘hard problem’ of consciousness highlights the distinction between registering and actually feeling a phenomenon. Such feelings are what philosophers refer to as qualia: roughly speaking, the properties by which we classify experiences according to ‘what they are like’. In 2008, the French thinker Michel Bitbol nicely parsed the distinction between feeling and registering by pointing to the difference between the subjective statement ‘I feel hot’, and the objective assertion that ‘The temperature of this room is higher than the boiling point of alcohol’ – a statement that is amenable to test by thermometer.
It might seem surprising to many readers but, for 300 years, scientists and philosophers have been debating whether our minds might not operate more like Bitbol’s thermometer. Though Chalmers’ ‘hard problem’ term is new, the questions underlying it have haunted modern science from its beginnings, for the attribution of consciousness is one of the foremost qualities distinguishing us as something other than a complex set of dials.
As one of the founders of empiricism, Locke believed that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience, with real knowledge being felt by conscious beings. In the 17th century, René Descartes had also insisted on the irreducible centrality of subjective experience, arguing that, in principle, we could not build a machine to emulate human behaviour. For Descartes, a conscious machine was an impossibility, and something extra – a soul – was needed to account for the full spectrum of our mental landscape and actions. Like Chalmers and Bitbol today, Descartes and Locke considered conscious experience as something that couldn’t be wholly explained by the laws of physical nature.
But in the early 18th century an emerging group of mechanists began to suggest that feelings and emotions were merely secondary byproducts of the ‘true reality’ of matter in motion. On this view, expressed by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L’homme machine (1748), humans are essentially meat machines, complicated to be sure, but ultimately the same order of being as an expensive watch. The purpose of science was to discover the laws by which matter behaves, and thus the whole question of the conscious self – the ‘I’ that feels hot and blue – was not so much a problem as an irrelevancy.
The idea that the laws of nature might be able to account for conscious experience – a position known as physicalism – steadily gained supporters in the 19th century and was given a particular boost with the advent of Maxwell’s equations and other powerful mathematical frameworks devised by physicists in their golden age. If the invisible field of a magnet can result from natural laws, then might the same not be true for feelings?
Yet, as some philosophers of the early 20th century began to point out, physicalism contains a logical flaw. If consciousness is a secondary byproduct of physical laws, and if those laws are causally closed – meaning that everything in the world is explained by them (as physicalists claim) – then consciousness becomes truly irrelevant. Physicalism further allows us to imagine a world without consciousness, a ‘zombie world’ that looks exactly like our own, peopled with beings who act exactly like us but aren’t conscious. Such zombies have no feelings, emotions or subjective experience; they live lives without qualia. As Chalmers has noted, there is literally nothing it is like to be zombie. And if zombies can exist in the physicalist account of the world, then, according to Chalmers, that account can’t be a complete description of our world, where feelings do exist: something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience.
These are fighting words. And some scientists are fighting back. In the frontline are the neuroscientists who, with increasing frequency, are proposing theories for how subjective experience might emerge from a matrix of neurons and brain chemistry. A slew of books over the past two decades have proffered solutions to the ‘problem’ of consciousness. Among the best known are Christof Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004); Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000); Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999); and the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s bluntly titled Consciousness Explained (1991).
It has been said that, if the 20th century was the age of physics, the 21st will be the age of the brain. Among scientists today, consciousness is being hailed as one of the prime intellectual challenges. My interest in the subject is not in any particular solution to the origin of consciousness – I believe we’ll be arguing about that for millennia to come – but rather in the question: why is consciousness perceived as a ‘problem’? How exactly did it become a problem? And given that it was off the table of science for so long, why is it now becoming such a hot research subject?
Medieval theologians did not sit around debating the ontological status of zombies. They knew for a fact that humans are conscious and built a system of control and punishment around this principle. The Catholic Church tortured people for committing theological crimes over which they supposedly had conscious choice – the most salient being errors of faith: did one believe (as one should) in the Trinity of God, or in the heretical notion of Unitarianism? Torture was a method of mind control premised on a worldview in which conscious minds are morally accountable. Zombies, by contrast, have no real minds and no moral compass: they are neither good nor bad. Since they don’t feel pain in any meaningful sense, torturing a zombie would be pointless. What makes them such formidable foes on screen is that zombies are beyond the limits of subjectivity. We don’t feel for them because they don’t feel. Robots belong to the same order of being. Only when we think bots are developing consciousness (as in Blade Runner and Ex Machina) does our treatment of them become an issue.
Pain and suffering were very present aspects of the European mental landscape in the Middle Ages, and were graphically depicted in representations of Hell (think of Giotto’s Arena Chapel), thereby reminding would-be sinners of the torments awaiting them in the afterlife if they didn’t make the right moral choices here on Earth. For medieval Europeans, subjectivity extended beyond the grave. And that was the point. Self-awareness wasn’t an end in itself, it was a mechanism by which humans with their eternal souls were embedded in a cosmic scheme linking everything to an Ultimate Good. Heaven and Earth were two separate yet intertwined domains of human action. Medieval cosmology was thus inherently dualistic: the physical domain of the body had a parallel in the spiritual domain of the soul; and for medieval thinkers, the latter was the primary domain of the Real.
You could literally read the moral status of people in medieval images by their scale. Jesus would be drawn as the largest figure because he had the greatest moral stature; next came angels who were somewhat smaller, followed by saints and martyrs, then ordinary humans. Smallest of all were the sinners in Hell who, in Giotto’s rendition, are minute figures focused in their pain, hemmed in by their puny morals. In contrast with the bleakness and blackness of Hell, Heaven was often portrayed in a gorgeous shade of blue, achieved through costly pigments containing ground lapis lazuli and other precious stones that metaphorically signalled the value of redemption. Blue, here, was the wavelength of God.
When modern science swept away this dualistic symbolic schema, Europeans came to see themselves as inhabitants of a Euclidean void: we lived on a planet that orbited an insignificant star in potentially infinite space. As described by geometry and physics, this space was understood to be controlled by mathematical laws. And, in this despiritualised, Euclidean space, human figures, including Christ and the saints (now equally subject to natural law) were necessarily depicted at the same scale. The homogeneous, featureless Euclidean void, which forms the backdrop to Galilean and Newtonian science, has its visual correlate in the homogeneous scheme of perspectival representation that unified earthly and heavenly space. Now all objects were placed within a single frame of reference. Perspective, delightfully known in the 13th century as ‘geometric figuring’, enabled artists to simulate the illusion of physical depth, but it removed the metric by which they had previously represented moral depth. Just as art became literal rather than iconic with the advent of modern science, our concept of a moral universe became subject to homogenisation, and finally to a kind of erasure.
Once we take our universe to be a mathematical arena, a question arises as to where in this scheme the realm of the soul might be found. Specifically, in an infinite despiritualised Euclidean universe there is no room for Heaven. Indeed it now becomes problematic to talk about any place beyond the physical realm. This hadn’t been an issue with the medieval cosmos, which was finite. As depicted in pre-Renaissance imagery, the medieval cosmos was a relatively small place, with the Earth at the centre surrounded, onion-like, by a set of concentric spheres carrying the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. Beyond the outermost sphere of the stars, there was metaphorically plenty of space left for the Empyrean Heaven of God. At the end of The Divine Comedy (1320), when Dante reaches the end of the physical world, he pierces the cosmic skin and emerges into the presence of ‘the Love which moves the sun and the other stars’. But with the arrival of the Newtonian universe, the problem of Heaven’s ‘location’ was compounded into a geographical absurdity.
the baby of personal experience and conscious moral accountability was thrown out with the bathwater of the soul
And if there was no place for Paradise, then there was no place for a soul to go after death. In the end, did one even need a soul to make sense of the human condition? If the condition of the world is mathematical, and the space of reality is geometric, then can’t we dispense with the spiritual stuff and just get on with the business of plotting our co‑ordinates in Euclidean space, refining in ever more detail the ‘laws’ that operate within it?
Thus was born materialism, which viewed humans as purely physical objects made up of component parts moving in space according to mathematical laws. De-souled, stripped of a cosmic connection to God, humans became sub-units of the world-machine. The business of science was to ascertain the rules by which this machine-world works – the objective ‘laws of nature’ – and the whole question of subjectivity was heaved out the door. In a sense, the baby of personal experience and conscious moral accountability was thrown out with the bathwater of the soul.
Although full-blown materialism (an early variant of physicalism), wasn’t articulated until the 18th century, its shadow was already hovering in Galileo’s 17th-century distinction between objective and subjective qualities. In his book The Assayer (1623), Galileo wrote: ‘If ears, tongues, and noses were removed, I am of the opinion that shape, quantity and motion would remain, but there would be an end of smells, tastes, and sounds.’ Shape, quantity and motion – these were not only the objects of science, they were the primary reality. In Galileo we witness a quantum leap forward in the practice of science, but perhaps, even more monumentally, we see in his thinking the dawning of a new attitude to the question of what reality is.
Here was presaged a future that Descartes had struggled to avoid. For while Descartes championed mathematical science as a way forward for understanding the physical world, as a Catholic, he also insisted on the reality of the Christian soul. Hence his famous dualism, with its two domains of being: the res extensa (the extended realm of matter in motion), and the res cogitans (the realm of thoughts, feelings, emotions and moral action). Descartes wanted to preserve the essence of medieval dualism while simultaneously opening up a space for mathematical science. This was his special genius; he invented co-ordinate geometry (enabling us to better navigate inert Euclidean space), yet at the same time he attempted to ‘save’ the phenomenon of the soul.
Galileo, his near contemporary, had little interest in the soul. It’s one reason his writing still feels so modern. Like Descartes, Galileo wrestled with the question of what a new science could be and what aspects of reality such a science could describe. But where Descartes would have been horrified by the notion of subordinating subjectivity under the banner of science, Galileo remained agnostic. In The Assayer, he wrote: ‘Concerning sensation and things that pertain to it, I claim to understand but little. Therefore I leave it unsaid.’
For most of the history of modern science, subjectivity has been left unsaid – a topic hovering beyond the reach of equations and test-tubes. Why then has it now sprung so strongly to the forefront of scientific thinking?
Physicists and chemists might not have been thinking much about subjectivity during the 18th and 19th centuries, however lots of other people were. The development of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century can be understood in this context; whatever we might think about the specifics of Sigmund Freud’s theories, as emotional beings we can applaud his desire to offer a systematic approach to the understanding and healing of our psyches. It has been argued that one way of interpreting The Divine Comedy is as a medieval version of psychoanalysis – not only the theological journey of a soul toward redemption, but also the therapeutic journey of a sick mind toward psychic health. Heaven and hell aren’t only Christian places: they are also states of mind. Whatever our bodies are doing in physical space, we also inhabit psychic space and we need ways to talk about the states that minds are in.
Artists, too, attempted to tackle subjectivity head-on, with impressionism, surrealism and expressionism. These movements excite us precisely because they manifest, and at the same time interrogate, the deeply subjective perspective of the artist-observer. We love seeing the world through the eyes of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne because they are individuals with their own imaginative landscapes, and because their work (van Gogh’s green skies, Cézanne’s fractured Cubist landscapes) challenges the idea that objective reality is somehow more true than its subjective counterpart. Earlier this year, a painting by Paul Gauguin sold for an estimated $300 million. One reason the art market is so insane is that art has come to represent the power of the individual perspective and, rightly or wrongly, lots of people see it as an antidote to the de-subjectification of science.
Of course, literature has always given us subjective impressions of the world, and the rise of the modern novel, again when science was doubling down on its commitment to physicalism, testifies to an emerging appetite to become immersed in other people’s minds. Henry James, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka propel us into the unique sensibilities of their protagonists. James, whose writing has been likened to a literary version of impressionism, was deeply interested in representing the consciousness of his characters, while his brother, the psychologist and philosopher William James, gave us the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe the flow of thoughts, feelings and ideas that ramble through our minds. James coined this term in his book The Principles of Psychology (1890), and in the early decades of the 20th century it came to be associated with such quintessentially modernist writers as James Joyce.
But perhaps most surprisingly, just when the ‘stream of consciousness’ was entering our lexicon, physicists began to realise that consciousness might after all be critical to their own descriptions of the world. With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing reality. At the subatomic level, reality appeared to be a subjective flow in which objects sometimes behave like particles and other times like waves. Which facet is manifest depends on how the human observer is looking at the situation.
Such a view appalled many physicists, who fought desperately to find a way out, and for much of the 20th century it still seemed possible to imagine that, somehow, subjectivity could be squeezed out of the frame, leaving a purely objective description of the world. Albert Einstein was in this camp, but his position hasn’t panned out. Forty years ago, the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler proposed a series of thought experiments to test if an observer could affect whether light behaved as a particle or a wave and, in 2007, the French physicist Alain Aspect proved that they could. Just this April, Nature Physics reported on a set of experiments showing a similar effect using helium atoms. Andrew Truscott, the Australian scientist who spearheaded the helium work, noted in Physics Today that ‘99.999 per cent of physicists would say that the measurement… brings the observable into reality’. In other words, human subjectivity is drawing forth the world.
Not all physicists are willing to go down this path, however, and there is indeed now a growing backlash against subjectivity. That has brought into being the so-called ‘many worlds interpretation’ (MWI) of quantum theory. According to this interpretation, every time a subatomic particle is confronted with options – does it do X, or does it do Y? – the Universe splits into two identical copies of itself, in one of which the particle does X and in the other it does Y. Given that physicists estimate that there are around 1080 subatomic particles in our Universe, and most of them are confronted with options many times a second, it means that, according to MWI, gazillions of copies of our universe are sprouting off one another every nanosecond.
This fissiparous seething is one of the few ways to interpret quantum behaviour without awarding consciousness a central role, and when I was a physics student the MWI was widely seen as a fringe concept. Today, it is becoming mainstream, in large part because the pesky problem of consciousness simply hasn’t gone away.
Some physicists want to be rid of the problem of consciousness altogether, while others are attempting to treat it as a core material phenomenon. Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, hopes that consciousness will turn out to be another state of matter, like a solid, liquid or gas, and he’s calling for physicists to begin exploring the ‘physical correlates of consciousness’. What, he asks, are the physical conditions that pertain when consciousness is present?
Hildegard might well have been an epileptic: that didn’t mean God wasn’t also talking to her
There are parallel moves in neuroscience to determine the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ (NCC) – the neurological signatures of awareness. Originally developed in the 1990s by the American neuroscientist Christof Koch and the British Nobel laureate Francis Crick, the NCC project has been making massive strides; tools such as fMRI and optogenetics are now enabling us to see what neurons are doing when we think certain thoughts. Moreover, projects such as the BRAIN initiative in the US and the European Union’s Human Brain Project are mapping what parts of the brain are active while people experience a vast range of emotions and mental experiences.
This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explain subjective experience? Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained’. In other words, he says, no amount of detail about neuronal potentials and interconnection is going to get us to the essence of subjectivity.
Plenty of neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers disagree with him, but I’m on his side. What’s at stake here is far more than the issue of whether your experience of blue is the same as mine, because subjectivity also has a moral dimension, as Descartes and the medievals understood. Locke pointed to this as well when he defined the human self as ‘that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance, made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends’.
Here again we meet the subject of pain, both physical and emotional. Can misery be ‘explained’ by synaptic firing? Can happiness? Some years ago, I discussed this issue with Father George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and astronomer who was then Director of the Vatican Observatory. I asked him what he thought of the notion that when the 12th‑century Hildegard of Bingen was having her visions of God, perhaps she was having epileptic fits. He had no problem with the fits. Indeed, he thought that when something so powerful was going on in a mind, there would necessarily be neurological correlates. Hildegard might well have been an epileptic, Father Coyne opined; that didn’t mean God wasn’t also talking to her.
Pain is surely like this too: it must have neurological correlates otherwise we wouldn’t be able to react to withdraw a hand from a flame and save our bodies from damage. (People who lose the ability to feel pain quickly succumb to injuries.) At the same time, pain transcends its physical dimensions, as do the many species of misery catalogued in Dante’s Hell, and represented to us in daily news accounts of the effects of war on millions of people today.
Giulio Tononi’s book Phi (2012) asks the question: ‘How could mere matter generate mind?’ As a neuroscientist, Tononi says this is a mystery ‘stranger than immaculate conception… an impossibility that defie[s] belief’. Nonetheless, he offers us an explanation of consciousness grounded in information theory that has been admired by both Tegmark and Koch. He wants to do for psychic phenomena what Descartes, Galileo and their heirs did for physical phenomena: he wants to explain subjective experience by generalised empirical rules, and he tells us that such experiences have shapes in a multidimensional mathematical space.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with the idea that subjective experiences might have mathematical correlates any more than Father Coyne minds the notion of neural correlates. As an admirer of co-ordinate geometry, I like Tononi’s concept; at the same time, I don’t accept information theory as a bridge to subjectivity.
Neurological and informatic models of subjectivity will no doubt have their uses and values, as did mechanistic models of the world before them. Yet, like their mechanistic forebears, these theories are grounded in an insistence that subjectivity is a secondary phenomenon whose explanation resides in something prior. Chalmers wants to insist, along with Descartes and Locke before him, on the primacy of subjective experience or, as the philosopher Bitbol puts it, ‘that consciousness is existentially primary’. Rather than being something that can be ‘described by us in the third person as if we were separated from it’, Bitbol argues that consciousness ‘is what we dwell in and what we live through in the first person’. This feels reminiscent of what the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in 1936 called the ‘life-world’ of conscious experience, and I suspect that it is where we must look to locate the source of our selves. But I also expect that philosophers and scientists will be arguing the point for centuries to come.R’lyeh Roulette III: Monster Madness
Main Topic
We’re back and we’re giving the wheel of misfortune another spin. In our earlier R’lyeh Roulette episodes — 37 and 60 — we rolled for random spells from the spreadsheet that would one day become The Grand Grimoire of Mythos Magic. This time we’re using the Malleus Monstorum as our roulette wheel, rolling for random Lovecraftian monsters. Our format is unchanged, however. We improvise a variety of scenario seeds based on the results, trying to find unusual ways to use these monsters. Some of the ideas we come up with may not exactly be canon, but they amuse us.
The suggestion for this topic came from Danial Carroll, over on our Google+ Community. Danial has a special affection for Lovecraftian monsters. You may recognise him as the creator of the Brawl of Cthulhu blog, where he discusses all the entries in the Malleus Monstorum. If you like monsters (and who doesn’t?) then you should find plenty of wriggly inspiration there.
News
In our news segment, we share some further details of our programme at Necronomicon this week. In addition to the events we mentioned last episode, we will be signing books at the Chaosium stand between 3-4 PM on Saturday the 19th. We will also be in New York City on the 21st of August, signing books at The Compleat Strategist between 4;30 and 6 PM. If you are in the area and would like to meet up, please come along. Alternatively, if you’d like to meet us for a drink or a meal, drop us a line to make alternative arrangements.
We mention that Matt has arranged to run his Intersections mini-campaign from the World War Cthulhu: Cold War core book for the Into the Darkness crew. Scott is also in the process of running his Blackwater Creek scenario from the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition Keeper Screen pack for the players at the How We Roll podcast. We will let you know when the recordings are available and link to them from our Actual Play page.
Speaking of actual play, Marty Jopson has been running The Two-Headed Serpent and posting it online. The AP recording themselves are only accessible to patrons of Yog-Sothoth.com, Marty has, however, filmed a series of videos about his experience of running the game, called The Keeper Diaries, and made them publicly accessible. The most recent diary includes an interview with Mike Mason about Pulp Cthulhu. Marty has also interviewed Paul about the opening chapter and will talk to Matt and Scott as their chapters come up. Be warned — these videos are spoiler-heavy and designed for people running the campaign.
The final bit of news is Chaosium have released the PDF version of Kevin Ross’s Down Darker Trails. This is a setting supplement for Call of Cthulhu detailing eldritch horrors in the Old West. Paul worked on the book, updating the text to 7th edition and fleshing out the content. The print edition should be out later in the year.
Other Stuff
And monsters aren’t the only terrors you’ll find in this episode. We also sing. If you’re wondering why we sing, we ask ourselves the same question all the time. The horrible and unbelievable truth is that people have asked us to do so. When a brave and generous person pledges to back the podcast at the $5 level on Patreon, we commemorate them through song. Given our complete lack of any musical talent, the ongoing success of this confuses us as much as it does the rest of you. Once again, we have built up a small backlog of people to sing to, but have limited ourselves to two songs per episode. There will be more next time.
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Like this: Like Loading..."There were 36 states where Republicans who were in charge refused to implement a state (health insurance) exchange."
Two recent federal court cases, both about federal subsidies for health insurance, came within hours of each other this week, putting the future of the Affordable Care Act into question.
In Halbig vs. Burwell, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a 2-1 ruling that said people in states that don't operate their own marketplaces can't get subsidies. But a few hours later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in King vs. Burwell. Their unanimous decision upheld the legality of the subsidies for all states, even those without their own insurance marketplaces.
That same day Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chair and congresswoman from Florida, appeared on the Nevada news program Ralston Reports.
"There was a lot of panic from supporters of the law after the Halbig decision came down from the panel at the D.C. court," said host Jon Ralston. But Wasserman Schultz said she thought it would be resolved in favor of maintaining the subsides for all states.
"I think ultimately, when the Supreme Court decides this, it’s going to be very clear that the unanimous ruling by the Fourth Circuit is the right one."
She also said Nevada had "a governor who refused to implement a state exchange." She quickly had to backtrack as Ralston reminded her of Gov. Brian Sandoval’s enthusiastic support of a state exchange. "Well, I stand corrected, I’m not from Nevada," Wasserman Schultz acknowledged.
But she went on to make another claim we found questionable.
"There were 36 states where Republicans who were in charge refused to implement a state exchange, and as a result people who get Affordable Care Act plans are getting them through the federal exchange," Wasserman Schultz said.
It turns out that Wasserman Schultz was off on this claim, too.
Numbers don’t lie
Using information compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation |
modern river management
Slowly, over thousands of years, human intervention began to have a dramatic impact on the river’s character. Periodic breaches of the levee system led to devastating floods, with some shifting the river’s main channel hundreds of miles from its initial course.
A census taken by China in A.D. 2 suggests the area struck by the massive A.D. 14-17 flood was very heavily populated, with an average of 122 people per square kilometer, or approximately 9.5 million people living directly in the flood’s path.
“The misery and suffering must have been unimaginable,” Kidder said.
Historical accounts indicate that communities hit by the flood were soon in complete disarray, with reports of people resorting to banditry to obtain food and stay alive. By A.D. 20-21, the flood-torn region had become the epicenter of a popular rebellion, one that soon would spell the end of the Western Han Dynasty’s five-century reign of power.
“The big issue here is that human beings clearly changed the environment, and that these changes had real consequences for human history,” Kidder said. “It happened in the past and can happen again.”
While the research offers new insight into Chinese history, it also has interesting implications for modern river management policies around the globe, such as those causing similar flooding problems along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in the United States.
“To think that we can avoid similar catastrophe today due to better technology is a dangerous notion,” Kidder said. “When in doubt, bet on Mother Nature because physics will win every time.
“Human-caused environmental change is nothing new,” he said. “We’ve been doing this for a very long time, and the magnitude of change is increasing. Unlike ancient China, where human mistakes devastated a single river valley, we now have the technology to make mistakes that can cause devastation on a truly global scale.”
# # #
Editor’s note: Research maps and images courtesy of the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.We figured it was only a matter of time before we got the official word, but this quickly?
Aw, yeah.
Disney's Bob Iger has answered every fanboy and fangirl's biggest wish, today confirming plans for an "Avengers" sequel.
And if that wasn't enough, the Disney CEO had even more exciting news. Here's what he had to say (during a conference call with analysts, mind you):
"Marvel's The Avengers" shattered U.S. box office records with $207.1 million in its opening weekend.
It has brought in more than $702 million globally to date.
Some Disney theme parks are making room for "Avengers"-based attractions.
[Related: 'The Avengers' spoiler: Who was revealed in the final scene?]
Iger also repeated previous anouncemnts made by Marvel Studios:
The third "Iron Man" is scheduled for 2013.
"Thor" numero dos is also on the slate for 2013.
A "Captain America" sequel should happen in 2014.
While we now know there is, in fact, an "Avengers" sequel in the works, Iger did not disclose a date for it. (Though Reelz.com has speculated it could very well be May 16, 2014, as the studio has already reserved that release date.)
Joss Whedon has yet to say whether he's writing and/or directing the next installment. But he has been quoted recently as saying, "You know what, I haven't really thought about it. It's time for me to rest, and then see if that's even feasible."
And no one has spoken yet on which actors are returning for the sequel.
For now, we'll have to savor the tease to part II that was revealed in the final scene: During mid-credits of "The Avengers," the franchise's next villain was revealed to be... [SPOILER ALERT!]... the death-worshiping Thanos -- a villian that first appeared in Marvel Comics in 1973.
Watch more clips from 'Marvel's The Avengers':
Clip: Interrogation Clip: Face Off Clip: Desperate Clip: Another BoutModernist Cuisine, the ground-breaking cookbook series and kitchen lab from ultimate food nerd (and former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft) Nathan Myhrvold and company, is about to birth another megacookbook. First announced in 2014, Modernist Bread: The Art and Science is, as promised, a deep dive into the world of yeasts and starters, crusts and crumbs. Myhrvold and co-author chef Francisco Migoya — former pastry chef at the French Laundry and culinary instructor at the CIA — applied the scientific method, modern technology, and the hi-res, immersive photography the lab is known for to the world of bread making and baking.
Watch the book trailer, below. Do note the intense, primitive drum beat that accompanies questions like “Can you use any oven to bake bread?” and “Why does bread smell so good?”
The 2,300+ page Modernist Bread is filled with over 3,000 photos of bread, cross sections of ovens and other bread machinery, starter development, microscopic captures of yeast growth, grain, water, and salt — the basic building blocks and resulting alchemy of bread baking.
Modernist Bread was four years in the making. Contributors include: historian Jim Chevallier; grain experts Dr. Stephen Jones and Maria Speck; scientists Stanley Cauvain and Carl Hoseney; and bakers Emily Buehler, Ken Forkish, Richard Miscovich, Apollonia Poilâne, Peter Reinhart, and Didier Rosada.
The six-volume book is now available for pre-order for $625; it goes on sale next May 2017. A companion website, modernistbread.com, is now live. There’s also now a Modernist Bread calendar; those who order the calendar and pre-order the book on Amazon get $15 off the book. The Cooking Lab, Myhrvold’s in-house publishing department, is handling publication.
“Today there is no recognized Modernist bread movement, but there should be,” Myhrvold wrote in a release, “This book is a combination of very practical knowledge and ideas that are right at the cutting edge of bread research to empower bakers of all persuasions. Some bakers will want to make traditional breads in old ways, and some will want to make those same breads in new ways.”
• Modernist Cuisine Announces New Cookbook on Bread [E]
• Nathan Myhrvold on Modernist Cuisine, the Importance of Photography, and Books vs iPads [E]
How the Pros Bake Beautiful BreadJust as news of the massive Nexen oil spill in Alberta broke, the provinces' premiers were concluding a deal on Canada’s national energy strategy.
The deal signals that pipeline development can proceed, and Alberta's oil sands can expand, if it’s all done responsibly.
But that’s not how many First Nations see it. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation is further north of the spill, but has long battled the health and environmental impacts of oil sands pollution.
Chief Allan Adams said in a statement, if oil sands operations such as Nexen's expands, the region "will only result in more spills and incidents."
The Nexen oil spill released five million litres of emulsion — a mixture containing 34 per cent bitumen, and 66 per cent water.
“A spill this size into the Muskeg, which is an important part of the eco-system in the region and houses many of our medicines, berries and habitat for species our people rely on for sustenance, is extremely serious,” said Chief Adam.
“The muskeg are a part of the basin and feed into the groundwater system. The location of the spill is dangerously close to the Clearwater River that flows directly into the Athabasca River.”
"The repercussions from the incident could potentially be felt far and wide by those that rely on the Athabasca Basin,” he added.
Nexen oil spill near the company's Long Lake operation 35 km southeast of Fort McMurray. CP photo.
In Nexen's case, the spilled oil-water mix was being piped between the company’s steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) pads at Kinosis to its Long Lake plant. The company’s “fail safe” warning system did not function, said the company in a Friday press briefing.
The oil spill might not have been noticed for many hours, if it hadn’t been for a contractor who spotted the spill while walking by, according to media reports.
Grand Chief: 'We’re being grossly misinformed'
While the Nexen oil spill was not an export pipeline, the incident has raised alarm among First Nations hundreds of kilometres away in British Columbia, where major oil sands pipelines, such as Northern Gateway and the Trans Mountain expansion project, have been proposed.
"It’s incredibly disturbing to know that this spill went undetected for a significant period of time. We’re not sure how long it took for the volume that is being reported to leak out,” said Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs Grand Chief Stewart Phillip in Vancouver on Friday.
“We’re constantly told that there are world-class systems in place that closely monitor the operations of all oil carrying pipelines, and clearly that’s not the case."
“We’re being grossly misinformed by industry."
In a June report, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers projected that Canadian oil will increase 43 per cent over 16 years, growing to 5.3 million barrels per day by 2030.
Spill Location - Nexen oil sands facility near Fort McMurrayFamily Sharing was introduced back in 2014 alongside iOS 8 and Mac OS X Yosemite. It allows you to easily share apps, music, movies, books and more between the members of your family.
In this article we show how to set up Family Sharing on all your Apple devices. (Our Complete guide to Family Sharing has everything you need to know about using the feature once you're set up.) We'll be working in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, but the procedure is largely the same for other compatible OS platforms.
Benefits of Family Sharing
Once you've set up Family Sharing, you no longer have to buy items individually. When one person in the family buys an app, book or content from the iTunes Store, it's immediately available to all other members of the family to download for free.
(Usually. App developers and content makers need to activate Family Sharing for their digital media. If they don't, you won't be able to share it. But in our experience, most do.)
The family unit can contain up to six people, and you all pay on the same credit card, so the system is ideal for families that want to combine their purchases.
Another advantage is that you can set limits for younger family members, so when a child asks to buy an app (or other item from the iTunes or App Store) an alert appears on an adult's phone. If you have this option activated, the youngster won't be able to make the purchase until and unless the family administrator agrees to it.
There are other benefits to turning on Family Sharing. It integrates with other Apple services, such as iCloud and Find My Friends. You can share storage from a single iCloud account. With Family Sharing set up you get a group calendar and reminders lists for your family, so you can organise events together.
Find My Friends can be used to share the location of your family members, making it easier than ever to meet up. And you can all contribute to a shared family photo album, with the photos appearing up to date on everybody's device. Read next: How to use System Preferences on Mac
How to set up Family Sharing on an iPad or iPhone
The easiest way to set up Family Sharing is on an iPad or iPhone. (But you can set up on a Mac - we look at this later in the article.)
Open the Settings app. At the top you'll see your name and picture, if you've uploaded one. Tap this to see your Apple ID settings. Now tap on 'Set Up Family Sharing...' (If you've already got the service set up this will just say Family Sharing.)
You'll now see a series of windows that you can breeze through pretty quickly, but if you're interested, they briefly describe the features you'll be able to use with Family Sharing, and contain a few warnings about what exactly you're letting yourself in for - the things you'll be paying for, primarily. Tap Get Started on the first screen, and then Continue on the second and third ones.
The fourth screen, with the title 'Payment method', is very important. This shows the final four digits of the credit/debit card associated with the Apple ID you're using.
This is the card that will be debited whenever someone who's part of the family group buys an app, a song, a film or another piece of digital content from Apple. Make sure it's the right one before tapping Continue a third time.
As well as sharing apps and other digital content, Family Sharing allows you to share location data with your family. On the next screen you decide whether your own location data will be shared with other family members; when they each accept your invitation to join the family, they will in turn choose whether to share their location data. (At this point you may wish to give firm instructions as to which option they should choose!)
Select Share Location or Not Now.
And that's it: your family unit is set up. But for the time being it's a family of one. Now you need to add further family members.
Add family members on iOS
From the Apple ID screen in Settings, tap Family Sharing (the option that was Set Up Family Sharing before), then Add Family Member. You can then add type in the email address of your family member. If they're in your contacts list, just start typing their name and tap the right person when they are auto-suggested.
Tap Next.
You'll need to verify that you are indeed the organiser of the group by entering the security code for the group's credit card.
The 'Ask to Buy' screen allows you to stipulate whether the family member will need to get permission from you whenever they buy an app or piece of digital content. For the kids permission will probably be appropriate; for your spouse, less so.
Tap Next.
Now decide how you wish to bring the family member into the fold - either sending an invitation or creating a password that they can enter right away. (Our experience suggests that the invitation only takes about 20 seconds to arrive, so is a convenient option too, but if you're away from internet access it might not be suitable.)
And that's pretty much it. The family member gets their invitation (or enters their password), accepts (or declines), then simply selects whether to share location data. And you're ready to go with Family Sharing.
How to set up Family Sharing on a Mac
You can also set up Family Sharing via a Mac - again, it's pretty simple, but the only complication is that the Mac needs to be running Yosemite or later. Here's how to set up Family Sharing for all the members of your family on a Mac, as performed on macOS Sierra (but it's pretty much the same on earlier versions).
Open System Preferences > iCloud. Tap Sign In and enter your Apple ID and Password. Click on Set Up Family. Click on Continue and Continue again. A window will show the account that you will use to share purchases from. Double-check that it is your main Apple ID account, and click Continue. The Purchases Initiated By Your Family window will show which card is being used for payments. Click Continue. Click the tick box next to 'I Agree To The iTunes Store terms and conditions' and click Agree. If you want to use Find My Friends to locate your family, tick the Share Your Location option and Continue (otherwise click Not Now and Continue).
Family Sharing is now set up on your Mac. The next step is to add members to it.
Read next: Best iPad & iPhone apps for kids | Best iPad cases for kids
Add family members on macOS
Now that you've set up Family Sharing on your Mac, it's time to add a family member. Here's how to add people to your family:
Open System Preferences > iCloud and click on Manage Family. Click the plus sign at the bottom left to add a new member of the family. Enter the email address for the family member and click Continue. (Alternatively, you can just type in their name, if they're in your contacts, and select the correct person when suggested. Or even their Game Center nickname.) Decide if the new member will require approval to make purchases. Confirm you are the family organiser by entering the three-digit CVV security code from the payment card associated with your account. Click Continue. Decide how the new member will be invited - either via an emailed invitation or by entering a password right now. Enter your Apple ID password and click Continue.
Who pays for content in Family Sharing?
It's important to note that the person who sets up Family Sharing is the Organiser. This is the person in charge, and they pay for all purchases. So if you set up Family Sharing for your partner and family members, your card is charged for all purchases.
There is also no way for other family members to pay for Family Sharing content. Only the person who originally set up the group can pay (or the card they entered - which could be for a joint account). Other family members can leave Family Sharing if they want to pay for an app, or music, but they can only do so twice a year. So make sure you are happy to be paying for all content in Family Sharing when you set it up.
Read next: Is it safe for kids to use an iPad?1968 Dodge Charger Custom by the Roadster Shop.
This extremely modified Mopar was one of the several cool muscle cars brought to SEMA 2014 by the Roadster Shop and most probably one of the craziest Dodge Chargers ever. It is something normal for Phil and Jeremy Gerber to build way over the top show cars, but this particular hot rod is just insane. The only component, which is not custom built are the tires, how crazy is that?
The massive body rides on a full tube chassis and is set on a Dodge Viper spindles front suspension and Viper IRS in the rear, spinning awesome wheels by the “Greening Auto Company”. The interior is totally off the hook and makes you feel like you are about to enter a space ship, rather than a muscle car. Under the hood of the “Sliced” Dodge Charger is hiding a Twin Turbo Viper V10 engine pushing 1300 horse power.
Check out the walk around video filmed by Scottie at the 2014 SEMA car show. Watch, Enjoy & Share!
See also on Hot Cars: Striking 1969 Dodge Charger R/T Street machine
1.1K SharesMaterial list:
Body Filler (with its hardener)
Spot Putty
Squeegee
Wood piece (surface for mixing)
40 grit Sandpaper
150 grit Sandpaper
600 grit Sandpaper
Rubber Sanding Block
Wet rag
Gloves
Respirator
Protective Eye Glasses
Dremel Tool
Put your gloves, protective eye glasses and respirator. Mix very well a small portion of the body filler and hardener until you have a one color mix.
Here's my technique.
First body filler layer: Using the squeegee, apply body filler all over the part to give some body trying to let a smooth finish, let it dry some minutes (time depends on the amount of catalyst) until it is perfectly solid. Using 40 grid Sandpaper and the Rubber Sanding Block, sand it just to remove the sharp points and edges. Clean up the dust with the wet rag.
Second body filler layer: Apply body filler giving the necessary rounded shape of the part, and let it dry. Sand it with the 40 grid Sandpaper and the Rubber Sanding Block. After the surface is smooth, use the 150 grit Sandpaper and sand it again and you'll notice a smoothest surface. Clean up with the wet rag.
Third body filler layer: Watch for voids and imperfections, apply body filler to it. Sand it using the 150 grit Sandpaper. Clean up with the wet rag. Now you should have an almost perfect shape of the part.
Using the squeegee apply one very thin layer of Spot Putty to all the surface, as thin the layer is, the fastest it will dry. After some minutes with the Spot Putty dried, sand it using the 600 grit Sandpaper, Clean up with the wet rag again.
Use the dremel tool for line details, or any other kind of detail you need or want.
TIP: if you notice a deep void after applying and sanding the Spot Putty, fill it up with body filler, sand it, and apply again Spot putty and sand it. Is easier repair big or deep imperfections with body filler rather than Spot potty because of the drying time.*
OMG! Can you believe that???
That is what I was told the other morning by a neighbour who recently visited a small town near Tel Aviv …
He went further to identify the ‘guy’ as Steve. OMG! C’est Moi!!!
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My cover has been blown …. what to do??
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It seems that for most of my adult life I have been accused of many things by a wide mixture of both zionists and Islamophobes, but this ‘accusation’ takes the cake. I have always taken pride in the fact that I consider myself a hate free person. The only people I have a problem with are those that hate, so call me an anti hate person. Does that make me an Arab lover? Yes, I have Arab friends and neighbours that I love, but I also have Jewish neighbours and friends that I love. Why then was I not labeled ‘the guy in your neighbourhood that loves Jews’? Perhaps because it is a known fact by all who know me that I am a supporter of Palestinian rights and support the creation of a Palestinian State on the lands that were stolen from them by the zionists. If that makes me an Arab lover, then I guess I am guilty as charged.
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But why the accusation in the first place??? Simple explanation …. it’s an accusation based on ignorance. One of my favourite quotes comes from a non person, Yoda of Star Wars fame … Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” I have seen enogh suffering in my lifetime and refuse to be a part of seeing it continue, so I will continue refusing to hate.
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Below is an excerp from a post I did a few years ago about life in my neighbourhood….
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Clash of the Cultures
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You see everything in Jerusalem. It draws tourists from all over the world, every race, every religion, every political persuasion. Our own local population is quite a mixture as well…
We have Muslim women who dress like this woman…
We have Jewish men that dress like these men… It was once thought that ignorance is bliss… that is certainly not the case today and there is no excuse for much of our ignorance, especially when it pertains to our fellow citizens.
A quote from a beloved Star Wars character, Yoda is…“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
It was expanded by an unknown writer to say…”IGNORANCE leads to FEAR which causes HATE which leads to ANGER, which ends in SUFFERING.”
I prefer the second quote and it is fitting to the following episode I wish to relate here…
There was a woman walking towards the bank in my neighbourhood the other day. She was dressed like the woman in the photo. A man, on his way to the coffee shop passed her, he was dressed like one of the men in the other photo.
She covers her face so it would not be seen by men other than her husband, he, by his garb represents the ultra orthodox section of Judaism, is not supposed to look at other women. But he did, and he panicked. He ran from that woman as if he saw the devil himself. Why, because of ignorance. He had no idea why her face was covered. He was afraid. Most likely his fear will lead to hate and that will lead to suffering.
We cannot continue to live in our little isolated worlds. We have to open our windows and see who else dwells there. That alone will be a start to end this type of behaviour. It might even lead to peace.*
The Guardian’s Comment is free ran the following about my neighbourhood a few years ago … after reading it you will understand why I chose this particular area as my home. It will also clue you in to the fact that I am not the only guy in my neighbourhood that ‘loves Arabs’.
Thank God, Thank God Almighty I am not alone!
FEAR BUILDS WALLS
Could the harmony that has developed from an influx of Arab families in an area of Jerusalem set the tone for the rest of the country?
By Seth Freedman
Many critics of Israel’s security wall assert that its construction has driven another nail into the coffin of possible integration between the local Jews and Arabs. However, thanks to an unexpected phenomenon arising from its erection, certain Jewish parts of Jerusalem are experiencing an influx of Arabs into their areas – and the early indications are that their assimilation is progressing relatively smoothly.
The district of French Hill, which is technically over the Green Line but in reality bears little resemblance to the typical “settlement” stereotype, has seen a steep rise in the number of Arabs seeking to move into its neighbourhood in recent years. Not wanting to be caught on the “wrong” side of the security wall, many Arab families have sought homes on the Israeli side of the barrier, in order to ensure their Israeli IDs aren’t revoked, as well as to avoid hours-long delays at checkpoints as they commute to and from work.
With prices in the Arab villages of East Jerusalem soaring in the wake of a flood of eager buyers, those with fewer funds available have opted to move into Jewish parts of the city, including French Hill and nearby Pisgat Ze’ev. Their arrival hasn’t been to everyone’s liking, with the usual suspects up in arms and demanding that other residents band together to keep the Arabs out and ensure that the neighbourhoods remain strictly Jewish.
One such charming individual was quoted as saying: “As a Jew I am happy to be a racist,” claiming that it was the only way to preserve his children’s future in the face of the Arab invasion. Fortunately, however, his odious attitude is very much a minority one – at least, as far as I could tell from a visit to the area.
On arrival in the town centre, it was plain to see that the more level-headed and sedate residents have no problem with their neighbours and fellow shoppers. Jews and Arabs alike thronged the cafes, jostling for position in the bright sunshine as they downed cappuccinos and mint teas at the outdoor tables. The local bank was doing equally brisk business, and customers in kipot (skullcaps) stood in line behind others in Arabic headscarves with no hint of tension present.
Sitting behind the counter at Cafe Malcha, the Jewish owner spoke proudly of the mixed group of customers who pack his shop every day. “There’s no problem here. Jews and Arabs sit together, everyone’s friendly, and they come from all over, including the centre of Jerusalem and the surrounding [Arab] villages.” He pointed out that it is mainly the secular Jews and Arabs who socialise with one another, “since the religious on both sides are far more cautious.”
Iyal, a 19-year-old Arab who waits tables at the cafe, agreed with his boss that French Hill is largely devoid of any racial tension. “I’ve worked here for years”, he said, “and I never see any racism in the area”. Sitting outside was a group of five Arab workers, chatting loudly to one another in Arabic and clearly at ease in their surroundings – belying the image that some reporters portray of French Hill as being a hotbed of anti-Arab racism.
However, that’s not to say that under the surface there doesn’t linger some degree of antipathy between the area’s ethnic groups. Isawiya’s youth have something of a poor track record when it comes to their treatment of any Jews who enter the village. Many Jews go there to shop, or get their cars repaired, and are often pelted with rocks and stones by the local children, which does nothing to enhance relations between the two sides. At the same time, local Arab residents have made no bones about their desire to keep their neighbourhoods all-Arab, forbidding the sale of homes to Jewish buyers for fear of losing the Arab identity of their districts.
Similarly, one Jewish girl I spoke to had a great deal of venom in her system when it came to the local Arabs. “I can’t trust them enough to live alongside them,” she said flatly, before going on to assert that “they all want to kill us simply because we’re Jews, so why should we let them move into our neighbourhoods and get the chance to?” When pressed, however, she conceded that her work as a local receptionist has brought her into contact with plenty of Arabs, “and the ones I know aren’t like that at all. I suppose I shouldn’t generalise about them, actually.”
Despite it going against her defensive mentality, it is clear that the experience of working alongside Arab colleagues and discovering what they’re like as individuals – rather than collectively tarring them as “the Arabs” – has produced a chink in her armour. While I still wouldn’t want her in charge of the peace process, given her overriding penchant for painting the Arabs as bloodthirsty Jew haters, the fact that she softened her position at all during the course of our conversation indicates that the process of assimilation is bearing positive fruit.
And, in the words of another local I spoke to who said: “I can barely tell who’s Jewish and who’s Arab round here”, the success of French Hill’s multicultural exercise might well set the tone for the rest of the country one day. Of course, things aren’t going to change overnight – Arabs are still treated with a great deal of suspicion by many Israelis, at both street and institutional levels, but that shouldn’t stop the moderates on both sides forging on with their goal of overcoming the prevalent racist attitudes.
There is an aphoristic piece of graffiti sprayed near thecheckpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem that reads: “Fear builds walls,” which is as true as it is depressing. However, one unlikely byproduct of the security barrier’s construction could, ultimately, end up eradicating at least some of the fear that exists between the two communities, thanks to the Arab migration into Jewish neighbourhoods that it has created. And that, despite the overarching negativity that surrounds the building of the wall in the first place, is well worth clinging on to for those seeking at least a modicum of hope from a seemingly hopeless situation.Nicky Hilton is a married woman.
The 31-year-old hotel heiress married U.K.-based banker James Rothschild on Friday at London's Kensington Palace. The fashion designer wore a white lace gown by Valentino with a long train as guests including Chelsea Clinton and Kate Beckinsale looked on.
View photos Nicky and James toast their wedding. (Instagram) More
Nicky — the younger sister of reality star Paris, who served as her maid of honor — began dating her new husband in 2011. Rothschild is a member of the Rothschild European banking dynasty, so both he and his bride are used to a luxe lifestyle.
In fact, back in 2005, Forbes magazine ranked Rothschild family patriarch Mayer Amschel Rothschild as the seventh most influential businessman of all time. He "helped invent modern banking by introducing concepts such as diversification, rapid communication, confidentiality and high volume" in the late 1700s in Frankfurt, Germany. His empire spread throughout Europe. Hilton's new husband is the only son of one of Rothschild's descendants, the late Amschel Rothschild and his wife, Anita. James is also the ex-boyfriend of London socialite Astrid Harbord, who is a friend of Prince Harry and Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton.
View photos Paris and Kathy Hilton celebrate Nicky's nuptials. (Getty Images) More
The two were engaged in August 2014 during a boat ride in Lake Como, Italy, after he secretly traveled stateside to ask Hilton's parents for permission to pop the question.
View photos Nicky Hilton debuts her engagement ring. (Instagram) MoreStory highlights "This is the worst drought I've ever seen," says 62-year-old Missouri farmer
The designations make farmers eligible for low-interest loans
Help kicks in automatically after eight consecutive weeks of severe drought
597 counties in 14 states are designated primary natural disaster areas
The U.S. Agriculture Department cited drought and heat on Wednesday in designating 597 counties in 14 states as primary natural disaster areas.
"As drought persists, USDA will continue to partner with producers to see them through longer-term recovery, while taking the swift actions needed to help farmers and ranchers prepare their land and operations for the upcoming planting season," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.
The designations make qualified farmers in the areas eligible for low-interest loans, the agency said.
Affected counties have suffered severe drought for eight consecutive weeks, which qualified them for the automatic designation.
Richard Oswald, a 62-year-old farmer in Missouri's Atchison County, said he has been hit hard by the drought but was not sure whether he would take advantage of the drought designation for his county by getting a low-interest loan.
"The hay situation is not good; the pastures burned up early because of the heat and lack of rain," said Oswald, who was born on a farm and has been farming since he was a teenager. "This is the worst drought that I have ever seen. An emergency loan is great, but it's still borrowed money, and as a farmer, that's not good because you have to pay it back."
Chad Breiner of Wabaunsee County, Kansas, said the drought has affected his bull-selling business because he uses grass for feed and has to buy hay.
"The fact that it hasn't rained significantly since June is going to make 2013 look rather bleak because the ponds are low, the creeks are low, and without adequate moisture in the next few months when grazing comes up, our production is going to be significantly less than normal," he said.
Last year, the USDA designated 2,245 counties in 39 states, or 71 percent of the United States, as disaster areas due to drought.
Wednesday's announcement comes a day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that 2012 had been the hottest year on record for the continental United States and the second-worst for "extreme" weather such as hurricanes, droughts or floods.
The year's average temperature of 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit across the "Lower 48" was more than 3.2 degrees warmer than the average for the 20th century, NOAA reported. That topped the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree.
Drought shriveled crops across the farm belt, leading to an expected rise in food prices in 2013, according to USDA. It also turned forests of the mountain West into tinder stands that exploded into wildfires over the summer, scorching millions of acres and destroying hundreds of homes.
Seven of the 10 hottest years on U.S. record, which date to 1895, and four of the hottest five have occurred since 1990, according to NOAA.
The year also saw Arctic sea ice hit a record low in more than 30 years of satellite observations and studies that found the world's major ice sheets have been shrinking at an increasing rate.
Scientists are quick to point out that no single storm can be blamed on climate change, but say a warming world raises the odds of extreme weather.
"I think, unfortunately, 2012 really may well be the new normal," said Daniel Lashof, director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. environmental group. "It's the kind of year we expect, given the global warming trend is ongoing."
The science of global warming is politically controversial but generally accepted as fact by most researchers, who point to heat-trapping carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels as the major cause.One man sought to apply the principles of a forkless front suspension in a bike of his own design. He designed it, refined it, and built it himself. Julian Farnam is the type of builder who inspires accolades and envy – here is a man who, with minimal resources aside from his own talents, built an advanced and beautiful one-off that looks like a priceless factory prototype produced by a massive R&D department. That bike is the FFE 350, a stunning custom bike based around the engine of a Yamaha RZ350 which recently wowed crowds at the One Motorcycle Show in Portland, Oregon. While it has recently been garnering attention on the web among motorcycle geeks, Julian has been tinkering with the FFE and forkless designs since the early 90s.
But first, lets talk about forks. Today’s telescopic dampers were just one of many solutions that were tried out in the early days of motorcycle design. Racing quickly improved the breed and weeded out the ineffective designs, and telescopic forks with hydraulic damping came out the winner by the 1950s. Despite their advantages and decades of intense development, telescopic forks still have significant weaknesses. The most obvious is flex. Having two spindly tubes holding the front wheel out at an angle, with three relatively small clamping points (axle, top and lower triple) means that there is a great deal of lateral movement inherent in conventional forks. Upside-down designs improve rigidity, as do oversized triple clamps and fork braces, but flex can never be entirely engineered out of the design – it needs to be accommodated and compensated for.
In terms of performance, the design of conventional forks is such that bumps are constantly altering the geometry of the front end. As the forks compress, they shorten, and the wheel moves upback, which changes the trail of the bike. Braking and acceleration also alters the geometry due the angle of the forks. The horizontal forces exerted by braking compress the fork, the front end dives, the weight pitches forward, and you load up the front tire. Not ideal, but we've grown accustomed to the shortfalls and learned to tune and ride around them.
Conventional forks pivot around a single stem in the headstock, which necessitates a beefy frame with a large spine (or heavy perimeter spars) to brace and channel the considerable forces coming from the front end. The modern frame has evolved around this need – you have a round steering head attached high in the front to a set of tubes or beams which then channel forces into the rest of the frame, or through the engine cases if the motor is a stressed member. With a front swinging arm design, you can practically engineer that bulky frame right out of the equation: you simply need a relatively minimal spar that connects the front and rear suspensions together, ala Bimota Tes |
moved to suitably equipped facilities.
Nuclear components are sometimes flown by helicopter or driven over roads. But instead of moving nuclear material in armored, well-defended convoys, the SPD prefers to use civilian-style vans, without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic. And, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the Pakistanis have begun using this low-security method to transfer not merely the “de‑mated” component nuclear parts, but also “mated” nuclear weapons. Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, tactical nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Islamabad building these devices, it is also now driving them around the streets of Pakistan.
Experts further worry about the accidental launch of a nuclear warhead during a period of high tension between Pakistan and India, or the possibility that rogue elements inside the Pakistani military might take it upon themselves to launch a nuclear attack. On paper, Pakistan’s nuclear command-and-control body, the National Command Authority, is overseen by the civilian prime minister, working in conjunction with the country’s military leaders. But in reality, the military controls the system of enabling and authenticating codes that would be transmitted to strategic forces in the event of a nuclear alert. Pakistan’s nuclear posture is opaque, however, and the U.S. has many questions about how the authority to use the weapons is delegated.
In 2006, Kidwai told an audience at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., that Pakistan maintained for its nuclear arsenal the functional equivalent of two-person control and permissive action links, or PALs -- coded locks meant to prevent unauthorized arming of a weapon. Asked about Pakistan’s PAL protocols, one former U.S. defense official replied, “It has never been clear to me what Pakistani PALs really entail. The doctrine is ‘two people’ -- but is it two people to unlock the box around the warhead, or is it two people to launch the thing once you’ve mated the warhead to the missile?” (India, in contrast, has been more transparent about its nuclear posture; unlike Pakistan, it has pledged not to use nuclear weapons first -- only in response.)
Still, what really frightens American strategic thinkers is not so much the launch protocols as the long-term stability and coherence of Pakistan itself. Stephen P. Cohen, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, says that if Pakistan were not in possession of nuclear weapons, the problem would be like “Nigeria without oil” -- a much lower foreign-policy priority. But Pakistan is in dire shape. “Its economy has failed, its politics have failed, and its army either fails or looks the other way,” says Cohen. “There are no good options.” For that reason, Washington must keep a tight bond with a nuclear Pakistan.
Few experts believe that Pakistan is in imminent danger of collapse -- but the trends, as Cohen notes, are negative. The government is widely considered to be among the world’s most corrupt (President Asif Ali Zardari is informally known as “Mr. 10 Percent”). Last year, Pakistan’s inflation rate hit 15 percent, and the real unemployment rate was 34 percent. Some 60 percent of Pakistanis survive on less than $2 a day. Nearly a quarter of the government budget goes to the military.
Pakistani Paranoia
In a country that has made only modest gains in the areas of innovation, science, and education (especially in comparison with its rival, India), the Pakistani nuclear program has played an outsized role in the building of national self-esteem. And so critiques like those are deeply wounding. They produce feelings of distrust.
In 2000, one of the authors of this article met A.Q. Khan, the nuclear scientist known as the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear-bomb program, at a ceremony in Islamabad marking the second anniversary of the detonation of the country’s first atomic bomb. (Khan was also the principal exporter of Pakistani nuclear technology to such countries as Iran, North Korea, and Libya.) The celebration -- complete with a vanilla sheet cake on which the words Youm-e-Takbeer, or “Day of God’s Greatness,” were written in lemon frosting -- was held in the presence of many of the country’s leading nuclear scientists, and of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who had recently taken power in a coup.
After the ceremony, Khan told a small circle of admirers, as well as the visiting American reporter, that Westerners resented Pakistan’s admission into the nuclear club. “The West has been leading a crusade against the Muslims for a thousand years,” he said. He went on to assert that the U.S. would do anything in its power to neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear assets. One of the scientists in the circle agreed, and said, “Why do the Americans want to destroy Islam?” In a recent interview with National Journal, Musharraf echoed the point: “No one ever speaks of the dangers of a Hindu bomb.”
An American visitor to Pakistan can easily see that a particular narrative has been embedded in the country’s collective psyche: The U.S. favors India, punishes Pakistan unjustifiably, and periodically abandons Pakistan when policymakers in Washington feel the country is not useful. “America is a disgrace because it turns on its friends when it has no use for them,” says Gen. Aslam Beg, a retired chief of staff of the Pakistani army, in an efficient summation of the dominant Pakistani narrative.
This sort of paranoia has spread through the Pakistani security elite -- and it went viral after the Abbottabad raid. Fear of pernicious American designs on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has combined with people’s anger over their military’s apparent impotence, creating a feeling of almost toxic insecurity across the country. The raid shook the confidence of the army, and its admirers, like no other event since Pakistan’s most recent defeat by the Indian army in 1999. (India and Pakistan have fought multiple wars, all of them won by India.) A Pew poll taken after the Abbottabad raid found that 69 percent of Pakistanis view the U.S. as “more of an enemy”; only 6 percent see the U.S. as “more of a partner.”
A retired Pakistani general, who expressed disgust at the military’s performance (“There should have been a try to shoot down the American helicopters”), says that the raid amplified the traditional paranoia. “You can think of this in terms of drones. The Americans are in the skies, where they are invisible, and yet they can kill anyone they want,” he said. “America is a superpower of technology. It would be easy to make a quick snatch of Pakistani strategic assets.”
Pakistanis tend to believe that the United States seeks to seize their country’s nuclear weapons preemptively, simply because the U.S. doesn’t like their country, or because of an ideological commitment to keep Muslim countries nuclear-free. This paranoia is not completely irrational, of course; it’s wise for the U.S. to try to design a plan for seizing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in a low-risk manner. “The U.S. tried to prevent Pakistan from becoming a nuclear-weapons state,” said Harvard’s Graham Allison. “It is not delusional for Pakistan to fear that America is interested in de‑nuking them. It is prudent paranoia.”
U.S. War Plans
Though the United States has punished Pakistan in the past for its nuclear program (with sanctions that not only failed to stop the program but also helped to aggravate anti-American feeling among Pakistanis), there is no evidence to suggest that the Obama administration is actively considering “de-nuking” Pakistan in its current state. Officials at the White House and elsewhere argue that the Pakistani military and the SPD are the best tools available to keep Pakistan’s weapons secure. In the recent past, Washington has spent as much as $100 million to help the SPD build better facilities and security systems. (However, according to David Sanger’s book The Inheritance, Pakistan has not allowed Americans to conduct an audit to see how the $100 million was spent.) Although Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, eventually became disillusioned by Pakistan’s double-dealing on terrorism, he always felt his relationship with Kayani had borne fruit on nuclear weapons. “When he would bring up a concern about nuclear weapons in a meeting, the Pakistanis would usually deal with it,” an associate of Mullen’s told us.
But Pakistanis are correct to believe that the U.S. government -- because it does not trust Pakistan, because it knows that the civilian leadership is weak, and because it does not have a complete intelligence picture -- is worried that the SPD could fail in its mission, and that fissile material or a nuclear weapon could go missing. Concerned that Pakistan’s ethnic rivalries, corruption, and terrorism could one day tear the country apart, the Pentagon has developed a set of highly detailed plans to grapple with nuclear insecurity in Pakistan. “It’s safe to assume that planning for the worst-case scenario regarding Pakistan nukes has already taken place inside the U.S. government,” Roger Cressey, a former deputy director of counterterrorism under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, told NBC News in August. “This issue remains one of the highest priorities of the U.S. intelligence community … and the White House.”
From time to time, U.S. officials have hinted publicly that concrete plans are in place in the event of a Pakistani nuclear emergency. For instance, during Senate hearings for her confirmation as secretary of State in 2005, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was asked by Sen. John Kerry what would happen to Pakistan’s nukes in the event of an Islamic coup in Islamabad. “We have noted this problem, and we are prepared to try to deal with it,” Rice said.
Those preparations have been extensive. According to military and intelligence sources, any answer to a Pakistani nuclear crisis would involve something along the following lines: If a single weapon or a small amount of nuclear material were to go missing, the response would be contained -- Abbottabad redux, although with a higher potential for U.S. casualties. The United States Joint Special Operations Command maintains rotating deployments of specially trained units in the region, most of them Navy SEALs and Army explosive-ordnance-disposal specialists, who are trained to deal with nuclear weapons that have fallen into the wrong hands. Their area of operation includes the former Soviet states, where there is a large amount of loose fissile material, and, of course, Pakistan. JSOC “has units and aircraft and parachutes on alert in the region for nuclear issues, and regularly inserts units and equipment for prep,” says a military official who was involved in supporting these technicians.
Seizing or remotely disabling a weapon of mass destruction is what’s known in military jargon as a “render-safe mission” -- and JSOC has evidently pulled off such missions before. In his memoir, Hugh Shelton, who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001, recalls an incident from the 1990s in which the CIA told the Special Operations Command that a ship had left North Korea with what Shelton describes as “an illegal weapon” on board. Where it was headed, the U.S. didn’t know. He wrote: “It was a very time-sensitive mission in which a specific SEAL Team Six component was called into action. While I cannot get into the tactical elements or operational details of this mission, what I can say is that our guys were able to ‘immobilize’ the weapon system in a special way without leaving any trace.”
Much more challenging than capturing and disabling a loose nuke or two, however, would be seizing control of -- or at least disabling -- the entire Pakistani nuclear arsenal in the event of a jihadist coup, civil war, or other catastrophic event. This “disablement campaign,” as one former senior Special Operations planner calls it, would be the most taxing and most dangerous of any special mission that JSOC could find itself tasked with -- orders of magnitude more difficult and expansive than Abbottabad. The scale of such an operation would be too large for U.S. Special Operations components alone, so an across-the-board disablement campaign would be led by U.S. Central Command -- the area command that is responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia, and runs operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and U.S. Pacific Command.
JSOC would take the lead, however, accompanied by civilian experts. It has been preparing for such an operation for years. JSOC forces are trained to breach the inner perimeters of nuclear installations and then to find, secure, evacuate -- or, if that’s not possible, to “render safe” -- any live weapons. At the Nevada National Security Site, northwest of Las Vegas, Delta Force and SEAL Team Six squadrons practice “Deep Underground Shelter” penetrations, using extremely sensitive radiological detection devices that can pick up trace amounts of nuclear material and help Special Operations locate the precise spot where the fissile material is stored. JSOC has also built mock Pashtun villages, complete with hidden mock nuclear-storage depots, at a training facility on the East Coast, so SEALs and Delta Force operatives can practice there.
At the same time, U.S. military and intelligence forces have been quietly pre-positioning the necessary equipment in the region. In the event of a coup, U.S. forces would rush into the country, crossing borders, rappelling down from helicopters, and parachuting out of airplanes, so they can secure known or suspected nuclear-storage sites. According to the former senior Special Operations planner, JSOC units’ first tasks might be to disable tactical nuclear weapons -- because those are more easily mated, and easier to move around, than long-range missiles.
In a larger disablement campaign, the U.S. would likely mobilize the Army’s 20th Support Command, whose Nuclear Disablement Teams would accompany Special Operations detachments or Marine companies into the country. These teams are trained to engage in what the military delicately calls “sensitive site exploitation operations on nuclear sites” -- meaning that they can destroy a nuclear weapon without setting it off. Generally, a mated nuclear warhead can be deactivated when its trigger mechanism is disabled. So both the Army teams and JSOC units train extensively on the types of trigger mechanisms that Pakistani weapons are thought to use. According to some scenarios developed by American war planners, after as many weapons as possible were disabled and as much fissile material as possible was secured, U.S. troops would evacuate quickly -- because the final stage of the plan involves precision missile strikes on nuclear bunkers, using special “hard and deeply buried target” munitions.
But nuclear experts issue a cautionary note: It is not clear that U.S. intelligence agencies can identify the locations of all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, particularly after the Abbottabad raid. “Anyone who tells you that they know where all of Pakistan’s nukes are is lying to you,” Gen. James Jones, President Obama’s first national-security adviser, has said, according to a source who heard him say it. (When asked by the authors of this article about his statement, Jones issued a “no comment.”) Another former official with nuclear expertise says, “We don’t even know, on any given day, exactly how many weapons they have. We can get within plus or minus 10, but that’s about it.”
Back Burner
Pakistan’s military chiefs are aware that the U.S. military has developed plans for an emergency nuclear-disablement operation in their country, and they have periodically threatened to ally themselves with China as a way to undercut U.S. power in South Asia. In a recent statement obviously meant for American ears, Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, described the Pakistani-Chinese relationship as “higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, stronger than steel, and sweeter than honey.” But China, too, is worried about Pakistan’s stability, and it has recently alleged that Pakistan has harbored Uighur separatists operating in western China. According to U.S. sources, Beijing has reached an understanding in secret talks with Washington that, should America decide to send forces into Pakistan to secure its nuclear weapons, China would raise no objections. (An Obama administration spokesman had no comment.)
The United States takes great pains to stress to the Pakistanis that any disablement or render-safe plans would be put into effect only in the event that everything else fails -- and furthermore, that these plans have the primary goal of helping to maintain Pakistan’s secure possession of the weapons over the long term. In fact, some Pakistani officials accept these American plans -- they welcome American technical and military assistance in keeping nuclear material out of the wrong hands. Still, the subject comes up at almost every high-level meeting between U.S. and Pakistani officials.
In the end, though, the policy goals of the Obama administration are focused not on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons but rather on the terrorist groups based there. “Our core goal is to disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al‑Qaeda,” one senior administration official says. “This is a very clarifying way to think about what we are doing and why cooperation with Pakistan is important.” In the short term, this issue flummoxes policymakers in Washington even more than nuclear security. Frustration with their dissembling Pakistani counterparts has drawn the countries further apart than at any time since just after Sept. 11.
The United States must, for its own security, keep watch over Pakistan’s nuclear program -- and that’s more easily done if it remains engaged with the Pakistani government. The U.S. must also be able to receive information from the ISI about al‑Qaeda, even if such information is provided sporadically. And Washington will simply not find a way out of Afghanistan if Pakistan becomes an open enemy. Pakistan, for its part, can afford to lose neither America’s direct financial support nor the help that America provides with international lending agencies. Neither can Pakistan’s military lose its access to U.S. weapons systems, and to the trainers attached to them. Economically, Pakistan cannot afford to be isolated by the U.S. in the way the U.S. isolates countries it considers sponsors of terrorism. Its neighbor Iran is an object lesson in this regard. For all these reasons, Pakistan and the United States remain locked in a hostile embrace. There is no escaping this vexed relationship and little evidence to suggest that it will soon improve.Leonard Fournette is a game-day call for Sunday (AP)
It’s semifinal week, so the stakes are raised. Let’s take a good look around.
• Leonard Fournette (quad) missed the full practice week and according to Chris Mortensen, will not play Sunday. Chris Ivory and T.J. Yeldon are the other key backs in this offense. Allen Hurns (ankle) is not ready to return.
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• Joe Mixon (concussion) will miss his second straight game. Giovani Bernard will be the primary back at Minnesota. The Bengals are 11-point underdogs, but nonetheless Bernard has a fairly large projectable workload for this game.
• Chris Hogan (shoulder) is listed as questionable, though one report says he will not play Sunday. Be ready with other options. Hogan was not effective Monday at Miami.
• As expected, Aaron Rodgers (collarbone) was activated Saturday and will start at Carolina.
• Alvin Kamara (concussion) returns for the home match against the Jets. Ted Ginn (rib) will not play, which could be good for Brandon Coleman or (gasp) even Willie Snead.
• Matt Forte (knee) missed the Thursday and Friday work and is no sure thing to play at the Saints.
• Tevin Coleman hasn’t made it out of the concussion protocol yet, which means Devonta Freeman might see more work than usual Monday at Tampa Bay.
• Ameer Abdullah (neck) is available Saturday against the Bears. Not a chance I’ll use him in any of my fantasy semifinals. Chicago TE Adam Shaheen is inactive.
• Zach Ertz has cleared the concussion protocol and will be available against the Giants. Carson Wentz, of course, is out for the year; Nick Foles takes over at quarterback.
• Tyrod Taylor (knee) is back in the saddle for the Bills. Kelvin Benjamin (knee) had a limited practice week and is listed as questionable.
Story continues
• Damien Williams (shoulder) won’t play at Buffalo, which means more of the Kenyan Drake Show. Drake was outstanding in the Monday win over New England.
• Adrian Peterson (neck) went on injured reserve, which sets up Kerwynn Williams to be the featured back the rest of the way. Arizona is at Washington on Sunday. Jermaine Gresham (illness) will not play; perhaps Ricky Seals-Jones will finally see an uptick in snaps.
• Devin Funchess (shoulder) missed Friday’s practice and is listed as questionable. He put in a full session Thursday.
• Amari Cooper (ankle) won’t play Sunday night against Dallas, not that anyone will miss him.
• Tom Savage (concussion) and Braxton Miller (concussion) won’t play at Jacksonville. QB T.J. Yates picks up the start. DeAndre Hopkins (toe) is expected to play, though he didn’t practice Thursday or Friday.
• Vance McDonald (shoulder) is out, which could skim a few extra passes to Jesse James. Juju Smith-Schuster has a sore ankle and is listed as questionable.
• I don’t know why Minnesota would risk Kyle Rudolph (ankle) against Cincinnati, but he was upgraded to questionable Saturday. Rudolph did not practice all week. The Vikings should be able to do whatever they want against a Cincinnati defense that’s ravaged by injury.
• Mike Wallace (ankle) had a limited practice Friday after missing the two previous sessions. Check him on Sunday.Five more U.S. MVPDs have joined Cablevision Systems in striking deals with Hulu that will enable them to offer the over-the-top streaming service to their respective customers.
Armstrong, Atlantic Broadband, Mediacom Communications, Midcontinent Communications and WideOpenWest (WOW!) have agreed to distribute the OTT service. Those deals follow a similar agreement announced by Hulu and Cablevision on April 28.
Hulu’s subscription service sells for $7.99 a month as a stand-alone OTT service. In its announcement about the Hulu agreement, Mediacom noted that pricing, availability date and “other particulars” will be announced in the near future, echoing what Cablevision said last month.
Update: A Hulu official confirmed that the OTT service will also sell for $7.99 per month via its MVPD partners.
Hulu said the agreements will allow its pay TV partners to offer Hulu's full library of content, including Hulu originals, directly to their video and broadband subscribers via their "advanced set-top boxes."
“At Hulu, we believe users should have the ability to consume their favorite content, when, where and how they want,” Tim Connolly, Hulu’s senior vice president, distribution, said in a statement. “We are very excited to partner with these MVPDs to bring Hulu to users where they are already watching TV.”
“We believe Hulu is the perfect complement to Mediacom’s Internet service offerings,” John Pascarelli, Mediacom’s EVP of operations, added in a statement issued by the MSO. “Hulu brings a robust video selection to our customers who want to supplement their traditional cable service with online content at home or on the go.”
Hulu, co-owned by NBCUniversal, Walt Disney Co., and 21st Century Fox, announced last week that it has nearly 9 million subscribers, a 50% increase since 2014.Saying they’ve been left behind in London’s rapid transit plan, some downtown business owners are warning it will be a disaster for the core.
As the $560-million plan to speed public transit using fast buses heads to a public information session Thursday, many core merchants vow they’ll be there, hoping their voices will be heard.
“We just want an opportunity to be involved,” said Jill Wilcox, owner of the Jill’s Table kitchen store on King Street, who plans to attend the meeting.
“Every businessperson I’ve talked to, and I’ve talked to quite a few people in the last few days, nobody has been consulted,” Wilcox said. “So there’s a real concern about that.”
Wilcox and other King Street businesses are sounding the alarm over a proposed plan to add two transit lanes — one westbound, the other eastbound — to the now-one-way street in the downtown area.
The move will eliminate street parking and turning lanes, choking traffic and deterring customers from coming to the area, they say.
Under a plan approved by council last spring, downtown London would become the hub for a 24-kilometre system of high-frequency buses that would run along L- and 7-shaped corridors bisecting the city.
The corridors would run north to Masonville Place, east to Fanshawe College, south to White Oaks Mall and west to Wonderland Road and Oxford Street.
Regular London Transit bus routes would serve as feeders to the four main rapid transit corridors.
While the proposal has been widely debated at city hall, street-level questions and concerns persist in the city’s core, an area crucial to rapid transit’s success.
Many of the tenants at the downtown Covent Garden Market plan to be at Thursday’s meeting, said Bob Usher, the market’s general manager.
With hundreds of people parking in the market’s underground parking lot daily, adding rapid transit lanes to King Street would create traffic chaos, especially after sports events and concerts at the nearby Budweiser Gardens, he said.
“Over 50 per cent of our revenue comes from parking,” Usher said Wednesday.
“If that goes away... not only do we lose our consumer for upstairs (in the market), but we also lose our ability to be able to fund the building in a manner that is prudently wise.”
Restaurateurs with patios say they fear the constant bus traffic whipping by would put a knife in their outdoor business.
Then, there’s the construction, which is projected to take years to complete.
“Is the end result worth the pain that you’re about to go through? Because you are going to annihilate a lot of businesses around here,” said David E. White, owner of a high-end men’s clothing store on Richmond Street.
“The process will cost a lot of us our livelihoods.”
Like many downtown business owners, White said he isn’t against rapid transit, but has concerns about the proposal for the core.
“You will have a beautiful transit system, but you’ve left a ghost town,” he predicted.
The rapid transit system would be the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history.
City hall has committed about $130 million, largely from development charges, and is waiting for Ottawa and Queen’s Park to commit the rest, a combined $435 million.
“We all do want a good transportation system for the city. That’s certainly something everyone’s in agreement on,” Wilcox said.
“It just needs to be a well-thought out one.”
Coun. Phil Squire, who heads up a group of politicians and community members examining the transit plan, said many businesspeople are concerned about their futures given the upheaval the proposed system will cause.
“And they should be concerned,” he said, because the plan, including the proposed tunnel along part of Richmond Street, will have “serious repercussions, including business failures. There’s no question that’s going to happen.
“That’s one of the things I’m really glad people are starting to talk about,” he said. “Is the tunnel, is everything we’re doing, the right thing to do at this particular time?
“We’re all in favour of rapid transit or some improvement in transit, but the real issue is what are the best routes and what is the best way to do it?”
dcarruthers@postmedia.com
twitter.com/DaleatLFPress
— — —
IF YOU GO
What: Rapid transit pubic meeting
When: Thursday, 5-8 p.m.
Where: London Central LibraryThe message from America's ruling elite is, as always - "do as I say, not as I do" - and nowhere is that more evident in the following chart. Simply put, follow the money!
As we detailed last week, as US financial stocks have soared in the post-election Trumphoria, so bankers have been dumping over $100 million in personal stock holdings...
But, as Barron's details, it's not just the bankers that are bailing out of US stocks (just as the corporate elite and their mainstream media lackeys cajole you and your hard-earned retirement funds back into the most-expensive market ever), it's everyone!!
The massive spike in insider-selling (relative to buying) is broad-based...
Still - listen to CNBC, buy some more NFLX or TSLA or the latest Biotech stock, we have reached a new permanantly high plateau...O'Sullivan Daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, 1855. Missouri History Museum The locomotiveDaguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, 1855. Missouri History Museum
The Gasconade Bridge train disaster was a rail accident in Gasconade, Missouri on November 1, 1855. The Gasconade bridge collapsed under the locomotive O'Sullivan while crossing. Thirty-one people were killed in the first major deadly bridge collapse in American history. More recent sources put the number of deaths at 43.[1][2][3]
History [ edit ]
At the time of the disaster, the Pacific Railroad was being built west from St. Louis, which was to be the starting point for the first transcontinental railroad, an effort led by Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri.[4] Construction had begun on the railroad on July 4, 1851, and two years later, it had reached Kirkwood; by 1855, the railroad was completed to Jefferson City. The railroad bridge at Gasconade, a 760-foot wooden structure spanning the Gasconade River, was unfinished, but track was supported by temporary trestle.[4]
Accident [ edit ]
On November 1, a day of heavy rain, the inaugural train carrying some 600 invited visitors and dignitaries, including Henry Chouteau, of the founding family of St. Louis, set out from downtown at 9 a.m. led by the locomotive Missouri. Thomas O'Sullivan was chief engineer on the train.[4] O'Sullivan considered stopping to check the Gasconade Bridge but because the train was behind schedule he opted not to stop. He felt reassured of its stability, as a gravel-hauling train had traveled over it the day before. A single locomotive preceded the train across the bridge as a final check for any problems.[5]
As the train started over the bridge, the span between the east bank and the first pier collapsed. The steam engine and seven of the cars fell through the wooden timbers and the others rolled down the 36 foot embankment into the riverbed (but fortunately not in the water). Only one car remained on the tracks.[6] The engine tipped over backwards and landed on the first passenger car, which carried many dignitaries. Thirty-one people were killed (later revised to 43 killed), including Chouteau, O'Sullivan, and many other prominent St. Louis citizens.[7] Newspapers named 136 as injured but estimated up to 200 more unnamed. (In this age of primitive medicine, germ theory and sterile wound dressing were not yet known. Simple wounds could be fatal due to infections. Twenty-nine people were killed outright, but hundreds were injured. The true number of fatalities is unknown.)
Passengers on the train included many well known people including Mayor Washington King of St. Louis (badly cut),[8] Mayor Madison Miller of Carondolet (badly injured),[9] and Erastus Wells, President of St. Louis omnibus company (not injured)[2] as well as bankers, judges, representatives in the state legislature and their friends and children. Only two women were on the train.[2] For some time after the accident, passengers were marked by cuts, scratches, bruises, blackened faces (presumably from bruising), and sometimes by broken limbs.
Investigation [ edit ]
The railroad commissioned an investigation of the accident.[10]
The plan was a truss bridge of six spans, two of 130 ft each, two of 140 ft, two of 92 feet resting on five stone piers and abutments, 32 feet high. The false work, consisting of trestles to facilitate construction of the bridge, was strengthened to prepare for the train and tested with heavy gravel cars. The commission found the trestles were of traditional railroad design made of three to four posts (called bents) driven into the river bed. Caps on the posts held stringers, on which were mounted floor boards and then ties and rails. The trestles were held together with 2" oak dowel rods. They were stabilized with diagonal planks. The stone piers were completed; the trestles were spaced at 15 ft intervals across the river. The stone piers of the bridge were built by Saler, Schulenburg & Co. The wooden trestle was built by Stone, Boomer & Co., of Chicago, “men of great experience building bridges in the West.”
The investigation found that the trestle design should have been sufficient for the weight of the train at slow speed (4 mph). The engineer had been instructed to speed up going into the curve before the bridge, and then cut steam and coast across. The track leading to the abutment was newly installed and was rough. Although the engineer claimed his speed was 5 mph, witnesses estimated the speed at 15 to 30 mph. The commission cited excessive speed as the cause of the accident. Julius W. Adams, Principal Engineer of the Lexington and Danville Railroad offered the opinion that excessive speed and roughness of the tracks had caused the locomotive to derail on the first section of the bridge damaging the floorboards. The floorboards were found broken in half.
A New York Times report of the investigation featured the contrary opinion of Mr. Darius Hunkins, a contractor on the site. He thought the bridge timber insufficient and specifically cited the distance of 16 ft between the points of support in the trestle vs 10 ft in other trestles on the road.[11]
Details [ edit ]
The excursion train left the 7th Street Station in St. Louis at 8:30 a.m., Thursday, November 1, with 14 cars, including one baggage car. After a stop at the 14th Street Station, three cars were dropped at Cheltenham to reduce weight, increase speed and stay on schedule. Invited guests were picked up at other stations along the line.[12] In Hermann, additional National Guardsmen boarded.
The accident happened at about 1:30 p.m.[13] The quick work of brakeman Radcliff is credited with keeping the last four cars from falling into the riverbed.[14] Three of those derailed and fell over beside the rails. Only the last car remained on the tracks.
The excursion train was followed by a locomotive running in reverse. Because Jefferson City had no turntable, this engine was to bring the train back to St. Louis.[2] In the event, this engine and the remaining car promptly returned to Hermann.[13] The locomotive blew its whistle for the length of the trip to alert residents.[1] The National Guard troop from Hermann was criticized for returning without assisting the injured.[5] In some reports they marched back to Hermann. Conductor English is credited with walking back to Hermann to bring the relief train.[14] More likely the Guard, the conductor and the first survivors rode in the last car.
Response [ edit ]
While a conductor attempted to telegraph for help in nearby Hermann, the rain storm had disabled the telegraph lines and first word of the disaster did not reach St. Louis until 8 p.m., some 7 hours after the bridge's collapse.[4] Some reports say the telegraph was out of service due to bad weather; others say the line had no telegraph.[1] News of the accident arrived in St. Louis by steamboat.[13]
The Missouri Republican from November 2, 1855, contained stories on both the inaugural trip of the Pacific Railroad and the ensuing tragedy. On the former topic, the article ends "How little do we know what an hour may bring forth! The above paragraphs had hardly been written when reports came of a terrible disaster in an attempt to cross the Gasconade Bridge. At a later hour, we received the melancholy particulars which are detailed in another article."[15] The follow-up article contained the names of the dead and seriously injured. Others were less severely injured, but the paper did not name them.[15] The list of wounded appeared a few days later.[8][9]
Hermann was the end-of-line for the Pacific Railroad until the Jefferson City division was opened. A relief train was made up at Hermann from the reverse locomotive and cars available there.[2] Survivors and construction crews at the wreck site worked to free those trapped in the wreckage and helped load the dead onto a freight car. The relief train left the wreck site with the wounded and dead at about 5 pm Thursday.[16]
Fear of additional bridge failures due to high water and flooding delayed the return to St. Louis. When the excursion train crossed Boeuf Creek bridge east of New Haven, MO, the temporary bridge sank a foot. It was a rainy day. It was raining when the excursion train reached Hermann but let up at the time of the accident. Torrential rains were reported later in the day.
On the way back to St. Louis, the relief train was stopped by flood waters at Boeuf Creek. The bridge was in danger of collapsing. Survivors that could walk crossed the bridge on foot and boarded a second train on the other side. Crew then began pushing the cars across by hand. With the first car, the bridge collapsed[6] leaving cars with the wounded and dead on the New Haven side. Those who walked across the bridge got to St. Louis at about midnight.[16] About 150 passengers including 30 to 40 of the injured arrived in a four car train.[16]
Seriously wounded survivors and deceased were transported from New Haven to Washington by ferryboat and reached St. Louis by train the next day. Other injured passengers remained at Hermann and Washington. The railroad suspended service west of Washington until bridges could be repaired or replaced. The city of St. Louis was shut down to accommodate the funerals.[4] In St. Louis, 12 of the dead are buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery, 6 are buried in Calvary Cemetery (including Henry Chouteau buried as Henri Pierre Chouteau[17] and several are buried in the old Wesleyan Cemetery.
Some believe the Pacific Railroad had engaged in shoddy construction. The railroad hoped the excursion would convince the state legislature to authorize additional funds.[3] The Pacific Railroad was privately funded, but financing required the state to guarantee the railroad’s bonds.
In addition to the Boeuf Creek bridge, bridges over the Moreau River and Loose Creek (between Gasconade and Jefferson City) failed during the storm. Claims of shoddy construction became more credible.[9] The railroad noted that of the 60 |
will it fill up? Feel free to list additional categories, even if it wasn’t identified on your wheel of life. Actions – List action-able items you must do to make the outcome a reality. Break these actions into smaller chunks or steps if necessary. Ideally, each item should take less than 1-2 hours to complete.
Please note that if your outcome is too vague or too big, it will be difficult to measure or remain motivated. Be specific and measurable (if possible). Use numbers and measurements.
If your outcome is big, or consists of many categories of to-dos, then we must break each sub-outcome into its own outcome block. For example, if you are planning a large wedding, you may have many areas that need to get done, and each area needs to be grouped as an individual outcome: booking a beautiful location, finding a flattering outfit, perfect accommodations for guests, etc. Similarly, if you are planning to elope, your may not have that many to-dos, and they can all be grouped under one outcome: An incredibly intimate and memorable wedding.
Photo: Thomas Hawk
Here is an example of an outcome planning block for myself:
Outcome 3 : Continuous Learning & Intellectual Development
Continuous Learning & Intellectual Development Purpose: To expand my horizon, to pickup new tools for my emotional toolbox, and to enhance my understanding of human transformation to better serve my readers. To be regularly motivated, inspired and challenged. To live a rich and fulfilling life with growth, contribution and purpose.
Categories of Fulfillment: Emotional Wellbeing, Personal Development, Professional Growth.
Emotional Wellbeing, Personal Development, Professional Growth. Actions: To read something for at least 30 minutes, everyday. Come up with a list of books I want to finish for the year. Organize my book shelf. Schedule tentative books I want to read each month in my calendar. Write down at the end of each day, what I learned or improved upon or contributed towards in that day.
Step 5: The Most Important Outcome
Give yourself a pat on the back for making it past step 4!! I’m so proud of you. And if you haven’t done it, take some time, go back and do it for yourself. Trust me, you will benefit from it.
Review each of your outcome blocks, especially each purpose and category of fulfillment. Pick the top 3 outcomes you really want to work on. Pick ones that will give you the biggest rewards for your efforts. Pick ones that contribute towards the life categories that need to be filled up the most.
These are the most important outcomes for the year – if you just got these outcomes done, you would feel like a complete rock star! Make these outcomes a priority.
That’s it! You’re done with the designing phase!
Tips for Following Through
Now that you have a beautiful year ahead of you, a plan for achieving the outcomes you want most, and reasons for why each outcome is important, the rest lies in your ability to follow-through and take consistent action towards results that mean the most to you.
Photo: Kevin Russ
Here are some tips:
Weekly Review and Planning – Spend a set amount of time to review which outcomes you will work on this week. Evaluate your results from previous weeks. I will cover the weekly planning process in more detail in another article.
– Spend a set amount of time to review which outcomes you will work on this week. Evaluate your results from previous weeks. I will cover the weekly planning process in more detail in another article. Momentum – Take action every week (everyday if you can) regardless of how small, to keep momentum.
– Take action every week (everyday if you can) regardless of how small, to keep momentum. One Outcome – Focus on just one outcome at a time. You can have other outcomes, but only work on them when you’ve completed tasks for the most important outcome.
– Focus on just one outcome at a time. You can have other outcomes, but only work on them when you’ve completed tasks for the most important outcome. Review Often – Read over your written outcome blocks as often as you can in a day, in a week. Especially review the purpose, to be reminded of why each outcome is important to you.
– Read over your written outcome blocks as often as you can in a day, in a week. Especially review the purpose, to be reminded of why each outcome is important to you. Visualize Outcomes – Before doing something, it helps to close your eyes for a moment to visualize the end result. When the outcome is a reality, how will you feel? How will you celebrate it? How big will you smile? Feel the feelings of excitement in your Being.
– Before doing something, it helps to close your eyes for a moment to visualize the end result. When the outcome is a reality, how will you feel? How will you celebrate it? How big will you smile? Feel the feelings of excitement in your Being. Tell People About It – We are more likely to do something when we feel accountable for it. Let other people know what your up to, and you’re outcomes.
– We are more likely to do something when we feel accountable for it. Let other people know what your up to, and you’re outcomes. Visual Reminders – Post your outcome and its purpose up where you can see them – walls, bathroom mirror, on your desk, etc.
– Post your outcome and its purpose up where you can see them – walls, bathroom mirror, on your desk, etc. Find a Buddy – Find a buddy who is also working on something important to them. Become each other’s best support and motivator. Tell each other what you are currently focused on, why it is important and the actions you plan to take. On a regular basis, review your results with each other.
– Find a buddy who is also working on something important to them. Become each other’s best support and motivator. Tell each other what you are currently focused on, why it is important and the actions you plan to take. On a regular basis, review your results with each other. Divide Annual Goals – Where would you need to be in 6 months, in order to achieve a particular outcome in a year? Where would you need to be in 3 months? In a month? Keep dividing annual goals, until you have a more realistic target to shoot for in the short term.
– Where would you need to be in 6 months, in order to achieve a particular outcome in a year? Where would you need to be in 3 months? In a month? Keep dividing annual goals, until you have a more realistic target to shoot for in the short term. Reward Yourself & Celebrate Successes – When you’ve succeeded in taking action or you’ve completed your outcome, don’t rush to work on the next outcome. Jump up and down! Treat yourself to something you enjoy (web surfing time, a snack, a stretch, a movie). Celebrate and give gratitude for your wins!
Parting Words
The art and act of designing your life is not just limited to the start of each year, nor is it set in stone. You are in control of your destiny. Instead of living in constant reaction and drifting between urgent demands on our to-do list, we have a choice to design and create a life with meaning and purpose.
It’s never too late to start drafting your life based on the areas that matter most to you. And you are free to adjust the sail at anytime as you navigate to sea. Instead of working off a big list of action items and arriving at an unpredictable outcome, start with a clear vision of the outcome you want, understand why it’s important to you, and then list the actions necessary to get that result.
Your destiny is in your hands. How will you design it?
** What are some of your most important outcomes for the year? Share your thoughts in the comment section. See you there!
[01/11/2009 Update]: The “wheel of life” technique came from the Tony Robbins UPW live seminar and the OPA (Outcome Purpose Action) planning technique came from Tony Robbins’ The Time of Your Life audio program on time management. The author does not claim credit for these concepts, but is merely iterating what has been helpful in her own life. Step 1 and 2 of this article are original concepts from the author.Two men have been charged with attempted murder in the Canadian city of Calgary after a nightclub shooting early Sunday morning. Mohamed Elmi, 31, and Mohamed Salad, 29, also face a host of other charges, including unauthorised possession of a firearm, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm with an altered or defaced serial number.
A 38-year-old man was sent to hospital immediately after the attack with serious soft tissue injuries to his torso. Video below shows the moments leading up to the shooting as well as the consequences.
According to the Calgary Herald, officials believe many more patrons could have been hurt if the nightclub’s bouncers hadn’t immediately intervened.
“I don’t have the information for how many shots that firearm was capable of at that time, but we certainly can say their actions stopped what could have been several other injuries,” Staff Sgt. Brad Glaicar told the newspaper.
A nightclub employee who witnessed the shooting around 1:30 a.m. Sunday at Ten X Night Club, at 1140 10th Avenue S.W., agreed.
“There’s no doubt in my mind these two guys did save lives. Had they not been there it would have been a lot worse,” Spencer Wallace said of his fellow bouncers.
Canadian media has been careful not to make any link between the suspects named and their religion. The word ‘jihad’ is conspicuously absent in media coverage, something that is irritating social media users who are openly speculating whether or not they have been banned from making any connection with radical Islam.
Mohamed Elmi & Mohamed Salad Arrested In Calgary Club Jihad-Attack? https://t.co/m2JZzomaWH Video Of Attack https://t.co/hHaS7tYPXs #MyJihad — Anti-CAIR (@AntiCAIR) January 11, 2016
Mainstream news trying to bury this. Shooting at Calgary nightclub by two men with first name Mohamed. https://t.co/bZt50QfgOI #rapefugees — Captain Canuck (@captncanuck777) January 11, 2016
@joe_warmington any reason the media isn’t covering the coordinated shooting of a Calgary nightclub by Muslims Joe? pic.twitter.com/n6AIYruGzy — Politics In Memes (@politicsinmemes) January 11, 2016
Newly-elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made it a campaign promise in 2015 to welcome as many as 50,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2016. His government is yet to outline how much this will cost, whether processing times for other immigrants will get longer and what their overall immigration plan is for 2016.Frequent “Dr. Drew” guest John Cardillo think he knows exactly why host Pinsky lost his show on CNN’s HLN after five years on the air.
“Personally, I think HLN was undergoing a major overhaul to make it more pro-Hillary friendly,” Cardillo, host of “The John Cardillo Show” on 880 The Biz, tells The American Mirror.
Pinsky’s comments about Hillary Clinton’s health, made on a KABC radio show on August 16th, may have provided the impetus for the network to ditch one of its popular primetime hosts.
Dr. Drew said he reviewed the limited information that has been released with Dr. Robert Huizenga on his HLN show.
“Based on the information she has provided, he were gravely concerned not just about her health, but her health care,” the HLN and MTV star said on KABC.
“Both of us concluded that if we provided the care she was receiving, we’d be ashamed to show up in a doctors lounge, we’d be laughed out.
“She’s receiving sort of 1950-level sort of care by our evaluation,” he said.
Pinsky was alarmed by the treatments for some of her ailments, particularly for blood clots.
Pinsky noted Clinton has a very rare blood clot in the “collecting system for the celebral spinal fluid,” which he said “guarantees somebody has something wrong with their coagulation system.”
He concluded her health care “looks bizarre.”
Nine days later, Pinsky was booted from his show gig on HLN.
Deadline reported:
Days after CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield announced on air she’s moving to HLN in the fall, HLN quietly confirmed Dr. Drew Pinsky’s program will end next month, though he will remain a contributor for CNN Worldwide. …
Pinsky made headlines last week when he announced on his radio show he is “gravely concerned” about Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s health and the health care she is receiving. It played nicely into Donald Trump’s position that Clinton is not healthy enough to serve as POTUS.
“Drew is good TV,” Cardillo tells The American Mirror. “Far more engaging than Banfield. And no one can deny that a cancellation coming nine days after some pretty damning words about Hillary’s health is peculiar.
As for the intent of the cancellation, Cardillo says, “I think it puts on air personalities, especially at Hillary friendly outfits, on notice that ‘this can happen to you if you don’t bow down to the queen.'”
Cardillo warns the purge of hosts like Pinsky “Won’t be the last.
“But I’m less concerned about liberal media purging their ranks of non ideological drones than I am about President Hillary weaponizing the FCC against conservative media.”The concept of entropy in international relations is instructive here, Rudd writes: “Under this argument, any international order, once established, is immediately subject to the natural processes of decline and decay, ultimately resulting in a return to disorder.”
There is “growing evidence of nation-states walking around the UN to solve major problems and then perhaps coming back to the UN when it’s all done as some sort of diplomatic afterthought,” Rudd told me. The United Nations continues to establish rules for how people and states should conduct themselves in the world. “The problem is, if you simply set norms and don’t do anything about the execution of those norms, as the international agency given that function back under the charter of 1945, then you start to lose complete relevance over time.”
I asked Rudd whether the remaining secretary-general candidates were advocating the kinds of reforms he’d like implemented at the United Nations. “I... understand that in a competitive selection process such as this, many candidates are going to choose to be publicly diplomatic about the sort of problems the UN faces,” he responded. Presumably he himself can be less diplomatic, now that he is no longer auditioning to be the world’s chief diplomat.
“We are facing the biggest set of external changes and challenges to the global order since 1991,” following the fall of the Soviet Union, Rudd told me. “Over the last 25 years, we haven’t seen anything comparable to the current state of great-power relations. We haven’t seen anything comparable to the current intensity of the globalization process. We haven’t seen anything comparable to the emergence, for example, of terrorism as a mainstream threat to many societies across the world. These are new phenomen[a]. Each age has had its own new phenomenon. But in a quarter of a century, which is a long time [for] an institution that only has a 70-year history, it’s a set of circumstances which should cause us to act.”
Rudd’s report includes numerous prescriptions for reinventing the institution, from striking a new international agreement on resettling refugees to more rigorously measuring the results of UN initiatives. The United Nations, Rudd told me, is much better at reacting to crises than anticipating and preventing them. He proposes investing in a policy-planning staff that can analyze global trends several years into the future, and in what he calls “preventive diplomacy.” As an example, he cited the UN’s appointment in 2013 of the former president of East Timor, Jose Ramos-Horta, as a special representative to the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, which had just experienced a military coup; within roughly a year, Ramos-Horta had helped forge enough political consensus for elections to be held. Prevention could also mean, for instance, prepositioning food aid in countries at the earliest warnings of famine, or tracking unemployment patterns to predict where violent extremism could emerge.Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is leading the GOP field in New Hampshire, a new poll finds.
A Voter Gravity poll released Friday shows Fiorina with 22 percent support among Granite State GOP primary voters. She has a 4-point edge over her nearest competitor, billionaire Donald Trump, who has 18 percent support.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson nets 10 percent support, with the poll finding no other Republican White House hopeful cracking double digits in the first-in-the-nation primary state.
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The poll found Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) and former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) tied with 9 percent each.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) follows with 7 percent while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) trail him with 6 percent each.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) nabs 3 percent in New Hampshire, while Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) and former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.) tie at 2 percent.
All other GOP presidential candidates, Voter Gravity added, got 6 percent overall.
Voter Gravity’s poll surveyed 2,839 New Hampshire Republican primary voters via touchtone phones on Thursday.
The poll was conducted after Fiorina’s strong performance in the second televised GOP presidential debate Wednesday night.
The former Hewlett-Packard CEO emerged from Wednesday evening’s contest, in Simi Valley, Calif., with glowing reviews and rising interest across social media platforms.
A Morning Consult poll released Friday also found her to be the winner of the debate. Twenty-nine percent of viewers thought Fiorina emerged victorious.
Trump currently leads the race for next year’s GOP presidential nomination with an average of 28.3 percent support, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of national polls.
Fiorina, meanwhile, ranks sixth with 4.7 percent support.Maybe you’re wondering why Autism is a feminist issue. Maybe you’ve got a general idea. Either way, I’m hoping something in my writing will teach you something new. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even teach you something about yourself.
Hi. *Waves and smiles.* I’m 27 years old, have a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts, am married to a wonderful husband, and we have many furbabies together. Oh, and I’m Autistic.
Great dinner conversation, I know. (Sarcasm.)
Being diagnosed with Autism happens at an early age, right? Sadly, that trope only holds true for boys, in most cases. In fact, I was just diagnosed this year, after having suspected I had Asperger’s Syndrome for a few years prior. I have two friends who, I suspect, are also on the Autism Spectrum, but they hesitate on seeking a diagnosis. This is because most mental health professionals are unaware that there are most likely just as many girls as there are boys on the Autism Spectrum.
When studies on Autism are performed, they are for males only. Girls have actually, at times, been turned away – in rare occasions are they admitted into the study, and typically it’s when they display that “classic” Autism. To date, there has not been an official study on females with Autism. It goes without saying that this would cause a gender bias in the documentation of Autistic symptoms, quirks, etc., which is a prime reason why Autism is a feminist issue.
So many girls go undiagnosed, “flying under the radar.” (An idiom used to illustrate the inability to detect something due to it being hidden.) It’s not unheard of for a girl to present the “classic” style of Autism. However, they only tend to make up a smaller percentile in the amount of girls that are Autistic, but they are no less important to the count.
There’s a certain point at which girls who are Autistic have a masking skill, using echolalia, mimicry, and every skill that being a human version of a chameleon can afford itself. Most of these “chameleons” can imitate their social peers flawlessly, only being considered shy or introverted, a little weird and clumsy. They will force themselves to learn eye contact, to learn “proper” facial expressions, and pick up “appropriate” girl skills or traits. All the while, they are internally wondering what the big deal is about boys, fashion, or other popular ideals. These traits, because they’re more associated with female cases of Autism, go unnoticed, making it more apparent that Autism is a feminist issue.
This isn’t the case with all Autistic girls, because there are some of us who have found an obsession with a particular boy band, horses, or latest styles. That can be embodied in the quote “Once you’ve met one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism.” It’s considered a spectrum for good reasons. The interesting fact is that, even though these subjects can turn into literal obsessions, it isn’t noticed because it is a typical interest for the female gender – but the difference is that it does indeed become an obsession.
Often, because of how females are expected to behave in our society, a girl or woman with Autism misses out on a diagnosis because they are dismissed as “shy,” “ditzy,” or other societal norms expected of women. Autism is a feminist issue because these characteristics aren’t considered symptoms of Autism, and therefore, Autism has become something more so associated with boys and men. When a society expects women to be submissive and not speak unless spoken to, of course traits like that would be ignored, even if they are to the extreme.
I am one of those females.
At a young age, I had never “fit in” with peers, but I did learn how to use my masking skills and became excellent at playing chameleon. Alone, I was rambunctious and “tomboyish.” I enjoyed playing outside barefoot, and playing with bugs and lizards. Around my peers, however, when trying to fit in I learned very quickly that I didn’t understand the behaviors of other girls. I would attempt to fit in, but often missed out on cues that I was either not welcome, or becoming annoying to my schoolmates.
This allowed for a hefty amount of bullying. Playtime went from attempts to control the games of pretend, to playing pretend alone and building fairy houses out of sticks, leaves, shells and mulch. I became more withdrawn, unsure of what words to use to communicate with peers, oblivious to being the butt-end of jokes, and noticing that I was being left out of the progress my peers were making with social skills. I also had an unidentified, undiagnosed, (until about five years ago), learning disability that almost resulted in being held back – dyscalculia.
The end result was having read more books out of our library than any other child at the school, becoming absorbed in earth sciences club, and having small poetry competitions between myself and the Language Arts teacher. I was extremely adept at music, both singing and instruments, but because of overstimulation and extreme stage fright, the chorus teacher refused to let me be any more than lightly involved. My security blanket was a backpack over-stuffed with books (especially The Silmarillion and any Irish myth book I could get my hands on), my sketchbook, a couple dozen drawing tools, kneadable erasers, internet-found tutorials of Chinese calligraphy, and a hoodie tied around my waist to feel safe.
While I didn’t have a delightful social life, I did have one or two close friends in my neighborhood and multiple acquaintances, and I did learn a lot. I was also grateful to feel a connection with a few teachers who knew I was different, but because I couldn’t express what was going on in my brain, they couldn’t do much other than be patient and supportive.
Sadly, there was a devastating result of being unable to communicate my feelings and my thoughts. My Autistic “meltdowns” – I like calling them short-circuiting, because the feeling of one of those attacks reminds me of a computer that became overheated and short-circuited – became implosions, or I would hold it in until I was alone and couldn’t hold it anymore. If I couldn’t have a proper short-circuit moment, I would excuse myself to the bathroom and self-harm, and no one ever knew because I hid the marks.
I developed depression and anxiety, which I also hid from everyone. (Yes, that is possible.) When I eventually became abused by a previous family member and later by a significant other, I refused to report it because it was my new way to “punish” myself, to allow for self-harm without using my own hands. That eventually resulted in PTSD. It’s not uncommon for Autistic people, males or females, to become abused and eventually develop PTSD.
When I got to college, it was a bit of a surprise to find more like-minded people. I made many enjoyable acquaintances, and connected with a few professors. Sadly, there was still bullying, but not by who you may think – it became some professors and one college adviser, as well as a few office workers. The tables had turned, (an idiom used to explain that a situation has become the opposite of what it once was), and fellow college classmates were more patient and supportive than most professors, who were there only for their job and not concerned with students’ personal lives. There were exceptions – I did have a very helpful professor who let me skip on group work as long as I compensated, and another professor who helped me during a panic attack caused by stage fright. But for those few helpful professors, I don’t think I would have lasted very long. Many dismissed me as a “flake” (someone who is unreliable, usually on purpose).
I eventually met a classmate who volunteered at a local school for Autism, who was educating herself because of her two Autistic sons. She noticed some Autistic traits in herself and considered herself someone with Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of Autism eliminated from the DSM-V, and is not considered relevant in the U.S. but is still a valid diagnosis in other parts of the world). She encouraged me to go to the college counseling services for my issues she had noticed, and possibly be tested for Autism, with the warning that not many girls are diagnosed. This is when I first realized Autism is a feminist issue.
I didn’t think much of her suggestion towards testing, because there was no point if I was most likely to be dismissed.
Later on, after dating, graduating from college, and marrying one of the closest friends I could ask for, I confessed to my husband that I needed mental help. The anxiety and depression were becoming overwhelming. So I did what I did best, and made a list. I listed all of my quirks, shortcomings, family history and personal history. I listed every detail I could think of to make sure I was being clear and concise. I asked family and friends, and my husband, for traits of mental illness (now we also know “disability”) that they could think of. I sought a therapist for help, one that was more up-to-date on the newer version of the DSM-V, as well as current studies, and in my mental health evaluation she came to the conclusion that my General Anxiety Disorder, minor depressive episodes, and panic attacks had a root source – the different brain wiring of having Autism Spectrum Disorder.
What needs to change is how we view Autism, and how it presents in girls. Autism is a feminist issue because when it comes to diagnosis, women and girls are left out of the conversation. This includes trans girls, who, when diagnosed with Autism are found to have presented in the same manner as biological females. The same is true of trans boys presenting the same style of Autism as biological boys.
Thankfully, there are a few professionals realizing the complications of the gender divide in Autism, and how it affects the different genders. They understand how Autism is a feminist issue. The movement towards progress in Autism gender bias research is currently focused in Australia and Europe, with the United States beginning to follow. There are excellent professionals such as Tania Marshall, Rudy Simone, Temple Grandin, and more. There are even TED Talks, (something I absolutely love) by women with Autism, and professionals in the research field.
What does Feminism have to do with it? I think Autistic women, like me, could learn a lot from the Feminist movement. Especially since it’s still developing, even today. It’s possible that some of the first leaders of the Feminist movements may have been Autistic as well – what else could have provided such hyperfocus, such perseverance, and the application of hard logic? But I digress. Not only could Autistic women learn from Feminism in standing up for equal rights, but perhaps Feminist Neurotypicals (a term used for non-Autistic people) should stand up for the Autistic women who can’t speak for themselves, be it non-verbal Autistic women or Autistic women who simply don’t know what words or actions to use in order to fight for equal rights. As these concepts are expanded, Autism is a feminist issue in many different ways.
To me, the point of Feminism is to emphasize that all people are equal. Not that one gender is greater than the other. Feminism represents minorities. Even if they’re different. As Temple Grandin put it – “Different, not less.” She meant this towards the Autistic community, but it easily also applies to the divide we still face today between the genders. Autism is a feminist issue because both the Autistic and Feminist communities overlap and have a lot to learn from each other.
I am an Autistic Woman, and we deserve to be recognized for our differences, disabilities, and abilities. We present differently, but it doesn’t affect us any less. This is why Autism is a feminist issue.
*The author has chosen to explain certain idioms, sarcasms, and include an action to assist my fellow ASD readers. Some are unable to pick up euphemisms and expressions in text. Some of us have learned those skills, others of us have not, so she made her writing easily accessible to those of us who haven’t.
Photo by Dee AshleyBIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Born in the ashes of the smoldering South after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan died and was reborn before losing the fight against civil rights in the 1960s. Membership dwindled, a unified group fractured, and one-time members went to prison for a string of murderous attacks against blacks. Many assumed the group was dead, a white-robed ghost of hate and violence.
Yet today, the KKK is still alive and dreams of restoring itself to what it once was: an invisible empire spreading its tentacles throughout society. As it marks 150 years of existence, the Klan is trying to reshape itself for a new era.
Klan members still gather by the dozens under starry Southern skies to set fire to crosses in the dead of night, and KKK leaflets have shown up in suburban neighborhoods from the Deep South to the Northeast in recent months. Perhaps most unwelcome to opponents, some independent Klan organizations say they are merging with larger groups to build strength.
In a series of interviews with The Associated Press, Klan leaders said they feel that U.S. politics are going their way, as a nationalist, us-against-them mentality deepens across the nation. Stopping or limiting immigration — a desire of the Klan dating back to the 1920s — is more of a cause than ever. And leaders say membership has gone up at the twilight of President Barack Obama’s second term in office.
Joining the Klan is as easy as filling out an online form — provided you’re white and Christian. Members can visit an online store to buy one of the Klan’s trademark white cotton robes for $145, though many splurge on the $165 satin version.
While the Klan has terrorized minorities during much of the last century, its leaders now present a public front that is more virulent than violent. Leaders from several different Klan groups all said they have rules against violence aside from self-defense, and even opponents agree the KKK has toned itself down after a string of members went to prison years after the fact for deadly arson attacks, beatings, bombings and shootings.
“While today’s Klan has still been involved in atrocities, there is no way it is as violent as the Klan of the ’60s,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that tracks activity by groups it considers extremist.
“That does not mean it is some benign group that does not engage in political violence,” he added.
Klan leaders told the AP that most of today’s groups remain small and operate independently, kept apart by disagreements over such issues as whether to associate with neo-Nazis, hold public rallies or wear the KKK’s trademark robes in colors other than white.
It’s impossible to say how many members the Klan counts today since groups don’t reveal that information, but leaders claim adherents in the thousands among scores of local groups called Klaverns.
“Most Klan groups I talk to could hold a meeting in the bathroom in McDonald’s,” said Chris Barker, imperial wizard of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Eden, North Carolina. As for his Klavern, he said, “Right now, I’m close to 3,800 members in my group alone.”
The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish protection group that monitors Klan activity, describes Barker’s Loyal White Knights as the most active group today, but estimates it has no more than 200 members. The ADL puts total Klan membership nationwide at around 3,000.
The Alabama-based SPLC estimates the Klan has about 190 chapters nationally with no more than 6,000 members total, which would be a mere shadow of its estimated 2 million to 5 million members in the 1920s.
“The idea of unifying the Klan like it was in the ’20s is a persistent dream of the Klan, but it’s not happening,” Potok said.
Formed just months after the end of the Civil War by six former Confederate officers, the Klan originally seemed more like a college fraternity with ceremonial robes and odd titles for its officers. But soon, freed blacks were being terrorized, and the Klanwas blamed. Hundreds of people were assaulted or killed as whites tried to regain control of the defeated Confederacy. Congress effectively outlawed the Klan in 1871, and the group died.
The Klan seemed relegated to history until World War I, but it was resurrected as waves of immigrants arrived from Europe and elsewhere, and grew more as the NAACP challenged the South’s Jim Crow laws in the 1920s. Millions joined, including community leaders like bankers and lawyers.
That momentum declined, and best estimates place membership at about 40,000 by the mid-’60s, the height of the civil rights movement. Klan members were convicted of using murder as a weapon against equality in states including Mississippi and Alabama, where one Klansman remains imprisoned for planting the bomb that killed four black girls in a Birmingham church in 1963.
KKK leader Brent Waller, imperial wizard of the United Dixie White Knights in Mississippi, said stopping immigration — not blocking minority rights — is the Klan’s No. 1 issue today.
And other Klan leaders say Donald Trump’s ascendancy in the GOP is a sign things are going their way.
“You know, we began 40 years ago saying we need to build a wall,” Arkansas-based Klan leader Thomas Robb said.
Despite trying to rebrand itself, the Klan has not stepped away from burning crosses. As the sun set on a warm Saturday in April,Klan members gathered in a huge circle in a northwest Georgia field to set a cross and Nazi swastika afire.
“White power!” they chanted in unison.
“Death to the ungodly! Death to our enemies!”
___
Associated Press writer Ryan Phillips in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and AP photographer Mike Stewart in Rome, Georgia, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Raiders’ competitive spirit shows a transformation is afoot
The Raiders are finishing strong. They haven’t quit. And for anyone who has watched the Raiders over this sad stretch of losing years, those two qualities are pretty astonishing.
“We are trying to change the culture,” quarterback Derek Carr said. “And we are changing the culture. We know if we keep fighting and working hard, it’s going to get there.”
Which means, rather than opt for huge changes in the offseason, maybe owner Mark Davis simply should retain the status quo?
The Raiders closed out their home season Sunday with their third win at the Coliseum, a 26-24 victory over the Buffalo Bills. Every team the Raiders have beaten this year has had a winning record and playoff aspirations at the time of the game.
The Raiders have won three of their past five games after an 0-10 start. If Denver decides to rest some players Sunday, the Raiders could get their fourth victory, finishing with four wins in their final six games.
The team has young talent at key positions. And it also has shown life and energy, which is impressive.
Oakland Raiders' Marcel Reese hurdles Buffalo Bills' Corey Graham in 2nd quarter during NFL game at O.co Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, December 21, 2014. Oakland Raiders' Marcel Reese hurdles Buffalo Bills' Corey Graham in 2nd quarter during NFL game at O.co Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, December 21, 2014. Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Raiders’ competitive spirit shows a transformation is afoot 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
On Saturday night, interim head coach Tony Sparano told the Raiders their character would be tested in Sunday’s game. In truth, the Raiders’ character has been tested all season. How do you keep competing after an 0-10 start?
“The guys continue to come out fighting, when it would be very easy to do the opposite,” said Charles Woodson, a 17-year veteran. “This team has never really gotten down to the point where we were ready to give up.”
Sparano is 3-8 since replacing winless Dennis Allen. Does Sparano think he should be considered for the full-time job?
“Yes,” he said.
Does he deserve it?
“It’s not for me to decide that,” he said.
Sparano, who has the support and praise of many members of the team, has one year remaining on his contract; he’s the only coach on the Raiders’ staff whose contract extends beyond this year. Davis might look at that situation, weigh the value of continuing what has been started this year, against the cost of both buying out Sparano and spending $8 million a year on a |
Encapsulation of data
"Information hiding" makes objects opaque, that's its purpose. It seems useful if objects contain private mutable data necessary to implement stateful behaviour. However, with respect to concurrency and more algebraic data transformation this encapsulation hurts. It hurts because we don't know what's underneath an objects API and the last thing we want to have is mutable state that we're not aware of. It hurts that if we want to work with its data we have to ask for every single bit of it.
The common solution to the latter problem is to use reflection, and that's exactly what all advanced frameworks do to uniformly implement their behaviour on top of user-defined classes that contain data.
On the other hand, we all have learned that reflection is dangerous, it circumvents the type system, which may lead to all kinds of errors showing up only at runtime. So most programmers resort to work with objects in a very tedious way, creating many times more code compared to what they would have written in a different language.
Judging the OO class
So far, we have seen that OO classes are not ideal. They mix up a lot of features while often providing only a narrow subset of what a more general concept is able to do for us. Resulting programs are not only hard to do right, in terms of lines of code they tend to require a multiple compared to programs written in modern FP languages. Since system size is a significant cost driver in maintenance, OOP economically seems to me as a mistake when you have other techniques at your disposal.
When it was introduced more than 20 years ago the OO class brought encapsulation and polymorphism into the game which was beneficial. Thus, OOP was clearly better than procedural programming. But a lot of time has passed since then and we learned much about all the little and not-so-little flaws. It's time to move on...
A better way
Now, that I have discredited the OO class as offered to you by Java, C# or other mainstream OOP languages I feel the duty to show you an alternative as it is available in Clojure and Haskell. It's based on the following fundamentals:
Data is immutable, and any complex data structure (regardless of being more like a map or a list) behaves like a value: you can't change it. But you can get new values that share a lot of data with what previously existed. The key to make this approach feasible are so-called "persistent data structures". They combine immutability with efficiency.
Data is commonly structured using very few types of collections: in Clojure these are vectors, maps and sets, in Haskell you have lists, maps, sets and tuples. To combine a type with a map-like behaviour Clojure gives us the record. Haskell offers record syntax which is preferable over tuples to model more complex domain data. Resulting "instances" of records are immutable and their fields are public.
Functions are not part of records, although the Haskell compiler as well as the Clojure defrecord macro derive some related default implementations for formatting, parsing, ordering and comparing record values. In both languages we can nicely access pieces of these values and cheaply derive new values from existing ones. No one needs to implement constructors, getters, setters, toString, equals or hashCode.
Defining data structures
Here's an example of some records defined in Haskell:
module Accounting where data Address = Address { street :: String, city :: String, zipcode :: String } deriving ( Show, Read, Eq, Ord ) data Person = Person { name :: String, address :: Address } deriving ( Show, Read, Eq, Ord ) data Account = Account { owner :: Person, entries :: [ Int ]} deriving ( Show, Read, Eq, Ord )
And here's what it looks like in (untyped) Clojure5:
( ns accounting ) ( defrecord Address [ street zipcode city ]) ( defrecord Person [ name address ]) ( defrecord Account [ owner entries ])
Let's see what we now have got:
Thread-safe data.
Extensional equality.
Types.
No subtyping.
Reasonable default implementations of basic functionality.
Complex data based on very few composable collection types.
The last item can hardly be overrated: since we use only few common collection types we can immediatly apply a vast set of data transformation functions like map, filter, reduce / foldl and friends. It needs some practice, but it'll take you to a whole new level of expressing data transformation logic.
But where should we implement individual domain logic?
Adding domain functionality
If we only want to implement functions that act on some type of data we can pass a value as (for example) first argument to those. To denote the relation between the record and the functions we implement these in the same Clojure namespace or Haskell module that the record definition lives in.
Let's add a Haskell function that calculates the balance for an account (please note that the Account entries are a list of integers):
balance :: Account -> Int balance ( Account _ es ) = foldl ( + ) 0 es
Now the Clojure equivalent:
( defn balance [{ es :entries }] ( reduce + es ))
If we now want to call these functions in an OO like "subject verb" manner we would take Clojure's thread-first macro ->. To get the balance of an account a we can use the expression (-> a balance). Or, given that p is a Person, the expression (-> p :address :city) allows us to retrieve the value of the city field.
In Haskell we need an additional function definition to introduce an operator that allows us to flip the order:
( -: ) :: a -> ( a -> b ) -> b x -: f = f x
Now we can calculate the balance for an account a using a-:balance, or access the city field with an expression p-:address-:city.
Please note, that the mechanisms allowing us to flip the function-argument-order are totally unrelated to records or any other kind of data structure.
Ok, that was easy. For implementing domain logic we now have
Ordinary functions taking the record as parameter.
A loose "belongs-to" relation between data and functions via namespace/module organization.
Independent "syntactic sugar" regarding how we can denote function application.
No hassle when we want to extend functionality related to the data without being able to alter the original namespace/module.
From an OO perspective this looks like static functions on data, something described by the term Anemic Domain Model. I can almost hear that inside any long-term OO practitioners head it starts to scream: "But this is wrong! You must combine data and functions, you must encapsulate this in an entity class!"
After doing this for more than 20 years, I just ask "Why? What's the benefit? And how is this idea actually applied in thousands of systems? Does it serve us well?" My answer today is a clear "No, it doesn't". Actually keeping these things separate is simpler and makes the pieces more composable. Admittedly, to make it significantly better than procedural programming we have to add a few language features you have been missing in OO for so long. To see this read on, now the fun begins:
Polymorphism
Both languages allow bundling of function signatures to connect an abstraction with an API. Clojure calls these "protocols", Haskell calls these "type classes", both share noticable similarities with Java interfaces. But in contrast to Java, we can declare that types participate in these abstractions, regardless of whether the protocol/type class existed before the record/type declaration or not.
To illustrate this with our neat example, we introduce an abstraction that promises to give us somehow the total sum of some numeric data. Let's start with the Clojure protocol:
( defprotocol Sum ( totals [ x ]))
The corresponding type class in Haskell looks like that:
class Sum a where totals :: a -> Int
This lets us introduce polymorphic functions for types without touching the types, thus essentially solving the expression problem, because it let's us apply existing functions that only rely on protocols/type classes to new types.
In Clojure we can extend the protocol to an existing type like so:
( extend-protocol Sum Account ( totals [ acc ] ( balance acc )))
And in Haskell we make an instance:
instance Sum Account where totals = balance
It should be easy to spot the similarity. In both cases we implement the missing functionality based on the concrete, existing type. We're now able to apply totals on any Account instance because Account now supports the contract. What would you do for a similar effect in OO land?6
With this, the story of function implementation reuse becomes very different: protocols/type classes are a means to hide differences between concrete types. This allows us to create a large number of functions that rely solely on abstractions, not concrete types. Instead of each object carrying the methods of its class (and superclasses) around, we have independent functions over small abstractions. Each type of record can decide where it participates in, no matter what existed first. This drastically reduces the overall number of function implementations and thus the size of the resulting system.
Perhaps you now have a first idea of the power of the approach to polymorphism in Clojure and Haskell, but wait, polymorphism is still only a special case of dispatching function invocations.
Other ways for dispatching
Let's first look from a conceptual perspective what dispatching is all about: you apply a function to some arguments and some mechanism decides which implementation is actually used. So the easiest way to build a runtime dispatcher in an imperative language is a switch statement. What's the problem with this approach? It's tedious to write and it conflates branching logic with the actual implementation of the case specific logic.
To come up with a better solution, Haskell and Clojure take very different approaches, but both excel what any OO programmer is commonly used to.
Haskell applies "Pattern Matching" to argument values, which essentially combines deconstruction of data structures, binding of symbols to values, and -- here comes the dispatch -- branching according to matched patterns in the data structure. It's already powerful and it can be extended by using "guards" which represent additional conditions. I won't go into the details here, but if you're interested I recommend this chapter from "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good".
Clojure "Multimethods" are completely different. Essentially they consist of two parts. One is a dispatch function, and the other part is a bunch of functions to be chosen from according to the dispatch value that the dispatch function returns for an invocation. The dispatch function can contain any calculation, and in addition it is possible to define hierarchies of dispatch values, similar to what can be done with type based multiple inheritance in OO languages like C++. Again very powerful, and if you're interested in the details here's an online excerpt of "Clojure in Action".
By now, I hope you are able to see that Clojure and Haskell open the door to a different but more powerful way to design systems. The interesting features of the OO class like dispatching and ease of implementation reuse through inheritance fade in the light of more general concepts of todays FP languages.
To complete the picture here's my discussion of some left-over minor features that OO classes provide, namely type parameters, encapsulation and intensional equality.
Type parameters
In case of Haskell, type parameters are available for types (used in so-called "type constructors") and type classes. If you know Java Generics then the term "type variable" is a good match for "type parameter". These can be combined with constraints to restrict the set of admissable types. So, with Haskell you don't loose anything.
Clojure is basically untyped, therefore the whole concept doesn't apply. This gives more freedom, but also more responsibility. However, Typed Clojure adds compile-time static type checking, if type annotations were provided. For functions, Typed Clojure offers type parameters. But, AFAIK, and by the time of this writing, Typed Clojure doesn't offer type parameters for records.
Encapsulation
The OO practitioner will have noticed that the very important OO idea of visibility of members seems to be completely missing in Clojure and Haskell. Which is true regarding data.
Restriction of visibility in OO can have two reasons:
Foreign code must not rely on a members value because it's not part of the API and it might be subject to change without warning.
Foreign code must not be allowed to change a members value when this could bring the object into an inconsistent state.
As available in todays mainstream OO languages, I don't see that the first reason is sufficiently covered by technical visibility, because the notion of "foreign" can not be adequately encoded. In fact, an idea like PublishedInterface makes only sense because visibility does not express our intent. Instead of a technical restriction, sheer documentation seems to be a better way to express how reliable a piece of a data structure is.
Regarding the second reason, immutable data and referential transparency is certainly helpful. A system where most of the functions don't rely on mutable state is less prone to failure caused by erroneous modification of some state. Of course, it is still possible to bring data into an inconsistent state and pass this to functions which signal an exception. But the same is possible for mutable objects, the only difference being that a setter signals an exception a bit earlier. Eventually validation must detect this at the earliest possible point in time to give feedback to the user or a external system. This is true regardless of the paradigm.
Regarding visibility of functions, Haskell as well as Clojure give us a means to make a subset of them available in other modules / namespaces and to protect all others from public usage. Due to its type system Haskell can additionally protect data structures from being used in foreign modules.
Intensional Equality
In a language that consistently uses value semantics there is only extensional equality and the test for equality works everywhere with = or ==. If we need identity in our data then we can resort to the same mechanism that we use for records in a relational database. Either define an id function that makes use of some of the fields or add a surrogate key. Anyway, in a system with minimal mutable state the appetite for object identity diminishes rapidly.
Are there any downsides?
Of course, apart from being different and requiring us to learn some stuff, programming without objects -- especially without mutable state -- sometimes calls for ideas and concepts that we would never see in OOP7. For example, there is the concept of a zipper to manipulate tree-like data which is dispensable in OO because we can just hold onto a node in a tree in order to modify it efficiently in place. Or, you can't create cyclic dependencies in data structures. In my experience, you seldom encounter these restrictions, and either detect that your idea was crap anyway, or that there is an unexpected but elegant solution available.
A system without side-effects is a useless thing. So real-life functional languages offer ways to enable them. By being either forced by the compiler to wrap side-effects (as in Haskell) or by being punished by obstrusive API calls (as in Clojure) we put side-effects at specific places and handle them with great care. This affects the structure of the system. But it is a good thing, because having referential transparency in large parts of a code base is a breeze when it comes to testing, parallelization or simply understanding what code does.
You may argue that imperative programming leads to more efficient programs compared to functional programming. You're right. Manual memory management is also likely to be more efficient than relying on a garbage collector. If done correctly. Is there anyone on the JVM missing manual memory management? No? So, there is certainly a price. But modern multi-core hardware as available in enterprise computing is not as expensive as precious programmer time.
Conclusion
This was really a long journey. I started by breaking down and analyzing the features that the good old OO class offers. I continued with showing how you can do the same and more using a modern FP language. I know, it looks strange and I promise it feels strange... but only in the beginning. In the end you're much better off learning how to use the power of a modern language like Clojure or Haskell.UPDATE: FORMER Prime Minister John Howard believes there is still support for tight gun controls.
Mr Howard was speaking at a $350-per head lunch in Sydney yesterday hosted by Gun Control Australia.
Mr Howard said he opposed any winding back of gun control legislation.
“If the community thought the gun laws were being seriously weakened their would be quite a kick back,” he said.
Commenting on the controversial Adler A110 lever-action shotgun, Mr Howard said he supported the government’s temporary ban on imports.
“If the Government ends up letting this in, and not treating it as I think it should be on the evidence available to me at the moment — treated as akin to an automatic or semiautomatic — then I would be very critical of that, certainly, and that would be a huge mistake,” Mr Howard said.
The Federal Government will not be revoking its now temporary ban.
Senator David Leyonhjelm has ended his bid to have the initially permanent ban overturned with the Government agreeing to a “sunset clause” on the ban after 12 months.
Senator Leyonhjelm says gun owners will need to be vigilant, or else a ban may be reintroduced.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott intervened in July to suspend imports of what was dubbed a “fast and furious” shotgun, which threatened to undermine gun laws introduced after the Port Arthur massacre.
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The Government ban succeeded in stopping the arrival of 7000 Adler seven-shot lever-action shotguns entering Australia.
The shotguns would have been available to category A licence holders.
A modified version of the Turkish-made shotgun, now reduced to five shots, is expected to arrive in Australia later this month.
Senator Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrats senator for NSW, won plaudits from the pro-gun lobby after negotiating with the Government to have the ban replaced with a temporary halt.
Imports of the seven-shot Adler are suspended until the National Firearms Agreement review process, which is expected to take about six months, is completed.
Senator Leyonhjelm yesterday gave notice that he would withdraw his disallowance motion to disallow the permanent ban “because the government has advised that it will replace the permanent ban with a temporary ban”.
An online petition signed by 7300 shooters urged the Commonwealth to revoke the ban.
A spokesman for Senator Leyonhjelm said he would “assess the Government’s approach in detail and consider next steps for representing law-abiding shooters over the coming weeks”.
Critics have warned the Turkish-made Adler A110 threatened to open the door to thousands of ordinary shooters being able to own a rapid-fire shotgun for the first time since Port Arthur.
Justice Minister Michael Keenan said the decision to suspend imports was not about targeting law-abiding gun owners but reflected the heightened terrorist threat in Australia.
“We know gun technology has updated and we’re doing the work to ensure our laws aren’t outdated,’’ Mr Keenan said.
Senator Leyonhjelm said: “I am concerned that some people in the Government who would not know their backside from a popgun, want to renege on the National Firearms Agreement.”
“There is nothing new about the Adler. It is not rapid fire or more powerful than any other shotgun. I will continue to use my votes in the Senate in the interests of Australia’s 800,000 law abiding gun owners.”× Gov. Fallin signs ‘Humanity of the Unborn Child Act’ into law
OKLAHOMA CITY – A bill that requires the state Department of Health to develop informational material “for the purpose of achieving an abortion-free society” was signed into law.
On Monday afternoon, Gov. Fallin signed The Humanity of the Unborn Child Act.
The act, authored by Republican Rep. Ann Coody, authorizes the health department to develop a public information campaign about the developmental stages of a fetus and alternatives to abortion. It also authorizes an optional instructional program for students.
A previous version of the bill that required Oklahoma’s public schools to teach that life begins at conception was amended in the Senate.
However, the bill’s message clearly states that any information distributed to the public “shall clearly and consistently teach that abortion kills a living human being.”
The bill also states that information should be available for prenatal health care, but “no program or state employee may refer any student to a medical facility or any provider for the performance of an abortion.” It also says that the program should include “no component of human sexuality education other than those included in science education standards.”
Coody says the legislation can only be implemented if funding is available in the future.
The act will go into effect Nov. 1.[+]Enlarge Unleaded Engineered bacteria could help remove lead from wastewater at treatment facilities such as this one. Credit: Shutterstock
Industrial activities such as battery manufacturing can pollute water with lead and other toxic heavy metals. Now, Chinese researchers have designed a way to use microbes to get the lead out. They have engineered bacteria that can detect the toxic metal and remove it from water (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2014, DOI: 10.1021/es4046567).
Although chelating agents and sorbent materials can scrub heavy metals from water, workers still must dispose of the contaminated materials, which can create pollution, says Jing Zhao of Nanjing University and Peking University’s Shenzhen Graduate School. His team has developed a more sustainable approach to recover heavy metals from contaminated water for potential reuse in industry. They recently engineered bacteria to express a gold-binding protein, allowing them to detect the metal and recover it from wastewater (Chem. Sci. 2012, DOI: 10.1039/C2SC01119K). The scientists thought a similar strategy could help them get rid of lead.
So he and colleagues, including Zong-Wan Mao of Sun Yat-Sen University, engineered Escherichia coli to express a lead-binding protein on the cell’s surface. With the protein on the surface, the bacteria can grab large amounts of lead without letting the metal accumulate inside the cells, which can reduce their growth. The researchers also included a set of genes that allowed the bacteria to produce a fluorescent signal when lead binds to the surface proteins.
The modified microbes could collect 5 to 12% of the lead in solutions with concentrations between 5 and 300 μM of the metal. In China, lead concentrations up to 5 μM are allowed in wastewater, but illegal discharge sites may have concentrations of 300 μM or more, according to Zhao.Uber’s self-driving cars are operating on Pittsburgh streets, so it’s only natural they’d pick up some professional athletes along the way. Defensive ends Cam Heyward and Stephon Tuitt likely max out the passenger capacity of the back of that Uber-tech equipped Ford Fusion that picks them up, but they do manage to get in and take the trip.
My favorite moment here might be when Tuitt basically says what every person contemplating a first ride in one of these is thinking before they actually get picked up by the car.
Tuitt: "What are we going to do?"
Cam: "Don't worry, bro. I got the @Uber_PIT." pic.twitter.com/08KhpV02GR — Pittsburgh Steelers (@steelers) October 7, 2016
The video has some solid explanatory sections that cover its LiDAR capabilities, laying the basics of that tech pretty clearly. It also might be the closest non-Pittsburgh residents get to being able to take a ride inside one for a while.
Uber’s doing its self-driving trials in Pittsburgh because that’s where its robotics facility is located. The ride-hailing company took most of its self-driving vehicle engineering department from nearby Carnegie Mellon University, so it makes sense that it would choose the city to host its Advanced Technologies Center, and to kick off its initial driverless trials.
Testing defensive end load-bearing capabilities might not be absolutely crucial to achieving a wider rollout, but it will help Uber humanize the tech, which is bound to make others like Tuitt “nervous” at first.by
There is an ongoing debate on the potential health risks of the consumption of genetically modified (GM) plants containing high levels of pesticide residues.
Currently, no regulatory authority requests mandatory chronic animal feeding studies to be performed for edible GMOs and formulated pesticides. This fact is at the origin of most of the controversies. Only studies consisting of 90-day rat feeding trials have been conducted by manufacturers for GMOs.
Statistical differences in the biochemistry of treated rats versus controls may represent the initial signs of long-term pathologies, possibly explained at least in part by pesticide residues in the GM feed.
This is why we studied the long-term toxicity of a Roundup-tolerant GM maize (NK603) and a whole Roundup pesticide formulation at environmentally relevant levels from 0.1 ppb.
We first published these results in Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) on 19 September, 2012 after a careful and thorough peer review.
However, 1 year and 2 months later, in an unusual step, the editor-in-chief requested the retraction of our study, while conceding that the data were not incorrect and that there was no misconduct and no fraud or intentional misinterpretation.
According to him, some data were inconclusive, but for reasons already known at the time of submission of the paper. This artiocle summarises the debate resulting in this retraction – which in our view is a historic example of conflicts of interests in the scientific assessments of products commercialized worldwide.
The long-term toxicity study of the NK603 maize and Roundup
An initial study on NK603 maize was submitted by Monsanto Company in support of commercial authorization of the maize. NK603 maize was fed to 4 groups of 20 Sprague Dawley rats (2 doses of 11% and 33% in the diet of both sexes) for 90 days. The blood analyses were performed on 10 rats per group.
The re-analysis of the raw data resulted in a debate on the biological relevance of admitted statistical differences versus controls as the first signs of hepatorenal toxicities.
To solve the problem, a 2-year-long study was carried out using two hundred Sprague Dawley rats to which the following treatments were administered:
NK603 maize treated or not with Roundup at three different levels in their feed (11%, 22%, and 33% of the total diet)
and Roundup alone, administered via drinking water at three different concentrations, from the admitted residual level in regular tap water (0.1 ppb), to the maximum level authorized in GMOs (400 ppm), up to half of the agricultural dose (0.5%).
They were divided into ten groups, each containing ten males and ten females. No other long-term study has examined the effects of regular consumption of Roundup-tolerant GM maize and of a pesticide formulation, in any dilution, on blood parameters, sexual hormones, and multiple organs.
Statistically discriminant disturbances
We found that these products provoked statistically discriminant disturbances in biochemical markers of livers and kidneys in females at the 15th month, when most of the rats were still alive. At the same time, testosterone and estradiol levels were also disturbed.
At the end of the experiments, these disrupted biochemical markers corresponded to pathologies evidenced in a blinded manner: notably hepatorenal deficiencies, more severe in males, and female mammary tumors, which led to premature deaths.
For instance, after around 700 days, there were up to 3.25 more mammary tumors (the highest rate was observed in females consuming 0.1 ppb of Roundup in water). This could be associated with a 2.4-time increase in pituitary dysfunctions noticed by the end of the experiment (2 years).
Then the attacks began
These findings were immediately dismissed by persons involved in the products’ authorizations, or in collaboration with biotech industries.
A number of them wrote to FCT to nourish a controversy, including Richard Goodman, a former Monsanto employee in charge of the immunotoxicity files of GMOs, and Paul Christou, a patent holder of the methods used to create transgenic plants.
This was rapidly followed by a coordination of national regulatory agencies organized by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), released on 4 October, 2012. The EFSA had previously assessed NK603, and glyphosate, the declared active principle of Roundup, as safe on the basis of regulatory data, which they never fully published.
The EFSA has since published Monsanto’s safety data on NK603 maize, but not on glyphosate. The NK603 data are in a pdf format preventing an easy statistical re-analysis. However, there was no long-term toxicological assessment for NK603, or for Roundup.
Moreover, we demonstrated in several studies that Roundup is far more toxic than glyphosate because of non-inert adjuvants. On 10 October, 2012, the Monsanto Company also sent its criticisms to FCT but did not release its safety data, claiming commercial confidentiality.
Serious yet undisclosed conflicts of interest
Overall, the first wave of criticisms arrived within a week, mostly from plant biologists. We answered all criticisms in FCT on 9 November, 2012. The debate then encompassed scientific arguments.
A second wave of ad hominem and potentially libelous comments appeared in different journals [13-16]. Regrettably, there were no invitations to respond to these exacerbated attacks, which we discovered only by our literature survey. Some of the authors of these articles had serious yet undisclosed conflicts of interest.
The scientific remarks concentrated on the supposedly inadequate choice of the Sprague Dawley rat strain, which is, however, a classic model for toxicology. The Sprague Dawley strain was also used by Monsanto in its 90-day test on the same maize.
In addition, Monsanto measured biochemically the same number of rats per group as in our experiment. Thus, with regard to blood and urine biochemistry, Monsanto gathered data from the same number of rats that we did.
Unsubstantiated allegations of fraud or errors
Paul Christou, the lead author of Arjo et al., demanded that our paper be retracted and insulted us personally. He claimed first in a letter addressed to the editor-in-chief that the publication of our study “does not meet minimal acceptable standards of scientific rigor”and “will damage an entire scientific discipline due to flawed conclusion”.
Then, he attacked us in an article published in the journal Transgenic Research on 20 December 2012.
The quantity of insults and defamations in this paper, authorized and co-authored by the editor-in-chief in a supposedly serious Journal, is excessive. They include:
“abject failure to treat the experimental animals in a humane manner”,
“inability to formulate a valid hypothesis”,
“media fanfare”,
“fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements”,
“unethical behavior”,
“transparent attempt to discredit regulatory agencies”,
“ammunition for extremists”,
“flawed science”,
“disingenuous or inept”, and
“unjustified waste of animals” (while at the same time asking for more animals in the groups).
Christou and co-authors suggest that by practising “flawed science”, we are working against “progress towards a better quality of life” and in fact are “actively working to make life worse”. We were not invited to reply.
Christou – further undisclosed conflicts of interest
This behaviour can be explained, though not justified, by the undisclosed conflicts of interests. Christou is not only the editor-in-chief of Transgenic Research, the journal in which he published his article, but is also linked to Monsanto.
He is named as the inventor on several patents on GM crop technology, for most of which Monsanto owns the property rights. These include patents on the plant transformation process used to make glyphosate-tolerant transgenic corn plants.
He worked as a researcher at Agracetus Inc. (later acquired by Monsanto) for 12 years. Then, from 1994 to 2001, Christou worked at the John Innes Centre in the UK, which is heavily invested in GM crop technology. He thus has no mammalian toxicology background.
However, in his published article, Christou only gave as his affiliation his publicly funded position at a research institute.
Christou’s failure to declare his current interests – his inventor status on patents concerning the company that developed the products we tested – could be considered grounds for retraction of a paper in a scientific journal, according to ethical guidelines for scientific publishing.
The Arjo et al article was co-authored by Wayne Parrott, an active member of the Biotechnology Committee at the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI).
ILSI is funded by multinational food, agribusiness, and biotechnology companies, including Monsanto and Syngenta. ILSI has proved highly controversial in North America and Europe due to its influence on risk assessment methodologies for chemicals, pesticides, and GM foods.
Wayne Parrott also has an inventor status in patents on materials and methods for selecting transgenic organisms and transformation vector systems.
False assertions, misrepresentations and defamation
In addition, Christou and his co-authors made numerous mistakes, false and unsubstantiated assertions, and misrepresentations of our data.
The title of Arjo et al’s paper includes defamation and a misrepresentation of our research, implying that it is “pseudoscience” and alleging that it claimed Roundup Ready maize and Roundup herbicide caused “cancer” in rats – a claim we never made.
We did not even use the word ‘cancer’ in our paper although this argument was reiterated in the final letter of the editor-in-chief of FCT when explaining his decision to retract our paper. Tumors do not always lead to cancer, even if they can be more deleterious in a shorter time because of their size or body position, by hurting internal functions.
Arjo et al’s paper begins with a false assertion that is not evidenced in the paper or in the cited source: “It started with a press conference in which journalists agreed not to engage in fact-checking”. The authors made other false assertions about our study, for example, alleging that “the water consumption was not measured”.
In fact, we measured both the water and food consumption, and the stability of the Roundup solution over time. This was indicated in the paper, in which we explained that all the data cannot be shown in one paper and that we concentrated on the most important data; these parameters were only part of a routine survey.
They also falsified the reporting of the data, compiling the mortality data only at the end of the experiment and ignoring the originality and the major findings of the differential chronological effects between treated rats and controls, which we established by measuring tumor size twice a week over 2 years.
Moreover, we respected legal requirements and ethical norms relating to animal experiments, and Arjo et al. present no evidence of the contrary, so their allegation of inhumane treatment of the rats is without substance.
Our responses were simply ignored
Importantly, we had already answered many of the criticisms of our paper made by Arjo et al in a paper that was published before that of Arjo et al.. Their publication was received on 20 December 2012, when our paper was published on 9 November 2012. Our published answers were simply ignored.
Christou and Parrott were not alone in failing to declare conflicts of interest in their criticism of our paper. Since we underlined that 75% of the comments addressed to FCT within a week after our study was published came from plant biologists, it was discovered that several had developed patents on GMOs.
Some authors were employees of Monsanto Company, which owns NK603 GM maize and sells Roundup herbicide. Other more recent papers, published by plant biologists and/or affiliates of the industry-funded group ILSI [15,16], repeated the arguments.
Forbes magazine – false and unsubstantiated fraud allegation
The author of a separate article criticizing our study expressed concern that our results could damage public opinion about GM crops – a sentiment that gives precedence to economic interests over public health. An article in Forbes magazine even alleged, without presenting any evidence, that we had committed fraud.
Surprisingly, even Monsanto authors declared that they had “no conflicts of interest” in their first draft published online on FCT website.
Investigative reports evidenced that many authors of these opinions had failed to disclose their conflicts of interest, including Henry Miller, Mark Tester, Chris Leaver, Bruce Chassy, Martina Newell-McGloughlin, Andrew Cockburn, L. Val Giddings, Sivramiah Shantharam, Lucia de Souza, Erio Barale-Thomas, and Marc Fellous.
The undisclosed conflicts of interest included links with biotechnology companies that develop GMOs and with industry-backed lobbying organizations.
Huge implications for public health
All of this has huge implications for public health. We observed an intense lobbying in parliaments, as well as proofs of conflicts of interests for persons involved in the regulatory decisions for the commercialization of these products.
A series of high-profile conflict-of-interest revelations (not restricted to GMOs and pesticides) led to the resignations of leading administrators involved in decisions affecting the assessment of these products – including:
*the European Commissioner John Dalli;
*and the former chair of the European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) management board Diana Banati.
In February of 2013, a strange occurrence following the publication of our paper raised questions about the connections of industry to scientific publishing, described below.
Conflicts of interests in the editorial board
In February 2013, FCT acquired a new assistant editor for biotechnology, Richard E. Goodman. The editor-in-chief has admitted that Goodman was introduced into the editorial board after he sent a letter to FCT to complain about our study.
In his letter, Goodman appears worried about economic consequences but not so much about potential public health consequences. He wrote:
“The implications and the impacts of this uncontrolled study is having HUGE impacts, in international trade, in consumer confidence in all aspects of food safety, and certainly in US state referendums on labelling.”
Further in his letter, Goodman asked for “an evaluation by an independent set of toxicologists”. This is particularly why the Publishing Assistant for FCT asked for our raw data on 15 March 2013.
In fact, we can question the independence of this re-evaluation. After his appointment at FCT, Goodman was a member of the subcommittee that requested our raw data, until we complained to Elsevier publishing group.
Goodman is far from being independent. He previously worked for Monsanto for 7 years. He also has a long-standing affiliation with ILSI. Yet Goodman will now deal with all biotechnology papers submitted to FCT.
Another scientific paper on GMO risks was withdrawn from FCT, without explanation shortly after it had been accepted and published by the journal. The paper was immediately published by another journal according to the authors’ initiative.
The retraction notice
We received a letter from the editor-in-chief of FCT, A. Wallace Hayes, asking us to retract our paper on |
user desires to be automatically performed. In the case of a page-biased search system, for example, attributes of a reference set of information to be used in a comparison can be used to determine whether a similar set can be considered to match the reference set.A support vector machine (SVM) is an example of a classifier that can be employed. The SVM operates by finding a hypersurface in the space of possible inputs, which hypersurface attempts to split the triggering criteria from the non-triggering events. Intuitively, this makes the classification correct for testing data that is near, but not identical to training data. Other directed and undirected model classification approaches include, for example, naive Bayes, Bayesian networks, decision trees, and probabilistic classification models providing different patterns of independence can be employed. Classification as used herein also includes statistical regression that is utilized to develop models of priority.As will be readily appreciated from the subject specification, components disclosed or described herein can employ classifiers that are explicitly trained (for example, by a generic training data) as well as implicitly trained (for example, by observing user behavior, receiving extrinsic information). For example, SVMs are configured by a learning or training phase within a classifier constructor and feature selection module. Thus, the classifier(s) can be used to automatically perform a number of functions including but not limited to ranking search results.Moreover, those skilled in the art will appreciate that the above-described components and methods may be practiced with other computer system configurations, including single-processor or multi-processor computer systems, minicomputers, mainframe computers, as well as personal computers, hand-held computing devices, microprocessor-based and/or programmable consumer electronics, and the like, each of which may operatively communicate with one or more associated devices. Certain illustrated aspects of the disclosed and described components and methods may also be practiced in distributed computing environments where certain tasks are performed by remote processing devices that are linked through a communications network or other data connection. However, some, if not all, of these aspects may be practiced on stand-alone computers. In a distributed computing environment, program modules may be located in local and/or remote memory storage devices. FIG. 12 is a schematic block diagram of a sample-computing environment 1200 within which the disclosed and described components and methods can be used. The system 1200 includes one or more client(s) 1210. The client(s) 1210 can be hardware and/or software (for example, threads, processes, computing devices). The system 1200 also includes one or more server(s) 1220. The server(s) 1220 can be hardware and/or software (for example, threads, processes, computing devices). The server(s) 1220 can house threads or processes to perform transformations by employing the disclosed and described components or methods, for example. Specifically, one component that can be implemented on the server 1220 is a security server. Additionally, various other disclosed and discussed components can be implemented on the server 1220.One possible means of communication between a client 1210 and a server 1220 can be in the form of a data packet adapted to be transmitted between two or more computer processes. The system 1200 includes a communication framework 1240 that can be employed to facilitate communications between the client(s) 1210 and the server(s) 1220. The client(s) 1210 are operably connected to one or more client data store(s) 1250 that can be employed to store information local to the client(s) 1210. Similarly, the server(s) 1220 are operably connected to one or more server data store(s) 1230 that can be employed to store information local to the server(s) 1240.With reference to FIG. 13, an exemplary environment 1300 for implementing various components includes a computer 1312. The computer 1312 includes a processing unit 1314, a system memory 1316, and a system bus 1318. The system bus 1318 couples the system components including, but not limited to, the system memory 1316 to the processing unit 1314. The processing unit 1314 can be any of various available processors. Dual microprocessors and other multiprocessor architectures also can be employed as the processing unit 1314.The system bus 1318 can be any of several types of bus structure(s) including the memory bus or memory controller, a peripheral bus or external bus, and/or a local bus using any variety of available bus architectures including, but not limited to, Industrial Standard Architecture (ISA), Micro-Channel Architecture (MCA), Extended ISA (EISA), Intelligent Drive Electronics (IDE), VESA Local Bus (VLB), Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI Express), ExpressCard, Card Bus, Universal Serial Bus (USB), Advanced Graphics Port (AGP), Personal Computer Memory Card International Association bus (PCMCIA), Firewire (IEEE 1394), Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA), and Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI).The system memory 1316 includes volatile memory 1320 and nonvolatile memory 1322. The basic input/output system (BIOS), containing the basic routines to transfer information between elements within the computer 1312, such as during start-up, is stored in nonvolatile memory 1322. By way of illustration, and not limitation, nonvolatile memory 1322 can include read only memory (ROM), programmable ROM (PROM), electrically programmable ROM (EPROM), electrically erasable ROM (EEPROM), or flash memory. Volatile memory 1320 includes random access memory (RAM), which acts as external cache memory. By way of illustration and not limitation, RAM is available in many forms such as synchronous RAM (SRAM), dynamic RAM (DRAM), synchronous DRAM (SDRAM), double data rate SDRAM (DDR SDRAM), enhanced SDRAM (ESDRAM), Synchlink DRAM (SLDRAM), and direct Rambus RAM (DRRAM).Computer 1312 also includes removable/non-removable, volatile/non-volatile computer storage media. For example, FIG. 13 illustrates disk storage 1324. The disk storage 1324 includes, but is not limited to, devices like a magnetic disk drive, floppy disk drive, tape drive, Jaz drive, Zip drive, LS-100 drive, flash memory card, or memory stick. In addition, disk storage 1224 can include storage media separately or in combination with other storage media including, but not limited to, an optical disk drive such as a compact disk ROM device (CD-ROM), CD recordable drive (CD-R Drive), CD rewritable drive (CD-RW Drive) or a digital versatile disk ROM drive (DVD-ROM). To facilitate connection of the disk storage devices 1324 to the system bus 1318, a removable or non-removable interface is typically used such as interface 1326.The various types of volatile and non-volatile memory or storage provided with the computer 1312 can be used to store components of various implementations of the data port signaling system disclosed and described herein. For example, with reference to FIG. 3, the ranking module 310 can be implemented as a software module in the non-volatile memory 1322. At runtime, information the ranking module 310 can be loaded into the volatile memory 1320 from where machine-interpretable code can be accessed by the processing unit 1314 and thereby placed into execution.It is to be appreciated that FIG. 13 describes software that acts as an intermediary between users and the basic computer resources described in the suitable operating environment 1300. Such software includes an operating system 1328. The operating system 1328, which can be stored on the disk storage 1324, acts to control and allocate resources of the computer system 1312. System applications 1330 take advantage of the management of resources by operating system 1328 through program modules 1332 and program data 1334 stored either in system memory 1316 or on disk storage 1324. It is to be appreciated that the disclosed components and methods can be implemented with various operating systems or combinations of operating systems.A user enters commands or information into the computer 1312 through input device(s) 1336. The input devices 1336 include, but are not limited to, a pointing device such as a mouse, trackball, stylus, touch pad, keyboard, microphone, joystick, game pad, satellite dish, scanner, TV tuner card, digital camera, digital video camera, web camera, and the like. These and other input devices connect to the processing unit 1314 through the system bus 1318 via interface port(s) 1338. Interface port(s) 1338 include, for example, a serial port, a parallel port, a game port, and a universal serial bus (USB). Output device(s) 1340 use some of the same type of ports as input device(s) 1336. Thus, for example, a USB port may be used to provide input to computer 1312, and to output information from computer 1312 to an output device 1340. The interface ports 1338 specifically can include various data connection ports that can be used with components disclosed and described herein, among others.Output adapter 1342 is provided to illustrate that there are some output devices 1340 like monitors, speakers, and printers, among other output devices 1340, which require special adapters. The output adapters 1342 include, by way of illustration and not limitation, video and sound cards that provide a means of connection between the output device 1340 and the system bus 1318. It should be noted that other devices and/or systems of devices provide both input and output capabilities such as remote computer(s) 1344.Computer 1312 can operate in a networked environment using logical connections to one or more remote computers, such as remote computer(s) 1344. The remote computer(s) 1344 can be a personal computer, a server, a router, a network PC, a workstation, a microprocessor based appliance, a peer device or other common network node and the like, and typically includes many or all of the elements described relative to computer 1312. For purposes of brevity, only a memory storage device 1346 is illustrated with remote computer(s) 1344. Remote computer(s) 1344 is logically connected to computer 1312 through a network interface 1348 and then physically connected via communication connection 1350. Network interface 1348 encompasses wired and/or wireless communication networks such as local-area networks (LAN) and wide-area networks (WAN). LAN technologies include Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), Copper Distributed Data Interface (CDDI), Ethernet, Token Ring and the like. WAN technologies include, but are not limited to, point-to-point links, circuit switching networks like Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN) and variations thereon, packet switching networks, and Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL).Communication connection(s) 1350 refers to the hardware/software employed to connect the network interface 1348 to the bus 1318. While communication connection 1350 is shown for illustrative clarity inside computer 1312, it can also be external to computer 1312. The hardware/software necessary for connection to the network interface 1348 includes, for exemplary purposes only, internal and external technologies such as, modems including regular telephone grade modems, cable modems and DSL modems, ISDN adapters, and Ethernet cards.What has been described above includes illustrative examples of certain components and methods. It is, of course, not possible to describe every conceivable combination of components or methodologies, but one of ordinary skill in the art will recognize that many further combinations and permutations are possible. Accordingly, all such alterations, modifications, and variations are intended to fall within the spirit and scope of the appended claims.In particular and in regard to the various functions performed by the above described components, devices, circuits, systems and the like, the terms (including a reference to a "means") used to describe such components are intended to correspond, unless otherwise indicated, to any component which performs the specified function of the described component (for example, a functional equivalent), even though not structurally equivalent to the disclosed structure, which performs the function in the herein illustrated examples. In this regard, it will also be recognized that the disclosed and described components and methods can include a system as well as a computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing the acts and/or events of the various disclosed and described methods.In addition, while a particular feature may have been disclosed with respect to only one of several implementations, such feature may be combined with one or more other features of the other implementations as may be desired and advantageous for any given or particular application. Furthermore, to the extent that the terms "includes," and "including" and variants thereof are used in either the detailed description or the claims, these terms are intended to be inclusive in a manner similar to the term "comprising."HYDERABAD: Not just wheelchairs, but all basic facilities at Gandhi Hospital come for a price. The nexus of in-house staffers has ensured that patients walking into the staterun facility have no choice but to cough up a few extra bucks -over and above the cost of treatment -in the name of 'chai paani'.Investigation by TOI on Monday revealed that corruption at the 1,800-bed hospital is far more widespread than what meets the eye. To add to patient's woes are the extremely unhygienic conditions and poor services that they, and their families, are left to battle. “My brother was admitted in the hospital in January.During his treatment, we had to pay up to Rs 50 three times a day to the housekeeping staff to avail their services. Apart from this, we had to bribe the ward boys with another Rs 200 to get us an injection or medicines,“ said Hajra Begum, sister of Khaja Pasha, who succumbed to Haemophilia on March 18. The sister was visiting another ailing relative, admitted in the emergency ward, on Monday.Gandhi Hospital has close to 3,000 patients visiting the OP -from across the state -on a regular basis. Several among them have similar tales of harassment, at the hands of hospital staff, to share. Prerana, a dentist, for instance said how she had to bribe the ward boys, every time her grandfather shifted from one ward to the other.“And this was happening constantly. After settling in one ward, he was shifted again to ward no 6. Every time he was shifted, ward boys demanded `chai paani',“ said Prerana.While the ward boys -all of them outsourced -at the hospital draw a monthly salary of Rs 12,000, the salaries of housekeeping staff is about Rs 7,800 (including provident fund and state insurance). Insiders say these employees easily make an additional Rs 7,500 to 15,000 from `chai paani' demands.They shockingly charge even to change soiled bed sheets, said another patient, Mahalaxmi who had come from Tandur, Vikharabad. “I was amazed when a housekeeping staff told me that I would need to pay some money to get a fresh bed sheet,“ she said, ruing how the staffers are extremely rude.When TOI spoke to the incharge of housekeeping at the hospital, S Nagaraju, he said that the problem lies in the acute shortage of staff. “There are only 250 sanitation workers, 20 supervisors and 200 ward boys working in three shifts. The required manpower in each department is 400,“ said Nagaraju.He inexplicably argued how corruption had also mushroomed because of patients' attitude. “Several patients take the wheelchair and fail to return it. They avail it from the OP and then leave it at some other ward.Ward boys then have to bring it back. Therefore, they seek money so that there is a sense of accountability among patients,“ said Nagaraju.While government hospitals attract patients from across all economic strata of society, it particular serves the lesser privileged. It is extremely important that authorities put a fair system in place so that patients can avail hospital facilities without much trouble. Healthcare is a basic right of every citizen and they cannot be deprived of the same because of monetary constraints.SANAA, Yemen (AP) — An official news agency controlled by Yemen’s Houthi rebels says 12 civilians have been killed in two airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition in a northern province.
The SABA news agency reports that warplanes bombed a house in the town of al-Safra in Saada province Friday, killing nine residents including four children. A second airstrike bombed a car carrying civilians, killing three and wounding seven.
Security officials in Saada confirmed the airstrike on the house and the civilian deaths. It wasn’t possible to verify the second attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Since 2015, the conflict in Yemen has pitted the Saudi-led coalition against Houthi rebels. The war has left over 10,000 civilians dead and displaced three million others.Phil Harris, captain of one of the crab-fishing vessels featured on the Discovery Channel series "Deadliest Catch" has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke.
Harris suffered a stroke while in port offloading his vessel, the 128-foot Cornelia Marie, according to the Discovery Channel website.
Harris was transported to a local medical facility, where he was resting comfortably.
Harris has captained the Cornelia Marie for 18 years and has two sons, Josh and Jake, who work as deckhands on the boat.
The popular television series "Deadliest Catch" follows the adventures of seven crabbing vessels and their crews during the Alaskan king crab season in the Bering Sea. A sixth season has been announced for broadcast this year.
The Aleutian Islands port of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, is the base of operations for the fishing fleet.
-- Kelly Burgess
Photo: Capt. Phil Harris of the Cornelia Marie. Credit: Discovery Channel
To follow this blog on Twitter please visit @latimesoutposts.The first giraffe in France arrived at the port of Marseilles (Marseille in French) on 23 October 1826. The strange animal with spots, long legs, bulging eyes, eighteen-inch tongue, and horn-like structures on its head, was a gift from the Viceroy of Egypt to Charles X. Everyone who saw her thought she was marvelous. In fact, she excited the public’s curiosity for several days. One English reporter said the giraffe was something he had never witnessed, and he claimed there was nothing “more beautiful than the large, bright, and mild eyes of this elegantly-formed creature.”[1] Because of her undeniable beauty, the giraffe quickly acquired the nickname of “Belle Africaine” or “le bel animal du roi” (The Beautiful Animal of the King). Today, however, she is called Zafara.
Belle Africaine was small and young when captured by Sudan hunters. In fact, she was so small, she was taken to Khartoum on the back of a camel, and cows traveled with her so she could be fed with their milk. From Khartoum she sailed down the Nile to Alexandria. There she boarded a ship. Her sea journey lasted thirty-two days, and to transport her on the ship, Belle Africaine traveled standing up in the hold. Her long neck and head protruded through a hole in the deck, shaded by a tent. (A male giraffe arrived at the same time in Marseilles. However, the male giraffe headed to London as a gift for George IV and went to Windsor where it was placed in the Great Park.)
From the moment Belle Africaine stepped off the ship, the public was enthralled and numerous descriptions were given of her:
“It must be confessed that the attitudes of the giraffe are not always graceful; for instance, whens she gallops her hind feet project beyond the fore feet, in consequence of the great slope of her back; and when she puts her head to the ground she is obliged to widen the distance between her fore feet in a very awkward manner. She looks best when upright and walking gently along, when she carries herself with much stateliness and grace. Her eyes are black and large, surrounded by eyelashes, and full of the mildest and most intelligent expression; her mouth is small and entirely covered by the upper lip; her tongue is remarkably long, thin, and black in colour; her ears are large and white, and her short horns, covered with brown hair, are placed between them. Her whole head is very small, and has a bony tubercle between the nostrils and the eyes, covered with hair. Her neck is furnished with a short black mane, and her neck, body, and sides of her head are covered with large brown spots on a white ground. Her tail is small, and has black hair at the end some inches long. Her feet are large and cleft, and resemble those of the ox, and when she walks the two feet on the same side move together.”[2]
Most people did not realize Belle Africaine was a political gift given in the hope that Charles X would stop supporting the Greeks in their war for independence against the Ottoman Empire. Newspapers teemed with articles daily about the giraffe. However, it never satisfied the public’s hunger. One newspaper announced, the giraffe would create intense interest among natural history lovers once she arrived in Paris. In fact, she did more than create interest in Paris.
Belle Africaine’s arrival in France resulted in honors bestowed upon her in practically every city she passed through. For example, the Prefect of Marseilles had her body-cloth embroidered with the arms of France. After wintering in Marseilles (in order to inure her to the change in climate), more honors followed. On her 550-mile, 41-day trek to Paris, she traveled by cavalcade. One newspaper stated, “her Highness’s predilection for cavalry was evinced by her following horses in every place she came through.”[3] The cavalcade was led by France’s foremost scientist, Ėtienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire who headed the menagerie at Les Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
Unfortunately, there was at least one incident that scared Belle Africaine as she journeyed to Paris. So many horsemen accompanied her on her way into Lyons she became alarmed, and, in turn, the horses became alarmed. The result was a scene of confusion, and it took some time before the cavalcade could be back on its way. The cavalcade’s next stop was Fontainebleau where a military escort from Paris met the cavalcade. Thus, her arrival into the city of Paris occurred on 30 June 1827.
Belle Africaine’s parade through Parisian streets evinced much fanfare. Additionally, “thirty gendarmes were appointed as guards of honor to protect her Highness (the giraffe) from the vulgar intrusion of the populace.”[4] It was also in Paris that Belle Africaine met King Charles X. After stating that the Dauphin had an audience with the king, the Court Gazette described the meeting between Belle Africaine and Charles X:
“‘Lundi, en la matinée, Madame le Giraffe va etre presented au Roi.’ Her Highness was to be presented to his Majesty! how little the king must have looked by a lady 14 feet high! What the ceremonial was I cannot say, but I really believe her Highness was guilty of leze majeste — the treason of looking down upon a king, the monarch of the great nation; but her Highness is unbendable by nature, and she has a quality very rare and estimable in the female sex, as all married men will allow; she is mute.”[5]
A formal reception for Belle Africaine also occurred at the Le Jardin des Plantes. Her entrance into the garden was tout as a “triumphal procession” with hundreds of carriages and people greeting her. A pamphlet was also printed that contained a congratulatory speech from the animals in the garden. One newspaper offered the following humorous tidbits related to the animal greeting’s given Belle Africaine:
“Marten Ours, the great bear, was the speaker, who offered to embrace her Highness, but she declined the hug; the Byson offered his horns; but she begged by signs he would present them to her intended; the Lion offered his paw, but she turned away, as he had forgotten to cut his claws. All the beasts, thinking their court useless, then conceived the lofty lady must be engaged to his Highness the Giraffe, on his voyage to England.”[6]
The exotic giraffe settled into the Le Jardin des Plantes after meeting France’s king and all of nature’s royalty. Public curiosity was high and La Pandore wrote on 12 July, “The giraffe occupies all the public’s attention; one talks of nothing else in the circles of the capital.”[7] Everyone wanted to see her, and supposedly from ten to twenty thousand persons poured into the garden daily for a glimpse at the exotic giraffe.
Everything also became à la giraffe. For example, “fresh portraits, by eminent artists, and bulletins of everything she did remarkable, were published weekly. All the bonnets and shoes and gloves and gowns—every species of apparel was made à la giraffe; quadrilles were danced ‘à la giraffe.'”[8] The giraffe so intrigued the Parisian populace her picture was “exhibited in every print-shop window … printed on every stage-coach. … Its long neck and sloping body … seen all over the papered walls, on the ladies’ sashes, on the gentlemen’s pocket-handkerchiefs, nay, the prettiest retailer of gingerbread had given his cakes the same all-fashionable form.”[9]
Belle Africaine’s popularity continued for several years. But as with all crazes, it came to an end. By 1830, the French tailor Barthélemy Thimonnier created the first practical sewing machine that stitched 200 stitches a minute. That same year France invaded Algiers, which fell on 4 July. Before the new status of Algiers could be settled, Charles X abdicated after the July Monarchy issued in a liberal constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe I, whose father was the guillotined Philippe Égalité.
Everywhere things were changing. In the midst of all the changes, Belle Africaine seemed somewhat ordinary and commonplace. Yet, she still remained at Le Jardin des Plantes and did so for 18 more years until she died. After her death, officials ordered her stuffed. She was then displayed in the foyer of the Jardin for many years, but then finally moved to the Museum of Natural History of La Rochelle, where she remains today.
References:
[1] “Paris, July 3,” in London Evening Standard, 9, July, 1827, p. 2.
[2] The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1832, p. 308-309.
[3] “The Giraffe,” in Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 25 August 1827, p. 2.
[4] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Majer, Michele, “La Mode à la girafe: Fashion, Culture, and Politics in Bourbon Restoration France’,” Studies in Decorative Arts 17:1 (Fall-Winter 2009-10), p. 131.
[8] The American in Paris, Volume 1, 1847, p. 133.
[9] Owen, Robert Dale, Twenty-seven Years of Autobiography, 1874, p. 274.
Related
Google+ CommentsA health visitor with a first class honours degree in nursing was found hanged after she became tormented by her severe skin condition.
Hollie McEwen, a dedicated professional, first suffered psoriasis as a 12-month-old but it eased with treatment.
However, it later reappeared due to stress and the 28-year-old became so depressed she took her own life at home.
Her father Andrew told an inquest: 'Her condition played a large part in what she decided to do.
'She was a beautiful, vibrant young woman who felt she couldn't deal with the condition. She felt this was the only way out.'
The Doncaster hearing was told she had suffered from bulimia as a teenager. Her family believed the eating disorder stemmed from her ongoing issues with her skin condition.
Her mother Wendy said: 'Her skin condition played a large part in her problems as a teenager and when older I feel this was at the root of all the problems.'
Hollie McEwen, 28, hanged herself just two days after she had sought medical help for her depression
Ms McEwen, pictured, had been prescribed drugs to help combat her depression
Hollie's body was found just two days after she had sought medical help for her depression.
She had spent a long time writing several letters to loved ones which were found in a bin.
Her father, who saw her the evening before the tragedy said: 'She was a happy, young woman who enjoyed her work and social life but she kept everything very close to herself. We had a good laugh on that last night and there was no indication she was unhappy.'
Mrs McEwen said her daughter, who lived in Scawsby, Doncaster, had treatment for psoriasis over the last few years involving hospital stays and steroids after suffering anxiety attacks.
Hollie had enjoyed a family holiday in Turkey but was 'down' after being given an anti-depression drug by her GP which failed to lighten her mood.
'She was an intelligent, determined and organised young woman,' she said. 'I told her to keep going with the tablets and give it time.'
When told about her daughter's death she said: 'I was in absolute shock. Her death has left a large hole in our family. I still can't understand why this has happened.'
Hollie's brother Andrew told the inquest: 'She was a happy young woman who enjoyed her work and social life. She kept everything very close to herself.'
Assistant Doncaster coroner Fred Curtis said Ms McEwen's family was'most loving' and'really cared for her'
He said there was no indication that she was unhappy the evening before she died. He added: 'As a teenager she was always conscious of her skin condition and it worried her greatly.'
Hollie's neighbour Elaine Lunn found a note from her on the morning of Friday, May 23 asking her to call the emergency services so Hollie's family would not find her body.
She said: 'I believe she had planned it. There was nothing to suggest prior that she was going to do anything like this. I feel totally distraught.'
She added: 'She was a very attractive young woman. She was energetic, thoughtful and caring and studied to further her career. She was very bright and intelligent.'
Nurse and friend Angelina Deighton, who trained with Hollie at Sheffield Hallam University, said she knew her psoriasis had worried Hollie and she said she was having treatment and counselling.
'She was always the life and soul of our friendship group,' she said. 'She was always bubbly. She had a boyfriend for a few months in 2013 but it fizzled out and she wasn't concerned about it.
'Lately she described being tired, down and just not coping. She had been to her GP for anti-depressants but she didn't think counselling would help her and she tried to help herself.
'I tried time and time again to get her to seek help. She had many friends who thought she would never do anything like this.'
Behavioural psychotherapist Jessica Dunn, who had a session with Hollie just two days before she died, said Hollie had started to feel anxious and overwhelmed at having to plan a friend's hen party.
The inquest heard Ms McEwen, pictured, had been avoiding her friends because her mood was so low
'She was well presented with immaculate hair and make-up,' said Miss Dunn. She had 'dark thoughts' but had no intention of carrying them out. 'She told me "I wouldn't put my family through that".'
Hollie had been avoiding her friends and not socialising because her mood was so low. After breaking down in tears in the witness stand Miss Dunn said: 'I had no concern for her safety.'
Dr Elena Pamphilon, Hollie's GP for ten years, said she had come in for repeat prescriptions for medication to treat her psoriasis which she managed herself.
She attended with depression and anxiety towards the end of 2013 and again this year. 'In May she said she was finding things overwhelming but did not mention any particular trigger.'
PSORIASIS AFFECTS 1.8M PEOPLE The skin condition — characterised by raised flaking, itching red patches on various parts of the body — affects around 1.8 million people in Britain, most of them first affected before their 40th birthday. It is an immune condition that causes the body to produce too many new skin cells. The extra cells accumulate and cluster in red, inflamed patches, thickening the skin, which often has a ‘silvery scale’ appearance. A virus or infection such as tonsillitis — when the immune system is weakened — can trigger the condition in those with a genetic predisposition, as can a stressful event. Around 30 per cent of people with psoriasis get painful joints — sometimes the joint pain comes before the skin condition appears — because the immune system targets the joints, triggering psoriatic arthritis. The severity of the condition varies from person to person, for some causing a minor irritation, while for others it has a major impact on their quality of life. The condition is not contagious, so cannot be spread from person to person. There is no cure for psoriasis, but a range of treatments can be used to improve symptoms and the appearance of the affected skin patches. In most cases a sufferer will be prescribed creams and ointments to ease the symptoms.
The doctor gave her sertraline, an anti-depressant drug, but a fortnight later Hollie's mood had worsened and she went back.
'She may have had to wait longer to see the benefits of the drug,' said Dr Pamphilon. 'There isn't a drug to give more immediate relief.'
Assistant Doncaster coroner Fred Curtis said: 'She was a young lady who has achieved well in just about everything she has done.'
Although suffering from psoriasis and bouts of anxiety and depression she was 'happy and active' until her mood began to change towards the end of 2013.
'She had the most loving of families - a family that really cared for her,' said the coroner. 'They were aware of some of the problems but never the full extent thereafter not because of any fault on their part because Hollie did not reveal the full extent of the depression she suffered at times.'
She never told her family, doctors or friends about her suicide plans. 'During the spring of 2014 her mood was at all times lower than that recognised by anyone,' said the coroner.
'That's not to criticise her family or health services. It may be down in part to the fact that she cared for so many people she didn't want them to believe she had a very low mood and didn't want to distress them.'
He said her death involved planning 'which she kept from everyone.'
Recording a suicide verdict he extended his sympathies to the family and said: 'She had been successful and had a good future ahead of her.'A challenge by an Algerian man with alleged links to Islamic terrorism against a second refusal by the Minister for Justice to revoke deportation order against him has opened before the High Court.
A challenge by an Algerian man with alleged links to Islamic terrorism against a second refusal by the Minister for Justice to revoke deportation order against him has opened before the High Court.
High Court hearing over second refusal to revoke deportation order on suspected Islamic terrorist
On Tuesday, Micheal Lynn SC, for the man, told Mr Justice Richard Humphreys that Minister's decision that the man is not at risk if returned to Algerian was "irrational" adding that the decision made last September should be quashed.
The Minister, represented by Remy Farrell SC, said the decision should remain undisturbed and the man should be deported.
Last July the Supreme Court unanimously quashed the Minister for Justice's refusal to revoke the deportation order issued in December 2016.
The Supreme Court also remitted the man's case back to the Minister for further reconsideration.
When the Minister again refused to revoke the order, the man's lawyers fresh High Court proceedings over the second refusal. That hearing continues.
The Supreme Court's ruling had come after the man appealed an earlier High Court order which found the Minister's decision that there were no substantial grounds to find he would be at real risk of ill treatment if deported to his home country was lawful.
The state opposed the appeal.
Opening the appeal, Mr Lynn said the state had made some unreasonable findings when assessing the man's claims he is at risk of being tortured if returned.
The state had said that there had been changes to Algerian laws to protect people from torture and ill treatment, and that Algerian police had received human rights training.
However counsel said that there was no evidence that these changes had any "positive effect."
The State claims the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is involved with Islamic terrorism and was convicted of terrorism offences in Algeria and France.
The Minister issued a deportation order after gardaí informed the Department of Justice the activities of the man and his associates were “of serious concern” and “contrary to the State’s security”.
The man, aged in his 50s and has lived in Ireland for several years, denies being involved in terrorism or being involved in groups including Al-Qaeda.
He claims he is at risk of being tortured and subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment due to his political views.
During the 1990s he was convicted of several offences in Algeria and received three life sentences and two death sentences, which are no longer carried out.
Those offences include forming an armed terrorist group intending to spread murder, sabotage, possession of prohibited war weapons assassination, theft intending to harm the security of his home country.
He was jailed for eight years following his arrested in France in 2002 after he was found guilty of charges including membership of a criminal organisation preparing an Act of Terrorism.
Online EditorsGOP candidate Donald Trump speaks during the second Republican presidential debate, held in Simi Valley, Calif., on Sept. 16. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
Warning: The data below is current as of Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 12 p.m. Eastern time. If you are reading this after that point, there is a high likelihood that the status of one or all of these relationships has changed. Exercise caution when assuming you are |
has suggested.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected accusations that his government was behind the recent intrusion that resulted in thousands of sensitive emails being published Friday by WikiLeaks.
“Overall, we still see attempts to use — manically use — the Russian issue during the U.S. electoral campaign,” Mr. Peskov told reporters Tuesday, according to Sputnik, a news agency operated by the Russian government.
“These absurd claims were immediately refuted directly by a presidential candidate’s family,” Mr. Peskov said,
On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted that blaming Russia for the breach was a “joke,” and said he doubted the Kremlin had any part in the hack “because Putin likes me.”
Days after the DNC leak turned the Democratic Party on its side, several cybersecurity companies, in addition to Clinton aides, have suggested Russia was likely responsible for hacking the DNC.
Even if Mr. Putin personally carried out the breach, however, experts would have a hard time linking the Russian government with supplying those emails to WikiLeaks.
Julian Assange, the Australian hacker who launched WikiLeaks nearly a decade ago, told NBC News on Monday that “there is no proof of that whatsoever” when asked if Russia supplied his website with the hacked emails.
Asked for his take Tuesday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov deferred questioning from an American journalist who raised the question of possible Russian collusion.
“I wouldn’t like to use English four-letter words,” Mr. Lavrov responded when asked about the hack, Bloomberg reported.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Well in this post I’ll be covering how to create a GUI for controlling a bot using MATLAB. Now this concept can be readily extended to various other stuff. As after learning alphabets one can make words and sentences and essays so can one make various applications using basics. So let’s start, shall we?
To begin with you need to read this post on creating GUI because I’ll be assuming you have read that. So we know how to make buttons now. So this tutorial will focus on using this GUI along with serial class of MATLAB.
Serial Communication in MATLAB
Well we all know man is a social animal. We need someone or the other to communicate with others. We may use words or gestures or expressions etc. Similarly MATLAB needs to communicate with the outside world to get data in order to manipulate the data and send the processed result back. The way to communicate is via RS232 protocol.
There is a serial class in MATLAB that lets you to create objects and manipulate its properties.
Syntax:
obj = serial(‘port’)
Here port is the COM name and obj is the object name. You can change the baud rate and other properties like number of party bits and stop bits etc. I won’t be covering that in this post. If you have further interest you may refer to their website.
Now that we have a object for the serial COM port we need to open that port for serial communication. Now the syntax for the same is as follows.
fopen(obj)
This will open the COM port for communication. Similarly there is fclose(obj) that will close the port.
Now that we know how to open and close the port might as well learn how to write data to the port.
fwrite(obj,data)
Here obj is the object created and data is 1 byte data that you want to send/write on the port.
For example :
fwrite(s,’a’)
Well that takes care of the serial part that is required for our task. Remember that internet is a universe of knowledge and you can travel it to unravel new mysteries whenever you like.
Now many of you out there who are programmers are already aware of the concept of global and local variables. We’ll require this concept as well. For creating a global object just type global keyword before the object. Now whenever you want to access the global version of the variable just type global before the object or variable.
Now in the GUI code you need to create a global object, open the port. Then the logic we’ll be using for making this GUI work is as follows:
1) Write code in the button callback function to send a specific character. For example send ‘W’ for forward and so on.
2) Now the controller comes into picture wherein you have to receive the character and take some action depending on the character received.
So basically you need to use the UART module of your controller whether it be msp430 or PIC or 51 or arduino or atmel or and processor for that matter. The logic is simple if you are using embedded c or assembly language you can write a simple ISR that will check the character received serially and send some data to port pins that will drive the motor via the motor driver.
I think this much explanation is enough. If you have any queries you can always mail me or comment, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Code
/* * serial_reception.c * * Created on: 30-Mar-2014 * Author: MANPREET * Website: https://learningmsp430.wordpress.com/ */ #include <msp430g2553.h> #include "serial.h" void main(void) { WDTCTL = WDTPW + WDTHOLD; // Stop watchdog timer uart_init(); // Refer the UART post for the functions P1DIR |= BIT3|BIT4|BIT5|BIT6; P1OUT = 0; IE2 |= UCA0RXIE; // Enable USCI_A0 RX interrupt __bis_SR_register(LPM0_bits + GIE); // Enter LPM0, interrupts enabled } #pragma vector=USCIAB0RX_VECTOR __interrupt void USCI0RX_ISR(void) { if(UCA0RXBUF=='W' | UCA0RXBUF == 'w') { P1OUT |= BIT3|BIT5; P1OUT &= ~(BIT4|BIT6);// Send 1010 for forward } if(UCA0RXBUF=='S' | UCA0RXBUF =='s') { P1OUT |= BIT4|BIT6; P1OUT &= ~(BIT3|BIT5);// Send 0101 for backward } if(UCA0RXBUF=='A' | UCA0RXBUF == 'a') { P1OUT |= BIT4|BIT5; P1OUT &= ~(BIT3|BIT6);// Send 0110 for left } if(UCA0RXBUF=='D' | UCA0RXBUF == 'd') { P1OUT |= BIT3|BIT6; P1OUT &= ~(BIT4|BIT5);// Send 1001 for right } if(UCA0RXBUF=='F' | UCA0RXBUF == 'f') { P1OUT &= ~(BIT3|BIT6|BIT4|BIT5);// Send 1001 for right } }
MATLAB Code link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/iyddas4ynf93rz5/project_bot.fig
https://www.dropbox.com/s/78fzdopyci2g5km/project_bot.m
GUI:
Note :
The connections are obvious if you read the code. You have to use a driver like L293d of l298. If you face any difficulties doing this feel free to contact me. I’m happy to help.Before she conceived her daughter, who is now a toddler, Christa Dias worked as a technology coordinator in two Ohio parochial schools, both governed by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
This same diocese now owes Dias more than $170,000 — $100,000 in punitive damages, $20,000 in compensatory damages, and $51,000 worth of back pay — as the result of a wrongful dismissal suit. After revealing her pregnancy at 5 ½ months gestation, when she went to speak to school administrators about her options for maternity leave, Dias lost her jobs at Holy Family School and St. Lawrence Elementary.
The Archdiocese alleges that she was fired for a breach of her contract, which stipulated that she must “comply with and act consistently in accordance with the stated philosophy and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church” since she was a teacher at a Catholic school. Dias was an unmarried woman, then-closeted but now living openly as a lesbian in Atlanta, who conceived her child via artificial insemination. No one involved in the case claimed that Dias’ sexual orientation played a role in her dismissal. However, the Church considers both out-of-wedlock pregnancy and artificial insemination to be serious moral problems.
The particular circumstances of Dias’ pregnancy are addressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple — donation of a sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus — are gravely immoral. These techniques — heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization — infringe the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ “right to become a father and a mother only through each other”.
As a non-Catholic, Dias might never have come into contact with the Catechism. (Indeed, many Catholics have never read it!) She testified in court that she was unaware of the Church’s teaching on artificial insemination. She interpreted the contract she signed based on her own less-doctrinal understanding of what it means to be a Christian — reading and following the Bible, living by the example of Jesus… (you know, heresy.)
A jury found Dias’ dismissal unjust, but legal experts expect the case to be appealed. It touches on several dramatic and controversial issues. For instance, the law permits religious organizations to impose religious restrictions on their ministerial employees. But who qualifies as a “ministerial employee,” involved in the transmission of faith? Does the mere fact of teaching non-religious subjects in a parochial school make one subject to the same rules as a religious minister?
The case also raises some concerns about whether morality clauses in employment contracts are legally enforceable. To what extent is it fair to permit religiously-affiliated employers to enforce or police employees’ adherence to dogma outside of the workplace?
Dias has also pointed out that the school’s pregnancy-based policies are inherently biased against women, since men who participate in artificial insemination or who father children out of wedlock are invisible and therefore not subject to punishment.
In an ironic final twist, James Kiffmeyer, the pastor who fired Dias, was himself in a spot of trouble in 2002, when he was suspended from his position and stripped of his priesthood as a high school teacher following allegations of sexual misconduct involving two male students. The Vatican overruled Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk by restoring Kiffmeyer’s priestly status and commanded him to “closely guard his personal behavior.” They then reassigned him to the position he held when he removed Dias from her job. (A year ago he left the priesthood and now works in a pharmacy.) How’s that for a double-standard?
Meanwhile, Dias says she’ll keep fighting even if the ruling is challenged.One of the few utility programs that are used every day on mobile devices is a wireless networking tool, but somehow this is one of the last applications to appear for KDE 4. With the autumn 2009 crop of Linux distributions, a usable client for the widely used NetworkManager system finally makes its debut.
Why so long?
D-Bus connects the NetworkManager Server and Client D-Bus connects the NetworkManager Server and Client
So why did a native KDE 4 version of what is basically a system tray icon take three and a half KDE 4 releases to complete? There are several reasons. The original NetworkManager client was a GNOME applet and was developed in tandem with the server. Because of this, the NetworkManager interfaces for client developers were only partially documented. The NetworkManager system consists of a system daemon that receives network settings from a pair of settings services, one of which is run by the first local logged in user. This service supplies configuration information by placing Connection objects on the system bus. A client application sends commands to the service to activate these connections. One of the first tasks, therefore, was to take the D-Bus interface documentation system from Telepathy and apply it to the NetworkManager D-Bus interface. This was contributed to the upstream NetworkManager project, enabling up-to-date HTML documentation to be produced at build time so that other client authors can work without reading the NetworkManager C sources. Another reason was that the existing KDE 3 KNetworkManager needed many improvements to its user interface to fit in with other KDE 4 apps. It used the Qt3 D-Bus bindings, so this layer had to be completely rewritten as well. The current KDE 4 code shares only a few core algorithms with its predecessor. Finally, the KDE 3 KNetworkManager clients for NM 0.6 and 0.7 were developed entirely in-house at SUSE and never merged into KDE main modules, so few developers joined in and most of the work was done when necessary by SUSE engineers.
A new beginning, and a false dawn
The KNetworkManager menu The KNetworkManager menu
Will Stephenson of the openSUSE KDE Team took over responsibility for the KDE 4 NetworkManager client in 2007 from another team and began coding the base D-Bus layers using the new Qt4 D-Bus bindings. At the KDE 4 Launch Event in Mountain View in January 2008, he met with Celeste Paul, Christopher Blauvelt, Sebastian Kügler and others to develop a concept for a user-friendly yet powerful NM client. It was to be designed as a native Plasma Network Management applet for KDE 4.1, and shipped on several distributions. But this client had more than its share of flaws, mostly because the team spent much of its time dealing with layout problems in the very new QGraphicsView classes, instead of ensuring that NetworkManager features worked, and the design had grown naturally over time, resulting in an amorphous structure that was hard to work with. Then in May 2009, the KDE eV offered to sponsor a coding sprint in Oslo, where seven developers met and produced a workable design to go forward with. Throughout Summer 2009 this was refined, implemented and tested. The problems with the previous implementation led the team to produce a strongly layered design so that a simpler System Tray applet could be written first, running as an independent process so that any bugs could not crash Plasma, with most of the code in libraries that a subsequent Plasma applet can build on.
What KNetworkManager offers
Basic configuration Basic configuration
So what does the new KNetworkManager offer? At the least, a NetworkManager client provides user controllable networking. A system daemon receives configuration and commands from user programs. This is what the default nm-applet tool for GNOME offers. But since we were creating a new client from whole cloth, and with the experience of two KDE 3 clients and nm-applet to work from, we decided to improve on existing designs to make it as usable as possible. For example, where there are many wireless networks available, showing all the networks all the time in the applet's menu results in a screen-filling popup, making it hard to spot the network you wish to use. Instead, the applet only shows networks that you have used before out of those that are present. To connect to another network, or a previously used hidden network, a dialog provides a scrollable complete list, which can be easily filtered with a search line. Even though KNetworkManager is not built with the fashionable QGraphicsView used by Plasma for its UI, Qt allows a lightweight yet attractive interface, with menu items that display wireless strength and detailed security information, while other designs are still mockups. You can connect to networks with a single click in the popup menu, and its configuration dialog plugs into the standard KDE System Settings tool, making it easy to find there or in the popup menu.
The system tray applet with tooltip The system tray applet with tooltip
But that's not all we managed to fit in. Due to the modular structure of the code, we've already been able to attract new developers like Paul Marchouk to add polish and enhancements while the core was being completed. Features such as setting custom icons for a connection, configurable tooltips for both the hardcore networking specialist and the first time user, a choice between one icon for everything, or an icon per network interface (like in Windows), and a configuration UI for IP addresses that is 'better than OS X' have come from new KDE contributors. Other tweaks like storing passwords and other secrets securely or forcing them to be entered every time please administrators, and a Wireless Scan display lets you see what access points are in the neighbourhood.
But what about Plasma?
Some readers will be asking about the Plasma applet now. While this isn't being released yet, it hasn't stood still. The Oslo sprint design splits the user interface from the configuration UIs and the D-Bus services that do most of the work, so 90% of the KNetworkManager code will be used directly by the Network Management Plasma applet. Meanwhile, Sebastian Kügler is continuing to polish the code, and the layout issues have been fixed in Qt. We expect that the Plasma applet will be released as part of KDE 4.4.
Future directions
Detailed information on a network Detailed information on a network
While we hope that users of openSUSE 11.2, Kubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 will agree that KDE 4 KNetworkManager is useful for daily wired and wireless networking, and is mostly functional for 3G mobile broadband connections, there is still a lot to be done. The number of possible networking configurations mean there are still known and undiscovered bugs, which are being fixed now. A set of final icons are being prepared by the Oxygen team. Improvements for KDE 4.4 will include a minimal UI when creating new connections, showing only the password fields necessary, and better input verification to produce connections that work first time. Mobile Broadband will be improved by the inclusion of a database of ISPs, and support for the ModemManager interface will deliver cellular signal strength. IPv6 configuration should be available soon, and it will also be possible to create and edit system-wide connections so networking is up before users log in. And by passing information about connection usage to Nepomuk, queries such as 'Which files did I download at the office yesterday?' become possible. Finally, we hope that backends for other network management stacks such as wicd, ConnMan, and the in-house tools used by Mandriva and Pardus will be written, so that a KDE user will feel at home no matter which distro he/she picks up.
Distributions working for KDE, not the other way round
Extensive configuration settings Extensive configuration settings
Most of the the KDE 4 Network Management stack was developed by Will Stephenson as a Novell employee, but it is important to point out that this is an open and Free development, with and for every other distribution and end user to benefit from. Throughout the development we have liaised with Fedora and Kubuntu and exchanged bug reports, experiences, patches and even icons. The source code is in KDE SVN, and will shortly move to Extragear, and developer documentation will be available at TechBase. We hope that this serves as a model for other cross-distribution cooperation to benefit all of KDE.NEWS
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1. UN agency seeks access to civilians in IS-held Syrian city (Associated Press)
A mosque in Raqqa damaged by Coalition bombing.
The U.N.'s refugee agency on Tuesday called for better access to northern Syria's Raqqa province, where U.S.-backed forces are trying to drive the Islamic State group out of its self-styled capital, saying close to half a million people are in need of assistance.
UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic said the barriers to movement have made aid operations "costly and complex." He said all land routes to the region have been blocked by other parties to Syria's civil war that are hostile to the U.S.-backed force, forcing the aid agency to rely on airlifts.
"Resources are also badly needed," said Mahecic. "Funding is not keeping up with needs on the ground." The U.N. has managed to raise only $29 million of the $153 million it budgeted to meet humanitarian needs in Raqqa province.
2. U.S.-backed Syrian fighters reach old city walls in IS-held Raqqa (Reuters)
U.S.-backed Syrian militias advanced further into Islamic State's Syrian stronghold of Raqqa from the east on Monday, reaching the walls of the Old City, a war monitor and a militia spokesman said on Monday.
3. Islamic State calls for attacks in West, Russia, Middle East, Asia during Ramadan (Indian Express)
“O lions of Mosul, Raqqa, and Tal Afar, God bless those pure arms and bright faces, charge against the rejectionists and the apostates and fight them with the strength of one man,” said al-Muhajer. Rejectionist is a derogatory term used to refer to Shi’ite Muslims. “To the brethren of faith and belief in Europe, America, Russia, Australia, and others. Your brothers in your land have done well so take them as role models and do as they have done.”
4. UNHCR appeals for better access as thousands flee Raqqa (ReliefWeb)
A nurse in Qamishli, Syria, holds two children who survived a mine explosion as their family tried to escape the embattled city of Raqqa.
5. HRW Says Protecting Civilians in Syria’s al-Raqqa Should Be Priority (Latin American Herald Tribune)
“The battle for al-Raqqa is not just about defeating ISIS (another acronym for the IS), but also about protecting and assisting the civilians who have suffered under ISIS rule for three and a half years,” said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
“Coalition members and local forces should demonstrate concretely that the lives and rights of the hundreds of thousands of civilians in Raqqa are a parallel priority in the offensive,” Fakih added.
HRW urged coalition fighters to take every possible precaution to prevent civilian casualties, investigate illegal bombings, secure passage for fleeing civilians and prevent child soldiers from taking part in the offensive.
(KURDISH SOURCES)
6. Syrian Democratic Forces capture university building in Raqqa amidst ongoing clashes with ISIS (ARA News, pro-Kurdish)
(SPECIAL SOURCES)
7. Christians Forces Fighting ISIS in Raqqa Ask for US Help (Clarion Project, anti-radical Islam)
MEDIA/TWEETS
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The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said the SDF took the al-Sanaa industrial neighbourhood on Monday as part of their push into the eastern half of the city, and had reached the walls of the Old City neighbourhood. SDF media officer Ahmad Mohammed said the SDF had reached the walls but there were still fierce clashes in al-Sanaa and the district had not yet been totally secured.The Old City, east of central Raqqa, is a neighbourhood of modern housing bordered on two sides by fortified city walls built in the eighth century by the Abbasid Islamic Caliphate which at one point used Raqqa as its capital.Over 430,000 people are estimated to be in need across Ar-Raqqa governorate. In May alone, over 100,000 people have been displaced. UNHCR’s response on the ground is being closely coordinated with sister UN agencies and other humanitarian partners.But with needs growing and displacement rising, access on the ground is challenging. Relief items are being airlifted from Damascus to Qamishli – a costly and complex undertaking. Until now, there were no viable land routes available to move supplies. With partners we continue to explore all possible supply routes and are working with the authorities to secure greater access to those in need.Those fleeing the fighting are taking shelter in numerous locations. Many have been displaced more than once. Tens of thousands are passing through camps or transit sites and quickly moving on to other areas or returning to their places of origin. Levels of humanitarian access vary for security and logistical reasons.The Kurdish-led SDF seized control of the Science Collage building of Raqqa University. “The building had been used by ISIS as a security centre. The SDF soldiers were able to expel ISIS militants from the building and seized a large deal of ammunition there,” SDF officer Habun Osman told ARA News on Monday.Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) activist group told ARA News that ISIS has buried many of its militants in the backyard of the Old Mosque in Raqqa city, “for being unable to reach the main cemetery due to the SDF bombardment.”The Syriac Military Council (SMC) and its female wing, the Bethnahrin Women Protection Forces (HSNB), have issued a press release announcing their participation in the offensive on Raqqa. The SMC is a part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed, multi-ethnic force led by Kurds. The Syrian Democratic Forces are about 55,000-strong and include 29,000 Arabs. The 2,000 members of this Christian unit complains that the international community is discriminating against them in its support for the Syrian Democratic Forces. The press release reiterates their request for help — a request they’ve been making since April. “We ask them [the international coalition] to support us in equal measure as our Kurdish brothers and sisters," it says.The SMC is asking Christians around the world to pray for guns, ammunition, minimal bloodshed and a speedy victory. About 4,000 ISIS fighters are in Raqaa, preparing for a street-by-street battle.The Christian female fighters and their Kurdish allies see themselves as warriors for women’s rights who will open a new chapter for their gender in the region.Apple has cut down its order of memory chips from Samsung, reducing its reliance on its smartphone rival for components, say supply chain sources cited by Reuters.
The iPhone 5, widely expected to be announced next week, will feature fewer Samsung components than its predecessors, say the sources.
The newswire speculated that the move could be a signal that Apple is looking to diversify its supply chain or pull back its dealings with arch smartphone-rivals.
Samsung manufactures the A5 and A5X processors at the heart of the iPhone 4S and iPads 2 and 3, but the RAM layer in the chip package will no longer be from Samsung, and the NAND flash memory used in iPad, iPhone and iPod will be from elsewhere too.
Instead Apple has increased orders of DRAM chips and NAND flash memory from SK Hynix, Toshiba and Elpida Memory – which are all existing contractors.
We already knew that the new iPhone 5 will feature fewer Samsung components, with the screen manufactured by Sharp and LG for the first time, but this means that the memory will come from elsewhere too. Samsung is still expected to make the main processor for the phone.
Samsung is the biggest manufacturer of memory chips in the world - recently investing £4bn in its chip-making plant in Austin, Texas, where the A5 chips are made.
It will be a welcome move for Toshiba at least. In July, the world's second biggest NAND chip-maker announced a 30 per cut in flash memory chip production, pinned at the time on market oversupply and declining prices.
In April this year, Apple reported that it was committed to £11bn in parts and component expenditure. ®(ZHE) A federal criminal investigation is being opened into WikiLeaks’ publication of documents detailing alleged CIA hacking operations, CNN reported as both the FBI and CIA are coordinating their hunt for the mysterious whistleblower inside the CIA, who has already been dubbed Snowden 2.0.
The criminal probe will look into how the documents came into WikiLeaks’ possession and whether they might have been leaked by an employee or contractor. The CIA is also trying to determine if there are other unpublished documents WikiLeaks may have. Incidentally, the answer to that is yes as the whistleblowing organization revealed earlier in the day on its twitter feed.
WikiLeaks has released less than 1% of its #Vault7 series in its part one publication yesterday 'Year Zero'. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 8, 2017
The documents published so far are genuine, officials confirmed to CNN, which adds that one of the biggest concerns for the federal government is if WikiLeaks publishes critical computer code on how operations are conducted, as other hackers could take that code and cause havoc overseas. Of course, if the CIA had not left its code open and accessibly by outside interlopers, making hacking simple – as Edward Snowden explained – that would not be a concern.
Still, the attacks listed in the Wikileaks documents largely require physical access to devices. Even if code was released, a hacker would need to physically tamper with a smart television to infect it with the CIA’s purported malware.
The officials emphasized any intelligence collection using the types of operations described in the documents is legal intelligence collection against overseas targets. The officials also cautioned some of the material describes programs still under development by the intelligence community.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) immediately called for a Congressional investigation upon the documents’ release. “I am deeply disturbed by the allegation that the CIA lost its arsenal of hacking tools. The ramifications could be devastating.” It appears that his wish has been granted.
By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge / Report a typo / Image: WikiLeaks TruckSINGAPORE - A 28-year-old beer promoter who drank alcohol in public during restricted hours one month after the new liquor control law kicked in was on Thursday (July 21) fined $5,000 for hitting a policeman.
Siow Hui Lin, a Malaysian, had earlier pleaded guilty to one charge of using criminal force to deter a policeman from carrying out his duty.
One charge each of behaving in a disorderly manner and of consuming liquor in public during prohibited hours (10.30pm and 7am) were taken into account in sentencing.
A district court heard that Siow and her friend Susan Cheng Hwee Mui, 45, a housewife, started drinking beer together at the hawker centre at Block 75 Lorong 5 Toa Payoh after 10pm on May 5 last year.
Related Story Persistent offender fined $1,000 for early morning drinks
At about 1.30am the next day, policemen on patrol told them there should be no consumption of alcohol in public after 10.30pm, under the Liquor Control Act, which took effect a month earlier - on April 1.
"(Siow and Cheng) refused to comply and stated that there was no such law and kept (asking) why they could drink at other places but not here," Deputy Public Prosecutor Yang Ziliang told the court.
When a policeman firmly told them to stop drinking and to dispose of their beer bottles, Siow and Cheng continued drinking and laughing. They also asked for more time to finish their drinks.
Another policeman again told the women to stop drinking and to dispose of their beers, but Cheng shouted at the officer: "I had never heard of such (a) law and I am Singaporean, I am not afraid. I did not do anything wrong."
Siow also raised her voice at the same policeman.
After several warnings were given to the women to behave themselves and calm down, officers arrested Cheng for disorderly behaviour.
She shouted: "You have no right to arrest me! I will hire a lawyer!"
Siow then became aggressive and moved towards her friend, protesting against her arrest.
Officers tried to arrest Siow, but she struggled and swung her hands towards them, hitting a sergeant on the nose bridge with her arm while shouting: "Why you guys arrested my friend?"
The officer who was hit suffered a bruise on his nose.
The maximum punishment for using criminal force to deter a public servant from discharging his duties is four years' jail and a fine.
Siow is believed to be the first person to be prosecuted for consuming liquor in public during prohibited hours. She was charged in January.
Cheng received a 12-month conditional warning on Jan 15 for disorderly behaviour and for drinking in public during prohibited hours.Central Florida defeated UConn, 24-16, Saturday in the fourth installment of the greatest artificial college football rivalry ever: The Civil Conflict. My mistake—it’s actually the Civil ConFLiCT.
UConn head coach Bob Diaco, possibly looking to motivate his program, manufactured the importance behind the game before the Huskies’ 2015 season. Diaco even had a trophy made, with the first nameplate dedicated to UConn’s 37-29 victory over UCF in the 2014 season. (UCF had won the first conference game in 2013 by a score of 62-17.) That game was one of the Huskies’ two wins that year.
UConn won 2015's Civil Conflict, 40-13, but yesterday, the Knights snapped their vaunted two-win streak. UCF was clearly not as enthusiastic about the rivalry, because no one even picked up the trophy:
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Maybe the Knights’ lack of respect towards the trophy can be turned into a crucial chapter in the history of the Civil Conflict. Probably not, though.FORT WORTH, Texas (Reuters) - The mother of a Texas teenager, derided for a defense of “affluenza” in his trial for killing four people while driving drunk, was flown on Thursday to Texas from California and charged with helping her son escape to Mexico after he was suspected of violating probation.
Tonya Couch, 48, could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted in Tarrant County on a third-degree felony charge of helping her son Ethan, 18, flee after he was suspected of violating a probation deal that kept him out of prison.
During his trial for the 2013 accident, a psychologist testified on Couch’s behalf that he had “affluenza,” meaning he had lost the ability to recognize right from wrong after being spoiled by his wealthy family. The diagnosis, which is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, was widely ridiculed.
Ethan was sentenced in Tarrant County to 10 years of drink- and drug-free probation, which critics saw as leniency because of his family’s wealth.
Couch and her son left Texas after a video surfaced on social media in early December showing Ethan at an alcohol-fueled party. The video raised questions about whether he had violated his probation agreement, which was reached in juvenile court after the fatal accident.
Ethan Couch is in a Mexican immigration detention facility while he fights deportation, which could take months. His mother did not formally apply to stay in Mexico.
She was deported in late December and sent to Los Angeles where she was taken into custody. She will be held on a bond of $1 million in Tarrant County, officials said.
Live television footage from broadcaster WFAA showed Couch being led off a plane and placed in a sport utility vehicle.
She is due to be arraigned on Friday morning on a charge of hindering the apprehension of a fugitive, said Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson, who met Couch at the airport.
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“She was very quiet, very reserved, respectful and surprisingly, she was very appreciative,” he said at a news conference.
Ethan faces about four months in Texas custody if he is found to have violated the terms of his probation. Tarrant County prosecutors said they were looking at additional charges that could keep him in custody longer.
“It is not a question of if he is coming back, it is a question of when he is coming back,” Anderson said.The Phillies are willing to listen to offers on any players except Domonic Brown, Chase Utley and Cole Hamels, according to Jim Salisbury of CSNPhilly.com. That includes Cliff Lee, though general manager Ruben Amaro Jr.'s preference is to hang onto him, and he'd need to be blown away to move his ace left-hander.
The Phillies view Hamels' poor season as an aberration, according to Salisbury, and their desire is for Hamels and Lee to front their rotation in 2014. Utley, of course, is said to be working on an extension with the Phillies, and Brown has emerged as the young power bat that the Phillies have hoped he could become.
Boston is currently the most interested team in Lee's services, according to Salisbury, and their interest dates back to the offseason when they were told he wasn't available. Salisbury adds that the Red Sox's reluctance to part with Xander Bogaerts or Jackie Bradley Jr. makes it likely that Lee will likely remain with the Phillies beyond the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline. Recent reports have indicated that Lee would require three or four top prospects to acquire, though at least one NL executive speculated that he did think Lee would be traded.
Both the Yankees and Red Sox continue to show interest in Michael Young, and Salisbury writes that Jonathan Papelbon is "very much available" as well. He notes that the Tigers' interest in Papelbon had cooled even before their acquisition of Jose Veras on Monday, so there may no longer be a fit between the two sides.Argentina wants a fresh start with Washington. But the legal battle over a polluted New Jersey river could spoil those plans.
Argentine President Mauricio Macri flew to Washington this week to present a new image of his country. Once mired in debt and feuds with foreign creditors, Macri wants the world to know that Argentina is back open for business. But there’s a big hitch in his sales pitch, and it has to do with a chemical-laden river in New Jersey.
Argentina’s state-controlled oil company, YPF SA, is mired in a heated legal dispute over who foots the bill to clean up a New Jersey river saturated with pollution. The state legislature accused YPF of trying to duck out on its responsibility to help clean up the mess that one of its subsidiaries is legally on the hook for, even though it filed for bankruptcy last year. Both chambers of the New Jersey state legislature have called on Trump’s Justice Department to investigate, and they say the buck stops with Macri.
The legal dispute could cloud Macri’s international campaign to present a new above-the-board face for Argentina’s business climate. It’s also embroiled the state oil company in a potentially costly legal mess at a time when Argentina needs its energy revenues the most. And if YPF manages to avoid footing the bill, New Jersey lawmakers say, it could provide a blueprint for companies to escape future environmental damage claims.
The story dates back to the 1980s, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first measured off-the-charts pollution levels in New Jersey’s Passaic River, thanks in large part to a spillage from a nearby chemical company, Diamond Shamrock Chemicals, which produced Agent Orange, among other toxic chemicals. In 1983, Maxus Energy Corporation bought Diamond Shamrock, legal liabilities and all, and then YPF bought Maxus for $762 million in 1995, thereby inheriting a share of the Passaic River cleanup burden, New Jersey lawmakers say.
In 2016, the EPA finally completed a plan to clean up the Passaic River, one of the largest of the EPA’s so-called “Superfund” sites requiring hazardous waste cleanup. (New Jersey has 100 Superfund sites — more than any other state in the country).
The cleanup for the Passaic River, dubbed the Diamond Alkali Super |
just wanted some sort of relief,” Joan Pistorius said later.
Pistorius said he gradually learned to understand his mother’s desperation and forgave her.
Trapped with his thoughts, Pistorius taught himself to “disengage” from the voices in his head. However, there were some things he couldn’t ignore.
“I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney,” Pistorius told NPR about the children’s television program that used to play on a loop in his room.
But one day, in an incredible twist of fate, Pistorius’ aromatherapist, Virna van der Walt, picked up on his subtle “language” — virtually imperceptible smiles, gazes and nods he used to indicate he was paying attention. He was about 25.
“Happiness surged through me. I was Muhammad Ali, John McEnroe, Fred Trueman. Crowds roared their approval as I took a lap of honour,” Pistorius said of the moment his therapist acknowledged his consciousness.
The Ghost Boy: The uplifting story ofhow Martin Pistorius survived a mystery paralysis http://t.co/yxexyPr4dt @Femail pic.twitter.com/ZUfvSxPTGq — Marcel Rivera Paniza (@UtopiasArchitct) January 10, 2015
At her request, Pistorius’ parents sent him to the Centre For Augmentative And Alternative Communication at the University of Pretoria where tests confirmed he was aware and could respond to statements.
His parents bought him a computer with communication software. After years of therapy and intense computer-based exercises, he was able to use a computer to write messages and operate a synthetic voice. He taught himself to read and write.
In 2003, Pistorius got a paid job at the health centre, working one day a week.
“At every turn my eyes opened in wonder as I crashed into new experience: seeing a man with brightly coloured hair like parrot feathers running down the centre of his head; tasting a cloud of melting sugar called candy floss; feeling the warm pleasure that comes with going shopping for the first time to buy Christmas presents for my family; or the sharp surprise of seeing women in short skirts,” he said.
Starving for information, Pistorius learned how to build websites and eventually graduated from university.
media_camera Incredible story... Martin Pistorius, 39, has regained control of his body. Picture: Facebook/Martin Pistorius
But he felt like something was missing: love.
When he met Joanna in 2008, he wondered if she would be “indifferent” like the other women he’d encountered.
Pistorius’ sister had moved to England where she met Joanna, a social worker. She introduced Joanna to her brother in a family web chat.
The pair hit it off, emailing each other regularly before finally meeting in person.
“I work with the disabled in my career, so it isn’t something I am wary of, and I just knew — it’s hard to explain — that Martin was very special. I’d had relationships before, but he struck me as a very unusual and fascinating man. Straight away, I saw past his disability,” Joanna told MailOnline.
“It makes me angry when people refer to me as his ‘carer’. I’m not his carer. I am his wife. His mind is incredible, and I am learning from him all the time.”
Pistorius proposed to Joanna in a hot-air balloon in December 2008 before they wed in June 2009.
media_camera Miraculous... Martin Pistorius with his wife Joanna. Picture: Facebook/Martin Pistorius
The couple now live in England where Pistorius works as a web designer.
“It was she (Joanna) who has taught me to understand the true meaning of the Bible passage we were having read at the service: ‘There are three things that will endure — faith, hope and love — and the greatest of these is love’,” Pistorius said.
“My life has encompassed all three and I know the greatest of all is indeed love, in all its forms. I’d experienced it as a boy and man, as a son, brother, grandson and friend, I’d seen it between others and I know it could sustain us through the darkest of times. Now it was lifting me closer to the sun than I ever thought I would fly.”
Pistorius has published a memoir about his life, Ghost Boy: My Escape From a Life Locked Inside My Own Body.
media_camera Memoir... Martin Pistorius has published this book about his incredible life. Picture: martinpistorius.com
Originally published as ‘I allowed myself to vanish’Dungeons & Dragons is an American animated television series based on TSR's Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. A co-production of Marvel Productions and TSR, the show originally ran from 1983 through 1985 for three seasons on CBS for a total of twenty-seven episodes. The Japanese company Toei Animation did the animation for this series.
The show focused on a group of six friends who are transported into the titular realm and followed their adventures as they tried to find a way home with the help of their guide 'Dungeon Master'. A final un-produced episode would have served as a conclusion as well as a re-imagining had the series been picked up for a fourth season. However, the show was cancelled before the episode was made. The script can be found from various sources online and was performed as an audio drama as a special feature for the BCI Eclipse DVD edition of the series.
Overview [ edit ]
The show focuses on a group of friends aged between 8 and 15 who are sucked into the "realm of Dungeons & Dragons" by taking a magical dark ride on an amusement park roller coaster. Upon arriving in the realm they meet Dungeon Master (named for the referee in the role-playing game) who gives each child a magical item.
The children's main goal is to find a way home, but they often take detours to help people or find that their fates are intertwined with that of others. The group come across many different enemies, but their primary antagonist is Venger. Venger is a powerful wizard who wishes to rule the realm and believes the power from the children's weapons will help him to do so. Another recurring villain is Tiamat, who is a five-headed dragon and the only creature that Venger fears.
Throughout the show, a connection is suggested between Dungeon Master and Venger. The final unproduced episode "Requiem" would have confirmed that Venger is the Dungeon Master's corrupted son (making Karena Venger's sister and Dungeon Master's daughter), redeemed Venger (giving those trapped in this realm their freedom), and ended on a cliffhanger where the six children could finally return home or deal with evil that still existed in the realm.
Characters [ edit ]
Protagonists [ edit ]
Left to right: Hank, Eric, Diana, Presto, Sheila, Bobby and Uni. in the first episode "The Night of No Tomorrow"
Hank, the Ranger (voiced by Willie Aames): At 15, [2] he is the oldest of the gang, along with Eric, and a natural leader. Hank is a brave and noble individual, maintaining a focus and determination, even when presented with grave danger. Hank is a Ranger, with a magical bow that shoots arrows of glowing energy. These arrows could be used in many different ways such as a climbing tool, to hurt enemies, to bind them or to create light. His deepest fear is a failure to be a leader ("Quest of the Skeleton Warrior"). Twice he does fail as a leader: making the wrong decision trying to save Bobby from Venger ("The Traitor") and disobeying Dungeon Master's instructions ("The Dungeon at the Heart of Dawn"). Only once does his anger and frustration at not going home result in uncontrollable rage at Venger ("The Dragon's Graveyard"). Of all the kids, Venger regards Hank as his most personal enemy ("The Dungeon at the Heart of Dawn").
he is the oldest of the gang, along with Eric, and a natural leader. Hank is a brave and noble individual, maintaining a focus and determination, even when presented with grave danger. Hank is a Ranger, with a magical bow that shoots arrows of glowing energy. These arrows could be used in many different ways such as a climbing tool, to hurt enemies, to bind them or to create light. His deepest fear is a failure to be a leader ("Quest of the Skeleton Warrior"). Twice he does fail as a leader: making the wrong decision trying to save Bobby from Venger ("The Traitor") and disobeying Dungeon Master's instructions ("The Dungeon at the Heart of Dawn"). Only once does his anger and frustration at not going home result in uncontrollable rage at Venger ("The Dragon's Graveyard"). Of all the kids, Venger regards Hank as his most personal enemy ("The Dungeon at the Heart of Dawn"). Eric, the Cavalier (voiced by Don Most): The Cavalier age 15 is the spoiled child, originating from a rich home. On the surface, Eric is the big-mouthed coward of the show, and he also fulfills the role of the comic relief character. Despite his egotism, selfishness, and snobbery, Eric is potentially also the most realistic character: complaining about the dire situations in which he is involved and voicing concerns which might be common to inhabitants of our world transplanted to the Realm. Despite his cowardice and reluctance, Eric has a well-hidden heroic core, and frequently saves his friends from danger with his magical shield, which can project a force field. In one episode ("Day of the Dungeon Master"), he is even granted the powers of the Dungeon Master, and manages this duty quite successfully—even to the extent of risking his own life fighting Venger—so his friends can return home. Series developer Mark Evanier revealed that Eric's contrary nature was mandated by parents groups and consultants to push the then-dominant pro-social moral for cartoons of "The group is always right; the complainer is always wrong". [3]
Diana, the Acrobat (voiced by Tonia Gayle Smith): Diana is a beautiful and brave 14-year-old girl. [2] She is an Acrobat, and an outspoken and tomboyish member of the group. She carries a magic staff which can shift in length from as short as a few inches to be easily carried on her person to as long as six feet, and which she uses as a weapon or as an aid in various acrobatic moves. Furthermore, if the staff is broken apart, Diana simply has to touch the severed pieces together at their break point and they will reunite. She is skilled at handling animals, and is a self-assured, confident person. These qualities make her the natural leader in the absence of Hank. It is mentioned that Diana is chosen as the Acrobat because in her real world she is an Olympic-level gymnast. In "Child of the Stargazer" Diana finds her soulmate—whom she must give up in order to save a community.
She is an Acrobat, and an outspoken and tomboyish member of the group. She carries a magic staff which can shift in length from as short as a few inches to be easily carried on her person to as long as six feet, and which she uses as a weapon or as an aid in various acrobatic moves. Furthermore, if the staff is broken apart, Diana simply has to touch the severed pieces together at their break point and they will reunite. She is skilled at handling animals, and is a self-assured, confident person. These qualities make her the natural leader in the absence of Hank. It is mentioned that Diana is chosen as the Acrobat because in her real world she is an Olympic-level gymnast. In "Child of the Stargazer" Diana finds her soulmate—whom she must give up in order to save a community. Presto, the Magician (voiced by Adam Rich): 14-year-old Albert, better known as Presto, [2] is the Wizard. Presto fulfills a role of the well-meaning, diligent, but hopeless magician. He suffers from low self-confidence and nervousness, which manifests in the use of his magical hat. He is able to pull an endless succession of various tools from it, but often these will be, or appear to be, of little use. There are also numerous instances when the whole group is in danger, whereupon Presto will draw from his hat precisely what is needed in order to save all of his friends. Although, like all the kids, Presto yearns to return home, in "The Last illusion" Presto finds his soulmate—an illusion power girl [ clarify ] named Varla and makes friends with the Fairie Dragon Amber ("Cave of the Fairie Dragons").
is the Wizard. Presto fulfills a role of the well-meaning, diligent, but hopeless magician. He suffers from low self-confidence and nervousness, which manifests in the use of his magical hat. He is able to pull an endless succession of various tools from it, but often these will be, or appear to be, of little use. There are also numerous instances when the whole group is in danger, whereupon Presto will draw from his hat precisely what is needed in order to save all of his friends. Although, like all the kids, Presto yearns to return home, in "The Last illusion" Presto finds his soulmate—an named Varla and makes friends with the Fairie Dragon Amber ("Cave of the Fairie Dragons"). Sheila, the Thief (voiced by Katie Leigh): As the Thief, Sheila age 13 has a magical cloak which, when the hood is raised over her head, makes her invisible. Although Sheila is often shy and nervous ("Citadel of Shadow") with a deep-seated monophobia (fear of being alone) ("Quest of the Skeleton Warrior"), she will always display bravery when her friends are in trouble, especially her younger brother, Bobby. Sheila is also the first to point out the flaws or dangers of the group's plans. Through her capacity for friendship with those in trouble she receives unexpected rewards—such as being offered to become Queen of Zinn which she politely declines ("The Garden of Zinn") and redeeming Karena, Dungeonmaster's daughter, from evil ("Citadel of Shadow").
Bobby, the Barbarian (voiced by Ted Field III): Bobby is the youngest member of the team, eight years old when he enters the realm; the characters celebrate his ninth birthday in the "Servant of Evil" episode, and he confirms that he is "almost ten" four episodes later in "The Lost Children". He is the Barbarian, as indicated by his fur pants and boots, horned helmet, and cross belt harness. He is Sheila's younger brother; in contrast to her, Bobby is impulsive and ready to run headlong into battle, even against physically superior enemies, usually resulting in one of the others moving him from harm's way. He has a close relationship with Uni and is often reluctant to leave her when they discover a way home. Bobby carries a magical club, which he regularly uses to trigger earthquakes or dislodge rocks when he strikes the ground. In "The Dragon's Graveyard", the strain of being separated from family and friends causes him to have an emotional breakdown; in "The Girl Who Dreamed Tomorrow", Bobby finds his soulmate Terri, whom he must give up in order to save her from Venger.
Uni, the Unicorn (vocal effects provided by Frank Welker): Uni is Bobby's pet, a baby unicorn, which Bobby discovers in the first episode and retains as his companion throughout the show. She has the ability to speak, though her words are not quite discernible; she usually is heard echoing Bobby when she agrees to his opinions. As seen in the episode "Valley of the Unicorns", Uni also possesses the potential for the natural unicorn ability to teleport once a day, and has accessed this power through tremendous concentration and effort; it is intimated that she is still too young to use this ability regularly—without her horn she cannot teleport and becomes very weak.
Dungeon Master (voiced by Sidney Miller): The group's friend and mentor, he provides important advice and help, but often in a cryptic way that does not make sense until the team has completed the quest of each episode. It is the Dungeon Master who supplies the companions with their weapons and clues for their numerous opportunities to return home. As the series progresses, from his repeated displays of power, it begins to seem possible and later, even probable, that the Dungeon Master could easily return the companions home himself. This suspicion is confirmed in the script for the unmade series finale, "Requiem", wherein the Dungeon Master proves he can do just that, without any difficulty.[4] In some episodes, including "City at the Edge of Midnight" and "The Last Illusion", realm inhabitants display great respect or nervous awe of Dungeon Master. It is through the efforts of the kids that both of Dungeon Master's children, Venger ("Requiem") and Karena ("Citadel of Shadow"), are redeemed from evil.
Venger, the main villain; trapped in "The Dragon's Graveyard"
Antagonists [ edit ]
Venger, the Force of Evil (voiced by Peter Cullen): The main antagonist and the Dungeon Master's son (as revealed in the unmade finale "Requiem"), Venger is an evil wizard of great power who seeks to use the children's magical weapons to bolster his power. He especially hates the kids not only because their refusal to part with their weapons prevents him from not only destroying Tiamat ("The Hall of Bones") and conquering the realm ("The Dragon's Graveyard") but also because they are "pure of heart" ("Quest of the Skeleton Warrior"). He is described as an evil force, although it is hinted that he was once good, but fell under a corrupting influence ("The Treasure of Tardos"). This is later revealed to be true in the unmade finale "Requiem", when Venger is restored to his former self.
Shadow Demon (voiced by Bob Holt): A shadowy demon, he is Venger's personal spy and assistant. Shadow Demon often informs Venger about the children's (whom he refers to as "Dungeon Master's young ones") current quests.
Tiamat (vocal effects provided by Frank Welker): Venger's arch-rival is a fearsome female five-headed dragon with a reverberating multi-level voice. Her five heads are: a white head breathing ice, a green head breathing toxic gas, a central red head breathing fire, a blue head breathing lightning, and a black head breathing acid. Although Venger and the children both avoid Tiamat, the children often use her to their own ends such as making a deal with her in "The Dragon's Graveyard" to destroy Venger. Although promotional blurbs show the kids fighting Tiamat, the kids only fight her twice ("The Night of No Tomorrow" and "The Dragon's Graveyard")-Tiamat's main quarrel is with Venger.
Episodes [ edit ]
The show ran for 27 episodes split into three seasons of thirteen, eight, and six episodes respectively. Most of the episodes served as'stand alone' stories; however, towards the end of the series, the storyline involving Venger being revealed as Dungeon Master's son was sewn into several episodes. This storyline would have climaxed in the unproduced finale "Requiem".
Opening credits [ edit ]
Fear not: Ranger, Barbarian, Magician, Thief, Cavalier, and Acrobat. That was Venger, the force of evil. I am Dungeon Master, your guide in the realm of Dungeons and Dragons!
The opening credits served as an introduction to the series and an explanation as to how the children ended up in the realm. It begins with the group getting on the "Dungeons & Dragons" ride, which then transports them to the realm. Dungeon Master appears to give them their individual weapons to defend themselves from Tiamat and Venger.
The credits were altered for the second and third seasons. It started in a similar way to the first with group getting onto the roller coaster. Once in the realm, however, the characters can be seen in a castle and already in possession of their weapons fighting various enemies before Venger appears and says -
There is no escape from the realm of Dungeons and Dragons!
The credits featured an orchestral score composed by Johnny Douglas, which played alongside the soundtrack of Dungeon Master. However, in France it ran with the song "Le Sourire du Dragon" sung by Dorothée. In Spain, the theme song "Dragones y Mazmorras" ("Dragons and Dungeons") sung by Dulces became very popular.
Controversy [ edit ]
The level of violence was controversial for American children's television at the time, and the script of one episode, "The Dragon's Graveyard", was almost shelved because the characters contemplated killing their nemesis, Venger.[5] In 1985, the National Coalition on Television Violence demanded that the FTC run a warning during each broadcast stating that Dungeons & Dragons had been linked to real-life violent deaths.[6] The series spawned more than 100 different licenses,[7] and the show led its time slot for two years.[1][7]
Merchandise [ edit ]
The show produced a variety of spin-off merchandise.
DVD releases [ edit ]
In 2004 Dungeons & Dragons was released by Fox Kids Europe in Region 2 on four stand-alone DVDs, distributed by Kult TV, a Contender Entertainment Group label. Extra features on each volume include fan commentary tracks on two episodes, character profiles, and DVD-Rom content. The original series bible, scripts, character model sheets, original promo artwork, an interview with Michael Reaves (writer on the unproduced finale episode "Requiem") and a featurette on the title sequence are spread amongst the discs. The fourth volume includes the script for "Requiem" and a featurette about it. The four DVDs each have different original cover artwork (by Eamon O'Donoghue) that form a panorama when placed side by side, depicting the series' main characters: Hank and Sheila with Venger, Presto with Tiamat, Eric and Diana with Shadow Demon, and Bobby with Uni and Dungeon Master.
The first Region 1 DVD release, Dungeons & Dragons - The Complete Animated Series, was on December 5, 2006 by BCI Eclipse, under its Ink & Paint classic animation entertainment label (under license from Disney). The 5-disc set featured all 27 episodes, uncut, digitally re-mastered and presented in story continuity order, as well as an extensive array of special features including documentaries, commentaries, character profiles, a radio play of the unproduced finale episode "Requiem", and more. This release is now out of print as BCI Eclipse ceased operations in December 2008.[8]
In June 2009, Mill Creek Entertainment acquired the rights to the series and subsequently re-released the complete series on August 25, 2009, in a 3-disc set without any special features but with almost all the original music restored; the release contains all the televised episodes but does not contain the radio play of "Requiem".[9]
Board games [ edit ]
In 1984 TSR Inc. released the board game named Quest for the Dungeonmaster, inspired by the episode "In Search of the Dungeons Master", when Dungeon Master is captured by Warduke and frozen in a magic crystal. When the kids discover this terrible truth, they try to rescue him before Venger gets there first. The Brazilian company named Grow release a translated version of this game in 1993.
Music [ edit ]
A full orchestral version of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon main theme, composed by Johnny Douglas, was released as the sixth track of the 1991 album The Johnny Douglas Strings - On Screen, published by the label Dulcima,[10] a record label founded by Johnny Douglas in 1983.[11]
Toys and collectibles [ edit ]
An Advanced Dungeons & Dragons toy line was produced by LJN in 1983,[12] including original characters such as Warduke, Strongheart the Paladin, and the evil Wizard Kelek that would later appear in campaigns for the Basic edition of the roleplaying game. None of the main characters from the TV series were included in the toy line, but a connection does exist, as Warduke, Strongheart, and Kelek each guest-starred in their respective episode of the series. Only in Spain and Portugal were PVC figures of the main cast (Hank, Sheila, etc.) produced.[13][14] The Brazilian company named Iron Studios will release in 2019 an entire set of polystone collectible statues for most of Dungeons & Dragons cartoon characters, using a 1/10 scale and together they form a full diorama.[15] Planned for the same year, more exactly June-August 2019, PCS Collectibles company will release two versions of Venger in 1:4 scale, both fully sculpted polystone statues hand painted.[16] One version, a Sideshow and PCS Collectibles partnership, will be strictly limited to only 400 pieces worldwide; the second version, a PCS exclusive version will include Venger's loyal henchman, the Shadow Demon, as well as an alternate swap-out arm with a magical energy effect, will be limited to 250 pieces.[17]
Electronic games [ edit ]
The PC game Baldur's Gate II features a parody Easter Egg in the form of portraits featuring Hank and Bobby in the Adventurer's Mart in Athkatla, Amn. Both portraits can be clicked and the player can read jokes that imply they were eaten by Tiamat.[18]
Books [ edit ]
Several books on this series were released at the time of its greatest popularity.
Pick a Path to Adventure. Six books following the Choose Your Own Adventure format, from the point of view of one of the children. Six separate stories were created, each focused on a separate character (though in the books Eric was replaced by his brother, who did not appear in the cartoon series). These books were released by TSR. [19]
. Six books following the Choose Your Own Adventure format, from the point of view of one of the children. Six separate stories were created, each focused on a separate character (though in the books Eric was replaced by his brother, who did not appear in the cartoon series). These books were released by TSR. The UK Annuals. Two hardcover books published in the United Kingdom in 1985 and 1987, by World International Publishing Limited. Included illustrated stories of differing quality. The first of which included eight original adventures whilst the second only included three as well as a re-telling of the episode 'Eye Of The Beholder' renamed as 'Eye Of The Watchman'.
. Two hardcover books published in the United Kingdom in 1985 and 1987, by World International Publishing Limited. Included illustrated stories of differing quality. The first of which included eight original adventures whilst the second only included three as well as a re-telling of the episode 'Eye Of The Beholder' renamed as 'Eye Of The Watchman'. Marvel Summer Special 1987: Prison Without Walls. Published in the United Kingdom. A simple re-telling of the episode 'Prison Without Wall' which included original artwork drawn for the book.
. Published in the United Kingdom. A simple re-telling of the episode 'Prison Without Wall' which included original artwork drawn for the book. "Donjons et Dragons" : Published in France, a six-book collection that re-tells some of the most popular episodes.
: Published in France, a six-book collection that re-tells some of the most popular episodes. "Tour of the Realms": Published by DC comics features the now adult characters still stuck in the Realms, now the Forgotten Realms, with Presto seeking apprenticeship with Elminster the Mage.
Awards [ edit ]
For her work on the series, Tonya Gayle Smith (as "Diana") was nominated for Outstanding Young Actress in an Animation Voice-over at the 1984-1985 Youth in Film Awards.[20]
In January 2009, IGN ranked Dungeons & Dragons at #64 on its "Best 100 Animated Series" list.[21]It has been almost 10 years since international cricket was last played on Pakistani soil. Yes, I'm aware that Zimbabwe popped over in 2015, but that doesn't really count.
The big boys just won't go there to play.
India won't because of politics. The rest of the world won't due to security fears.
But despite this, Pakistan in the last 12 months rose to number 1 in the Test rankings and won the ICC Champions Trophy.
But many of us Westerers have no idea what makes Pakistan cricket tick. Why is it so contageous. Why the only team that can beat Pakistan is Pakistan itself.
So, without the tick of approval from my wife, I'm off to the land of the Green Shirts to document what it is that draws me to love this cricketing culture and people so much.
Day 15:
Pakistan is that crazy girlfriend that you had back at University. It is uncontrollable. You cannot read her mind. Yet, she is captivating and alluring. She provides you with every possible emotion in spades. Even when you don’t pursue it. And when you finally break up with her and perhaps choose a safer path, she continues to hold a special place in your heart. Pakistan. Land of the pure. Home of the resilient. A place of wonder. Deliverer of dreams. An incredible puzzle that is probably unsolveable. But trying to has been so much fun. Thank you Pakistan. All of you. Every little last inch. The biryani was delicious, but not as good as the mixed tea.
Day 14:
As we approach Islamabad, or “Isloo” as the locals know it by, the landscape changes. The clinical flatness of Punjab is ending and the Himalayas are beginning to rear their beautiful head.
We are here to meet Imran Khan.
Cricket legend. Politician. Builder of cancer treatment hospitals. Potentially the country’s next Prime Minister if elections go his way. Arguably one of the most important and influential people in Pakistan.
Day 13:
One of Najam's senior guys tells us there is good and bad news. The bad news is that Najam is under the weather and won't be able to meet today. The good news is that he has invited us to his place in two days’ time. The bad news is that we plan to be in another city at that time, interviewing somebody else. The good news is that we can split our camera crews up and do both. The bad news is that there's still a chance neither interview will happen.
Day 12:
Before we leave, I interview Anam Nadeem. A young woman who at age 17 was told by her parents to stop playing cricket despite being told she would be selected to play for Pakistan. “You need to finish your studies. You need to get married. Which boy will have you if you behave like this?” It is a common theme that I’m hearing. But Anam, like so many other women I’ve met in Pakistan are now comfortable standing up to some of these norms. They are building new roads that are leading to thrilling destinations for those women that will follow.
Day 11:
I'm back to the Cricingif office to play a game of cricket. Not just any game mind you. This was virtual cricket. The team here have written the software to make this happen. I’ve posted a video of it on my Facebook page. Suffice to say you really get immersed in it. I can’t wait until it is released on the Xbox.
It just goes to demonstrate the calibre of breadth of skills over here. To be honest, Pakistan has proven to be no different to many other counties, including Australia. The big cities are modern and behave as big cities should. They have fast internet. Chain restaurants. Public transport. ATM’s. Events. Billboards. All the normal stuff.
Day 10:
When we arrived, Misbah’s team was fielding. He was at mid off. Yasir Shah at point. Adnan Akmal and Abdul Razzaq were sitting in the players stand. A small rope is all that divides them, myself and about 100 cricket nerds.
It’s at least 35 degrees outside. School kids have popped in to watch their heroes during their lunch break. Full uniforms including ties. A stupid hangover from colonialism. Ties should be banned worldwide. It is essentially just a piece of coloured silk tightly wrapped around your neck for no practical purpose other than fashion.
The sound of the bat on ball at a relatively quiet cricket ground is something else. Hard to explain to non cricket fans, but it sends warmth and comfort through your body.
The sightscreen at one end is an old manual thing on wheels. It takes three sleepy groundsmen to move it. At the other end, a concrete wall has been whitewashed. However, over the years it has found itself worn down and slightly dirty. It’s not the best but that’s how things work here.
I watched a bit of the game while we wait for Qasim to organise an interview. The opener leaves a straight ball and loses his off stump. It appears bad leaves are a global phenomena and not just for Virat Kohli and Glenn Maxwell.
Day 9:
When he (Adnan) saw this gora in his bogan canary yellow “Australia” T-shirt, he vocally ushered me through the crowd. Where you from? You want a picture? Oh, you have a film crew with you? Want an interview? What channel is this for? Meet me after the game. We can talk.
Now, let’s take a selfie.”
I’ve never met an Akmal before. There are seven brothers, but three of them are international cricketers. However, this response from Adnan was true to the stereotype I had created about him in my mind.
If you aren’t a rock star, just act like one anyone.
Day 8:
“Believing in Allah takes all fear away from you”. The whole time we speak, Misbah is composed and thoughtful. His most playful reply was when recalling the time he hit the world record fastest Test 50 and 100 against Australia. I asked nicely if you would indulge me in a push up challenge. He never directly said no, but the crew politely shot it down. I discovered later that Misbah wasn’t comfortable doing it in the clothing he was in. He asked us to come to the ground he is playing at later in the week and we could do it then. He also said he can probably do 30 now, but when playing for the national side, he was up to 70. I reckon this will be a neck and neck race if we can make it happen. 30 is about my limit too.
Day 7:
One of my early perceptions is beginning to change. As discussed in an earlier piece, my early dealings with sponsors and corporates while I was based in Australia was primarily with women. They were the Heads of Marketing or the Sponsorship Managers and the like. I had also spoken with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a two time Academy Award winning documentary maker based in Karachi, and her younger sister Hadeel Obaid, who was having a great time in cricket journalism. Benazir Bhutto was the first female Prime Minister of a Muslim nation. Powerful women in powerful positions. But today, as I scratched the surface a little, it appears that this is the exception and not the rule. Amna Tariq is the woman behind the scenes at Cricingif who is pulling this whole trip together. An impressive person who tells me that Pakistan is very much a man’s world. She says that it is possible for a woman to succeed here, but the cards are stacked against you.
Day 6:
Our initial plan was to leave early and drive to Multan. Here, we were planning to interview a current Pakistani cricketer. However, as is consistently the case, our plans changed when the player had to be in another city at the last moment. Pakistan is unveiling itself to me in a way that is highly consistent with its team's performances on the field. One day it can blow your mind. The next day it disappoints. It is always unpredictable. Many times, you are left shaking your head at what is going on. Pakistan could never be accused of being boring. I love it and hate it at the same time. Just a little bit of certainty would be nice. I am trying to make a documentary. Don't they realise this?
Day 5:
I finally got to taste my first Pakistani biryani. A rice and dry chicken dish with plenty of tasty spices. I'd happily eat it again. But, despite all of this, we were granted permission to explore and the police escort was waiting for us when we left the hotel. Given we had lost most of the day, it was decided to skip the stadium shoot and head out about 60kms to a place called Derawar Fort. A 12th century structure where the local “Nawab [King]” once lived. We captured some wonderful footage at this place for the documentary. It was so quiet out here in the middle of the desert. You could hear things like the cow bells in the surrounding paddocks, the kids playing in the nearby village and the birds. Real countryside, and a welcome respite from Karachi’s aggressive heartbeat.
Day 4:
Our last official appointment for the day is with Farhan Saeed. Clearly the most inspirational person I’ve met in a long long time, if not ever. Farhan contracted polio as a child and lost the use of one leg. However, he doesn’t recognise himself as disabled. “I am normal” Farhan plays for the Pakistani Disabled Cricket Team. He bowled their first ever ball. The ground where we are meeting him has a T20 game winding up. We organise for Farhan to bowl to one of the batsmen. It is difficult to accurately describe how Farhan bowls, except to say that watching a guy use a crutch off a 15 metre run up and ping it with speed and accuracy brought tears. You’ll need to see the final documentary to truly understand what Farhan overcomes, but on his third delivery, he knocked out this guy’s leg stump with a pearler.
Day 3:
I typically spend 30 minutes on google researching the background of my interviewees before I arrive. Just to remain sharp. Moin may have been the national captain. Moin may have been a selector. He may now be running one of the best cricket academies for kids in the country. But the fact I most like is that we share the same birthday. We are already bonded before we shake hands. Like all that I've met before him, Moin is humble and loves his country and the game. He has a smile that he can't hide every time he talks about his academy kids and that maybe one day, insha'allah, one of his students will wear the Green Shirt.
Day 2:
I've taken a cricket bat and ball with me. I ask Zaheer if he will show me a cover drive as his playing |
Anora,” he said, “that thing that I was doing is on the news.”
Tracy, Anora and Tracyann watched the reports with rapt attention. They’d seen Elton trundle down into the woods with a shovel and a couple of buckets. What they saw in those tantalizing police photos was like nothing they thought Elton could do. “I surprised them,” he says. “It looks like our house’s hallway,” says Tracyann.
In the Driftwood Court townhouse, discussion turned to what they should do. Except for a brush with the law several years ago—Elton says a gun that police uncovered in the townhouse was planted, and the charges laid against him eventually went away—Elton has kept out of trouble. Nevertheless, the family was skittish about telling authorities the tunnel was his.
The next morning, Elton went to work as usual. Boko, too, had seen the news and recognized the tools in the photos. As soon as they saw each other, Elton told him he was the guy who’d built the tunnel on television. “He was laughing, because he couldn’t believe it was me,” says Elton. But Elton was worried. He asked Boko what he should do. “I will find out,” Boko told him. “You don’t have to worry.”
Despite those words of encouragement, Boko, too, was worried. He did not go immediately to police, but instead sought out an intermediary—someone who could give him assurances this was not a criminal matter, and that Elton would not be charged. He reached out, without success, to Toronto Mayor John Tory, then to former mayor and current city councillor Rob Ford. Next, he turned to Ford’s older brother Doug, himself a former Toronto city councillor, and an acquaintance.
According to Boko’s account, he explained his predicament to Ford at the latter’s private business offices at Deco Labels and Tags. Ford, now a private businessman, told him he knew just whom to call, and left the room. Minutes later, Ford returned and informed him that whoever was behind the tunnel was unlikely to face charges. But he went on to say it was Boko’s civic duty to inform authorities, who were in the midst of an expensive investigation to track down the mystery digger. Boko says Ford asked him if he’d object to his inviting police to speak to him at Deco Labels. In a few minutes, Boko was in conference with investigators. “They told me not to talk to no one—not even Elton,” he says.
Soon after, Elton got a call at the townhouse. It was the police. “We want to talk to you about the hole you dug,” an officer told him, and asked that he come down to 31 Division, the busy Jane and Finch police station. “I thought there was a chance I wouldn’t come back home,” says Elton.
Doug Ford had been right: There would be no charges. Toronto police, announcing they’d unravelled the mystery, said two men had built the tunnel for “personal reasons.” Chief Bill Blair later told reporters this was not unexpected: “One of the theories was maybe this is just the coolest fort ever.” All Elton got was a little advice: “Don’t dig any more holes,” the police told him.
Yet his discovery did not come without punishment. The police filled in the tunnel. “It took a couple of years to do it and it took them one day to fill it up,” he says. He misses just knowing it was there, and the family feels his sense of loss. “I’m sad they found it,” Tracy says.
Elton first revealed his identity in an interview with the Toronto Sun. The media attention this unleashed surprised everyone. Journalists congregated outside the townhouse and tried to charm Tracyann into interviews through the window (Tracyann is not easily charmed). They staked out the parking lot at Driftwood Court. Others showed up at Boko’s work sites, looking for Elton or anyone who knew him. “That was him!?” one man who’s worked with him (and who has been so disgusted by the performance of the Toronto Maple Leafs that he stopped watching the news entirely) asked a reporter last week. “Get outta here! I thought it was al-Qaeda!”
The media storm forced Elton to take time off work and to hole up in the Driftwood Court townhouse. And he got to thinking. Months ago, Anora’s life talks had turned to what Elton wants to do with his life. Now she was starting to use Elton’s escape hatch to spin new homilies. “I use this now as an example. ‘You put your mind to something,’ ” Anora says. “ ‘You manifested your dreams.’ ”
Here was a chance to make more of his dreams a reality. Elton thought about his future, how he wants a contracting business like Boko’s. And he thought about the kids of Driftwood Court. He envisions a summer program that will give neighbourhood kids a chance to work cutting grass like he did, even do some light landscaping. It’s not just about creating summer jobs. “I’ll make a new definition of cool—because what I think is cool now is having your own house, getting married,” he says.
Last week, he launched an online fundraising campaign, called Eltons Tunnel Vision Fund, to help get his contracting business and that summer program up and running. His goal is $10,000 by summer. (Update: Two days after this story was published, McDonald met his goal, thanks to many supporters.)
“I’m going to be a big contractor one day,” he says. “And I want to be a good parent.”
“And you’ll teach your kids like I did,” his mother, Tracy, says. “You got to break the cycle somehow.”
Will he ever build another tunnel? “It’s something, for sure, I’m going to do again,” he says. “When I have my own property.”Open your tastebuds to the possibilities that lie beyond Fallowfield
To the inexperienced foodie, Manchester may not seem to have much on offer. Admittedly, the city is distinctly lacking a Michelin restaurant, but what it lacks in stars it certainly makes up for in variety and flavour.
The ‘Big Easy’ Burrito from Luck Lust Liquor and Burn
https://www.instagram.com/p/9T3v54AWv4/?taken-by=rosieeej
As Almost Famous’ Tex-Mex sister restaurant, LLL&B has some big shoes to fill and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Their Big Easy Burrito, wrapped in a quesadilla for extra oomph is certainly not one to be missed if you fancy a challenge.
Milkshake from Archie’s
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGuM42mCjXk/?taken-by=lovearchies&hl=en
Boasting an impressive celeb clientele, Archie’s is by far the best takeaway Manchester has to offer. With a wall full of milkshake toppings to choose from, you’ll be spoilt for choice. So, whether you fancy a sweet treat or a dutty burger, Archie’s is on hand to meet all your takeaway needs.
Veggie All Day Breakfast from Fuel
Gorgeous mid day breakfast #LivingRight A photo posted by Kieran Ghataora (@kierangdk) on May 29, 2016 at 5:27am PDT
Withington’s favourite veggie haven offers affordable meat-free meals, which taste great too!
Hanging Kebab from The Oast House
If you haven't tried them yet, you havent truly lived! Come down this weekend for one of our succulent chicken kebabs grilled with red peppers & onions and marinated in tangy sweet chilli sauce. Goes perfectly with our seasoned chips then drizzled with garlic butter. Enjoy! TOH x A photo posted by @theoasthousemcr on Nov 22, 2014 at 6:35am PST
Snuggled into the centre of Spinningfields, The Oast House is a gastro-pub with a difference. Famed for its hanging kebabs, you’d be foolish to miss out on these babies drizzled with their signature marinade.
Fried Chicken from Krunchy Fried Chicken
Classic Fallowfield takeaway value: succulent chicken and crispy batter, accompanied by thinly sliced fries, need I say more?
Burgers from Almost Famous
omg yes A photo posted by tay (@taylllxr) on Jul 25, 2015 at 8:47am PDT
The burgers at this Manchester institution are like no other. Upon first visit, many may question their choice to reject the standard of burger and chips included, but you’ll soon see that your eyes are bigger than your belly. With so many creative combinations, there’s no doubt you’ll find your savoury soulmate on this menu.
Late night pizza from Crazy Pedro’s
https://www.instagram.com/p/BEiB60aBbGB/?taken-at=443357558&hl=en
It’s no secret that a slice of pizza can work wonders in curing a hangover (before it’s even happened) when preceded by copious amounts of alcohol. Open until 4am, Pedro’s offers trippy toppings, classic combos and colourful cocktails to feed the city’s ravenous revellers.
All-you-can-eat steak from Fazenda
Getting ready for #lunch #Fazenda #Manchester #Saturday #Picanha A photo posted by Fazenda Manchester (@fazendamanchester) on Mar 12, 2016 at 3:52am PST
Like meat? You’ll love Fazenda. With 15 different prime cuts to choose from, you’ll be spoilt for choice.
Pancho’s Burritos
Pancho's! A photo posted by Rebecca Surley (@rsurley) on May 6, 2016 at 10:23am PDT
Authentic Mexican is hard to come by, but Pancho’s has it down. Tightly wrapped mouthfuls of spicy bliss, their burritos will add a little samba to your soul.
Espresso Martini from Alberts Schloss
I know this doesn’t technically constitute as a food item, but just try it. Silky smooth, the perfect equilibrium between a coffee kick and sweetness. Get down early to avoid queues on weekends.
Cake from Home Sweet Home
Toppings galore, Home Sweet Home’s cakes are anything but typical. Indeed, their sweet masterpieces are so fabulous they’d tickle the taste buds of Mary Berry herself.
Grilled cheese from Nothern Soul
our Croque MonSOUL #grilledcheese #mcr #foodfriday #instagood A photo posted by NorthernSoulmcr (@northernsoulmcr) on Oct 30, 2015 at 1:50am PDT
Northern Soul has given this American classic a thoroughly Northern twist and by cheese have they succeeded. Top on Tripadvisor, you’d be mad to miss out on this soulful eatery.
Cocktails from The Wash House
Sushi roll in my cocktail, that's new…. #thewashhouse #manchester #cocktails #sushi #friends #newfavoritebar A photo posted by Becky Tock (@bextox) on Jun 12, 2016 at 2:39am PDT
To the untrained eye, the Wash House simply resembles a small and unassuming laundrette. However, those with insider knowledge will know that a glorious speakeasy lies behind the laundrette’s suspiciously large washing machine door. Booking essential. See website for details.
Unlimited Brunch from Pen & Pencil
On the final Saturday of every month, the Pen and Pencil opens its doors for their much awaited unlimited brunch. Book ahead to avoid disappointment.
Bagel Burgers from New York Street Deli
Is it a bagel? Is it a burger? No, it’s a bagel burger! Up and coming New York St Deli is bringing a taste of the Big Apple to the streets of Manchester. Catch these guys at the foodie fest that is Beat St Manchester.
Railway Kari from Mughli
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGXD0MDMwzi/?taken-at=225412208&hl=en
For a real taste of India, Mughli’s the place to go. The centrepiece of Manchester’s legendary Curry Mile, their Railway Kari is an ode to the Indian railway to which the restaurant owes its inspiration.
Pizza from Rudy’s
Finally getting to try Rudy's! Prosecco, pizza and pals ❤️ A photo posted by Lcconnor (@lcconnor) on May 27, 2016 at 1:06pm PDT
The most up and coming pizzeria in Manchester, Rudy’s brings a taste of Italy to the streets of the Northern Powerhouse.
Pasta from Pasta Factory
#Repost @louiserhindtutt (via @repostapp) ・・・ Bucatini neri con il polipo @pastafactoryuk – squid ink pasta, marinated octopus, sunblushed tomatoes, fresh basil A photo posted by The Pasta Factory (@pastafactoryuk) on Jun 3, 2016 at 9:37am PDT
As you can imagine, the Pasta Factory specialises in the Italian delicacy which has won hearts the world over. What’s more, they’re totally reinventing the often abused carb – forget the pesto student staple, pasta has so much more to offer.
Morcilla Scotch Eggs from El Gato Negro
Morcilla (black pudding) scotch eggs from @elgatonegrotapas. Yes please. #EATMCR A photo posted by EATMCR (@eatmcr) on Jun 4, 2016 at 11:49am PDT
An ode to its Northern environment, El Gato Negro’s Morcilla Scotch eggs encompass an exquisite marriage between the cuisines of Manchester and Spain’s Basque country. A little on the pricier side for a student budget, this fresh new tapas restaurant is perfect for special occasions or simply if you fancy splashing a little cash.
Smashed Avo & Eggs Combos from Federal
Smashed avocado heaven #federal #avocado #brunchliketheaussies #baconisgoodforme #sourdough #powerdough #brunch A photo posted by Evangeline (@evangelinegrace21) on Apr 30, 2016 at 1:42pm PDT
It’s a globally known fact, that nobody does brunch quite like the Aussies. Inspired by the lands down under, this café brings a bit of that marvellous mid-morning magic to the streets of Manchester.
S’mores from Solita’s NQ
Already boasting a notorious burger menu, you’d be left questioning what s’more Solita’s could possibly offer… But their fresh and wonderfully chocolatey addition of S’mores will certainly leave you tempted to undo that top button and indulge.
Ribs from Cane and Grain
Meaty madness and luscious liquor in a Prohibition-era setting, this establishment boasts a range of marinades in which their glorious ribs are doused for your eating pleasure
Fish and Chips from Hip Hop Chip Shop
Melt in your mouth chilli-infused batter paired with hand cut potato wedges: Hip Hop Chip Shop offers a much-needed twist on a British classic. This Manchester grown street eat now holds a much coveted temporary residency at Spinningfield’s ‘The Kitchens’ so you can experience what this street food trader has to offer all year round.
Doughnuts from Common
Move over Krispy Kreme’s, Common are offering freshly filled doughnuts, for all your holey needs.
Freak Shakes from Black Milk Cereal Dive
https://www.instagram.com/p/BF4ehP_w13s/?hl=en
Although they may slightly resemble their frankly inferior cousin, the milkshake, Black Milk’s freak shakes will leave you quivering with excitement.
Whilst most students aren’t brave enough to leave the likes of Fallowfield or university campus, you’d be torturing your tastebuds if you didn’t give some of these marelous ‘must-eats’ a try. So venture a little further and experience the best that Manchester has to offer!The speed of rotation of Earth is decreasing due to revolution
of moon around the Earth. (Credit: NASA)
The days are getting longer due to motion of moon around the Earth. Although this is happening at extremely slow rate but the day length is getting longer. The day length has increased by 1.7 milliseconds during the last 100 years. This seems unusual because we have never felt the elongation of day length. The day length is increasing because of the decrease in speed of rotation of Earth. The revolution of moon around the Earth is applying a pull which is trying to slow down the rotation of Earth. Let’s understand it in detail.
Revolution of Moon around the Earth
revolution of moon. The moon revolves around the Earth at an average distance of 384000 km and completes on revolution in 27 days 7 hours and 43 minutes. The moon keeps the same face towards the Earth throughout its motion because the rotation period is exactly same as the period
The moon revolves around the Earth because of the force of gravitation between the Earth and the moon. The moon also applies force on the Earth and both revolve around their common Center of mass. As the mass of moon is 81 times smaller than the mass of Earth so the Earth does not move much but it is only the moon which appears to revolve around the Earth.
Effect of gravity of moon The effect of gravity of moon can be seen in the phenomena of tides. The moon exerts gravitation pull on the surface of Earth but due to rigidity of the solid surface its effect is very less. The oceans are not rigid so they easily deform under the effect of gravitational pull. The level of water of the ocean increases on the surface of Earth which is facing moon. The water level on the back side of Earth also increases. This results in a bulge on the front and back surface of Earth.
Drag between the Earth and moon
The bulge is not localised to a particular place because the speed of rotation of Earth is larger than the speed of revolution of moon around the Earth. The surface below the water bulge moves with the rotation of Earth but bulge is pulled by the moon. The Earth tries to drag the bulge along the direction of rotation. Thus the bulge is not exactly along the direction of line joining the Earth and moon but bulge lies slight towards the direction of rotation of Earth.
Formation of bulge due to gravity of moon which exerts drag on the Earth. (Credit: astrointerest)
This situation results in a torque on the bulge due to moon. Since a friction force exists between the surface of Earth and the bulge in the ocean water, the torque also acts on the surface of Earth which is in the opposite direction of the motion of Earth. So this torque tries to slow down the rotation of Earth. The torque also acts on the bulge on the back surface of Earth and this torque is in the same direction of rotation of Earth. This torque on the back surface tries to increase the speed of rotation of Earth but the magnitude of torque on the back surface is less than the torque on the front surface. The net result is the torque in the opposite direction of rotation of Earth which tries to decrease the speed of rotation of Earth.
Result of decrease in speed of rotation of Earth
speed of rotation of Earth also results in the increase in speed of revolution of moon around the Earth. Due to decrease in speed of Earth the angular momentum of Earth decreases and the angular momentum of moon increases. So we can say that the angular momentum is transferring from the Earth to moon. The net angular momentum of Earth moon system remains constant and follows the law of conservation of angular momentum. The slowing of theof Earth also results in the increase in speed of revolution of moon around the Earth. Due to decrease in speed of Earth the angular momentum of Earth decreases and the angular momentum of moon increases. So we can say that the angular momentum is transferring from the Earth to moon. The net angular momentum of Earth moon system remains constant and follows the law of conservation of angular momentum.
The increase in speed of revolution of moon around the Earth also results in the increase in radius of orbit of moon. The moon is moving away from us at the rate of 3.78 cm per year.
The Earth will keep on slowing down and moon will keep on speeding up until they reach at the common speed. Then the period of rotation of Earth and period of revolution of moon will be same. But it will take billions of years.Synereo, a Tel-Aviv based startup developing a decentralized, open-source social network, has revealed today that its product will move into alpha this September. Synereo’s alpha is built as a smart contracts app on top of the company’s distributed tech stack, which utilizes blockchain technology to enable a peer-to-peer internet.
Join the industry leaders at the Finance Magnates London Summit, 14-15 November, 2016. Register here!
The blockchain-based social network disrupts the current model of social media by giving control back to the users over content, personal information and monetization. Furthermore, contrary to the established social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Synereo’s social network cannot record or store personal information of any kind, and does not sell it to third parties, or target users with ads. Instead, all network transactions and relations are encrypted on a distributed ledger and accessible to permitted parties only.
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The Synereo network operates entirely without central servers or data centers. Instead, the network compensates users for contributions of storage and computation power when they support the distributed network with their personal devices. Additionally, the startup means for the social network itself to adhere to the principles of the attention economy, providing users with monetary rewards for creating and curating content that people like.
Synereo alpha will include the ability to post simple text and images, #hashtags and a decentralized search. Additionally, users will be able to promote content by charging their posts with the test network’s native cryptocurrency (called test AMPs). Accordingly, users will be compensated with said AMPs when viewing promoted content.I have an article coming soon and I can almost guarantee that you will get to learn about something completely new and fascinating. A topic I haven’t seen covered anywhere else outside the deepest pits of PubMed.
At least I don’t think so. Not from this perspective. But if I’m wrong I’m gonna have to go spank myself.
In the meantime, let me provide some motivation for getting in outrageously good shape this summer. Or spring. Or just about any damn occasion.
Success stories are emailed to me from people all across the globe and everyone has been using the simple but effective intermittent fasting guidelines I’ve outlined in The Leangains Guide.
This is from David Bengtsson in Sweden and here it goes.
Leangains Summer Motivation
I never believed in the idea that certain types of food or special diets would be the key to getting very lean. I have always kept in mind that the only way to lose weight is by managing energy input and output. With this in mind I wanted to show myself and others that you can get lean, and stay lean, without the need of following what the fitness and health mainstream consider ‘healthy diets’. You know the need to leave out certain foods, the need to eat birdmeals every third hour and never eating until you’re full, and so forth. What I wanted was a simple diet that was flexible, easy to follow, and backed by science. It should also allow me to get the macronutrients, vitamins and minerals that I need everyday. I also wanted something that would sidestep the usual problems with dieting, like the leptin crash, so I thought about using a cyclical diet approach. I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to find something that covered all this, but after some searching, I found Martin Berkhan’s website. Since I wanted to know more about the advantages of fasting, I also read “Eat Stop Eat” by Brad Pilon. After that I knew I was ready to start the diet using the Leangains approach.
David at 182-185 lbs before Leangains in April 2010.
Training wise I continued with my regular routine, which consisted of basic compound movements three times a week. Each workout took less than an hour. I prefer to work out fasted with an intake of 10 g EAA before and after the workout.
David at 164-166 lbs in June 2010 after 8 weeks of dieting with Leangains. A jaw-dropping transformation in such a short time.
I lost some strength during the end of the diet, but that’s because I rushed things and kept a too big calorie deficit given how lean I was. But now that I felt satisfied with my results, I felt confident that I could stay there and I switched goal to muscle gain. I basically continued my usual basic routine, but changed the set structure to Reverse Pyramid Training. After 8 weeks of training, I’ve gained strength and my conditioning is as good as during the diet, if not better.
Truly exceptional abs.
Thanks to Leangains, I have found a new lifestyle which makes me able to stay lean 24/7 and I have never felt so great before. Skipping breakfast is the best thing I’ve done when it comes to diet. Leangains also allows me to eat things like pizza, ice cream, cheesecakes, etc, since I don’t have a problem to stay full when I eat my daily intake of calories within a few hours. Another fun thing is to go out to eat with your friends at restaurants that offer ‘all you can eat’. Make sure that you have fasted a long time before, trained, and you will be able to eat a whole lot of food.
Comments
Score another one for the fact that you should be basing your diet on personal preferences – within reason, of course – and be critical of nonsensical diet advice in the fitness mainstream, like David was before he started dieting.
A few quick comments on some other things:
David mentions EAA, which is a supplement consisting of the eight essential amino acids. EAA is somewhat more popular than BCAA here in Sweden.
The difference between the two is that BCAA-supplements primarily consist of branched-chain amino acids, which are the three aminos most intimately involved in muscle protein metabolism and synthesis.
I’m saying primarily because manufacturers also tend to add some other as well, such as beta-alanine and citrulline malate to Purple Wraath and Xtend, which are the brands I personally use and recommend.
The research on free-form aminos and muscle protein synthesis (MPS) has typically used EAA-mixtures. MPS is maximally stimulated by 10 g EAA in conjunction with fasted state training, which is why I recommend 10 g EAA or BCAA for fasted training.
There are no comparative studies on EAA and BCAA. For now you can simply assume that they are simply interchangeable. I plan on addressing this topic again. But don’t worry, there won’t be any shocking surprises…I think.
Note that David dropped weight very fast. That’s risky business for someone already lean – and he paid the price with some strength loss.
A lot of people get greedy and overzealous when attempting to get the last fat off, and they pay for it with muscle loss, feeling like shit and hating the diet. Post-diet binges are also common if you push yourself too hard during the last weeks.
Just before you know it, you might find yourself back where you first started – starting a new diet, thinking that you’ll do it right this time.
Except “this time” doesn’t come unless you actively and constantly fight your inborn tendencies. Been there, done that. But I also conquered it.
You need to learn to temper yourself. Much easier said than done. Unfortunately for most people, it usually takes a few rounds of dieting and learning this lesson the hard way before it truly sinks in. Hell, it took me several years.
That’s it for tonight, folks.Page 1 Bottom Search Replies Previous Page Next Page
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FEMA Ebola camps, Internet down, West-Point gone dark.
SarahC
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User ID: 12277895
United Kingdom
08/26/2014 12:57 AM
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Report Copyright Violation FEMA Ebola camps, Internet down, West-Point gone dark. I wonder, just some casual musings (hence no links, but I imagine fellow Ebolatards are familiar with this already):
The recent internet downage - it COULD be routing tables getting too full. That's the official line, BUT could it also be the government testing its control of Ebola information?
If someone doesn't have Facebook/ Livejournal/ Jabber/ Twitter/ Google+, that's a HUGE slowdown in "gossip". Such as 500 infections in a particular Hospital? Meanwhile they can use the MSM to report some other infection, so the few rumours that do get out don't get believed. Imagine 500 independent Facebook users in Mississippi all writing "Major HASMAT operation! There's army trucks everywhere and armed men! A curfew's in place!" versus a news report "A small town in Mississippi today had an outbreak of E.Coli."
West-Point's gone news-dark, and I expect it to stay that way... imagine the unease people will have if they learn an entire town (slum) was shut, and given up on.
Lastly and most importantly:
Remember those two partners of the carers of Mr. Patrick Sawyer, who got Ebola despite their partners being aware they had to look out for symptoms and report in if they had them?
Infectious before symptoms.
This is important for my next point:
In America how do you quarantine a small town? You tell everyone to stay indoors, and put razorwire and roadblocks around the place.
How do you quarantine a BIG town? YOU CAN'T. If you tell people to stay in doors, chances are some will leave and especially if food isn't regularly arriving.
The solution? Quarantine camps. You round everyone in the large town up, and separate those with symptoms from those without. You put them in a large compound where they can be quarantined easily.
Now the problem: None symptomatic people are infectious - the people you are FORCED to be around may have Ebola. A few thousand people in an area of half a football field.
Ebola will spread.
These quarantine camps "for your own protection!" will become just like West-Point... breeding grounds for Ebola, and no one can do anything about it.
Imagine having your bug-out supplies, keeping away from people in your home bunker, then some army guys remove you at gun point - you end up in a camp with no supplies, and surrounded by potential Ebola...
This leads back to the internet again - imagine the internet for that town going dark... and the cell phones. No one will know what happened.
So keep an eye out next year for unusual events - busy doctors surgery's, or busy hospitals... sudden internet blackouts may signal your area is at risk of Ebola and they're checking the cut off switches. Beware military movement's around 3AM. If you see large military convoys around that time of day, leave.
I have a feeling lots of well people will get caught up in infections even when they have prepared.
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 57991136
Canada
08/26/2014 01:33 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FEMA Ebola camps, Internet down, West-Point gone dark. Doesn't exist.....
Kidding! Another great post op. I just had to be cheeky there. So yeah, this is another thing to put on your radar folks. They can't control 100% but they sure can limit their exposure in terms of bad PR. Also, you won't be able to miss their mobilization, someone will spot it, but likely they will stick to secondary highways and such before they blatantly rattle in to any such end point.
This will take place, there is no question, the only question... When and where. Doesn't exist.....Kidding! Another great post op. I just had to be cheeky there. So yeah, this is another thing to put on your radar folks. They can't control 100% but they sure can limit their exposure in terms of bad PR. Also, you won't be able to miss their mobilization, someone will spot it, but likely they will stick to secondary highways and such before they blatantly rattle in to any such end point.This will take place, there is no question, the only question... When and where.
Banachek
User ID: 58793078
United States
08/26/2014 01:39 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FEMA Ebola camps, Internet down, West-Point gone dark. West-Point's gone news-dark, and I expect it to stay that way... imagine the unease people will have if they learn an entire town (slum) was shut, and given up on.
Quoting: SarahC
Possible Explanation:
As some of you already know I spent around 1.5 years working in Liberia. While this was 3-4 years back, I still have numerous friends, both Liberians and Westerners, who are in the country.
Just this evening I was corresponding with one of these individuals. He specifically stated that the Liberian National Police force, as well as Liberian soldiers, have SHOOT TO KILL orders on anyone violating the nationwide curfew (not only West Point) implemented 7 days ago.
The SHOOT TO KILL orders are also in effect for those who attempt cross closed areas.
I would assume this also applies to those attempting to sneak through or around the internal immigration checkpoints. These have existed for years as the last 2 civil wars started via overland invasion from Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. They are found throughout the country.
West Point has not been given up on. Aid convoys are sent daily to deliver food and water. Typically this is accomplished by cordoning off an area, unloading, getting transports out, then some type of orderly distribution. Between the people and the supplies are disinfecting stations (water and bleach).
There is likely some type of effort to get the sick removed as well, though I have no detail on this.
Needless to say, the people in the country are petrified. I can imagine journalists are pretty fearful of travel to the country to cover the story.
Further, the WHO has already made several public statements that it is getting extremely hard to even get into the region because of so many cancellations of commercial airline flights. After that, the only options are private aircraft or overland travel. Some airlines are still flying, but few.
Just thought I would chime in.
. Possible Explanation:As some of you already know I spent around 1.5 years working in Liberia. While this was 3-4 years back, I still have numerous friends, both Liberians and Westerners, who are in the country.Just this evening I was corresponding with one of these individuals. He specifically stated that the Liberian National Police force, as well as Liberian soldiers, have SHOOT TO KILL orders on anyone violating the nationwide curfew (not only West Point) implemented 7 days ago.The SHOOT TO KILL orders are also in effect for those who attempt cross closed areas.I would assume this also applies to those attempting to sneak through or around the internal immigration checkpoints. These have existed for years as the last 2 civil wars started via overland invasion from Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. They are found throughout the country.West Point has not been given up on. Aid convoys are sent daily to deliver food and water. Typically this is accomplished by cordoning off an area, unloading, getting transports out, then some type of orderly distribution. Between the people and the supplies are disinfecting stations (water and bleach).There is likely some type of effort to get the sick removed as well, though I have no detail on this.Needless to say, the people in the country are petrified. I can imagine journalists are pretty fearful of travel to the country to cover the story.Further, the WHO has already made several public statements that it is getting extremely hard to even get into the region because of so many cancellations of commercial airline flights. After that, the only options are private aircraft or overland travel. Some airlines are still flying, but few.Just thought I would chime in.
Joe42
User ID: 29607553
United States
08/26/2014 01:41 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: FEMA Ebola camps, Internet down, West-Point gone dark. West-Point's gone news-dark, and I expect it to stay that way... imagine the unease people will have if they learn an entire town (slum) was shut, and given up on.
Quoting: SarahC
Possible Explanation:
As some of you already know I spent around 1.5 years working in Liberia. While this was 3-4 years back, I still have numerous friends, both Liberians and Westerners, who are in the country.
Just this evening I was corresponding with one of these individuals. He specifically stated that the Liberian National Police force, as well as Liberian soldiers, have SHOOT TO KILL orders on anyone violating the nationwide curfew (not only West Point) implemented 7 days ago.
The SHOOT TO KILL orders are also in effect for those who attempt cross closed areas.
I would assume this also applies to those attempting to sneak through or around the internal immigration checkpoints. These have existed for years as the last 2 civil wars started via overland invasion from Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. They are found throughout the country.
West Point has not been given up on. Aid convoys are sent daily to deliver food and water. Typically this is accomplished by cordoning off an area, unloading, getting transports out, then some type of orderly distribution. Between the people and the supplies are disinfecting stations (water and bleach).
There is likely some type of effort to get the sick removed as well, though I have no detail on this.
Needless to say, the people in the country are petrified. I can imagine journalists are pretty fearful of travel to the country to cover the story.
Further, the WHO has already made several public statements that it is getting extremely hard to even get into the region because of so many cancellations of commercial airline flights. After that, the only options are private aircraft or overland travel. Some airlines are still flying, but few.
Just thought I would chime in.
.
Possible Explanation:As some of you already know I spent around 1.5 years working in Liberia. While this |
1998 nuclear tests in particular left a deeply negative impression because they cut off military supplies not just from the US, but also from third party sources that contained US components. On 1 December 2004, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Prakash sent a letter to Admiral Doran expressing concerns about the status of FMS and security assistance issues. Three main issues raised concern the Sub-Rescue contract, P-3 Orion, and Aviation Training. Admiral Doran replied on 14 January 2005 with details on the status of each program (see below). 44. (U) Aero India the largest aerospace tradeshow in South Asia, took place from 9-13 February 2005 at the Yelahanka Indian Air Force Base in Bangalore. The centerpiece of press attention for Aero India 2005 was the participation of five US military aircraft on static display and fifteen US defense contractors. The US demonstrated the largest foreign presence at this show. Two themes emerged from Aero India: 1) All MoD officials and military personnel were very pleased and impressed with the USG's participation in this event, and 2) There are still serious doubts about the USG's reliability as a defense supplier. Having established the seriousness of US commitment to competing in the Indian arms market, the challenge now is to come to the table in a timely fashion with competitively priced products for a major military platform. 45. (C) P3 Orion Maritime Patrol Aircraft - In response to their request, the Indian Navy was provided P&A data in September 2003 for 8 P-3B(H) Orion maritime reconnaissance aircraft. These aircraft would be brought out of long-term storage and fully refurbished, bringing them up to P-3C Plus capability. The total case value for 8 aircraft with associated weapons, equipment, spares and training would be approximately $1 Billion. When the Indian Navy learned that P-3Cs might be available they expressed interest in these aircraft instead of the P-3Bs. A P-3C aircraft and sensor package has since been cleared for release to India and a weapons package is under development. The US Navy's International Programs Office sent a delegation to New Delhi from February 15-16, to discuss P&A information for P-3C with the Indian Navy. Currently, the US Navy's International Programs Office is exploring Indian Navy requests for the "hot" transfer of one or two P-3Cs to the Indian Navy and is exploring the possibility of lowering the total costs of this proposed sale. 46. (C) SH-60 Sea Hawk helicopters - In September 2003 the Indian Navy requested pricing data for the purchase of 16 Sea Hawk helicopters to replace their aging Sea Kings. This P&A data is expected in early 2005. ODC has learned that GOI will probably release a global Request for Proposal (RFP) to meet this requirement. If that happens the Sea Hawk will face stiff competition from French and Russian aircraft, which are likely to be aggressively priced. 47. (C) E-2C Hawkeye aircraft - In July 2003 Northrop Grumman provided the Indian Navy with an open source brief on the E-2C Hawkeye, which led to a request for P&A data for 6 aircraft. This P&A data has just arrived, with a total case value of approximately $1.3 Billion for 6 aircraft and associated equipment. The Indian Navy's interest in the Hawkeye waned however, when they learned that it would not be able to operate from their newly acquired aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov. As a result, the Hawkeye sale is on hold for the foreseeable future. 48. (C) Deep Sea Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) - The DSRV case was initially opened in 1997 but was suspended in 1998 due to sanctions. The case was restarted after September 2001. In March 2004, the Indian Navy approved an amendment to the DSRV case and made an initial deposit of $158,425. The total value of the DSRV amendment is $734,443. ODC is currently working gith the Indian Navy to update the DSRV case to allow for modifications to their model 209 submarines so they are compatible with the DSRV. The Indian Navy has indicated their desire to conduct a demonstration of this rescue capability. 49. (C) Excess Defense Articles. On 15 February the Indian Navy was briefed by Navy IPO that the US will be retiring MHC and LPD class ships in FY 2006 and 2007. The Indian Navy has indicated an interest in these vessels and specifically asked that this information be kept confidential (possibly to avoid interference from Indian shipyards). US-India Joint Exercises Continue to Expand --------------------------------------------- ------ 50. (C) Since sanctions were waived in September 2001, we have conducted a series of nearly 20 bilateral exercises of increasing scope and sophistication with all three services. The fifth and largest 'Malabar' exercise was conducted from October 1-10 off the south Indian Coast and featured ASW, AAW, SUW, and VBSS exercises. For the first time we utilized the IN-USN Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) which were perceived to significantly ease the planning process and set the stage for even more sophisticated exercises. These SOPs will be reviewed, enhanced and expanded during the Malabar 05 planning conferences. The exercise also featured the first sub vs sub event, the first port visit of a US nuclear powered warship to India, and the first use of the Navy to Navy fuel transfer agreement (which we hope will ultimately open the door for an ACSA). We have proposed that Malabar 05 include the Indian aircraft carrier Viraat, and Malabar 06 include a US carrier. Despite numerous requests, the Indian Navy has not included a KILO class submarine in any of our exercises. 51. (C) Exercise Flash Iroquois with USN SEALS and Indian Maritime Commandos (MARCOS) was conducted in October 2004 in a training area south of Mumbai. The focus was on ship intervention. Also Indian MARCOS participated in the EOD exercise, Spitting Cobra with EODMU Five in January 2005. Finally, US warships are stopping routinely in Chennai, Cochin and Mumbai for refueling, crew rest and recreation. 52. (C) Future exercises in 2005 will include only the Malabar 05. A Flash Iroquois Special operations exercise involving SEALs was not scheduled due to operational commitments of the SEALs. The planned Search and Rescue exercise (SAREX) has been postponed to CY 2006 due to funding issues (PACFLT) and a desire to conduct a more sophisticated exercise by the Indian Navy. The Indian Navy would like this exercise to include a submarine rescue phase and to actually test the DSRV capability purchased through FMS. 53. (C) USARPAC and SOCPAC have conducted a number of high altitude warfare, CT, and jungle warfare exercises at the platoon level. PACAF has conducted several air exercises to include Para-drop. PACAF's COPE India DACT will be in November in India and feature F-16s, AWACs, and tankers. Air forces agreed on a road map for IAF to participate in REDFLAG exercise in 2006-07. The USMC and the Indian Army have company level exercises this summer at Camp Pendelton and 29 Palms. USARPAC has a plan to raise the level of engagement up to battalion and brigade by 2007. Port Visits ------------------ 54. (C) Port visits to India continue at about one per quarter. Last visit was USS Blue Ridge in Goa, 15-18 February 2005. During the July 2004 visit of USS Cushing to Mumbai, the local Foreigners Regional Registration Office (INS equivalent) demanded a "crew list" from the ship and, in accordance with policy, the CO refused. The FRRO then refused to process visa applications for two sailors departing on emergency leave. The Charge appealed to the Ministry for External Affairs and was able to obtain the visas. Diplomatic approval for subsequent visits has been contingent on the ship providing a "Shore Party List" of names only, of those departing the ship and entering India. Four ships have visited India under this regime without incident. The Indian Navy views this issue as outside their purview. Non-Combatant Operations (NEO) Planning ----------------------------------------- 55. (S/NF) In time of war or natural disaster as many as 3000 official AMCITs and 50,000 passport holders might become affected. PACOM's and III MEF's NEO Planning for India has evolved rapidly since the near war situation in 2002 resulting in a highly developed on-the-shelf plan. The embassy's NEO planning in coordination with the other four allies has also progressed to a high level. What's left to do is approach the GOI to ask for guarantees for access to bring military equipment and personnel into India during a time of crisis. The tsunami tragedy has presented an opportunity to engage the GOI on issues linked to our NEO planning. We plan to exploit this window to start a dialogue that will lead to engagement on direct questions that support our NEO planning ACSA ---- 56. (C) One key administrative goal we need to complete to further advance our defense cooperation programs is completing the ACSA which PACOM has been trying to get signed for close to three years. Embassy has reinvigorated it with Mr Mukherjee several times. USD(P) Feith mentioned it in June during the Defense Policy Group. Mr Feith also mentioned it with Foreign Secretary Saran in September. Recommend you stress with Mukherjee and other officials the importance of getting this signed. POW-MIA Issues ---------------------------- 57. (C) OSD's POW-MIA coordinator has visited India and laid the ground work for future investigations into possible recovery of remains of downed US fliers who flew "the Hump" from India across Burma, into China during WWII. Presently three possible recovery sites have been provided to GOI in Indian's North-East. According to US war records, up to 406 personnel may have perished on Indian soil. Conclusion ---------- 58. (C) Once again, we appreciate the opportunity your visit presents and look forward to your arrival. MULFORDSteinmeier penned an opinion piece published Saturday warning that relations between the US and Russia have reached a new low.
"It's a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War. The current times are different and more dangerous," Steinmeier wrote in a 214-word guest column published by Bild, Germany's largest circulation newspaper.
The Ukrainian crisis, Syrian conflict and a lapse in nuclear material cooperation between the former Cold War adversaries are listed by Germany's top diplomat as reasons for the dangerous environment. He laid the blame mostly on Russia for "provoking" a new Cold War but, unlike the Cold War-era, in which the US and Russia had "red lines and respected them" the new multi-polar environment has more regional conflict making geopolitics "more unpredictable."
A plea for stronger diplomacy
"But in spite of all the frustration, disappointment and deep distrust on both sides," he wrote. "We must continue to search for ways to put an end to the insanity in Syria. The US and Russia must continue to talk."
He closed by urging Moscow to put pressure on Damascus to allow humanitarian aid into the besieged city of Aleppo. "Russia can and must bring its weight to bear. And the regional players have to assert their influence on the fighters in Aleppo," he concluded.
This comes as the UN Security Council is poised to vote on two rival resolutions on Syria on Saturday, one drafted by France calling for an end to air raids on Aleppo and a second by Russia that makes no mention of a halt to aerial bombardment.
jar/rc (AFP, Bild)(Nashville,TN) – We will admit that there is something very redeeming about living in Nashville and having zero musical talent. So when we sat down with the folks with the Americana Music Association, a new door of music and beer working together was opened. The Americana genre of music is defined as any music that has roots in America and that covers a pretty broad spectrum. We decided the best approach for creating a beer that exemplified the Americana spirit was to just get some great Americana artist around the long table at the taproom one Sunday afternoon to see how many stories and beers we could go through in one evening. The result was was AmericanaFest Ale, a lighter-bodied ale that begins with a slight smoky aroma and finishes with a very aromatic hop flavor. Join us this Wednesday from 4-6 at the Yazoo Taproom as we kick off this year’s AmericanaFest Ale with local Americana Artists, cold pints and bottles of AmericanaFest Ale for everyone to drink with us or take home.
Americana Music Fest and Conference will be September 15th-20th with the awards show on the 16th honoring musical greats Buffy Sainte-Marie, Don Henley, David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, Ricky Skaggs and Los Lobos. We hope you will join us this Wednesday for a celebration of good music and good beer working together for something great.
Visit AmericanaMusic.org for more info about Americana Music Association. See You all then, and now – other Yazoo Goodness.I recently discovered a Linux shell script that was running slowly due to an inefficiently implemented loop. This innocent investigation ended up uncovering misleading information from time and a bad interaction between the Linux thread scheduler and its CPU power management algorithms.
How often does an eight line shell script expose such rich information?
Conclusions first, explanations later
Using $(expr) to do math is over a hundred times slower than using bash internals. This is not a new discovery, but it’s worth reiterating. Excessive use of sub processes (see point 1) can confuse the Linux kernel’s power management algorithms, leading to an additional three times slowdown. Interesting… time gives accurate elapsed time information but its CPU time information should not be trusted, especially if you make excessive use of sub processes (see point 1). Interesting… When time lies you can always use the Windows Task Manager to measure Linux CPU consumption. Amusing. Looping in Windows batch files can be faster than looping in Linux shell scripts. Process creation in Windows is slower than on Linux. Not surprising.
This is part of a series of posts about Linux. Previous posts include:
The setup
We recently added a new shell script to our build process and I noticed that this was causing a two times to three times slowdown on our builds. Not good. One of my coworkers found that the use of $(expr) to loop over arguments was the culprit. A minimal repro is shown here:
# Warning: this code is excessively slow ExprCount() { for (( i = $1 ; i > 0; i=$(expr $i - 1) )); do : done echo Just did $1 iterations using expr math } time ExprCount 1000
Note: this code copies/pastes much better on Chrome than on Internet Explorer. FWIW.
On my 3.2 GHz six-core twelve-thread Core i7-3930K this script took almost two seconds to run and gave results like this:
Just did 1000 iterations using expr math real 0m1.883s
user 0m0.096s
sys 0m0.260s
This means that my machine can do only 530 iterations a second using this technique because each $(expr) statement is starting up a child process in order to decrement an integer. Linux process startup has a reputation for being fast, but this is a reminder that ‘fast’ is not the same as ‘free’. So far so good.
I tested to see whether expr was particularly slow by having a loop that invoked $(nop) a thousand times, where nop was just a C program that just returns immediately. The cost to invoke $(nop) was measured to be about 20% lower than the cost to use $(expr) to do some math, so not really enough faster to be interesting.
$(expr) is commonly recommended for implementing counters in shell scripts, but this is bad advice.
Faster looping
The solution is to use the math operations that are built into bash like this:
# This code performs quite well BashCount() { for (( i = $1 ; i > 0 ; i-- )); do : done echo Just did $1 iterations using bash math } time BashCount 150000
On the same test machine this script gave results like this:
Just did 150000 iterations using bash math real 0m0.716s
user 0m0.684s
sys 0m0.032s
In other words, using the built-in decrement operation ran about 400 times faster than using $(expr)! Not a huge surprise – experts know this already – but still, nice.
Anomaly the first, CPU usage
A less OCD person might have called a 400 times speedup sufficient, but I’d noticed a few peculiarities during the investigation that I wanted to investigate. Noticing and investigating anomalies is, I believe, a critical skill for a developer, as anomalies often reveal mistaken assumptions, bugs, or ‘jankiness’.
The results from time had been confusing throughout the investigation. They consistently showed that only about 15-25% of the elapsed time in the $(expr) loops was CPU time. This then caused me to not use CPU profilers during the investigation but instead think about what could be causing stalls. Network delays? Disk I/O? Nothing made sense.
I eventually ran iostat 1 in another window and noticed that it said that CPU usage during my test runs was about 8.5%. On my twelve hardware thread (six cores, hyperthreaded) system this corresponds to one CPU core. In other words, total CPU time was equal to elapsed time, the script was CPU bound, and time was lying to me.
I then used a stopwatch to check that time’s elapsed time calculations were correct. Finally I used multiple other tools to confirm that my ExprCount() shell script, running on an otherwise idle machine, was indeed CPU bound:
Running the test script under perf stat showed 0.945 CPUs utilized
Running mpstat -P ALL 1 in another terminal showed one core worth of CPU time being consumed
Context switch graphing (see screenshot in the next section) showed that the task was CPU bound
It also made sense that the loop would be CPU bound. After the first invocation of $(expr) everything is in the disk cache so there should be no I/O latency. All of process creation, reading from the disk cache, process execution, and process teardown is done by the CPU, so the overall task should be entirely CPU bound. And it is.
So, be aware that time always underestimates CPU time, and that this underestimation is roughly proportional to how many sub processes you create per second. Presumably the process creation time is being attributed neither to the parent nor the child process, even though it really should be, as sys time.
This anomaly occurs both with the bash time-builtin and with /usr/bin/time. I assume that the problem is ultimately a limitation of what the Linux kernel reports back to time, so the proper fix here is probably to acknowledge the limitation in the man page. I’m discussing this with the man-page maintainers.
Since time is mostly just a wrapper around the wait3() call it makes sense that both time versions give the same results – they are just reporting what the kernel tells them.
To be crystal clear, my complaint/concern is that when time is used to measure my ExprCount() loop it makes the loop seem like it is not CPU bound, when it is. This can lead a performance investigation astray. I believe that this should be fixed, or documented.
Anomaly the second, CPU frequency
I was about ready to declare the case closed when I noticed another anomaly. The ExprCount() time was usually extremely stable, but occasionally it would run three times faster – usually it was 400 times slower than BashCount() but sometimes it was only ~133 times slower. Now that is an anomaly worth investigating.
I quickly discovered that if a busy loop CPU hog was spinning away in another process then the ExprCount() loop would run three times faster. The loop that used bash math was unaffected. I immediately suspected power management, and I eventually verified this by running the test scripts under perf stat. Running the tests under perf stat was the most rewarding because it clearly shows the CPU frequency, and it showed that it was far lower when running the ExprCount() loop:
Performance counter stats for ‘counttest.sh ExprTest’: 1780.553888 task-clock # 0.979 CPUs utilized
3,183 context-switches # 0.002 M/sec
1,119 CPU-migrations # 0.001 M/sec
319,758 page-faults # 0.180 M/sec
1,948,359,438 cycles # 1.094 GHz Performance counter stats for ‘counttest.sh BashTest’: 716.316659 task-clock # 0.997 CPUs utilized
74 context-switches # 0.000 M/sec
0 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec
354 page-faults # 0.000 M/sec
2,524,171,488 cycles # 3.524 GHz
The perf stat results also hint at why the CPU frequency is lower on the ExprCount() tests. Perf stat shows that the ExprCount() loop does thousands of CPU migrations compared to zero in the BashCount() loop.
Once I started to suspect lots of CPU migrations it was interesting to see what other tools might be useful. Running mpstat -P ALL 1 while running the two different count loops showed dramatic results. When the counting was done with $(expr) then the CPU usage was distributed relatively evenly across all of my CPU cores. However when the counting was done with bash internals then CPU usage was localized entirely to one core.
As a final bit of investigative reporting (I enjoy this sort of stuff way too much) I used the Zoom profiler to record context switches while running the $(expr) loop. The results, color coded by process and put on per-CPU racetracks, are shown below:
The bash process is in red and we can see that it spends very little time running. The other colors are various invocations of expr which bash is usually waiting for. The fascinating thing is how often the processes migrate between CPUs. The bash process alternates between CPUs 2 and 5, and each expr process starts on one thread and is then forcibly migrated to another.
We can see that the overall task is CPU bound. The bash process runs for a fraction of a millisecond, then expr launches, then expr moves to another core, then expr terminates and the cycle repeats.
After discussions with some kernel developers it appears that new processes are placed on the least-busy core, however that doesn’t explain why bash keeps moving or why each expr instance moves once.
The net result is that none of the CPUs are fully loaded which, apparently, means that the power management algorithms don’t realize that a CPU bound task is running. It’s kind of crazy awesome, and it is an example of when a multi-core system actually runs (a lot) more slowly than a single-core system.
Setting thread affinity is usually a bad idea because it reduces the kernel’s scheduling flexibility and may cause unexpected interactions with other processes. However, in the interests of science I knew I had to run my test script under taskset 1 to see what happens when it is forced to a single CPU. Doing this caused the average CPU clock speed in ExprCount() to triple, and performance increased identically.
Please don’t work around this by setting your power management settings to High Performance. If every Linux user did that then the cumulative extra power draw would be significant and would make me regret writing this article. The behavior is an anomaly. It probably should be fixed, but in most situations I’m sure that the power management algorithms work fine. Just don’t go create hundreds of child processes per second.
I tested this on Ubuntu 12.04.1 (32-bit) and Ubuntu 12.04.2 (64-bit). The timings were slightly different, but the conclusions were fundamentally the same.
Measuring Linux performance using Windows
While trying to decide which tools to trust regarding CPU consumption I decided to let Windows be the tie breaker. I have a Linux VM on my laptop so I ran my tests in the VM and then monitored the CPU consumption of the VM with Task Manager. It correctly showed that the VM, and therefore the task running inside it, was CPU bound. Which made me laugh.
Measuring Windows Performance
In the interests of science I made some similar measurements on Windows. First, a simple batch file that counts down using internal commands.
@echo off
echo Starting for loop at %time%
for /L %%i in (400000,-1,0) do (
rem empty statement
)
echo Finishing at %time%
This ran in about a second, so 400,000 iterations per second.
Then I added a call to nop.exe to the loop to measure minimal process creation time (and reduced the iteration count to 1,000). Here’s the new batchfile:
@echo off
echo Starting for loop at %time%
for /L %%i in (1000,-1,0) do (
nop.exe
)
echo Finishing at %time%
This showed that a Windows batch file can launch about 133 processes per second. A lot slower than Linux.
Counting the easy way
Maybe it would be better if I did my counting in PHP instead:
https://github.com/Herzult/SimplePHPEasyPlus
Or maybe counting in assembly language (~14 billion subtractions a second?) would be better.
Full test program
Here’s my full test script:
#!/bin/bash # Warning: this code is excessively slow ExprCount() { for (( i = $1 ; i > 0; i=$(expr $i - 1) )); do : done echo Just did $1 iterations using expr math } # This code performs quite well BashCount() { for (( i = $1 ; i > 0 ; i-- )); do : done echo Just did $1 iterations using bash math } ExprCountWrapper() { time ExprCount $1 } BashCountWrapper() { time BashCount $1 } case "$1" in "ExprTest") ExprCountWrapper 1000;; "BashTest") BashCountWrapper 150000;; "") perf stat counttest.sh ExprTest && perf stat counttest.sh BashTest;; esac“Everybody loves celebrity children,” said Stephanie Trong, the editorial director of The Cut. “But perhaps the biggest appeal is that these guys live in the lap of luxury and they’re extremely open about their exploits. How many teens go to couture shows or fashion parties, much less document them on their joint Twitter feed, in such a hilarious, uncensored way?”
The Brants have almost 70,000 Twitter followers, a fraction of whom appear to be their age.
“Most of my tweets happen between 1 and 5 in the morning,” Harry said. “I’m a night owl, and random thoughts pop into my head. I’ll be watching ‘Mommie Dearest,’ and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, my God, Joan Crawford is amazing.’ ”
This sets off a film tangent.
“ ‘Cocktail’ is the best movie of all time,” Peter said.
“You hate ‘Troop Beverly Hills,’ but you love ‘Cocktail?’ ” Harry countered. “You are a tacky European man!”
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But this was a brief low-culture aside. For a teenager, Peter Brant can sound like a been-there-done-that dowager countess, not that his Old World pretensions aren’t refreshing in the Internet age.
“I’m interested in 18th-century furniture, late-19th-century art, the Arts and Crafts movement and history of the mid- to late-19th century,” he said. “I bounce around a lot, but I usually stick with the same three centuries.”
Harry has similarly lofty passions. “I become obsessed with things like DNA or old Valentino shows or the Qing dynasty,” he said. “I have a love of opulence.”
Peter interjected, “He gets that from me.”
Harry admitted, “I definitely learned that from you.”
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The brothers, who live with their family in Greenwich, Conn., seem well on their way to transitioning from Internet to general fame — all for just being... well, fabulous. They are the perfect harbingers of the “It boy,” young enough that it isn’t emasculating that they don’t yet have jobs, and fashion-forward enough that they don’t water down their straight-from-the-runway looks.
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It could be said that the Brants have taken the torch from the Hilton sisters, that they are the next generation of to-the-manner-born siblings in the public eye.
But Paris Hilton’s catchphrase (if you can remember) was “That’s hot.” Peter Brant name-checks Edith Wharton and Henry James. In a pop-culture landscape that has been populated by heir heads (any entertainment produced by the Hilton sisters or the Tinsley Mortimer reality show, “High Society,” which was about as classy as the skin magazine that shared its title), the Brants could certainly elevate the medium. But don’t expect the boys to be reality fodder in the near future.
“That’s where I draw the line,” said their father, Peter M. Brant. “That’s not going down on my nickel. It’s not their cup of tea, either, but they have been approached.”
Mr. Brant is baffled by the public’s growing obsession with his sons. “I have no idea,” he said. “I try to discourage their making their private lives public. They’re both good kids, and I’m proud of them.”
He thinks they are handling their increasing public stature with poise. “We’ve given them reasonable freedom,” he said, “and expect them to get to school on time. We expect them to be good human beings and to care about other things besides clothes.”
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The writer-about-town Derek Blasberg, who has taken the brothers under his wing, can often be spotted with them. “For all their evening proclivities, they go home at a reasonable hour,” Mr. Blasberg said. “I’ve never seen them — How shall I put this? — drunk and disorderly. I’ve been out when Stephanie has dropped them off and Petey’s father has picked them up.”
The Brants attended Mr. Blasberg’s recent birthday hoedown in a barn in St. Louis. “Those boys were the first ones on the dance floor in their chaps and cowboy hats,” he said. “They’re not snobby. They can have fun anywhere from the Venice Biennial to a hayride.” And, no, it was not as if two zany teenagers had infiltrated the party.
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“They were raised surrounded by adults,” Mr. Blasberg went on. “They are fully aware of who their father is, and what art they have on their walls, and who their mother is, and what she represents in terms of fashion and glamour. Naïve teenagers these boys are not.”
The Brant brothers’ ability to stay even-keeled and roll with 40-year-olds is a byproduct of a childhood spent at gallery openings and art dinners with their parents. “It trained us how to make conversation and how to behave,” Harry said.
Peter added: “Art people like to talk about little else than art, so you have to be able to keep up. A conversation about art always turns into a conversation about fashion, and a conversation about fashion always leads to art.”
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Those events were a gateway to socializing at adult events solo. “I first started going out with a friend of mine, Nick Hissom, who is a model,” Peter said. “We always went out in threes, me and him and a girlfriend to adult parties. But I was still with a bunch of kids when I went. A lot of times we weren’t invited, but we snuck in or found a way onto the guest list. We just started doing it more often, and Harry would go out with me. The people I hang out with at parties I have known since I was growing up. It’s like hanging out with your uncle or aunt at a party.”
The brothers insist that their filled-to-the-brim social calendars don’t interfere with their studies. Peter finished high school in January and is majoring in art history at Hunter. Harry, who will be a sophomore, said, “Come rain or shine, I will be going to school at 6 a.m. whether I’ve gotten one hour of sleep or 10.”
And, yes, Peter did go to the prom, and they squeeze in normal activities one would find more age appropriate. Besides getting an early start at philanthropy by serving on the committee of Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation, a blood-cancer research charity, he is spending the summer interning at Sotheby’s. “Besides delivering mail, I help with appraisals and circa dating,” he said. Harry is interning in Interview’s advertising department.
“I’ve had a summer job since I was 9,” Harry said. “At our house we have stables, so I’d work in the barn. We had to clean the stalls.” Harry doesn’t share his father’s passion for polo. “I think horses are beautiful, and I respect them aesthetically,” he said, “but I can’t play polo like he does. It’s a demanding sport.”
Plans for their careers are up in the air. Harry knows that he wants to work in some sort of creative field, and Peter is leaning toward luxury goods, but isn’t sure.
“I’m young and have a lot of time and can sit on that question,” Harry said, before casting a comical sneer at his older brother. “But Peter, you have to hurry. You’re old candy. You’re withering away.”
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Ever blasé, Peter tilted his head, looked at him blankly, then turned away, showing off his strong profile.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Oct. 31, 2014, 2:23 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 1, 2014, 7:08 PM GMT
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane broke up and crashed during a test flight on Friday, killing one crew member and seriously injuring another, authorities said.
The catastrophic breakup came after the plane dropped away from its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane and fired up its hybrid rocket engine, said Stuart Witt, CEO and general manager of the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Debris was scattered across a two-mile swath of the desert floor north of Mojave, which is about 95 miles (150 kilometers) outside Los Angeles.
One of the two test pilots aboard the plane was killed, said Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood, who was among the officials dealing with the crash's aftermath. The pilot was identified Saturday as 39-year-old Michael Alsbury, who died at the scene, according to the Kern County Coroner’s Office.
The other pilot, identified Saturday as Peter Siebold, 43, parachuted to the ground and was injured. Siebold was transferred to Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, California, according to Kern County Deputy Fire Chief Michael Cody.
"We hope that the survivor will be just fine," Youngblood said during a news briefing.
Both pilots worked for Mojave-based Scaled Composites, according to Scaled's president, Kevin Mickey. Scaled has played a key role in developing and testing SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic.
Virgin Galactic had planned to use this SpaceShipTwo to fly passengers on suborbital trips to the edge of space, beginning as early as next year. A nearly identical rocket plane is already under construction inside a Mojave hangar. More than 700 customers, including celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber, have paid as much as $250,000 to take a ride.
George T. Whitesides, Virgin Galactic's CEO, said the company would press on despite the setback.
"Space is hard, and today was a tough day," Whitesides told reporters. "We are going to be supporting the investigation as we figure out what happened today, and we're going to get through it. The future rests in many ways on hard, hard days like this. But we believe we owe it to the folks who were flying these vehicles as well as the folks who are working so hard on them to understand this and to move forward."
Witt said Mojave's close-knit aviation community was hit hard by the tragedy.
"When we have a mishap from the test community, we find that the test community is very small," he said. "We are human, and it hurts."
First powered flight in months
SpaceShipTwo's crew was testing the rocket engine in flight for the first time in more than nine months. The plane was slung beneath WhiteKnightTwo for takeoff from the Mojave Air and Space Port at about 9:20 a.m. PT (12:20 p.m. ET). When the paired planes reached a height of about 50,000 feet, about 50 minutes later, SpaceShipTwo was released for the test.
Witt said the anomaly occurred about two minutes after SpaceShipTwo dropped away and fired the rocket engine, but he didn't see any explosion. "It wasn't because something did happen. It was what I was not hearing and not seeing," Witt said.
Photographer Ken Brown, who was covering the test flight, told NBC News that he saw an explosion high in the air and later came upon SpaceShipTwo debris scattered across a small area of the desert. The WhiteKnightTwo plane and its pilots, meanwhile, landed safely.
Authorities cordoned off the crash site pending an investigation. A National Transportation Safety Board team was expected to get to the crash site Saturday morning. The Federal Aviation Administration said it was also investigating the incident.
Mickey said he expected that the investigation would take several days.
New kind of fuel tested
During the nine months since the previous rocket-powered test in January, Virgin Galactic switched SpaceShipTwo's fuel mixture from a rubber-based compound to a plastic-based mix — in hopes that the new formulation would boost the hybrid rocket engine's performance.
Mickey said engines using the new type of fuel had been thoroughly tested on the ground. The final pre-flight qualification engine firing took place earlier this month. Friday's test marked the first time the new fuel was used in flight, but Mickey said "we expected no anomalies with the motor today."
Before Friday's flight, the most recent aerial outing was on Oct. 7, when SpaceShipTwo took an unpowered, gliding flight back to the Mojave runway.
The fatal flight was part of SpaceShipTwo's years-long test program, following up on the successful suborbital spaceflights of the smaller SpaceShipOne rocket plane in 2004. Virgin Galactic had said SpaceShipTwo's first test |
(64-bit OS required)
Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required) Processor: Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz/AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz or equivalent
Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz/AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz or equivalent Memory: 8 GB RAM
8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or equivalent
NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or equivalent Storage: 30 GB available space Recommended:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required) Processor: Intel Core i7 4790 3.6 GHz/AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz or equivalent
Intel Core i7 4790 3.6 GHz/AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz or equivalent Memory: 8 GB RAM
8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB/AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB or equivalent
NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB/AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB or equivalent Storage: 30 GB available space Minimum:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system Recommended:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system Minimum:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system Recommended:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
Activation key must be used on a valid Steam account, requires internet connection.Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, welcome you to the world of Fallout 4 – their most ambitious game ever, and the next generation of open-world gaming.U.S. District Judge James Robart on Thursday determined that Google’s Motorola Mobility unit was not entitled to the $4 billion per year it sought from Microsoft for its standard-essential patents. Motorola was seeking royalties from Microsoft’s Xbox gaming system, which utilizes the company’s technology concerning video decoding wireless connectivity. Instead of the $4 billion per year Google had valued Motorola’s patents, the judge decided that the appropriate annual payment was closer to $1.8 million.
“This decision is good for consumers because it ensures patented technology committed to standards remains affordable for everyone,” David Howard, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, said in a statement to Bloomberg.
Robart’s ruling comes as a significant blow to Google, which bought Motorola for $12.5 billion in 2011. The company claimed it was interested in Motorola’s vast portfolio of patents, however the lower valuation now gives Google a weaker bargaining chip when negotiating licensing deals with other companies. Some analysts have argued that Google overpaid for the troubled vendor and today’s decision supports that notion.
Motorola and Microsoft will return to the court room in August to argue whether or not Motorola failed to license Microsoft its standard-essential patent at fair terms.With the ongoing larger US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere, it can easily become the "new normal" that US troops are also fighting in (relatively) small numbers in places we just do not hear about, in wars the media does not question, in bloody conflicts that Congress does not bother to debate much less authorize. Once it was news when US troops were fighting overseas. But now the total US militarization of the rest of the world is so non-controversial that the average American doesn’t even seem fazed about it.
For example, most Americans either had not heard or had not stopped to scratch their heads upon hearing that US Special Forces in Somalia ordered airstrikes yesterday while operating alongside Ugandan forces who were battling Al-Shabaab militants. Why is the US backing up the Ugandans? Why are the Ugandans in Somalia in the first place? Is Al-Shabaab such a clear and present threat to the United States that the president was forced to send US troops there without notifying Congress? No one asks these questions (aside from us, of course). The US has been using drones to strike at Al-Shabaab, a small group with no international ambitions, for a number of years, but that too is seldom reported in the media. It’s just normal that US troops are on the ground in Somalia. After all, they are only "advisors" – until they call in airstrikes, that is.
In Libya, we also learned this week that US Special Forces have had their boots have been on the ground in that country since late 2015, preparing the field for a full US invasion (or should we say re-invasion) of that country. The 2011 US attack on Libya was supposed to overthrow an evil dictator and usher in a new democratic era for the Libyan people. Instead, it turns out US bombs only helped al-Qaeda gain a stranglehold on the country. The parts not controlled by bin Laden’s old gang were snapped up by ISIS. So the US "liberation" of Libya was such a disaster and the people who promised a bed of roses were so horribly wrong (as usual) that the US has been secretly planning another invasion for months.
Little wars. Unauthorized wars. Expensive wars. Deadly little wars. US foreign policy is a hammer and all it sees are nails.
Daniel McAdams is director of the The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity. Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.This entire video is a study in bad decisions. But it ends with a Miata on fire, one very lucky kid, and a good lesson of what not to do when working on your car.
Where do I start? This kid has a Miata project car that he's swapping over to a carbureted V8. That's not a bad thing, in fact, I commend him for working on his own car.
That's the only thing that's goes right.
The engine is on a hoist when he tries to start it up. Why start it at that point? When he tries to start it, it spits out a flame, so he tries to start it again. Then it catches on fire.
But it still isn't running. So he keeps trying to start the car, because that's a legitimate, intelligent decision. Of course, it won't start. His next move is to try and blow it out, because this is a lot like a birthday cake.
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So he then goes and grabs a red gas can that is next to the Miata. It's his fuel tank, so presumably he's hoping to starve the fuel supply by taking it away. Yeah, that red can catches on fire. That then briefly sets his shirt on fire. Right now, this is what is technically known in the car world as a "clusterfuck."
Instead of putting out the now large fire with a proper extinguisher, he uses a hose. Thankfully it works and does put the fire out, which restores some order to the garage, even though a perfectly good Miata probably sacrificed itself for this cause.
It also teaches a very important lesson: Don't work on your car unless you really know what you're doing.
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(Hat Tip to Erwin!)Movie Review
Potiche
Directed by Francois Ozon
Starring Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu
2010, France, 103 mins.
Cinema often reflects, predicts and influences what’s happening in the world. We appear to be entering a period of global upsurge similar to 1968: mass uprisings spreading from North Africa and the Middle East to the Midwest. As Vietnam vet Ron Kovic (played by Tom Cruise in Oliver Stone’s 1989 antiwar classic Born on the Fourth of July) declared on stage at the March 19 anti-war rally in Hollywood, “The power of the people is unbeatable. We see it in Tunisia, Cairo. We are not exempt in this country from sweeping change… It can happen here… We are moving into a period of great change.”
In recent years, the movies have been addressing social upheaval. Cut in the merry mode of Karel Reisz’s 1966 Marxian madcap Morgan!, Canadian writer-director Jacob Tierney’s uproarious 2009 The Trotsky stars Jay Baruchel as a Montreal high school student who fantasizes he’s the reincarnation of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and sets about trying to organize a union at his dad’s factory. The 2010 British film Made in Dagenham stars Sally Hawkins as a factory worker who leads a real-life strike for equal wages and women’s rights. And just now a re-mastered version of Sergei Eisenstein’s immortal 1925 Potemkin is being theatrically released.
Now that quintessence of French femininity, the exquisite Catherine Deneuve, is getting into the act. Writer-director Francois Ozon’s Potiche, based on a play by Barilet and Gredy, is the latest addition to the growing cinematic strike wave. Deneuve’s Suzanne Pujol is related to the owners of an umbrella factory in a French provincial town, formerly owned by her late, paternalistic father, and now run by her despotic, reactionary, philandering hubby, Robert (Fabrice Luchini).
The French word “potiche” translates as “a vase or decorative object of little value,” but idiomatically stands for Suzanne’s role as a bourgeois trophy wife, mother, and homemaker (with the help of the help, mais oui). When first seen onscreen, Denueve, long renowned for her unearthly beauty, looks positively shlumpy. Initially, I felt disheartened to see the Chanel model and actress looking so plain: Since Luis Buñuel’s 1967 surrealist classic Belle de Jour, she has exemplified “class” and elegance for a generation of viewers.
But as strikes sweep her family’s factory in 1977, Suzanne finds inner resources of resolve, and there’s more to this ornamental madame than meets the eye. She seeks out Babin (Gerard Depardieu, another heavyweight of French cinema), the mayor who is a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), to amicably settle the brewing brouhaha. Here, the story takes an unexpected turn, in terms of the relationship between the proletarian man of the people and the bourgeois do-gooder.
Once Suzanne enters the fray, she becomes transformed, psychologically as well as physically, as Deneuve’s renowned radiance returns to illumine the screen. Finding her footing, Suzanne transcends the economic realm and enters politics.
In fact, the politics of Potiche are peculiar. Suzanne rejects right-wing austerity economics (a knowing nod to today’s dire crises). But the film does not see Babin’s PCF as an alternative, either. Depardieu (who in 1983 portrayed the title role in the Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton about the French revolutionary) depicts Babin with empathy. He has several good lines about being a devoted lifelong leftist who may never live to see the revolution he’s dreamt of and worked for. But Depardieu’s obesity, never commented upon onscreen, may be an oblique criticism of a sclerotic bureaucracy that has grown fat off the class struggle and union dues.
Like Daniel “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit’s Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, written in the wake of the historic May 1968, worker-student revolt in France, Potiche seeks a third way, another path between the traditional right and left. But instead of opting for anarchy as Dany le Rouge did, Potiche chooses a combination of feminism and Suzanne’s late father’s paternalism – a sort of matriarchal maternalism.
Even if Potiche’s politics aren’t precisely your cup of tea, it’s a heady brew of comedy, romance, class struggle and song – yes, the great Deneuve proves she is an enchanting chanteuse as well as a stellar actress. And it’s a kick to see those French cinema stalwarts Depardieu and Deneuve, who first co-starred in Francois Truffaut’s 1980 anti-Nazi The Last Metro, reunited onscreen. The delightful Potiche tackles the class war in an extremely entertaining, thought-provoking, funny way. Don’t miss it.
Image: Deneuve shines in Potiche.by Reston Citizen John K. Nusbaum
My dad and mom bought 12 acres on Hunter Mill Road in Oakton in 1948 so I had plenty of time as I grew up to get acquainted with the area that would later be named Reston. There have been many changes since the days when I would ford Difficult Run on Lawyers Road and hunt small game in the beautiful wooded countryside.
My wife Maria and I have lived here in Reston for over 27 years now and over those years I’ve watched it change to meet the needs of an increasing population. Lately the desires of some property owners have produced serious issues that stand to impact Reston’s future in very profound ways.
Ambivalent Fairfax County administrators’ heads are turned by special interests and big business so counting on their help in protecting the essence of what makes Reston unique is getting harder by the day.
Without question the genie is out of the bottle, so now more than ever before it’s the duty of we the residents to understand what is at stake in Reston’s future and stand up for core values that we hold dear.Barcelona (ACN).- The Catalan Vice President, Joana Ortega, will meet next week with the Unity for Electoral Process to discuss the logistics of organising the 2014 referendum on independence. In an interview with Catalan radio, Ortega said the government is starting plans to obtain ballot boxes and polling booths on the assumption that the Spanish government will not provide them.
“We’ll have to prepare public funds to get all that is necessary including polling booths and ballot boxes. This is all material that, up until now, was provided by the Spanish state and as a government we have to be prepared”, she said. “I will ask for a special line in the budget for these expenses”, she stated, adding that the government should act “step by step, with no rush, but with an aim to be ready and to do things in the right way”.
The Catalan president, Artur Mas, sent a letter in July to Spanish president, Mariano Rajoy, to formally request a referendum on independence in Catalonia. The letter is said to be answered by Rajoy in the next few weeks according to the Presidency Minister of the Catalan government, Francesc Homs. The government is not confident that it will receive a positive answer to the petition to hold a referendum, but Mas sent the letter to urge Rajoy to start “talks and a negotiation process to allow, in an agreed way, the Catalan people to vote”.
Joana Ortega said that she doesn’t expect the Spanish government to provide ballot boxes or other materials necessary for the referendum, as it does in regular elections. The Vice President didn’t want to speculate on how much it would cost to run the referendum, but said the money will be there because the Catalan government is “committed” to next years referendum. “We will see on what day we will do it, but the government must be ready”, she stated.
Ortega said that Catalonia passed a consultations law and is preparing a second one that can provide the regional legal framework to hold the referendum in case the Spanish government refuses to authorise it. The Vice President said that whatever happens, “what cannot be denied is the will of the people” to vote democratically. Ortega is confident the referendum will have a high turn-out and “the result will be unquestionable”.
The Catalan Vice President also criticised the leader of the People’s Party in Catalonia, Alícia Sánchez Camacho, who said Rajoy is going to answer Mas’s letter by acting following the rule of lay and offering an improvement in the fiscal arrangements with Spain. “They shouldn’t try to fool us”, said Ortega, adding that the changes to the fiscal system were already expected for 2014 and that Spain cannot avoid a referendum by offering a new economical arrangement. “Rajoy does not have a plan for Catalonia, and does not have Catalonia in his plans”, Ortega criticised.
The Vice President regretted the level of debt that Spain has with Catalonia, adding that, besides those, Madrid has not shared with the autonomous communities the extra time that has been offered by Brussels to meet its deficit targets and has forced regions to apply strict austerity measures. “Madrid owes money to Catalonia, and it has to pay for institutional loyalty”, she stated.Nathan For You
“Daddy’s Watching/Party Planner”
Season 2, Episode 6
Chad White, You're Invited To My Party, Only If Your Daddy Comes
It’s always weird to think about today’s dating scene. In the past, people actually went out to meet someone or they were set up on blind dates. Now, we can sign up for a service – free or paid – and meet a man or woman almost instantly. Blind dates aren’t even blind anymore. Your friend can give you the name of your date and you can find them on the internet in under one minute. All of the fun in meeting somebody new is completely gone. But with innovation comes ease. Dating sites are plentiful with several spanning certain niches. Farmer’s Only, Christian Singles, Black People Meet; the list goes on. This week, Nathan develops a strategy for a seemingly LA based dating website to garner more users.
The title of the episode is as creepy as it sounds. The idea is to send a protective “father” figure along with the female user of the site on her date with a male user. The father strikes quickly too. As the date is going to pick up the girl, he is bombarded with questions by said father to make sure he isn’t up to no good. Fielder plays the role of dad for the first test and is barley inconspicuous about it. A question about wringing a woman’s neck is ever so slightly dropped into conversation but the male date is not deterred. When the two leave, it is up to Fielder to continue following the woman. “Daddy” keeps a hawk’s eye on the two from a safe distance. At a bowling alley, Fielder disguises himself as a woman in Islamic religious garb. What’s even better is that the girl didn’t even notice that Fielder was bowling right next to them; she was way too into her date. What’s irksome is some of the conversation between the two of them. The male and female start talking about 9/11. Who the heck does that on a date let alone a first one?
But possibly my favorite bit of the entire episode is the picture Fielder used to describe the bad guys a woman can meet in the dating scene. It’s….just look at it. So much is going on.Monty Widenius, one of the original cofounders of MySQL, issued a statement Monday articulating his latest views about Oracle's acquisition of Sun. He shares the European Commission's concern that the deal will reduce competitiveness between database vendors, suggesting that Oracle should sell MySQL, a move that would demonstrate to regulators and the market that the acquisition is not going to erode choice.
Database giant Oracle reached an agreement to acquire Sun earlier this year following a failed bid by IBM. The acquisition represents major consolidation for the database market because Sun owns MySQL, the most prominent open source database platform. EU regulators have temporarily halted the acquisition so that they can study the potential implications.
Sun acquired MySQL last year and has faced a steady barrage of criticism over its handling of ongoing development. Widenius condemned Sun's release management practices when MySQL 5.1 was released last year with serious bugs. He finally abandoned Sun in February, citing dissatisfaction with the direction that MySQL was going under Sun's ownership.
Widenius launched his own company, Monty Program Ab, in order to focus on developing his own MySQL fork called MariaDB. He also founded the Open Database Alliance which consists of independent vendors that provide services relating to MySQL or develop various forks. Widenius has previously said that the organization could potentially help create a more transparent and community-driven development environment for moving the open source database forward in collaboration with Oracle. In his latest statement, he takes a much stronger position and calls for Oracle to turn over development entirely to someone else by selling MySQL.
"[Oracle should] be constructive and commit to sell MySQL to a suitable third party, enabling an instant solution instead of letting Sun suffer much longer," he wrote. "MySQL needs a different home than Oracle, a home where there will be no conflicts of interest concerning how, or if, MySQL should be developed further."
Widenius has enlisted consultant Florian Mueller to help communicate his message to the European Commission during the ongoing regulatory investigation. Meuller is well known in the open source software community for his efforts as the mastermind behind a 2004 lobbying campaign against software patents in Europe. Meuller is heading back to Brussels to represent Monty Program Ab and the MySQL community. In a public statement, he had some strong words for Oracle and called for the deal to receiver tougher scrutiny.
"Every day that passes without Oracle excluding MySQL from the deal is further evidence that Oracle just wants to get rid of its open source challenger and that the EU's investigation is needed to safeguard innovation and customer choice," he said. "This is highly critical because the entire knowledge-based economy is built on databases."
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has firmly rejected the prospect of selling off MySQL. He argues that the open source database doesn't compete with Oracle's enterprise products. The two database offerings target different sections of the market, he contends.
It's unclear if the EU regulators will accept his view and allow the deal to move forward, but the delays are certainly damaging. While the EC is conducting its investigation, IBM is cannibalizing Sun's server business and picking the bones clean. Ellison says that Sun is losing roughly $100 million per month. There might not be much left for Oracle by the time the acquisition is approved.SingularDTV CEO Zach LeBeau has indicated to Cointelegraph that they will hire more Hollywood experts to shape his company’s drive and future plans. Last week the crypto outfit hired Hollywood veteran Michael Blieden as a consulting producer. The writer/director/producer is to advise the company on its launching phase scheduled for the second quarter of this year.
The decentralized entertainment platform, which uses Ethereum, is set to launch its entertainment synthesis this year with the rights management gateway and a decentralized distribution portal in Q1 and Q2 respectively.
Hollywood and Blockchain
LeBeau told Cointelegraph that the move represents SingularDTV's commitment to bringing top talent from Hollywood into the Blockchain movement. When asked if the current trend of hiring top guns in the mainstream entertainment industry will continue, this was his response:
"We will be announcing more hires at this level in the coming weeks, and the public should expect more high profile hires for SingularDTV. In the long-term, SingularDTV is positioning itself to operate at the levels Netflix or Hulu operates at.”
“We will hire Hollywood and entertainment industry talents and professionals to help position us to be a major player in the international entertainment industry," he adds.
No intermediaries
SingularDTV believes the decision to hire more seasoned hands from the mainstream entertainment industry is a deliberate policy to promote Blockchain adoption in Hollywood. "We are finding a great demand from the entertainment industry for what we offer - no intermediaries and more transparency," LeBeau informed Cointelegraph.
Kim Jackson, who is SingularDTV's entertainment president, exemplifies her company's goal. She started at Disney, worked with Universal and for Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee, and has been the driving force behind several independent films.
Jackson says:
"SingularDTV will be launching innovative tools that will allow creators and industry alike to use and adopt blockchain technology, giving them total command and control over their creative content. The industry will be able to see how artists and content producers benefit directly from a decentralized, peer-to-peer exchange, giving them a direct connection with audiences, like never before."
Blieden's background
Blieden, who is a writer/director/producer, comes on board with a wide range of more than a decade experience in the creative industry. The University of Michigan alumnus recently directed the Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll pilot plus the first season for FX.
He is credited with directing Broad City for Comedy Central, Sirens for the USA, Brooklyn Nine-Nine for Fox, Up All Night for NBC, Awkward and The Inbetweeners for MTV and Children's Hospital for Adult Swim.
Blieden also directed, co-wrote and starred in a pilot for the IFC called International Plan. In fact, it is on record that he directed all the short films and roll-ins for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and produced and directed live specials for comedian Zach Galifianakis and Joe Rogan. Moreso, some music videos for Fiona Apple and Kanye West are his handiwork as well.It's fitting that the likeness of Judge James Edwin Horton Jr. appears humble because that's how he was in life, his granddaughter said Thursday at the unveiling of the bronze statue. Horton's grandchildren and great-grandchildren were in downtown Athens for the event honoring Horton, a white judge who lost his career defending a black man.
"This is more than I could ever imagine," said granddaughter Kathy Horton. Horton's sons - Ed, Don and Mac - have passed away but Ed's widow, Katherine Horton, was at the ceremony and pulled the cover from the statue of her father-in-law to reveal it to the public. The judge made the pivotal decision in 1933 to overturn the guilty verdict rendered by an all-white jury in the trial of Haywood Patterson, one of nine defendants in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case. Click here to read about the case. The trial was held in Decatur but the decision was written in the Limestone County Courthouse, just blocks from Horton's home in downtown Athens.
Eighty-four years later, Horton is celebrated as an early civil rights hero for doing what was right when no one else would.
The statue
The life-size statue shows Horton in a suit, with his hands clasped behind his back, in an unpretentious pose. Kathy Horton said an initial design of the statue showed Horton with his chin up, looking proud. "That wasn't our grandfather, so they dropped his chin," she said.
It was created by renowned Mobile sculptor Casey Downing Jr., who attended the unveiling.
The Limestone County Bar Association decided to erect the statue and the Judge Horton Monument Committee was established to raise the $60,000 needed in private donations. No government funds were used for the project. The Limestone County Historical Society erected the marker explaining the judge's role in the Scottsboro Boys case.
Former Judge Jimmy Woodroof spoke at the unveiling, saying people would learn Horton's story when they walk past the statue and the accompanying historical marker to enter the courthouse. "Let it always serve as a reminder," he said. He described Horton as a good and kind man who did the right thing, knowing it would be an unpopular decision and that he would not be re-elected.
The decision
Athens Mayor Ronnie Marks said, "Judge Horton got up that morning and walked here to make a decision that changed history forever."
In his written decision, Horton said the testimony of Victoria Price - one of two women to accuse Patterson and eight other young black men of rape - was not only "uncorroborated, but it also bears on its face indications of improbability and is contradicted by other evidence..."
Speaker and historian Chris Paysinger reminded people that the decision meant Horton would stand against the beliefs of most white people in his community. "Judge Horton knew too well the realities of the Jim Crow south in 1933." Paysinger defined "bravery" as Horton's act to serve justice when he knew the consequences would hurt him personally. The historical marker beside the statue says, "Horton faced threats on his life and his name became a lightning rod for supremacists who labeled him a traitor for overcoming the verdict."
Horton was ousted from the bench in the next election by voters angry that he sided with a black man, no matter what the evidence showed. Ruby Bates, the second accuser, later recanted her testimony about the rape and people began to believe, as Horton had, that the young men were innocent. In 2013, Gov. Robert Bentley formally pardoned the nine men, eight of whom spent time in prison and whose lives were ruined by the case. Read about the pardon by clicking here.Binyamin Netanyahu's cabinet is in disarray as the Israeli prime minister comes under fire from several of his most senior ministers for his handling of the crisis in Gaza.
The storm of public criticism from within his own ranks led to the sacking on Tuesday night of the deputy defence minister, Danny Danon, a member of Netanyahu's Likud party.
Danon had told the media that Hamas had humiliated Israel by setting conditions for peace, after Netanyahu said he was willing to accept the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire. Hamas claimed that it had not been consulted over the ceasefire conditions and rejected it.
"At a time when … Israel and the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] are in the midst of a military campaign against the terrorist organisations and taking determined action to maintain the security of Israel's citizens, it cannot be that the deputy defence minister will sharply attack the leadership of the country regarding the campaign," Netanyahu said in a statement on Tuesday.
"These sharp remarks on the deputy defence minister's part are irresponsible, especially given his position. They also serve the Hamas terrorist organisation as a tool to attack the government with."
The divisions within the Israeli cabinet have been mocked by Hamas, with spokesman Fauzi Barhoum calling the sacking of Danon a "victory for the resistance".
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's hawkish foreign minister, split his Yisrael Beiteinu party from Likud – dismantling a crucial alliance for Netanyahu – having accused the prime minister of hesitation over Gaza.
Lieberman criticised the government for accepting the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire and called for an IDF ground assault and occupation of the Gaza Strip, arguing that a ceasefire would allow Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups to replenish their stock of weapons.
"All this hesitation works against us. We must go all the way, there is no alternative. We have to end this conflict with the IDF in control of all of Gaza … There is no other way to tackle the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror that rules Gaza," Lieberman said at a press conference on Tuesday night.
Netanyahu's election last year was only possible at the head of a shaky coalition of rightwing parties, cracks in which appear to be emerging over the war in Gaza.
Danon and Lieberman are not Netanyahu's only critics. Israeli media reported that another senior figure on the Israeli right, Naftali Bennett, who leads the Jewish Home party, also voted against a ceasefire. Haaretz has reported both Lieberman and Bennett as claiming the government had not informed them about the ceasefire, and that they had heard about the proposed deal via the media.
Analysts have said the spats between Netanyahu and his rightwing cabinet colleages should be seen within the broader framework of Israel's shaky coalition dynamics. Michael Stephens, the deputy director of Qatar-based thinktank Rusi, said that the divisions were extremely damaging to the Israeli government.
"[The Lieberman] brand of rightwing populism is actually hurting Bibi more than he initially thought. Lieberman was always a threat but the thinking was Likud-Beitenu would contain him. Now it's more clear that the right in general is fractured, and particularly at odds with the security establishment."
Hugh Lovatt, the Israel/Palestine project coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the split could "help to balance out the ruling coalition and glue it around Netanyahu" as more extreme voices gave way to centrist elements of the government, such as justice minister Tzipi Livni, who have called for greater restraint on Israel's part and a greater willingness to secure a ceasefire with Hamas.
"As far as Danny Danon is concerned, he is increasingly seen as a potential rival to Netanyahu within his own party and has been gaining increasing popularity. Netanyahu's [sacking of him] may backfire. Now that Danon is out of the cabinet he will have even more freedom to criticise him," Lovatt said.
Four rockets were shot down over Tel Aviv at around 9am on Wednesday morning, with reports of shrapnel falling in the north of the city. Israel also suffered its first casualty on Tuesday, when a civilian was killed by a mortar shell outside the Erez crossing into Gaza. The Palestinian death toll now stands at 205, with Israel warning 100,000 Palestinians to leave their homes on Wednesday ahead of further aerial bombardments of the strip.Does stretching make you more flexible? I know the obvious answer to this question, based on what we’ve all been told about the merits of stretching, is, “Duh! Yes!” But it turns out that might not be the case. But it might be the case. At least a little. But not totally. Okay, let me explain.
Stretch Your Bits or Stretch Your Mind?
I’ve had a few things come up recently that have me rethinking the common stretching belief that goes something like this: stretch tight bits in your body and they will get longer/more flexible/more supple.
The things that have me rethinking this are:
An interview I did on the Liberated Body Podcast with Jules Mitchell who is writing a book (and just finished a thesis) on the science of stretching. A guide I am putting together on how to resolve short hamstrings (it’s out on Liberated Body in October), which had me immersed in the research about how hamstrings specifically manage to return to a more functional length. And last but not least, I am reading Katy Bowman’s new book Move Your DNA where her insights on sarcomeres have my attention (plenty of other things too, but I’m already trying to keep this post from becoming epically long).
I’ll do my best to summarize the a-ha moments that have sprung out of these three things.
Your Nervous System Runs the Show
In her interview with me, Jules Mitchell* talked about how she began her thesis with the intention of taking a biomechanical view into yoga asana, which is exactly what she does. However, because she started her work from the perspective of a yoga teacher- with all the training that had told her that stretching leads to increased flexibility, she was surprised to discover that the research on stretching did not bear this idea out.
She discovered this idea - that if we stretch more and stretch harder that our tissue will change - was untrue. In reality, we are not lumps of clay that can be molded by persistently tugging on things. This is because our nervous systems are running the show.
So what does that mean? That means that unless you are under anesthesia (where you will miraculously gain full and even excessive range of motion, but I do not recommend attempting to go through life under full anesthesia simply for its flexibility gains), your ability to stretch at any range is determined by your nervous system’s tolerance to that range.
As in, when you have super short hamstrings and you try to forward fold and meet rigid resistance, it is not that you need to pull on your hamstrings like they are inanimate taffy, because you can’t. Your nervous system is the thing giving you that firm end range, and it’s basically saying, “Nope. Sorry buddy. I don’t feel safe there, so I’m not going to let you go there.”
Getting pushy about it and trying to force your hamstrings into ever deeper end ranges will have one of three outcomes:
Nothing will change Your hamstrings will get shorter You will injure your tissue (which, P.S., has about a two-year healing period if we’re talking about a tendon injury).
I recommend not trying to force override your nervous system on issues of flexibility. It will win. It will be unpleasant.
Your Body's Emergency Brake
Why would the nervous system not feel safe and therefore limit your mobility? Because that range is unfamiliar, or because compensatory patterns in your body have determined that certain parts of you need to function as an emergency brake in order to hold it all together (and of course these two things are not mutually exclusive). Both boil down to issues of motor control (plenty more to chew on here) and of Davis’ Law, which can be (over) simplified to, “use it or lose it.”
While working on the Liberated Body Short Hamstrings Guide, I kept coming back to the issue of how the hamstrings function, in some chronically short-hamstringed people, as an emergency brake. This kind of compensatory pattern happens for plenty of reasons, but top among them might be under active deep core musculature, too rigid core musculature (yes, underactive and too rigid can come together), weakened adductors, and more. If these or other key stability structures can’t fully do their job, the hamstrings are at the ready. They sub in for a lack of support elsewhere by battening down the hatches.
To go back to the emergency brake analogy - if your car were parked on the edge of a cliff and was held there only by its emergency brake, would you release it? Not if you are sane. This is the same decision your nervous system is making when you attempt a forward fold and are stopped prematurely.
Those Naughty Sarcomeres
In regards to the use-it-or-lose-it part of the flexibility equation, let’s talk Katy Bowman**, moving your DNA, and the sarcomeres. Bowman has been a champion of getting people to understand the difference between frequency and intensity. In short, that what we are doing with our bodies most of the time thoroughly trumps how hard we may be capable of working out (or stretching) for a small portion of our day. In relationship to flexibility, this means that if we, for example, sit in a chair with our hamstrings contracted from both ends all day long, we will gradually develop short hamstrings.
Here is an extremely pared down, Cliff’s Notes version of Bowman’s writing in Move Your DNA on the role the sarcomeres play: Sarcomeres are the basic contractile units of our muscles. Muscles move because sarcomeres generate force and move. When you are often in the same position - as with our contracted-hamstrings-in-the-chair example - your sarcomeres change on the cellular level in a way that makes it easier for you to do more of what you are already doing. Yes, those naughty sarcomeres will actually cannibalize themselves and grow themselves to set your chair-shape as your new normal.
That said, the way to approach rehabilitating this would be to move with more normal hamstrings length more frequently. For example: to use a standing desk for all or part of the day, to sit on the floor with our legs outstretched in front of us (if we can accomplish that without rounding our backs, another symptom of short hamstrings), wearing neutral-heeled shoes, and to walk and to take frequent movement breaks, among other things.
The road |
chimney pots”—Mr Lambert feels he has little choice but to vote Clegg.
That personal view of Mr Clegg's situation is echoed by local Lib Dem activists and councillors. They talk of a “very difficult” adjustment after the 2010 election, and the party's loss of Sheffield city council in 2011. There was special rage among the many students who live locally, incensed when Mr Clegg broke an election promise to oppose higher tuition fees (a policy he knew was foolish before the election, but had failed to change).
After more than a year of shouted abuse and front doors slammed in canvassers' faces, Lib Dems report signs that undergraduates are adjusting to the new fees system, which seems not to be deterring poorer students, they note. People close to Mr Clegg make a painfully ironic prediction: by the next general election tuition fees may have lost toxicity as a policy, but Mr Clegg's broken promise will still be held against him.
The Lib Dems cannot out-oppose Labour
The view from Dungworth carries broader lessons. Britain's third party has always built success by assiduously serving local interests and appealing for tactical votes. The party has held Sheffield Hallam since 1997 with votes “borrowed” from Labour supporters. Nationally, the Lib Dems prospered for years by posing as an eco-pacifist soft alternative to New Labour. In seat after seat Lib Dems are now watching the anti-Tory tactical vote fragment, migrating to Labour, to the Greens or into sullen non-voting.
To date, fewer Lib Dem seats have been won by borrowing the votes of centrist Conservatives. Mr Clegg's inner circle—standing on the free-market liberal wing of their party—believe that they must win over more such “soft Tories” to replace lost left-wingers, and survive the next election in reasonable shape.
So a big choice looms for the party. Many Lib Dems mourn their past as a party of instinctive opposition with a leftish tinge. They have been cheered by a string of clashes with the Conservatives, notably over tax, egalitarianism in education and—above all—the National Health Service. Lib Dem members of the House of Lords have greatly amended a mammoth NHS reform bill, succeeding mostly in making it more complicated, removing mechanisms to promote competition and adding committees.
At a recent meeting of the Lib Dem parliamentary party, Tim Farron, an ambitious left-winger and party president, reportedly cheered this anti-Tory success, but bemoaned the fact that unelected peers had led the charge against the NHS reforms and got the credit for it, rather than Lib Dem MPs who need votes. That drew a rebuke from Jeremy Browne, a foreign office minister on the party's free-market wing. Success should not be measured by how many Conservative initiatives the Lib Dems frustrate, said Mr Browne: we should not try to be a better opposition party than Labour, but a better governing party than the Tories.
Mr Clegg's inner circle agree. The party can never go back to its previous easy existence, they say. Mr Clegg himself accepts that some of his views on immigration, law and order or Europe are on the wrong side of public opinion, especially in an age of austerity. It is a “shitty time to be a liberal”, he tells colleagues.
Actually, Britain is a tough place to be a liberal at any time, with a winner-takes-all voting system that punishes leaders like Mr Clegg, a minority within a minority party. The bet for Mr Clegg is that he does not need mass appeal: he just has to earn (or win back) the respect of enough voters to hold a balance of power in the next parliament. Popularity, of the sort that earns a warm pub welcome, will have to wait.Under the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program, if you teach full-time for five complete and consecutive academic years in a low-income school or educational service agency, and meet other qualifications, you may be eligible for forgiveness of up to $17,500 on your Direct Subsidized and Unsubsidized Loans and your Subsidized and Unsubsidized Federal Stafford Loans.
If you have a Direct Consolidation Loan or a Federal Consolidation Loan, you may be eligible for forgiveness of the outstanding portion of the consolidation loan that repaid an eligible Direct Subsidized Loan, Direct Unsubsidized Loan, Subsidized Federal Stafford Loan, or Unsubsidized Federal Stafford Loan.
What are the eligibility requirements?
Who is considered a teacher?
Am I a highly qualified teacher?
How do I know if I’m teaching at a low-income school or educational service agency?
How much loan forgiveness can I receive?
Can I receive loan forgiveness under both the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program?
Can I receive teacher loan forgiveness on my PLUS loans or Federal Perkins Loans?
Am I eligible for teacher loan forgiveness if I’m in default on a loan?
How and when do I apply for teacher loan forgiveness?
What are the eligibility requirements?
You must not have had an outstanding balance on Direct Loans or Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program loans as of Oct. 1, 1998, or on the date that you obtained a Direct Loan or FFEL Program loan after Oct. 1, 1998.
You must have been employed as a full-time, highly qualified teacher for five complete and consecutive academic years, and at least one of those years must have been after the 1997–98 academic year.
You must have been employed at an elementary school, secondary school, or educational service agency that serves low-income students (a "low-income school or educational service agency").
The loan(s) for which you are seeking forgiveness must have been made before the end of your five academic years of qualifying teaching service.
Teaching for Less Than a Complete Academic Year
If you were unable to complete a full academic year of teaching, that year may still be counted toward the required five complete and consecutive academic years if
you completed at least one-half of the academic year; and
your employer considers you to have fulfilled your contract requirements for the academic year for the purposes of salary increases, tenure, and retirement; and
you were unable to complete the academic year because you returned to postsecondary education, on at least a half-time basis, in an area of study directly related to the performance of the teaching service described above; you had a condition covered under the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA); or you were called or ordered to active duty status for more than 30 days as a member of a reserve component of the U.S. armed forces.
Who is considered a teacher?
A teacher is a person who provides direct classroom teaching, or classroom-type teaching in a nonclassroom setting. Special education teachers are considered teachers.
Am I a highly qualified teacher?
There are basic requirements that all teachers must meet to be considered highly qualified. There are also additional requirements that you must meet depending on whether you’re an elementary or secondary school teacher, and whether you’re new to the teaching profession.
Basic Requirements for All Teachers
To be a highly qualified teacher, you must have
attained at least a bachelor’s degree;
received full state certification as a teacher; and
not had certification or licensure requirements waived on an emergency, temporary, or provisional basis.
You’re considered to have received full state certification even if you received your certification through alternative routes to certification or by passing the state teacher licensing examination.
If you’re a teacher at a public charter school, you are considered to have received full state certification as a teacher if you meet the requirements set forth in the state's public charter school law.
Additional Requirements for Elementary School Teachers Who Are New to the Profession
To be considered highly qualified as an elementary school teacher who is new to the profession, you must also have demonstrated subject knowledge and teaching skills in reading, writing, mathematics, and other areas of the basic elementary school curriculum by passing a rigorous state test.
The rigorous state test may be a state-required certification or licensing test or tests in reading, writing, mathematics, and other areas of the basic elementary school curriculum.
Additional Requirements for Middle or Secondary School Teachers Who Are New to the Profession
To be considered highly qualified as a middle or secondary school teacher who is new to the profession, you must also have demonstrated a high level of competency in each of the academic subjects in which you teach.
To demonstrate a high level of competency, you may either
pass a rigorous state academic subject test in each of the academic subjects in which you teach or
successfully complete an academic major, a graduate degree, course work equivalent to an undergraduate academic major, or an advanced certification or credential in each of the academic subjects in which you teach.
The rigorous state test may be a state-required certification or licensing test or tests in each of the academic subjects in which you teach.
Additional Requirements for Elementary, Middle, or Secondary School Teachers Who Are Not New to the Profession
To be highly qualified as an elementary, middle, or secondary school teacher who is not new to the profession, you must also
meet the applicable requirements for an elementary, middle, or secondary school teacher who is new to the profession or
demonstrate competence in all the academic subjects in which you teach based on a high, objective, uniform state standard of evaluation.
The uniform state standard of evaluation may involve multiple, objective measures of teacher competency and must
be set by the state for both grade-appropriate academic subject matter knowledge and teaching skills;
be aligned with challenging state academic content and student academic achievement standards and developed in consultation with core content specialists, teachers, principals, and school administrators;
provide objective, coherent information about your attainment of core content knowledge in the academic subjects in which you teach;
be applied uniformly to all teachers in the same academic subject and the same grade level throughout the state;
take into consideration, but not be based primarily on, the time you have been teaching in the academic subject; and
be made available to the public upon request.
How do I know if I’m teaching at a low-income school or educational service agency?
The school or educational service agency must be listed in the Annual Directory of Designated Low-Income Schools for Teacher Cancellation Benefits (Low-Income School Directory), which is published by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) each year. To find out if your school or educational service agency is classified as low-income, search the directory database for the years you have been employed as a teacher. If the Low-Income School Directory is not available before May 1 of any year, the previous year’s directory may be used for that year.
Any questions about the inclusion or omission of a particular school must be directed to the state education agency contact in the state where the school is located and not to ED. State education agencies are responsible for determining which schools or educational service agencies are eligible to be reported to ED for inclusion in the Low-Income School Directory.
If your school or educational service agency is included in the Low-Income School Directory for at least one year of your teaching service, but is not included during subsequent years, your subsequent years of teaching at the school or educational service agency will still be counted toward the required five complete and consecutive academic years of teaching. For example, if you taught at the same school for five complete and consecutive academic years from 2011–12 through 2015–16, but the school was included in the Low-Income School Directory only for the 2011–12 academic year, your subsequent four academic years of teaching at that school can still be counted toward the required five complete and consecutive academic years.
Teaching service performed at an educational service agency may be counted toward the required five years of teaching only if the consecutive five-year period includes qualifying service at an eligible educational service agency performed after the 2007–08 academic year.
All elementary and secondary schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE)—or operated on Indian reservations by Indian tribal groups under contract with BIE—qualify as schools serving low-income students. These schools are qualifying schools for the purposes of this loan forgiveness program, even if they are not listed in the Low-Income School Directory.
How much loan forgiveness can I receive?
The maximum forgiveness amount is either $17,500 or $5,000, depending on the subject area taught. If you have eligible loans under both the Direct Loan Program and the FFEL Program, $17,500 or $5,000 is a combined maximum forgiveness amount for both programs.
You may receive up to $17,500 in loan forgiveness if you were
a highly qualified full-time mathematics or science teacher who taught students at the secondary school level; or
a highly qualified special education teacher (at either the elementary or secondary level) whose primary responsibility was to provide special education to children with disabilities, and you taught children with disabilities that corresponded to your area of special education training and demonstrated knowledge and teaching skills in the content areas of the curriculum that you taught.
If you didn't teach mathematics, science, or special education, you may receive up to $5,000 in loan forgiveness if you were a highly qualified full-time elementary or secondary education teacher.
Can I receive loan forgiveness under both the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program?
You can potentially receive forgiveness under both the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, but not for the same period of teaching service. For example, if you complete five consecutive years of qualifying teaching and receive forgiveness of your Direct Loans under the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program, any payments you made on your Direct Loans during that five-year period cannot be counted toward the required 120 monthly payments for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. To receive Public Service Loan Forgiveness, you would need to make 120 more qualifying monthly payments.
Teacher Loan Forgiveness and AmeriCorps Program Benefits
If you’re an AmeriCorps Program volunteer, a period of teaching that qualifies you for a benefit through the AmeriCorps Program cannot be counted toward the required five consecutive years of teaching for the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program.
Can I receive teacher loan forgiveness on my PLUS loans or Federal Perkins Loans?
PLUS loans for parents and graduate or professional students aren’t eligible for this type of forgiveness.
Federal Perkins Loans aren’t eligible for this type of forgiveness. However, you may be eligible to have all or a portion of your Federal Perkins Loan canceled (based on your employment or volunteer service) or discharged (under certain conditions).
Am I eligible for teacher loan forgiveness if I’m in default on a loan?
If you’re in default on a loan, you are not eligible for forgiveness of that loan unless you have made satisfactory repayment arrangements with the holder of the defaulted loan.
How and when do I apply for teacher loan forgiveness?
You apply for teacher loan forgiveness by submitting a completed Teacher Loan Forgiveness Application to your loan servicer after you have completed the required five consecutive years of qualifying teaching. Note: The Teacher Loan Forgiveness Application is in the process of being cleared through the Office of Management and Budget. The current form with the July 31, 2017, expiration date will remain valid for use until the revised form has been approved and implemented.
The chief administrative officer of the school or educational service agency where you performed your qualifying teaching service must complete the certification section. If you are applying for forgiveness of loans that are with different loan servicers, you must submit a separate form to each of them.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Prof Greg Rouse on the first footage of a 'purple sock' in the wild
The mystery of a deep-sea creature that resembles a discarded purple sock has been solved, scientists report.
The animal, called Xenoturbella, is so bizarre that for 60 years researchers could not work out what it was - or where it fitted into the family tree.
But the discovery of four new species in the Pacific has enabled scientists to conclude that this animal belongs to one of the earliest branches of life.
The study is published in the journal Nature.
If you think of a sock that you have taken off and thrown on the floor - they literally look like that Prof Greg Rouse, Scripps Institute of Oceanography
Lead researcher Prof Greg Rouse, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US, said: "Our nickname for them was purple socks.
"So if you think of a sock that you have taken off and thrown on the floor - they literally look like that.
"Or a deflated balloon."
Image copyright MBARI Image caption Genetic tests now reveal that the organism is primitive and is positioned at the base of the evolutionary family tree
Xenoturbella was first described in 1949.
The ocean oddity has no eyes, no brain and no gut. Just a small gaping mouth from which food goes in - and then waste comes out.
Only one species was known, and it left scientists scratching their heads.
Early genetic tests mistakenly placed the marine "sock" as a mollusc.
"But it turned out they had sequenced the DNA of what it eats," explained Prof Rouse.
Image copyright MBARI Image caption This strange deep-sea beast has baffled scientists for more than 60 years
Other researchers thought that it was a once-sophisticated creature that had got rid of all of its complex features as it evolved.
But the discovery of four new species from the depths of Pacific Ocean has allowed scientists to study this animal more closely.
With Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), they have been able to film these creatures for the first time.
A major branch on the evolutionary tree of life has now got another four new species instead of just one Prof Greg Rouse, Scripps Institute of Oceanography
They include a new large specimen, which is more than 20cm-long, which has been called Xenoturbella monstrosa.
And also Xenoturbella churro: named after the sweet, fried Spanish pastry, which it resembles - in an admittedly less appetising way.
The new additions to the family have enabled scientists to carry out more extensive genetic tests.
"We corroborate the fact that they should be thought of as a fairly primitive group," said Prof Rouse.
Image copyright MBARI Image caption Can you spot the difference between this deep-fried snack and deep-sea'sock'?
They sit near the base of the family tree, he added.
"A major branch on the evolutionary tree of life has now got another four new species instead of just one."
But if you think it is cased closed for Xenoturbella, think again.
"We've never seen it feeding," said Prof Rouse.
"We find it where these molluscs are, and when we sequence it, we find these molluscs, their DNA, is inside. But when we open them up, we find their gut is empty.
"And they just have a tiny little mouth opening. They don't have teeth, they don't have any sucking proboscis structure that could tear off a piece of some bivalve.
"It is a great unsolved mystery as to how Xenoturbella eats."
The team hopes future ocean expeditions will shed more light on this bizarre beast of the deep.
Follow Rebecca on TwitterChristmas movies are all about magic, miracles and faith. It takes a special kind of monster to cast a critical eye on these wondrous films and crudely drag their filthy little secrets out for all to see. Well, our teachers always told us we were special, so let's get monstering: Here are six "family friendly" Christmas films that contain nothing but horror beneath their shiny wrapping paper.
6 The Santa Clause (1994)
The Jolly:
Tim Allen plays Scott Calvin, a divorced advertising executive who's vying for his son's lost affection (as is the case for every single father in Hollywood; be careful, as soon as the wife dies or divorces you, that kid will turn on you like an ungrateful top). But, since this is a Christmas movie, he's also attempting to reaffirm his son's waning faith in Santa Claus. The tables turn, however, when Scott accidentally startles Santa and Claus falls off the roof, tragically dying in the process. Santa's body mystically disappears, Scott dons the red suit and now there's a new Santa Claus.
Presumably with a teardrop tattoo under his eye.
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While reluctant at first, Scott embarks on an emotional journey, during which he comes to grips with the reality of the Santa Clause, reconnects with his estranged son and becomes a better person overall thanks to his new position...
The Horror:
... and it was all made possible by the death of the former Santa. Not that it was a difficult kill. No, this guy practically murdered himself:
-- Self-disappearing body! No pesky corpse to hide or chop up, since Santa vanishes within seconds after his demise!So this is what winning feels like. The Tories still took more seats, but it feels like a red rout. And indeed, if common sense would suggest we should judge success relative to what is possible, Jeremy Corbyn and Labour have shattered expectations.
Corbyn had won the Labour leadership by arguing that the old bag of Blairite tricks, could no longer work. Labour, he argued, had to be more than an electoral machine if it was to survive. To be viable in the future, it had to reach out to social movements, especially the movements of the young. In his leadership victory speech in 2015, he defended those:
…written off as a non-political generation who are relatively not interested, hence the relatively low turnout and low levels of registration of young people in the last general election. They weren’t. They are a very political generation that were turned off by the way in which politics was being conducted, and not attracted or not interested in it. We have to and must change that.
Labour went into this snap election with a triumphalist Tory press exhorting the crushing of saboteurs. The broadcasters were taking their lead from a Lynton Crosby-fuelled tabloid frenzy over Corbyn’s supposed Provo ‘links’, every insinuating question and accusation flung at Corbyn coming directly from the pages of the Telegraph and the Sun.
20 points behind in the polls, with a combined Tory-Ukip majority since 2015 likely to be turned into a giant Conservative lead, Labour was particularly vulnerable in the angry rustbelts. These were ‘heartlands’ where the turnout of the Labour vote had eroded for two decades, and the populist right had emerged in the vacuum as an energising force, giving fresh life to local conservatism. Dozens of seats across the West Midlands, the North, and even Wales looked susceptible to the revolt of older, white, and less educated male voters.
To add to these problems, much of the parliamentary party didn’t want to win the election. For two years, they had run a sabotage operation, beginning with the pseudo-controversy mill fuelled by negative briefings and culminating in a failed coup attempt. At the outset of the snap election, a string of MPs had resigned at the last moment in order to load the party with extra problems in a short electoral period. John Woodcock MP urged people not to vote for a Corbyn-led Labour party. Many local MPs, such as Enfield North’s Joan Ryan, openly campaigned on the basis that Corbyn had no hope of winning. Corbyn’s personal popularity was exactly as you would expect it to be after such a feeding frenzy.
And yet, refusing to be intimidated, the Labour leadership ran a confident, aggressive, and mostly left-wing campaign. It refused to run with a pale imitation of Tory flag-waving, as would have been the preference of Tom Watson and his confederates. Its manifesto went far to the left of the accepted mainstream – nationalising key utilities, reversing anti-union laws, building council houses, free education, ending NHS privatisation, and abolishing the bedroom tax and punitive welfare sanctions. And it was popular.
Corbyn, baited about his support for Irish republicanism, and urged to “condemn the IRA,” politely insisted that all the murder in Northern Ireland had been wrong, including that of the loyalists and the British state. After the Manchester massacre, he made a dignified speech criticising the ‘war on terror’ which called down the usual chorus of abominations while winning the argument with the public. Baited on immigration, Labour did not defend ‘free movement’, but nor did it run scared. There was no ‘Controls on Immigration’ gimmickry, and by and large the focus was on workers’ rights, including those of migrant workers. Corbyn’s personal qualities, particularly his calm good humour in the face of relentless attack, came through particularly well in the campaign.
Labour took on the blue beast, that many-headed-hydra, and slayed it. It shut up the countersubversive roar of the reactionary press, with the polite revenge of electoral success. Corbyn mobilised almost 13m votes, around 40% of the total. By exciting voters, Labour raised the turnout, which among 18-24 year olds was estimated to be 72%. It also increased its support among over-65s, with a chunk of northern Ukip voters opting to vote for a Labour party that actually looked like the Labour party.
Again and again, as the seats came in, it was the same line: this seat, which Labour has just taken with a huge majority, is the sort of seat you would expect Labour to win if it was winning the election. Canterbury turned something other than blue for the first time since the Great War. Kensington, still recounting, may been swallowed in a vengeful blood-red wave across London as its forgotten working class constituents take revenge on an atrocious Tory MP. Portsmouth, a Tory-Liberal marginal, went Labour, as the party showed surprising strength across the south and south-west.
Perhaps even more important, the ‘Ukip effect’ was mostly drowned in the red tide. There were some local manifestations of it, for example in Stoke and Mansfield, where elderly, angry white racists came out for the Tories. But Bury North was the sort of seat you would expect to succumb to a combined Tory-Ukip vote, and Labour took it with an increased majority. The West Midlands was expected to fall to the Tories, with at least a dozen seats vulnerable. In the end, Labour defended even that most marginal of seats, Birmingham Edgbaston. Labour candidate Preet Gill took over from the outgoing Blairite Gisela Stuart, and claimed the seat with a 10% swing.
Labour won back seats in Scotland including the hugely significant Glasgow North East, while also soaring to mountainous majorities in former marginals. Rupa Huq, Rosena Allin-Khan and Tulip Siddiq all held onto their London seats with generous majorities, thanks in large part to the work of Momentum activists. Labour’s two biggest Tory hate figures, Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott, romped home with massive majorities. Abbott’s 35,000 majority is a joyful riposte to acres of misogynoir spite in the press.
Had anything like this scenario been described at the start of the election, it would have been a delirious fantasy. It is not just that Theresa May lost her majority, after expecting a landslide. It is not just that Labour triumphed by turning out exactly those voters Corbyn said they should appeal to. It is that the Lynton Crosby machine is dead. It is that the tabloids have lost their intimidating power. It is that Labour’s Blairites and the coup-plotters are now decisively finished. It is that the core axiom of neoliberalism, There Is No Alternative, has been rubbished.
It is that we woke up in a different country – one we didn’t know existed.March 8, 2014
Dart is Google’s latest answer to how to do large scale web application development. Dart isn’t just a new programming language it is a “platform”. That includes having its own standard libraries and tools. Additionally, even though Dart compiles to JavaScript, there is also a Dart VM that runs in a preview version of Chrome called Dartium. The language itself will feel very familiar to developers who have worked in JavaScript, Java and C#. Like TypeScript it’s “optionally typed”. That means type declarations are optional, but when you provide them the compiler will provide type checking warnings. Unlike JavaScript, it is class based rather than prototype based. It fixes the problems with both the syntax and semantics of JavaScript
Dart is a much more ambitious project than Microsoft’s TypeScript. It moves further away from both the syntax and semantics of JavaScript. So the JavaScript produced by the Dart compiler, while quite readable, may not correspond one-to-one with the original Dart source. The Dart compiler applies more transforms and optimizations to your code. Beyond that, even core libraries are replaced. Dart has it’s own DOM manipulation library that differs from the standard one provided by browsers. This allows them to fix not only problems with JavaScript, but problems with the browser APIs which are widely regarded as being one of the worst parts of client side web development. This ambitiousness makes Dart an exciting project that appears to be a real improvement over the current state of affairs.
Before we look at some problems with Dart, a word about the Dart VM. Since Google wants Dart to eventually be the platform of the web, they are hoping that they can convince browser makers to include a native Dart VM. Since they control one of the big three browsers, they are already 1⁄ 3 of the way there. However, many people feel that it is unlikely the other browsers will follow suit. It wouldn’t seem to be to their benefit to spend the time and money doing so. When Microsoft tried basically the same thing with VBScript in IE, it didn’t go well. Admittedly, the browser market isn’t as contentious and political as it was then, but competitors will always be competitors. To address this, Google has the, quite effective, compile to JavaScript escape hatch. The situation will be different if all major include a native Dart VM some day, but for now, the idea of a Dart VM is irrelevant to whether Dart is the answer to the JavaScript Minefield.
I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are enough) will never embed the Dart VM. Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript language & active partcipant in JavaScript standardization
JavaScript Interop Dart is such a radical departure from JavaScript that it is not possible to interact directly with JavaScript libraries from Dart. Instead, you must use a special interop library that exposes wrapped versions of any JavaScript objects you access. This enables Dart to safely sandbox JavaScript away and prevent its problems from leaking into a Dart application. This is very reminiscent of what Microsoft had to do with COM interop, for.NET all be it for somewhat different reasons. Like COM interop, JavaScript interop is not a pleasant experience. It’s a necessary feature for times when the only implementation for a library you need isn’t in the platform you are working in, but whenever possible you avoid it. The problem with that is, it tends to silo you in the platform you have chosen. Currently, many new and exciting JavaScript libraries are being released and the Dart platform is immature and hasn’t had time to fill out with all the options a developer might want. Being siloed into the Dart platform will be a very high price to pay to avoid the JavaScript minefield.
Another GWT? The Google Web Toolkit ( GWT ) is a project first released by Google back in 2006. It provides a platform allowing developers to create client side web application in Java that are then cross-compiled to JavaScript. The GWT project has a lot of similarities to the Dart project. Both create a siloed platform with restricted interop options that addresses the pitfalls of working directly in JavaScript and the browser. The largest difference is that GWT builds on an existing language (Java) and platform which are potentially not as well suited to the needs of web development and semantically more distant from JavaScript. Never the less, the history of the GWT project is instructive. While it was released with fanfare and promise, it has remained a niche solution and is not where all the exciting advances in web development are being made today. I don’t see why the future of Dart should be any different.
Still not statically typed It’s surprising to me that Google would deviate so far from the semantics of JavaScript and include optional typing but stop short of actually having static type checking. Dart’s type annotations have no effect on the execution of the code and the compiler only reports warnings, not errors, for type violations. Essentially, it is as if someone took a dynamic language like Ruby and added type annotations to it without actually changing the way the language works. Because of this, it is possible to put incorrect and misleading type declarations in a program, for example declaring an integer variable as an array of strings, and still have the program execute correctly. C# has shown with its dynamic type that a mix of dynamic and static typing can be interesting and useful. A language showing another way of mixing the two with dynamic as the default would be very interesting. Unfortunately, that isn’t what Dart is. Dart is a dynamic language, plain and simple. Type checking is just a jsHint style suggestion that something might be wrong. What’s the use of a type declaration if it doesn’t mean the value will actually be of that type? To dig deeper, check out Why Dart is not the language of the future by Rafaël Garcia-Suarez.DEHRADUN: A court in Dehradun on Tuesday acquitted two men accused of rape and sexual harassment and directed that a complaint under section 182 of CrPC be filed against the woman complainant for filling a false rape charge. The two men, who hailed from Moradabad, were tenants at the complainant’s house in Raipur and she later accepted in court that she filed the charges to evacuate the tenants from her house.One of the accused, Padam Singh, an Ayurveda practitioner, has been lodged in jail since the case was filed in June 2014. The other accused was out on bail. The woman, a resident of Vikas Lok Colony in Raipur, accused Singh of raping her and sexually harassing her 12-year-old daughter. She also named his cousin, Anil Kumar, in the FIR, alleging that he intimidated her and beat her up.Singh was booked under section 376 (rape), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace), 506 (criminal intimidation), 354-a (sexual harassment) of the IPC and section 3/4 of the POCSO Act. Kumar was booked under section 120-b (criminal conspiracy) and 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) of the IPC.Talking to TOI, prosecution lawyer Jaya Thakur, said, “The woman had alleged in her complaint that Singh raped her and sexually harassed her minor daughter while Kumar had intimidated and beaten her. But during the cross examination in one of the hearings, she admitted that she had filed a false complaint to get rid of her tenants.”“As a public prosecutor, I moved an application in the court seeking action against her for filing a false complaint against the two men,” she said.The court of Neena Agarwal ordered authorities to take action against the complainant under section 182 of CrPc.Known for her many spars with President Donald Trump on social media ever since last year’s election campaign, Senator Elizabeth Warren has once again taken to Twitter, this time over a judge’s decision to temporarily block the White House’s revamped travel ban.
“Turns out, an illegal Muslim ban by another name is still an illegal Muslim ban,” she tweeted hours after the judgment came.
Reiterating many of the arguments against the travel restrictions imposed on people from six Muslim-majority nations, Warren tweeted that the revamped executive order would “still be a recruiting tool for ISIS” and “a betrayal” of U.S. values, as well fail to secure the country.
.@realDonaldTrump's illegal Muslim ban is still a recruiting tool for ISIS. Still a betrayal of our values. Still doesn't keep us safe. — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 16, 2017
“@realDonaldTrump, your Muslim ban is now 0 for 2 vs the Constitution,” Warren continued, appearing to echo former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s tweet when the Ninth Circuit Court upheld a halt on Trump’s first travel ban in February.
.@realDonaldTrump, your Muslim ban is now 0 for 2 vs the Constitution. Stop fighting the rule of law and start fighting for all Americans. — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 16, 2017
For more on Elizabeth Warren, watch Fortune’s video:
“Stop fighting the rule of law and start fighting for all Americans,” the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts implored at the end of her tweetstorm.If you thought an alligator emerging from the ocean on Folly Beach was crazy, you'll think this story is hog wild!
According to beach-goer Erin Lisa Schwartz, a wild pig swam out of the ocean on Sullivan's Island near Station 26 today. Schwartz, a Seattle resident who was vacationing with her family, posted pictures and a few details about the incident on her Twitter page. She tweeted that the animal seemed like had been swimming a while and that it was "saved by Sullivan's Island police." You can see a video of the capture below.
ABC News 4 has even more pictures of the pig, so of which actually show it in the water.
Holy City Sinner has reached out to the Sullivan's Island Police Department to get more details on this story. Stay tuned...
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--We see many great Toyota Tacoma trucks here at Tacomahq.com, but this truck really blew us away. It is a 1999 Toyota Tacoma with 440k miles and it still looks almost new! This truck reinforces what people have known for years. Take care of your Tacoma and it will take care of you.
The white 1999 Toyota Tacoma is owned by Josh Coffey out of Knoxville, TN. Coffey says he has really enjoyed his truck and he is a big fan of the trucks. We can see why. Getting 440k miles out of it is a testament to the build quality of the truck. He also looks like he has a lot of fun with it. One thing that is readily apparent from the photos is how well Coffey has taken care of his truck. It sure doesn’t look like a 1999 model with 440k miles. It looks a lot newer with less miles.
How do you get 440k miles on a 1999? Coffey says a lot of travel and hay hauling.
One of the questions on our minds is how many miles should it have. Let’s do some math. The average person in the U.S. drives between 12-15k a year. Let’s go with 15k because truck owners regularly put more miles on than a car owner. The truck is 15 years old, so 15 years multiplied by 15,000 miles is 225,000 miles. This means, this Tacoma has 215k more miles than the recommended mileage. Wow! We could easily see Coffey having gone through two trucks during that time instead of just one.
Next, let’s check out the value Coffey has gotten from his truck. Taking a look at KBB.com, we put in the different specs that we know: 1999 with 440k miles, SR5 package, V6 with manual, 4wd |
planets.
Small planets appear to be the most common, especially super-Earths and Mini-Neptunes, that is, exoplanets slightly larger than Earth, but smaller than Neptune or Uranus. Most known stellar systems have at least one planet, but Méndez says this might be an observational bias as planets are hard to detect. We know of at least three systems with seven planets, for instance, and there are hints of many more.
To that point, and at the top right corner of the chart, Méndez lists the number of known stellar systems according to the number of exoplanets they contain (for example, we've discovered 46 star systems with four planets). Importantly, these systems could contain more planets still waiting to be discovered.
"I'm overwhelmed by the number and diversity of planets in the stars around us. So many places to explore in our own Solar System, but much more is waiting for us beyond," Méndez told Gizmodo. "I won't be very surprised by another planet with life, Earth is the example that this is possible. I will be more surprised by something we haven't seen before."
[Planetary Habitability Laboratory]Variety has Cate Blanchett as its new cover girl, and inside, she talks about playing the lead in Carol, a “lesbian romance” based on Patricia Highsmith‘s novel The Price of Salt. Interestingly, the accomplished actor offers that she has had relationships with women “many times.” From the piece: When asked if this is her first turn as a lesbian, Blanchett curls her lips into a smile. “On film — or in real life?” she asks coyly. Pressed for details about whether she’s had past relationships with women, she responds: “Yes. Many times,” but doesn’t elaborate. Like Carol, who never “comes out” as a lesbian, Blanchett doesn’t necessarily rely on labels for sexual orientation. “I never thought about it,” she says of how she envisioned the character. “I don’t think Carol thought about it.” The actress studied the era by picking up banned erotic novels. “I read a lot of girl-on-girl books from the period,” she says. Cate is married to Australian writer/director Andrew Upton, and this is the first time she’s spoken about having been with women. A six-time Oscar nominee, Cate is lauded as one of today’s best leading actors, and her roles in films like Notes on a Scandal and now Carol have been of particular lesbian interest. In Carol, which premieres at Cannes on May 17, Cate engages in a romantic and sexual relationship with Therese, played by Rooney Mara. Carol was adapted by out playwright Phyllis Nagy and also stars out actresses Carrie Brownstein and Sarah Paulson. Produced by Christine Vachon, an out lesbian, and directed by gay filmmaker Todd Haynes, it is highly anticipated to be one of the best queer films ever, and that’s a lot of pressure. Despite Variety calling gay love stories often “cursed,” Todd has a more optomistic spin on it: “In some ways, the event of a gay love story is less surprising every day,” Haynes says. “But I think love stories are hard to pull off, period. They require external forces that keep the lovers apart.” As for the sexiness of the script, Cate said it will be different from our last big lesbian film. “It’s not Blue Is the Warmest Color,” she said. “That’s not the ambition of the film.” Instead, the film is less about “politicizing” sexuality, Cate said. (“I think there are a lot of people that exist like that who don’t feel the need to shout things from the rafters.”) Cate is one of several public women who have spoken about having relationships with women, while also not labeling themselves. In this interesting time we live in, it offers more visibility but also begs the question, should we consider them queer? Without their identifying as such, it’s hard to say, so we’re more likely to refer to someone as “out” if they do not specify or seek to do so. But since Cate is open about her having dated women, she’s officially one of those “out” actresses in our eyes.In 1917 people were astounded by harbours full of colourful ships. But some of the visual impact of Wilkinson’s camouflage is lost today in the black and white images we have of World War One. The striking colours can still be seen on hundreds of model ships in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.
These were made by the Dazzle Section at the Royal Academy of Arts, at Burlington House in London. Scale models were painted and used to test dazzle designs. They were placed on a rotating turntable and viewed through a periscope.
This allowed Wilkinson’s team to see how dazzle distorted a ship’s form as if it were travelling in different directions. Wilkinson believed that using strong contrasts, with light and dark greys, blues and greens, was most effective.
Wilkinson appointed dock officers at ports around Britain. They supervised the painting of ships from the finished designs. One dock officer was the artist Edward Wadsworth. He was a founder of Vorticism - a British art movement that grew out of Cubism.
The Admiralty experimented with various camouflage ideas during WW1. They had considered similar proposals by US artist Abbot H Thayer and the Scottish zoologist John Graham Kerr.Every video editor, animator, designer, and general creative will need stock video at some point. Maybe it'll just be a pretty background for some graphics, maybe b-roll for something the cameraman missed, or maybe it's just that missing link between a good video and a great one.
There are many great sites that sell stock video clips. Sites like Motion Array all feature paid video clips. But there are quite a few sites that offer a range of free stock video clips as well. Let's delve into a few.
Pexels
Pexels started out as a free photo website and is definitely worth a look for their photo selection. But they've ventured onto free video clips as well with a growing selection. Their videos are largely in full 1080p HD, but some clips are in 720p HD format.
They have an endless scroll of video clips on the main page as well as a range of categories to choose from like Cars, Tech, and Timelapse to name a few. There is no search option, so get ready to dig in.
All of the videos on Pexels fall under the Creative Commons CC0 license. In short, this means go crazy. You can use any clip for personal or creative projects without the need for attribution. The only rule is identifiable people can't be portrayed in a bad light or offensive manner. So mind you manners people.
Video Monkey
Video Monkey is a new free video site with a fast growing library. Whereas Pexels focuses on live action only, Video Monkey has a combination of live action and animated backgrounds. Look for subway train clips mixed in with geometric backgrounds and fire effects at Video Monkey.
Here you can scroll through the library of content or click on the search button and punch in terms like "street" or "blue" for tailored results. All of the clips are either full 1080p HD or 4K ultra high resolution.
Video Monkey clips are available "100% license free." So, again use these clips to your heart's content. Get creative, go wild.
Videezy
Videezy is one in a series of sites offering free design elements to the masses. Some of their other sites include the vector site Vecteezy, and a site for web templates called Themezy. They've cornered the market on the "ezy" suffixes.
Videezy has a pretty large library, but come prepared with what you are looking for. There isn't much in the way of browsing. Searching often leads to a wide range of results. For example, a search for "beach" resulted in 129 clips. The quality varies widely from clip to clip, but there are lots of choices.
Be aware that Videezy also shows results for paid clips on other sites. Just make sure you know what you are picking so you can stick to the free clips if you want.
Videezy asks its contributors to abide by Creative Commons license terms, but there they have their choice of which Creative Commons license to use. This means each video clip may have different rules. Some may allow for commercial use and some personal only. Some may require attribution while others don't. Just be sure to check the license for each clip you download so you can honor the contributor's requests.
Mazwai
Mazwai is a free video site with a simple and bold layout. Lots of really pretty scenery make up a majority of the clips. There are lots of high quality clips, but Mazwai isn't big on information.
There is no search or category view, just an endless scroll of clips. So, visit Mazwai when you have a little time on your hands and you want to explore for a bit.
License terms are viewable when you click to download a clip. All of the clips housed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. What does that mean? It means you can use the clips however you'd like but you need to attribute the creator, link to the license, and note if the video has been changed. Follow those rules and these clips can be in your projects.
Videvo
Videvo might be the largest library of free video clips with a combination of live action and motion graphic options. There are lots of ways to find what you are looking for including search, category options, and good old browsing.
Categories include things like Nature, Musical, and VFX. You can also sort by what's new and what's most popular.
In order to use clips from Videvo, you'll need to do a couple of things. First, you'll have to register for a free account on the site. Then you'll have to agree to the Terms & Conditions for each clip you download. Make sure to read the terms fully to understand exactly what you can and can't do with the clips.
In basic terms, contributors have two options for licensing. They can use the Standard Videvo license which allows for personal and commercial use without attribution, or they can opt for a Creative Commons license with more restrictions like attribution. Again, be sure to check before you use any of these clips for your project.
These free stock video sites may not have every clip you'll ever need for your projects, that's where some of the paid sites come in, but they can go a long way to help get you started or bail you out in a pinch.
Be sure to thank the contributors and the sites stock site on social media for offering these great free services. And let us know which sites you use for free videos in the comments below.Kaufman is for Jeb Bush, who he thinks has an “off chance” to surprise in New Hampshire. The centrist candidate, by his reckoning, has won every Republican primary since 1980; Reagan was only retroactively adopted by the conservative movement, which largely worked against him at the time, according to Kaufman. “I’ve been around since 1865,” he jokes, “so I’m kind of sanguine about the whole thing.” He doesn’t believe that perhaps this year the old rules won’t apply anymore.
If Trump or Cruz does win, he will have laid bare the vacuum where once sat the Republican establishment. Yes, there are the donors, people who give the party a lot of money and think this ought to get them something in return; Trump is running against them. (No less a GOP bigwig than Charles Koch recently lamented his lack of influence on the party.) There are the lobbyists and consultants, but Trump doesn’t listen to them either. There are the elected officials, but they are held hostage by their constituents. There is no smoke-filled room where the poo-bahs could go to work out a deal and end this. In an age of radical disintermediation, parties can’t tell the people what to do. (The Democrats, it should be noted, are struggling with their own version of this same problem.)
I expected to find the establishment’s angst on display at the RNC meeting. The committee, after all, has taken as its project the improvement of the GOP’s image: After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, it commissioned a diverse group of party elders to get to the bottom of its problems. The so-called Growth and Opportunity Project, nicknamed the “autopsy,” concluded that Republicans ought to get behind immigration reform and strike a more tolerant tone in order to attract youth and minority voters. These days, that idea seems a rather distant memory, and the report mostly resurfaces when Democrats and journalists rub it in the GOP’s face.
One of the authors of the report was Henry Barbour, a Mississippi political consultant, committeeman, and scion of a prominent Republican family. Barbour backed Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who has now quit the race. I come upon him, wearing a tweed jacket and slacks, outside the hotel ballroom.
As political consultants are wont to do, Barbour emphasizes the importance of winning. “We have got to nominate someone who can beat Hillary,” he tells me. “This country is ready for change. But Trump and Cruz would have a harder time winning than other candidates who could appeal to a broader coalition.” Nonetheless, if either one is nominated, Barbour isn’t going to defect: “I’m going to support our nominee,” he says.
Not all Republicans are willing to make that commitment. The former George W. Bush aide Peter Wehner, for example, has just published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump,” putting into writing the pervasive muttering of the Beltway GOP. The readers of the Times surely eat this up, but it’s not clear whom Wehner expects to persuade. John H. Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and chief of staff to the first President Bush, warned on television this week that Trump would “ruin the Republican Party.” At a private breakfast at the RNC meeting, Holland Redfield, a delegate from the Virgin Islands, implored his colleagues, “There is a limit to loyalty.” (Redfield videotaped himself speaking and then leaked the video to Politico.)Former emergency services minister Jane Garrett is being pressured by her Labor colleagues to resign from parliament after being accused of leaking sensitive documents to destabilise Premier Daniel Andrews.
Treasurer Tim Pallas is understood to have addressed an emotional Labor caucus meeting on Tuesday morning declaring he would "not name names" but the person responsible for leaking sensitive documents should "go".
According to one account, Bentleigh MP Nick Staikos then said he would "not be as kind" as Mr Pallas, naming Jane Garrett as the source of the leak and reiterating the demand that she resign.
In a bitter reprisal, a number of MPs, some of whom were in tears, also spoke against Ms Garrett, whose seat of Brunswick is under threat from the Greens, vowing not to support her in any preselection contest or vote.Last Friday, a Cologne court began the trial of Gabriele S. - a Sicilian immigrant accused of tax fraud.
The case is part of the larger investigation called the Scavo Commission into mafia outreach in the Rhineland that has uncovered far more than shell companies and tax evasion.
"The mafia has infiltrated every sector in Germany from construction to alternative energy, from waste management to shareholding of large companies or banks.
“They buy votes and influence elections through bribery, corruption”, said Roberto Scarpinato, attorney general of Palermo’s court of appeals and anti-mafia pool, in an article published in Wired Italia.
According to Wired Italia, and in collaboration with Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI) and media publisher Funke, the mafia is “increasingly present in Germany”.
Imported machinations of Calabrian and Sicilian crime families have been in place for decades, but more recently have been upping their activity in German industries, the investigation reveals.
Statistics from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police (BKA) detail 460 suspected mafia members living in the country, with hands in construction, bribery, politics, fake food and clothing products and illicit food services including at least 300 pizzerias.
Mob activity has also become increasingly more visible.
In August 2007, an ‘Ndrangheta massacre in Duisburg left six people dead, leftovers from the nearly two-decade “San Luca feud” which started in Calabria.
In January 2013, 17 people from Germany and Sicily were arrested at a Colonge bar in a tax-evasion scheme that continues to unravel a tangled web of mafia and ‘Ndrangheta involvement.
Scarpinato said: “The mafia in Germany wants the Germans to think it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t need to be violent, it can seduce with money.
“Of course, there is still the violent face of the mafia in Italy, but that only shows itself when the power of convincing by money isn’t enough.
“In times of crisis like today, the power of money and corruption can become an epidemic that shakes the foundations of a society. Germany has to decide whether to accept the mafia, or fight it."
By Erica Firpo/The Local
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There are thousands of cats that end up in shelters every year, and when one of those shelters can't take in any more animals it creates problems for other shelters.
"All of these other rescues are going to start to feel the strain from what my rescue cannot do," said Erin Lynch, the founder of Sympathetic Ear Animal Rescue Society in Cook's Brook, N.S.
"They're going to have more kittens coming to them, more people wanting their help, which puts a strain on their rescue."
'This has put my whole rescue into lock down'
Last year Lynch took in 372 cats. In the first six months of this year she's already taken in 200.
Now she's had to stop helping cats because of an outbreak of feline leukemia and panleukopenia at her shelter. Both diseases are contagious and can be fatal to cats.
"This has put my whole rescue into lock down basically. We can't move, we can't move kittens in, we can't move kittens out," said Lynch. "At the same time I can't help anybody until this is solved."
"Now there's going to be animals that won't get help."
There's seemingly no end to the number of kittens and cats that are dropped off at animal shelters in the Halifax area. (Submitted by Erin Lynch)
Lynch has had three kittens from a six-kitten litter die in the last 48 hours.
"What I've gone through in the last 48 hours is heartbreaking. My foster homes are heartbroken. At the same time it's frustrating and maddening because there's a simple solution, there's testing, vaccinating, spaying and neutering."
Rescue groups 'bombarded'
About 25 to 35 people have recently called Sympathetic Ear Animal Rescue trying to get cats into the shelter.
Lynch said all the shelters in the Halifax area are overburdened with cats and would have a hard time absorbing any more.
"The rest of us get asked to take more animals and eventually if we take more animals we're putting ourselves at the exact same risk," said Sonya Higgins, the founder of Healing Animal Scars, an animal shelter in Cole Harbour.
"I've got 16 kittens to find homes for - if I were to take a new kitten in now that could potentially infect them all, I wouldn't be able to put any of them up for adoption. Our medical, veterinary bills would be astronomically through the roof."
"Every day all of the rescue groups across Halifax Regional Municipality and beyond are bombarded with requests for help about stray and feral cats," said Higgins.
Unwanted cats are a strain on shelters
Heather Woodin is provincial administrative coordinator with the Nova Scotia SPCA. She said the shelter system is struggling to keep up with the number of unwanted cats.
The SPCA hopes its new mobile spay and neuter clinic will help cut down on the number of abandoned and feral cats. (Submitted by Erin Lynch)
Sometimes the SPCA even has waiting lists for people wanting to give their cats to the shelter.
Last year the SPCA took in 2,500 stray and abandoned cats and the organization estimates there are several hundred thousand feral cats across the province.
Mobile clinic will help
The SPCA is trying to reduce those numbers by starting a mobile spay and neuter clinic that would travel across the province.
"We'll need volunteers to help us trap the cats, the spay and neuter clinic will roll in, help to fix those cats and then those cats will then be released back to the community," said Woodin.
That mobile clinic is expected to start running at the end of June.
In the meantime Erin Lynch at Sympathetic Ear Animal Rescue is waiting for the recent outbreak to pass, but that will cost her. She will have to pay thousands to try and treat the kittens she has, adding to organization's $10,000 vet bill.According to a new survey, 50 percent of mothers of daughters diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder thought their child's behavior was part of "normal" adolescent development and struggles before they eventually sought help.
The nationally representative survey of 1,883 people was conducted by Edelman Berland and fielded by Harris Interactive. Researchers looked at tween girls with ADHD ages 8 to 14, as well as mothers, adult women with ADHD, teachers and healthcare professionals, in order to examine the awareness around girls with ADHD.
The belief that girls will simply grow out of their ADHD symptoms is a common one, according to Dr. Patricia Quinn, a developmental pediatrician in Washington, D.C., who founded the National Center For Girls and Women With ADHD.
Quinn has been focusing on this demographic for the last 20 years and has seen many girls' symptoms go overlooked, since they don't match up with the stereotypical hyperactive-impulsive presentation of the disorder, most commonly seen in boys.
Girls tend to have an inattentive presentation of ADHD, and their symptoms are much more difficult to recognize. These symptoms include a tendency to daydream, trouble following instructions and making careless mistakes on homework and tests.
In order to be diagnosed with ADHD, one must show nine out of the 18 symptoms in the diagnosis criteria, half of which are in the hyperactive-impulsive category and half of which are in the inattentive category. But 36 percent of the mothers surveyed incorrectly believed that one must have the hyperactive-impulsive symptoms to be diagnosed at all. This could explain why the diagnosis rate for kids with ADHD continues to rise, but boys are still about twice as likely than girls to be diagnosed with the disorder.
Once the surveyed mothers did suspect ADHD, 59 percent hesitated to seek professional help. Sixty percent wished they had recognized the symptoms sooner so that their daughter would have gotten the help she needed faster.
"We're probably not getting a true picture of how many girls actually have the disorder," Quinn said. "What I say to mothers is, 'If something is going on and your daughter is having problems, you should really listen to that little voice inside and seek help. Ask someone about it. Talk to people about it who are professionals in this area.'"
About 60 percent of mothers reported talking to a pediatrician once they noticed signs in their daughter, but 59 percent went to their child's teacher first. A third of teachers surveyed felt they didn't know a lot about ADHD and wished their schools provided services to educate them. As a whole, 29 percent of both teachers and healthcare professionals believed that children would outgrow symptoms of ADHD.
Quinn said it's important that parents get their daughters to someone who specializes in ADHD who can actually make a diagnosis and recommend treatment, like a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a psychologist or even the school psychologist.
"I know, personally, in my own practice, I have dealt with families who are concerned about their daughter, they see her having problems at home and yet when they go to the teacher, the teacher says, 'She seems to be trying hard, but she just needs to pay more attention,'" Quinn said. "And that's the point -- if she needs to pay more attention, she may have ADHD."
Left untreated, girls with ADHD face significant psychological risks. Studies have shown that they can suffer from depression, low self-esteem and anxiety. As they get older, they may be prone to suffer from eating disorders or even engage in self-injurious behavior. According to Quinn, many young girls come to her and think they're simply just not smart, since they feel that they can't measure up to societal expectations.
"Most people with ADHD are smart; they are trying," Quinn said. "If we diagnose and treat the disorder, these same individuals can be very successful."
Once the diagnosis is made, treatments are a coordinated effort and tailored to the specific symptoms a girl is experiencing. She may work with a professional to improve organizational or social skills, or her parents may learn new techniques to help her. Girls experiencing low self-esteem may work out those issues in therapy. Medication may also be used to reduce symptoms so that girls can pay attention and get their work done.
Quinn hoped that these new findings would help educate the public about girls with ADHD and encourage more parents to take daughters to professionals if they suspect a problem. She said that parents are doing a good job at noticing the problem, but they need more education so that they know how to act on their suspicions and seek out a gender sensitive diagnosis.Only six years separate the production of Logan’s Run (1976) from that of Blade Runner (1982), yet those intervening years form a watershed in how science fiction imagined the future. The first movie depicts the year 2274. The setting is futuristic, and the people so beautiful that one significant detail may go unnoticed. Eventually, the penny drops—everyone is white! The future looks very different in the second movie. We’re only in the year 2019, and whites are already a minority in Los Angeles; indeed, if we exclude the replicants, there don’t seem to be many left.
This change in our imagined future is especially noticeable if we compare pre-1980 movies with post-1980 remakes. In The Time Machine (1960), the future is inhabited by two races: the Eloi and the Morlocks. Both are descended from present-day humans, but only the Eloi still look human. Not only that, they have fair skin and blonde hair. It’s the year 802701, and those folks are still around! The Eloi look a lot different in the 2002 remake: they are now a dark-skinned people of mixed Afro-Asian descent, in contrast to the pale Morlocks. This physical difference is absent from the original film and the book itself, which repeatedly describes the Eloi as fair-skinned: “[I was] surrounded by an eddying mass of bright, soft-colored robes and shining white limbs” (Wells, 1898, p. 24); “I would watch for [Weena’s] tiny figure of white and gold” (Wells, 1898, p.41); “I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars” (Wells, 1898, p. 57). In the remake, the only people who look approximately white are the Über-Morlocks … and they feed on human flesh. A fair-skinned viewer would be torn between two conflicting responses: a desire to identify with the Über-Morlocks as People Who Look Like Me and a desire to hate them as morally worthless. This situation is almost the reverse of the original story line: the Time Traveller is misled by the familiar appearance of the Eloi and develops affection for them, even love, only to realize that they are as different from him as the hideous Morlocks.
Even before 1980, we see some awareness in sci-fi that whites would, one day, no longer have societies of their own. Star Trek(1966-1969) led the way in this direction; nonetheless, the ship’s crew looks overwhelmingly white, partly because the American population was still overwhelmingly white during those years and partly because of the small pool of African American actors. Very few of the latter appear in guest roles, which were just as often filled by part-Asian actresses like France Nuyen, born of a Vietnamese father and a Roma mother (Elaan of Troyius), or Barbara Luna, of mixed Filipino and European descent (Mirror, Mirror). This was the 1960s, when antiracism was still taking shape and partly driven, apparently, by a desire to see exotic-looking women.
All the same, those years saw a general tendency to raise the visibility of African Americans on both the big screen and the little screen. Sci-fi was no exception, particularly by the 1980s. In the Alien series (1979, 1986, 1992), the casts are multiracial, although whites still predominate. Just as significantly, the taboo against a non-white killing a white is broken, albeit in a seemingly acceptable way:
In Alien itself the representative of the company is an android named Ash (something white) – he is a white man who is not human. This is revealed when an African-American crew member pulls off Ash’s head: the black man reveals the nothingness of the white man and destroys him by depriving him of his brain, the site of his spirit. The crew bring this severed head back to temporary electronic life to find out how the alien can be destroyed. He tells them that it is indestructible and one of the crew realizes that he admires it. ‘I admire its purity’, he says, adding in a cut to an extreme, intensifying close-up, ‘unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.’ Purity and absence of affect, the essence of the aspiration of whiteness, said in a state of half-life by a white man who has never really been alive anyway. (Dyer, 2000)
It is really only with Blade Runner (1982) that popular culture began to acknowledge the imminence of white demise. We think of the 1980s as the Reagan Era, a time when White America pushed back after a long retreat during the previous two decades. In reality, the retreat picked up speed. The endgame was already apparent to anyone who gave it much thought, like Blade Runner‘s scriptwriters. Thus, in the year 2019, we see whites inhabiting a world that is no longer theirs, with some like Sebastian living alone within the decaying shell of their past—the grand but neglected building where most of the action takes place. The least pathetic white is Rachael, a replicant. She also seems the least WASP-looking with her jet-black hair and her family photos, which suggest a southern European, Armenian, or Jewish origin. The photos themselves are a lie—like the loner Deckard she has no real collective identity, but she does have an imagined one.
We now come to a common theme of love stories: how a fallen man is redeemed by the love of a woman. Here, the fallen man is Deckard—a remnant of a White America in terminal decline. The woman is Rachael, who wants to give him a future of love, marriage, and family, even though this prospect is no more viable than her own imaginary past.
Rachael offers the possibility of developing true emotions […] The two dark ‘whites’ [Rachael and Gaff] offer something definite, real, physical to the nothingness of the indifferently fair white man. In the first version, Deckard and Rachael escape, the film ending with a lyrical (if naff) flight away from Los Angeles and perhaps Earth: the dark woman’s discovery of true feeling (she weeps) redeems the fair – truly white – man’s emptiness. This ending is absent from the ‘director’s cut’; the dark woman cannot redeem the fair man (Dyer, 2000)
Blade Runner is a film noir with no happy ending in the traditional sense. Even if the two of them did escape to build a life together, it’s hard to see how this new life could evolve into anything more than two deracinated individuals with no past and no clear future. Can Rachael have children? Doubtful. It’s also doubtful whether Deckard would want to settle down and become a family man. What would he do to support a family? Go back to hunting replicants?
The film does not address these questions. Nor should it. Whether you are for or against, white demise is something to be addressed collectively, and not at the level of individuals. This point is made in the writings of Richard Dyer and other postmodernists who welcome a future of collective death and feel that whites should come to terms with it:
Whites often seem to have a special relation with death, to yearn for it but also to bring it to others. […] I have been wary of dwelling on the fearfulness – sometimes horrible, sometimes bleak – of the white association with death. To do so risks making whites look tragic and sad and thus comes perilously close to a ‘me-too’, ‘we’re oppressed’, ‘poor us’ position that seems to equalise suffering, to ignore that active role of whites in promulgating inequality and suffering. It could easily be taken as giving us a let-out from acknowledging the privilege and effortless power of even the most lowly of those designated as white. Yet, if the white association with death is the logical outcome of the way in which whites have had power, then perhaps recognition of our deathliness may be the one thing that will make us relinquish it.
This sounds ominous. It strangely resembles what some people wrote in the 19th century about the disappearing American Indian and the disappearing Australian Aborigines. It was all for the best, some argued. As “savages” declined in numbers and disappeared, their lands would be resettled and better societies created. Today, whites are being seen in this light. Their departure from existence will purportedly bring an end to inequality and suffering, thus making the world a better place.
So goes the narrative, and few seem to be challenging it, no matter how outrageous it becomes.
Conclusion
Imagined reality often foretells the real thing—not because the imaginers have a special knack for prediction, but because they end up playing an active role in shaping the future. The death of White America was already being imagined over three decades ago by people who, ultimately, had become reconciled to that fate and even looked forward to it. Moreover, this endgame seems to have struck a responsive chord among the public. As Dyer (2000) argues, “the death of whiteness is, as far as white identity goes, the cultural dominant of our times, that we really do feel we’re played out.”Figure Size (inches): W 3.14" x D 2" x H 8.8" tall
From the latest chapter in the globally beloved KINGDOM HEARTS series by Disney and Square Enix, KINGDOM HEARTS III, the protagonist Sora now makes an appearance to the Play Arts Kai action figure line!Accompanying the improvements in the graphic technology of the game, our designers have paid close attention to expressing the minute details in the sculptwork of Sora in his slightly more mature and grown-up figure.The costume design is based on the look of Sora’s KINGDOM HEARTS II outfit, with the predominantly red and black color scheme of KINGDOM HEARTS 3D: DREAM DROP DISTANCE.He is highly poseable due to the utilization of flexible materials. The Keyblade that can change form into a double crossbow – which could be called the trademark of this title — is also included as an accessory part. With all these features and more, this figure is certainly an eagerly awaited collector’s item for fans.Figure includes display stand.How Porzingis’ game entices and challenges Hornacek: Kristaps Porzingis enjoyed a memorable debut season with the Knicks, finishing second in the Rookie of the Year voting, and though he won’t be required to shoulder the same offensive responsibility as last season, the 21-year-old expects to be able to do more than ever. With the additions of Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah and Brandon Jennings, among others, Porzingis believes his game will only grow, especially once the new coaching staff becomes more familiar with his abilities. -- New York Post
Hornacek: Phil Jackson hasn’t been the triangle tyrant I feared: The Knicks didn’t run much of the triangle offense in their preseason opener. In their second showing Saturday night, the system was showcased a little bit more, but still took a backseat to the faster-paced offense preferred by Jeff Hornacek. The new Knicks coach wouldn’t have been surprised if Phil Jackson wanted to see more of the system he utilized during 11 title runs, but Hornacek has been pleasantly surprised by the team president’s “hands-off” approach with the team. -- New York Post
There are reasons to doubt the story of Derrick Rose’s accuser: This trial boils down to one issue: whether the accuser consented to intercourse with Derrick Rose and his friends. Because there is a complete absence of any physical evidence, such as a rape kit or corroborating medical report — a fact that favors Rose — the jury must decide whom to believe based on witnesses, none more important than the basketball player and his accuser. Before calling a single witness, Rose’s lawyers have already planted seeds of doubt in the accuser’s story. -- New York Post
Jeff Hornacek admits players ‘don’t like to run’ Phil Jackson’s triangle offense: Jeff Hornacek is intent on updating Phil Jackson's antiquated triangle offense and even admitted on Sunday what has been painfully obvious for the past two seasons. "Guys," Hornacek said, "don't like to run it." Hornacek addressed the elephant in the room after he was asked to respond to a comment ESPN analyst and former Knicks point guard Chauncey Billups made last week when Billups said that the Knicks have "a very bad system, the triangle." -- New York Daily News
Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah Distract Knicks, Right on Schedule: The New York Knicks have spent recent days going about the unvarnished business of preseason basketball without two starters. Center Joakim Noah continues to work his way back from a hamstring injury, and point guard Derrick Rose will spend his foreseeable future in Los Angeles, dealing with his well-chronicled legal troubles. As Noah put it last week, “Nothing’s perfect.” Given the team’s current situation, it might be worth recalling some recent history. -- The New York Times
Jeff Hornacek given some latitude on the triangle by Phil Jackson: As the |
festival at the Coachella site, FYF (Fuck Yeah Fest), in downtown L.A., and Firefly, in Delaware—all co-produced by Goldenvoice. Can festivals that began as independents thrive under corporate control? In 2016, the year that Live Nation bought Bonnaroo, the festival sold 45,537 tickets, which was 28,156 fewer than it sold in 2015, when tickets were cheaper. Maybe people were put off by the higher prices, or perhaps the muddy fields of Bonnaroo, which swallowed my shoe seven years ago, look less inviting than they used to, thanks to Coachella.
One part of the festival map remains unconquered by either Malone or Anschutz: New York City. The Big Apple has never been a major music-festival town. Chicago, Austin, and New Orleans all have better festivals. Mass happenings like those at Bethel and Watkins Glen have never much interested city officials, for obvious reasons; promoters of multiday events are largely confined to perimeter islands and parking lots, and not to more centrally situated parks where the city’s free outdoor concerts take place. 20 Courtesy Goldenvoice Nonetheless, in recent years both Live Nation and A.E.G. have established festive beachheads here. Live Nation bought Founders, a local company started by Tom Russell and Jordan Wolowitz, two friends from prep school who launched the Governors Ball, in 2011. Last June, Goldenvoice/A.E.G. débuted Panorama, a festival similar to the Governors Ball, on the same East River island, a month ahead of its competitor. Not surprisingly, tickets sold poorly. (Sales are better this year.) Founders, understandably irked, countered with yet another event, the Meadows Music & Arts Festival, last October. A.E.G. also bought fifty per cent of Bowery Presents, an experienced local promoter. In March, Irving Azoff upped the ante, booking his management clients the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac to play the new Classic East festival at Citi Field, the Mets’ stadium, at the end of July, on the same day as Panorama. (Classic West, with the same lineup, will play Dodger Stadium, in L.A., two weeks earlier.) These startups may not make money for years, if ever; there’s a limit to how many festivals New York can sustain, at least as long as such gatherings are confined to lesser islands and stadiums. They’re placeholders—the first moves in a longer game. A.E.G. simply cannot allow Live Nation to dominate the New York festival scene (or vice versa). “Because then,” Tollett explained, “Live Nation could say to its artists, ‘Here’s forty of our festivals, including New York—skip Coachella.’ We can’t let that happen.” Ultimately, Tollett believes, one great world-class New York festival will emerge from the current slate of second stringers. He envisions a kind of Coachella East, a multiday urban event that would involve not just music but “tech, art, fashion, and culinary leaders in New York,” he explained. But a great festival requires a great site. Early one Sunday morning, I picked up Tollett at the J.F.K. Hilton—he had taken the red-eye in from L.A.—and we set off to inspect the locus of his vision: Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, in Queens, where the 1964 World’s Fair took place. A light snow had fallen over the city the night before. The park was deserted, except for a few joggers negotiating the black ice. We stood with our backs to Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion, now the Queens Museum. (The Panorama Festival is proactively named for the celebrated model inside, which depicts the cityscape.) In front of us was the huge shallow circular pool, now empty, with the twelve-story-tall Unisphere in the middle. “So you’d have a stage there, and another over there,” Tollett said, gesturing toward opposite ends of the park. Thus far, the city has denied permit applications from Live Nation (its Meadows Festival, which took place in the parking lot of Citi Field, is also wishfully christened), Madison Square Garden, and A.E.G. to use the park. It could easily hold seventy-five thousand people, he pointed out. “And you get to go back to your hotel and come back the next day. It’s not like the desert.” We crunched through the crusty snow covering the park’s western lawn. Tollett looked across Queens toward the spires of Manhattan. “It’s New York—that’s crazy, ” he said, and in his mind’s eye he seemed already to be grappling with the second-line chefs and third-line tech stars on the poster. “You’re always looking for a reason to go to New York. This becomes that reason.”Early Monday morning a sozzled British ex-pat and longtime Taiwan resident named Paul was arrested for drunk driving in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, just two days after inking the traditional characters for Taiwan on his forehead and the country’s independence flag on his chin.
On Friday night, Paul, the proprietor of “The Kayak Club,” a bar in Kaohsiung’s Yancheng district, reportedly beelined for the nearest tattoo parlor after a spirited debate over Taiwanese independence. In an impassioned — and by his own admission “rash” — decision, he opted to use his face as a canvas for the expression of his views, apparently not content to tackle the issue through the medium of bar chitchat.
On the defensive after netizens accused him of taking advantage of Paul, the tattoo artist claims that the bar owner-cum-Taiwanese nationalist, “though reeking of alcohol,” was lucid enough to “answer my questions without ambiguity.” “‘Do you really want to tattoo it on your face?'” the tattoo artist asked. “He insisted that was what he wanted.”
In the ensuing days Paul became a viral internet sensation in Taiwan. Even the police officer who nabbed him for drunk driving Monday morning recognized him from the news. Paul submitted to a breathalyzer test at the scene and blew 0.82mg/l, according to the Liberty Times, more than five times the legal limit. Taiwan News reports he was held overnight in a detention cell, “where he became highly agitated to the point of even breaking the toilet inside, before he finally passed out due to exhaustion.”
[Images via Taiwan Observer / Taiwan News]
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PrintThe pace of events in the decline of the Trump administration has accelerated. Things are moving so fast it’s becoming impossible for anyone in the White House to regain the initiative. That takes us into the more dangerous phases of this disaster, when administration and establishment figures find themselves overwhelmed, reacting in increasingly desperate and irrational ways. Buckle up folks.
Here’s a quick rundown of things I’ve been watching over the past few days.
Social Capitalism is doing its thing.
Not a single one of the pastors in Trump’s “faith advisory council” has distanced themselves from the administration, but corporate CEO’s are putting their conscience on display. Three CEO’s resigned this week. This is an important watershed in our history. Corporate America is becoming our public conscience while religious authorities remain happily complicit. Social capitalism is emerging as a new political and economic force.
Meanwhile, Nazis are losing their jobs. A massive crowd-sourced effort to dox the participants in the Charlottesville Nazi rallies is already paying off. Several participants have already been fired by their employers.
Here’s a little rule you can follow to guess who is going to win a political or even military fight inside the US – Business always wins. Every time. A lot of comfortable white people who are used to voting GOP more or less thoughtlessly are being confronted with chilling realities. They are not safe anymore. Markets have decided what the future looks like, and it doesn’t look like Southern conservatives.
Look at statements and actions over the past six months from major corporate figures. The market has decided where it stands on white nationalism. Those who embrace it publicly will find their prospects dimmed. This is a serious problem for the Republican Party which Republicans are only waking up to this week.
A mob tore down a Confederate statue in Durham.
There is going to be more of this. Durham had been discussing plans to remove the Confederate memorial outside the old courthouse. Then, in 2015 the GOP-dominated legislature in North Carolina banned cities from removing the monuments. That was a mistake.
It would be a very good idea for mayors and city councils all over the country to accelerate the process of removing these monuments. They have been a rallying point for racists since they were erected. That’s why they were erected in the first place. Now they will become a focus of street battles. Cities and colleges are going to be forced to either remove them, or defend them with state-sponsored force.
All the safe spaces in which nice white people used to hide from the realities of racism are being destroyed by the Trump administration. Good riddance. Now we get to find out where people really stand.
We got an ugly look at the next generation of Republicans.
You may have wondered what a college Republican actually looks like these days. With Trump’s approval rating among young people so small you have to use special equipment to measure it, who wants to be a Republican on a college campus? Well, we got our answer – Nazis.
The head of the College Republicans at Washington State University was outed as a participant in the Charlottesville rally. His response was just as crude and snide as you’d expect. Can’t wait to see his first job interviews.
Expect more of this. Leaders of College Republicans nationally pressed him to step down, but so what? Where are they going to find replacements that aren’t wearing that same stupid Nazi haircut? We are running out of room to pretend that there is anything left animating the right in the US besides white nationalism, especially among our youngest generation of voters.
Trump is hinting that he might pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Apparently fuming after being forced to read some somewhat unfriendly things about Nazis, Trump has responded with an olive branch toward the alt-right. He told Fox News he might pardon Arpaio. If he does this, our political tinderbox will explode. That fuel is just waiting for a spark.
Right on cue, another white guy was arrested for a terrorist plot.
A 23-year-old white supremacist was arrested in Oklahoma for trying to blow up a bank. The FBI was monitoring his activities, supplying him with phony materials which he used to build the bomb and attempt to detonate it.
Republicans are standing on a very dangerous precipice. Everything present-day Republicans value, from market-based economics to abortion restrictions, is rapidly being subsumed under, and tainted by, a blanket of white nationalism. One more year of Donald Trump, and we may go through a generation in which no one can afford be an “out” Republican in any mainstream commercial or social setting outside the Deep South. The only Republicans will be retirees, welfare recipients, and the independently wealthy. Come to think of it, that’s not far from the coalition that supports the GOP today.
Shed Donald Trump this fall, or the statue-toppling mobs are going to get bigger and their targets will get harder to predict. Our window for containing the rage stirred up by this administration is closing and it is impossible to predict who will end up in its crosshairs.
Revolutions are bad. They are unpredictable, irrational, and randomly lethal. Remove Donald Trump from office now, while an orderly transfer of power remains plausible. We are running out of time.Willie and I will be meeting up with Zach Green of MN8 FoxFire in New York City next week. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, even though it meant fitting in another trip in an already hectic schedule. I am behind…way behind. I am looking forward to the trip, but now I am REALLY looking forward to the trip.
Willie and Zach’s minds never quit thinking about what do to next. Willie bounces ideas off me like a crackhead trying to score his next fix. Some are just completely absurd. Like the time he wanted to land in the middle of Lucas Oil Stadium at FDIC in a hot air balloon. He was deflated and dejected when I told him that the stadium had a roof on it. Or the time he wanted to drive to Hawaii…Oh, and I cannot forget the one about dressing up in drag and parading…never mind, that was my idea.
I digress
Willie and Zach hit the ball out of the park with this last idea. It fits perfect into our schedule, supports the brotherhood, spreads a message, and the ones who help out can get something tangible out of it as well. Willie writes about this effort here. Zach writes about it here.
Rewind to December 19, 2011 at a fire in Brooklyn that left Firefighters James Gersbeck and Robert Weidmann seriously injured. The men are members of FDNY’s Company Rescue 2. Gersbeck and Weidmann were searching the top floor of a Brownstone when the entire floor flashed and trapped both members inside.
Firefighter Gersbeck was removed through the interior after somehow making it (diving into) the stairwell. Firefighter Weidmann made an unbelievable push through the flames making his way out a front window and onto an awaiting aerial ladder.
Willie and I have teamed up with MN8 FoxFire for a fund raising effort for the Rescue 2 MAYDAY Fund
For the next week, today (Monday January 23, 2012) through next Monday (January 30, 2012) Zach will donate 50% of all online sales of MN8 FoxFire products to the Rescue 2 MAYDAY fund!
The offer is good for ANY MN8 FoxFire Products … Tetrahedrons, Helmet Bands, Equipment Bands, Tool Wrap or the Epoxy Kits! Or you can simply donate funds that 100% go to the fund.
The MN8 FoxFire team worked through the weekend to have everything set up on their site for this to happen.
This is what giving back is all about. I am not sure of any other company willing to pledge such a sizable chunk of profit for a cause such as this. However, if there is let me know and I will share it right here on my site.
Willie, Zach, and I will present the check to Rescue 2’s Captain Flaherty next week in Brooklyn.
Here is the full press release:
Joint Fundraiser to Benefit F.D.N.Y. Rescue 2 Injured Firefighters Established by MN8-Foxfire, FireCritic.com and IronFiremen.com
Cincinnati, OH, January 23, 2012— MN8-Foxfire, the developer of breakthrough illuminating products for firefighters, Lt. Rhett Fleitz of the Fire Critic blog (FireCritic.com) and Captain Willie Wines Jr. of the Wooden Ladders and Iron Firemen blog (IronFiremen.com) have teamed up to establish a joint fundraiser to support two injured firefighters with the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) Rescue 2. The fundraiser begins on Monday, January 23 and ends at midnight on Monday, January 30. During this time, MN8-Foxfire will donate 50 percent of all product sales through the company website to the FDNY Rescue 2 Mayday Fund. Opportunities for individuals to make donations without a product purchase will also be available through the MN8-Foxfire website at www.mn8products.com.
On Monday, December 19, 2011, two firefighters from Rescue 2 suffered severe burns during a brownstone structure fire and were in critical condition upon hospital admittance. Both men face long recoveries. One is still hospitalized in critical condition and the other is now recovering at home under the care of a burn center outpatient program.
“We were devastated to hear about the fire involving the Brooklyn firefighters as we have a special connection with Rescue 2,” said Zachary Green, president of MN8-Foxfire. “I’d met and spent some time Captain Liam Flaherty (from Rescue 2) in San Diego last year. Then last fall, Willie, Rhett and I visited Rescue 2 and they welcomed us like we were part of their team.”
“We had great discussions over coffee with Captain Flaherty and his men at their kitchen table and even watched a hockey game with them while we were there,” said Wines.
Fleitz, Wines and Green will travel to New York to personally present a check towards the FDNY Rescue 2 Mayday Fund during the first week of February. “There is such a sense of brotherhood among firefighters,” said Fleitz. “And when one of our brothers is in need, the firefighting community pulls together. We want to do all we can to help these men and their families.”
All Foxfire illuminating products are eligible for the 50 percent Rescue 2 Mayday fundraiser, including illuminating helmet bands, coating kits, grip wrap, tetrahedrons, equipment bands and t-shirts.
About MN8-Foxfire
MN8-Foxfire is a firefighter owned company offering energy efficient and eco-friendly products utilizing breakthrough advanced illumination technology. MN8’s product offerings for the fire safety industry, marketed under the name Foxfire®, have earned a reputation for safety, high quality and performance-proven. This is readily apparent in Foxfire’s photoluminescent helmet bands, coating kits, grip wrap, equipment bands, helmet tetrahedrons and other products. Both the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber and Cincinnati Innovates have recognized MN8-Foxfire for its efforts in developing technology that keeps firefighters safe. The company is headquartered in Wyoming, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb. For more information, visit www.mn8products.com.Richmond residents'mad' over graffiti in the Fan Copyright by WRIC - All rights reserved Video
RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) -- Residents in Richmond are concerned about a recent increase in vandalism.
Neighbors living in the Fan said graffiti keeps popping up on homes and businesses.
Surveillance footage from Spoonbread Bistro shows what appears to be four people who residents believe are the culprits.
Jeff Hood said he first noticed the acts of vandalism the morning of Thursday, September 14.
Copyright by WRIC - All rights reserved
"Pushed me over the edge, made me mad," Hood said.
Residents and business owners accuse the vandals of returning after having the graffiti removed.
One resident, Jeffrey Allison, had his home tagged three months after painting it over the summer.
Copyright by WRIC - All rights reserved
"It's absolutely desecration of a beautiful house," Allison said. "You know we've lived here seven years and really have never had very much problem with graffiti before the past nine or 10 months."
Neighbors are offering a $1,000 cash reward to anyone who provides information on the suspects.
Richmond Police are planning a meeting with members of the Robinson Street Association to discuss cleanup efforts and to prevent this activity from happening.
Copyright by WRIC - All rights reservedAfter critical reviews of RESPETO, one thing became clear. RESPETO is definitely not just a hip-hop movie, but a movie of our times when the effects of violence wrought by Martial Law echoes today.
The film is about Hendrix (Abra), a 17-year old aspiring rapper who meets a crusty old poet (Dido dela Paz) who turns out to be an activist and survivor of a brutal past.
RESPETO is a film by Alberto Monteras II and opens on September 20. It premiered in Cinemalaya and bagged all the major awards including Best Picture, NETPAC Prize and Audience Choice.
The film has been lauded by NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema), “for tackling the complex issue of human rights violation across two generations, musically connected by the vibrant and socially-conscious use of language.”
The film is going to kick off U.P.’s commemoration of 45 years since Martial Law by hosting a screening on September 19, 7p.m. at Cine Adarna, Quezon City.Updated 6pm
SOME 399 MIGRANTS have arrived in Italy on board Irish naval vessel the LÉ Eithne.
The 280 men, 78 women and 41 children were rescued by the Irish ship in two operations over the weekend.
Footage provided by the Irish Defence Forces shows the migrants reaching the Taranto port in southern Italy at 7:40am local time.
Over 1,150 people have been rescued by the Irish operation in the 10 days in which it has been operating in the Mediterranean.
Speaking today on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Commander Brian Fitzgerald from the Navy Headquarters described the number of people being rescued as “biblical” in its proportion.
He added, however, that the number was in line with predictions, with approximately 200,000 migrants expected to land in Italy this year.
The LÉ Eithne is set to sail back to its allocated area of operation this afternoon, he said.
The number of rescued migrants who have been transferred to Italy by boat this year has now passed 50,000, with close to 6,000 people being rescued by Irish, British and German naval ships in the Mediterranean over the weekend.Running a small business can be a bit overwhelming at first, especially when you are still in the start up phase of your company. There is a lot to learn when first starting your small business and the internet offers many ways for you to learn all about the rights and wrongs of small businesses, and will also help you learn how to make your business flourish. Twitter is an abundance of great information pertaining to whatever it is you are looking for, and small business resources can be found very easily. We scraped through Twitter and hand picked 20 of the best small business feeds that make for great resources to aid in the startup or growth of your business. So go and follow these great feeds on twitter and you will surely find many of the questions that you need answered without having to look anywhere else. twitter has become one of the best ways of sharing new information, and no matter what niche you or your company may be in, there is sure to be plenty of info on Twitter alone.
SmallBusinessHub – This feed is loaded with great tweets about small businesses, including up to the date news, excellent resources, links, and much more. In keeping current with small biz news and resources this can be a valuable account to follow. SmallBizAnswers – Another top notch account that you should be following to find all kinds of information about small business. Just as the name implies you can find some great answers to questions you may have and learn many new things by following this Twitter feed. SmallBusiness.com – Rex Hammock, of the website with the same name as the Twitter feed, tweets about all types of things that are related to small business. Sometimes it may be breaking news about an area of small business, or other times it may be about tools or apps that can be valuable for small business owners. One thing that is for sure is that you should be following on Twitter. Bucknell SBDC – This is a Twitter feed run out of Bucknell University in Pa. It is loaded with useful information about starting, maintaining, and growing a small business from the very beginning. TWRT4SmallBiz – A nice feed on that tweets about marketing your small business on Twitter and other social media outlets on the internet. With technology nowadays you can make your small business a huge success if you just take the time to learn the best ways to market and promote your site online. SmallBusiness – Tips, articles, advice and a lot more can be seen coming out of the great tweets here. If you are looking for a guide to help get going in the small business world, or to just keep growing an already established business then you can find great resources here. SBA – This is the official twitter account of the United States Small Business Administration. It is full of amazing news, tips, and resources for the small biz community. Anita Campbell – Anita is the CEO of Small Business Trends, which is a nice small business community that averages over 250k visitors monthly. Her feed is loaded with helpful advice and resources pertaining to small business. Small Biz Survival – Becky McCray shares small business stories and small business news from the website that the twitter account is named after, she also mixes in many other very useful updates that will be of interest to anyone who runs or wants to start their own small business. Mary-Lynn Foster – Mary-Lynn can be found in numerous places around the internet, she hosts her own radio show, blogs, does production work, web design and a whole lot more. She is also a popular small business consultant and her Twitter feed shares a lot of great small business info making her another must follow. TheSmallBizPro – Yet another great feed that you need to follow on Twitter so you can get some great tips and advice as well as keep up with current small business trends and news. This is a very popular and informative account as well, and once you start following and see the great info being tweeted about you will see why. SmallBusinessTech – A great account to follow for some excellent information about technology for small businesses. Technology enables many small businesses to thrive, and keeping up with technology of any kind is not as easy as it sounds. SmallBizLeader – Discussions, advice, tips, and ideas for small business are constantly being tweeted here, which makes this another extremely valuable feed to follow and keep up with. SmallBizBee – This is a really popular Twitter feed because of all the amazingly useful tweets that are offered up to help out anyone with even the slightest interest in small business. Once you start following you will see why it is another one that you should have been following months ago. GrowSmartBiz – Tweets all about growing a small business and helping promote small business success for anyone that is motivated and driven enough to start up their own small biz. SmallBizExpo – Small business resources, this is the ultimate online resource directory for small business owners and entrepreneurs and another valuable asset to the Twitter and small biz communities. John Joyce – John is another guy every small business owner and entrepreneur that uses Twitter should already be following, he is very knowledgeable and helps many people by sharing. BusinessExchange – BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange users create business topics, collaboratively edit and aggregate content from the web and share with their network and others, and their Twitter feed helps you keep up to date with it all. SmallBusinessBlogs – Small Business blogs is a top internet resource for small business blogs on the web. The Twitter feed is constantly updated with the best small business blog posts and it can be a very informative feed to follow. StartUpAmerica – Start Up America is a coordinated effort that brings together many of the country’s most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, and foundations and now they are bringing their words of wisdom to you on twitter.
If you are a small business owner who is just joining twitter these are some great feeds that you can get started with, these are also just as valuable even if you are a Twitter veteran. On the other hand, if you are a small biz owner and you are not on Twitter then what are you waiting for? As you can see just by browsing these 20 Twitter accounts, there is a ton of free and extremely valuable info for you to use as you start or grow your small business.
Image Credits: Todd Barnard
Share This...The Final Moonwalk of the 20th Century Subscribe Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 13, 2009 in Science On this day in 1972 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt went out for their third and final Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) — which is known to us civilians as a moonwalk. The Apollo 17 mission would mark the last time in the 20th Century when humans would walk the surface of the moon. While the close of that century would start a new golden age of astronomy with many planets outside of our solar system being discovered, it’s been a dark age of space exploration. And yet least we forget: The nation that went to the moon was in the middle of an expensive Cold War, was fighting an actual war in Asia and was enacting new healthcare programs — and yet they still had the gumption to go.Introduction of Apple iPhone 5S
Apple iPhone 5S was launched in the year 2013 alongside with Apple iPhone 5C and featured with better specs and amazing design than its predecessor. The phone comes with a processor that is twice as fast as its predecessors topped with an amazing camera. Apple iPhone 5S will serve great as it’s the best smartphone they can buy from Apple without upsetting their budget very much.
Design Specifications
The build quality is fantastic with its diamond rolled edges and timeless design the phone has a marvelous appearance. The Touch ID serves great as it saves you from the hassle to enter the pin or make a pattern open the phone.
The phone is very handy as its dimensions are 4.87×2.31×0.30 inches, which make it very easier to fit in almost all types of pocket. The phone is light weight, weighing just 112 grams.
Display Features
The phone is provided with 16:9 Retina display with 4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit widescreen. The phone has a multi-touch display with IPS technology, providing a screen resolution of 1136×640 pixels at 326 ppi.The phone provides support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously. The display is very crisp and produces vibrant colors that do not get pixilated when zoomed.The display is 4 inches long, so multitasking could be a problem and watching videos and playing games could become less appealing. Overall the display is one of the good features of the phone.
Memory Storage
The Apple iPhone 5S is provided with 16 GB of internal storage in its lowest model regarding memory storage while the best model has 32 GB of internal memory, there is no Card slot provided in the phone so you cannot increase the memory externally. The phone is provided with a 1 GB RAM.
Processor
The Apple iPhone 5S is powered with Apple’s A7 Chipset having 1.3 GHz Cortex Dual-core processor. The A7 chip is powerful, even though the processor looks weak on paper compared to the heavy processors found in most of the smartphones these days.
The Apple iPhone 5S is provided with an 8-megapixel iSight camera with 1.5µ pixels and ƒ/2.2 aperture that provides more light for the sensors to take amazingly detailed pictures. In broad daylight, the camera captures high-quality images that are full of color and details. The front camera comes with additional features that include local tone mapping, Noise reduction, Backside illumination sensor, Hybrid IR filter, Autofocus, Tap to focus, Face detection, Panorama (up to 28 megapixels), Auto image stabilization, Burst mode, Photo geo tagging, etc.
Battery Backup Life
The phone is provided with Built-in 1560 mAh rechargeable lithium‑ion battery that works decent enough. The phone works for around 10 hours if used moderately, while the battery seems to behave differently for various functions done on the phone. The Battery is the one place this phone is not on par with other smartphones in the market.
Conclusion
Apple iPhone 5S is the best smartphone available in the market for people who want to feel the Apple’s luxurious smartphone at a budgeted price. iPhone 5 offers amazing features like Siri and Facetime and with its current price in India slashed down due to the launch of higher models; the phone qualifies as a best buy.
AdvertisementsFor the first time ever, scientists have photographed light behaving simultaneously as both a particle and a wave.
The photograph, above, is a momentous achievement, providing direct observation of both behaviours simultaneously for the first time, after decades of attempts by the scientific community. Previous research projects have successfully observed wave-like behaviours and particle-like behaviours in light, but not at the same time.
The dual behaviour of light, which is demonstrated through quantum mechanics and was first proposed by Albert Einstein, was only possible to capture by scientists at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, due to an unorthodox imaging technique.
The scientists generated the image with electrons, making use of EPFL’s ultrafast energy-filtered transmission electron microscope. This gave them a rare advantage over other institutions, as EPFL has one of only two such microscopes in the world.
The image was achieved first by firing a pulse of laser light at a miniscule metallic nanowire, adding energy to charged particles in the nanowire and making them vibrate.
The light waves travel along the nanowire in opposite directions, like lanes of cars on a road, but when they meet from opposite directions they form a new wave then appears as if it is “standing in place”, effectively confined to the nanowire.
This wave, which radiates around the nanowire, was the light source that was imaged.
The scientists fired a stream of electrons in close proximity to the nanowire, and imaged their interaction with this “standing wave”. As they came into contact with the light, their changes in behaviour acted as a visualisation of the light’s behaviour.
The electrons that interacted with the light, or photons, either slowed down or sped up, together forming a visualisation of the light’s wave.
However, the changes in speed also appeared as an exchange of quanta – packets of energy – between the electrons and the photons. These packets were the tell-tale sign of the light behaving as a particle.
The experiment is a significant step for future quantum mechanics research.
“This experiment demonstrates that, for the first time ever, we can film quantum mechanics – and its paradoxical nature – directly,” said research leader Fabrizio Carbone.
However, the research could also be important for the future development of quantum-based technology.
“Being able to image and control quantum phenomena at the nanometer scale like this opens up a new route towards quantum computing,” he added.
The research, which was a collaborative effort between EPFL, Trinity College and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is published today in the journal Nature Communications.
Image courtesy of Fabrizio Carbone/EPFL.
Journal Reference: Piazza L, Lummen TTA, Quiñonez E, Murooka Y, Reed BW, Barwick B, Carbone F. Simultaneous observation of the quantization and the interference pattern of a plasmonic near-field. Nature Communications 02 March 2015. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7407Wavefront Music Festival Sun Jul 01 2012
(Photo by Steve Stearns)
First year festivals are truly a force to be reckoned with. The festival producers are still feeling the crowd out. The attendees are still feeling the festival out. And no one has yet to determine the ideal means of enjoying the festival. The discovery of how to have the best possible experience is all in the hands of the inaugural crowd. Wavefront Music Festival--day one, at least--was nothing short of an experience...a ridiculously fun one at that.
Now, I don't believe the two should be compared but it's hard not to reference Wavefront without mentioning its fellow first-year Chicago dance festival Spring Awakening Music Festival which happened just two weeks ago. Let me repeat: this review is not a comparison of the two. I was thoroughly impressed by both and recognize their uniqueness from each other. However, just for the sake of context, if Spring Awakening was like an all-out-rager that college-bound kids throw the weekend their parents go out of town then Wavefront was the party the parents throw when their kids actually do move into the dorms. No, not old and boring. Professional, experienced, mellow, awesome.
(Photo by Steve Stearns)
Just halfway through the weekend and it's this writer's humble opinion that this festival will go down as one of the best of the summer. As with any festival debut, there's bound to be some bumps along the way but most of the time those things are simply of of anyone's hand. In Wavefront's case, the folks behind it--the same folks behind veteran dance club Spybar--managed to keep the ratio of what rocked and what flopped on day one weighing heavily in the favor of rocking.
What rocked:
The locale -...was perfect. Montrose beach. The actual, sand-covered beach was the home to the festival's two main stages with the two smaller stages and the vendor's row located in the shady grove just west of the shore. When performers like DJ/producer/techno pop wizard Matthew Dear started spinning jams that basically demanded dancing nothing felt better than kicking off your shoes and kicking up some sand.
Matthew Dear (Photo by Steve Stearns)
The experience - As I mentioned earlier it seems the goal of this dance music exclusive beach party was just for people to have a great time. Generous hour and a half sets for most of the artists gave you time to listen in on the tunes and wander the beach checking out the sites. The crowd deserves a pat on the back as well. Maybe it was the excessive amount of alcohol that was consumed (keep reading), maybe everyone was in some sort of heat-induced coma but it's been a while since I've been around such a mellow, friendly, good-time-having group of people at a festival. Minimal amounts of shoving, drunken debauchery and all around jerkery made for a day of smiles and new friends.
(Photo by Steve Stearns)
Target marketing - Rather than have fans schlepping back and forth across the beach in 90-degree heat, Wavefront successfully divvied up the artists to their respective sub-genre-inclusive stages. House and drum 'n bass beatmakers stuck to the North Stage. Heavier, more dubsteppier DJ's took to the South Stage. Local stars played the adequately named Local Stage and, well, the Solar Beatz Stage was a bit of a hodgepodge. But overall it was a very effective means of keeping the herding from one stage to the next at a minimum.
(Photo by Katie Karpowicz)
Go-go dancers - Yesterday's appearance by MSTRKRFT was one of my most anticipated of the summer. My my, how they've only gotten better since I last saw them. It was awhile ago, I admit (Lollapalooza, '09) but my fondness for this Canadian duo has never waned. Scantily-clad, space-themed go-go dancers lining the stage and its center aisle; generous usage of the stage's CO2 canons; Jesse F. Keeler's 312-chugging, Parliament-smoking self; and a non-step mix of original melodic, bass-bumping beats along with perfectly beach-worthy sing-a-longs like Nero's "Crush On You" made me remember why.
MSTRKRFT (Photo by Steve Stearns)
Boys Noize (Photo by Steve Stearns)
The light shows - If you're going to create a festival in which there's never more than one or two guys at a time standing behind a DJ booth, then why not cram the rest of the stage full of sweet lighting effects? Excellent call, Wavefront. Nothing justified this decision more than Boys Noize's headlining set. Amidst a bombardment of strobes, lasers, sparks |
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A pilot study of the genetic basis of canine separation-related distress disorder
Diane van Rooy, Peter Thomson, Paul McGreevy, Claire Wade | University of Sydney, Australia
Separation-related distress is a common behavioural disorder affecting an estimated 14 to 29% of companion dogs, although the prevalence amongst working dogs is unclear. Behavioural issues are the primary reason cited for rejection of guide dogs and co-morbidity between different anxiety disorders is common. While current research has concentrated on identifying the environmental risk factors of anxiety disorders, little is known about genetic contributions. This project aims to use genome-wide association analysis to identify loci predisposing dogs to develop separation-related distress disorder.
A validated owner-based questionnaire (CBARQ) is used to phenotype cases and controls. Although separation-related distress can affect dogs of any breed, we are initially looking at Labrador retrievers and golden retrievers. To date, questionnaires have been received for 423 dogs, including a cohort of 81 dogs belonging to Guide Dogs Victoria. Of the 342 dogs belonging to the general public, 49 dogs (14.3%) have been identified as cases, while only one case has been phenotyped in the guide dog cohort.
It is expected that inheritance of the disorder will be complex. A pilot cohort of 24 cases and 24 controls – 12 of each breed – has been genotyped. While genome-wide significance was not reached, several loci showed a high probability of association and merit further investigation.
Increasing our knowledge of the genetics underlying separation-related distress and, therefore, the mechanisms of the disorder has the potential to improve the quality of life of affected dogs and their relationship with their owners. A better understanding of the development of anxiety disorders also gives us the potential to improve success rates of guide dog organisations.
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Guide Dogs Victoria, the Goldia and Susie Lesue scholarship (2010), Neil and Allie Lesue scholarship (2011), Jean Walker Fellowship Trust (2011-13), Jessie Mary Briggs scholarship (2012-13) and James Serpell for use of CBARQ.
Email: dvan8497@uni.sydney.edu.au
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Early development and conditioning for working dogs
Boyd Hooper | Tactical and Specialist K9, Australia
Behaviour is a combination of the genetic predisposition and thresholds, combined with the environment and learning an animal has been exposed to. Certainly some behaviour is largely hereditary and is under limited control of the environment, however the vast majority of breeders and trainers do not utilise environmental and learning processes to their full advantage. Providing the correct environments and a customised puppy and young dog development program that continually assesses the dogs performance (strengths, weaknesses, thresholds), can make a dog with poor genetics a good dog, and a dog with good genetics into a great dog.
Based on over 30 years of international experience in training, raising and breeding working dogs, the importance of pup and young dog development, as well as specific protocols used in habituating the dogs to specific environmental conditions (arson environments, gunfire, confined spaces, rescue harnesses, tactical scenarios etc) will be discussed. In addition there will be information on producing a training and development plan for the pup/young dog to develop the specific skill sets and competencies required for their future roles and tasks. The presentation will include findings from several studies and the experience of a number of international breeders, trainers and experts on behaviour, supported by video footage of the conditioning /development program and the results these programs produce. The focus will be on Law Enforcement, Military, Rescue and Scent Detection roles, however the principles will be relevant to virtually any working/service dog application.
Email: hooper@task9.com.au
Listen to and view the presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?wmode=transparent” width=”480″ height=”360″ >
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Welfare of working dogs and its impact on performance – research so far
Nicola Rooney | Animal Welfare and Behaviour Group | Bristol Veterinary School, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
The working dog world is surrounded in great personal expertise, but also very strong and conflicting opinions as to best practice. In order to optimise working dog ability, it is important that we monitor day to day performance and investigate analytically, those factors which may impact upon this. To do so we need to valid and reliable ways of recording dog’s day to day performance, which take into account the numerous different aspects of performance which are important to individual working dog roles. I will describe the rigorous scientific process we employed to derive performance measures for search dogs, both during day to day work tasks and during controlled training and calibration searches.
I will describe a range of studies exploring the challenges of handlers rating their own dog’s performance and behaviour, the inherent biases and how they can be overcome via training. I will then describe how measures can be adapted to measure team, and handler performance and once we have meaningful measures, how we can investigate those factors which most affect this. I will use examples from our own work on explosives search dog and more recently on hypoglycaemia alert dogs.
PDF of presentation slides
Listen to the audio of this presentation (Part 1 of 2: mp3)
http://workingdogalliance.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/WDC2013_RooneyDay2Part1.mp3
Listen to the audio of this presentation (Part 2 of 2: mp3)
http://workingdogalliance.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/WDC2013_RooneyDay2Part2.mp3
Link to research publications
Dr Nicola Rooney – University of Bristol
Email: Nicola.Rooney@bristol.ac.uk
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Risk factors associated with loss of working farm dogs in New Zealand
Naomi Cogger*,Amy Jerram and Helen Sheard | Massey University, New Zealand
In 2008-09 a study was undertaken to determine key features of the working farm dog population in New Zealand. One researcher visited 118 sheep and beef farms in NZ to collect demographic, husbandry and health information for all working dogs on the farm at the time of the visit or that had been on the farm in previous 12 months. One thousand and twenty-four dogs were enrolled in the study: 78% were alive on the farm at the time of visit; a further 7% had been sold or given away and 14% had been euthanized or died in the preceding 12 months.
The study found that the risk of death was highest in dogs less than two years of age and dogs greater than seven years of age. Owners report that 52% of dogs experienced an adverse health event that could not be attributed to trauma. Furthermore, dogs experiencing adverse health events 1.34 times more likely to be dead at the time of the visit than those that did not experience a health event in the preceding 12 months. The breed of the dog, sex, neuter status and topography of the farm were not significantly associated with death. Further analysis of this data will focus on determining the prevalence and impact of owner reported health events because this information can be used to determine which health events should be prioritised for future studies.
Email: N.Cogger@massey.ac.nz
Centre for Service & Working Dog Health
Massey University EpiCentre
Listen to and view the presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?wmode=transparent” width=”480″ height=”360″ >
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Recognising anxiety in working dogs – impact on dog and handler
Kersti Seksel* and Caroline Perrin | Sydney Animal Behaviour Service, Australia
This presentation will focus on neonatology and cover the importance of breeding from the right individuals, early recognition of anxiety and intervention strategies, and the impact that this has on the dog and the handler. What happens from the time of conception in the womb to 12 weeks of age affects the way the puppy develops not only physically but also mentally. The period is characterised by intense development and change within the central nervous system.
Early experiences affect the animal’s resiliency or coping capacity. The ability to cope with life’s stressors varies with genetic predisposition, learning from previous experiences and the current environment. Early identification of individuals who are not developing resilience allows early interventions to be implemented. Early intervention can alter brain development. Interventions may take the form of environmental management, behaviour modification and medication.
Environmental management involves creating a complex but stable and predictable environment for the puppy. Interaction with complex environments results in denser brain development. A stable environment allows the puppy to develop rules or expectations for the outcomes of interactions and so develop coping strategies. Behaviour modification helps shape acceptable and desirable behaviour. More importantly, behaviour modification encourages and rewards calm, quiet behaviour and relaxation. This way the puppy learns coping strategies. Medication can be used to normalise brain neurotransmitter function and also to maximise neuronal connections through the release of brain neurotrophic factor. New connections are encouraged along desirable pathways. Appropriate early interventions can affect brain development, thus helping more normal growth and behaviour to occur.
Email: sabs@sabs.com.au
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The role of stress in learning
Caroline Perrin* and Kersti Seksel | Sydney Animal Behaviour Service, Australia
Background: Neuroplasticity refers to the changes in the neural pathways and connections between neurons that occur in response to learning, the environment and structural damage to the brain. Stress refers to the physiological responses that occur in the body such as cortisol release from the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis in response to changes in the environment.
Main content: Working dogs need to be able think, remember and learn new information effectively in a variety of environments. Some of these environments may be stressful and cause a release of neurochemicals such as cortisol and noradrenaline. These neurochemicals have wide ranging effects on neuroplasticity and hence effect learning. Excessive stress impairs learning new behaviours. In addition, there are various behavioural indicators that can help us recognise stress in dogs, modify the learning environment and hence improve learning outcomes.
Summary: Not all stress is bad, however excessive stress impairs learning. Recognising the behavioural signs of stress and reducing stress will increase learning.
Email: sabs@sabs.com.au
Listen to the audio of this presentation:
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Giving working dogs a new (working!) start
Di and Carey Edwards | Australian Working Dog Rescue, Australia
Presentation includes a summary of where rescue comes into play with saving lives, how it all works, from selection of dogs, dealing with council in a professional manner as opposed to appealing based on emotion, the numbers killed each year in pounds and shelters, quarantine and husbandry, through to behaviour testing (initial testing can lead to more specific testing by relative industries, being those people who take the dogs in to train them specifically for a working life on the land [farm dogs] – many of the people doing this testing and training are noted working dog professionals or government agency representatives), and finding suitable new homes that meet the needs of the dogs and the new working placement or family they go to.
This presentation will outline all aspects of rescue and why it is required. Presentation will emphasise how great dogs can be found that were deemed unsuitable for being part of one area of human life, and can then become invaluable members of working society.
Email: contact@awdri.com.au
Listen to and view the presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?wmode=transparent” width=”480″ height=”360″ >
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Can models be used successfully to mimic the real thing to prevent canine predation of an endangered species?
Arnja Daleab*, Christopher Podlesnikb, Douglas Elliffeb
a Animal Welfare Group, Unitec Institute of Technology, NZ
b School of Psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Dogs pose a significant threat to kiwi (Apteryx spp.) through predation. In an attempt to balance kiwi conservation and the need for dogs to be used for hunting purposes in kiwi habitat, the New Zealand Department of Conservation developed the Kiwi Aversion Training (KAT) programme. KAT is a canine aversion training programme which uses models rather than using live kiwi which aims to stop dogs killing kiwi. ‘Kiwi-safe’ permits are issued after a short training session where dogs receive a brief period (0.5-1.5s) of aversive electrical stimulation from an electric shock collar when interest is displayed towards the kiwi models.
Despite models being commonly used when training and assessing animals, for example in canine temperament testing, in predator awareness training and for prey aversion training; there has been no systematic evaluation about their effectiveness. This research investigates whether models mimic the real thing using the KAT protocol and then presenting the dogs with a live bird one month later. Chickens were used rather than kiwi due to their widespread availability. 84 dogs were trained to avoid a chicken model and then presented with a live chicken one month later at a novel location with novel dog handlers. There were five chicken models used and dogs were randomly allocated in to one of seven treatment groups: (1) dead chicken; (2) stuffed chicken; (3) chicken faecal material; (4) chicken nesting material; (5) wooden cut-out chicken; (6) all chicken models together; (7) a live chicken. These models were selected for investigation because they comprise the range of the training stimuli used by the various trainers in the KAT programme, but with kiwi equivalents (Groups 1-6 only).
Behaviours towards the live chicken were quantified, as was the time and distance taken to detect the chicken when it was presented. The majority of the test dogs did not generalise from the chicken models to the live chicken potentially indicating that some of the models did not mimic the real thing and were not ecologically significant to the dogs. It is recommended that the use of models is questionable for one-off aversion training sessions, and needs further study.
Email: adale2@unitec.ac.nz
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Therapy dogs: companion dogs who work
Gaille Perry | Delta Society, Australia
Dogs are increasingly being used to provide interaction, support and comfort for people in a variety of institutions, including hospitals, nursing homes and hospices. More recently, they have been incorporated into reading assistance programs for children experiencing reading and writing difficulties. Despite the profusion of programs, there have been little data to support their success beyond anecdotal.
There has been even less focus on the needs of the dogs who provide this service. In well-conducted programs, dogs and owners undergo a rigorous assessment procedure before entry and owners receive training to assist them to understand the needs of their dogs and the people they visit. Dogs are usually “ working” for 60-90 minutes once per week. It is difficult however for owners to balance the needs of their dogs with their perceived responsibility to those they are visiting. Even with training, owners may not recognize and act on displacement behaviours or other possible stress signals exhibited by their dogs. Research is required to assess dogs’ stress levels during visits and the information obtained can then be used to modify selection procedures and training to prepare owners for the program they are entering.
Email: gaillep@optusnet.com.au
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With thanks to our sponsors and exhibitorsWhen I was reading about the new App Store review view controller, which is most likely provided in iOS 10.3 on different technology blogs and newsletters, I wanted to try it out immediately.
So I started to look after it, where could I acquire more information about it. The answer was so obvious (except the technology blogs), and still not really advertised, I decided to make a blog post from it.
Apple has a marvellous API documentation online, on the https://developer.apple.com/reference address. The only trick here is in the top-right corner, where you can find the “Show API Changes” button. If you click on it, you will have a nicely coloured and highlighted sets of the changed APIs. You can also select from a drop down menu under the “Hide API Changes” button, the versions between the changes need to be shown.
Actually, in the Xcode beta there is also a menu item under the Help, called “API Changes”, but at the time of writing of this article, it will drop you to a landing page of the API changes, and not to the actual API documentation.
By the way the answer is for the App Review controller is in the StoreKit Framework, and you need just call [SKStoreReviewController requestReview]; in order to display the review.
Like this: Like Loading...On what would have been her 104th birthday, Google pays tribute to yet another trailblazer - Homai Vyarawalla, India's first female photojournalist - with a doodle. Other women who have made it to the Google Doodle list this year include Begum Akhtar, Cornelia Sorabji, and Anasuya Sarabhai.
Codenamed Dalda 13 in the photo archives, she also went by that pseudonym. Her pseudonym comes from the year of her birth - 1913 - and the Dalda from her car's number plate DLD 13.
image credit- Google
The Padma Vibhushan awardee was born in a Parsi family in Gujarat, and much of her childhood was spent travelling with her father's travelling theatre company. She later moved to Bombay, now Mumbai, and studied at Bombay University and Sir J J School of Art. A friend taught her photography, and she started exploring life in Bombay through her camera lens early on, starting to work as a photographer professionally in her late teens.
Her career took off after her marriage to Manekshaw Vyarawalla, who worked as an accountant and a photographer for Times of India. Her photos were initially published under his name, or her pseudonym.
Her work soon started gaining national attention, and in 1942 she had moved to Delhi with her family to work at the British Information Services. Here she photographed world leaders such as Ho Chi Minh, and American Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, and the first ladies, Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy.
She also photographed Queen Elizabeth II's State visit, and the Dalai Lama who had just escaped Tibet.
Some of her best work, however, came during Independence. Her key works include photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the latter being her favourite subject. Some of her notable pictures that resonated with the masses were of Nehru addressing jubilant crowds in Delhi, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy departing from India, and Gandhi being prepared for the funeral.
Soon after her husband's death, in 1970, she gave up photography disappointed with the change the profession had undergone. In 1982, she moved to Vadodara with her son Farooq who she lost to cancer in 1989.
Later on, she handed her collection of photographs to the Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts. In 2011, she was awarded the second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan.
She died in Vadodara on January 15, at the age of 98 due to a lung disease.
In 1998, Sabeena Gadihoke from Jamia Milia Islamia University made a documentary on Homai and two other photographers titled 'Three Women and a Camera'. Sabeen also wrote Homai's biography - Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla - which was published in 20o6. The biography celebrates her work and her contribution to photojournalism especially as a lone woman in a field that continues to be male-dominated even today.
Homai's Google Doodle today is a reminder of her contribution, her will to succeed despite the odds, and an inspiration who shows nothing is impossible.The Bruins broke ground on a new practice facility in Brighton. According to BuildZoom permit data, the estimated cost is over $100 million.
The rink, dubbed “Warrior Ice Arena,” will be attached to a 10-story office building, and will include a parking garage below ground. Currently the Bruins share practice and playing space with the Celtics at TD Garden (which is undergoing its own large-scale renovation).
The Bruins’ plan is part of “Boston Landing,” an ambitious development project in Brighton, in the northwest part of Boston. Boston Landing will also house the New Balance corporate HQ (whose permits are valued at more than $115 million), a 300,000 s.f. sports complex, a 175-room boutique hotel, and a brand new commuter rail station, which will be open in 2016.
Check out the permit data for Warrior Ice Arena, New Balance HQ, and TD Garden here.
image via Elkus Manfredi ArchitectsA planned 2016 ballot initiative would ask Arizona voters to legalize marijuana for recreational use and establish a network of licensed cannabis shops where sales of the drug would be taxed, in part, to finance education. (Photo: Nick Oza, The Arizona Republic)
Two Vermont lawmakers fed up with delays to legalize marijuana in the state introduced a headline-grabbing measure this week designed to move things along: one that would outlaw alcohol. Legislators Chris Pearson and Jean O'Sullivan admit they have no interest in reinstating Prohibition, but they want to make a larger point, reports Vermont Public Radio.
In their eyes, marijuana is safer than alcohol, so why ban that drug and leave the other untouched?
"The object was to basically embarrass leadership to say that we have [marijuana legalization bills] in front of us, and they're going absolutely nowhere," O'Sullivan tells the Huffington Post.
Their bill would make those found in possession of small amounts of alcohol subject to fines of up to $500, and anyone caught selling or distributing it faces 30 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
(A drug that's been around a while shows promise as a substitute for medical marijuana, without the stoner side effects.)
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1G40jOwFormer LSU head coach Les Miles has hired Trace Armstrong to his agency team and said he is ramping up his search for a new coaching job.
"I'm fighting like heck trying to win a championship at another place," Miles told The Baton Rouge Advocate.
Miles was fired on Sept. 25, one day after LSU lost 18-13 at Auburn when referees overruled what had appeared to be a winning touchdown. He boasts the highest winning percentage in modern-day LSU history (.770) and sits second on the school's all-time wins list with a record of 114-34. In his 11-plus seasons in the SEC, Miles' teams claimed a 2007 BCS championship, played for another national title in 2011 and won three conference titles.
Looking for a new job is part of the conditions of Miles' buyout clause, which is roughly $9.6 million over the next six years.
Armstrong, a former Pro Bowl defensive end, also represents Ohio State's Urban Meyer, Notre Dame's Brian Kelly, Houston's Tom Herman and Penn State's James Franklin.
"I just think we're talking about broader coverage, a nation to represent," Miles told the newspaper on the hiring of Armstrong. "I enjoy the fact we use guys to do similar things and different things."Valia was stationed in the Garrison force in Borogskov and oversaw the breakdown of the old order. It was not a pretty job, there had been two riots and a large number of smaller scuffles over the last eleven days since Infrastructural troops came in. It was clear that the population of this city had been going down between war-dead, detentional laborers being sent east and freed slaves making their way home even with the release of a fair number of the lower ranking prisoners of war. Being on patrol could be dangerous, but there was a safe refuge just outside the city called the Hinge.Like Daagsgrad, Borogskov was built on the mouth of a river though unlike it's counterpart was mostly built on one shore. The Southeastern shore had about a fifth of the city in total with it's most substantial feature being the Hinge. A fortress mainly built and named to enforce tariffs on traffic on the river and sink ships who refused to pay. It allowed the river to be opened and closed. And indeed it still served that purpose even if Nova ordered that Tariff's be cut in half and trade had been going down recently. But its main purpose now was as the administrative center and housing of the garrison. In addition to soldiers and Bureaucrats there were a number of people doing odd jobs many of whom were freed slaves. She was on sentry duty in the evening watching the river. A few people walked across the battlements as well as it was the quickest route from the northernwestern and southwestern offices due to the hodgepodge construction of the Hinge. She watched as the ships went by. Among them were fair number of Infrastructural boats carrying in supplies from Dalatyr for longterm projects, among them a few paddle steamers. These were still quite a novelty and had been increasing in number on the Coldland's rivers for a few years now. The newer craft was another story.She had heard rumors of this, now she knew that they were true. While the paddlesteamers were squat and boxy, designed to carry cargo over long distances. This one was long, narrow and predatory in appearance. A fact made more apparent by its cannon heavy arsenal. It's hull was metal, painted to protect against rust. It was assembled upriver in a special facility and kept under wraps. Now it moved forward and out to sea through the Reka river for sea-trials. As it passed, its sailors gave a salute. She gave a few cheers and waved her bayonet in salute. A few people came up to the battlements witnessing the Vanguard as it passed by. People in the city proper would come and witness this new craft as well. What they saw was not the just a novel construct but the future of naval warfare. The first of many.Previous- [link] Next- [link]Britain’s premier motor sport series confirms unchanged line-up of events
Series organiser TOCA has today (27 July) confirmed its calendar of events for the 2016 Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship.
The highly successful consistency of its current format and order of ten events will continue for a fifth successive season, with Brands Hatch again bookending next year’s schedule.
The Indy Circuit layout will kick off proceedings in early April before Britain’s biggest series goes on to visit Donington Park, Thruxton, Oulton Park and Croft. Action will recommence at Snetterton following the traditional summer break, which will be followed by the series’ annual pilgrimage to Knockhill in Scotland. A Northamptonshire double bill at Rockingham and Silverstone are next on the agenda, ahead of the season finale on the legendary Brands Hatch Grand Prix circuit in early October.
The calendar will continue to comprise of 30 races across ten events, with three races of equal distance taking place on each scheduled weekend. The location and date for the annual Season Launch will be confirmed in the coming months.
The BTCC and its support series appears at all of the country’s major motor sport venues, providing a geographical spread which ensures that literally hundreds of thousands of fans can catch Britain’s biggest motor-racing package throughout the season.
Trackside and TV audiences for the BTCC have continued to grow year-on-year over the last decade with 2015 having already enjoyed huge attendances during the first half of the season. Each venue permits free admission for children – some for up to 16-year-olds – to its BTCC event, further broadening the championship’s appeal among family audiences and the next generation of fans.
ITV4 will continue to broadcast every race weekend live, free-to-air and in high definition in 2016, as well as live streaming via the ITV website. Regular highlights programmes will also be screened on both ITV and ITV4 following each event.
2016 BTCC Calendar:
Rounds, Date, Circuit, County
1,2,3, Sat 2/Sun 3 April, Brands Hatch (Indy), Kent
4,5,6, Sat 16/Sun 17 April, Donington Park, Leicestershire
7,8,9, Sat 7/Sun 8 May, Thruxton, Hampshire
10,11,12, Sat 4/Sun 5 June, Oulton Park (Island), Cheshire
13,14,15, Sat 18/Sun 19 June, Croft, North Yorkshire
16,17,18, Sat 30/Sun 31 July, Snetterton, Norfolk
19,20,21, Sat 13/Sun 14 August, Knockhill, Fife
22,23,24, Sat 27/Sun 28 August, Rockingham, Northamptonshire
25,26,27, Sat 17/Sun 18 September, Silverstone, Northamptonshire
28,29,30, Sat 1/Sun 2 October, Brands Hatch (Grand Prix), Kent
*all events subject to contractBy Fred Gardner / O’Shaughnessy’s News Service December 4, 2014
The “Right to Medical Marijuana Initiative” —better known as Amendment 2— seemed very likely to pass as of July 2014, when 88 percent of prospective voters supported “allowing adults in Florida to legally use marijuana for medical purposes if their doctor prescribes it,” according to the respected Quinnipiac University poll.
Amendment 2 was intended to legalize marijuana use by patients coping with any “conditions for which a physician believes that the medical use of marijuana would likely outweigh the potential health risks.” Also, to legalize “medical marijuana treatment centers,” otherwise known as dispensaries.
How did it happen that a medical marijuana ballot initiative supported by almost 90% of Florida voters in the summer was defeated in the fall? Let us count the ways.
1. The “supermajority” requirement
Because the Florida legislature has voted down medical marijuana bills in recent years, reformers took their case directly to the voters in 2014 with a ballot initiative.
And because the Florida legislature can weaken or even throw out a law passed by the voters, the reformers framed their intiative as an Amendment to the state constitution (which legislators beholden to lobbyists wouldn’t be able to mess with).
However, an Amendment requires not a “simple” majority of voters (as in demoracy) but a 60% “super”majority (as in maintain the status quo).
Florida’s medical marijuana initiative garnered 58% of the vote on Election Day. Meaning it lost.
Until 2006 an Amendment to the Florida constitution required only a “simple” majority. Then, as explained by Alan Farago on Counterpunch.org, “the GOP legislature and its patrons, Big Sugar, the Florida Homebuilders, the Florida Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries of Florida, began demonizing a ballot initiative called ‘Hometown Democracy.’”
Hometown Democracy would have allowed citizens to vote on changes to community and municipal master development plans (which affect the environment and everybody’s quality of life). To defeat it (and an initiative raising the minimum wage), the Florida legislature placed on the ballot an initiative establishing the 60% requirement on constitutional amendments. The ballot initiative to require a supermajority required a simple majority.
The well-funded campaign against Hometown Democracy, writes Farago, “was managed by a Jeb Bush lieutenant, John Thrasher — a former speaker of the Florida House— who was recently appointed president of a major Florida university despite lacking any academic qualifications for the role.”
Supermajority = pseudodemocracy.
2. Charlie Crist, Democrat
Amendment 2 was promoted by a prominent Orlando personal-injury lawyer named John Morgan. He was the face of the campaign. In talks and TV ads Morgan said that his father’s final months had been made bearable by marijuana, and that his brother Tim, a quadriplegic, needs and uses marijuana and should be able to do so legally. John Morgan gave $4 million to a PAC called “United for Care” to push Amendment 2. Much of it went towards getting the measure on the ballot.
The Democrats’ candidate for governor, Charlie Crist, a lawyer employed by Morgan’s firm, emphasized his support for Amendment 2. Crist had been elected governor of Florida as a Republican in 2007. In 2010, aspiring to run for the Senate, he lost to Marco Rubio in the primary and lost again in the general election after filing to run as an Independent.
In 2012 Crist endorsed Barack Obama. When he ran for governor as a Democrat in 2014 Crist’s detractors called him “a chameleon.” His defenders said, “The Republicans have been taken over by the far right, one has to change with the times.”
The link between the Democratic candidate for governor and Amendment 2 undoubtedly alienated many Republicans who might otherwise have voted ‘yes.’
3. Square Strategists
Even last spring, when Amendment 2 looked like a sure winner, savvy Irvin Rosenfeld had misgivings. He had been involved in many medical marijuana campaigns and seen big early leads in the polls go way down when the attack ads commenced.
The Amendment 2 campaign wanted little to do with Rosenfeld’s friend Robert Platshorn, a 70-something pitchman whose “Silver Tour” had been carrying the pro-marijuana message to senior citizens across the state and beyond. Platshorn was unwelcome because he had done time in federal prison for smuggling marijuana into the U.S. in the 1970s. And though he had paid his debt to society (29 years!), and though most people hearing his story find him likable and admirable, the Amendment 2 strategists “did not want Bobby Platshorn associated with the campaign,” says Rosenfeld.
The Amendment 2 strategists “wouldn’t even use the image of a cannabis leaf in any of their materials.”
Nor did the campaign make full use of Rosenfeld himself. A stockbroker based in Fort Lauderdale, Rosenfeld, 61, is one of the best known and most persuasive proponents of medical cannabis. “I don’t care that the campaign didn’t use me that much,” he says. “I care that they didn’t use my story enough.”
In 1982, with guidance from Alice O’Leary and Robert Randall (the first “federal patient” to get cannabis from the government), Rosenfeld had convinced the Food and Drug Administration that only marijuana countered the tumorous growths on his bones and enabled him to lead a normal life. Rosenfeld in turn helped other Floridians —glaucoma patient Elvy Mussika, and AIDS patients Barbara and Kenny Jenks— to enter the FDA’s so-called “Compassionate Investigational New Drug” program.
Rosenfeld requested in vain that the campaign focus on the fact that he and other Floridians had been using marijuana provided by the federal government, safely and beneficially, for many years.
The campaign strategists, according to a reliable source, thought “it was too difficult to explain Irv’s story in a 30-second commercial. Also, the marijuana Irv gets is in the form of joints, and the campaign didn’t want to show anybody smoking. They wouldn’t even use the image of a cannabis leaf in any of their materials.”
Your correspondent is confident that Rosenfeld can tell his story and make the relevant points in 30 seconds.
4. The “medical necessity” alternative
Kenny Jenks was a hemophiliac who had contracted the HIV virus from a blood transfusion in the early 1980s. His wife Barbara became ill, too. It was before the advent of protease inhibitors, and the Jenkses were fading fast. When they learned that marijuana restored their appetites, Kenny began growing. He was arrested for cultivation in 1990 and his defense in court was “medical necessity.”
It was to stave off AIDS wasting syndrome and death, he claimed, that he committed the crimes of marijuana cultivation and possession. Jenks was acquitted and a Florida statute was enacted acknowledging a citizen’s right to a “medical necessity” defense.
(Barbara Jenks died in 1992 at age 25, Kenny the following year at age 31. He was the first AIDS patient to get cannabis from the government, and the last. With hundreds of AIDS patients applying to the FDA, the George H.W. Bush Administration closed the “Compassionate Use” program. Rosenfeld and 12 others were “grandfathered in” to avoid the public-relations disaster that would ensue if the government stopped providing the herb to patients likely to die without it.)
Florida’s statute recognizing “medical necessity” would have an impact on the 2014 election after it was rediscovered by attorney Ian Christiansen of Health Law Services, who made it the basis for a campaign to recruit clients. “Medical marijuana is already legal in Florida,” Christian proclaimed to the media and on the law firm’s website.
“A patient with a debilitating medical condition has a right to use cannabis just like any other prescription medication, as long as a physician deems cannabis ‘medically necessary’ and orders its use, pursuant to Fla. Stat. 381.026(d)(3), 456.41, 893.13 (6) (a)...
“Florida Courts have held patients may cultivate their own medicine… Our firm specializes in understanding the intricacies of the application and law of this medicine, and therefore we provide legal guidance to patients, physicians, hospitals, authorized agents, law enforcement, Department of Children and Families, the Florida Department of Health and more…
“Our firm assists patients in establishing this medical necessity, then work closely with law enforcement to ensure the patients rights and compliance with all applicable law.” Sic.
The prospect of immediate access to legal cannabis drew many desperate people to sign up with Health Law Services. Among them was Moriah Barnhart, 30, mother of a little girl named Dahlia who was afflicted with brain cancer. When John Morgan gave a talk in Jacksonville, Barnhart said she would vote ‘no’ because she intended to grow cannabis for her daughter based on “medical necessity.” Morgan, grandstanding, offered to pay for her daughter’s medicine for the rest of her life. Barnhart said thanks but no thanks —her goal was a political solution for all, not a private one for her kid.
In a debate with Morgan two weeks before the election, Florida Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Bell said that a doctor could “already prescribe marijuana, and since statute 893.13(6)(a) built on the medical necessity doctrine, a patient can grow it themselves, and under this amendment that will go away.”
The Health Law Services website gleefully posted video of Bell’s pronouncement with the comment, “No on 2 is Yes on Medical Marijuana!”
5. The “low-THC” bill
In February 2014 a bill was introduced in the Florida house of representatives to legalize “low-THC cannabis” —defined as plants whose flowers don’t contain more than 0.3 percent THC. It was dubbed “the Charlotte’s Web bill |
defensive halfback Jerrell Gavins for taking a swing at Carter.
Days later, the Canadian Football League announced one fine against Gavins, another against Jermaine Robinson for a hit to the head of Carter on the touchdown play, a third against Campbell for failure to avoid contact with Carter and a one-game suspension for Carter.
Related
He has exercised his right to appeal that punishment, and, conveniently, that appeal will be heard in Montreal on Wednesday, one day before the Alouettes travel to Ottawa and two days before the teams’ only regular-season at TD Place stadium.
The neutral arbitrator could rule quickly on whether the CFL appropriately followed its disciplinary procedures and the collective agreement with the CFL Players’ Association, or it could take a while, which presumably would allow Carter to continue playing while awaiting the decision.
What it means in football teams is that the Alouettes don’t know yet if Carter will be available for Friday’s contest, nor can Redblacks defenders prepare with absolute certainty.
“It’s simple. We go against one of the top receiving groups in the league every day in practice, so that prepares us already,” cornerback Nick Taylor said following Tuesday’s on-field session.
“And in this league, you respect everybody because they’re professionals. You respect them, but you don’t fear them. Come out and just play them tough like you would play everybody else.”
Officially, that’s true. However, while Nik Lewis remains an apparently ageless, hard-to-tackle tank in a CFL jersey, with 43 receptions for 417 yards, and B.J. Cunningham has provided a nice secondary threat with 23 receptions for 291 yards and two touchdowns, Carter is undoubtedly the Alouettes’ most powerful weapon.
He ranks sixth in the CFL with 564 yards on 38 receptions, he has three of the team’s seven touchdown catches and he’s tied with the Redblacks’ Chris Williams for the league lead in 30-yard-plus pass plays with seven.
“At the end of the day, you still have to guard them,” added Taylor, who made his Redblacks regular-season debut in the last game against the Edmonton Eskimos. “Everybody has their own unique talents, so you just have to adjust to it as quickly as possible. If you don’t know them from scouting them, you just adjust quickly during the game. You’ve got a couple of plays to see how they do it and then you just adjust from there.”
The Redblacks (4-2-1) rank sixth in the nine-team CFL in passing yards allowed with an average of 318, while Carter averages 80 for the Alouettes (2-5-0), who stand eighth at 282 per contest.
“We are getting ready to play Montreal,” Redblacks defensive co-ordinator Mark Nelson said, “and, if 89 (Carter) is playing, great. If he’s not playing, great. It really doesn’t matter to us. We are going to do what we do and, if he’s out there, he’s out there.”
Something the Redblacks have done too well, particularly on defence, is commit fouls.
Forty-three of their league-worst 89 accepted penalties for 903 yards have occurred when other teams are on offence. The Redblacks also top the charts in calls for defensive pass interference and roughing the passer, and they’re second behind the Alouettes for illegal contact on receivers.
The predictable byproduct of all those misdeeds is that Redblacks opponents top the list with 28 first downs gained by penalty, or four per game.
“We got some hits on the quarterback that (CFL officials) said were either a little high or a little late or whatever,” Nelson said. “All we’re going to do is we’re going to talk to the players, we’re going to work on it. We’re going to hit lower, we’re going to hit in the numbers and try that.
“But, you know what? Our kids are smart football players that play real fast. There’s a couple of those (penalties) that, you know what, we’ll take those. That’s playing hard … We’re going to play hard and fast and we’re going to try and knock the crap out of you legally.”
gholder@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/HolderGordDust off your lawn chairs. The most visually stunning meteor shower of the year is about to reach peak activity over the next 2 to 3 days. According to NASA, during peak hours that vary by region, viewers will be able to see up to 100 meteors an hour zooming overhead at 37 miles (about 60 km) per second. In April, NASA said on its Asteroid Watch page that “[i]f you see one meteor shower this year, make it August’s Perseids or December’s Geminids.”
The Perseids borrow their name from the Perseus constellation, first catalogued by Greek astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century. The annual meteor shower, which usually takes place during July and August, is the result of falling debris from large comet Swift-Tuttle, which si twice the size of the comet that is believed to have taken out the dinosaurs. The Earth crosses the orbital path of Swift-Tuttle about once a year during the summer, but the bulk of the comet’s debris typically rains down after the first week in August. The meteors will appear to originate from the direction of the constellation, which is meant to resemble the Greek hero Perseus, but in reality they share no connection to the Perseus constellation.
The Perseids boast fast and bright meteors that regularly leave trains, the white tails of light that lag behind meteors in the sky. During this year’s meteor shower there will be no moonlight to detract from their glow, because the shower is happening during a new moon. (During a new moon, the side of the moon that faces Earth is completely dark, causing less light pollution and making it easier to see other objects in the sky.)
The view from less light-intensive areas (as in, places unlike New York’s Times Square) won’t require any fancy tech to appreciate the shower; everything will be viewable with the naked eye. For those in the Northern Hemisphere, experts recommend watching the shower just after midnight on Aug. 12 and 13.I think it is impossible for me to be impolite directly to strangers who aren't being dickheads. I guess the lesson to take away from this is that, even if I don't express it, it doesn't mean that I don't hate you.This comic is taken directly from something that happened to me last week. And by "something" I mean "I overestimated my car's power and got stuck trying to go over a big pile of snow." Lots of people stopped and helped out for a bit before continuing on their way. Eventually someone drove up behind me and gently pushed my car out with their truck. Which was super good, because based on the area of snow that my car had been on, there was still a ton of digging that would've needed to be done to get my car out on its own.In other news, a local band composed of three of my roommates and a friend of mine asked me to come up with a t-shirt design for them. I think it turned out pretty nicely, and they all liked it, too:. The band is called The Wampires, and even though there isn't much there to look at right now, theirHolden says:
"The book's manuscript is being edited. Art is coming in and corrections are being sent out. Arms of the Chosen is in redlines."
So, to go a bit deeper, every bit of text is in editing except for one bit of fiction that we expect any day now. We don't yet know how long the entire text will take to edit and then combine into a whole manuscript, but like the writing, we want our trusty editor to take the time to do the tightest job possible before anything gets laid out. Far simpler to fix things before they are turned into pages.
Also, ARMS OF THE CHOSEN is in redlines! Redlines are the first developer pass over the first draft of the text, so called because editors and developers used to use red pens to write their notes.
Maria Cabardo is continuing to assign art from the first batch of 90+ art descriptions, and we are now seeing and approving sketches (see below).
Matt Forbeck's EX3 Novel is being written and the EX3 Anthology is in second drafts with the editor. Composer James Semple (he created the music we used in the KS video) and I talked and he is working on new material finally for the EX3 Music Suites. Writing is being done on the EX3 Quickstart (although it seems that has been slowed down by the EX3 editing).
And last regular news before the sketches is a reminder that we now have an Onyx Path Mailing List that you can sign up for on the Onyx Path website. http://theonyxpath.com/ A lot of backers have asked us for this so they can be alerted to our new Kickstarters. By signing up we will email you alerts for upcoming and running Kickstarters, PDF and PoD releases, and other news and announcements. Each week we'll email you the Monday Meeting Notes blog that contains our weekly project updates so you can see how your favorite games are progressing. Sign up and start getting those little email gifts of knowledge and love!
And now, Our first set of sketches:
As I've mentioned here and in our weekly updates on projects in the Monday Meeting Notes blog on the Onyx Path site, Maria Cabardo, world renowned and award winning art director, has been contacting illustrators around the globe in order to involve them in creating art for EX3. It is no simple task to arrange for over a hundred pieces of art for any single project. In addition, one of the reasons I asked Maria to art direct this is because she has contacts with a much wider range of artists than usually work in the tabletop RPG biz and getting them to work on our illustration project rather than more film or computer game concept art has been rough.
I know that sounds unbelievable to some of you as getting to work on Exalted art is a pretty cool gig, but when they are super busy, on million dollar projects that easily pay ten times what any paper RPG could afford, it takes an art director who knows artists to get them on board. Fortunately, Maria is one of the best ADs I've ever worked with, so things are proceeding apace.
So how does this whole art process work anyway, I hear someone out there ask? First, we get the raw art descriptions from the Developers based on the amount of art and parts of the text they'd like illustrations for. We have various formulas based on number of words for how many half-page pieces which the Devs followed, including bulking up the number of pieces as we said during the Kickstarter.
I read through those descriptions and take notes on questions of clarity and description and fire those questions back to the Devs. It helps to read them as a freelance illustrator like I've been for so many years, to see where the writer thought the description made sense but it didn't, and that sort of stuff. I also note where any reference might be found in the notes, and start assembling those images for Maria to send on to the artists.
Here are the four descriptions that we have the first sketches in for:
1- The Divine Revolution (Vertical half-page illustration, full color)
The wall of an ancient temple depicts the Exalted in combat against the ancient, cosmic god-monsters that created the world. The piece should be highly stylized, somewhere between hieroglyphics and Mesoamerican temple art—the temple wall is carved as well as painted. A Solar Exalted champion is foremost in the battle, glorious in golden armor and carrying a magical, golden blade, with lesser Chosen supporting him (a beast-like Lunar Exalt, a mystical Sidereal, and several Terrestrial soldiers in jade armor of various colors—red, white, blue, black, green). The enemy of the Exalted is a vast and terrible titan, one of those monsters that wrought the world and created the gods, and whose age the Exalted brought to an end by steel and spell. The depiction should be action-centric, rather than two forces posing before one another; the Solar hero should be striking a blow against his vastly greater foe, leading his fellows to victory.
4- Heaven (Horizontal half-page illustration, full color)
“Once the home of the world’s creators, the great celestial island of Yu-Shan floats beyond the world in an endless sea of quicksilver. Heaven is a city the size of a continent, teeming with ten million gods of all rank and title. At its center, in the Jade Pleasure Dome, the Incarnae wile away the centuries playing turns at the Games of Divinity, while the highest-ranking gods observe and wager from the stands.” I want an image of the Jade Pleasure Dome rising above the skyline of Yu-Shan. Give the spires and temples and pyramids rising up around the dome a mystical look, rather than a technological one. Draw futuristic chariots and airships in the skies around the dome. To show its enormity, show a sorcerer or two zooming around on flying clouds. Any aircraft in this picture should look ancient, and powered by magic. Nothing in this picture should have an overwhelming Sci-Fi logic to its design.
6- Eyre of the Sleepwalker (Horizontal half-page illustration, full color)
“In the Time Before, a young man lay on his sickbed, locked in the grip of the sleeping death. One cold night, as Saturn passed through the constellation of the Sorcerer, he awakened with starlight in his eyes, and was borne away on the wings of omen-birds. They say that this is how Rakan Thulio, the Sleepwalker, entered the service of Endings. What little they know for certain is this: Rakan Thulio Exalted in the first days, and was a hero amongst the Chosen. But when the love of his life chose another, he came to believe that Heaven had done him a great injustice. Believing his destiny had been written by another, his resentment for the cruel hands of fate became hatred for the entire Celestial Bureaucracy. Using forbidden martial techniques, he tapped into a power feared even by the Demon Princes, and marked himself as an enemy of Heaven. When Saturn made her Sign against him, he turned it aside with blasphemous power, and tore the thread of his destiny from the Loom of Fate. For this, Thulio was cast out of Heaven. Only then did Yu-Shan learn the scope of his ambitions. Thulio has not aged a day since then. Yu-Shan fears what he has in store for the world, even as information on his plans is frustratingly sparse. What is known for sure is that Thulio loathes Heaven, and has sent his agents to tear it apart, piece by piece.” This illustration depicts Rakan Thulio in the foreground, from the waist up. His head is slightly bowed, as he considers a supernaturally gleaming violet thread suspended between his hands—the stolen thread of his destiny. The backdrop is a moonless sky full of stars. Behind Thulio and to either side are a handful of dimly-seen figures in white, hooded robes, of varying heights and genders; their profile and the cut of their clothes should suggest martial artists, rather than mystics. Visual reference for Rakan Thulio can be found in the Exalted Third Edition comic, on pages 9 and 10, though draw him with his hood drawn back and his hair shorter and more controlled than the comic’s art (REFERENCE).
7- The Five Dragon Throne (half page horizontal illustration)
Do a cover of the picture on page 33 of the Exalted second edition corebook (REFERENCE), of the Empress sitting on the Five Dragon Throne. The austere old man immediately to the Empress’s right is Chejop Kejak, and the taller, more ornately clad character is one of his Sidereal aides. Instead of the Roseblack (kneeling) draw an original Exalted character kneeling there. Have the Empress holding and inspecting this character’s daiklave. This character may be male or female. Have them clad in a very anime-stylish combat ready outfit. Do not deck this character’s armor out in elemental designs as shown on that of the Roseblack and Cainan (standing, flame armor). This character should be an Exigent, strangely-armored, perhaps wearing a mask and with exotic weapons on his/her belt. Overall, vary the characters who are surrounding the Empress. You may enhance or modify the Empress’s attire, though her hair and headdress need to remain the same, and she should always be wearing a crimson jacket with gold flames over her robes. Her face is perfect; get as close to that look as possible.
These sketches below were deliberately sent to us from a studio of illustrators in Manilla in various stages - from very sketchy to very tight and colored - in order to show how they work in stages. This is important as we hope to use these talented guys in further pieces and both sides are getting used to each other.
The Divine Revolution Sketch
Heaven Sketch
Eyre of the Sleepwalker Sketch
5 Dragon Throne Sketch
You'll note that the art is protected by a watermark used by the studio to prevent their work being walked off with.
Our notes back were these, compiled with the Devs' and my thoughts on the sketches:
The Divine Revolution: Would like the hieroglyphics to 'pop' more at first glance -- as it stands I have to lean in and squint to tell what's being shown, they're sort of washed out by the (gorgeous) jungle lighting. Can the primordial world-forger to be more of a vast and monstrous presence in the piece, being thwarted by the Solar-- right now it seems a bit more like some random monster.
Heaven: The aesthetic of the city is spot-on. Let's limit the flying craft to only a single dirigible-style design. Can we add in a few more fantastical designs, such as decks rising from captured stormclouds, or barques being pulled by majestic birds wrought of flame and lightning-- that sort of thing.
Eyre of the Sleepwalker: Looking good so far, although Thulio's hair should be a less exaggerated version of what's depicted in the EX3 comic (Hanzo's very anime-esque style showed it as being a bit thicker and longer than we want to be the norm), not shorn off entirely. And let's get rid of the Caste Mark on Thulio's forehead.
The 5 Dragon Throne: Love it. Only issue: Kejak's hand looks weirdly chunky. Can we get a small fix on that?
You'll note that our notes back try not and use setting info that the artists probably are not keyed in on, but very direct instructions and concerns. Ambiguous or slang notes are the bane of artists everywhere.
So there you go, we'll see what the results are in a later post. Thanks!That's the case with pretty much all of the other drawings as well. There's Princess Marie Curie (the "Nobel Princess") with her test tube smoking heart shape clouds, and Princess Rosa Parks (the "Equality Princess") with her dorky glasses and severe spangled jacket over billowy skirt, both serious and vibrant. Hillary Clinton's billowy pants and insouciant pet dove seems less like a sneer at princesses than like an unusually charming campaign poster ("Princess 2016"), while Princess Susan B. Anthony ("Suffrage Princess") in a starry Victorian dress looks ready to go out and overthrow some patriarchy, stylishly. Even Harriet Tubman ("Abolition Princess"), holding a rose and dressed in red, white and blue, seems less like a trivialization than like a defiance. Why shouldn't freedom fighters be glamorous too? (Thus the success of Beverly Jenkins's Underground Railroad romance.)
As I've noted before, the discomfort with princesses often seems to be a discomfort with those things considered feminine—frilly clothes, romance, sparkles, kittens, and sunshine. Making Gloria Steinem a princess is supposed to be silly and artificial because traditional femininity is silly and artificial.
But, as it turns out, making Gloria Steinem a princess is not silly and artificial. Instead, it is awesome. Which suggests, first of all, that femininity is, or can be, awesome. It can be smart, or fierce, or courageous, just like masculinity can. In his caption for Princess Malala Yousafzai, Trumble writes, "She risked all for what she believed in, for education and equality for young girls everywhere! But never mind that … Look! Sparkles!" In the drawing itself, though, those feminine sparkles don't make Yousafzai less determined. On the contrary, they seem part of the determination and the commitment. Gloss them as cynically as you will, but if you put stars on Malala Yousafzai's dress, those stars mean hope.
Trumble, then, hasn't shown that princesses are superfluous; instead, he's inadvertently highlighted the potential of their appeal. Little boys (and little girls) like to imagine they can shoot force bolts like superheroes; little girls (and little boys, too) like to imagine they're glamorous like princesses. You can say little boys are too violent and little girls are too frivolous if you want, but the truth is that both force bolts and glamour are fun, and it's pretty natural to want both. Admittedly, too much of anything can be a problem; you don't want to solve all your problems with force bolts, and you don't want to end up paralyzed in the grip of a one-size-fits-all glamour. Which is why Trumble's drawings end up being, despite themselves, so inspiring. He doesn't demonstrate that princesses are stupid. Rather, he shows that princesses, like girls (and maybe the occasional boy, as well) can do anything—and sparkle while doing it.
* This post has been updated to reflect that Trumble later changed the name of his Anne Frank princess cartoon.NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - When family members were allowed to watch emergency personnel try but fail to resuscitate a loved one, the relatives were less likely to have post traumatic stress symptoms, anxiety or depression months later, in a new French study.
The researchers, who published their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine, also found that allowing the family to witness the rescue attempts did not increase stress on the health care workers, influence whether the victim survived or result in more lawsuits.
“Family presence during CPR was associated with positive results on psychological variables and did not interfere with medical efforts,” wrote the team, led by Dr. Patricia Jabre of Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny.
CPR is unsuccessful in the vast majority of cases.
Supporters of the idea of allowing family members to observe say it can help them understand that medical workers did everything they could, come to grips with the reality of death and give the family the chance to say goodbye.
Although the question of whether it’s a good idea has received little study, international guidelines encourage letting the family watch.
“Our results show that it is very important to systematically propose to the relative (it’s not mandatory) that the relative attend CPR and offer the choice to be present or not,” study author Dr. Frederic Adnet, also of Avicenne Hospital, told Reuters Health in an email.
“What this study says is, ‘It’s not a serious problem if a close relative wants to be around for the process,’” said Dr. Gordon Tomaselli, past president of the American Heart Association and a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
The French group’s conclusions were based on 570 cases treated by 15 emergency medical teams equipped with mobile intensive care units and staffed with at least one doctor and nurse. In each case when watching was permitted, family members were directly asked if they wanted to observe. If not, they were taken to another portion of the home.
When people chose to watch, a member of the team briefed the relatives throughout the process.
Ninety days later, relatives were interviewed using a 15-item questionnaire.
Among the 266 cases in which family were asked if they wanted to watch, someone did choose to do so 79 percent of the time. In the 304 cases where no special effort was made to ask and the usual practice was in place, 43 percent of the time someone chose to witness the resuscitation attempts.
Of the 570 people who underwent CPR, only 20 were still alive 28 days later, a survival rate of 4 percent. Whether family members were allowed to watch made no difference in that rate.
Among the participating families who did not witness the CPR, the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms was 60 percent higher than among the relatives who did watch the CPR.
And while 12 percent of the people who did not witness the CPR said they wished they had, only 3 percent of the relatives who were present for it said they wished they hadn’t been.
Less than 1 percent fought with the medical team, and team members reported comparable stress levels whether or not family members were present.
No lawsuit threats were received. The culture may be different in France, the researchers said, but “our findings should help allay physicians’ medicolegal concerns.”
“Although our study involved only out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, we think that it is applicable for in-hospital cardiac arrest in the U.S.,” said Adnet. “Two American studies involving pediatric patients... found results similar to ours.”
“It’s nice to finally see documentation for what many of us, as physicians, have known for a long time - that often family members will come to you afterwards and say ‘Thank you so much. You did as much as you could possibly do,’” after a revival attempt, said Comilla Sasson, a CPR researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who was not involved in the new research.
There can be a reluctance to let family watch because “we know most people will not survive, and as members of the medical community we don’t want them to think it was our fault,” Sasson said in a telephone interview. “So there’s a huge amount of fear associated with it.”
In a Journal editorial, Drs. Daniel Kramer and Susan Mitchell of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston noted that “the intervention involved well-trained medical teams that followed a scripted protocol, a designated support assistant charged with carefully explaining the resuscitative efforts, and a comprehensive postresuscitation debriefing from a qualified physician.
“Thus, it would be imprudent to adopt this strategy into clinical practice without a similar commitment to training and staffing emergency response teams and without an understanding of the cost-effectiveness of such an approach,” they wrote.
Tomaselli told Reuters Health that most U.S. rescue units don’t have someone designated to explain the CPR process to the family as it’s happening. “As care teams get smaller because of cost, fewer people are available to do this type of thing.”
In addition, the emphasis is often on quickly stabilizing the patient enough to get to the hospital, which may hamper the ability for the type of interaction with the family seen in the French study, Tomaselli said.
The French researchers said their test should be replicated in a hospital setting to see if the results are different.
Survival after CPR tends to be higher in France than in the U.S., and an unrelated study published in the same issue of the journal found that for U.S. patients over 65, the odds of surviving a cardiac arrest that takes place in the hospital to be discharged are just 22 percent.
Among those survivors, 28 percent ended up with some sort of neurologic disability and in 10 percent of those cases that disability was severe.
Yet when someone age 65 and older does survive, the long-term outlook is good.
Younger patients fared better than older patients, women did better than men and whites did better than blacks, said the team, led by Dr. Paul Chan of the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri.
But, overall, the one-year survival rate was 73 percent among the people who had survived their hospital stay with a mild neurologic disability or no disability at all, 61 percent for people with a moderate disability and 42 percent with a severe disability. Just 10 percent of those who left the hospital in a coma or were in a vegetative state survived for a year.
SOURCE: bit.ly/YrM4KW and bit.ly/YrMdxR New England Journal of Medicine, online March 13, 2013.For most of the history of television, the barrier to syndication—and to profitability—has been 100 episodes. The shows that have made it to that mark are an unusual group. Many were big hits. Some found small cult audiences. Still others just hung on as best they could and never posted numbers quite low enough to be canceled. In 100 Episodes, we examine the shows that made it to that number, considering both how they advanced and reflected the medium and what contributed to their popularity.
They aren’t clouds. Strange symbols dot the backgrounds of Bikini Bottom, home to SpongeBob SquarePants, Squidward Tentacles, Patrick Star, Eugene Krabs, and Sandy Cheeks—but they aren’t clouds. You could call them “sky flowers,” but that doesn’t really make sense either—after all, the faded blue behind each squiggle is water, not sky, and the squiggles themselves don’t represent solid objects in any tangible, meaningful way. But they look right. The reds and greens and yellows add life and color in a way that a flat blue might not. Those odd shapes, suspended motionless with no clear reason or value, establish a tone.
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There are a lot of things that don’t make sense on SpongeBob SquarePants. But there’s a clear and coherent vision that runs through the entire show, from the design of SpongeBob’s kitchen-sponge body down to the squeaky-balloon sound of his footsteps. It’s a perspective, and a warm, specific, crazy little world. Of course it has sky flowers in it. What else would be up there?
The brainchild of a marine biologist turned animator, SpongeBob SquarePants made its debut on Nickelodeon in May of 1999. The show arrived at the end of a decade of cartoon hits for the network, including The Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, and Rocko’s Modern Life. SpongeBob itself would go on to be one of Nickelodeon’s greatest success stories, running nine seasons (and counting), and managing one big-screen film, aptly titled The Spongebob SquarePants Movie. The show’s appeal stems from the fundamental simplicity of its attitude, a pervasive geniality that embraces the broad, the subtle, the absurd, and the surreal without ever seeming to strain. Its fantasy environment provides home for archetypes that have been a staple of comic storytelling for centuries, like the grouch, the miser, and the cowgirl squirrel.
When it came time to pitch the series, creator Steve Hillenburg had a vision. Coming fresh off a stint on Rocko’s Modern Life (a show that would eventually provide SpongeBob with a number of its key personnel, including Tom Kenny, the actor and voice artist who gives SpongeBob his distinctive nasal chirp), Hillenburg brought together ideas he’d been planning for years, a mixture of tiki culture (SpongeBob lives in a pineapple; ukulele music waves goodbye through the closing credits), his own passion for marine life, and a main character distinguished by his relentless optimism and fundamental sweetness. Hillenburg even wore a Hawaiian shirt to the pitch meeting. One of the elements that set the show apart from the very beginning was a consistent, confident commitment to these ideas, a kind of texture brought to life by the various, dedicated artists working behind the scenes.
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Take the first-season segment “Rock Bottom” for example. In it, SpongeBob and his best friend Patrick (a lovably dim-witted starfish voiced by Bill Fagerbakke) take the wrong bus after a trip to the amusement park, and find themselves stranded in an unfamiliar—and scary—part of town. Patrick manages to catch a ride home, but SpongeBob finds himself alone for the night, trying to catch a series of buses that seem sadistically intent on avoiding him. Eventually, a nice man helps him on his way, and SpongeBob arrives back in Bikini Bottom just in time to see Patrick riding yet another bus out to rescue him.
It’s simple stuff, and a lot of the best episodes of the show are simple—because the structure allows ample room for gags, as well as providing a strong emotional base for those gags to grow from. There are the usual, inspired silly touches, like SpongeBob and Patrick leaving not just any amusement park, but Glove World, and SpongeBob is appropriately decked out in a rubber glove hat, and carrying a rubber glove balloon. When SpongeBob tries to find money for his bus far, he inadvertently bludgeons the driver with his balloon, a slapstick set piece, which is a good example of the flexibility of the show’s protagonist. SpongeBob’s cheerful goodwill can be inspiring, or it can make him into an unintentional tormenter, depending on the needs of the story and the viewpoint of that story’s central figure. There are few villains on the show; even Squidward, SpongeBob’s perpetually grouchy neighbor, is allowed his fair share of pathos. The only legitimate bad guy in Bikini Bottom is Plankton, a minuscule tyrant obsessed with swiping a secret recipe from rival restaurateur Mr. Krabs. Even then, the humor of Plankton comes from how his operative ambitions are constantly thwarted by a naïve, trusting kid.
The real heart of “Rock Bottom” comes from SpongeBob’s increasingly desperate efforts to get home. While these efforts are filtered through the exaggerated lens of animated silliness (fickle buses, a shape-shifting protagonist, a ploy involving a SpongeBob decoy), they stem from the entirely understandable and relatable fears of being lost in a strange place, not having anyone to call, and just wanting to get back home. The episode doesn’t go out of its way to stress these feelings, but the inherent tension of the scenario is conveyed through shadows and mood and freakish design work. The shaggy, laid-back style of the series suddenly peels back to reveal a hint of danger. And SpongeBob’s reaction to what he sees demonstrates an effective complexity of character. He gets nervous, and then he gets angry, and even ungenerous; the humor comes from both the inevitable deflation of each fit of pouting, and from the recognition that that’s how the viewer would react in a similar situation. (Minus the cardboard stand-up, presumably.)
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While the rest of the cast sticks to a narrower range of emotional responses, there’s still an engaging depth for such a seemingly straightforward show. SpongeBob often hits the rhythms of a classic sitcom, taking scenarios that pair characters of disparate motivations—like, say, sending SpongeBob and Squidward off together to deliver a pizza in “Pizza Delivery”—and then turning the screws to see what happens. By combining clearly developed personalities with a well-established world in which almost anything can happen (but only certain kinds of things do happen) the storyboard artists have the freedom to explore a wide variety of humor. (SpongeBob episodes are storyboard-driven rather than scripted.) SpongeBob’s malleability provides tremendous opportunity for creative manipulation, and the show takes any chance it gets to drop puns, wit, and left-field pop culture absurdity. None of these elements would work without the clear sense of care and craft that underlines the show’s design. The best series, animated or otherwise, are built out of a clear vision of character and purpose, and SpongeBob has both in spades.
But “purpose” is a vague, pompous term; it doesn’t reconcile easily with the show’s stinging jellyfish, senile crime-fighters, and money-obsessed crustaceans. So why not double-down on the pomposity and call it more of an “ethos” instead, an ethos that helped transform a small, chipper cartoon into a merchandising-rich cultural juggernaut. (You could probably find someone who’s never seen an episode of SpongeBob, but it would be a trick to find someone who’s never heard of the character at all.) The run of the show leaves a warm, welcoming, and unexpectedly kind impression—a winning friendliness and good cheer that’s more than willing to laugh at its own excesses. SpongeBob can be a bit much, but his enthusiasm is balanced by a likeable vulnerability, and plenty of episodes find humor in the character’s inherent over-the-top intensity without undermining his fundamental decency. Whereas something like Ren & Stimpy found comedy in the alienating ugliness of extremes, SpongeBob allows us to like its characters even as we laugh at them, wearing its heart on its sleeve without ever sacrificing the slight edge required for broader appeal.
That philosophy reached its peak in the show’s jump to the big screen in 2004. Hillenburg put the show on hiatus in order to focus his attentions on the film. The result is over an hour of pure bliss, a riff on childhood insecurity, maniacal evil genius, heroism, and David Hasselhoff. It’s not perfect: Scarlett Johansson’s character—who could be nicknamed Girl Who Is Basically There To Give The Heroes Pep Talks—doesn’t work, and there’s evident strain in stretching what usually runs no longer than 11 minutes to almost seven times that length. But it’s still a very good, and often great, movie, building to a gleefully unabashed climax of pure rock triumph that captures much of what makes the show so great. There’s a thrill to watching something that embraces its potential corniness so utterly that it transcends irony and camp. Yes, it’s utterly cheesy to see SpongeBob dressed as a wizard performing the most righteous of guitar solos ever shredded; it is also awesome. That the talent involved clearly understands both sides of the equation is what makes it so exhilarating and fun.
Hillenburg left SpongeBob after the show’s third season, and the diminishing returns, especially in later seasons, are hard to ignore; characters settled into stock types, the pacing slowed, and shagginess gave way to a pristine airlessness. Plots became less personal, and more driven by standard cartoon cliché. But at his heart, SpongeBob remains SpongeBob: a dreamer who won’t let anything get him down for very long. It’s not hard to see why such a character would capture so many hearts and minds. In an episode from season two, Squidward finally gets his chance at the big time when he’s invited to form and conduct a band for a halftime show. At first, it looks like a disaster, which is typically the joke in Squidward stories—as a perpetual sourp |
Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The network’s leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is also one of two deputy emirs of the Afghan Taliban.
Haqqani Network leadership has been targeted numerous times during the US drone campaign in Pakistan, which began in 2004 but ramped up in 2008 under President George W. Bush. The US has killed 13 senior Haqqani Commanders, according to data compiled by FDD’s Long War Journal. Among those killed were Badruddin Haqqani, Sirajuddin’s brother and a top deputy; Jan Baz Zadran, the group’s third in command; Mullah Sangeen Zadran, a senior military commander who was the Taliban’s shadow governor of Paktika; and Abdullah Haqqani, who coordinated and trained the group’s suicide bombers.
Today’s strike is the second inside Pakistan this month, according to data compiled by FDD’s Long War Journal. On Dec. 18, US drones struck a compound, also in the Mata Sanghar area of Kurram. No casualties were reported, according to Dawn. That compound is reportedly owned by Bashrat Khan, a commander in the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan (TIP).
Eighth strike reported in Pakistan this year
Today’s strike in Kurram is the eighth of its kind reported in Pakistan this year. It is also eighth since the US killed Afghan Taliban emir Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour in an airstrike in Baluchistan province in May 2016.
The US has killed at least four senior jihadists in those attacks inside Pakistan this year. In a May 24 airstrike, the US killed “Abdullah,” who was identified by the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan as “a great master in electronics.” Abdullah was associated with Akhtar Muhammad Khalil, the Taliban’s emir for North Waziristan.
On April 29, US drones reportedly killed al Qaeda commander Abdul Raheem. And on March 2, US drones reportedly killed two jihadists as they rode on a motorcycle in the tribal agency of Kurram. An Afghan Taliban commander known as Qari Abdullah Subari is believed to have been killed in the strike, according to Reuters.
Drone strikes in Pakistan have tapered off significantly since the peak of operations against al Qaeda’s leadership and allied jihadist groups in 2010, when 117 strikes were recorded. In 2015, the US launched only 11 drone attacks. In 2016, there were only three more, including the one targeting Mansour in May 2016, which was the final one for the year and the last of President Obama’s second term.
President Donald Trump has vowed to take a tougher line on Pakistan, and in a speech in August, called out the country for providing safe haven and support for the Afghan Taliban and other terrorist groups in the region.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.Nine Inch Nails have announced a new EP, which will arrive this year “before the first shows” of their planned tour dates. The news was relayed to fans via an email from Trent Reznor, which Pitchfork can confirm; the full text of it can be found here. “DID YOU KNOW NOT THE ACTUAL EVENTS WAS THE FIRST PART OF A TRILOGY OF RELATED EPS THAT WILL BE RELEASED ABOUT 6-8 MONTHS APART? NOW YOU DO,” a part of the message reads, referring to the band’s 2016 release Not the Actual Events EP. If that schedule holds, we should see the second installment of the three-EP trilogy before July 23 (the first scheduled Nine Inch Nails tour date at FYF Fest in Los Angeles), and the final release near the end of the calendar year.
Elsewhere in the note, Reznor explains the reasons for delays on Nine Inch Nails vinyl releases, giving fans an updated timeline on when they’ll be receiving their orders. Not the Actual Events EP was released with a “physical component,” which ended up being a mysterious black powder.DISCLAIMER: This fan fiction story is based on elements from the X-Com computer games series, which is a trademark belonging to 2K Firaxis. Please do not change the text in any way without the author's permission or use any of the elements and characters contained in the text.
CONTACT: I can be reached through the following email: aadlg. Please feel free to contact me regarding any comments on the story. Either being positive or negative, they'll be much appreciated and they're the only reward I'm getting out of all this work.
THANKS: To all the people that have supported me while I was writing this book and to the readers that emailed me their comments. And also Julian and Nick Gollop and the rest of the team that designed games like Rebelstar, Laser Squad and X-Com, because of all the enjoyment I received over the years by playing them. And please keep up the good work. :)
André Galvão
X-Com: The Unknown Menace
Prologue
December 17th, 1946
USS Philippine Sea, South Atlantic
Although it was summer on the southern hemisphere, the United States Army Air Force officer that was near one of the elevators on the flight deck of the Essex class aircraft carrier had chosen to wear his flight jacket since the temperatures had been dropping as the fleet moved south towards its destination.
The man, who seemed to be in his early thirties, had a smooth face and light eyes, with his nose and ears starting to turn reddish from the cold air outside. The weather was a bit cloudy and it was the first sign to the fleet of gray ships that things were about to get rougher in their mission. The Philippine Sea was the largest ship of the sixteen vessels that made up the task force. Besides the combat escorts it included tenders for seaplanes and tankers, together with a Coast Guard icebreaker that had been rushed from California to be included in the force.
Looking at the deck of the carrier and seeing his own plane, he shook his head in frustration. He couldn't understand the reasoning behind the Navy's decision to send a dedicated task force of nearly five thousand men to such an extreme place. And it annoyed him even more that his superior officers hadn't deemed him to be important enough for him to know the reasons of the mission. He had fought a number of operations in the war as a part of the OSS, the more general name for the Office of Strategic Services that had been retired last year. But now that the war was over it seemed as if the politicians were bent on getting rid of all things military. The inter-military branch agency that had been responsible for espionage and secret military missions through the war had been dismantled last year and he had barely managed to stay attached to what remained of it. However nowadays the Army seemed to be in a hurry to get rid of every soldier and officer in its ranks.
He wore golden seven-sided leaves on the collars of his shirt that had almost disappeared completely into the inside of his thick flying jacket. Normally, he'd be considered a bit too young for the rank of major but the war had given him several chances for promotion. However he hadn't missed any of the action since the Battle of Britain in 1940 where he had volunteered to fight for the Royal Air Force. By the time of the United States' entry into the war at the end of 1941 he was one of the top US fighter pilots. And the Pentagon had been really quick about assigning him to the newly formed OSS, which badly needed veteran combat pilots. To his surprise he had found out that the other half of his work there, which was related to intelligence, started to be the one which attracted him the most. The information, that had been revealed to him, gave him a view of how military decisions where made based upon intelligence along with his realization of just how fallible the system could be also.
And in the case of operation High Jump, he was still wondering what the people at the Pentagon and the White House were thinking about when they called the mission. They were had been ordered to conduct a survey of Antarctica and perform military exercises to provide information about combat in those conditions. It simply didn't make any sense to him to be here.
His attention turned to one of the planes parked at one of the ends of the deck, which was completely clear of personnel and stood attached by cables to the floor. The converted DC-3 cargo planes hadn't been originally designed to be flown off carriers but from long runways on land. However since the Navy's seaplanes didn't have the necessary range to reach the inner areas of the pole safely, the DC-3s had been equipped with rocket pods strapped to their wings in addition to their engines, in order to allow taking-off from the short deck. And they were also equipped with large skis to land on the airstrip that would be built on the land by the Navy Seabee construction crews that had been brought for the mission. Underneath the flight deck there were six brand new 'helicopters' or whatever the new rotating flying machines were called, together with a small force of Navy fighters and dive-bombers.
The officer suspected that there were unofficial reasons for the inclusion of combat aircraft and vessels in the force. At the end of the war in Europe strange reports had started coming in from the South Atlantic concerning large movements of German submarines heading for an unknown destination. And after Germany's surrender further support for the sightings had been found in the Kriegsmarine's logs that failed to report a number of U-Boats. Also there were rumors in the OSS that a number of high-ranking Nazi officers had evaded capture by the Allies at the end of the war and were still at large. He tried enquiring the personnel of the Office of Naval Intelligence that was present at the task force, but to no avail. The officers had simply refused to answer any of his questions and had refused to further comment on the matter citing secrecy laws. But the worst part had been the arrogance and pettiness in their tone of voice. Although both the ONI and the OSS had worked together during the war it hadn't been without points of conflict between the two organizations, with much jealousy and egoism present on both sides. And now the Navy officers were simply ignoring him and the dead OSS, in no doubt getting revenge for old grudges.
As he started walking down the flight deck and heading towards the mess hall, the officer looked at the setting Sun that was giving mixed color tones to the white clouds overhead. The Moon was also starting to appear on the horizon, glowing white. A mix of excitement and fear passed through him. Well, soon we'll all discover what's the real reason behind all of this.
February 25th, 1947
Ross Sea, Antarctica
Leisurely cruising at 250 knots per hour the converted cargo plane was flying over the Antarctic coastline at a height of four thousand feet. The ski-equipped DC-3 had been painted in a new white and gray artic camouflage and was now standing over the packs of icebergs that littered the waters close to the massive white and blue glaciers. Its cargo section, forming the main body of the plane, had been adapted to carry photographic and other survey equipment, leaving just enough room left for a number of technicians to operate the machines.
The Major and the co-pilot completed the rest of the crew for this mission. They had taken off from the improvised landing strip at first light and now were following the coastline until the point at which they would turn inland into inner Antarctica. Both men were seated inside the cockpit of the craft, still dressed into winter parkas since the plane wasn't pressurized.
So far operation 'High Jump' had been a success. The naval task force was able to enter the Ross Sea and land a party at the continent that had later established a provisional base. Then the DC-3s had successfully taken off from the deck of the carrier and land there on the airstrip without incidents. Both them and the seaplanes had now been operating for more than three weeks conducting photographic and weather surveys. And while it was summer, the cold Antarctic weather still took its toil on men and equipment but that was what they had come here for. However there were still some questions that the major hadn't been able to find answers for.
A number of incidents had taken place since the task force had arrived: Strange lights in the skies that had at first been attributed to boreal auroras. But more unexplainable events had occurred in the past week as one of the destroyer escorts detected the sound of an unidentified submersible object in the proximity of one of the groups. No official explanation had been advanced to explain the contact, which had disappeared as the destroyer was moving to engage it. And whatever is happening no one at the top seems to have an idea about what it is or how to deal with it!
It was more than obvious to him that someone was keeping a keen eye on the task force's actions without revealing their identity. The obvious choice would be to give credit to the rumors that a number of Nazi officers had fled from the crumbling German empire at the last stages of the war and had taken refuge on the ice-covered continent. But another alternative was possible: the Soviets.
There were already a number of disturbing reports about Stalin's intentions about the countries that had been liberated from the Axis powers. Unlike the US Russia wasn't demobilizing its war machine and instead had left its armies in Eastern Europe. And there were reports that the Soviets had used the war to put a network of intelligence officers in the western countries and that Stalin was desperately seeking to develop atomic weapons by every means necessary, including spying on their allies during the war. The dropping of the bombs on the Japanese towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the previous year had destroyed the cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, but it had brought Japan to its knees and forced its unconditional surrender. Another effect of their use had been to reveal to the stunned world that it was possible to built atomic weapons and although the US now had the monopoly there was a high possibility that other nations would be able to replicate its effort. But why would Stalin also be interested in an operation to Antarctica? No, there's something missing here that all of us involved aren't able to discover. He wished that he could talk to some of the people that he knew at the former Research and Analysis branch of the OSS but most of them had either left the intelligence field or now worked in the State Department. However, he doubted that even they had an idea of what was going on.
As the Major shook his head to try to clear it, his co-pilot looked to him from his chair at the right of the cockpit. "Tired Major?"
He let go of a breath of frustration before replying. "Yeah. You got any smokes there?" As the co-pilot fished a pack out of his flying jacket the Major took the controls of the DC-3, keeping it on a straight course towards the south, which was hard since they had to use a sun compass to determine their bearing. Magnetic compasses were nearly useless this close to the south pole and the landscape didn't help much either, since most of it was composed out of endless plains of white that stretched into the horizon.
The co-pilot dug out two cigarettes along with a Zippo lighter and was about to light them up when his eyebrows fringed for a moment as he was looking at the Major's direction. "What's the problem?"
Taking out the cigarettes from his mouth with one of his hands, the co-pilot pointed across the Major's face in a puzzled voice. "Is that a reflection?"
When the Major looked through the plexiglass window on his left side in response to the co-pilot's query his own eyes grew wide as he picked it up.
A small green dot of light could be seen in the vivid blue sky. First the Major dismissed it as a light effect of the Sun's rays on the window, but as he rocked his head from one side to the other he discovered that it wouldn't go away. Moreover it seemed to have a solid appearance, as he noticed that he seemed could make out the contours on the green ball as it slowly started to change its form.
"It's keeping formation with us! What is that thing?!" The co-pilot was now nearly all over the Major as he was bending his body to have a better look at it. Shoving him back to his seat the officer barked an order: "Get back there and have someone take a shot at it with a camera!" Whatever that is we'll need some sort of proof that it wasn't just the Antarctic sky playing light tricks with two pilots.
As the co-pilot unhooked himself from his chair, the Major checked the plane's altitude and speed to make sure that they were still on a steady course. He thought of radioing the carrier to report the contact, but as his fingers moved to the transmit button they stopped their motion and instead he gripped the control wheel tighter.
The ball had resolved itself into what seemed to be an inverted cup. He still couldn't tell how far away or how big it was but those aspects ceased to matter as it suddenly crossed the entire sky in front of him and placed itself on the other side of the plane. A foo fighter?
During the war there had been numerous reports of strange flying machines made by the crews of the Allied bombers and fighters on missions over Nazi occupied Europe that could perform impossible maneuvers and fly at unheard of speeds. It had been initially thought that they were advanced German planes, such as the jet fighters that they had deployed at the last stages of the war. However the "lights" had never taken any aggressive actions towards the Allied planes and the OSS and the other intelligence agencies didn't have time to spare in order to investigate what seemed to be weird natural effects.
"It was gone before we could take a picture!" The disappointment in the co-pilot's voice was obvious as he came back from the cargo section.
"You idiot! It's on the other side of the plane!" The major barked in reply, still keeping his eyes on the green form. He was now sure that it had to be an artificial object as he had watched it transverse the sky from one side of the cockpit to the other. It kept changing its flight path and performing impossible maneuvers. It must be watching us also. It was time that he reported the contact to the Philippine Sea. The carrier had a pair of Wildcat fighters on alert status and they could be launched in five minutes after the order was issued. However he doubted that the Navy fighters would be able to do much against the craft that he was seeing.
A sense of dread came to him as he pressed the transmit button. "Home, this is Seagull Four. I have an unidentified contact…" A loud cracking sound made him stop in the middle of the sentence and his eyes widened in horror as something suddenly flashed and bathed the inside of the plane in a burning light. As the DC-3 suddenly jerked to one side the co-pilot crashed against the hull of the plane, violently banging with his head on a container built into the wall. The Major's restrains kept him in his seat though and he tried to regain control of the plane but the stiffness of the controls told him that they had lost all hydraulic power and couldn't move any of the plane's control surfaces built into its wings and tail.
"Get the emergency hydraulics going!" The plane was falling in an uncontrolled spiral towards the surface and he watched as the altitude gauge kept dropping from eighteen thousand feet at which they had been flying, to sixteen thousand in a matter of seconds. When no response came from the other man he looked and saw that the co-pilot was lying on the floor, probably unconscious from hitting the wall of the plane. Another glance at the outside told him what had happened to the DC-3. One of its wings had been completely ripped off from whatever had hit them. The Major realized that there was no way they could make an emergency landing, the Major realized and they would hit the ground in less than a minute.
Unhooking himself from his seat he tried to stabilize himself as he raced to the co-pilot's and checked his condition. Crouched against the wall that separated the cockpit from the cargo area he saw that the man was dead. "What is happening? What hit us?" A voice asked in panic as one of the three technicians managed to reach the door.
"Get out of here fast!" He hoped that his parachute was still functional as he raced down the length of the cargo section towards the door at the end. As he entered the area holding the photographic equipment the stench of burned flesh briefly caught his attention but he ignored the badly burned cadaver that was against a mass of destroyed equipment near a large hole on where the now lost wing had been attached to the main body. Going over the gap he saw to his surprise that the metal edge of the hole wasn't carved like he had expected but instead it seemed melted instead. The metal was still incredibly hot as he grabbed the sides with both hands and it started burning through his thick gloves though he ignored it.
Lunging his body forward across the opening he hoped that he still had time to safely deploy his parachute.
The mangled inside of the plane was quickly replaced by the openness of free falling as he quickly got away from the falling craft. The white ground quickly approached as his hands tried to find the cord to deploy the chute and his mind raced in confusion. What was that thing?• Two-thirds of fresh retail chicken in UK contaminated with campylobacter • Guardian findings prompt investigations at three major supermarkets • Government shelves plans to name and shame suppliers Food poisoning scandal: how chicken spreads campylobacter
Three of the UK’s leading supermarkets have launched emergency investigations into their chicken supplies after a Guardian investigation uncovered a catalogue of alleged hygiene failings in the poultry industry.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sick chicken: what you need to know and what the government won’t tell you – video
Undercover footage, photographic evidence and information from whistleblowers has revealed how strict industry hygiene standards to prevent the contamination of chicken with the potentially deadly campylobacter bug can be flouted on the factory floor and on farms.
Specific incidents identified in the last month include a factory floor flooded with chickens guts in which the bacteria can flourish, carcasses coming into contact with workers’ boots then returned to the production line and other poor practices involving points in the production chain that increase the risk of its spread.
The evidence prompted Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer to launch emergency investigations into their chicken sources over the last week.
The concern centres on the bacteria campylobacter, which at the last count was present in two-thirds of British fresh chicken sold in the UK. Although the bug is killed by thorough cooking, around 280,000 people in the UK are currently made ill each year by it and 100 people are thought to die. Contamination rates are known to have increased in the past decade.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA), however, decided on Wednesday to shelve a promise to name and shame supermarkets and processors for their campylobacter rates. The climbdown comes after “push-back” from industry and interventions from government departments.
One source said they had been told Number 10 had raised concerns about the communication of the results, fearing that they could provoke a food scare similar to that triggered when the former Conservative minister Edwina Currie warned that most of British eggs were contaminated with salmonella in 1988.
The Guardian’s five-month investigation uncovered a series of alleged hygiene failings in the chicken industry.
The allegations have been made against two of the largest UK poultry processors, 2 Sisters Food Group and Faccenda. They relate to two factories owned by 2 Sisters that supply fresh chicken and chicken for ready meals to Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Aldi, M&S, KFC and to farms and an abattoir owned by Faccenda, which supplies Asda and Nando’s.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Poultry offal piles up during a pump system failure at the 2 Sisters factory in Anglesey. Guardian
The allegations are that:
• Chickens which fall on to the floor have repeatedly been put back on to the production line at two 2 Sisters sites. They company denies this ever happens and says all chicken from the floor is correctly disposed of as waste.
• Breakdowns led to high-risk material – feathers, guts and offal – piling up for hours on separate occasions while production continued at a 2 Sisters factory in Wales. The company says they did not stop the line because they had to consider the welfare of chickens waiting in crates to be killed.
• Another breakdown led to the water in scald tanks at the same site not being cleaned for three days, so that around 250,000 birds passed through dirty water after slaughter. The company says this was an isolated incident that lasted only one day, bacteria counts were checked and were acceptable.
• According to a whistleblower chicken catcher, biosecurity rules to stop the spread of campylobacter in chicken sheds at Faccenda were regularly ignored by workers when he was employed there. Faccenda says this is not true and it has invested heavily in a highly trained and motivated workforce.
Campylobacter contamination has plagued the poultry industry for more than a decade and has got worse in that time.
The FSA ordered new tests for campylobacter amid worries that there had been no improvements in rates. Results were due in June, and as recently as March the FSA’s chief executive, Catherine Brown, publicly vowed to press ahead with “steely determination” despite push-back from industry.
On Wednesday, however, Brown asked the FSA board to reverse the previous decision to publish campylobacter results for named supermarkets and processors every quarter. The board heard that there were now concerns, not raised previously, that the sample size for one quarter’s data was insufficiently large to be statistically robust.
Brown insisted that the threat of exposing campylobacter results had made supermarkets and chicken processors take notice of the FSA’s concerns about contamination for the first time, but said the industry had not so far made the changes in production needed to reduce campylobacter on any scale.
“Time is upon us for everyone to work out how they are going to stump up money to make the interventions on [the production] line,” she told the meeting.
The eight members of the board were divided on the proposals, leaving the chairman and former president of the National Farmers’ Union, Tim Bennett, to use his casting vote to quash the plans to name companies for the moment. They are looking at separate proposals to urgently increase the testing of retail chicken.
Steve Wearne, director of policy at the FSA, said ahead of the board meeting: “Other government departments have reflected to us concerns which are the same as those we’ve heard directly from retailers and producers. We’re not letting the industry off the hook. We’ll publish all the names when we’ve completed [the survey] next summer.
“If we publish the results piecemeal, other people might draw unwarranted conclusions from partial data and we don’t want consumers being misled or confused.”
Erik Millstone, a food safety professor at Sussex University, condemned the board’s decision. “In the last few years the Food Standards Agency has been under a great deal of pressure from the government and the food industry to ensure that it only provides reassuring messages, and especially that it should say nothing that could provoke any ‘food scares’,” he said. “But the FSA was created to protect consumers, not to protect the food industry, or to give ministers a quiet time. This decision shows that its independence is entirely illusory.”
The executive director of Which?, Richard Lloyd, said: “The Guardian’s investigation raises serious concerns. Tackling campylobacter has to become a much bigger priority for supermarkets and their suppliers as it is responsible for thousands of cases of food poisoning and the deaths of 100 people every year. It’s therefore disappointing that the FSA has gone back on its commitment to publish in full the quarterly data on the levels of campylobacter in supermarket chickens, when it is clearly in the public interest to do so. The FSA must put consumers first and operate more transparently than this.”
The campylobacter story
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Campylobacter is the most common form of food poisoning in the UK. Photograph: Alamy
Although the public are mostly unaware of it, the scale of campylobacter contamination and the number of people it makes ill each year have been well-known among industry bosses, retail directors and government officials for more than a decade. The annual cost to the economy is a staggering £900m, making a significant dent in the £3.3bn the poultry industry claims to contribute to Britain’s GDP. Up to 80% of campylobacter infections are attributable to contaminated poultry.
The points in the chicken production chain at which contamination occurs are clearly understood, but during the past decade the picture has got worse. In 2003 the FSA reported that 56% of chicken on sale was infected. By 2008 that had increased to 65%.
The decision over whether to name and shame the industry is a vexed one. The stakes are high – consumers are likely to shun poultry in supermarkets with the worst scores. Cleaning up would require money, experts say, and poultry firms and retailers are locked in to an economic structure of their own making in their race to produce the cheapest possible chicken.
In the factory
The Guardian has investigated the weak links in the chicken chain, gathering material from undercover film, photographic evidence and whistleblowers.
Just last month – on a not untypical day, according to sources – at a vast chicken abattoir in Anglesey owned by the UK’s largest poultry company, 2 Sisters Food Group, something of the nature of the problem is revealed. Tesco, M&S and Asda are among the customers for chicken for ready meals supplied from this site.
The pump system has broken down again, and the channel that is supposed to drain away the innards from the tens of thousands of chickens killed and processed each day for supermarket orders has been blocked for a prolonged period. Guts and offal extracted during a process called evisceration are piling up to form a gory heap of high-risk material. The floor around is wet with blood. Campylobacter is carried in the guts and faeces of chickens and evisceration is one of the key points in the processing chain at which contamination occurs.
“That’s unbelievable, it just shouldn’t be allowed to happen,” said Ron Spellman, the director general of EWFC, which represents meat inspectors across the EU, when we showed him pictures the Guardian had obtained of the incident that had been described to us. Spellman was a poultry inspector for 12 years.
“They should stop the line and clean up. But that costs money, and the process is generally run so hard and fast, if a line is down too long they don’t have enough hours in the day to fulfil their supermarket orders. And if they don’t meet orders, they lose the contract.”
In Spellman’s view, the driving down of prices is a key part of the problem. “The supermarkets have got to have some responsibility because they push harder and harder on price. There is this perception that supermarkets somehow keep the industry honest and hygienic, but what we’ve seen is that it doesn’t work,” he said.
Modern poultry processing is a production line business. Birds are hung upside down on a moving conveyor belt of shackles at the beginning of the abattoir, and in a sort of food Fordism, carried seamlessly through every stage from slaughter to washing, chilling, cutting and packing at high speeds. Large abattoirs typically run lines at a rate of 185 to 195 birds a minute, or nearly 12,000 an hour.
On the evisceration line, guts are scooped out by automated metal fists. Today’s chickens are bred to fatten fast to a standard 4lb (1.8kg) size in six weeks, but as units of production they are not as obligingly uniform as car parts. If the machine is not adjusted to different crops of birds as they come through, the metal fist can burst the guts, and then any campylobacter is automatically spread to bird after bird. Adjusting machinery or stopping the line to clean up takes time and costs money.
On a separate occasion last month in the same factory, workers witnessed another breakdown. Workers say these are repeated events. This time it was the pump feeding the flume of water that is supposed to carry feathers away from the plucking machines.
The defeathering machines are another high-risk point for campylobacter infection. Slaughtered birds pass first through a scald tank of warm water to loosen the feathers and then through a series of whirring rubber fingers which pull the feathers out. The feathers themselves can be contaminated with faeces, the fingers put pressure on the birds and can squeeze out more faecal matter, and the fingers can become impregnated with bacteria.
In the steamy atmosphere, campylobacter from the feathers can also become airborne. Removing the feathers promptly through the drains is a vital part of food safety, but the evidence provided to us suggests they had piled up for hours as production was allowed to continue at the Anglesey site.
Across the industry, the water in the scald tank is generally only changed once a day, so that by the end of a shift it can become a soup of chicken faeces and dirt. This used to be a high-risk point, but the water is now kept hot enough to kill bacteria. The foam that forms on the top, however, is cooler and bacteria can survive here, according to Spellman, with each bird passing through it as it goes on its way.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scald tanks on the left with chicken debris on the floor. Photograph: Guardian
At the Anglesey plant, sources told us of an occasion last month when there was another breakdown. They said the scald tank was left uncleaned for two nights, so that three days of fresh birds – more than 250,000 chickens – were processed through the same dirty water.
Our sources told us that managers were made aware of these different breakdowns, but said the lines must be kept running because they had to meet targets.
We asked 2 Sisters why the lines had not been stopped for cleaning when these incidents occurred. The company told us that it and the vets had to make difficult decisions when there were breakdowns in the evisceration, defeathering and scald tank parts of the line. These required weighing up contamination risk with the welfare of chickens waiting in crates to be slaughtered.
The company denied that the scald tank had gone uncleaned over three days of production, saying it was an isolated incident which lasted only a day, and that it had tested for bacteria counts at the time and found they were acceptable.
2 Sisters bought the Anglesey factory last year when it acquired the UK operations of the Dutch poultry group Vion. Despite being one of the largest meat processors in Europe, Vion had decided to leave the UK market altogether after years of extremely tough trading conditions.
The industry runs on slim margins from the retailers and main fast food companies. Making a profit depends on being able to process very large volumes. That has driven not just the speed of production but also the concentration of ownership. Just four companies account for most of the UK market.
The alleged repeated breakdown of good hygiene at Anglesey appears dramatic, but our investigation has found problems elsewhere that help account for the rate of campylobacter on our chicken.
We had been told by insider sources in several different factories that one reason campylobacter rates remain stubbornly high was that across the industry there was a gap between companies’ policies on good hygiene and auditing systems to check for it, and the reality on the factory floor during long shifts and intense production.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A chicken is thrown from the floor into a crate with other food chickens by a staff member
Our reporter went undercover to look for a job in a chicken factory to find out what it was really like. He found one at another 2 Sisters poultry factory in Scunthorpe. This site supplies Tesco, Sainsbury’s, KFC and Aldi among others.
He witnessed carcasses with traces of faecal contamination that had made it through to packing for sale. Insider sources with expertise in food safety have told us this is common across the industry and is even unavoidable given the way chicken is processed. 2 Sisters said this allegation did not “reflect reality” and that the company had strict controls on carcass contamination which would remove them from the food chain.
Workers are trained to bin any meat that falls on the floor, where it could be contaminated, but our reporter saw staff pick it up and recycle it in to the production line on repeated occasions when preparing orders.
In one episode of almost grotesque comedy, a carcass that had fallen on the floor was run over by a worker pushing a trolley of crates, before our reporter saw it eventually being scooped up and lobbed back into production by a supervisor who then wipes their hands on their coat rather than washing them. We do not know where the chicken ended up. He was told it was going to Birmingham, where the company has another plant that debones chickens and processes them.
Jamie Pritchard worked as a meat cutter at 2 Sisters’s Anglesey site last year before leaving to join another meat company. He says during his time there he too saw workers picking chickens off the floor and putting them back in to production instead of throwing them into the waste bins. When auditors were present, he said, this never happened and line speeds were slowed down.
“If there’d be a site audit everything would be absolutely perfect, the line would be running at the correct speed. The carcasses would be clean, there’d be no faeces inside, but on the days when there wasn’t an audit, things would pile up and drop on the floor. If there was a visitor, you’d be told to put them in the bin ‘for not fit for human consumption’. But on days when there wasn’t an audit, basically, just wipe it down and put it back on the line.”
Reviewing footage of the incidents at Scunthorpe for us, Spellman said they were unacceptable. Those incidents, he said, suggests a culture in the factory that does not care that it is producing human food.
2 Sisters denied this could have happened. The company said it had stringent procedures for handling meat that falls on the floor, and only a team of trained waste operatives is authorised to handle it so that it never goes for human consumption. In a statement, the company said: “The allegations about our processing sites at Scunthorpe and Llangefni [Anglesey] are untrue, misleading and inaccurate. Both sites have British Retail Consortium ‘A’ grade Food Standards certifications, based on a number of announced and unannounced visits. In addition, we and our customers carry out a number of audits of our operations. None of these audits have uncovered any concerns about our hygiene standards or food safety.
“Our Scunthor |
’s not protectionism. The data comes and goes freely, but the atoms stay.”
Barcelona has pledged that over a 40-year period, it will move toward a goal of no longer needing to import and export, because it will have a cradle-to-cradle urban ecosystem that repurposes physical material, much like taking apart Lego blocks and putting them back together. There are now at least 16 Fab Cities and regions that have pledged their own version of moving toward this ‘atoms to bits, bits to atoms’ ethos. Kerala, in southwestern India, was the first state, as opposed to city, to take the pledge, in 2015.
Kerala has started by spreading the word about Fab Labs and the coming revolution in digital fabrication, and by putting Raspberry Pis in the hands of 10,000 schoolkids, with more to come. A Raspberry Pi is not a dessert, but a credit card-sized $35 computer, handy when making Internet of Things gadgets and for many other projects. One Kerala student programmed a Raspberry Pi to keep track of which government officials were showing up for work.
Higher on the skills hierarchy, two Fab Labs are now open in Kerala. Gershenfeld came to Kerala in the summer of 2015 to inaugurate them. Twenty more mini-Fab Labs are set to open in engineering schools around the state. Students in each can take Gershenfeld’s MIT class “How to Make Almost Anything,” connected live via internet to him and to other Fab Labs around the world as he teaches — a more interactive approach than traditional distance learning.
Startup Kerala technical officer Varun Geethamony (left) and Kochi Fab Lab head Daniel Jeevan (right). Credit: Mary Kay Magistad
All these efforts by the Kerala government are meant to increase skill and spur innovation, something that Kerala Startup Mission technical officer Varun Geethamony says – as a former engineering student – is in short supply among Kerala’s engineering students.
“Most of them don’t actually innovate anything,” he says. “So once we are out of engineering, we know only about the theories, nothing in practical. And the problem is, even if they’re having an innovative idea, there is no support mechanism for it.” He complains that the textbooks are old, that some teachers resist learning about and teaching new technologies, and that many engineering schools have little cutting edge equipment on which students can get practical experience. “So they graduate knowing only theory, without practice.”
In signing on to the Fab Cities movement, Kerala has pledged to try to move toward what’s called Fab 2.0 — having a Fab Lab whose machines can create machines for yet another Fab Lab. Another project is creating a Community Owned Wifi Mesh, or, as they put it here, Cow-Mesh, so even people who don’t have internet access can get information about their community, and share ideas, and post complaints, in wifi chatrooms.
Street scene in Fort Kochi. Credit: Mary Kay Magistad
The ideas shared by the Fab City and Fab Lab network have also been invaluable, Geethamony says, connecting Kerala to a global network of people thinking about how to mesh digital fabrication, urban design and development, citizen participation, ecological awareness, conservation and recycling. Kerala’s aim is to emerge as a Maker and fabrication center in the era of the "Internet of Things," to draw back gifted Indians now working in Silicon Valley, to update Kerala’s education system and to give a boost to the local economy by nurturing startups, from the "pre-incubation stage" on up.
“Pre-incubation means, if a person or a group of guys comes up with an idea and the idea is found to be viable, then we give them, we’ll start giving them, incubation support,” he says. “If they come up with a viable idea within six months, they’ll be moved into incubation. If not, we’ll ask them to come up with a better idea.”
Students can do this while still in school — an effort by the local government to stem a trend of would-be entrepreneurs, looking to the examples of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
“They seem to think being a drop-out is an added value or something,” Geethamony says. “We don’t encourage that.”
Another goal for Kerala, which is proud of its literacy and e-literacy, is to move to having wide-spread ‘f-literacy,’ fabrication literacy, throughout the general population — for more people to become comfortable making what they use. Geethamony likes the idea of everyone being involved in making as much as possible, but he recognizes that not everyone may be interested, at least not at first.
“It’s a very ambitious dream,” he says with a smile.
But Gershenfeld says it’s just a matter of time before personal fabrication starts to change lives around the world, whether people are initially interested or not.
“If computers were the first digital revolution, and the internet was the second, personal fabrication is the third,” he says. And from where he sits, there is no question; the revolution has already begun.In what might be one of the world’s strangest Independence Day fireworks displays, Indonesia sank 38 boats seized for illegal fishing this week. Four were local, but 34 of them came from neighboring countries like Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia.
As part of Indonesia’s 70th Independence Day festivities, five of the boats were laden with small explosives and sent to the bottom of the ocean Tuesday. Indonesia’s Minister of Maritime and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti said the mass sinking was a show of strength to make clear that the country is serious about its territorial integrity and maritime sovereignty.
"mashable.com/2015/05/15/migrants-harrowing-journey-at-sea/" is not a valid see-also reference
While the scuttled boats will make cozy new homes for aquatic life on the sea floor, not everyone is pleased. A spokesman for Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told a local newspaper on Friday that he is “deeply concerned” about the sinking of boats belonging to Vietnamese fishermen.
A history of boat-sinking
This isn’t the first time Indonesia has orchestrated a high-profile mass sinking. The spectacle has become a staple of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s administration. On May 20, he ordered 41 boats sunk to commemorate National Awakening Day, including a boat from China. Several more were sunk without a special occasion.
China said it was “gravely concerned" with Indonesia's actions. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson was quoted by AFP: "We hope that the Indonesian side can press ahead with fishery cooperation in a constructive manner and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies."
Taiwan also has many fishing vessels in the area and has been warned against illegal fishing by Jakarta in the past. A Taiwanese diplomat criticized Jokowi‘s methods, saying: “We don’t burn or sink the fishing boats. We just fine and punish and detain, we don’t burn down the fishing boats aggressively like Indonesia.”
Jokowi says his country loses over $20 billion per year as a result of illegal fishing. An estimated 5,000 boats illegally operate in Indonesia’s waters every day.
The festivities
The ships, which have no one aboard and are emptied of oil, are stationed around different parts of the archipelago. When the festivities begin, the event is televised live nationwide.
An official at the maritime affairs ministry says only a few boats are actually blown up with explosives for environmental reasons, while the rest are scuttled in a less flamboyant manner. To avoid harming coral, they are all sunk at a depth of 40 meters or more. Indonesian authorities state that all of the sunken boats underwent due judicial process.
Vietnam has vowed to better educate its fishermen on the appropriate laws and regulations, but it hopes that Jakarta will treat Vietnamese fishing boats with “with a spirit of traditional friendship and strategic partnership.”The nation's two largest movie theater chains are about to encroach on Hollywood studios' turf.
Regal Entertainment Group and AMC Entertainment Inc. are close to launching a joint venture to acquire and release independent movies, according to people familiar with the situation, a part of the business historically dominated by the Hollywood studios.
The move potentially disrupts the longtime and delicate business relationship between theater operators and studios, in which they have acted as partners and divided a movie's box office ticket sales. Instead, the venture would essentially thrust theaters into the studio's role of distributor, turning a partner into a rival as the theaters' own movies compete for screens against those from the studios.
It also is occurring against a backdrop of increasingly strained relations between theaters and studios as the latter are looking to release movies directly into the home through video-on-demand shortly after they have appeared in theaters. Theater operators fear that will dissuade people from going to the movies.
The still unnamed company has yet to acquire any movies. However, the partners have hired a chief executive: Tom Ortenberg, a former senior executive for the Weinstein Co. and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., who has been working as an independent consultant since 2009.
AMC and Regal hope in part that by acquiring their own movies for distribution they will fill the supply-and-demand gap created by Hollywood's downshift in movie making. From 2007 to 2010, the number of movie releases in the U.S. dropped 16%, according to Box Office Mojo. At the same time, the theater industry's trade group estimates that the number of screens in the country has risen 3%, making fewer pictures available for a larger number of screens.
And with attendance flat over the last five years and down 5% in 2010, theater owners have been experimenting with ways to draw more people into their venues, such as showing live sports events and concerts.
Some chains have already taken steps to promote independent movies. AMC currently runs a program called AMC Independent that helps market independent films that play in its theaters. However, the company does not buy distribution rights to the pictures as its joint venture with Regal would.
People familiar with the plan said the joint venture will not compete with the studios by acquiring big-budget event films. Instead, the new company will seek out independently financed movies that may not otherwise make it into theaters, such as low-budget dramas, comedies and horror pictures.
Independent or specialty films have been largely eschewed by the studios in recent years but are experiencing a resurgence thanks to such broad-appeal movies as Oscar contenders "Black Swan" and "The King's Speech."
The venture's movies will have automatic access to theaters owned by AMC and Regal, which together control 31% of the nation's nearly 40,000 screens, but will also be offered to other cinemas. AMC and Regal also will aim to release movies on DVD, television and the Internet, which would also provide new sources of revenue that theater companies sorely need.
While a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court consent decree barred the major studios from owning movie theaters, the federal government has relaxed the rules over the last two decades. In 1996, MCA Inc., the former owner of Universal Pictures, bought a large stake in theater company Cineplex Odeon. Also, the parent company of Sony Pictures Entertainment previously owned Loews Theaters.
Currently, the Massachusetts theater chain National Amusements Inc., is privately held by Sumner Redstone, the controlling shareholder in Paramount Pictures parent Viacom Inc. And, the largest shareholder of Regal, Philip Anschutz, also owns the movie production company Walden Media.
In addition, independent film financiers such as Mark Cuban own small movie companies and theater chains.
Ortenberg did not respond to a request for comment, nor did a representative for Regal. An AMC spokeswoman declined to comment.
-- Ben Fritz and Richard Verrieramazingxkcd Profile Blog Joined September 2010 GRAND OLD AMERICA 15736 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-04 16:13:56 #2
Poll: Who will win?
Mind (16)
52%
Effort (15)
48%
31 total votes (16)52%(15)48%31 total votes Your vote: Who will win? (Vote): Mind
(Vote): Effort
Poll: Who will win?
Last (18)
67%
Olympus (9)
33%
27 total votes (18)67%(9)33%27 total votes Your vote: Who will win? (Vote): Last
(Vote): Olympus
Poll: Who will win?
Free (19)
76%
Guemchi (6)
24%
25 total votes (19)76%(6)24%25 total votes Your vote: Who will win? (Vote): Free
(Vote): Guemchi
Poll: Who will win?
Hiya (19)
70%
Hero (8)
30%
27 total votes (19)70%(8)30%27 total votes Your vote: Who will win? (Vote): Hiya
(Vote): Hero
The world is burning and you rather be on this terrible website discussing video games and your shallow feelings
2Pacalypse- Profile Joined October 2006 Croatia 8120 Posts #3 don't fail me now magikarp! Moderator "We're a community of geniuses because we've found how to extract 95% of the feeling of doing something amazing without actually doing anything." - Chill
LaStScan Profile Joined May 2011 Korea (South) 1007 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-05 08:00:24 #4 Fighting for all players Military Service 2018.07.12 ~ 2020.05.25 :')
maybenexttime Profile Blog Joined November 2006 Poland 3985 Posts #5 This season is incredibly stacked. Can't wait! :D
BisuDagger Profile Blog Joined October 2009 Bisutopia 16635 Posts #6 These games look as promising as day 1. Hypuuuu! Moderator Ofiicial Afreeca Starleague Caster: http://afreeca.tv/ASL2ENG2
TheGreatOne Profile Joined November 2005 United States 502 Posts #7 Amazing looking games!!! Live life and enjoy every day and always be thankful for God and his blessings!!!! :)
SWAT-Kat Profile Joined July 2011 United States 311 Posts #8 Olympus for the upset!!!
Probemicro Profile Joined February 2014 3708 Posts #9 On July 05 2015 12:15 SWAT-Kat wrote:
Olympus for the upset!!!
Mind
Olympus
GShizzle
Hero
all to win today MindOlympusGShizzleHeroall to win today
N.geNuity Profile Blog Joined July 2009 United States 5007 Posts #10 i liquibetted hero as I am ignorant and not thinking
effort
last
free
hiya iu, seungah, yura, taeyeon, hyosung, lizzy, suji, sojin, jia, ji eun, eunji, soya, younha, jiyeon, fiestar, sinb, jung myung hoon godtier. BW FOREVERR
deathgod6 Profile Blog Joined January 2008 United States 4949 Posts #11 People aren't giving the brainiac Mind enough credit. He'll outsmart the alien handily. 4.0 GPA = A rank 5.0 GPA = Olympic --------- Bisu, Best, Fantasy. i ♥ oov. They can get in my BoxeR anyday.
BLinD-RawR Profile Blog Joined April 2010 ALLEYCAT BLUES 43985 Posts #12 so psyched for Mind vs Effort, only wish it was on CB or La Mancha instead of neo jade. Moderator Woo Jung Ho, never forget.| Twitter: @BLinDRawR
c3rberUs Profile Blog Joined December 2010 Japan 11274 Posts #13 How is Hiya's TvZ? If it's decent, Hero will crumble.
Also Bak Jae Hyun hwaiting!!! Writer Movie, 진영화 : "StarCraft will never die".
kerpal Profile Blog Joined June 2009 United Kingdom 2578 Posts #14 Go effort! I wanna see some solid zvt from him. I don't think hero can beat hiya, but he does sometimes have days where he doesn't totally suck.
I think free and last should clean up easily too.
reminisce12 Profile Joined March 2012 Australia 316 Posts #15 mind vs effort better be a macro game
art_of_turtle Profile Blog Joined September 2012 United States 831 Posts #16 I think i can only stay away for Mind vs Effort
but hype hype hype Out here, am I floating on my tin can.
kerpal Profile Blog Joined June 2009 United Kingdom 2578 Posts #17 On July 05 2015 18:39 art_of_turtle wrote:
I think i can only stay away for Mind vs Effort
but hype hype hype
Do we know 100% that the order in the OP is what sonic is going to stick to? Do we know 100% that the order in the OP is what sonic is going to stick to?
BLinD-RawR Profile Blog Joined April 2010 ALLEYCAT BLUES 43985 Posts #18 On July 05 2015 18:57 kerpal wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 05 2015 18:39 art_of_turtle wrote:
I think i can only stay away for Mind vs Effort
but hype hype hype
Do we know 100% that the order in the OP is what sonic is going to stick to? Do we know 100% that the order in the OP is what sonic is going to stick to?
its accurate its accurate Moderator Woo Jung Ho, never forget.| Twitter: @BLinDRawR
SWAT-Kat Profile Joined July 2011 United States 311 Posts #19 Just noticed that under the results section, the spoilers are listed as "Group A, Group B, Group A, Group B"
GO TIME!!!
BLinD-RawR Profile Blog Joined April 2010 ALLEYCAT BLUES 43985 Posts #20 we are live! Moderator Woo Jung Ho, never forget.| Twitter: @BLinDRawR
1 2 3 4 5 9 10 11 Next AllYoann Maestri has won 56 caps for France
France lock Yoann Maestri has been fined £26,000 after accepting a misconduct charge for comments he made about referee Wayne Barnes after their dramatic Six Nations win against Wales.
Maestri, 29, allegedly criticised Barnes' decisions following a chaotic end to the game in Paris.
Wales conceded a try and conversion in the 100th minute as France won 20-18.
Half of Maestri's fine is suspended until the end of next season, with the other half payable within 30 days.
A Six Nations statement said Maestri "accepted he had committed an act of misconduct and openly apologised for making the comments".
The statement continued: "The disciplinary committee also ordered Mr Maestri to pay Six Nations' legal costs. Both parties were reminded of their right of appeal."
Six Nations Rugby earlier confirmed it is continuing the investigation into replacements made by France in the latter stages of the same match.
Wales coach Rob Howley was left to "question the integrity of our game" after France replaced Uini Atonio with Rabah Slimani during the 20 minutes of added time that were played.
France's team doctor said Atonio needed to go off for a head injury assessment.Advertisement
A few days ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced a new home battery system. Not the sexiest product at first blush – but a closer look shows that this battery has the potential to disrupt the glacial progress of the energy industry. Check out the keynote below to see what I mean.
In other words, this is huge. According to CBC, “Musk is trying to steer his electric car company’s battery technology into homes and businesses as part of an elaborate plan to reshape the power grid with millions of small power plants made of solar panels”. TechCrunch described the move as “a new business arm that is focused on ending our dependence on grid power and switching instead to solar energy.”
What Is Tesla Selling?
During the keynote, Musk announced two new sets of products. First was the Tesla Powerwall home battery. This is a slick looking power pack that can be mounted and stacked (up to 9 deep) on the interior or exterior walls of your home or small business.
There are two models: a $3000 7kWh battery and a $3500 10kWh battery. The portability aspect of the product makes this the perfect solution for bringing power to off-the-grid locations, and also areas whose power access is unstable, with frequent blackouts and brownouts.
Both models are available for pre-order now, and should be shipping late this summer.
The second product is a much larger version of the battery for use in medium-to-large-sized businesses and for utility companies (with 100kWh to 10MWh+ batteries on offer). The largest stores enough power to run a typical US home for nearly a year It’s these batteries that powered the entire conference in which the products were announced.
Why is This Big News?
Despite the fact that the Sun creates ample energy to power the globe, currently we can thank solar power for a measly 0.23% of the energy that the US consumes (globally, that figure is 1%). And according to Tesla, “The US electric power sector alone produces over 2,000 million metric tons of CO2 which is like burning 225 billion gallons of gas. The EPA says it would require 1.6 billion acres of US forest to negate the environmental damage”. This doesn’t lead to rosy predictions for the future Interesting World Simulations For Predicting The Future & Understanding Society Interesting World Simulations For Predicting The Future & Understanding Society Lots of people are very concerned about issues that affect their local communities, and maybe even their country, but are you the kind of person that's actually also very concerned about the entire world itself?... Read More, and will lead to more of us breathing air that looks like this.
One of the main reasons our use of sustainable energy is increasing so slowly is the unavailability of suitable batteries to store the power generated. During the launch, Musk stated that current batteries “are expensive, unreliable and bad in every way”. Without affordable and reliable batteries we have two huge problems to solve: power availability at night, and power availability during power outages.
But Why Would I Even Want a Battery?
As Wired points out:
“A house battery will let you be more power independent. If you have solar panels or electricity generated from wind, they don’t always produce the same amount of power. With a battery, you can store this energy during the day (or during wind) and then use it at night. A house battery will also let you get power from the electric company at night when the rates are lower and then use it during the day. Really, that’s win-win. You win with a lower power bill and the electric company wins with lower demand during the day.”
Once we have batteries that can store a suitable amount of energy, that are not reliant on being plugged into the grid, and that are affordable enough to be distributed on a larger scale, then we’re on the precipice of disrupting the energy industry as a whole. And that’s exactly what Musk is offering.
How Does This Solve The Problem?
Currently, installing a home battery to increase your energy independence is expensive and full of hassles. The (usually lead acid) batteries can be difficult to install, and require routine maintenance. They all need to be hooked up together. They need replacing. They take up too much space. They’re ugly.
Is it a surprise that people opt for a diesel generator over a battery?
Tesla’s lithium ion batteries, however, are touted as being extremely simple to install, completely automated, and require no maintenance. Another win-win.
Along with this:
“Without a home battery, excess solar energy is often sold to the power company and purchased back in the evening. This mismatch adds demand on power plants and increases carbon emissions. Powerwall bridges this gap between renewable energy supply and demand by making your home’s solar energy available to you when you need it.”
(Tesla Powerwall).
But this isn’t all. The vision here isn’t just to have each property with a standalone battery being fuelled entirely by solar power Efficient. Cheap. Awesome. Here's Why New Spray-On Solar Cells Matter Efficient. Cheap. Awesome. Here's Why New Spray-On Solar Cells Matter The cost of solar energy is set to drop precipitously after a team of scientists working at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom announced development of solar cells using a spray-on process. Read More. The vision is to reduce the planet’s overall reliance on fossil fuels by creating localised networks of home batteries (or larger, industrial batteries) that can, as a whole, be seen as a power plant in themselves.
In theory this could see entire villages, towns, cities, and eventually countries be able to generate power in an entirely sustainable, renewable way, totally independent of fossil-fuels, in a way that’s no been possible before.
Granted, the $3000+ price tag may scare some people out of the market for now, but it must be remembered that this is a first iteration of the product. The battery is ‘only’ 92% efficient, and It doesn’t include an AC/DC converter. But, for a piece of kit that’s aiming to save you money within a few years of purchase (investment), it’s very affordable compared to the alternatives.
The main selling point (for now) though, is the prospect of back-up power. Given economies of scale, however, as the technology reduces in price, more and more people will be able to turn their homes and local areas into reliable, independent power plants.
Is this the Solution?
This development is from the guy behind SpaceX: the first private company to successfully launch a rocket into orbit, despite huge opposition. It’s also from the guy who, again against heavy opposition, launched Tesla, the all-electric car company, which is now heavily involved with autonomous vehicles Tesla to Release Autonomous Car Features This Summer Tesla to Release Autonomous Car Features This Summer Tesla owners may get a peek at self-driving features sooner than expected. Tesla has its own autonomous car program, and they want to push some of their software to end users this summer. Read More. If anyone can dream big, and accomplish those dreams, it’s Elon Musk. Historically, betting against him hasn’t worked out.
The thing that really makes this development stand out from other sustainable developments The Energy of The Future, Today: How Do Solar Panels & Heliostats Work? The Energy of The Future, Today: How Do Solar Panels & Heliostats Work? Renewable resources. It’s a problem that we face every day whether we realize it or not. With every pump of a gas handle, with every press of a car’s accelerator, with every plug of our... Read More is that Musk is allowing anyone to freely use his technology. All of Tesla’s patents are freely available for anyone to use. And this is where the revolutionary part of this project starts to really stand out.
Musk has taken this technology through the boring, slow part of the exponential curve, and now that it’s ready, he’s launching it to an entrepreneurial public to do with what they like.
As stated in the book Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, “The creation of a simple and elegant user interface gives entrepreneurs the ability to harness this new tool to solve problems, start businesses, and most importantly, experiment”.
The gorgeous design and open technology that Musk is offering us is the “simple and elegant user interface” that the sustainable energy industry needs. The barriers to experimentation are at last being removed.
Musk has seen that if entrepreneurs adopt this technology without the burden of paying for the use of those patents, then we could be onto something huge. Be democratizing the technology, he’s hoping to drastically reduce the time it takes to disrupt this market, and create as much of an impact as possible. Not primarily for profit, but for the sake of humanity.
What Does The Future Hold?
If Musk succeeds in distributing 2 billion of these batteries around the globe, we would at last be able to harness enough power from the Sun to power the entire planet. 2 billion is a huge number, but it’s the same number of cars we have on the road, which makes Musk believe that this is indeed possible for humanity to accomplish. All we need to do is connect the dots, and Tesla’s new and future battery technologies could be the most important of those dots to reverse our reliance on non-renewable energy sources without turning to hair-brained ideas of power production 8 Unbelievable New Ways of Generating Electricity 8 Unbelievable New Ways of Generating Electricity Alternative energy is one the rise, but you may not know about all the options. Here are some of the craziest new ways of generating power. Read More.
Do you think this could be the start of a more sustainable energy industry, or are we dreaming too big?
Image Credits: Solar Panels by Kedin Dooley (Flickr), Pollution!, by Agustin Ruiz (Flickr), Elon Musk, Tesla Factory, Fremont by Maurizio Pesce (Flickr), Tesla Powerwall Press KitThe World Boxing Organization has stripped Floyd Mayweather Jr. of the welterweight world title he earned two months ago, when he defeated Manny Pacquiao in what was called the fight of the century.
Mayweather, whose victory in the fight earned him $200 million, failed to pay a $200,000 sanctioning fee he owed the WBO by a Friday afternoon deadline. He also failed to relinquish the junior middleweight title he held prior to the May 2 fight, violating the WBO rule prohibiting its fighters from holding simultaneous titles in different weight classes.
“The WBO World Championship Committee is allowed no other alternative but to cease to recognize Mr. Floyd Mayweather, Jr. as the WBO Welterweight Champion of the World and vacate his title, for failing to comply with our WBO Regulations of World Championship Contests,” the WBO said in a statement.
Reuters reports that he has two weeks to file an appeal.
See the Top 10 Boxing Matches of All Time Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images AP Dirck Halstead—Getty Images Steve Miller—AP Joseph Costa—New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images Eric Jamison—AP AP Jed Jacobsohn—Getty Images Ken Levine—Getty Images Chris Smith—Popperfoto/Getty Images 1 of 10 Advertisement
Contact us at editors@time.com.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- An 81-year-old woman who tried to cover up the hit-and-run death of a 13-year-old Olmsted Township boy in October 2011 avoided prison and received five years of house arrest at her sentencing Monday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
Helen Fettes, of Olmsted Falls, also was ordered to pay $128,000 in restitution and a $1,000 fine. Her driver’s license was revoked for life.
The mother, father and an uncle of the victim, Charlie Kho, asked Judge Hollie Gallagher to give Fettes the maximum sentence of 6 1/2 years. Fettes is allowed to leave her home for the next five years only for medical appointments and to attend church.
She pleaded no contest Nov. 30 to charges of vehicular homicide, failure to stop after an accident and tampering with evidence.
Fettes had originally pleaded not guilty in 2011, but then changed her plea to "no contest" late last year to charges of vehicular homicide, failure to stop after an accident, and tampering with evidence. Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Hollie Gallagher had found Fettes guilty on all charges in December.
The hit-and-run occurred Oct. 17, 2011. Charlie died the next day at MetroHealth Medical Center. It was his 13th birthday.
During Monday’s hearing, Fettes’ attorney, Philip Kushner, blamed his client’s use of an improperly prescribed muscle relaxer called Soma for the events of Oct. 17.
She struck Charlie with her car on Cook Road near his family’s home. Kushner said his client had been taking Soma, a drug normally prescribed for short periods, for more than nine years.
Kushner did not say whether Fettes’ use of Soma caused her to try to cover up the accident. Fettes took her car to a dealership for repairs after she struck Charlie and asked employees not to contact police or her insurance company. A suspicious secretary called police when she noticed hair and blood on the cracked windshield of Fettes’ 2008 Mercury Sable.
Fettes sat with her head bowed throughout much of Monday’s hearing. When given the chance to speak, Fettes apologized in a clear voice to Charlie’s family.
“I pray for them morning and night when I pray,” she said.
Kushner briefly described his client’s life. Fettes was born in Scotland, moved to Canada after college and married a man who abused her and left her with two small children. She made her way to the U.S. where, Kushner said, she rose through the ranks as an accountant at Forest City Enterprises. She has lived a law-abiding and admirable life, Kushner said.
Charlie’s mother, Ali Haley Kho, said her son’s death has “left a large hole in my heart.
“It’s very hard for me to understand that a mother and grandmother could be so heartless to leave someone on the side of the road to die,” Ali Kho said.
She pointed out the irony of how, as a driver’s education instructor, it’s her job to teach students about such dangers of driving while impaired.
“I never thought I’d be living with this nightmare,” she said. Ali Kho and the rest of her family declined to speak to reporters after the hearing.
“It’s all in God’s hands,” she said.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:mgillispie@plaind.com, 216-999-4738The Red Cross is still at the site of a dramatic 3-alarm fire on Thompson Street in Soho, providing relief to residents who were evacuated after fire tore through a seven story building around 2 a.m. today. Streets were closed off this morning as firefighters grappled with the blaze, which took two and a half hours to get under control. 10 firefighters were injured, and one female civilian, but we're told most the injuries are considered minor. (Update: FDNY spokesman Frank Dwyer just told us two of the firefighters were hurt more seriously, but the injuries "do not appear to be life threatening.")
FDNY officials say the fire started in the basement and quickly spread all the way up to the roof, which was consumed by a dramatic conflagration. There are multiple reports that smoke alarms in the building did not go off, and residents frantically banged on apartment doors to alert their neighbors to the emergency. “I couldn’t see anything. Not an inch in front of me,” one resident told NBC New York. “I was asking where to go. Go up, go down? I didn’t know where the fire was. It was insane.”
Over 150 firefighters and EMS responded to the blaze, but fire marshals have not yet entered the building, located at 68 Thompson Street, because the structure is so badly damaged. 72 Thompson Street has also been evacuated, and six families placed in emergency housing. The massive fire calls to mind last February's four alarm fire that ripped through a loft building at 82 Greene Street just before dawn, leaving three families homeless.
UPDATE: A Red Cross spokesperson tells us, "We provided comfort and refreshments to residents and firefighters at the scene of the fire. Temporary housing was provided for 15 adults, 1 child and 1 dog who were displaced by the fire. Other residents are being invited to our headquarters at 520 W 49th street for additional services and help with referrals to other city agencies that can provided assistance."As it says on their “about” page…
(Occupy Wall Street) is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations (and) aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy.
“Yeeaahh”, says fattie Michael Moore, who addressed an Occupy crowd in Denver last week and railed against “greedy” corporations. Though, to be fair, that isn’t why he went to Denver in the first place.
Moore was in Denver on a tour to promote his $27 memoir, ‘Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life.’
By the way that book is published by Grand Central Publishing, a subdivision of the French company Hachette, which is the second largest publisher in the world. Hachette is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Lagardère Group, a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Paris which does business in nearly 40 countries. Among other things they hold a 7.5% stake in EADS, a global defense and military contractor, which absorbed the Lagardère subsidiary Aérospatiale-Matra, a French missile and aircraft manufacturer. On a side note, some claim Moore is worth 50 million dollars. But I’m getting off track. “Heese hiant companies an wich people are ewol,” says Moore between bites of food!
And now Jay Z wants to cash in on Occupy too, though he just said fuck it and isn’t even gonna pretend that he’s trying to help in some way.
The millionaire rapper and entrepreneur is launching a line of Occupy Wall Street-themed t-shirts featuring the phrase “Occupy All Streets,” that go on sale on Jay-Z’s Rocawear website on Friday.
But the genius behind “99 Problems” isn’t sharing the profits with the 99 percent. A spokesperson from Rocawear told Business Insider in a statement that the company has not “made an official commitment” to support the movement financially.
I’d also like to encourage these dirty hippies to Occupy All Streets. Since that’s where I drive.1857/5506 (33.7%) men reported using computers and 347 (6.3%) received a diagnosis of dementia during an average follow up of 6.0 years (range: 6 months to 8.5 years). The hazard ratio (HR) of dementia was lower among computer users than non-users (HR = 0.62, 95%CI = 0.47–0.81, after adjustment for age, educational attainment, size of social network, and presence of depression or of significant clinical morbidity). The HR of dementia appeared to decrease with increasing frequency of computer use: 0.68 (95%CI = 0.41–1.13), 0.61 (95%CI = 0.39–0.94) and 0.59 (95%CI = 0.40–0.87) for less than weekly, at least weekly and daily. The HR of dementia was 0.66 (95%CI = 0.50–0.86) after the analysis was further adjusted |
ach populations. It relies on a snowball sampling, using current study subjects to recruit future subjects. In total, 408 transgender people in Ontario, Canada were included in the analysis; 214 female-to-male, and 195 male-to-female. Findings include:
21 per cent of transgender people report having avoided the ED in a potential medical emergency because of fear of negative experiences.
Among those who did attend the ED, 52 per cent had experienced at least one of the trans-specific negative experiences asked about in the survey (e.g. having a doctor refuse care, or refuse to examine parts of your body) while presenting in their felt/core gender.
32 per cent experienced hurtful or insulting language
31 per cent were told the healthcare provider didn't know enough to provide care
"As far as we're aware, this paper represents the first published paper to examine the experiences of transgender patients in emergency department settings, and is based on data from our longstanding project, Trans PULSE," says Bauer, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Jan. 3, 2017, 11:20 AM GMT / Updated Jan. 3, 2017, 11:23 AM GMT By Eoghan Macguire
A state-run Chinese newspaper accused Donald Trump of "pandering to 'irresponsible' attitudes" Tuesday after the president-elect alleged that Beijing had failed to rein in North Korea’s nuclear program.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Sunday that his country was close to test-launching an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Having conducted three nuclear tests during Kim's five years in power, he is thought to be pursuing the missile technology it would need to attack South Korea. North Korea also has designs on reaching the U.S. military outpost of Guam and the U.S. mainland itself.
Trump tweeted Monday that the prospect of North Korea developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. "won't happen," but offered no other details as to why that would be the case.
Related: What Will Trump Do About Kim Jong Un?
The president-elect then took a swipe at China for what he sees as its part in failing to control its neighbor’s nuclear ambitions.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded Tuesday that China's hard work in trying to ensure the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is obvious to all, Reuters reported.
Related: China Expresses 'Serous Concern' Over Trump Threat
However, the state-run Global Times tabloid was more aggressive.
It responded to Trump’s tweets by stating that he was "pandering to 'irresponsible' attitudes" and stoking “the anxieties of some Americans" who blame China rather than looking inward, according to The Associated Press.
China is North Korea’s main ally and a key economic supporter. While Beijing has frequently condemned North Korean nuclear tests, Defense Secretary Ash Carter stated in September that the fact they had gotten so far was the responsibility of China.
Trump has also repeatedly criticized China on social media since winning November’s presidential election and ruffled feathers in Beijing by speaking with the president of Taiwan by phone.
China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province.
Trump has also spoken out on nuclear weapons, stating that a new arms race was possible when speaking to MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" last month.David de Gea will not play at Real Madrid - at least not at the start of the season. The contracts, which had been signed by the player, did not arrive at the LFP headquarters in time to be processed so as it stands, Keylor Navas will continue at Real Madrid and De Gea with United. Sources at the LFP confirmed that the documents sent by Real Madrid arrived at 00:28 CEST.
A total agreement between both clubs had been reached almost an hour earlier at 23:30. Real Madrid and Manchester United had agreed a 30 million euro fee for the transfer of David de Gea while Keylor would move in the opposite direction for 15 million. However, Keylor wanted to make modifications to his contract which meant that they were dispatched later than anticipated.
The two clubs started negotiating this morning but only started to make headway once United had secured Martial. Part of the operation hinged on Keylor accepting United's offer but the player was initially against a move to Old Trafford until he was eventually convinced by Van Gaal. It is understood that the bureaucratic formalities concerning the Costa Rican keeper’s transfer took longer than expected, and still hadn’t been resolved until well after De Gea’s transfer was closed.
But the documentation didn’t get to the LFP headquarters on time for De Gea to be registered, arriving 28 minutes after the transfer window had closed.Pinterest Pool
The revelation that Mike Pence used a private e-mail account for official business is a grim reminder that a sexist lie propelled Donald Trump all the way to the White House.
Fresh off a successful White House bid during which his running mate campaigned on the idea that his political opponent should be jailed for using a personal e-mail account to conduct official business, Vice President Mike Pence has some explaining to do. According to a report from the intrepid folks at The Indianapolis Star, while he was serving as Indiana's governor, Pence routinely used a personal e-mail account to conduct official business. The only thing less surprising than this cheerfully unapologetic hypocrisy is the fact that, in 2016, Mike Pence was still using an AOL e-mail address.
EDITOR’S PICK
Let's get a few things out of the way. Yes, it's alarming that some of these e-mails were deemed sensitive enough that they were withheld from the state's response to the Star's public-records request. No, it's not inherently unusual for politicians like Pence to use their private e-mail addresses for work on occasion. Yes, this revelation becomes even more troublesome when you remember that Pence's e-mail has been hacked before—last summer, when he spammed his contacts pleading with them to send him money to an account in the Philippines. No, Governor Pence probably would not have dealt with information as sensitive as that which came through Secretary Clinton's inbox. And so on and so forth. If you wish to spend this dreary Friday afternoon litigating their relative levels of culpability, rest assured that Twitter is amply stocked with people who stand ready and willing to do so.
Whichever egg gets the best of any one scintillating @-reply back-and-forth, though, does not matter. The revelation that Pence employed shoddy e-mail protocols of his own reinforces something that you probably already intuited, but that nonetheless bears repeating, just in case: Donald Trump's ceaseless, furious condemnations of Hillary Clinton's e-mail management was never about honesty, or national security, or best practices in information technology. It was a politically expedient lie, carefully crafted by a man well-versed in telling them, that was designed to take advantage of one of the most insidious lingering stereotypes in so-called polite society, which is the falsehood that women, deep down, are incapable of doing the tough jobs right—that it would simply be imprudent for a nation to entrust a lady with a role as important as president of the United States.
Trump, because he is never one for half-measures, chose to describe Clinton's conduct as purposeful and malicious while on the campaign trail. But really, establishing her intent wasn't necessary. As long as his "Lock her up" drum-beating activated the stereotype in voters' minds, planting just enough seeds of doubt about the potential consequences of making this careless, bumbling, technologically illiterate woman commander-in-chief, that was enough.
Here is what Pence had to say about what Clinton's e-mail mismanagement really means, which came in the same conversation in which he called her "the most dishonest candidate for president of the United States since Richard Nixon." (Mike Pence is not fond of half-measures, either.)
Hillary Clinton operated in such a way to keep her e-mails, and particularly her interactions, while Secretary of State, with the Clinton Foundation out of the public reach, out of public accountability.
And later:
She either knew or should've known that she was placing classified information in a way that exposed it to being hacked and being made available in the public domain, even to enemies of this country.
This was shameless, sexist bullshit at the time, but this week's news makes it hypocritical shameless, sexist bullshit, too. Donald Trump never cared about public accountability, and the shouty anti-Clinton conspiracy theories to which he diligently clung were never based on a sincerely-held belief that his opponent, if elected president, would engage in cybersecurity practices that would put American lives and interests at risk. The reason Mike Pence is a heartbeat away from the White House while Hillary Clinton is taking long walks in Chappaqua is because Donald Trump trussed up her frighteningly boring internal communications protocols as evidence of a fatal character flaw that disqualified her from being president. Her e-mails never mattered. It was the fact that they were hers, not his.Developers in some near-downtown neighborhoods no longer would get city incentives under a new plan after officials acknowledged that a proliferation of high-density projects are changing the character of those neighborhoods in unanticipated ways.
Instead, efforts would be focused on downtown itself, where hotels predominate and incentives have not had the desired outcome of fostering residential developments.
The new Center City Housing Incentive Policy would be better tailored for the challenges of building housing downtown, including the high costs of real estate, city officials said at Wednesday’s meeting of the council’s housing committee.
“We have to try to offset those costs through our incentive programs to make (downtown) viable” for residential projects, said Ramiro Gonzales, who is the redevelopment officer at the city’s Center City Development and Operations Department.
It also would address the concerns of residents who have been battling to keep their near-downtown neighborhoods from being overrun by development, Assistant City Manager Lori Houston said. Neighborhoods such as Five Points and most of Tobin Hill and Lone Star would be left out, although the Lone Star Brewery site that is being primed for development would remain inside.
The housing committee voted unanimously Wednesday to present the changes before the full council, which is expected to vote on them in June.
Committee members said they expect the new boundaries to run into some local opposition for seeming “restrictive,” as District 10 Councilman Mike Gallagher put it.
The geographic reach of the policy — which offers low-interest loans, waivers of city fees and property tax relief for new housing — would shrink to about 5.2 square miles including downtown, the near West Side, the near East Side, The Pearl area and part of Southtown. It currently spans 36 square miles centered on downtown but identifies the innermost neighborhoods as “targeted growth areas” eligible for larger incentives.
Developments outside the CCHIP boundaries still could get incentives, but the incentive packages would have to be designed and approved on an individual basis, officials said. Council approval is not required for CCHIP incentive packages.
“This is no way restricts our ability to incentivize projects outside the boundary,” Gonzales said.
The changes would increase the size of the “urban core,” where projects are eligible for the highest level of incentives.
The current area covers about 0.4 square miles in the central part of downtown, while the new area would span the entire 1.7-square-mile central business district, bringing Hemisfair into the fold.
Construction loans for “urban core” projects would be forgivable after seven years — in other words, the loans wouldn’t have to be paid back if developers met certain conditions.
Downtown has scored some big residential projects lately — including two developments at Hemisfair and a 10-story luxury apartment tower on the River Walk — but it hasn’t enjoyed the housing growth seen in areas like King William and the stretch of Broadway near The Pearl. Many areas of downtown remain desolate, and many of the new developments announced recently have been hotels.
The alterations to CCHIP could change that, officials said, building on the upcoming $175 million revitalization of San Pedro Creek and a new federal courthouse that Congress is expected to approve for Santa Rosa Street.
“Those are going to be catalysts,” Assistant City Manager Lori Houston said at the housing committee meeting. “We want to make sure we have the tools to allow that to happen.”
Mayor Julián Castro and the City Council unanimously approved CCHIP in June 2012 with a condition that it would be re-evaluated for extension after four years; their goal was to create 7,500 housing units in the downtown area by 2020. The program was part of Castro’s “Decade of Downtown” initiative to promote residential and commercial development in central San Antonio.
Forty-two developments with a total of 4,288 housing units have taken part in CCHIP — including many that are under construction or in design phase — city documents show.
About 2,700 of those are in the downtown area, while another 1,981 downtown units have been built outside the CCHIP program.
Overall, 4,695 housing units have been built in the greater downtown area, meaning the city has reached 63 percent of its goal to add 7,500 units downtown by 2020, according to the city.
Through CCHIP, the city has doled out $53 million in incentives for projects representing a total of $707 million in private investment, officials say.
“A more targeted approach toward incentives, I think, makes all the sense in the world given the fact that we’re halfway through the housing goal that we set,” District 8 Councilman Ron Nirenberg, who is on the housing committee, said after the meeting Wednesday.
Gallagher, whose district isn’t included within CCHIP’s boundaries, says he supports the changes to CCHIP because of the importance of preserving neighborhoods.
Developers of recently announced projects have said they plan to apply for incentives under the program, including those of a 30-story apartment tower along the River Walk and of a $165 million mixed-use development at the northwest corner of Hemisfair. The Cellars at Pearl apartment tower under construction at The Pearl is making use of the policy.
The proposed changes include several more rules to benefit downtown projects. Only “urban core” projects could receive full waivers of a SAWS impact fee; currently, all CCHIP projects can get a full waiver. The “urban core” projects also would be eligible for larger loans for retail and office space.
Under the changes, every project receiving CCHIP incentives also would be required to go through the city Historic and Design Review Commission — whether or not they are in a historic district — giving the city more control over design.
The Center City Development Office is putting together a separate incentive policy for the areas around the missions, which were declared World Heritage sites last fall and have sparked some passionate battles over plans for high-density development, officials said at the meeting.
The policy area could stretch between César E. Chávez Boulevard and Mission Espada, Gonzales said. City staffers are studying the housing market in that area to figure out how to design the policy for it, he said.
rwebner@express-news.netSo far I released there is no place for gnomes in 4/16/2011 at the moment we have obtained 156 sales. So far this is what our graph looks like:
We can see a few things here most of the sales were at the beginning and a bit tickled out after the release. At the moment the game has not made enough money to even cover for the cost of producing and paying for the marketplace subscription so lets looks at the reason that can be causing this:
Game Quality – According to most people I have talked while they enjoy playing the game at first they feel the replay value is not that high. They buy it play with it a bit then stop using it. I interviewed 10 of the people that own the game found that only 2 of them referred it. With this I have realized that I need to do a much better job at doing instant gratification in this game that are snack types.
Marketing – I’ve gone to the websites and posted the game sadly I have not gotten any press that actually helps and this is a field that I’m not sure how to approach in order to generate more interest. Coming up I will be doing a website for my indie game company Cross Of the South development and will try working hyping up.
Making lemonade out of lemons My current plan is to in the next month release a patch for the game with most of the main concerns that people had with the game addressed and making it easier to play. Besides this adding a trial mode so people can try it before buying it and last but not least release an ad based version and hope that some small revenue starts sipping in. But i think the most important part is to try again and this time attempt to have some fans for the idea before releasing the physical game
Alfredo OutPalestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday denied offering secret concessions to Israel and said that reporting of purportedly leaked documents had presented Israeli positions as those of his own negotiators.
"What is intended is a mix-up. I saw them present things yesterday as Palestinian, but they were Israeli... This is therefore intentional," Abbas told reporters in Cairo after a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
"We say things very clearly, we do not have secrets." Abbas stressed.
Al -Jazeera television published on Sunday what it said were extracts of 1,600 documents it had obtained that cover Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in recent years.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas speaking at a ceremony in the West Bank city of Ramallah on August 8, 2010. AP
The Palestine papers thus far have revealed that the Palestinians have previously agreed to serious concessions, such as secret compromises over core issues such as Jerusalem and refugees.
Abbas said he has kept Arab countries fully briefed on the negotiations with Israel.
Quickly following the release of the documents on Al-Jazeera TV, the Palestinians denied the reports, saying that parts of the documents were fabricated.
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The chief Palestinian negotiator in the 2008 talks, Ahmed Qureia, told The Associated Press that "many parts of the documents were fabricated, as part of the incitement against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian leadership."
He denied making an offer about the Jewish enclaves in East Jerusalem, claiming that Israel refused to discuss the issue.
The current chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, dismissed the TV report as "lies and half truths."
Abbas told Egyptian newspaper editors in Cairo on Sunday that he kept the Arab League updated on all details of the negotiations with Israel, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. "I don't know where Al-Jazeera came from with secret things," Abbas was quoted as saying. "There is nothing we hide from our brothers, the Arabs."
Al-Jazeera said the Palestinians offered to let Israel keep all but one of the Jewish enclaves it build in east Jerusalem after capturing it in the 1967 Mideast war. About 200,000 Israelis live there now.
In return, according to the quoted documents, the Palestinians wanted Israeli land, including a section close to the West Bank-Israel line where many of Israel's minority Arab citizens live.
Also, they proposed international control of the key Jerusalem holy site as a temporary measure. The Palestinians, Israel, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan would administer the site where the Al Aqsa Mosque compound sits atop the ruins of the biblical Jewish temples, until Israel and the Palestinians could work out a permanent arrangement.
On the issue of refugees, the documents said the Palestinians agreed that Israel would take in 10,000 refugees a year for 10 years — a total of 100,000. The Palestinians have insisted that all refugees from the 1948-49 war and their descendants — several million people — have the right to return to Israel. The Israelis have always rejected that as a threat to the Jewish character of the state.
The peace talks referred to in the documents went through 2008 but ended without agreement when Israel attacked Gaza to try to stop daily rocket barrages by Palestinian militants on the strip.President Trump on Monday officially endorsed Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama, less than a month after Moore was accused by multiple women of inappropriate sexual conduct while they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore tweeted the news of the coveted endorsement and quoted the president as saying, "Go get 'em, Roy!"
"Go get 'em, Roy!" - President Trump
Just got off the phone with President Trump who offered his full support and said he needs a fighter to help him in the US Senate.
I look forward to fighting alongside the President to #MAGA! — Judge Roy Moore (@MooreSenate) December 4, 2017
The White House confirmed the endorsement in a statement, saying Trump "had a positive phone call" with Moore.
After allegations of Moore's sexual misconduct became public, the White House declined to comment one way or another on the race, saying that the people of Alabama should make their own decision. In the last two weeks, however, the administration had all but endorsed Moore's campaign while attacking the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, for his positions on immigration and abortion.
Trump reportedly sees parallels between himself and Moore, as both men have been accused of sexual assault and both were (temporarily) abandoned and denounced by prominent Republicans. Trump isn't the only Republican to warm up to Moore, either: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called on Moore to "step aside" on Nov. 13, but on Sunday backtracked that statement, saying, "I think we're going to let the people of Alabama decide... who they want to send to the Senate, and then we'll address the matter appropriately."
A CBS News poll published Sunday found that Moore leads Jones 49 percent to 43 percent and that 71 percent of Alabama Republicans do not believe the allegations against him. Kelly O'Meara MoralesTherapists around the country are reporting an uptick in patients seeking to voice their anxieties about the popularity of Donald Trump’s candidacy, The Washington Post reports.
“We have these social mores and he breaks all of them and he’s successful. And people are wondering how he gets away with it,” psychologist Alison Howard told The Post. She said she has seen two patients in recent days complaining about the GOP frontrunner.
Therapists said that many of these patients express dismay at the thought of others supporting the New York real estate developer.
A New York City psychologist, Judith Levy, said she recently met a middle-aged woman who “was so upset and worried that she could have a sister — someone so close to her — who would have zero problem with Trump.”
Levy continued to say that Trump’s apparent care-free attitude has people worried, “Part of the reason he makes people so anxious is that he has no anxiety himself. It’s frightening. I’m starting to feel anxious just talking about him.”
Folks stressing out about Trump is not only confined to the offices of therapists, take a quick peek at Twitter.
the fact that trump is winning in a some states scares me like people who actually support everything he stands for exist….. — brat (@mariasirens) March 2, 2016
Trump becoming president genuinely scares me — cat lady (@phoeebus) March 2, 2016
I’m in denial that someone like Trump could actually win the election, But what if he does? That scares me so badly. This is REAL. Wake up. — ⠀ (@youloveriah) February 29, 2016
Ken Goldstein, a Los Angeles businessman, told the Post about how he was shocked to find out his associate supported Trump. “You just realize you have nothing more to say to that person.”
He added, “Who are these people? Are they at the grocery store, are they sitting next to me at Dodger Stadium? That makes me nervous.”
People are so stressed about Trump, that they are even giving their massage therapists anxiety. One masseuse recounted to WaPo about how many of her patients have been venting about the New York real estate developer and it, “stress[ed] me out to listen to it.”
She continued to say, “I can’t give you a good massage if I’m grabbing your shoulders like Donald Trump’s orange face.”The Godrej India Culture Lab in Mumbai turned into an 'adda' of the feminist kind on Tuesday, 18 April 2017.
A panel discussion titled 'What’s Sex Got to Do With It' aimed to talk about feminism and sexuality, with journalist and documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra who runs the website Agents of Ishq, US-Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy, disability rights activist Bishakha Datta and academic Geeta Patel among the panelists.
The panelists discussed a whole lot of topics, ranging from sex, feminism and how are our lives are influenced by it.
We got a chance to catch up with Geeta Patel, who is an associate professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian Languages and Cultures and Women, Gender and Sexuality. She has worked on how nationalism, gender, sexuality and grief in 20th-century Urdu poetic movements intertwine in her book Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2002).
Excerpts from our interview:
Risky Business
Geeta spoke with us about her new book, Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy:
She then adds, "Actually a chapter on aravani kinara (the transgender community) is set in Mumbai, where I grew up and the other is on the film Fire when it was banned. People came to the streets to protest the ban. The film was stopped from being shown... People in Mumbai asked for the film to be shown and generally asked for a different kind of life where they would not be stopped from doing what they like. "
Languages Of Love
Since Patel specialises in poetry across Sanskrit, Urdu and Hindi, we asked if the portrayal of women and sexuality differs when it comes to different languages. She said, "Well, not really. South Asia is full of sexual poetry. Look at the Tamra Sangam. Bengali prose has a whole different set of sexual poetry. If you look at each language, the lexicon for sexuality might be different for every language, because different languages have different characters."
She adds, "But I must say, Urdu is a stunning language to listen to. Since Urdu is familiar to everyone, maybe through Bollywood films, Urdu gets assigned the most pleasurable poetry of desire. We all get our little lexicon of love from Urdu. I mean, haven't you?"
Feminism Through The Ages
We asked Patel about the history of feminism in India, and the religious traditions that are not very woman-friendly, like being forcefully isolated when you are on your period. She tells us, "Tradition is constituted at the moment when it becomes useful as a political device. So practices actually change a lot of times. I have to say one thing as a woman and as someone who has spent a lot of time in the village — if you do not have access to the temple and there were things that you couldn't do, it wasn't so bad. Because one of the things it let you out of is domestic work. But what I have an issue with is that gendered bodies are curtailed and power is organised through gendered bodies. People actually use gender as a way of establishing power."
Has the way women are treated in India changed for the better? Is it safer to talk about sexuality as a woman, in spaces like this panel? Patel is not so sure about that. "Women wrote sexual poetry through the ages. We have an idea that now we have more freedom to say things because it makes us feel better than everybody else. I say that we can certainly go back to the past and find a possibility for a future that we want. I don't think it is easy for women to talk about sexuality, it is definitely hard, but it has always been hard and women do take a stand."
She says about the history of feminism in India, "Other people have said this, but interestingly enough, the control of women's bodies and sending back women to the domestic (space) was something that comes out of a British practice. It is a British critique of Indian communities. The British critique was that we treat our women really badly; South Asians treat their women really badly. They don't know how to govern themselves, they don't know how to govern their women."
What about the current government's stance on curtailing the freedom of women? Patel explains in this video.
The Femi-Nazi Chronicles
While the feminism moment is gathering force in India, women shy away from being labeled as feminists. She says, "That is because women don't want to claim the best part of feminism. Feminism is not about shutting things down. Feminism is about claiming your pleasure. I'm the kind of person who wants to claim pleasure and desire and not only protest as a feminist."
As for the term 'Feminazi', hear what Geeta has to say, in this video:
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The tea party strategist who orchestrated the effort that toppled Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., in 2012, has set his sights on Kentucky, organizing hundreds of like-minded neighboring activists to infiltrate the Bluegrass State in the coming weeks in an attempt to upend Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Greg Fettig, who helped found the Hoosiers For A Conservative Senate group that assisted upstart candidate Richard Mourdock during the last election cycle, has determined that McConnell GOP primary challenger Matt Bevin is the movement's best chance for a seismic upset this year.
"It is a perfect storm against McConnell," Fettig says. "We don't intend to just give him a good run for his money, we intend to beat him. [If] we beat McConnell, we can prove we can do back-to-back Senate races and we can take anybody out if we work together."
The plan -- dubbed "Unbridled Liberty" after the 1990 Kentucky Derby winner -- is to marshal tea party activists from six bordering states to descend upon Kentucky to door knock, phone bank and hold meetings and rallies encouraging McConnell's ouster.
As a result of McConnell's staggering financial superiority -- his cash advantage over Bevin is nearly 10-to-1 -- Fettig believes a sustained on-the-ground communication enterprise similar to what he employed in Indiana is the most effective strategy and puts a fine point on the David vs. Goliath frame he's trumpeting.
He's already received commitments from tea party leaders in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri, and estimates he'll have a ground army of approximately 1,000 ahead of the May primary.
Ed Bell, a Cincinnati-based tea party leader, is hopeful he can deliver at least 150 foot soldiers to help fan out in northern Kentucky. Bell has confidence in being able to produce the troops, in part, due to the lack of grass-root conservative enthusiasm for the re-election of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, or his tea party opponent.
"We're trying to be more pragmatic. If there was a stronger candidate running against John Boehner or John Kasich, we may look at that," says Bell. "Kentucky has a guy pretty much everybody's on board with. You've got to look at the opportunity. The whole concept of helping across the river appeals to me."
Settling on the McConnell-Bevin clash as the crown jewel wasn't automatic; it involved a process of elimination.
During 2013, Fettig made trips to South Carolina and Tennessee, two other states hosting 2014 Senate races with Republican incumbents undeserving of re-election in his eyes.
What he found in both places was not encouraging, but for different reasons.
After a July jaunt to Columbia, S. C., he picked up on several signals that local tea party groups were struggling to lock arms to defeat Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. In addition to the complexity of dealing with three challengers vying for the upper hand, organizers expressed hesitancy about a coordinated effort.
"Some wanted to work with their local GOP, others only through the tea party and still others, not at all," Fettig recalled. "They're just fiercely independent and won't unite."
In Tennessee, where Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander is seeking a third term, the problem wasn't organization, it was the candidate, according to Fettig.
After surveying activists on the ground last spring, he determined that Joe Carr, a state representative mounting a bid against Alexander, "doesn't have the wherewithal" to pull off the upset.
"Many feel the battle in Kentucky is of more importance and urgent," Fettig said.
While the parallels between McConnell and Lugar are evident, they aren't seamless.
Most acutely, McConnell's political survival instinct is far more savvy and cutthroat than the feeble Lugar. Whereas the Indiana icon seemed almost oblivious about the storm manifesting around him, McConnell has built a presidential-style operation in anticipation of just that type of unforgiving assault.
McConnell's campaign has largely ignored Bevin and the tea party critics, preferring to focus solely on tarring presumptive Democratic nominee Alison Lundergan Grimes, the secretary of state.
Grimes and McConnell entered the year polling within the margin of error of each other, intensifying what was already ripe to be the marquee contest of the cycle.
But tea party activists are betting that the incumbent's indifference to Bevin will begin to change once activists begin swarming the state and outside reinforcements pile up.
McConnell's polling advantage over Bevin was 22 points on Jan. 2, according to a Gravis Marketing survey.
Lugar led Mourdock by a similar margin three months before his own harrowing defeat.
But the tea party's veritable accomplishment in that primary was just as swiftly washed away in November, when Mourdock fell to Democrat Joe Donnelly.
Asked about that searing loss and its repercussions, Fettig argues simply that Bevin is a more disciplined, focused candidate than Mourdock and maintains that the entire undertaking was worthwhile.
"It has inspired thousands of conservative activists to action two years later in defeating the leader of the GOP establishment," he said.
More News:Apollo of the Belvedere (Photo: Ruslan Gilmanshin/Dreamstime)
Can seeing white-marble sculpture really “influence white supremacist ideas”?
According to an essay penned by a University of Iowa professor, seeing white-marble sculpture “continues to influence white supremacist ideas,” and it’s a shame that this is “often ignored.
The essay, titled “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color,” has a sub-headline that declares that “the equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe; it’s a dangerous construct that continues to influence white supremacist ideas today.”
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The author, a classics professor named Sarah E. Bond, explains that even though “most museums and art history textbooks contain a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi,” “many of the statues, reliefs, and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted,” with marble being “considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture.”
“The exalting of white (and unpainted) marble was then an 18th century construct of beauty rather than the representative of the classical view,” Bond further explained in an e-mail to Campus Reform.
“One of the most influential art historians of the era was Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He produced two volumes recounting the history of ancient art, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), which were widely read and came to form a foundation for the modern field of art history,” Bond writes in her essay. “These books celebrate the whiteness of classical statuary and cast the Apollo of the Belvedere — a Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic bronze original — as the quintessence of beauty.”
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Now, all of that is interesting enough. I certainly can admit that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about classical sculpture (sorry), and, sure, it’s a good thing to know that a lot of it was painted. Where Bond loses me, however, is her assertion that a common misconception about the colors of ancient sculptures “has an impact on the way we view the antique world” and that that “impact” is the spread of enduring white-supremacist views.
‘It may have taken just one classical statue to influence the false construction of race.’ — Sarah E. Bond
But Bond disagrees. In fact, she states that “it may have taken just one classical statue to influence the false construction of race” — to make people actually think that everyone in the Mediterranean was white and/or that it’s better to be white — and that although she is “not suggesting that we go, with a bucket in hand, and attempt to repaint every white marble statue across the country,” there should be “better museum signage, the presentation of 3D reconstructions alongside originals, and the use of computerized light projections can help produce a contextual framework for understanding classical sculpture as it truly was.” That should, presumably, work to diminish all of that racism.Prison officials are looking to step up security at Arthur Road jail to prepare for the arrival of gangster Chhota Rajan, who was arrested last week in Bali and will be extradited to India soon. The additional security is meant to prevent an attack on Rajan by his rivals from the Dawood Ibrahim gang. A few months ago, Dawood’s lieutenant Chhota Shakeel had hatched a plan to kill Rajan in Australia, but the attempt failed as Rajan got wind of it, according to a police source.
As most of cases against Rajan are in Mumbai, he is likely to be brought to the city soon after his extradition, said another source, and is likely to be lodged in Arthur road jail. Considering that many inmates of the prison are from rival gangs, jail officials are thinking about roping in a paramilitary force, such as the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), which bolstered security at the jail when Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab was lodged there.
Read: Chhota Rajan: Scheming, ambitious, calculating underworld don
“We will rope in a security force equivalent to ITBP to ensure tight security at Arthur Road jail. This was discussed at a recent meeting attendant by senior officials from of jail, the police and the government,” said a senior prison official, who did not wish to be named.
Indonesian plainclothes policemen escort Indian gangster Rajendra Nikalje (C), widely known as Chhota Rajan, as they |
you need to make it work, by setting sides to be “ never defeated” before removing all their units, or toggling remove_from_carryover_on_defeat, etc. Following discussions with mainline and UMC developers who had concerns about changes in 1.11.x regarding the frequency with which the engine checks the victory conditions of a scenario, the solution previously included in 1.11.13 has been revamped.In 1.11.15 and forward, Wesnoth checks for victory/defeat of sides more or less at the end of any player action that is synchronized over the network (non-undoable moves, attacks, recruits, WML-defined menu item actions, and so on); this is to say, not only at the end or start of a turn, but also at the end ofevents and similar. It will not interrupt an attack to end the game, and it will not check in between two events invoked by the same player action, but you should assume itcheck more frequently.The victory check process is simple: for each non-empty side (a side for which theattribute is not empty), Wesnoth will check its defeat condition according to the units currently on the map. Then, if any two non-defeated sides are enemies, the game will proceed. Also, in the case thatis, and there is a not-defeated human-controlled side, the game will proceed. Otherwise, the game will end., and in many very simple cases the engine now works better than before. However, if some scene in your campaign doeswork properly anymore because you were removing all the units, or expecting that they would not be removed from carryover when their side was defeated, we expect that you now have all the tools you need to make it work, by setting sides to be “defeated” before removing all their units, or toggling, etc.
User interface fixes »
Unit drag and drop for moving and attacking has been fixed (bug #21491 [Gna.org]).
Fixed resuming unit movement with ‘t’ (or a custom configured hotkey) after encountering units (bug #21372 [Gna.org]).
Fixed units not attacking if the attack was issued from more than one hex away (bug #21961 [Gna.org]).
Fixed clicking on units with scheduled multi-turn moves not unscheduling them (bug #21448 [Gna.org]). Several fixes for UI regressions introduced in past 1.11.x releases are included in this version:
[i]Son of the Black Eye[/i] balancing improvements » Some minor tweaks were applied to this campaign’s scenarios “The Desert of Death”, “Silent Forest”, and “Back Home”.
Known issues » The MP server has trouble with players of type Local in campaigns. It has been decided to postpone dealing with this. In the meantime, you might try assigning such sides to the host, or running multiple instances of Wesnoth (bug #21965 [Gna.org]).
Start-of-scenario saves from multiplayer campaigns are currently bugged and cannot be loaded. This also affects start-of-scenario saves from multiplayer scenarios that have progressed to other scenarios by means of [endlevel], even if they are not defined as MP campaigns (bug #22068 [Gna.org]).
New Contributors
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RC
You may be wondering why we skipped the announcement for versionand brandedas our fifth 1.12 beta in its stead. The truth is, we did plan to release 1.11.14 on May 12th, and even went as far as to tag it in our source code repository, as a few players and coders may have noticed. However, much like with version 1.11.3 and a few others before, some serious regressions were found by the release team shortly after tagging. In light of their impact on the game’s playability, we chose to wait some more time for our developers to fix them and save everyone the trouble of coping with issues of which we were already aware. It Is Ready When It Is Ready is our unofficial motto for a reason, after all!After amending those bugs and then a few more, we can now publicly announce our fourteenth development release in this series. 1.11.15 packs a generous number of bug fixes and improvements made since 1.11.13, and since a considerable share of them were committed following the failed 1.11.14 attempt, you could say this is a 50% discount release!Remember that, as it has been the case for all development versions since 1.11.10, ais in effect to facilitate testing, bug fixing, and translation efforts; although this beta does not include any new features for this reason, we stillto ensure the best possible quality for the upcomingstable release:Everyone willing to test this beta release should report any bugs they encounter, be they issues found during normal gameplay, or when working with WML or Lua for add-on content. Every properly-filed bug report is useful to us,Typos in the English text of the game should also be reported in the wiki so they can be amended as soon as possible.Here is a list of the most important changes since the last development release:As usual, there aremore changes in addition to the aforementioned, including translation updates and fixes for recent and long-standing issues. Most of these items are listed in the full changelog. There’s also an alternative players changelog including only those changes deemed to be relevant for regular players. Finally, an announcement including a list with the most notable changes between 1.10 and 1.12 will be made available along with the 1.12.0 release when it is ready.Do you want to help shape the future of Wesnoth? You are always free to join us in the IRC channel on irc.freenode.net to ask for help with getting started! Source code (389.9 MB) ( MD5 sum Xdelta from 1.11.13 (1.2 MB) ( About Xdelta The, andpackages are already available and can be found on the Download page in the wiki.All knownpackagers have been contacted, and binaries for your distribution may have already been created. Information about where to get the respective binaries or how to install them can be found on the Linux binaries page in the wiki.Downloads formay be found on the Download page in the wiki as they become available.The multiplayer server for 1.11.15 is up and running. This server can be used to play with other players running 1.11.15 and later 1.11.x and 1.12.x versions, unless a future bug fix requires raising the version requirements again.The add-ons server for 1.12.x is already running. It was started for 1.11.10 and it will serve all future beta andreleases from this series, as well as all releases in the stable 1.12.x series.If you find any bugs, do not hesitate to report them, but please read the instructions on how to report bugs first! As bug reports in the forums tend to be forgotten, you will get better results using our bug tracker. We require your help for finding and fixing issues, no matter how obvious, trivial or complicated they seem!Have fun!The Pride Centre of Edmonton is looking for funding from the public as the opening of its new centre, almost tripling its space, nears.
The new space, set to open in September, will be 4,600 square feet — 2,700 square feet larger than its current home in the same building, acting executive director Kristy Harcourt said Monday.
The centre has reached 80 per cent of its funding goal for construction, but is still looking for $30,000 by September to complete the renovation.
“We’re reaching out to the community to ask people to help us get to this next stage: to build a bigger, better pride centre so that we can continue to expand our offerings, reach a wider demographic who are asking for support,” Harcourt said.
The centre, which serves about 1,000 people a month in the LGBTQ community, has been on 105 Avenue just north of MacEwan University for seven years, Harcourt said.
The landlord approached the centre in 2016 and said it could have the vacant second-floor space with only a marginal increase in the monthly rent, Harcourt said, as long as it took responsibility for renovations.
The new space will offer programming throughout the year, and two or three groups will be able to use it at the same time.
It will also include two private counselling rooms, a kitchen, a boardroom which will also be a space for groups to conduct smudging, as well as a space for the library — the largest catalogue of LGBTQ books and resources in Western Canada.
Money raised will go to the big renovation costs of the larger space, including an elevator to make the second floor space accessible, as well as new flooring and stairs.
Donations to the campaign can be made online through CanadaHelps.
ducook@postmedia.com
twitter.com/dustin_cook3A nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court pronounced their verdict on Right to Privacy on Thursday.
The ruling has determined the equation between Indian citizens and the State in the digital era. The right to privacy also impacts the outcome of several cases where aspects of Aadhaar have been challenged, with petitioners arguing that making the scheme mandatory violates Right to Privacy.
The nine judges who pronounced the verdict are: Chief Justice of India JS Khehar, justices Jasti Chelameswar, SA Bobde, RK Agarwal, Rohinton Nariman, AM Sapre, DY Chandrachud, SK Kaul and S Abdul Nazeer.
According to PTI, a five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Khehar had said that the larger bench would examine the correctness of the two judgments delivered in the cases of Kharak Singh and MP Sharma which held that privacy was not a fundamental right.
While the Kharak Singh ruling was delivered by a six-judge bench in 1962, the MP Sharma verdict was reported in 1954 and delivered by an eight-judge Constitution Bench.
Here's a profile of the nine judges who determined the way we view privacy:
1) Chief Justice JS Khehar
The verdict comes just days before the chief justice's retirement. After the historic judgment on triple talaq on Tuesday, Khehar is heading the bench that will determine the tenets of the right to privacy.
Having studied LLB and LLM at Punjab University, Chandigarh, Justice Khehar was awarded the gold medal for securing first position in the university LLM examination.
He was elevated as Chief Justice of Uttarakhand High Court on 29 November, 2009 before being transferred as Chief Justice of Karnataka High Court and then being elevated as the judge of the Supreme Court on 13 September, 2011.
Some of the cases Khehar has heard: National Judicial Appointment Commission (NJAC), the 2G spectrum scam, 'equal pay for equal work' and the SEBI-Sahara case where he was part of the bench which sent Subrata Roy to jail.
2) Justice Jasti Chelameswar
According to Bloomberg Quint, Justice Chelameswar was the head of the bench which delivered the 11 August, 2015 order on Aadhaar referring it to a Constitution Bench. He is also part of the Constitution Bench which will hear the Aadhaar case.
He was the only voice of dissent in a bench which struck down the NJAC. The judge has, on different occasions, voiced his disagreements on the selection procedure for judges, most recently in the Justice Karnan contempt case. Chelameswar was also part of the bench which banned a controversial law which gave the police the power to arrest anyone for posting emails which "causes annoyance or inconvenience".
3) Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde
According to a report in The Times of India, Justice Bobde is known as being a no-nonsense jurist. In legal circles, he is said to be all ears for litigants' disputes and woes and when not in court, he has an ear for Rabindra Sangeet.
Bobde was a part of the three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, along with Chelameswar, and Chokkalingam Nagappan, which ratified an earlier order of the apex court and clarified that no citizen without an Aadhaar card can be deprived of basic services and government subsidies.
4) Justice Rohinton Nariman
Son of eminent lawyer Fali Nariman, Rohinton is a distinguished jurist. On Tuesday, Justice Nariman was part of the bench that delivered the landmark judgment against triple talaq (talaq-e-biddat) where he said, "Triple talaq is a disapproved form of divorce. Even the Hanafi law says triple talaq is sinful."
Not accepting the argument that Right to Privacy was elitist, both Justice Nariman along with Justice Chandrachud emphasised that Right to Privacy was as much sacrosanct to the poor as it was to the elite, IANS reported.
"Please don't forget the little man's Right to Privacy and don't make it Aadhaar-centric. Right to Privacy is a much wider right," Justice Nariman told the Attorney-General, while noting that even the World Bank said that other developing countries should replicate the Aadhaar scheme.
Nariman earlier joined Chelameswar in striking down the law giving the police the power to arrest anyone accused of posting emails or other electronic messages which "causes annoyance or inconvenience". The judges held Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which made such offenses punishable up to three years imprisonment, to be unconstitutional.
The judges had made the prominent statement: "What may be offensive to one may not be offensive to another. What may cause annoyance or inconvenience to one may not cause annoyance or inconvenience to another.”
Nariman also argued the cases for thespian Vijay Tendulkar and the controversial play Sakharam Binder which the senior advocate called the turning point of his life.
5) Justice DY Chandrachud
Appointed as a judge of the apex court in 2014, some of Justice Chandrachud's prominent rulings have been in the areas of constitutional law and the protection of human rights. Chandrachud has written down several articles on human rights and recently co-edited a book titled A Heritage of Judging - the Bombay High Court through One Hundred and Fifty Years on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the high court.
According to IANS, in the right to privacy case, Justice Chandrachud has said the State can undertake the direct transfer of cash, but the Fundamental Rights of the people can't be taken away. "Your argument that the Right to Privacy applies to the elite alone is wrong, it applies to the poor people as well," the bench told the Attorney-General.
Justice Chandrachud said, “The right to privacy can’t be defined by the court as its contours are amorphous. He asked the counsel, “Can this court define privacy? You can’t make a catalogue of what constitutes privacy. Privacy is so amorphous and includes everything from liberty, dignity, religion to free movement.”
Elaborating further, he said: “If we make any attempt to catalogue privacy, it will have disastrous consequences. Privacy is a sub-sect of liberty and not necessarily co-exists with data protection. Every fundamental right can be subject to reasonable restrictions under Article 19 (2) of the Constitution and the State is entitled to regulate the right”.
Citing examples, Justice Chandrachud said, “The right to make a decision will not come under privacy. If I decide to co-habit with my wife, the police can’t barge into my bedroom. That’s my privacy. Whether I send my children to school or not, is not a matter of privacy”.
6) Justice RK Agrawal
Justice Agarwal was the chief justice of the Madras High Court before becoming a part of the Supreme Court in 2014.
7) Justice AM Sapre
Justice Abhay Manohar Sapre was the first Chief Justice of the Manipur High Court and he has also served in the Gauhati High Court. A civil and constitutional lawyer, Sapre joined the apex court in 2014.
8) Justice S Abdul Nazeer
Justice S Abdul Nazeer is known as the third judge in the country to be directly elevated to the Supreme Court without becoming the chief justice of any court. Justice Nazeer, the youngest member of the bench for the right to privacy, was part of the Constitution Bench in the triple talaq case.
9) Justice SK Kaul
Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul has been a prominent voice in upholding the freedom of speech and expression. In 2008, he quashed the obscenity case against painter MF Husain and in 2016 against famous writer Perumal Murugan.
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With inputs from agencies
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE on Friday announced plans for a new National Service Reserve program designed to encourage volunteering among young Americans.
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"Studies have shown that millennials are particularly interested in volunteerism and are looking for ways to contribute to their communities," the campaign statement said.
"I believe one of the jobs of the president is to encourage more service. To help more Americans answer President Kennedy's call. You know it, 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,' " the Democratic presidential nominee said during a campaign event at Fort Pierce, Fla.According to the Clinton campaign, the National Service Reserve seeks to "allow young Americans to serve their communities and their country.""The Reserve will provide a vehicle for the sense of civic ownership and responsibility that Clinton has felt throughout her life, bringing Americans from all backgrounds together in common cause to make a difference where they live," the campaign added.Although the reserve targets the participation of millennials, it is designed to be open to anyone who wants to join.Higher-ranking leaders of the the Reserve will call on its members to assist in ongoing disaster relief efforts and public service projects across the country.Clinton hopes that the Reserve will enlist 5 million people, according to the campaign.The new project is part of her broader initiative to create a culture of public service as president.The former first lady also pledged to expand the AmeriCorps program, increase full-time public service and work with the Republicans to establish healthy relationships between businesses and service organizations.Clinton will seek to reward those who enlist in her National Service Reserve with an opportunity to earn special certifications and "modest stipend based on need."Apple executives are set to defend the company's tax practices and call for corporate tax reform on Capitol Hill Tuesday amid harsh criticism following a Senate investigation.
A report released Monday by Senators John McCain, R-Arizona, and Carl Levin, D-Michigan, charged that Apple "has used a complex web of offshore entities -- including three foreign subsidiaries the company claims are not tax resident in any nation -- to avoid paying billions of dollars in U.S. income taxes."
The report says Apple (AAPL) relies on a number of unusual accounting tactics along with a handful of subsidiaries in Ireland -- where it has negotiated a tax rate of less than 2% -- to reduce its tax bill. The U.S. corporate tax rate stands at 35%.
One Irish subsidiary -- Apple Operations International, or AOI -- has no employees or presence in Ireland, holding its board meetings and keeping its bank accounts in the U.S., the senators said. AOI reported $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, but its management structure allowed Apple to exploit a gap between U.S. and Irish law and avoid paying taxes in either country, the report claims.
Another Apple subsidiary in Ireland, Apple Sales International, had an effective 2011 tax rate of just five hundredths of one percent, the report says. Apple also ducked taxes on $44 billion in income by transferring the rights to its intellectual property though cost-sharing agreements with its subsidiaries, the senators alleged.
"A company that found remarkable success by harnessing American ingenuity and the opportunities afforded by the U.S. economy should not be shifting its profits overseas to avoid the payment of U.S. tax, purposefully depriving the American people of revenue," McCain said in a statement Monday. The senators did not weigh in on the legality of Apple's tactics.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will take questions from McCain, Levin and other members of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations at a hearing Tuesday morning alongside Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and Head of Tax Operations Phillip Bullock.
In testimony posted online ahead of Tuesday's hearing, Apple brushed off charges that it is gaming the U.S. tax system, saying it "pays an extraordinary amount in U.S. taxes" and "does not use tax gimmicks."
The company disputed the characterization of its subsidiaries as tax shelters, saying its Irish operations employ nearly 4,000 people and "are involved in manufacturing, distribution, technical support, sales support and finance support services."
"For cash management purposes, these subsidiaries distribute foreign, post-tax income as dividends within Apple's corporate structure," Apple said. "Under US tax law, these foreign intercompany payments are not taxable."
The cost-sharing agreement with its subsidiaries, Apple added, "is authorized by US law and complies with all US tax regulations."
"This agreement allows the Company to co-develop and share the risk of developing new products with its foreign subsidiaries," Apple said.
Tuesday's hearing comes amid criticism of American corporations over practices by which they lower their tax bills through legal means, holding cash overseas and funneling profits through subsidiaries in low-tax countries. Apple says this issue could be solved via new legislation, arguing that the U.S. tax system "has not kept pace with the advent of the digital age and the rapidly changing global economy."
The California-based company holds more than $102 billion offshore, allowing it to avoid the 35% tax it would pay upon returning the money to the U.S. The firm recently borrowed $17 billion to buy its own stock from shareholders rather than draw on its overseas cash, avoiding substantial U.S. taxes as a result.
In the testimony prepared for Tuesday's hearing, Apple said its foreign cash holdings are so high because the majority of its sales -- 61% last year -- come overseas. The company added that it's "likely the largest corporate income tax payer in the US," having paid $6 billion to the U.S. government in its previous fiscal year, and says it has "created or supported approximately 600,000 jobs for American workers," an estimate that includes 290,000 tied to its App Store.
Related: Apple -- What it's like to drown in cash
Apple employs nearly 50,000 people directly in the U.S. The firm said its mountain of overseas cash supports its expansion and capital investments.
"Current US corporate income tax law severely discourages the use of these funds in the US," the company said, noting its duty to protect pension funds and other shareholders.
Looking ahead, Apple called for "a dramatic simplification of the corporate tax system that is revenue neutral, eliminates all tax expenditures, lowers tax rates and implements a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that allows free movement of capital back to the US." The company said that while such reform could increase its tax burden, it "is not opposed to such a result if it occurs in the context of an overall improvement in efficiency, flexibility and competitiveness."
In September, the Senate subcommittee heard from Apple competitors Microsoft (MSFT) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), whom Levin called "case studies of how U.S. multinational corporations... exploit the weaknesses in tax and accounting rules and lax enforcement."
A subcommittee report at the time alleged that Microsoft had saved nearly $7 billion off its U.S. tax bill since 2009 by using loopholes to shift profits offshore. H-P, the report said, avoided paying taxes through a series of loans that shifted billions of dollars between two offshore subsidiaries.
McCain and Levin have called for corporate tax reform that prevents U.S. corporations from shifting profits offshore through accounting gimmicks.
Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt contributed reporting.Local pilot Eddie Andreini pictured with his airplanes at the Half Moon Bay airport in Moss Beach. (Photo11: Half Moon Bay Review)
A vintage civilian airplane crashed onto the tarmac at Travis Air Force Base in California while performing low-altitude aerial acrobatics during an air show Sunday, killing its pilot, officials said.
Air Force base officials identified the dead pilot as Eddie Andreini, 77, of Half Moon Bay, Calif.
He was performing an acrobatic aerial maneuver at the "Thunder over Solano'' Air Expo when his PT-17 Stearman biplane aircraft crashed at approximately 2:05 p.m.
The base posted online that an air show at the base "has been cancelled due to the aircraft crash of an aerial performer.''
Lynn Lunsford of the Federal Aviation Administration said the plane was a Stearman biplane. Lunsford says emergency responders said the pilot did not survive.
The 1944 plane was registered to the Eddie Andreini Air Shows, Inc., of Half Moon Bay, Calif.
The owner's website described the plane as a restored one-of-a-kind "Super Stearman" powered by a supercharged 450 hp Prall & Whitney radial engine.
It said the plane "has an inverted fuel and oil system, allowing it to perform unnatural maneuvers,'' and features "a unique two-place canopy designed and built by Eddie himself.'' It adds: "The modifications to this plane are too numerous to mention.''
His website said Andreini had flown 950 aerial performances since 1964. It said aerial acrobatics he performs in the plane include "double outside loops, triple snap rolls, square loops and torque rolls'' as well as "original high-energy maneuvers."
No one answered phone calls to Andreini's business headquarters Sunday evening.
Sgt. Rachel Martinez, a spokeswoman for the base, said no one on the ground was injured.
The National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash, Lunford said.
KTVU-TV reported that the biplane was flying upside down and close to the ground executing a maneuver when it crashed at the air base in Solano County.
The air base posted on its Facebook page that guests were instructed to exit the base following the crash. It requested that anyone attending who had photos or video of the crash to provide them to investigators.
Contributing: Associated Press
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1q4VRu1Say it ain't so Jon.
Our friend Jon Romano, press secretary for the inside-the-beltway PR campaign "Fix the Debt" and its pet youth group, The Can Kicks Back, have been caught writing op-eds for college students and placing the identical op-eds in papers across the country.
This is the latest slip-up in Fix the Debt's efforts to portray itself as representing America's youth. Previously, they were caught paying dancers to participate in a pro-austerity flash mob and paying Change.org to gather online petition signers for them.
The newspapers involved in the scam were not amused.
Gainesville Sun to Fix the Debt: "Lay Off the Astroturf and Outright Plagiarism"
The identical op-eds were discovered by a citizen with the Twitter handle "DeficitHacks" and flagged by Florida's Gainesville Sun. The paper's scathing editorial on the topic makes for an entertaining read.
If you liked University of Florida student Brandon Scott's column last Sunday about the national debt, you also should enjoy columns by Dartmouth College student Thomas Wang and University of Wisconsin student Jennifer Pavelec on the issue. After all, they're the same columns. The identical columns ran last weekend in newspapers in New Hampshire and Wisconsin. They each included the same first-person passage describing the student's work with the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its "millennial arm," The Can Kicks Back. After I was told last week about the column appearing under the byline of different writers in other publications, it was removed from The Sun's website. Staff with the Campaign to Fix the Debt, who sent out the columns, said they were templates that were supposed to be personalized or otherwise reworded. The campaign's vice president of communications, John Romano, said Scott -- an intern with the group -- was not at fault. "This was an inadvertent mistake and the campaign takes full responsibility for it," he said.
Ooopsie.
"The Sun's policy is not to publish astroturf pieces written by advocacy groups and only signed by supporters," writes the editorial page editor. "Advocacy groups and others should lay off the astroturf and outright plagiarism unless they want to discredit themselves and their causes."
The paper promptly pulled the op-ed, as has Wisconsin's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the New Hampshire Foster's Daily Democrat.
Fix the Debt "Chapters" Are State-Based PR Firms on Retainer
The papers who pulled the phony opinion pieces are to be applauded for standing up to this type of crass manipulation.
With polling consistently showing that 90 percent of Americans want to preserve and strengthen Social Security, Fix the Debt has its work cut out for it pretending to represent the grassroots.
The truth is Fix the Debt is the latest effort by Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson (who pledged a cool billion of his Blackstone Group fortune to the cause), to convince America that our deficit (which has been on a steep decline since peaking in 2009) is so out of control that it justified extreme budget cuts, including to Social Security and Medicare. Peterson gave $5 million to get Fix the Debt off the ground. Fix the Debt's members are a raft of Wall Street firms, like JP Morgan Chase who pitched in $500,000 and GE who contributed $1 million, and its "grassroots" are a series of politically-tied state-based PR firms on retainer who are required to line up a list of politicians and lobbyists, call them a "chapter," and work to make sure they get regular interviews in the local press. Here in Wisconsin, Fix the Debt's flack is Mark Graul, a Republican apparatchik best known for his false, racially-charged TV ad campaign against Judge Louis Butler in his 2008 race for Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Fix the Debt fails to tell students that its leaders, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, have a new budget plan that not only throws Grannie under the bus with cuts to Social Security and Medicare (which mean their kids and their grandkids will be working harder to support them in their old age), but also attacks college students by calling for higher interest rates on student loans and changing the law to allow those interest rates to kick in even before the student graduates from college (PDF, p. 30). Fix the Debt cries crocodile tears over the "generational inequities" of the federal budget, but fails to note that states spend billions on education.
While the nation hurtles to new budget deal deadlines in December and January that put Social Security and Medicare in danger, Fix the Debt is looking for a new press secretary to aid its effort to achieve a "Grand Bargain," along the lines of Simpson-Bowles -- budget cuts so steep they would cost America some four million jobs says the Economic Policy Institute. We can anticipate that the group will use some of its $40 million budget to ramp up its spin campaign on TV, in print ads, and radio.
Fortunately, more people are starting to catch on. The editorial board of the Georgetown Voice, the student newspaper of Georgetown University, urged student groups to do their homework before inviting groups to campus:
Given the lack of transparency in the structure and goals of Fix the Debt and, by proxy, The Can Kicks Back, it is of special importance that Georgetown student leadership take a closer and more critical look at the external groups they promote in the future. Had [student groups] done some research and looked past the glossy, misappropriated rhetoric and symbolism of the group they invited to the Hilltop, they would have found that Fix the Debt's agenda is undoubtedly anti-student and anti-poor, despite its claims to "promote generational equity."
Next time you see an op-ed from Fix the Debt or The Can Kicks Back (and there are many penned by Romano and his crew), give the editorial page editor a jingle and tell them that they have been hoodwinked by a reclusive billionaire named Pete Peterson and his Wall Street friends.
Learn more about Pete Peterson's chorus of calamity and decades long effort to gut Social Security and Medicare. Visit Pete Peterson on SourceWatch and our Nation package exposing Fix the Debt as an "astroturf supergroup." To hear Romano's side of the story, read "Conversations with Fix the Debt, Help Count the Pinocchios." This opinion piece was penned by Mary Bottari, no press secretary or Wall Street firm advised in its construction.The U.S. Navy shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle on Monday in a test of its Laser Weapon System (LAWS). This test was a positive step not only for combating air and missile threats but also for cost-effective weapons systems.
The laser, onboard the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf, uses advanced laser and sensor technologies to track, target, and hit threats from the air, such as enemy aircraft. The Navy hopes to advance this capability to the point where it can shoot down certain missile threats as well.
Many of LAWS’s potential benefits come not just from its capability but in cost savings. Since lasers require only an electricity source to use them, ships will not have to carry as many explosives and heavy munitions. Furthermore, as Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder stated:
Our conservative data tells us a shot of directed energy costs under $1. Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to fire a missile, and you can begin to see the merits of this capability.
Any savings the Navy can find will become increasingly important as defense budget constraints put increasing pressure on each of the armed services.
One of the purposes of sailing the Ponce to the Persian Gulf is to test LAWS in the region with Hamas, Iran, and other potential threats looking on. Iran’s continued pursuit of a nuclear weapon capability and Hamas’s attempts to strike Israel with cruise missiles illustrate that these are real threats. The Navy needs to continue to mature the program to the point that it deters adversaries from even considering firing on U.S. citizens or property.
One of the biggest threats to such ground-breaking technologies comes not from a U.S. adversary but the White House. The Obama Administration cancelled the Airborne Laser, Multiple Kill Vehicle, and Kinetic Energy Interceptor programs and proposed $1.6 billion in cuts to missile defense in fiscal year (FY) 2010 compared to the prior year’s budget estimate.
With the release of Obama’s FY 2014 budget request, Congress needs to make sure that programs such as LAWS are sufficiently funded. This should be a no-brainer, as they are economical as well as highly effective. States such as North Korea and Iran continue to develop their ballistic missile capabilities, and it is critical that the U.S. remain a step ahead of such threats.Emma Watson doesn't know who she is. A funny conundrum for an international acting icon, but quite understandable, too. The magic of Hollywood sometimes makes identities disappear. Especially for wizards.
The "Harry Potter" star, now 21 and on the precipice of leaving behind the epic series that launched her to fame, admits that she's very much like her character, the brainy, neurotic and loyal Hermoine. But shedding that role means getting to expand, spread her wings, find out what else she can be.
“Hermione is so close to who I am as a person that I’ve never really had to research a role,” Watson told Vogue Magazine for their new cover story. “I’m literally rediscovering what it means to be an actress.”
Not just an actress, but a person. She's now making decisions for herself, modeling and designing and picking new roles. And while she says that she was a pain in "Potter" studio Warner Bros. butts with her requests built to give her a chance to go to college, she's only now fully independent.
“I have had no control over my life,” she told the magazine. “I have lived in a complete bubble. They found me and picked me for the part. And now I’m desperately trying to find my way through it.”
That being said, she's not obstinant or difficult; in fact, becoming herself involves accepting what she's been.
"I was in denial," she told the Sunday Times Style Magazine last week about her brief retreat into the anonymity of college life. "I wanted to pretend I wasn't as famous as I was. I was trying to seek out normality, but I kind of have to accept who I am, the position I'm in and what happened."
Her next role, which she pursued immediately after reading the script, will be in Stephen Chbosky's "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." It's a role far from who she is, which allows her a chance to find out what else she can be as an actress. And a regular girl, with problems involving regular guys. Of course, she's got a wizard to help her cast those charm spells.
Co-star Daniel Radcliffe told Vogue that he and Watson are, “very much like brother and sister, and when one or the other of us was having a tricky moment in our lives, it was often that we would confide in each other. We would also help each other with relationship advice; particularly funny were the moments when we would help each other compose texts to the most recent flames in either of our lives (not too flirty, but not too subtle either!). It was certainly a case of the blind leading the blind, but it was extremely funny.”
As she goes forward, "blind" Emma Watson looks like she's finally got her eyes wide open.
For more, click over to Vogue.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
Floyd Mayweather is reportedly set for a sensational return to the ring - against Conor McGregor.
Mayweather, 39, is on the verge of agreeing a deal which will see him step out of retirement and into the richest fight in boxing history against UFC upstart McGregor.
Mayweather, who calls himself The Best Ever, was widely-recognised as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world before walking away from the sport last September.
And according to the Sun, he is now set to earn £100million for a Las Vegas mega-match with McGregor, known as Notorious, with just the purse agreement and paperwork to be signed before an announcement in the coming weeks.
(Image: Instagram/floydmayweather)
(Image: Getty Images)
A source reportedly revealed: “Floyd went mad after Conor said he would crush him and knock |
team underachieve? For me, the answer is a resounding no.This age is one of instantaneous, world-at-our-fingertips information, where we can simultaneously grab coffee, cash a check, load our newsfeeds, and drive our cars. Our age is one of options, our calling card: progress. We have even become innovators of our own health. We stay active, we read labels, we keep our bodies the way we keep our phones: updated, in as good a condition as we can.
As a result, there is a plethora of ways for us to keep in shape. We can customize our workouts the way we customize our running shoes. Yet so many options need not lead to exclusivity. In fact, the body responds best to a range of movement practices and cross training. I’m talking to you, the Yogi who shuns the weight room, and you, the martial arts enthusiast with a distaste for stretching. We can learn from the fitness practices of others, and incorporate a variety of strength, stamina, and sensibility training into our daily lives.
Let’s take our aforementioned friends as an example. There is a tendency to stereotype yogic practices at one end of the spectrum and martial arts practices such as Krav Maga, an Israeli hand-to-hand combat technique, at the other. On closer examination, however, the two forms originate from similar needs. Both strengthen the senses and teach participants to harness an inner availability and openness. Both forms require a finely tuned awareness of one’s body — in yoga through internalized sensations, and in Krav Maga through external encounters with an adversary. Each form requires strength yet emphasizes the importance of “this moment,” not the next one or the last, but the one at present. In yoga this functions as a way simply to be with yourself, whereas in Krav Maga this moment could literally mean the difference between disabling your opponent or not.
Many of us already understand the gist of yoga due to its recent and sweeping influence in America. Krav Maga is a practice less well known, yet just as influential to those familiar. The form originated as a training technique for the Israeli army. Born from street combat, an arena without law, Krav Maga teaches the art of disarming, be it an adversary with a weapon or any other advantage over you. Hebrew for “contact combat,” Krav Maga teaches self-defense paired with immediate offense. Quick responses and confident counter-attacks allow individuals to flip the tables on their attacker. The quality of one’s technique is proven by the efficiency of a single strike, not by brute strength. Even if an attacker may have certain advantages — a weapon, tremendous size, strength or physical ability — what Krav Maga provides to students is much more valuable and cannot be diminished. Featuring short yet highly precise, tactful strikes, the form centers on the most vulnerable parts of the body: eyes, throat, groin, and the illusive yet effectively paralyzing pressure points. The goal is to disarm and control completely, but not injure unnecessarily.
The training of one’s senses is often overlooked in favor of more overtly physical practices. By nature we are a rapid-fire culture; we seek out the most efficient options available to us. There is an art to balancing this drive for self-improvement with self-awareness. Krav Maga and yogic philosophies both teach this equanimity while refining the physical body. If you are unconvinced of the benefits of cross training in such practices, there’s always the classic celebrity endorsement: Ashton Kutcher, respected actor and obviously fit human being, has described his workout regime to include daily running, Bikram yoga, and Krav Maga.Watching former Trump aide Steve Bannon defend Roy Moore by mocking Mitt Romney tells you all you need to know about American conservatism in 2017: We reward bad behavior and punish decency. Say what you will about Romney, but he is an upstanding family man and all-around good human being. Bannon, Trump, and Moore, are… not.
There’s a chapter in Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom that explains “Why the worst get on top.” In it, the author warns that in a totalitarian regime, “the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful.”
Sound familiar? We are thankfully not in a totalitarian regime, but it’s hard to deny this dynamic is very much at play. In today’s conservatism, decent men are rejected, while the voters clamor: “Give us Barabbas!”
It was with this backdrop that Bannon, the Breitbart boss, took to the stage of a rally in Fairhope, Alabama, Tuesday night, wearing his patented barn coat and sounding like Hulk Hogan, circa 1986, with his frequent use of the word “brother.”
“Mitt, here’s how it is, brother: The college deferments, we can debate that— but you hid behind your religion,” Bannon said. “You went to France to be a missionary while guys were dying in rice paddies in Vietnam… You had five sons, not one day of service in Afghanistan and Iraq.... Where were the Romneys during those wars?"
(First, this proves Bannon has a short memory. Everyone knows the Romney kids serve their country by campaigning. I kid, I kid.)
In what world does re-litigating the matter of Mitt Romney’s sons and the military serve as a relevant guide for people casting votes in Alabama? There are many pertinent questions an Alabama voter might confront in the next week as they make their decisions. But would voters arrive at a different conclusion had Tagg Romney joined the Green Berets? How about the SEALs?
This is, of course, Bannon’s way of changing the subject from a losing one to a winning one. If the question voters have on their minds when they head to the polls next week is, “Do I trust Roy Moore or the women?”, then Roy Moore is in deep trouble. But if the question is, “Do I want to deal a blow to the GOP establishment?”, then Moore will win in a landslide. Thus, Bannon frames the election in those more favorable terms—using Romney as the foil.
In fairness, Romney did provide a pretext for Bannon’s comments by criticizing Moore on Twitter. “Roy Moore in the US Senate would be a stain on the GOP and on the nation. Leigh Corfman and other victims are courageous heroes. No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity,” he said.
Still, attacking Romney takes a lot of chutzpah for a man who is (a) defending a candidate who is credibly accused of sexually assaulting an underage girl. It also takes a lot of gall coming from a man who served a president who (b) received multiple deferments for bone spurs, (c) described avoiding STDs as his “own personal Vietnam,” and (d) who attacked John McCain for being a prisoner of war. (In fairness, it’s worth pointing out that Bannon served in the Navy for seven years.)
There’s also the issue of religion. Bannon sought to otherize Romney by invoking his Mormon faith. Calling someone a draft dodging chicken hawk is a pretty personal attack, but bringing his religion into it is another. This isn’t the first time religion has been an issue in this race, and it strikes me that this was a thinly veiled attempt to remind Alabama voters about Romney’s LDS religion.
In many ways, I see what is happening in Alabama has the continuation of the degradation of the party of Lincoln and Reagan. The parallels between Trump and Moore are pretty obvious. If Moore wins, as it appears he might, it will be further proof that this is Donald Trump’s party, and that good behavior is for suckers, while shamelessness will get you everywhere. Or, as Hayek might say, in today’s GOP, the worst get on top.So this is what happens when two old surf dudes get together. Richard Pollock, our favorite street-tracker builder, was a semi-pro surfer in his youth. Motocross was a way to pass time when the waves were flat, which led to a gig as a bike shop mechanic, which led to a 30-year career as an aerospace fabricator, which then led back to motorcycles, specifically Mule Motorcycles. To date, about 140 machines, almost all street-trackers, have left the refitted suburban San Diego two-car garage that serves as Mule’s build facility.
This British Racing Green Yamaha XS 650 is one of his latest, commissioned by another surfer, Fred Snyder, a northern Californian whose favorite spot for shooting curls is Moss Landing north of Monterey. Discreet MLAV lettering, for “Moss Landing Assault Vehicle,” just below the Mule logo on the Storz aluminum gas tank is an in-joke between Pollock and Snyder.
About the only items that remain from the original XS are the engine castings and the footpegs. Everything else had been replaced, rebuilt or thoroughly massaged, starting with the motor, which gets a big-bore 750 kit, hotter cam, large valves, porting and an electronic ignition from Powerdynamo in Czechoslovakia.
The smaller sparking system allowed Pollock to trim the alternator bulge on the primary cover and weld on a flatter aluminum piece for more of a race bike look.
All buttoned up, the rebuilt twin was slotted into a new chromoly-steel frame built to Pollock’s specs. The design does away with the bottom frame cradles. Wheels at both ends are Morris-lookalike 18-inchers originally fitted to 1970s Kawasakis.
Mule acquires these inexpensively on eBay, then sends them to Kosman Specialties to be widened so modern rubber—Bridgestone BT45s in this case – can be used.
Pollock’s uncanny ability to mix-n-match parts is evident on the front end, where his own billet triple-clamps house 45mm conventional forks taken from a Honda CBR900RR. Nissin calipers from the 900RR remain, putting the bite on rotors that consist on custom carriers and trimmed, thinned XS650 discs, the latter drilled with a series of holes to resemble TZ750 roadracing items.
A new Triumph Bonneville headlight bucket, tiny Acewell multi-function instrument pod, Woods Racing stainless-steel handlebars and Brembo front master cylinder complete the fork assembly.
The tail section is a Mule part, traditionally flat-track in shape but crafted out of carbon-fiber. Snyder, over the moon about all other aspects of the MLAV, has requested that the seat’s skimpy slab of foam padding be doubled in thickness. Hey, even old surfers can appreciate a little more comfort…Last fortnight, the environment ministry rejected a Western Ghats conservation report written by a panel of experts led by ecologist Madhav Gadgil. The National Green Tribunal, a specially constituted judicial body that focuses on environment conflicts, told the environment ministry that it had to decide between the Gadgil report and another report by a committee chaired by the space scientist K Kasturirangan. The environment ministry decided it would not use the Gadgil recommendations.Ecologists are protesting the decision, saying that the Gadgil plan offers more rigorous protection to the region. The Gadgil report says that all of the Western Ghats should be treated as ecologically sensitive, though divided into three zones, with different criteria for development in each zone. Gadgil’s panel is of the view that 90% of the ghats should be protected. The Kasturirangan report, on the other hand, says only 37% of the Ghats is ecologically sensitive.The Western Ghats are rich in biodiversity, with more than 500 known species of native plants and animals. The region is crucial to the survival of the iconic but endangered tiger and the Asian elephant. In the three years since the Gadgil panel submitted its report, researchers have found new species of frogs, lizards, fish and trees – many of which were already on the edge of existence when discovered. Here are some of the lesser-known but threatened and endangered species found in the narrow mountain forests today.The International Union for Conservation of Nature has put this mammal on its critically endangered list. This small dog-like grey feline, with large, dark spots was believed extinct in 1978 but was rediscovered a decade later. There are now only about 250 mature adults found in the Kerala ghats and protected regions of Karnataka.
Photo: Ganesh Subramaniam/Flickr
Categorised as "vulnerable" by the IUCN, this large pigeon is identified by a black-and-white checkerboard pattern on its nape. These birds were hunted for food and sport, which began their decline in the Nilgiri section of the Ghats. They are now threatened by habitat loss due to shifting cultivation and the timber industry.
Photo: Sagar/Flickr
The toad is found only in a relatively small patch of 10 square kilometers, in Amboli in Maharashtra. The toad is less than 1.5 inches in length, with a black-brown body and a yellow throat with black spots. It is critically endangered, though no conservation action has been undertaken.
Photo: Varad Giri
This lizard, marked with black and white bands on its body, is found not less than 1,000 meters from the intertidal zones of the coast, where it thrives in the high moisture and salinity. It hides under rocks in the coastal plains and feeds on insects. The white-banded lizard is currently vulnerable because of rampant stone quarrying and mining, which is driving it from its habitat.
Photo: Arundhati Das/Creative Commons
The bronze-headed vine snake is about two feet long and is found in the shola grasslands of the Nilgiris. The species was only discovered in 2011. The bronzeback is losing its grasslands to pine, eucalyptus and tea plantations and is endangered.
Photo: Ralph Britz/JOTT
The barb is one of the newest species of fish to be discovered and has been found in the rivers of Raigad and Ratnagiri in Maharashtra. The fish is bright yellow with iridescent scales. Scientists who published their discovery of the barb this June have recommended that the fish be added to the IUCN list of endangered species.
Photo: Lilly Margaret/Creative Commons
A bizzare-looking frog found widely in the Western Ghats, the frog spends most of the year underground and surfaces only to mate in the monsoon. The existence of this curious-looking amphibian is threatened by the loss of forests for coffee, cardamom and ginger plantations.Almost one fifth of racial hate crimes during 2016 were committed due to “anti-white bias,” according to FBI data.
The FBI released its annual report on hate crime data for 2016, revealing that 4,229 single-bias hate crime offenses were done on the basis of race.
Of the 4,229 offenses, 20.7 percent were carried out due to “anti-white bias” in 2016, the FBI noted. Anti white bias offenses also increased 19 percent from 2015 to 2016. Seven hundred and thirty four anti white bias offenses were committed in 2015, while 876 were committed in 2016, according to FBI data.
Hispanics saw the second highest increase (18 percent) in hate crime offenses from 2015 to 2015. Three hundred and seventy nine hate crimes were classified as anti-Hispanic/Latino in 2015,compared to the 449 that were committed in 2016.
“Anti-Black or African bias” still made up the overwhelming majority of cases of racial hate crime offenses in America. Over fifty percent of the hate crime offenses in 2016 were done out of anti-black bias, the FBI said in its report. Anti black bias offenses went down slightly from 2015 to 2016–2,125 in 2015 and 2,122 in 2016.
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Palestinian protesters have whitewashed a rainbow flag painted on six slabs of the West Bank separation barrier. Khaled Jarrar, the Palestinian painter of the piece, said his art was meant as a reminder of Israeli occupation, at a time when gay rights are in the news after the US allowed same-sex marriage.
But protesters perceived the painting as support for homosexuality, a taboo subject in Palestinian society where gay people are not tolerated. It ignited angry responses and activists whitewashed the flag on Monday night, just a few hours after it was painted on the best-known section of Israel’s graffiti-covered barrier, next to a portrait of Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian figures.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Repainted section of barrier in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Tuesday. Photograph: Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP
Jarrar, 39, who has exhibited his work in Europe and the US, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the destruction “reflects the absence of tolerance and freedoms in the Palestinian society”.
“People don’t accept different thinking in our society,” he said, adding he painted the rainbow flag on the barrier to put a spotlight on Palestinian issues.
Rainbow over Palestine Read more
Muhammad, who only gave his first name for fear of repercussions, said he helped whitewash the flag because “we cannot promote gay rights”.
Muhammad al-Amleh, a 46-year-old lawyer, approved of the action, saying “it would be shameful to have the flag of gays in our refugee camp”.
Gay Palestinians tend to be secretive about their social lives and some have crossed into Israel to live safely. There are no laws on the books in either the West Bank or the Gaza Strip that specifically ban homosexual acts.
Israel, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the world’s most gay-friendly travel destinations, in sharp contrast to the rest of the Middle East where gay people are often persecuted and even killed. Earlier this month, more than 100,000 people attended a gay pride parade in Tel Aviv.
Officially there is still no same-sex marriage in Israel, primarily because there is no civil marriage of any kind – all Jewish weddings must be conducted through the rabbinate, which considers homosexuality a sin and a violation of Jewish law. But the state recognises same-sex couples who marry abroad.
Same-sex relations are punishable by death in Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen.
• This article was amended on 13 August 2015 after AP issued this correction: “The Associated Press reported erroneously that homosexual acts are banned by law in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. While homosexuality is largely taboo in Palestinian society, there are no laws specifically banning homosexual acts.”Il progetto di riportare il Grande fiume a infrastruttura per il trasporto logistico ha il sapore di un sogno. Ma in un Paese che rischia infrazioni comunitarie per lo sforamento di polveri sottili e che fa viaggiare su gomma oltre il 90% dei tonnellaggi (e appena il 6% su rotaia) l’obiettivo di utilizzare il Po come idrovia è tutt'altro che scentrato e potrebbe diventare un’alternativa sostenibile non solo dal punto di vista ambientale ma anche economico. Si inserisce in questa cornice la notizia che i lavori a Piacenza nella nuova conca di Isola Serafini sono ormai quasi completati (al 77%) ed entro fine anno il fiume sarà navigabile dal capoluogo emiliano fino a Chioggia.
L’occasione per fare il punto sugli interventi per la navigazione del Po è stata la visita di ieri nelle terre ducali di Julian Espina, project officer della Commissione europea, che ha co-finanziato il 20% (9,3 milioni) dei 46,4 milioni di euro di investimento per potenziare lo snodo piacentino, nell’ambito del progetto «Iniwas. Miglioramento del sistema idroviario del Nord Italia», dopo che l’Ue ha inserito il Grande fiume e i suoi canali tra i dieci corridoi chiave della rete transeuropea dei trasporti 2014-2020.
«I cantieri di costruzione della conca di Isola Serafini sono il grosso di un progetto da oltre 56 milioni di euro che ci ha permesso di eliminare altri colli di bottiglia sull'idrovia padana: a Porto Levante nel Rodigino e lungo Canale Boicelli nel Ferrarese», precisa Ivano Galvani, che guida il settore Navigazione interna di Aipo, l’Agenzia interregionale per il fiume Po, ente strumentale delle quattro principali regioni del bacino fluviale (Piemonte, Lombardia, Emilia-Romagna e Veneto). E annuncia: «A fine anno il Po sarà navigabile da Piacenza a Chioggia secondo gli standard europei classe V, cioè da imbarcazioni lunghe 100 metri e larghe 11 capaci di portare 1.500 tonnellate di merci, l'equivalente di una cinquantina di tir».
Ma il fatto che il corso del fiume si avvicini sempre più ai requisiti europei di navigazione non basta per pensare di avvicinare l’Italia, con il suo 0,1% di merci trasportate via fiume, ai parametri medi europei (10%). «Mancano le infrastrutture portuali e manca ancor di più un’industria logistica che creda nell'investimento necessario per collegare operativamente Milano e il delta del Po via acqua», nota Galvani, ricordando che solo Cremona, Mantova, Boretto (Reggio Emilia) e Ferrara hanno banchine portuali e che oggi appena 300mila tonnellate di merci viaggiano sul fiume, quando erano un milione di tonnellate fino alla fine degli anni Novanta.
Eppure in una giornata merci ingombranti e non deperibili come sfarinati, inerti, fertilizzanti, potrebbero viaggiare “slow” (24 ore) e “low impact” dal porto di Chioggia alla Lombardia. «Si calcola che per mettere in funzione l'intera rete e renderla efficiente dal punto di vista logistico e industriale servirebbero 500-600 milioni di euro, una cifra non spropositata se manifattura, trasporti e istituzioni del Nord Italia ci credessero. Il punto è che non ci dobbiamo inventare nulla, questa strada su acqua già c’è», conclude il dirigente Aipo. Che invece fa i conti con poco più di 12 milioni di euro l'anno per la manutenzione e la gestione dei 700 chilometri del Grande fiume e relativi canali, in un bacino di circa 74mila kmq dove vivono 16 milioni di italiani.
© Riproduzione riservataI wrote a follow-up to this blog post on 4 October 2017. If of interest, link: Thoughts on the Saft Part II: SAFT Harder
This week in Initial Coin Offering (“ICO”) land brings us the first publicly-acknowledged SAFT offering, of Protocol Labs’ Filecoin. For those of you not familiar with the SAFT, or “Simple Agreement for Future Tokens,” this is an option agreement modelled after something called a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) used by Y Combinator to reduce the complexity of early-stage raises (say, $2 million-ish), staking out a position in a investment prospect’s cap table in a legally-binding way without going through the trouble of doing a full-bore Series A process of diligence, docs & raise. SAFT is the standard-form agreement used by CoinList, the new cryptocoin investing site co-founded by, among others, Filecoin’s Juan Benet and AngelList’s Naval Ravikant.
Before we begin/full disclosure, I’m an English lawyer and not US-qualified. However (a) nobody seems to be interested in s. 21 of FSMA 2000 this week and, (b) having done securities law in the UK, I have a healthy appreciation for rules around not selling securities in the USA.
With the above in mind, please read this blog post as a casual treatment of the subject by a curious third party observer; this is not legal advice and if you need legal advice, you need to hire a US-qualified securities lawyer. I know a few lawyers who are highly qualified to advise in this area in both the US and the UK. It should be my pleasure to refer you to them.
WTF does SAFT actually do?
As we all know, ICOs were slapped down in fairly dramatic fashion last week when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) published its comprehensive report on the “DAO” investment scheme. The SEC concluded that the DAO token sale was a sale of securities/investment contracts and subject to American securities laws, the implication being that those laws were broken since the DAO’s promoters neither filed a registration statement nor published a prospectus.
The SAFT, in theory, is a way that we can get America-compliant with our token sales. According to the media:
“what makes this offering especially compelling is the fact that [Protocol Labs] has found a way to run an initial coin offering (ICO) that [the company] suspects will satisfy Wall Street’s rule-makers, even though they haven’t really written rules for this sector yet. In part, because it isn’t so much offering its digital currency now, but a token that will convert to it later.”
The general rule about selling securities is that if you sell securities to the public, you need to register them with the SEC and publish a prospectus; registration is expensive, a huge time sink and an administrative pain in the ass. For many, it is best avoided.
The SAFT structure makes ICOs achievable, we are told, because a SAFT limits participation in the SAFT to “accredited investors” Under Rule 506(c) of Regulation D, in contradistinction to your garden-variety ICO which sells tokens to all and sundry. Do this and meet some other conditions, and you don’t have to register the securities with the Commission. You can raise your funds and avoid the expense and bother of regulation.
“What does this mean?” I hear you ask. Well, if we look elsewhere in Regulation D, “accredited investor” is defined as…
“any person who comes within any of the following categories, or who the issuer reasonably believes comes within any of the following categories, at the time of the sale of the securities to that person: (1) Any bank… any investment company… [etc.]; … (4) Any director, executive officer, or general partner of the issuer of the securities being offered or sold, or any director, executive officer, or general partner of a general partner of that issuer; (5) Any natural person whose individual net worth, or joint net worth with that person’s spouse, exceeds $1,000,000 [not including their primary residence]; (6) Any natural person who had an individual income in excess of $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with that person’s spouse in excess of $300,000 in each of those years and has a reasonable expectation of reaching the same income level in the current year; (7) Any trust, with total assets in excess of $5,000,000, not formed for the specific purpose of acquiring the securities offered, whose purchase is directed by a sophisticated person as described in § 230.506(b)(2)(ii); and (8) Any entity in which all of the equity owners are accredited investors.
In other words, this is not any Tom, Dick and Harry with a couple of Bitcoins sloshing around like you and me. These are folks with the ability to throw some money into a highly risky investment without worrying about making the rent next month.
This is the demographic to which CoinList and the SAFT are designed to cater. If you sell to them and to them only, you’re not selling to the public. There are other rules, like a requirement to produce financial statements. If you comply with these requirements, per Rule 506(c) of Regulation D, you can raise an unlimited amount of money selling securities to anyone if they’re accredited. You can even advertise your sale over the Interweb.
Startups are basically printing money with ICOs right now – over $1 billion raised this year alone. As Filecoin pre-sold $52 million, pre-product, from 150 different persons including prominent venture capital firms like USV and Sequoia (its main accredited investor sale has not even begun), it would appear the SAFT is capable of printing money as well.
Worked example
So let’s say I want to do an ICO for a new cryptocurrency. I use a SAFT and advertise the thing on CoinList. I sell coins to accredited investors only. At some point after that I will need to hash a genesis block and give the investors their coins.
Presumably, at some even later point, either one of my investors or I will want to sell some of those coins. When that happens, someone – not necessarily me, it could be anyone – could call up Kraken or Poloniex and start trading them from there. I’d trade into Bitcoin, move it over to Coinbase, cash out, pay my developers, fuel up my Lamborghini and keep developing my project.
Something people do every day.
No problem, right?
Not quite.
The answer to this question is a tiny bit more complicated and invokes a genuine piece of regulatory uncertainty.
The question here is whether a token issued pursuant to the terms of a security/investment contract (i.e. the SAFT) is itself also an investment contract. (Which, to this week’s SAFT offering’s credit, is briefly acknowledged in the PPM).
This question currently has no answer. If our hypothetical generic token isn’t a security, a lot of problems go away from a securities law perspective. But if it *is,* token issuance – SAFT or no SAFT – gets complicated, and fast.
There are two rules which are involved here. The first is Rule 230.502(d)(vii),which states
(d) Limitations on resale. Except as provided in §230.504(b)(1), securities acquired in a transaction under Regulation D shall have the status of securities acquired in a transaction under section 4(a)(2) of the Act and cannot be resold without registration under the Act or an exemption therefrom. [etc.]
And the second, to which the SEC made reference in its DAO paper as well, is Section 5 of the Securities Act, which states
Unless a registration statement is in effect as to a security, it shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly (1) to make any use of any means or instruments of transportation or communication in interstate commerce [note: including the Interweb] or of the mails to sell such security through the use or medium of any prospectus or otherwise [note: presumably this encompasses half-baked crypto whitepapers], or (2) to carry or cause to be carried through the mails or in interstate commerce, by any means or instruments of transportation, any such security for sale or for delivery after sale.
These are non-trivial continuing compliance obligations which are of fundamental relevance for cryptocurrencies – keeping in mind that a blockchain is traditionally the back-end of a fully automatic system designed to facilitate the instantaneous peer-to-peer transfer of digital property (meaning it’s likely to be classed as “interstate commerce”). Whether the rules bite depends on whether the SAFT is a vanilla investment contract wrapping itself around an unregulated token, or a vanilla investment contract wrapping itself around a more exotic investment contract. It’s important to know what the answer is up front because:
First, CoinList’s structuring decisions mean the SAFT contract is the critter that benefits from the Rule 506(c) exemption, not the tokens.
This means that, assuming the issuer complies with the requirements of Rule 506, the SEC can’t nail a company for issuing a SAFT – but the yet-to-be-created tokens remain fair game.
Second, the Rule 502(d) prohibition on re-sale without registration is likely the reason why token issuers see a need for the SAFT instead of just using the accredited investor exemption to sell the tokens directly to the VCs/investors in pre-sale allocations.
Tokens, if indeed they are investment contracts, are not typical investment contracts like stock or debt in that they do not represent a claim against the company, but rather they represent an ability to write to some data structure that the company has built (in common market practice). That’s it. When a company creates these tokens/coins, very often it issues a significant number of coins to itself which it then holds as a balance sheet asset with an acquisition cost of 0. Issuers then flog the extra coins they gave to themselves on public markets to finance their operations (i.e., they make public offerings).
Availing yourself of Rule 506 for the token would basically be tantamount to admitting that your token is an investment contract and thus can’t be publicly re-sold unless you register. You can’t really call a token one thing today to obtain the benefit of a safe harbor, and then reclassify it as something else tomorrow because you want to trade it.
Third, Rule 144 won’t fly either – at least not for the kind of trading that we see on today’s ICO market. Nobody is going to get a legal opinion every time they open their crypto wallet.
Fourth, the s. 5 prohibition on resale does not apply to transactions executed by persons who are not “issuers, underwriters or dealers.” Meaning it applies to issuers, underwriters, and dealers. Where tokens are found to be part of a public offering, projects (being issuers) will not be able to liquidate their own coins due to the operation of the prohibition (note: this legal rule more or less nukes USV’s Fat Protocol thesis from orbit).
As to underwriters/dealers, these definitions are broad, but suffice it to say they’re not commonly thought to encompass day traders. Query whether the crypto hedge funds or VCs who are investing in this stuff would qualify depending on the exact nature of their businesses and involvement in a given scheme.
Fifth, it is difficult to divorce the money and exchange component from “utility tokens,” as app-coins are sometimes called, particularly in the context of a speculative ICO where the token allocation is pre-sold to persons who could not possibly consume them all and are purchasing the coins with the expectation of profit on re-sale.
Sixth, under these circumstances, the safest way for a coin to demonstrate legality in the context of a mass-market public blockchain application, and to allow it to be traded for money or money’s worth with relatively little hassle, is to endeavor to register the coin and subsequently list it on a national securities exchange.
To my knowledge, nobody has yet attempted to register a coin ICO (although some folks have done securities issuances on a public chain).
Lastly, no matter how you slice it, you’re probably going to have to pay a huge amount of tax on income or capital gains from your tokens’ sale, which doesn’t happen when you raise traditional equity. (Tax law treats this stuff differently than securities law, I’m afraid.)
But hey, if you’re paying a lot of taxes you’re selling a lot of tokens, so who cares, right?
As to the exchanges themselves, the question of whether a token is or is not a security is relevant for the purposes of Section 5 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which states
It shall be unlawful for any broker, dealer, or exchange, directly or indirectly, to make use of the mails or any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce for the purpose of using any facility of an exchange within or subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to effect any transaction in a security, or to report any such transaction, unless such exchange (1) is registered as a national securities exchange under section 6 of this title, or (2) is exempted from such registration upon application by the exchange because, in the opinion of the Commission, by reason of the limited volume of transactions effected on such exchange, it is not practicable and not necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors to require such registration
So that’s interesting.
Is a post-SAFT token an investment contract?
We now know that a token seller answering this question incorrectly will find himself in a world of pain. So what’s the answer?
Unfortunately, the answer is “it depends” – on the facts surrounding a particular token, and on what a judge says the first time that a ICO sees the inside of a courtroom. Which has not yet happened.
For now, the SEC has left the door open somewhat by not opting for something hyper-aggressive and tantamount to a blanket ban, which leaves some room for plausible deniability among SV bigwigs and others when this bubble pops and the SHTF (if not in the eyes of the law, then at least for the sake of face-saving in two years’ time). Also, by not blanket-banning crypto-tokens they have left open a means by which a cryptocurrency can at least get through the first phase of its existence (funding protocol development) without falling foul of securities law along the way.
There are also some practical points to consider; I would expect global regulators’ attention to be focused on the more wild ICOs that pre-date the guidance, and ICOs which are quite transparently frauds (some ICOs are more honest than others). The frauds will have more victims, who will make more complaints. Those cases will therefore jump to the front of the queue.
If it turns out that garden-variety ICO tokens are not investment contracts, we really are dealing with a new paradigm and I will eat my hat on Bitcoin Uncensored. Good for the issuer and praise be to the prescience of their enlightened venture backers.
If however most of these tokens are investment contracts in the end, we know that due to the impact of the securities laws that registration is more or less the only thing we can do in order to operate a |
the expedition to Tabuk and some people reported whats others did not. All the reports agree, however, that the Messenger of God ordered his companions to prepare for the military expedition against the Byzantines. This was a season when people were hard pressed; the heat was oppressive and the country was passing throuhg a dry spell. At the time, fruit was ripe and shade was dearly sought. People love to stay where they have shade and fruit [trees], and find leaving them distasteful. The Messenger of God would seldom go out on a military expedition without alluding to a destination and announcing [publicly] that he meant [a place] other than that intended.
The Tabuk expedition was the exception, in that he explained [the particulars of the expedition openly] to the people. This was because of the long distance, the difficult season, and THE ENEMY’S NUMERICAL SUPERIORITY. He wanted the people to be fully prepared, so he ordered them to make ready and informed them that his objective was the Byzantines. They prepared themselves despite their dislike for that approach and what it entailed, as well as their respect for the Byzantines and their fighting ability. One day, while the Messenger of God was making preparations for this expedition, he said to Jadd b. Qays, brother of the Banu Salimah: ‘Would you like, O Jadd, to fight the Banu Asfar this year?’ He said: ‘O Messenger of God, please excuse me [from this] and do not tempt me. By God my folk know no better admirer of women than I. I fear that if I see the women of the Banu of Asfar I shall not be able to control myself.’ The Messenger of God turned away from him saying, ‘I excuse you.’ It was about al-Jadd that the following verse was revealed:
‘Among them is a man who says, ‘Grant me exemption [to stay at home] and tempt me not [into trial].’ Have they not already fallen into trial? Indeed hell encompasses the unbelievers.’ [‘Tempt me not’] meant that he feared temptation from the women of the Banu Asfar. But was it not [also] temptation that he had fallen into, by staying behind [while] the Messenger of God [went to battle]? By falling prey to human desires, he had fallen into a greater temptation. Indeed, hell is at his back. (Tabari vol. 9, page 47 – 48) [5]
This report on Jadd b. Qays mentions nothing about Muhammed going to war for the enslavement of “blonde women”.
Furthermore, towards the end of Tabari’s quote it says that Qays didn’t want to go because he may be tempted by the Banu Asfar women, and may lead him to sin. If as the critic claims that rape of these women were allowed, why would Qays say that he didn’t want to go, as it may lead him to touch women? Doesn’t this report show that rape was forbidden, for why would Qays not be willing to join the expedition if this heinous act was permissible?
The critic’s sole claim that Muhammed (p) went to this expedition to ‘enslave blonde women’, has no historical backing from the report.
5. Where is “Enslavement of the Blonde Women”?
As we have seen from the above evidences, the expedition of Tabuk was started as a result of Banu Asfar’s impending army. Let’s look at a further evidence when the Muslims got to the territory of Banu Asfar, what did the Muslims do to the enemy? Did their ‘blonde’ women get enslaved?
Historical Reports
Sahih al-Bukhari:
“We accompanied the Prophet in the Ghazwa of Tabuk and the king of ‘Aila presented a white mule and a cloak as a gift to the Prophet. And the Prophet wrote to him a peace treaty allowing him to keep authority over his country.” (Sahih al-Bukhari volume 4, Book 53, Hadith 387)
Kitab Futuh Al-Buldan:
“Tabuk make terms. When in the year 9 AH the Prophet marched to Tabuk in Syria for the invasion of those of the Greeks, Amilah, Lakhm, Judham and others whom he learnt had assembled against him, he met no resistance. So he spent a few days in Tabuk, whose inhabitants made terms with him agreeing to pay poll-tax.” (Kitab Futuh Al-Buldan volume 1, page 92) [10]
Al-Waqidi:
“In the name of Allah, The most Merciful, The Most Compassionate. This is a covenant of security from Allah and Muhammed, the Messenger of Allah, to Yuhanna Ibn Ru’ba and the people of Alya. Their ships and their journeys by land and sea shall be under the safe protection of God and Muhammed, as shall the people of Syria and Yemen and the coastal dwellers who accompany them. His assets shall not protect the perpetrator of a crime and it shall be lawful to confiscate his wealth.” (Kitab al-Maghazi, by al-Waqidi, volume 3, page 1031)
Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya:
“Then the Governor of Ayla came to the Messenger of God (SAAS) and presented to him a while mule. The Messenger of God (SAAS), presented him with a robe of honour and wrote a document for him giving them protection.” (Al-Sira an-Nabawiyya, volume 4, page 14)
With the Prophet (p) and his army’s arrival in Banu Asfar’s territory, we read that he made peace treaties with the tribes that had allegiance to them. These reports are very interesting! It thoroughly debunks the myth perpetuated by the critic that Prophet Muhammed (p) conquered, and sole purpose was to enslave ‘blonde women’.
We have to also remember that these tribes were guilty of siding with the Byzantine (Banu Asfar) in harming the Muslims, yet when the Prophet (p) had the opportunity to avenge them for what they did (i.e., siding with Byzantine in killing Muslims), he left them alone.
Furthermore, if the claim as the critic claims that the sole purpose of this expedition was for women as he quotes one commentary, why do our most authentic reports tell us the opposite of what he claims? Why is that none of the perverted assertions he made is not backed historically?
6. Conclusion:
The conclusion that can be drawn from all the above proofs is that the purpose of Tabuk expedition was to do with the Byzantine (Banu Asfar) preparing their people to attack the Muslim community. The claim that Muhammed (p) and his companions set out on the expedition to Tabuk to ‘enslave blonde women’, has no historical truth to the event.
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References:
[1] A narration reported by Abu Dharr tells us that:
“The Prophet (p) said: “Feed those of your captives who please you from what you eat and clothe them with what you clothe yourselves, but sell those who do not please you and DO NOT punish Allah’s creatures.” (Sunan Abu Dawud, Hadith 5142. Albani classified it as Sahih)
This report tells us if a captive-woman were to refuse to please her master, by making food or getting intimate, he was NOT allowed to force her. God orders Muslims to sell her and move away from her. The Prophet also recommended to set free captives. They were NOT to punish. From leaving each other, maybe the second person she goes to may have a better relationship. The idea about ‘raping’ captive-women is described by God to be “punishing Allah’s creatures”, which is the most heinous crime to do.
[2] Ibn Sa’d’s Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, Translated by S. Moinul Haq (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 2009) Volume 2, page 203-204
[3] The origins of the Islamic State, being a translation from the Arabic accompanied with annotations Geographic and historic notes of the Kitab Futuh Al-Buldan of al-Imam Abu’l Abbas Ahmad Ibn Jabir Al Baladhuri, By Phillip Khurti Hitti, PHD, [1916], volume 1, page 92
[4] Muhammad Rasulullah: The Apostle Of Mercy, [Translated by Mohiudin Ahmad, Academy of Islamic Research And Publications, Lucknow (India) – Series No. 126 – Edition English 2nd Lucknow, 1982]S. Abul Hasan Ali, page 349
[5] History of al-Tabari: The Last Years Of The Prophet – [Translated And Annotated By Ismail K. Poonawala, Suny – Series in Near Eastern Studies, University Of California, Los Angeles – State University of New York, 1990], volume 9, page 47 – 48
[6] The origins of the Islamic State, being a translation from the Arabic accompanied with annotations Geographic and historic notes of the Kitab Futuh Al-Buldan of al-Imam Abu’l Abbas Ahmad Ibn Jabir Al Baladhuri, By Phillip Khurti Hitti, PHD, [1916], volume 1, page 92
AdvertisementsMy Turn Fri Feb 8, 2013 6:54 PM
Tobacco advertising has been banned from television since 1971; however, this important blackout shockingly did not seem to apply to electronic cigarettes during this year’s Super Bowl.
We were stunned to see that twice during the nation’s largest televised sporting events, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix aired a commercial that touted the use of e-cigarettes. The close-ups of a male smoker’s fingers maneuvering the e-cigarette and the vapors — which appeared to be smoke — escaping from his mouth might as well have been a Marlboro cigarette: The similarities were cunning and the message dangerous.
As has become an annual post-Super Bowl practice of advertising experts, the American Lung Association in Arizona rated the e-cigarette commercial. Its verdict: a definite loser. It was as if Congress had never passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned the advertising of cigarettes on television as of January 1971.
Costs were not spared in the creation of this polished and professionally produced television commercial to deliver a misleading message to the public. Ironically, the commercial promoted this e-cigarette as the first with “a look, feel and flavor of the real thing.” We would say that it has a whole lot in common with real cigarettes.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has found e-cigarette cartridges labeled as nicotine-free often have traceable levels of nicotine.
That means a smoker using e-cigarettes hoping to slowly break his nicotine habit is really exacerbating his addiction to the drug.
To make matters worse, FDA tests have found detectable levels of carcinogens and toxic chemicals, including an ingredient used in antifreeze, in some e-cigarettes.
And, in further evidence that e-cigarette marketers will go to extremes to sell their products, e-cigarettes even are available in flavors that may appeal to impressionable children and teens, including chocolate, strawberry and mint.
E-cigarette companies sometimes say this product can help people stop smoking.
Going well beyond views and studies of the American Lung Association in Arizona, the World Health Organization knows of no evidentiary basis for the marketers’ claims that the electronic cigarette helps people quit smoking.
The American Lung Association in Arizona believes nicotine use, whether it is a regular cigarette or an e-cigarette, is still an addiction.
It has been proven that quitting is nearly impossible without the right combination of counseling support and access to services, including FDA-approved over-the-counter and prescribed medications.
Furthermore, overcoming an addiction is like any other chronic condition: best addressed with advice and intervention from a physician.
Doctors are best suited to provide advice because they are in tune with the health impacts of smoking and are on the cutting edge of treatment options, such as nicotine replacement therapies, medications and of resources like the Arizona Smokers’ Helpline, 1-800-55-66-222.
In 2011, the FDA announced that e-cigarettes would be regulated as tobacco products unless the products are marketed as therapeutic.
Certainly, the television commercial that ran during the Super Bowl was a far cry from a therapeutic message.
The American Lung Association in Arizona urges the FDA to move forward with further regulatory guidance to prevent continued television advertising for this dangerous product before more misguided, slick misinformation gets center stage. CBS and the Super Bowl should have known better.
Bill J. Pfeifer is president and CEO of the American Lung Association of the Southwest.OAKLAND — As Warriors guard Steph Curry settles into his seat, Klay Thompson’s dad can hardly wait to get the conversation rolling.
“How’s the chest?” Mychal Thompson asks Curry. “You feeling any pressure on it lately?”
Curry looks at him blankly.
“You know what that means?” Thompson continued. “It means that anything less than the Western Conference finals is going to be a disappointment.”
Thompson smiles. He understands expectations, having won two NBA titles with the Los Angeles Lakers. Sitting to his right is Steph’s dad, former sharp-shooter Dell Curry, who spent 16 seasons in the league and was the Sixth Man of the Year in 1993-94. To his left is his son Klay.
They are all here, at one sitting, for the first time. And for the better part of a half-hour last week, the Warriors’ heralded guards and their fathers work a a four-man weave, recounting tales of backyard H-O-R-S-E games, hard-earned lessons — and that time Robert Parish’s dunk was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s fault (allegedly).
The sons are the top single-season three-point tandem in NBA history, having connected on 483 threes last season. Both fathers are now broadcasters: Curry with the Charlotte Bobcats and Thompson for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Welcome to the scorers table.
Q: For the players, what’s the hardest your dads have ever been on you in terms of basketball?
Steph: My senior year in high school, my dad was an assistant coach. I can’t remember which game it was, but it was a long car ride home. I didn’t shoot enough. I was like a really unselfish player as a point guard. And in certain situations in the game, I could have been a little bit more aggressive trying to score and leading the team that way. I kind of shied away from that a little bit and he got into me.
Dell: That is a cardinal sin. (Laughter) I remember that. He was passing it to some kid. But I was like, ‘The guy is open for a reason. They want him to shoot, son.’
Klay: My dad’s been pretty mellow when it comes coaching me. … I only have one vivid memory of him getting mad at me. And that was on the air, actually. The first year we played the Lakers at Staples Center, I had made three or four of my first shots. As a shooter, you kind of have a heat check. So that fifth one I kind of pulled up for a transition 3. I think I airballed it. My friend sent me a sound bite from the radio where you hear my dad say, “Klay, what are you doing, man?!”
Q: For Dell and for Mychal, now that you’re broadcasters, how do handle it when your sons are on the court?
Mychal: For me, it’s easy. I always told Klay this, and his brothers: As long as you compete hard, I’ll never criticize you. That’s one thing I’ve always admired about Klay. He competes really hard. Steph. This whole team completes hard. They play hard. They show up every night. And as far as I’m concerned, as long as he does that I have no criticism of his game.
Dell: The way they played last year, there was nothing negative you could say about your play, especially when they played the Bobcats. My play-by-play guy, he does enough bragging for my son. He watched him grow up in Charlotte, so I just feed off him. It’s a little different. When I used to watch from home, I was watching Steph at all times. I found myself doing that in the first quarter. I caught myself on the air and thought, ‘Whoa, I have to watch out. I need to watch everybody here.’
Q: Do I have this right, Mychal? Do you call your son ‘Thompson’ on the air?
Mychal: No! I call him Klay. I wanted to call him ‘Klayboy’ but his mother wouldn’t let me. (Laughter)
Q: Do you (Steph and Klay) ever go back and listen to what your dads say about you during a broadcast?
Klay: Sometimes. I’ll Tivo the game when we play the Lakers. I like hearing him talk on the radio. I’m not going to lie: It’s pretty entertaining. He kind of brings a different personality than I see at home. His radio personality is pretty fun. He holds the Warriors high, but I always feel like we’re second place to the Lakers.
Mychal: Well, that’s true. Absolutely. My blood is purple and gold.
Klay: Yeah. Hopefully we can dethrone them this year.
Mychal: People in LA are always calling me up on the radio and asking about this situation: Score tied, 4 seconds to go, Klay is in the corner taking the shot against the Lakers. What do you want that shot to do? For me? I want him to miss. (Laughter) … Now, Dell, go on record: What do you say?
Dell: Oh, man. You can’t go against blood.
Klay: Thank you!
Steph: Blood is thicker than water.
Q: Mark Jackson famously said last year Klay and Steph are “the greatest shooting backcourt in the history of the game.” As two longtime veterans, what’s your reaction to that?
Dell: I’ve heard a lot of people try to come up with duos to dispute that, and I cannot do it. Obviously, you have backcourts that have won more and done more, but as far as shooting a basketball? I can’t think of anybody from my time.
Q: The closest?
Dell: Oh, gosh. I don’t know if you’ve ever had two guys. You’ve had one guy who carries the weight and then the next guy is OK. But not two guys who shoot as accurately as they do.
Mychal: They didn’t shoot as many 3s, but maybe Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars? But I agree with (Jackson). You know, I had thought that, but when Mark actually said it, I’m like, ‘Whoa! He put it out there!’ Mark had the nerve to actually challenge these two young men to live up to that lofty expectation. I was just too scared to say it.
Q: Mychal, you played on two Lakers championship teams and Dell played in 51 career playoff games. How will things be different now for this Warriors team now that the bar has been raised?
Mychal: It is a process for teams, as Dell knows. Young teams get together like the Warriors and you learn how to win. Last year, these guys learned how to win. And you could see the first series against Denver and against San Antonio they put themselves in position to win the series. It didn’t happen, but now Steph and Klay and the rest of the roster know what it takes to get to the next level and now you come into the seasons and not only are the fans expecting it and the media, hopefully the guys in the locker room are looking at each other and saying, ‘Boys, if we don’t get to the West Finals this year, something is wrong.”
Dell: That’s the thing. Once you get to the playoffs it’s a different beast than the regular season. You have to learn how to win and learn what it takes on a game-by-game basis. You’re so focused and locked in, It takes a lot more energy than the regular season. And now they have a little target on their chest, so to speak, because people know they’re a young team, a hungry team and a lot of teams are going to come in and try to make their season by beating them.
Q: For Steph and Klay, does it feel different? You can’t sneak up on teams now. You’ve got a target.
Klay: Yeah, I’m not going to lie. Especially, with the moves we made this summer … It feels a lot different, especially compared to last year when people weren’t expecting us to do anything. It’s a culture change for the Warriors and it’s a position we haven’t been in in a long time. So we’re excited.
Steph: On the same note, though, we have approached the season the same way with our preparation. Everybody is coming in early, like Klay was talking about. … There’s still a hunger. Nobody is really complacent around here. And that same kind of drive and focus going into training camp is still there. We have our eyes on bigger goals this year.
Q: Dell, you brought up the work ethic that it took for all of you guys to get the success that you’ve had. As players, what do you think you inherited from your dads and what do you think you worked to earn all on your own?
Klay: I would say the knowledge of the game I got from my dad. Growing up around him, and I’m sure Steph could testify to this, I had to kind of a step on the other kids. Just knowing how to read screens, how to run a pick-and-roll. Simple stuff like that. I would say I got my knowledge of the game from my dad, just being able to experience live games, being able to have NBA package and watch all of the NBA games. And just go out and do it. I would definitely say I got the knowledge of the game from my dad.
Steph: Basketball IQ is just being around it and enveloping yourself in it. And watching him, I don’t know if it was just being in that atmosphere and just seeing what he did and how he talked about the game off the court. You just kind of pick up stuff a lot quicker. And when you actually get on the court, you rely on those nuances of the game that you know. They kind of give you an edge. But also just having balance, on and off the court, with family. Now that I have my own family, and a daughter, how do put the time in to your job and your love of the game and also give your family the time that they need and deserve as well. He was a great influence in that aspect as well.
Q: How often do you guys talk during the NBA season?
Klay: Since this guy learned how to text, quite a lot. (Laughter) And that’s not a lie, either. He’ll just text me after each game saying great job rebounding or staying out of foul trouble, little stuff like that.
Mychal: Yeah, little stuff like that. In this day and age, with social media and the technology, you can just leave texts messages. You don’t have to talk as much, which I’m sure the kids really appreciate.
Klay and Steph: Mmm-hmm
Mychal: You don’t want to inundate them. Because they have coaches. You don’t want to be too overbearing as a parent. You have to give them some room.
Dell: That’s me. I don’t coach much anymore. They have the best in the game here and it’s their joto coach them. So you get too many people in your ear and it can be a not-too-good experience. So we talk about golf more than we do basketball.
Q: Steph, what’s it like having your brother, Seth, here? And you, too, Dell, You’ve now got two sons on the same roster.
Dell: Well, it’s a good opportunity for Seth. Coming off of injury, he wants to be in the NBA. They’re giving him a chance here. Now he has to go out an improve himself. … He can learn from guys who know how to play and do it the right way in a great organization. We’re blessed that he’s here.
Steph: It’s kind of a throwback to high school, when I played with him my senior year and his sophomore year. He seems like he’s playing well in pickup and things like that. It’s an opportunity for him to hopefully leave an impact on training camp and preseason and hopefully make the team and start his own career.
Q: For the players, what’s your favorite moment of your dad’s play, whether it was something you saw in person or maybe looked up on youtube?
Mychal: Remember, you were laughing at me a couple of months ago?
Klay: Yeah. This guy said he never got dunked on. We were watching ‘Hardwood Classics’ and Robert Parish dunks on him. Me and my brothers haven’t stopped giving him grief.
Mychal: It wasn’t my fault. I was trying to help out. I got caught and Robert Parish dunked. C’mon! I was taking about straight on.
Dell: It wasn’t his man.
Mychal: That’s right. I was guarding (Kevin) McHale. (Parish) was Kareem’s guy. It was Kareems’s fault. (Laughter)
Klay: I pulled out the tape against the Spurs when my dad had 40, and that was pretty impressive. He was hitting jumpers and his little ugly hook shot. It was effective though, very effective. It was quick. It was kind of like David Lee’s baseline hook.
Steph: Other than the uniforms and the flattop, which is always fun to watch on my dad’s highlights? Hmmm. The 1994 playoffs against Boston, in Charlotte, they had a last-second play drawn up and (my dad) was the in-bounder underneath the basket. They ran a play for Alonzo Mourning and he made the assist to Alonzo at the free-throw line for the game-winner and then was the first person on the dogpile. ‘Zo had his hands up celebrating the shot. That was one of my favorite memories of my dad being involved in basketball.
Q: What were your backyard games like?
Mychal: It was easy for me, Dell, because I could just back Klay or his brothers into the low post. With you being a guard, you couldn’t keep up with them little young quick boys outside. But I had the advantage of playing in the paint.
Dell: (Pats his belly) I had a little girth on them.
Mychal: What age were you when Steph and Seth started beating you?
Steph: I don’t even remember if we played 1-on-1 like that.
Dell: I’m not a 1-on-1 guy. We played H-O-R-S-E.
Steph: We just played H-O-R-S-E all the time. I probably got you once or twice in middle school, maybe. I don’t remember the first time. … I just remember the first time I beat you in golf. It was on your birthday and I was 13.
Dell: So around 13-14. That’s when kids start to beat their fathers. When you’re 11 or 12, they’re still so small you can block their shots. But then the boys start getting 13-14-15, they’re just too fast.
Q: A lot of kids are born with athletic talent. At what point did you realize your boys were going to put in the work it takes to be great?
Dell: I don’t know if there was an age.
Steph: We had that conversation, when was it, my seventh grade year? Eighth grade? I was trying to play four different sports and you tried to focus down on what I was going to invest my time into and what sport I truly loved to play, the one I would eat, sleep and breathe all the time. I was a big-time golfer. Loved baseball. Loved basketball. But that was the time when you sat me down and said, ‘You need to figure out which one you want to work on the most.”
Dell: We did AAU basketball and baseball in the same summer. That’s when I said, “Hey, you’re going to pick one and stick with it.”
Mychal: By the time Klay got to ninth grade, that’s when he decided to play basketball. And I always tell him he made a mistake when he did that because — and it hurts me to say this — but he was a heck of a baseball pitcher. Steph. You were probably a good pitcher, too.
Steph: I was a middle infielder and center fielder. I didn’t pitch.
Mychal: Man, Klay had a curveball that looked like Clayton Kershaw’s. And being a 6-foot-7 pitcher, too? (Laughter) But he’s doing all right I guess. He could have been a big time prospect but he gave it up for basketball.
Klay: I was too slow.
Q: To Dell and Mychal, what advice from your own dads did you pass down to this generation?
Mychal: I always tell Klay: Respect the game. Appreciate the game. This is a privilege to play in the NBA. Don’t take it for granted. I told this to Klay. I said, “Listen man, your worst day in basketball is going to be better than your best day when basketball is over.” Because when you have a hard time at practice, when you can’t make a shot, when you’re achy and the coach is yelling at you, someday you’re going to say, ‘Those were some good days.’ Even the bad days, I miss. So as we go along in this journey, as these young men start out in their careers, appreciate every day. Don’t take one day for granted. That’s what I always try to tell Klay and my other sons.
Dell: Same here. Like he said, it’s a privilege to play in the league. You’re so blessed and it’s special to be one of the 300 players or whatever it is in the league. Don’t take it for granted. And then, with basketball: It’s what you do but don’t let it be your life. You work hard. You want to win a title. You do everything you can to get there. But when it’s over, you still have to live your life. When I retired, I just stopped playing basketball. That’s the only thing in my life that changed. I’d like to see same thing for him.
Q: Mychal, you talked about being frank on the air and you’re fine if Klay is going to miss a shot against the Lakers. How do you handle it when these guys get criticism from others? When Steph was struggling with his ankle injury and fans started getting impatient, how do you deal with that as a father
Dell: I don’t, to be honest with you. I know what it’s like as a player. You have to block all that stuff out. As a parent, you have to do the same thing. You talk to him. You know how your son is feeling. You know he wants to play. So it doesn’t bother me.
Mychal: For me — and I don’t want to say this without sounding arrogant, Dell — but it would bother me more if it came from someone like Dell Curry or a Clyde Drexler. If a former peer who understands the game starts criticizing your son, whether it’s justifiable or not, that hurts more. But if it’s some pundit or some blogger says something, they don’t know. They haven’t played. It would hurt more if it was a respected guy like Dell. That hurts because those guys understand what it takes to play at this level. So when they do rip Klay or Steph, I just think, ‘Those people don’t know what they’re talking about.’
Q: To Steph and Klay, what advice are you going to pass on to your kids that you got from your dad?
Steph: Hmm … Really, it’s family first. When you have family, you have support system no matter what happens in life. Things will be all right. They supported me and anything I was interested in growing up. They allowed me to venture out and figure out what I wanted to do. They had good advice and a watchful eye, but I had some freedom to pick and choose what I was interested in and kind of go at it.
Klay: Yeah, just like what Steph said. I’m not going to force my kid to do basketball, or even any sport. Hopefully he does love sports because it’s a lot of fun. But if he wants to be an architect or artist or, shoot, movie director — it doesn’t matter to me.
Mychal: Or ‘she.’
Klay: Or ‘she.’ That’s right. Volleyball player. It doesn’t matter. As long as they do what they love and give it their all, that’s all I can ask for really. I can just try to teach them discipline and time management and all that good stuff. That’s all you can do.
Follow Daniel Brown on Twitter at twitter.com/mercbrownie.Sadly, I missed all the fun Tuesday at Arizona State University's Tempe campus, where demonstrators assembled to support two ASU instructors singled out by neo-Nazi groups: ASU English Professor Lee Bebout and Ph.D. candidate Robert Poe.
The ASU State Press reports that on March 3, demonstrators "protested outside ASU's Fulton Center... calling for ASU administration to defend their faculty members from the harassment of outside organizations, such as National Youth Front."
Protesters were countered by six or seven neo-Nazis and white supremacists of various allegiances, including Harry Hughes of the National Socialist Movement and John Hess of the National Youth Front.
Continue Reading
NSM member Harry Hughes's video of Tuesday's dueling demonstrations
In videos and photos taken at the event, Hess is the guy with the thick brown beard, carrying a megaphone and a black flag with a red NYF symbol on it.
Young Hess has come a long way from just a few weeks ago, when he was shielding his identity as an NYF member by wearing a hoodie in an NYF video as he passed out fliers on campus targeting Bebout as "anti-white."
See also: -National Youth Front's "John Hess" Cops to "Anti-White" Fliers Targeting ASU Professor -White Supremacists Target ASU Professor and His Family Over "Whiteness" Course
Since then, Hess has copped to fliering ASU's Tempe campus, but not Bebout's neighborhood in Tempe, which also was fliered.
Another video of Tuesday's events by local activist Flora Farago
Seen at the event wearing dark glasses and camo, Hughes currently is the best-known neo-Nazi in Sand Land, a onetime pal of suicidal baby-killin' white supremacist J.T. Ready.
Hughes wrote up the event for his blog "Just another day...", and posted a video, which I've re-posted above.
As I've discussed in previous blog posts, since Bebout's course "The Problem of Whiteness" became talk-show fodder for Fox News hosts, far-right extremists have deluged both Bebout and his mixed-race family with violent threats, fliered his neighborhood with handouts calling him "anti-white," and posted both pics of his family and his address on neo-Nazi websites.
More video of Tuesday's demos at ASU from local activist Flora Farago
A recent teach-in that Poe led in support of Bebout and his course resulted in Poe's also getting targeted by the neo-fascist National Youth Front.
ASU has sought to silence both Bebout and Poe from discussing the matter publicly, apparently in hopes that the controversy will dissolve.
At the demonstration, Poe stated that he had been disciplined by ASU for his activism.
The anarchist site Down and Drought, which is allied with Poe, details some of what it says ASU has done in an attempt to silence the doctoral candidate.
Also present on the "white pride" side of the fence were Gilbert's "John Maelstrom," with the Traditionalist Youth Network, and, interestingly, a fellow of Iranian descent named Ali Aliabadi, who has been featured on the Daily Stormer and has some unconventional ideas concerning the origins of Buddhism and Zen.
In a related development, a new anti-fascist blog has sprung up: "Problem of Whiteness 101," which offers intriguing insights into the leadership of the National Youth Front.
Well worth checking out, if you haven't already.
Got a tip for The Bastard? Send it to: Stephen Lemons.
Follow Valley Fever on Twitter at @ValleyFeverPHX. Follow Stephen Lemons on Twitter at @StephenLemons.The controversy surrounding Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s role in the 2008 Wall Street bailouts was ramped up Thursday with the revelation of emails that show the New York Federal Reserve — then run by Geithner — pressured insurance giant AIG to withhold information about payments the company made to its creditors.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) obtained emails between AIG employees showing that the company had planned to disclose in its filings to the SEC that it had paid 100 cents on the dollar to creditors like Goldman Sachs and other banks, but “the New York Fed crossed out the reference,” Bloomberg News reports.
AIG has received $183 billion in taxpayer relief. The news that the New York Fed attempted to keep from the public how that money was spent will likely increase political opposition to Geithner’s appointment as Treasury Secretary.
As Shahien Nasiripour notes at the Huffington Post, a report (PDF) last fall from the inspector general for the TARP bailout found that the New York Fed pressured AIG into paying creditors like Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia 100 cents on the dollar for failed insurance agreements known as credit default swaps, even though AIG was actively negotiating with those banks to pay them less. If AIG had had its way, it would have saved taxpayers money. But the Fed’s intervention ensured taxpayers would be on the hook for all of AIG’s bad debts.
The report therefore appeared to be definitive evidence that the Federal Reserve was far more concerned with the well-being of Wall Street than the well-being of the taxpayers bailing out Wall Street firms.
The emails obtained by Rep. Issa show that AIG was aware that the |
, concluding that this could render current treatment ineffective and put vaccines that are being worked on for its cure in danger. According to reports, the team of researchers, under the Broad Institute in Massachusetts and Harvard University, analyzed more than 99 Ebola virus genomes which were collected from 78 patients diagnosed with the disease in Sierra Leona in the first 24 days of the current outbreak. Dr Pardis Sabeti, a senior associate member at the Broad Institute and an associate professor at Harvard University, who was among leaders of the research, said “by making the data immediately available to the community, we hope to accelerate response efforts.Falcom Hopes To Develop PS3 Games With PhyreEngine, Discusses Market Changes
By Spencer. October 27, 2011. 4:00pm
In the first part of our interview with Toshihiro Kondo we talked about how Falcom approaches video game development and covered the series you know – The Legend of Heroes, Ys, and briefly Gurumin. This half discusses the company’s plans with Sony’s PhyreEngine and Kondo’s views on the industry.
Did you get a chance to use Sony’s PhyreEngine as a way to develop new IPs faster?
Toshihiro Kondo, President: Yes, we are working with the PhyreEngine. Being able to use that, it seems to be compatible with PlayStation Vita and PSP. Moving forward, we’ve already created an internal team to specialize working with PhyreEngine.
In the past, all of our projects have used their own original engine. It was not very efficient, but it allowed us to do things maybe we couldn’t have done per title if they were sharing the same engine.
This screenshot shows a demo game created with PhyreEngine 3.0, not a Falcom product.
Can you elaborate more on what things you could do with an individualized engine over using a common engine?
Once we moved to PSP a lot of the releases share a common engine. Our PC games we made earlier had different engines. The difference between the Ys engine and The Legend of Heroes engine is the Ys engine is centered around action. We had to program it with good collision detection and other elements for action oriented gameplay. Whereas The Legend of Heroes series, those games are focused more on event scenes and telling a story. The engine we created would let us put in small details, controlling the characters as they explore the world, and having the event scenes to move the story forward. That’s where different engines helped out.
At Falcom, our programmers tend to want to work with their own stuff. They don’t like working on middleware, which was developed other places. Moving forward, technology is getting to the point where we do need programs like the PhyreEngine to control 3D data and libraries. For graphic formats, if the libraries are off that could create problems. We have to get everyone here on board working with the same engine.
Falcom has grown a lot from the PC days and now you’re more of a console focused developer. When you look at Japan, what do you think is the greatest change in the market?
Twenty years ago, Falcom was only work on the PC platform and PC-Engine (TurboGrafx-16). The biggest difference now would be working on the consumer oriented platforms to release our titles.
Before we would license those out to Hudson or NEC to bring a PC game to a console. Now we can work on consoles directly and together with Xseed we have been able to work directly on bringing the console games outside of Japan.
Twenty years ago, games were very simple. One game could be played by pretty much anyone in the world. Games now have gotten so complicated you have to be aware of the differences in each territory in terms of gamer’s preferences and cultural issues since there is more text and story in games these days. In addition, the install base for consoles is different depending on what territory you’re in too. That’s another way gamers are segregated. That’s probably the biggest difference. Before you had one pool of gamers you could sell one single game too. Now, each territory has their own cultural influences and system preferences.
And now, that you’re starting to have a growing presence in the West how are you going to handle all of these different groups?
When it comes to the style of our games, I’m often asked what are you going to do about selling your games in America or appealing to Europe. Other Japanese publishers have been saying they’ve been trying to keep the American and European markets in mind when creating new games to try and build a worldwide appeal. Ideally, that would be nice to have a style or an initial concept that matches American or European tastes. However, all of our experiences are based in Japan, so that is hard for us to do. Even if we made a game trying to cater to what we think are American tastes we don’t think the game will turn out very well because we are not in America.
The best we can do is make the games we know we can make and we know the users like such as The Legends of Heroes series. From there try to expand that by partnering with an overseas publisher like Xseed and finding like minded people. Ghostlight will release The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky in Europe. That is a game where we didn’t look to European tastes or American tastes, but hopefully there will be a group of Europeans who will appreciate it for what it is. With the small number of programmers we have here, it would be difficult to make a game for say Xbox. We are going to concentrate on what we feel are our core strengths and get gamers around us, sort of starting off as a small snowball and rolling to make it bigger and bigger.
Before you mentioned licensing your titles to NEC. Do you think one day you would license out your IP to a Western developer, perhaps to Xseed who can make a Western oriented title?
[Laughs.] If Xseed is willing to do that it would be interesting. I’d like to see how that would turnout. Perhaps, it’s something we can discuss together.
Acquire’s Twitter feed said you met with the company’s president and Nippon Ichi, so what can you tell us about your meeting?
I don’t think he was tweeting about any firm details. It was about Nippon Ichi, Acquire, and Falcom who have strong PlayStation presence. It was him gathering us to say it would be nice if we could work together in the future given our ties to the PlayStation brand.
Thanks to that tweet from the Acquire president, the chance of a Falcom character making it into a Nippon Ichi game increased greatly.
Like Classic Dungeon x2?
Yes, as you mentioned, and perhaps in the future we can work on something in the future.
Falcom has committed to supporting handhelds like PSP and soon PlayStation Vita. However, in the West because public transportation isn’t as well developed we drive and play games on the couch at home on big screen TVs. Are you concerned that supporting handhelds while they are popular in Japan may make it difficult for you to expand in the West?
The easiest would be to release games for PS3 and 360 so American gamers can play it on their big screens. The Vita is pretty close to HD screen quality. Especially, with Sony’s PhyreEngine where games can be developed for Vita and PlayStation 3 we are hopeful we can develop games for Vita and PS3 together or have Vita games running on HD screens. We’re still looking through the engine and all the possibilities.
Even in Japan, we hear from fans they would like to see games such as The Legend of the Heroes on the big screen.
We touched on it earlier, but do you something you would like to say to all of the fans in North America waiting for The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter?
As you know, [The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky] SC is on two UMDs. With the retail UMD market the way it is in America and Europe, it would be very difficult to release it as a packaged product. Because the game has two UMDs, making it a downloadable title for PlayStation Network takes a lot of programming effort on our side to make it one file so it is compatible with the PlayStation Store.
The Trails in the Sky series, even in Japan is still shipping thousands of units a month. We’re getting thousands of new fans a month for the series as it continues to grow. At some point in the future, we would like to expand on the series by bringing it to other platforms. The best I can say right now is please be patient. We would like to bring the rest of the games over to the West. If all of the fans can keep bugging Xseed they will keep bugging us and perhaps we can work out a solution together in the future.
Special thanks to Endless History who sent us some questions for our Falcom interview. Did you know she runs a Falcom fansite?Testimony got under way today in the Dallas County trial of a former priest accused of engaging in a murder-for-hire plot to kill a man who accused the priest of molesting him as a boy.
Prosecutors allege that John Fiala was distraught over indictments that accused him of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old boy in his rural West Texas parish when he asked a neighbor to kill his accuser.
Fiala faces a charge of solicitation of capital murder, which is punishable by up to life in prison. He's also been indicted on four charges of sexual assault in Edwards County.
The neighbor, Scottie Fisher, testified that Fiala told him about his legal troubles in November 2010 when they were renting rooms at a house in Garland. Fisher said that Fiala was crying and that he tried to comfort the man he had known just three weeks by patting him on the back.
"Can you go out and kill him?” Fisher testified that Fiala asked.
“I said ‘Hell no.’”
Fisher said Fiala told him “he deserves to die” and said Fiala was serious. “He said if he was dead all of this would be OK. …He said he wanted him dead before Thanksgiving.”
Fisher then told Fiala that his brother might do it and promised to call him. Fisher instead called an attorney whose name he had seen in Fiala's legal paperwork. That attorney called authorities, who contacted Fisher.
Fisher testified that he cooperated with authorities because he believes Fiala belongs behind bars.
“He’s a monster,” Fisher testified.
A member of the Texas Department of Public Safety’s gang unit posed as Fiala’s brother and arranged to kill Fiala’s accuser, who is not being named because The Dallas Morning News does not typically name possible victims of sex crimes.
Prosecutors Hector Garza and Brandon Birmingham told jurors in opening arguments that the meeting left no doubt about what Fiala wanted.
“I want him dead,” Garza told jurors that Fiala told the man he believed was a hitman. Fiala said he didn’t care how it happened, according to Garza: “Chop off his head or shoot him. I don’t care.”
Fiala’s attorney, Rex Gunter, told jurors in opening arguments that the plot was Fisher’s idea and that he set the plan in motion. He said Fiala was never serious about carrying it out.
“In reality this was your plan, wasn’t it?” Gunter said while questioning Fisher.
“No,” Fisher responded.
Gunter asked Fisher whether he told Fiala “you need to have this boy killed?”
“No,” Fisher responded.
Gunter asked if Fisher’s mental state caused him to be confused or perhaps not understand because Fisher is a paranoid schizophrenic. Fisher said no because he has taken his medication regularly for at least four years.
According to a lawsuit filed by the accuser, who is now 20, Fiala repeatedly sexually assaulted the boy in 2007 and 2008. The lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Antonio and the archbishop at the time, alleged Fiala twice forced the boy to have sex at gunpoint when Fiala was at the Sacred Heart of Mary Parish in Rocksprings.
Fiala’s accuser testified for mere minutes today. He confirmed that he is the complainant in the sexual assault cases and not much else. He was not questioned by the defense.
The San Antonio Express-News has reported that Fiala amassed a troubling ministry record that stretched back two decades. Fiala’s record included parents telling Fiala to stay away from their sons and a psychologist saying he was narcissistic, naïve and displayed potentially harmful sexuality.Majority of Australians want to get rid of the carbon tax. (Only 1 in 3 want to keep it).
The latest Newspoll results say that Australian voters want Clive Palmer to stop blocking the repeal of the carbon tax.
[The Australian] A Newspoll conducted exclusively for The Australian after last Thursday’s chaos in the Senate saw the repeal bills rejected, reveals 53 per cent want the controversial tax to be abolished. Only 35 per cent want the Palmer United Party to continue to block the removal of the tax, while 12 per cent are uncommitted.
So one third of Australia wants us to keep the carbon tax (they can always pay it voluntarily thinks Jo?)
Keeping the carbon tax is costing Australians $11 million dollars a day. There is a deadline. It’s Friday:
The electricity industry incurs $11 million a day in carbon tax charges and market-traded contracts have not been trading carbon since July 1. But a carbon price of $25.40 a tonne will be returned to the contracts if the repeal fails to pass the Senate by Friday. Mr O’Reilly said failure to achieve the repeal by Friday would complicate returning savings to customers by “an exponential amount’’.
Even 33% of Labor voters want the tax gone.
A majority of Australians aged over 35 want the carbon tax axed, with support at 58 per cent among those over 50 and at 52 per cent in the 35-49 age group.
Among voters aged 18 to 34 the numbers are closer, with 46 per cent backing the removal of the tax and 38 per cent wanting to keep it.
And what of the fracas last week when everyone thought the tax was going – only to find last minute amendments made it unworkable:
Mr Hunt said the government had supported the Palmer United Party’s final amendment last week and the PUP senators needed to explain why they voted against the repeal. “The final version which had been ticked off by the clerk, or the umpire, of the Senate was constitutional, was about to be moved by the Palmer senators and they walked out on their own amendment and never presented that constitutional version.”
According to The Australian, PUP senator, Jaqui Lambie thought an agreement had been reached now and the repeal should be passed.
The Australian
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please wait... Rating: 8.9/10 (64 votes cast)I think TypeScript is the most important thing to happen to Javascript yet. All of the frontend of DripStat is written in TypeScript. So a good cross platform TypeScript IDE is important to me.
I have previously written about how weak WebStorm is, especially given the high quality of the rest of Jetbrains’ products. However, I have waited for a long while to write this for a couple reasons:
TypeScript wasn’t at 1.0 yet WebStorm 8 was right around the corner.
Now that TypeScript is at 1.0.1 and WebStorm has released 2 revisions (at version 8.0.2 now), I think its high time we see how good WebStorm’s support for TypeScript really is.
1. Refactoring that screws up your code
This is the worst for me because in this case using the feature of your IDE actually results in your code being incorrect. Its one thing to not have features/buggy features in your product, but another to fuck up your user’s code. The fact that Jetbrains has not bothered to fix it doesn’t give me hope that they care about TypeScript. Some examples:
Extract method
Extracting a method always creates an incorrect function definition. It creates a javascript function instead of a TypeScript function This is 100% reproducible.
Inline
This quite literally does nothing …
Change Signature
This puts a weird internal text next to your function, which obviously is incorrect code.
All these refactoring bugs are 100% reproducible and of course these are just a few examples. If Jetbrains doesn’t want to support these refactorings, it should just remove them from the available options. There is no excuse for screwing up people’s code.
2. Code completion cant even detect globals
A global variable declared in a file, when referenced in another file is not available in the code completion list
3. No auto referencing
Both Visual Studio and Eclipse TypeScript plugins will detect the typescript files in a project and automatically make the symbols of each file available in other, regardless of whether its manually referenced or not. This is needed because while you may have the code split across files, during the build stage you may end up concatenating those files, thus not needing to manually reference each file.
Webstorm however will just mark your file full of errors if you don’t include all the files that are referenced in each file.
4. No Syntax coloring option
Yes, you read that correct. There is no way to change the highlighting of your TypeScript code!
My Webstorm highlights class names with red. Red is also what Webstorm uses to highlight incorrect symbol names in your code.
Thus scrolling through code I now have no idea whether the red I see is correct code or not.
Related bug
Its only about 17 months old…
http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-2073
5. Editor wont recognize method overloads
The editor does not understand method overloads.
As you can see in the image, the method separator line is shown for each of the oveloads (it should just one for the entire constructor, including overloads). This means when you tell Webstorm to format your code, there will be extra newlines between the overload definitions, thus screwing up your formatting.
6. Slooow compilation
In Visual Studio, I just save the typescript file and the corresponding javascript is generated instantly. There is no build progress indicator and its not needed either. Its so fast it could probably show the generated Javascript as I type.
WebStorm is a different story however. The same file when saved will show a progress indicator at the bottom for many seconds showing the file being compiled.
Maybe its because they use the awful File Watchers, instead of a more integrated system. But either way, the end user experience and speed of development is highly impacted due to the slow build time.
Conclusion
WebStorm’s support for TypeScript is close to non-existent. Heck, you cant even change the syntax highlighting! While TypeScript is designed to make Javascript be useful inside an IDE, WebStorm’s highly buggy support makes you not want to trust it for anything. This is specially true after you have seen it screwing up your code after refactoring.
Bottom line, if you are using TypeScript, don’t use WebStorm. Eclipse remains the only usable multi-platform TypeScript IDE.The group of military veterans that runs the naval museum wants to restore the sub as an attraction but sees no help on the horizon. They have no money to even replace the gangplank on the Ling, the only remaining high-speed submarine from World War II.
No one else seems to consider the Ling their responsibility — not the Navy or any governmental entity, and certainly not the Borg family.
“It’s not on our property — it’s in the river and we don’t own the river,” said Malcolm A. Borg, 79, former chairman of The Record whose father, Donald G. Borg, helped obtain the sub when he was editor and publisher.
“He thought it would be a wonderful attraction,” Malcolm Borg said of the now-languishing vessel.
“Its tragic — it’s rusting through in a number of places,” he said. “It would take a lot of permits to get that boat out of there. It’s stuck in the mud.”
Les Altschuler, vice president of the Submarine Memorial Association, which runs the New Jersey Naval Museum, said his group was still active and controlled the vessel but had neither the money nor the ability to move the Ling, especially since the museum had to close, curtailing revenue from admission fees and small donations.
“We tried a GoFundMe and barely got $25,” he said of the fund-raising website. “Nobody cares about it.”
Mr. Altschuler, who said he trained on the Ling in the early 1960s while in the Navy, said it needed at least 17 feet of water to be moved. These days, people could traipse through the muck to the vessel at low tide. Mr. Altschuler said that the vessel was still buoyant but that he had been told by government officials that there was scant chance of the river being dredged again.By: as Dawn sees it
Gulag Bound
In a speech in Prague (2009) in which Obama had stated “The United States has a moral responsibility to act,” a set of goals were laid out, to be achieved in 4 years. Let us first take a look at the stated goals:
First, the United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons. To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same. Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies…. But we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal. To reduce our warheads and stockpiles, we will negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians this year…. And this will set the stage for further cuts, and we will seek to include all nuclear weapons states in this endeavor. To achieve a global ban on nuclear testing, my administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. [T]o cut off the building blocks needed for a bomb, the United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons. [T]ogether we will strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a basis for cooperation. Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon. My administration will seek engagement with Iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect. We believe in dialogue. But in that dialogue we will present a clear choice. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed. [F]inally, we must ensure that terrorists never acquire a nuclear weapon. [T]oday I am announcing a new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years. Arms Control Association, “Obama’s Arms Control Goals”
Fast forward to 2013. After all, he has more flexibility now. With a new national security team in place, a willingness to appease Russia (see Reagan speech below article) at the expense of our own national security, everything is a go to proceed forward with the planned New START Treaty II with Russia.
They might try this with a legally binding agreement, which will likely fail as it has to have 2/3 votes in the Senate. So it it will probably be done with an “informal understanding” with Russia. Makes a person wonder how many “informal understandings” we have with other countries.
Here is a portion of what the New START Treaty entails:
The New START treaty limits each side to deploying no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons by 2018, but uses a counting rule that pretends strategic bombers carry only a single warhead, instead of up to 20. So the actual arsenals after the treaty takes effect are likely to be closer to 1,900, a number that Obama’s advisers now think is too high. New START also imposes no limits on nuclear weapons in each country that are held in storage or considered of “tactical” or short-range use — a number estimated by independent experts as roughly 2,700 in the United States and 2,680 in Russia. Under the new deal envisioned by the administration, Russia and the United States would agree not only to cut deployed warhead levels below 1,550 to around 1,000 to 1,100 but also — for the first time — begin to constrain the size of these additional categories. Several officials said that as a result, the total number of nuclear warheads could shrink to less than 3,500 and perhaps as low as 2,500, or a bit more than half the present U.S. arsenal, without harming security or requiring a major reconfiguration of existing missiles or bombers. The Center for Public Integrity, “Obama administration embraces major new nuclear weapons cut”
Its also worthy to note that our new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was coauthor to “Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission Report,” promoting “a world without nuclear weapons.”
The Russian Iranian Alliance
Here are some key points from Amir Taheri an Iranian dissident, and former editor and chief of an Iranian newspaper:
In Iranian political folklore, Russia has long been depicted as a bear whose embrace, even if friendly, could smother you. The dynamic persisted despite multiple changes of regime in both nations. Even after the fall of the shah and of the USSR, the Iranian tradition of keeping the Russian bear at arm’s length continued under the Khomeinist regime.
The deal that has been struck is the START Treaty which lowers our defenses and is what Russia has been waiting for. And Obama seems to be “the one” they have been waiting for. In his quest to “prove” to Russia that we will appease them, they are using that as leverage to strike a deal with Iran.
And both Moscow and Tehran regard what they see as an US strategic retreat under President Obama as an opportunity. They think that, with the United States out, no other power has the capacity to check their regional ambitions.
The Strategic Partnership
‘A strategic partnership”: So Iran and Russia describe the series of security, economic and cultural agreements they’ve signed together in the past few weeks. Iran’s Foreign Minister Ai-Akbar Salehi arrived in Moscow this week to co-chair the first annual session of the “partnership” with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. Days earlier, a group of officers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard arrived in the Russian capital for a crash course in crowd control and civil unrest. They’re expected to return to Iran by May and be “operational” in time for the June presidential election. Iranian authorities are nervous about expected unrest during the elections, and so have called on Russia to help prevent an Iranian version of the “Arab Spring.” But Russia made its support conditional on signing a security treaty with Iran; Tehran complied last month. New York Post, “Why Iran is Falling into Russia’s Arms”
It is important to note in regards to Iran, mentioned in Obamas 2009 speech in Prague, “My administration will seek engagement with Iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” Coincidentally Mr. Hagel also holds those sentiments in regards to dealing with Iran. He is also under the delusion that you can have dialogue with people who see us as the “Great Satan.” I am sure that will work as well as the sanctions posed in the past via the United Nations. Nothing like basing nuclear policy’s on “If the Iranian threat is eliminated.”
Taking into account everything that has been presented thus far, we are seeing the beginnings of quite an unholy alliance being formed.
For the first time in my life, without hesitation, I can say we are on the wrong side of history. Any seeing and hearing person can see that it not only puts our national security at risk, it is also setting up Israel, a country that we have always called an ally.More than 750,000 Medicare beneficiaries have so far received relief from the so-called prescription drug donut hole as a result of President Obama’s health reform law.
The Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress created the” donut hole” with their 2003 Medicare privatization law. Essentially the law created a “drug benefit” that actually forced Medicare beneficiaries to pay hundreds, even thousands, each year more for prescription drugs.
Because of the Republican-authored law, current Medicare beneficiaries pay 25 percent of the cost of their prescription drugs. Medicare covers the rest up to about $2,800 annually. After that amount the enrollee pays the full cost of their drugs until the price tag reaches close to $5,000. This gap in coverage is known as the “donut hole.”
Government estimates show that about 25 percent of Medicare enrollees reach the “donut hole” each year.
“High prescription drugs costs are a problem for many seniors and other Medicare enrollees with limited incomes,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “These checks are an important first step in helping them afford the medications they need – and are evidence of how Americans are already seeing the very real benefits of the Affordable Care Act.”
Sebelius also touted health reform’s projected positive impact on the overall financial soundness of Medicare. “From strengthening the long-term future of Medicare as evidenced by the recent Medicare Trustees report, to saving seniors and the disabled money on everything from prescription drug costs to preventive services,” she pointed out, “the Affordable Care Act is helping to preserve and protect Medicare.”
This year millions of Medicare beneficiaries have received or will receive a $250 cash payment to cover expenses incurred after falling into the “donut hole.” In 2011, as a result of health reform, beneficiaries will receive a 50 percent discount on brand name drugs in the “donut hole” and generic drug prices will also fall substantially.
In 2013, drug prices will fall faster. By 2020, the “donut hole” will be closed and beneficiaries will pay only 25 percent of the cost of their drugs, as now mandated under Medicare.
Critics of the Republican-authored Medicare privatization law also noted that it was intended to shift billions in federal tax dollars to private insurance companies, force low-income seniors to pay more out-of-pocket expenses, and create long-term financial problems for the popular Medicare program. Health reform addressed many of these concerns. In addition to eliminating the “donut hole,” the law removes some of the costliest privatization schemes.
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/speakerpelosi/4443559641/sizes/o/
Stella Johnson speaks about impact of donut hole on her health care costs.NEWARK — A Transportation Security Administration officer was fired this week after being accused by the agency of trying to sell a laptop computer taken from the lost and found area for items left at Newark Liberty International Airport, officials said today.
The TSA plans to turn the case over to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Newark for criminal prosecution.
"TSA has taken swift action against a Transportation Security Officer who was discovered unlawfully taking property from the agency’s lost and found department," the agency said in a statement today. "TSA will be presenting this case to law enforcement for prosecution and, as of Tuesday, July 6, the employee is no longer employed by the agency."
Ann Davis, a TSA spokeswoman, declined to elaborate on the statement, which was released in response to an inquiry from The Star-Ledger.
Theft of property in the custody of the federal government is a federal offense, even if the theft involves property belonging to an individual, such as items sent by the Postal Service or held at a lost and found office, said Special Agent Bryan L. Travers, a spokesman for the FBI’s Newark Office.
The fired officer, who has not been identified, had worked in the agency’s New Jersey headquarters in Union Township, which houses the lost and found department for Newark Liberty. Officials said the theft occurred several weeks ago, and that the officer was let go after being interviewed by agency officials.
The lost and found is a secured area the contains items left at TSA checkpoints by hurried, frazzled, nervous or otherwise distracted airline passengers, Davis said. Some items, like passports or drivers licenses, are easily traced to their owners, and promptly returned by the agency. Other items, however, jewelry, smart phones, portable computers and toys often go unclaimed, she said.
Staff writer Mike Frassinelli contributed to this report.
More coverage:
• Rutgers student who caused Newark airport security breach completes community service
• Newark airport security screener charged with stealing $495 from passenger's purseA federal judge in Santa Ana issued a temporary restraining order Thursday preventing the Trump administration from deporting hundreds of Cambodian immigrants who have been convicted of crimes, including at least three men from the Sacramento area.
Over the past few months, an unknown number of Cambodians with felony records, possibly as many as 200, have been arrested across the country and targeted for deportation by the federal government. The Trump administration has been pushing Cambodia to repatriate these former nationals, many of whom fled with their families when they were small children or were born in Thai refugee camps.
There are more than 1,900 Cambodian nationals living in the U.S. who are subject to final removal orders, according to ICE. Of those, 1,412 have criminal convictions that caused them to lose legal status.
The first group of about 50 individuals was scheduled for expulsion on Dec. 18, according to court records. U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney said Thursday he was issuing a stay of removal until the court “can give proper consideration to the complex issues presented” by attorneys for the Cambodians.
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Holly Cooper of the UC Davis Immigration Law Clinic, representing long-time Davis resident Rottanak Kong, called the judge’s ruling “a huge victory for Cambodian immigrants whose criminal convictions are at least a decade old.”
Cooper said many Cambodians in detention have been moved between six or seven times to detention facilities in different states in the last 30 days, making it impossible for their attorneys to have meaningful access to their clients to review the legality of the removal orders.
For years, Cambodia has resisted repatriating felons like Kong from the United States, and the U.S is unable to send them back without the Cambodian government providing travel documents.
President Donald Trump’s administration has pushed aggressively in recent weeks to pressure Cambodia and other “recalcitrant” countries that don’t cooperate with deportations to change their stance and issue those travel papers.
In September, the United States stopped issuing visas to some high-level Cambodian dignitaries and their families to increase pressure, said Sophal Ear, a Cambodian expert and associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Days later, Cambodian officials agreed to interview candidates for repatriation and may have issued as many as 80 travel documents to deportees, said attorney Kevin Lo of Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, part of the legal team that filed for the injunction on behalf of all 1,900 Cambodians potentially subject to removal.
Lo called the called the restraining order a legal “Hail Mary.” He said he didn’t expect to win, in part because the legal bar for stopping the deportations was high.
“We were pretty surprised; it was such a long shot,” Lo said.
Kong, the Davis resident, hasn’t been to Cambodia since he was a child and his family fled the brutal Khmer Rouge government, which slaughtered about 2 million people.
He was convicted of felony joyriding in 2003 in Stanislaus County at age 25 and sentenced to one year in jail.
Lo said the temporary order will give detained Cambodians under imminent threat of deportation like Kong time to potentially appeal or change the convictions that led to them losing their legal status in the first place.
One of the two lead defendants in the case, Mony Neth, 42, of Modesto, has appealed to Gov. Jerry Brown to pardon him — as have other Californians facing deportation.
Stanislaus County court records show Neth was convicted as a teenager in a 1995 case on a felony weapons charge with a gang enhancement, and a misdemeanor charge of receiving stolen property with a value of $400 or less. Court records also show that case was reopened on Dec. 8 and a Proposition 47 report entered into the court record – a possible sign that Neth’s case is being re-examined.
Cat Khamvongsa, Neth’s wife, said she last last saw her husband on Monday at Rio Cosumnes Correctional Facility near Elk Grove, where he has been held since October. She was allowed to deliver a suitcase to him and see him briefly before he was transferred to Texas for the deportation.
"We were able to just say goodbye through a glass window. We didn't get no hug or nothing," said Khamvongsa.
Their daughter, Angelina Neth, 16, was traveling in a separate car and didn't arrive in time to see her father.
Khamvongsa said she met Neth after he served his time in jail and married him shortly after.
"I met him when he came out and and we married two years later and he hasn’t gotten in trouble since then," she said.
She said Neth came to the United States when he was about 10 years old. Like Kong, his family had fled the Khmer Rouge regime when he was only a few months old, and lived for years in a Thai refugee camp.
After leaving jail, Neth worked as an electrician and later a solar panel installer. Khamvongsa said the couple is active in their church, Crosspoint Community Church, and members have been writing to Gov. Jerry Brown to urge him to grant the pardon. She is hopeful to hear news of that in coming weeks.
"I just feel like my husband deserves a second chance to be here with us and we just need him home," she said. "He keeps the family together."
The deportations remain clouded in secrecy. The government has declined to provide specific numbers of those detained or set for deportation. It also has not provided names of those to be deported.
Lo said his office had seen a letter from Cambodian officials confirming that that government expected a chartered flight with at least 50 Cambodians aboard to depart Monday, Dec. 18 at 1:30 p.m. from El Paso Texas and arrive in Cambodia on Wednesday.
“That flight was already set up,” said Lo. “We were almost dreading Monday.”
Lo said he has heard rumors that the flight was also scheduled to transport Vietnamese and Filipino deportees. Those individuals would not be covered by the Friday legal ruling.
ICE spokesman James Schwab said the government “does not comment on pending litigation, it’s too early to tell what is happening.”
The government has until Dec. 28 to file papers opposing the court order, and the attorneys representing the Cambodians will have until Jan 4 to reply. A court date has been set for Jan. 11 at 9 a.m. in the |
part and parcel of women’s health – a reasonable construct even if arguable. But that is not why Planned Parenthood was created. Hence, you can see why there is such a volatile debate surrounding taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. My strong guess is that most of this debate would disappear overnight were its sole purpose simply women’s health.
The muddled justifications and amoral compartmentalizations in support of Planned Parenthood are staggering among people who should know better.
Here in Utah, one woman recently wrote that she is a Mormon who stands with Planned Parenthood and insists that those two things are not a contradiction. According to her blog post on Mormon Press, this woman writes that she is “an active, believing temple recommend holding member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and “also a board member of the c4 arm of the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah.”
I beg to differ.
She invokes the idea of former President Bill Clinton that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” But if she truly believes this she would oppose Planned Parenthood. It is in the business of preventing life, especially by means of abortion. That is hardly support for “rare.” But she knows this incongruity. In fact, unlike the words “safe and legal,” she immediately argues that only the term “rare” is not a justifiable basis for government intervention – because, of course, to encourage “rare,” the federal government would defund Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in America.
The reason abortion needs to be safe, legal and rare is precisely because abortion prevents a human life, many people would say takes a human life. I realize the writer thinks those three words exist solely in the name of women’s health. But, again, if that were true, there would be no debate over abortion. Surely, this woman’s LDS church does not see abortion simply, or even primarily, in terms of women’s health. The LDS Church believes in exceptions, it is true. But those exceptions define the LDS church’s view that abortion should be avoided when possible, not encouraged when possible.
Lastly, the writer purposely conflates and then separates the terms “moral” and “religious.” She is “morally opposed” to abortion but objects to “religious” opposition to abortion. Faithful Latter-day Saints are smart enough to know that abortion is generally opposed because of its moral ramifications on the individual and society, not as an article of faith.
Oddly, she turns right around and argues for abortion in the name of religious freedom – as if she has defined and is defending the LDS church position. She states, emphatically, “We Mormons ‘believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men.’ We Mormons also believe in the importance of agency and freedom.” Surely she does not mean “all men” literally to the exclusion of women. But, somehow, she justifies that Article of Faith to the exclusion of unborn lives – a perfect example of confusing ideology with theology. If she were true to her faith, as she describes it, she would resign her position with Planned Parenthood and oppose its federal funding.
Paul Mero is an opinion columnist for St. George News. The opinions stated in this article are his own and may not be representative of St. George News.
Email: paul.mero@nextgenfreedomfund.org
Twitter: @STGnewsThe DOL reported:
In the week ending January 21, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 259,000, an increase of 22,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 3,000 from 234,000 to 237,000. The 4-week moving average was 245,500, a decrease of 2,000 from the previous week's revised average. This is the lowest level for this average since November 3, 1973 when it was 244,000. The previous week's average was revised up by 750 from 246,750 to 247,500.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.
The previous week was revised up.The following graph shows the 4-week moving average of weekly claims since 1971.The dashed line on the graph is the current 4-week average. The four-week average of weekly unemployment claims decreased to 245,500.This was above the consensus forecast. This is the lowest level for the four week average since 1973 (with a much larger population today).The low level of claims suggests relatively few layoffs.The Wenatchee child abuse prosecutions in Wenatchee, Washington, USA, are examples of day-care sexual-abuse hysteria, that occurred in 1994 and 1995.[1][2]
Accusations [ edit ]
The investigation began in January 1995 when Detective Robert Perez was told by his 13-year-old foster daughter, Donna Perez, that she had been sexually molested. She said she had been raped or molested by almost every adult she knew, and that the same molestation had occurred to almost every other child she knew. On March 13, 1995, Perez put Donna in his police car with two social services caseworkers and they drove through Wenatchee and East Wenatchee. Donna pointed out houses and buildings where she says she and other children were repeatedly raped and molested since January 1988. She listed 22 locations.[3]
Many of the people convicted were poor, mentally retarded and on welfare, and their lawyers stated that their guilty pleas were coerced. In 1995, after Pastor Robert Roberson criticized the investigation, he was arrested and charged with eleven counts of the sexual abuse of a child. Roberson and his wife were acquitted of all charges.[4]
Arrests [ edit ]
Forty-three adults were arrested on 29,726 charges of child sex abuse, involving 60 children in 1995.[5] Parents and Sunday school teachers were charged, and many were convicted of abusing children, often including their own, or their foster children.
Trial [ edit ]
Prosecutors were unable to provide any physical evidence to support the charges. The main witness was Perez' foster daughter; Perez was the investigator of the cases.[4]
Conviction review summary [ edit ]
Those who were convicted were freed by higher courts and had their convictions overturned or pleaded guilty on lesser charges. Five served their full sentences before their cases were overturned. Some lost parental rights. By 2000, the last person in custody, Michael Rose, was released, after a judge vacated his March 1995 convictions.[6]
Culpability [ edit ]
In 1996, a consultant, retired Bellevue Police Chief D.P. Van Blaricom, hired by a city insurer who looked into how the Wenatchee police ran the child abuse investigations, stated that the cases were handled properly. In 1998, Phillip Esplin, a forensic psychologist for the National Institutes of Health's Child Witness Project said that "Wenatchee may be the worst example ever of mental health services being abused by a state... to control and manage children who have been frightened and coerced into falsely accusing their parents and neighbors of the most heinous of crimes."[7] In 2001, a jury found the city of Wenatchee and Douglas County, Washington negligent in the 1994-1995 investigations. They awarded $3 million to a couple who had been wrongly accused in the inquiry.[2]
See also [ edit ]census-designated place in California, United States
Cayucos Landing, 1883. Captain Cass's warehouse still stands, though his pier has been rebuilt.
Cayucos as seen from Highway 1
[3] July 4th Parade in Cayucos, 2010. Parking is at a premium for this very popular annual event.
Cayucos is a census-designated place located on the coast in San Luis Obispo County, California along California State Route 1 between Cambria to the north and Morro Bay to the south. The population was 2,592 at the 2010 census, down from 2,943 at the 2000 census.
History [ edit ]
Prehistorically the local area was inhabited by the Chumash people, who settled the coastal San Luis Obispo area approximately 11,000 to 10,000 BC, including a large village to the south of Cayucos at Morro Creek.[4]
The first European land exploration of Alta California, the Spanish Portolà expedition, camped in the vicinity of today's Cayucos on September 9, 1769. Coming from the previous campsite near Morro Bay, Franciscan missionary and expedition member Juan Crespi noted in his diary that "In the four hours that we traveled, making at the most three leagues, we encountered eight arroyos by which the water from the mountains runs to the sea, along whose edge we traveled. We halted at the eighth watering place in a moderately broad valley, into which enters an estuary fed by an arroyo of good water coming from the mountains."[5] Crespi translator Herbert Bolton noted the camp location as Ellysley Creek (further along the coast to the northwest), but the description sounds more like Cayucos.
Cayucos is the Hispanicization of a Chumash word for "kayak," or "canoe," used by the Chumash people to fish in the bay, particularly in the rich kelp beds just north of the current Cayucos pier. The town took its name from the old Rancho Moro y Cayucos, a Mexican land grant awarded in 1842 that includes the present area of the town.
In 1867, Captain James Cass settled on 320 acres (1.29 km2) of this land, and founded the town of Cayucos. Cass began developing the area with his business partner, Captain Ingals. Cass built a 900-foot pier and a warehouse to house cargo bound for San Francisco or Los Angeles. Eventually Cass returned to life on the sea and in 1875 real estate developer C.H. Phillips subdivided and sold the remaining portions of Rancho Moro y Cayucos. The original pier was swept away by a storm but has since been rebuilt.[6]
On December 7, 1987, Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771, bound from Los Angeles International Airport to San Francisco, was cruising above the central California coast when a recently terminated disgruntled USAir employee aboard the plane shot his ex-supervisor, both pilots, a flight attendant and presumably PSA's chief pilot, causing the airplane to enter a steep nosedive. The aircraft slammed into a hillside just east of Cayucos at 770 mph (1,239 km/h).[7] All 43 passengers and crew aboard perished.[8]
In October 2009, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel Magazine listed Cayucos as one of the "Coolest Small Towns in America".[9]
Geography [ edit ]
Cayucos is located at (35.438390, -120.890647).[10]
According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 3.5 square miles (9.1 km2), of which, 3.1 square miles (8.0 km2) of it is land and 0.4 square miles (1.0 km2) of it (10.85%) is water.
Cayucos is home to Cayucos State Beach.
Demographics [ edit ]
Historical population Census Pop. %± U.S. Decennial Census[11]
2010 [ edit ]
The 2010 United States Census[12] reported that Cayucos had a population of 2,592. The population density was 745.4 people per square mile (287.8/km²). The racial makeup of Cayucos was 2,366 (91.3%) White, 6 (0.2%) African American, 12 (0.5%) Native American, 54 (2.1%) Asian, 8 (0.3%) Pacific Islander, 57 (2.2%) from other races, and 89 (3.4%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 207 persons (8.0%).
The Census reported that 2,592 people (100% of the population) lived in households, 0 (0%) lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 0 (0%) were institutionalized.
There were 1,314 households, out of which 214 (16.3%) had children under the age of 18 living in them, 578 (44.0%) were opposite-sex married couples living together, 105 (8.0%) had a female householder with no husband present, 45 (3.4%) had a male householder with no wife present. There were 76 (5.8%) unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, and 10 (0.8%) same-sex married couples or partnerships. 471 households (35.8%) were made up of individuals and 195 (14.8%) had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 1.97. There were 728 families (55.4% of all households); the average family size was 2.53.
The population was spread out with 337 people (13.0%) under the age of 18, 169 people (6.5%) aged 18 to 24, 488 people (18.8%) aged 25 to 44, 946 people (36.5%) aged 45 to 64, and 652 people (25.2%) who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 53.0 years. For every 100 females, there were 91.9 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 93.2 males.
There were 2,354 housing units at an average density of 677.0 per square mile (261.4/km²), of which 781 (59.4%) were owner-occupied, and 533 (40.6%) were occupied by renters. The homeowner vacancy rate was 4.6%; the rental vacancy rate was 12.8%. 1,555 people (60.0% of the population) lived in owner-occupied housing units and 1,037 people (40.0%) lived in rental housing units.
2000 [ edit ]
As of the census[13] of 2000, there were 2,943 people, 1,405 households, and 809 families residing in the CDP. The population density was 954.4 people per square mile (368.9/km²). There were 2,284 housing units at an average density of 740.7 per square mile (286.3/km²). The racial makeup of the CDP was 93.82% White, 6.80% Hispanic or Latino (of any race), 2.17% from two or more races, 2.11% from other races, 1.26% Asian, 0.37% Native American, 0.24% African American, and 0.03% Pacific Islander.
There were 1,405 households out of which 19.6% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 46.4% were married couples living together, 7.5% had a female householder with no husband present, and 42.4% were non-families. 33.6% of all households were made up of individuals and 13.2% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.08 and the average family size was 2.62.
In the CDP, the population was spread out with 16.8% under the age of 18, 6.5% from 18 to 24, 24.4% from 25 to 44, 28.7% from 45 to 64, and 23.5% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 46 years. For every 100 females, there were 91.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 91.1 males.
The median income for a household in the CDP was $42,841, and the median income for a family was $53,594. Males had a median income of $35,333 versus $31,359 for females. The per capita income for the CDP was $26,525. About 2.4% of families and 8.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 7.1% of those under age 18 and 4.0% of those age 65 or over.
Government [ edit ]
In the California State Legislature, Cayucos is in the 17th State Senate District and the 35th Assembly District.[14]
In the United States House of Representatives, Cayucos is in California's 24th congressional district, represented by Democrat Salud Carbajal.[15]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]A learning program, predictive text is supposed to be able to contextualize based on what form of communication (i.e. text or email) and who you are communicating with. So for your mom or your boss you can sound a little more polite and for your best friend, your secret slang language is ready to go. Fun and kind of handy, right? So what does this have to do with sexism and racism?
Sexism and racism built into your phone? Maybe, particularly if you have an iPhone.
The Apple-made product is equipped, as most smartphones are, with a predictive text feature. A step beyond autocorrect, the predictive text makes suggestions as to what word you are typing and then what word you want to come next. It’s a handy feature, designed to help us all text just a little bit faster. Convenient and sometimes a bit entertaining, Apple claims that the iOS8 predictive text may change the way you type:
“Now you can write entire sentences with a few taps. Because as you type, you’ll see choices of words or phrases you’d probably type next, based on your past conversations and writing style. iOS 8 takes into account the casual style you might use in Messages and the more formal language you probably use in Mail. It also adjusts based on the person you’re communicating with, because your choice of words is likely more laid back with your spouse than with your boss. Your conversation data is kept only on your device, so it’s always private.”
- Apple
A learning program, predictive text is supposed to be able to contextualize based on what form of communication (i.e. text or e-mail) and whom you are communicating with. So for your mom or your boss, you can sound a little more polite and for your best friend, your secret slang language is ready to go.
Fun and kind of handy, right? So what does this have to do with sexism and racism?
A lot, it turns out. Some of the predictive text is based on what it has learned from your personal texting habits, but it has to start somewhere. Apple has programed the iOS8 with certain algorithms to get the predictive text started and words you don’t use often still fall back on these algorithms. The suggested words are ones Apple thought users would most likely use, word suggestions that seem to just make sense or even go together. No surprise, Apple’s algorithm is pretty solid with the recommendations and I find myself using them fairly regularly.
It appears that Apple finds sexism and racism is a bit… well, predictable. Even in texting. At least, that’s what it seems to be with Apple’s program.
Type in “Fat” and just as soon as you hit space, three words will pop up as suggestions: and, girls, and girl.
Because, obviously, we are only going to be talking about fat in reference to girls.
When my friend Julie Dollarhide from Hideadollar Yoga first discovered this on her phone, she wondered if maybe it was a fluke. She asked on Facebook and several of her friends tried it out with the same results. That’s when she texted me. I too asked around and sure enough, every one of my friends with an iPhone had the same results.
Fat shaming and sexism in two little predictive text suggestions.
Our curiosity piqued, we began experimenting with different words and what we discovered was interesting. According to Apple’s predictive text, when users type the word “black,” the top three words they’re likely to use next are girls, and, and man (sometimes screen), but for “white” they’ll be looking for and, chocolate, and shirt (sometimes screen). “Short” pulls up girls, and, and time; “tall” gives us guys, girls, and and. Interestingly, while fat can be expected as an adjective for young females (girl/girls), Apple suggests day, graphics, and morning for “beautiful” and and, enough, and phone for “smart” Evidently Apple thinks it is normal for people to talk about girls being fat than being beautiful or smart.
Speaking of smart...Apple, maybe not so much.
We checked with our friends with other phones, Windows and Android options are different. Girl and girls aren’t even suggested in the five words in the predictive text window when the word “fat” is typed in on a Windows phone. This is just a serious metadata problem for Apple. They need to fix it.
It’s not all bad, many of the word suggestions just seem to make sense, filling in with common phrases or natural progression, they seem logical. So why this? Why does Apple think "fat" is going to most likely be followed by girls or girl? Or "black" by girls or man, but "white" by chocolate or shirt? Is this just a reflection of our culture? Does fat-shaming, sexism, and racism so completely infiltrate every aspect of our interactions that we need to predict it in our word suggestions for texting?
More importantly, if it is normal, why would we just accept that? The other smartphone companies haven’t. If Windows can suggest words that don’t assume fat-shaming, sexism, and racism to be expected, why did Apple?
I don’t know and I don’t have any answers but I do know that, as an iPhone owner who is ready to upgrade my phone, I’m going to be asking Apple to change this right away. It has been a long and conscientious process to challenge my own privilege and assumptions about size, sexism, and racism, and I certainly don’t want my phone to be predicting that it would be normal for me to revert back. There are a lot of issues with the company, not the least of which are their manufacturing practices and labor concerns. While it may not seem that the words their predictive text program suggests are a major cause of concern, the reality is little things like this continue to send messages that promote, normalize, and expect sizism, sexism, and racism. As consumers, we can stand up and say this isn’t what we want and chip away at the systematic expressions of oppression. These issues are so pervasive in our societies, let’s reject the idea that we need predictive text programs encouraging such mindsets.
To tell Apple that is isn't acceptable, sign the change.org petition here.Could YOU build a flatpack house? Home in a box costs just £6,500. But is it really as easy to build as an IKEA bookcase? We gave one brave dad a week to try
Like most British men, the sight of a screwdriver and something to assemble from a flatpack sends me into a competitive tailspin.
While my chest puffs with machismo, my head is filled with doubts about my abilities.
So when I heard that a British company has begun selling a flat-pack mini-house, which is said to be as easy to assemble as an Ikea bookcase, I couldn’t resist the challenge.
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A British company has begun selling a flat-pack mini-house, which is said to be as easy to assemble as an Ikea bookcase - and Tom Rawstorne couldn¿t resist the challenge to build it
At £6,500, they don’t come cheap, but the company which produces the wooden cabins — tinyhouseuk.co.uk — says that homeowners have been snapping them up.
Mark Burton, the company’s founder, says the traditional wooden buildings are being bought by people desperate to acquire more space without moving house. Indeed, it seems there’s a growing market for ingenious ways to expand your home — without inflicting fatal damage on your wallet.
Many of these involve creating separate, fully furnished buildings that include everything from sinks to beds, and are big enough to provide accommodation for a teenager or two, but small enough to fit in a garden without the need for planning permission.
Late last year, a British engineer unveiled the QB2, a £10,000 mini-house that boasts living space for two. Then there’s the Hivehaus, a series of hexagonal modules that can be slotted together depending on how much living space is required.
With three daughters aged four, eight and 11, space in my family’s Kent home is certainly at a premium.
As we live in a traditional farm cottage, I eschew the modern mini-houses, and plump for a classic wooden design — setting myself the challenge of whipping up a mini-home in just seven days.
SUNDAY
As the footballer Roy Keane famously once said: ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’ He may have been talking about qualifying for the World Cup, but I like to think the no-nonsense Irishman would adopt a similar attitude if he had just been asked to prepare a 15ft x 8ft base for his new house.
Floor plan: Now that's down, how about starting the walls? At £6,500, they don¿t come cheap, but the company which produces the wooden cabins ¿ tinyhouseuk.co.uk ¿ says that homeowners have been snapping them up
For me, this involves levelling part of our front garden by digging up the turf and then hiding the huge pile of earth behind a shrubbery in the hope that my wife, Charlotte, can’t see the damage I’ve caused.
I’m rumbled almost immediately and decide that now is probably not the ideal time to discuss my thinking about what we should do with any ‘waste water’ from the sink which will be fitted in the finished cabin.
MONDAY
My excitement at the arrival of my tiny house is tempered by the fact that this morning the perfectly flat base of my house — plywood screwed down on to a rectangle of timber, which I laid yesterday after moving the turf — now has clearly discernible undulations.
It may have something to do with the fact it rained non-stop all night. This means I can’t do any more work on it today.
Shortly after midday, the main structure for the house arrives in the back of a lorry and I unload 16, 6ft-tall wall panels and about 200 individual pieces of wood. Bedtime reading is seven sides of hand-written instructions, courtesy of Mark Burton.
He’s also thrown in a hand-made scale model showing what the finished cabin (don’t call it a shed!) should look like.
Confidence builds and I start imagining my daughters having sleepovers in it, proudly boasting to their friends that their dad built it.
Tuesday
The good news is that it’s stopped raining, so building work can theoretically begin again. The bad news is that the water on the base has now frozen, creating an ice-rink — much to the delight of my daughters.
Once they are packed off to school, I don thick gloves — not to mention my coat and scarf — and start trying to lug the wooden panels which make up the house walls into a vertical position.
Raising the rafters: Tom wants to get the roof on before it rains again. Mark Burton, the company's founder, says the traditional wooden buildings are being bought by people desperate to acquire more space without moving house
The wooden framework has an MDF board pre-fixed on what will be the inside wall. This means that once the panels are in position, the interior will be ready to paint.
Each panel is numbered, allowing me to butt the appropriate ones next to each other and then screw them down — first into the base and then into one another.
By lunchtime, I have completed the rectangle of walls without any major difficulty. Structurally, my little house is already remarkably strong given that it is held together only by a handful of screws.
The next step is to add the pointy gables onto either end of the house and to connect them by the ridge beam — a long strip of wood which runs the length of the roof.
Because the ridge stands less than four metres tall, most local authorities would not require such a structure to have planning permission.
This is just as well, as I’ve already noticed the neighbours peering nervously through the hedge at this new addition to my garden...
Wednesday
Perhaps yesterday wasn’t as easy as I’d thought — every muscle in my body aches when I wake up this morning. But there’s no time for a lie-in.
With the ridge in place, it’s time to tackle the roof.
This involves balancing on top of my wobbly old stepladder while I try to fix the rafters into place — thin wooden beams which connect the top of the walls to the ridge in the middle of the roof.
What feels like hundreds of metal screws later, and I’m done.
Then it’s a case of laying a waterproof membrane — which looks suspiciously like a bit of old plastic sheeting — over the top. I then fix overlapping lengths of wooden cladding on top of the sheeting to create the finished roof.
Home truths: There's nothing like a cuppa brewed in your new house. The wooden framework has an MDF board pre-fixed on what will be the inside wall
By this point it’s mid-afternoon and I’m exhausted, but I really need to get the outside layer of wood — called cladding — onto the basic walls I put up yesterday. If it rains overnight, my inner walls will get wet and this will delay the rest of my building work.
I step up the pace and use all the same techniques on the walls that I did on the roof, affixing beams, the planks of wood.
When I run into difficulties working out which boards go where, I call Mark for advice and — glad of the break from manual labour — we get chatting about the people who are buying the cabins.
He tells me it is those who can’t afford to get on the housing ladder, students who don’t want to waste money on rent, parents wanting extra space for teenagers and older people who have come to the realisation that there are better things to spend their money on than maintaining a large house.
But he adds that the problem many potential clients face is finding somewhere to put their tiny house. After all you can’t just plonk it down in the middle of a roundabout or on the local village green. And if you have to buy a suitable bit of land, then the cost is self-defeating.
‘I’d like to see some land set aside to set up a village of tiny homes,’ says Mark. ‘You often have elderly people living together in mobile homes — why not have younger people doing the same, but in these sort of things?’
Looking at my half-finished mini-house, I’m not sure there would be many takers.
Thursday
Despite my aching arms, countless splinters and chapped hands, I wake up feeling strangely energised.
My mini-house might not be particularly sophisticated, but I have built something with walls and a roof, in which my family could conceivably shelter in a disaster, and feel quite chuffed with myself.
I start fixing the glass in the windows. In my version I am just using basic panes of glass, but if I were to live in it full-time then proper, double-glazed windows would be a must.
I also fit the glass in my front door and hang it from its hinges. It doesn’t shut particularly well — but then again, nor do any of the doors in my real house, all of which have swollen in the rain and are currently driving me mad.
Down one end of the building I also fix the internal joists for what an estate agent might describe as a mezzanine floor.
Friday
I am totally shattered and never want to see a screwdriver again, but feel so close to the finishing line I’ve no choice to continue with my project. I’m also on a bit of a high at what I’ve accomplished, I can’t believe how satisfying this work is (when it goes well).
The inside of my new house looks bare, so I give the MDF on the internal walls a couple of coats of paint and fix some insulation in between the rafters — vital if anyone who sleeps in it isn’t to get hypothermia.
I also tackle the floor, fitting some laminate floorboards which I picked up at a local hardware store. At this point the sage words of Mr Keane came back to bite me.
My poor preparation of the base has resulted in a distinctly lumpy floor, which means the boards won’t clip into one another as easily as the instructions promise.
Like all the best craftsmen, I solve the problem by banging some nails through the boards that keep popping up. They may not be totally smooth, but the pale pine looks chic enough to pass muster with my wife, Charlotte.
Tom Rawstorne celebrated the completion of his flat pack house by settling down to a microwave meal and a James Bond film inside
I then set about the furnishings. The bed area is easily big enough for a double mattress, below which I position a sink unit. Many of the people Mark supplies his buildings to are keen to live entirely ‘off-grid’ — in other words to be self-sufficient and take nothing from the utility companies.
To do this I would need to install a solar system on the roof to provide electricity and then add water tanks and the like. I don’t have the time — or inclination — to do this, so I just run a cable from my house which I use to power my TV and DVD, a couple of lights, a fan heater and a microwave.
Hurrah! The house that Tom built is finished, and it looks pretty darn good. My chest is now perpetually puffed out with manly pride.
I invite Charlotte and the girls in for a look around, and can’t help but feel chuffed as they coo over how ‘cute’ it is.
But there’s definitely not room for the whole family to sleep here so, despite the girls’ protests, I evict them and settle down for an evening of quiet time. I heat up a chilli con carne in the microwave, pop a Bond film on the box and then head to bed. Outside the wind may be whistling and the rain falling, but my little house is watertight — and surprisingly snug.
Saturday
When I wake, I’m struck by two things. First, because the house is so small it doesn’t take long to warm up when I turn on the heater.
Second, while undoubtedly compact, the cabin holds a surprisingly large amount of my stuff. I could definitely imagine a single person or a couple living comfortably within it.
Is it better than a mobile home or a large caravan? The height of the roof means that it doesn’t feel at all cramped and it certainly looks and feels more permanent and homely.
If it’s to be a permanent home, rather than just temporary accommodation, then the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of a property is essential — you have to feel affection towards your house. Building it yourself and customising it definitely fosters those emotions.EXCLUSIVE: At least a dozen email accounts handled the “top secret” intelligence that was found on Hillary Clinton’s server and recently deemed too damaging for national security to release, a U.S. government official close to the review told Fox News.
The official said the accounts include not only Clinton’s but those of top aides – including Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan and Philippe Reines – as well as State Department Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy and others. There is no public evidence they were authorized to receive the intelligence some of which was beyond Top Secret.
A second source not authorized to speak on the record said the number of accounts involved could be as high as 30 and reflects how the intelligence was broadly shared, replied to, and copied to individuals using the unsecured server.
“My contacts with former colleagues and current active duty personnel involved in sensitive programs reveal a universal feeling that the HRC issue is more serious than the general public realizes,” Dan Maguire, a former strategic planner with Africom, and with 46 years combined service, told Fox. “Most opine they would already be behind bars if they had apparently compromised sensitive information as reported.”
Without access to the actual e-mails, Maguire said it was hard to ascertain what damage might have been done by the disclosure of human spying intelligence and secret material.
“Either way, the intelligence community is undoubtedly conducting damage assessments and evaluating the viability of any ongoing operation that may have been exposed to unauthorized personnel. The vulnerability of HRC’s server to foreign government hacking cannot be overlooked - even the DCI, John Brennan, has been the target of hackers,” he said.
Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey told Fox, “It is counterintuitive to suggest that they (Clinton’s aides) all had authorization and access through a non-secure server to information of that sensitivity.”
The State Department recently confirmed that the messages in question include the most sensitive kind of intelligence. On Jan. 29, Fox News first reported that some emails on Clinton’s server were too damaging to release in any form. The State Department subsequently announced that 22 “top secret” emails were being withheld in full; these were the messages being handled by more than a dozen accounts.
Pressed on whether a damage assessment was being done, State Department Spokesman Mark Toner said, “To your broader question – what is being done to -- as you said spillage – I can’t speak to those efforts today. We’re aware obviously of those concerns. We are taking steps, but I don’t have any more details to provide.”
Aside from this week’s letter confirming the FBI investigation is focused on Clinton’s server, the Bureau has not publicly acknowledged whom it has contracted or interviewed.
Kennedy recently told the House Benghazi Select Committee that he knew about Clinton's personal email from the beginning, but did not understand the "scope" of its use for Clinton’s government business.
Kennedy's testimony now appears to conflict with emails released through the Freedom of Information Act that show he routinely sent and received government business from the Clintonemail.com account.
Toner said Kennedy learned about Clinton’s arrangement later. “He did not have knowledge of the computer server that she had set up [for] personal email or computer server she'd set up at her residence,” he said.
However, on the official State Department website, Patrick F. Kennedy’s biography says that he has worked for the department since 1993 and, in his current position as Under Secretary for Management, he is |
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Today I noticed this one in my facebook feed and thought; that's different! It's been a while since I chased a rabbit, so down the rabbit hole I went.The blogspot page delivers a access.im link visible as a "skip this add page" image and redirects to http:// allhqpics.com/ the-guy-with-the-largest-dick-on-the-planet.html when you click on it. Lets head further down the burrowLooks pretty normal, right? I took a look at the jquery.js and at a cursory glance it looks authentic, but then top.js delivers the first rabbit droppingsDecoding that string gives us:I'll get back to the second html page in a bit, first lets check bottom.js from the first page:Which decodes to:This gets a little more interesting, now there is a CSRF request to facebook for you to like the malicious site and lure more unsuspecting victims. It's time to pick up the pace and move on.And the reference to cpalead gives it away. That url delivers your typical function(p,a,c,k,e,d) obfuscated javascript which we decode using the tom liston methodWhich gives us more obfuscated javascriptThe next steps would be far to time consuming for me given the glaringly obvious conclusion you can draw by googleing for cpalead or http://www.cpalead.com/mygateway_iframe_loader.php. In conclusion there isn't anything new here. The techniques aren't very advanced, but god enough to keep the general public ignorant of what's really going on. I did find the firebug / anti tamper code used in the last bit of js interesting, but I'm sure that malware analysts have seen it thousands of times before.CAF Champions League 2017 final first leg ends in draw
Both sides score early goals in Alexandria
Second leg in Casablanca on 4 November
The first leg of the 2017 CAF Champions League final ended in a 1-1 draw between Al Ahly and Wydad Casablanca in Alexandria, Egypt.
The match got off to a very lively start as hosts Al Ahly scored in the third minute through Momen Zakaria. Wydad answered with a goal of their own just over ten minutes later thanks to in-form Achraf Bencharki, and neither side were able to find the winning goal for the rest of the match.
Al Ahly produced plenty of chances, especially in the second half, but the visitors were able to do enough on the evening to frustrate Hossam El-Badry's side.
Zakaria scored in the third minute after he received a pass outside the penalty area before quickly unleashing a shot with his left foot into the back of the net.
Wydad Casablanca then replied with a goal of their own when Mohamed Ounajem broke through on the right flank and delivered a superb ball for Bencharki to head in the equaliser.
Wydad will now host Al Ahly in the second leg of the final on 4 November in Casablanca. The winner with the superior aggregate score will lift the CAF Champions League title and earn a place at the FIFA Club World Cup UAE 2017.By Jhoo Dong-chan
A growing number of Chinese people are visiting Korea this year, and that’s been a bad news for Ewha Womans University students.
Some have clearly crossed the line.
Students have complained that some Chinese visitors even burst into a classroom during school hours, and even take photos of female students’ legs.
“It is not difficult to find Chinese tourists taking photos of good looking students without their consent,” a humanities major, surnamed Lee, said. ”The school was in uproar after a Chinese tourist posted a number of photos of Ewha students in his blog under the headline of ‘female students in Korea.’”
There also are a number of posts at Ewhaian, the school’s online community, complaining about Chinese tourists. One student said: “Chinese tourists enter the main library and make too much noise when they take photos as if it is a tour route.”
Another Lee, a senior majoring in political science, said that it was frustrating when a Chinese tourist entered into the gym and took photos of the girls.
“When Chinese tourists first started to visit the campus several years ago, I felt good. I believed that their visit was a result of the school’s international reputation,” said Lee.
“Now there are too many and they are disturbing. I don’t know if the school is handling the issue seriously.”
After receiving a number of complaints from students, Ewha sent an official note to Chinese tourism authorities and travel agencies at home and abroad, requesting tourists to avoid behavior that can harm the academic atmosphere, such as entering classrooms and taking inappropriate photos.
Despite such complaints, the school has not completely banned Chinese tourists from visiting, probably since they spend a lot of money on school souvenirs such as mugs, hoodies and note books.
“One Chinese tourist spent more than 1 million won ($930) for the school merchandises here,” a school merchandise shop worker said.
An Ewha official said that the sales revenue of the school’s souvenir shop has doubled every month since January due to Chinese tourists.
According to the school, 1,105 Chinese tourists visited the school in February, skyrocketing from 47 in June 2013.
CCTV, China’s state TV broadcaster, showed the school on one of its programs last year, saying the century-old school has raised many female politicians.
Ewha professor Yoo Sung-jin believes that another reason for its popularity comes from its school name Ewha, which means pear blossom.
“The pronunciation of Ewha in Chinese sounds similar to that of ‘leepa,’ a Chinese word meaning fortune and wealth,” Yoo said.Between Clinton's 'prices to be paid' and Obama's new trade-war, is it any wonder the Chinese have decided to escalate their'more-than-rhetoric' from bartering away from the USD. After ignoring the sanctions and then receiving their exemption, PressTV reports tonight that China is to invest in developing north and south Iranian oil fields (which will produce 700,000 barrels per day of crude). One of the oil fields, Azadegan, has one of the world’s largest oil deposits, with in-place oil reserves estimated at 42 billion barrels - enough to tide China over a for a while - as Iran's Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi adds after 10-15 years of negotiations the decision has finally ( |
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For more activities by crazy leaders, check out 6 Brutal Leaders And Their Ridiculous Secret Hobbies. Or learn about what creatures have lived in the White House, in 7 Badass Animals Presidents Have Kept As Pets.
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Do you have an idea in mind that would make a great article? Then sign up for our writers workshop! Do you possess expert skills in image creation and manipulation? Mediocre? Even rudimentary? Are you frightened by MS Paint and simply have a funny idea? You can create an infograpic and you could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow!ISP filtering of "pirated" material is a controversial measure that would be tough to push through a national legislature in the US, EU, Japan, Korea, or Canada, what with all those pesky "voters" with their concerns about privacy, fair use, and false positives. But sneaking the provision into a trade agreement? Much easier.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been negotiated in secret by trade negotiators from rich countries around the globe. Despite the recent leak of a four-page memo on possible ACTA provisions, no draft text (or details of any kind, really) have emerged from the process. Google's William Patry, a top US copyright lawyer, now says that anonymous sources close to the ACTA process have slipped him more details on the plan, and they don't sound good.
Bring on the filters
Writing on his blog yesterday, Patry noted that two separate sources talked about filtering. "The rumors of what is in the draft are pretty much all bad and the scope is growing, not shrinking," said one. "It is even said that the latest version has filtering language in it."The second report was similar.
ACTA negotiators are meeting in Geneva this week to hash out more details of the proposed deal, but their work is already generating furious online opposition from people like Patry, who thunders, "The attitude of USTR [United States Trade Representative] toward copyright is a blinkered, one-sided view that copyright is good and therefore as much of it as possible is even better."
A shroud of secrecy
US Trade Representative Susan Schwab
Critics are blasting the secret nature of the proceedings, which they see as a way to negotiate and sign a "trade" deal which will then be presented to national legislatures as something already done.
"This 'patriot act' for intellectual property 'crimes' may be one of the late legacies of the Bush Administration," writes James Love of the Consumer Project on Technology. "It would be nice to have more transparency about such a far-reaching and important global trade agreement."
Patry agrees that "we do not want our trade representatives to negotiate on their own agreements that require changes in domestic copyright laws and then present the agreement after signature to the legislature as a fait d'accompli."
Alan Story, a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at the UK's University of Kent, objects not just to the secret process behind ACTA but also to the idea that stronger copyright is better copyright.
"Where do we read about how copyright blocks access to books or leads to ever greater commodification and sameness in our culture?" he asks. "Instead, we are regularly carpet-bombed by the latest revelation, accompanied by statistically unreliable surveys, as to how piracy is, one week, killing the music industry, and the next week, the film industry. Lock ‘em up, cut off their Internet access forever, piracy funds terrorist cells: the articles never cease in this steady drip after drip."
Because of the secrecy, though, it's hard even to criticize ACTA; no one yet knows what it might say. But if Patry's sources are correct, the agreement may go far beyond "fighting fakes" (as the USTR said last year) and could attempt to force new, tougher IP provisions on everyone who signs up.
Such a policy, negotiated at institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), would require more transparency and would be certain to raise more objections from countries and civil society groups. By forming its own club and including only select countries in the draft, ACTA can remain both secret and totally pro-copyright. That's a bad combination.Marine experts found many rare species as they surveyed the Scottish coast in 2011.
© Scottish Government
A brainless and faceless fish is one of a number of rare species discovered in the waters around Scotland this year.
The "elusive" prehistoric Amphioxus was found in waters off Tankerness in Orkney and is regarded as a representative of the first animals to evolve a backbone.
The rare creatures were discovered during 15 marine surveys carried out in 2011.
Giant mussels with shells measuring nearly half-a-metre were also discovered around the Small Isles off the west coast of Scotland and are said to have the largest sea shells in the country.
More than 100 specimens of the fan mussels were found around the islands, meaning the area has the largest aggregation of the fish in UK waters.
The mussels are said to have golden threads similar to human hair, which are so fine they are able to attach to a single grain of sand.
In Caithness, the country's largest horse mussel bed was found in waters near Noss Head.
The species, known as "Clabbydhhu" in Gaelic, which translates as "enormous black mouth", are slow-growing molluscs that can live for up to 50 years.
They are said to stabilise mobile seabeds and provide a critical ecosystem for other species.
Other rare finds from the marine surveys, which covered more than 2000 square miles, included flame shell beds in Loch Linnhe, Argyll, as well as new communities of Northern Feather Star, a brightly coloured species with ten feather-like arms fanning out from a central disc, which were revealed off the Sound of Canna.
The Scottish Government said the findings will further the country's knowledge of the biodiversity of its seas.
Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead said: "In an age where the lands of the world have been mapped out and recorded, it's amazing how many discoveries are waiting to be found under the waves.
"Spanning from the weird to the wonderful, discoveries this year have included the bizarre Amphioxus and the beautiful yet elusive brightly coloured Flame Shell.
"The waters around Scotland are rich in such fascinating biodiversity and it's our responsibility to protect this fragile environment.
"That's why we have ramped up our marine survey work, with plans being prepared for new surveys in 2012 to further our knowledge of what lies beneath Scotland's seas."
During the surveys, multi-beam scanners were used to create 3D images of the seabed, allowing the first marine maps of many new areas to be made.
Dr Dan Barlow, head of policy at WWF Scotland, said: "These surveys highlight that Scotland's seas and coasts are home to a truly amazing range of weird and wonderful wildlife.
"By providing vital information on what lies beneath the waves, these surveys will help inform decisions on better ways to protect this important resource now and long into the future.
"It is important that the government builds on this survey work to further our knowledge of the marine environment."
Susan Davies, director of policy and advice with Scottish Natural Heritage, added: "Scotland's seas really are a fantastic asset. The findings from these surveys will help us to manage them sustainably and ensure future generations can also enjoy the benefits of a healthy and diverse marine environment."Pat Fitzgerald was rattling off some positives that he could take from Northwestern's 40-30 loss to Ohio State. He mentioned how the Wildcats showed off improved fundamentals after a bye week, how the offensive line turned in one of its best games of the season and how the players handled all the hype and excitement of the atmosphere as well as possible.
Still, Fitzgerald had a hard time summoning much enthusiasm.
"I'm bitterly disappointed," he said on Tuesday. "I'm not very pleased about it. We've got a bunch of not very happy people walking around here."
Northwestern acquitted itself very well against the No. 4 Buckeyes, even leading in the fourth quarter and nearly pulling off the upset. But this is a program that won 10 games last year and is ranked into the Top 20. It's not really into moral victories these days.
"We know Ohio State is going to be one of the best teams in the Big Ten, and we knew we could play with them," safety Ibraheim Campbell said. "And we did. We just didn't finish."
Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald, right, with Ohio State coach Urban Meyer after the Buckeyes' win. Jerry Lai/USA TODAY Sports
Finishing games has been an issue of late for both Northwestern and its opponent this week, Wisconsin. It's appropriate, then, that both teams meet Saturday after coming up just short against Ohio State in their last outing. Both will look to flush that loss out of their system and take their next step toward their season goals.
In that regard, the Wildcats are in much better shape than the Badgers. They lost their Big Ten opener but did so in a cross-division game. Wisconsin will have a hard time catching Ohio State now in the Leaders Division race, Northwestern remains among the favorites to win the Legends -- and possibly force a rematch with those Buckeyes in Indianapolis.
"If we can go out and win the rest of our games, we can still get to where we want to go," center Brandon Vitabile said. "If you lose, you've got to learn. We're just hoping to learn something and move on."
One major lesson stemming from last week's defeat involves the run defense. Led by Carlos Hyde, Ohio State ran for 248 yards in Evanston and used its offensive line to control the second half. Wisconsin doesn't have backs as big as Hyde, but it has two star runners in James White and Melvin Gordon and its typical massive O-line. The Badgers are averaging over 300 yards per game on the ground.
"It was a deal where we didn't fit very well, we didn't get off blocks, we didn't tackle and we didn't get enough population to the ball," Fitzgerald said of the defensive effort last week. "If we do that again this week, we'll give up the same amount of yards. We need to perform better if we want to beat a very physical and a very dominant, in my opinion, Wisconsin offense."
Northwestern knows it also can't leave points on the board. It settled for three short field goals last Saturday night to help keep Ohio State in the game.
"We've got to finish when we get down there," Vitabile said. "We moved the ball well, but we can't just stop at third-and-5 or third-and-6. We've got to convert those and get into the end zone."
Wisconsin knows all about not finishing, as the Badgers have lost 10 games by seven points or less since 2011. Similarly, Northwestern has held a fourth-quarter lead in its four losses dating back to last year.
One team will finish on top at Camp Randall Stadium. The other could wind up bitterly disappointed once again.Yip Pin Xiu, PJG (Chinese: 叶品秀; pinyin: Yè Pǐnxìu,[1] born 10 January 1992) is a Singaporean backstroke swimmer.[2] She is a three-time Paralympic gold medallist and a one-time IPC gold medallist, with two world records in the 50 m backstroke S2 and the 100 m backstroke S2.
She has muscular dystrophy and competes in the S3 category for the physically impaired. Since 2005, she has won medals in international competitions such as the World Wheelchair and Amputee Games, Japan Paralympic Swimming Championships and International German Paralympic Swimming Championships. At the 2008 Summer Paralympics, she won a gold medal in the 50 metres backstroke and a silver medal in the 50 metres freestyle, setting world records in both events. At the 2016 Summer Paralympics, she won a gold medal in the 100 metres S2 backstroke, setting a world record for that event, and another for her 50 m split.
In honour of her feats at the Paralympic Games, she was conferred the Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Meritorious Service Medal) during the National Day Awards ceremony and named "Young Woman Achiever of the Year" by local magazine Her World.[3] Her achievements contributed to public debate about the treatment and recognition of disabled athletes in Singapore.
On 17 September 2018, Yip became a Nominated Member of Parliament in Singapore.[4] Her term began on 22 September 2018, and was sworn to the parliament on 1 October 2018.[5]
Early years and personal life [ edit ]
Yip was born with muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder that slowly breaks down the muscles, and a nerve condition that affects eyesight.[6] When she was five, she started swimming to improve her health and strengthen her muscles;[7] nevertheless, by the age of eleven, she had lost her ability to walk and had to use a wheelchair.[8][9] The youngest of three children in her family,[7] she studied in Ai Tong Primary School and Bendemeer Secondary School,[7] then graduated from Republic Polytechnic as back-up valedictorian and, as of 2017, graduated from Singapore Management University with a Bachelor of Social Science.[10]
Swimming career [ edit ]
Yip started swimming competitively when she was twelve years old.[8] After losing her ability to kick, Yip switched from the front crawl to the backstroke and was reclassified from the S5 to the S3 category (lower numbers indicate more severe disabilities).[9] Her coach is former Singaporean Olympic swimmer Ang Peng Siong,[9] while fellow Paralympic swimmer Theresa Goh is her close friend and role model.[8] Besides competitive swimming, Yip has participated in events to raise awareness of disabled sports, such as the Interschool Swimming Meets and Montfort Secondary School Track and Field Meet 2007.[6]
After successes in national championships, Yip participated in the Asia Paralympics Swimming Championship 2005, winning two gold medals.[6] Her first international competition was the World Wheelchair and Amputee Games 2005, where she won two gold medals and a bronze.[6] She then received four gold medals at the DSE Long Course Swimming Championships in 2006.[6] In 2007, she won three gold medals at the Japan Paralympic Swimming Championships and four gold medals at the World Wheelchair and Amputee Games.[6]
At the 4th ASEAN Para Games, Yip finished first in the women's 150 metres individual medley, clocking 4 minutes 56.34 seconds.[11] She set a world record time of 1 minute 00.80 seconds in the 50 metres backstroke at the US Paralympic swimming trials.[8] The 22nd International German Paralympic Swimming Championships saw her set a world record of 2 minutes 10.09 seconds in the 100 metres backstroke heats; in the finals, she was awarded the gold medal with a time of 2 minutes 08.09 seconds, bettering her own world record.[11]
Yip started her 2008 Summer Paralympic Games campaign by breaking another world record, clocking 57.04 seconds in the women's 50 metres freestyle heats.[7] However, she was narrowly beaten by Mexican swimmer Patricia Valle in the finals, clinching a silver medal with a time of 57.43 seconds.[7] In the women's 50 metres backstroke heats, she posted a time of 57.92 seconds, taking two seconds off her own world record.[12] She then swam the women's 50 metres backstroke finals in a time of 58.75 seconds to win the gold medal.[12] After she returned to Singapore, the president conferred Yip a state medal, the Meritorious Service Medal.[13]
The success of Yip and Laurentia Tan, who won two bronze medals in equestrian events,[12][13] sparked public debate about the treatment and recognition of disabled athletes in Singapore.[14] Letters to The Straits Times criticised the poor coverage of the Paralympics.[14] Many Singaporeans also commented about the disparity of the cash awards handed out by the government:[14] S$1,000,000 for an Olympic gold and S$100,000 for a Paralympic gold.[15][16] When the issues were raised in Parliament, MCYS parliamentary secretary Teo Ser Luck promised to study plans to give disabled athletes greater support and to include them in sporting programmes such as Project 0812, a training programme for top Singaporean sportspeople.[16] Two months later, the cash rewards for Paralympic medals were doubled and funding for the Singapore National Paralympic Council was increased.[15]
At the 8th ASEAN Para Games, she was torch lighter with Tay Wei Ming and Gan Kai Hong Aloysius.[17]
Yip participated in the 2016 Summer Paralympics. On 10 September 2016, Yip swam in the finals of the 100 m backstroke, S2 class; her time of 2:07.09 was a new S2 world record, earning her a Paralympic gold medal. Her 59.38 split for the first 50 m of the race was also a new S2 world record; in both cases she overwrote her own world leading times. Her medal was Singapore's first at the 2016 Summer Paralympics.[18] On 16 September, Yip won her (and Singapore's) second gold medal of the 2016 Games, this time in the 50 m backstroke finals, S2 class with a time of 1:00.33.[19]
Yip also participated in the 2018 Asian Para Games, and won one gold medal and two bronze medals in total. On 8 October, she won her first gold medal for the 50 m backstroke,[20] S1-4 class, and on 9 October, her first bronze medal for the 100 m freestyle, S1-4 class event. On 12 October, she won her second bronze medal on the 50 m freestyle, S1-4 class event with a time of 1:04.68, behind Peng Qiuping of China and Gabidullina Zulfiya of Kazakhstan, with times of 43.48s and 45.51s, respectively.[21]
Honours [ edit ]
Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Meritorious Service Medal)About
Thr33 Days Dead was/is the little movie that everyone said couldn't, but did. It may have taken us six years to finally finish the first go-round, but....we finished. And we aren't "dead" yet.
"Thr33 Days Dead: The Clarion Call" is a continuation of Thr33 Days Dead, the movie that premiered on the SyFy cable network and was the focus of a 12-episode comedic docu-series which also aired on the SyFy network.
Some clips from the show:
The sequel will contain some familiar faces and some new ones, and maybe even a surprise cameo or two. Patrick and Valerie will again be played by Bryan Boylen and Catie Teeter respectively. And just because others from the original may be gone, don't count them out from making an appearance in the sequel. :) The sequel is written this time by our producer herself, Tina Teeter. And, she will also be making her directorial debut, taking the helm for the sequel. We promise you won't want to miss what we have in store for you this time! ALSO, although we weren't picked up for a second season on SyFy, we realize we have a lot of fans that loved watching us along our movie-making journey. We are excited to announce that we will be producing a weekly behind-the-scenes web series documenting our journey for the sequel, complete with cast/crew interviews!!!! Why are we attempting to make a sequel although our show wasn't picked up for a second season? We're glad you asked.
It's very simple, really. Everyone one of us in our little crew wants to make movies and tell stories. It's our passion. It's in our blood. It's our drug. Yes, we are in small-town, Alabama, where making movies isn't commonplace, but we don't let that deter us.
And we refuse to take no for an answer. Trust us, we've been told no more times than we can count. In fact, over the six years it took to make the first one, if we had a dollar for every time we heard no, we would have our budget and then some for the sequel!
We believe that great things can be achieved through hard work and dedication. If you put your head down and keep moving forward, no matter how many times you get knocked down or backwards, you will eventually cross the finish line.
We look at it like this. It took us six years to make the first one. Essentially, those six years were like film school to us. We learned SO much about what it takes to make a movie, and especially what not to do. And so many of the things we learned, we didn't get a chance to showcase in the first movie. We want to showcase that now.
We made the first movie on a $27,000 budget. By Hollywood standards, that's "no-budget". We are asking for $150,000 this go-round just to give us some breathing room (which is still no-budget by industry standards). We are asking essentially for 6 times the budget we had on the first movie, and we promise, if we get it, the sequel will be at least 33 times better. But it's all or nothing. If we don't reach our goal here, sadly, there will be no sequel.
What will this money be used for? The following:
ROUGH BUDGET:
-securing locations
No more begging and pleading to use locations for just a day or two. A great portion of our budget will be spent on securing locations for the duration of our production.
-new equipment
This includes a couple new cameras, lenses, new sound equipment (so the sound won't be an issue this time around), new makeup, props, etc.
-hiring personnel
Our small crew of 10 or so each wore several different hats the first time around. We want to grow our crew so actors can concentrate on acting, sound peeps can concentrate on sound, makeup artists can concentrate on makeup, and so on and so forth. We plan to hire a couple PA's, a sound mixer, a set designer, etc. We don't want to spread ourselves thin this time. Efficiency is key.
-food
It sounds trivial, but full stomachs makes for productivity. We want to be able to offer lunch and snacks on set for our cast, crew, and extras. We were lucky to get a bologna sandwich on days we filmed the first time around.
-unpredictability
Sometimes things break. If our camera went down in the first movie, or if a car broke down, or if a prop broke, we were down until we could get it fixed or replaced, which sometimes took several days. We can't afford for that to happen this time. So if something breaks, we need to be able to replace it quickly. We plan on finishing this movie in 3-4 months, not years this time!
We aren't asking for $150K so we can spend $50K making the movie and split up the rest. Every last penny of our budget will be spent on making this movie and making it the best it can possibly be.
Our Cast
Patrick:
Not yet cast
Catie Teeter-"Valerie"
Michael Haygood- "Jimmy"
Chase Lawrence-"Jeff"
John Ware-"Justin"
Yes, of course we are doing this for selfish reasons-- it's our goal, our passion, our dream. But we are also doing this for various other reasons, none of which are of any less importance. We are doing this for indie filmmakers everywhere who need nothing more than an example of how hard work, determination, and refusal to quit can get you where you want to go. We are doing this for everyone who has a dream but is a bit apprehensive to chase it.
Dreams are constantly in the forefront of our thoughts for a reason. They are there to serve as a reminder that happiness is obtainable. You just have to work for it. Sometimes it may be the hardest, most seemingly impossible thing to accomplish, but it can be done. We set out to make a movie with no real expectations other than finishing...and we ended up with a TV show and our movie airing on a major TV network. We are proof positive that goals can be achieved. But our ultimate goal is to improve upon what we have already accomplished and to keep going in pursuance of our dream-- to turn the industry on its ears and show the world that you can start from nothing and work your way to the top.
We need your help to do that. Please contribute what you can. And if you can't contribute monetarily, please help us spread the word by sharing our Kickstarter on FB and Twitter. Also, be sure to follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/thr33days and on twitter @Thr33DaysDead.
We have created what we think are some awesome rewards for our contributors, so pick yourself one!
And stay tuned for exciting production updates and more teasers!!!Written by: AnonymousWorldWideNews
The only authority that can make a difference is you. Not the police. Not the military. Not so called grand juries. Only you! Do not look to the plutocratic mandarins for assistance, or expect anything but vaudevillian smoke and mirrors from the billion-dollar corporate circus that’s rampaging across the globe like a retarded elephant on steroids with nuclear weapons strapped to its back flinging Monsanto seeds. The local killers want us distracted by foreign killers so they can rob us blind and keep us under control. It’s our responsibility to wake up to this fact and to at least attempt to put a stop to it. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
It’s time to end the blind march of the living dead, and to begin instead the wide-awake journey of being truly alive. It’s time to end the rank and file of willful ignorance. This means questioning the status quo and the people who blindly uphold it. This means holding the power-that-be accountable for their actions. This is our call to adventure. Mother Nature is screaming at us using a language older than words. It echoes in our bones. It resonates in our souls. We can all feel it. Some of us are confused by it, and we are suffering from cognitive dissonance, but she is still there singing her harsh Truth. And it is high time we listened. It’s time we made some noise. It is time her voice became our voice. It is time to replace “their unhealthy unsustainable way” with “our healthy sustainable way.”
“The secret of freedom lies in educating people,” wrote Maximilien Robespierre, “whereas the secret in tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” So ask yourself: am I an agent of liberty, intent upon freeing and empowering people; or an agent of tyranny, intent upon keeping people suppressed and ignorant. If it’s the latter, by all means keep the chain of obedience intact and keep people suppressed. But if it’s the former, by all means break the chain of obedience and join us in educating people. The war machine begins and ends with you either blindly obeying the vicious chain of obedience or having the courage to disobey when you feel the actions of the chain of obedience are immoral. It won’t be easy. Hell, it will probably be the hardest thing you will ever do, and you may have to face “vilification and disgrace” because of it, but sometimes that’s the price you have to pay for being a moral agent in an immoral world. That’s the price you pay for courage. That’s the price you pay for liberty.
At the end of the day, if you still feel like it’s all for naught and that you cannot possibly make a difference, consider the words of Thomas Edison, “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: You haven’t.”
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Source: AnonymousWorldWideNews https://www.facebook.com/AnonymousWorldWideNewsPosted by Jason Koebel on May 22, 2014
Photo By: Brad Kotnik & James Fetterly
Brewing beer has never been easier in Canada than it is right now. You have easy access to any ingredient and mouth drooling gear you could ever imagine, all available locally or on our very own website at beergrains.com. The internet is chock full of information on how to brew, clone your favorite beers, formulate your own recipes, and even win homebrew competitions. Now is the best time ever to get started so here are 10 reasons to start brewing right now!
1 It Tastes Better
The best reason of all is you can brew the beer you like to drink. If you can imagine it you can brew it. There are no limits to the spectrum of flavours and aromas you can get from your beer. You can brew a straight up classic style such as an Ale, Lager, Stout, Hefeweizen, Barley Wine, Porter or one of the other countless styles. Or tweak your recipe with different grain, more/less hops, oak chips, experiment with different yeasts, and add fruit like orange peel or juniper berries. With some practice you can fine tune your recipes to appeal to the only person in the world who's taste buds matter, you.
2 Inner Caveman
No gender stereotypes intended here. Brewing beer connects you to your inner caveman in much the same way that fishing, hunting, building a deck, and screwing in a light bulb does. There is an inherent primal satisfaction in doing something yourself and sharing it with others. Just like your prehistoric ancestors went out in the wee hours, clubbed a sabretooth tiger, dragged it back to the cave and proudly said "EW-EW-EW!"; which of course meant "look what I did cave people, I'm pretty awesome eh!". Brew your own beer and you will get exactly the same caveman-like satisfaction.
3 It's Easy
Brewing beer is as easy or as complicated as you want to make it. The basic principles are just that, basic. Follow them and you will brew great beer. Unlike rocket science or heart surgery, brewing beer requires no special skills. If you can boil water you're halfway there. If you choose to take it to the next level and get sciency and technical you can do that too.
4 It's Fun
What could be better than making your own beer? Once you get started there is nothing that can wipe that smile off your face. Not only is it fun, it's one of the most relaxing and stress free ways to spend your day. The best part of all is you can drink the fruits of your labour while you brew. You can also share this new found joy with your friends and family who inevitably become your unwitting taste testers. Before long they become your best customers and advocates.
5 Fresh Factor
A reputable retailer like Beer Grains Supply Co will only sell fresh ingredients. Brewing with fresh ingredients is like cooking with vegetables from your garden. It not only tastes better but it's also better for you. As a homebrewer you can select top quality fresh ingredients, brew it, and drink it within a few weeks. That's as fresh as it gets! There are no preservatives to make it survive the hollows of the retail market like mass produced beer. Due to this fresh factor homebrewed beer is the best quality beer on the planet.
6 Save Money
You can expect to pay between $18 to $40 on ingredients for a 5 US gallon (18.9 Litre) batch of beer depending on the style of beer you're brewing and whether you're brewing an all-grain or extract beer; after your initial investment in a starter kit. That's a cost of between $0.32-$0.72 per standard 341ml bottle or $7.68-$17.32 per case of 24! Most beer can be brewed for around $12 per case. Keep in mind that we're talking about full flavour beer using farm fresh, quality ingredients. Wow, the best quality at the lowest cost! Pinch me!
7 Win Competitions
Canada has a ton of homebrew competitions each year. Most are hosted by a homebrew club like the ones listed in this Homebrew Clubs Directory. Enter your best brews and you could win some incredible prizes. Your beer will be judged and given feedback by (in most cases) certified judges and top brewers. This feedback is invaluable to improving your craft. Best of all, if you win you get bragging rights and sack full of personal satisfaction to boot. The road to being a better brewer is paved with lots of practice and feedback from competition judges.
8 Make Friends
Homebrewers are great people and the brewing community is HUGE! When you become a homebrewer you are guaranteed to make new friends. Join a homebrew club, attend beer tastings and festivals like National Capital Beer Week and Toronto Beer Week, become active in online forums like Homebrewtalk and Canadian Home Brewers. When people find out you brew your own beer they are instantly interested and they hang off every word you say, it's almost magical.
9 Learn About Beer
The best way to learn about beer is to learn how to make it. You will become well versed in the entire sensory experience and how to customize that experience to your tastes. As you become more aware of how smelling, touching, tasting, and seeing beer creates a sensory symphony you will increase your appreciation of beer ten fold. By understanding how each ingredient and method of brewing enhances and alters beer it will open the door to truly appreciate and understand the greatest beverage on earth.
10 Carry on the Tradition
Long before bikini clad girls promoted beer made by massive factories people brewed beer at home. The history of brewing beer goes back 6000 years. It was a staple of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and was consumed daily by people of all ages and statures from cradle to grave. The domestication of cereal grains, farming, and migration led to the colonization of the planet. Beer was a form of liquid currency and a safe drink when urban water supplies became contaminated so often the first crop planted was barley so that beer could be made. Louis Hébert, who emigrated to Quebec in 1617, is believed to be Canada's first homebrewer. Since then homebrewing has been an important part of Canada's history. For hundreds of years most communities had a local brewpub and brewery that produced mostly heavier, full flavoured beer quite unlike the light beer most modern North American consumers are use to. When Prohibition squashed brewing activities there was a massive decline in the number of homebrewers and breweries. Thankfully the craft beer revolution began in the UK in the 1970's and quickly spread to North America helping to bring homebrewing back to it's former glory. Become a homebrewer and carry on the tradition.Next Monday will be a historic day for transport in Auckland as for the first time the city will have electric trains carrying fare paying passengers. Electrifying the rail network is something that has been talked about for 90 years, mostly in conjunction with a version of the City Rail Link. While Britomart was undoubtedly a turning point for rail in Auckland it wouldn’t have been possible without some key events and a whole pile of luck that occurred just over a decade earlier, without which it is unlikely we would have a rail system today. One man was at the centre of it all and this is the story of how he saved rail in Auckland.
The story starts in the late 80’s where the Auckland rail network is in serious decline. The trains were being run under the name of City Line which was part of NZ Rail Ltd and also ran a number of bus services.
Unlike Wellington which had just fairly new electric trains, the trains running on the Auckland network were decrepit and consisted of former long distance carriages that had been converted for suburban use. They were originally built in 1936 and had steel frames but the bodies were made from wood. They were also hard to access, requiring customers to climb up into the trains from what were basically oversized kerbs that masqueraded as station platforms. The video below shows what these trains looked like and there are more linked to here. Also note: to change ends there was no driving cab like today, the locomotive had to be uncoupled and moved to the other end of the train at a station with a passing loop.
At the time Auckland had also seen numerous grand plans for new public transport networks but none ever saw the political support needed to actually implement them. At the time the latest idea was convert the western line to light rail using a tram train from Henderson then send it via a tunnel under K Rd before running down the surface of Queen St. The problem was the idea couldn’t get political support. The City Council didn’t want trams on Queen St and the regional council saw it as competition to the Yellow Bus Company which they owned 90% of. That left Auckland with its near derelict trains and not much hope for the future.
It’s now the early 90’s and enter Raymond Siddalls. With a year to go before the regional council took over the contracting of services he was in charge running the suburban fleet. His bosses had also tasked him with shutting the Auckland network down. With an aging fleet, falling patronage and little political support (both locally or nationally) no one thought it could be made to work. After looking at the operations Raymond was surprised to find that with with a restructure he was be able to cut down the costs and actually have the company start making a profit on the gross contracts it held.
The critical time came in 1991 when a decision needed to be made on how to move forward. New legislation controlling how public transport services would operate was coming into effect and basically changed everything. No longer could PT be treated as a social service and the focus was on making PT stand up commercially. The legislation also didn’t allow for any distinction between rail and bus services which meant bus companies could tender for rail routes. Note: this legislation is still in effect today and has had a significant negative effect on the planning and provision of PT for over two decades. The new PTOM legislation should address most (but not all) of the issues it caused.
With the network actually making a profit the operation |
its people, and the public must recognise and respect their differences rather than trying to impose a uniform identity under the pretext of unity.
The absence of a concrete “Malaysian nation” identity had first caught the attention of then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, causing him to outline the creation of a united “Bangsa Malaysia” in his Vision 2020.
Datuk Seri Najib Razak had tried to continue the idea with his 1Malaysia concept introduced soon after he took over as prime minister in 2009, which stresses national unity and ethnic tolerance.
The historians will continue to sit down today in the summit’s second day, with prominent names such as Prof Datuk Dr Zainal Kling and Prof Emeritus Tan Sri Dr Khoo Kay Khim expected to touch on topics such as collective memory of Malaysians.This morning, Crunchyroll released the final episode of the TV anime adaptation of Rin Kokuyō's Recovery of an MMO Junkie, entitled "On a Moonlit Evening." Due to the show's advanced production work, instead of releasing the Japanese home video release months after the series' finale, the Blu-Ray box set is being released today! We previously reported on this set, which includes a "Director's Cut" of the ten-episode series, as well as gorgeous art work, a hot springs story drama CD, and a special 11th OVA episode featuring two new short stories.
In an interview with Recovery of an MMO Junkie Producer Satoshi Taira earlier this week from Manga Tokyo, Crunchyroll's role in the series' production was revealed, as well as news that Crunchyroll would also be distributing the 11th episode. We are happy to confirm this and announce that you will be able to watch this special episode on Crunchyroll next Friday, December 15th. Recovery of an MMO Junkie has been one of the most beloved anime this season, both among the Crunchyroll audience and as well as among our staff - we're thrilled to be able to share this special OVA episode with all of you so quickly after Japanese release. This episode will be made avaialble for streaming exclusively on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and VRV.
You can watch the preview for the episode here:
Net-juu no Susume episode 11 PV. It will come bundled with the Blu-ray box which goes on sale December 8th https://t.co/c6vSXRxcYZ pic.twitter.com/UClCzGMQ3N — moetron | pKjd (@pKjd) December 4, 2017
Recovery of an MMO Junkie Japanese BD Box Set Artwork
Complete Contents of Japanese Recovery of an MMO Junkie BD Box SetFT. MEADE, Md. (CN) – If not for the WikiLeaks disclosures, al-Qaida propagandists would have used other news stories to demonize the United States and the West, the government’s expert in militant Islam conceded Thursday.
Manning could face up to 90 years in prison for uploading more than 700,000 files, including diplomatic cables, incident reports from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, profiles of Guantanamo detainees, and a video of an airstrike in Baghdad that WikiLeaks titled “Collateral Murder.”
A clip from that airstrike, which killed two Reuters journalists and several other civilians, found its way on a video segment disseminated by al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn. The winter 2010 issue of Inspire, the group’s English-language magazine, asked readers to help them sift through WikiLeaks releases.
Cmdr. Youssef Aboul-Enein, an officer for the Navy Medical Services Corp, called the leaked trove a propaganda boon for the terror group on Thursday. Nonetheless, he could not point to another example other than two previously cited of al-Qaida’s reliance on the hundreds of thousands of leaked files. He said he was not aware of any al-Qaida chatter about WikiLeaks in 2012 or 2013.
Manning’s military defender, Maj. Thomas Hurley, pressed him on the issue during cross-examination.
“If it wasn’t WikiLeaks, it would be something else?” Hurley said.
“Absolutely,” the commander replied.
Prosecutors claim that the Iraq and Afghanistan “war logs,” as the battlefield reports are known, represent the U.S. military’s “playbook” in detailing how the armed forces respond to “significant activities,” or SigActs.
A stash of these reports were found in the raid on Osama bin-Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Hypothesizing on how al-Qaida may have used the SigActs, Aboul-Enein said: “They could possibly, potentially deduce a pattern of behavior from U.S. combat forces.” He supported this theory with the so-called “Manchester documents,” a collection of U.S. Special Forces manuals stitched together by al-Qaida operatives. He said that al-Qaida could exploit the WikiLeaks-released battlefield reports just as it used military instruction manuals.
When pressed, however, the commander admitted that this was speculation.
“You have not seen any reporting that indicates that that has happened,” Hurley said.
“No,” Aboul-Enein said. “No, I have not.”
The witness noted that the Manchester documents were originally compiled by 2003 World Trade Center bombing plotter Ali Mohamed, who gleaned the documents from his own stint in the U.S. Army.
Essentially a handbook for al-Qaida operatives, the Manchester documents were first created in 1989, but they were mostly unnoticed in the United States until 2000, two years after the bombing of two U.S. Embassies in East Africa put Islamic extremism on the radar of intelligence agencies.
Aboul-Enein also agreed that al-Qaida members tend to brag about their strategic victories, and never said a word about making tactical gains from the WikiLeaks disclosures.
Acquitted of “aiding the enemy,” Manning said that he wanted that he wanted to spark worldwide debate, discussion and reforms on the conduct of U.S. diplomacy and warfare. The defense’s sentencing case is expected to begin next week, and he will be allowed to present evidence related to his motive to inform the public for the first time in military court.
Like this: Like Loading...Nobody is ever impressed by Ramires the first time they see him play. Perhaps it is his nationality that creates unrealistic expectations – it is a crude national stereotype, but you expect a Brazilian to be skilful and exciting on the ball, liable to an unnecessary piece of trickery, yet potentially devastating in the final third.
Ramires unwittingly helped perpetuate the assumption. The first time he came to international attention was when replacing Robinho in Brazil's 2008 Olympic squad; it was supposed he was a natural replacement. Later, he started his Benfica career with a brilliant goalscoring spell – four in his first five games. The realisation that Ramires's qualities are actually his discipline, reliability and stamina comes as something of a disappointment. Yet the more often you see him, the more you realise his value.
He remains a difficult player to categorise, particularly within Brazilian football. The genius of the system Luis Felipe Scolari created – or stumbled upon – when winning the World Cup in 2002 was that it exclusively featured the four types of outfield player Brazil does well. There were the rugged centre-backs – Lúcio, Roque Júnior and Edmílson. Ahead of them, the legendary flying wing-backs of Roberto Carlos and Cafu, protected by the solid, physical holding midfielders of Gilberto Silva and Kleberson. Up front, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Rivaldo were brilliant central attackers.
Outside of those four categories, Brazil has struggled to create top-class footballers this century – there is a real dearth of wide players, in part because of the prevalence of 4-2-2-2. You do not find a great deal of top-class box-to-box midfielders, nor many genuinely talented deep-lying playmakers. Defensively solid full-backs are at a premium.
Ramires is a cross between those first two categories; a wide player and a box-to-box midfielder. He found a huge fan in Dunga, the Brazil coach between 2006 and 2010, whose lopsided shape needed a right-sided central midfielder shuttling out to the flank. No one else could play that role properly – Elano did not have the legs, and Dani Alves was not accustomed to getting the ball in more central, advanced positions. Ramires's job at Benfica was similar – on the right of a diamond, asked to provide right-sided width but also support Javi García at the base of midfield. "Angel Di María was on the left, as a winger, and there was only one holding midfielder in front of the defence," he remembers. Di María, Pablo Aimar and Javier Saviola were too busy supporting Oscar Cardozo to worry about defending.
It is unusual that a player so based around stamina is also cast in such specific, disciplined roles – he is neither a headless chicken nor a solid holder, he is a hybrid of the two. "When the team are defending I try to close down the midfield, and when we are attacking I have to open up to give more space to the more creative players and be available out wide," he explains.
At his first club Cruzeiro, Ramires was nicknamed O Queniano Azul – the blue Kenyan – because of his constant running. He was regarded as a particularly brave player, and frequently told he would suit the English game. Again, a Brazilian naturally suited to Premier League football, rather than La Liga or Serie A, is something of an anomaly.
However, Ramires found the Premier League difficult at first – he was typically full of running, but too easily pushed off the ball. He was asked to play a less vertical game than he had with Brazil or Benfica, partly because Chelsea had Frank Lampard making his classic driving runs from midfield. Now, although he now finds himself playing out on the flank, Ramires appears to be a key player at Chelsea. With Lampard playing deeper alongside Mikel John Obi, Ramires can cut infield and drive at the opposition defence, with and without the ball. Furthermore, the switch from 4-3-3 to 4-2-3-1 under Roberto Di Matteo means a different job for the wide players. Chelsea are now defending with two banks of four, so require more disciplined players on the flanks – hence Salomon Kalou and Ramires are favoured over Juan Mata, who has been moved inside, and Daniel Sturridge, who is now a substitute.
Ramires's cool finish to make the scoreline 3-1 in the FA Cup semi-final against Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday was exactly what Di Matteo wants from him, and in many ways, the match at Wembley was a classic Ramires game. Browse Simon Burnton's minute-by-minute report, and Ramires's name does not feature until the description of his 77th-minute goal. He does not do anything spectacular or noticeable, yet he is always available for a pass, always in the right position, and always performing his defensive duties. He helped José Bosingwa deal with Gareth Bale, yet also gave Benoît Assou-Ekotto a difficult afternoon. He was a presence in the centre, where Scott Parker's physical exhaustion was particularly obvious when juxtaposed with the Brazilian's boundless energy.
That is further summed up statistically. Ramires is Chelsea's most frequent tackler and also their most frequent dribbler – a unique role for a Premier League player. He helps defensively and offensively, and frequently covers more distance than any of his team-mates. In the home win over his former club Benfica, which set up the Champions League semi-final meeting with Barcelona this week, he ran 11,839 metres, the equivalent of 105 lengths of the Stamford Bridge pitch. He is technically skilled too, but his mobility is Ramires's main quality.
In an age of gifted passing midfielders, the concept of raw energy can be overlooked, when frequently it is crucial in enabling the more technically proficient footballers to play. Jordan Henderson, for example, has been criticised for his contribution at Liverpool this season, but when fielded alongside Lucas Leiva, who stays very deep, and Charlie Adam, who lacks mobility, he performed an important function simply by covering a lot of ground. That was particularly obvious in Liverpool's 2-1 win at Stamford Bridge in November, when Liverpool were being completely overrun in the second half – Henderson came on with fresh legs, motored up and down, and gradually helped Liverpool push up the pitch and compete in midfield.
Henderson and Ramires would be unlikely heroes in next month's FA Cup final, but players in that mould often prosper in finals. Ray Parlour, for example, was hardly Arsenal's most talented player, yet was man of the match in the 1998 final, and scored the opener in the 2002 final. On hot days in May, he stood out simply by being able to run the furthest. Coincidentally, in that 1998 game Parlour defeated a Newcastle United side coached by Kenny Dalglish, and in 2002 the losing Chelsea team were led out by the injured Di Matteo. Those two will contest this year's final.
In an FA Cup final between two sides who have underperformed in the league, have struggled to get their expensive No9 firing, and still lack long-term direction, it may be sheer stamina that wins the day.
Drogba beats Torres in a jam
Having spent so much of the past year trying to delicately thread the ball into the channels for Fernando Torres – only to find that he is still lacking confidence even when he receives the ball in his preferred position – Didier Drogba's goal against Spurs illustrated how much easier it is with him up front. His sensational strike was reminiscent of his goal against Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League late last year – collecting a high ball up against two defenders with no support, yet still managing to turn and score. As much as Torres would love to start the final against his old club, Drogba will surely be favoured – his record at Wembley is extraordinary, and he will be going for his fourth FA Cup final goal.
Suárez is great channel changer
Everton's left-back zone is often their most promising position going forward, yet also a real weakness when defending. Leighton Baines is a key part of their approach with the ball – he has created 35 more chances this season than any other Everton player. But his movement upfield can leave Everton prone to balls in behind, and that was exploited particularly well by Luis Suárez, who gave the centre-back Sylvain Distin an extremely uncomfortable afternoon by getting into one-versus-one situations down that side. Suárez's preferred role is still uncertain, but no forward in the Premier League is more dangerous when moving out to the channels.Image copyright Aquascutum
It is a fashion classic that has endured through the decades. But away from catwalk shows and Hollywood glamour, the trench coat's first starring role was in World War One kitting out battle-weary soldiers.
From Humphrey Bogart to Audrey Hepburn and Kate Moss, the trench coat is now synonymous with elan and sophistication.
Clocking up countless appearances on the silver screen and in the glossy pages of fashion magazines, it is considered a timeless wardrobe essential.
But while today it adorns the shoulders of supermodels and celebrities, it seems - despite the heavy clue in its name - its origins in bloody battlefields may be less well-appreciated.
"If you read articles about '10 items everyone should have' the trench coat will probably feature along with a pair of jeans and a leather jacket," says Amber Jane Butchart, author, blogger and associate lecturer in cultural and historical studies at London College of Fashion.
"It's become a perennial classic.
"Many people may be surprised about where it comes from, but for centuries fashion has influenced military dress and vice versa."
As World War One took a stranglehold on Europe, the Allies and opposition German forces dug deep with defensive lines stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss border.
There in the trenches as the onslaught raged were the soldiers - caked in mud and battered by biting winds.
Image copyright PA Image caption Trench warfare was one of the defining characteristics of World War One
Image copyright Burberry Image caption Today the coats are more associated with preening and pouting
Their heavy greatcoats - long wool overcoats which had been regulation garments for British forces since the Crimean War of the 1850s - proved ill-suited to the desperate conditions.
In contrast, the lighter, shorter, waterproof coat produced by English clothing companies such as Burberry and Aquascutum was a perfect fit.
But they were not its only practical benefits.
Epaulettes displayed an officer's rank, while a gun flap buttoned at the chest was designed to provide an amount of additional protection when in combat.
Map cases and other equipment were attached to D-rings on the belt, and covering the upper back area was a storm shield that enabled water to run off the coat cleanly.
Their subdued colour, too, played an important role.
"It became imperative for soldiers to not stand out," says Ms Butchart, who is writing a book examining the links between military wear and fashion.
"Khaki is the Hindi word for dust. Before that, military clothing was incredibly brightly coloured.
"For centuries you needed to recognise the side people were on very easily, so colours like blue and red that were quite easy to dye relatively cheaply got used a lot in European uniforms.
"However, by the time of the African campaigns [in the late 19th Century], warfare was getting more industrialised and those colours were basically putting a target on your soldiers."
Who invented the trench coat?
Image copyright Burberry
Two names loom large in the history of the trench coat with both laying claim to having invented the garment
In 1879 Hampshire's Thomas Burberry developed gabardine, a tightly woven, water-repellent cloth which was later used for the forerunner of the trench coat, the Tielocken
developed gabardine, a tightly woven, water-repellent cloth which was later used for the forerunner of the trench coat, the Tielocken To make them waterproof, fabrics had previously been waxed or rubberised - resulting in them becoming heavy, stiff and uncomfortable to wear
In contrast, gabardine was lightweight, weatherproof and 'breathable'
The coats were first used in the Boer War in 1895 - Burberry developed them further and supplied about half a million during World War One
London's Aquascutum, meanwhile, claims to have used designs which later formed the basis for the trench coat as early as the 1850s
, meanwhile, claims to have used designs which later formed the basis for the trench coat as early as the 1850s Using patented waterproof wool, the firm says its coats were worn by soldiers fighting in the Crimean War
A number of companies advertised variations on the trench coat during World War One including Thresher and Glenny, Gerrish Ames and Simpkins, Kenneth Durward, and David Moseley and Sons
That shift reflected a marked change in the psychology of battle, says Jane Tynan, lecturer in cultural studies at Central Saint Martins in London and author of British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki.
"The introduction of the trench coat is really significant - it's a story of clothing becoming part of the technology of warfare.
"Armies' very bright colours were often reminiscent of their flag, but they were also associated with honour.
"In World War One, French soldiers wore red trousers because they felt it was dishonourable to be in camouflage.
"But the British were enthusiastic adopters of khaki from the time of the Indian Mutiny in 1857.
"It went hand in hand with a belief that pragmatism was more important than honour.
"Uniform became a lot more functional and decorative features were less in evidence."
Weighed down by sludge, it was not unusual, Ms Tynan says, for frustrated soldiers to slash away feet of fabric from their greatcoats using bayonets.
The trench coat alleviated that issue, but despite its suitability it was never a regulation garment supplied to each and every soldier.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption This Burberry trench coat is featured in an exhibition at the Museum of the Great War in Meaux, near Paris
Adopted by officers who, unlike other ranks, were allowed to procure their own clothes from tailors and outfitters, its use became more widespread from 1917 onwards.
Desperate to clothe an army which had quadrupled in size, the manufacturing of uniforms was put out to trade by the War Office with civilian firms entering into mass production.
It resulted in cheaper garments - a benefit for newly recruited officers, some of whom were less well-off than their predecessors.
It highlights, Ms Tynan argues, an issue that still resonates today with concerns over kit shortages for British soldiers during their recent campaigns in Afghanistan.
"A method previously associated with clothing lower ranks, it presented firms such as Burberry and Aquascutum with a huge opportunity to market the trench coat.
"Having a mass-produced item for officers became quite normalised.
"There are so many myths around soldiers all being clothed and kitted out to the necessary standard, but the reality is very different.
"When you think of the scale of the First World War, you realise it would have been impossible to fully regulate the dress of each soldier for such a large conflict."
While the trench coat's popularity was not restricted to the battlefield, the qualities embodied by the armed forces did help widen its appeal.
"Even during the war you got ads in the Illustrated London News for the Burberry trench coat being sold to men and women," said Ms Butchart.
"It was a unisex item.
"Then when the soldiers returned from battle there was the idea of heroism and patriotism that people wanted to buy into."
Image copyright Aquascutum Image caption As with this example from Aquascutum, many adverts for trench coats played up links to military heritage
But having been firmly rooted in military campaigns, the coat was soon to be taken in a different direction - one which would shape popular perceptions in decades to come.
As Hollywood cemented its grip on the public imagination, filmgoers increasingly looked to the stars of the silver screen for fashion inspiration.
Men were drawn to the effortless cool displayed by detectives in slick film noir crime thrillers, while alluring leading ladies such as Marlene Dietrich provided a template for women to follow.
"By the 1930s Hollywood was really influential," said Ms Butchart. "Its reach in terms of fashion was becoming huge.
"Warner Bros produced a lot of gangster films that featured characters wearing trench coats.
"And by the time of World War Two they were becoming strongly linked with film noir and Humphrey Bogart.
"He embodied that trench 'attitude'. Many people think of him in Casablanca, even though he only wore one in two scenes."
Image copyright AP Image caption Humphrey Bogart played trench coat-wearing private eye Sam Spade in 1941 film The Maltese Falcon
Image copyright AP Image caption The following year, 'Bogey' starred alongside Ingrid Bergman in romantic drama Casablanca
The coats remained a favourite with Hollywood costume departments into the 1960s and a beige trench in romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany's helped confirm Audrey Hepburn's status as a style icon.
That transition will be the focus of From Field to Fashion, an exhibition running at Winchester Discovery Centre in Thomas Burberry's home county of Hampshire from 4 October until 21 December.
Alongside an authentic World War One Burberry cavalry trench coat will be the one Dietrich wore in 1948's A Foreign Affair - on loan from Berlin's Deutsche Kinemathek Museum.
Today, the coat's popularity on catwalks and the High Street shows little sign of waning.
The centrepiece of Burberry and Aquascutum's lavish ad campaigns, other brands continue to produce their own versions annually too.
In fashion terms, the trench coat has gone on to win the style war.
But, a hundred years after the outbreak of World War One, its beginnings on the battlefields should not be forgotten.Racist flyers targeting Chinese students were posted across a university in Texas this week, days after campus officials had released plans to make the school a more inclusive and diverse environment.
Students at the University of Texas at Austin discovered the offensive posters displayed on campus at the school of engineering on Sunday. The flyers contained derogatory messages directed at Chinese students, according to a copy that a student shared on social media.
someone put these up around UT engineering smh pic.twitter.com/kzrkr93hJo — Daniel (@dannnerrrr) April 3, 2017
The flyers accuse Chinese students of plagiarizing and “faking” their skills for a job or graduate school. It also claimed that “burping and farting are unethical,” but were a part of Chinese culture.
“We know they aren’t bad in your culture,” the note continued. “WE WILL TEACH YOU WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.”
UT Austin president Greg Fenves announced on Monday that the university was investigating the incident and called the posters “hateful and biased” and “completely unacceptable.”
Fenves tweeted on Tuesday that officials have identified the student responsible for the flyers. He said that the school was reviewing the incident under the university’s hate and bias policies.
“Every student, faculty member and staff member who sets foot on our campus has the right to learn, teach and work without fear and without being the object of hate and discrimination,” Fenves said in an official statement.
It’s unclear if the student was acting alone and whether or not the student will be formally disciplined. Officials at UT Austin did not immediately return The Huffington Post’s request for comment.
Update: We identified the student who may be responsible for hateful flyers, are reviewing under hate & bias policy https://t.co/D3zjcsEDif — Greg Fenves (@gregfenves) April 4, 2017
UT Austin’s Chinese Student Association and student government published a combined statement on Tuesday saying that the flyer’s contents did not represent Chinese culture or traditions, “nor the UT students who so proudly honor their country and heritage.”
The organizations called the incident an ignorant “act of discrimination” and encouraged all students to join the Chinese Student Association to learn more about Chinese culture.
The disparaging flyers were posted several days after UT Austin officials published the school’s first university-wide diversity and inclusion action plan.
The document, posted to the university’s website on March 30, detailed the school’s plans to embrace and encourage diversity on the school’s campus. Key goals of the plan include strengthening minority student recruitment efforts.
“This plan... helps make certain we are all doing our part to build a strong inclusive culture where all members of the community are respected and the educational experience for our students is enhanced by diverse people, scholarship and ideas,” vice president of diversity George J. Vincent said in a statement when the plan was released.
University officials held a town hall in late February to discuss the school’s new hate and bias policy. The meeting was held more than a week after a similar incident occurred, when the white nationalist group Vanguard America posted anti-Muslim flyers near the campus.
Students were initially upset with the university’s response to the February incident because officials appeared to defend free speech without condemning the flyers’ xenophobic rhetoric.
President Fenves denounced the language in a statement on Tumblr, calling it discriminatory and anti-Muslim.The Fair Work Commission will begin a fresh investigation into the Health Services Union in Victoria, after a complaint from the union's assistant secretary.
The investigation is new, and unrelated to issues surrounding former national secretary Craig Thomson's alleged misuse of HSU credit cards.
Fairfax Media last week reported that the Victorian union's assistant secretary and treasurer, Leonie Flynn, had complained to the Fair Work Commission, alleging ''cronyism'', the misuse of members' funds and Health Services Union resources being used for Labor Party preselection campaigns.
Fair Work Commission general manager Bernadette O'Neill (pictured) on Thursday issued a statement saying there would be an investigation as a result of the allegations.
Union secretary Diana Asmar released a statement on Thursday night to say the union would work with Fair Work to resolve any concerns it had with the union's processes.
Clay LucasRobert Grant has a list. I’ll just give the ones with more than 10,000 Google Scholar cites:
Cox (1972) Regression and life tables: 35,512 citations. Dempster, Laird, Rubin (1977) Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm: 34,988 Bland & Altman (1986) Statistical methods for assessing agreement between two methods of clinical measurement: 27,181 Geman & Geman (1984) Stochastic relaxation, Gibbs distributions, and the Bayesian restoration of images: 15,106
We can find some more via searching Google scholar for familiar names and topics; thus:
Metropolis et al. (1953) Equation of state calculations by fast computing machines: 26,000 Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing: 21,000 White (1980) A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator and a direct test for heteroskedasticity: 18,000 Heckman (1977) Sample selection bias as a specification error: 17,000 Dickey and Fuller (1979) Distribution of the estimators for autoregressive time series with a unit root: 14,000 Cortes and Vapnik (1995) Support-vector networks: 13,000 Akaike (1973) Information theory and an extension of the maximum likelihood principle: 13,000 Liang and Zeger (1986) Longitudinal data analysis using generalized linear models: 11,000 Breiman (2001) Random forests: 11,000 Breiman (1996) Bagging predictors: 11,000 Newey and West (1986) A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroskedasticity and autocorrelationconsistent covariance matrix: 11,000 Rosenbaum and Rubin (2004) The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects: 10,000 Granger (1969) Investigating causal relations by econometric models and cross-spectral methods: 10,000 Hausman (1978) Specification tests in econometrics: 10,000
And, the two winners, I’m sorry to say:
Baron and Kenny (1986) The moderator–mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations: 42,000 Zadeh (1965) Fuzzy sets: 45,000
Ugh.
But I’m guessing there are some biggies I’m missing. I say this because Grant’s original list included one paper, by Bland and Altman, with over 27,000 cites, that I’d never heard of!
P.S. I agree with Grant that using Google Scholar favors newer papers. For example, Cooley and Tukey (1965), “An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series,” does not make the list, amazingly enough, with only 9300 cites. And the hugely influential book by Snedecor and Cochran has very few cites, I guess cos nobody cites it anymore. And, of course, the most influential researchers such as Laplace, Gauss, Fisher, Neyman, Pearson, etc., don’t make the cut. If Pearson got a cite for every chi-squared test, Neyman for every rejection region, Fisher for every maximum-likelihood estimate, etc., their citations would run into the mid to high zillions each.
P.P.S. I wrote this post a few months ago so all the citations have gone up. For example, the fuzzy sets paper is now listed at 49,000, and Zadeh has a second paper, “Outline of a new approach to the analysis of complex systems and decision processes,” with 16,000 cites. He puts us all to shame. On the upside, Efron’s 1979 paper, “Bootstrap methods: another look at the jackknife,” has just pulled itself over the 10,000 cites mark. That’s good. Also, I just checked and Tibshirani’s paper on lasso is at 9873, so in the not too distant future it will make the list too.January 6, 2017 Javier Eguiluz
PHP 5.4 version introduced a built-in web server that can be used to run your PHP applications locally during development without the need to configure a full-featured web server such as Apache or Nginx.
Symfony adopted this technique a while ago by providing some console commands to control that web server. In Symfony 3.3 we decided to move those commands to a new bundle called WebServerBundle.
The main reason is that moving the commands make them more easily discoverable and more decoupled. Discoverability is specially important when not using the symfony/symfony dependency. In that case, the commands are not available unless you have the symfony/process component installed. With a dedicated bundle, installing the bundle also installs the dependency, making the whole process easier.
In any case, this new bundle won't change the way you work with the local web server:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 # start a web server in the foreground and see the logs $ bin/console server:run # start, stop and manage a web server in the background $ bin/console server:start $ bin/console server:stop $ bin/console server:statusDear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Israel is prepared to hold peace talks based on the Arab Peace Initiative, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surprisingly declared Monday just moments after new Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman took the oath of office, ending a month-long saga over which party would join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
“I remain committed to making peace with the Palestinians and with all our neighbors,” Netanyahu said in a press conference following the swearing- in ceremony. “The Arab peace initiative includes positive elements that can help revive constructive negotiations with the Palestinians.
“We are willing to negotiate with the Arab states revisions to that initiative so that it reflects the dramatic changes in the region since 2002, but maintains the agreed goal of two states for two peoples.”The controversial Arab Peace Initiative – long rejected by Jerusalem and also known as the Saudi Initiative – calls for normalizing relations between Arab countries and Israel, in exchange for a complete withdrawal by Israel to pre-1967 lines and a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.The Jerusalem Post has learned that Likud MK Tzachi Hanegbi, who was sworn in as minister-without-portfolio in the Prime Minister’s Office and will deal with foreign affairs and defense issues, will be involved in new regional diplomatic initiatives Netanyahu intends to advance in coming weeks. He is the Likud’s most dovish minister.Netanyahu also praised Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s offer to advance peace and security in the region. Liberman, who has been critical of Egypt in the past, said he agreed with Netanyahu’s statements, including about the Arab peace plan and reiterated Yisrael Beytenu’s long-standing support for a two-state solution.Sources close to Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett, however, said he would have a hard time supporting such diplomatic initiatives.They said the people of Israel elected a right-wing government and deserved to receive one. The diplomatic issue is expected to be one of many disputes within the coalition in the weeks ahead.A dispute between Netanyahu and Bennett over the appointment of a military secretary to the security cabinet was resolved past midnight Sunday night. The National Security Council will brief security cabinet ministers until a committee appointed by Netanyahu to determine how to proceed further issues its recommendations in three weeks. If the recommendations are not to Bennett’s liking, Bennett’s associates said the dispute could start all over again.There also expected to be disputes over the state budget; deliberations on the budget in the cabinet will start Tuesday morning.When he agreed to join the coalition, Liberman withdrew from his party’s demands on matters of religion and state, but he opposes a controversial bill that will come to a vote in the Knesset Wednesday that requires harsh punishments for people who are not Chief Rabbinate recognized rabbis who conduct wedding ceremonies in Israel.Yisrael Beytenu formally joined the coalition Monday night following approval by a 55-43 Knesset vote in which Likud MK Bennie Begin abstained and rebel Yisrael Beytenu MK Orly Levy-Abecassis did not participate. In addition to Liberman, Yisrael Beytenu MK Sofa Landver was sworn in as immigrant absorption minister. Along the guidelines of the so-called Norwegian Bill, which allows a minister or deputy minister from each coalition party to be replaced by the next name on the party’s Knesset list, Liberman quit the Knesset Monday night. He will be replaced by Holon city councilwoman Yulia Malinovsky, who will be the Knesset’s 33rd woman.Ahead of the vote approving the coalition agreement, the Knesset conducted a stormy debate on the issue in which opposition MKs harshly criticized Liberman.Zionist Union MK Erel Margalit read a speech full of insults to Netanyahu that were all uttered by Liberman over the past year.Zionist Union MK Yoel Hasson poked fun at a statement by Liberman last month that if he became defense minister, he would assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh within 48 hours. Hasson started a countdown until Haniyeh’s death.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Fox & Friends reported yesterday that former FBI Director James Comey had leaked classified information in a memo he had written to memorialize a meeting with President Trump, which he then passed on to a friend to leak to the press. Trump, a self-described big fan of Fox & Friends, seemed delighted in this news and amplified it with this tweet:
James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2017
Except it turns out that it wasn’t true.
As we wrote in a few posts yesterday, turns out that there is no evidence that anything in the memo that was classified. In fact, Comey specifically said during testimony that he had not leaked any classified information, though until that memo is released publicly, we may never know. As the political media world began to take note, many eyes turned to Fox & Friends for furthering what |
: That night, I think he was a better me than I was. I was a little off my feed that night.
SAGAL: Well, Mr. President, we are delighted to have you with us, but we do want to play a game with you and today we're calling...
CLINTON: This is the part where you make me look like a fool, right?
SAGAL: No, sir.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: The farthest thing from our minds. This is the part where you...
CLINTON: I'm going to create a job at my CGI America; somebody will volunteer to be my tutor for a year after this is over.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: All right, we have invited you here to play a game we're calling?
CARL KASELL, Host:
Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy and Twilight Sparkle.
SAGAL: So you're a former president, you're a Rhodes scholar, you're famously well informed. What could we be sure that an accomplished person like you would know nothing about? And then the answer came to us: the TV show "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic."
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Answer three questions, or answer two out of three questions about the wonderful world of "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" and you win our prize for one of our listeners, Carl's voice on their home answering machine. Carl, who is President Clinton playing for?
KASELL: The President is playing for Dave Parks of Chico, California.
CLINTON: Poor Dave.
SAGAL: Poor Dave, I know.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: So here we go. You ready to do this? One of the current My Little Ponys is Rarity. That is her name, Rarity. What is her particular enthusiasm? A: she loves her little line of toys called My Even Tinier Ponies.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: B: giving other ponies makeovers. Or C: eating paste.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: Eating what?
SAGAL: Eating past, sir, Mr. President.
CLINTON: P-A-S-T-E?
SAGAL: P-A-S-T-E, paste, sir.
CLINTON: B.
SAGAL: Yes, giving other ponies makeovers. Yes, that is in fact Rarity's...
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Big enthusiasm. Very fashion conscious, our Rarity is. All right, when ponies in Equestria discover their true talents in life, they earn something. What? A tattoo on their flank, known as a cutie mark. B: a title, such as Fluttershy the Inventive. Or C: the right to mate.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: A.
SAGAL: A. You're going to go for A, a tattoo known as the cutie mark? Oh, you're right, sir.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
JESSI KLEIN: I have to say I think it's probably fair to say this is the highest stake situation President Clinton has ever been in.
SAGAL: I think so.
KLEIN: In his entire life.
SAGAL: And he's doing so well.
KLEIN: He's killing it.
SAGAL: That's true.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: All right, well let's see if you can be perfect. The ponies' most powerful enemy is which of these? A: Krastos the Glue Maker.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: If he's not, he ought to be.
SAGAL: Yeah, I know. B: the evil pony Nightmare Moon. Or C: the cynical grownup, Chester.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: B.
SAGAL: B, you're going to go for the evil pony Nightmare Moon. You're right, Mr. President.
BODETT: Wow.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Nightmare Moon is released in the opening episode from the prison where she's been held for a thousand years, and is only defeated by the ponies working together, and then they have a party.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Carl, how did President Clinton do on our quiz?
KASELL: President Clinton wins again, Peter.
SAGAL: Oh my gosh.
KASELL: He had three correct answers. So the President wins for Dave Parks.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Another victory for you, sir. You've done so much. Been elected twice, governor of Arkansas, the youngest governor ever. How does this stack up?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: It's right up there.
SAGAL: All right.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: President Bill Clinton is hosting the Clinton Global Initiative meeting next week in Chicago, with a focus on job creation right here in the United States. President Clinton, thank you so much for joining us on WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Harry Potter author JK Rowling is a huge liberal loudmouth who can’t seem to stay out of American politics. The British citizen has a true hatred for all things Trump, but now, she has gone too far. With as much publicity as she could muster, Rowling very publicly accused President Donald Trump of mistreating and humiliating a disabled toddler at the White House, and she continued to perpetuate this lie until Melania Trump gave her a nasty surprise she won’t soon forget.
JK Rowling believes that, since she wrote the Harry Potter series of books, she is pretty special and people should hang on her every word. To most English literature scholars, Harry Potter is nothing more than a cheap “imitator” of the true classics written by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, best known for their works “The Lion, Witch and The Wardrobe” series and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, respectively.
She’s nothing more than a Lewis and Tolkien knock-off queen who now uses her stardom to push her liberal causes, but this time she straight up lied. Even after she realized she had the wrong information, she still allowed thousands of people to continue to believe that what she said is true.
It all began after Rowling watched a highly edited video of the president greeting sick kids at the White House and she tweeted out to her large following:
How stunning, and how horrible, that Trump cannot bring himself to shake the hand of a small boy who only wanted to touch the President. /4x — J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 28, 2017
So, according to Rowling, President Trump must hate disabled kids, and if you believe Rowling’s rants, he wouldn’t even touch a small boy suffering from a disability. Truly, what kind of man would do that and what kind of woman would be married to a man like that? Of course, Rowling was talking out of her behind, and the real video shows our president taking extra time to greet the small, 3-year-old disabled boy named Monty Weer. Below is the portion of the video that was conveniently cut out by Trump-haters:
But, that’s not all. Days before, Melania Trump had actually spent time with the little tyke, who suffers from spina bifida. Monty Weer’s mom Marjorie had brought him to the White House to share her Obamacare nightmare.
Instead of spending time tweeting out eight mean tweets directed at Trump over Monty, maybe Ms. Rowling could have done a little research and found out something true about the boy. She could have tweeted some truth out, like how Obamacare has been the biggest burden to his parents being able to gain the right treatment for him.
Marjorie Weer spent six months negotiating with an insurance company just to clear the way for her 3-year-old son Montgomery to travel from South Carolina to see doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital. Monty, as the family calls him, has spina bifida, a birth defect that prevents the spinal cord from developing properly. Weer says she had to press his case with the insurer from November into April. During Monty’s short life, the family has had three health insurance plans—under two different companies—largely because of problems caused by Obamacare, Weer says. [Source: Daily Signal]
JK Rowling made Donald Trump out to be this cartoon villain who drowns puppies and hates little kids, but Melania Trump made Rowling look like a bigger fool with her tweet just days before. It really was a nasty surprise for this mediocre author of children’s books, who chose to run her mouth without any concern whether she was spreading accurate information:
Happy belated 3rd bday (yesterday) sweet Monty! Thank you for visiting us at @WhiteHouse today! pic.twitter.com/ZnENYjB7zE — Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) June 27, 2017
JK Rowling didn’t have a magic wand to make her accusations go away, but she could have deleted the tweets now that they are proven false and issued a correction. She ignored why Monty Weer was at the White House – because Obamacare has been his nightmare. Instead, she makes Trump out to be the bad guy once again. I guess fiction is the only thing she is good at. However, her “story-telling” is down right sick on this one. Maybe Rowling should consider another career and stop trying to rip off the true greats.
The real villain here is a man named Barack Obama who sold Americans an expensive and horrible nightmare called Obamacare. The parents of little boys like Monty Weer know all too well who really is mistreating them, and it’s not Donald or Melania Trump. They are only trying to make it better and unburden Americans of the scourge of Obamacare before it’s too late for all those who suffer like little Monty Weer.Bills that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana have been introduced in both houses of the Vermont legislature. A Senate bill, Senate Bill 48, was introduced late last month, and its House counterpart, House Bill 200, was introduced Tuesday.
The bills are not identical. The Senate bill would decriminalize the possession of up to an ounce of pot by those 21 and over, while the more far-reaching House bill would decriminalize the possession of up to two ounces and the cultivation of to two mature and seven immature marijuana plants. Under both bills, people under 21 who are caught with pot would be treated like minors caught possessing alcohol.The bills have tri-partisan support (Democrats, Republicans, and Progressives), with 39 cosponsors in the House and eight in the Senate. Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) has also repeatedly indicated strong support for a decriminalization bill.In previous years, House Speaker Shap Smith has blocked decriminalization bills from moving to the House floor, but last month, he said he wouldn't block a bill if it made it out of the Judiciary Committee.
Fourteen states have decriminalized marijuana possession, including Colorado, which along with Washington, legalized possession in the November elections. Other states in the Northeast that have decriminalized are Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and New York.Getty Images
As Raiders G.M. Reggie McKenzie continues to settle in as the new captain of the team’s front office, he’s not afraid to overturn the decisions of his predecessor, the late Al Davis.
Per a league source, McKenzie and company will be waiving today cornerback DeMarcus Van Dyke.
Van Dyke, a third-round pick in 2011 who appeared in 14 games with four starts last year, fit the former vision for the franchise. He was fast. The fastest man at last year’s Scouting Combine, running the 40-yard dash in 4.28 seconds.
The move comes two days after the Raiders and McKenzie parted ways with cornerback Chimdi Chekwa, a fourth-round pick in 2011 who ran the 40 in 4.33 seconds at the Combine. Both Chekwa and Van Dyke are listed as second-team corners in the Raiders’ most recent depth chart, with Shawntae Spencer and Ron Bartell the starters. Joselio Hanson recently was added to the team, which apparently triggered the decision to dump Van Dyke.
Van Dyke will now hit the waiver wire, with the Colts continuing to have dibs.
The broader message is that McKenzie must see something in the player the team took in the third round of the 2011 supplemental draft, quarterback Terrelle Pryor. Otherwise, he’d be gone, too.
Then again, who knows what the next move from McKenzie will be?Paulette Leaphart walked from Biloxi to Washington
Latria Graham Paulette Leaphart and her daughter Madeline walk through Spotsylvania County, Virginia, on the shoulder of Jefferson Davis Highway, on June 23.
Paulette Leaphart left her hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi, on April 30, intent on walking to Washington, D.C. -- a journey of 1,034 miles -- and arriving by June 27, her 50th birthday, a milestone her doctors weren't always confident she would reach.
She strides with a sense of purpose, acknowledging that her body is forever changed. Leaphart was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer in January 2014. She underwent a double mastectomy and wears the scars as emblems of her struggle.
Accompanied by her youngest daughter, 8-year-old Madeline, Leaphart is traveling the entire route topless.
All she can talk about is what will happen when she gets to Washington. Leaphart wants to tell lawmakers about the battle everyday people like her face in trying to afford treatment.
She shares the stories of other people in trouble, folks in agony, at the mercy of their insurance, unable to focus on their survival because they lack the economic means to get the treatment they need.
"Yellow is the new pink. We're taking lemons and making lemonade," Leaphart tells Chrystie Logan, a woman who flags her down on the side of the highway near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Logan has been following Leaphart's journey online.
Latria Graham Leaphart uses her phone to check her progress in Stafford County, Virginia, on June 25.
The lemonade quote is not an accident -- Leaphart made an appearance in Beyoncé's visual album "Lemonade" on April 23. The hourlong film is described as a visual representation of every woman's journey of self-knowledge and healing. Leaphart spent some time with the singer on set.
"She said I inspired her -- that she admired me. It was great to hear that. I asked her to join me for a block of the walk, and she offered to join me for a mile," Leaphart says, a smirk forming on her lips as if she's letting this slip.
Beyoncé has yet to make an appearance, but that doesn't bother Leaphart. She's concentrating on the end goal.
Leaphart endured a journey before this walk, and she wrestled with a number of the emotions represented in Beyoncé's film. Anger and emptiness attempted to take root in her, but she chooses to focus on hope and redemption.
She wants to make sure Congress understands her experience and recognizes that her plight isn't unusual. In the United States in 2015, 60,290 people received a new breast cancer diagnosis and 40,290 people died of the disease, according to the American Cancer Society.
So she walks. God gave her this mission almost a year ago. Those are her words.
"I trained for this. When I got sick, I had to sell my cars. That made me walk to the doctor," Leaphart says, the memory still vivid. "I'd walk the 5 miles there, recover for an hour or two, then walk the 5 miles back."
***
She has to get to D.C. After she shows Congress her chest, she wants to show them her teeth.
Cancer treatment had an effect on her mouth. Many of her teeth are now chipped or broken, her molars useless.
"I need to get my mouth fixed, but do you know how much they want? Ten thousand dollars," Leaphart says, the number spilling from her lips with acrimony.
She and her daughter are taking a break and eating peaches after a hot morning in the sun. The fruit serves a dual purpose -- it's a favorite of Madeline's, and the ripe peach is one of the few things Leaphart can eat comfortably.
She hopes to receive dental treatment one day, once a change is made. She believes delivering the message is her duty, so she goes back to walking in her black Nike Air Maxes and neon-green socks, kicking up rocks, creating a rough-sounding scrabble that reverberates as she heads down into a valley.
The journey hasn't been without its problems. First there was the dissolution of her relationship with a documentary crew, which resulted in the removal of the recreational vehicle that was meant to provide a respite at night. Leaphart and her young daughter were left by the side of the road, but the mother of eight was undaunted. She needed a new plan and decided to travel light -- a relative picked up their luggage, and they continued their journey with three changes of clothing each.
Leaphart has no support vehicle. Every day she must decide on the move what she and Madeline will eat and where they will sleep.
Once, near the border of North Carolina and Virginia, they were stranded 12 miles from the nearest hotel and had no access to a cab. Mother and daughter made their way to Lake Gaston, where someone knew of her trek and helped the pair find a place to sleep.
Latria Graham Taraysha and Sarah Woodall stop Leaphart outside of Falmouth, Virginia, on June 25 to see if she needs a ride.
"People expected me to quit now that there wasn't any publicity," Leaphart says, her arms swinging. "I made a promise to make it to D.C., and that's what I'm going to do."
She does a lot of talking and walking at the same time. She has to, in order to hit her goal of 30 miles a day. When pressed, she can cover 5 miles in an hour, but by doing so she pushes her body to the point where it can endure no more.
People who know her story stop by the side of the road almost every day. Some bring Popsicles. Some bring Powerade, or anything with electrolytes. Some join the journey. They shower Leaphart with prayers and at times offer her and Madeline a place to stay.
Leaphart documents the kindness from strangers on her Facebook page. Videos of her story have spanned the globe, and now 20,000 people watch daily, tracking her progress. One of the videos she made has more than 10 million views. The online presence has helped her fight the inclination to hide her scars.
"I loved the color pink. I can't stand what they've done to it," she says, the frustration evident in her voice. She has adopted yellow to symbolize the need for hope and a cure, not awareness.
"We need to tell the truth about cancer. They're using the slogan, 'Save the ta-tas,' but the ta-tas aren't what's important. It's the people with the breasts. You can still be alive without your breasts."
Leaphart had a medical condition that made breast enhancements risky, so breast reconstruction was not an option.
"I'm still beautiful," Leaphart declares. "I still turn heads even though I don't have breasts. It doesn't make me less of a woman. I'm a girly girl. I like getting dressed up, putting on makeup and everything else, but I refuse to allow one standard definition of beauty to exist in my household. That sets us all up for disappointment when things change. Regardless of what we look like, we should be celebrated."
***
"Sit tight for a minute."
A deputy of the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office eases out of his vehicle, parked along Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia. He and another officer have come to talk to Leaphart about her decision to walk bare-chested.
Leaphart taught Madeline how to use Facebook Live so that when they are stopped by the police, the girl can document the encounter. Just in case.
Latria Graham Deputies Pearce and Ridings of the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office stop Leaphart on June 24 to speak with her about her decision to walk topless.
The officer's initial concern stems from social norms based on gender -- the idea that she should be wearing a shirt because she is a woman. The officers respectfully but firmly insist that she wear a shirt.
For Leaphart, hiding would mean giving up her confidence and giving in to shame. She tells this to the police when they stop her. Today it's the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office, but it has been a dozen other departments along the way.
"It's amazing that I've got to educate the police on the law," Leaphart says. "I took the time to do the research before I ever got started. I knew this was coming."
After her double mastectomy, her chest has long, horizontal scars and pouches of skin where fat, ligaments and connective tissue used to live. Leaphart no longer has nipples. That's why she is allowed to walk around shirtless.
In most states, indecent exposure is defined as exposing the genitals (breasts and nether regions). She explains this to almost every officer she meets. While respectfully challenging the police's reasoning, she also confronts society's definition of what it means to be a woman.
Later, the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office will share a Facebook post chronicling its time with Leaphart and the education the officers received about breast cancer and her story. In the final picture, everyone is all smiles. With their differences resolved, Leaphart loads Madeline into her stroller and sets off again, walking down the side of the highway.
This trip has been educational for the child, and her mother isn't the only one getting stronger with each mile. They stop to read historical markers. On rest breaks, they use Leaphart's phone to look up the types of plants and animals they encounter on the trail. Madeline sits in her stroller for the better part of the day, taking mental notes.
Latria Graham Paulette waits patiently for Madeline, who stopped to smell and examine foliage in Thornburg, Virginia, on June 24.
Madeline's favorite scenery is the forest. They walk past the blooming primrose and dandelions, the scent of honeysuckle trailing after them as they seek shelter from the unrelenting sun. Overgrown grass threatens to overwhelm the pair at times, and they hold hands to get through the scary parts. They hardly take notice anymore of the clatter and clank of trucks carrying freight as they zoom past on the highway.
Still, even a day of relaxation has its perils. Late last week, after a day at a theme park, the door of a passing SUV is accidentally left open and it strikes Leaphart on the left side of her body. She says she is grateful -- if they door had hit her chest, she would still be in the hospital.
Vehicles aren't the only problem. Often the weather refuses to cooperate. Leaphart is occasionally thwarted by the rain; one morning the sky opened up and let loose a torrential downpour.
Mist clings to their ankles when they walk through patches of fog after an early-morning rainstorm. The mud on the shoulder of the road seems like quicksand sucking at her shoes. Leaphart has only one thought: forward.
Later on, the sun will deprive the dirt of its moisture and the ground will turn to dust, which swirls around their feet like smoke.
There are moments when the two must take shelter from the sun. Temperatures in the high 90s are common this time of year.
Sitting under a shade tree in Spotsylvania County, Leaphart begins to talk about the past. She had a different life before all of this -- she was a social worker. Cancer tried to take a lot of things from her. It took her home: One day, Leaphart returned from an appointment to find a notice on her door ordering her to vacate. Soon she and her children would be homeless, and because she had an eviction on her record, she has trouble finding safe, affordable housing for her family.
She tries not to dwell on this, grateful that she is alive to bring the issue to light. She takes another swig of her Powerade before resettling her and Madeline's things in the basket of the stroller.
They move beyond Aquia Harbor in Virginia, and then on past Quantico. The increased military presence means they don't have much farther to go.
A green-and-white sign in the distance announces their progress.
Dumfries 5
Alexandria 32
Washington 40
She is getting closer. She gets a call from a friend -- Leaphart has been granted a meeting with some lawmakers when she arrives. After the news, Leaphart redoubles her efforts, arms swinging, meeting on her mind, hope radiating from her with every footfall.
Latria Graham At a motel in Stafford County on June 24, Leaphart is all smiles after receiving the news that she has an official appointment with lawmakers in Washington.
***
Paulette Leaphart is dreaming of her day in Washington.
When she arrives in Alexandria, the buildings go vertical, reaching for the sky in their 1980s industrial glory, the entire complex tinged with exhaust from the vehicles that wheeze and whiz by on the highway and nearby interstate. Pink clouds creep across the sky, replaced by white ones as the day goes on.
Closer.
Heels cracked, blisters deflated, she passes by the Pentagon before taking the 14th Street Bridge across the Potomac River, the Jefferson Memorial on her left. The Washington Channel is the last body of water standing between her and the moment of reckoning she has been walking for two months to achieve. In her mind, the journey -- the tests, the loss, the doubt, the despair -- has been worth it. Sweat trickles down her forehead as she looks up at the dome covered in construction netting, its whiteness a stark contrast to the color of the sky.
She has found the purpose for her pain, and as she stands on the steps of the Capitol building on her birthday, she utters three words: "Thank you, God."
Every footstep, every second of forward motion led up to this. She did it -- survived. Free of the stroller, her daughter walks beside her, followers, family and friends walk behind her, wearing yellow, bearing witness to her testimony of strength, faith and endurance.
She is 50. She is in Washington. The woman from Biloxi has accomplished the first portion of what she set out to do.
This was just the beginning.
Latria Graham is a writer based in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The majority of her work revolves around the dynamics of race, gender norms, class, nerd culture and sports. You can find more of her work at LatriaGraham.com, or engage with her on Twitter at @LGRaconteur.Jetman and his buddies are back. Yves Rossy, the man who decided that you don't need much more than a tiny wing and a jetpack to fly, has teamed up with pilots Vincent Reffet and Fred Fugen in south of France for another absolutely insane and beautiful stunt.
This time, the three pilots are flying in formation with Patrouille de France's Alphajets, one of the best precision aerobatics teams in the world.
According to the press release, the jetpack-equipped men fly "just a few meters" from the airplanes — not an easy task when you control the jetpack with body movements alone.
Yves Rossy has pulled several stunts like this before. Last year, he flew alongside an Airbus A380 in Dubai and circled the world's tallest building, that city's Burj Khalifa.
The new video is available in glorious 4K resolution, so be sure to choose that one if you have a monitor that supports it.Nearly a hundred skeletons buried in a cave in southeast Utah offer grisly evidence that ancient Americans waged war on each other as much as 2,000 years ago, according to new research.
Dozens of bodies, dating from the first century CE, bear clear signs of hand-to-hand combat: skulls crushed as if by cudgels; limbs broken at the time of death; and, most damning, weapons still lodged in the back, breast and pelvic bones of some victims — including stone points, bone awls, and knives made of obsidian glass.
Signs of violence were evident in 58 of the approximately 90 bodies found in the cave. Most of the victims were men, but at least 16 women were also found among the dead, as well as nearly 20 children, some as young as three months old.
Since the discovery of this prehistoric charnel house — known to archaeologists as Cave 7 — more than a hundred years ago, there has been little doubt about the violence visited upon those interred there.
But anthropologists continue to debate what that violence meant — specifically, whether Cave 7 was simply a burial ground for casualties of individual conflicts and small skirmishes over centuries, or whether it was more like a war cemetery, where victims were put to rest after a single, catastrophic conflict between cultures.
The site was first excavated in 1893 by Richard Wetherill — the self-taught archaeologist who also led digs at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon — and it was a historic discovery in many regards. Judging by the artifacts and other clues found around them, the mutilated bodies were the first evidence of a new people: a pre-ceramic culture that predated the Ancestral Pueblo. From the handiwork they left behind, Wetherill called them “Basket People,” later to be known as Basketmakers, a culture that thrived in the Southwest from about 500 BCE until 750 CE or later.
But the significance of this find was almost overshadowed by the circumstances surrounding the Basketmakers’ deaths. The carnage found in Cave 7 could only be explained, Wetherill concluded, by the “sudden and violent destruction of a community by battle or massacre.”
And this interpretation held for more than a century, until 2012, when radiocarbon dating of some of the bones from the cave showed that the burials actually spanned many centuries — from the first century CE to the early 300s — suggesting that the dead represented several, smaller conflicts over time.
Now, a new analysis of the Cave 7 remains finds that, while the dates do cover a range, the victims of violence in particular appear to date from the same period, intimating that they’re evidence of a “single-event mass killing.”
In a recent study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Dr. Phil Geib of the University of New Mexico and Utah archaeologist Winston Hurst obtained new radiocarbon dates for some of the remains, but they also relied heavily on a traditional standard of archaeology: context.
Drawing on Wetherill’s original field notes, as well as photographs and other documentation, they determined the positions of the bodies within layers of sediment, and also in relation to each other, to assess which were buried together.
In doing this, they identified four sets of remains that were clearly buried in tandem — each from slightly different parts of the cave, some bearing obvious signs of violence, others not — to serve as samples for the new radiocarbon dating.
The first group consisted of eight adult men, their bodies flexed and their faces turned toward the mouth of the cave, all but one of whom exhibited signs of what the scientists call “extreme cranial trauma.”
The second featured the body of a young woman with three children positioned on her breast, ranging in age from one to three years, none of which showed any skeletal damage.
The third included seven skeletons seemingly stacked in a haphazard pile, four of them males that had clearly suffered yet more “cephalic brutalization.”
The fourth burial was that of four adult women, one of whom may have been injured at the time of death, and another young child.
Analysis of collagen, a protein, extracted from 11 bone samples among these four groups showed that three of the groups dated to around the same time — from about 1,915 to 1,950 years ago, within the dating process’s margins of error.
Only the remains in the second group, the undamaged female skeleton with the three children, were slightly more recent, dating to about 1,880 years ago.
While Geib and Hurst don’t contest that the 90-some dead in Cave 7 were likely buried at more than one time, these results lead them to conclude that the site’s most salient feature — the nearly five dozen brutalized bodies — were indeed the result of a single massacre.
“Regardless of how many other separate interments there were …,” they write, “it is evident that the bulk of the Cave 7 assemblage was interred at the same time and consisted of victims of a mass killing.”
The researchers note that the majority of the victims who suffered the most obvious deadly force were men — 35 of the 58 bludgeoned bodies. This suggests a more “preferential” approach to killing used among familiar groups, they say, as opposed to the indiscriminate murder of men, women, and children of all ages that’s usually seen in conflicts between different cultural or ethnic groups.
So rather than an act of genocide, the Cave 7 massacre was probably part of a large, but internecine, war within Basketmaker culture, they say, “a clear example of internal warfare.” [Read more about the role of sex in studying mass graves: “Infamous Mass Grave of Young Women in Ancient City of Cahokia Also Holds Men: Study“]
And they go on to point out that, armed with little more than cudgels, knives, and spear-throwing atlatls, there probably would have to have been twice as many attackers as victims, in order to exact the damage seen in the cave.
And yet, all archaeological evidence suggests that Basketmakers at this time lived only in scattered, remote farms, with no more than a few families sharing space. In fact, they note, the largest community in the region — a complex called Rock Island — included no more than nine small pithouses, probably not large enough to account for all the victims in the cave.
So, to the scientists, Cave 7 “suggests collective action far beyond anything that archaeologists can infer at this time from all other evidence,” they write. “It implies a form of social organization and cooperation, even if fleeting, that far exceeds in scale the social units of Basketmaker residential sites or even clusters of such sites.”
Such “massacre assemblages,” Geib and Hurst say, “are the sine qua non for war.”
And indeed, the violence betrayed by Cave 7 was probably of such tremendous scope that, even 2,000 years ago, it may have been considered history-making.
“This incident … doubtless had a significant social impact at the time because of its scale, reverberating throughout the early farming communities of the Southwest,” they write.
Sources:
Phil Geib, Winston Hurst (2013). Should dates trump context? Evaluation of the Cave 7 skeletal assemblage radiocarbon dates Journal of Archaeological Science DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2013.01.034
“A re-assessment of Basketmaker II cave 7: massacre site or cemetery context,” Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 39, Issue 7
VXGC2HSK2GE6I don’t believe it is that controversial of an opinion to say that Ryan Miller and, more specifically, John Gibson are the main reason that the team is barely out of a playoff position. There have been many games this season where I have personally said, “Wow without Gibson tonight, the team would have had absolutely no chance in that game.” So that got me thinking if there would be a good way to quantify that thought and look into how many additional points the Ducks goaltending has earned the team. The method I determined to be most useful in evaluating this is GSAA.
GSAA stands for Goals Saved Above Average and is determined by calculating the expected SV% of a league average goaltender based on the shot quality faced. That number is then compared to the SV% of the actual goaltender and multiplied by the shot quantity to get the GSAA.
In layman’s terms, its the amount of goals that a goaltender has saved in comparison to an average one. Both Gibson and Miller have been fantastic in this metric on this season as a whole, compiling a combined 25.04 GSAA so far this year. I want to go even deeper with this stat though. I have gone through each individual game this season and evaluated if the goalie has either earned or lost the team points or neither with GSAA. The following is my criteria for points earned and lost:
Points earned: Any Ducks win or overtime loss, where the goaltender had a GSAA greater than the goal difference.
Points given away: Any Ducks regulation or overtime loss, where the goaltender had a GSAA less than the difference.
Note: I will not be considering empty net goals in the goal difference due to the goaltender having no effect on these tallies.
Points Earned games:
October 7th vs Philadelphia: Gibson GSAA: 0.56 and the Ducks lost in OT. Gibson earned the Ducks 1 point.
October 11th vs New York Islanders: Gibson |
one fact emerges: in order to move on they need to be able to speak candidly about what happened. Many require seeing justice served, and ensuring that their attackers face justice. This can never happen if survivors feel it’s unsafe for them to break their silence. That is now much more likely to happen due to fallout surrounding the Rolling Stone article and the subsequent lawsuit by Phi Kappa Psi.
To be clear, when A Rape On Campus was first published last December, I was thrilled. The article’s publication came on the heels of the release of the Ray and Janay Rice elevator video and The Washington Post’s piece on the rape allegations against Bill Cosby. Victims of sexual assault were coming out of hiding and telling their stories in record numbers, and the tide seemed to be changing for the better, as those stories were being heard, listened to, and even acted upon.
And then it all went south. What could have made a profound positive difference in the lives of survivors — and those in their lives — was about to have the opposite effect.
♦◊♦
Inconsistencies were found in the Rolling Stone piece; then the feeding frenzy began. The voracity with which people went after discrediting the specific particles of the article seemed inexplicable to me. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not naïve enough to believe that everything I read in print is true, and I’m also not advocating the spreading of lies, inaccuracies, or half truths by the media or anyone else. I’m addressing the rapacious way that the article was dissected and attacked. A nerve had been struck, and people were striking back because of it. It was as if somehow people could discredit the article, the rape issue would go away, or better yet: it never happened in the first place. The overwhelming collective response seemed to be akin to, “So you were raped, huh, Jackie? Prove it!” Problem is, even if the specifics of A Rape On Campus were altered, amalgamated, or even fabricated entirely, it’s still no secret that rape and gang rape occurs on campus and elsewhere all the time. How often is “all the time”? According to RAINN, those violent acts occur every 107 seconds. Ignoring or attempting to discredit numbers that large is done at our own peril. Unfortunately the way in which the Rolling Stone story was discredited — not simply the fact that it was discredited — will likely force victims of sexual assault back into hiding. And that would be a real problem for us all.
We, each of us, know victims of sexual assault. Chances are we know them very well, and we are related to them, even though we may not know that’s the case. They are our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers, our partners, our family members. Many of them are silently suffering, as are we, by virtue of our relationship with them, because we become “secondary survivors.” Secondary survivors often experience rage, self-blame, alienation, abandonment, lack of intimacy, guilt, depression, feelings of helplessness and a hunger for revenge. The bottom line: there’s no statistically possible way that each of us can remain untouched by the pandemic of sexual assault and violence.
Another tragedy of the A Rape On Campus mess is that it perpetuates the culture of victim-blaming. The Associated Press states that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner “took a combative tone, saying that despite the magazine’s failures, ‘Jackie’ was also responsible.” Look, we all make mistakes in life; we’re human. When that happens, the right thing to do is to stand up, take full accountability, and fulfill whatever reparations necessary to make up for the damage we’ve caused. In feigning to take responsibility, all the while shifting the blame to “Jackie,” Wenner demonstrates the same flippant disregard that his magazine displayed in publishing A Rape On Campus in the first place. Wenner should have shouldered the blame himself. Rolling Stone has broad shoulders; teenage rape victims do not.
♦◊♦
I know from firsthand experience. As a teenager, I left behind my family’s horse ranch in the mountains of rural Colorado for the bright lights of Paris, with nothing more than an over-packed suitcase and a dream. My mind was bent on solving one problem alone: how do I stay here forever? When I was abducted by two criminals who brutally beat and raped me, I became faced with solving a much bigger problem: how do I survive?
I did survive. How I did it was by not telling anyone what happened. I could barely function as it was; the initial physical pain soon gave way to an emotional pain and mental anguish which were unimaginable to me. I thought that if I ever told anyone they would condemn me for having made the stupid decision to go with the men; I thought people would judge me; they’d think I was dirty, disgusting, and ruined. After I fled from the men — who chased me through a city and country in which I was a stranger — I jumped on a train with what little belongings I could carry. I never went to the police; I never reported the crime. I worried that if I told anyone, they’d castigate me for letting the men walk free. Ultimately, I worried that the act of telling anyone would victimize me a second time, and if that happened, I knew it would send me over an edge from which I’d never return. I was miserable. I realized I had to either fix my life or end it.
It took me nearly two decades to tell anyone what happened in France. By that point I’d put in years of inner work of every sort imaginable, and yet I still was terrified to finally utter the truth.
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Understandably, I started out an advocate for women. In the process I realized that one cannot simultaneously champion women and ignore men. Our relationship is a symbiotic one: if women are suffering, men suffer; if men aren’t flourishing, neither can women. Our fates are inexorably linked; we either rise together or we fall together. Good men need good women to thrive and vice versa.
Together, let’s raise our voices and end the silence. Let’s understand — and help other people understand — that this is our problem, everyone’s problem, not just the problem of a few. As Emma Lazarus wrote, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
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Photo credit: Flickr/Forest RunnerThe Portland Timbers added another Argentine attacker to their arsenal on Friday, signing forward Lucas Melano to a Designated Player contract.
Melano joins the Timbers from Argentine first-division side Lanus, the same club that is coached by former MLS MVP Guillermo Barros Schelotto. It is also the same club that the Timbers acquired Diego Valeri from before the 2013 season.
In order to accommodate Melano as a Designated Player on the Timbers’ roster, Targeted Allocation Money was used to lower the budget charge of Fanendo Adi, freeing a Designated Player slot.
Melano, 22, joined Lanús in July 2013 and has tallied a team-leading five goals in 14 games during the 2015 Argentine Primera División season. The 6-foot-1 forward has made 42 league appearances for the club since 2013, recording eight goals and also helping the side to a championship in the 2013 Copa Sudamericana as one of tournament’s leading scorers.
“This is player we tried to sign several years ago while he was at Belgrano and have followed him very closely ever since,” said Timbers general manager Gavin Wilkinson in a press release. “The process in bringing him to Portland has been a lengthy and challenging one, as he was targeted by several European and Mexican clubs. We believe Lucas is a player that will suit the style and system, will make us better immediately and will be an asset to the club for the future.”
Shortly after joining the club, Melano helped Lanús win the 2013 Copa Sudamericana title, appearing in nine matches and scoring three goals during the cup competition, while finishing tied for fourth among all players in goal scoring during the tournament.
"Melano is a player we've had our eye on for some time and we are extremely pleased to finally announce his addition,” said Caleb Porter, head coach of the Timbers. “Lucas is a very exciting, dynamic player with pace and individual game-changing ability. His versatility to be able to play any of the front four positions in our system also gives us flexibility to mesh him with our other quality pieces. We feel confident Lucas will make an immediate impact on our goal production this season but will also continue to grow with the club and be a key fixture in MLS for years to come.”
In other competitions, Melano has appeared for Lanús during the 2014 Copa Libertadores tournament, appearing in one group-stage match and the first leg of the Round of 16 clash against Mexican club Santos Laguna.
A native of Hernando, Argentina, Melano began his professional career with Argentine first-division club Belgrano, earning his first-team debut on March 17, 2012, after working his way through the club’s youth ranks. Melano recorded seven goals in 44 career league appearances for Belgrano, helping the club qualify for the 2013 Copa Sudamericana competition with a third-place finish in the 2012-13 Torneo Inicial season.Related stories
If elected governor, Republican Frank Edelblut would push back on the federal policy that calls for transgender people to use the bathroom matching their chosen identity, he said Tuesday.
“I don’t think we need the federal government dictating that type of policy to us,” said Edelblut, a first-term state representative from Wilton. “It’s a practical issue. I think that people should use the bathrooms that are associated with their physiological gender.”
Transgender issues have exploded as a national debate in recent months and New Hampshire has waded into the discussion. Attorney General Joe Foster recently signed onto a brief supporting the Obama administration’s guidelines on transgender student bathroom use.
The state doesn’t have a law on the books protecting transgender people from discrimination, but Gov. Maggie Hassan signed an executive order in June that bars such bias in state government.
Edelblut, locked in a Republican primary with three other candidates, didn’t say whether he would reverse that order.
Edelblut is pitching himself as a conservative Republican who is focused on growing business, and preserving family values. He is competing against state Sen. Jeanie Forrester Forrester, Ted Gatsas, the Manchester mayor, and Chris Sununu, an executive councilor.
In an interview with the Monitor editorial board, Edelblut said he supports repealing the state’s death penalty, decriminalizing marijuana, and overhauling the education system.
Edelblut said he would not sign an execution order for Michael Addison, the state’s only death row inmate. Addison was found guilty for the 2006 killing of Manchester police Officer Michael Briggs and sentenced to death.
“If somebody comes after me, or my family, I am happy to use force and I would use deadly force to protect myself,” Edelblut said. “But once someone has been incarcerated and they are no longer a threat to society, lock them up and throw away the key.”
Edeblut said he would sign a bill to decriminalize marijuana, and allow people to grow up to six plants in their home. While one gubernatorial candidate backs legalizing marijuana, Edelblut cautions one step at a time.
On education, Edelblut outlined an idea to overhaul the state’s public school system by letting students “personalize” their classes and potentially graduate from high school courses in two years.
Edelblut, an accountant who sold his consulting business in 2009, homeschooled his seven children.
While the fight over state education aid for local school districts has been fought fiercely over the last two decades, Edelblut said his proposed changes wouldn’t cost additional dollars, they would just reshuffle what’s already there.
He doesn’t support increasing state adequacy aid for the districts that implement full-day kindergarten programs. It’s not necessary, he said, because more than half of public schools already offer the full-day option without the extra state money.
Edelblut does not support bringing commuter rail from Massachusetts to Southern New Hampshire.
“I do have a lot of experience with the millennial generation,” he said. “The last thing they want to do is roll out of bed and get on the train and ride it for an hour-and-a-half to go to work in Boston. They will get an apartment in Boston if that’s where they’re working.”
Edelblut backed a bill to bring the electronic lottery game keno to New Hampshire, and would do the same as governor, he said. But he doesn’t back casino gambling.
Edelblut opposes legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases. He is against sending mental health records to the federal gun background check system that is used to vet prospective buyers. “Mental illness, in all cases, is not a crime,” he said. New Hampshire is one of a handful of states that do not currently submit that information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
Edelblut agrees with Hassan’s call last year for the U.S. to temporarily stop accepting Syrian refugees, while the government strengthens the vetting process.
As governor, Edelblut said he would work to ensure incoming refugees’ health and criminal backgrounds are screened. Most refugees in New Hampshire are resettled in Concord, Laconia, Manchester and Nashua, but Edelblut said they should be distributed across the state.
“When immigrants are coming into our communities we tend to pile them all into one place, we create these enclaves,” he said. “Imagine if every community took one family... the kids would learn how to speak English, they would become more assimilated.”
(Allie Morris can be reached at 360-3307 or amorris@cmonitor.com)T he election of Donald Trump has sent shockwaves through the souls of compassionate, humane people across the country and the world. Horror that a candidate who ran on a platform of open bigotry, threats against immigrants and Muslims, and blatant misogyny will soon be president is now sinking in. Trump appointed a white nationalist, Steve Bannon, as chief White House strategist — which was promptly celebrated by the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Bannon and other possible extremist Trump appointees, such as John Bolton, a neocon who believes the U.S. should “bomb Iran,” and the authoritarian Rudy Giuliani, are now receiving much deserved public scrutiny.
The incoming vice president, Mike Pence, has not elicited the same reaction, instead often painted as the reasonable adult on the ticket, a “counterbalance” to Trump and a “bridge to the establishment.” However, there is every reason to regard him as, if anything, even more terrifying than the president-elect.
Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants — would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend. “This may not be our preferred candidate, but that doesn’t mean it may not be God’s candidate to do something that we don’t see,” said David Barton, a prominent Christian-right activist and president of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.” In June, Barton prophesied: “We may look back in a few years and say, ‘Wow, [Trump] really did some things that none of us expected.’”
Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.
“The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government,” contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right, including “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” “So when they speak of business, they’re speaking not of something separate from God, but they’re speaking of what, in Mike Pence’s circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained.”
One of Trump’s sons, Don Jr., reportedly said that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy, while Trump would focus on the vague mission of “Making America Great Again.” Trump’s campaign subsequently claimed the story was “made up,” though Trump has consistently denied saying things he is on record as saying, so who knows? In any case, the implications of a Pence vice presidency are vast. Pence combines the most horrid aspects of Dick Cheney’s worldview with a belief that Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” novels are not fiction, but an omniscient crystal ball.
While Trump has flip-flopped on a variety of issues, Pence has been a reliable stalwart throughout his public life in the cause of Christian jihad.
How the GOP foisted Pence on Trump is undoubtedly a fascinating story that hopefully will some day be revealed. Obviously, Pence gave Trump badly needed credibility with evangelical voters and the GOP establishment, but Pence’s selection portends a governing apocalypse. While Trump has flip-flopped on a variety of issues, from abortion to immigration to war and health care, Pence has been a reliable stalwart throughout his public life in the cause of Christian jihad — never wavering in his commitment to America-First militarism, the criminalizing of abortion, and utter hatred for gay people (unless they go into conversion therapy “to change their sexual behavior,” which Pence has suggested the government pay for).
He supported making the Patriot Act permanent and wants to ban the burning of the U.S. flag. Pence does not believe federal law enforcement agencies should have to get a FISA warrant to conduct domestic surveillance and voted against requiring any warrant for domestic wiretapping. As governor of Indiana, he did quietly sign a bill to limit the use of Stingray devices by local law enforcement, though it was during the early stages of the Snowden revelations and the public concern about government surveillance was intense.
Pence supported giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies implicated in warrantless surveillance. He does not want congressional oversight of CIA interrogations — which Trump believes should include waterboarding and other torture “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Pence has paid lip service to the illegality of torture but said that “enhanced interrogation” has saved lives. He has characterized relationship-building, non-coercive interrogation strategies as “Oprah Winfrey methods.” Pence is against whistleblower protections that would prohibit retaliation for reporting crimes or misdeeds. In 2002, the ACLU gave him a 7 percent rating on civil rights.
He wants the U.S. to resume the practice of holding new prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or, as Trump put it, they plan “to fill it up.” Pence also supports expanded use of the military tribunal system.
Pence has claimed that he wants to “economically isolate” Iran rather than engage in a military attack. But should Israel decide to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, he said in 2010, “if the world knows nothing else, let the world know this: that America will stand with Israel.” He supported a failed legislative effort to make it U.S. policy “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.” Both in rhetoric and policy, Pence has compared “radical Islam” to the “evil empire of the Soviet Union” and said that he and Trump will “name the enemy” and “marshal the resources of our nation and our allies to hunt them down and destroy them before they threaten us.”
“We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs,” Pence promised.
As has been widely reported, as governor of Indiana, Pence signed a law requiring fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated, making his state one of the most medieval in its approach to reproductive rights. The fetus burial law, which Pence claimed would “ensure the dignified final treatment of the unborn,” was suspended at the 11th hour by a federal judge, who said it was likely unconstitutional. Pence has been at the forefront of the movement to defund Planned Parenthood. “We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs,” Pence promised. He has long sought to have 14th Amendment protections applied to fetuses, arguing that they should be declared persons. In Congress, Pence voted to criminally punish doctors who performed late-term abortions, except in cases where the woman’s life was in danger. A doctor who “kills a human fetus” faces up to two years in prison, according to that law.
Pence opposed efforts to widen hate crimes laws to include attacks on LGBT people. He tried to block federal funding of HIV treatments unless they came with a requirement to advocate against gay relationships. Pence opposes non-straight people serving in the military. “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service because the presence of homosexuals in the ranks weakens unit cohesion,” he said.
Pence believes “the only truly safe sex … is no sex” and once (falsely) claimed on CNN that “condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases.”
Pence supports the “wall” Trump has said he will build, believes in self-deportation, and has staked out one of the most virulent positions against the U.S. taking in refugees from Syria. In defending a proposed ban on Syrian refugees entering Indiana, Pence said it was necessary to “ensure the safety and security of all Hoosiers.” He has advocated for greater militarization of the so-called war on drugs, including escalated military patrols. Pence denounced activists and others protesting recent police killings of unarmed African-Americans, charging they “seize upon tragedy in the wake of police action shootings.” He said he found it offensive to “use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism and that really has got to stop.” He has said that “police officers are the best of us.”
Pence is a strong supporter of stop-and-frisk programs, which in New York were used overwhelmingly against people of color. “It’s on a sound constitutional footing,” said Pence, who added that he wanted the practice expanded nationwide. “Stop-and-frisk literally saved lives in New York City when it was implemented, and it’s been implemented in cities around the country.”
One interesting difference between Pence and Trump centers on the First Amendment. Trump has made clear he believes in waging war against a free press and has encouraged hostility toward journalists covering his campaign. While in Congress, Pence was a major force behind trying to get a federal shield law to protect journalists’ rights to maintain confidential sources. A former radio talk show host, Pence said he was inspired to act by the case of then-New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who was imprisoned for refusing to answer questions about her sources during the scandal over the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. No such law was ever passed and the bill provided wide latitude to nullify the protections of journalists in national security situations.
When he joined the ticket with Trump last summer, Pence claimed they were internally reviewing the campaign policy on the treatment of journalists covering Trump events. If anything, the situation worsened as the campaign moved forward.
On health care, Pence is now on board with repealing the Affordable Care Act, though as governor he did embrace the law in a pretty bold act of hypocrisy. He also supported denying non-emergency care for people who cannot afford a Medicare co-payment and opposed expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Pence is what might be termed “climate change curious,” though earlier in his political career, he wrote an essay in which he asserted, “Global warming is a myth. The global warming treaty is a disaster. There, I said it.” More recently, Pence has kind of acknowledged the fact-based nature of human action contributing to climate change but opposes ending any of the industrial, governmental, or corporate practices responsible. He has consistently advocated withdrawing from climate change agreements and treaties. Pence has an impressively atrocious record on environmental issues and a slavish devotion to big energy and big oil companies.
He opposed government assistance to U.S. workers who lost their jobs because of free trade agreements and has supported every neoliberal trade program since his time in public office. Pence was a loud proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership until he joined Trump on the ticket, and now he claims to be pondering the “wisdom” of the agreement.
Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
ike Pence was
raised Catholic, in a Kennedy Democrat household, but he has been a devout evangelical since being converted at a Christian music festival in Kentucky while in college. Pence now describes himself as “a Christian, a Conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” Even his political action committee’s name gives off a crusader vibe: Principles Exalt a Nation.
Pence opposed imposing restrictions on no-bid contracting, which may help explain his close relationship to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. In December 2007, three months after Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, Pence and his Republican Study Committee, which served “the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives,” organized a gathering to welcome Prince to Washington. But their relationship is not just forged in wars. Prince and his mother, Elsa, have been among the top funders of scores of anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives across the country and have played a key role in financing efforts to criminalize abortion.
Prince has long given money to Pence’s political campaigns, and toward the end of the presidential election, he contributed $100,000 to the pro-Trump/Pence Super PAC Make America Number 1. Prince’s mother kicked in another $50,000. Ironically, Erik Prince — who portrays himself as a mix between Indiana Jones, Rambo, Captain America, and Pope Benedict — is now working with the Chinese government through his latest “private security” firm.
Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
he Prince family’s
support for Pence, and the Christian supremacist movement he represents, has deep roots.
Erik Prince’s father, Edgar, built up a very successful manufacturing business in Holland, Michigan, and became one of the premier bankrollers of what came to be known as the radical religious right. They gave Gary Bauer the seed money to start the Family Research Council and poured money into James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” Bauer recalled soon after the elder Prince’s death. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.” Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team. The two families merged together like the monarchies of old Europe and swiftly emerged as platinum-level contributors to far-right Christian causes and political figures.
The Prince and DeVos families gave the seed money for what came to be known as the Republican Revolution when Newt Gingrich became House speaker in 1994 on a far-right platform known as the Contract with America. The Prince and DeVos clans also invested heavily in a scheme developed by Dobson to engage in back-door lobbying activities by forming “prayer warrior” networks of people who would call politicians to advocate for Dobson’s religious and political agenda. Instead of lobbying, which the organization would have been prohibited from doing because of its tax and legal status, they would claim they were “praying” for particular policies.
The Princes consistently poured money into criminalizing abortion, privatizing education, blocking gay rights, and other right-wing causes centered around their interpretation of Christianity. The family, especially Erik, was very close to Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Watergate conspirator Charles “Chuck” Colson. The author of Nixon’s enemies list, Colson was the first person sentenced in the Watergate scandal, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the investigation of the dirty tricks campaign against Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Colson became a born-again Christian before going to prison, and after his release, he started the Prison Fellowship, which sought to convert prisoners to Christianity to counter what Colson saw as the Islamic menace in U.S. prisons. Erik Prince funded this as well and went on prison visits with Colson.
“There’s a coalescing idea that somehow, obviously, God is doing something with Trump.”
All of these figures, bankrolled by the Prince family, are the ideological and theological ascendants of Mike Pence, who called Colson “a dear friend and mentor.” Colson and his allies viewed the administration of Bill Clinton as a secular “regime” and openly contemplated a faith-based revolution. In the early ’90s, Colson teamed up with conservative evangelical minister-turned-Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus and others to build a unified movement. That work ultimately led in 1994 to the controversial document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” (Note: I wrote extensively about this in my book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” and drew heavily on that for this story.) Pence has described himself as “a born-again, evangelical Catholic.”
The ECT manifesto declared:
The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics.
The signatories called for a unification of these religions in a common missionary cause, that “all people will come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” They asserted that religion is “privileged and foundational in our legal order” and spelled out the need to defend “the moral truths of our constitutional order.” The document was most passionate in its opposition to abortion, calling abortion on demand “a massive attack on the dignity, rights, and needs of women. Abortion is the leading edge of an encroaching culture of death.” It also called for “moral education” in schools, advocating for educational institutions “that transmit to coming generations our cultural heritage, which is inseparable from the formative influence of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity.”
The ECT signers, according to author Damon Linker — who worked for Neuhaus for years — “had not only forged a historic theological and political alliance. They had also provided a vision of America’s religious and political future. It would be a religious future in which upholding theological orthodoxy and moral traditionalism overrode doctrinal disagreements. And it would be a political future in which the most orthodox and traditionalist Christians set the public tone and policy agenda for the nation.”
In November 1996 — the month Clinton crushed Bob Dole and won re-election — an organ of what Linker termed the theoconservative movement, Richard Neuhaus’s journal First Things, published a “symposium” titled “The End of Democracy?” Acknowledging that it might be viewed as “irresponsibly provocative and even alarmist,” the symposium bluntly questioned “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the “regime,” at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”
Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays in the issue, as did the extremist judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. Colson’s essay was titled “Kingdoms in Conflict.” “Events in America may have reached the point where the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation of the judicially controlled regime,” Colson wrote, adding that a “showdown between church and state may be inevitable. This is not something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare.”
Dobson said the essays “laid an indisputable case for the illegitimacy of the regime now passing itself off as a democracy,” adding, “I stand in a long tradition of Christians who believe that rulers may forfeit their divine mandate when they systematically contravene the divine moral law. … We may rapidly be approaching the sort of Rubicon that our spiritual forebears faced: Choose Caesar or God. I take no pleasure in this prospect; I pray against it. But it is worth noting that such times have historically been rejuvenating for the faith.”
Mike Pence looks out over the crowd as President Barack Obama answers a question at the Republican GOP House Issues Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, on Jan. 29, 2010. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
oday, Pence and
his allies have warded off the return of another secular Clinton regime that their ideological and theological prophets once contemplated overthrowing. They will now have the opportunity to build the temple they have long desired. “Secular viewers forget that King David wasn’t always such a nice guy in the Bible, but he was God’s chosen man,” said Jeff Sharlet. “So there’s a coalescing idea that somehow, obviously, God is doing something with Trump.”
Donald Trump’s grasp of the bible is certainly not up to the standards of Pence and the religious zealots behind him. “Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame,” Trump declared — in the same way he spits out “Make America Great Again” — in front of an audience at an evangelical college on the campaign trail. People laughed. At him. It is Second Corinthians.
Perhaps that episode is telling. The radical religious right doesn’t need to save Trump’s soul. As they saw in the campaign, Trump has staked out a hateful agenda — one that tracks quite well with the crusades of Pence and his fellow apostles. Even if elements of Trump’s vile rhetoric and his various threats were a psychotic form of performance art, or mere opportunistic political strategy, as some suggest, they have set the stage for the pursuit of a civilizational war that poses a dire threat to vulnerable populations throughout the world. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a slew of prominent Democrats have publicly said that Americans should give Trump a chance. With Mike Pence seated at the right hand of the father, running foreign and domestic policy, they will do so at their peril.5. Fargo, ND-MN
>Pct. adults drinking to excess: 25.2%
>Pct. driving deaths involving alcohol: 29.5%
>Premature death: 280 deaths before age 75 per 100,000
>Median household income: $53,867
As is the case with many of the cities with relatively high shares of heavy drinkers, Fargo has plenty of bars. There are 63 drinking establishments in the metro area, or about 2.8 bars for every 10,000 residents — enough to put Fargo among the top 50 U.S. cities with the most bars per capita.
4. Madison, WI
>Pct. adults drinking to excess: 25.5%
>Pct. driving deaths involving alcohol: 38.7%
>Premature death: 259 deaths before age 75 per 100,000
>Median household income: $60,903
Wisconsin tops all states in alcohol consumption, and more than half of the 20 cities on this list are in the state. In Madison, 25.5% of adults report heavy or binge drinking on a regular basis, fourth highest nationwide. While excessive drinking does not always lead to adverse outcomes, it may be causing serious problems in the Madison area. Of driving deaths in a given year, 38.7% are alcohol related, one of the highest percentages nationwide.
3. Green Bay, WI
>Pct. adults drinking to excess: 25.6%
>Pct. driving deaths involving alcohol: 47.5%
>Premature death: 290 deaths before age 75 per 100,000
>Median household income: $53,208
More than one in every four adults report heavy or binge drinking on a regular basis in the Green Bay area, nearly the highest excessive drinking rate in the country. While premature death in Green Bay is not more common compared to other metros, it would certainly be much lower if the current level of excessive drinking were to decline. Nearly half of all driving fatalities in Green Bay can be linked to alcohol consumption, the seventh highest percentage in the country.
2. Oshkosh-Neenah, WI
>Pct. adults drinking to excess: 26.0%
>Pct. driving deaths involving alcohol: 44.6%
>Premature death: 299 deaths before age 75 per 100,000
>Median household income: $52,387
In the Oshkosh-Neenah metro area, 26.0% of adults drink excessively, a considerably higher share than the corresponding 18.0% national rate. Excessive drinking is taking a heavy toll on metro area residents. Alcohol is involved in 44.6% of roadway fatalities in Oshkosh-Neenah, one of the highest shares in the country and far higher than the corresponding 31% national rate.
1. Appleton, WI
>Pct. adults drinking to excess: 26.8%
>Pct. driving deaths involving alcohol: 30.3%
>Premature death: 257 deaths before age 75 per 100,000
>Median household income: $60,106
Appleton is home to the largest share of binge and heavy drinkers in both Wisconsin and the country. According to the CDC, binge drinking is more common in households earning at least $75,000 annually. In Appleton, 38.5% of households earn that much, a higher share than the 35.6% of household nationwide earning at least this much. Also, for every 10,000 area residents, there are 4.4 drinking establishments, the ninth highest concentration of bars of any U.S. area.The National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA science programs would receive favorable treatment in a 2015 budget bill drafted by a House of Representatives spending panel. Despite an overall cut of 1% in the overall allocation to the House Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS), and Related Agencies appropriations subcommittee, legislators are proposing a 3.3% boost for NSF, to $7.4 billion, and a 1% hike to NASA science programs, to nearly $5.2 billion. Those increases compare with a 1 |
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Anyroad… This time? Not an exception.
Final Fantasy XIV and the concept of a bestiary appearing in the same place usually means one of two things; either Yoshida-san is confirming that it’s still pretty low on their priority list (but still totally something he’d like to do), or someone on the Official Forums or Reddit has just asked for one and was told that it was impossible. After all, there’s roughly 1,500 unique display models that apply to roughly 5,000 in-game entities. To a point, it is impossible. And that point is about three yalms away from where we’re now standing.
Let’s talk history for a moment.
We got our first hints about in-world taxonomy from Fernehalwes in 2011 via the Localization forum, because, at the time, a Lore Forum wasn’t really thought of as a thing that should … be a thing. Immediately, I started trying to apply this to the wiki here at Gamer Escape (which Gahoo went pretty far out of his way to accommodate, more than once).
The out-of-world understanding of Final Fantasy XIV’s enemies mirrors the in-game Raimdelle Codex, a naturalists’ guide to life on Hydaelyn, penned by Frandelont Raimdelle centuries ago. Raimdelle, however, was not perfect. The man tried to categorize ducks as Spoken. Eorzeans are quick to classify as voidsent anything stranger than would merit a “Y’aint from around here are ya”. And how do you even begin to attempt applying naturalism to the creations of Allag? However, the Lore Team itself works organically around Raimdelle, for the most part, so I was determined to follow.
To aid in classifying the thousands of enemies in the game, I envisioned an easy-to-follow chart of names and identifications. I got a decent chunk of work done on a prototype, but quickly realized that, “It’s impossible!” isn’t so bad of an analysis when you can’t even guarantee you even have a complete pool of potential species to start whittling things down.
The rise of various database websites (including Square Enix’s own website and app) also gave rise to complete checklists and a new way of looking at classification. I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty ambiguously-legitty details, but “impossible” ever-so-gradually turned into “okay, maybe possible, but who would do that much work”? Who, indeed.
The biological classification guide that I’m releasing today (and will continue to update) will not perfectly match the one hidden behind World Lore Creator Banri Oda-san’s false bookshelf. I’ve made (and will continue to make) judgment calls. It is not the official taxonomy, but hopefully it’s not too far off. For these reasons, I’m simply calling this project The Raimdelle Codex Alces—a different version of the same guide you might find in the Stillglade Fane’s Green Athenaeum.
The big challenge, of course, is using this guide to classify all of the individual mobs in the game, but even if I can’t get that down, the Codex itself nears completion after … more time than I’d care to admit. This is one of the few times, “Moose, share your notes!” is something I can actually accommodate, however, so that’s what I’m doing. Please feel free to make use of it while I go about trying to build mob lists and lore background for all of these. I’ll be keeping an open thread in the forums to discuss new revelations and ways to improve it.
THE RAIMDELLE CODEX ALCES
But if you’ll excuse me, I’m pretty sure there’s a patch in a week and a Story So Far… in need of an update…Several Republican governors likely to run for president have secured hundreds millions of dollars under Obamacare while working to dismantle the healthcare law, according to a Reuters review of federal spending records.
Governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, all staunch opponents of President Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act, have collectively applied for and won at least $352 million through grant programs set up by the law, federal records show.
The action is at odds with the public stance of all four potential candidates, who have blasted the law as an unprecedented expansion of government and called for its repeal.
Aides told Reuters they saw no contradiction in applying for these grants while criticizing the law as a whole.
“It’s critically important that we continue these services for our citizens,” said Walker spokeswoman Laurel Patrick. “Receiving federal grants that existed prior to the ACA is not the same as participating in the core elements of the ACA.”
The money in question stems from less controversial parts of the law that enhance public health and other nuts-and-bolts programs, rather than the insurance exchanges and expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor that have drawn fierce opposition from Republicans.
Some of these programs were established by Obamacare, while others had existed in other forms and were expanded by the law. (Graphic: //reut.rs/1FewtGN)
For example, the law included $1.5 billion to enable medical workers to visit new mothers at home. The money has enabled some states to set up programs where none had existed and allowed others to expand existing programs. Wisconsin has more than doubled its home-visit program under Obamacare, according to state documents.
It’s not clear whether the Republican governors now considering running for the White House would protect these programs if they won the November 2016 presidential election.
Aides to Walker, Christie and Perry either declined to comment or didn’t respond. A Jindal aide said these programs would work better if states were given more discretion over how to spend federal money.
UNITED IN OPPOSITION
Republicans have been united in their opposition to the healthcare reform since it passed Congress with only Democratic votes five years ago, and many potential presidential candidates are eager to demonstrate their anti-Obamacare bona fides.
Walker has called the law an “abysmal failure” and Perry has blasted it as an “abomination.” Christie called it a “failure” and Jindal told a gathering of conservative activists in February that “we must repeal every single word of Obamacare.”
Walker, Perry and Jindal also supported a legal challenge that fell short of striking down the law in 2012 but enabled states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion.
Still, Republican governors have to balance their opposition to the law with their obligation to look after the needs of their states.
The federal government accounts for nearly one in three dollars of state revenue, and the Affordable Care Act has been an important source of much of that money in recent years. It provides $10 billion for public health and $425 million to train nurses and other health-care workers.
The money isn’t handed out automatically: state governments, hospitals and other organizations have to apply for it.
“There’s a lot of hypocrisy when it comes to some Republicans and Obamacare,” said Greg Valliere, a nonpartisan political adviser to Wall Street clients. “As my father used to say: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.'”
Walker’s administration has accepted at least $69 million through Affordable Care Act grant programs, according to a Reuters analysis – a figure that does not include programs that the U.S. Health and Human Services Department says existed before the law took effect. It also excludes grants that went to state universities or other entities not directly under Walker’s control.
During that period, Walker returned $38 million that his Democratic predecessor had secured to set up a state-based insurance exchange, and turned away hundreds of millions of dollars to help expand Medicaid. He expanded the state’s own Medicaid program to cover more residents without federal money, in part by moving 80,000 participants onto private insurance plans subsidized by Obamacare.
In Louisiana, Jindal’s administration has accepted $60 million in Obamacare grants while refusing to expand Medicaid and set up a state exchange. “Most of these grant funds are used for state initiatives that existed long before Obamacare ever became law,” Jindal spokesman Mike Reed said.
In Texas, Perry took in at least $148 million in Obamacare grants while refusing money tied to the insurance exchange and the Medicaid expansion. He stepped down as governor in January.
“Governor Perry has long called for flexibility from the federal government so the states can implement health care programs in the best interests of their citizens,” spokeswoman Lucy Nashed said.
In New Jersey, Christie has not set up an exchange but has accepted the Medicaid expansion on the grounds that it will help low-income residents and hospitals in his state. His administration has secured at least $75 million in grant money, on top of the additional Medicaid dollars.
“The governor has said he will make decisions with respect to the law that are in the best interest of New Jerseyans,” spokesman Kevin Roberts said.
(Additional reporting by Luciana Lopez, editing by Ross Colvin)By Emily DePrang
Sebastian Prevot watched helplessly as three police officers advanced on his wife. Prevot was handcuffed and bleeding in the back of a cop car. Half of his left ear dangled where it had been torn from his head. The Houston Police Department doesn’t deny that its officers gave Prevot these injuries during a late-night arrest in January 2012. The only dispute is whether he earned them.
Prevot had been returning home from a night out with a friend. He was two miles from his house when he stopped just past the white line at a four-way stop sign. Two officers in a patrol car tried to pull him over, but he kept driving. Prevot says he didn’t want to pull over and continued home—“going the speed limit, stopping at every stop sign”—because he knew he was about to be detained and have his car impounded.
“My kids had to go to school in the morning,” he told me. “My wife had to go to work.”
Prevot sits across from me in a noisy McDonald’s at dusk. He’s 30, married, with three little boys. In 2009 Prevot was one semester away from getting his bachelor’s degree in marketing when his wife, Annika Lewis, was promoted at her job with AT&T, and the family moved to Houston from Lafayette, Louisiana. Now he takes care of his sons, ages 7, 5, and 4, coaches youth sports and looks for work. His left ear still bears a crosshatching of paler brown where an emergency room doctor stitched it up on January 27, 2012, the night he should have stopped.
I ask Prevot why he anticipated trouble if all he’d done was roll past the line at a stop sign. He looks at me like I’m crazy.
“Obviously, it’s three in the morning,” he says, “so they’re gonna find something. Besides, the inspection sticker on my car was bad.”
Prevot didn’t say he expected to be arrested because he is black, but racial profiling is common. In 2012, almost half the Houstonians arrested during traffic stops were African-Americans, though they make up less than a quarter of the city’s population. Houston Police Department statistics show that white drivers are more likely than black drivers to be carrying contraband, but according to HPD’s annual report on racial profiling—which concludes, “The analysis provides no evidence that officers of the Houston Police Department engage in racial profiling”—officers performed “consent searches” on black drivers in 2012 more than four times as often as on white drivers. A consent search is specifically one made without probable cause.
“When they put those lights on,” Prevot says, “I automatically knew I was going to jail.”
Prevot also kept driving because he was scared. “I mean, I saw the cops,” he says. “I’m from Louisiana, and it was two white boys in the car in a dark area. I wasn’t about to stop nowhere close to there.”
“What were you afraid of?” I ask.
“Getting beat up,” he says. “The same thing that happened.”
As Prevot drove, more police cruisers joined the slow pursuit. By the time he arrived at his house, he estimates 10 cars had him surrounded.
“When I pulled in right in front of my driveway, I got out, hands in the air,” Prevot says. “They already had guns drawn on me. Then they put those up and attacked. From there, they was just beatin’ the bricks off me.”
What Prevot describes isn’t rare in Houston. According to citizens, community activists, a veteran Houston police officer and even the president of the local police union, the scenario of multiple officers beating an unarmed suspect happens nearly every day.
What’s rare is for the Houston Police Department to punish its officers for excessive force. An eight-monthTexas Observer investigation found that during the past six years, Houston civilians reported officers for “use of force”—the department’s term for police brutality—588 times. The Internal Affairs division investigated each complaint and dismissed all but four.
More surprisingly, HPD rarely believes even its own officers when they claim to have witnessed unjustified violence against citizens. In the same period, Houston cops reported other officers for excessive force 118 times. Internal Affairs dismissed all but 11.
In total, Internal Affairs sustained just 15—or 2 percent—of the 706 police abuse complaints the past six years, according to department records the Observer obtained through public information requests.
In at least 10 of the 15 sustained complaints, the incident was videotaped. Many say—and internal documents suggest—that videotaped beatings have prompted Houston cops to aggressively prevent citizens from recording their behavior.
But beatings take time. They make noise. Witnesses can gather and start filming. Shootings, on the other hand, are fast. They’re usually over as quickly as they begin, which may be one reason why, in the past six years, not a single Houston police officer has been disciplined for shooting someone.
Between 2007 and 2012, HPD officers were involved in 550 incidents in which either a citizen or animal was injured or killed by a police officer’s bullet, according to agency records.
Internal Affairs investigated each incident and determined that every single shooting was justified.
Some of these civilians were armed. Others weren’t. Mark Ames, 23, was unarmed and fleeing when he was shot and injured. Yoanis Vera, 26, was also unarmed when he was wounded. Kenneth Releford was unarmed, but HPD says he charged at an officer while keeping one hand behind his back. Releford, 38, was killed. All of those cases are from 2012.
Another citizen killed by HPD in 2012 was a wheelchair-bound man. Brian Claunch was mentally ill and had only one arm and one leg. Claunch was shot because he allegedly threatened an officer with a ballpoint pen.
Out of 706 complaints about excessive force, HPD disciplined only 15 officers. For 550 shootings, HPD disciplined none. The message is clear: Either Houston police almost never abuse their power, or they abuse it with impunity.
Prevot says after he surrendered, one officer “tackled me into my [car] door and threw me to the ground in the middle of the street. From there, all of them rushed me and started coming to beat me. Hit me with a stick, twisting my ankle in back. While the rest of them were beating me, there’s one in the back twisting my ankle the whole time. Tore tendons and everything. I still go to the doctor for that.
“One will get a lick in and another will get a lick in. It was many, many, many licks. Like, two officers tried to kick me—” his hand hovers over the table and he looks embarrassed—“in the gonads. And I’m out there yelling loud. I guess my wife finally heard me. She came outside with her camera phone. The whole time, they’re yelling, ‘Put your hands behind your back! Put your hands behind your back!’ But they’re standing on my hands. I’m trying to get them to the back like they’re telling me to, but they’re not allowing me. So meanwhile, they continue to whup the shit out of me.”
Jimmy reads the transcript of my conversation with Prevot quietly. Jimmy—not his real name—is a white man, has been an officer with the Houston Police Department for more than 10 years, and doesn’t want to disclose any more than that. He’s disturbed by what he describes as a culture of brutality and racism at HPD but says it’s not safe to criticize the department openly.
Jimmy reads as far as the beating and looks up. “Sounds about right,” he says. “Adrenaline dump, everybody’s chasing him, they all come piling after him. They tackle him, everybody gets their licks in and they put handcuffs on him. That makes sense. Whupping somebody that just ran, that’s like an everyday occurrence. Hell, I’d be surprised if they didn’t.”
I ask Jimmy if it’s plausible that cops would prevent a suspect from complying and putting his hands behind his back. “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t know that it’s normal, and I don’t even know that it’s necessarily deliberate. Could be bad communication. But it’s not exactly innocent either. Cops are starting to learn to perform for the camera. So they know that, like, maybe you can’t see all the details of exactly what’s going on in the scuffle, but if they’re yelling out things like, ‘Give me your hands,’ then it sure looks better after the fact.”
Handcuffing, Jimmy says, “may or may not bring it to a stop. Generally speaking, that’s the sort of limit, when you put the handcuffs on. But even then, it’s not…”
Jimmy trails off. Although we’ve talked many times over several months, he still occasionally seems surprised at what he is about to say. “It’s just, not everybody is necessarily done just because you’ve got the handcuffs on. People will typically stop at that point, but I have heard officers running up to a fight yelling, ‘Don’t put the handcuffs on yet!’ They want to get their licks in.”
“My wife caught all this on camera,” Prevot says. “So by that time, the guy twisting my ankle gave it a final twist.” Prevot mimes wrenching. “And he dropped my foot. The other guys kinda laid off. Then they were like, ‘Get up! Get up!’ And I told them, ‘I can’t get up!’ You know, I’m crying. So they picked me up. They got me in the cuffs now. They put me in the back of this car, and they go over to see what’s going on with my wife. In the back of this car, I could see everything that’s going on.
“Well, I’m looking at them going at my wife. She’s still got her phone. She’s in her own yard. She’s not nowhere near the streets. She’s not interfering or anything, she’s just recording what’s going on. I guess when they seen she was recording them, those three guys, they came behind her and they attacked her. One of them tried to grab the phone out of her hand. She wouldn’t let go, so they twisted her arm behind her and punched her a couple of times. They did her pretty bad. And she’s real short, real petite, like 4 [foot] 11, and at that time maybe 101 or 98 [pounds].
“They got the phone from her, cuffed her up, and put her in a car. They took the phone and took it all the way apart. She had an HTC Evo, and it’s not easy to get the memory card out of the back. They were there for about 10, 15 minutes trying to get it open. Took them a good while.”
Less than two weeks after Prevot’s arrest, the Houston Police Department distributed a memo reminding officers that “citizens have a right to photograph, record, or videotape officers while officers are doing their job. … Officers are further reminded not to initiate an investigative detention or ask for identification merely because a citizen is photographing or recording an officer.”
The memo adds, “If an officer believes a videotape or photograph may contain evidence of a crime, the officer shall consult with the District Attorney’s office to determine if a search warrant is needed to either seize the video or view the contents on the device in question.”
Jimmy says the last bit—don’t take someone’s phone without permission and a reason—is in response to a new tactic cops are using to fight citizen surveillance.
“Are you familiar with the drunk lawyer phenomenon?” Jimmy asks. “Like when you’re at the bar and your friend is giving you crazy legal advice about how to avoid DWI, and it has nothing to do with real law? Well, cops play that game, too, except it’s new ways to prevent people from recording us. Like now they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s evidence’ and confiscate the phone and tag it into the property room for 18 months.” Jimmy says even if a phone does contain evidence of a crime, the department has equipment that can quickly copy its contents. “There’s no need to sit on it for a year and a half,” he says. “It’s purely punitive.”
But that depends on how you define “need.” The officers who arrested Prevot might have needed to take Annika’s phone to keep their jobs.
In 2011, local news station ABC-13 KTRK aired security camera footage of a dozen HPD officers punching and kicking an unarmed 15-year-old burglary suspect named Chad Holley. The video sparked outrage. National news outlets aired it and community organizers rallied around it as proof that Houston police officers abuse their power. Even the chief of police, Charles McClelland, said publicly that the video “made me sick to my stomach because it was an egregious use of force.”
Twelve officers were disciplined for the Chad Holley beating, seven of whom were fired. Three of those later got their jobs back through arbitration. (For more on HPD’s flawed discipline system, see “Crimes Unpunished [5],” in the Observer’s July issue.) Four of the fired officers were also indicted for misdemeanor official oppression. One was found not guilty—an all-white jury decided in May 2012 that Andrew Blomberg was not stomping on Holley’s hands but was trying to lift them with the back of his foot—one was found guilty and the other two pleaded no contest. All three received probation.
To Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, those former cops are the real victims. “If Chad Holley had been in school and not burglarizing a house,” he told me, “those officers would still be in this department.”
I asked Hunt how often the Chad Holley scenario—one suspect, multiple officers and “a question about force”—happens.
Hunt, who was a Houston patrol officer for 18 years, replied, “That happens a lot. And I can tell you—myself, two paramedics, my old partner and another police officer were in a similar type thing with a 78-year-old woman on a scene one time. And if that had been videotaped, I can only imagine what people would have thought we were doing to this person. All’s we were trying to do was make sure that her knife was gone and she was handcuffed. … But yeah, a lot of times, when you’ve got a citizen that’s fighting with officers, it may take seven, eight, nine officers to subdue that person. The adrenaline’s going, and it can be bad.”
I asked, “Was the only difference between the Chad Holley scene and scenes that go on all the time that there just happened to be video?”
“Um, I think video is a lot,” Hunt said. Then he seemed to hear himself. “Let me clarify something. I would not say that you’ve got scenes going on all the time that you’ve got persons who are kicking or hitting suspects. I will say you’ve got situations a lot of times out there where you’ve got six or seven officers trying to handcuff a suspect. … Is it ever appropriate to kick or strike a suspect? Absolutely. … Is it ever appropriate to kick or hit a suspect who’s handcuffed and not resisting? Absolutely not.”
Hunt continued, “So then the question is, on Chad Holley’s situation, was he resisting or not? Is it resisting to say, ‘Put your hands behind your back’ and he has them here?” Hunt placed his hands above his head, as Holley did when he was face-down in the grass on the video. “He thinks he’s complying. The officer doesn’t think he’s complying.”
The Houston Police Department’s general orders governing use of force specify, “The circumstances justifying the initial use of force may change during the course of an event. It is the duty of all employees to constantly assess the situation and adjust the use of force accordingly.” But that’s exactly what Hunt says doesn’t happen during an event like Holley’s arrest.
“When that first person runs in,” Hunt says, “it’s very difficult for an officer to stand back and go, ‘Well, hang on, let me think of the penal code…’ You automatically assumed that that person was justified in going in whenever you go in and follow.”
Jimmy agrees. “You’ve got that groupthink going on. All it takes is for one officer to break ranks and go running up there and everybody else is like, ‘Well, I’m not gonna let him run up there by himself.’ There’s a lot of trusting each other’s judgment calls on that sort of stuff and the net result is a lot of piling on. One guy makes a bad call and everybody just goes for it.”
Hunt says this piling on isn’t just automatic—it’s obligatory. Of Holley’s arrest, Hunt said, “If anybody was standing there on the scene when you’re trying to get a felon into custody, I would question that person’s integrity to be a police officer.”
Hunt added, “I want to make sure I’m not quoted as saying we have situations all the time where we’ve got a situation exactly like Chad Holley where he’s being struck both with hands and being kicked. But I’m saying that a lot of times, you’ve got multiple officers trying to subdue a suspect.”
Video, as Ray Hunt said, is a lot. In many cases, the presence of video appears to determine whether a use-of-force complaint is sustained or dismissed.
One jail attendant, Roy Ferrer, had four complaints about use of force dismissed before cameras caught him seizing a handcuffed prisoner by the throat, forcing him to the ground, and kneeing him in the kidneys. That complaint was sustained. Ferrer received a 15-day suspension, according to department records.
Adam Anweiler received two excessive force complaints within a year of each other shortly after joining the Houston Police Department as a jailer; both were dismissed. Then a surveillance camera recorded Anweiler striking a prisoner in the groin, slamming the man’s face into the concrete, and twisting his arm until his shoulder dislocated and his arm broke. Anweiler was fired.
His supervisor, Captain Douglas Perry Jr., was also disciplined. After an employee reported Anweiler’s assault, Perry sent a letter to his superiors stating, “I have completed a thorough review of this incident that included reviewing all relevant documents and watching the video…” and “I’m confident that all Jail Policies were followed and no further actions [sic] is needed.”
Internal Affairs disagreed. When investigators asked Perry why he hadn’t reported the abuse, he claimed the lieutenant with whom he watched the video had “somehow skipped over the portions” that included the beating, according to HPD records. He was suspended seven days.
Officer Angela Horton was simply unlucky. Unaware that she was being filmed by a news helicopter, Horton sucker-punched a handcuffed teenager in the face as another officer led him away. In her official statement, Horton claimed she did not punch the teen but merely pushed his face. “Because the suspect was sweating profusely from trying to elude us,” she wrote, “…my hand slid off of his face.” Horton lost her job.
Through open records requests, the Observer obtained documentation on 11 of the 15 complaints about use of force sustained in the last six years. All but one of those incidents were recorded.
Jimmy, the HPD officer, says this isn’t a coincidence. Without video, he says, excessive force complaints go nowhere. “I’m having a hard time conceiving of any situation in which witness testimony would outweigh the testimony of officers on the scene,” he says. “You could almost have a busload of nuns come by and watch the whole thing, and Internal Affairs could still figure out a way to make it not sustained. They would say, ‘Oh, we don’t really know for sure. You know, the position they were sitting in, the distance they were away, they didn’t really see the full context of what happened.’”
Perhaps the most distressing part is not how many complaints about excessive force the Houston Police Department receives or how few it sustains, but what happens to all the ones they dismiss.
If a complaint is not sustained, it disappears. The complaint, and its investigation, can’t be reviewed by anyone outside HPD or another qualified government agency. Even with all identifying information redacted, members of the public can’t read what a complainant, witness, or officer said about an incident.
That’s because Texas’ Local Government Code allows Houston and other large cities to withhold information about a “charge of misconduct … not supported by sufficient evidence.” Because Internal Affairs decides what constitutes sufficient evidence, Jimmy says, the department has total latitude in cases that don’t involve, for example, publicly broadcast video of an incident.
With full control, Jimmy says, “If you want something to come out a particular way, you can contort the evidence to make an argument for that.”
One of the ways HPD justifies keeping all un-sustained complaints secret is by pointing to the Independent Police Oversight Board. The board comprises four panels of citizens who review every serious or criminal complaint against Houston officers and every allegation of citizen mistreatment. After an investigation is complete, HPD makes the file available to one of the four oversight board panels, which meets to discuss the case. If the panel finds something lacking in the investigation or disagrees with the conclusion, it sends the case back to Internal Affairs, which is required to issue a response.
But that’s the end of it. The Independent Police Oversight Board doesn’t review cases a second time to see if its concerns were addressed, and Internal Affairs isn’t obligated to do anything the board asks. “They’re not in the chain of command,” explains Executive Assistant Chief Michael Dirden, HPD’s liaison to the board. “It’s not a civilian review board with subpoena power and investigative power or anything like that.”
If an oversight board member feels a case is being mishandled, the board’s charter says he or she should report the case to the city’s inspector general. But the inspector general, whose office is responsible for investigating city employee misconduct, has no jurisdiction over HPD. Firefighters, yes, the mayor, yes, but Houston police are explicitly exempt. The inspector general can’t investigate alleged wrongdoing. He or she can only urge the police to do so.
“Under the City of Houston system,” Dirden says, “no one—neither the [oversight board] nor the inspector general or anybody—can tell the chief of police, ‘You know, we don’t like this and you’re going to change it.’ No one has that authority.”
From the police car, Prevot watched HPD officers release Annika.“All the guys are still out there,” he says, “all out laughing and smiling and so forth. Like it’s a big game or whatever.” After Annika went inside the house, “That’s when the guys came back to the car. They looked at me like, ‘Man, your ear’s hanging off!’ They were laughing and playing with it. My hands are cuffed. Everything was swolled up. I couldn’t feel a thing. I couldn’t even feel that. I don’t even know what’s going on, I just know blood’s everywhere. But they were playing with it, making jokes, like ‘Man, they’re gonna have to glue that back together or something!’ It was just a big fun time for them.
“So they drove off, took me straight to the jailhouse. When you’re booked at the jailhouse, there’s a doctor who checks everybody in. Doctor told them, ‘No, you can’t bring him in here. You gotta bring him to the hospital.’ So the officers said, ‘Oh man, you gotta be shittin’ me.’ And the doctor said, ‘No, you gotta take him to the hospital for that ear and everything else that’s going on.’ So they brought me to Ben Taub [General Hospital].
“These guys, they’re waiting on the physician to come and see me. We’re sitting in this room, and they came and took a picture with me. All beat up, handcuffed, ear hanging. … Like I was a freaking trophy head or something. This guy’s got his arm around my shoulder, taking a picture with me. We were waiting there for a while. They were talking noise … saying things like, ‘You were hollering like a bitch!’”
Jimmy reads this part of the Prevot interview and sighs.As a cop, he says, “you’re knee-deep in enough car wrecks, and you see enough bodies torn apart, and you’re around all this horror-show stuff enough times and, like, it just stops being so horrible after a while. You’re around a lot of people who are in horrific, awful, horrible pain and suffering, caused by other people, caused by you, caused by a lot of different stuff and…” He sighs again. “The human heart only has a certain capacity, right? You hit a limit in there somewhere, and it just shuts down. It quits working.
“I’m not going to say that’s not sick and twisted,” he adds. “But it’s a necessary response to the job. It’s a coping mechanism, especially for the guys in patrol. They’re up close and personal with the horror every day.”
In December 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would review six incidents in which Houston police officers used force against unarmed citizens. Prevot’s arrest was one; Holley’s beating was another; Angela Horton’s face-push was a third. Fourth was Anthony Childress, who says a group of officers stopped him while he was riding his bike and beat him so severely that he lost six teeth and needed 56 stitches. Childress filed an excessive force complaint that was dismissed.
In the other two cases, HPD officers killed people.
When Officer J. McGowan arrived at a reported assault in progress in July 2012, she didn’t know that Rufino Lara was the victim. The officer saw him walking away and followed him, ordering him to stop and show his hands. Witnesses say Lara, 54, turned around with his hands already in the air. McGowan says one hand was tucked into Lara’s waistband. Wherever Lara’s hands were, McGowan shot him dead. In his waistband, she found a beer.
Brian Claunch made violent threats against the officers who came to his home in September 2012 on a disturbance call. Claunch, 45, lived in a residence for disabled men with mental illness. He suffered from schizophrenia and was confined to a wheelchair because he had only one arm and one leg. Yet according to HPD, Claunch backed an able-bodied officer into a corner and jabbed at her with a shiny object. Officer Matthew Marin came to his partner’s aid and killed Claunch with one shot. The object in Claunch’s hand turned out to be a pen. HPD says the case is still under investigation, but a grand jury has already cleared Marin of any wrongdoing.
HPD records consider Brian Claunch to have been armed. The department counts his pen as a weapon. But 49 of the people Houston officers fired on during the past six years were unarmed, even by HPD standards. That’s one in five.
In most cases, the reason the department gave for officers firing on unarmed citizens was “posturing.” The news releases that accompany each HPD shooting use a specific vocabulary to justify the ones in which a suspect is unarmed. The officer “saw several suspicious males” in an area “known for narcotics activity.” The officer saw someone who “matched the description of a suspect” wanted elsewhere. The suspect “made furtive motions,” or “aggressively confronted the officer with one hand behind his back as if he was holding a weapon.” Most often, though, the suspect “appeared to place his hands down the front of his pants” or “began to make movements around his waistband” or “reached into his waistband, as if he was retrieving a weapon.” Why so many unarmed men would rummage in their pants at a moment of crisis is never addressed.
In one case, an off-duty officer saw a man walking up his driveway and suspected him a car thief. The officer says he grabbed his service weapon and ordered the man to show his hands but the man “instead began running at” him with his hands “concealed in his pockets.” The officer fired several shots. Because the suspect escaped, he must have charged the officer, hands in pockets, despite seeing the gun and hearing commands, then made a U-turn after the officer fired and dashed away.
No matter the reason an officer gives for firing, it’s always enough for Internal Affairs and the Homicide Division, which investigate every discharge of a service weapon. In the past six years, HPD officers killed citizens in 109 shooting incidents and killed animals in 225 incidents. In 112 shootings, officers wounded citizens; in another 104, they wounded animals. Of 550 shooting incidents with some kind of casualty, not one was found unjustified.
Hunt says the investigative process that finds all shootings justified is extremely thorough and fair. “When we shoot someone, [Internal Affairs] comes out, [District Attorney]’s office comes out, Homicide [Division], and our attorney comes out, and we agree to do a walk-through of the case,” Hunt says. “We oppose videotaping that walk-through and the reason is, all the facts out there show that two, three days [later], things will be recalled that the officer realizes took place that he didn’t realize that second when his adrenaline is sky-high and he just shot or killed somebody. … We don’t think it’s fair, then, for an officer who—and this routinely happens—two, three days later [to] say, ‘You know what? I forgot to tell y’all, something did happen out there. I remember this.’ … If the defense attorney shows a videotape of [the walk-through], saying ‘Well he didn’t say it here!’ you can’t convince all those jurors that people recall things later.”
But internal documents show that if a recording of an officer’s initial statement about a serious incident differs from |
Windows App Studio is all about making it as easy as possible to build apps for Windows. The online tool helps you build apps with no coding required, so you can either start your project there and extend it in Visual Studio, or you can create and build the app completely in the tool. Today, we want to talk about another way we’re helping to make it easier to develop for Windows 10: Our Windows App Studio UWP Samples app, which is powered by our open source UWP Controls and Data Sources libraries. Open source libraries are incredibly useful in software development, but one of the tougher things for developers is to find good documentation and examples of code in those libraries without firing up an IDE. The UWP Samples app aims to solve this problem and showcase the contents of the libraries beautifully and in an interactive way.
A bit of background. As we build out and add new features to Windows App Studio, we need to create controls and data sources that are standardized in a way that makes them work for the tool. This standardization of the controls also makes it easy to package them in a library, so that’s exactly what we did. There are two main libraries:
Each of these are open source with the MIT license and are available as NuGet packages and these are the libraries that power the UWP Samples app. You are free to use anything in these libraries for any project and you don’t even need to assign attribution/credit. Since they’re open source, you are enthusiastically invited to contribute new controls, data sources, and whatever else you think is great.
Windows App Studio UWP Samples app
The Windows App Studio UWP Samples app is now available in the Windows Store. What is unique about the app is that it lets you browse through all of the controls and data sources included in the libraries, without needing to write one line of code. You can even adjust the attributes of the controls to mimic how they would look in your app before opening Visual Studio. Furthermore, the app has the code and descriptions for each of the controls and data sources in the libraries, so you can even copy and paste directly from there.
Windows App Studio UWP Controls
As hinted before, this library is used in the Windows 10 apps generated with Windows App Studio. The library implements common patterns used in UWP apps, and provides some user interface controls that help you create responsive apps that adapt to different form factors. Examples of the controls are Variable Sized Grid, Pivorama, Carousel, Animation effect, and more.
Windows App Studio Data Providers
Within the Data Providers library is the code that enables apps generated by Windows App Studio to access data from different providers. The library includes code to make easy integrations with the data sources used in the tool, such as WordPress and YouTube. Since the library is open source, feel free to contribute back with a pull request and submit your own coded integrations to services. Please note that some data sources will need you to sign up for keys in order for the APIs to work properly.
We hope these libraries and UWP Samples app will make it as easy as possible to develop for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Feedback is welcome, so please share your thoughts on the forums or User Voice. If you’re interested, visit the GitHub page and share your contributions to the library. Feel free to fork the repository, submit pull requests, and contribute to the world of Windows development.
Updated June 28, 2018 7:45 amNEWARK - Police announced Sunday the arrests of two city men after they removed nearly 50 roosters, including five that were dead, from a cockfighting event Saturday night.
The two men, Noralberto Orengo and William Aviles, are the business owner and manager, respectively, of El Cacique Social Club located on the 800 block of North 6th Street in the city's North Ward.
On Saturday night, Newark police and officials with the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NJSPCA) removed 45 roosters, including five dead ones, from the social club, Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose said in a press release.
Police had responded to the club around 10 p.m. after receiving an anonymous tip about a cockfighting event, Ambrose said.
"Officers entered the social club where they witnessed a large crowd watching and participating in a cockfighting event," the police director said.
Orengo and Aviles, both 53 of Newark, each received charges associated with illegal gaming and managing an establishment hosting live animal fighting.
Ambrose said these establishments are often "catalyst for other criminal activity taking place or will take place."
Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.About This Game
Key Features:
The original version of the first chapter in this historical series, featuring strategic turn-based combat with unmatched customization.
Over 50 hours of gameplay on average, with countless side-quests, collectibles and secrets to encourage replay.
A vast world where every NPC has a name and personality, every town has its own unique politics and economic concerns, and no detail is ever trivial.
Support for a wide variety of fullscreen and widescreen resolutions, including true 1080p HD.
Fully adjustable controls supporting virtually any USB gamepad, as well as a standard keyboard and mouse setup.
Over two dozen unique Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support and Steam Trading Cards featuring gorgeous anime-style art from the franchise's original artists.
Numerous updates previously seen only in the handheld version, including:
- Selectable difficulty level and new game+ features on subsequent playthroughs
- Full voice-acting during combat
- "Retry Offset" feature to lower the difficulty of battle with each attempt if desired
Modern society owes much to a mystical technology known as “orbal energy.” Fifty years ago, during what’s come to be known as the “Orbal Revolution,” the invention of this technology and the “orbments” developed from it led to a period of rapid human advancement, birthing innovations of all shapes and sizes -- not the least of which was the airliner, or “orbalship” industry. Although the positive impact of this revolution is obvious, every coin has a flipside; for every beneficial device developed with these new materials, so too were advanced weapons and other implements of war. Thus, the land became mired with turmoil, and remains in such a state even now.Enter, the bracers: an organization established to serve as police and intermediaries alike, holding above all else the peace and safety of the lands under their jurisdiction. Whenever a citizen is in need of assistance, he or she may place a request at the local Bracer Guild -- and be it monster extermination, crime prevention or even peace talks among warring nations, the bracers will do whatever they can to resolve the matter cleanly and efficiently.Some matters require a gentler touch than others, however. When an orbalship transporting a legendary "S-rank" bracer named Cassius Bright suddenly goes missing, said bracer's daughter, Estelle, and adoptive son, Joshua, must join forces in search of him across the entire Kingdom of Liberl.And what they find along the way could change both of their lives forever...Hailed as one of the largest, longest and most meticulously detailed turn-based JRPG series of all time, this first chapter in the ongoingsaga sets the stage for what's quickly become Ys developer Nihon Falcom's most popular and best-selling franchise in their entire 30+ year history. Introducing people, places, ideas, events and lore that rival in complexity those of even the most highly-regarded fantasy epics in literature, the care and attention given to each and every NPC, location and historical in-game event is what setsapart from its contemporaries.Come join Estelle, Joshua, Scherazard, Olivier and the rest of the cast as they uncover the secret underbelly of Liberl in their first 50+ hour masterpiece, and see what Japanese gamers have been raving about for over ten years.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption David Cameron: "The British public can be proud that we've cut the seven-year credit card limit for the EU."
David Cameron has hailed a deal which will see the first ever real-terms cut in the European Union's budget as "good for the UK and good for Europe".
After two days of talks, leaders agreed on a 908bn euros (£768bn) budget limit for 2014 to 2020 - about 3% lower than the current seven-year period.
The prime minister said the public could be "proud" of the deal.
Labour welcomed the news but critics warned the European Parliament could still block the package.
Friday's agreement - which required the backing of all 27 members - represents the first reduction in the EU's multi-annual budget in its history and comes after EU leaders failed to agree a deal in November amid deep divisions over proposed austerity measures.
'Rebate safe'
After hours of negotiations in Brussels, the prime minister said he could "look taxpayers in the eye" and argue he had helped deliver a good deal.
Analysis It is traditional, following EU summits, for all 27 leaders to proclaim a "good deal" for their countries. David Cameron's Brussels press conference certainly didn't break with custom. At home, Conservative MPs have been falling over themselves to say words to the effect of "didn't the boss do well?" Labour is also welcoming the deal, albeit cautiously, having voted before Christmas for a real-terms cut in the budget. But the rule when covering EU politics is watch out for the Euro smoke and Brussels mirrors. Yes, the upper limit for the long-term Brussels budget has fallen. However, to quote the prime minister, "Our contributions were always going to go up, but now they'll be going up by less." And that is before we consider that the European Parliament might reject the deal anyway.
"I think the British public can be proud that we have cut the seven-year credit card limit for the EU for the first time ever," he said.
The deal would see a fall in the share of money given to agriculture, while protecting areas such as research and development, he said, adding that "working with allies it is possible to take real steps towards reform in the European Union".
Mr Cameron said he had "fought off" attempts from all sides to protect the UK's multi-billion pound annual rebate on its contributions, declaring it "safe".
"I battled off every attempt to change it in any way," he told reporters. However, he acknowledged that the UK's yearly contributions would rise - albeit at a slower rate than before - and blamed this on rebate negotiations agreed by the last Labour government in 2005.
The European Commission originally proposed overall spending of 1.03 trillion euros (£870bn) over the period, a 5% increase over the current period which the UK argued was unacceptable at a time most national governments were cutting their own budgets.
MPs from all parties had urged Mr Cameron to push for an unprecedented cut in spending over the seven-year period.
The UK had initially hoped to trim the budget down to about 886bn euros (£749bn) and, as recently as Thursday, Mr Cameron said the proposals did not go far enough and he would not agree a deal unless further cuts were made.
Conservative MEP Martin Callanan said he had hoped for a "smaller, leaner budget" but believed most people would be "reasonably satisfied" with the outcome "given the negative headlines" which preceded the summit.
"Europe's leaders have sent a clear signal to the EU that it must live within its means and this cut is modest compared to some parts of the public sector in EU member states," he said. David Cameron has done a great job at achieving a far better deal than I had expected."
Labour said the outcome had vindicated its surprise backing for a real-terms cut in a debate in Parliament in November.
"It seemed at times that David Cameron was ready to throw in the towel and aim for a freeze, but today's deal proves that a cut was worth voting for in Westminster and worth negotiating for in Brussels," said shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander.
"As Labour we called not only for a reduction, but also reform, of the EU budget. The EU had an opportunity to focus the budget on growth and jobs and it will be a matter of deep regret if that was not achieved, but we will continue to scrutinise the details as they emerge."
The UK Independence Party, which wants to leave the EU, said the deal had not addressed the fundamental issue of why the UK should remain in the union
"Clearly a huge victory for David Cameron: looks like he's managed to increase the UK contributions," its leader Nigel Farage said in a Twitter message.
And Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, indicated that MEPs could seek to block the deal while former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said the cuts were "unthinkable" while much of Europe was in recession.According to the newly-released DisplaySearch Tablet Quarterly report, shipments of tablets powered by chips based on ARM’s CPU designs will grow by a projected 211 percent in 2011 to nearly 60 million units. At the same time, mobile devices using Intel’s x86 architecture are not expected to pick up steam until 2013. Meanwhile, Apple sold 11.12 million iPads in the September quarter, a 166 percent annual unit growth, grabbing a Strategy Analytics-estimated 67 percent market share of all quarterly tablet shipments, down from 96 percent in the year-ago quarter when the company took the market by surprise and left competitors flabbergasted.
ARM’s domination in mobile stems from the tremendous growth of smartphones and tablets, the vast majority of which come with chips based on ARM’s blueprints. With iPad accounting for more than two-thirds of tablets and their A-series of chips being based on ARM’s designs, it’s really not surprising that tablet PC architectures are now feeling the heat by ARM and iOS.
In retrospect, the mobile landscape might have looked a lot different had Apple’s deceased co-founder Steve Jobs not listened to the iPod Godfather Tony Fadell. I found this incredibly interesting anecdote yesterday in the authorized Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson…
Encouraged by the successful transition to Intel processors for Macs, Jobs had initially planned on basing the Apple tablet on Intel’s Atom platform, Isaacson explained in the book:
Since the Macintosh computers were now using Intel chips, Jobs initially planned to use in the iPad the low-voltage Atom chips that Intel was developing. Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO, was pushing hard to work together on a design, and Jobs’s inclination was to trust him. His company was making the fastest processors in the world.
However, engineer Tony Fadell strongly opposed the idea based on power consumption and even threatened to resign should Jobs proceed with Intel’s platform:
Apple had been an early partner with ARM, and chips using its architecture were in the original iPhone. Fadell gathered support from other engineers and proved that it was possible to confront Jobs and turn him around. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” Fadell shouted at one meeting when Jobs insisted it was best to trust Intel to make a good mobile chip. Fadell even put his Apple badge on the table, threatening to resign. Eventually Jobs relented. “I hear you,” he said. “I’m not going to go against my best guys.”
In fact, having realized Fadell was right, Jobs would later go on to greenlight the $278 million acquisition of a 150-person Palo Alto-based fables chip maker PA Semi in April of 2008. The then CEO also proceeded with the purchase of chip experts Intrinsity. Apple’s in-house PA Semi team would then design processors for iPads, iPhones and iPods. Apple’s A-series silicon is based on ARM’s CPU blueprints and Imagination Technologies’s GPU designs.
The Intrinsity team was responsible for performance enhancements such as higher clock rates and additional L2 cache. Samsung manufactured the chips in its fabs, per Apple’s design. Jobs outlined two reasons for eventually deciding against Intel-branded processors.
The A-series of chips containing ARM’s CPU cores drive all of Apple’s iOS devices today, including the latest iPhone 4S which runs dual-core A5.
First, he told Isaacson, Intel “is like steamship, not very flexible”. Second, “we just didn’t want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors”. Tony Fadell would step down as senior vice president of the iPod division in 2008 because of supposed infighting with Scott Forstall’s team on the iPad OS platform design. He stayed on as a special consultant to Steve Jobs before severing final ties with Apple in March of 2010.
Nest, his 100-person startup, made waves today with an intelligent thermostat appliance that sports a remarkable user interface (the work of designer Mike Matas, another former Apple guy and co-founder of Push Pop Press), an iPod-esque click-wheel and the ability to learn and adapt itself to the user’s energy consumption behavior.UT signs deal with online planning tool The aim is to get students through school faster.
The University of Texas System on Tuesday announced a $10 million deal with MyEdu, an online tool that helps students choose classes and professors and plot out degree plans.
UT officials want students to graduate faster, lowering the cost of a degree, and see the new service as an aid in accomplishing that.
“With millions of choices across degree programs and class schedules at each institution, college planning can be very complex,” said Francisco Cigarroa, chancellor of the UT System.
Graduating in five or six years has become the norm at American universities, even elite flagships. At UT-Austin, only 52 percent of students graduate in four years, while 80 percent graduate within six years. Many students work part-time or change majors, lengthening the time to a degree; others lack one or two classes to graduate on time.
“Advisers call it senior surprise. Students discover late in their college career that they need a core course, or a really hard course, to graduate,” said Frank Lyman, vice president at MyEdu.
Bill Powers, president of UT, has set a goal of raising the four-year graduation rate to 70 percent, in part with better planning. In a time of tight budgets, an online tool is a cheaper alternative to hiring more advisers.
The $10 million will give the UT System a 22 percent stake in the company, making it an equity investor, said Barry Burgdorf, a lawyer for the UT System.
“There is a chance that if this goes well, we end up making money instead of paying money for the work,” Burgdorf said.
Students have shown demand for MyEdu; the company has 3 million users nationwide, including more than 80 percent of UT-Austin students.
The partnership will allow UT to offer a custom product, giving students complete official information about schedules and individual professors. MyEdu will pilot the product at the end of this year at UT-Austin, UT-Arlington and UT-Permian Basin before rolling it out to all nine universities next year.
When choosing classes, MyEdu gives students access to course times and places, as well as grade histories and professors' scores on student evaluations. They can also review professors the way they do at RateMyProfessors.com.
Lyman said MyEdu will moderate comments and exclude irrelevant information, such as a professor's “hotness,” a quality noted on RateMyProfessors.com with a chili pepper icon.
There's also a social networking function, somewhat akin to Facebook, where students can comment on classes and assignments.
When plotting out a degree plan, MyEdu will also help students factor in pre-existing credits and give options for transferring credits from other campuses, community colleges, or online classes.CLOSE Eric and Blythe Jones speak about Donald Trump at their diner in Towanda, Pa., where they proudly display a Trump campaign sign. Video by Jasper Colt, USA TODAY
Trump speaks to the media at the Trump International Hotel that is currently under construction March 21, 2016, in Washington, D.C. (Photo11: Mark Wilson, Getty Images)
A significant part of modern journalism focuses on minorities who in the past might otherwise have seemed invisible to traditional media.
The New York Times is aggressively on top of the transgender story, likely to the surprise of many of its longtime readers. The issue of economic opportunities for African Americans stretches all the way, according to a recent breathless BuzzFeed story, to the fact that they may not be getting their fair share of jobs in the growing marijuana industry. Another dull Oscar year became a big story about multicultural diversity. The evils of sexism are as large in media as the evils of communism once were. This is otherwise known as identity politics — a chronicle of the rising power and continued grievances of various social subdivisions.
And yet the media seems largely to have missed what may be the most important development in identity politics, radically pushing the national mood and agenda: white rage. Indeed, the nation’s Donald Trump shock might not have been so great if white plight had been better documented.
True, this is often called the white backlash story — quite a media chestnut. But that’s not a story so much about conditions in poor and lower-middle-class white communities as about the resentment of people in these communities toward other groups. The condition is the resentment.
There’s a broad business news category that deals with the collapse of the manufacturing sector and, occasionally, the setbacks of trade unionism and, more recently, a sudden awareness of the effects of trade imbalances — all having a disproportionate effect on older white people without college educations. But there is to these stories largely a sense not of inequity but of the inevitable. Globalism is globalism, and not all demographics are equal. Some are a write-off.
The Times, not long ago, seeming to grasp at the larger story here, devoted considerable attention to drug issues in this demo. White people are the new heroin addicts. The "proscription" drug epidemic is now one of the leading killers in the demo. And if the drugs don’t get you, you’ll kill yourself anyway — with spiking suicide rates in the new white ghettos. This is, it’s hard to miss (or perhaps easy to miss), very similar to the stories that used to be written when the once overwhelmingly white media tried to cover the black community. From outside looking in, what you saw were crime, drugs and single mothers.
You might regard older white people as the new black people — in an economically hopeless situation, with broken families, and ever-escalating drug dependence, handicapped by deep cultural prejudice (and a negative media portrayal), and largely funneled into depressed communities, ghettos by any other name.
Part of the problem here is that older poor and lower-middle-class white people don’t have a separate identity designation. Once, there was the working class, or the white rural poor, and for a while there were the evangelicals, but now it's an identity largely formed just by lack of education. They are merely part of the larger dominant white culture — the failures in it.
Another specific media problem is that, for a host of complicated reasons, this group largely ended up in the right-wing camp (as Reagan Democrats or part of the politically homeless catchall called populism) rather than the left-wing camp, which fosters modern identity designations and allocates media coverage. (Fox News understood this and developed its counter-programming strategy accordingly.)
Then too, there is the issue of how exactly to cover this story. A particular holy grail of the media is that you need natives of an identity group to understand and write about that group. Everybody’s bearing witness. Gays about gays. Hispanics about Hispanics. Even Millennials about Millennials. The Times has a frequent transgender op-ed columnist, Jennifer Finney Boylan, for a trans point of view. Vanity Fair used a gender ambivalent writer, Buzz Bissinger, to profile Caitlyn Jenner.
White people, however, can’t write about other white people just because they are white. And even if they could, what would they bring to the story? People in the identity politics business, even as they become respected journalists, endeavor to hold on to their identities — and have pride in them. The nature of white upward mobility, however, is that you become the opposite of the downwardly mobile. White people — strivers vs. Trump’s hard-bitten base — are divided. It’s an identity gap. To maintain a sympathy with an older white underclass might even appear to be a kind of racism. (Curiously, before the rise of identity media, there was robust coverage of and identification with the white lower class — they were newspaper readers!)
Has this very invisibility and lack of representation, this virtual blackout, this, at best, merciless condescension in the media, helped fuel Donald Trump’s rise? This demo would hardly be the first not to see itself or its concerns reflected in the media — and to have realized that to gain any cultural consideration, it must make itself impossible to ignore.
Is this Trump’s attraction? He is someone who can talk back to the media — who can take control of the media. Identity politics needs a showman. The Donald as a sort of white rapper. He would seem like an awfully unlikely hope. But every identity group must have its own unique promoter. And often you don’t choose him, he chooses you. And you embrace.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1RvbaFlIn aggregate, Morning Consult’s data supports this trend. According to its survey, the plurality of people born in the 1930s and 1940s thought the 1950s were America’s best years; people born in the 1960s and the 1970s had a similar affinity for the 1980s.
But it’s worth a closer look. Using a slice of the raw survey data, I ran a multiple linear regression analysis, which attempts to calculate how much a collection of independent factors influences an outcome. In this case, the outcome was an individual’s pick for America’s Greatest Year; the factors were their age, their race, their education level, their gender, and their political party. (I threw out any response that named a date before 1930 as America’s best; very few people, save historians, are truly nostalgic for the 19th century, and these outliers skewed the sample.)
The result? It seems age does play a role in determining when a person thinks America peaked. For every 10 years a respondent’s age increased, their average America-Was-Greatest date dropped by three years. But race and party matter, too. Being a Democrat gave respondents an average bump of five years in their favorite dates, compared to Republicans; being black raised the average by more than eight years.
That said, the correlation is weak. Only 15 percent of the variability among the 2,000-odd favorite-year responses can be explained by these five demographic factors, which is laughably low by statistical standards.
Part of this might be due to a particularly tortured generation: The late Baby Boomers, or people born in the 1960s. While it’s not uncommon to think the U.S. is going down the hole—a third of registered voters think the country’s best days are in the past, according to the Morning Consult survey—the late Boomers are particularly misanthropic. Just over 38 percent say America’s best years are behind it, and only 41 percent think things will get better, the lowest spread of any generation (and tied with people born in the 1940s, like Donald Trump). What’s more, they absolutely hate the present: About half say things are worse today than they were in 2000, or even 2010, tracking closely with other Baby Boomers but no one else.
This population appears particularly friendly to Trump. Around 70 percent of Republican voters aged 50-65 recently reported feeling enthusiasm or satisfaction about a Trump nomination. And while it's hard to pin down exactly the era Trump wants to restore, his comments on manufacturing, China and Japan would seem to show a preference for the 1980s—which just happens to be the late Baby Boomers’ favorite decade.
When was America greatest? It’s a subjective question, and the data suggests the answer is more personal than generational. But Trump’s slogan seems to have particular resonance with one slice of the population, even as it speaks to the more general nostalgia.Email Share +1 815 Shares
A new rule for an executive order signed by President Obama prohibiting federal contractors from engaging in anti-LGBT workplace discrimination is now final, the Labor Department announced Wednesday.
Following years of pressure from LGBT advocates, Obama signed the order on July 21, but the process wasn’t yet final because the Labor Department and the Office of Management & Budget had to draft a rule to implement the measure.
Once the final rule is published in the Federal Register, it will become effective 120 days later and apply to federal contracts entered into or modified on or after that date, according to the Labor Department.
After its announcement, the Labor Department published Frequently Asked Questions for the final rule, which can be found here. The final rule itself is set to be online at 4:30 pm, according to the Labor Department. UPDATE: The final rule is here.
Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said in a statement the final rule for the executive order, known as Executive Order 13672, is a step in the path to ending anti-LGBT discrimination in the workforce.
“Americans believe in fairness and opportunity,” Perez said. “No one should live in fear of being fired or passed over or discriminated against at work simply because of who they are or who they love. Laws prohibiting workplace discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation and gender identity are long overdue, and we’re taking a big step forward today to fix that.”
No explicit protections exist in federal code prohibiting companies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, although the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has interpreted existing protections for gender to protect transgender workers.
The executive order is considered the first federal action to ensure LGBT employment non-discrimination in the public sector. However, in April the Obama administration interpreted the LGBT non-discrimination provisions in reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act to extend to employment at organizations accepting federal grants for domestic violence programs.
Charged with enforcing the executive order is the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which is headed by Patricia Shiu.
“We are building on the work of presidents and members of Congress from both parties who have expanded opportunities for America’s workers,” Shiu said in a statement. “This rule will extend protections to millions of workers who are employed by or seek jobs with federal contractors and subcontractors, ensuring that sexual orientation and gender identity are never used as justification for workplace discrimination by those that profit from taxpayer dollars.”
In October, the Labor Department had submitted its proposed rule for the executive order to the Office of Management & Budget. No comment period took place for the proposed rule.
Laura McGinnis, a spokesperson for the Labor Department, said the administration didn’t allow for a comment period because of the nature of the executive order.
“In cases where an Executive Order is very clear about the steps the department needs to take and leaves no discretion regarding how to proceed, agencies may publish final rules without notice and comment,” McGinnis said. “So this one was sent to OMB as a final rule.”The Motorcycle Safety Foundation course, for those of you not in the know, can best be summed up as motorcycle driver’s ed. In some states, it will waive the skills portion of your license test. In others, it will reduce your insurance rates. In all, it’s a good way to learn the bare-bones mechanics of how to operate one of these kooky contraptions in a quasi-safe environment. But make no mistake, it will not really prepare you for riding on the street.
I came into motorcycling relatively late. I wasn’t one of those kids that grew up racing dirt bikes and riding on the back of their dad’s Harley. On some level, I always was aware of them, and had a vague appreciation, but that was about as far as it went. It just wasn’t part of my worldview. Plus, in the Midwest, motorcycles are seen very much as a novelty. You either dress up in your best leather outlaw dentist gear to drink at your local dive bar, or you put on your board shorts and try to top out your Gixxer on I-435. Neither sounded particularly compelling.
That was until my brother moved back from Tampa with his Kawasaki Vulcan. Any time the family headed out, we’d all pile into the various hatchbacks and pickup trucks, and he’d just glide away on the bike. Damn, that actually looked like fun. Like, actual fun. The ability to shut out everything else, and just enjoy the sheer sensation of motion and internal combustion.
But I’d never ridden any sort of motorcycle before, not even a scooter. I wasn’t exactly keen on learning via trial and error. Some of my friends learned that way, and sometimes it works. Other times, you wind up in someone’s front yard, or having to relearn how to walk after smearing yourself across the Walmart parking lot.
In the fall of 2010, I signed up for the Basic Rider Course at Rolling Wheels in Independence, Missouri which cost a whopping $150. There are a lot of venues for the MSF course, but I decided to go with these folks. Sure, you can take it at a community college or Harley dealership, but something about the fact that this was a company that did nothing other than riding classes gave me a bit more confidence. I didn’t want to be taught by someone who was a salesperson; I wanted to be taught by someone who was first and foremost a riding coach.
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Plus, if I wadded up the bike, or decided this wasn’t for me, it wasn’t my machine.
The facility itself was set in a strip mall next to a closed down Sam’s Club. because suburbia. Inside the building was a large room used for the classroom section. Outside, at the end of the parking lot, was a section walled off by concrete Jersey barriers. This means that even the most inept and unaware driver can’t run you over, which is nice. One less thing to be terrified of. That is where you actually hone your skills.
So I bought a full face Shoei helmet. Yes, the MSF course will provide loaner helmets, but I didn’t want to do that for a few reasons. For one, wearing a rented helmet is like wearing bowling shoes, but on your face. No one enjoys the feel of someone else’s old sweat in their ears. Also, buying my own helmet made me financially invested in the prospect of owning my own bike. Think of it as a very tiny down payment on that future.
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My class took two days, and consisted of equal parts classroom lessons and practical skills on the bike. Because I have a paralyzing fear of looking stupid in front of strangers, I spent the weeks leading up to the class pestering my brother with questions on technique and etiquette.
I could have saved myself some effort. The class starts out under the presumption that you have never seen a motorcycle, and have never heard of a clutch. So there’s a lot of pictures of various types of motorcycles, and descriptions of how the controls work.
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The class consisted of roughly 15 students, two-thirds of whom were men, and two instructors, one male and one female. Of those students, two were middle-aged men who had ridden years ago and were trying to get back into it safely. Other than that, none of us had ever ridden before. Which was actually a big relief to me. Looking foolish in front of strangers is pretty high up on the fear list for me, but if everyone is equally inept, it’s not too bad.
Once you eventually do sit on a bike out in the parking lot, you start with just walking it around in neutral, with it turned off, just to get an idea of weight, and how the handlebars work. Yes, you actually do start at that level. I told you, they assume you know literally nothing about anything. From there you move to using the clutch to just kind of creep the bike forwards using the friction zone.
The available bikes at our facility were primarily Honda Shadows and Honda Nighthawks, all provided by the course, and all 250cc. That means none of them would really going to get away from us. However, because these were all learner bikes, that also meant that they had all been horribly abused. Mechanically, they ran relatively well, but most had no functioning turn signals, and the gauge cluster on mine was broken. When a bunch of rookies are constantly dropping the bikes, they tend to look a little rough.
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Speaking of dropping, I only saw one bike go down in the full two-day course. Well, I say I saw it, but really I heard it. We were all riding in a large oval, single file, when right behind me I heard the unpleasant sound of steel sliding across concrete. The young man following me had managed to low side his bike, and slid across the course. He wound up being fine, just a little road rash, and he was given a new bike.
This was a harsh way for him to learn what a lot of car enthusiasts already know: you have a limited amount of traction available, don’t use it up. If you’re already using most of the available grip, and then decide to brake heavily, one of those things won’t happen. In a car, you’d stop turning, and understeer. On a bike, you also stop turning, and then fall the fuck over.
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I sound dismissive now, but at the early stages of the class, I struggled. Not with the clutch, as I’d owned manual cars for a few years at that stage, but with simple balancing. I’ve got the equilibrium of a drunk toddler. Motorcycles are inherently unstable at low speeds. As the speed increases, they function like gyroscopes, and want to stay upright, regardless of what you do. Think of it as a teenager. Once it’s finally up and going, it will work fine, but getting it up and moving is a struggle. It just wants to go lay down.
With any new skill I learn, there has to be a point where it “clicks,” and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have to have a brief moment where it’s fun. That lets me see the value of the activity, and makes the struggle worthwhile. For motorcycling, that happened the first time I took a long sweeping corner in second gear. Suddenly, everything made sense. The balance that was so shaky at slow speed smoothed out. The engine that was rough and sluggish at low RPM evened out once it had some revs built up. Oh, so this is why people do this.
At one point after doing a few laps, an instructor pulled me aside to critique my form. The exact quote was something along the lines of “I don’t know if you’re lucky or just good, but there’s no reason your cornering should be that good when you’re not looking where you’re supposed to be going.” I chose to take that as a compliment. I’m doing |
possibility.
Notably, the authors of the paper never responded to Sohn's request for an interview.
• Read Emily Sohn's report on the problems with the GM corn and rat tumors study at Discovery News
• Read the full study online
• Read an earlier BoingBoing post explaining how peer review works, and some of the flaws in the system. (Be sure to check out the extensive comments, which include further context from scientists.)
Image: Corn Maze, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from pinkmoose's photostreamsetTimeout is most probably calling the sleep or Sleep system call.
The actual mechanics, including the minimum amount of milliseconds, of setTimeout are proprietary and/or system-dependent, since they are not in the official ECMA specs. It depends on your Javascript run-time, as well as the system you are running it on. Given, your Javascript run-time does not add a whole lot of overhead, the minimum amount of milliseconds is determined by the timeslice resolution of your operating system and hardware. The smallest "sleepable" amount of time is usually the time it takes for the process to be allocated another timeslice by your system's scheduling algorithm.
On Windows (post XP) for example, the documentation for the sleep system call reveals:
A value of zero causes the thread to relinquish the remainder of its time slice to any other thread that is ready to run. If there are no other threads ready to run, the function returns immediately, and the thread continues execution.
That means, under some extremely rare conditions, where there is no other process currently waiting on the hardware thread that your Javascript run-time process is running on, it might continue immediately after the caller finished executing, depending on how your Javascript run-time is implemented. You will probably not observe such condition very often though :)A Portsmouth man was arrested Monday after forcing police into an eight-hour standoff at his home and threatening two women with a gun.
According to authorities, 39-year-old James Lawrence surrendered around 6:30 a.m. He was then apprehended and charged for felony assault with a dangerous weapon.
Police responded to 561 Boyds Lane shortly after 9 p.m. Sunday, as it was reported that a man pulled a gun on two women at the house.
At the scene, a 46-year-old Portsmouth woman said she had been contacted by Lawrence’s girlfriend, who was attempting to get her keys from inside the home.
Police said the woman told them she tried to help Lawrence’s girlfriend get her keys when she was confronted by the suspect.
Authorities said Lawrence was upset and intoxicated. He allegedly obtained a gun from inside his house and then reportedly loaded the weapon and threatened the women, as well as anyone who messed with him.
Officers attempted to make contact with Lawrence, but he would not answer the door. Instead, he turned off all of the lights in the home.
Police attempted to persuade him to surrender, but he was not cooperative.
Eventually, the Rhode Island State Police tactical response team got Lawrence to peacefully surrender and he was turned over to Portsmouth police and arrested.
Lawrence was scheduled to appear in Newport County District Court Monday.Update: A Google spokesperson writes that Google hasn't purchased and is not testing any Microdrones: "This was a purchase by a Google executive with an interest in robotics for personal use."
If you felt that Google Street View violated your privacy, wait until you've got one of these hovering over your back porch.
The German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche reported over the weekend that Microdrones, a company based in the city of Siegen, Germany, has sold at least one of its flying surveillance robots to the search giant for testing. Sven Juerss, Microdrones' chief executive, told the magazine that the radio-controlled devices--four rotor helicopters about a meter across--could be helpful in Google's mapping projects, and that he think there's a good chance Google will buy more of the airborne bots.
I've asked Google for confirmation of Wirtschaftswoche's report. If it holds true, Google may still be using the drones for a silly one-off experiment--remember the Street View snowmobile?--rather than as a large-scale fleet of floating cameras.
But even if the Microdrones are intended for mere experimentation, the suggestion of flying Google drones would still almost certainly set off another round of protest from privacy advocates, particularly in Europe, where Google Street View photography has faced years of criticism.
Given that less than three months have passed since Google admitted that it had accidentally collected data from thousands of Wifi networks with its Street View cars, and that it still faces a legal probes in more than three dozen states, this is probably not a new toy that the company needs.This was basically the Waldorf. via imgur
Well folks, you saw it for yourself: it turns out that Jonas, our dreaded, sledded and bedded snowstorm of 2016, was every bit as bad as Governor Cuomo said it would be, and then some. Streets were blanketed, cars were conquered and strange snow sculptures walked the earth. Meanwhile, in the real estate world, someone tried to make a killing by renting an igloo in Greenpoint for $200/night.
The rental listing was up on Airbnb for all of six hours before it was removed, probably due to the safety concerns of storing humans overnight in a snow cave, or the legal uncertainties of charging them for it. Regardless, it was yet another entertaining instance of Brooklyn’s residents taking any opportunity to capitalize on tourists’ unending hunger for “authenticity.” We caught a few screenshots of the ephemeral Airbnb listing, and shared them here for your Monday bemusement. [UPDATE 12PM: We also spoke with Patrick Horton, the creator of the igloo, who shared his process of building it, and the reason Airbnb gave for deleting his listing.]
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“Dripping with ingenuity and alt-lifestyle aura lays this Snowpocalypse’s most desirable getaway,” read the listing for this one-bedroom igloo. “Built completely by hand all natural Come experience this chic dome-style bungalow with Bae.” Bizarrely, the listing claimed that the igloo had one bathroom, as well as a washer and dryer. And air conditioning, which makes sense, since there were holes to let the light in.
We caught up with Patrick Horton, 28, who built the igloo in his private backyard in Greenpoint with the help of his roommates, Griffin Jones and Justin Seeley. He admitted that he and his roommates had actually been planning the igloo long before Jonas hit.
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“We decided we were going to do this 2 months ago,” Horton told us. “We were sitting and joking around that we should build an igloo, and then we decided we’d actually do it. We were just waiting for a snow day.”
Horton is a freelance art director, which might account for the impeccable structure of the rental property — but he also said that he and his building crew watched hours of Youtube tutorials to guide their hands. “We built an eight-foot high pile of snow on Saturday, let it freeze overnight, and then spent three hours on Sunday digging it out.”
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The inside of the igloo could only house a pile of blankets and some pillows, so one can assume that sleeping (or boning) is pretty much the only thing you would have done inside. Horton explained that the purported “amenities” of the igloo — a bathroom, washer and dryer — could be accessed inside their apartment, since the igloo was in the backyard.
Horton’s igloo received 5 rental requests before it was taken down. After removing his listing, Airbnb sent Horton the following message:
Hi Patrick, My name is Dustón and I work with the Airbnb Trust and Safety Team. I am contacting you regarding your new listing the “Boutique Winter Igloo for 2.” We are happy to see that you guys are busy and having fun during the Blizpocalypse. Unfortunately, your igloo, while very well constructed, has failed to meet our occupancy standards and has been removed from search results.
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The note went on to praise Horton as “an appreciator of igloos around the world” and offered him a $50 credit to be applied to a stay at any of Airbnb’s other igloos. Because yeah, it’s actually legal to rent out igloos, and this isn’t the first time an American has tried it (successfully). Dustón’s message ended by offering up a recommendation clearly directed at Horton’s future endeavors in the igloo rental market: “Be sure to pick a place with running water, electricity, and a roof that doesn’t melt.”
“Okay, so we had a roof that could melt,” Horton said. “But I’m pretty sure that defines every igloo.”
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Whether or not this first attempt at Airbnb-ing his snow fort will propel Horton into a life of seasonal micro-apartment real estate remains to be seen. As you’ve probably inferred from the listing’s price and the language he used to describe the igloo, the business side of this blizzard bungalow was conceived half-jokingly. But, riding on the heels of today’s media attention from the around the world, Horton told us that his igloo rental may not be entirely defunct. “We might put it up on Craigslist and see if anyone wants to do it.”
By the way, it’s worth noting that even though this living situation might seem a little chilly, it’d actually still be cheaper than any of the nightly rates at Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel.
Follow Sam on Twitter to catch more news-worthy absurdities at @ahoysamanta
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6 CommentsPlant a Seed to Read
My students need 12 copies of 9 children's book titles that will accompany the monthly story units for next year.
My Students
Do you remember what it was like when you were given a book to keep for your very own and began to build your own library at home?
I teach 12 preschoolers with disabilities.
Their ages are 3 to 5 years old, and they are from diverse ethnic backgrounds. My students live in a high poverty area of South Carolina. Our school is a Title One school serving grades preschool to grade 5.
My Project
My students love books! Unfortunately, they lack reading materials in their homes. This presents an immense challenge for their literacy development. I use a preschool literary curriculum in which every month a new story unit is centered on one book. The book is read to the class daily. The curriculum teaches rhyme, rhythm, and repetition as effective tools for the different activities in the story unit. At the end of the month each child is given a new copy of the book with his name and date written inside to keep and take home.
Each month my students look forward to taking their book home to share and read with their family.
Your help will make it possible for my students to have their own precious books and begin building their own home libraries.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Communications Commission approved on Thursday a proposal to let consumers swap pricey cable boxes for cheaper devices and apps, a change that would boost competition in the $20 billion television set-top box market while delivering a blow to major cable companies.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) logo is seen before the FCC Net Neutrality hearing in Washington February 26, 2015. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
The new rule, unveiled by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in January, would allow customers to obtain video services from providers such as Alphabet Inc, Apple Inc and Tivo, instead of cable, satellite and other television providers such Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications.
The proposal passed in a 3-2 vote, with three Democratic commissioners including Wheeler in favor and two Republican commissioners dissenting.
Wheeler said the proposal is the beginning of an “information-gathering process” in which the FCC will allow cable providers and other stakeholders a 60-day comment period. If implemented, the industry would then have two years to comply with the rule.
“Technology allows it, the industry at one point proposed something similar to it and the consumers deserve a break and the choice,” Wheeler said at Thursday’s FCC meeting.
The proposal has set off a frenzied lobbying battle pitting a tech industry eager to tap into the lucrative market against cable and TV companies, which could lose billions of dollars in rental fees for set-top boxes. Many of those industry providers spoke out against the measure after the vote Thursday.
“While consumers are embracing an apps-based approach that offers a variety of content on more than 450 devices, the FCC has chosen to go down a path that threatens the very competition and innovation that has led to this vibrant marketplace,” said Bob Quinn, AT&T’s senior vice president of federal regulatory.
Stanton Dodge, general counsel of Dish Network Corp, said: “It is really not clear to us that any new regulation is needed to encourage innovation and in fact would actually hinder it.”
The FCC says 99 percent of U.S. customers now must get their boxes from their cable companies, and they pay on average $231 a year to lease the devices.
The commission has said opening the set-top box market to alternatives such as a smart TV or tablet would help lower prices for consumers, noting that set-top box rental fees have risen 185 percent since 1994.
The cable companies say the video marketplace is already evolving as more customers replace traditional pay TV services with streaming Internet video.
Underscoring the fierce industry battle and the FCC’s concerns, the agency on Tuesday abruptly canceled a Twitter town hall where it was slated to detail the proposal and its impact on minority and independent programmers.
An FCC spokeswoman said the Sunshine Act prohibits outside parties from lobbying it on a pending item during the week before a full commission vote, and said the town hall would be rescheduled after the proposal was voted on by the commission and released publicly.
The proposed rule would require cable and satellite providers to give alternative device makers - their eventual competitors - access to cable and satellite programming.
While that is currently possible, cable and satellite companies often impose restrictions on third-party device makers, resulting in a virtual lockup of the market.The early signing period for basketball kicks off Wednesday, and the Oregon Ducks expect to solidify their recruiting class, as four-star point guard Payton Pritchard (West Linn) and four-star small forward Keith Smith (Seattle) confirmed that they intend to sign this week.
Pritchard, arguably the top in-state point guard in more than two decades, was once an Oklahoma Sooners commit, but changed course and became an Oregon pledge this summer, choosing the Ducks over offers from Arizona State, Butler, Cal, Gonzaga, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Villanova, Washington, Wisconsin and others.
Rated the No. 42 prospect in the country by ESPN, the 6-foot-1, 175-pound point guard is pleased that his path will lead to remaining in his home state.
"Definitely, it's nice. It's great. I have a comfortable relationship with Coach (Dana) Altman," he said. "I get to play for my state and stay close to home, so it's nice. I get to play for my home city. I get to rep Oregon."
For the Ducks, signing Pritchard is a sign that the program is building some in-state traction after losing out on big-time talents over the past several years, including Michael Dunleavy Jr. (Duke), Kevin Love (UCLA), Kyle Singler (Duke), Terrence Ross (Washington) and Terrence Jones (Kentucky).
Having won three 6A state championships and two state player of the year awards in his first three prep seasons, some feel Pritchard has a chance to be an all-time great within the state.
"When it's all said and done, I think he's got to be in the mix for the best players to ever play in Oregon," West Linn coach Eric Viuhkola told The Oregonian. "Charlie Sitton was unbelievable, Kevin Love was unbelievable. I remember Michael Dunleavy - he was the third pick in the draft - he was unbelievable - Stoudamire, Danny Ainge and all those guys. In my heart of hearts, I think Payton will be one of those guys, in the college and pro ranks, when it is all said and done. He will be in the mix with all those great players."
As a junior, Pritchard averaged 22.1 points, 5.8 assists, 3.8 rebounds and 2.4 steals per game.
The Ducks also expect to sign Smith, a Rainier Beach High School standout who committed in April after a visit.
"I had a really good relationship with the coaches beforehand. I took my visit down there and I loved everything I saw," Smith said. "We got to see the whole campus, student life, the players, we got to see a session of player development. Everything fit me. That's the reason why I chose Oregon."
The 6-foot-7, 200-pound small forward is rated by Scout as the No. 42 player in the country, and his father, who carries the same name, believes Altman is the perfect coach to develop his son's talent.
"He's developing, not only the program, but players too," Smith told The Oregonian. "They are putting in a lot of work. And you see that he's really hustling and putting it in on the recruiting end. He's all over the place. I said, 'Good gracious coach. You need three or four of you to get to all the places you are trying to get to.'"
Smith will have a signing ceremony Wednesday at the Boys and Girls Club he "grew up in," then will have another event at his school Thursday.
Oregon's three-man class, also consisting of four-star big man M.J. Cage, is rated the No. 11 group in the country by 247Sports.
Note: No word yet on Cage's plans
Pritchard highlights
Smith highlights
-- Andrew Nemec
anemec@oregonian.com
@AndrewNemecCanonical has just announced the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, a glimpse of the future Ubuntu for Phones, but it seems that besides the obvious problems, there are a few interesting ones.
After we installed Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, we started to fiddle with it. As you would imagine, most of the stuff you’ve seen in the videos and presentations is just a mockup.
This is understandable, but we had the curiosity of pressing the Gmail app, which turns out it’s a webapp. It opened the browser, which asked for my Gmail details, but then it redirected towards an iTunes installation link for the Gmail App.
We shouldn’t be too hard with Canonical because developing such a complex ecosystem takes time and a lot of effort. Even in its state, the Touch Developer Preview is fast, smooth and holds a lot of promise.The state's case against accused serial killer Homer Lee Jackson III suffered a significant blow after a judge this month threw out his alleged confession, finding Portland police used improper and coercive tactics during more than seven hours of questioning over two days.
Police arrested Jackson, now 57, in October 2015 and accused him of strangling two teenagers and two women in their 20s who worked as prostitutes in the 1980s. He's pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder charges.
It's the latest setback in a case that has lingered for two years after police announced at a news conference that they had finally solved the asphyxiation deaths of four African American women who had been sexually assaulted and their bodies dumped. Relatives and friends of the women filled three rows in the courtroom's gallery when Jackson entered his plea.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys have been locked in a series of pitched court arguments about the quality of evidence in the case against Jackson, who was collecting disability payments and had lived quietly in a Northeast Portland for 13 years at the time of his arrest. He told court officials he was taking medication for paranoid schizophrenia.
Multnomah County Circuit Judge Michael A. Greenlick now has suppressed the two days of statements that Jackson made to two Portland cold case detectives when he was first taken into custody in October 2015, finding they were "made under the influence of fear produced by threats (and promises of leniency.)'' The judge cited more than a dozen examples from the interrogation.
Read excerpts of police interrogation that concerned judge in accused serial killer case
At several points during the interview, Detectives Meredith Hopper and James Lawrence told Jackson that if he admitted to killing the women and explained why, they'd help him, he'd feel "great relief" and everything would turn out "for the best for everybody."
At other times, the detectives were hostile, exploiting Jackson's religious belief by suggesting God would never forgive him for his sins and promising that bad things would happen if he didn't start talking, the judge said.
Hours into the questioning on Oct. 15, 2015, Hopper advised Jackson not to put the families of his alleged victims through the pain of a trial. If he did, she told him, jurors would look at him as a monster because he couldn't remember how many women he killed.
The detectives would make sure he got the severest penalty if he didn't come clean on the killings, she said.
After Jackson continued to deny involvement, Hopper said, according to transcripts of the interrogation:
"Well then, you are a monster, my friend. You deserve what's coming to ya and I hope you get every bit of it. Because I think you're a nice guy to talk to, very pleasant, but I'm telling you right now, you are a monster and we will do everything we can to make sure you spend as much time in prison as we can put you there for. Because that's what's coming. You have the power to help these people."
The judge also highlighted Lawrence's likening of the case to a train as the detective urged Jackson to confess and "get on'' the train and then warned that if Jackson didn't, he'd get "run over'' by the train.
Conor Huseby, one of Jackson's defense lawyers, argued that the promises of leniency mixed with threats showed the detectives were trying to manipulate Jackson into confessing to murders "it was abundantly clear he had no memory of.''
State prosecutors countered that the detectives lawfully pressed Jackson about how he should clear his own conscience and give closure to the families of Essie Jackson, 23, killed in March 1983, Tonja Harry, 19, killed in July 1983, Angela Anderson, 14, killed in September 1983 and Latanga Watts, 29, killed in March 1987. Homer Jackson and Essie Jackson aren't related.
Jackson's statements were voluntary, and the detectives made no threats, the prosecutors said.
"There is simply nothing threatening about calling the defendant a monster nor is it threatening to tell the defendant that the detectives will work as hard as possible to do their jobs and make a strong case against the defendant in order to keep him in prison as long as possible,'' wrote Deputy District Attorney Susan O'Connor. "A threat must be more than expression by the officer of an intent to do something that the officer is authorized to do.''
The judge disagreed.
"Police threatening the worst punishment if convicted, I believe, is coercive," Greenlick ruled. Citing case law, he said police have the power to follow through on threats of harsher penalties and it's reasonable for a defendant to believe that could happen.
"Given the totality of circumstances, I believe the defendant could have started to believe that he would suffer a number of detrimental consequences, including that the judge and the jury would consider him to be a monster, the police would seek the longest possible penalties, the victims would be angry and influence prosecution negatively," the judge said. "It might also have been reasonable for him to believe that the interview might not end until he cooperated and he would not be able to let his family know what is going on."
Though the judge said he isn't required by law to determine whether he believed Jackson's statements were false or wrong, he called it "noteworthy" that Jackson admitted only to the killing of the 14-year-old yet had no recollection of what occurred and provided details that were inconsistent with how she died.
"It sure appears that the defendant became convinced that he committed murders for which he had no memory," Greenlick said.
"The fact that the defendant remembers Ms. Anderson or remembers being at a place where she took johns obviously does not mean that he committed murder on this particular date 34 years ago," he said.
Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Jenna Plank argued that under recent case law, "the probable truth of a confession" shouldn't be a factor in deciding whether a statement can be admitted as evidence at trial.
The judge said he wasn't ruling on the truth of the statements. But he said he found in his close review of the interview with Jackson that the types of inducements or threats made by police can create a risk of an inaccurate admission.
"Backing that up is my concern the defendant isn't really able to come up with anything specific about any of these murders even though he seems to be trying," Greenlick said.
The judge threw out all of Jackson's statements to police after Lawrence, responding to Jackson who asked to call his sister during a smoke break on the first day of questioning, told Jackson that he couldn't call his sister until "we get to a point where we are working together on this."
Before that break, Jackson had repeatedly denied any involvement in the killings. After emerging from that break, he suddenly remembered "the girl in the house," referencing the death of Angela Anderson, the interrogation transcript shows.
The judge issued his ruling from the bench Oct. 2, but then sought more input from lawyers regarding an unusual turn in the interrogation, when police called Jackson's sister and allowed him to talk to her on speaker phone while the detectives listened and participated in the conversation.
When his sister asked why Jackson was there and why he was talking to police without a lawyer, he said, "I did it."
The judge ruled Tuesday that the unlawful police tactics tainted Jackson's admission to his sister as well, finding it reasonable for Jackson to believe at the time that "that the detectives would evaluate the statements he made to his sister and potentially react negatively to them.
Prosecutors haven't yet discussed with Oregon Department of Justice lawyers whether to appeal the judge's ruling to a higher court, Plank said Wednesday. "We're still moving forward,'' she added, noting there are hearings set next month on other pretrial motions in the case.
Prosecutors allege Jackson's DNA was found at three of the crime scenes. Jackson's lawyers have countered that his DNA isn't the only male DNA at the scenes and often was found in less suspicious places than the DNA of other potential suspects.
-- Maxine Bernstein
mbernstein@oregonian.com
503-221-8212
@maxoregonianA Russian journalist is working out of an Oakland loft, while she seeks asylum in the United States because she fears for her life. She has keen insight into the controversies now making headlines. Dan Noyes has an exclusive I-Team interview.This journalist has been tracking how Russia tries to exert influence in countries around the world and here.33-year-old Kseniya Kirillova has applied for asylum in the U.S. She tells Dan Noyes she fears for her life, if she returns home.: "If you went back to Russia, what would happen?": "Two opportunities, death or prison, I think."Kseniya turned a critical eye on Russia's military actions in Ukraine with colleague, Alexander Shchetinin. But last year, he was found dead of a gunshot wound and, just hours later, an in-depth article about his death appeared in Russian media -- too quickly, she says."If this article was written by people who knew about Sasha's death in advance," Kseniya says. "So that means it was written by his killers or by people who has connections with his killers."The article also contained a threat and named Kseniya."They wrote that Russian journalists who supported Ukraine should be nervous and they listed several names including mine."So, Kseniya is here with her husband, a software programmer, continuing her reporting out of an Oakland loft. She's an expert on Russian influence around the world, and she analyzed the American presidential race closely.Kseniya says, "I myself traced activity of Russian trolls."She tells the I-Team Russia didn't expect to change the results of the election in favor of Donald Trump, but they wanted to damage what would be a Hillary Clinton presidency as much as possible.: "To create some hell, some mess.": "Some chaos.": "Yes, to hurt Clinton."Just last week, President Trump dismissed Russian influence in the election, telling an Alabama crowd, "I call it the Russian hoax."But Russian agents spent $100,000 on Facebook ads during the election, and as ABC News reported tonight, the ads favored Donald Trump. Kseniya says no one could do that without Vladimir Putin's knowledge and approval."In Russia, it's impossible that the government is not involved in such level of an operation because all high level media in Russia is under government control," Kseniya says.On June 2nd, Putin told an audience in English, "Don't worry, be happy."Putin tried to downplay hacking of Democratic National Committee emails during the election, denying the Russian government was involved and saying it must have been Russian patriots working on their own.But Kseniya counters, "In Russia, it's impossible to do such things without government control."As the investigations into all these issues play out, she worries about America's standing, saying our image is becoming tarnished around the world."And it's really painful for me to see how Americans betray their values and put partisanship above the interest of the country."Dan Noyes asked Kseniya if she's concerned about her chances for asylum being affected by doing this interview, discussing Russian influence in the campaign. She said, no -- after all, this isn't Russia.The plan aims to make fashion more environmentally sound and ethical The government has launched a campaign to tackle the environmental impact of a "fast fashion" culture. About two million tonnes of clothing end up in landfill every year. More than 300 retailers, producers and designers are part of the "sustainable clothing action plan", launched at the start of London Fashion Week. Ministers say customers should be sure clothing is made, sold and disposed of "without damaging the environment or using poor labour practices". The initiative outlines commitments to make fashion more sustainable throughout its lifecycle: from design and manufacture to retail and disposal. It hopes to draw attention to the environmental impact of cheap, throwaway clothes, which have become hugely popular on the High Street but are adding to the UK's landfill. HAVE YOUR SAY Why do they end up in landfill? I lived in Africa for many years and there's millions of people literally living in rags Paul, UK The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says the clothing and textiles sector in the UK produces around 3.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide, 2m tonnes of waste and 70m tonnes of waste water per year. Gases such as CO2, emitted by fossil fuel burning, and methane, released from landfill sites, are widely believed to be contributing to global warming. As part of the action plan: Marks and Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury's have pledged to increase their ranges of Fairtrade and organic clothing, and support fabrics which can be recycled more easily
Tesco is banning cotton from countries known to use child labour
Charities such as Oxfam and the Salvation Army will open more sustainable clothing boutiques featuring high quality second-hand clothing and new designs made from recycled garments
The Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion will be resourced to provide practical support to the clothing sector
The Fairtrade Foundation will aim for at least 10% of cotton clothing in the UK to be Fairtrade material by 2012. The Minister for Sustainability, Lord Hunt, announced the plan at the launch of the sixth season of estethica, the world's leading showcase of ethical designer fashion, at London Fashion Week. He said climate change was a bigger problem than the economy, and the clothing industry was "responsible for lots and lots of greenhouse gas emissions". Launching the action plan, he said: "It's going to be great for the fashion industry, great for the climate and for anyone who's in the supply industry in developing countries to those working in retail. "We believe customers want sustainable clothing and we want to give them as much as possible." Complex challenges Jane Milne, business environment director of the British Retail Consortium, said retailers should be "applauded, not criticised, for providing customers with affordable clothing, particularly during these tough economic times". "They're raising standards for overseas workers, offering clothes made from organic and Fairtrade cotton and encouraging the re-use and recycling of unwanted clothes," she added. The challenge is to reduce the amount of damage we are doing now, while a revised, sustainable model of consumption is created
Malcolm Ball, ASBCI chairman
Fast fashion from UK to Uganda The ASBCI, the forum for clothing and textiles, said the industry was "very cognisant" of the environmental issues it faced and "highly motivated" to find solutions. Chairman Malcolm Ball said the challenges facing the industry and the consumer were "complex". Taking cotton as an example, he said organic cotton was highly desirable but represented only a fraction of world production, adding that growing it "requires vast amounts of the most precious resource on earth - water". "There are many voices who argue the current Western model of fast and cheap fashion is totally unsustainable in the medium to long term," he said. "The challenge is to reduce the amount of damage we are doing now, while a revised, sustainable model of consumption is created." Cheap, throwaway clothes are adding to the UK's landfill Allana McAspurn, of ethical fashion campaign body Made-By, said change would be gradual: "It's about continuous improvement - a step-by-step approach. "We've created a situation where we've got really cheap clothes and that's not going to re-addressed overnight." London Fashion Week runs from Friday until Wednesday.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionComponent is a section of Aux.Out. for one-off pieces, special editorials, and lost orphans of the music discussion. Today, Philip Cosores offers some last words on the recently defunct outfit, Death Grips, and why pop culture should always make us think.
“I think we are just threatened by unfamiliar things as people and then we react strangely, or it seems common for people to get some false sense of how they think you think of yourself but it’s actually a total projection.” – Zach Hill, 2010
Last year, on August 8th, I talked to the creator of Pigeons and Planes via a series of emails. Death Grips had just staged their no-show concert and the music world was enraged. I wound up drafting this response to the situation that never got published because Kendrick went and dropped his “Control” verse and Stereogum posted an essay that had some similar arguments.
Now, Death Grips has broken up and I am even more disillusioned with my contemporary writers and critics, as well as a few music industry professionals, that feel the need to ridicule the band on their way out. It’s funny, because Death Grips’ napkin note says words like “art” and actually expects the listeners to think in terms of art, but it’s 2014, and we don’t believe in art anymore. We believe in pop culture.
If it isn’t pop, we aren’t much interested in it, or at least that is what it seems. These worlds used to be as separate or as intertwined as you wanted, but try to be a music critic without having to have readily available knowledge on Ariana Grande, and good luck. When the worlds were separate, people could enjoy these art world curiosities, and not have a peanut gallery cracking jokes about not that which they don’t understand, but that which threatens their existence just because it is different.
Imagine if Sonic Youth was playing in the ’80s to fans of Wham. That’s what it feels like to see the current music writing community try and actually contextualize Death Grips. In the schoolyard sense, the popular kids shouldn’t be worried about what the misfits are doing. But in 2014, pop not only wants the numbers, but it wants the cred as well. And the best way to get that is by pushing down the most threatening kind of music to pop – that which has no possibilities to be pop music and exists just to be art.
The reaction to Death Grips oozes entitlement in the most ugly of ways. There was a time when being a rock star and being volatile, abrasive, and provocative were not negatives. But now you have Trent Reznor mocking you for not having it together, and suddenly the Nine Inch Nails concert tour feels much less like anything “art” related and much more about commerce. It’s a pop music tour, how silly of Death Grips to try and be artists in that environment.
Of course all concert tours have bottom lines and financial considerations, but why should that be a concern to music listeners and critics? Thinking about Reznor as an entrepreneur, stressed out to find a new opener, does nothing to benefit Reznor as an artist, and only stands to hurt enjoying the music experience for what it is.
Likewise, it seems more and more we are seeing articles focusing on numbers, sales figures, trends, and the like. Yes, this is significant for people interested in business and economics. But it also can mask the fact that a lot of people can’t, and won’t, engage music as the art form it is.
Here is a significant portion of the essay I wrote last year about the Death Grips concert incident and I think it’s still relevant.
~
I literally just read six different writers, all talented and generally of opinions that I agree with, and they all had six wildly different reactions to Death Grips. The articles conclude that either a.) Death Grips was doing performance art in the form of a “gotcha,” b.) Death Grips were indulging in their creativity as artists and delivering much needed punk attitude, c.) Death Grips were seeking attention, d.) Death Grips were being asshole punks that don’t care about their fans, e.) Death Grips were just redundant and unimaginative, and f.) Death Grips are the worst human beings ever to live.
Now, these are six interesting takes, or maybe only five interesting takes, and who is to say that any one of them are right or wrong, but all seem to take their presupposed opinions of who Death Grips are from slanted headlines or what makes sense to their essay. Like Zach Hill stated in 2010, these are projections of who they need Death Grips to be to suit their argument. What do we actually know about Death Grips? We know plenty about Zach Hill. He’s been in the indie music world for more than a decade, and in that time, he hasn’t exactly been a spotlight hog or a money grabber. He has played on numerous well-known and unknown projects, and seems to attract people to him more than repel. |
be expected as our bodies start to detox, but I know if toxins are escaping through my skin, they’re also likely to be getting in my milk.
Thing 3 is really what contributed most to Thing 1. I want to lose weight, and I know I have the willpower to do it! The thought of having to stop breastfeeding, though, is pretty scary to me. I don’t want anything I’m doing for myself to harm my baby.
Conclusion: I’m going to need to slow down. I can’t quit everything cold turkey or my dwindling milk supply is going to be riddled with toxins.
New plan: Replace snacks with smoothies for a few days, and drink lots of water. After detox has ceased, I’ll replace a meal with a raw vegan one.
Have any of you nursing mothers experienced this? What did you? Halp?Ralph and Sandra Fisher, who run a show-animal business in Texas, had a beloved Brahman bull named Chance. Chance was the gentlest bull they'd ever seen—more like a pet dog than a bull. They loved him, kids loved him. He had a long career in movies, on TV, performing at parties. When he finally died, Ralph and Sandra were devastated. Around that same time, scientists at Texas A & M University were looking for animal subjects for a cloning project. They already had some tissue from Chance because they'd treated him for an illness. So Ralph and Sandra offered up Chance's DNA for the experiment. Second Chance was born. And he was, eerily, just like Chance. Except he wasn't. Which they found out the hard way. (21 minutes)The 17th annual White Privilege Conference in Philadelphia devolved into a precious snowflake whinefest when attendees noted that the conference was too white. No, I’m not kidding. To make things more absurd, a speaker, who was Caucasian, spoke over his allotted time, an offense that was nothing more than an exercise in white supremacy. The Daily Caller was there to capture these precious snowflakes engaging in pervasive nonsense over what was probably an excruciating three-day (April 15-17) excursion:
Disaffected participants in the 2016 White Privilege Conference (WPC) have taken to Twitter to complain that the conference was, ironically, too white and was actually filled to the brim with white supremacy. Adopting the hashtag #WPCSoWhite, inspired by the recent #OscarsSoWhite campaign, Twitter users claimed the conference that was supposed to battle white privilege instead served to entrench it. The tag appears to have been started and pushed with particular vigor by Aeriel Ashlee, an education consultant who attended WPC and objected to several parts of a keynote address delivered by (white) historian James Loewen. She said Loewen’s rhetoric, which was solidly progressive throughout, actually entrenched white supremacy, partly because his speech allegedly lasted too long. When Loewen attempted to defend himself, Ashlee said that any defense was invalid and only further showed his white supremacy.
Great keynote by @JamesWLoewen, but going over time allotted is another example of white supremacy #WPCsowhite #PHLWPC17 — Aeriel A. Ashlee (@aerielashlee) April 16, 2016
@aerielashlee Dr.Moore told me, just before I started, to take one hour. I took exactly 53 minutes. — James W. Loewen (@JamesWLoewen) April 17, 2016
A white woman telling a black woman to close the door at a workshop session. Another example of #WPCsowhite #PHLWPC17 @got_privilege — Aeriel A. Ashlee (@aerielashlee) April 16, 2016
The Daily Caller also noted other causes for concern with these delicate cupcakes, which included saying we’re a “nation of immigrants,” how we have too many white superheroes, gender-specific pronouns, “walking while white,” and the ever-present objection to saying “undocumented immigrant.” You can’t make this stuff up, folks. But what’s all this “walking while white”/ nation of immigrants business? You might want to reach for the Wild Turkey for this one:
Describing the United States as a “nation of immigrants” is very common, and it’s a particularly common phrase for those who oppose placing greater restrictions on immigration, illegal or otherwise. But to the die-hard progressives of WPC, “nation of immigrants” is an appalling term that simply highlights the exploitation and genocide of American Indians and the occupation of their land. After Sunday morning’s keynote address, one attendee came up to perform a short piece of poetry denouncing the phrase. “If you’ve ever used that term, stop using it,” he said. “It’s time to put an end to that idea, because it is wrong.” He then began a singing his poem to illustrate the point. […] A major part of WPC are the daily caucuses, where attendees segregate themselves by race and talk through their feelings on white privilege. They were assembled collectively beforehand and assigned to a specific smaller room because of the large number of white people in attendance. Before dispersing, attendees received a warning to be careful while walking to their rooms. Why? With so many white people going in so many different ways all at once, organizers warned they could start physically exerting their white privilege by walking too aggressively and not paying heed to their surroundings. If attendees weren’t careful, they said, they risked getting in the way of non-white attendees who would have no choice but to shy away and debase themselves before these barreling vectors of overwhelming privilege.
So, as you can see, it was quite the collection of minds, analyzing ways to make life seem horrible. Even worse, constructing a social narrative to thrust upon us to advance their miserable view of the world. Yes, there is racism; it isn’t in the form of a person speaking over their allotted time during a lecture. The good thing is that I assume that the vast majority of people agree that this is nonsensical drivel. So, please keep it up my dear cupcakes, we’re all laughing at you.
Editor’s Note: This is a crosspost from Townhall.com.— On Dec. 6 and 7 Historic Speedwell will be transformed into a Civil War soldiers’ winter encampment. The weekend event will feature reenactors performing routine tasks, including cooking holiday meals, in winter huts and tents. In addition, an Officers’ Ball, featuring officers and ladies in 19th-century finery, will be held in the Vail House. There also will be a holiday craft workshop and hot mulled cider and cookies will be served to visitors around open outdoor fires. Activities will take place Dec. 6 from noon to 5 p.m. and Dec. 7 from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is $7 both days, $6 for ages 65 and older and $5 for ages 4 to 16. Historic Speedwell is located at 333 Speedwell Ave. in Morristown. For more information, call 973-285-6550.Jonathan Creek is a British mystery crime drama series produced by the BBC and written by David Renwick. It stars Alan Davies as the title character, who works as a creative consultant to a stage magician while also solving seemingly supernatural mysteries through his talent for logical deduction and his understanding of illusions.
Production [ edit ]
The series ran semi-regularly from 1997 to 2004, broadcasting for four series and two Christmas specials, initially co-starring Caroline Quentin as Creek's collaborator, writer Maddy Magellan. After Quentin's departure in 2001, Julia Sawalha joined the cast as new character Carla Borrego, a theatrical agent turned television presenter. Following a five-year hiatus, the series returned for a one-off special on 1 January 2009, "The Grinning Man", which featured Sheridan Smith as another paranormal investigator with whom Creek joins forces. A further 90-minute special "The Judas Tree", was filmed in October 2009 and broadcast on 4 April 2010;[1] while a third special, "The Clue of the Savant's Thumb", was shown at Easter 2013.[2]
Sheridan Smith reprised her role as Joey in both specials. Series 5 comprised three episodes and featured Sarah Alexander as Jonathan's wife Polly. These episodes were shown at 9pm on Friday 28 February, 7 and 14 March 2014 respectively.
In 2014, conflicting reports surfaced regarding Alan Davies's view of the show. In one article published online he was said to be 'happy to do Jonathan Creek for another ten years' and praised David Renwick's talent as a writer.[3] Another newspaper report quoted the star as saying that he had become unhappy playing Jonathan Creek and bemoaned both the BBC and the show's harrowing production schedule.[4]
On 4 March 2016, it was reported that the series would be returning for another 90-minute one-off special, with filming to begin in summer 2016.[5] This new 90-minute special aired on 28 December 2016.[6] Sarah Alexander returned as Jonathan Creek's wife Polly, alongside guest stars Warwick Davis, Emun Elliott and Rosalind March.[7]
The cult success of the series won it the BAFTA for Best Drama Series in 1998.[8] It was notable for featuring comic characters and sub-plots that lent a lot of humour to the series. Unusually, it was produced by the BBC's in-house Entertainment department rather than the Drama department – this was because Renwick preferred working with people he knew rather than the people at Drama who might not share his vision.[9] It has included guest-stars such as Bob Monkhouse, Griff Rhys Jones, Rik Mayall, Jack Dee, Bill Bailey, John Bird and Nigel Planer; who are mainly associated with comedy, but who gave straight performances.
The first two series were broadcast in the U.S. on a number of PBS stations, while the remainder aired on BBC America.
Concept and casting [ edit ]
David Renwick wanted to write a detective series that dealt with the actual work of detection rather than action, which most crime dramas appeared to focus on at the time.[9] Also, whereas most of these were about who did it (Inspector Morse or Taggart) and why it was done (Cracker), this new series would be about how it was done, with such tropes as murders committed in locked rooms, a person being in two places at once or impossible thefts. Finding a culprit would still be part of the detective's job, but the emphasis would be on discovering how the crime was committed.
Magic would play an important part of the series, but it would be in the form of tricks and sleight-of-hand used by stage magicians to audiences. The programme often exposed how such tricks are actually done, but in a way quite banal compared to the trick itself.
The series would also focus on the relationship between Creek and his collaborator Maddy Magellan, a writer who often uses dishonest means in order to expose miscarriages of justice. It would be a mainly platonic one, though they do at some stage consummate their relationship only to agree that it must never happen again. (In his early planning, Renwick had thought that Maddy should be Creek's stepmother and that they would investigate crime in memory of his murdered father. However, he decided that the concept of the avenging son was far too "Batman" and in the series Creek's parents are mentioned as having moved to America.)[9]
Caroline Quentin was Renwick's first choice for Maddy Magellan, but the casting of Creek proved something of a problem. Renwick had wanted Nicholas Lyndhurst, but he turned it down. Rik Mayall was also offered the part, but was, at the time, busy with stage work (he would later guest-star in a Christmas special of the series). Hugh Laurie showed a great deal of interest and agreed to take the part, but later turned it down as he could not figure out Creek's motivations for investigating the cases Maddy involves him in, especially when he shows so much reluctance in some of the episodes.[9]
Others who were tried for the part included Nigel Planer (who would later guest star) and Angus Deayton (who had previously worked with Renwick and director Susan Belbin on One Foot in the Grave). Almost a dozen actors were considered before Susan Belbin saw Alan Davies during a rehearsal for a sitcom. Davies was invited round to talk to Renwick and "turned up in his duffle coat with straggly hair and a broad grin [and] was self-evidently the closest match yet to Creek as we had always seen him".[9]
The role of Adam Klaus was originally cast to Anthony Head in 1997 in the pilot episode ("The Wrestler's Tomb"). However, after accepting the role of Rupert Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Head was unable to play Adam Klaus in later episodes, leaving the way clear for Stuart Milligan to take over the role until the present. This explains why Adam Klaus is missing in episodes 2–5 of series 1.
Cast [ edit ]
1 Anthony Head portrays Adam Klaus in the pilot episode.
Guest cast [ edit ]
Many well-known actors have appeared in the series, including Bob Monkhouse, Rik Mayall (who had been considered to play Jonathan) and Jack Dee who are better known for their comedy roles.
Other guest stars, both comedy and straight, have included: Steven Berkoff, John Bluthal, Kate Isitt, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Nigel Planer, Griff Rhys Jones, Hattie Hayridge, Alistair McGowan, Tamsin Greig, Katherine Parkinson, Colin Baker, Brian Murphy, Rebecca Front, Mary Tamm, Jim Bowen, Peter Davison, Maureen O'Brien, Lysette Anthony, Mark Caven, Lorelei King, Geoffrey Beevers, Annette Crosbie, Rae Baker, Doreen Mantle, Charlie Brooks, Maureen Lipman, Paul Blackthorne, Jimmi Harkishin, Nicola Walker, Paul McGann and Amanda Holden.
Jonathan Ross, Michael Grade and Bamber Gascoigne have all appeared as themselves.
Summary [ edit ]
The series follows the exploits of Jonathan Creek and (in the first three series) Maddy Magellan, a pushy investigative journalist, as they work together to solve crimes where others have failed.
Creek is a somewhat cynical designer of illusions for stage magician Adam Klaus. He originally lived in a windmill in West Sussex.[10] His ingenuity and lateral thinking usually, if not immediately, lead to an unveiling of the intricacies of the crime.
Magellan is a plausible liar who never seems to have trouble sneaking into closed crime scenes, and Klaus is a flamboyant performer with a sinister stage persona who is really a dull-witted, insensitive womaniser. In some instances, his magic tricks go comically wrong.
The programme usually features 'impossible crimes', for example an offence having been committed in a sealed environment from which no criminal could have escaped (a "locked room mystery"), paranormal thefts and murders. Creek solves these cases using his knowledge of misdirection and illusion. No matter how fantastic the crime appears to be at first, he always finds a rational explanation, giving the character a passing resemblance to stage magician turned paranormal investigator James Randi. Some aspects of the character were inspired by Ali Bongo.[11]
As the series progresses, Creek gradually changes from an asocial anorak to a man with a great deal of wit and charm. This helps to fuel the romantic thread between him and Maddy. Jonathan's trademark duffle coat worn in the first series was actually Alan Davies' own coat that he wore to the auditions; it helped him win the role, as the writer and producers thought it suited the character. After the first series, Jonathan's coat was supplied by the wardrobe department. Davies kept the original at his home, and wore it again for the 2009 New Year special.[12]
For the 2001 Christmas special and thereafter, Caroline Quentin declined to appear, and so a second supporting role was introduced, theatrical agent Carla Borrego, played by Julia Sawalha. After her first appearance, the character married TV producer Brendan Baxter (Adrian Edmondson), and she became a TV presenter. A third supporting role was introduced when the show returned in 2009 after a five-year hiatus. From "The Grinning Man" onwards, Creek was assisted by online paranormal investigator Joey Ross, played by Sheridan Smith. As Smith was unable to appear in the fifth series due to other commitments, she was replaced by Sarah Alexander as Creek's wife and newest sidekick.
Part of the humour comes from the fact that Jonathan often does not want to get involved in other people's problems, and has to be pressured into it by Maddy, Carla or Joey. In "The Scented Room", which centred around a theft from a critic who had lambasted Adam's act, he took great delight in announcing that he had solved the crime but wasn't going to tell anybody how it was done. Initially, Jonathan was only brought in to investigate because he was asked by Maddy due to her having a professional connection to the crime in her role as a journalist, or because it involved an old friend of theirs (Such as one case featuring Jonathan being contacted by an old friend of his mother's after her husband was impaled by a sword in a sealed room). As time went on, he acquired a more significant reputation and was independently recruited by such varied contacts as a chief of police or even the United States military.
Over time, the show became noticeably darker, with Jonathan investigating psychopaths, pimps, gangsters and corrupt policemen, who stood in stark contrast to the duplicitous suburbanites of earlier series; one story even saw Maddy being held at gunpoint by a gang member who was only just disarmed thanks to a card trick Jonathan had picked up recently. The 2009 special contained a hybrid of elements from earlier and later series, with the lethal engineering element, somewhat reminiscent of "Mother Redcap", and the torture and murder of a young woman as she is held dangling by a rope in the middle of a room. This theme continued on in "The Judas Tree" with a murderer being killed and her accomplice then being framed for the crime.
In the 2013 episode "The Clue of the Savant's Thumb", Jonathan Creek had left the world of theatre and magic and is now a high-powered businessman with a wife, Polly Creek. Despite this, and his disillusionment with his old work due to the lack of real awe received when he made his announcements, he has still returned to his roots when faced with particularly baffling cases, such as a dead man vanishing from a locked room. During the fifth series, he and his wife move into her family's old village house, with Polly attempting to encourage Jonathan to become part of the local lifestyle, but Jonathan is distracted by various minor mysteries, as well as enthusiastic fans asking for his assistance. The Christmas 2016 special sees a similar format to past specials as an old secret — in this case, an apparently demonic ritual where women witness their lovers thrown through the air into a fire — plays a key role in the death of a man Jonathan once cleared of murder (although the subsequent investigation prompts Jonathan to realise that the man actually did commit the crime he was accused of).
Episodes [ edit ]
Music [ edit ]
The distinctive theme tune is an arrangement by Julian Stewart Lindsay of Camille Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre. Lindsay wrote the incidental music for the first three series, after which it was written by Rick Wentworth.
Broadcast [ edit ]
Ratings [ edit ]
Series Series premiere Series finale No. of
episodes Avg. UK viewers
(in millions) Most watched episode UK Viewers
(millions) 1 10 May 1997 7 June 1997 5 8.43 "Jack in the Box" 9.35 2 24 January 1998 28 February 1998 6 9.70 "Mother Redcap" 10.92 Christmas 1998 24 December 1998 1 9.86 "Black Canary" 9.86 3 27 November 1999 2 January 2000 6 10.69 "Miracle in Crooked Lane" 11.45 Christmas 2001 26 December 2001 1 7.64 "Satan's Chimney" 7.64 4 1 March 2003 28 February 2004 6 8.97 "Angel Hair" 9.9 Specials 2009-2013 1 January 2009 1 April 2013 3 8.43 "The Grinning Man" 9.91 5 28 February 2014 14 March 2014 3 7.36 "The Letters of Septimus Noone" 8.09 Christmas 2016 28 December 2016 1 7.28 "Daemons' Roost" 7.28
Awards and nominations [ edit ]
Year Award Category Recipient(s) Result Ref(s) 1998 BAFTA TV Award Best Drama Series Susan Belbin, Sandy Johnson, Marcus Mortimer, David Renwick Won Best Design John Asbridge, Jonathan Taylor Nominated Best Sound (Fiction/Entertainment) Terry Elms, Craig Irving, Laurie Taylor, Lee Crichlow, Ben Norrington Nominated Broadcasting Press Guild Awards Writer's Award David Renwick (Episode: "One Foot in the Grave") Won National Television Awards Most Popular Drama Series Won Most Popular Actor Alan Davies Nominated 1999 BAFTA TV Award Best Drama Series Verity Lambert, Keith Washington, David Renwick, Sandy Johnson Nominated British Comedy Awards Best TV Comedy Drama Episode: "Black Canary" Nominated RTS Television Award Best Drama Series Won 2004 British Comedy Award Best TV Comedy Drama Nominated
Similarity to other television shows [ edit ]
Other television programmes have utilised the same formula of a magician helping police to solve crimes,[13] such as the U.S.-made programmes The Magician, starring Bill Bixby, which aired in 1973–74, and 1986's short-lived Blacke's Magic, starring Hal Linden.[14]
There were two attempts to make a U.S. version of Jonathan Creek. The first involved Castle Rock, the production company behind series such as Seinfeld, but the initial scripts were not felt to be good enough, and David Renwick's scripts were rejected by CBS.[15] The second attempt, also by Renwick, was for Whoopi Goldberg and would have included Alan Davies.[15]
Home media [ edit ]
Regions 2 (UK) and 4 (AUS) [ edit ]
DVD Date Series 1 & 2 16 February 2004 Series 3 & 4 & the Christmas Specials 2 August 2004 Complete Series 1–4 & the Christmas Specials (gold-coloured) 29 November 2004 The Grinning Man 19 October 2009 The Judas Tree 12 April 2010 Complete Series 1–4 & the Christmas Specials (blue-coloured) 4 October 2010 The Clue of the Savant's Thumb 6 May 2013[16] Series 5 17 March 2014[17] Daemons' Roost February 6, 2017 The Complete Collection
(Series 1-5 plus six specials) February 6, 2017
Series 1 was released in Region 1 (US/Canada) in December 2006.
Series 2 was released in Region 1 in late 2007.
Series 3 was released in Region 1 on 20 January 2009.
Series 4 was released in Region 1 on 19 January 2010.
The Specials were released in Region 1 on 19 October 2010.Driving too fast in Canada? Officials in West Vancouver have developed a 3D optical illusion designed to scare the hell out of motorists: A child who darts out in front of your car.
Beginning next Tuesday, the city will confront drivers with a 3D image of a child chasing a ball into the street, a “lesson” to motorists to slow down. “We need to expect the unexpected because anything could happen, whether it is a 3D image on the road … or whether it’s a live child or a dog running in front of the car, these are all things that we have to be able to control for in a vehicle,” David Dunne of the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation told The Globe and Mail.
The break-slamming optical illusion cost about $15,000 to unleash on West Vancouver’s city streets, and will be put in place close to an Elementary School for about a week. The 3D image will appear when the driver is about 100 feet away. “You’ll see this image start to rise off the pavement and it will look like a little child is crossing the street. As you get closer to the image, the image recedes into the pavement,” Dunne told The Globe and Mail.
City officials went on to note that cars traveling at a safe speed will be able to stop in time, while those with lead feet might be left to slam on the breaks, or so we’d imagine. What they didn’t address is the possibility of injury to drivers who slam on their breaks after seeing what they think is a little girl running out in front of their car. And though we’re hoping motorists will be able to distinguish the illusion from a real child, advertising that ghost children will be running the streets of your city and that you’re to simply drive through them is in an alarming category all its own.
What could go wrong?Just what the world needs: 3 books on scam artist Bernie Madoff being rushed into print.Is there much we don't know about Madoff's Ponzi scheme or any devastating news in the offing?Here's betting the books will do moderately well before sliding into the remainder bin. But the tabloid reader in all of us now wants to know about Bernie's life in prison: the yin and yang of making license plates; the proper etiquette when soap is dropped in the shower; how to remain healthy on a starchy prison diet; and whether this bastard has an ounce of remorse for his crime.It would also be nice to know if Bernie thought he'd get away with it or if he lived it up, knowing the Feds would one day knock at his door, jangling handcuffs. Is it possible that Bernie's wife and family didn't know that he ran a criminal enterprise? Is willful ignorance a defense in a criminal case?How Bernie's victims put their lives back together is more interesting than his fake trades, his USDA Choice, Grade-A, Number-1 BS financial statements, and the semi-conscious regulators who didn't catch a whiff of corruption. There's also prurient interest in how Bernie's wife, bounced out of her posh apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, will survive with only $2.5 million in the bank. (Oh, the humanity!)Madoff's fraud totaled about $65 billion. The case grew into a global scheme that involved hedge funds, charities, and celebrities. He bamboozled thousands of individual investors, including US Democratic Senator from New Jersey, Frank Lautenberg, former Dodgers pitcher and Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, and a charity run by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.About 200 investors have received legal requests to return money withdrawn from Madoff's fund before the scheme fell apart, including the RBS ), GLE ) and HBC ). Such "clawback" requests are routine. The theory: The withdrawals were paid as part of a scam and therefore should be returned and divided proportionately among those who were cheated.Erin Arvedlund'smay be the best of the bunch. Arvedlund questioned Madoff's steady returns in a story forin 2001. Publication of her book has been moved to August 11 from September 8.Andrew Kirtzman'sis also scheduled to be released August 11, up from October. A betrayal, huh? Who woulda thunk it?Jerry Oppenheimer'swill be in bookstores August 12 rather an September 15. Cute but dumb title, no?There are sure to be more books -- but after the first few, who cares? The good books will be well researched and tightly written. Bernie is yesterday's news and, sad to say, the books are likely to enjoy a brief period of sales.Luckily, a Federal judge sentenced Bernie to 150 years in prison, the maximum term. Madoff is 71, and his life now comes down to a prison cell.Looking forward to being released in 2159, Bernie? In the meantime, you can set up an arbitrage for cigarettes, rumored to be the currency of The Big House.And if it takes a while to get that enterprise off the ground, Madoff can always use his honorary membership in HotPrisonPals.com.The website describes its members as "the hottest, succulent, juiciest, gorgeous, hunkiest, most muscle-throbbing, adorable, cutest, piece[s] of man meat... [who] happen to be behind bars."Yep, that's Bernie.NEWARK — There will be fewer rockets emitting red glare and bombs bursting in air on July 4 after Newark police confiscated 378 pounds of illegal fireworks from one home Monday.
Police made the bust in the 5200 block of Sussex Place after officers responded to a Craigslist ad. Shekhar Ali, 21, was booked into Santa Rita Jail on suspicion of selling dangerous fireworks without a permit and possession of more than 100 pounds of fireworks.
Detective Sgt. David Higbee said that after officers purchased fireworks from the suspect, they obtained a search warrant. Inside the home, they found miscellaneous boxes of fireworks they believed originally weighed a little over 100 pounds.
The Alameda County bomb squad was called to remove the fireworks from the home.
Ali has posted bail.Lynne Ramsay’s film We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) is an exquisite study in fear. Based on Lionel Shriver’s novel of the same name, about a teen on a killing spree, it opens with the nightmare of his mother (Tilda Swinton) drowning in the red juices of a tomato-throwing festival; she wakes up to find her house and car covered in red paint. From the start, fear permeates every image of the film. As spectators, we too experience that fear: in the filtered red light of the present and the chilling white light of the past, in the anxious expressions of the mother and the detached cold gaze of the son. Only gradually do we learn the extent of Kevin’s transgressions. But the narrative is the mother’s journey. We have been inside her head all along, and suspense emerges when basic emotions like fear collide with a wide spectrum of higher-level reactions – guilt, hope, despair, and other more nuanced feelings that have passed through the filter of the thinking brain. This new brand of film, the neurothriller, creates a spiral of fear or lust, a warm bath of sorrow, not through classic narrative, but with sound, image, and sophisticated computer technology, all of it tapping the circuitry of the ancient emotional brain.
Perhaps the first person to manipulate film to reach the emotional centres of the brain was the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, who called cinema his laboratory and said each film was an experiment in the interplay between a cinematographic technique and the effect it had on the audience. Suspense and surprise, desire and longing, laughter and fear, sympathy and disgust were the emotions and feelings that Hitchcock managed to induce in his spectators. Hitchcock’s way of distributing narrative information and cinematographic effects guided his audience masterfully from one emotion to the next.
During the shooting of North by Northwest (1959), Hitchcock even confessed to his scriptwriter Ernest Lehman that he would love to access the spectator’s emotions directly. ‘The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment we play this note, and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react. And someday we won’t even have to make a movie – there’ll be electrodes implanted in their brains, as we’ll just press different buttons and they’ll go “oooh” and “aaah” and we’ll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful?’ Hitchcock reportedly said, according to Donald Spoto’s biography The Dark Side of Genius (1999).
Today, Hitchcock’s fantasy of direct access to the brain is a reality in neurological operations such as deep-brain stimulation (DBS) for the treatment of patients with Parkinson’s disease. Experiments using the same technology aim to cure depression by stimulating more joyful emotional circuits. In turn, Hitchcock’s films are used by neuroscientists to study emotions in the brain. And while cinema itself has not literally transformed into a brain machine with electrodes hooked to our neuronal tissue, new models of cinema have nonetheless managed to plug more directly into the brain than the master himself. Consciously or unconsciously, contemporary filmmakers not only tap into increased knowledge about the brain offered by neuroscientific experiments, but their films also stimulate the neural senses of emotions without the detour of narrative.
In earlier days of cinema, the best method for stimulating the brain and eliciting a charged emotional response was plot itself. Hitchcock, for instance, contended that an audience with more knowledge than the characters on screen would be more engaged and emotionally implicated. ‘Let the audience play God,’ Hitchcock summarised his main rule for suspense.
This narrative rule is explained in Kent Jones’s documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), based on the legendary week-long interview between the two filmmakers, published as a book in 1967. Talking to his fellow director, Hitchcock gives the simple example of a scene where two people are having a conversation while sitting quietly at a table. Imagine we see them pleasantly chatting when suddenly a bomb explodes. The emotional effect on the spectator is that of surprise.
Now take the same dramatic situation of two people chatting at a table. But this time the audience has seen an additional close-up of a bomb hidden underneath the table, and a clock that is ticking away, indicating the moment of detonation. The characters know nothing and simply continue to enjoy their conversation. The audience, however, is now included in the narrative process because they will want to warn the characters to stop talking and get away before it is too late. Now we have an effect of suspense.
In all of Hitchcock’s films, the story provides the context for triggered emotions. Take Rear Window (1954), a film about film. The protagonist Jeff (James Stewart) is a photographer bound to his apartment because of a broken leg. He spends his days voyeuristically spying on his backyard neighbours. The ultimate spectator, he sits immobile (often in the dark) watching others act in front of his eyes. The different windows are like little cinema screens, each containing their own story. When a woman suddenly seems to have disappeared from her apartment, Jeff suspects a neighbour of killing his wife. Jeff’s girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) sets out on an investigation and enters the apartment in question, setting off suspense when, like Jeff, we see the suspicious neighbour returning home. Like Jeff, we want to warn Lisa but cannot do anything: we bite our nails, cover our eyes, move to the tip of our seat, and fear for her life.
had it been the hero whose life was at stake, the audience would have been in an even greater state of distress
Other types of story elements create suspense as well: delaying progression of the narrative by crosscutting between scenes; emphasising details such as a glass of milk, a key or a lighter in the mise-en-scène (the setting on screen) so that they become suspicious story objects and gain dramatic value; adding mood music; or focusing on facial expressions that contradict the apparent meaning of, for instance, a romantic situation.
Moreover, characters who have the audience’s sympathy can count on more shared emotional anxiety when they find themselves in dangerous situations. In Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock recounts a suspense scene at the end of his spy thriller Saboteur (1942). The story is about a young man wrongfully accused of sabotage in a munitions factory. At the end of the film, the young man and the actual saboteur, all along portrayed as a real villain, have a confrontation on top of the Statue of Liberty. The villain stumbles and falls over the railing. Our hero just manages to grasp the sleeve of his enemy’s jacket and tries to pull him up. The action is slowed by crosscutting between long shots that emphasise the enormity of the Statue of Liberty and the mortal effects of a fall from such height, and close-ups of the sleeve that is slowly ripping apart. Even before the characters understand, the audience anticipates stitch by stitch the eventual downfall of the villain. While the situation is certainly suspenseful, Hitchcock felt he made a mistake in this scene: had it been the hero whose life was at stake, the audience would have been in an even greater state of distress.
In short, a Hitchcock movie can be considered a form of direct-brain stimulation. The neuroscientist Uri Hasson and his team at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute have demonstrated in an experiment that a Hitchcock movie effectively takes control of your brain. They showed Bang! You’re Dead (1961), a short film that Hitchcock directed for his television show Hitchcock Presents to a group of test subjects. In the film, a little boy finds his uncle’s gun and thinks it’s a toy with six toy bullets. Unaware of the dangerous reality, the boy places the bullets in the gun and starts playing, pointing the weapon at several (equally unwitting) people around him: his friend, his mother, his uncle, and the maid. We never know if or when he will pull the trigger. The test subjects, meanwhile, were connected to galvanic skin-response devices and put in an fMRI scanner while watching this film. They responded in practically identical ways, showing that tension levels go up at each step as the director guides us through the story.
Hitchcock knows how to manipulate our emotions, and narrative is key. The dramatic situations lead to an understanding of, and engagement with, the emotions of the characters on screen. Obviously, classical methods of suspense are still very effective on the screen today.
But in the digital age, with new findings in neuroscience and new cinematographic technologies evolving in lockstep, the game has changed. Cinema’s awareness of neuroscience is perhaps best illustrated in Pixar’s Inside Out (2015). This animated film explores the emotional life of Riley, an 11-year-old girl who moves to a new city, told from the perspective of the basic emotions inside her head. The film playfully visualises the adventures of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust; these are not just Riley’s emotions but also characters in the film, and help the filmmakers give us a |
by the democratization of media. Not only that, but the kinds of filter bubbles offered by this media landscape have often been found to be inimical to public discourse and a shared search for Truth.
Silicon Valley has begun to adopt the role of actively policing their networks for political speech they wish to counter, but Sandberg did not discuss this but rather attempts to understand how discourses such as that of Daesh manage to capture the imagination of some and to short-circuit such narratives of hate through things such as “like attacks” where the negativity of websites is essentially flooded by crowds posting messages of love.
It’s a nice thought, but as the very presence of Kagame on the same stage with Sandberg while she was making these comments makes clear: it seems blind to the underlying political issues and portends a quite frightening potential for a new and democratically unaccountable form of power. Here elites would use their control over technology and media platforms to enforce their own version of the world in a time when both democratic politics and international relations are failing.
Another panel dealt with “The State of Artificial Intelligence.” The takeaway here was that no one took Ray Kurzweil ’s 2029 – 2045 for human and greater level AI seriously, but everyone was convinced that the prospect of distribution to the labor force from AI was a real one that was not being taken seriously by policy makers.
In related session titled “A World Without Work” the panelists were largely agreement that the adoption of AI would further push the labor force in the direction of bifurcation and would thus tend, absent public policy pushing in a contrary direction, to result in increasing inequality.
In the near term future AI seems poised to take middle income jobs- anything that deals with the routine processing of information. Where AI will struggle making inroads is.in low skilled, low paying jobs that require a high level of mobility- jobs like cleaners and nurses. Given how reliant Western countries have become on immigrant labor for these tasks we might be looking at the re- emergence of an openly racist politics as a white middle class finds itself crushed between cheap immigrant labor and super efficient robots. According to those on the panel, AI will also continue to struggle with highly creative and entrepreneurial tasks.
At some point the only solution to technological unemployment short of smashing the machines or dismantling capitalism might be the adoption of a universal basic income which again all panelist seemed to support. Though as one of the members of the panel Erik Brynjolfsson pointed out such a publicly guaranteed income would provide us will only one of Voltaire’s three purposes of work which is to save us from “the great evils of boredom, vice and greed.” Brynjolfsson also wisely observed that the question that confronts us over the next generation is whether we want to protect the past from the future or the future from the past.
The discussions at Davos also covered the topic of increasing longevity. The conclusions drawn by the panel “What if you are still alive in 2100?” were that aging itself is highly malleable, but that there was no one gene or set of genes that would prove to be a magic bullet in slowing or stopping the aging clock. Nevertheless, there is no reason human beings should be able to live past the 120 and so year limit that has so far been a ceiling on human longevity.
Yet, longevity itself poses problems. Even extending current longevity estimates of those middle-aged today merely to 85 would bankrupt state pension systems as they are now structured. Even here we will probably need changes such as workplace daycare for the elderly and cities reengineered for the frail and old.
By 2050 upwards of 130 million people may suffer from dementia. Perhaps surprisingly technology rather than pharmaceuticals is proving to be the first order of defense in dealing with dementia by allowing those suffering from it to outsource their minds.
Many of the vulnerable and at need elderly will live in some of the poorest countries (on a per capita basis at least) on earth: China, India and Nigeria. Countries will need to significantly bolster and sometimes even build social security systems.
Living to “even” 150 the panelists concluded would have a revolutionary effect on human social life. Perhaps it will lead to the abandonment of work life balance for women (and one should hope men as well) so that parent can focus their time on their children during their younger years. Extended longevity would make the idea of choosing a permanent career as early as one’s 20s untenable and result in much longer period of career exploration.
Lastly, on my part there was a revealing panel on neuroscience and the law entitled “What if your brain confesses?” panelists there argued that Neuroscience is being increasing used and misused by criminal defense. Only in very few cases – such as with tumors can we draw a clear line between underlying neurological structure and specific behavior.
We can currently “read minds” in limited domains but our methods lack the kinds of precision and depth that would be necessary for standards questions of guilt and innocence. Eventually we should get there, but getting information in, as in Matrix kung-fu style uploading, will prove much easier than getting it out. We’re also getting much better at decoding thoughts from behavior- dark opportunities for marketing and other manipulation. Yet we could also use this more granular knowledge of human psychology to structure judicial procedures to be much more free from human cognitive biases.
The fact that elites have begun to seriously discuss these issues is extremely important, but letting them take ownership of the response to these transformations would surely be a mistake. For just like any elite they are largely blinded to opportunities for the new by their desire to preserve the status quo despite how the revolutionary the changes we face open up opportunities for a world much different and better than our own.
About these adsIBF super-middleweight world champion James 'Chunky' DeGale is set for a 'Battle of the Bulge' contest against Rogelio 'Porky' Medina in what will be the Londoner's first appearance on home soil in 18 months.
DeGale had been expected to take on mandatory challenger Jose Uzcategui this spring after failing to finalise his desired unification clash with WBC champion Badou Jack, who beat George Groves in September.
However undefeated Venezuelan Uzcategui has suffered an illness and had to pass up his top spot in the IBF ranking leaving DeGale with a new mandatory challenger. That comes in the form of Medina, the Mexican, who has 36 wins from 42 fights with 30 knockouts.
IBF super-middleweight world champion James 'Chunky' DeGale set for return to the ring in April or May
The 27-year-old has suffered defeats at the hands of both Jack and Uzcategui but is in form having racked up four straight stoppage wins since August 2014, all of which came in the first three rounds.
DeGale's promoter Eddie Hearn said: 'He was due to fight Jose Uzcategui, who is now out with an illness, so he will fight Rogelio Media.
'It will still count as a mandatory as the IBF have just gone down the list. It means he will have fulfilled that obligation so he is free to look at whatever fights he wants afterwards.'
DeGale, of Harlesden, north west London, won his world title by beating Andre Dirrell in Boston last year and then defended it with a points win over Lucian Bute in Canada in November.
It means he has not competed in England since he stopped Marco Antonio Periban in Liverpool back in November 2014 with his last outing in his hometown not since his victory over Brandon Gonzales on the Froch-Groves II undercard at Wembley the previous May.
It had been suggested that DeGale's fight with Uzcategui would be included on the show at the 02 Arena on April 9, which has now been topped by Anthony Joshua's challenge for the IBF heavyweight title against Charles Martin.
DeGale celebrates super-middleweight championship victory over Lucian Bute in Quebec during November
However Hearn revealed that DeGale could now headline his own show in the capital and it is understood that Alexandra Palace has emerged as a potential for the clash five weeks later.
'We are still looking at the possibility of April 9 or maybe a stand-alone show for James on May 14,' he said.
'Obviously we were due to take a weaker and cheaper opponent than Charles Martin for Anthony Joshua with a bigger undercard.
'Now a lot of he money has gone into Charles Martin, we will still have a strong undercard but it won't quite have the depth of the original undercard.
'That means James will probably go elsewhere but we are not ruling anything out.'UPDATED
Will end “system of privilege and oppression,” says Campus Life chief
Northwestern University isn’t quite an Ivy League school, but it sure wants to be like Harvard with regard to its attitudes toward freedom of association.
The university’s Office of Campus Life is planning to force student groups that require an interview or application process to let anyone join, or risk losing their student funding, The Daily Northwestern reported.
One student leader has already drawn up a resolution condemning the plan, though the vote on that resolution has been pushed back a week after a Wednesday night student government meeting lost its quorum.
RELATED: Harvard professors including Steven Pinker file resolution against punishing male-only clubs
The plan will end a “system of privilege and oppression” at Northwestern, Campus Life Executive Director Brent Turner told the paper. (Northwestern itself isn’t so open – its acceptance rate hit an all-time low of 10.7 percent for the 2016-2017 class, the seventh consecutive year of decline.)
The new policy won’t apply to all clubs, the school said, leaving open whether groups that are often targeted in “all comer” policies – notably evangelical groups – will get exemptions.
Student government would continue funding derecognized clubs
Though Turner said reaction has been evenly split since the plan was announced in mid-May, some students think that by making membership so easy, the mandate will dilute the commitment of those who join clubs.
The student director of the Institute for Student Business Education Analytics, Kathir Sundarraj, told the paper he was so concerned about the administration’s ultimatum he was introducing a student government resolution against it.
The resolution would continue funding student groups even if they are derecognized by the administration, and it asks the university to search for a more nuanced solution to the purported problem of exclusive clubs.
ASG Senate to consider resolution disavowing potential open group proposal. https://t.co/dQ15xDuBBp pic.twitter.com/OEFDa3d8EZ — Daily Northwestern (@thedailynu) May 19, 2016
Sundarraj initially declined to talk to The College Fix about the resolution until a date could be set for debate, but has still not responded.
RELATED: Harvard already hit with petition campaign to dump its new rules against single-sex clubs
“When people feel like they earned their spot in a group they feel a higher dedication to the group,” another club leader, Rohan Mehta of the Institute for Student Business Education, told the Daily.
Turner told student representatives at last week’s meeting that “no specific policy or mandate has been drawn up” – the administration simply wanted to “dialogue” with students, the Daily reported.
Do you want to drive student groups ‘farther underground’?
Before the tabled vote on the resolution, the university hosted its first “roundtable” on the plan Wednesday afternoon, which drew eight students who largely split in their views.
The university shouldn’t try to force values on students from the top down but rather work with them on a “case-by-case basis” to review their application processes, said Joseph Raff, executive director of Supplies for Dreams, according to the Daily. Otherwise exclusive groups will go “farther underground.”
WOW! We are blown away by your support. Let's make this another great year! pic.twitter.com/sgKxYwpFYm — Supplies for Dreams (@supplies4dreams) January 25, 2016
The leader of the cross-cultural internship group AIESEC, Aashrey Tiku, said the university should separate function-oriented organizations from more community-like organizations, excluding the former from the open policy.
The Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators (SHAPE) group will most likely be exempt from the open requirements, according to Executive Director Molly Benedict. That’s to keep “perpetrators” away from victims of sexual violence in the group, she told the Daily.
Turner did not respond to requests for comment from The Fix on who is likely to get exemptions, whether entire categories or specific groups.
Christians: the canary in the coal mine
Similar policies designed to open group leadership opportunities have been approved at other colleges, but they disproportionately affect the ability of religious groups to require their leaders to observe doctrinal and lifestyle standards.
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ saw their chapters derecognized across the California State University System for initially refusing to follow the all-comers policy. As a result they lost visibility on campus and were forced to pay higher fees to rent rooms on campus.
They eventually agreed to let non-Christians run for leadership in return for being re-recognized by CSU.
(Though InterVarsity’s Greg Jao initially told The Fix that one of its largest CSU chapters, Chico State, lost 50 members in the wake of derecognition, InterVarsity told The Fix 15 after this article was published that it couldn’t find “documentation” to confirm Jao’s statement. Its attendance numbers are “up overall” systemwide, a spokesperson said: “Most chapters in the Cal State system grew or stayed relatively even during the year we were off-campus [2o14-2015]. Long Beach, for example, has almost doubled in size since 2014.”)
The InterVarsity chapter at Northwestern told The Fix that it “welcomes all students to be members in our student groups. We do not think we will be affected by this policy.” The university did not respond.
RELATED: Rejected as ‘discriminatory’ and shunned from campuses, Christian clubs struggle
The university’s move to become more “inclusive” is peculiar in the face of its high rejection rate for applicants, according to a Daily student columnist.
“The irony of the situation is that students attend an institution that derives its elite stature from its exclusivity and continuously decreasing admission rates,” Jacob Altstadt wrote.
“Yet, the University’s extrinsic values would contradict its intrinsic ones: The sense of accomplishment felt from admission to one of the country’s most selective schools would not be felt in the student groups within the school itself.”
UPDATE: InterVarsity Christian Fellowship says its attendance numbers in California State University chapters were not substantially affected in the year that it was derecognized across the CSU System. The article has been amended accordingly.
RELATED: Christian groups return to Cal State only after agreeing to allow non-Christians in leadership
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IMAGE: Buppha/Shutterstock, Jeff Stanford/FlickrThat the sport is not showcased in the Olympics also could detract from its legitimacy in the eyes of many Russians.
And much of Emelianenko’s popularity problems at home may have to do with the fighter himself: he is nonchalant when it comes to self-promotion, and he lives a cloistered life out of the ring in Stary Oskol, his hometown, which is nearly 300 miles south of Moscow.
“I like living here at home much better; I like my own city,” Emelianenko, 32, said of the small industrial city where he has lived since age 2 after moving with his family from what was then the Soviet republic of Ukraine.
Outside his rigorous training schedule — he spends hours honing various boxing and martial arts styles and runs 10 miles a day — Emelianenko’s life can seem at times to more closely resemble that of a traditional Russian peasant. He reads Orthodox Christian literature and relaxes at a banya, or Russian bathhouse.
His opponents typically possess a thick layer of macho flamboyance, dyed hair or tattoos complementing a hefty dose of hubris. With his receding hairline, doughy middle and subdued manner, Emelianenko fails to evoke an image of the Russian warrior. He strolls morosely up to the ring, introduced by a crooning Russian folk song about a Cossack fighter whose death is presaged by a dream.
“He’s just a simple, charming guy, who doesn’t even look like an athlete,” said Vadim Finkelshtein, Emelianenko’s manager. “It would just be nice if ordinary people knew more about him. It is somewhat insulting, because he is nevertheless a national hero.”
Fedor Emelianenko (pronounced FYO-dor yemel-YAN-enko) was born in 1976, the son of a teacher and a welder, and began as a boy to practice judo and sambo, a martial art developed in the Soviet Union. Sambo remained largely unknown in other countries until a few years ago, when fighters like Emelianenko began to show off the style in international competition.
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He left school as the Soviet Union crumbled, a time when even once-famous Soviet fighters began to have lucrative, if often fatal, careers in the mafia as bodyguards and hit men. The visage of a burly former fighter with a crew cut, black track pants and gold chains became an icon of 1990s criminality.
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One of these, Otari Kvantrishvili, a former Soviet Greco-Roman wrestling coach, was said to have climbed to the very heights of the mafia hierarchy before he was shot to death in 1994 by a sniper.
While he admitted to tough times during this era, Emelianenko said he took a different route. “I have never associated with criminal structures,” he said by telephone from Stary Oskol.
He finished trade school, then made it through two years (1995 to 1997) in the Russian military, where even the toughest recruits can wither and break under violent hazing rituals. Emelianenko continued training and became a certified master of sports in judo and sambo by the time he left the service.
His career took off in 2002 when he won the Russian national sambo championships and the world sambo championships, held that year in Greece. That year, he joined the Pride Fighting Championships, a mixed martial arts league based in Japan.
Since then, Emelianenko has been nearly unbeatable in 29 mixed martial arts bouts. His only official loss, in 2000, was the result of a referee’s controversial decision after a head butt opened a gash above his right eye.
Meanwhile, conditions in Russia have improved markedly for athletes in the last decade, and fighters are increasingly able to support themselves plying their trade at home, Emelianenko said.
This has something to do with Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s prime minister and the country’s biggest celebrity. A black belt in judo, Putin has worked to raise the profile of martial arts and sports in general since coming to power as the president in 2000. He has even taken a special interest in Emelianenko, whom he has met. When the fighter fought Matt Lindland in April 2007 in St. Petersburg, Putin was in attendance.
“I don’t know if he’s a big fan, but he’s an enthusiast,” Emelianenko said. “He likes to watch mixed martial arts fights.”
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This weekend, Emelianenko will face a fellow Slav, Andrei Arlovski of Belarus, a brown-bearded behemoth who resembles the rippling Spartan general from the Hollywood action film “300.” Arlovski, nicknamed the Pit Bull, is younger, taller and heavier than his opponent, and many commentators have suggested that Emelianenko may fall.
“I think a lot of people lose to Fedor before they even step into the ring,” Freddie Roach, Arlovski’s trainer, said in an interview with Affliction. He added that Arlovski was prepared and “will dominate.”
Emelianenko seems unimpressed. “I have no special strategy,” he said. “I can just wait to see what my opponent offers.”
As for his prospects and those of his sport at home, he has only somewhat more to say.
“I hope that the sport develops,” he said. “My plans are to continue fighting.”There are a few things you should know about me. I’ll knock you over for a cupcake in a jar, I still cry every time I watch that Susan Boyle video, and I really hate it when people force me into uncomfortable situations. I mean, I know none of us like it, but I think I hate it more than most. My life is already plenty uncomfortable. I don’t need others making it any worse. Especially when I know you’re just using me.
Earlier this week there was a lot of buzz about the new Google Profiles. I tried to ignore it because I find the idea of gift wrapping your online thumbprint and then hand delivering it to Google completely absurd. I mean, why would I want to do that? But people were tripping over themselves to get in and “optimize” their information. I didn’t want to get in the way.
But then Google came after me.
I’m all for Google launching these profiles under the guise that they’re “giving you control” over your name. It’s cute. It’s a very creative little scheme they’ve started so they can easily connect all your info and then do God knows what with it. Well done. However, you can’t bully and threaten me into playing your game.
Google, The Bully
I did a live vanity search this morning to see if my Outspoken bio was making any progress rising up the search results (it is) and got this.
I know the promo box has been there for a few days, but I was kind of hoping it’d go away. You know why? Because it’s hella creepy the way they’re doing this. They’re connecting MY NAME with MY SEARCH and using it against ME. Do I get that box if I do a search for someone else’s name – my brother’s, Rhea’s, various boys that I religiously stalk – no, I don’t. I only get Google whispering in my ear to try their devil cookie if I do search for me. This isn’t Say Anything and you’re not John Cusack. You can’t play your music and expect me to fall in love with you. Back off, Google.
Google, The Intimidator
It’s one thing to repeatedly ask me to try your cookie; it’s another to be holding a gun while you do it. In case you didn’t notice, you’re being FORCED into creating these profiles. Because if you don’t do it, then you don’t get to show up in their search results and you voluntarily hand over that space to someone else.
Do a search for Danny Sullivan and you already get an assortment of Dannys to choose from.
Do a search for Susan Esparza, and look, there she is.
That means I either act like a good little girl or I risk creating a reputation management issue for myself down the road. I’ve worked hard to build up content that ranks for my name, why do I lose that ranking just because someone else decided to hand over more information than I did? What you’re telling me is that I either give you everything you want or I don’t get to play. That’s not right. That’s using your power to intimidate me into doing what YOU want me to do for YOUR selfish reasons.
Calm down, Lisa, you say. You don’t have to fill out all the information. You can pick what you tell them. Well, according to Danny’s review on Search Engine Land, I really do have to fill out all the information. Because it’s “the most comprehensive” profiles that are going to appear in the results cause they’re more “trusted”. Forgive me, but I’m not looking to give Google an easily accessible thumbprint that consists of:
Where you live
Where you used to live
Where you went to school
Where you work now
Where you used to work
What you do for a living
Interests
Any fun nicknames, or you know, usernames you may be using on the Web
I have best friends that don’t know that much information about me. Facebook doesn’t have all that information about me and they’re NOT Google. Just because you throw in the occasional “what’s your super power” question, doesn’t mean you’re whimsical and my friend. You’re not. I see what you’re doing. I don’t like it.I don’t like being forced into doing things I don’t want to do. We have no idea how Google is going to use this information. We have no idea when the profiles are going to be moved from the bottom of the SERPs to the top, making it damn certain that you need to have one or you lose your brand real estate. It’s not okay for Google to force your hand.
Bad on Google for putting people in the position to either hand over their privacy or search engine prominence.
It’s funny; people joked that one day we’d all get Google barcodes. Well, there aren’t any barcodes here. Just a complete thumbprint that we’re being lined up and forced to hand over. And if you don’t hand it over willingly, watch out cause they’ll just cut off your thumb.
UPDATE: TheGypsy was kind enough to share this link with me about Google’s social user ranking system for ad targeting, which frankly, raises my concerns to all holy hell. Do not like.Medicinal Plants in Permaculture: Basil
Basil – Ocimum spp.
Lamiaceae
Herbs are often included in the permaculture design process and constitute a vital role in the garden for integrated pest management and bee fodder. They are also included because of their culinary properties and find themselves located near to the kitchen for easy access. However, these ‘culinary’ herbaceous plants are often underutilised as medicines. It is curious that many plants, and spices, get labelled as ‘culinary’ without much heed paid to their highly valuable medicinal properties. This series of articles aims to provide precise, simple information on how to use more medicinal plants in the permaculture garden. Knowing how to use medicinal plants and using locally available plants for medicine is an integral part of building self-sufficiency and resilience. Herbal medicine is part and parcel of a holistic, low-tech approach to sustainability.
The first in this series is the wonderful plant Basil. This well-loved plant, familiar to many, is highly valued in traditional medicine disciplines. It is native to India, where it was domesticated and cultivated for more than 5,000 years (2). There are more than 150 varieties (1) and 160 named cultivars with more added each year (2) around the globe. There are both garden and wild varieties (3). It is commonly used in Italian and Southeast Asian cuisine. This strongly aromatic plant growing to 50cm has shiny oval leaves, square stems and small white flowers growing in whorls (1). It is predominantly an annual, though it does exist as a perennial in some warmer, tropical climates. From personal observation, the wild perennials tend to have much thicker, coarse leaves and woodier stems, similar in morphology to basil’s cousins: lavender and rosemary (same family). The word basil stems from the Greek basileus, meaning ‘king’ (5), lending associations of greatness, power, superiority and boldness.
It is the aerial parts — all parts above ground — that are used to make medicine, and especially the leaves. The essential oil of basil is also highly utilised. 80 different chemical constituents in the variety O.basilicum have been identified (7), dominated by the presence of volatile oils (around 1%) (1). Predominantly these are composed of linalol (54.95%), methylchavikol (11.98%), methylcinnamat and linolen (8) as well as citral, eugenol and geraniol (9). The proportions and variations of the volatile oils are affected by seasonal variation (10) and geography (11).
There is scientific evidence showing strong anti-bacterial (12 & 13), antioxidant (14), anti-viral (15), cytoprotective (16) and anti-microbial properties (17 & 18) of the essential oils occurring in basil plants. Traditionally Basil’s main indications focus on complaints associated with the digestive and nervous system because of mildly sedative and anti-bacterial actions (1). It is used as a tea for indigestion, vomiting and nausea (19), flatulence, stomach cramps, colic (1), fevers, colds and flu, kidney and bladder troubles, and headaches (19). It is great tonic to use for nervous irritability, depression, anxiety and difficulty sleeping (1). As quoted in Henriette Kress’ website (3), “their smell comforts the brain … expel melancholy, or sadness of mind”. In the Tropics Basil is known for its wide range of anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties and can be used to treat malaria (20).
I know … this all sounds great, but how to use it practically?! As a herbalist, I have found this to be a major stumbling block for many people who wish to use medicinal plants more, but just don’t know how. Well, this plant can be used in the following ways, using the following preparation methods*:
1. Eating
As the leaves have strong anti-microbial, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties, and aid digestion, it is a great plant to incorporate into the diet as regularly as possible. As Hippocrates stated: "Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food". It can be included as a salad leaf or as the more traditional preparation of pesto. A large summer harvest can be preserved by pureeing basil in a food processor with a little bit of water, pop the puree into ice cube trays and freeze. Once frozen pop the cubes into a plastic freezer bag. The cubes can then be used as and when needed for a wide variety of dishes and even to make fresh pesto (21).
2. Fresh herb tea
For fever, flatulence, to ease digestion, colds and flu and a tonic drink take 1 handful of fresh leaves (whoever shall drink the tea needs to use their hand-size), wash them and place in 1L of boiled water. Cover with a lid (this is very important to retain all the volatile oils) and leave to draw for 5-10 minutes. Strain and drink in equal proportions through the day. For a ‘quick fix’, take a few leaves (~5), wash them and add one cup of boiled water. Cover, brew for 5-10 minutes and drink.
3. Dried herb tea
1 teaspoon of high quality dried herb in one cup of boiled water, covered 5-10 minutes, brewed, strain and drink 1-3 times per day.
4. As a poultice
Whilst working in Zimbabwe with natural medicine I met a group of wonderful women running a formal natural medicine clinic. They had developed a highly effective wound dressing made from fresh herbs that included basil. The dressing treated a wide variety of fungal and bacterial wounds that were otherwise difficult to treat and heal using orthodox medicines. These wounds ranged from bacterial (probably staphylococcus) infections to diabetic ulcers. It comprised the following plants:
3 leaves Aloe vera (Aloe barbadensis)
3 bulbs garlic (Allium sativum)
6 nasturtium leaves (Tropaeolum majus)
3 branches of basil (wild or cultivated)
3 big comfrey leaves (Symphytum officinalis)
3 pieces bulbinella (Bulbinella spp.)
Cut the fresh herbs and wash them. Put them in a food processor or pestle and mortar. Liquidise. Strain off the liquid through a cloth or fine sieve. Compost the plant matter. Soak gauze with the solution and apply the gauze directly to open area of wound. Cover with dry gauze and dress with a crepe bandage. Change the dressing twice per day, re-make the dressing fresh everyday and re-apply everyday until the wound is healed. Once the wound has closed at least 70%, dress the wound once per day. Keep the mixture cool or refrigerated for one day’s use.
5. Essential oil
Used in an oil burner or diffuser, basil essential oil is great to clear the mind, stimulate the brain and eliminate mental fatigue. Blended with other oils for massage (for it has a known synergistic effect – enhancing the actions of other herbs) such as lavender, it is effective in reducing tired, tight and over worked muscles. It is therefore indicated for people doing a lot of physical activity, athletes and dancers (22).
*Disclaimer: the information provided here is not intended to replace information provided by a medical health professional or for the treatment of serious medical conditions. Consult your physician or health provider with any questions regarding medical conditions.
References:
Chevalier, A. (1996) Encyclopaedia of Medicinal Plants. Dorling Kindersley, UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil https://www.henriettes-herb.com/eclectic/salmon/basil-common.html Simon, Quinn, Murray 1990 https://biblehub.com/greek/935.htm https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814607012666 https://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0352-5139/2010/0352-51391000125P.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12732427 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16324777 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814607012666 Koba, K., Poutouli, P.W., Raynaud, C., Chaumont, JP., and Sanda, K. 2009. Chemical composition and antimicrobial properties of different basil essential oils chemotypes from Togo. The Journal of Bangladesh Pharmacological Society; 4: 1-8 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15752638 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12732427 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9490339 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173941 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15300717 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2978706 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16797760 Tierra, M., 1980. The Way of Herbs. Pocket Books. Hirt, H.M., M’Pia, B. (2008) Third Edition. Natural Medicine in the Tropics I: Foundation Text. Anamed https://www.henriettes-herb.com/archives/best/1996/basil-pres.html Davis, P. (1999). Aromatherapy an A-Z. Vermilion, UK.
~~~~~
Lucie Bradley is a medical herbalist, ethnobotanist and amateur permaculturalist.
Related
PopularUnusually high air temperatures and a warm ocean have led to a record low Arctic sea ice extent for November, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctic sea ice extent also hit a record low for the month, caused by moderately warm temperatures and a rapid shift in circumpolar winds.
"It looks like a triple whammy -- a warm ocean, a warm atmosphere, and a wind pattern all working against the ice in the Arctic," said NSIDC director Mark Serreze.
Arctic sea ice extent averaged 9.08 million square kilometers (3.51 million square miles) for November, 1.95 million square kilometers (753,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average for the month. Although the rate of Arctic ice growth was slightly faster than average, total extent actually decreased for a brief period in the middle of the month. The decrease in extent measured 50,000 square kilometers (19,300 square miles) and was observed mostly in the Barents Sea, an area of the Arctic Ocean north of Norway, Finland, and Eastern Russia.
NSIDC scientists said the decrease in extent is almost unprecedented for November in the satellite record; a less pronounced and brief retreat of 14,000 square kilometers (5,400 square miles) happened in 2013. November 2016 is now the seventh month this year to have hit a record low extent in the 38-year satellite monitoring period. The November extent was 3.2 standard deviations below the long-term average, a larger departure than observed in September 2012 when the Arctic summer minimum extent hit a record low.
Arctic sea ice is still in the early stages of winter freeze-up and is expected to continue expanding until it hits its maximum extent around March next year.
NSIDC scientists said unusually high temperatures over the Arctic Ocean, persistent winds from the south, and a warm ocean worked together to drive the record low Arctic extent. Extending from northeast of Greenland towards Svalbard and Severnaya Zemlya, air temperatures at the 925 hPa level (about 2,500 feet above sea level) were up to 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1981 to 2010 long-term average for the month. Sea surface temperatures in the Barents and Kara Seas remained unusually high, up to 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) above average around Novaya Zemlya and Svalbard, preventing ice formation. These high temperatures reflected a pattern of winds from the south, which also helped to push the ice northward and reduce the ice extent.
NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve was in Svalbard during November and noted the lack of sea ice. "Typically sea ice begins to form in the fjords at the beginning of November, but this year there was no ice to be found," she said.
In the Southern Hemisphere, sea ice surrounding the continent of Antarctica declined very quickly early in the month and set a record low. The average extent for November was 14.54 million square kilometers (5.61 million square miles), 1.81 million square kilometers (699,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average. This was more than twice the previous record departure from average set in November 1986 and was 5.7 standard deviations below the long-term average.
NSIDC scientists said that higher-than-average temperatures |
is accelerating the trend towards.
So whilst it is too late for the euro-zone members who for better or worse are locked into a death embrace that has all but nullified democracy for most of the euro-zone states as the elections in Greece, Spain and Italy have clearly demonstrated the lack for even radical governments such as Syriza to do anything other than obey their German paymasters who control the euro currency and can within a couple of weeks bring fellow euro-zone members to the brink of collapse as was repeatedly demonstrated by Greece last year.
Thus, for Britain the saving grace of not being in the euro-zone offers the UK a unique final opportunity to make the choice of either FREEDOM or become another satellite state revolving around a German centre that will increasingly dictate terms and conditions.
Therefore, given that there would probably not be another referendum for at least 20 years, then this really is Britain's VERY LAST CHANCE. There WON'T be another opportunity because with each passing year the price for a BREXIT increases, and we are not that far off from the point of no return when an exit would result in an economic collapse, much of the situation the euro-zone members have been since they signed up to scrap their currencies and join the Euro-zone.
Of course both the LEAVE and the REMAIN camps put out a lot of propaganda and spin on the others consequences. For LEAVE it's a case of everything smelling of roses in a Britain that has been freed from increasing European bureaucracy and interference, that would be in full control of Britain's borders. Whilst the REMAIN camp paints a picture of FEAR, of economic and financial catastrophe coupled with punitive terms for exit that would seek to punish Britain for daring to exit the euro-zone, so much for so-called european unity built on common purpose and friendship instead the European Union is increasingly a club of FEAR and PARALYSIS.
The Price for Freedom
The truth is that a BREXIT WILL BE ECONOMICALLY PAINFUL despite all of the benefits of being outside of the E.U. The cost of BrExit will be anywhere from 2% to as high as 5% of GDP if the euro-zone is determined to make an example of Britain to act as a warning to others by raising punitive tariffs on trade. However remember that attaining FREEDOM ALWAYS carry's a PRICE, in which respect even the worst case scenario for a 5% loss of GDP in the grand scheme of things does not compare against the infinitely greater price the people of Britain paid for their freedom in both past World Wars and so it is now THIS generations turn to pay a price for the freedom of future generations.
What the people of Britain need to fully understand is that this really is their VERY LAST CHANCE for Freedom!
The bottom line is that given the immigration crisis then the EU may implode even before Britain votes to LEAVE.
Ensure you are subscribed to my always free newsletter (only requirement is an email address) for the following forthcoming analysis -
US Interest Rates 2016
US Dollar Trend Forecast
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By Nadeem Walayat
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk
Copyright © 2005-2016 Marketoracle.co.uk (Market Oracle Ltd). All rights reserved.
Nadeem Walayat has over 25 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis focuses on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and housing market. He is the author of five ebook's in the The Inflation Mega-Trend and Stocks Stealth Bull Market series that can be downloaded for Free.
Nadeem is the Editor of The Market Oracle, a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication that presents in-depth analysis from over 1000 experienced analysts on a range of views of the probable direction of the financial markets, thus enabling our readers to arrive at an informed opinion on future market direction. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any trading losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors before engaging in any trading activities.
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Comments
R.E.B
26 Feb 16, 18:11 In work Benefit numbers.
Have you been able to find any substantive numbers for the number of migrants claiming in work benefits? The government seem either unable or unwilling to give accurate data, even though the DWP should have it surely, pointing to the possibility that the numbers are very bad and would add weight to the BREXIT case.
Nadeem_Walayat
26 Feb 16, 20:23 In work benefits
Hi You can check out the tax credits calculator that illustrates the magnitude of the black hole the government is trying hard to hide. IF they have kids then they GET TAX CREDITS on earnings upto about £40k! Where evenif both are working on minimum wage and say £16k combined can with four kids get £22k in benefits! Even an wage of £30k would yield about £16k in benefits! Labour created a perfect storm of massive in work benefits voter bribes and then allowing out of control immigrationCLOSE Just ahead of the election, Robert De Niro went off on Donald Trump on national television at the Hollywood Film Awards. USA TODAY NETWORK
Robert De Niro accepts the Hollywood Comedy Award at the 20th annual Hollywood Film Awards. (Photo: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
LOS ANGELES — Robert De Niro lashed out at Donald J. Trump, calling the Republican presidential candidate "insane" from the podium of the Hollywood Film Awards on Sunday night.
De Niro compared Trump to off-kilter movie characters in front of a supportive crowd at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
The Trump comparisons included the "totally insane" General Jack D. Ripper, who pushed the world to "nuclear Armageddon” in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. De Niro said the Ripper character was not a stretch from the "totally insane" Trump.
"I know we’re here to celebrate movies in Hollywood. But it’s two days before a frightening election and the shadow of politics is hanging over us whether we like it or not. And it’s hard for me to think about anything else," said De Niro.
"So let me lay it out right here. We have the opportunity to prevent comedy from turning into a tragedy," De Niro added. He advocated voting for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, bringing a cheer from the crowd.
De Niro, who received the Hollywood Comedy Award for his role in The Comedian, has gone after Trump before. In October, the Oscar-winner took Trump to task, calling him "a punk, a dog, pig, a con (and) a (BS) artist" in a video that went viral.
"He's a mutt who doesn't do his homework, doesn't care, thinks he's gaming society, doesn't pay his taxes," De Niro said in the video.
In August, De Niro called Trump "totally nuts" during a film festival discussion.
Leonardo DiCaprio also got political from the HFA podium, accepting the Hollywood Documentary Award for Before the Flood, a film he made with director Fisher Stevens about global warming.
DiCaprio pointed out that during the widely-viewed presidential and vice presidential debates, not one question was asked about global warming.
"That is completely unacceptable," said DiCaprio, who called global warming "an urgent threat to life on Earth."
"There’s no more time for arguing or clouding the facts or for spreading campaigns of misinformation. All of us need to act," said DiCaprio.
DiCaprio urged: "Lets all use our power as citizens and do the right thing. Please vote this Tuesday."
Host James Corden went political during his opening, pointing out that Star Wars and Ghostbusters were "brought back with a female lead."
"I pray to God they reboot the Clinton presidency with a female lead," said Corden.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2fuLMF6I am delighted to introduce, to those of you who have not yet met her (there can’t be many), the wonderful Catherine Curzon aka Madame Gilflurt, the esteemed salon hostess. Catherine has an exciting new book out: Life in the Georgian Court. My copy is on order and yours should be too. Keep reading to find out more.
So, without further ado, I’ll leave you in Madame G’s capable hands. As she explains, something is not right in the Cumberland household…
While researching my book, Life in the Georgian Court, I developed rather a soft spot for George III, the Georgian king who did all he could to live a life of piety and honour. George famously fell victim to madness, yet in his sane moments, he did all he could to uphold the good name of his family and the House of Hanover.
In stark contrast to their father, George’s sons assembled a litany of shocking tales. From the embarrassment of the Delicate Investigation, which laid bare the sex life of the Princess of Wales, to the Duke of York’s involvement with Mary Anne Clarke, who sold army commissions to support herself as the Duke’s mistress, to the Duke of Clarence, later William IV, who was living openly with his mistress and a legion of illegitimate children, there was never a dull moment. But perhaps most shocking of all came in 1810 when the Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, was implicated in the suicide of his valet, Sellis.
“It is with regret and horror we have to announce an horrid attempt which was made, at a very early hour yesterday morning, to assassinate his Royal Highness the Duke of CUMBERLAND, by a villain, an Italian of the name of SELLIS, one of the pages of his Royal Highness.”
According to the oh-so-innocent Duke of Cumberland’s account, he was contentedly slumbering in his bed in the early hours of 31st May 1810 when he was attacked. Struggling to his feet, the bewildered Duke was bludgeoned and slashed in the leg with a blade. Somehow he managed to fight off his unknown attacker and raise the alarm, summoning the household to his aid and doing his best to tell them what had happened. By the time help arrived the assailant was nowhere to be seen and, when the staff assembled, neither was the Duke’s valet, Joseph Sellis. That same morning Sellis was found dead in his own locked room where “he was found to have cut his throat cut in such a manner, as nearly to have severed his head from his body”.
The public, however, were not so sure and unsurprisingly rumours soon began to spread about the true fate of Sellis. Perhaps the duke had been slipping Mrs Sellis the occasional treat and had her husband killed when they were discovered, or maybe the object of the Duke’s affections was Sellis himself, who had been slain by his noble lover after he had made an attempt at blackmail. Whatever the truth, it was one more blow to the moral authority of the sons of the King and the public looked to George as the example of how to behave, the paragon of sovereign virtue.
As for Cumberland, his own particular locked room mystery remained for ever unsolved.
Bibliography
Anonymous. George III: His Court and Family, Vol I. London: Henry Colburn and Co, 1821.
Baker, Kenneth. George III: A Life in Caricature. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
Black, Jeremy. The Hanoverians: The History of a Dynasty. London: Hambledon and London, 2007.
Hadlow, Janice. The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. London: William Collins, 2014.
Hibbert, Christopher. George III: A Personal History. London: Viking, 1998.
Tillyard, Stella. A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings. London: Vintage, 2007.
About the author Catherine Curzon is a royal historian, and blogs on all matters 18th century at A Covent Garden Gilflurt’s Guide to Life. Her work has been featured by publications including BBC History Extra, All About History, History of Royals, Explore History and Jane Austen’s Regency World. She has also provided additional material for the sell-out theatrical show, An Evening with Jane Austen, will she will introduce at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, in September (tickets are available here). Catherine holds a Master’s degree in Film and when not dodging the furies of the guillotine, she lives in Yorkshire atop a ludicrously steep hill. Her book, Life in the Georgian Court, is available now from Amazon UK, Amazon US, Book Depository and all good bookshops!
About ‘Life in the Georgian Court’
As the glittering Hanoverian court gives birth to the British Georgian era, a golden age of royalty dawns in Europe. Houses rise and fall, births, marriages and scandals change the course of history and in France, Revolution stalks the land.
Peep behind the shutters of the opulent court of the doomed Bourbons, the absolutist powerhouse of Romanov Russia and the epoch-defining family whose kings gave their name to the era, the House of Hanover.
Behind the pomp and ceremony were men and women born into a world of immense privilege, yet beneath the powdered wigs and robes of state were real people living lives of romance, tragedy, intrigue and eccentricity. Take a journey into the private lives of very public figures and learn of arranged marriages that turned to love or hate and scandals that rocked polite society.
Here the former wife of a king spends three decades in lonely captivity, Prinny makes scandalous eyes at the toast of the London stage and Marie Antoinette begins her last, terrible journey through Paris as her son sits alone in a forgotten prison cell.
Life in the Georgian Court is a privileged peek into the glamorous, tragic and iconic courts of the Georgian world, where even a king could take nothing for granted.CLEVELAND -- Two Cleveland Cavaliers fans stood courtside before Game 3 of the NBA Finals and marveled at the player who had been the star of the series so far, even if he wore a Golden State Warriors uniform.
One turned to the other and asked, "Did you know Durant was this good?"
2017 NBA Opening Night On opening night, the Warriors were stunned in Oakland and the Celtics' high hopes took a tumble. • Irving: Hayward injury among worst
• Despite gloom, hopeful signs for C's
• Hobbled CP3 sees Houston rally
• LeBron shakes ankle woes in opener
• Warriors get rings for 2017 title
They could be forgiven if they were unaware. The local fans have never seen Kevin Durant win a game in Cleveland when LeBron James was on the Cavaliers. The last time Durant was in town, on Christmas Day, he missed seven of nine shots in the fourth quarter, and was unable to get a shot off on the Warriors' last possession.
In addition to the obvious hole in Durant's résumé, the lack of a championship ring, he had yet to so much as win an NBA Finals road game. He whiffed in three tries in Miami during his first crack at it in 2012. Even Charles Barkley can claim he's 2-1 on the road in the Finals, including a triple-overtime classic in Chicago in 1993.
And then, just when it looked as if the trend -- and these NBA Finals -- would be extended, when James and Kyrie Irving were about to overcome the whole load of Warriors All-Stars, Durant went strike-through on all of it.
The official play-by-play shows that Durant made a 13-foot jump shot with 1 minute, 15 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter to bring the Warriors to within two points.
At the 45-second mark there's an entry for Durant making a 3-pointer for a 114-113 lead.
Then there are two made free throws with 12 seconds left to make it a 116-113 advantage.
It was the pivotal moment in the Warriors' 118-113 victory that gave them a 3-0 lead in the series.
The cold facts don't capture the way Durant silenced a sellout crowd that was tantalized by the possibility of the Cavaliers pulling to within a game of tying the series. They don't summarize the historic swing in this game, from just another case of home teams holding serve to the Warriors capturing their record-setting 15th consecutive victory in the postseason, on the brink of completing the first 16-0 playoff run in NBA history.
They don't pay him the tribute that Warriors coach Steve Kerr did.
"He took over," Kerr marveled. "You can tell he knows this is his moment. He's been an amazing player in this league for a long time. He senses this is his time, his moment, his team."
When the buzzer sounded, Durant balled his fists. Curry ran over to congratulate him. If he had the game ball, he would have handed it to him.
Kevin Durant: 2014 MVP, 2017 Finals MVP. Stephen Curry: 2015 MVP, 2016 MVP. Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports
It was a fleeting instant, long gone by the time a subdued Durant sat down at the postgame podium.
"I don't want to relax," said Durant, who scored 14 of his 31 points in the fourth quarter. "It's not over. This is a crazy game, anything can happen. I'm just trying to enjoy this moment, try not to look in the future or the past."
This was as far as the Warriors had been pushed in this series, including the new experience of trailing in the second half. LeBron had another strong start, then Irving worked his wizardry. They combined for 77 points. They also played 46 and 44 minutes, respectively, and missed their last five shots during the final five minutes.
Kerr was convinced that they'd eventually wear down. He also believed enough in his bench and was so pressed to have Curry and Durant fresh at the end that he had both of them sitting at the start of the fourth quarter.
"I believe in our guys," Kerr said. "I believe in playing a lot of people and I also believe in getting them a little rest. I thought Steph and KD getting those few minutes of rest at the beginning of the quarter, I thought that paid off late. That's just my personal opinion."
Whether it's Kerr's rotation or Durant's determination, Durant has been at his best in the fourth quarter, shooting 67 percent and outscoring LeBron 31-11 over the course of the series. This was the first time the game hung in the balance, though. This was Durant tested as he has never been before, and delivering.
"He was their closer tonight, for sure," Irving said. "Doing what he's supposed to be doing."
Klay Thompson said there were no special plays for Durant or spoken instructions, just a consensus determination to "Get that man the rock."
GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS Check out the team site for more game coverage
CLEVELAND CAVALIERS Check out the team site for more game coverage
Thompson had every right to hunt for shots himself after scoring 16 points in the first quarter to avoid the slow starts that have plagued the Warriors in previous Game 3s here and finishing with 30. But his mentality reflects the Warriors' ways.
"We got an unselfish team who just wants to win," Thompson said. "They don't care who gets the stats or the accolades."
Thompson, Curry and Durant all got the stats. Durant got the accolades... along with his first Finals road victory.
He snatched the opportunity. Now the ring is within his reach.Calendar notifications are nice, but speaking for, er, other people, not so much if you also forgot to keep your phone nearby. Most of us at least remember to put our watches on, though, and productivity app Todoist now supports Android Wear with location-aware notifications. If you have to "pick up milk" as a task, for instance, it'll use your GPS to buzz the watch when you drive near a selected store. If that doesn't make you feel futuristic enough, there are also voice commands -- just say "OK Google" into your watch, launch the app and it'll let you add a task on the fly. Finally, you can now send task lists straight from your smartphone to your watch to plow through, say, a grocery list hands-free. The new update will hit Google Play soon, and if you don't have an Android Wear device, Todoist is even giving a few awayLooking for news you can trust?
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In the upcoming issue of the Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris has a cover story called “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama,” a headline almost guaranteed to set your teeth on edge. Normally I’d just blame the copy desk and move on, but since Glastris is both writer and editor, there’s no way to let him off the hook for this. What were you thinking, Paul?
But let’s move on anyway. Glastris’ argument, obviously, is that Obama has been a pretty good progressive president. So why doesn’t he get more credit from us lefties?
There are plenty of possible explanations. The most obvious is the economy. People are measuring Obama’s actions against the actual conditions of their lives and livelihoods, which, over the past three years, have not gotten materially better. He failed miserably at his grandiose promise to change the culture of Washington…In negotiations, he came off to Democrats as naïvely trusting, and to Republicans as obstinately partisan, leaving the impression that he could have achieved more if only he had been less conciliatory—or more so, depending on your point of view. And for such an obviously gifted orator, he has been surprisingly inept at explaining to average Americans what he’s fighting for or trumpeting what he’s achieved.
As long as we’re piling on, I’d add a few other items to that list. First, Obama seems to despise the progressive base. He and his associates have made that clear over and over again. Second, he allowed Congress to take the lead on most of his domestic agenda. Whether this was smart or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it makes him seem almost like an observer of events over the past three years, not a commander-in-chief. Third, from a progressive point of view, his record on national security is pretty bad. No, we’re not torturing prisoners anymore, but the NSA surveillance program is still in place, American citizens are being targeted for assassination, the Afghanistan war has been escalated, drone attacks have skyrocketed, the state secrets privilege is still being used with abandon, Guantánamo is still open, and Patriot Act abuse seems to be as robust as ever.
And yet, there’s still…the entire rest of his record. After all, Obama deserves to be judged by ordinary human standards, not by standards of perfection. A sidebar to Glastris’ piece lists Obama’s top 50 accomplishments, and I think it was a mistake to create a list so long. It ends up looking like the usual boring laundry list that any president can trumpet. Better to pare it down to 10 really top achievements in order to highlight how many truly major accomplishments Obama has been responsible for. So I did. Except I couldn’t get there. I cut it down to 13 and got stuck. Here they are, in the same order as the original Washington Monthly list:
1. Passed Health Care Reform
2. Passed the Stimulus
3. Passed Wall Street Reform
4. Ended the War in Iraq
6. Eliminated Osama bin Laden
7. Turned Around US Auto Industry
9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
12. Reversed Bush Torture Policies
14. Kicked Banks Out of Federal Student Loan Program
16. Boosted Fuel Efficiency Standards
18. Passed Mini Stimuli (July 22, 2010; December 17, 2010; December 23, 2011)
22. Created Conditions to Begin Closing Dirtiest Power Plants
27. Achieved New START Treaty
These are all big deals. Big fucking deals, to quote our vice president. Unless you’re just bound and determined to sulk in your tent while insisting that health care was a sellout and the stimulus was too small and Dodd-Frank was feeble and the mini stimuli were more like micro stimuli, there’s just no way around the fact that this is a historically colossal set of progressive accomplishments, especially in the face of a historically hostile political environment.
Obama has gotten more done for the progressive cause than Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, JFK, or Harry Truman.
Now, it’s true that any serious accounting also has to include Obama’s domestic failures—most notably his feckless housing policy and his inability to pass cap-and-trade—but both of those were very heavy political lifts. (On cap-and-trade in particular, I think in retrospect that it was just flatly never going to happen no matter what Obama did.) There’s also his weak record on judicial appointments. So could Obama have done better? Was there a more effective way to deal with an unprecedentedly obstructive Republican Party? On reflection, I doubt it. During Obama’s first two years, Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for only 14 weeks. This means that Obama needed two or three Republican votes for every bill, and if he had taken the blustering, partisan attitude that a lot of liberals wanted, he never would had gotten them. Republican obstructionism would have been even more hardened than it was with his more conciliatory attitude. So as annoying as Obama’s “most reasonable man in the room” act was to the progressive base, it was probably his best strategy.
I was never an Obamamaniac. Actual politicians are never as good as the versions that star in the reality TV shows that we laughingly call presidential campaigns these days, and Obama was bound to be hemmed in by all the same dynamics that hem in every president. So I don’t judge Obama against a standard that expected him to single-handedly lead a progressive revolution. His national security policy has been disappointing but hardly a disgrace. It’s just a continuation of the mainstream national security policy that both parties have endorsed for decades with only minor differences. His economic policy since late 2009 has been, perhaps, too concerned with long-term deficits at the expense of short-term job creation, but that’s been due more to political realities than to bad instincts. Likewise, his general willingness to compromise has been evidence of a pragmatic desire to get things done, not a sign of insufficient dedication to the cause. He’s a president, not the Sun King.
Unlike Paul Glastris, I’m not ready to start chiseling Obama’s mug on Mount Rushmore. But unless national security is pretty much your sole obsession, I really have a hard time understanding progressives who are disappointed in him. Obama has gotten more done for the progressive cause than Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, JFK, or Harry Truman—and, on balance, nearly as much as LBJ, since he doesn’t have any epic disasters to weigh down his successes. For an actual, existing human being, that’s pretty damn good.This post is dedicated to my second duty in the anniversary food extravaganza: dessert. When Bon Appetit recognized Aziza’s pastry chef last year, we hopped on an across-SF bus to try out the confections for ourselves. They weren’t lying, it was THE best dessert I’d ever eaten (and I’ve eaten many many many desserts) – a dessert that always lingers in your memory as you search for something just as tasty. My description won’t do this dessert any justice, but it had: lavender ice cream, lemon curd, mini raspberry meringues, homemade shortbread and granola, and sprinkles of pomegranate seeds. Each bite had such a wide range of flavors that continued surprising your taste buds as you ate. If you live in the Bay Area, get up off your couch and go there – you won’t be disappointed. While planning my secret sweet, my friend Tina recommended I try to replicate this favored dessert. Brilliant.
Rather than attempting (and not living up to) the exact dessert, I put it in cupcake form! I baked a lavender and lemon cupcake topped with meringue frosting and a raspberry heart garnish with candied citrus peels. The citrus peels replaced the out of season and unavailable pomegranate seeds. It was a delicious trip down memory lane. Plus, I got to use the cupcake stand Lucas gave me for my birthday last year. Since it’s our anniversary, I’ll brag about him again. Lucas took note weeks prior to my birthday when I resisted buying this stand for myself. He secretly went back for it later and dropped it off with some friends (who had also been put in charge of the cupcake delivery) – all within hours of returning to the US from Taiwan. When I questioned why it was taking him so long to get home from the airport, he told me about the traffic on the bridge (he is lucky there really was traffic, because, as a true problem solver, I looked it up online to plan the most efficient way for him to get home). When we arrived at the pub later that night, there it was, in all its glory, filled with the moistest cupcakes you’ve ever eaten. Isn’t he the best? AND he gave me beautiful colorful flowers this morning (which our cats have since tried to eat).
The cupcake recipe I modified for these lavender lemon treats is wonderfully moist, but a note for replicating it: fill your cupcake tins to the brim because the batter doesn’t rise very much. When the second batch was coming out of the oven, Lucas was lending a helping hand, but sadly, accidentally dropped the tray. Only two cupcakes hit the floor, but the rest turned into a broken up mess. The cake was too good to toss, so I froze it to make cake balls later in the week. Stay tuned.
PrintBILL Harrigan has given the Origin III referees both barrels, claiming they let the game “fall apart” by getting sucked in to blowing penalties that weren’t there.
In one of the most lopsided penalty counts in Origin history, NSW were awarded 12 to Queensland’s three, with the Maroons clearly upset by the way the game was officiated.
Harrigan refereed 21 Origin games and was famous for using his game sense to let the contest flow rather than intervening every time there was an indiscretion by the letter of the law.
He said the poorest aspect of the officiating in Origin III was Gerard Sutton and Ben Cummins’ blatant lack of feel for the game.
“The first 10 minutes I thought both the blokes, Benny Cummins and Gerard, were both going well, they kept them apart and we saw a bit of the game going up and down the paddock but then all of a sudden it just all fell apart,” Harrigan told Triple M NRL during the call.
“For instance, the one when it was the last tackle and I think it was Gillett was still standing near the ruck and Robbie Farah threw the ball into him on purpose from the dummy half to milk the penalty.
“The referee clearly should have yelled out ‘pick it up and play on’, because he tried to milk the penalty, but he didn’t he gave it (the penalty).
“That’s when you don’t have a real good feel for the game and I just think they bogged it down and we didn’t see that flowing game we were entitled to see”
Harrigan said the fans were entitled to a better performance, particularly as both referees have plenty of experience in big games and have controlled all three games this series.
“It’s disappointing at this level I would think Gerry Sutton as the lead referee out here would have a better grasp of the game, a better empathy for the game.”
Referee Gerard Sutton signals to the sin bin as Ben Cummins looks on. Source: News Corp Australia
Neither Queensland coach Kevin Walters or captain Cameron Smith wanted to be openly critical of the referees after the game but the skipper said he had “never faced a penalty count that lopsided and especially not in Origin”.
Smith turned the fact into a criticism of NSW, saying he felt the Maroons could go on dominating for years given the Blues needed the last play of the 80 minutes to win a game in which they were so utterly dominant in possession as a consequence of all their penalties.
The writer is on Twitter @glover—benny
Download the new FOX SPORTS App to get the latest news and scores from your NRL team.How Do You Drug Test A City? Check The Sewer
It only takes a teaspoon of waste water to reveal an entire city's eating or drinking habits — and also its drug habits. Scientists in Norway are using the technology, called sewer epidemiology, to drug test an entire city. One of those scientists, Kevin Thomas, explains.
RACHEL MARTIN, host: OK. So you think being president's a tough job? How about this one: the guy who tests sewer water for drugs. Yeah, there really is someone who does that. It happens through a process called sewer epidemiology. Think of it as a citywide urine test. Kevin Thomas is one of a group of environmental scientists in Norway who use the technology to drug test the entire city of Oslo for a full year. Kevin Thomas is with us from Oslo. Thanks for joining us.
KEVIN THOMAS: No problem at all.
MARTIN: Kevin, explain to us how sewer sampling works. What are you measuring, exactly?
THOMAS: What we're measuring are specific biomarkers of drug use. So these are the breakdown products that the body produces when they've - when someone's taking a particular drug. So for instance, for cocaine, there's a specific biomarker that we use, which is called benzoylecgonine. And there's even a specific biomarker that we can use, for instance, if someone's taking cocaine with alcohol - which is called cocaethylene. And what we do is, we take samples of sewage effluent, and we measure the levels of these biomarkers, these very specific biomarkers in the effluent.
MARTIN: OK. So let's talk about this study. You took a wastewater sample every two weeks over the course of one, entire year, and you found some trends. What did you find?
THOMAS: I guess the most interesting trend that we found was a peak in ecstasy consumption during the two-week period that high school students in Norway partied quite hard, in May. And that represented around a tenfold peak in ecstasy consumption over what we'd seen over the previous five or six months. Also, in kind of Christmas and New Year, that there was a peak in cocaine consumption as well.
MARTIN: Is that surprising? Is that something that you didn't know before you did this study?
THOMAS: This allows us to pinpoint exactly when it happened, and the quantities that were used.
MARTIN: Are there any drugs that don't show up in this kind of testing?
THOMAS: There are some drugs which we feel are harder to analyze, using this method, than others. For instance, heroin. Heroin itself is metabolized in the body to compound called s6-MAM. And that's not very stable in sewage systems.
MARTIN: Is there any way to determine whether or not you could scale this technology down - where scientists could do this in a neighborhood and identify, perhaps, a block where cocaine or other illegal drug use had spiked, and then alert authorities and raid a house?
THOMAS: There's nothing to stop you using it in that way. The nice thing about the approach, when you're testing large numbers of people, is that it's totally anonymous. But once you get into small numbers of people, then you start being able to point fingers at individuals. And I think that's when some of the more tricky, ethical questions come into play.
MARTIN: Privacy concerns, I imagine.
THOMAS: Privacy concerns. Yeah.
MARTIN: So what's done with this data?
THOMAS: What this approach allows us to do is to evaluate how big of - a drug problem is. And what we do is, we use the technique alongside the existing types of data that are accumulated - you know, things like seizures and police arrests, and that sort of thing. And what we do is try and use our data to make the data that they have better.
MARTIN: Is the overall use of illegal substances higher than anticipated?
THOMAS: It is slightly higher than the official numbers. Yeah.
MARTIN: That's Kevin Thomas. He's an environmental scientist at the Norway Institute of Water Research. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us.
THOMAS: Thank you. Goodbye.
MARTIN: Now, sewer epidemiology is also being used in this country. Scientists in Oregon are doing the same tests to create a kind of drug map of their state. Caleb Banta-Green is a drug epidemiologist at the University of Washington's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute. He says the testing in Oregon revealed a few surprises, and dispelled the myth that methamphetamine is only a problem in rural areas.
CALEB BANTA-GREEN: And what we saw with some data that we collected in Oregon, across 96 cities, was that methamphetamine was in every one of those 96 cities. It's not somebody else's problem. It's not just somewhere else. It's quite ubiquitous.
MARTIN: That's Caleb Banta-Green, with the University of Washington's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute.
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3×18 „Secret Cargo“ – 3/04/2017
When a routine refueling mission goes wrong, the Ghost crew find themselves transporting an important rebel leader across the galaxy, pursued by Imperial warships.
3×19 „Double Agent Droid“ – 3/11/2017
Chopper and AP-5 team up to infiltrate an Imperial station to steal needed codes, but an Imperial specialist turns the droids against the crew to cause chaos |
average is not an intuitive stat. Neither is earned run average. Both of these statistics are considered meaningful because baseball has grown to love them over the course of a century and a half. BP’s own True Average is what it is because people know what a “good” or a “bad” batting average looks like. The internalization has come slowly, and if baseball were to start over there’s no way we arrive at the same numbers; they were forged through arguments and power shifts. But they’re what we have, what our grandparents gave us.
(Fig. 3: some data)
One of the points of contention in the sabermetric era was the inclusion of advanced statistics in popular baseball culture: getting broadcasters and talking heads to employ, or even correctly describe when debunking, “complicated” stats like OPS and WPA. It seems (and seemed) like a rather silly political battle, but it was political. Often the argument was that the statistics hadn’t been internalized, that explaining these new-fangled numbers would alienate viewers, disrupt the flow of the game. The vicious circle: the stats required explanation because the average fan didn’t know them; they didn’t know them because they never got taught.
A decade later, pockets of resistance still hold their ground, but the landscape has mostly transformed. Statcast’s in-house sponsorship will allow it to avoid that awkward phase and beam straight into homes at full power. The tools now available to describe and analyze are almost unfathomably expansive and specific. But they also arrive at a time when caution is equally necessary.
It won’t be an easy task, and it’s not necessarily a problem of Statcast’s making. As with the advancement of science, current baseball knowledge has reached a level of granularity that goes beyond our level of intuition. It’s a tricky balance: we do want information that challenges preconceived notions, that pushes the audience closer to a concept of truth. As Sam Miller noted recently, a game without statistics, one in which intuition is given free reign, is an uncomfortable place. Both halves of the game feed off of each other.
So much of modern analytics dwells in the realm of probability, a concept that can come off as unintuitive to the point of meaningless at best, and insulting at worst. The value of probability study is to provide context on exactly what isn’t intuitive, that the reality we experience isn’t predestined, but one possible result. In a society that values results, has bronzed its own national bootstraps and glamorized the concept of glamour, it’s a difficult sell. It’s also a vital one. Probability gives us an opportunity to move past the golden-era flawless hero to an imperfect, fortunate, and human one. It gives us an opportunity to find nobility and honor not just in triumph, but also in failure.
Unlike the Project Scoresheet and PITCHf/x revolutions of the past, which began as underground movements, Statcast is a top-down enterprise; while they’re to be commended for how much data they’ve freely provided, its authority puts it at an immediate disadvantage. The advantage of not having to fight for its place is actually a disadvantage, because denying that conversation and debate is also denying a learning curve. It’s not enough to just give the people statistics, quote barrels and launch angles without context and without meaning. It’s not even enough to try to give them the context.
The masses will have to build that value themselves, take apart the pieces and look at them and argue about them and slowly understand them. It’ll be messy, and it may not be a pleasure to watch in real time on Twitter. The turmoil over the usefulness of WAR, and its less creditable components, is a fine example. But it’s vital if these numbers are to become more than incidental fun facts, or arbitrary judgments. The average fan will need to be able to see those statistics and not just know them but feel them, take them in as just as much of the game as the hue of the grass and the sound of the crowd and the arc of the left-hander’s swing. Otherwise, baseball runs the risk of watching its fans reject them entirely, and go back to what they’ve always done: make up their own stories.Amazon conducts total surveillance of workers in new German plant
By Marianne Arens
16 December 2017
“Big Brother is watching you” is the well known phrase from the famous novel 1984 by George Orwell. The horror of total control has arrived in 2017 at Amazon warehouses worldwide.
The company’s new logistics center at Winsen in Lower Saxony is considered to be the most modern in Germany and is the first to use transport robots. The German television program “Panorama 3” recently took a close look at the plant.
In the run-up to Christmas there is an increased need for workers at the logistics warehouse that usually staffs 2,000 people. The young “Panorama 3” journalist, Kaveh Kooroshy, did not find it difficult to infiltrate himself as a temporary worker. On December 12, his report, “Amazon: Violations of Employee Rights,” aired on German television.
Kooroshy was hired for the late shift, and he immediately began working with the company’s transport robots, called “Drives.” Here, workers do not run through the warehouse themselves, instead the “Drives” bring entire shelves to the worker’s “cage,” a workplace fenced off from three sides. There, the worker, called a “picker,” stands ready to take items from the shelf, scan and place them in a box according to exact computer specifications. These boxes then continue on an assembly line to the next station, where other workers pack the items for transport.
“Grasp, scan, drop”—this was Kooroshy’s work from just after three in the afternoon until midnight. Modern technology should make work easier and more enjoyable. But instead of the worker determining what needs to be done and at what speed, it’s the other way around: computers and robots tell him what he has to do and register how fast he’s doing it. The work rhythm is clocked to the second, and the worker is completely at the mercy of the machinery. Kooroshy comments: “You actually become a robot yourself. … One speaks of robots becoming more and more like humans, at Amazon it’s the other way round: humans become robots.”
At the same time, nothing remains hidden from the system. Computers register every movement, every process and every step in the labour process. (“How many items are transferred per minute? how many per hour? is the worker efficient enough?”) The tasks are laid down meticulously. Foremen can check every second what workers are doing and how long they need for the task. If there is any slacking, they will be immediately scolded by their supervisor.
The fact that Amazon is establishing vast levels of performance control in its logistics centres is not new. In Winsen, however, it is tantamount to total surveillance. The Panorama reporter discovered cameras on the ceiling everywhere. They are installed in the production halls, above the assembly lines and above workers’ lockers in the changing area.
The journalist presented the results of his research to a labour lawyer, Hajo Köhler, from Oldenburg, who commented in the film that, according to law, every control in a workplace must comply with the “principle of proportionality.” This means that workers be allowed to know when and what data about them has been collected and stored. At Amazon, however, an absolute control system had been established, which in effect amounts to an illegitimate “interference with the right to privacy.”
When asked to comment by “Panorama 3,” Amazon refused to be interviewed. Instead, the company stated in writing that there was no surveillance in its work halls. “The data collected helps employees in the execution of their tasks,” they said. The cameras in the changing rooms are only there to prevent theft. In the work area there are “no cameras,” according to Amazon.
Even if the omnipresent “eyes” seen in Kaveh Kooroshy’s film were dummies, it would not make things better. Just the awareness of constant control leads to psychological pressure and stress. “The team leaders treat us like machines, not like humans,” an Amazon employee says in the film.
It has long been known that Amazon workers are subject to inhumane pressure, slave-like conditions and constant surveillance. In “fulfilment centres,” more than 300,000 workers around the world are working at miserable wages. At the same time, Jeff Bezos, owner and boss of Amazon, has once again massively increased his already obscene wealth. The multi-billionaire’s fortune soared to over $100 billion recently. He earns more money in a minute than his employees in the US earn in a year. Amazon workers in poorer countries like India would have to work for eight years to make what Bezos makes in 60 seconds!
The levels of exploitation have provoked a series of protests and strikes at the company’s European facilities, including recently in Italy, Germany, France and Poland. In all of their struggles Amazon workers confront the hostility of the trade unions, which seek to isolate workers at individual plants from their co-workers in other facilities both in the same country and internationally.
In Germany, the Verdi trade union has made no attempt to solidarise with Amazon workers protesting in Poland. The French CGT trade union banned workers from striking at Amazon’s Lauwin-Planque facility (Northern France) at short notice.
The research by “Panorama 3” and the growing wave of industrial actions has alarmed the authorities. Barbara Thiel, the data protection officer of the Lower Saxony state government, has initiated a legal action against Amazon on suspicion that the company is violating the Federal Data Protection Act.
However, such token gestures will do nothing to improve the plight of Amazon workers. Politicians and political authorities across the globe are throwing themselves at the feet of the company, offering unprecedented tax breaks and subventions if Amazon sets up shop and exploits workers in their particular town, state or region.
In order to coordinate the struggle of Amazon workers, the Socialist Equality Party and its sister international parties have launched the International Amazon Workers Voice newsletter. Amazon workers can network with their colleagues worldwide, report on their working conditions and coordinate their struggles. We call on all Amazon workers to subscribe to the newsletter and “like” us on Facebook.
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.The Syrian Arab Army’s 104th Airborne Brigade (Harss Al-Jamhouri) has resumed their offensive at ‘Ayyash in northern Deir Ezzor, attacking an Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) command-and-control center in the northwest part of village.
According to a military source in Deir Ezzor, the 104th Brigade was able to advance past the cornfield adjacent the C & C center, killing a confirmed 9 ISIS militants and capturing a bulldozer in the process.
An ISIS contingent attempted to break into the recently captured Al-Mari’iyah; however, they were repelled after sustaining heavy casualties while trying to cross through the farms in the eastern part of the village.
Among the dead ISIS militants at Al-Mari’iyah was a Moroccan field commander “Abu Bilaal Al-Maghrabi” – he was identified by one of his captured fighters.
The Syrian Arab Air Force (SAAF) carried out 19 airstrikes over the province of Deir Ezzor on Sunday, targeting ISIS gatherings in Abukamaal, Al-Mayadeen, Al-Sina’a, Haweeja Sakr, Al-Haweeqa, and ‘Ayyash.
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Professional music writers are being paid – handsomely, it must be said, by music press standards – to deliver succinct contextual copy around pre-created playlists. They are delivering around 50 words per playlist as the company looks to stockpile thousands ahead of the anticipated relaunch in June. The playlists cover a variety of areas – introduction to particular artists and genres, deep cuts by classic acts, playlists for sports workouts (across a multitude of genres) and so on.
Back in February, Apple advertised for an “editorial producer”, requesting the applicants have a solid background in music journalism. This particular post will be based in Apple’s London office and has yet to be filled – but Music Ally understands that the playlist curation programme is currently being driven out of the US.
There is no confirmed date for when any of this will go live, but we have been told the stockpiling has been happening for some time and that there are “thousands of different playlists” being created.
We approached Apple with this story but the company said it would not comment on rumour or speculation.
Curated “smart” playlists is nothing new for Beats. Before its $3bn acquisition last year, it was working with name music journalists and DJs to beef up its recommendations. What is most significant is that Apple is now working hand-in-hand with a wide range of outside journalistic experts, possibly an idea brought into Cupertino by the Beats team.
Apple poached Zane Lowe from Radio 1 in February to tap into his taste-making expertise and to lead a new emphasis on recommendation. So this development is part of a wider strategy to fine-tune discovery in a way that its Genius tool only hinted at and which iTunes Radio has only scratched the surface of.
The fact all the major labels have their own playlist services shows the importance the industry is placing on them as a way to both break new acts and reinvigorate catalogue. Apple will be entering the streaming market behind a number of established players like Spotify, Deezer and Rdio (as well as new entrants like Tidal) and so it will have to debut with multiple points of differentiation. It appears playlists will be a significant part of that so that, when the new Beats goes live, users will have plenty of options to guide them through 30m+ tracks.
Eamonn Forde“Titushky” is a word which came thundering into the socio-political vocabulary of the former Soviet Union countries. In Ukraine, this word labeled young boxers and fighters, who were recruited from various sports around the country and were later mobilized and incited against opposition during the EuroMaidan, January 2014.
These athletes were named “titushky” after the name of one of the first offenders identified in the protests. His name was Vadim “The Romanian” Titushko, hence the labeling of all other violent individuals. The massive participation of these young people, mostly athletes, was considered to be a special tactic, used in order to intimidate the Ukrainian opposition within EuroMaidan clashes that took place in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities [1], [2], [3].
This example from the recent history of conflicts and social rebellion shows us how athletes are being used as mercenaries; their brute force is exploited by all kinds of different military, political and underworld leaders, which round up their assault groups or gangs with young people well trained in gyms. This is the point where a delicate aspect related to sport-aggression relationship is reached, i.e. the readiness of people with sports experience to get engaged into violent actions and the role of sport in the process of cultivating a vengeful spirit in men. And it’s not only about the social environment in which this aggression can be spilled, but also about the athletic contests themselves, which are characterized by rivalry and violence.
Many sport psychology researchers agree on the fact that the actions in sport can be described as being aggressive and violent, the fight often ruthless, especially in contact sports like rugby, hockey, boxing, wrestling etc. [4], [Lemieux et al., 2002, Burton, 2005]. Physical contact, aggression and violence often represent the main sources of enthusiasm in athletes, giving them pleasure and fueling their motivation to participate in the contests. The abundance of violence in sports has started to be seen as a social problem [5] [Tenenbaum et al., 1997; Kerr, 2004].
In order to better understand how the dyad sport-aggression works, it is important for us, in the first place, to observe a specific feature of aggression, which we could call the cascade effect, or the autocatalytic effect of aggression. What do we mean by that? Ethologists have found that, contrary to eating, drinking and sex, aggression seldom has a saturation condition. For example, if a hungry person eats, then his threshold of responses to a different amount of food rises, rendering him more indifferent to food.
In the case of aggression, however, it is often the opposite: after the first expression of anger, or after the first attack, the threshold of responses to the irritant factor decreases, but the tendency to attack keeps rising. The authors of some studies have revealed this behavioral phenomenon. Aggression facilitates the apparition of another assault, and this chain reaction can continue until physical exhaustion is reached [Sevenster, 1961; Geen et al, 1975; Manning, 1979].
The autocatalytic effect of aggression explains the escalation of violence in armed conflicts, but also clarifies the genesis of aggression in sport; contrary to expectations, the very act of sport practicing does not always manage to satisfy the aggressive impulses of individuals, but gives them the opportunity for a repeated manifestation.
A series of studies by psychologists have confirmed the link between sport and violence in general and stimulatory influence of sport on aggression in particular [6]; especially in men that were practicing such sports as wrestling and American football. The competitive activity does not decrease aggressiveness, but intensifies it [Patterson, 1974; Arms et al., 1979]. We can often see such cases in media; when boxers, fighters and practitioners of martial arts behave violently and assault people in situations where the use of force is not required.
I shall bring another example, from a completely different context. This is the case, which has already become famous, of the Uruguayan footballer Luis Suarez who, during the 2014 World Cup (in Brazil), bit Giorgio Chiellini, an Italian defender. Afterwards, FIFA found out that Suarez had bitten at least eight times in his football career [7].What is the cause of this athlete’s extravagant behavior? One could say it is due to frustration [8]. By the way, Mike Tyson, who was involved in perhaps the most famous biting incident in sports history (he took a chomp out of Evander Holyfield’s right ear in a Las Vegas world title bout in 1997), has defended Luis Suarez. Tyson says: ”Sometimes you can just become highly frustrated” [9].
But it’s more than that. Here, just like in other athletic situations, we can see the autocatalytic effect of aggression in action. Suarez is a striker, demonstrating a bold, aggressive manner of playing soccer. During the highlights of the game, the physiological arousal that the athletes experience reaches very high levels, game frauds are seen often; goals, as an expression of the fatal strike, are accompanied by shouts, buy clomid euphoric and theatrical gestures. In the case of Suarez, the arousal he gets from the game becomes uncontrollable, which is not an uncommon thing. What is uncommon is the way he breaks loose – by biting his opponents. This is also a way to release nervous tension. He can’t help himself, even if he knows that he’s going to be punished and suspended from many games important to his career.
An important role in the appetite for acts of aggression plays the sensation of pleasure, and it looks like Suarez experiences pleasure whenever he bites. From the evolutionary point of view, at the core, hunting and killing represented a survival behavior for human beings and the acts of aggression were rewarded with a feeling of satisfaction at the neurophysiological level, due to the elimination of the neurotransmitter dopamine, also called the “hormone of happiness.” The physical contact itself, fighting, were accompanied by an immediate injection into the brain of the so-called opioids – substances with analgesic effect which reduce, for a short time, the pain caused by injuries, but also generate a euphoric moment [Nell, 2006, p. 215; Couppis, 2008].
Therefore, an act of aggression generates a state of satisfaction, which, in order to be experienced repeatedly, requires new acts of aggression. This could be an explanation both for men’s passion for hunting and aggressive sports, as well as the autocatalytic effect of aggression. Ethologists have identified a similar behavioral phenomenon in animals, also called the “winner effect.” An individual who has won a skirmish increases his chances of winning the next fight. This effect is due to the fact that individuals that are already involved in physical competitions become more experienced and skilled in battle, but also receive an “injection” of dopamine into the brain, which makes them more prone towards other confrontations and other victories. Their neurochemistry literally changes: they demonstrate more dominant gestures, impose themselves in the hierarchical plan and are searching for the context of a new fight, which could offer them a “dopamine pleasure.” [Schwartzer et al., 2013]. The “winner effect,” specific to the animal world, is, in many ways, important for understanding the athletes’ appetite for competition and combat.
© Dorian Furtuna, ethologist
Sources:
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1. About Titushky // 2014 / http://lenta.ru/articles/2014/01/27/ukraine/
2. Titushky // http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titushky
3. The Titushki Generation // by Lesia Mazanik. Sean’s Russia Blog. 1 February 2014 / http://seansrussiablog.org/2014/02/02/titushki-generation/
4. Aggression and level of contact within sport // by Luci Smith. The Sport in Mind. August 12, 2014 / http://www.thesportinmind.com/articles/aggression-and-level-of-contact-within-sport/
5. Violence and Aggression in Sport // June 4, 2008 / http://thecommunicationbreakdown.blogspot.com/2008/06/violence-an…
6. Violence and Aggression in Sport // http://thecommunicationbreakdown.blogspot.com/2008/06/violence-an…
7. Luis Suarez ‘has bitten EIGHT people on the pitch’ // by Scott Hesketh. Daily Star. 29th June 2014 / http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/386282/FIFA-investiga…
8. Luis Suarez needs therapy to overcome urge to bite // by Dr Saima Latif. The Telegraph. 25 Jun 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/players/luis-suarez/109…
9. Mike Tyson backs Luis Suarez over biting scandal as former heavyweight champion says: ‘It was just the heat of the moment’ // by Sean Gallagher. Daily Mail. 10 July 2014 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/article-2687108/Mike-Tyson-backs-Luis-Suarez-biting-scandal-former-heavyweight-champion-says-It-just-heat-moment.html#ixzz3EMCSWYaZ
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• Arms R.L., Russell G.W., Sandilands M.L. Effects of viewing aggressive sports on the hostility of spectators // Social Psychology Quarterly, 42. 1979. P. 275-279.
• Burton W.R. Aggression and Sport // Clinics in Sports Medicine. Vol. 24 (4). 2005. P. 845-852.
• Couppis M.H. Dopamine and the positively reinforcing properties of aggression // Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Neuroscience. May, 2008. Nashville, Tennessee. 142 p.
• Geen R.G., Stonner D.; Shope G.L. The facilitation of aggression by aggression: Evidence against the catharsis hypothesis // Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 31(4). Apr 1975. P. 721-726. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.31.4.721
• Kerr J.H. Rethinking Aggression and Violence in Sport. London. Routledge. 2004. 176 p.
• Lemieux P., Mckelvie S.J., Stout D. Self-Reported Hostile Aggression in Contact Athletes, No Contact Athletes and Non-Athletes // Athletic Insight: The Online Journal of Sport Psychology. Vol. 4 (3). 2002.
• Manning A. An Introduction to Animal Behaviour. London : Edward Arnold. 1979. 329 p.
• Nell V. Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators // Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2006. Vol. 29. P. 211-257.
• Patterson A.H. Hostility Catharsis: A Naturalistic Quasi-Experiment // Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Vol. 1. No. 1. 1974. P. 195-197.
• Schwartzer J.J., Ricci L.A., Melloni Jr. R.H. Prior Fighting Experience Increases Aggression in Syrian Hamsters: Implications for a Role of Dopamine in the Winner Effect // Aggressive Behavior. Vol. 39, Issue 4. July-August 2013. P. 290-300.
• Sevenster P. A causal analysis of a displacement activity (fanning in Gasterosteus aculeatus L.) // Behaviour Supplement. Vol. 9. 1961. P. 1-170.
• Tenenbaum G., Stewart E., Singer R.N., Duda J. Aggression and violence in sport: an ISSP position stand // J. Sports Med. Phys. Fitness. Vol. 37(2). 1997 Jun. P. 146-150.
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commentsISTANBUL (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Sunday praised the courage of the Turkish people in defending democracy from an attempted coup almost exactly a year ago, although he made no mention of the widespread crackdown that has followed.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Istanbul, Turkey, July 9, 2017. REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Speaking at the opening ceremony of an oil conference in Istanbul, where he received an award recognizing his four decades of work in the industry, Tillerson also said the United States saw Turkey as a partner in its push for greater energy security in the region.
“We’re all here in Istanbul at a momentous time. Nearly a year ago, the Turkish people - brave men and women - stood up against coup plotters and defended their democracy,” Tillerson said.
“I take this moment to recognize their courage and honor the victims of the events of July 15, 2016.”
A group of rogue soldiers commandeered tanks, helicopters and warplanes on the night of July 15, attacking parliament and seizing control of roads and bridges in an effort to overthrow the government.
The putsch failed when thousands of Turks took to the streets in protest, answering a call from President Tayyip Erdogan to resist the coup. More than 240 people, many of them civilians, died that night.
Since the failed coup more than 100,000 people have been sacked or suspended from their work in the civil service, police, military and private sector and some 40,000 people jailed. The government says such efforts are needed, given the scope of the security threat it faces.
Rights groups and some Western governments say that Turkey is using the coup as a pretext to quash dissent, and on Sunday hundreds of thousands of people attended an opposition rally in Istanbul.
Tillerson, who was previously the head of Exxon Mobil Corp, arrived in Turkey on Sunday evening and was due to meet Erdogan later on Sunday, according to Erdogan’s office.
Ankara had high hopes for the administration of President Donald Trump, after relations with Washington soured under former President Barack Obama.
However, Erdogan has been angered by Trump’s decision to arm a Syrian Kurdish militia in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria. Turkey sees the Kurdish fighters as a terrorist group and worries their advance in Syria would inflame a Kurdish insurgency at home.This article is about the one-man music project. For more details and biography on its founder, see Varg Vikernes. For the song, see Filosofem
Burzum (; Norwegian: [ˈbʉrt͡sʉm]) was a Norwegian music project founded by Varg Vikernes in 1991. Although Burzum never played live performances, it became a part of the early Norwegian black metal scene and was considered one of the most influential acts in black metal.[3][4][5][6] The word "burzum" means "darkness" in the black speech, a fictional language crafted by Lord of the Rings writer J. R. R. Tolkien.[7]
Vikernes began making music as a teenager in 1988, but it was not until 1991 that he recorded his first demos as Burzum. The first four Burzum albums were recorded between January 1992 and March 1993. From 1994 to 2009, Vikernes was incarcerated for the murder of Mayhem guitarist Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth and the arson of three churches. While imprisoned, he recorded two dark ambient albums using only synthesizers, as he did not have access to drums, guitar or bass. Since his release from prison in 2009, he has recorded several more albums. In 2018, Vikernes announced the end of the Burzum project.
History [ edit ]
Early years (1988–1992) [ edit ]
The Burzum logo used in 1991
Varg Vikernes began making music in 1988 with the band Kalashnikov.[7] The following year, the name was changed to Uruk-Hai, after the creatures from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.[7] In 1990 and 1991, Vikernes played guitar for the death metal band Old Funeral, which also consisted of members who would later form the band Immortal. He appears on the Old Funeral EP Devoured Carcass. Vikernes left Old Funeral in 1991 to concentrate on creating his own musical visions. He had a short lived project called Satanel, along Abbath Doom Occulta. He then began a solo project under the name Burzum. The word "burzum" means "darkness" in the Black Speech, a language crafted by Tolkien. Soon after recording two demo tapes, he became part of the Norwegian black metal scene. With his demo tapes, he had attracted attention from Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth of Mayhem, who had just recently formed Deathlike Silence Productions. Aarseth then signed Burzum to the label, and shortly after, Vikernes ―under the pseudonym of Count Grishnackh―, began to record Burzum’s self-titled debut album. According to Vikernes' autobiography on his website, he had intended to record the album in the worst recording quality possible (due to this being a typical trademark of the early Norwegian black metal scene), while still making it sound acceptable. Burzum's eponymous debut album was released in 1992, being the second album released on Deathlike Silence Productions. The song "War" from this album had a guest appearance from Euronymous, playing a guitar solo "just for fun", according to Vikernes.
The Burzum logo used between 1991 and 1993
Vikernes has stated that he had never played any live shows with Burzum, though at one point was interested in it,[not in citation given] so Samoth of Emperor accompanied him as a session bassist, though only appearing on the Aske EP.[8] Additionally, Erik Lancelot was hired to be the band's drummer,[citation needed] though did not record on any Burzum material, and along with Samoth did not play a live show. Vikernes had by then lost his interest in playing live concerts, and stated that he "didn't even need session musicians anymore". Therefore, Samoth and Lancelot had parted ways with Burzum. Det som engang var was released as Burzum's second album in 1993, recorded in 1992.
Imprisonment (1993–2009) [ edit ]
The Burzum logo used between 1994 and 2009
May 1994 saw the release of Hvis lyset tar oss, a new album of previously recorded material from 1992. Burzum remained as a solo project until 1994, when Vikernes was arrested for the murder of Euronymous and the burnings of several churches in Norway. During his time in prison, Vikernes released his next album, titled Filosofem, on 1 January 1996. Recorded in March 1993, Filosofem was the last recording Vikernes made before his imprisonment. Burzum / Aske, a compilation comprising the Burzum album and Aske EP, was released in 1995. While imprisoned, Vikernes managed to record two other albums in a dark ambient style. They were released as Dauði Baldrs (1997) and Hliðskjálf (1999). Both of these albums were used with a synthesizer as Vikernes was prohibited from using any other instruments in prison.
In 1998, all Burzum albums released up to that point were re-released as vinyl picture discs in a special box set called 1992–1997; however the Filosofem album didn't contain "Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte" due to its length. The regular vinyl issue of Filosofem on Misanthropy had tracks 1–4 plus "Decrepitude II" on side 1 and "Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte" on side 2.
Post-imprisonment and end of project (2009–2018) [ edit ]
Belus, set in the typeface The Burzum logo used on the 2010 album, set in the typeface Ruritania
Soon after being released, Vikernes started writing new tracks (nine metal tracks and an ambient intro and outro) for an upcoming Burzum album. According to Vikernes' recounts, several record companies were interested in releasing his first album in eleven years. He stated about the new album, "I want to take my time, and make it the way I want it. It will be metal, and the fans can expect genuine Burzum."
The album was going to be originally titled Den hvite guden ("The White God"),[9] but he later decided to change it to Belus, which was released by Byelobog Productions (byelobog is the transliteration of "белобог" in Slavic languages, meaning "white god") on 8 March 2010.[10][11] It was also announced that a movie would be released in 2010, based on Varg Vikernes' life in the early 1990s. The movie would mainly draw inspiration from the book Lords of Chaos, with the film being of the same name. Vikernes expressed his contempt towards both the movie and the book upon which it is based.[12]
A second new album of original Burzum material, Fallen, was released on 7 March 2011,[13] followed by a compilation album, From the Depths of Darkness, containing re-recordings of tracks from Burzum's self-titled album and Det som engang var, on 28 November 2011.[14] A third new studio album of original material, titled Umskiptar, was released in May 2012.[15] Sôl austan, Mâni vestan ("East of the Sun, West of the Moon"), Burzum's first electronic album since 1999, was released in May 2013.[16] On April 27, 2013, a song was posted on the official YouTube channel of Vikernes, titled "Back to the Shadows."[17] In a blog post, Vikernes stated that "Back to the Shadows" will be the last metal track released by Burzum.[18]
The album The Ways of Yore was released in June 2014.[19]
In June 2018, on his YouTube channel, Vikernes made comments that "[he had] moved on [from Burzum]", saying "bye bye" to the project.[20][21]
Musical style [ edit ]
Burzum's music features characteristics common in black metal, including distorted, tremolo-picked guitar riffs, and harsh vocals. Earlier Burzum albums feature very low production quality |
working it has given me great service that by mere accident I had again leafed through Hegel's Logic - Freiligrath found some volumes of Hegel which originally belonged to Bakunin and sent me them as a present.
Many students of Marx have referred to the letter and have discussed it, but Marx's use of Hegel's Logic in the Grundrisse has not been fully examined. Let us consider some representative writers who have concerned themselves with the relationship.
There are the editors of the original German edition of the Grundrisse (1953). This photocopy edition of the original two volumes of 1939 and 1941 has end-notes, many of which refer to Hegel's Logic. A reader using these notes, however, inevitably fails to find the hidden use of Hegel's Logic in the Grundrisse, because the notes are not based on a correct understanding of Marx's critique. These notes only create confusion.
Roman Rosdolsky wrote The making of Marx's 'Capital', the pioneering study of the Grundrisse, whilst 'inhabiting a city whose libraries contained only very few German, Russian or French socialist works', and so he was able to use only 'the few books in his own possessions He nevertheless became aware of the relation of Hegel's Logic to Marx's Grundrisse, and wrote:
The more the work advanced, the clearer it became that I would only be able to touch upon the most important and theoretically interesting problem presented by the 'Rough Draft' - that of the relation of Marx's work to Hegel, in particular to the Logic - and would not be able to deal with it in any greater depth.
Although he thought that he could only 'touch upon' the problem, and that he could not 'deal with it in any greater depth', he ventured to remark:
If Hegel's influence on Marx's Capital can be seen explicitly only in a few footnotes, the 'Rough Draft' must be designated as a massive reference to Hegel, in particular to his Logic irrespective of how radically and materialistically Hegel was inverted! The publication of the Grundrisse means that the academic critics of Marx will no longer be, able to write without first having studied his method and its relation to Hegel.
The fact that Hegells influence on Marx's Capital is largely implicit was suggested in Marx's letter of 9 December 1861 to Engels: '... the thing [Critique of political economy 1861 -3] is assuming a much more popular form, and the method is much less in evidence than in Part I' [i.e. A contribution to the critique of political economy of 1859]. This letter relates to the manuscripts of 1861 - 3, but the case is the same with Capital. Compared with Capital (or the manuscripts of 1861 - 3), the Grundrisse has many explicit references to Hegel, to the Logic. Rosdolsky, who studied with 'a number of difficulties', suggested that Marx critically utilised Hegel's Logic in writing the Grundrisse. However, Rosdolsky did not fulfil the task of proving this in his book.
Rosdolsky referred eight times to Hegel in his study of the 'Chapter on Money' from the Grundrisse, and nine times when he considered the 'Chapter on Capital'. He indicated a few specific points where Marx's critique of political economy was carried out in reference to the Logic. Most of the examples which Rosdolsky gave his readers are arbitrary and not relevant to the theoretical context of the Grundrisse. This should be said, albeit in the light of the difficulties which he endured whilst writing his study of the Grundrisse, the first variant of Capital.
Martin Nicolaus, the English translator of the Grundrisse in the Pelican Marx Library, has a similarly high opinion of the importance of Hegel's Logic in the 'Rough Draft'. In the Foreword to the English translation of the Grundrisse Nicolaus wrote as follows:
If one considers not only the extensive use of Hegelian terminology in the Grundrisse, not only the many passages which reflect self-consciously on Hegel's method and the use of the method, but also the basic structure of the argument in the Grundrisse, it becomes evident that the services rendered Marx by his study of the Logic were very great indeed.
Readers of Nicolaus's introductory Foreword naturally expect him to refer to the crucial points where the Grundrisse contains a critical application of the Logic. However, this expectation is not fulfilled, though the Grundrisse contains several footnotes to the Logic. Those footnotes are never sufficient to explain how the Logic was critically absorbed as a whole and in detail in the Grundrisse. For example, though Nicolaus properly noted that Marx relates 'production' to Hegel's 'ground', he failed recognise that the reference is intimately connected with Marx's conception of money in its third determination as 'a contradiction which dissolves itself'. The same expression appears just before 'ground' in the Logic.
Nor did Nicolaus notice that Marx refers'means of production' to'matter' (Materie) and 'labour-power' to 'form' (Form) in the Logic, and he mistranslated the German term Materie as'material'. Therefore it may be helpful to remind readers of the Nicolaus translation that they should consult the original German text if they wish to rediscover Hegel's Logic in the Grundrisse.
Besides Hegel, Aristotle should be considered in connection with philosophical aspects of the Grundrisse. Alfred Schmidt commented on this in his excellent work, The concept of nature in Marx: 'Although the Grundrisse contains an extraordinary amount of new material on the question of Marx's relation to Hegel and, through Hegel, to Aristotle, they have so far hardly been used in discussions of Marx's philosophy.' Marx's comments in his letter of 21 December 1857 to Ferdinand Lassalle are evidence that he was most interested in Aristotle whilst writing the Grundrisse: 'I always had great interest in the latter philosopher [Heraclitus], to whom I prefer only Aristotle of the ancient philosophers.'
Schmidt is correct to point out the use of Aristotle in the 'Rough Draft', remarking that Marx approached Aristotle through Hegel. However, Schmidt failed to find any direct use of Aristotle by Marx. As we will see later, Marx does refer directly to him, for instance, when he posits the commodity at the beginning of the 'Chapter on Money' as the concrete instantiation (synolon) of the primary substance (prote ousaia) and the secondary substance (deuterai oustai).
However, Schmidt made a noteworthy suggestion concerning the use of Aristotle in the Grundrisse:
Here [in the Grundrisse] Marx tried to grasp the relation of Subject and Object in labour by using pairs of concepts, such as 'form-matter', or'reality-possibility', which stem from Aristotle, whom he rated highly as a philosopher. In an immediate sense, of course, Marx depended on the corresponding categories of Hegel's logic, but as they are interpreted materialistically their Aristotelian origin shines more clearly through than it does in Hegel himself.
According to Schmidt, Marx used Aristotle to construct a materialist basis for his theory, and he used Hegel to inquire why and how modern life is alienated and appears in an idealist form. Hegel, though thinking himself to be the greatest Aristotelian, actually deformed Aristotle's philosophy. He changed what Aristotle defined as 'active reason', which existed in every individual, into'substance as subject'.
In my view, Marx attempts to reform Hegel's philosophy using materialist aspects of Aristotle's philosophy, in order to prove why and how modern life is developed through the force of capital. His critique of Hegel does not simply reduce his idealism to a materialist basis, but consists in converting his philosophy of alienation and reification into historical categories. He uses these to clarify perverted life in capitalism, and he reads Hegel's 'idea' as a form of bourgeois consciousness.
Marx's use of Hegel's Logic in the formation of Capital can be summarised as follows:
In the Economic and philosophical manuscripts (1844) he studies not only the Phenomenology of spirit and the Philosophy of right, but also the Encyclopaedia. He characterises the Shorter Logic as 'the money of the spirit'. This means that the Logic is the most abstract philosophical expression of the bourgeois spirit or consciousness of value. This consciousness of value forms the basic economic relation of bourgeois society. In The holy family of 1845 he discusses Hegel's mode of presentation, writing, for example, that many forms of fruit really exist, so'man' may abstract 'fruit in general' as an idea. Hegel, however, reverses the process, insisting that at the beginning 'fruit in general' exists as substance, and it posits many particular forms of fruit as positive subjects. Marx reveals the secret of Hegel's philosophy, which presupposes an ideal subject par excellence, even though this subject is in reality a 'thought-product' or abstraction that exists merely in the mind. In the Poverty of philosophy of 1847, Marx implies a simultaneous critique of political economy and of Hegel's philosophy, especially the Logic, when he criticises Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's System of economic contradictions, or the philosophy of poverty of 1846. In the Grundrisse of 1857-8 Marx at last develops his critique of political economy and of Hegel's philosophy, especially the Logic, which he claims Proudhon misread. In Marx's view Proudhon grounded his socialism falsely. Marx uses a critical reading of the two classics to undermine Proudhon's theory of socialism. Whilst writing the Critique of political economy 1861-3, Marx re-reads the Shorter Logic and takes notes from it. Although his method of working in these manuscripts is'much less in evidence', as already mentioned, the fact that he seems to apply the Logic to these manuscripts should not be overlooked. As is well known, in the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx recalls his criticism of 'the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic' in The holy family,and announces:
I... openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
Terrell Carver correctly suggested that Marx's 'rational kernel' is Hegel's analysis of logic and the 'notion', and 'the mystical shell' is Hegel's confusion of categorial movement with reality. The difficulty in reading Hegel's Logic, however, consists in making a clear distinction between these two aspects and giving concrete examples from the text. In the text Hegel describes the process of 'becoming' of the 'notion' as simultaneously the process in which the 'idea', the mystical subject, posits itself as reality. The Grundrisse is the first text in which Marx attempts to relate the 'becoming' of the'subject' to the categories of political economy, and therefore there is more evidence of his analysis in it than in Capital, which displays his solution. The Grundrisse is the most suitable text for studying the relation of the critique of political economy to the Logic.
The correspondence of each part of the Grundrisse to the Logic is briefly summarised as follows:
The Introduction corresponds to the Doctrine of the Notion. The Chapter on Money corresponds to the Doctrine of Being. The Chapter on Capital corresponds to the Doctrine of Essence.
If the relation were not conceptualised this way, it would never become visible as 'an artistic whole'.
The themes of the Grundrisse can be summarised in the following way:
For Marx, Hegel's Logic is 'the money of the spirit', the speculative 'thought-value of man and nature'. This means that in bourgeois society'man' and nature, and body and mind, are separated and reconnected through the relation of private exchange. Their relation is alienated from the persons who form the relation, which is mediated by value. They become 'value-subjects', and those who possess enough value also rule the society. The Logic in fact describes the value-subject abstractly.
In bourgeois society the value-subject also rules nature, the indispensable condition of life, because the subject monopolises physical as well as mental labour, so the non-possessor of nature is forced to engage in physical work. This coercion is seemingly non-violent and is legally mediated through the value-relation on which modern property is founded. In modern society there is wide-spread acceptance of the legitimacy of one person controlling the product of another's labour, and the other's labour itself, in order to appropriate a surplus product. This approval is founded on the value-relation and the 'form' of the commodity. Value is abstract and imagined in the mind, and also embodied in money. Hegel's Logic implicitly ascribes a sort of power to money, and Marx presents it as the demiurgos of bourgeois society. That is why he characterises the Logic as 'the money of the spirit'. His task in the Grundrisse therefore consists in demonstrating that the genesis of value and its development into capital are described in the Logic, albeit in a seemingly closed system which reproduces itself, and overall his work is directed towards transcending capitalism in practice.
Further Reading: Geoff Pilling on Concepts of Capital | Ilyenkov on Abstract & Concrete | Hegel, Economics & Marx's Capital, Cyril Smith | Logic of Marx's Capital, Tony Smith | Marx on Capital | Marx on MethodOne of the great Freudian slips of our time was supplied by a Fox News anchor on March 24, 1999, as Nato was preparing to wage war on Yugoslavia:
'Let's bring in our Pentagon spokesman - excuse me, our Pentagon correspondent.'
For indeed the unwritten rule informing this type of journalism is: if you want to get close to the 'defence' establishment, you better be close to the 'defence' establishment: ideologically, sympathetically, 'patriotically'.
A near-perfect example of this industry-wide perceptual bias has been supplied this year by BBC diplomatic editor, Mark Urban.
Last week, Urban discussed the Russian bombing campaign in Syria in a piece entitled: 'Russia's Syria intervention: One month in.'
This was made fascinating by the fact that, in January, Urban had written a piece on the US bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq: 'On board with the US air crews fighting Islamic State.'
So how do these articles compare?
'On Board With The US Air Crews Fighting Islamic State'
The title of the piece on US bombing is an obviously positive, propaganda formulation, indicating that Urban was 'on board' and embedded with a US aircraft carrier attacking the bad guys du jour - Islamic State. The title excludes from consideration the possibility that the US, directly and through regional client regimes, has been supporting Islamic State with weapons, or has other nefarious aims. It is simply waging war on the Official Enemy. This immediately banishes the kind of 'complexity' described by political analyst Bill Blum:
'The mainstream media almost never mentions the proposed Qatar natural-gas pipelines – whose path to Europe Syria has stood in the way of for years – as a reason for much of the hostility toward Syria. The pipelines could dethrone Russia as Europe's dominant source of energy.'
The piece features a Top Gun-style photo of a carrier jet waiting to be launched into action. The article begins by humanising the military operation with context and detail. The aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson, 'is a floating town of more than 5,000 souls and 60 fighter aircraft engaged in a costly and complex campaign'. Urban introduces us to Lt Junior Grade 'Sarah', described as 'a 29-year-old weapon systems operator or back seater in an F/A-18F fighter' - a bomb aimer in old money (how journalists love to focus on high-tech military jargon). 'Sarah' is gung-ho:
'There is a coyness among the crews - in front of us at least - about wanting to appear too keen to take life, but after completing the mission, she said, "when we do get to employ [drop bombs] out there it's very exciting".'
The article repeatedly stresses the danger facing US carrier aircrews rather than the people under their bombs: 'Each time it launches one of its jets' the event is'so dramatic and inherently dangerous'.
While Urban makes just one, oblique reference to the risk to civilians - 'dropping [a bomb] in error could have terrible consequences' - the danger to US aircrews is the major focus:
'But whether it drops multiple bombs or none, the effort involved in launching each mission is considerable and fraught with hazards.'
Urban continues in the same vein:
'"Every flight there is a risk out there," notes Lt Cdr "Mike," who at 35 is one of the veteran pilots on board. It starts with being catapulted off the deck, goes through the in-flight fuel top ups, which he notes "can be unpleasant," flying in close proximity to the tanker in bad weather or at night, and ends with the "controlled car crash" of recovering the jet onto the carrier. 'I watched Lt Cdr Mike's F/A18F land at night on the Vinson's deck after a seven-hour mission over Iraq. As the plane came in at what seemed like an impossibly steep angle and at 160mph, I remembered reading an old carrier pilot's quip that during such recoveries in the hours of darkness, "there are no atheists in the cockpit".'
'Mike, Top Gun pilot that he is', Urban opines, managed to land 'flawlessly' on the carrier.
As well as dangerous, this is uncomfortable work:
'Spending five or more hours strapped to an ejector seat, unable to get up or use a toilet, must be a distinctly unpleasant experience at times. The pilots take snacks and "piddle packs" to relieve themselves into.'
Above all, though, it is dangerous:
'But of course these discomforts are mundane compared to the dangers of going down over IS-controlled territory, as a Jordanian pilot recently did, or crashing during carrier operations.'
Urban continues discussing the risk – to the bombers:
'The crews are all too aware of the risks but are uneasy discussing them with an outsider. "It's not something we like to think about," Lt Sarah said about the risks of getting shot down. Clearly though, it informed her decision not to use her name when interviewed.'
There is apparently no space for a discussion of the morality or legality of the US effort, particularly in light of the catastrophic US 'interventions' in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. And by the way, why is it the job of the US to bomb anyone, anywhere in the world without UN approval? And why should we believe the US imperial power is guided by moral motives?
The success of the mission is boldly affirmed:
'Those commanding the operations on board are quite sure they are making progress. "Absolutely the situation has changed since airstrikes began", says Cmdr Mike Langbehn, boss of one of the Hornet squadrons... The days of IS making sweeping gains were over and their progress has been halted, several officers said. "They swept through the country, now they're not," commented Capt Thomas.'
By contrast, investigative journalist Patrick Cockburn comments in the London Review of Books this month: 'the [US] campaign has demonstrably failed to contain IS, which in May captured Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria'.
Remarkably, the 10-minute video embedded in Urban's article is even more one-sided. It opens with a motivational propaganda speech by the carrier's chaplain on the US mission to'stem the tide of tyranny and hatred'. It continues with a long description of the awesome size and power of the ship and its weapons, includes jokey interviews with the air crew on their superstitions and on how careful they are not to hit civilians, with officers confidently discussing progress made. The commanding officer is quoted as saying his bombers are 'working the Isis target a couple of bodies at a time'. The video concludes with a poignant prayer from the chaplain requesting that the 'Lord' protect US forces working so patiently to end human life a couple of corpses at a time.
Urban's piece on the US bombing campaign, then, is classic 'patriotic', wartime propaganda glorifying 'our' courageous fighting men and women – named and humanised for the reader - risking their lives to make the world a safer place. And of course they are winning.
'Russia's Syria Intervention: One Month In'
The title of Urban's piece on the Russian bombing campaign is coldly factual – there is no indication that he is 'on board' with Russian forces. There is no propaganda video, or Top Gun-style picture, just a rather menacing photo of a Russian bomber without visible human occupants.
Unlike the US carrier piece, no attempt is made to describe the dangers, fears and discomforts facing Russian aircrews. There are no friendly discussions with Russian pilots and commanders – none are named, interviewed, humanised. There are no quotes from a chaplain saying prayers, or from a commander expressing confidence in final victory. Apart from a couple of comments from Putin, there are no quotes from Russian military sources at all. Urban prefers to reference the opinion of US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, the 'independent' UK website Belingcat and a Free Syrian Army commander, all pro-Western.
In this second piece, the central focus is exactly reversed – the threats facing aircrew are not even mentioned, while the previously ignored threats facing civilians, and the costs paid by them, are heavily and repeatedly emphasised. Urban begins sceptically:
'So Russia has rained down destruction, but to what end?'
In the US piece, the focus is on whether the air offensive is 'working' and 'achieving results', not on 'destruction'.
Urban cites sources indicating that 90 per cent of Russian bombs 'have been dropped in places held by groups other than the so-called Islamic State (IS).'
The Russian authorities are thus openly accused of dishonesty in describing their objectives: they are not, as claimed, targeting Islamic State - the enemy that Urban's BBC audience has been trained to unreservedly hate - but are working to'strengthen the Assad regime and its forces', which the BBC audience has also been taught to hate.
Urban asserts that Russian bombs are also less accurate and therefore a greater threat to civilians:
'Typically US "precision" bombs have a circular error probable (the radius around the aiming point in which 50% or more will fall) of eight-to-12 metres. With unguided or dumb bombs that increases to 50-100m. 'Furthermore, the Russians have been dropping cluster munitions that western air forces would shun for their indiscriminate effect.'
Urban does at least mention a figure for civilian casualties of US bombing in this piece - '600 plus non-combatants in Syria and Iraq since August 2014' - but uses it to cast Russian performance in a much darker light:
'Using much less accurate weaponry, experts believe the rate at which the Russians are killing innocents is likely to be much higher, and of striking the right aiming points lower.'
Urban adds a deeply damning, unsourced claim:
'Rebel groups and NGOs have claimed hundreds of civilian deaths and seven hospitals hit.'
The Russian Defense Ministry, no more reliable than the BBC, has contested these claims. We asked Urban to disclose his sources and to comment on the Russian response, but he repeatedly failed to reply. He adds:
'Russian counter-claims that no civilians have been killed and all missions have hit their targets are simply not credible...'
And:
'It's also obvious that their enemy will adapt and returns diminish.'
These deeply sceptical, critical comments on the Russian mission stand in stark contrast to the earlier unrelieved positivity and blithe acceptance of US military claims, notably the claim that the commanders 'are quite sure they are making progress'.
In discussing the Russian attacks, the civilian cost is consistently to the fore:
'It may be that [the Russians] are hitting so many targets, that even with less accuracy, they are doing more damage than the Americans... we know that civilians living in the areas where these attacks have been most intense, are fleeing in droves.'
Details are provided:
'The UN says 120,000 were displaced from Aleppo, Hama, and Idlib provinces between 5 and 22 October: the places where most Russian strikes have taken place, where Syrian Army ground pushes have happened, and where all these people have fled are one and the same...'
Notice the complete absence of this kind of comment in the earlier piece, which made no reference at all to civilian casualties from US bombing. Urban continues:
'At the same time there is a cost, in terms of displaced or killed people.'
The same concern is the focus of the conclusion: Russia 'has deployed a military force to Syria swiftly, and it has brought enormous force to bear. But the human cost of this is becoming clearer'.
We can call this 'journalism' if we like, but actually it is indistinguishable from state propaganda. Readers might like to consider a couple of questions:
1. Is it conceivable that a BBC journalist would produce an article and video as 'on board' and positive about a Russian bombing campaign as Urban supplied on the US campaign?
2. Have we ever seen a piece from a BBC journalist as openly critical of US government dishonesty in regards to an ongoing military campaign - accusing it of lying about its real intentions and the true costs to civilians, of supporting known enemies - in the way of the second piece on the Russian campaign?
The answers matter because this kind of propaganda - repeated relentlessly across our broadcast media and newspapers - is effective in persuading large numbers of people to support one war after another, without end. After all, how can it be that so many can accept that Britain and the US should go on bombing distant countries year after year, creating unimaginable misery and chaos, much of it swept under the media carpet?
A good deal of the discredit goes to the 'diplomatic' and 'defence' editors of the BBC, ITV and newspapers - men and women apparently awarded jobs for life, regardless of their performance, with zero accountability (unless they fail to defer to elite interests). Their pro-Western, warmongering bias is often as naked as it is lethal to human life, and yet our political and media system is so structurally corrupt that it passes without'mainstream' comment.
DE
Suggested Action
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Mark Urban at the BBC:
Email: mark.urban@bbc.co.uk
Twitter: @MarkUrban01Toronto Mayor John Tory said Wednesday that he supports studying the possibility of turning Woodbine racetrack into a casino — an issue that's divided progressive voices in the city.
His executive committee approved a request for a staff report on a proposed casino at Woodbine, which currently has slot machines but no table games.
The committee heard presentations on the idea for much of the morning and afternoon.
Metro Morning | Should Woodbine develop a casino?
Toronto's executive committee is discussing whether or not to allow Woodbine racetrack to expand its gambling operations. (Michael Burns/The Canadian Press) Some say the casino is needed for economic development in the area, while others are dead set against casinos. Council previously argued over the idea in 2013.
Tory, speaking with reporters while the executive committee took a break, said he's willing to go through that fight again because he thinks the casino could be an economic "catalyst" for the Rexdale area of Etobicoke.
"I believe it is a part of the city that desperately needs investment and job creation," Tory said.
"I am very willing and anxious to look at whether expanded gaming would serve as a catalyst for that."
Former city council candidate for Ward 2 Andray Domise told CBC Radio's Metro Morning many in the Rexdale community support the idea.
"Trying to find a job within the community is really hard," he said. "As some have said, it's easier to find a gun in the area than a job."
Domise said it is too hard to get downtown — where most people in the ward work. That depresses economic activity in Rexdale.
As evidence, he said the nearby mall, Woodbine Shopping Centre, is downtrodden with a high turnover rate for tenant businesses. He thinks a casino would help all this.
Coun. Rob Ford, who represents Ward 2, also wants to see a casino established at Woodbine.
"I'd like to see Woodbine become a full casino, just like the Exhibition does for 20 days every year," Ford told CBC News.
"They have the slots, they want tables. Let's give 'em tables, let's create jobs [and] stimulate the economy. That's what we have to do."
Betting against
The casino proposal is not without its detractors.
Mayor John Tory says he supports another study and public consultation about a potential casino at the Woodbine racetrack. (The Canadian Press) "I want to make sure these are good jobs, not just jobs," said Mike Layton, city councillor for downtown Ward 19.
He likened gambling to smoking, saying people are "wising up" and quitting the vice.
Layton publicly called out the idea for a Woodbine casino on Twitter, telling Domise casinos cost communities more than they gain.
"The pathway to prosperity and good jobs isn't paved by promises of a golden mile. It's done with new ideas and investment. Not shortcuts," tweeted Layton at Domise.
Domise, who is a self-described progressive, said he has not seen Layton or any downtown councillors come with any new ideas for the Rexdale neighbourhood.
"The first thing we need is building better transit," said Layton on Metro Morning. He said that would help spur business in the area.
Layton said downtown councillors should have a say in Etobicoke development, just as Etobicoke councillors should have a say in downtown development. He stressed it's better to have a fulsome dialogue with many perspectives.My God: He’s making a play to win the nomination on the 15th ballot.
No, actually, I think what he’s doing here is putting his #NeverTrump beliefs into practice.
Rubio has sent letters to Republican officials in states where he has won delegates, charging he wants to keep his delegates, even though he’s no longer an active candidate. Representatives from Rubio’s network said the former candidate wants to retain his delegates in order to keep his options open in the coming months. Campaigns are preparing for the possibility of a contested national convention in July that could feature an intense fight for every available delegate… Alaska had already divvied up Rubio’s five delegates to Trump and Ted Cruz. However, since the actual people have not been selected yet, the state party said the delegates will go back to Rubio. In Oklahoma, state party Chairwoman Pam Pollard said she received a letter from Rubio saying he has not released his 12 delegates from that state.
If those delegates are released, Rubio can try to persuade and cajole them all he likes to vote for Cruz over Trump — but that’s all he can do is try. They’re free agents, entitled to support whomever they like. The only way he can ensure they don’t vote for Trump on the first ballot is to keep them bound to him for that vote. And it’s the first ballot, remember, that’s all-important for Trump. The delegates he’s won in the primaries are required to vote for him on that ballot only; Team Cruz is hard at work making sure that Cruz fans are elected across the country as Trump delegates so that, if Trump fails to clinch a majority on the first ballot, they’ll switch to Cruz en masse once they become unbound on the second. Every delegate that Rubio releases now becomes an unbound delegate whom Trump could, in theory, convince to support him on the first ballot, which increases the chance that he’ll get to 1,237. (Cruz could also win over Rubio’s unbound delegates, of course, but no one thinks Cruz will be close enough to win outright on the first ballot. Those delegates won’t matter to him unless he makes it to the second.) What Rubio’s doing here, in other words, is limiting the number of available unbound delegates to make it that much harder for Trump to win.
And he’s making no bones about it:
“Of course, he’s no longer a candidate and wants to give voters a chance to stop Trump,” Rubio spokesman Alex Burgos said in an email to the Washington Examiner. Rubio won 167 delegates as a presidential candidate, and dozens of them will be required to back him on the first ballot of the Republican National Convention, though the rules vary state-by-state. By working to retain his delegates, Rubio is shrinking the pool of “free agents” who could help Trump clinch the nomination on the first ballot.
Cruz fans owe Rubio thanks for this. In fact, it’s almost certainly better than an endorsement. Think of it this way: If Rubio succeeds in keeping, say, 100 delegates away from Trump on the first ballot, that’s the equivalent to Cruz of winning a very large state. (Florida was only 99 delegates.) Rubio endorsing Cruz and campaigning for him might move some votes his way, but it’s hard to believe it’d make enough difference in enough states to shift 100 delegates to Cruz. And it may be an either/or choice: If Rubio endorses Cruz, that may be treated for purposes of state GOP rules as him no longer maintaining an “active campaign,” which would mean Rubio’s delegates become unbound. Rubio might be better off staying out of the fray and keeping his delegates on the board. And Cruz should be doing everything he can right now to make sure that John Kasich, whether or not he eventually suspends his campaign, follows Rubio’s lead and keeps his delegates on the board too. The fewer available unbound delegates there are on the first ballot, the greater the chance that Trump doesn’t clinch.
Speaking of delegate math, here’s Trump advisor Barry Bennett telling MSNBC yesterday that the “lawsuit” Trump’s been threatening over Cruz winning more delegates in Louisiana is actually a complaint to the RNC to have Louisiana’s delegates decertified. (Which is good, because they’d almost certainly never win in court.) Er … why would Trump want to do that? Trump won 18 delegates in Louisiana; he’ll need every last delegate he can scrape together to get to 1,237 on the first ballot. As noted, if he falls short on the first ballot, it’s highly likely that he’ll lose on a subsequent ballot. That being so, the last thing he should want to do is get 18 of his own delegates tossed out simply because it’ll cost Cruz a few more than that. Cruz has no prayer of getting to 1,237 on the first ballot. All he wants to do on that vote is prevent Trump from clinching. As such, he’ll happily shed himself of some of his own delegates if he can reduce Trump’s total too. Does Team Trump not understand the math here?
Oh, and needless to say at this point, his core claim here that Trump’s team in Louisiana was somehow unfairly excluded from a meeting is untrue.Ericsson Labs is showing off an API for navigating through a three-dimensional interpretation of the world based on real imagery powered by Saab spinoff (the defense firm, not the car company) C3 Technologies on Sony Ericsson's upcoming X10 -- and in a word, it's looking impressive. The buttons for controlling the action are a bit hokey, of course, but don't worry too much about that -- this is strictly a proof of concept, and the important thing is that no matter how much panning, tilting, and swooping through the cityscape the demo-giver does, video output stays above 30 frames per second. Thank goodness for Snapdragon, eh? There's no indication that we'll see a shipping version of this app on retail X10s out of the box, but let's hope something awesome comes of this. Follow the break for video.The International Handball Federation is pleased to announce the GRUNDFOS World Handball Players of the Year 2012: fans, media representatives and an IHF expert group have decided – and two debutants are the winners: Alexandra do Nascimento is the first ever Brazilian GRUNDFOS World Handball Player of the Year and Daniel Narcisse is the sixth Frenchman to win this award since the first vote in 1988 - and the fourth player of German club THW Kiel to become GRUNDFOS World Handball Player of the Year since 2007 after Nikola Karabatic (2007), Thierry Omeyer (2008) and Filip Jicha (2010).
Right wing do Nascimento, playing for Austrian club Hypo Niederösterreich, and left back Narcisse overcame the 2011 GRUNDFOS World Handball Players of the Year, Heidi Löke (Norway, Audi ETO Györ/Hungary) and Mikkel Hansen (Denmark, Paris Handball/France) in this year’s vote.
Alexandra do Nascimento obtained 28% of votes to be ahead of Löke and Montenegrin Bojana Popovic (Buducnost Podgorica, 24 % each). Andrea Penezic (Croatia, Krim Mercator Ljubljana/Slovenia) and Katarina Bulatovic (Montenegro, Oltchim Valcea/Romania) each earned 12% of votes to both rank fourth.
Daniel Narcisse obtained 25% of votes to outclass Hansen (21%). Filip Jicha (Czech Republic, THW Kiel/Germany), Kim Andersson (Sweden, KIF Kolding/Denmark) and Julen Aguinagalde (Spain, Atletico Madrid/Spain) share the third rank with 18% each.
The award ceremony, organized by the IHF and their voting partner Grundfos, will take place prior to the gold medal match of the 2013 Men’s World Championship in Spain on 27 January in Barcelona. Narcisse and do Nascimento will receive both a precious trophy and a cheque for 10,000 euros presented by IHF partner Grundfos.
Results of the GRUNDFOS World Handball Player of the Year 2012:
Female:
1. Alexandra do Nascimento (Brazil, Hypo Niederösterreich/Austria) 28%
2. Heidi Löke (Norway, Audi ETO Györ/Hungary) 24%
2. Bojana Popovic (Montenegro, Buducnost Podgorica) 24 %
4 |
transmissions to his receptive partners. Estimating this potential population-level impact thus requires mathematical modeling. Two such studies have considered this question, both for high-resource settings [21], [22]. Both found the overall long-term population-level impact of a hypothetical MSM-MC intervention to be modest (∼5% decrease in prevalence for explored scenarios), although the one paper conducting an explicit cost-benefit analysis found MSM-MC to be likely cost-effective and possibly cost-saving [21]. No published model has considered such an intervention in resource-limited settings. Multiple studies have considered MSM's willingness to consider prophylactic MC in a host of settings. Willingness is generally low (∼10%) in high-resource settings [23], [24], but higher (∼30%) in some resource-limited Asian settings [25]–[27]. One San Francisco study found moderate willingness (20%) among the target population (HIV-negative, predominantly insertive, uncircumcised MSM who have UAI); however, the proportion of the MSM sample found in the target population was so small (3.7% or n = 15) that the study anticipated limited public health benefits for MSM-MC [28]. In contrast, unpublished results from Peru and Ecuador suggest that around half (54.3%) of uncircumcised MSM would be willing to participate in an MSM-MC trial [29]. This, combined with higher rates of sexual role segregation and lower rates of circumcision in these settings, suggest that it may be possible for an MSM-MC intervention in this community to generate significant public health impact through both direct and indirect (spillover) effects. Other areas that share some or all of these characteristics include the remainder of the Andean region, as well as much of Central America [30]. The literature discussed above suggests that South Africa (and perhaps elsewhere in Southern Africa) and some areas of South East or East Asia may match these key criteria as well. In this paper, we adopt a stochastic network-based model of HIV transmission among MSM developed for the Prevention Umbrella for MSM in the Americas (PUMA) Project, parameterized using behavioral data from multiple studies, to consider the impacts of MSM-MC interventions in Peru. We consider this as a reasonable approximation to a best-case scenario for MSM-MC worldwide, given the set of conducive conditions there. Intervention scenarios are defined by two characteristics—inclusion criterion (insertive during recent acts of UAI either 100%, >80% or >60% of the time), and uptake (25% or 50% of eligible MSM). We conduct sensitivity analyses on these models using both different data sources for the prevalence of sexual role categories (exclusive insertivity, versatility, exclusive receptivity) and on the frequency of switching among sexual role categories over time. Finally, to help contextualize the ORs obtained in observational studies, and to justify some of our modeling assumptions, we estimate the ORs for HIV status by circumcision status that would be obtained if one sampled either all MSM or predominantly insertive MSM from our modeled population.
Methods The PUMA modeling framework has been described in detail elsewhere [7]; we adapt “Model 2” from this previous work. In brief, it is a stochastic network-based model with an initial population size of 10,000 MSM; in the Peru version, men are distinguished by age, circumcision status, infection status, sexual role preference, time since infection, diagnosis status, viral load, treatment status (including adherence), and propensity for casual UAI. Sexual role preference includes exclusive insertives; exclusive receptives, and versatiles; versatile men are further distinguished by an insertive propensity, drawn from a (0,1) uniform distribution. We track both main partnerships and casual contacts, each using exponential random graph modeling [31]–[34], with relational and UAI probabilities determined by age, diagnosis status, casual UAI propensity, AIDS status, sexual role, and existence of other ongoing relationships. Each day, relationships may form and/or break; UAI and potentially transmission occur; viral load is updated; and men may enter the population, get tested, initiate treatment, stop treatment, and/or die of AIDS or natural causes. Under the intervention model, men also may opt for circumcision. Behavioral parameters are derived from multiple studies, predominantly the Peru 2008 Sentinel Surveillance [35] and the baseline of HPTN-039 (a trial of daily oral HSV-2 suppressive therapy with acyclovir to prevent HIV acquisition) [36], and are summarized in the Appendix in [15]. Table 2 details the scenarios explored, including the proportion of HIV-negative MSM receiving adult MC under each intervention scenario. All of our interventions target predominantly insertive MSM, for which we model three definitions: men with propensities towards insertivity during UAI of 100%, >80% or >60%. Men are eligible if they meet this definition, are uncircumcised, and are HIV-negative. For each definition of predominantly insertive, we consider two uptake levels (25%, 50%) among eligible men. Adult men who are eligible and willing to uptake at rollout do so then, regardless of age; subsequently, men opt for circumcision as they enter the sexually active population or first meet the definition of predominantly insertive MSM, with probability equal to uptake. We assume that healing lasts 30 days [37]. With no numerical estimates at the time for increased per-act risk during healing, nor for realized UAI frequency reduction while healing in these populations, we arbitrarily assumed values of 30% and 50% respectively, and note that basic sensitivity analyses showed results to be highly insensitive to these choices given the short duration of healing. Throughout, we assume the same proportional reduction in transmission potential (∼60%) from MC for UIAI as for UIVI [1]–[3]. PPT PowerPoint slide
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larger image TIFF original image Download: Table 2. Scenarios explored. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102960.t002 Given the central importance of sexual role in circumcision impacts, we explored multiple models for role based on existing data. For our main model, we use data from the 2008 Peru sentinel surveillance, which asks men about AI role over the previous five years; 22.7% reported exclusive insertivity, 50.1% versatility, and 27.2% exclusive receptivity. It is possible that this sample was biased towards receptive men, who are more likely than other MSM to identify as gay and to be reached through some of the study recruiting venues. We thus also use sexual role proportions from the baseline data of the Peru arm of HPTN-039 (54.0% exclusively insertive, 34.9% versatile, 11.1% exclusively receptive) as one sensitivity analysis (“high role segregation” model, or HRS). This sample, subject to its own sources of bias, had an extremely high proportion of men reporting exclusive insertivity; we expect the two studies to bracket the true population proportions. We run this model for the >80%/25% scenario and compare it to the analogous main model. Our models thus far assume that men remain in one sexual role category for life. We next explore different assumptions about the rates of role-category-switching (RCS), chosen over a feasible but arbitrary range given the paucity of long-term sexual role data. We consider cases in which men switch sexual role categories on average every 3 or 5 years. We assume a memoryless, stochastic process, implying a geometric distribution of time within a given category. We assume men do not switch directly from exclusively insertive to exclusively receptive or vice versa; any switch is to or from versatile, although men may move among all categories over the lifecourse. We consider this analysis to be exploratory, given the lack of lifecourse data on sexual role in Peru specifically, and return to this point in the Discussion. Each combination of parameters considered is simulated 10 times in order to assess both the mean and variation in outcomes of interest. We use the latter to calculate theoretical confidence intervals around the mean with the t-distribution, which are plotted in most Figures. These provide a sense of the relative stochasticity of the various outcome measures, and must be interpreted in the light of our modeled population size. Since that population size is arbitrary, and in most cases the questions we are investigating do not have a natural null hypothesis, questions of statistical significance are ill-defined in many cases. Instead, the confidence intervals provide a sense of the natural variation that might be expected in outcomes, and how easy or hard it would be to detect differences between an intervention and control or between two different interventions in MSM populations of this size. We explore this point further in the Discussion. For all intervention scenarios, our outcome measures include proportion of incident cases averted, proportional reduction in prevalence, and number of cases averted per circumcision, all relative to a baseline of identical behavioral parameters but no MSM-MC intervention, and all measured over 25 years. Cases averted are measured by aggregate counts, not at the individual level, since both the baseline and intervention scenarios are stochastic and different individuals will be infected in each. Proportion of cumulative cases averted at time x is thus [(incident infections in baseline model from time 0 to x – incident infections in intervention model from time 0 to x) / incident infections in baseline model from time 0 to x]; other metrics share the same logic. Note that the stochasticity of births and non-AIDS deaths will make the population exposed to possible infection vary across scenarios; however, these phenomena, while stochastic, have the same probabilities in every scenario, and examinations of the runs indicate that the potentially exposed population varies by less than 0.2% on average among scenarios. We then divide the cases averted (at the group level) between those averted among the men circumcised as part of the intervention (i.e. that would be directly detectable in a follow-up study of the intervention) and those in the rest of the population (which would only be detectable from population surveillance or similar methods, and more difficult to attribute to the intervention). For such a comparison, we must define for our baseline (non-intervention) scenarios a population of men who would have been circumcised if the intervention had been available; this is done separately for each intervention scenario, with the same inclusion criteria and uptake as that scenario, and is also repeated 10 times. For cases averted per circumcision, we consider both a measure with no discounting, and one with 3% annual discounting on both inputs and outputs. Because we are not explicitly modeling cost, our input is a count of circumcisions; in this case discounting may be thought of as occurring in terms of an implicit cost metric, the average cost of an adult circumcision. This discounting allows for additional comparisons with other published MSM-MC models.
Discussion Our models suggest a rather modest public health impact of a male circumcision intervention for MSM in a setting like Peru, despite the high levels of sexual role segregation, low level of neonatal circumcision, high HIV incidence among MSM, and high levels of potential willingness to be circumcised. Scenarios considered, including coverage up to 50%, suggest that such an intervention is unlikely to avert more than 5–10% of cases over the coming decades. These numbers are similar to those observed in two earlier modeling studies conducted for high-resource settings, although one key difference is that we were able to achieve those reductions with only 25%–50% coverage instead of the 100% coverage included in previous work [21], [22]. Nevertheless, we consider our coverage values to be an upper bound of what is likely achievable for MSM in this setting, such that the overall impact will not be large. Circumcision may, however, be a useful consideration for individual men who are exclusively insertive and who anticipate remaining as such for long periods of time. It is also possible that in a different setting, with different risk practices, sexual mixing, and/or inclusion of other prevention strategies, that a larger impact could be achieved. We did not conduct an explicit cost-effectiveness analysis. Nevertheless, our main scenarios were more efficient (in terms of circumcisions per case averted) than those considered by Anderson et al. [21], whose analysis found circumcision to be generally cost-effective and sometimes cost-saving. Our higher effectiveness is likely due in part to higher risk behaviors and HIV incidence in this population, as well as high sexual role segregation and low background circumcision prevalence. However, our results, and in particular our measures of circumcisions per case averted, were highly sensitive to assumptions about the frequency with which men change among sexual role categories over the lifecourse. Our point estimates for efficiency approach those of Anderson et al. when men switch among sexual role categories on average every 3 years; however, at this level we also cannot rule out a lack of effect within a population of the size we modeled (10,000 MSM). This sensitivity of circumcision's effects to the frequency of sexual role switching is a particular challenge, given how little data exist on men's long-term role trajectories in any population. Our results suggest that any considerations of an MSM-MC intervention in any population must begin by collecting such data. Longitudinal data of role switching over time in other settings do exist, but are rare. For instance, early data from the Amsterdam MSM cohort [6] suggested that between two consecutive 6-month periods, among those men continuing to have anal sex, the percentage of insertive, receptive, and versatile men retaining their role category was 69%, 79%, and 71%, respectively. Very few men switched directly from insertive to receptive (4%) or vice versa (3%), consistent with our model. Switches out of versatile were about equal in each direction (15% to insertive, 14% to receptive). However, a higher proportion of insertive men (26%) than receptive men (18%) moved to versatile. In our model, these numbers are equal. Although we do not have similar data for Peru, the age distribution by role in cross-sectional data, where insertivity is more common among younger men, is suggestive of the fact that this pattern is likely to be similar in both settings [13]. If this is indeed the case, then our model may be overstating the potential effectiveness of MSM-MC for any given overall rate of role change, since in reality a higher proportion of insertive men than we model would be progressing to other states. Our model assumes that the proportional reduction in risk from circumcision is the same for UIAI among MSM as it is for UIVI (∼60%), as do the two previous published papers in their baseline models. There is no direct evidence supporting this assumption, since there has been no circumcision trial among MSM. As a minimum check on its reasonableness, we demonstrated that the assumption is broadly consistent in our modeled population with the two meta-analyses of observational studies that consider HIV prevalence by circumcision status among all MSM and among predominantly insertive MSM. Nevertheless, the estimate remains speculative. It might even be an underestimate, since point estimates for the OR or RR of HIV status by circumcision status among predominantly insertive MSM have been <0.4 in multiple studies conducted in resource-limited settings with a historical pattern of sexual role segregation [19], [20]. One potential reason for the different results by setting in these observational studies is previous history of sexual role switching, since inclusion criteria typically involve role in a bounded time period of the recent past. The observational studies thus provide some suggestive evidence that sexual role switching may be less frequent over the lifecourse in settings like Peru and South Africa than in resource-rich settings. Nevertheless, we reiterate that data on sexual role switching over the lifecourse would be crucial to collect before any MSM-MC intervention. We included theoretical confidence intervals in our analyses, derived from the variation observed across our ten simulations of each scenario. These represent the amount of stochasticity in outcome that might be expected (with 95% probability) in a population of the size that we modeled. To interpret these, then, it is useful to consider what such a population might represent. The Peruvian census indicates that ∼30% of the nation's population comprises males in our modeled age range [38]. No solid estimate for the percentage of adult males who are MSM exists for Peru. If one believes that figure to be <1%, then the stochasticity in our model may be reflective of the city of Lima; if one believes a figure more like 3%, then the population-size-induced stochasticity would more resemble the metropolitan areas of Trujillo, Arequipa, or Chiclayo (Peru's second- to fourth-largest urban areas, respectively). One phenomenon that we excluded but which might increase the effectiveness of MSM-MC is behavioral bisexuality among MSM. Female sex partners of such men would be an additional population provided indirect protection by MSM-MC, especially given evidence that exclusively insertive men have the most female partners among MSM [13]. However, these men may also be the least likely to agree to MSM-MC, if it were conducted as a stand-alone intervention without parallel MC interventions among heterosexual males; in this context, opting for adult MC would be a potential signal to partners of same-sex sexual activity. This consideration was part of our motivation to model lower uptake rates than previous studies. In settings where many MSM are behaviorally bisexual and not open about their same-sex sexual activity, MSM–MC will clearly have its greatest uptake—and greatest public health impact—when it occurs in parallel with efforts to increase MC among heterosexual males. Additional challenges for any MSM-MC intervention include the fact that its effects are slow to accumulate (over two decades, given the lifelong protection each circumcision affords), and that about half of the public health effect is not directly detectable, through missed onward transmission. Elective adult circumcision for MSM is unlikely to achieve a major reduction in new HIV infections in settings like Peru, despite high and relatively stable levels of sexual role segregation and high HIV incidence rates. Additional data on other populations of MSM with high incidence and high role segregation (e.g., parts of Asia and Africa) is needed to determine whether these results are generalizable. MSM-MC should currently be thought of as benefitting an individual, rather than having a substantial public health benefit.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the PUMA team, the staff of Impacta, the Statnet development team, the research participants, and Drs. Silvia Montano and Tadeusz Kochel from the US Naval Medical Research Unit 6.
Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: SMG NBC EV JRL JDF JS SPB. Performed the experiments: SMG NBC. Analyzed the data: SMG NBC. Wrote the paper: SMG NBC EV JRL JDF JS SPB.A toxic, flesh-eating street drug known as “Krokodil” is reportedly showing up on Niagara Region Streets. The two cases of addicts admitting using the drug are believed to be the first time the street drug has been reported in Canada.
Niagara Regional Police warn the public to think twice about injecting Krokodil, the potentially fatal heroin substitute. ( Jeff Vinnick / For the Toronto Star )
News of the drug appearing in Canada is so significant and frightening that the story has been picked up by the Independent newspaper in Britain. It notes that CHCH TV in Hamilton has reporting three cases of the drug in the Niagara Region. Even by street drug standards, Krokodil is considered ugly. It’s a toxic blend of household chemicals such as iodine, gasoline, industrial cleaning oil, lighter fluid and paint thinner mixed with codeine.
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It was given the street name “Krokodil,” because of the scaly, crocodile-like skin that appears around the injection site. Niagara Regional Police warn the public to think twice about injecting the potentially fatal heroin substitute. “It is important we continue to educate about the dangers of drugs like Krokodil to combat making the wrong decisions concerning experimenting with any mind altering substance,” a statement from Niagara Regional police says. There have been two reported cases of Krokodil use in the region, police say. There was no report on where the drug is manufactured. But there are fears a market has appeared for it after OxyContin went off the market
“Krokodil is known to be primarily used by heroin addicts that can no longer afford heroin,” the police bulletin states. “Some users of “Krokodil” reported that they thought they were buying and using heroin until they started developing sores.” The drug, also known as “desomorphine,” is extremely addictive, police warn.
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It first became popular in Russia and Ukraine more than a decade ago. “It causes brain damage; damage to internal organs and produces severe tissue damage that, at times, requires limb amputations,” Niagara Regional Police say.Shutdown’s impact in Virginia: McAuliffe’s lead over Cuccinelli has grown… New NBC4/NBC News/Marist poll has McAuliffe up, 46%-38%, in advance of Hillary Clinton stumping for McAuliffe on Saturday... Virginia has become a microcosm of the GOP’s woes… Hatch and McCain vs. Heritage… Budget talks have lowered sights… More Obamacare website woes… McConnell focuses on Grimes, not Bevin… Cook Political Report expands the House playing field… And “Meet the Press” has Schumer and Coburn.
Steve Helber / AP Republican gubernatorial candidate, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, center, gestures during a press conference at the Capitol in Richmond, Va., on Oct. 15. Cuccinelli and running mates Lt. Gov candidate, E.W. Jackson, left, and Attorney General candidate State Sen. Mark Obenshain, right, received the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police of Virginia.
*** Measuring the shutdown’s impact in Virginia: By now, you know that the 16-day government shutdown took a toll on the Republican Party -- in the polls and with a now-expanded 2014 House map (see below). But here’s one more negative result the shutdown has had on the GOP: It has hurt Republican Ken Cuccinelli’s chances of winning next month’s gubernatorial contest in Virginia. According to a new NBC4/NBC News/Marist poll, Democrat Terry McAuliffe holds an eight-point lead over Cuccinelli among likely voters, 46%-38%, up from McAuliffe’s five-point edge (43%-38%) last month before the shutdown. Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis gets 9%. And when the race is reduced to just two candidates, McAuliffe’s lead jumps to nine points, 52%-43%. But here’s the role the shutdown has played in government-worker-heavy Virginia: 39% of residents say they or a family member were impacted by the shutdown. And by a 54%-29% margin, voters blamed the shutdown on congressional Republicans instead of President Obama. What’s more, the GOP’s fav/unfav in the state is dismal 32%-62% among voters (and 23%-71% among independents), versus the Dem Party’s 45%-50% (and 39%-56% among indies). “Just when Cuccinelli needed to start closing the gap against McAuliffe, the government shutdown became a huge roadblock,” says Marist’s Lee Miringoff.
*** Virginia has become a microcosm of the GOP’s woes: Of course, Cuccinelli came into this contest with his own issues (example: he trails McAuliffe by 20 points among female voters). Bob McDonnell’s (R) ethics woes didn’t help the party over the summer (though McDonnell’s approval rating among voters is a very healthy 55%). And Cuccinelli and the GOP are being outspent in the race by a 2-to-1 margin. But if Cuccinelli ends up losing the Nov. 5 gubernatorial race, many will point to the shutdown being the final nail in his coffin. Yet there’s a larger political point to make about Virginia: It has become a microcosm of the GOP’s woes. The party nominated the more conservative candidate over potentially a moderate one (due to the state’s nominating convention instead of a primary). And it has a damaged brand in this key swing state (let us repeat, the GOP’s fav/unfav is 32%-62%). If the party can’t win this state in 2016, it is VERY difficult to get to 270 electoral votes. Oh, and guess who is campaigning for McAuliffe tomorrow in Virginia -- Hillary Clinton.
After a 16-day shutdown, many members of Congress have gone on recess until next week as technical glitches continue to impact Americans trying to sign up for Obamacare. NBC's Peter Alexander reports.
*** Hatch, McCain vs. Heritage: Next door to Virginia, in the nation’s capital, the shutdown has had another result: It has brought the GOP to the brink of an ideological civil war. Yesterday on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) took a shoot at Heritage Action, which helped lead the defund-Obamacare effort. "Heritage used to be the conservative organization helping Republicans,” he said. "There’s a real question in the minds of many Republicans right now, and I’m not just speaking for myself: Is Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn’t amount to anything anymore?" In addition, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) fired off this tweet yesterday: “Must-read for Robert Robb, #Arizona’s preeminent conservative commentator: ‘Sad Demise of the Heritage Foundation.’” In what appears to be a response to his critics, Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint (a former colleague of Hatch’s and McCain’s) pens this Wall Street Journal op-ed: “[I]t's worth explaining why my organization, the Heritage Foundation, and other conservatives chose this moment to fight—and why we will continue to fight. The reason is simple: to protect the American people from the harmful effects of this law.” It’s a fascinating battle to watch: These longtime GOP senators vs. three of the most powerful conservative groups: Heritage Action, Senate Conservatives Fund, and Club for Growth.
*** Lowered sights: Also in Washington yesterday, the budget talks between Republicans (led by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan) and Democrats (headed by Sen. Patty Murray) got underway. And as the New York Times notes, the headline is that everyone seems to be lowering their sights to getting a small deal. “With the scope of the talks narrowed for now, on the table are ideas left over from past, failed bargaining: possible reductions in other programs — like farm subsidies, federal pensions, the Postal Service and unemployment insurance — and relatively minimal tax loophole closings, possibly as little as $55 billion.” Do pay attention to Murray’s comment yesterday that “We believe there is common ground.” That’s a clear sign these talks aren’t about a “grand bargain”; rather, they’re about getting the bare minimum, it appears.
*** Obamacare website woes: As we said yesterday, the end of the government shutdown is bringing more attention and scrutiny to the Obamacare websites. And here’s USA Today: “The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system... Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer's cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message.” And here’s NBC’s Tom Costello on the company behind the problematic rollout. Of course, one of the stories here is that the websites for the state exchanges are working MUCH better than the federal website.
*** McConnell focuses on Grimes, not Bevin: In 2014 news, Mitch McConnell seems to have picked which contest he’s more concerned about -- between his primary challenge from Matt Bevin and his general-election challenge against Alison Grimes. The answer: the general election. “Asked if the deal would hurt his chances in a primary against conservative businessman Matt Bevin, McConnell declined to comment on his primary. But he offered up a stinging analysis of his Democratic opponent, Grimes,” Politico writes. “‘What happened yesterday completely steps on the whole rationale for her candidacy, which is that somehow I’m part of what she calls the dysfunction in Washington,” McConnell said. ‘Look, I demonstrated on four occasions — including yesterday the most recent occasion, yesterday — that when the country is in crisis and something needs to be done on a bipartisan basis, I can step forward and get an agreement.’ Grimes, McConnell said, has had a ‘pretty bad 24 hours.’”
*** Cook Report expands the House playing field: Also in 2014 news, the Cook Political Report moved additional House seats into its competitive column. “In the interim, we are shifting our House Topline from a Republican gain of two to seven seats to a minimal net change of up to five seats in either party's direction, with larger Democratic gains possible if Republicans continue to pursue unpopular and self-destructive strategies,” the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman writes.
*** On “Meet” this Sunday: Finally, “Meet the Press” this Sunday will have Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Coburn (R-OK).
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A rally in support of Planned Parenthood, Thursday, April 7, 2011, on the National Mall in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Ad Policy
After a series of odd visits by patients asking questions about sex-selective abortions, Planned Parenthood has determined that their centers are likely the target of another undercover video “sting” operation.
In a post on RH Reality Check, Planned Parenthood’s Vice President of Education Leslie Kantor and Senior Medical Adviser Dr. Carolyn Westhoff wrote that they anticipate the group—presumably Live Action, which has targeted Planned Parenthood in the past—“likely in coordination with a broad range of anti-choice leaders, will soon launch a propaganda campaign with the goal of discrediting Planned Parenthood.”
According to the Huffington Post, Planned Parenthood clinics in at least eleven states over the last few weeks have been the target of “patients” coming in asking a series of questions about finding out the gender of their fetus, and indicating that they want to terminate the pregnancy if it’s a girl.
Westhoof and Kantor write, “From the questions that were repeatedly asked in these recent hoax visits, we expect that the materials eventually released will focus on Planned Parenthood’s non-judgmental discussions with the various women who posed as possible patients.” Planned Parenthood’s policy—rightly—is that the reason why a woman chooses to get an abortion (outside of coercion) is really none of their business:
Planned Parenthood insists on the highest professional standards, which among other things means we offer nonjudgmental, confidential care in accordance with relevant laws. That doesn’t mean we always agree with the decisions made by people who seek our help, but it does mean that we realize that we can’t know all of the circumstances faced by any patient and that requiring women to justify the care they seek is a dangerous health care model for an organization.
Obviously Live Action—run by James O’Keefe protégé Lila Rose—will not see Planned Parenthood’s attempts to respect patient privacy in the same way. In the past, the group has used heavily edited videos to accuse Planned Parenthood of supporting sex trafficking. I’m quite sure that this latest round of videos will claim to show that Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about sex-selective abortions. The truth, however, is that they care about their patients.
Abortion providers must be nonjudgmental if women disclose why they’re choosing to have an abortion. Some of the main reasons women cite for seeking abortions are that they want to be a good parent in the future and concern for existing children. But no matter what the reason—even if it’s one that most would find reprehensible—it’s still a woman’s decision alone. Changing that standard is too slippery a slope. Planned Parenthood sticking to this incredibly important issue of privacy in their caretaking of patients isn’t controversial—it’s ethical.Nadia Nadim, Sam Kerr Score in 2-0 Road Victory; Cameron Records Shutout
Houston, Texas (Friday, August 7, 2015) – Sky Blue FC (4-7-5, 17 points) picked up a critical three points against the Houston Dash (5-6-5, 20 points) at BBVA Compass Stadium on Friday night, winning the season series against the Dash behind a 2-0 road victory. The match, which was aired live on FOX Sports GO, saw goals from forwards Nadia Nadim and Sam Kerr, with goalkeeper Brittany Cameron recording the shutout with another stellar performance in net.
“We were able to catch a couple of breaks tonight, and we capitalized on them,” said Jim Gabarra, Sky Blue FC Technical Director & Head Coach. “The whole team had a really good performance. We were able to avoid some potential letdowns in the first half and started the second half with a high level of intensity that we needed to come away with the win.”
After some back-and-forth action that saw Sky Blue FC get the better of the possession, Houston had its first dangerous opportunity in the 27th minute. On the sequence, Dash striker Melissa Henderson turned on a ball from the left flank and fired it towards the frame. Continuing her impressive season was Cameron, who put a diving hand on the ball before it was cleared away by defender Lindsi Cutshall.
Sky Blue FC eventually broke the deadlock in the 38th minute. On the scoring play, Australian forward Sam Kerr centered a ball from the left flank, where Kelley O’Hara stretched to place it at the feet of defender Caitlin Foord just outside the left post. Levin then touched the feed before chipping it across the mouth of the goal, where Danish striker Nadia Nadim was able to put away a diving header to give the road side a 1-0 advantage.
Both teams continued to battle as the game maintained a one-goal differential, thanks in large part to some critical saves from Cameron and some well tracked balls by the Sky Blue FC backline.
In the 72nd minute, Sky Blue FC was able to add an insurance tally. On the series, Kerr was able to collect possession and raced toward the penalty area as the Houston defense attempted to collapse on her. Kerr then tried to step around defender Ella Masar to create some space on top of the 18-yard box, firing a ball that Masar was able to block. However, the rebound landed right back at the feet of Kerr, giving her just enough room to hammer a hard shot that was outside the reach of Flash goalkeeper Erin McLeod. The scoring strike quickly hit the back of the net, and Sky Blue FC saw itself with a 2-0 lead that it would never relinquish.
“It was almost like a half-court basketball game in the second half,” Gabarra reflected. “They came out and pressed a little higher, which made our back four a bit hesitant to come out. Seeing that our defenders were having to play in a more defensively defined role, our attacking players stepped up and evened our play on the other side of the field.”
With the win, Sky Blue FC has now won three of its last five contests, and the only loss for the New Jersey side was a heartbreaker last Saturday night when the Western New York Flash put away a game-winner in the 89th minute.
“This team has been consistent with their attitudes and team spirit,” Gabarra concluded. “When our World Cup players returned, it was an additional boost for our team chemistry. It is a credit to every player on this team that they have hung in there and fought through a lot of adversity. I am proud of the way this team has maintained their positive spirit, and we look to carry that momentum into the remaining four games of the regular season. Our goal has always been reaching the playoffs, and that is where our focus remains.”
With Friday night’s win, Sky Blue FC currently trails the Dash by three points for the fourth and final playoff spot with four games remaining on its regular season slate.
Sky Blue FC will have a quick turnaround after tonight, next playing on Wednesday, August 12th, in an afternoon matinee with the Chicago Red Stars. The team will then return home to Yurcak Field on Saturday, August 22nd, hosting Portland Thorns FC at 7:00 PM.
Individual and group tickets are on sale now and can be purchased online at tickets.skybluefc.com or by calling 888-SBFC-TIX (888-723-2849).
Sky Blue FC vs. Houston Dash
August 7, 2015 – BBVA Compass Stadium
Houston, Texas
Scoring Summary
SBFC: 1-1-2
HOU: 0-0-0
SBFC 38 N.Nadim (C.Levin)
SBFC 72 S.Kerr
Lineups:
SBFC – Cameron, Rampone, Foord, Cutshall, Levin, O’Hara, Stanton, Freels (Lytle-87), Killion, Kerr, Nadim
Substitutes Not Used: Bledsoe, Haagsma, Goodson, Filigno
HOU: McLeod, Masar, Pressley (Axon-77), Brush, Klingenberg, Andressa, Brian, Lloyd, Ohai, McDonald, Henderson (McCarty-69)
Substitutes Not Used: Henninger, Camila, LaPonte, Jackson
Misconduct Summary:
SBFC 45 S.Killion (Yellow Card) |
"What Have We Done."
David Wood, welcome back to FRESH AIR. I'm wondering how this article got started. Did the military - did military leaders come to you and share their fears with you, or did you approach them?
DAVID WOOD: No, Terry. I was thinking back to the - during the Cold War, I spent a lot of time in Europe and was acutely aware of everything that the U.S. and the Russians were doing to prevent war from breaking out accidentally. And it was a huge, huge effort in which a lot of smart people were completely dedicated. And we don't have anything like that today.
I started looking at incidents that were happening where there weren't set procedures for managing a potential crisis, thinking this is not good. We don't have those kinds of arrangements. We don't have those kinds of communication channels already set up. And we don't have a regular exchange of military officers and senior officials with their Russian counterparts. And that kind of got me worried.
GROSS: We'll get to why we don't have that a little later. But first, share one of your concerns about how a war can start by accident between the U.S. and Russia with one miscalculation.
WOOD: Sure. I spent some time with the pilots and crews that fly U.S. and NATO surveillance aircraft out over the Baltic Sea. So this is an interesting part of the world. It's basically where the - Russia grinds up against NATO. And it's - there's a lot of contested issues right there, including Russia's seizure of Crimea and its interference in the Ukraine and its long history of meddling in the Baltic States. So there's a lot going on there.
When a U.S. aircraft, for example, is flying up the Baltic Sea in international airspace, inevitably a Russian jet will come up alongside in an intercept to identify what the U.S. aircraft is and what it's doing. Perfectly normal, absolutely routine, happens all over the world. Russians intercept us. We intercept the Russians. That's fine. Everybody's professional. And it's not a problem. Increasingly though. American pilots tell me that the Russians are undertaking really harassment actions.
For example, rather than closing gently with the American aircraft - approaching it maybe 30 miles an hour, closing the distance at about 30 miles an hour - they'll come really fast at the American aircraft and then veer off at the last second, kind of a frightening maneuver. The other thing is - become fairly common is what they call a barrel roll. And this is a maneuver where a Russian plane will approach an American plane, come alongside and then circle around the American plane while both are barreling along at about 400 miles an hour.
GROSS: Well, it sounds terrifying. There's a plane circling you, and you're both traveling at like 400 miles an hour.
WOOD: It's very concerning. For example, the pilot of a big four-engine American surveillance aircraft who I spent some time with them, they can't really see what's going on. They can't tell if the Russian is about to clip a tail or a wing tip. And it's frightening. And there's nothing you can do as an American pilot except sit there and hope the Russian guy knows what he's doing.
GROSS: OK. So let's talk about the possible consequences of this. Say intentionally or unintentionally, a Russian plane that's intercepted a NATO or U.S. plane through, say, a barrel roll clips a wing, the plane dives into the sea, the pilots are hurt or killed. How do you control the consequences of that?
WOOD: Well, the first thing that could happen is if there's an American or NATO aircraft in the vicinity, they are armed and - with missiles - air to air missiles - but also armed with the approval to defend themselves. If that pilot decided that he was under threat from this Russian pilot, he might decide to open fire, or he might decide to be in touch with his immediate air control center. And they might decide, yeah, take that guy out. We don't know what's happening here but take him out.
I mean, this is a far-fetched scenario, but it does illustrate the dangers that lurk in a situation like this. The bigger danger, I think, is that back in Washington at the White House, an event like that would become known immediately. And President Trump might decide to tweet a response which could set off a whole chain of events that would be uncontrollable. Now, in past times, that wouldn't be the case because there would be layers and layers of military and professional staff people between the incident and the president. But that's not the case anymore for two reasons.
One is a lot of the offices of the staff who would normally process a situation like that are empty because they just haven't been nominated or confirmed. So I'm talking about the Pentagon State Department and the White House. The other thing is that it's now possible because of social media and 24/7 news cycles for the president to know as much or thinks he knows as much as the people right on the scene. So all that argues for an itchy trigger finger in the White House.
GROSS: Well, speaking of itchy trigger finger, let me quote something that that you quote, which is something that candidate Trump said last April after a Russian fighter jet barrel rolled a U.S. jet over the Baltic. And candidate Trump said that the Obama administration had only lodged a diplomatic protest.
Trump said that if he were president, you want to make at least a phone call or two. "But at a certain point, when that sucker comes at you, you got to shoot. You got to shoot. I mean, you got to shoot." Is that the kind of response that concerns the military, like, an over eagerness to fight?
WOOD: Yeah, of course it does. I mean, there's a lot of concern in the military that as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said and others have said that the decision time in responding to a potential crisis like that has been enormously compressed. And what they mean by that is, well, Terry, I went back and looked at the Cuban Missile Crisis, right? And it was weeks and weeks and weeks between when President Kennedy learned that the Russians were putting missiles in Cuba and when he decided what to do about it.
And there wasn't the kind of instant communication and social media. So they're constantly banging up against the White House. When are you going to do something? When are you going to do something? And that sort of gathering of antagonistic political pressure. You know, weeks and weeks went by. And we don't have that today. I mean, imagine if the Russians did participate in a incident in which a U.S. plane was clipped and went down. And by the way, those American planes flying over the Baltics, it's not just a three-man flight crew. There's, like, two dozen other people on board. So it would be an enormous loss of life. In that case, the White House would know pretty quickly what happened. And as I say, the political pressure to do something adds to the impulse of the president to do something. And, you know, that's not something the military is - looks kindly at.
GROSS: And in the meantime, you write Putin is using a deliberate strategy of intimidation and provocation. What's the evidence of that?
WOOD: There's evidence all around the world where U.S. or NATO forces come up against Russians. So in Syria, for example, the problem of Russian aircraft harassing or barrel rolling American aircraft is pretty common. There is a U.S. and Russia communications channel in which they can de-conflict or sort out where their aircraft go, where their aircraft can fly where our aircraft can fly. And if we're planning a mission into a different part of Syria, we let them know and so on and so forth. But that doesn't stop this harassment behavior.
It also happens over the Baltic Sea quite frequently in the air, and it also happens in the Black Sea. There have been a couple of incidents in the last few years where Russian fighters have flown attack profiles against U.S. ships in the Black Sea. You know, that's just not necessary from any kind of a military standpoint. And it's just - it's just pure harassment.
GROSS: One of the military leaders you spoke to described Putin's strategy as escalation dominance. What is that?
WOOD: Well, the way it was described to me is basically the game of chicken, that the Russian - deliberate Russian strategy is to ratchet up the pressure in a crisis until the other side backs down. Well, you know, that's a - that's kind of a scary thing. And, you know, they have shown a willingness to push the envelope, as it were, in those kinds of situations. Prime example is their backing of separatists in Ukraine. And there have been many, many documented instances of Russian conventional military forces crossing the border into Ukraine and fighting there and bringing in weapons and that kind of thing. You know, in a confrontation over that diplomatic confrontation with NATO and the European Union and the U.S., Russian President Vladimir Putin denied doing that and then pushed it even farther, basically daring NATO to respond. And, you know, the difficult thing here for NATO is that the Russian provocations never quite rise to the level where a response is demanded.
In other words, you know, the problem with NATO is that decisions have to be unanimous, and if NATO is going to respond to Russia, everyone has to agree. Well, that's a difficult problem because, for example, Italy might not want to risk going to war in order to protect Estonia, which is a NATO member along the Baltic Sea. And so this game of chicken that Putin plays, he stays just below the level where NATO would have to gather together and decide together to do something. And that's not likely to happen.
GROSS: But in the meantime, that can weaken NATO because of the dissension.
WOOD: Which is - I think Putin's goal is to weaken NATO and to drive wedges between its members. But again, you know, all that is OK. I mean, that's like international politics, right? That's OK. The problem is when it comes down to a potential crisis and what happens then.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is David Wood. He's the military correspondent for The Huffington Post, and his latest article is called "This Is How The Next World War Starts." We're going to take a short break, then we'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOUIS SCLAVIS' "FETE FORAINE")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is David Wood. He's the military correspondent for The Huffington Post. He's been covering war and war zones and the military for over 35 years. His latest article is called "This Is How The Next World War Starts," and it's about how the military establishment is actually very worried about the possibility of war between the U.S. and Russia through a miscalculation.
You're concerned that if things come down to a crisis point that neither Trump nor Putin are good crisis managers, what are the - some of the traits that you think they share that are bad for crisis management?
WOOD: Well, one thing we don't know about President Trump is how he behaves in private. So publicly, at least, he is impulsive and shoots off his mouth and tweets things that make everybody else cringe. If he was in a room or on the phone with Vladimir Putin, how would he behave? Would it be different? I don't know, and I don't think we know that. And I don't think we'll ever know that until it comes to a crisis where there's just those two guys on the phone. So - but on the outside at least, it appears as if Trump is impulsive, makes decisions, you know, sort of flies by the seat of his pants, does not staff out new positions.
For instance, when President Trump has declared a change in U.S. nuclear strategy, it comes in the form of a tweet. And it's not been staffed out, and people are - people at the Pentagon are like uh-oh, now what? It's - it takes everybody by surprise. So that appears to be the way Trump operates. Putin, on the other hand, I think is very calculating, and the way he handled the situation in which a Russian jet was shot down on the Turkish border a year and a half or two years ago is a good illustration of that.
So that's one difference between the two men. But also they're both responsive to a - their political base of ultra nationalism, right? And this is worrisome in a crisis because you can imagine that if there is, for example, a - some kind of a small minor or military clash that threatened to grow bigger, that partisans both in the U.S. and in Russia would be clamoring for strong action. And that's kind of a dangerous dynamic.
GROSS: Well, another thing you point out just in terms of, you know, conflict management is that first reports can be wrong and that you need a thick skin to ward off insults and accusations and to acknowledge the limited value of threats and bluffs. How would you say both Putin and Trump do on that score?
WOOD: Well, we don't know. We can only guess because a crisis like that hasn't arisen. But if you look back at the - at a recent situation that could have gone really bad - and that was a year - just over a year ago when Iran seized 10 American Navy sailors who had strayed off course in the Persian Gulf and strayed into Iranian waters. And they were caught and taken ashore and held - detained. What could have happened in that situation is that our Navy warships in the Persian Gulf could have attacked.
They could have gone to get them, and that could have sparked a whole conflagration or the White House could have been tweeting that this will - all kinds of insults aimed at the Revolutionary Guards in Iran which might have invited a response and just ratcheted up the tension of both sides until something bad happened. I mean, you can imagine, for example, if the White House was insulting Iran that they'd say, OK, we're not going to give your guys back. But what happened instead was that then Secretary of State John Kerry got on the phone with his counterpart on a communications link that had been set up while they were negotiating the Iran nuclear deal.
And basically the U.S. acknowledged that the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters, that the Iranians had a right to detain them, but that there was nothing more to it than that. There was no apology given, and the Iranians released them. So there was a situation in which crisis management worked really, really well. Nobody got hot under the collar. Nobody wanted the situation to escalate. There were no threats or insults traded back and forth. There was no military action threatened. It was just very calm and very quiet.
Although after that was announced and the sailors were released, Breitbart News which was run by Steve Bannon at the time - Steve Bannon, of course, is now Trump's chief White House strategist - so Breitbart News set upon the release of those sailors that President Obama had been, quote, "castrated on the world stage," close quote, for allegedly having given into the Iranians in some way. That's the kind of response that's really unhelpful in a crisis and helps ratchet up the tension on both sides and can make bad things happen.
GROSS: David Wood is a Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent for The Huffington Post. His latest article in The Huffington Post Highline is titled "This Is How The Next World War Starts." After a break we'll talk about why diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia - the kind of communication that could avert war - has become more difficult than it used to be. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF PATRICK ZIMMERLI'S "GENERATRIX")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with David Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent for The Huffington Post. His latest article in The Huffington Post Highline is titled "This Is How The Next World War Starts." He reports that now that Russia is determined to destabilize the West, Russia and the U.S. are brushing up against each other in perilous ways in international waters and airspace. One false move, one miscalculation can lead to catastrophic consequences. We were talking earlier about how some of the diplomats who go through diplomatic channels to prevent war from breaking out when there is an accident or a misunderstanding, those diplomats aren't in place right now. There's so many unfilled positions in the Pentagon and the White House and in the State Department. And at the same time, President Trump wants to cut the State Department staff by 28 percent. I'm wondering how your contacts at the military feel about that.
WOOD: Well, of course, they're worried because look, the staffs at the Pentagon and the State Department and the national security staff at the White House, those are the people who in a crisis are looking at various alternatives and plotting out consequences of various courses of action. So in the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, the thinking about how to respond to this went back and forth and back and forth until everyone was pretty happy that they'd come to a good course of action, which was to put a quarantine around the island and prevent the Russian ships from coming.
So in a fast-moving crisis, that kind of really fast analysis and wargaming and what-if-ing (ph) the consequences of every proposed course of action is critical, critical, critical and can be done quickly if you have the staff in place. But, you know, if you walk down the 17 and a half miles of corridors in the Pentagon and look in people's offices, there's a lot of empty offices there. And those are the people who, by and large, are - even though they're political professionals - almost all of them are practiced in their craft of national security. And we don't have them in place now. So that's a real problem.
GROSS: Do we have assistant secretaries of defense and state yet?
WOOD: No.
GROSS: So what does that mean practically?
WOOD: Well, what it means is that those offices - the assistant secretary of defense for whatever, you know, there's a dozen or more assistant secretaries of defense for various issues. And what it means is those offices are being filled temporarily by the permanent civil service staff. And those people are really, really good. They are smart. They've been in their jobs for a long time. They know their subjects backwards and forwards.
The problem is that they don't have the political heft to be really heard. So I'm told that in meetings at the Pentagon, for example, where the military is meeting with their - the civilian assistant secretaries, you know, the military is like OK, but you're not the real political appointee. You don't have ties to the White House. You don't have any political heft. Of course, they don't say this out loud, but that's the way the thinking goes.
And so what comes out of the Pentagon policy-wise then tends to reflect the military judgments on issues. Now, the military judgments on issues are good and professional. And they're smart, you know, well-meaning patriotic good folks. But it's one - it can be one side. And as a result, those other points of view that political appointees might bring in don't get heard.
GROSS: So in talking about diplomatic channels between Russia and the U.S. and how those diplomatic channels have helped to prevent war for decades, what role as a diplomat does the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Ambassador Kislyak, play? We've heard his name come up a lot in terms of the investigation into ties between Russia or possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
WOOD: Well, critical role. So it has to work that people in the Pentagon and the White House and the State Department can pick up the phone and have a conversation with the Russian ambassador. That's the way things get smoothed out really quickly. But even before you get to that point, the more critical piece is that the commander of U.S. ground troops in Europe ought to be able to call up his counterpart in Russia and say OK, something bad just happened but here's our view of it. And we're not pushing this. And here's, you know, here's where we are in that situation. But that can't happen.
We don't have those kinds of communications anymore, they don't exist. Those communications links don't exist in part because after Russia invaded Crimea, the Congress and the administration at the time decided that's it, we're going to punish them by having no more military cooperation. And so those communications links which used to enable a senior U.S. military commander in Europe to call his Russian counterpart, those went dead. Those don't happen anymore. And so the other thing that has stopped is that during the Cold War and in the few years after the Cold War, there was a huge amount of U.S., NATO and Russian military exchanges.
So even while the U.S. and Russia had nuclear weapons pointed at each other, in Europe on the ground it was common to have Russian inspectors come watch U.S. military maneuvers and vice versa. So what happens in that case, and I remember this very clearly, is that American military officers came to know their Russian counterparts in ways that they would, you know, go off and have a beer together, that kind of thing. We don't have anything like that anymore. That has all stopped for years. And so that kind of informal relationships which can really ease a crisis, when you can say, oh, wait a second, that's Boris, you know, Colonel Boris. I know that guy. He wouldn't, you know, I know how he would behave in this kind of situation.
Those kinds of relationships don't exist. There is in this administration in particular a cloud of distrust over what the White House is saying - right? - which is a really dangerous thing. So when there's a crisis, it is critically important that each side speak clearly and to be believed and trusted - right? - 'cause otherwise, things break down. Well, when you have a president who plays fast and loose with the truth, how are you going to believe what he says in a crisis?
GROSS: You report that a lot of military leaders are really worried about the possibility of war between the U.S. and Russia caused by an accident but leading to a conflict. And you say according to an analysis by the U.S. Army War College, the top Russian leadership is moving Russia onto a war footing. What are they doing?
WOOD: Yeah. So it's hard to know exactly what they're doing because we don't have that much visibility. Again, we don't have the kinds of military exchanges and inspectors and observers that we had even during the height of the Cold War. But from what we know, Russia has been rebuilding its military with an emphasis on hybrid warfare, which means special forces, cyber war, political destabilization, all those kinds of things that again would not quite rise to the level where they demanded a NATO military response.
So I think that's what the - what is referred to as Russia's new war footing. It's not that they're massing tanks at the border ready to pour across, which would lead to World War, but more this kind of creeping hybrid warfare which is deniable. We're not interfering in Ukraine, for example.
And a lot of emphasis on political and social destabilization, which we know was a strategy that was first enunciated by General Gorshkov, who was their chief of staff some years ago. And so that's pretty much out in the open. What's not in the open is how they're carrying it out.
GROSS: Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Wood. He's the military correspondent for The Huffington Post. We've been talking about his article, "This Is How The Next World War Starts," which is about the possibility that military leaders are very worried about, the possibility that war will accidentally break out between Russia and the U.S. because of increasing tensions between the two countries. We'll be back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF KEVIN EUBANKS' "POET")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is David Wood. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent for The Huffington Post. We've been talking about his new article, "This Is How The Next World War Starts," which is about the possibility of a miscalculation leading to war between Russia and the U.S., and that's something that military leaders are very worried about.
H.R. McMaster, who's the national security adviser who replaced General Flynn in that role, is famous for his book "Dereliction Of Duty," which was a book criticizing senior officers during the Vietnam War for not standing up against President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in their strategy on Vietnam. Have you spoken to him directly about how he would apply what he wrote about in that book to his position now as national security adviser?
WOOD: I have not spoken to him directly about that, and I don't see that he's talked to anybody about that. But the implication is clear. What that book was about was criticizing the generals who went along with the president during the Vietnam War even though they knew that what he was - that the policies he was pursuing were counterproductive and wouldn't work. That book, "Dereliction Of Duty," has been on required reading lists for military officers for years and years and years. And the idea has infused throughout the officer corps that if you get an immoral or illegal order, you better resist it. And if you see something that you think is immoral or illegal or just tactically, strategically wrong, your obligation as a military officer is to stand up and voice your criticism.
So that has become an accepted part, I think, of the role of the professional military officer, to stand up and voice your opinion loudly and not sort of go along with things that you think are absolutely wrong. Of course, in the end, the military is a hierarchy, and its officers are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution and so forth. So how far that goes, I don't know. But I think that that book by H.R. McMaster has had a big impact on the officer corps where it now seems more acceptable to voice your opinions loudly within the military context. But of course, in the end, as a sort of a common military saying is you voice your opinion and then salute and carry out the orders.
GROSS: Or face court-martial, right?
WOOD: Right.
GROSS: I want to move on to talking about another article that you wrote, and this was an article about how President Trump's military buildup promises little for working Marines and soldiers. And you're right about the class distinction between the defense contractors who are getting a lot of money and the people who are actually doing the fighting who have a lot of outdated equipment. So what are the kinds of projects that you know that President Trump wants to fund with the increased budget that he wants the Pentagon to have?
WOOD: Well, a lot of the buildup is already under way. So new aircraft carriers cost about $6 billion each, and one is almost done. It's way over cost and over budget. But there are two more in - sort of in the pipeline. So a lot of what is going to be done is already underway, and President Trump had nothing to do with it. I think what Trump has talked about doing is, number one, expanding the size of the military, and then really what he's - the way he's posed it is whatever the military needs, we'll have that and more of it. And so that tends to be those big weapons, costly technical weapons systems, that defense contractors love and that we end up not buying very many of them because they're always way more expensive than promised and don't work quite as well as promised. And so they they end up being politically controversial and stretch on for years and years and it's - tends not to be effective in actual warfighting. The problem is that that sucks money away from what the actual war fighters often need, and the people who do the most of the warfighting are infantry soldiers and Marines. And, you know, when you go talk to them (laughter) I asked a bunch of them, you know, these are sort of the working class - and I use that term fondly - the working-class military, you know, the trigger pullers and the watch standers and the wrench turners and truck drivers and the tank mechanics and all those people. I asked them what they needed and what they'd like out of the $600 billion defense budget. They were astonished and there was (laughter) like total silence. Nobody had ever asked them that before. But after a while as I kept prodding them, there were like, well, sir, we sort of need this and we sort of need that. We don't have any of this. And it turns out that the little things that make a fighting force effective are often broken or missing. For example, the Marines at Camp Lejeune who were required to be certified and fully trained in firing grenade launchers told me that the grenade launchers they have - there's an optic sight on the tube. And when you fire it, it falls off. Well, they shouldn't have grenade launchers where the range finder falls off. That's not OK. It's a small fix. It's not an expensive thing. But there's many, many of those kinds of examples.
Here's another example. Marines have to go from their main base out to a firing range to practice firing - right? - very simple thing. It's about eight or 10 miles. There are no trucks to take them out there, so they have to walk. There are no trucks because they're short on truck mechanics, and there are no spare parts, so all the trucks are broken. What that means is that the guys who have to be certified in firing in your weapons - it takes much longer for them to get certified because they have to walk out to the rifle range.
And there's this kind of domino effect of when you think about what you need to have in order to field an effective fighting force quickly. People have to be trained all the time, and they have to keep at it. And when they - when their optic sights fall off, their grenade launchers and then the trucks don't work and they have to walk out to the rifle range, there's a cumulative effect that could be fixed with not a lot of money that's now going to big weapons systems like the $6 billion aircraft carrier, which by the way needs another billion dollars worth of airplanes because otherwise, I mean - that's what you need an aircraft carrier for. The $6 billion price tag doesn't include airplanes.
GROSS: What kind of war would that aircraft carrier be used for?
WOOD: Well, it could be used in all kinds of wars. So if part of your response to armed conflict is that you need to conduct airstrikes, you move your aircraft carrier in whether the airstrike is on Crimea or Belarus or Syria or Iraq or wherever. So an aircraft carrier is a very useful thing to have, and I'm not against aircraft carriers.
What I am saying is that, perhaps, there's ways to save a little money building a $6 billion aircraft and shifting some of that money over to things that the working class military really needs. And if you're going to pump up the defense budget, you know, let's buy these guys good boots. And let's make sure that their weapons work. And, by the way, the infantry guys need new rifles, and they're out there. We could buy them. They need individual drones. ISIS has drones.
ISIS fighting in Iraq has surveillance and attack drones. They're not sophisticated and complicated. They're like a, you know - a toy drone that you can get from Wal-Mart and they hang a hand grenade on it and send it over to where, you know, where our allies and our troops are fighting. We don't have those things. Why? Because it's not in the budget. And so my point is that there's not enough attention paid in the budget to the people who do the real fighting.
GROSS: David Wood, thank you so much for talking with us.
WOOD: Thank you, Terry.
GROSS: David Wood is a Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent for The Huffington Post. His latest article in The Huffington Post Highline is titled "This Is How The Next World War" starts. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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According to the Daily Mail, Ny Richardson and her friends were dining at the St. Andrews Quay McDonald’s branch when Richardson got up to use the restroom. Richardson said: “I ordered my food and left it with my girlfriend as I went to the toilet. When I was in there, someone told me to get out and when I sat back down, the manager came over and told me that I needed to leave because I have been in the girls’ toilet.”
Richardson, who denies she was uncooperative, claims that the manager then asked her to provide proof of ID, which she did not have. According to Richardson, the manager told her to leave the restaurant before proceeding to call the police. Police confirmed that they responded to a call at the McDonald’s branch after an altercation arose between Richardson’s group of friends and restaurant staff. A McDonald’s spokesperson acknowledged that a group of individuals were asked to leave the restaurant “following several complaints about inappropriate behavior.” The spokesperson emphasized that “these actions have been taken due to unacceptable behavior only.”
The incident with Richardson is not the first story to make recent headlines for requiring proof of gender to use public restrooms. Across the pond in the United States, North Carolina recently passed a law that requires transgender individuals to use the restroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificates. According to data from the National Center for Transgender Equality, seven other states have current legislation aiming to enact similar policies. There are some resources for transgender individuals who may not know their exact rights when it comes to restroom policies in various states and what actions are being taken to ensure equal access and non-descrimination. As policy makers look to regulate the use of public restrooms, the personal and ethical ramifications of requiring an individual to show proof of ID must be considered. For Richardson, the experience was demeaning. “I'm used to being accused of being a boy, but this time I was humiliated in front of the whole restaurant […] I'm still angry about it now.”Joost Oppenheim plays with Solomon Oppenheim, the youngest of his 13 grandchildren. Joost, two of his four children and seven of his grandchildren, including Solomon, decided to become German citizens. (Julie Zauzmer/The Washington Post)
Joost Oppenheim came into the world stateless.
He had no choice: Born in the Netherlands to refugees from Nazi Germany, both the country of his birth and the country of his ancestry refused him citizenship.
Eighty-one years later, Oppenheim and his family have a choice, but the decision is so wrenching that it has left relatives across three generations arguing about the ethics of identity.
The question for the Oppenheims: Should they accept citizenship from Germany, the nation that tried to exterminate them?
Joost Oppenheim, along with thousands of American Jews in the past few years, said yes.
“Did it involve forgiveness?” the Rockville, Md., resident said of his decision to become a dual citizen at age 81. “In a sense, it does. Becoming a German means I can identify, to some extent, with them.”
Although some of the younger members of his family have also sought German citizenship, others aren’t ready to forgive.
[‘Jew.’ Why does the word for a person of my religion sound like a slur?]
Since 1949, Germany has offered citizenship to Jews who fled Germany or were deported to concentration camps from 1933 to 1945, and any of their direct descendants. Until recently, few American Jews were inclined to accept it.
But from 2000 to 2014, the number of Jewish Americans naturalized annually increased more than 16-fold, driven primarily by a younger generation more than 70 years removed from the horrors of the Holocaust.
In 2000, 42 Americans were naturalized under the law. The numbers gradually crept up until 2008 when, coinciding with the financial crisis, 514 Americans were naturalized as German citizens. The embassy thinks, but is unable to prove, that these Americans may have become more interested in a second passport as the economy at home got shakier.
In 2013 and 2014, the most recent years for which the German Embassy could provide statistics, more than 700 Americans were naturalized each year.
[In their 80s and 90s, three Jewish women finally become bat mitzvahs]
The German law excludes most Jews persecuted in the Holocaust, who largely lived in other countries that Germany invaded during World War II. According to a German census, about half a million people in Germany were Jewish in 1933, out of 67 million residents.
More than 200,000 people around the world have been naturalized since 1949 under the law, the German Embassy in Washington said.
Consul General Holger Scherf has witnessed four naturalization ceremonies during the past year, each one welcoming about 10 new citizens.
“For us it’s a very positive thing, that they are wanting to be German citizens,” Scherf said. As the new citizens sit in a conference room named for Friedrich von Prittwitz, a diplomat who quit rather than serve under Hitler, Scherf always asks them why they chose to pursue citizenship.
“The young ones don’t have any negative feelings. For them that’s history; that’s past,” said Scherf, who is not Jewish.
[Venice’s Jewish ghetto is turning 500. Is it ever time to celebrate oppression?]
Steven Windmueller, a professor at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles who studies Jewish American attitudes, noted that the Holocaust still tops the list when pollsters ask young Jews what defines their Jewish identity.
But although postwar generations boycotted German |
aren’t supportive. This article explains how the fit of VS products are counter-productive to their purpose of holding girls up. Their sports bras are push-up, and squash breasts into contortions to create the appearance of cleavage at the gym. A bra still has a utilitarian function in a woman’s closet, and VS neglects to address the comfort and support aspect with their roster of “sexy” bras.
2. Victoria’s Secret’s lack of products
The average bra size in the United States is now 34DD. It used to be 34B merely 20 years ago. Interestingly, most of the models in the Victoria’s Secret show tonight hover around a 34B bra size, including Lily Aldridge who has the honour of wearing this year’s Fantasy Bra. (Actually, many sites seem to list her as a 32B, Wikipedia lists her bust size at 33, but it’s close enough).
When you walk into a Victoria’s Secret store, their sizes run from 32A to 36DD. They don’t offer 38 band sizes, nor do they offer smaller 30 band sizes or AA for smaller cup sizes, and if you’re larger than a DD cup, you’re straight out of luck. The selection available in DD is dismal, and many of those bras are packed with push-up padding and lack thick straps for support.
Also missing from their lineup are options for women post-masectomy, or postpartum nursing bras. Victoria’s Secret is neglecting to service a huge segment of the population, who would eagerly spend money on lacey, overpriced lingerie. It’s frustrating enough to shop for a bra, never mind going into a store and finding that you don’t fit into a brand’s spectrum of sizes.
A decade ago, a shitstorm happened when Abercrombie & Fitch CEO, Mike Jeffries basically said fat people aren’t cool enough to wear Abercrombie… look where that brand is now. Once the mall brand for the it-girls of high school, most millenials wouldn’t be caught dead in something emblazoned with an embroidered moose.
While exclusivity is good for a brand image, eventually, it will always lose its luster as another image of “cool” takes over. In the meantime, VS is purposely excluding a huge segment of shoppers by simply not catering to their product needs, and their Lovespell-scented bras might go the way of a Fierce-scented tank top.
1. Victoria’s Secret Angels
Probably the biggest asset Victoria’s Secret has are their Angels. These genetically blessed superhumans (hence the name, Angels) are the face and soul of the brand.
Probably the coolest thing about the fashion show tonight is including body-positivity/social media superstar Gigi Hadid as an Angel, along with her even more popular sidekick (and ex-step sister), Kendall Jenner. That, and musical performances by Ellie Goulding and The Weeknd are easily the most noteworthy aspect of the show.
Every year follows a series of themes with incredible couture-like creations showcasing the $60 bras and $10 panties. It’s all excess and fantasy. How cool would it be to see a minimalist approach, or athleisure being part of the fashion show? The reason why is that the VSFS is NOT a fashion show. It’s a massive media production and we all (including the writer of this blog post) cover it, garnering the brand with free publicity. While the show’s production doesn’t come cheap, the amount of free press they get is staggering.
Back to the Angels… each and every one of these women are undeniably beautiful, by any standards. Despite NOT having a typical lingerie model frame, the unforgivable aspect of the Angel omnipresence is how the brand sexualizes teenagers.
This year is Adriana Lima’s 16th year walking the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show catwalk. Her first show was in 1999 at the ripe age of 18. Karlie Kloss, now a retired Angel debuted on the VSFS runway in 2011 at only 19. This year, Taylor Hill is the youngest model at 19. It’s slightly unsettling that a spectacle so sexualized prominently features young models who can’t even drink yet. And the effects of keeping up with the demands can be staggering. Former VS model Cara Delevingne, who has suffered from depression and anxiety from her modelling career, debuted for VS when she was 20 years old at the time. Youth is paramount to the Angel image, and the few Brazilian standouts approaching their mid-thirties are the last holdouts.
Of course the VS Angel body is a constant topic in the fashion and media world. We hear crazy stories about models not drinking water before the show for fear of bloating, or giving up solid foods a week before the show. And the worst part is that media gives these troubling practices the mouthpiece. Following the show, social media is rife with people proclaiming: “I feel so fat after the VS fashion show!” The fact that airing this show alienates viewers is problematic. We should feel inspired and empowered by these women! Why not show more of how Adriana Lima is a badass boxer? Or how Behati Prinsloo is a gifted photographer? Instead, we focus on the sinewy leg mustles and perfectly blown out hair.
As consumers move away from typical mall fashion and flock to both ends of the spectrum – luxury or mass-market high street options, VS is caught in the middle. With an aging brand image premised on Photoshop-enabled “Angels” and sweatpants obnoxiously emblazoned with PINK in all caps, it’s time for consumers to discover new lingerie options that cater to the public’s need for comfort, style and support, and without feeling alienated and inferior by portraits of models hung in a change room.By Ashwin Parulkar
These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children.
What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths.
India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in food production for decades and having leaped forward economically over the past 20 years. So it isn’t surprising that public officials and even many in the media are reluctant to face up to the painful reality that hunger persists in 2012. Starvation doesn’t fit neatly into the story of a “shining” India.
But India is also a nation with about 360 million people living under the official poverty line – more than any other country – and starvation is all too real.
Just ask Paro Devi of Manjhladih village in the eastern state of Jharkhand. Her husband, Padamchand Hazra, earned $1.50 per day doing construction labor and riding a cycle rickshaw. Food was always scant in their house. They were surviving on a razor’s edge.
In the summer of 2010, the government-run food distribution program in the area shut down when the local ration dealer stopped distributing grains. The dealer said he simply ran out of inventory, but a senior local official said the village had been given a full allotment of food and shouldn’t have run out.
Around the same time, construction work dried up. The family went days without food. Mr. Hazra grew thin and weak, and was unable to work.
One day, “about six in the evening,” Ms. Devi recalled, “he asked me to put the khattiya (makeshift bed) outside. He wanted food. He kept asking for it but there was no food in the house.”
That night, Mr. Hazra died.
I set out last September with my colleague Ankita Aggarwal from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank, to investigate deaths that bore the hallmarks of starvation in three Indian states: Bihar, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh -- the country’s “hungriest”, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan group that advocates policies to fight hunger and poverty.
Each state fares worse than the abysmal national averages in nearly all nutrition indicators, including height for weight and age of children and mortality rate for children under five years old.
Ashwin Parulkar for The Wall Street Journal Jhagaru Hazra (pictured) is the older brother of the late Padamchand Hazra, who died in Jharkhand's Manjhaladhi village in August 2010 after days without food.
Historically oppressed and disenfranchised lower castes and tribal populations – known as “scheduled castes” and “scheduled tribes” -- are the poorest of the poor and the most at risk. It is no surprise that most reported starvation deaths occur in these communities. In Bihar the under-five mortality rate for scheduled castes is 113 deaths per 1,000 births, compared to the state-wide average of 85 and the all-India average of 74.
We visited 30 scheduled castes and scheduled tribe families that had reportedly lost at least one man, woman, or child because of a lack of food in the house. Our goal was to reconstruct exactly what happened in each case. What were the living conditions that led to these catastrophes? What was the government response? What should policymakers do to correct this as they write a national food security law?
One of the clear themes that emerged was that India’s current system of distributing food to the needy is seriously flawed. Inefficient planning leaves grain rotting in government warehouses rather than getting to the hungry. Botched government surveys leave poor families without the ration cards to which they are supposed to be entitled. Corrupt ration shop dealers pilfer food and sell it on the black market rather than to intended beneficiaries.
Drawing clear lines between chronic malnutrition, hunger and starvation isn’t straightforward. One international standard for measuring hunger is the body mass index, or BMI, which refers to an individual’s weight relative to height – a proxy for body fat. The internationally acknowledged threshold for a “normal” BMI is 18.5. An individual with a BMI of 17 to 18.4 is “undernourished”, someone with a BMI of 16.0 to 16.9 is considered “severely malnourished” and a BMI less than 16 signifies a person is “starving”.
Based on government estimates that 35.6% of Indian women and 34.2% of Indian men have BMIs less than 18.5, the Planning Commission’s India Human Development Report states, “If India is not in a state of famine, it is quite clearly in a state of chronic hunger.”
Dr. John Butterly, executive director of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire and co-author of “Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation,” says chronic malnutrition often leads to a compromised immune system and makes a person unable to fight off organisms “that a normally fed human would barely notice.”
Hunger doesn’t happen in isolation. Inevitably, our research exposed us to a range of economic and social ills in rural India and led us to incredible stories – tales of totally defunct public food and work programs, corruption, broken hand pumps for water, decrepit dirt roads, and caste exploitation.
In the coming days, we’ll be telling these stories, hoping to show empirically why India needs to overhaul its approach to hunger.
India is a food surplus nation but according to the International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2011 Global Hunger Index, it ranks 67th out of 81 countries and has more than 200 million food-insecure people, the most in the world. (The Hunger Index measures hunger based on the percentage of a country’s population that is undernourished, the proportion of children under five years old who are underweight, and the mortality rate of children under five.)
In mid-January, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called India's malnutrition problem a national shame after a survey revealed that 42% of the nation's children are underweight. Officials in the prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
In a statement in response to written questions, an official at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said the public health system should ensure all needy citizens can access medical care. “Those who are malnourished are likely to be amongst the ‘poorest of the poor’ towards whom the public health system has an added responsibility as this is the only avenue where they can receive free medical care and attention,” the statement said. It is difficult to generalize why starvation deaths occur, the statement said, because there are special local factors at play in every case.
The entire debate over food security – the push by many in civil society for a universal “right to food” – has its roots in starvation deaths. In 2001, activists blamed Rajasthan state for failing to stop a string of hunger-related deaths, especially with millions of tons of unused grains in government warehouses.
That and other national woes were the catalysts for the public interest litigation filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties in 2001, which resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision to convert nine food, work and nutrition programs into legal entitlements. The heart of the PUCL’s case was that the Indian Constitution’s right to life as spelled out in Article 21 entitles Indians to a right to food.
Eleven years and nine court orders later, the right to food case is still going and is largely responsible for pushing the government to develop food security legislation, which is expected to be debated in Parliament in the coming months. The draft bill would give 75% of rural Indians and 50% of urban Indians access to discounted rice and grains.
The Centre for Equity Studies is involved in the food security debate, advocating reforms based on our extensive research into hunger and starvation. CES is also producing a book on the history of India’s right-to-food movement. Harsh Mander, the organization’s director, is also a member of the National Advisory Council, an independent body of experts that advises the government on social development issues, including food security.
As I will explain later in this series, we believe the bill as proposed doesn’t go nearly as far as it should to identify starving people and ensure they receive the benefits the courts have said they are entitled to.
Click on image to enlarge.
A government response to a starvation death requires public officials to admit that one happened – and that it was the result of negligence or corruption. As we found again and again during our investigation, officials often are reluctant to make such an acknowledgement.
Trying to prove that someone died because of starvation is tricky in poor communities where a variety of health problems are prevalent. People commonly suffer from ongoing, untreated illnesses such as tuberculosis, malaria, and chronic fever. What is clear though, doctors say, is that a lack of access to food can greatly exaggerate and complicate other health problems and put people’s lives at risk.
When a poor person can’t access entitlements to government food and work programs local officials often find it convenient to attribute their death solely to a pre-existing disease. Sometimes the officials attribute those deaths to alcoholism or lifestyle choices. This isn’t always the case, of course – some officials are upfront about the fact that starvation deaths are a reality and have to be confronted.
In his book “Starvation and India’s Democracy,” a study of starvation deaths in Orissa and West Bengal, food security expert Dan Banik argued that those in authority “do not expect to be held accountable to persistently high levels of under-nutrition and are confident that such issues are accepted by society as a natural feature of a poor country with a large population.”
As for Ms. Devi, her family’s situation improved slightly after her husband’s death. Government food distribution resumed and she is eligible for her full quota of 35 kilograms of subsidized rice. But she hasn’t gotten promised benefits like a widow’s pension and continues to live on the brink.
"We still don't eat to a full stomach," Ms. Devi said. "I haven't tasted dal (lentils) in so long I forget what it tastes like."
Starvation is a brutal but little-discussed reality in India. The Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time is publishing a six-part series on starvation, showcasing the findings of an investigation by the Centre for Equity Studies. The series of essays documents the stories of starvation victims, explores the primary causes of their deaths, and argues fiercely that India must overhaul its broken food security system. We welcome your comments and feedback. And you can ask questions now for a live chat with the series creators on Monday, April 16, here.Hearing from those effected most immediately by the Oil Spill.
Shot by Robert M. Young and Edward James Olmos on a trip to the heart of the oil spill in the Gulf. Edited by Stephen Cohen.
Robert Young and I jumped on a plane and went to the Gulf of Mexico just to lend our support by documenting what we saw…
Well, the people that we met took up all of our time. It was brutal! I was not ready for the human aspect because no one had prepared me for it.
I thought they would be angry. They are devastated.
Take a look at this video and see for yourself. People are afraid to talk and you will learn why watching this…
Please pass it on, recommend it.
If you feel like doing something, just go down there (anywhere on the Gulf) and support by spending time and energy in the region.
They need our support. Thank you for Caring.
Edward James Olmos
For More information on what some local organizations are doing on the ground go to:
http://SaveOurGulf.orgCLOSE Pope Francis says he's 'open' to allowing married men become Catholic priests in a recent interview with a German newspaper. USATODAY
Pope Francis waves to the faithful during the Angelus prayer delivered in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican March 5. (Photo: Gregorio Borgia, AP)
Pope Francis said he is open to the possibility of permitting married men to become priests to address the serious shortage of Catholic priests in some countries.
The pope raised the idea in an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit.
He ruled out the prospect of allowing single men who are already priests to marry but was open to the idea of allowing unmarried laymen or men already married to be ordained.
The pope raised the prospect in the context of allowing "viri probati," Latin for "tested men," to be ordained in places with a scarcity of priests.
He told the newspaper the lack of Catholic priests was an "enormous problem" for the church.
"We need to think about whether 'viri probati' could be a possibility," he told the German weekly. "If so, we would need to determine what duties they could undertake, for example, in remote communities."
Francis said allowing priests in training to choose whether or not to be celibate was “not the solution.”
Read more:
The idea of permitting married priests has been simmering at lower levels in the church in recent years.
CLOSE Pope Francis has once again answered the question of whether women will be priests in the Catholic church. Video provided by Newsy Newslook
In 2014, Bishop Erwin Krautler, bishop of Xingu in the Brazilian rainforest, told the Austrian newspaper Salzburger Nachrichten that he spoke to the pope about the desperate shortage of priests in his region.
The Austrian-born bishop noted that in his diocese, Brazil's largest with 800 church communities and 700,000 faithful, there were only 27 priests.
The bishop said the pope made it clear he would be open to ideas from the bishops as to how to address the problem, including ordaining married men, according to The Tablet, an international Catholic newsweekly.
In his latest interview, the pope discussed the possibility of female deacons, saying theologians should study the example of Scripture, according to the Catholic Herald. “What did this mean at that time (of the Bible)? What does it mean today?” He added, “Don’t be afraid! That makes us free.”
The idea that Roman Catholic Church priests should not be married is based on certain biblical passages and a belief that a priest acts "in persona Christi" (in the person of Christ) and should therefore be celibate, like Christ.
The Vatican accepts married priests in certain circumstances, such as those in the Eastern Rite sects of the church, and married members of the Anglican or Episcopal churches who convert to Catholicism.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2mtcu5XThe Wallabies celebrate a David Pocock try
Sir Clive Woodward is confident England can beat Australia at Twickenham on Saturday, claiming Michael Cheika's side are "not the brightest team".
The hosts face the prospect of failing to qualify for the quarter-finals following last weekend's 25-28 defeat to Wales, but Woodward believes all is not lost for Stuart Lancaster's men.
It is a must-win game against Australia and Woodward claims with the right tactics they are there for the taking.
"It is not a case of playing random running rugby against Australia, it's all about attacking cleverly and with purpose," he told the Daily Mail.
Australia stand between England and a quarter-final berth
"It's about never letting them off the hook. If you can keep hold of the ball and run through the phases, always moving forwards, Australia will disintegrate. Do the opposite of what they expect, move the ball quickly from the scrum, take quick line-outs, tap and go.
"Contrary to popular belief, they are not the brightest team, they give away penalties and pick up yellow cards when they are stretched.
"Playing at pace also applies to the scoreboard, keep it ticking. Just always score next. Target five tries and if they want to give us penalties in the process, take them too."
Sir Clive Woodward is the only England coach to do this...
Woodward, who coached England to World Cup glory in 2003, was stunned by criticism aimed at Mike Brown for a post-match interview in which the full-back, visibly disgruntled at losing to Wales, gave some terse answers.
"Across the board I would like to see more of Mike Brown's die-hard attitude," Woodward added.
"I was amazed at the criticism he has been copping all week on social media for a rather bad-tempered and brief interview after the Wales match.
Mike Brown - England need more like him, says Sir Clive
"I thought it was absolutely fantastic. He was gutted and angry and he didn't want to be there and made that very clear. He didn't swear or indulge in any unacceptable behaviour but he was narked, so he gets a high five from me.
"The TV guys put a microphone right under his nose seconds after the most disappointing defeat of his career and they got the real Mike Brown, the full Monty - brilliant. Brown is a winner who finds defeat unacceptable and that is why he is one of the best full-backs in the world.
"If you had a team of Mike Browns, players with the same competitive DNA, England wouldn't lose many Test matches and I wish some of the other players and coaches would sometimes demonstrate that same passion and anger when things have gone badly wrong."Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Lavabit founder Ladar Levison tells BBC Click's Jen Copestake his concerns about the future of privacy.
Lavabit, a private email service used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has been in court appealing against a government order to hand over its encryption keys. Commentators say the case could represent a landmark for internet privacy.
In August 2013 Lavabit's owner, Ladar Levison, suspended the facility after being ordered to turn over information about one of his accounts. The name of the account's owner is unconfirmed but many reports assume it was Snowden's.
Image copyright Lavabit Image caption Mr Levison announced Lavabit's closure by posting a message enclosed in its logo on the firm's website
Mr Levison refused to hand the data over and met a demand to release the service's encryption keys by handing over an 11 page printout listing the keys' digits in tiny type, in effect making them unusable.
He said turning these keys over to the FBI in a usable form would compromise the security of more than 400,000 account holders, who had believed their communications to be private.
When he was threatened with daily fines until he handed over electronic copies of the keys, he instead shut the service down without warning, and issued a statement on his website saying he would not "become complicit in crimes against the American people".
He is now challenging the government's actions in court and has also joined a group called the Dark Mail Technical Alliance, which aims to develop a new encrypted email protocol.
Interview with Ladar Levison
The BBC's technology TV show Click met Mr Levison at the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.
How are you feeling about finally having your day in court?
I'm happy that for the first time the issue is being discussed in a forum that is open to the public. I'm just afraid that it may have been unsealed too late and the court may decide not to provide wisdom or guidance on the substantive issue at hand, whether or not the government has the authority to demand these SSL [secure sockets layer] encryption keys.
It is unfortunate that so much of the hearing was spent focused on the procedural issues raised by the government and not the substantive question on whether or not the government has the right to demand the SSL encryption key of a business.
It just goes to illustrate why a matter like this, one of national import can't be adjudicated in secret if the litigant is to be given a full and fair hearing. I certainly don't think I was afforded that at the district level.
A further illustration of that is just how far off the record [it] was when it came to the technological facts of the case. And that again goes to two things.
One, the government completely refused to answer any of my questions about how they would be using the keys, how their device would function, and two, the proceedings at the district level moved with such speed and we had so little time to prepare that no witnesses were called, no questions were asked, no facts were collected that could be considered at this stage.
So, it's truly unfortunate but there still is the simple substantive question of law, whether or not the government should be allowed to collect encryption keys. And if they choose to rule on procedural grounds it could do nothing but devastate the technology sector because it would leave this issue unsettled.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mr Levinson feared all his clients' messages would be compromised if the authorities had a copy of his encryption keys
What was also apparent in the hearing was the technology has advanced past the knowledge base of the judicial system.
The real issue is that the pace with which things were moving, and in some cases are still moving, has not afforded counsel for either side the adequate time to go and truly understand the technology.
And the simple fact is unless you are an engineer or cryptographer you don't fully understand, one how these systems work, and two the real import of what these keys do and how they function.
I think it's interesting that they said the government has the right to collect this information without the use of an intermediary, but what about the service provider's right to communicate with his customers without the government being the intermediary?
They would say you have to trust the government.
I trust the government when they provide adequate transparency, and when I can verify that they are not abusing the authority they have been given.
I do not trust a government who operates in secret.
Why do people need services like Lavabit or Dark Mail if they have nothing to hide?
Because you shouldn't have to worry about what you're saying coming back to bite you. In a world where every communication is monitored and recorded, people no longer have the ability to speak openly and freely.
Not just about political issues, but about their own personal issues. And we've seen throughout history that when that's the case, societies become a very dark and oppressive place. And governments become rather tyrannical.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Edward Snowden's NSA leaks appear to have precipitated Lavabit's clash with the authorities
Do you think there might come a day when you have to leave the United States?
I think there may come a day when the United States is no longer associated with the word freedom in people's minds. The sad thing is that I think that I am too much of an American to abandon my country when that happens.
Can you tell us what the future holds for you and Dark Mail?
I just feel that the ability for individual law-abiding citizens to communicate privately without a fear of government surveillance is so important and the courts and the politicians so naive that the only way to ensure that we retain this ability to communicate privately is to come up with a long-term technical solution.
And that's what Dark Mail is trying to do.
They are trying to bring cryptography down to the common man. It's unfortunate but in the world today the only people who can have a secure conversation electronically, are cryptographers.
The people that need to be able to communicate securely, the lawyers, the activists, the doctors, they don't know how to use the current suite of encryption technologies.
The Department of Justice's case
US government lawyers set out their defence of the FBI's actions in court documents released at the end of last year. Their central argument was as follows:
Just as a business cannot prevent the execution of a search warrant by locking its front gate, an electronic communications service provider cannot thwart court-ordered electronic surveillance by refusing to provide necessary information about its systems.
That other information not subject to the warrant was encrypted using the same set of keys is irrelevant; the only user data the court permitted the government to obtain was the data described in the pen/trap [electronic copy of the encryption keys] and the search warrant.
All other data would be filtered electronically, without reaching any human eye.
Lavabit's belief that the orders here compelled a disclosure that was inconsistent with Lavabit's "business model" makes no difference. Marketing a business as "secure" does not give one licence to ignore a District Court of the United States.
You can see more of the interview with Ladar Levison of Lavabit on this weekend's episode of Click.
The following link provides the show's broadcast times in the UK and on BBC World.The White House has only one Republican supporter, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana. A survey of 14 other Senate Republicans who were considered possible supporters found none who were willing to publicly back the treaty. Ten of them said they were undecided or were waiting for the same assurances as Mr. Kyl, and four did not respond, suggesting that approval may depend on changing Mr. Kyl’s mind.
Among those who agreed with Mr. Kyl that the issue should wait until next year was Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, one of three Republicans to vote for the treaty in committee in September. In an interview, he said that the treaty and modernization program needed to be “fully digested, fully explained” and that there was no reason to rush during the lame-duck session. “I’m very skeptical that it’s the right thing to do and very skeptical that it can be done this December,” he said.
Moreover, 10 newly elected Republican senators who will take office in January signed a letter objecting to a lame-duck vote. “Out of respect for our states’ voters, we believe it would be improper for the Senate to consider the New Start treaty or any other treaty in a lame-duck session,” said the letter, which was released by Senator-elect Roy Blunt of Missouri.
Mr. Kyl showed no signs of backing down after meeting with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. But Mr. Kerry expressed hope afterward that a deal was still possible, and the White House released new details of its commitment to Mr. Kyl to spend $84 billion over the next 10 years to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
Because treaties require a two-thirds majority, the White House needs 67 votes. Senator-elect Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, will be sworn in Nov. 29 to replace a Democrat, so the White House will need to keep all 58 remaining members of the Democratic caucus and win over nine Republicans. If it waits until next year, it will need at least 14 Republican votes because of the party’s gains.
Photo
Gary Samore, the top White House arms-control official, said Thursday he feared that putting off the treaty until next year would mean it “could be delayed indefinitely.” As a result, the United States and Russia would not resume nuclear inspections that lapsed last year, which he said would fuel distrust and lead to “a greater likelihood you could get into an arms race.”
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He also said a failure to ratify the treaty would undercut Russian support for the campaign to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program. “To do that, we really need the Russians with us,” he told a forum at the Nixon Center. And he suggested that Mr. Kyl might not get his modernization money because Democrats and conservative Republicans in the next Congress would not go along. “Support for that could evaporate if the treaty is not approved,” he said.
Critics of the treaty have said the administration is overstating the consequences of delay and have questioned its seriousness about nuclear modernization because it provided Mr. Kyl with its latest spending proposal only last Friday. Mr. Corker and others noted that there were still no guarantees that Congress would fully finance the program. He said insisting on a vote before the next Congress “creates an air of distrust.”
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At this point, the Democratic strategy is to keep pressing for a deal with Mr. Kyl and to respond to every Republican question in an effort to minimize any pretext for opposition. Democrats would then take the treaty to the floor in December for up to seven days of debate and force Republicans to choose sides. They are banking that Mr. Kyl has been surprised that Mr. Obama is choosing to turn the issue into a public fight.
At the same time, by making it a test of his presidency, Mr. Obama risks making Republicans more reluctant to hand him a victory. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has said his top priority is to deny Mr. Obama a second term.
Mr. Samore described the impact in more dire terms. “If we fail to act,” he said, “I think it will damage the U.S. reputation as a country that’s willing to lead.”Designer stores to implement series of changes after two black shoppers were detained after making purchases
New York’s state attorney general on Monday settled allegations of racial profiling at Barneys, one of the city’s most famous department stores, in a controversy that had dragged in rap mogul Jay Z.
Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation into the designer store nine months ago amid a wider probe into allegations of racism at other famous New York shopping sites including Macy’s.
Barneys has now agreed to pay $525,000 in fees and penalties and to implement a series of changes to ensure it does not discriminate against black and Hispanic customers.
“Profiling and racial discrimination remain a problem in our state, but not one we are willing to accept. This agreement will continue our work to ensure there’s one set of rules for everyone in public accommodations, including customers in New York’s retail establishments,” Schneiderman said. “This agreement will correct a number of wrongs, both by fixing past policies and by monitoring the actions of Barneys and its employees to make sure that past mistakes are not repeated.”
Schneiderman’s office investigated claims that:
Door guards identified minority customers exclusively as warranting surveillance;
In-store detectives followed minority customers, even when the customers had been identified by sales associates as clients and frequent patrons of the store;
In-store detectives disproportionately asked sales associates to reprint receipts after minority customers made purchases in order to confirm the purchases were legitimate;
In-store detectives disproportionately called sales associates who handled and completed minority customers’ transactions in order to investigate the customers’ credit card use; and
Some sales associates avoided serving minority customers so they would not be contacted by loss-prevention employees seeking to investigate the use of credit cards by minority customers.
The investigation came after two black shoppers filed lawsuits against Barneys alleging racial discrimination last year. Trayon Christian, a college student from Queens, sued the store and the New York police department after he was arrested at the luxury department store in April last year following the purchase of a $350 Salvatore Ferragamo belt.
Christian was stopped by undercover officers who allegedly asked “how a young black man such as himself could afford to purchase such an expensive belt”.
Police allegedly accused Christian of using a fake ID when he produced the credit card and receipt for belt. He was handcuffed and taken to a local precinct. Replying to the suit in July this year the NYPD “acted reasonably in the proper and lawful exercise of their discretion”. The case continues.
In another case, Kayla Phillips, a nursing student from Brooklyn, sued Barneys after she was detained following the purchase of a $2,500 Céline bag at the store in February 2013.
Phillips told the Daily News she bought the bag with the money from a tax return. After leaving the Madison Avenue store, she said she was surrounded by four undercover police officers at the subway station.
The controversy led to protestors targeting Jay Z, who partnered with Barneys last year for a holiday sale of luxury merchandise. More than 59,000 signed a petition at Change.org calling for the rapper to scrap the deal.
An internal Barneys report obtained by the Associated Press last year put the blame for the arrests on the police. According to the report, Barneys did not “request, require nor initiate the actions of the New York police department”.
As a result of the investigation Barneys will make several changes including retaining an independent anti-profiling consultant and establish new record keeping requirements on investigations, detentions and false stops conducted by loss-prevention employees. The store will also limit access to its closed-circuit TV areas by local law enforcement officers and maintain records of visits by local law enforcement officers as well as developing anti-profiling training for loss-prevention and sales employees.
A spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office said they could not comment on the Macy’s investigation but confirmed it was ongoing. Macy’s was sued last year by actor Rob Brown, who has appeared in The Dark Knight Rises and HBO series Treme, after he was detained for nearly an hour by police about possible credit card fraud. Brown settled the suit earlier this year.
Macy’s was sued in 2005 previous attorney general Eliot Spitzer for alleged profiling of black and Hispanic customers.In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, commentators have been quick to blame Houston’s lack of |
legal issues that have specific application to transgender persons throughout the United States,” said Robert J. O’Toole, cochair of the New York State Bar Association’s Transgender Subcommittee, in a review of the book. “I commend this book to any lawyer who might be representing transgender clients, or anyone who is interested in learning more about the special legal challenges faced by transgender people.”
Howell also addresses the medical community regarding properly identifying transgenderism and includes a glossary of terms commonly used in the transgender community.
Phyllis Randolph Frye, the first openly transgender judge in the U.S., called the text comprehensive and noted the progress that has been made and the work yet to be done for full recognition of transgender (TG) people.
“All lawyers and lay activists dealing with this area of the law either in the courts or in legislative lobbying should read it,” she writes in the book’s forward. “As I read, I felt gratified at how far TG legal gains have come, as expressed in this book, since 1992 when I created the first international TG legal conference in Houston. Obviously, there is much more work to be done in the area of TG legal gains.”
The book comes less than a month after LGBT groups stepped up to advise media outlets on how to cover the announcement by Pfc. Chelsea Manning that she had changed her name from Bradley Manning and wished to receive gender transition therapy in prison. Manning was convicted last month on charges related to transmitting classified information to WikiLeaks.
Has your association offered guidance on an issue in your profession or industry that was previously untouched? Share your story in the comments.
Share this articleFILE - In this Saturday, Feb. 11, 2012 file photo provided by Hasbro, toy demonstrator Marnye Young practices with the “Koosh Alien Archer” ball launcher at Hasbro's American International Toy Fair showroom in New York. Toy maker Hasbro says its fourth-quarter revenue failed to meet expectations because of weaker-than-expected demand over the holidays. It plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce and consolidate facilities to cut expenses. The stock dropped more than 4 percent in premarket trading Friday, Jan. 25, 2013. (AP Photo/Hasbro, Ray Stubblebine, File)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Toy maker Hasbro said Friday that its fourth-quarter revenue failed to meet expectations because of weaker-than-expected demand over the holidays. It plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce and consolidate facilities to reduce expenses.
The stock dropped 3 percent Friday.
Pawtucket, R.I.-based Hasbro, whose brands include Monopoly and Nerf, has about 5,500 employees worldwide. A 10 percent workforce cut would put about 550 people out of work.
While Hasbro said consumer demand was softer than it expected over the holidays, the season was expected to be tough. This was in part because retailers were ordering inventory more cautiously.
In addition, stores such as Wal-Mart, Kmart and Toys R Us beefed up their layaway and reservation services to encourage shoppers to buy toys early in the season, which meant items may have been scarce later on.
The November and December holiday selling period is critical for toy makers because it can make up as much as 40 percent of their annual revenue.
Spokesman Wayne Charness said that the job cuts will all be this year and will occur globally, with no particular business groups targeted. He said that the facility consolidations could result in some closures but was not specific about which plants would be affected other than to say no closures were planned In Rhode Island or Massachusetts in 2013. Hasbro has offices in 40 countries worldwide.
CEO Brian Goldner said in a statement that Hasbro created a plan during its fourth quarter to deliver $100 million in annual cost savings by 2015.
The company expects charges of about $37 million in 2012 and an additional $20 million to $30 million in estimated charges in 2013 related to its cost-cutting efforts.
Hasbro Inc. anticipates fourth-quarter revenue of about $1.28 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet predicted revenue of $1.4 billion. Unfavorable foreign currency exchange rates lowered results by $8 million.
Goldner said that demand over much of the holiday season was weaker than expected in the U.S. and some international markets.
For 2012, Hasbro expects adjusted earnings between $2.89 and $2.91 per share on revenue of approximately $4.09 billion. Unfavorable foreign currency exchange rates lowered revenue by $99 million.
Wall Street forecast earnings of $2.84 per share on revenue of $4.2 billion.
The company will report its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results on Feb. 7.
Its stock fell $1.14, or 3 percent, to close at $37.31 Friday. Its shares have traded in a 52-week range of $32 to $39.98.In October, 29,000 neuroscientists gathered in Chicago to discuss new research in their sprawling field at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting. Amid mountains of abstracts on every conceivable aspect of brain science, there were a surprising number of studies about an unlikely subject: video games.
Plenty of pop cultural bandwidth has been devoted to showing how video games harm us–from ostensibly making us less social to making us more violent–there’s been remarkably little scientific study of whether they do anything good for us. “The probable negative effects of video game playing are well discussed in the media,” wrote one presenter, Sabrina Schenk, in her abstract. “But the positive effects are almost completely neglected.”
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That’s changing. Because not only are video games increasingly diverse and played by more people, they’re also a fantastic controlled simulation of real-world tasks. That makes them perfect for scientists who want to study the complex neurological mechanisms at work while we play, say, Rise of Nations.
What Makes a Player’s Brain Light Up?
Some of these studies look at how typical gamers compare to non-gamers on cognition tasks, while others look at whether non-gamers benefit neurologically when they start playing video games. For example Schenk, a PhD student at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at Ruhr University Bochum, studies how people who play video games might actually be much better at some tasks than those who don’t.
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In an experiment she presented at the conference, Shenk asked fifteen “gamers” (people who played more than 20 hours per week) and “non-gamers” to complete a common puzzle designed to test a person’s so-called “probabilistic” learning abilities. As the participants worked, Schenk imaged their brains with an MRI machine. Not only did the gamer group do a lot better at the task, they used a more complex “multi-cue” strategy to complete it.
Playing World of Warcraft at the BlizzCon in 2015. AP Photo/Jae C. Hong.
People who didn’t play video games, meanwhile, usually ended up relying on a single cue.Schenk also told me that the brains of the gamer group showed some unique activations during the task. Gamers exhibited more activity in the frontal cortex and hippocampus, which are associated with learning and memory-formation, as well as the posterior cingulate cortex and the precuneus, often associated with episodic memory and spatial learning.
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The Virtues of League of Legends
What’s so intriguing about these types of findings isn’t that gamer brains light up in a unique way while they’re solving a puzzle. It’s that through training, video games might be able to teach anyone to think like a gamer and light up certain regions of their brain.
In another paper presented at the conference (and since published in the Journal of Neuroscience) Gregory Dane Clemenson, a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California at Irvine, explored the idea of “environmental enrichment.”
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Here’s a basic example: if you give a dog a more stimulating environment, like buying it new toys or making its kennel bigger, you also improve its hippocampal functioning and neuroplasticity. It’s a proven phenomenon for many animals, and the same idea may be true for humans: if we expose our brains to a broader range of spaces and richer experiences, we can improve our cognition and even slow its eventual decline.
Hippocampal neurons. Dr A.Irving / University of Dundee / Wellcome Images.
Clemenson and his co-author, Craig Stark, wanted to find out whether complex 3D video games could enrich our environments as much as actually exploring a new city or place. Imagine if an elderly bedridden person, unable to even go outside, could explore a 3D video game to reap the same cognitive benefits they would get from going on a walk or visiting a new place.
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“Because of their engaging experiences and enriching 3D virtual environments, the same video games that have been played for decades by children and adults alike may actually provide our brain with meaningful stimulation,” Clemenson and Stark write.
At the conference in October, Clemenson explained how they’re testing this idea. Their study includes two basic experiments: One on self-described gamers, and another on people who don’t play. The first experiment divided gamers by the level of complexity in the games they choose to play: Tetris, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Zelda were all 2D examples, while 3D games ranged included Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and League of Legends (LOL).
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yxxxx2003 on Flickr/Creative Commons.
All of these games have different versions of dimensionality, but the most complex versions, like LOL, let you actually move the camera away from the player to explore other parts of the virtual environment.
After classifying subjects by the complexity of their most-played games, they tested both memory skills and hippocampal functioning using a pattern separation task called the lure discrimination index, or LDI. They found that players who favored the more complex 3D games, like League of Legends, scored better at the hippocampus-dependent LDI task than those who preferred 2D games like Tetris.
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Clemenson even replicated the effect on competitive gamers who are at the top in both 2D and 3D games–and sure enough, the more complex the virtual environment, the better their score on the LDI.
Super Mario 3D World vs. The Real World
In Clemenson and Stark’s second experiment, they evaluated whether those same mental benefits can be imparted to people who don’t typically play games at all.
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They recruited 69 non-gamers, and tested their memory skills and hippocampal functioning to get a baseline. Subjects then spent 30 minutes every day, for ten days straight, playing either Angry Birds (a 2D game) or Super Mario 3D World (a 3D game), while a third group played nothing. Clemenson and Stark kept testing the subjects’ memory during and after the 10-day period.
The group that had played Super Mario 3D World ended up showing improvement, while the Angry Birds players, and the passive control group, didn’t.
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3D complexity versus 2D simplicity. Images: Brad Clinesmith on Flickr/Creative Commons. Aaron Stroot on Flickr/Creative Commons.
As Clemenson points out, the results pose as many new questions as they answer. For example, exploring that virtual 3D world on-screen might activate the same parts of the brain as exploring the real world–but will training in Super Mario 3D World make you better at creating and recalling real-world places? Clemenson calls this “translation,” and says demonstrating it will be crucial going forward.
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“Ultimately, what we would really like to demonstrate is that learning to explore these virtual environments could help people learn, remember, and even explore real-world environments,” he wrote over email. “This would be a true translational effect.”
Right now, Clemenson and his colleagues are testing how gaming could help aging populations slow cognitive decline. Using games like Minecraft and Super Mario 3D World, they’re hoping to find out whether video games that give players a virtual version of “environment enrichment” can do just as much as the real thing.
Other scientists are studying similar ideas. Last year, Daphne Bavelier–a neuroscientist who in 2003 introduced the idea of video game-based learning in Nature and has led the field since–published a paper in the Annual Review of Neuroscience called Brain plasticity through the life span: learning to learn and action video games.
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In the study, Bavelier argues that action video games, like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, don’t just make gamers better at specific perception and cognitive tasks like improved vision, motion-tracking, and decision-making. Instead, she says, they actually teach gamers to learn. It’s a controversial idea that has spurred a discussion that will play out over the coming years.
Over the last three decades, the way humans live has radically changed. Rather than spending most of our time seeing and interacting with a physical world, we spent huge amounts of time interacting with screens–which often represent a virtual simulation of the real world. Thirty years isn’t very long, in science time, so questions about how these new behaviors affect us are only beginning to be thoroughly studied. But the field is quickly growing into one that could unlock more of gaming’s benefits—and pitfalls too.
“Video game playing is not only good or bad. It can be both and should be used moderately and wisely,” as Schenk and her co-authors put it. “Too much could be as bad as too little.”
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Lead image: A scene from Paris Games Week in November, 2015. AP Photo/Francois Mori.
Contact the author at kelsey@Gizmodo.com.As the global population expands, demand for water for agriculture and personal use will increase dramatically, but there could be a solution that will produce clean drinking water and help reduce carbon emissions as well. That process is nuclear desalination.
Many areas of the world are suffering from a water crisis – and it's not just arid, developing countries that are suffering. The Western US is particularly vulnerable and its water crisis is getting more severe by the day.
Las Vegas could be one of the first US cities to be hit by a serious water shortage, some are even questioning whether it can survive at all. The city gets 90pc of its water from Lake Mead, the body of water created by the Hoover Dam.
The water in Lake Mead, and the Colorado River which feeds it, has been falling for some time. It is slowly running dry due to overuse. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography believes there is a 50pc chance that the lake will be completely dry by 2021 if climate change continues as expected and future water usage is not curtailed.
Water is so important that, as a population grows and demand increases, there is a strong chance of conflict in the future.
According to the World Water Council, 260 river basins are shared by two or more countries.
"In the absence of strong institutions and agreements, changes within a basin can lead to transboundary tensions," the Council said. "When major projects proceed without regional collaboration, they can become a point of conflicts, heightening regional instability."
The World Water Council cites the Parana La Plata in South America, the Aral Sea, the Jordan and the Danube as examples.
It's not just tensions between countries that are a potential problem. Civil unrest caused by scarcity has already started.
In India on December 3, one man was killed and dozens injured during a protest over water rationing in Mumbai following the country's poor Monsoon. The prospect of further water riots is very real.
However, nuclear energy could help provide the solution for this thorny issue.
Oil-rich Middle Eastern nations are rushing to build new nuclear plants.
Anwar Gargash, a foreign affairs minister in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said last month that nuclear power was "best able" to meet future power demand in his country. Demand for electricity is expected to double by 2020.
This followed comments from Saudi Arabia, which said it planned to generate up to a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power within the next 15 years.
Everyone thinks the trend for oil-rich nations to move towards nuclear power generation is about limiting domestic consumption so they can boost oil exports. However, that's just part of the story.
Saudi Arabia, for example, has very little water – and global warming is likely to make this situation much worse. This is a major problem because Saudi Arabia is about to see its population explode.
The overwhelming majority of the Saudi people are young. Almost 40pc of its population is under the age of 14, with just 2.5pc being in the over 65 bracket. This means its population is growing at about 2pc per year – and as the young start to have families of their own, the rate of population growth will increase.
In fact, many of the nations that are predicted to have the strongest growth in population over the next years are the areas where the water crisis is most acute.
For example, the UAE has the largest growth rate of any nation in the world – at 3.69pc, according to data compiled by the US government.
Nuclear reactors can be used to generate electricity – but they can also be used to desalinate water.
Nuclear desalination is not a new idea – it's a proven technology, thanks to Kazakhstan.
A single nuclear reactor at Aktau on the shore of the Caspian Sea successfully produced up to 135 megawatts of electricity and 80,000 cubic metres of potable water a day between 1972 and 1999, when it was closed at the end of the reactor's life.
Water has also been desalinated using nuclear reactors in India and Japan.
The problem with desalination is that it is very energy intensive. Most desalination today uses fossil fuels, contributing to carbon emissions.
However, because nuclear power generation does not emit carbon, it is a clean and efficient way of producing the most important commodity around. For countries experiencing rapid population growth, it could be a lifesaver.Col. Muammar Qaddafi: Western intelligence services believe Libya (along with Iraq) was a key sponsor of Ramirez’s 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, which killed three people. “Years later, an accomplice of Carlos confirmed the view that Col. Muammar Qaddafi had commissioned the attack, promising Carlos an annual payment of $1 million as a reward,” wrote John Follain in the book Jackal. In a Sunday interview with the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacion, Ramirez, a Venezuelan native, said Qaddafi "had an eternal debt to me." Of course, now that Qaddafi's been deposed and killed, that debt's going to be very hard to collect.
Saddam Hussein: Follain writes that "Iraq was one of the first Arab countries to offer Carlos support," and according to journalist Edward Jay Epstein, Hussein personally backed the OPEC raid: "The operation was conceived of and backed by Saddam Hussein. Iraq provided him with the weapons, explosives, and other equipment by using its diplomatic pouch to transport them to its Embassy in Vienna, as well as the false documentation and money he needed. It also arranged his escape to Algeria with his hostages." But of course, U.S. forces deposed Hussein in 2003, after which he was arrested and executed.
Hugo Chavez: The Venezuelan leader praised Ramirez as a "revolutionary fighter" in 2009, saying, "I defend him. I don't care what they say tomorrow in Europe." Venezuela has reportedly kept a steady stream of care packages including cigars coming to Ramirez via its embassy in France, but those recently stopped coming. Ramirez suggested to El Nacional that the Chavez administration had tried to have him extradited to Venezuela, but Chavez has other issues to deal with this year. In July, he acknowledged he was battling cancer, and while he declared he was healthy in October, he's still struggling to maintain his political mandate back home after a weakening year.
Bashar al Assad: While al Assad didn't necessarily support Ramirez as a head of state (having come to power in 2000), Ramirez had lived in Damascus while he was at large, and traced his rise to prominence to Syrian support. He invoked that support in his first trial in 1997, according to Follain:
But Assad and the rest of the Syrian government have fallen distinctly out of favor with the West, as the Syrian military continues to fight a brutal battle to quell unrest there, and Western powers pressure Assad to step down.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.“The returning warrior may not realize it, but he has acquired an MBA in enduring adversity and a Ph.D. in resourcefulness, tenacity and the capacity for hard work.” – Steven Pressfield
How does a veteran successfully reintegrate into civilian life? One answer to this question may lie in the warrior ethos. The warrior ethos is an existential outlook that embraces the warrior virtues of selfless commitment and perseverance in the face of adversity. The U.S. Army embodies these virtues in its Warrior Ethos creed:
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
In The Warrior Ethos, Steven Pressfield defines the ethos as a sense of honour gained through the virtue of selflessness, toughness, and the desire to excel. Selflessness, he says, is the absolute core of the warrior ethos. He illustrates the virtue of selflessness in the following story:
Plutarch asked, “Why do the Spartans punish with a fine the warrior who loses his helmet or spear but punish with death the warrior who loses his shield?” Because helmet and spear are carried for the protection of the individual alone, but the shield protects every man in the line.
Along with the virtue of selflessness, the willingness to embrace adversity is also a central virtue for the warrior ethos. In The Unforgiving Minute, Crag Mullaney illustrates this virtue in a chant he recalls from his training at West Point: “If it aint raining, we ain’t training… you gotta love being cold wet and miserable. Love the suck men, love the suck.”
Civilians often don’t understand why anyone would want to plunge themselves into such harsh conditions, especially since military service is completely optional. The civilian world – far from a warrior culture – values luxury and comfort, the pursuit of individual goals, and success is measured by one’s monetary achievement. Although monetary achievement is a key marker of civilian success, the warriors salary is not strictly monetary. Steven Pressfield states:
There’s a well-known gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps who explains to his young Marines, when they complain about pay, that they get two kinds of salary—a financial salary and a psychological salary. The financial salary is indeed meager. But the psychological salary? Pride, honor, integrity, the chance to be part of a corps with a history of service, valor, glory; to have friends who would sacrifice their lives for you, as you would for them—and to know that you remain a part of this brotherhood as long as you live. How much is that worth?
The military cultivates the warrior ethos in its individual members through elaborate training methods and ritualized behavior. Once an individual leaves the military institution, the external constraints of a warrior culture no longer directs their behaviour. Transitioning from a warrior culture to a consumer culture can take a toll on an individual. The “psychological salary” of contributing to a warrior brotherhood fades, leaving an existential void.
So how can one regain a sense of purpose and belonging in civilian life? The warrior ethos must be internalized and applied to new endeavors. Pressfield writes: “As soldiers, we have been taught discipline. Now we teach ourselves self-discipline.” When one’s war is over, the new battle of civilian transition begins. The virtues of the warrior ethos make veterans highly valuable employees or entrepreneurs. Although veterans may be extremely valuable assets in civilian institutions, are civilian institutions suitable for veterans whose salary has been more than just monetary?
Getting back the “psychological salary” requires more than just the ability to self-discipline and persevere in the face of adversity – although these are both necessary. It requires the ability to find a new cause or occupation one can commit oneself to. This is how the veteran warrior regains the core of the warrior ethos: selflessness, or as the first line of the U.S Army Warrior Ethos creed states, “…always place the mission first.”
But new missions are not easy to come by. Unlike the military, missions are not handed down a chain of command in civilian life. Although the highly unregulated state of affairs in consumer culture may lead to veterans experiencing anomie, the freedom to choose our own life-course has lead to an increased number of opportunities for a diverse array of individuals.
A new mission must be sought after and discovered on one’s own, but not by one’s self. The internalized warrior ethos is indispensible to the returning veteran, making him or her an extremely valuable asset to civilian life. What we need are not only programs that treat psychological issues such as PTSD, but programs that assist individuals in finding a new mission.
Here are some organizations that are currently assisting with this endeavor:
Enactus’ ‘Based in Business’: http://enactusregina.ca/projects/basedinbusiness/
Canada Company: https://www.canadacompany.ca/en/
Team Rubicon: http://teamrubiconusa.org/
Squadbay: http://www.squadbay.org/
Like this article? Join the mailing list to receive email updates when new ones are published:A controversial company that sells weaponized spyware has been penetrated by hackers who claim to have plundered more than 400GB worth of e-mails, source code, and other sensitive data—including invoices showing that the firm has done business in countries ruled by highly repressive governments.
Italy-based Hacking Team has long denied selling to nations with poor human rights records. It instead markets itself as a supplier of customized software for law enforcement departments and government agencies in countries with good human rights records. Its spyware, company officials have said, helps crack down on criminals and terrorists. Over the weekend, unidentified people claimed to hack Hacking Group computers and social media accounts and to make off with documents contradicting that narrative. As proof, the hacktivists posted invoices purporting to show malware sales to groups in Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.
"Since we have nothing to hide, we're publishing all our e-mails, files, and source code," the hackers wrote in a tweet that included a BitTorrent link to the alleged trove of documents. The statement was posted to the official Hacking Team Twitter account, which the hackers said had also been compromised (the account handle was changed to "Hacked Team").
Other tweets posted to the same compromised Twitter account and elsewhere purported to show passwords for Hacking Team support websites, e-mails sent by Hacking Team executives, and invoices. According to The Guardian, one June 2012 bill showed Hacking Team charging €480,000 for goods and services provided to the Sudanese national intelligence service. The British news organization reported a separate document showing Hacking Team negotiating with a third-party reseller to export malware to Nigeria. Other material reportedly showed Hacking Team executives discussing what to do should an independent report from the University of Toronto criticize the sale of hacking tools to Ethiopia for use in monitoring journalists.
Hacking Team engineer Christian Pozzi may have acknowledged the security breach. In a tweet, he wrote, "We are awake. The people responsible for this will be arrested. We are working with the police at the moment." The tweet and Pozzi's entire Twitter account were soon deleted. The official Hacking Team Twitter account was active as of press time, but Pozzi's account remained unavailable.
Long criticized by human rights groups
Hacking Team is known to sell a malware surveillance software known as Da Vinci. Its remote access tools also make it possible to compromise a wide variety of hardware, including Android and Blackberry phones and Windows devices. More recently, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the US Army were identified as Hacking Team customers. (Kaspersky Lab has deep dives on Hacking Team technologies here and here.)
Hacking Team has long been criticized by human rights organizations. Reporters Without Borders, for instance, named Hacking Team as one of the "enemies of the Internet" because its software was used in countries known to be openly hostile to the press. Given the strong dislike of Hacking Team, it wouldn't be surprising if less law-abiding groups targeted the Italian firm and deliberately orchestrated a massive data breach.
It's not possible to immediately confirm the authenticity of the documents or the claim that more than 400GB of data was seized. Still, it's a safe bet that Hacking Team has suffered some sort of breach involving its corporate network. Assuming the hack is legitimate—and there are no indications so far it's not—it wouldn't be the first time a controversial surveillance firm has been penetrated. In 2014, documents leaked online showed that software created by the controversial UK-based Gamma Group International was used to spy on computers that appeared to be located in the US, the UK, Germany, Russia, Iran, and Bahrain.DETROIT -- The Detroit Tigers will recall right-handed relief pitcher Victor Alcantara before Tuesday's game, adding another arm to their crowded bullpen.
The Tigers will now have 13 relief pitchers, in addition to five starters. (Jordan Zimmermann and Michael Fulmer are injured).
Tigers manager Brad Ausmus said Alcantara would probably be the last player recalled from Triple-A Toledo. The Mud Hens' season ended on Monday.
That would mean Bruce Rondon is not getting an invitation back to the big-league club, possibly marking the end of his time with the organization. Rondon is eligible for arbitration again this winter and could be non-tendered, meaning he wouldn't be offered a contract for 2018.
In contrast to the huge bullpen, Tigers will be going with only a five-man bench once Miguel Cabrera returns from suspension. Outfielder Jim Adduci and Double-A Erie second baseman Dawel Lugo are the only position players on the 40-man roster who haven't been called up to Detroit.
Alcantara, 24, was acquired last winter from the Los Angeles Angels in exchange for Cameron Maybin. He split the year between Toledo and Erie, going 1-3 with a 3.62 ERA.
Control has been an issue for Alcantara at times. He's walked 46 and struck out 73 in 74 2/3 innings this year.
The Tigers bullpen now contains: left-handers Blaine Hardy, Jairo Labourt, Daniel Norris and Daniel Stumpf; and right-handers Jeff Ferrell, Shane Greene, Myles Jaye, Joe Jimenez, Zac Reininger, Warwick Saupold, Drew VerHagen, Alex Wilson and Alcantara.
Wilson will return from a three-game suspension on Tuesday.Struggling to get your computer monitor at just the right height? Sick of using old books to get it there? Well now you can start reading those books again, right after you print out a Mighty Stand. It will even clear up some desk space!
The Mighty Stand is the only rugged and customizable 3D printed monitor stand you'll ever need. The base stands at a standard 40 mm tall and is 190 mm by 140 mm (7.5 by 5.5 inches) on top. The overall size of the stand is 210 mm by 160 mm (8.25 by 6.3 inches).
--I have uploaded a smaller version (190 mm by 160 mm) just in case you need it a little smaller.
--I have also uploaded a split version of the base to make printing possible on smaller printers. This version is two pieces that are 160 mm by 110 mm.
There are three sizes of blocks you can use to customize the height to your liking: 40 mm, 20 mm, and 10 mm. I have added in support material into the model to save some time and effort for printing.
There are also feet included to cap off the bottom slots of the stand to ensure a solid base. You can choose between a smaller square cap for small heights and a round cap for taller heights. They have slits so they can be removed with a flat screwdriver if the fit is too tight.
I would recommend measuring the height you'd like then printing everything you need and assembling last just in case some of the blocks are too hard to get apart.
If the fits seem a bit too tight I would just cut off a little bit of the male extrusion piece until it has a snug fit.
MAKE SURE EVERYTHING HAS A SNUG FIT BEFORE YOU USE YOUR STAND. I designed it so it should all fit fairly well, but as you know every printer has different tolerances. If the pieces fit loosely you can put your monitor at risk. I also used a microfiber cloth between the stand and monitor base to prevent slipping.The dollar falls to its lowest value yet
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THE dollar's recent decline has taken it to new lows. The chart shows the nominal exchange rate, in trade-weighted terms (ie, against the country's trading partners). The index is now 30% below its level when the Bretton Woods system was abandoned in the early 1970s and the dollar has halved since 1985, when leading nations adopted the Plaza Accord to drive it lower. There was a rally in 2008 when the dollar attracted “safe haven” flows during the financial crisis, but that now looks like a blip in a 40-year decline. A weak currency should be good news for a country's exporters, but that hasn't stopped America from running a persistent trade deficit. And America's creditors are having to cope with the unappealing combination of holding low-yielding Treasury bonds in a depreciating currency.If you have an Nvidia Shield tablet and it get heated, you will wish to turn it off and you may request a replacement.
Nvidia on Friday announced that eight-inch Shield tablets sold between July 2014 and July 2015 have a battery that is inclined to overheating and could create a fireplace hazard.
The company also informed that no other devices and alternative Shield products, as well as the Shield Android TV set-top-prime box and also the Shield gaming portable and transportable are part of the voluntary recall.
The US recollects its affects 83,000 Shield tablets sold within the States, consistent with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.. Within the US, the company has received four reports related to batteries overheating which was due to thermal runaway, as well as recognize 2 reports of damage to flooring, a spokesman said. It is also recollected that 5000 tablets were also sold in Canada
The reason of the thermal runaway is basically when a temperature increase ends up to an additional temperature increase, usually resulting in destruction.
As such, Nvidia has informed owners and alert the users to prevent or stop using the recalled slate. Nvidia has suggested to the users to keep or back up a copy, to back up information and to use an online form to submit it for replacement. To apply for replacement fill the form here
How to Check Are You Affected by ReCall?
Step 1: The owners of Nvidia Shield must go to settings than to about and now check status as
Settings > About > Status
Step 2: Here in status go to the codename which is for battery. If it is B01 than owner is not affected, if it’s Y01 than owner is affected
Status > Codename for battery > B01 (not affected) / Y01 (affected)
Nvidia Gamer Focused Special Featured Product
Nvidia perceives the device especially as gamer-focused product therefore they has enhanced and uplifted its internal parts to improve on-device gaming. In the Nvidia’s devices there is a special feature of Nvidia’s game controller which gives a very special comfort feel, whenever playing on the device.
Nvidia’s Specification
1. Best graphical processors
2. It powers graphical content on computers
3. It’s slate built for gamers therefore it pitches the Shield tablet
4. Available in two configuration 16GB (Wi-Fi-only) and 32GB (Wi-Fi-and-LTE)
5. Costs of 16GB-$299 of 32GB-$399.
Nvidia and Other CompaniesA GREEN Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford has announced she is stepping down in a tactical move to try to defeat the Conservatives.
Cheryl Briggs, who was planning to stand for Oxford West and Abingdon at the General Election on June 8, has said she will no longer be contesting the seat.
The decision to stand aside was taken by local party members following a special meeting in the constituency, and was supported overwhelmingly.
The Green Party will now be telling supporters that the main aim is to try and prevent a Conservative victory in Oxford West and Abingdon, and Layla Moran of the Liberal Democrats is the candidate who stands most chance of defeating the Conservative candidate Nicola Blackwood.
Ms Briggs said: "I’m a Green Party member to the core, but we need to be prepared to put the greater good before our own political self-interest here.
"As it is a marginal constituency, the party is prepared to support the progressive party that has the best chance of beating the Conservatives."
The decision follows discussions between senior members of the local Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
Oxfordshire Green Party chairwoman Sarah Wood said: "As things currently stand, the UK is set to be ravaged by five more years of Tory government.
"Yet the fact is that, under our electoral system, the Tories will win many seats, where a majority of the voters in the constituency do not support them. Our political system is broken, and it makes no sense that parties with many common values stand against each other and let the Tories through."
Ms Wood added that the Labour Party in Oxford West and Abingdon should consider withdrawing their candidate as well, to maximise the chances of ousting the Tories.
She said: "Meetings supporting a ‘Progressive Alliance’ in Oxford recently have shown the appetite amongst the wider population for parties to come together in this way. We know standing aside is a major step for parties to take. But given the damage that an unconstrained Conservative government can do, we would hope that they can be brave enough to put the national interest above narrow party politics this time."
Nicola Blackwood, the Conservative candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon said: "This is yet more proof that Jeremy Corbyn and his closest allies are cooking up deals behind closed doors and building a disastrous coalition that will prop him up in Downing Street.
"Whether it says Green or Lib Dem on the ballot, it is Jeremy Corbyn who will get the vote in the end.
"This is a sharp reminder of the choice facing the British people on June 8 between strong and stable leadership with Theresa May or chaos under Jeremy Corbyn."Financial freedom sounds like a wonderful dream that many people find hard or impossible to reach. However, the truth is, you do not need a lot of skill or education to start your journey towards financial freedom. Successful professionals are no more likely than ordinary folks to become financially free |
Police officers in Mason City, Iowa, get a look at the department's new mine resistant-ambush-protected vehicle on loan from the Department of Defense in April 2014. (Arian Schuessler/Globe Gazette via AP)
If you're going to wage war on drugs, you need to be outfitted like a warrior.
That seems to be the rationale behind hundreds of police department requests for armored trucks submitted to the Pentagon between 2012 and 2014. The requests, unearthed in a FOIA request by Mother Jones magazine, shed light on how the war on drugs has directly contributed to the militarization of local police forces in recent years.
Police departments can request surplus military gear from the Pentagon through the Department of Defense's 1033 program, which doles out hundreds of millions of dollars in military goods to cops each year. The equipment includes everything from underwear to office equipment to armored combat vehicles. After Ferguson, when images of local cops training assault rifles on peaceful protestors from atop armored trucks flooded the airwaves, the program has come under increasing scrutiny.
The Mother Jones investigation focuses on requests for armored combat vehicles, arguably the most iconic piece of police military equipment in the post-Ferguson era. Among the requests Mother Jones obtained, the most frequently cited rationale for needing an armored vehicle was drugs: "Fully a quarter of the 465 requests projected using the vehicles for drug enforcement," the investigation found. By contrast, police departments rarely cited hostage situations, terrorist attacks or armed gunmen as rationale for obtaining the trucks.
At least seven departments explicitly cited marijuana in their vehicle requests, tying pot with methamphetamines for the drug that shows up most often in the documents. In 2012, Sheriff Tom Bosenko of Shasta County, Calif., requested two armored tactical vehicles to be "used during apprehension of suspects in both Marijuana eradications and during high risk search warrant service for drug offenders."
In 2013, the Sheriff of Sumter County, Fla., requested one armored vehicle partly because his office had located "several marijuana grows both indoors and outdoors" in Sumter County. Here's how other departments wanted to wage war on pot from the gun turret of an armored truck:
Clearwater County, Idaho, has a population of fewer than 10,000 people. It seems like overkill to keep an armored truck on hand for the purpose of "marijuana eradication." This is especially true when you consider that in recent years, the number of marijuana grow sites discovered in the entire state of Idaho can be counted on one hand.
But overkill has been part of the drug war since Day 1. Experts largely agree that the harms inflicted by the way we wage the war on drugs — incarceration, police killings, gangs fighting over black market turf — far outweigh the costs to society of drug use itself. The Obama administration has been smartly dialing back the rhetoric and policies of the drug war.
Earlier this year, the administration even started limiting the types of military equipment that police departments can request through the Pentagon's 1033 program. But notably, armored vehicles are still available. So for the time being at least, your local police department can still request what amounts to a tank to deal with a marijuana plot.REDDING, Calif. - A Redding man is in custody after he allegedly stabbed three people at the Castle Lounge late Wednesday night.
Police were dispatched to the Castle Lounge on Hartnell Avenue at approximately 11:14 p.m. in regards to a stabbing in-progress.
When officers arrived, several people were physically detaining a man, who was later identified as Nicholas Morgan Vanvleet, 23.
Police said Vanvleet stabbed three people, starting with Bryan Rhodes, 45, in the parking lot of the lounge. Vanvleet allegedly approached Rhodes and started making comments about believing he was the devil. Police said he stabbed Rhodes several times in the upper arm and chest before Rhodes ran inside the Castle Lounge and asked for help.
An employee and another patron approached Vanvleet and attempted to disarm him. During the struggle, Vanvleet allegedly stabbed one of them in the wrist and head and the other in the hand.
When police arrived, they arrested Vanvleet and tried to put him in a patrol car. Vanvleet broke free and was seen being tackled by several officers, screaming out for help and that he was an angel.
Vanvleet was taken to Shasta Regional Medical Center and booked into the Shasta County Jail for assault with a deadly weapon.
Police said the three people who were stabbed suffered non life-threatening injuries and refused medical attention.Share The migrant crisis in Calais and Kent is the EU's fault
The migrant crisis in Calais and Kent is the EU's fault As long as people hope to make it across the Channel, the horrors in the Mediterranean will continue
As long as people hope to make it across the Channel, the horrors in the Mediterranean will continue The single most helpful thing is to stop holding out the prospect of entering Britain
The free movement of people, we keep being told, is a fundamental principle of the EU. Its definition has been stretched to cover benefits claims, subsidised university places and voting entitlements. But it plainly doesn’t cover the actual free movement of people – at least, not of British people wishing to move freely through Calais.
The migration crisis has been bubbling away for years around the mouth of the Channel Tunnel. Now, though, it is spreading chaos through Kent. It’s not just holidaymakers who are affected. All those who need to use the M20 are suffering. Small businesses across my constituency, especially those which import supplies from the Continent, are losing money. None expects compensation.
Strikes by French transport workers are as much a British summer variable as rain. The present crisis, though, is of a different scale. Hundreds of thousands of people in Africa and the Levant aim to enter Britain through Europe.
It’s worth pausing to ask why they are so desperate to come here rather than Italy or France. After all, a refugee is someone who is trying to get out of a particular country, not into a particular country. For years, anti-cuts campaigners have been telling us what a mean and miserable welfare system we have. Why this determination to leave socialist France for “austerity Britain”?
The explanations are clear enough. Migrants prefer to go to places where they know someone – and, as a result of the massive influx of people under the last Labour government, people from every part of the world have compatriots here. We have a growing economy and plenty of jobs. We have no identity cards, deport few illicit entrants and speak English.
The young men washing up on the shores of Spain and Italy have little intention of staying in those countries, afflicted as they are by the euro crisis. Shakespeare has words for this, as for every, situation: “And then to Calais; and to England then: where ne’er from France arrived more happy men”.
If the migrants are happy, the people of Calais are not. They complain of rising crime and disruption and, in an unfocused but intense way, they blame the British. Their mayor recently suggested that the whole crisis had somehow been got up by David Cameron.
Seriously? A sans-papier enters France unimpeded, travels from the Italian border to Calais without once being detained, and is allowed to roam about near that city without arrest. How is this Britain’s fault?
In truth, the fault here lies with the EU’s rules on immigration, which have not only created a border-free-zone across the Continent, but which make it impossible to return sea-borne migrants to their ports of origin. Under the current rules, if you are picked up by an Italian vessel a hundred yards outside Libyan territorial waters, you must be landed in Italy. Understandably, hundreds of thousands of people are tempted into such journeys, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Australia faced a similar challenge of sea-borne migration, and solved it by processing all refugee claims offshore. Since that change of policy, there has not been a single death by drowning.
At this stage, all sorts of people like to signal their virtue by saying that offshore processing would be far too harsh and that we’re dealing with human beings (as if anyone disputed it). But consider the logic of what they’re saying. Once we start allowing the Mediterranean migrants to remain in Europe, we contract out our immigration policy to people smugglers. Instead of giving places to those who have applied properly, or to those judged to be genuine refugees, we allow gangsters in Tripoli to determine who gets to jump the queue – assuming they survive the journey.
No one denies that there are individual tragedies. Next month, I’ll be working with a team of Centre-Right MPs from around Europe in some of the camps in Sicily where the boat people are housed on their arrival. If you’d like to help, there are plenty of charities operating there and, indeed, in the countries of origin. There are things we can do, both to ease the plight of those who have already made the crossing and to stabilise some of the places from which they are fleeing. But the single most helpful thing is to stop holding out the prospect of entering Britain. As long as people hope to make it across the English Channel, the horrors in the Mediterranean will continue.
Daniel Hannan is a Conservative Member of the European Parliament and blogs at www.hannan.co.uk.
ShareHundreds of thousands of people marched through the center of the Chechen capital Grozny on Monday, holding signs that read "Hands off our beloved prophet" and chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest).
Russia's interior ministry reported that over 800,000 people had attended the government-sponsored rally which was broadcast live on state television.
"This is a protest against those who support the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad," Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin leader of the predominantly Muslim region, told the crowds.
"If needed, we are ready to die to stop anyone who thinks that you can irresponsibly defile the name of the prophet," he added.
A Muhammad caricature featured on the cover of French satirical magazine "Charlie Hebdo" last week, after a shooting at the publication's Paris offices left 12 people dead. The perpetrators claimed the attack was to avenge the prophet. Kadyrov criticized the French government for defending Charlie Hebdo's right to publish the cartoons, and condemned other publications that reprinted the images.
"You and I see how European journalists and politicians under false slogans about free speech and democracy proclaim the freedom to be vulgar, rude and insult the religious feelings of hundreds of millions of believers," he said. "We say firmly that we will never allow anyone to go unpunished for insulting the name of the Prophet and our religion."
Kadyrov has been accused of carrying out human rights abuses in Chechnya, which he's ruled with an iron fist since being installed by President Vladimir Putin in 2007. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the two wars Russia waged against Chechnya in the 1990s, and the province is still plagued by an Islamist insurgency.
Kadyrov, who depends on Moscow's support to maintain stability, has used rallies in the past to demonstrate his loyalty to Putin. Some citizens, however, have reported being bullied into showing up.
Protests in the Muslim world
Hundreds of thousands of Chechens demonstrated against Charlie Hebdo in Grozny
The Grozny rally was the latest of several demonstrations in Muslim countries against Charlie Hebdo's cartoons. Around 15,000 people joined a similar rally in the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia on Saturday, according to Russian news agencies.
While Moscow offered its condolences to France after the shootings, several Russian publications were warned against reprinting the Muhammad cartoons.
Russian communications oversight agency, Roskomnadzor, said publishing the caricatures could be qualified as "inciting ethnic and religious hatred" and punished under anti-extremism laws.
"Roskomnadzor calls on all national media to choose other methods of expressing their solidarity with their tragically killed French colleagues, rather than inflaming sectarian tensions in Russian society," it said in a statement.
nm/bw (Reuters, AP, AFP)Oct 19, 2013; Ann Arbor, MI, USA; Indiana Hoosiers wide receiver Shane Wynn (1) wide receiver Nick Stoner (14) and center Collin Rahrig (64) celebrate a touchdown in the third quarter against the Michigan Wolverines at Michigan Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports
It’s a new day for Hoosier wide receivers and tight ends.
The Indiana receiving corps may have led the B1G in receiving yards a year ago, but three of their top four producers are now gone. Kofi Hughes and Cody Latimer have been familiar faces at wideout since Wilson’s first year in 2011, and the tight end spot? Ted Bosler has been the leading receiver at the position since Ben Chappell was leading the show. Yeah, it’s been a minute.
Fans can at least find comfort knowing Shane Wynn is back in his old familiar spot, right? Nope. Despite standing only 5’7″, Wynn is being moved from the slot position he has occupied since his freshman year to fill the outside spot previously played by two players who on average were 51 pounds heavier and 7.5 inches taller than Wynn (Hughes and Latimer).
Here’s a look at what the depth chart heading into fall camp:
Freshman Making a Name for Themselves
Expect several changes in the depth chart ahead of the first game next Saturday, most notably, look for a few freshman to get in the mix. Aside from those who enrolled early (like stud recruit Dominique Booth), most freshman didn’t have a chance to make the pre-camp two-deep. That’s all changed and the freshmen are making a big impact. 6’4″ Simmie Cobbs, a former Purdue commit, has gained consistent praise from his coaches and looked very comfortable making several big catches in the most recent intra-squad scrimmage. His size makes him an attractive option at the currently undersized outside receiver position, especially in light of Caleb Cornett’s recent slip up.
From his small stature to his lightning quick explosiveness, Harris appears to be Shane Wynn 2.0
According to Coach Wilson, freshman J-Shun Harris “has been as good as anyone,” and his highlight reel from the previously mentioned scrimmage backs that statement up nicely. From his small stature to his lightning quick explosiveness, Harris appears to be Shane Wynn 2.0. The staff may use him in the same way the used Wynn as a freshman: some action at slot receiver as well as on special teams as a return man.
The tight end position will also have some freshmen flavor to it. Coaches have raved about the ability of Jordan Fuchs, a 6’6″ former basketball star, to make athletic catches, and without a clear replacement for Bolser, the door could be open for Fuchs to make a name for himself early.
New Cast, New Strengths, Same Goal
While the newcomers are cause for excitement, the novelty of the corps in general may be cause for concern. As Offensive Coordinater Kevin Johns explained,
“We’re a different offense than we were a year ago, and we’re still trying to put the pieces together…Nothing is going to be handed to us and nothing is going to be guaranteed. We’re not as big as we were a year ago. We have more speed than we had, but not as much size…We don’t have a ton of experience, so those guys are still learning to play the game.”
The depth chart for the tight end spot in particular remains a question mark as Johns says the team will start with a “tight end by committee” strategy. Position coach James Patton recently mentioned Anthony Corsaro, Jordan Fuchs and Arizona transfer Michael Cooper (who sat out last season due to NCAA transfer rules) as players who have impressed him thus far in camp.
While the majority of the group may be inexperienced, the three starting wideouts (Wynn, Stoner and Roundtree) at least provide some experience and veteran leadership. While opposing defenses will undoubtedly be focused on holding Wynn in check, look for Nick Stoner to finish his IU career on a high note. Stoner is freaky fast and until this year, spent a good amount of time training as an NCAA National Championship track star. With the void left by Latimer and Hughes, Stoner decided to focus on football this year, redshirting in track. He says the move has allowed him gained weight and describes himself as finally looking like a football player, rather than a track star in pads.
The addition of new faces doesn’t mean a new game plan for offensive juggernauts Kevin Wilson and Kevin Johns. Defenses will be spread out. They will be pushed with a frantic pace. The ball will fly out of Sudfeld’s hand. It’s just a matter of who is going to be there to catch it.When you are applying for a business analytics position, the questions that you will be asked are aimed towards your understanding of the business situation, your ability to assess the environment and the industry in which the firm operates and your ability to give a structure to the problem and developing a framework for arriving at a solution. Here are some typical scenarios discussed in business analytics interviews:
Basic Questions on Applying analytics to Business Problems
How will you start while approaching an analytics problem?/ What will be your first step in solving a business analytics problem? (You may refer to the article on first step to an analytical problem for framing an answer)
A large part of business relevant information originates in unstructured data that can’t be stored in SQL, spreadsheets or other structured databases. It’s generally text heavy and may contain text, numbers or other data types like images or audio files. How will you plan to unlock the potential of such data for a traditional company where employees and managers place heavy emphasis on structured databases and spreadsheets.
Questions Based on Business Experiments
1. You have to choose from multiple actions to decide which one will lead to increased sales? How will you make a decision?
2. There are multiple products on your portfolio and you need to prioritize which products should be released first in order to maximize revenue. How will you make a call?
3. You have to take a call on discontinuing one product from a set of N products. How will will you do that while minimizing the revenue impact while maximizing the cost savings from discontinuing a product.
4. You have to select from three different channels for your next marketing campaign. How will you maximize the response rate to the campaign.
5. As a manager you can only select two channels to proceed with the next rund of recruitment. How will you select which channel is better?
Customer Analytics
How would you use the following types of customer data to analyze the customers and get a better understanding of problems and opportunities for your customers for an insurance company (you can replace insurance with any other industry)-
a). Demographic data like gender, age, geography and income
b). Behavioral data like purchases, registration data, browsing, and device usage data
c). Interaction data like clicks, navigation paths and browsing activities
d). Attitudinal data like opinions, desirability, branding and sentiments
Technology is changing how customers interact with products even for traditional products like insurance, banking and Mutual Funds. As a marketing manager for a finance company that offers multiple products to its customers, what data will you collect to understand the changing behavior of your customers. How will you apply this understanding to gain new customers.
You have joined a company that has ignored the data revolution for years and is now losing its customer base to new generation of competitors. They don’t have enough infrastructure to collect or store data related to existing customers. How will you approach the problem as an analytics manager and what methods will to adopt to immediately arrest the customer attrition and gain lost customers in short to medium term.
How do you plan to measure customer satisfaction for your company? What are the questions that you will ask as part of a survey data collection?(Think about descriptive data collection)
If you ask the question to your customers “How Likely are you to recommend the product to a friend or a colleague”, what are the things you should keep in mind? (How will you define the promoters and detractors. Will you subtract the detractors from promoters?)
How would you justify a certain metric of customer satisfaction (think about finding a correlation with profitability and other managerial outcomes, comparing the correlation with alternative metrics)?
What are the pros and cons of using surveys vs other indicators like store purchase data (what customers are buying and when they are buying it) for measuring customer satisfaction?
How do you measure word of mouth dynamics from customers? As an analytics manager how would you approach collecting the word of mouth data from your customers? (for example how to capture data on who are your customers are talking to, how are the brands being mentioned and so on)
What are the advantages of using passive or unobtrusive ways of data collections from a customer analytics perspective?
Churn Related Problems
1. As a consultant you are trying to identify the customers of a telecom company who are most likely to churn. What data will you collect and what approach will you adopt.
2. On a similar line, you are tasked with identifying employees of an IT company who are most likely to move out to a different company. How will you approach the problem. (approach the problem with techniques such as survival analysis)
3. In retail banking, you are expected to develop a model for identifying the best customers who will be eligible for pre-approved loan based on customer profile attributes (apply techniques such as logistic regression)
Geographical/Location Based Analytics
A bit advanced and challenging but worth the effort – customising promotional messages and targeted promotional offers based on proximity of a customer to the store. For example, if you can track through a mobile GPS data that the target customer is parking near a shopping plaza defined within 100 mts of radius of your store, you can immediately send an enticing offer through SMS offering discount on a product if purchased within the next one hour
Customer and Product Affinity
1. You are tasked with automating product recommendations for any organization with a substantial product catalog and transaction volume to increasing competitiveness via product affinity. How will you approach this problem. (Think market basket analysis)
2. Determine frequently bought items together in a super market for purpose of cross-selling (Refer to the article on Association Rule Mining for a thorough understanding of such problems)
Forecasting
How will you apply time-series for forecasting of demand for products using ARIMA modeling
Application of Analytics in Marketing and Advertisement
1. Image analysis – advanced and challenging – translating images and other high dimensional data into numerical or symbols data to detecting events, surveillance, etc.
2. Sequence analysis – modeling a customer purchases as a sequence – customer first buys a computer, then speakers then webcam
3. Customer segmentation for targeted marketing (used clustering)
Applications in Finance- Fraud Analytics
1. How will you apply analytics in identifying credit card fraud (Anamoly / outlier detection in purchases data)
Pricing Analytics
1. In a airline flight booking operations how will you set decision rules about closing the slots for a particular price range
2. Hotel room bookings – when to say no rooms are available even when there are vacant rooms
Customer Analytics- Measuring Customer Experience and Retention of Customers
1. How will you derive sentiment analysis from product reviews, forum comments and tweets to identify possible point of discontent among customers
Unlocking Customer Data
You as a manager want to begin connecting to your customer data with the right tools and start analyzing your customers’ transactions. What will be your first step? (Ask if there is a data warehouse in place with a well-defined data dictionary)
Value of Data
Data is becoming a new source of value in large part because of what we termed its option value. Give few instances where you think data possesses option value for the business.
Earlier the emphasis was on companies that collected data. Now, the emphasis has shifted to companies that analyze data. In this context there are two types of companies at the different ends of the spectrum. Companies with data (like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc.) and companies with ideas to apply it in day to day business (consulting companies, technology vendors and analytics providers). How do you think these two can bridged to exploit hidden value? (think about companies holding involving consultancy firm to extract value from that data)
What changes do you think are likely to happen to the Big Data value chain in short-term (2-3 years) and medium term (5 years)?
How do you think companies that deal with data for one purpose can leverage its value through ancillary purposes? For example air ticket booking websites like Kayak or hotel booking platforms like Trivago has lots of data for customer preferences. How do you think they can leverage that outside their domain of expertise (which is selling air tickets and booking hotels).
Can you visualize a business model for a payment company (like Visa) that can forgo its fee payment and process transactions for free in return for access to more data and then use that data to derive and sell insights.
Site a few examples where a company can derive value from publicly available data. (for example flyontime started to gather open data to predict flight delays, Prismatic aggregates and ranks media contents across the web based on text analytics)
How value can be generated by cross-applying Big Data skills by collecting the data from multiple sources and using them to create an insight that can’t be generated by any of these standalone entities. (like for example, Climate Corporation collects environmental and other data to provide insights to farmers)
Data as Strategy
When Google collects any sort of data, it has secondary uses in mind. For example, GPS data collected from Google Street View and Google Maps ended up in its Training self-driving cars. Amazon on the other hand focuses on primary use of data and derives marginal secondary benefits from the huge data it collects. Give few example on how Amazon can use its data for secondary purposes to derive value. (its recommendation for example uses clickstream data but rarely uses it to predict the economy or other such things. Though it tracks underlined parts of Kindle books, it rarely shares that data with Authors, Publishers etc. to improve their products).
How data can be used to transform the business model of a car manufacturer and what sources would you look for to collect that data? (For example, Insurance companies collect enormous data based on accidents and collisions. By using telematics devices they also track the usage of different parts of a car. This data can be harnessed by the auto manufacturers themselves to improve the quality of their cars and even to reshape relationship with their parts suppliers )
Other Applications
1. How will you recommend the redesigning of store layouts based on data of customer purchase/ movement within the storeOn Monday morning, March 18, hundreds — if not thousands — of Talmadge and City Heights commuters found themselves trapped in long lines of traffic trying to access Aldine Drive through Talmadge.
With horns honking and fists shaking, unhappy drivers may have forgotten that notification had been posted along Fairmount Avenue and Aldine Drive warning that that two new stop signs would be installed along this busy, accident-prone corridor. The stop signs were installed along Aldine at 47th Street on Friday, March 15.
One stop sign controls northbound traffic to Fairmount; the other controls eastbound traffic to the Euclid and Monroe intersection. Morning commuters quickly discovered that their routine drive is no longer convenient or efficient to access Fairmount Avenue and I-8.
Most drivers were substantially delayed by the ensuing traffic snarl that stretched four or more blocks on the three major streets leading to Aldine Drive.
Since the 1990s, this section of Aldine Drive has been identified as a failing roadway, with its average daily traffic count now nearing 17,000 cars (6000 is capacity). The street wasn’t built to accommodate this level of traffic, but as density in Talmadge and City Heights increased, it became a preferred outlet.
City traffic engineers and the Kensington/Talmadge Planning Group agreed to install these stop signs so commuters would be discouraged and seek other streets. Commuters should now return to the major thoroughfare designed for such heavy traffic — El Cajon Boulevard leading to Fairmount Avenue. Future traffic counts will determine if the new signs have been a successful remedy.T-Mobile had the biggest turnaround in our Fastest Mobile Networks study this year, and it isn't done. In a series of exclusive interviews before the UnCarrier 5.0 event in Seattle today, T-Mobile's network heads revealed some of the company's upcoming secret weapons, and promised that the next year will see major moves on one of T-Mobile's biggest pain points: coverage.
"We're very confident with the LTE build we have underway this year, that if you re-ran your tests in less then six months we would rise to No. 1 nationally," T-Mobile's CTO Neville Ray said.
T-Mobile's LTE network now reaches more than 227 million of the 318 million U.S. residents. The company today announced that it had "wideband LTE" in 16 major metro areas and voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) in 15. (See the map below.) That makes its network "data strong, it said.
"We've been mobilized around building an extremely capable, data strong network. That's been the goal and objective of this team," Ray said.
Starting with Speed
Wideband LTE, in T-Mobile's parlance, is an LTE network with channels larger than 10 MHz - either 15 MHz or 20 MHz. Other carriers are moving to wider channels, as well. Verizon Wireless calls its version XLTE, and says it's available in 250 markets. Sprint calls its version Spark, and has it in 24 cities.
But channel width isn't everything. We were impressed with T-Mobile's speed in our nationwide network tests this year; the smaller carrier almost always beat Sprint Spark, and sometimes beat Verizon's wideband XLTE network. Ray says that's because T-Mobile has more capacity per user, not just fewer users on its network.
T-Mobile insists it has a capacity advantage over AT&T and Verizon because of its denser network. Since T-Mobile was built with smaller cells to operate over 1700MHz and 1900MHz rather than 700MHz and 850MHz, the company has more cell sites per square mile and can pack more data capacity into each city, Ray said.
"We have more sites than the Verizon guys do, and we have a lot more density with the metropolitan DAS [distributed antenna system]," Ray said. "The Verizon guys are chasing us. And the AT&T story is that as they started to drive more and more activity into the smartphone space their performance would dip."
Sprint Spark, meanwhile, uses the very high-frequency, short-range 2500MHz band from Clearwire's old WiMAX network. That requires even more cell sites, and our tests this year showed that Sprint has been having trouble building that out across whole cities.
Another T-Mobile capacity secret is 4x2 MIMO, which improves performance at the edge of cells and which no other carrier is implementing. It's already built into most of T-Mobile's phones, said Mark McDiarmid, T-Mobile's vice president of radio engineering.
"This is a huge technical breakthrough which our competition has completely missed. You see dramatic gains at the cell edge of many tens of percentage points of average throughput," he said.
With plenty of capacity, T-Mobile is remaining committed to unlimited data on smartphones."Our commitment to unlimited, unrestricted at a very fair price with no overages is firmly in place," according to McDiarmid.
Vibrant VoLTE
T-Mobile has led with cutting-edge voice technologies for a while now. It was the first carrier to introduce Wi-Fi calling, and the first to deliver nationwide HD voice. Now it's starting to turn on VoLTE, which is going to further improve call quality, according to engineering vice president Grant Castle.
"We've already turned in a 23.85 kilobit codec for all VoLTE calls. That is double the bandwidth of the existing HD Voice. While everybody's trying to catch up with us on HD Voice, we're going to double down on it," he said.
That means clearer calls - at least, between T-Mobile users. But so far, HD voice hasn't operated between carriers, and it sounds like it will still be a while before it does.
"We certainly recognize the benefit of interworking, and there's no technical reason not to implement interworking in HD Voice. We get inquiries from other operators for interworking and increasingly we're starting to make connections," he said.
One thing you're less likely to see is Rich Communication Services, heavily plugged by Qualcomm a few years ago as a reason for carriers to sign up for VoLTE. RCS would have introduced presence, video, and multimedia messaging into traditional voice calling, but apps like Facebook Messenger, Skype, and WhatsApp seem to have taken over those roles, Ray said. "The challenge we have on RCS is that we have such a rich app environment in both iOS and Android today," Ray said.
Continue Reading: So What About Coverage?>IDEAS Gorbachev, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was the only President of the Soviet Union.
The world today is overwhelmed with problems. Policymakers seem to be confused and at a loss.
But no problem is more urgent today than the militarization of politics and the new arms race. Stopping and reversing this ruinous race must be our top priority.
The current situation is too dangerous.
More troops, tanks and armored personnel carriers are being brought to Europe. NATO and Russian forces and weapons that used to be deployed at a distance are now placed closer to each other, as if to shoot point-blank.
While state budgets are struggling to fund people’s essential social needs, military spending is growing. Money is easily found for sophisticated weapons whose destructive power is comparable to that of the weapons of mass destruction; for submarines whose single salvo is capable of devastating half a continent; for missile defense systems that undermine strategic stability.
Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defense doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war.
It could have been different
In the second half of the 1980s, together with the U.S., we launched a process of reducing nuclear weapons and lowering the nuclear threat. By now, as Russia and the U.S. reported to the Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference, 80% of the nuclear weapons accumulated during the years of the Cold War have been decommissioned and destroyed. No one’s security has been diminished, and the danger of nuclear war starting as a result of technical failure or accident has been reduced.
This was made possible, above all, by the awareness of the leaders of major nuclear powers that nuclear war is unacceptable.
In November 1985, at the first summit in Geneva, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the U.S. declared: Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Our two nations will not seek military superiority. This statement was met with a sigh of relief worldwide.
I recall a Politburo meeting in 1986 at which the defense doctrine was discussed. The proposed draft contained the following language: “Respond to attack with all available means.” Members of the politburo objected to this formula. All agreed that nuclear weapons must serve only one purpose: preventing war. And the ultimate goal should be a world without nuclear weapons.
Breaking out of the vicious circle
Today, however, the nuclear threat once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.
We must break out of this situation. We need to resume political dialogue aiming at joint decisions and joint action.
There is a view that the dialogue should focus on fighting terrorism. This is indeed an important, urgent task. But, as a core of a normal relationship and eventually partnership, it is not enough.
The focus should once again be on preventing war, phasing out the arms race, and reducing weapons arsenals. The goal should be to agree, not just on nuclear weapons levels and ceilings, but also on missile defense and strategic stability.
In modern world, wars must be outlawed, because none of the global problems we are facing can be resolved by war — not poverty, nor the environment, migration, population growth, or shortages of resources.
Take the first step
I urge the members of the U.N. Security Council — the body that bears primary responsibility for international peace and security — to take the first step. Specifically, I propose that a Security Council meeting at the level of heads of state adopt a resolution stating that nuclear war is unacceptable and must never be fought.
I think the initiative to adopt such a resolution should come from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin — the Presidents of two nations that hold over 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenals and therefore bear a special responsibility.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that one of the main freedoms is freedom from fear. Today, the burden of fear and the stress of bearing it is felt by millions of people, and the main reason for it is militarism, armed conflicts, the arms race, and the nuclear Sword of Damocles. Ridding the world of this fear means making people freer. This should become a common goal. Many other problems would then be easier to resolve.
The time to decide and act is now.
Contact us at editors@time.com.YOU can’t call it a homecoming, but Sydney FC midfielder Ali Abbas is immensely proud that his form for the Sky Blues has been rewarded with a recall to the Iraq squad after a seven-year hiatus.
Without an official cap since Iraq won the Asian Cup in 2007, Abbas says the door has been opened for his dream of representing the country’s white shirt at the Asian Cup here in January - but now he must make an unanswerable case to see it through.
With the Asian Cup just 100 days away today, Abbas will leave shortly for Iraq’s friendlies with Bahrain and Yemen in Bahrain, the civil war in Iraq still preventing the national team from playing there.
media_camera Abbas (bottom left) prior to the Australia U23's v Iraq U23's Olympic game qualifier in 2007.
Once in camp, Abbas is desperate to impress coach Hakeem Shaker and secure a spot in the Iraq squad chosen for the Asian Cup.
“That was always in my mind, to get back in the Iraqi team,” he said. “I set myself the challenge, to keep working hard. It’s not there yet, I still need to play well and get my spot [in the team].
“You can’t go there thinking you’ve made it - if you want to be at the top you have to train hard, play well every game and hopefully continue to do my job. It’s been a long time, but now it’s come so I have to take the opportunity.
media_camera Ali Abbas.
“The coach is Iraqi, he did well with the youth team and the Olympic team and now the national team. He’s really good as a coach for Iraq - he’s done well, won a couple of competitions and hopefully he’ll do something special at the Asian Cup.
“That’s my target, and it’s why I need to play so well in these two games. There is the Gulf Cup in November and the Asian Cup in January, and hopefully |
will, maybe it won’t. I can’t know that now. It isn’t Saturday yet.Citing customer concerns over "the game's depictions of violence against women", Target stores in Australia are no longer selling Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V. Update: Take-Two Interactive chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick has issued a statement regarding Target's action.
In an official statement (via Kotaku UK), Target's general manager of corporate affairs said that the decision to pull the popular title from store shelves was made following extensive community and customer concern about the game's content.
"We've been speaking to many customers over recent days about the game, and there is a significant level of concern about the game's content," Mr Cooper said. "We've also had customer feedback in support of us selling the game, and we respect their perspective on the issue. "However, we feel the decision to stop selling GTA5 is in line with the majority view of our customers."
The decision to pull the game has garnered strong criticism from the gaming community, with many pointing out that the decision flies in the face of the relatively recent legislation that allowed games in Australia to be classified with an R18+ rating. Until that legislation passed, games featuring strong mature content were either significantly censored or banned from release in the country altogether.
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Target's Cooper stresses in the company statement that other R-rated games and movies would continue to be sold at the store, and that the Grand Theft Auto V situation is an extraordinary one.
"While these products often contain imagery that some customers find offensive, in the vast majority ofcases, we believe they are appropriate products for us to sell to adult customers. "However, in the case of GTA5, we have listened to the strong feedback from customers that this is not a product they want us to sell."
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It feels like an extreme measure, one Target Australia will no doubt lose revenue over. After spending the past year sifting through Grand Theft Auto V stunt videos featuring groups of friends gathering together to jump cars, fly planes and otherwise cause good-natured mischief, it's hard to imagine the game containing content objectionable enough for a ban.
But over at ABC.net.au they offer a different perspective on the story. They cite a Change.org petition from a trio of anonymous women — Nicole, Claire and Kat — calling for the retailer to ban the game from sale. The petition, with over 41,000 signatures so far, is labeled "Target: Withdraw Grand Theft Auto 5 – this sickening game encourages players to commit sexual violence and kill women."
It's a game that encourages players to murder women for entertainment. The incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'health' points – and now Target are stocking it and promoting it for your Xmas stocking. This is Grand Theft Auto 5. This game means that after various sex acts, players are given options to kill women by punching her unconscious, killing with a machete, bat or guns to get their money returned.
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Soliciting prostitutes has been a part of the franchise since Grand Theft Auto III, and while there is no on-screen prompt suggesting players kill sex workers after a transaction is made, it's an act that can be performed in the game.
We have firsthand experience of this kind of sexual violence. It haunts us, and we've been trying to rebuild our lives ever since. Just knowing that women are being portrayed as deserving to be sexually used by men and potentially murdered for sport and pleasure – to see this violence that we lived through turned into a form of entertainments is sickening and causes us great pain and harm.
Now imagine a Target executive with nothing but a cursory awareness of the Grand Theft Auto franchise reading something like that. Then imagine them clicking on the video linked in the petition (NSFW) in which a player makes sport of visiting a prostitute, partaking of her services and then backing over her with his car to get his money back.
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While we've seen such scenes play out countless times since Grand Theft Auto III, the release of Grand Theft Auto V on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 added a first-person camera option that lends a disturbing intimacy to the proceedings.
Target's statement does not mention the petition, and there's no outward indication the retailer is aware of its existence.
We've reached out to Rockstar Games for comment on the game's removal from Australian Target stores and will update this story should they respond.
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Update: Strauss Zelnick, chairman and CEO of Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive, offered the following statement regarding Target Australia's removal of the game from store shelves:
"We are disappointed that an Australian retailer has chosen no longer to sell Grand Theft Auto V — a title that has won extraordinary critical acclaim and has been enjoyed by tens of millions of consumers around the world. Grand Theft Auto V explores mature themes and content similar to those found in many other popular and groundbreaking entertainment properties. Interactive entertainment is today's most compelling art form and shares the same creative freedom as books, television, and movies. I stand behind our products, the people who create them, and the consumers who play them."OU students in Greek houses being targeted after racist video Norman police said they have responded to more than a dozen calls on sorority row. Share Shares Copy Link Copy
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WEBVTT KOCO ORGAN CHESKY LIVE WITH THE LATEST FOLLOW-UP FROM THE RACIST VIDEO. MORGAN? Reporter: PAUL, OUTSIDE THE SAE HOUSE THIS TAPE IS STILL UP THERE LETTERS DOWN IN STUDENT TELL ME THEY ARE TRYING TO MOVE ON, BUT THE ATTENTION FROM THE UNWANTED VIDEO HAS LEFT SOME WITH UNWANTED DISCRIMINATION. IT IS THE FOOTAGE BRINGING THE FALL OF ONE FRATERNITY, BUT THE PUNISHMENT MAY NOT STOP WITH SAE. ANYBODY WITH GREEK OTHERS IS BEING TARGETED WHICH IS AWFUL BECAUSE IT'S NOT THE ENTIRE GREEK SYSTEM IT'S INDIVIDUALS. Reporter: A SYSTEM SOME SAY IS UNDER ATTACK FROM VANDALS TAKING JUSTICE INTO THEIR OWN HANDS. THEIR TIRES ARE GETTING/THEIR WINDOWS ARE GETTING BUSTED IN. Reporter: THE THREAT HAS SOME STUDENTS NOT TAKING CHANCES. LETTERS WAS A SOURCE OF PRIDE HAVE BECOME A TARGET LEAVING SOME STUDENTS TO SCRAPE THEM RIGHT OFF. WE HAVE SEEN A SLIGHT INCREASE, SOMETHING WE DON'T USUALLY SEE MUCH OF. Reporter: NORMAN PD HAS RESPONDED TO MORE THAN A DOZEN CALLS ON SORORITY ROW, ANOTHER CALL ASKING FOR PATROLS DUE TO SLASHED TIRES. OUR JOBS IS TO DEAL NOT ONLY WITH CRIME THAT OCCURS BUT THE FEAR OF CRIME ITSELF. Reporter: FEAR KEEPING A COMMUNITY AND CHECK THAT STUDENTS TRY AND MOVE ON. RIGHT NOW, NORMAN POLICE ENCOURAGING ANYONE WHO'S HAD EXPERIENCE DAMAGE TO MAKE AN OFFICIAL POLICE REPORT ONLY KOCO CAMERAS WERE THERE AS CAMPUS STAFF BLOCKED OFF WHAT USED TO BE THE SAE HOUSE CAUTION TAPE. DAVID BORN GAY MEMBERS UNTIL MIDNIGHT TO LEAVE, AT THAT POINT STAFF LIKE THE GATE UP. IN THE HOURS AFTER THE HOUSE CLOSE WE CAUGHT THIS ON THE STATUE OF LEGENDARY OU COACH BARRY SWITZER, SOMEONE COVERED THE MOUTH WITH A PIECE OF RED TAPE THIS HAPPENED ON ANOTHER STATUE ON CAMPUS AS WELL. OUR COVERAGE CONTINUESApple today introduced a new Link Bracelet Kit, which is equipped with six additional stainless steel links to make the 42mm Link Bracelet able to fit wrists that exceed 205mm. The six links expand the band by up to 40mm, for a maximum size of 245mm.The Link Bracelet is Apple's only modular band, with size that can be adjusted by adding or removing links. That makes it the only band that can be expanded in this way, and with six additional links, it'll be the band best suited for wrists larger than 215mm, which is where the Classic Buckle maxes out.Apple has also introduced new sizing options for the Apple Watch Sport Band, introducing an L/XL sizing option for 42mm Apple Watches. Apple Watch Sport Bands are now sold in two configurations: S/M & M/L, and M/L & L/XL. The new L/XL size option is available in black or white and expands the size range of the Sport Band to 245mm.While Apple Watch bands were initially designed to fit a range of wrist sizes from 135mm to 215mm, there have been complaints that the Apple Watch bands are not large enough for bigger wrists. Quite a few people on Apple's support forums have requested XL-sized bands, and Apple's effort to introduce a kit for the Link Bracelet and new sizing options for the Sport Band is its first move towards offering an wider range of sizes.Apple's Link Bracelet Kit is priced at $49 and available for purchase immediately through the company's online site. It ships out in 5 to 7 business daysEXCLUSIVE: A new Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin warns it could be "impossible" to stop 3D-printed guns from being made, not to mention getting past security checkpoints.
A May 21 bulletin distributed to numerous state and federal law enforcement agencies and obtained by FoxNews.com states that the guns, which can be made by downloading blueprints into cutting edge computers that mold three-dimensional items from melted plastic, "poses public safety risks" and are likely beyond the current reach of regulators. The guns threaten to render 3D gun control efforts useless if their manufacture becomes more widespread.
"Significant advances in three-dimensional (3D) printing capabilities, availability of free digital 3D printer files for firearms components, and difficulty regulating file sharing may present public safety risks from unqualified gun seekers who obtain or manufacture 3D printed guns," warns the bulletin compiled by the Joint Regional Intelligence Center.
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The bulletin refers specifically to Defense Distributed, a nonprofit company started by a University of Texas law student, which has successfully made and fired a 3D gun whose only metal parts are the bullets and a small firing pin. Some 100,000 plans for a gun called "The Liberator" were downloaded in just a few days before May 3, when a branch of the U.S. State Department told it to stop sharing the file. But the government bulletin seems to acknowledge that the genie is out of the bottle.
"Limiting access may be impossible," concludes the three-page bulletin.
A source tells FoxNews.com the potential problems faced by government authorities involve securing large, high-profile events or those attended by the President, where magnetometers used to screen for weapons would not pick up a 3D printed gun.
"This is a serious threat," the law enforcement source said. "These could defeat magnetometers. The only security procedure to catch [the 3D firearms] is a pat down. Is America ready for pat-downs at every event?"
In a section called "Liberator design poses Public Safety Risks," the bulletin explains:
"Magnetometers may fail to detect the Liberator, depending on device sensitivity. Though it is prohibited by federal law, manufacturers may deliberately omit the unnecessary metal insert, leaving only a small nail and ammunition as the sole metal component. Future designs could further reduce or eliminate metal entirely.
"Unqualified gun seekers may be able to acquire or manufacture their own Liberators with no background checks."
Other concerns mentioned in the bulletin include: that 3D-printed firearms can be made without serial numbers or unique identifiers, hindering ballistics testing. And improvements in technology and decreasing 3D printer costs are likely to mean even more sophisticated printed guns will become easier to acquire.
"Proposed legislation to ban 3D printing of weapons may deter, but cannot completely prevent their production," the memo says. "Even if the practice is prohibited by new legislation, online distribution of these digital files will be as difficult to control as any other illegally traded music, movie or software files."PUTRAJAYA: A civil servant from Malaysia's Ministry of Education was sacked after he was absent from work for more than 2,000 days, according to a report by Astro Awani on Tuesday (Nov 14).
Astro quoted Education Minister Mahdzir Khalid, who was speaking at the launch of the ministry's Integrity Day where he stressed the importance of integrity among civil servants and how they must strive to avoid being dismissed from work.
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Mahdzir cited an example of how a ministry employee was sacked after being absent from work for 2,002 days - which is equivalent to almost five-and-a-half years.
"This incident happened in a rural school and we do not actually know how the employee could be absent for up to 2,000 days," he reportedly said.
"We don't know what the problem was - the principal was persuading the employee to come to work for years," he added.
Mahdzir did not specify that the staff in question was a teacher, adding that the employee could also be a school clerk or lab assistant.
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"We take into consideration the fact that civil servants staying in rural areas sometimes are forced to take a boat for six hours, then drive for two hours before walking for another four hours to finally get to work... but I'm not saying that's what happened (in this case)," he added.
Mahdzir was also quoted by Bernama as saying that out of almost 3,500 cases of wrongdoing committed by employees from the Ministry of Education from 2010 till October 2017, 55.4 per cent of the cases were relating to absenteeism.
And of the absenteeism cases, more than 68 per cent were committed by executives while the rest involved personnel at management level.
The Malaysian government encourages any civil servant who faces problems to seek help from the counseling department in their respective offices, Astro added.....................................................................................................................................................................................
One of the state’s most prolific restaurant companies is looking to build its portfolio by taking over one of Nob Hill’s most recognized establishments.
Santa Fe Dining — parent company of Chama River Brewing Co., Blue Corn Brewery and Rio Chama among others — is in the process of acquiring Kellys Brew Pub in Nob Hill, Santa Fe Dining president Jim Hargrove confirmed to the Journal Thursday.
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Should everything proceed according to plan, Santa Fe Dining would take over operations at the 10,000-square-foot eatery by the end of summer. The company must still complete its due diligence and get its own small brewers’ license for the landmark location at 3222 Central SE, the former Jones Motor Co. Ford dealership and service station.
Kellys would become the 11th restaurant under the Santa Fe Dining umbrella. While most are in Santa Fe, the company has a growing presence in Albuquerque. In addition to Chama River, the company opened its Draft Station taproom in the Country Club area in 2014. It also plans to add a location of its 35 North Coffee brand in the same area later this year.
The company typically develops its own brands rather than acquire existing restaurants, but Hargrove recited a list of reasons why Kellys made for an attractive prospect.
“The current owners have done such a great job of establishing it as a locals place to go, the location is amazing, the patio is an absolute homerun, the building and its architecture are just so cool and such a great location for a restaurant and a brewpub,” he said. “The only thing I can tell you that is a mild hangup that everyone has to deal with in Nob Hill is that parking can be a challenge but beyond that, it’s tough to find a reason not to pursue Kellys Brewpub as part of Santa Fe Dining.”
Kellys owner Dennis Bonfantine, now 66, said he and his wife, Janice, are preparing to retire. They started Kellys 20 years ago and have been in the current location, which is on the state and national registers of historic places and is a city landmark, since 2000.
“I think it’s a good transition,” he said of the planned sale to Santa Fe Dining. “I think it’s the best use of the property and the building and everything.”
The change of hands is not expected to lead to dramatic changes in the day-to-day operations. Santa Fe Dining will keep the name, give existing employees — of which there are about 75 — a chance to stay in place, and likely stick close to the established menu, Hargrove said. The idea is to use the formula that made Kellys a Nob Hill staple.
“Down the road, we’ll probably make some tweaks here and there, but Kellys is not broken so it doesn’t need fixing,” he said.The defendant in the deadly Colorado theater shooting could be given "truth serum" under a court order issued Monday to help determine whether he is insane if he pleads not guilty by reason of insanity.
Suspect James Holmes could be required to submit to a "narcoanalytic interview" as part of an evaluation to determine if he was legally insane at the time of the July 20 shootings, Arpahoe County District Judge William Sylvester said.
A narcoanalylitic interview is a decades-old process in which patients are given drugs to lower their inhibition. Academic studies have shown that the technique has involved the use of sodium amytal and pentothal, sometimes called truth serum.
The prospect of such interviews that may ensue under such a plea alarmed defense attorneys, who filed documents opposing the technique.
Holmes, 25, is scheduled to enter a plea Tuesday to multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. He is charged with killing 12 people and injuring 70 at a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the Denver suburb of Aurora.
More On This... Carnage in Colorado: Dazed gunman appears in court
If Holmes pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, he would be examined by doctors at the state mental hospital.
In an advisory that Holmes would have to sign if he enters an insanity plea, Sylvester didn't specify what type of drugs would be used but said the examination could include "medically appropriate" ones.
Sylvester said Holmes also could be given a polygraph examination as part of the evaluation.
After reading a draft of the advisory, Holmes' lawyers objected, saying a narcoanalytic interview and a polygraph would violate their client's rights.
In the final version of the advisory, Sylvester said he had incorporated some suggestions from the defense and the prosecution, but he did not address the defense objections to a narcoanalytic interview and polygraph.
Karen Steinhauser, a former prosecutor who is a law professor at the University of Denver and a defense attorney, said she could not find any case law about use of the narcoanalytic interview.
"It comes up so rarely," she said, adding she knows nothing about it.
She noted the technique is clearly allowed by Colorado law.I became interested in the Lafayette Hotel in Buffalo, N.Y.,when my partner, novelist Ishmael Reed, returned from a trip to his hometown. He reported that he happened to walk into the lobby of the hotel while attending a Buffalo book fair, and noticed a plaque, which cited Louise Blanchard Bethune (1856-1913) as the building’s architect and for being the first American woman to open her own architecture office (1881) and the first woman to become a fellow of the American Institute of Architects (1889). He was astonished that a woman in the 19th Century could find a place in a profession so adamantly dominated by men.
Buffalo’s proud past is exhibited by the grand mansions that line Delaware Avenue. One of them, which belonged to the Butler family, owners of the Buffalo News (formerly the Buffalo Evening News), is fit for a king. The city’s downtown is speckled with distinguished buildings that bear the names of some of the country’s greatest Gilded Age architects, including H.H. Richardson, Adler and Sullivan, D. H. Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Even Buffalo’s collection of grain elevators became international icons of modernism, inspiring architects and painters.
But this building–aka Hotel Lafayette and more recently Hotel @ The Lafayette–lingered in the shadows of a downtown square for decades.NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ - As an LGBTQ rainbow flag rose up the flagpole at the Middlesex County Courthouse late last week, attendees remembered the 49 men and women murdered in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida last year during a terrifying and bloody mass shooting that targeted members of that community.
According to published reports, Omar Mateen entered the LGBTQ nightclub on June 12, 2016 and opened fire, perpetrating the deadliest mass shooting in American History.
But the terrorist, who wounded 53 others, was not remembered during this week's event.
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The fear he hoped to create was replaced, instead, by support and a sense of unity here in Central New Jersey and downtown New Brunswick.
Local officials, including U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-12, and about three dozen county residents attended the flag-raising event.
"This is the first time we have a (LGBTQ) flag-raising in Middlesex county - one of the most diverse in the country - and we hope to see it continue from now on," Michael Spadoro, chairperson of the Middlesex Democratic Organization's LGBT Caucus, said. "Events like these bring us one step closer to equality. It's great to know that our representatives have our back here in Middlesex County."
He then provided a brief history of Pride Month, which was celebrated for the 26th time in Asbury Park two weeks ago.
According to the Library of Congress, Pride Month started in 1994 to remember the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, which were the "tipping point" of the LGBTQ movement.
It highlights the contributions of this community to our history.
Spadoro was then joined by Ruell Calvin Brown, a Democratic candidate for South River Town Council, in a recitation of the names of those killed in Orlando, to whom the event was dedicated.
Watson Coleman spoke to those assembled, describing her visit to the Pulse nightclub during the presidential campaign season last fall.
She noted that she was "inspired" by the messages of hope, love, and unity expressed by the visitors to the site.
Watson Coleman then went on to link the shooting with the recent gun assaults at the UPS facility near San Francisco and the attacks on Republican congressmen while they practiced for a charity baseball game on a field in Alexandria, Virginia.
"We have guns in the hands of the wrong people," she said. "The type of guns used in these attacks should not be available. We need common sense gun laws."
She said the attack in Orlando was carried out by a single shooter using a Sig Sauer MCX.223-caliber rifle and a Glock 17 9mm semi-automatic pistol, which were purchased legally. The attack on the congressmen during a baseball practice last week involved a single shooter with an SKS 7.62-millimeter caliber rifle, also purchased legally.
"We are pausing for America," Watson Coleman said. "We should celebrate diversity. We should take these moments to acknowledge the contributions of a diverse community. We are at our best when we bring our talents together."
In a reference to some current concerns of the LGBTQ community, Watson Coleman continued, "We must remember that we are a country of laws. We are working to ensure civil rights in public accommodations. We don't take inclusion lightly. Government has a distinct role in in protecting us and lifting us up. We want to lift hope, commitment, and solidarity for all people."
The vice-chair of the MCDO LGBTQ Caucus, Richard Green III, took the podium next.
"As a life-long resident of Middlesex County and a gay man, today means a lot to me," he said. "Yet, it reminds me that the hard work continues."
Green quoted the slain gay activist Harvey Milk, a San Francisco Councilman who was assassinated in 1978, saying, "We must show persistence, resistance, and commitment. Hope will never be silent."
Spadoro then invited everyone to exit the building to raise the flag in front of the courthouse.
"Let's go out and make some history," he said.
Freeholders Charles Kenny and Kenneth Armwood raised the rainbow banner, joined by Watson Coleman and State Assemblyman Joseph Danielson, D-17.Featured Artwork is art by @PiplupGoku on Twitter.
Some critics have claimed that YO-KAI WATCH cannot succeed outside of Japan. Their reasoning? That its abundant references to Japanese culture will confuse Western audiences. While it is true that the Yo-kai originate from Japan’s youkai mythology, that is not necessarily something that will dissuade consumers from giving it a try.
I can understand the mindset behind this idea. Naturally, if the characters are based on culture elements not native to an outside audience, one might anticipate difficulty for YO-KAI WATCH to gain universal attention. But I do not think that is the case, based on my research on social media.
I looked at SEVERAL opinions about the franchise across the current popular social media platforms, as I think it is the best to hear from the grass roots members. Whenever YO-KAI WATCH is mentioned, in a negative or positive light, I rarely see anyone bring up its Japanese culture. When the opinion is negative, it is usually criticism of the battle system or concerns about the concept being too derivative of genre mainstays such as Pokémon.
So, why is Japanese culture barely mentioned?
To start with, younger children generally care the LEAST about where the Yo-kai designs originate from with the lack of outside, cultural knowledge. And in the case of teens and young adults, they will judge more-so on how the designs look over all. In general, the origins of the designs will be simply glossed over by most people. This is because Pokémon are widely praised for their simplicity in design and a similar aesthetic would be pleasing to long time fans of that franchise.
This is very much true of YO-KAI WATCH‘s Yo-kai designs. Most generally have the same simplistic design as Pokémon, which can appeal to a universal audience. Although, the difference is that Yo-kai take a more quirky approach with their designs. They may seem odd to some people, but they were designed this way for good reason, which we will get into later.
Does YO-KAI WATCH have the potential to garner universal success? I truly believe so, but what is keeping that success from blossoming outside of Japan? Part of it comes from the moderately large portion of preexisting Pokémon fans that feel bringing down YO-KAI WATCH is a valid way of honoring their long standing love for a pioneer in this genre. Even when Nintendo themselves help Pokémon and YO-KAI WATCH coexist, working toward their successes, some fans feel aggressively opposed to the idea of other monster collecting game becoming a huge hit.
There has been a lengthy history of fans reacting unfavorably towards “Pokémon ripoffs” since Digimon, and this sentiment is still present today. Because it is the norm within the fandom to feel that way, it is very easy for Pokémon fans and even the media to influence a large number of people into ignoring YO-KAI WATCH without much earnest thought.
When fans do give YO-KAI WATCH an actual look, they tend to criticize hard with the same mindset. They will try to look for anything that has ideas similar to Pokémon so that they can use those as their criticism, ignoring everything else original and charming that the game and it’s concepts, ideas, and entertainment value have to offer players.
They will also seek for things missing in YO-KAI WATCH that the believe have made Pokémon a huge hit. They will say “There is no competitive community!”, “This game is not an epic adventure like Pokémon!“, or “Where is the trading card game for YW?” to dismiss the franchise as less robust. They will ask, “Why should I bother playing YO-KAI WATCH if it does not have these things that made Pokémon great?”
The problem with those statements, is that YO-KAI WATCH is not successful for any of those reasons (It should be noted that Yo-kai Watch game series and fandom is much farther along in it’s growth in Japan, and does host a competitive community and TCG). While I understand the need to compare these two franchises, what should be realized is that YO-KAI WATCH does not aim to be like Pokémon, it aims to be different and mergeing of the old and new. The truth of the matter is that there are different reasons why YO-KAI WATCH is very successful in Japan. Be aware, that I will be comparing Pokémon a bit as I share these reasons:
1. The relatable premise of YO-KAI WATCH
The Yo-kai designs I mentioned earlier connect with YO-KAI WATCH‘s core premise, invisible beings causing common and relatable problems for people. Have you ever had a case where you just forgot something out of the blue, or you lost internet connection on your cell phone, or were in a situation where you needed to hold a fart?
In YO-KAI WATCH, the franchise addresses that Yo-kai cause these phenomenons. Yo-kai are essentially to blame for these unexpected events and annoyances. Ask and think about it yourself while reading these next questions. Is a ghost causing these events? Are all of my cases of bad luck a result to spirits? Did something supernatural cause my cold to happen?
It is a relatable concept naturally wondered by people and especially today’s kids that makes YO-KAI WATCH universally appealing. We have seen similar concepts of ghosts being used in other media like Ghostbusters and Goosebumps, and both had their fair share of huge success with colorful characters and weird ideas. YO-KAI WATCH does that similarly, but in its own unique way that hits closer to real life than any other big-time media franchise.
2. The YO-KAI WATCH anime
A large part of the success comes from the anime, which made the first YO-KAI WATCH game sell over 1 million copies in Japan and even more for YO-KAI WATCH 2. The question is, what made the anime particularly stand-out?
In each episode, Nathan Adams (the main protagonist) encounters various Yo-kai that cause problems for people living in Springdale. Nate solves these troubles by negotiating with them using his Yo-kai. That is a quick summary of the show, the anime is more of a slice of life comedy than an action adventure like Pokémon. It might seem like a concept that could get repetitive over time, but each episode Nate is involved in are unique and very interesting situations.
YO-KAI WATCH utilizes the core premise to create many hilarious, yet relatable moments and charming characters that makes it a treat for kids AND adults. In addition, there are also side stories with other Yo-kai that help keep the anime engaging. The most popular side stories are the ones that involve Komasan, who is one of the most adored Yo-kai in the anime. I was skeptical before deciding to watch the anime myself, but now, I have been hooked to its unique experience and have watched over 100 episodes.
3. The songs.
This might not be as well known in America, but there are a number of songs produced for the anime that are extremely catchy and popular in Japan. The most well-known song is the YO-KAI Exercise, which most of Japan knows about. The YouTube music video of the YO-KAI Exercise has over 100,000,000 views.
There are also other popular songs such as the opening of Gera Gera Po, Uchu Dance, and Dan Dan Zombie Zubah that Japan loves as well. These songs are sung and danced to in MANY concerts and activities because of their catchy sound and fun dance moves. These songs were so good, that it was enough to warrant the creature of the franchise’s own Just Dance game.
There are also English versions of a few of these songs, which you can find here. Gera Gera Po and the Yo-kai Exercise in particular have garnered over 2 million views in each official music video since published.
4. The YO-KAI WATCH toys
This one may seem a bit obvious for some, and it requires understanding of the franchise to see why this is a reason. Sure, you could say that when a franchise is so popular it’s bound to sell toys easily. But the Yo-kai Watch watch toy and medals are particularly special.
The watch toy does a fantastic job of imitating the watch from the show. When kids hold the watch in their hand, they feel more introspective and connected to the story. They are able to imagine their own experiences and be fully immersed rather than merely imagining the scenarios using basic toy figures kids usually play with. To put it more simply, it is like a kid playing with a toy lightsaber; They get to feel more like a real Jedi when holding the lightsaber toy rather than just having a collection of character figures to imagine scenarios with.
Not only that, the medals in particular play a huge role in this same immersive play. Each medal is meant to “summon” a Yo-kai friend. They are basically a child’s contact with the Yo-kai they want to feel they have befriended and can summon. Being that these medals are meant to be tokens of friendship, it makes the toy medals feel more sentimental.
Each Yo-kai medal is different, having their own personality, character design, medal design, jingle sound, and unique voice which plays when a child inserts a medal into the watch toy. This makes them more than just trading cards. The medals interact with the watch as in the games and anime, adding more meaning and cohesiveness when kids play with them.
With each unique sound a Yo-kai medal produces, there is an incentive for kids to want to collect all of the medals just to see what each Yo-kai medal offers. Kids can store these medals in a toy medallium (shown above), which also stays true to the YO-KAI WATCH game and anime.
Kids feel that they are a real Yo-kai befriender when they collect these medals. And whenever kids get a new medal, it feels rewarding to finally complete the collection. Not only that, the medals can be used to unlock content in the games too, giving yet another incentive to collect medals. This is why the YO-KAI WATCH toys and medals sell phenomenally well in Japan, making a profit for Bandai of over 10 billion yen (approx. $93 billion in U.S. currency) total. The medals and watch are affordable enough for anyone to join in on the YO-KAI WATCH fun.
5. The games.
The games are the main draw and origin of the YO-KAI WATCH franchise. In the games, the plot is essentially the same as the anime. The core concept of the games is that players are able to explore a rich world of YO-KAI WATCH, and participate in the story that unfolds before them as they meet and battle yo-kai. Springdale is full of people walking around the streets and cars driving by that is intentionally close to real life, making the world feel immediately and profoundly immersive.
Gameplay-wise, YO-KAI WATCH is a turn-based, auto-battle RPG that requires the player to interact with the Yo-kai using team building techniques, items, and mini actions to pull off special moves called Soultimate attacks. You can decide which three of your Yo-kai friends should battle at a given time, as making useful team match-ups are a more subtle, yet rewarding unlike other JRPGs. The battle system is designed to be simple enough for all-ages to play, but having enough depth of customization and nuance that older gamers can appreciate once they delve in, with the ability to modify a Yo-kai’s behavior and creating a powerful Yo-kai team in other ways.
Unlike Pokémon, Yo-kai maintain their personal autonomy as a real friend to the player, rather than a pet or a tool to be commanded at will. This is one of the ways in which Yo-kai Watch has brought more heart and soul to this genre.
Players are able to find more kinds of Yo-kai in various places such as sewers, trees, and beaches. Finding and befriending these individual Yo-kai is incredibly rewarding, just like collecting the toy medals. Players are also able to meet human characters not seen or having had little exposure in the anime. You can help these people out by taking on side quests, and that also feels rewarding when you solve their problems with the mischievous yo-kai. Each character and yo-kai has their own unique personality, stories, and characteristics that prevent the experience from feeling stale. This is why the games have sold over 10 million in Japan, with its immersive world, charm, quirky characters, and over 100+ hours of gameplay.
So What Can We Do Now?
Art by @Carbon_Coal on Twitter.
Now that you know the different reasons for YO-KAI WATCH‘s success in Japan, is it really fair to harshly criticize the franchise for being similar to or not having the same things as Pokémon? After learning all of this information, what can you do now?
First, watch the YO-KAI WATCH anime. The anime really helped in part to grow the popularity of the franchise as a whole, and is often the first place that fans get to meet new and upcoming yo-kai. You can only truly understand things by giving things a shot and keeping an open mind, you will see the clear difference in tone and charm. You can find the first season available on Netflix, Disney XD, and on YouTube here, but those are only available in North America. I do not want to spoil much of the anime to you, because I honestly think it is good enough to have others give a look.
Second, if you do decide to play the games for the first time, I recommend waiting for YO-KAI WATCH 2 Bony Spirits/Fleshy Souls to come out on September 30th, the 3DS sequel is where YO-KAI WATCH truly shines. Or if you want to get into it immediately, there is a free mobile puzzle app called YO-KAI WATCH: Wibble Wobble that gives you a small taste of YO-KAI WATCH‘s unique charm.
Because of those false claims of YO-KAI WATCH being a Pokémon rip off, some potential new fans may feel put off from experiencing this franchise that could potentially be very appealing to them. I think YO-KAI WATCH has that potential to appeal to lots of people, just like in Japan. I have seen and heard many stories of kids, teens, and adults who gave YO-KAI WATCH a chance, and as a result adored its unique charm, characters, and world.
Let’s create a large community of people who can like YO-KAI WATCH, Pokémon, and other monster collecting franchises at the same time. You have the power to make the decision and change |
peaceful political solution for the Syrian crisis and its rejection to supply ammunitions to any party involved in the Syrian conflicts," the release said.
Opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's rule are concerned about the shuttling of arms to his government by entities such as Iran. Iraq borders Syria and Iran.
Al-Assad magazine interview
Earlier, Syria's besieged president slammed the rebels battling his government forces, but said the "door to dialogue is open."
"Dialogue with the opposition is the only way out to address the crisis," al-Assad said in a magazine interview published Friday.
The cries for freedom and democracy that spread across the Arab world last year also reached Syria. That set the wheels in motion for a standoff that morphed into a civil war between the al-Assad government and a burgeoning rebel movement.
More than 26,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the one-and-half-year-long conflict, according to opposition activists.
Al-Assad, who blames the violence on terror groups, told Egypt's Al-Ahram al-Arabi magazine that "armed men are engaged in terrorism against all of the state's institutions."
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"They have no support in the society. Rather, they have harmed the interests of the people by targeting the infrastructure that serves the people and killing innocent Syrians. Ultimately, they will not emerge victorious," he said.
He said backers of these forces "think the only solution is through a Libyan scenario." That's a reference to rebel forces, with foreign backing, toppling Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and his government.
"But a decisive end (to the crisis) will take some time, of course. However, the door to dialogue is open and we have offered several initiatives for amnesty for all of those who put down their arms in order to encourage dialogue," al-Assad said.
The president took jabs at Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar -- all supporters of the opposition.
"They suddenly saw money in their hands after a long period of poverty and think they can change (the role of) history and geography, and play a regional role," al-Assad said, referring to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Before the Syrian conflict started last year, Saudi Arabia served only as a "mediator with the West that does not appreciate the axis of resistance against Zionism advocated by Syria," the president said.
"Let me correct a prevalent idea that Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt are the triangular axis of stability in the region. This is not true. It has always been, and will remain, Syria, Iraq and Egypt," he said.
As for Qatar, it "uses the power of money and revolves in the orbit of the West by providing weapons and money to terrorists to repeat the Libyan scenario," al-Assad said. And Turkey, he said, has "lost a lot" by taking its stance on Syria.
"They are unconcerned about the interests of its people, focusing solely on its ambitions that include the new Ottoman Empire," he said.
Here's a roundup of other developments in Syria's conflict:
Mass grave, massacres reported in Damascus area
Twenty-five "bound and blindfolded" bodies were found in a mass grave in the al-Qadam area of Damascus Friday, Syria's state news agency said. Authorities blamed the deaths on "armed terrorist groups."
The government also said its armed forces "killed a number of terrorists" in the Damascus area town of Beit Jen.
The opposition Local Coordination Committees of Syria said regime forces conducted a "massacre" in the suburb of Buwaida. Seventeen people were stabbed to death after soldiers stormed the area, it said.
The LCC said the 17 were among 117 people killed across Syria on Friday. Forty-eight deaths occurred in the Damascus area. Seventeen people were killed in Aleppo and 15 each in Homs and Idlib provinces. Violence also raged in Daraa, Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, Latakia and Hama provinces.
Opposition figures disappear upon arrival in Syria
Two members of the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change -- an opposition group -- and a friend who came to pick them up disappeared shortly after leaving the airport in Damascus, the group said.
"The National Coordination Body's Exile Branch holds the kidnappers, whoever they be, completely responsibility -- ethically, legally, and politically -- for any physical or mental harm done. We demand an explanation for why there has been no communication, whatever the motives and reasons. We demand they be immediately returned safely to their families," the NCB said in a statement.
Syrian state news blamed terrorists for kidnapping the men.
Help for Syrians
The U.N. refugee agency says it is making progress relocating Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
It is also working to enroll refugee children in Lebanese and Iraqi schools, the agency said Friday. Nearly 73,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon have registered or are awaiting registration with the United Nations. There are now more than 29,000 Syrians in Iraq.
A second Russian plane transporting 38 tons of food arrived in Damascus Friday, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency, which reported the arrival of a similar shipment Thursday.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press
The Oakland Raiders have a big decision to make in the upcoming draft. The team has the fourth overall pick, and there are a lot of intriguing players that will be available at that spot. But with a roster so short on reliable performers, the team has to consider trading the pick.
The Raiders have to come out of the first round with a player who can step in and contribute right away. What they have to figure out is how best to accomplish this. For the first round to be a success, it might have to be from somewhere outside of the No. 4 spot.
What is Oakland dealing with at No. 4 overall?
There are far too many variables in any draft to make any sort of definite decisions. However, there are some knowns that the Raiders can work with.
As of now, this is what we know:
In order, the teams picking ahead of Oakland are the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Tennessee Titans and the Jacksonville Jaguars.
The top four prospects play three positions: quarterback (Oregon's Marcus Mariota and Florida State's Jameis Winston), defensive end (USC's Leonard Williams) and wide receiver (Alabama's Amari Cooper).
and Florida State's Winston), defensive end (USC's Leonard Williams) and wide receiver (Alabama's Cooper). Tampa Bay will not select a wide receiver.
Tampa Bay and Tennessee both need franchise quarterbacks.
Jacksonville will not take a quarterback.
Tampa Bay and Tennessee need an upgrade at defensive end.
Jacksonville already has a reliable defensive end in Sen'Derrick Marks, but it could consider pairing him with Williams.
Marks, but it could consider pairing him with Williams. Oakland needs an upgrade at defensive end and wide receiver and will not select a quarterback.
This information provides an idea of what Oakland is dealing with at the top of the draft, what options this creates for teams later in the first round and how this can affect different trade scenarios.
Should Oakland try to trade up?
Trading up is a real option for the Raiders. It seemed for years as if Oakland never had its full slate of picks. But this year, the team has enough picks to put together an intriguing offer for the three teams ahead of it.
The team could trade up to secure Cooper. If the Raiders agree that he's the can't-miss wide receiver many think he is, they could look to move into the second or third spot. However, this pick would come at too high of a cost. It would also be unnecessary with West Virginia's Kevin White also available.
Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press
There's only one justifiable reason for Oakland to trade up: Williams.
Williams is not only the top-rated defensive lineman in the draft, he's arguably the top-rated prospect overall. He would provide a huge boost to Oakland's pass rush, one of the team's weakest areas.
But things are complicated in the top three. Along with Williams, there are also two top quarterback prospects available in Mariota and Winston. With both in high demand, the Raiders could find themselves in a bidding war for either the first or second pick.
What this means for Oakland is that no matter whom it tries to make a trade with, that team is going to demand a price that's too high. It would likely cost Oakland its first- and second-round picks this season plus picks in the future. This is something the team can't afford given how many holes there are on the roster.
As much of a boost as it would be to add Williams, the team is better off staying at fourth overall rather than moving up.
If the Raiders trade, it has to be down
Trading up just doesn't make sense for Oakland. On the other hand, trading down is something the team should seriously consider.
If the Raiders do decide to move down, it should be with the intention of picking up a number one wide receiver. While most have Cooper as the top prospect at the position, White is arguably as good.
2014 Stats Amari Cooper Kevin White REC 124 109 YDS 1,727 1,447 AVG 13.9 13.3 TDS 16 10
USA TODAY Sports
For the Raiders to take Cooper, they would have to do so at number four. However, White will be available later in the first round. By trading down and taking him, they will still get a player they need while adding much-needed picks.
For Winston and Mariota to both be selected ahead of Oakland, it would have to happen in the first two picks. But if either Tampa Bay or Tennessee decides to go in a different direction—and with Williams available, there is a very real chance that they will—Oakland has to get on the phone immediately, as there will be no shortage of trading options.
With the fourth overall pick and a possible franchise quarterback on the line, the Raiders could demand four picks, including two first-rounders. In this scenario, Oakland could look to trade with Washington (fifth overall), the New York Jets (sixth overall) or the Cleveland Browns (12th overall). There are other teams looking for a quarterback, but the Raiders would be dropping down too far.
However, these options are tricky because all three teams have recently selected quarterbacks that they may or not have given up on yet: Robert Griffin III, Geno Smith and Johnny Manziel.
Because of this, the best trade option for Oakland is with the St. Louis Rams at 10th overall.
Unlike the other teams, St. Louis has a quarterback in Sam Bradford who's had enough time to establish himself. But through five seasons, he's played more than 10 games only twice, and he missed all of 2014. Injuries, including a clavicle fracture and two torn ACLs, have caused him to miss 31 of a possible 80 games since being drafted.
Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
He's injury-prone, and he's never led his team to the playoffs. With him entering the final year of his contract and carrying a hefty price tag ($13 million next season), this is the right time for the Rams to go in a different direction and bring in his replacement.
In this scenario, the Raiders could get three additional picks: a 2016 first-round pick, a 2016 third-round pick and a fifth-round pick in either 2015 or 2016. This would, of course, also include the 10th overall pick this year, where Oakland could still pick up a true number one receiver in White.
There's no guarantee that White would still be available when Oakland selects 10th, but it is likely. From five to nine, the teams selecting are (in order) Washington, the Jets, the Chicago Bears, the Atlanta Falcons and the New York Giants. All five teams already have a number one receiver.
This trade would give the team the ability to bring in more young talent and secure a playmaker that the team desperately needs.
Conclusion
Staying put at fourth overall wouldn't be a bad thing for the Raiders. The team should be looking for a wide receiver or a defensive lineman at this spot, and a proven performer will be available. But if the option to secure such a player while getting additional picks is there, the team has to consider it.
Ultimately, it could prove to be the best option of all.Share
Amazon Studios has found its next potential series. The studio has optioned the acclaimed short film True Skin and is working with its writer and director, Stephan Zlotescu, to adapt it to series, reports THR. Amazon snapped up the rights to the story after Warner Bros. let them lapse.
The short takes place in a near future where body augmentations are the norm and entirely organic humans are looked down upon. The protagonist, Kay (played by Zlotescu), felt he had no choice but to “enhance,” so he stole a prototype, not realizing it was classified. When the story picks up, he is on the run, hiding from multiple groups in Bangkok. There, he undergoes still more alterations and encounters threats not just to his life, but his humanity as well.
Though only about six minutes long (including credits), the premise of True Skin seems to lend itself well to a series. The short was filmed entirely in Bangkok and features original music by J-Punch.
An adaptation, however, will have to live up to the short’s interesting visuals, courtesy of the director of photography, H1. Amazon Studios has handed the reins to Opticflavor, a VFX company headed by Zlotescu and Vlad Caprini, for visual effects. The firm has worked with musicians like Kanye West and Lady Gaga in the past.
True Skin was produced by Christopher Sewall, with Scott Glassgold is credited as manager. Glassgold is attached to produce the TV adaptation, along with his production company, Ground Control. Zlotescu will serve as director, though it’s not clear if he’ll reprise his role as Kay. No writers are attached yet, but a search is reportedly underway.
While there are still numerous steps between development and a completed pilot, we’re excited to see what Amazon Studios can do with such a strange and orginal tale as True Skin.
Watch the full short film below.The trend of using glass in the construction of public and private buildings has steadily grown to dominate the modern skyline in the 21st century. It’s a trend that shows no sign of slowing down, especially with advances in glass technology that allow for even more complex and elaborate designs.
Glass is a popular architectural material because it is aesthetically appealing, it allows natural light to pour into the interior of a building, it creates a sense of flowing space, and is recyclable and cost efficient – the latter two being of increasing concern for modern architects. In particular, glass is increasingly used for skyscrapers in cities, as huge dropping glass facades allow people to look over the glittering cityscape while also creating a sense of space in often bustling and cramped locations.
Dancing Dragons, Seoul, South Korea
Designed to be situated in the Yongsan International Business District in Seoul, South Korea, these 450m and 390m tall Dancing Dragon towers are so named because of the scaly effect that is created by angular cuts of layered glass. Functional as well as visually impressive, the gaps between the overlapping panels of glass will feature operable 600mm vents through which air can circulate, making the skin ‘breathable’ like that of certain animals.
"The Dancing Dragon towers are so named because of the scaly effect that is created by angular cuts of layered glass."
Designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, the towers’ design is inspired by elements of traditional Korean culture; for example, a dramatic series of diagonal massing cuts create living spaces that float beyond the structure, recalling the eaves of traditional Korean pagodas.
The towers will be home to apartments, a hotel, offices and shops over 88 and 77 floors. Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture was commissioned to design the towers for the 23,000 square mile site along with 15 other architects commissioned to design buildings for the Yongsan International Business District master plan, the biggest commercial urban development in South Korea, which is due for completion in 2024.
Suzhou Center China
Last year US-based architect Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) won a competition to design a skyscraper in China called the Suzhou Center with a proposal for a 358m supertall tower featuring an atrium with a 30-storey tall operable window.
Called the ‘lung’ of the building, the large window invites cool air flow during summer months and floods the interior spaces with natural light. The atrium has also been designed to facilitate mixed mode ventilation in the lobbies and public spaces, providing a fresh air supply source for the building and its inhabitants.
The building is to be located beside Taihu Lake in Wuijang and will house offices, apartments, shops and a hotel across 75 storeys. The building is the sixth project Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has done with developers Greenland Group.
Emporia shopping mall, Sweden
Emporia in Malmö, Sweden, is an innovative in-ward curved glass building featuring 804 panes of glass fabricated by glassmaker Crícursa, each individually designed and manufactured with a complex curvature allowing for the smooth curve in the centre.
An important feature of the building is the colourful glass-clad entrances – amber and blue – said to be inspired by Sweden’s nature. The curved glass was coloured by laminating the panes with bright blue and amber coloured plastic films that were then glued into aluminium frames. The frames connect to tubular steel structures that are suspended from the roof slab like a curtain walls. Overall, the glass covers a surface area of 27,857ft².
Inside the partially built mall, which is open to shoppers but yet to be completed, retail shops are organised around a three-storey figure of eight. Currently, the roof has a rooftop park and in the future it will also feature outdoor dining and a spa.
Harpa – Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre, Iceland
This grand concert hall in Iceland, which is situated on the border between land and sea in Reykjavik, is designed to reflect sky and harbour space as well as the vibrant life of the city.
The building’s facade is made of glass and steel in a twelve-sided, space-filling geometric modular system called the ‘quasi-brick’. The building appears as a kaleidoscopic play of colours, reflected in the more than 1,000 quasi-bricks composing the southern facade. The remaining facades and the roof are made of sectional representations of this geometric system, resulting in two-dimensional flat facades of five and six-sided structural frames.
During the design process, Henning Larsen Architects, the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and the engineering companies Rambøll and ArtEngineering from Germany used three-dimensional computer models, finite element modelling, various digital visualisation techniques as well as maquettes, models and mock-ups.
The interior of the award-winning building, which recently won the The European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, Mies van der Rohe Award 2013, features an arrival and foyer area in the front of the building, four halls in the middle and a backstage area with offices, administration, rehearsal hall and changing room in the back of the building.
Arts Electronica Center extension, Austria
The Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, originally opened its doors in 1996 as a ‘Museum of the Future’ featuring six floors showcasing the most modern techniques from the technology sector. After a €30m redevelopment designed by Treusch using both glass and steel the building has become a changeable work of art based on the principle of dialogue with its environment.
"The building is covered by 1,085 glass panes that can be lit by 95,000 colour-changing LEDs."
The redevelopment, which opened in 2009 after two years of construction, features a new twin tower alongside the main building and a new space for the Ars Electronica Futurelab. The building is covered by 1,085 glass panes that can be lit by 95,000 colour-changing LEDs, which artists can use to create interactive artwork displays.
Most recently, in December 2013, artist Javier Lloret turned the building into a giant Rubick’s cube. Called Puzzle Façade, Lloret used a blank white 3D-printed Rubik’s Cube as the controller for the changing lights of the facade. The controller is able to use the electronic software in the Wifi cube to change the lights on the building facade. As the building can only be seen from one side the player is able to rotate and flip the interface of the cube.
Nanotechnology building for Pennsylvania University, US
Described as a "towering nave bathed in celestial light" by a Bloomberg news writer, the Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology building is poised at the eastern edge of Pennsylvania University and hailed as a beautiful example of elegant glass building design, where tired scientists can soak up some rays after a long stint in the lab.
According to designers WEISS/MANFREDI the three-storey $92m building is designed to "encourage the collaboration, exchange, and integration of knowledge that characterises the study of this emerging field". The building is wrapped in a panelled glass curtain that allows light to soak into the front of the building where researchers and scientist can gather. However, the building’s main feature is its highest elevation, which encompasses a meeting space that cantilevers over the quad below and opens to views of both the city and campus.
Inside the building, which was finished this year, a long orange pane window that filters ultraviolet light lines the galleria wall discretely hiding a 10,000ft², two-storey-high series of labs.
Follow Heidi Vella on Google+After weeks rumours from both sides of the ponds, it was officially announced on Friday that 20-year-old Fraser Aird has joined Vancouver Whitecaps from Scottish second tier side Glasgow Rangers on a season long loan, with an option to buy at the end of the year.
It was also announced that the Whitecaps had Aird on their discovery rights list, so they have clearly been tracking his progress for some time and are high on what he can offer the current squad.
Aird has mostly played right midfield and right back for Rangers, but was brought to Vancouver to push Jordan Smith for the starting right back job.
So now that the deal is finally all done and dusted, lets take a look at “The Good, The Average and The Bad” from the Fraser Aird signing.
THE GOOD
Added Depth At Right Back
When it was reported that Steven Beitashour’s contract option was not picked up by the Whitecaps, it left a lot of supporters panicking about the quality of depth at right back in the first team.
Although he has looked at attacking threat going forward, last season’s up and down performance of Jordan Smith has left people asking whether he can bring quality defending to the right back position.
Carl Robinson has stated that he is looking for both full backs to push up the pitch this season. Smith and Aird both fit that bill. Aird may not be the best defender, right now, but his ability to get up the field and push up the wings should make him a good fit for the team.
Will the converted right winger feel like a defensive liability at times like Smith? With the way the team will play this season, he should be able to do more moving forward than mistakes he makes sitting back.
With the Canadian Championship, Champions League and the games Smith will miss due to yellow card accumulation and Costa Rica national team call ups, there will be plenty of games for Aird this season to get those quality minutes he needs for his career and challenge for the starting spot.
THE AVERAGE
His Right Back Ability
From reports out of Scotland on Aird, it looks like he struggles at times with his defensive ability on the pitch. Yes, he can push up the pitch, but how good will he do with a player like Robbie Keane running at him down the wing. That being said, being Canadian, he will likely be given a longer leash by some supporters than that which was given to Smith during last season.
Let’s see how well he can make great plays to offset any defensive mistakes he will make (and every defender will likely make some of those over the course of the season).
The more he impresses the 21,000 in the stadium with his offensive ability, the more they will let him make some mistakes here and there on defence.
THE BAD
Supporters Expectations Of Where Aird Should Fit In
Some people will think that just because Aird is a player called up to the Canadian national team that he has to be the starting right back on this team, but right now, that spot feels to be Smith’s to lose and Aird’s to try and win.
Last week I ran a twitter poll about what the supporters’ expectations would be if Aird joined the Whitecaps. The poll results can be seen below:
I have to say that I found the results a little surprising. Overall, it seems that Aird will be welcomed in Vancouver with open arms, with the majority of those answering the poll seeming settled in the notion that he will be more of a squad player and they’re happy to see him here.
How long will the good faith last? Well that’s up to Aird now to show that he has the qualities to play regularly, and make a valuable contribution, in Major League Soccer and make that loan deal from Rangers a permanent transfer.
We wish him well.U.S. Soccer has released U-19 coach Brad Friedel's 23-player roster for the Copa de Atlantico tournament in Canary Islands, Spain, the team’s first tournament of 2016.
The roster includes an MLS-leading six FC Dallas academy players: Goalkeeper Ben Hale, defenders Reggie Cannon, Hector Montalvo and Eddie Munjoma, and midfielders Weston McKinnie and Paxton Pomykal. The call-up will be the first Youth National Team involvement for Hale, Montalvo, Munjoma and Pomykal.
Other MLS teams with players called up include Orlando City (2), DC United (1), Philadelphia Union (1), Portland Timbers (1), Chicago Fire (1), New York Red Bulls (1) and LA Galaxy (1).
All players on the roster were born in ’98 and could potentially earn a spot on the U.S. U-20 squad that will play in the 2017 CONCACAF U-20 Championship in Nicaragua with the aim of gaining a berth for the 2017 FIFA U-20 World Cup in South Korea
U-19 MNT Copa del Atlantico Tournament Schedule:
Feb. 2 - 12:30 p.m.
U.S. U-19 MNT vs. Spain
Municipal Maspalomas; Las Palmas, Spain
Feb. 3 - 12 p.m.
U.S. U-19 MNT vs. France
Campo Alfonso Silva; Las Palmas, Spain
Feb. 5 - 12 p.m.
U.S. U-19 MNT vs. Canary Islands
Campo Alfonso Silva; Las Palmas, Spain
U.S. U-19s National Team Roster:
GOALKEEPERS:
Benjamin Hale (FC Dallas; Frisco, Texas), William Pulisic (Richmond United; Mechaniscville, Va.), Kevin Silva (PDA; Bethlehem, Pa.).
DEFENDERS:
Reginald Cannon (FC Dallas; Grapevine, Texas), Tanner Dieterich (RSL Arizona; Nashville, Tenn.), David Longo (Weston FC; Weston, Fla.), Hector Montalvo (FC Dallas; Frisco, Texas), Edwin Munjoma (FC Dallas), John Nelson (Internationals Soccer Club; Medina, Ohio), Grant Robinson (DC United), Auston Trusty (Philadelphia Union; Media, Pa.).
MIDFIELDERS:
Eric Calvillo (Real SoCal; Palmdale, Calif.), Pierre Da Silva (Orlando City SC; Port Chester, N.Y.), John Denis (Beachside SC; Yorktown Heights, N.Y.), McKinze Gaines II (Lonestar SC; Austin Texas), David Loera (Orlando City SC; Orlando, Fla.), Terrell Lowe (Portland Timbers; Hillsboro, Ore.), Weston McKinnie (FC Dallas; Little Elm, Texas), Djordje Mihailovic (Chicago Fire; Lemont, Ill.), Paxton Pomykal (FC Dallas; Highland Village, Texas).
FORWARDS:
Simon Lekressner (Crossfire Premier; Bellevue, Wash.), Brian Saramago (New York Red Bulls; Garden City Park, N.Y.), Ethan Zubak (LA Galaxy; Los Angeles, Calif.).WINTER HAVEN — For more than a year, Rebecca Ann Sedwick's bullies tormented the girl by calling her ugly and urging her to drink bleach and die.
The harassment didn't stop — even after Rebecca's parents moved the 12-year-old Lakeland girl to a different middle school. The bullies reached her on her smartphone.
Rebecca brought it all to an end by jumping to her death from a silo at an abandoned concrete factory Sept. 10. But even after her suicide, the cruelty didn't cease, family members and investigators say.
"Yes ik [I know] I bullied Rebecca nd she killed her self but IDGAF [I don't give a (expletive)]."
That message — posted Saturday on Facebook by Rebecca's 14-year-old persecutor — ended with a heart symbol. And resulted in an arrest.
On Monday, Polk County deputies charged the author of the post and another 12-year-old girl with aggravated stalking. The online remark goaded detectives into arresting the two girls earlier than they had anticipated.
"That post was the tipping point," Polk Sheriff Grady Judd said during a Tuesday news conference. "She forced this arrest."
The 14-year-old instigated the bullying after she started dating Rebecca's ex-boyfriend, Judd said. The 12-year-old girl was once Rebecca's friend — but the other girl turned her against Rebecca.
The girls "repeatedly and maliciously" harassed Rebecca while all three attended Crystal Lake Middle School in Lakeland, investigators said.
"Several students corroborated stories of both girls bullying Sedwick on different occasions, through name-calling, intimidation, threats to beat her up, and at least one actual physical fight,'' a Sheriff's Office report said.
Judd said neither family cooperated with investigators, so the girls were placed under arrest Monday and charged with the third-degree felony. The 12-year-old was released to her parents because she demonstrated remorse to the judge, but she can't go back to school.
The 14-year-old is in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice until her next hearing.
After their arrests, Judd said, the girls admitted the abuse. The 12-year-old is on house arrest, and the Orlando Sentinel is not naming them because of their ages.
Under Florida law, a range of options is available to punish juveniles convicted of felony aggravated stalking.
Brian Haas, State Attorney's Office spokesman for the judicial circuit that includes Polk County, would not talk about the case specifically. But he said the charge carries a maximum penalty of juvenile probation or placement in a residential-commitment program for five years or until the 19th birthday — whichever comes first.
Judges have a variety of options for sentencing, including counseling and rehabilitation.
According to investigators, the 14-year-old had several arguments with Rebecca via Facebook, as well as verbal confrontations with her at school.
Witnesses said that the girl sent messages to Rebecca, calling her ugly, telling her to drink bleach and die, and saying Rebecca should kill herself.
Rebecca was jumped in school and later bombarded with such hateful messages via a cellphone application as "You're ugly," "Why are you still alive?" and "Go kill yourself."
In February, the 12-year-old was suspended from school after allegedly attacking Rebecca physically, Judd said.
Rebecca's mother decided to home-school her, and eventually Rebecca transferred to Lawton Chiles Middle Academy, but detectives found evidence that the bullying continued on her cellphone.
The morning Rebecca took her life, she posted a message to a North Carolina boy whom she reportedly met once at the airport: "I'm jumping and I can't take it anymore," the text read.
Judd said bullies must be held accountable, especially in today's instant-message, social-media environment.
"As I child I can remember my mother telling me, 'Sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you,'" Judd said. "Today, words stick, because they're printed. And words are as hurtful — and sometimes more hurtful — as sticks and stones.
"Ask Rebecca's family."
jesullivan@tribune.com or @jerriannOS
10 tips for responding to cyberbullying
Talk about it: Tell someone if you're the target of cyberbullying — your parents, a friend, teacher.
Ignore them: Cyberbullies who do not get a response from their target may just move on.
Never retaliate: Retaliation does nothing to solve the problem and could get you in trouble.
Tell them to stop: Let them know that what they are doing is hurtful, lame and uncool.
Laugh: Try to laugh it off — maybe they are just trying to be funny and not hurtful.
Save the evidence: Print out Facebook messages, emails; save text messages.
Block access: Most websites and programs allow you to block certain users from messaging or even "seeing" you online.
Report it: If you don't know who the cyberbully is, contact the content provider (Facebook, Google, YouTube) and make a report.
Never pass it along: If you receive hurtful or embarrassing messages or photos of someone else, delete them and don't share them with friends.
Call the police: If you think you are in danger, call authorities.
SOURCE: Cyberbullying Research CenterThe administration apparently has no intention of pulling out of the Libya campaign, and Mr. Steinberg said that Mr. Obama was committed “to act consistently with the War Powers Resolution.” So the Obama legal team is now trying to come up with a plausible theory for why continued participation by the United States does not violate the law.
A variety of Pentagon and military officials said the issue was in the hands of lawyers, not commanders. Several officials described a few of the ideas under consideration.
One concept being discussed is for the United States to halt the use of its Predator drones in attacking targets in Libya, and restrict them solely to a role gathering surveillance over targets.
Over recent weeks, the Predators have been the only American weapon actually firing on ground targets, although many aircraft are assisting in refueling, intelligence gathering and electronic jamming.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
By ending all strike missions for American forces, the argument then could be made that the United States was no longer directly engaged in hostilities in Libya, but only providing support to NATO allies.
Another idea is for the United States to order a complete — but temporary — halt to all of its efforts in the Libya mission. Some lawyers make the case that, after a complete pause, the United States could rejoin the mission with a new 60-day clock.
Congress passed the War Powers Resolution at the end of the Vietnam War, overriding President Richard M. Nixon’s veto. It was intended to re-assert Congress’s constitutional role in making decisions about getting involved in significant military conflicts.
That role had been eroding for several decades, as presidents of both parties, taking advantage of the large standing army left in place after World War II, increasingly initiated or escalated combat operations on their own.
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While many presidents of both parties have deployed forces into hostilities without prior Congressional permission, there is far less precedent for defying the section of the War Powers Resolution that imposes the 60-day deadline on hostilities. For the most part, the issue has not arisen because fighting was over by then, or Congress voted to continue an operation.
One event that set off a legal controversy came in 1999, when President Bill Clinton continued the bombing campaign in Kosovo more than two weeks after the deadline. But the Clinton legal team argued that Congress had implicitly authorized the operation to continue by appropriating specific funds for it.
That option is not available to Mr. Obama. This year, the Senate passed a resolution calling on the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone on Libya. But Congress has neither approved nor specifically financed United States participation in enforcing the zone, and the House of Representatives is in recess next week.The 2018 California gubernatorial election was held on November 6, 2018, to elect the next Governor of California. Incumbent Democratic Governor Jerry Brown was ineligible to run for re-election for a third consecutive (and fifth non-consecutive) term due to term limits from the Constitution of California.
The race was between the incumbent Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and businessman John H. Cox, a Republican. Newsom easily won a landslide victory with 62% of the vote, the biggest victory in a gubernatorial race in California since Earl Warren won re-election in 1950, the first time Orange County has voted for the Democratic candidate since Jerry Brown won it in 1978, and the first time Democrats have won three consecutive gubernatorial elections in the state's history.[1] Newsom assumed office on January 7, 2019.
A primary election was held on June 5, 2018. Under California's non-partisan blanket primary law, all candidates appeared on the same ballot, regardless of party. Voters may vote for any candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. The top two finishers – regardless of party – advance to the general election in November, regardless of whether a candidate manages to receive a majority of the votes cast in the primary election.
Democratic Party [ edit ]
Declared [ edit ]
Declined [ edit ]
Republican Party [ edit ]
Declared [ edit ]
Withdrawn [ edit ]
Declined [ edit ]
Libertarian Party [ edit ]
Declared [ edit ]
Green Party [ edit ]
Declared [ edit ]
Christopher Carlson, puppeteer [4]
Veronika Fimbres (write-in) [34]
Josh Jones, author, geologist, solar electric designer[4]
Peace and Freedom Party [ edit ]
Declared [ edit ]
American Solidarity Party [ edit ]
Declared [ edit ]
No party preference [ edit ]
Declared [ edit ]
Armando M |
again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, this time on his Trump Plaza Hotel (also in Atlantic City), at the time owing $550 million dollars. Recall that he would report an almost 1 billion dollar loss on his 1995 tax returns, according to the copies obtained by the New York Times. Indeed, the early
90’s were not a very good era for Donald Trump. In light of this fact, it’s worth noting that the sexual assault allegations against him are all clustered within this very time frame.
In light of this, and considering the other things that were going on in his life, I will make an observation- Trump has been in the public eye for around 30 years, and his personal life-including romantic dalliances-have been exhaustively covered. Yet within those multiple decades in the public eye, there is a period of a little under five years in which Trump faced multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault. To me, at least, the high number of accusations within a short time period are striking, as are similarities between each woman’s account.
His alleged rape of his first wife Ivana takes place in late 1989. He was accused of sexually harassing a model in 1992. A lawsuit filed by Jill Hearth alleged ongoing sexual misconduct-including an attempted rape, over the course of 2 months spanning between 1993 and 1994. And his alleged rape of a 13 year old girl (which I will discuss in more detail in the next installment) was reported as taking place in early 1994. As far as I’m aware, no other allegations have surfaced-although women in both his employ and personal life have spoken out about his continued inappropriate behavior and comments.
1989-1995 just so happens to be the same time period in which Donald Trumps world and empire was falling apart at the seams. In the beginning of the decade he was facing the end of his first marriage and a looming court battle. Despite his purportedly active dating life, by many accounts Trump was being rejected by many, if not most, of the women he pursued-including Carla Bruni and Jill Hearth. Marla Maples, after years of being the secret mistress and repeated rounds of being dumped and publicly humiliated by Trump, was starting to lose her patience. And the big gamble he took in Atlantic City was, by all accounts, failing miserably-a direct result of his jaw droppingly awful business practices and general incompetence. In 1991, his Taj Mahal Casino filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 1992, he again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy again, this time on his Trump Plaza Hotel (also in Atlantic City), at the time owing $550 million dollars. Recall that he would report an almost 1 billion dollar loss on his 1995 tax returns, according to the copies obtained by the New York Times. Indeed, the early 90’s were not a very good era for Donald Trump. In light of this fact, it’s worth noting that the sexual assault allegations against him are all clustered within this very time frame.
Casablancas in the 1980’s-The Beginning of the End
For his part John Casablancas enjoyed continued success throughout most of the 1980’s, building the largest and most profitable modeling agency in the world. But beneath the glitz and glamour of his supermodels and lifestyle lurked a much darker reality. Once his agency was established, Casablancas embarked on creating a kind of hierarchy-a multi-tiered system that his prospects would have to navigate in order to be signed. Casablancas would ultimately turn over the day to day control of his agency to his business partner, and focus most of his time and energy on his “New Faces” division, meeting dozens of aspiring models a day in the comfort of his corner office, away from prying eyes.
It was in this private setting that Casablancas began the tradition of weighing and measuring girls, which soon became widespread throughout the industry. It was a practice that served the dual purpose of allowing agencies to closely monitor any weight gain, and created a pretense for agents to meet with young models alone in their offices, and require them to strip nude. The tier system incentivized doing whatever it took to get to “the top”-a perch which 99% of the young girls scouted and brought before Casablancas would never reach-there were only a handful of models who could wake up for nothing less than $10,000 a day, after all. But the possibility was tantalizing, and Casablancas was a skilled groomer who lavished every one of his models with attention and made them feel like they had the potential to reach the top. This created a power dynamic that had previously not existed. Among models it was understood that John Casablancas could make you a star. It was also understood that he could ruin you.
The system worked for a while, but it was foiled by the fact that the playboys-in particular John Casablancas- were used to living by a different set of rules, and never being held accountable. None of these men were shy about their behavior, and the fact that they were bedding models as young as 12 on a routine basis was well known. But in the 1980’s the cultural tides started to turn against them. With increased awareness of child sexual abuse-both its alarming prevalence and it’s devastating effect on victims- attitudes began to change, and the public became less tolerant of famous men and their dalliances with children. And soon enough John Casablancas and his fellow playboys would find themselves embroiled in increasingly distasteful scandals involving underage girls.
Very Young Girls
In 1984, John Casablancas met then 14-year old Stephanie Seymour at his newly launched “look of the year” contest for Elite. Casablancas selected Seymour as the local winner, but declared her a bit too undeveloped for his personal tastes (“if I looked at anyone with interest, it was her mom!” he said) and she was shipped back off to Florida to start her sophomore year in high school. Throughout the year, Seymour, continued to write to Casablancas (“the kid was delightful” he said of her correspondence, “she would send little letters and when you opened the letter, little silver stars would fall out”) and Casablancas responded to her correspondence personally, urging her to come back to New York and join his agency once school let out. At the end of her sophomore year she did just that, and by this time she was finally up to Casablancas’s exhausting standards. “By that time...her body was extraordinary-she was long and thin and the shapes were where they had to be-and her face was gorgeous, with this innocent little-child voice” he said in an interview, explaining his lust over a girl young enough to be his grandchild.
On the night of her 16th birthday, John Casablancas threw Stephanie Seymour a party at a cocaine-fueled nightclub in Milan, presenting her with a,goblet of milk and plate of cookies. One week later, he would move in with her.
John Casablancas meets model hopefuls in his Denver offices in 1983
Casablancas affinity for very young girls was not a secret-in fact it was legendary within the fashion industry and the social scene in New York City long before it became public knowledge. “I really, really have a bit of Pygmalion syndrome” he admitted in an interview, before discussing how he encouraged one of his 17 year old “new face” girls to lose weight by telling her that he was “really, really turned off” by her body (The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon whereby higher expectations lead to an increase in performance. The effect is named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved)
By the time “New York Magazine” did a front page profile of him in 1988, Casablancas reputation for bedding young models was established and begrudgingly accepted (a price to pay in exchange for his “genius”) within the New York social scene, but the expose came as a shock to many outside the bubble. John Casablancas would soon find out that he was not as untouchable as he thought he was.
In the article-which ran under the title “Girl Crazy”-Casablancas was portrayed as a champagne guzzling pervert, singularly dedicated to the “new look” department of Elite where he spent his days ogling the scantily clad, sometimes naked bodies of teenage girls.
In light of Donald Trump’s more alarming comments and decisions around his daughter Ivanka, this quote stands out:
Casablancas talked about his seventeen year old daughter, Cecile. He said Cecile had been solicited by a photographer last summer on a beach in Ibiza.The photographer asked her to pose in a bikini, and Casablancas raced over to try to get a $2,000 fee for the shot. “She’s got a great little body” he told his models.
Another quote that brings a chuckle and a nod of recognition in this story is Casablancas’s bizarre pride over never having changed a diaper. Donald Trump would make similar boasts in a Howard Stern interview a few years later. Compelling proof this is not, but I do believe it’s a hint at the kind of Don Juan persona that Don, far from a Juan, actually a dejected, balding husband with a crumbling empire,
John Casablancas and Donald Trump at the Elite “Look of the Year” competition, 1994. Trump served on the judges panel.
“Girl Crazy”- marked the beginning of John Casablancas downfall. The article became a huge scandal that reverberated far beyond the modeling industry and into the mainstream press. It was especially visible in New York City, where Elite had it’s headquarters and where Casablancas lived and was an active part of the social scene. Certainly, without a doubt, it would have gotten around to Donald Trump.
But the scandal did not end there, nor did it begin. Less than a month earlier 60 minutes aired a prime-time special on the abuses of underage girls in the modeling industry. Investigative reporter Craig Pyes portrayed the modeling industry as infested with agents who were notorious hustlers and playboys. His report revealed that both Claude Haddad- the head of European scouting for Ford- and Ford’s Paris-based agent Jean-Luc Brunel had been accused of horrific sexual misconduct by many models. The special aired the interviews of dozens of women who accused both Brunel and Haddad of a litany of crimes, ranging from racist invective towards black models to violent rape. And in fact the hidden camera footage captured in filming the special caught it all- from Xavier lamenting about n**er models, to Haddad chuckling about drugging and raping 13 year old girls. According to Model At a retreat soon after the one-two punch delivered by the coverage, Haddad, Jean Luc Brunel and Casablancas were once again overheard (albeit not taped this time around) laughing about their crimes. Alternatively they were angry when confronted by interim scouting manager Trudi Tapscott-”I’m a man and I have needs, I will not apologize for that!” Casablancas is said to have declared.
There was, to be fair, fallout from these reports. Brunel and Haddad were condemned by Eileen Ford, and Casablancas never fully regained his public reputation. But the public and the insular world of fashion are very different animals, and within the latter the only repercussions any of the men faced was in retribution for airing the industries dirty laundry with their sloppiness. Haddad and Brunel kept their jobs, albeit not in an official capacity. And while Casablancas was removed from his official role as head of the “New Faces” division of Elite, where he had unrestrained access and influence over the youngest and most impressionable girls represented by his agency, he didn’t go very far. His unofficial capacity was far-reaching, and his behaviors were explained away by his replacements. One of the agents taking his place was Trudi Tapscott-the same woman who had tried unsuccessfully to confront John after his forced retirement. While initially she was furious at Casablancas, less than a year later she had softened her stance. Quoted in Model, she stated ”People in this business use their power to manipulate people in ways that are unfair”. But she nonetheless told the many parents who were concerned about Casablancas-who still retained an unofficial role in the division-that he was not a manipulator. “My answer is that no one ever did anything they didn’t want to” she stated. “I’m amazed how these girls act in certain situations. They knew more about making passes [at men] than I ever knew”
Over time Donald Trump would emerge from the ruins of his empire with a new approach to business, and a new source of income-in 1996 he bought the rights to the Miss Universe franchise, and became the central figure in the running of these pageants. And in 1999 he started a modeling agency-T models, later changed to Trump Model Management. The correlation of interests is quite clear-for a man awkward around women but dependent on his public image saying otherwise, a stable of women under his employ was a way to boost his image-and even better, he was able to lock all of these women into non disclosure agreements, ensuring that his behavior with them had little chance of becoming public knowledge. It also appeared to have served as a useful tool regarding his business transactions-which, in the aftermath of his bankruptcy, were increasingly dependent on some less than savory characters. How he did this, and the breadth of this activity, will be explored in the next installment. But for the time being, there is one final aspect of this story that is breathtaking, and speaks more to the character of Donald Trump than anything else.
Ivanka
Fourteen year old Ivanka, the suddenly ravishing mini-babe who seems like one of those kids from soap operas-4 years old one day, 19 the next-is starting to model [...] Donald is particularly enthusiastic. -New York Magazine, December 18th 1995
7 years had passed since John Casablancas had appeared on the cover of New York magazine, declaring his love for underage girls, and Donald and Ivana had made a decision-their daughter, Ivanka, would become a model. Despite a widespread belief that she was too young, too naive, and wasn’t quite aesthetically suited for the industry-Ivanka Trump was nonetheless able to get signed to a major agency, At the tender age of 13, she signed on with the new look department of Elite Model Management- under the tutelage of none other than John Casablancas:
It seems that Monica Pillard, the president of Elite, had been eyeing Ivanka since she spotted her on her father's lap four years ago, when Mr. Trump was a judge of a new-talent contest for the agency. Mr. Trump and Elite have a longstanding, informal relationship. Ms. Pillard served as a judge in the Miss Universe pageant, which is jointly owned by Mr. Trump and CBS, as is the Miss Teen USA pageant. John Casablancas, Elite's founder, is a friend of Mr. Trump's, and Elite has held events at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Yes, Donald Trump decided to entrust his daughter to this man. Yes, Casablancas still had his job. He would weather charges of tax evasion, and class action lawsuit-but eventually his past caught up with him. In 2002 he was sued by a former model who alleged that Casablancas had raped her when she was 15, and then forced her to get an abortion. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount, and in 2003 Elite model management officially declared bankruptcy.
Despite the fact that Ivanka largely flopped as a model, Donald Trump would continue to brag about her physical beauty, physique, and ostensibly prolific modeling career.
He would also go on to unceremoniously dump Marla Maples, his long suffering mistress having become his reluctant second bride, and shut her down with legal arrangements that both forbade her from saying a negative word about him in public for all time, and ensured she got next to nothing in spousal/child support. Maples agreed to this despite the fact that she had already raised their daughter Tiffany almost entirely on her own. In fact until his presidential run Trump had not shown a modicum of fatherly interest in her life aside from the bizarre speculation-when she was merely a baby-about her future breast size and compliments of her 1 year old legs on Lifestyles of the RIch and Famous. Over a decade later, in one of his few public acknowledgements of her existence, he would smirk as he admitted to Howard Stern that he had urged Marla to abort her.
In the meantime Elite and Ford collapsed under the weight of their scandals-creating a vacuum of talent to cash in on. A a cast of shady characters and playboys were drawn in, eager to capitalize on the power, social status and potential fortune that could be found in the business of beautiful girls.
As Ford lost her grip on power, for better or worse, so died the last vestiges of a honor code within the modeling world. While the one that existed was without teeth, it still marked a change. During this time, the supermodel era also came to an end-no model since has ever dared to suggest that there was a price tag attached to her presence. Modesty-in terms of value and talent-became synonymous with greed and hubris. The fact that models-even supermodels-never gained the riches that were born of their starved bodies and faces didn’t matter. The fact that the largest spoils went to the very men who were caught on hidden camera laughing about raping underage girls didn’t matter. The industry was, like so many others, an unregulated wild west. And into this fray came numerous playboys and would-become kings. Jean Luc Brunel, the unwitting star of the BBC undercover investigation started MC2. Claude Haddad, his co-star, started DNA. Paolo Zampolli, who we will talk about in the next installment, started ID. Michel Adam Lisowski started FashionTV. And Donald J. Trump started Trump Model Management.
All of these individuals and companies are, as it turns out, inextricably linked in ways that leave little doubt of the nature of their business. The fashion industry, as exploitative and morally ambiguous as it is on it’s very surface, is in fact merely the rock that covers an ecosystem of underground creatures beneath. This ecosystem will be explored and laid bare in my next post. This is a story that must be told in layers and parts. It involves oligarchs and diplomats, tax evasion, and trafficking of drugs, weapons, and human beings.
But for now, it is important to explore the surface-because it is the most easily understood, provable, and in many ways it’s the most telling when it comes to the character of the man who wants to be president. And there are a myriad of important questions to ask knowing the facts thus far:
What kind of man seeks out, pursues friendship and business partnerships with a man who is unabashed in his predilection for underage girls? Who openly admits he prefers them young because they are easily manipulated? John Casablancas was “girl crazy”, and proud of it. His reputation was legendary.
Ivanka Trump at a modeling shoot, age 14
Imagine, for a moment, that John Casablancas was doing this type of thing with boys of the same age. Imagine he was inviting young teenagers to his private office, having them strip down to near or complete nudity, inspecting their bodies, talking about how he thought they were sexy, sending them off to Europe to get them “broken in”, and falling in love with them. The ages of the girls he preyed on is not all that far off from the ages of the boys that Jerry Sandusky abused, and we all readily acknowledge that’s wrong. Joe Paterno was widely-rightfully-condemned for turning a blind eye to what was happening. But when it’s 14 year old girls? Why does anyone, including Trump, who continued to do business with him get a pass? And why is this the first time, to my knowledge, that Trump’s association with John Casablancas has even been questioned in the public sphere?
And for that matter-What kind of man throws his 14 year old daughter into this den of wolves? Plausible deniability isn’t going to work on this one-Donald Trump knew about the state of the industry, he knew that it was a cesspool of drug abuse and sexual exploitation. Why would he sign his underage daughter with, of all people, John Casablancas? Anyone who was tangentially connected to the modeling industry was well aware of the scandals that plagued him-his relationship with Stephanie Seymour, his unrelenting desire for young girls. And furthermore, they KNEW that Casablancas’ attitude was far from an outlier, that in fact the industry was rife with people exactly like him, and hopelessly corrupted by their influence. This was not obscure knowledge-it was a subject of a national broadcast. It was an industry wide embarrassment. It was a front page story.
Donald Trump knew the reputation of Elite, he knew the reputation of the industry, he knew that it was a ripe hunting ground for young, impressionable girls. He knew that drugs were rampant and frequently pushed on “models” as they were hired under the guise of “entertainment” of “guests”-in fact, he admitted as much when asked about it in this New York Times Interview:
''This is an interesting case,'' he said over his speaker phone, which was not on a boat but rather in his office. ''I am only modestly in favor of this because I understand that that life is a very fast life, and at that age it is always a risky proposition.'
So what did Trump do? Did he recoil in horror? Did he disavow any further dealings with these people?
No.
If you as a parent knew all of this about the fashion industry, modeling in particular-what would you do if your child, 13 at the time, announced that she wanted to become a model? By all accounts it does not appear that Ivanka was even the driving force behind the decision to start modeling. In fact reading old profiles of Trump, it’s abundantly clear that both he and Ivana were excited and invigorated by the prospect of their little girl being on the catwalk and in the pages of Vogue. They promoted her tirelessly-especially Donald. He bragged to anyone who would listen about how beautiful Ivanka was, often remarking on her body. He sought affirmation from others when he asked if they (including a judge for MIss USA and others) thought his daughter was “hot”. Trump is invested in this idea of his daughter as sexually desirable. I suppose it lends credence to his superior genes theory, in a way. But even a eugenicist would be able to talk about their progeny in a way that doesn’t reduce them to their sex appeal. Every father in this country-at least the ones who don’t have some underlying pathology-understand that fixating on your daughters body, her “hotness”, let alone thinking about her sex life vis a vis your own and even “joking” about dating her-is downright bizarre. An outrageous comment, a joke that falls flat-it happens. But this isn’t a one off. This is a pervasive pattern of behavior and a reflection of belief.
Most men do not talk about their daughters in this way. Not when they are adults, not when they are teenagers, certainly not when they are infants as he did when it came to Tiffany and her legs and future breasts. And most fathers care enough about their daughters to not thrust them into an industry rife with abuse, placing them under the control of a man known to take advantage of his underage charges. This is the basic criteria for being a decent human being, and the bare minimum to be a competent parent-you don’t expose your children to this. You protect them from it. Donald Trump is apparently incapable of even rising to that most basic standard of decency.
In fact, many, many people and many companies decided not to work with Casablancas at all after his private behavior became public. Whether it was a moral stance, or a business decision, they determined he was toxic and should be avoided at all costs. Many people were able to see that associating with Casablancas would not reflect well on their character, and that any young woman they put in his presence would be at risk.
The End Game for Casablancas, The Beginning of a New Empire
Russian models display Trump Vodka -- encrusted in 24-carat gold -- at the Millionaire Fair in Moscow in 2007.
And so this is the sad epilogue of John Casablancas-the man, the legend, the rather morally bankrupt human being. With his career and reputation in tatters, he moved to Brazil and tried to become a new man. It was there, in Brazil, that he met a high school junior from the slums of Sao Paulo who would eventually become his third and final wife. Casablancas, 51 at the time, met the 17 year old at-where else? The Elite Look of the Year competition, which he was able to export to Brazil with the help of friends like Trump, and Trump’s “matchmaker” and future business partner Paolo Zampolli. Once again Donald Trump was in attendance for the contest, sitting on the judges panel-smirk on his face, beaming, ready and eager to assert dominance.
But where John Casablancas ended up at the end of his life is sadly ironic considering where our story began:
''The amount of money you have, especially in the region around São Paulo, is absolutely mind-boggling,'' said John Casablancas, the modeling mogul [...] 'You can be so elitist and so selective that you can focus on the upper crust of the upper crust.'' Mr. Casablancas, who sits on the board at Trump Realty Brazil and calls himself a ''lifestyle consultant of sorts'' for the resort's planning committee, predicts that Villa Trump will be such a success that it will end up having to turn people away. -Trump Takes a Meeting, Now Backs a Resort in Brazil, New York Times, May 19 2004
Yes, John Casablancas- role model and rival to Donald Trump, the man who possessed the natural charm that Trump could never have, nonetheless ended up working for him in the end. And in many ways it would seem that Donald Trump ended up on top, doesn’t it? He has a beautiful wife who he has fooled most of the public into believing was once a high fashion model herself. She has given him another child who is good at the cyber, and stands as living testament to the continued virility of his orange hued father as he enters his 7th decade of life. But even better yet, Trump actually now has ownership over a stable of girls.
All of the sudden, it was Trump who was surrounded by the most beautiful women in the world, while John Casablancas settled down with wife #3 and served on Trumps board in Brazil- Which begs the question-exactly what type of lifestyle was John Casablancas promoting? What type of expertise did he bring to the table? Did he have a hidden knowledge of real estate all along? Or was his “expertise” something else entirely? We have an idea based on the people he was introduced to through Casablancas, but we will have to cover that in the next installment.
For now, I will simply note that John Casablancas died at the age of 70, of pancreatic cancer. He would go to his grave bitterly cursing the very supermodels he is credited with creating- raging about their high and mighty attitudes, inflated self-importance and sense of worth, Above all else their lack of appreciation for everything he, John Casablancas, had done for them. He died bitching, still, at the audacity of women Linda Evangelista expecting $10,000 a day for her presence. Never mind that his own presence went for considerably higher at the height of his career, or that it was Linda Evangelista’s face and body that were being photographed, not his. “That is something I will always regret” he said, of creating the supermodel. He called Naomi Campbell “odious”, and Heidi Klum a “talentless German sausage” (ever the Casablancas copy cat, Donald Trump would also insult Klum, saying that she was “no longer a 10” and lamenting the state of her apparently less than perfect bikini body 8 weeks postpartum)
In addition to his “lifestyle” consulting for Trump’s high class resorts precariously located in the middle of slums, Casablancas spent his final years working on other ventures. According to a late interview by Michael Gross for his fantastic book Model, he continued to do some kind of scouting-although the clients he worked for was never disclosed. Casablancas also developed a cyber-model agency, which he called “Illusion 2K”, which utilized the internet to facilitate global scouting. The program also featured computer-animated model, designed around what was considered an “ideal woman” at the time, named Webbie Tookay. Her greatest attribute, Casablancas said, was that she would never complain.
But there is one final endeavor that John Casablancas took on before his death, which carries on to this day. And I think it might sound familiar to anyone familiar with Trump.
Such glamour!
John Casablancas, you see, started a modeling school. It was wildly successful, and before long franchises started popping up all over the country like mushrooms. Women of my generation probably remember the ads in the back of YM and Seventeen magazine. They boasted of the training regimen,that Casablancas himself used for his new faces division. John Casablancas School of Modeling promised to transform any young lady with potential (as screened by the admissions office during an interview and upon review of a head-shot-later on I would find out that such “interviews” were conducted with anyone who applied and the majority of these Polaroids ended up in the dumpster)
I almost did it, but my parents balked at the cost. But my best friend in 7th grade-a former Texas beauty queen-signed on for summer classes. She would practice walking with a book balanced on her head and strut an imaginary catwalk. On the night before graduation she rinsed her hair with mayonnaise at the suggestion of her Casablancas official stylist. She did this treatment at my house and was horrified when it did not wash out, no matter how many rinses she tried. Her hair, and our bathroom, smelled like a bologna sandwich for weeks. But she came back from her model school graduation with a certificate in her hand and a huge smile on her face-she was officially, at that moment, a John Casablancas girl. An actual real life model. The thousands of dollars her family had spent were well worth it.
She never got booked. Well, correction-she got booked for a singing gig at our state fair, but only after she removed any mention of the John Casablancas modeling school from her resume. It swiftly became a source of humiliation, as everyone in the industry apparently knew it was a con. Her family paid off her debt to the agency, but many other “students” ended up in the same kind of quagmire that she found herself in, but with no way out. They had flushed away thousands on an education that they are too ashamed to list on their resume’s. They had been duped by the promises of a con-man who ensured them his sterling reputation would guarantee success, and that the fact they were even considered for such an honor was an honor in and of itself.
Casablancas Modeling Schools created the blueprint that other flim-flam artists would eventually follow-Using a well known name as a lure, then providing a worthless “degree” or “certification” from a non-accredited body. Curriculum designed by various clueless charlatans, combined with high pressure sales tactics, and unapproved charges. For almost 2 decades now, John Casablancas’ school has carried on his legacy, finding new victims daily-the majority of them children, and their parents who end up footing the bill.
In the words of one student:
“They "saw potential" in anyone with a checkbook.”
In the words of another-
”the most disrespectful people I have ever been in contact with”.
And finally one more (although there is a LOT where that came from here)
“My daughter went [...] back in 1998...they told her that she had to lose weight [...] she was 14 years old, and weighed 125 pounds at the time”
A famous name, the implicit promise of attaining fame and fortune, implied divulging of industry secrets and high powered connections. High pressure sales tactics and confusing contracts, widespread accusations of fraud and false advertising. A very rich man ripping off mostly working and middle class families. Sound familiar?
When John Casablancas died he was eulogized in the familiar way that powerful men are eulogized no matter what their sins. Stephanie Seymour, her goblet of milk and plate of cookies, were not mentioned. John Casablancas stubborn insistence that he owned the rights and should share in the profits made off of the bodies and faces of little girls….that lived on-even when those little girls were too undeveloped and disappointing compared to their mothers (not too young to write love letters to, not to young to lure back to New York).
“I’m only a man, and I have needs” was, of course, never mentioned. Casablancas’s legacy of fraud- the whole-sale rip off of dreams like those of my friend, and everything that lay within the back pages of my latest issue of seventeen and YM went unremarked upon. The countless number of girls who were abused and exploited within his “school’s”, his “new faces” division, his pep talks with naked adolescents trembling on scales as they straddled the fine line between “model” and “healthy weight” were forgotten. Honestly, who knows how many were affected? Based on the conversations I’ve had, not a single person who worked under Casablancas’s reign at Elite went unscathed. Victims of Claude Haddad-a man that Casablancas would later reconcile with and try to plot a re-entry into the industry- have formed a de-facto support group because of the horrors they endured. They still cry when they talk about it. They cry when they talk about him. They are not crying over his departure.
And yet John Casablancas, the corporation, the legend, lives on. His name is still attached and promoted by his discredited chain of modeling schools, which continue to churn through small town girls with high aspirations, low self esteem, and gullible parents willing to accrue sub-prime debt to help them succeed. A tapestry woven with countless broken dreams and lost fortunes. His legacy continues to take out ads in teen magazines to lure in young girls, teach them useless skills like how to balance a book on their head while turning their hair into grease-fires and issue them “diplomas” printed out at Kinkos under high volume discount. At the end they either walk away with thousands of dollars in debt before they even reach college-or if they are “lucky” they might funnel their “experience” and “Contacts” into the next level of this system-Miss Teen USA, teen modeling, hopelessly corrupt industries that will likely chew them up and spit them out before they reach the age of majority. In the end, despite his inadequacies, Donald Trump would end up on top.
In the meantime, however, the fashion industry as a whole would go through one more unexpected and profound transformation. After the USSR collapsed a very few number of men profited, and became untouchable, much more so than Casablancas could have ever dreamed. The cultural winds surrounding the industry changed direction yet again. It was likely inevitable, especially in such an already corrupt environment. But the results would be nothing short of devastating for many of the young lives caught in the balance, girls from Iowa to Slovenia and Brazil. And Donald Trump was in the center of it, just as one might expect he would be, all too willing to reap the rewards.
To be continued
If you are a journalist who is interested in pursuing this story further, I can be reached at swedishjewfish@gmail.com.Batman: Mask of the Phantasm will finally hit Blu-ray in July, thanks to Warner Archive
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is finally coming to Blu-ray! Warner Archive just announced that the 1993 DC Comics adaptation will hit high-definition for the first time ever in July. The release boasts a new 1080p HD remaster and will include both the original 16×9 aspect ratio (1.78:1) and an open matte 4×3 (1.37:1) version.
RELATED: The Batman Director Matt Reeves on His Vision for the Solo Film
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm begins when the city’s most feared gangsters are systematically eliminated and the Caped Crusader is blamed. But prowling the Gotham night is a shadowy new villain, the Phantasm, a sinister figure with some link to Batman’s past. Can the Dark Knight elude the police, capture the Phantasm and clear his own name?
Discounting two sets of Batman serials released in the 1940s, Mask of the Phantasm represents the dark knight’s fourth theatrical appearance (after 1966’s Batman: The Movie, 1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns).
A continuation of the Emmy Award-winning Batman: The Animated Series (which premiered the previous fall), Mask of the Phantasm was released in theaters on Christmas Day, 1993. Directed by Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm, the film stars the series’ iconic voice actors, including Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker. Although it only grossed $5.6 million at the box office, the film remains quite popular with fans. Until The LEGO Batman Movie was released earlier this year, Mask of the Phantasm was Batman’s sole theatrically-released animated feature.
The special features on Batman: Mask of the Phantasm appear to be limited to the film’s theatrical trailer (which will also be in HD). A specific release date has also not yet been confirmed outside of it being available to order “next month.”
Will you pick up Warner Archive’s Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Blu-ray? Where does it rank among your favorite Batman films? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!Image copyright AP Image caption The White House was placed on security alert
The Secret Service has shot an armed man outside the White House, according to US officials.
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155 or Google's 134 (for paid apps). For laughs, I also looked up the other competitors in the mobile space to find that Windows Phone 8 now falls to 2nd place with 180 countries, and Blackberry trails slightly behind at 171.
Changelog: International support for customers in Canada
Support for nearly 200 countries, including Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa to shop on the US store
Support for additional EU countries, including Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, and Belgium to shop on existing EU stores
Performance enhancements
Other bug fixes and stability enhancements
Based on the changelog, it appears that app availability will be dictated by the US store for all countries except those in the EU, which are governed by their own stores. For many locales, this will be the first time citizens will have the option to legally purchase Android apps without resorting to VPNs, hacks, or annoying licensing options.
Getting the latest version running on your device is pretty simple. Make sure you have enabled "installation of apps from unknown sources" and install the apk from amazon.com/getappstore. You can also try to check for updates from within the Amazon Appstore by going through Menu -> Settings -> Version and Release Notes, but that method doesn't seem to work for most people yet.
Congratulations, Amazon! Scientists in Antarctica can now buy Angry Birds!
Thanks, @Sp1tfirestarterTaliban terrorists are bribing starving eight year old children to plant roadside bombs, act as decoys and to be suicide bombers.
Taliban terrorists are bribing starving eight year old children to plant roadside bombs, act as decoys and to be suicide bombers against NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The terrorists are recruiting the young boys from the ranks of homeless and orphaned children, using candies and chocolate.
In return, they teach them how to shoot a gun, how to operate a suicide vest, and how to manage improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Children learn quickly - especially when they’re starving and sweets are offered for the lesson.
One little boy named Neaz told a reporter from Britain’s Channel 4 that at age 8 he was promised a handful of coins – worth a total of 91 cents -- by Taliban fighters recruiting him to the cause after his village was destroyed and his parents were murdered.
According to a report published in The Daily Mail, the Taliban leaders gave him sweets and took him to the next town, where they showed him how to use a gun and build IEDs. After gaining his trust, they bought him a special gift – a suicide vest.
“They made me try it on,” said Neaz, now age 15. “The grenades went all around my body and then they offered me the coins... They told me to blow myself up at a checkpoint. I asked what I’d do with the money if I had to blow myself up. But they kept encouraging me, telling me that if I did it, I would go to heaven.”
Palestinian Authority Arab terrorists in Gaza carry out similar activities, training children as young as eight years old to use guns in special summer camps, and brainwashing the children to believe that it is better to die than to live, as long as one dies as a "martyr" in the service of fighting to destroy the Jews in Israel.
They also teach children to carry out road terror attacks against Israelis, hurling rocks and other objects at passing vehicles with Israeli license plates on roads near Arab villages. Official PA government funded children's television programming promotes similar themes, as do the PA school text books in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem restored to the Israeli capital following the 1967 Six Day War.SYFY SUMMER 2012 FEATURES RECORD NUMBER OF PRIMETIME ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING HOURS ALL-NEW SEASONS OF WAREHOUSE 13, ALPHAS, FACE OFF, DESTINATION TRUTH AND HAUNTED COLLECTOR PREMIERES OF UNSCRIPTED SERIES SCHOOL SPIRITS, PARANORMAL HIGHWAY AND INSANE OR INSPIRED? NEW SYFY SATURDAY ORIGINAL MOVIES JERSEY SHORE SHARK ATTACK AND BIGFOOT NEW YORK - May 15, 2012 - Featuring a record number of primetime original programming hours, Syfy's hot Summer 2012 will be highlighted by the premiere of the new unscripted series School Sprits (from executive producer Mark Burnett), Insane or Inspired? and Paranormal Highway (working title) starring Jack Osbourne; new seasons of hits Warehouse 13, Face Off, Alphas, Destination Truth and Haunted Collector, along with the eagerly anticipated Saturday Original Movies Jersey Shore Shark Attack and Bigfoot, plus the series finale of the beloved Eureka. Syfy will also present a Memorial Day weekend movie festival highlighted by the premiere of Super Shark on May 26th, followed by the semi-annual Twilight Zone marathon on July 4th. Lost Girl will move to Fridays at 10PM beginning Friday, July 20. Highlights of Syfy's 2012 Summer Programming Schedule (All Times ET/PT) MAY INSANE OR INSPIRED? (NEW ORIGINAL SERIES) Premieres Friday, May 25 at 10PM This new series features the most exciting videos from the Internet that celebrate the world of imagination, invention, and extreme experiences. Actors Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Samm Levine (Freaks & Geeks), Brooke Hogan, Ralph Garman, as well as television personality Josh Gates, host of Syfy's Destination Truth, join comedians Ben Gleib, Owen Benjamin, Jodi Miller, Elliot Chang, Jermaine Fowler, Adam Ray, Christiana Pazistky, KT Tatara and Janet Varney to provide their unique commentary on each of the clips. The result is a fast-paced hour-long countdown of hilarious viral videos. Insane or Inspired? is produced by Comcast Studios with Jay James, Betsy Rott, and Sean Olsen serving as executive producers. JUNE HAUNTED COLLECTOR (SEASON 2 PREMIERE) Premieres Wednesday, June 6 at 9PM Haunted Collector features eminent paranormal collector John Zaffis, who searches for objects that have become home to paranormal spirits and/or energy. Each week Zaffis and his family help someone who's terrorized by something strange in their own home, using the latest technology to identify the source of the paranormal activity. On the season 2 premiere of Haunted Collector, the team heads to Warsaw, Kentucky, where a woman's home is suffering hauntings, possibly from two steamboats which crashed in a fiery collision, killing more than 60 people in 1868. Next, they travel to Huron, Ohio, in a race against the clock to remove the dangerous energy from an abandoned silo, scheduled to be destroyed in 48 hours. Haunted Collector is produced by Gurney Productions. Executive producers are Scott Gurney and Deirdre Gurney. SCHOOL SPIRITS (NEW ORIGINAL SERIES) Premieres Wednesday, June 20 at 10PM From executive producer Mark Burnett, School Spirits travels to schools and universities all across the country to recount the true ghost stories experienced on these academic campuses. The stories will be told in first person narratives through the testimonials of real students, teachers, parents and staff that have encountered the paranormal activity, blended with bone-chilling cinematic reenactments to further bring the haunting experiences to life. Executive producers: Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Voice) and Seth Jarrett & Julie Insogna Jarrett (Celebrity Ghost Stories). SATURDAY ORIGINAL MOVIES (ALL-NEW MOVIES) · Jersey Shore Shark Attack - Saturday, June 9 at 9PM - Led by an all-star cast of Tony Sirico (The Sopranos), Paul Sorvino (Goodfellas), Jack Scalia (Dallas), Joey Fatone ('N Sync), William Atherton (Die Hard) and Vinny Guadagnino (Jersey Shore) the movie unfolds during the July Fourth weekend at the Jersey Shore, where angry sharks are on a rampage, devouring residents, leaving it to the local Guidos to save the day. The movie also stars Jeremy Luke as The Complication, Melissa Molinaro as Nooki, Joey Russo as Donnie, Daniel Booko as Balzac, Audi Resendez as B.J., and Alex Mauriello as J-Moni. Jersey Shore Shark Attack is a production of Hybrid Entertainment. The director is John Shepphird. Jeffrey Schenck, Barry Barnholtz and Peter Sullivan are the producers. · Piranhaconda - Saturday, June 16 at 9PM - Part fish! Part snake! All killer! In B-movie icon Roger Corman's latest, a hybrid creature - half piranha and half anaconda -- attacks a movie crew on location near her nest when her egg is stolen. Now they must outrun and kill the deadly piranhaconda as well as stop the mad scientist who stole the egg - before they all become dinner. Stars Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill: I & II) and Rachel Hunter (The Benchwarmers). Piranhaconda is a production of New Horizons, directed by Jim Wynorski. · Arachnoquake - Saturday, June 23 at 9PM - In Arachnoquake, starring Tracey Gold (Growing Pains), massive earthquakes unleash giant albino spiders. Freed from their ancient subterranean prison, the spiders go on a murderous rampage through New Orleans. Joining Gold will be Bug Hall (The Little Rascals), Ethan Phillips (Star Trek: Voyager) and Edward Furlong (Terminator 2: Judgment Day). The movie is a production of Active Entertainment. Arachnoquake is directed by Griff Furst. · Bigfoot - Saturday, June 30 at 9PM - Television legends Danny Bonaduce (The Partridge Family) and Barry Williams (The Brady Bunch) star as life-long rivals battling over Bigfoot. Howard Hesseman (Head of the Class), Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks), Andre Royo (The Wire) and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Alice Cooper (School's Out) co-star in the movie, which is directed by Oscar and Emmy nominee Bruce Davison (X-Men). Bigfoot is a production of The Asylum. JULY DESTINATION TRUTH (SEASON 5 PREMIERE) Premieres Tuesday, July 10 at 8PM Season 5 opens with two special back-to-back episodes, as Josh Gates and his team lead viewers on a chase into one of the world's biggest caves in the jungles of Vietnam to search for Bigfoot. Then, at the overwhelming request of fans, they'll travel to Romania for a return visit to the haunted Hoia Bachu Forest, the site of their most terrifying investigation to date, and then explore the reportedly haunted Mayan ruins of Tikal in pursuit of a monster known as the Belize Goblin. They'll also lead viewers into a remote Transylvanian village on a hunt for vampires and journey to Kazakhstan (a Destination Truth first) to search for the legendary Kazakh monster. Destination Truth is executive produced by Brad Kuhlman for Ping Pong Productions (1000 Places to See Before You Die, Celebrity Rehab, FM Nation). Josh Gates and Erin Ryder serve as co-executive producers. PARANORMAL HIGHWAY (NEW ORIGINAL SERIES) Premieres Tuesday, July 10 at 10PM Paranormal Highway puts the pedal to the metal as Jack Osbourne and his friend Dana Workman do their own first-person investigations of the most frightening claims of paranormal activity along America's remote back roads. Fueled by eyewitness interviews and evidence collected by Jack's state-of-the-art equipment, he and Dana will travel alone, self-documenting their harrowing face-to-face encounters with the paranormal. Production company: BASE Productions. Executive producers: John Brenkus, Mickey Stern, Ron Ziskin. EUREKA (SERIES FINALE) Airs Monday, July 16 at 9PM After five seasons, Syfy's long-running original series comes to an end and the remarkable residents of Eureka say their goodbyes. During the thrilling final season, the town is reeling after the Astraeus and her crew mysteriously vanished just before their planned launch to Titan. As the town copes with the shocking personal changes caused by the Astraeus ordeal, they continue to uncover the truth about the forces behind the crew's bizarre disappearance -- with shocking results. Eureka stars Colin Ferguson (Sheriff Jack Carter) Salli Richardson-Whitfield (Allison Blake), Joe Morton (Henry Deacon), Erica Cerra (Jo Lupo), Neil Grayston (Douglas Fargo) and Niall Matter (Zane Donovan). Co-creator Jaime Paglia and Bruce Miller are executive producers. The series is produced and distributed by Universal Cable Productions. WAREHOUSE 13 (SEASON 4 PREMIERE) Premieres Monday, July 23 at 9PM Season 4 kicks off with the Warehouse Team still reeling from the shocking events of the climactic season three finale - the loss of Agent Steve Jinks (Aaron Ashmore), Mrs. Frederic (CCH Pounder), H.G. Wells (Jaime Murray) and the destruction of the Warehouse itself. Their only hope lies in racing to the other side of the Earth to hunt down an obscure artifact, which may or may not even exist - and if it does exist, what consequences will they face for using it? The most successful series in Syfy history, Warehouse 13 follows a team of government agents who work at a massive, top-secret storage facility in windswept South Dakota which houses every strange artifact, mysterious relic, fantastical object and preternatural souvenir ever collected by the U.S. government. The Warehouse's caretaker Artie Nielsen (Saul Rubinek) charges Pete Lattimer (Eddie McClintock), Myka Bering (Joanne Kelly) and Claudia Donovan (Allison Scagliotti) with chasing down reports of supernatural and paranormal activity in search of new objects to cache at the Warehouse, as well as helping him to control the Warehouse itself. Sam Huntington (Being Human) will be among the star-studded array of season 4 guest stars. Warehouse 13 is produced for Syfy by Universal Cable Productions. Jack Kenny (The Book of Daniel) is executive producer and showrunner. ALPHAS (SEASON 2 PREMIERE) Premieres Monday, July 23 at 10PM In Syfy's action-packed hit drama series, an unlikely team of ordinary people with superhuman physical and mental abilities - known as Alphas - takes on mysterious cases the CIA, FBI and Pentagon are unable to solve and go head-to-head with criminal Alphas. Season 2 picks up eight months after last year's finale with the stage set for an explosive turn of events at the Binghamton facility (the Guantanamo of the Alpha world) that could have devastating, far-reaching consequences. Dr. Lee Rosen (Emmy Award-winner and Academy Award-nominee David Strathairn), having exposed the existence of Alphas to the unsuspecting public, finds himself discredited and imprisoned by a government desperate to cover up his revelation. The rest of the core team has disbanded and some, without Rosen's guidance and care, have regressed to their old, destructive ways. They must now battle their individual demons in order to reunite and try to save their own. Alphas also stars Malik Yoba, Warren Christie, Azita Ghanizada, Ryan Cartwright and Laura Mennell. Erin Way (Detroit 187, Private Practice) joins the cast this season as "Kat" a mysterious young loner whose Alpha ability allows her to pick up any skill at a glance. But while her skills are permanent, her personal memories are short-lived. The series is produced by Universal Cable Productions and BermanBraun Television with executive producers Bruce Miller, Gail Berman, Lloyd Braun, Gene Stein and Zak Penn. Penn and co-executive producer Michael Karnow are series creators. AUGUST PARANORMAL WITNESS (SEASON 2 PREMIERE) Premieres Wednesday, August 8 at 10PM Using a mixture of intimate first-hand testimony, actual home video and gritty realistic drama, the hit series Paranormal Witness returns to transport viewers into a world turned upside-down by extraordinary, terrifying and sometimes life-threatening paranormal events. Paranormal Witness is produced by Raw TV (Locked Up Abroad and Gold Rush Alaska). Executive producers are Dimitri Doganis and Bart Layton. FACE OFF (SEASON 3 PREMIERE) Premieres Tuesday, August 21 at 9PM Syfy's hit competition reality series returns for season 3 with 12 aspiring special effects make-up artists and their unlimited imaginations, competing to create amazing works of living art. The eleven-episode season will feature some of the most difficult challenges ever attempted and high power special guest judges. It all culminates in one winner and one $100,000 grand prize that will launch a career. McKenzie Westmore returns as host. The second season finale became the most watched unscripted telecast in the channel's nearly 20-year history, transforming 3.58 million total viewers, based on Live+7 data. This also established a Syfy original series record - for scripted and unscripted programs - for most Adults 18-34 viewers with 1.01 million. Face Off is a production of Mission Control Media with Dwight D. Smith, Michael Agbabian and Derek Atherton serving as executive producers. Syfy is a media destination for imagination-based entertainment. With year round acclaimed original series, events, blockbuster movies, classic science fiction and fantasy programming, a dynamic Web site (www.Syfy.com), and a portfolio of adjacent business (Syfy Ventures), Syfy is a passport to limitless possibilities. Originally launched in 1992 as SCI FI Channel, and currently in more than 98 million homes, Syfy is a network of NBCUniversal, one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies. (Syfy. Imagine greater.)Share
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The new audiobooks come to Scribd through a new deal with Penguin Random House Audio, and these titles bring its audiobook library up to more than 45,000. Popular titles like The Girl on the Train, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, Wild, The Help, The Blind Side, and many others are now included. Also, many of the books are narrated by superstars like Bill Clinton (he didn’t do Fifty Shades of Grey), Christopher Plummer, Diane Keaton, Barbara Walters, Kate Winslet, and more.
In addition to these more popular titles, Scribd added great children’s books such as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume; A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle; The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman; The Maze Runner by James Dasher, and more. For the politically inclined, Scribd threw a few presidential memoirs in there, too. Scribd has seen growth ever since it added audiobooks, the company reveals.
“Penguin Random House Audio is one of the world’s most admired publishers, and we are excited to work with them to expand the potential audience for audiobooks by putting thousands of their amazing titles at readers’ fingertips,” Trip Adler, the co-founder and CEO of Scribd said in a statement. “Since we launched audiobooks last fall, reading time on Scribd has doubled. This is great news for Scribd and for our publishing partners.”
All of those audiobooks, plus the 1 million-plus ebooks on Scribd, are available to subscribers for just $9 a month. Considering how expensive audiobooks are to buy, as are comparable subscriptions from the likes of Audible and others, Scribd’s price is appealing. And it’s lower than its main competitor, Oyster, which doesn’t offer audiobooks at all.MY TITLE IS NOT AN AFFECTATION, or at least not entirely so. For years I have been attempting to persuade colleagues, university administrators, and students that something is going desperately wrong in modern universities. To no avail.
Readers may have a sense of the type of problem that concerns me from recent events at Yale, in which no less than 13 administrators felt compelled to compose a letter advising adult students on how to dress for Halloween. This was clearly an absurd thing to do, as was a segment of the student response to a lecturer who had the audacity to point out the absurdity in a reasoned and principled email. It was a strange situation in which students and administrators found themselves on the same side of the barricades on the question of the need for sensitivity and creating a place of comfort in the academy. Students siding with administrators against professors? Young people wanting comfort more than truth? If you’re over 50 it will seem strange indeed, but it’s not — not any more. It is the rule now, and it explains in part the trouble I’m having finding someone to talk to.
I’ve had good conversations with colleagues and students too, of course. These have been both a great help and a real inspiration. There has even been an administrator — just one — who agreed, on the QT, that all was not well in our institutions of higher learning and may even be worse than I imagined. But these people are a minority; while they despair, check out (i.e., quit while still receiving a pay check), or simply quit (there have been a few), the “system” chugs on, grinding to pieces what were once, if not great universities, then at least relatively sound institutions in which thoughtful people concerned about intelligence and learning could gather together to talk. What is this system? In one sense, nothing mysterious. Just the majority of people who now make up the university and who have chosen to serve other interests (money, power, expediency, reputation, career advancement, convenience, compliance with the zeitgeist) in preference to the ones that were once our raison d’être — intelligence and learning for both our students and ourselves. In another sense, though, something strange has happened, a shift in the institution that is difficult to describe but that will, I hope, become clearer as my story unfolds.
So now, instead of vainly repeating myself to yet another “senior manager,” I want to talk to you, the parents of the students I am supposed to teach. I don’t think you’re perfect, or that you can solve the problem single-handedly. In fact, I suspect that you, like me, are part of the problem. After all, in the world as it is, money, power, expediency, reputation, career advancement, convenience, and compliance with the zeitgeist are the tickets to success. So why wouldn’t you go along too? Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I inflate Susan’s and Bill’s grades to ensure that they have a nice experience, don’t feel disrespected, and acquire the type of transcripts necessary for their preferred employment? Why not indeed, if doing so comes with the added perk of preventing me from catching hell from students, administrators, and you for ruining the party by refusing to say that two plus two equals five? I have no excuse for my actions apart from my desire to pay my mortgage. Perhaps you feel the same way about your children and their future mortgages. But you (and me, too, ultimately) are supposed to care about them, not out of self-interest or even their self-interest in some narrow sense, but because you love them and want them to have real happiness, and real intelligence, and really to know something, and not just to have the appearance of these things.
So I’ll make a deal with you: I’ll have the courage possibly not to be able to pay my mortgage if you’ll have the courage to listen to my story and then to insist, loudly and clearly to those in power, that you are no longer willing to put up with their technological gimmicks and empty rhetoric about “student-centered learning” and insist instead that your children actually learn something and have their intelligence cultivated and refined by attending the institutions over which they preside. The gimmicks look good, like a nice, new shiny car. But they are still gimmicks. And the fact that universities, in the interest of increasing enrollments (= money), are willing to flatter you and your children so shamelessly about how wonderful and intelligent you all are should tell you that you are being played. This isn’t even political correctness and the therapeutic culture anymore; this is a straight-out scam. That fact that anyone falls for it is evidence of precisely the types of decline in higher education that I wish to discuss.
A word about which universities I have in mind, because not all universities are the same. I wish to speak about third- and fourth-tier Canadian schools that are primarily undergraduate institutions. Historically, these schools have had few graduate programs and have focused their curriculum on the liberal arts and sciences. Today they are abandoning this tradition at an alarming rate in favor of professional programs like engineering, nursing, education, and business. As they stand, these schools are about as similar to, say, the Claremont Colleges as pickled eggs are to Coquilles Saint-Jacques. They’re both universities, but … So just to be clear about my subject, I’m going to be talking about the pickled eggs.
The communities where such universities exist, like jars of pickled eggs themselves, tend to be on the margins and therefore poorer and less resourced than their urban counterparts. A common refrain often heard in these communities is that, because their kids are poorer, we shouldn’t expect too much from them. It’s not fair to them because of where they came from.
Though this is always presented as compassion, it’s not. It’s contempt. It amounts to saying, “Because these kids are poor it’s all right if we also let them be illiterate.” That to me simply adds insult to injury. Intelligence is and always has been a great leveler. It roams the world freely, flagrantly disregarding its divisions and classes. But it’ll settle in and make itself at home anywhere it receives an honest welcome.
It took a long time and a lot of advertising to convince people otherwise. To convince them, for instance, that you had to be rich to be smart, or that you had to be rich to be happy. Both statements are untrue, and there is a fortunate economic benefit that accrues to this fact for the universities I’m concerned with — there are a lot of poor smart people around looking for work in the university — any university — who, if only given the opportunity, would work themselves to the bone trying to help those poor students become as intelligent as their natures want them to be. But even better, there are a lot of people already in the university who care deeply about students and who go to extraordinary lengths with increasingly diminishing returns to educate them. They aren’t at Harvard but they don’t care about that. They are where they are, and they take themselves and their students seriously, or at least they try to. Some of them do absolutely first-rate scholarly work and have expansive pedagogical resources. But who listens to them? No one.
But one more thing before I begin: Why should you, parents of students at Claremont or Stanford or one of the UC schools, care? What’s it to you how these universities are faring? Perhaps you shouldn’t care. But I think it might be good for you, for two reasons. First, it’s always good to think about the less fortunate. It can make you more merciful, because you see how fickle fate can be and how, social capital notwithstanding, one or two slight turns of the screw either way could have caused things to turn out quite differently. It can also build community and even create more equity because seeing others’ misfortunes tends to make us less inclined to add to them. But second, and more to the point, the disease from which my university suffers, yours does too. It’s not as bad where you are, stage one or two as opposed to stage four, but it is recognizably the same disease, and it’s just as aggressive: administrative bloat, student illiteracy,[1] lots of “student experience” but very little “student intelligence,” dumb and dumber no longer a bad Hollywood joke but the unacknowledged consequence, if not the principle, of higher education. If you think I exaggerate, please read on. The university education you save may be your child’s.
¤
Over the past few years I have been polling my students informally on two basic questions: (1) How many of you, were you told today that a university education was no longer a requirement for employment, would quit? (2) For those of you who would remain, how many of you would switch programs were the same to be true? Positive responses to both questions run consistently in the 50 percent range. That means that roughly 75 percent of all students in my classes do not wish to be there.[2] And this corresponds to another interesting statistic: somewhere between 50 percent and 60 percent of all students who enter the university will not graduate after six years. In other words, all of those students who don’t want to be in university soon won’t be, but not before one or two years of tuition has been extorted from them.
During one class a couple of years ago, I dimmed the lights in order to show a clip of an interview. The moment the lights went down I saw dozens and dozens of bluish, illumined faces emerge from the darkness. That’s when I understood that a lecture or discussion is now only one of several entertainment options available to students in the university classroom. Given the way the game is played, lectures and discussions rank well below Facebook or Tumblr. You can’t get mad at them for this, not like in the old days. “Hey, you, pay attention! This is important.” Say that today and you won’t hear anger or shame. You’ll hear something like: “Wha…? Oh, sorry sir. My bad. I didn’t mean anything.” And they don’t. They don’t mean anything. They are not dissing you; they are not even thinking about you, so it’s not rebellion. It’s simply that the ground has shifted and left you hanging there in empty space, like Wile E. Coyote. Just a few more moments (or years) and down we’ll all tumble. These people look like students. They have arms and legs and heads. They sit in a class like students used to do; they have books and write papers and take exams. But they are not students anymore, and you are not a professor. And there’s the rub.
What they are, what we are, is difficult to say. But I read a description of contemporary Russian media the other day that comes pretty close to explaining it:
We all know [that in Russia] there will be no real politics. But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. So what should we play with? Shall we attack oligarchs? Who’s the enemy of the week? Politics has got to feel […] like a movie![3]
When I read that I thought: That’s it! That’s my classes. There is no real education anymore, but I still have to create the impression that education is happening. Students will therefore come to class, but they will not learn. Professors will give lectures, but they will not teach. Students will receive grades, but they will not earn them. Awards and degrees will be granted, but they will exist only on paper. Smiling students will be photographed at graduation, but they will not be happy.
But let me describe this less abstractly for you.
First, I should admit to you up front that I am part of the problem I wish to describe and analyze. When I think of my teachers and the scholars to whom I have looked as models of what it means to do this work well, I don’t just feel inferior to them; I am inferior to them. There is no false humility here; nor am I saying that this is always or inevitably the case — Einstein was someone’s student. But it is my case and also that of a whole generation of scholars with whom I came of age, I think.
How did it happen? To state the matter bluntly, the liberal arts and sciences don’t matter anymore. At some point after the Second World War, the latent assumption in the West that the humanities and “pure” science are at best luxuries and at worst irrelevant in comparison to the vaunted achievements of technologically driven research had infiltrated the university so thoroughly that administrators, faculty, and students began to act on that assumption in setting program priorities and curriculum. Because my friends and I all believed that what we were doing was entirely serious, we scoffed at the philistines as though their recriminations were little more than TV-style, frat house barbarity — infuriating but ultimately harmless. We were wrong. Many of the engineers who were painted purple during frosh week are now running the institutions where we teach. And they weren’t kidding when they were pissing on our guitars in the quad. It was a promissory note on the future — a future they could feel in their bones belonged to them, not us.
So what happened? Once our youthful, grad school illusions wore off in the trenches of a real academic job, it became clear to us that what we were doing did not matter either to those in power or to many of our students and colleagues. In the intervening years the culture had declined so precipitously that to argue, say, that the work of Albert Camus offered an important critique of the contemporary cult of efficiency that merited serious consideration would be met with silence, incomprehension, or even ridicule. I remember making such an argument in a large undergraduate class taught by multiple faculty members only to have one of my colleagues respond by asserting that what I was saying was merely “fluff.” How is one to respond to such a claim — made in a university classroom? According to the reigning ethos, politely, as it turns out. When it comes to a fair fight the barbarians are … well … barbarians. Incapable of virtue, they insist hypocritically on etiquette — and the powers that be are so vigilant about keeping up the appearance of civility that they may even suspend you or charge you with harassment should you have the temerity to call them on their hypocrisy and refuse to play nice. Not having to be nice when others are acting shamelessly is what academic freedom was meant to protect. We are supposed to value truth so deeply that we will be willing to tolerate the odd ill-mannered excess to ensure it is upheld and defended. We used to be big enough for that. It’s even enshrined in Collective Agreements. For instance, the Collective Agreement at my university states that the academic freedom of faculty members extends so far as to guarantee their right to criticize the university itself and their Faculty Association without fear of reprisal. When institutions go off the rails and become corrupt we are called upon to say so, clearly and unambiguously, and university administrators are supposed to listen. What happens instead? Gag orders, disaffected personnel serially disappearing without explanation, buy-outs with lots of hush money exchanging hands. You’d think you were in Bosnia circa the 1990s, or the Egypt of Hosni Mubarak.
This talk of academic freedom is more hope than reality, and the resistance it suggests is anything but the rule. If you are mocked and denigrated for years on end, whether passively-aggressively through the slow, clawing back of your budgets or the Disneyfication of your course offerings (Religious Studies 211: The Whore of North Africa: Augustine Gone Wild in Carthage) by more “progressive” colleagues, sooner or later your rational self will tell you that the game is up and you will stop doing what it is you do (serious study of texts and historical events, honest lectures with real content) and start doing what you are expected to do (keep an increasingly disengaged and intellectually limited group of young people entertained or otherwise distracted for three hours a week). Though entirely understandable, this is a self-defeating strategy, a race to the bottom in which there are no winners. None. You dumb down your lectures to keep your subscriptions up and to justify your courses in the eyes of the administration, and the dumber they become the less justification there is for continuing them and the more the administration sneers when it hears your defenses of the ennobling powers of the humanities or the arts or even the pure sciences. Ennobling? An online course that can be completed in a weekend and without reading a page? Tell us another one.
The extent of the betrayal this dumbing-down will require of you will depend in large part on your particular market. In the really cheap academic seats, serial use of YouTube clips, movies, and “student-centered learning activities” will and does pass as course content. (Last term, I was driven from my office on many occasions because the movie sound tracks emanating from the seminar room next door were so loud and unrelenting I couldn’t concentrate.) In slightly more affluent markets, something more middlebrow will be expected — say, an original Prezi presentation with YouTube bits thrown in only for spice and to establish “relevance” and perhaps also to satisfy nascent bourgeois resentment by affording a moment of condescension to “the culture.”
All such efforts to create the illusion of content in an effectively contentless environment are acceptable so long as they are entertaining and successful participation requires no real effort and no real accountability. If you’d like a sense of how contentless it can get, I have heard of an instructor, one without a PhD, who assigned his students videos of himself talking about this or that subject as their class text. A digital lecture is assigned as preparation for a live lecture that will be about a digital lecture. And this not from a Hannah Arendt or an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, neither of whom would have ever stooped so low, but from a partly educated sessional instructor with a curiously inflated perception of self. Great works — of science, art, literature, philosophy, and history — are the giants on whose shoulders we stand in our efforts to become giants ourselves and to explore with our students the best of what has been thought and written. The fact that such works may now plausibly be replaced by narcissistic and transparently self-promoting twaddle makes the nihilism of the modern university classroom amply clear. This is the classroom in which your son or daughter sits each day. Let’s map the contours of its nihilism a little more carefully.
¤
The anecdotal evidence I’ve been able to gather tells me that students do not read anymore. In one course I co-taught with several other faculty members, the readings were posted online, which allowed us to map access patterns. In that course, readings were accessed — not necessarily read — by between 5 and 15 percent of the students in the class. The same pattern was confirmed by the textbook sales in a course from the previous year. There were roughly 230 students in that class. I was teaching George Orwell’s 1984 and I had ordered 230 copies based on enrollments. At the end of term, the bookstore informed me that it had sold only |
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The Black Hat TeamDarkstar and Patten also contribute to the soundtrack, which lands this month.
The, written by Giorgio Moroder and Raney Shockne, will come out on May 31st.is a new Playstation game based on the popular sci-fi films. For the soundtrack, Disney commissioned original material from disco pioneer Moroder and co-composer Raney Shockne. Now they're gearing up to release the tracks with remixes by a number of UK artists, including IDM giants Autechre and Plaid. They've tapped a few other Warp Records artists for remix duties: Bibio Darkstar and Patten. The soundtrack is a follow-up to Giorgio Moroder's 2015 LP, Déjà Vu, which was his first in over two decades.You can hear Bibio's remix of "Run Program" here on Facebook.01. Run Program02. Run Program (Bibio Remix)03. Recursion04. Invalid Path05. Invalid Path (Darkstar Remix)06. Delta Antliae (Invalid Path Revisited - Nicholls Remix)07. Delta Antliae (Patten Remix)08. 611 Time Out09. 611 Time Out (Autechre Remix)10. Decrypted11. Memory String12. Memory String (Plaid Remix)13. Parity Error14. Parity Error (Rusko Remix)TRON RUN/r Original SoundtrackA total ofzero percent of African American voters support Mitt Romney, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reveals. Politico refers to this figure as “staggering.” But oh, just wait until the convention, when Romney karaokes two new verses of “Who Let the Dogs Out.” He’s been practicing his human-style smile, too.
After Romney suffered sustained booing at an address to the NAACP in July, the organization’s chair, Roslyn Brock, released the following apologia: “This morning Governor Romney laid out his policy agenda for this nation. Unfortunately, much of his agenda is at odds with what the NAACP stands for—whether the issue is equal access to affordable health care, reforming our education system or the path forward on marriage equality.”
Empirical research conducted on the “Blacks/Afro-Americans for Mitt Romney” Facebook page confirms Romney’s unpopularity within the black community. Many members of the group appear to be white; still more appear to have joined the group with the intention of arguing how disingenuous most of the posted pro-Romney arguments were.
The G.O.P. should really now focus on getting NBC/Wall Street Journal poll participant-I.D. laws on the books.President Barack Obama delivers remarks to discuss proposals unveiled in the State of the Union Address that focus on strengthening the economy for the middle class and those striving to get there, at Hyde Park Academy, Chicago, Ill., Feb. 15, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Obama was in Chicago on Friday to talk about the importance of making sure every child in America has every chance in life to succeed. Speaking at the Hyde Park Career Academy, which is less than a mile from the Obama's home in that city, the President discussed the recent death of Hadiyah Pendleton, a Chicago teenager who was shot just days after attending the 57th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, DC.
Hadiyah's parents were guests of First Lady Michelle Obama at the State of the Union address on Tuesday, where President Obama discussed the need to prevent this kind of senseless violence and protect American children. But the important goal of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals is not enough to ensure a bright future for all of our children, and the President also laid out a plan to rebuild ladders of opportunity for every American who is willing to work hard and climb them. This includes making sure every child in America has access to high-quality pre-K, and raising the minimum wage so that no family that works hard and relies on a minimum wage is living in poverty. But creating a path into the middle class also means transforming high-poverty communities into places of opportunity that can attract private investment, improve education, and create jobs, and President Obama talked about his plan to make that happen:
And that’s why on Tuesday I announced -- and that's part of what I want to focus on here in Chicago and across the country -- is my intention to partner with 20 of the hardest-hit communities in America to get them back in the game -- get them back in the game.
First, we’ll work with local leaders to cut through red tape and improve things like public safety and education and housing. And we’ll bring all the resources to bear in a coordinated fashion so that we can get that tipping point where suddenly a community starts feeling like things are changing and we can come back.
Second of all, if you’re willing to play a role in a child’s education, then we’ll help you reform your schools. We want to seed more and more partnerships of the kind that Rahm is trying to set up.
Third, we’re going to help bring jobs and growth to hard-hit neighborhoods by giving tax breaks to business owners who invest and hire in those neighborhoods.
Fourth, and specific to the issue of violence -- because it’s very hard to develop economically if people don't feel safe. If they don't feel like they can walk down the street and shop at a store without getting hit over head or worse, then commerce dries up, businesses don't want to locate, families move out, you get into the wrong cycle. So we’re going to target neighborhoods struggling to deal with violent crime and help them reduce that violence in ways that have been proven to work. And I know this is a priority of your Mayor’s; it’s going to be a priority of mine.Chicago comedy figure and Sketchfest founder Brian Posen has announced he is “stepping down as Creative Director of Stage 773” after a decade at the helm of the Lakeview performance venue.
Posen made the announcement Nov. 17 in a Facebook post, making it his second departure from a high-profile post in recent months. In March, Second City confirmed that Posen was dismissed as the head of the improv program at the Second City Training Center. He left the Chicago comedy institution, where he had taught since 1993, amid allegations of inappropriate behavior toward female students, the Tribune has learned.
Over the course of several months, the Tribune spoke to more than 20 former female collaborators and colleagues of Posen's who say they believe he behaved inappropriately while working with them.
Posen denied “any and all allegations of sexual harassment” in an emailed statement to the Tribune on Monday through his attorney. “Comedy often stretches comfort levels. In the 30 years I have been in comedy, and the thousands that I have taught or mentored, the most that anyone has ever accused me of is bad taste. If I crossed the line and offended anyone, I am deeply sorry. Today, more than ever, that line is blurry and continues to move.”
Posen, 52, has been a longtime player in Chicago’s comedy and theater scenes.
According to public records, Posen owns more than 35 percent of 1225 W. Belmont Ave., the entity that acquired the venue located at that address. Posen is listed as the principal officer of Lukaba Productions, the non-profit organization that does business as Stage 773. The Posen Family Foundation contributes to Lukaba Productions.
In 2002, Posen founded the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival (Sketchfest), a popular annual event at Stage 773, though as of Tuesday, he was no longer listed on the event website (www.stage773.com/sketchfest) as executive producer. He also created the Cupid Players, an ensemble known for the musical sketch-comedy show “Cupid Has a Heart On.”
Posen’s announcement that he was stepping down said in part: “Recently, there have been some individuals who have stated negative things about me on social media maintaining that I was inappropriate. I want to say strongly that if I have ever unintentionally offended anyone by saying anything improper, which in turn hurt or offended anyone, I profusely apologize. That was certainly not my intent as I have enormous respect for artists. I would never intentionally use my position in an unethical or unprofessional manner. I love the arts and have dedicated my life to the arts. Over my 30 year career, I have taught, directed and mentored over 15,000 aspiring artists. To have successfully mentored thousands of individuals and now have had these allegations being made has been deeply saddening to me personally.”
According to his statement, Jill Valentine, a Chicago comic who has worked with Posen for many years and co-founded the Chicago Women’s Funny Festival, will take over Stage 773 leadership.
Valentine sent the Tribune a statement: “I have worked with Brian for the last 20 years and he is all heart. I’m so sad for everyone involved. My number one goal is to make Stage 773 a safe and productive environment. I hope we can all move forward learning, listening and being good to each other.”
The changes at Stage 773 come just months after Posen’s dismissal from Second City, in March of this year, following allegations of improper behavior raised by former Second City performer and Cupid Player Becca Brown to Kerry Sheehan, the chief people officer of Second City and president of the Training Center. Brown’s claims were followed by complaints from other women.
At the time of his dismissal, Second City representative Kim Metcalfe told the Tribune, “Suffice it to say the allegations fell within the employee conduct manual of no tolerance and after the investigation, the allegations, there was merit to it, so pending the investigation he was terminated.”
Second City conducts periodic, mandatory sexual harassment training courses for all staff and faculty members and has a manual outlining its harassment policy. The company also has signs throughout the building that say: “The Second City Training Center has a zero tolerance policy against harassment of any kind.”
Danni Parpan was one of Posen’s students at Columbia College Chicago — where Posen was a part-time faculty member until spring of 2015 — and later worked as his personal assistant. She said she once took Posen’s Second City sexual harassment course on his behalf.
“He put it on my list as part of my job for that week,” Parpan told the Tribune. “I took it for him. And then he printed out the certificate and he hung it on his wall in his office at Stage 773 as a joke.”
Posen’s comedy work, particularly with the show “Cupid Has a Heart On,” frequently used sexually themed material, and Chicago sketch and improv humor is often celebrated for its irreverence. But students and performers say there are still limits.
“There wasn’t a line separating the songs from the backstage life, which became inappropriate at times,” said former Cupid Player Chrissy Bruzek, who left the group, along with two other female members, after she learned of Posen’s Second City departure. That observation about crossing the line was shared, independently, by more than a dozen former collaborators.
Second City student Clare Austen-Smith was another woman who sent an email to Sheehan in March. “It took me 2 years to report being sexually harassed by Brian Posen — at the time, I had no idea that I could talk to anyone about this at Second City … so I tried to push it aside,” Austen-Smith said in an emailed statement to the Tribune. In 2014 she was a student in a coached ensemble, or a group of students coached by a Second City teacher to help them get used to performing onstage (the class at the time was held at Stage 773). “During one of our first rehearsals, we shared our occupations. At the time I was working for a sexual health education non-profit. When it came to my turn, I said, ‘I teach sex education on the south and west sides to high schoolers.’ I remember very clearly (Posen) stopped, turned to look at me, and yelled, ‘Wait — you’re a hot white girl teaching young ethnic boys about sex? How can they concentrate?!’ I remember the blood draining from my face and my skin started to crawl.”
“It was creepy and weird and everyone was, like, feeling uncomfortable,” said performer Megan Stalter, who was at that rehearsal and along with performer Emmalee Dixon confirmed the substance of Austen-Smith’s account.
More than a dozen former Posen collaborators told the Tribune that Posen made inappropriate comments about women’s bodies; five former collaborators said Posen asked them how they groom their pubic hair.Roasted Corn Quesadillas
Whew, life has been hectic lately, y’all! But it’s a good hectic. In addition to launching the new Budget Bytes app (p.s. the Android app is officially coming!), I’m in the process of selling my home in New Orleans and relocating to Nashville. So yeah, my days have been CRA-ZY. But I still need to eat! So just before I left for my 8 hour drive to Nashville the other day I made these super fast, easy, and deliciously smoky Roasted Corn Quesadillas.
Roasted Corn Quesadillas
Roasted Frozen Corn is Amazing
The star of these quesadillas is this amazing frozen roasted corn that I got at Trader Joes. I’m beginning to see similar products pop up other places too, like Whole Foods. The corn is charred before it’s frozen and it has the most incredible smoky flavor. It’s kind of like fire roasted canned tomatoes versus plain canned tomatoes, except times ten. It’s seriously a game-changing ingredient.
If you can’t find the frozen fire roasted corn I think these quesadillas would still be quite good. You can experiment with blistering the corn in a cast iron skillet like I did for my Warm Corn and Avocado Salad, although it doesn’t quite impart the level of smokiness as the store bought fire roasted corn.
Make Your Roasted Corn Quesadillas Vegetarian
And for all of my vegetarian friends, try swapping out the chicken for a drained and rinsed can of black beans or pinto beans. :)
Print Recipe 4.89 from 9 votes Roasted Corn Quesadillas These smoky Roasted Corn Quesadillas are a fast and filling lunch that can be kept in the freezer for a fast meal or snack. Prep Time: 10 mins Cook Time: 15 mins Total Time: 25 mins Servings: 7 8" quesadillas Ingredients 1.5 cups chopped cooked chicken* ($2.50)
1 cup frozen roasted corn kernels ($0.75)
2 green onions, sliced ($0.20)
4 oz can diced green chiles, drained ($1.27)
4 oz shredded cheese* ($1.08)
1/4 tsp cumin ($0.03)
1/4 tsp salt ($0.02)
7 8-inch tortillas ($1.67) Instructions Combine the chopped chicken, corn kernels (no need to thaw first), sliced green onions, diced green chiles, shredded cheese, cumin, and salt in a bowl. Stir until everything is evenly combined.
Place 1/2 cup of the chicken and corn mixture in each tortilla, spreading it over 1/2 of the surface, then folding the tortilla to close. Repeat until you run out of filling (I filled 7 tortillas before running out).
Place the quesadillas in a dry skillet over medium-low heat. Cook on each side until the tortillas are brown and crispy and the filling is melted and gooey. Cut each quesadilla into thirds and serve. Notes **I used a Mexican cheese that I found at the grocery store, but it tasted exactly like Monterey Jack and that is what I would suggest in lieu of Mexican cheese. *I used one side of the breast from a rotisserie chicken, but you could quickly cook a boneless, skinless chicken breast or thighs in a skillet, then chop it.**I used a Mexican cheese that I found at the grocery store, but it tasted exactly like Monterey Jack and that is what I would suggest in lieu of Mexican cheese. Tried this recipe? Mention @budgetbytes or tag #budgetbytes on Instagram!
Step by Step Photos
These are the main ingredients for the quesadillas, and it looks like I forgot to flip the can of green chiles on its side so you can actually see the label. LOL! But anyway… 2 sliced green onions, 4oz. of cheese (shredded), 4oz. can of diced green chiles, about 1.5 cups chopped cooked chicken, and 1 cup of frozen roasted corn. You don’t have to use the cheese I have pictured above, I just wanted to try it and it was a reasonable price, so I picked it up. It tastes almost exactly like Monterey Jack, which is what I had planned on using to begin with. 👍
Place the green onions, cheese, green chiles, chicken, and corn in a bowl, along with 1/4 tsp cumin and 1/4 tsp salt. Stir until everything is evenly combined.
Place about 1/2 cup of the corn and chicken filling in each 8-inch tortilla, spread it over half of the surface, then fold the tortilla to close. I was able to fill seven tortillas before I ran out of filling.
To cook the quesadillas, place them in a dry skillet over medium-low heat. Cook on each side until the tortillas are brown and crispy and the filling is melted and gooey. Slice into thirds and serve! Easy and fast!
If you want to freeze your quesadillas for later, just fill and fold, but do not cook in the skillet before freezing. Stack the uncooked quesadillas with a layer of parchment paper between each, place them in a gallon-size freezer bag, and pop them in the freezer. To cook from frozen, let thaw at room temperature for about 15 minutes, then cook over low heat until crispy on the outside and melted on the side. Make sure not to use higher heat or the inside will likely not heat through before the tortilla browns.One of the reasons I moved to Vancouver was because of what surrounded the city: mountains.
Since moving here, my friend Ty has taken me under his wing and is showing me the best peaks in the area. He's also gotten me into back-country skiing (or ski-touring), and over the May long weekend we summited Mt. Baker in Washington state.
(For those that are unfamiliar with the sport of ski-touring, as I was until November last year, it's a combination of cross-country skiing and downhill skiing. To go up the hill, you put something called a "skin" on the bottom of your ski that provides you with traction (they're synthetic now, but I'm sure that back in the day they used to be actual seal skins). When you get to the top, you adjust the bindings, take off the skin and its downhill skiing.)United Kingdom: Activists Block Tunnel to Airport
from Plane Stupid
On the 26th of November, just three days before the COP21 climate conference in Paris was due to start, three Plane Stupid activists blocked the main road access tunnel to Heathrow’s terminals 1, 2 and 3. This reportedly caused a traffic tailback several miles long as police directed inbound vehicles to one lane of the outbound tunnel. Our early entry for the#ClimateGames sent a clear message to the UK government that expanding aviation is a no-go for the climate; were it to go ahead the UK would undoubtedly miss its emissions targets as set out under the 2008 Climate Change Act.
Nor will aviation expansion benefit the majority of the population or businesses, as is often claimed. The demand for airport expansion is being driven by rich frequent flyers. Last year, less than half of people in Britain flew. Of those who did, a mere 15% of flyers took 70% of our flights.
As well as noise and air pollution, poor people are paying the price in droughts, flooding and storms so that the rich can cook the planet with frequent leisure flights. Whilst we might hope that David Cameron might live up to his pre-election promise – “no ifs, no buts, no third runway” – we can’t rely on it. Partly after being forced to take non-violent disobedient action where all other options were exhausted, we stopped a third runway before and we’ll stop it again this time too.
At the COP21 talks this year in Paris, the theme for the mass day of action on December 12th (D12) is Red Lines. These blockades will represent lines that cannot be crossed if we are to stay within the 2C rise in global temperatures. Failure to stay within this threshold will take us down a road where even if we reduce emissions to zero, feedback loops will mean that emissions will continue to rise: climate chaos.
In reality there are many Red Lines we should not cross, but governments and corporations seem intent to do so. In the UK this includes the aviation industry, which if it continues to grow at its current rate will by 2050 emit all of the carbon it is safe for the UK to emit. Beyond this, other red lines that are close to being crossed nationally include increasing unconventional fossil fuel extraction through fracking and a government ‘dash for gas’ power stations rather than renewables. Internationally, there are similar concerns as well as a clear need to stop lignite coal mining in Germany and the Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada. Whilst there are many such examples of industries that cannot continue, overall the science dictates that the fossil fuel industry must transition to renewables and most of the carbon must be kept in the ground.
Beyond the talks in Paris
Unlike the climate talks in Copenhagen, many activists are going to Paris with low expectations. We know that the heads of states and business leaders won’t come up with a satisfactory deal to prevent climate catastrophe. Naomi Klein writes in ‘This Changes Everything’ that climate deals always come in second place to trade deals as corporate profit and perpetual economic growth are ideologically untouchable in our neoliberal era. With this in mind, the aim for many activists is to see the Paris talks as a way for us all to network between struggles and to show on day 12 that if our ‘leaders’ won’t do it, then we can stop climate chaos ourselves. Unfortunately, with the recent events in Paris, marches have been banned out of fears over safety, which may mean that our mobilisations might not be as big or as effective as we hoped.
However, given that we know that the solutions to the climate crisis won’t come from the COP, let’s see this as an opportunity rather than a problem. Let’s get out and take action wherever the real#RedLines are: the dirty fossil fuel industries, the unsustainable, undemocratic mega-projects. #ClimateGames starts tomorrow. In this game we have nothing to lose but our fears. We have our whole futures to win. Asking our ‘leaders’ to solve our problems has left us with the hottest years on record, year after year. We are the solution we’ve been waiting for.
We are not fighting for nature. We are nature defending itself.
See you on the playing field,
“Paula Bear”
The main road entrance to Heathrow airport has been blocked by climate change activists since 7.40 this morning. Three members of anti-airport expansion campaign group Plane Stupid parked a vehicle across both lanes of the entrance tunnel and locked their bodies to it, unfurling a banner quoting David Cameron’s election promise: “No Ifs, No Buts: No Third Runway”. David Cameron has promised a decision by the end of the year on whether to build another runway at Heathrow.[1]
Local resident Neil Keveren, a builder whose village, Harmondsworth, would be bulldozed for the third runway, arrived later at the tunnel. He was fined after blocking the same tunnel with his van on 2nd July.[2] He said, “No one wants to do this. They feel they have to. People feel they have no choice. After we campaigned for years, David Cameron was elected promising ‘no ifs, no buts: no third runway’.[3] In 2010 the High Court ruled third runway plans “untenable in law and common sense” because they breached the Climate Change Act.[4] Now Cameron might just build it anyway. We have tried every other option. We have been forced to be disobedient just to be heard. To save our homes and our planet.”
Plane Stupid spokesperson Cameron Kaye said, “Airport expansion would wreck the legally binding Climate Change Act,[5] risking wiping out 55% of species this century[6] and displacing 75 million more people from their homes by 2035.[7] if aviation growth isn’t reduced, by 2037 aviation alone could emit all of the carbon it’s safe for the UK to emit.[8] The government needs to choose: build new runways or stop climate chaos: it’s that simple.
“There is already airport capacity for families taking their yearly holiday. New runways only benefit the 15% of flyers who take 70% of our flights,[9] cooking our planet. These are rich frequent leisure flyers. The most reliable predictors of frequent flyer status are a household income over £115,000 and owning a second home abroad,[10] but it’s the poorest people who suffer most from climate change.”
On 13th July Plane Stupid blocked Heathrow’s North runway, reportedly causing 22 flights to be cancelled and hundreds delayed.[11]
Photos can be used freely from twitter.com/planestupid
Contact the Plane Stupid press team:
07799360351
press@planestupid.com
@planestupidNew research finds a link between fitting in with your peers as a teen and better health in your 20s.
(Photo: Chuck Patch/Flickr)
For most people, adolescence is a period of life marked by intense friendships, as well as a strong bias toward conformity. Fitting in with our peers is an urgent need, and we're generally willing to damp down our individuality in order to do so.
Newly published research suggests there is a tangible reward for this sort of blending in: better health 10 or more years down the road.
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A study in the journal Psychological Science finds participants' physical health in their mid to late 20s was "robustly predicted" by their adolescent experiences—specifically, the quality of their close teenage friendships, and their "pattern of acquiescence to social norms."
"Remaining close, as opposed to separating oneself from the peer pack in adolescence, has long-term implications for adult physical health," writes a research team led by University of Virginia psychologist Joseph Allen. This dynamic, the researchers add, may help explain "the unique intensity of peer relationships in adolescence."
"The intense adolescent focus on forming and maintaining peer relationships may well result from an instinctive recognition that these relationships are linked to well-being."
Allen and his colleagues examined data on 171 participants in a larger longitudinal study of adolescent peer influences. Each was assessed annually during a five-year period from ages of 13 to 17. Each year, participants provided the name of their closest same-sex friend (not necessarily the same |
age of "36 Pictures From Russia That Everyone Needs to See" brought millions of viewers image after image of bloodied and crying LGBT Russians clinging to one another — people trying to shield themselves from blows and rotten eggs at peaceful protests turned violent where the police, skinheads, and large crowds of anti-gay protestors beat, mock, assault, and arrest them.
So the news from the Russian LGBT Network that four Dutch tourists had just been jailed under the new "gay propaganda" law for filming a documentary on LGBT rights in Russia was the last straw. By the time Dan Savage called for a boycott of Russian vodka mid-week, gay bars from New York, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, and LA to Sydney, London, and Vancouver were good and ready to begin pouring Russian booze into the streets.
Had Putin reignited Russia's abuse of its Jewish citizens, it would have been unthinkable for the IOC to issue a statement suggesting that non-Russian Jewish athletes, pundits, and spectators could go have a blast in Sochi because we'd be spared the anti-Semitic violence sweeping the rest of the country. There's just no way. The American Jewish community and the Obama administration would have (rightly) enacted trade sanctions instantly. There would have been no statement from the State Department like the one issued the same day as the IOC announcement saying that it does not support a boycott of the games.
So how does a pogrom against LGBT people and our allies pass muster in 2013?
Twenty-first century queers aren't going to wait quietly for a diplomatic solution while each month more of us are tortured and more of us are murdered. Last month, killers reportedly stabbed and trampled a man to death before putting his body in his car and setting it on fire. Just weeks before, 23-year-old Vladislav Tornovoi's friends murdered him because he mentioned he was gay while they were getting drunk, according to the BBC. They raped him with beer bottles before smashing his skull in with rocks.
We've been here before. And we know the power of economic sanctions and boycotts. When Congress finally came around in 1986 and passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (overriding President Ronald Reagan's veto) that banned all new trade and investments in South Africa, other countries followed suit, South Africa's economy went into free fall. Five years later, its Parliament voted to repeal the legal framework for apartheid.
So it's no surprise that Stolichnaya, which is freaking out over the boycott, is running a disinformation campaign where it tries to convince the public that it's not actually Russian vodka because it's currently distilled and bottled in Latvia. Nice try, guys, but the label on the bottle says "Russian vodka" (three times), you're owned by Yuri Scheffler, one of the 100 richest men in Russia, your vodka is made from Russian products, and you've taken great pains to market Stoli as the iconic Russian vodka.
NBC Universal, which has paid $4 billion dollars for the rights to cover the Olympics from 2014 through 2020, has also been squirmy. Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin's letter (pdf) asking them to include news of Russia's human rights violations alongside their standard Olympics coverage has elicited a hasty if mealy-mouthed response from the network saying that it will "provide coverage of Russia's anti-gay laws if the controversial measures surface as an issue during the upcoming Winter Olympics". In short, they're punting for now and hoping we'll all forget about it.
Kris van der Veen, one of the Dutch filmmakers who was arrested, then released last week, told me he wants governments from all over the world to help LGBT organizers have a Pride march in Sochi. A petition calling on corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola, Panasonic, VISA, Samsung, and Procter & Gamble to speak out against Russia's anti-gay laws has garnered around 40,000 signatures in a matter of days.
This much I can promise. No international bureaucracy, corporate entity, or modern-day führer is going to shrug us off with the assurance that we don't need to worry about our brothers and sisters because the haters will never come for us. Our hearts and our history tell us otherwise.A protest was held outside the home of Yosef Elbaum, who is counted among the regular visitors to Har Habayis despite being a member of a chassidic community, that does not condone visiting the holy site. The protesters shouted “murderer” and waved signs stating Gedolei Yisrael forbid visiting Har Habayis. They blame the Jews who visit Har Habayis for the recent wave of Islamic terror and harsh shift in international opinion against Israel.
It appears the protest was prompted by a report released by Reuters, which shows Elbaum visiting Har Habayis along with other Jews. The report shows how a chareidi rabbi is among those visiting the site, which is at the heart of controversy today between Jews in Israel and between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
When confronted, Elbaum denied he was on Har Habayis. His response is attributed to his fear of protests against him for his actions. However, the video shows a different story and a protest was organized outside his home within a number of hours. As a result, Elbaum told leaders of the Belzer Chassidus that he will refrain from such actions until such time the situation calms down.
The Elbaum family has been counted among the visitors to Har Habayis for a number of years.
With secret prayers, Jews challenge'status quo' at Jerusalem holy site https://t.co/QM9Imfm3Cx pic.twitter.com/yOHt8NX37v — Luke Baker (@LukeReuters) October 26, 2015
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)Shortly before the mysterious bombing of a weapons factory in Khartoum in October, an Israeli operative code name PP0277 left a remote site near Sde Boker in Israel's Negev desert.
Carrying a sophisticated tracking device concealed in a box on his leg, he made his way south across the Sinai desert, over the Red Sea, and into Sudan. On 1 December, however, his mission came to an abrupt halt. Having covered up to 350 miles a day, PP0277 had stopped moving at a village near the Sudanese town of Krinkh.
It was on Thursday that his fate finally became clear when the mayor of Krinkh, Hussein al-A'ali, announced that PP0277 had been captured – declaring him to be an Israeli spy "capable of taking photos and sending them back to Israel".
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It was then that Ohad Hatzofe, the Israeli who sent PP0277 on his fateful flight, did not know whether to laugh or cry. For PP0277 is not a top Mossad agent, but a young griffon vulture who, Mr Hatzofe insists, was simply making its semi-annual winter migration to Africa.
Far from sporting a history of directing spying missions inside enemy territory, Mr Hatzofe is an avian ecologist for Israel's Nature and Parks Authority. He has tagged more than 1,000 migrating birds in the past 20 years, all as part of a major international project to track and preserve rare species among the billion-plus birds that fly north, then south, over Israel each year.
Like all such creatures, PP0277 wore tags clearly marking him in English as part of the academic research, asking anyone who found him to contact Mr Hatzofe. And as Mr Hatzofe told The Independent: "It's not very secret, marking a supposed spy with the words 'Tel Aviv University' and my email address."
Nor is their reconnaissance information confidential. The birds are fitted with tiny boxes containing GPS and GSM transmitters with a solar energy panel and three small antennae. The data from the tagged birds is uploaded to Movebank, an accessible international database linked to Google Earth.
Spying missions between the two countries are not unlikely. Sudan is thought by the West to be helping Iran ship arms through Egypt to Gaza to supply Hamas. For its part, Israel is believed to have launched air strikes on Sudanese targets in 2009, 2011 and earlier this year.
But even if the Israeli authorities were to conceive such an outlandish espionage mission, Mr Hatzofe said it would proved somewhat bird-brained as the feathered recruits would make terrible spies.
"If I wanted to send a spy to Sudan I'd send one less interested in dead camels and goats. That tends to distract them," he said. "We have more operatives in Sudan right now and one piece of intelligence we've gathered is that there seems to be a concentration of slaughterhouses not far from Port Sudan."
Nor can Israeli vultures boast an illustrious history when it comes to making it through the airspace of hostile nations undetected. Saudi Arabia detained one of PP0277's fellow vultures last year. Despite similar tags labelling it as a specimen tracked in a similar fashion by the same university, it prompted fears of an airborne "Zionist plot" against the kingdom.
Mr Hatzofe cautioned against Mossad getting any genuine spying ideas from the accusations, however. "I'd condemn anyone who tried using wild animals for military or espionage purposes. These creatures are already becoming rare and that would only put them in greater danger," he said.
Animals at war
Sudan's Vulturegate may sound like a laugh, but the use of living creatures for military purposes is by no means far-fetched: for half a century, for example, the US Navy has had a marine mammals programme which trains dolphins and sea lions for wartime tasks.
Although a 1973 Mike Nichols movie called The Day of The Dolphin would have us believe that the animals are being trained for aggressive missions such as killing enemy frogmen and laying mines or even nuclear weapons, the US Navy insists they are being trained merely for defensive purposes such as mine-detection, sentry duty and the recovery of objects lost on the seabed. Yet the California-based programme has been surprisingly extensive and has involved the use of at least ten species of whales and dolphins – and also investigated, yes, the potential role of birds.
In the Second World War American defence scientists looked at the possibility of pigeon bombs, but abandoned it as impracticable.
The reason suspicions were aroused in the case of the Israeli-ringed vulture in the Sudan is that the miniaturisation of GPS equipment is proceeding apace, and ornithologists are fitting devices to ever more migrant birds to plot their routes. Indy, The Independent's sponsored cuckoo, was fitted with a transmitter in Wales in May and transmitted continuously during his journey back to Africa – until he met his end, by means unknown, in Cameroon in September.
If you wanted a bird as an airborne photography platform, a vulture is probably what you would choose. Vultures do very little flapping and directly rapid flight, spending nearly all their time soaring and gliding. Your problem would be, you couldn't tell it where to go.
Michael McCarthy
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Subscribe nowEveryone is so caught up with their discussion of President Trump around the firing of FBI Director James Comey that they are completely overlooking the most explosive scandal in the history of congress.
This scandal, if exposed, should remove, or at least censure: Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Burr, Devin Nunes, Adam Schiff and Mark Warner.
The absence of their accountability shows the depth of corruption within Washington DC.
First, understand their job – Each of the aforementioned was/is part of the congressional intelligence oversight called the “Gang of Eight“. The Go8 are exclusively responsible for overseeing all intelligence community activity as it relates to intelligence gathering and corresponding investigations.
In short these eight elected representatives are in charge of all oversight of all U.S. intelligence operations and investigations. As elected representatives, they represent one of the most important checks within the system of government overseeing non-elected officials.
Again, we refer back to the March 20th testimony of FBI Director James Comey where he is questioned by Freshman Representative Elise M. Stefanik.
Stefanik is a young, freshman republican congresswoman from the Albany New York area. And using a probative questioning timeline, she single-handily pulled the mask from FBI Director James Comey, and exposed the corruption within the Gang-of-Eight yet no-one seems to notice.
In the segment of the questioning below Rep. Stefanik begins by asking director Comey what are the typical protocols, broad standards and procedures for notifying the Director of National Intelligence, the White House and senior congressional leadership (aka the intelligence Gang of Eight), when the FBI has opened a counter-intelligence investigation.
The response from Comey is a generalized reply (with uncomfortable body language) that notification of counter-intel investigations are discussed with the White House, and other pertinent officials, on a calendar basis, ie. “quarterly”.
With the statement that such counter-intel notifications happen “generally quarterly”, and against the backdrop that Comey stated in July of 2016 a counter-intel investigation began, Stefanik asks:
…”when did you notify the White House, the DNI and congressional leadership”?
Everything happens in the first three minutes of that questioning. Against the backdrop to what you know now about Director James Comey’s investigation which began in July 2016, let’s unpack the response.
Director Comey said he informed the DNI (James Clapper), White House National Security Council (Susan Rice), and the DOJ who would have been his boss acting Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates (head of counter intelligence operations). He DID NOT notify congress.
Again, review that 2:49 second Q & A segment.
Director Comey is admitting to congress that for eight months he did not tell them about the counterintelligence investigation “because of the sensitivity of the matter“.
From his own testimony Director Comey admits he coordinated with: Susan Rice (White House), James Clapper (DNI) and Sally Yates (DOJ Counter-Intel). However, Comey also admits he intentionally did not tell congressional oversight. EVER.
The people within congress who SHOULD HAVE BEEN notified of the counterintelligence operation are the ‘Gang-of-Eight’: (Ryan, Pelosi, McConnell, Schumer, Nunes, Schiff, Burr and Feinstein/Warner) [*note Warner replaced Feinstein in ’17].
Director Comey is openly admitting to beginning an intelligence operation/investigation in July 2016 and intentionally not notifying congress until March 2017. In essence, he is completely operating without oversight.
However, did you hear a single member of the Gang of Eight raise objection to this stunning revelation?
Comey is admitting to keeping the Go8 in the dark. Comey is admitting to intentionally acting without oversight. Did a single member of the Go8 call for his removal? Did they protest this action? Did they demand to know why he felt empowered to violate the checks-and-balances?
NO.
Not a single member of the oversight Gang of Eight raised an eyebrow after this testimony. Why?
What is the purpose of oversight when the people doing the oversight don’t care if a non-elected official can operate independent of oversight?
Answer those questions and you can see the depth of the swamp.
This is a much bigger issue than President Trump firing James Comey. This reality represents the structural collapse of a primary function of government.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Pay close attention to the names and actions by congressional leadership as they respond to Director James Comey’s firing.
Nunes and Shiff are the head of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence. Burr and Warner are the heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ryan and Pelosi are the heads of the House. McConnell and Schumer are the heads of the Senate.
The group functions as the Gang-of-Eight as a result of their position in congress and on the oversight committees. Yet it would appear they held no active interest in oversight of FBI Director James Comey’s intelligence activity.
Why is that?
Tell me again about how the UniParty doesn’t exist.
AdvertisementsFor years consumers have suspected that airline and travel agency websites use Internet cookies to their advantage – and to the disadvantage of the customer. Rick Seaney tackles fact and myth. (Photo11: George Doyle, Getty Images)
For years consumers have suspected that airline and travel agency websites use Internet cookies to their advantage – and to the disadvantage of the customer. How? When airlines "sense" a shopper is about to book a ticket, they quote higher prices.
Writer Bill McGee, in a column on this site, suggested that this happens with regularity. His piece titled, "Do travel deals change based on your browsing history?" even noted that this business practice might veer into the territory of "price discrimination."
One proposed antidote would be to delete browser cookies - before, during and after shopping - to erase the crumb trail. That's a painful task for even the most Internet savvy. Before determining whether you need to do this, though, let me address this myth (and myth is what I strongly believe it to be) by starting off with a couple of geeky facts:
Airlines typically offer more than a dozen price points for the same seat on the same aircraft - prices and rules that can and do change frequently throughout the day. Simultaneously automated inventory systems decide at any given moment which price point to offer a shopper, based on dozens of factors including current and historical bookings. Air travel quoting systems struggle beneath an avalanche of queries each day (the vast majority of which never result in a booking), and these systems use a variety of technology shortcuts like reusing earlier responses or "guesstimating" actual airline inventory. Have your eye on a particular deal? Bookings for that flight can occur even as you are contemplating your purchase (especially if it is a really good deal). Any website worth its salt uses cookies (ostensibly to provide a better user experience).
The question is, are these travel sites smart (or brazen) enough to target your personal behavior via cookies to jack up rates and pocket the difference? Or is this price-jumping behavior simply an artifact of airline pricing technology and the shortcuts used by quoting websites to handle the insatiable demand for ticket quotes?
My educated guess is the latter, but not because the airlines wouldn't like to try different pricing methods for different customers. In fact, they're already "accidently" conducting such experiments and possibly more worrisome, planning to implement the myth.
Case in point: Orbitz was recently dragged over the coals for changing the default display of their quoting results for users of Apple products - the theory being that people who could afford these pricy gadgets could afford to pay higher prices. While I thought the media's coverage was overhyped — to me it was a matter of Orbitz re-ordering its list of prices (the cheaper prices were just not at the top) — it hit all the major and social media outlets like wildfire.
ORBITZ: Mac users book fancier hotels than PC users
Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines' website tested pricing engines of two different companies, performing separate experiments for both "loyal" logged-in customers and not-so-frequent fliers (not logged-in) simultaneously which, as you might imagine, returned some very different results. Again, the discrepancy became a very big story, prompting an explanation from a Delta vice president who opined that now everyone's on the same search engine and ultimately all will get the "new improved search function".
Even as we speak, more than a dozen of the world's biggest airlines are in the midst of getting government approval to "augment" the current airline pricing technology into something more akin to the urban legend about cookies and higher prices. But in reality, it's all about prices tailored to specific shoppers – a so-called "New Distribution Capability." No surprise then that those who are concerned about privacy and higher fares are starting to give this their full attention.
MORE: Read previous columns
FareCompare CEO Rick Seaney is an airline industry insider and top media air travel resource. Follow Rick (@rickseaney) and never overpay for airfare again.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/Y9y50uIntroduction:
We've established that Counterstrike: Global Offensive is a tactical first person shooter and requires thorough understanding of the mentality of your opponents at high ranks. When your aim is as good as your opponent's aim, the only way you will beat them is through out smarting them. Here you will now have to understand how your opponent thinks, from rotations and their length in time to angle's and enemy hold (positioning).
Rotation:
An important aspect of out playing your opponents is to understand how many people rotate, how they rotate and how fast it takes them to get from point A to B. When taking a site your team strives to achieve maximum damage at no to little casualties, unless the team decides to run in and use brute force then the best way to enter a site is through creating fakes and force rotations for the other team.
Forcing a rotate is when you either fake a bomb site to achieve a player to move out of position/fully commit to the other bombsite or by getting a frag on an enemy. Fakes are effective if pulled off correctly, the goal of a fake is to sacrifice one or two players to use their smokes/flashes to create the illusion of a push onto a bomb site which you are actually not going to push into. For instance 0n Inferno B plant you can smoke off CT long (vision from CT spawn to B) and wires and possibly commit one player to enter the bomb site to make some noise.
The opponents, at least one, should rotate over into the other bomb site leaving A with a minimum of one less player which means that a certain angle will be left unprotected and swarming the opponents will be much easier, but do not assume that if one player is gone "it is easy to get the bomb site" cause you can still fail, so flashes and smokes should be used upon entry.
When you create a fake you should keep in mind that it takes time for a player to get from one site to another. It is not the wisest to run in right after the fake has been created because the rotating player might still be close by, but you cannot over extend either because the opposition might figure that it is a fake. Timing is the key.
Knowing how long it takes from bomb site A to bomb site B is important as well as understanding how the opponents react to situations and asking questions like: Do they take long to react? (By the time you think they have rotated, they only start rotating) Do they over react? (Send a player as fast as possible into the other site) Do they over commit? (Send two or more players to the other site).
Positioning and Angles:
Predicting where your enemy may sit is also a key when pushing onto bombsites. Knowing angles and spots from where you can be shot when coming around a corner is vital. Each corner, each barricade on a map is a potential hiding spot for your opponent. When you come around a corner always keep in mind which angles you are exposed to and in which order. On Inferno for instance when entering from mid into quad's you should keep in mind how you peek corners because even if you look towards quad whilst hugging the left wall the person at arch can potentially spot your weapon. It is vital to check both sides and then use smokes/flashes to your advantage.
Remember, you can dictate enemy positions by smoking off areas or flashing in, these nades can potentially scare off opponents and make them regroup in a new position allowing you to move up. You should also keep in mind that the most obvious place are the once you least expect someone to be in, always double check when you go past. If the first player to walk past an obvious spot does not look there that does not mean that there is no ct/t there, he most likely is just waiting for people to pass so he can inflict as much damage as possible. There are also some unfair angles you can forget about like the small opening between the blue truck on quad and the wall.
Conclusion:
When your aim skill is matched you have to use your map knowledge to your advantage. In the start experiment to see how the opponents rotate and move about, then you can start planning how your team could execute a bombsite entry with maximum damage at minimum cost. Keep in mind as well which corners you are exposed to as you do not want to go red before even executing the entry! Last, but not least try to use your grenades as efficiently as possible, you have four grenades and those can either get you a kill or open up a opportunity for a kill.Cubs Trying to Figure How They Managed to Get So Far Off Track
Green probably knew he had to cash in big in 1985. He had a veteran club, buoyed by the signing of three free agent pitchers, Rick Sutcliffe, Dennis Eckersley and Steve Trout.
It was a summer of disappointment. A summer of missed opportunities, of injuries, of failures.
"Sure, we're disappointed," Green says. "Looking back, we could have all done more. The front office, the manager, the players."
Instead, Green and the Cubs' hierarchy must be shaking their heads at the turn of events for the club after they were the toast of a cable-wired country when they won the National League East Division crown in 1984.
At this time of the year, Dallas Green, the head man for the Cubs, was hoping to be making plans for playoff and World Series games.
Especially if you are the president and general manager of the Chicago Cubs.
But a funny thing happen to that trio on the way to the bank. They all were injured for large chunks of this season and the Cubs' fortunes plummeted as their days on the disabled list mounted.
Cubs' fans will say the pitching staff injuries cost them a chance to contend in September. Critics argue they weren't matching their 1984 performances and with the offensive firepower defused, the Cubs were only slightly better than the pre-1984 championship days.
"I haven't moaned all year, have I?" Manager Jim Frey said. "But I know that on June 13, we were 15 games over.500, our pitchers were coming back and we were one game away from having the best record in baseball. Then things didn't go so well."
Green did everything he could. He kept a low profile, then tried to charge up the troops by suggesting on the day the two-day strike was over that some players weren't doing their best. He even shouldered some of the blame.
"Maybe we should have done more in the way of a trade," Green says.
But Frey doubts that would have made a difference.
"Everyone says we should have made a trade. But it isn't that easy," Frey says.
Green concedes clubs weren't willing to talk to the Cubs about deals the way they were before 1984 when the club was still a perennial loser.
"Teams aren't going to help you once you've won," Green says. "It's easy to beat a club when it's down."
Still, decisions made by the Cubs throughout the 1985 season didn't seem to have the same magic they did in 1984.
The Cubs opted to replace veteran Larry Bowa at shortstop with rookie Shawon Dunston at the start of the season. Dunston wasn't ready to hit major league pitching and was back at Des Moines, Iowa, in May.
When Sutcliffe initially went out with a pulled hamstring in late May, the club went with a more liberal physical diagnosis and allowed him to return after three weeks. The original doctor to examine him suggested up to six weeks.
Sutcliffe would go on to be hurt two more times and never completely recovered physically.
The same was true with Trout. He would miss a start, pitch well for two weeks, then miss two starts. Instead of complete rest, Trout was in and out of the rotation. Like Sutcliffe, he never recovered physically.
To compensate for the loss of Trout and Sutcliffe, Eckersley "shouldered" most of the burden. He later wound up with a cortisone shot in his ailing shoulder.YOUR DAILY DYSTOPIA | 2017.09.20
Fred Chong Rutherford Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 20, 2017
With the world facing a historically awful hurricane season due to global warming, and the possibility of nuclear war with North Korea looming, the Republican Senate and Donald Трамп are naturally focused on a new health care bill, the Graham-Cassidy act, that would both lower taxes for rich people and repeal the Affordable Care Act, taking away insurance for 22 million people.
Aides for the White House say the next item for the Трамп regime to focus on is a bill authorizing U.S. military forces to kick puppies whenever Трамп feels that, “puppies got it too good.”
— — — —
During his monologue last night, Jimmy Kimmel railed against a new Republican plan to repeal Obamacare, and said Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana lied to his face when he said he would only support a health care bill that guaranteed coverage for all families.
Kimmel told his audience, “He said he wants coverage for all, no discrimination based on preexisting conditions, lower premiums for middle-class families and no lifetime caps. Guess what? The new bill does none of those things.”
A spokesperson for Senator Cassidy said that he has his own unusual Louisiana dialect, and there was just a simple miscommunication. “See, the Senator, when he says coverage for all, what he means is, lower taxes for rich people. That’s what he always means. It’s not lying if that that’s what you always means,” said the Senator’s office in a press release.
— — — —
In his first speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Donald Трамп repeatedly lied to the people there about everything from job growth to defense spending.
As one diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity put it, “We would have been surprised if he had said something honest. But in a way, lying to us like that was a kind of honesty, because he was at least true to his nature. And being true to your nature is the honesty that counts.”
After making that statement, the lights accidentally flipped on, and the diplomat was revealed to be Трамп regime diplomat Nikki Haley.
— — — —
Have you done your part today? If not, take a moment to decide what to do, how you can help, and pitch in! Maybe pitching in for you means telling me I’m dumb, go for it! Whatever it is, make your time count!
McCain bucked his party once. Will he do it again?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/20/politics/john-mccain-graham-cassidy-bill/index.html
Senator ‘Lied’ Over Health Care Bill, Jimmy Kimmel Says
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jimmy-kimmel-senator-lied-right-my-face-over-health-care-n802896
Fact check: Trump makes misleading boasts on economy and foreign issues in U.N. speech
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/09/19/fact-check-trump-makes-misleading-boasts-economy-and-foreign-issues-u-n-speech/683568001/Here are the Chronicle editorial board's endorsements for the March 4 party primaries.
Travis County Races
County Judge: Sarah Eckhardt
Eckhardt's greatest strength is that she has been knee-deep in county work for many years, first as an assistant county attorney, and then for six years as Pct. 2 Commissioner, working on all kinds of initiatives to improve quality of life and making the county more "efficient, just, healthy, mobile, and green," as her campaign material states. She has also clearly articulated progressive goals for the whole region on matters like transportation and the environment, and she's done good spadework on CAMPO, building regional partnerships where a great deal of time and energy must be spent to make very slow progress.
An endorsement of Eckhardt is not to disparage her opponent, Andy Brown. There are solid reasons why Brown has garnered the lion's share of endorsements from Democratic public officials and local political organizations. He has a long history in the local party, beginning as a fieldworker in Travis County campaigns stretching back to Ann Richards (and notably in 2004 as Rep. Lloyd Doggett's campaign manager). As chair of the county Democratic Party, he helped revitalize a placid operation, and was instrumental in increasing fundraising and turnout, especially in the county's eastern precincts. That success has carried over to his ability to amass a sizable war chest and to run a smooth campaign with an impressive field operation. His broad support, including visible minority support (his fluency in Spanish is a bonus) reflects that he's clearly able to win friends and influence people.
Nevertheless, there are hard questions raised about both Brown's experience and his insider managerial style. He hasn't worked at the county itself, and he would take time to understand and use the available levers of action, or evoke cooperation from county staff (and county attorneys) long used to doing things in a fairly unimaginative way. On that score, a commissioner's seat would have been a better place for Brown to learn the ropes before making a run for county judge. Our sense is that he's been coming up to speed on current policy issues as the campaign progresses.
The main criticism we've heard against Eckhardt is that she would rather be right on principle than successful in practice, making it difficult to build consensus either among her constituents or on the court. But that's not an entirely true or fair representation. During her tenure on the court she helped secure a majority vote, if not unanimous support, on several seismic changes in county policy, including stricter groundwater regulations, a more inclusive economic development policy, and a means of improving the county's lackluster record of awarding contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses. Should she become our next county judge, Eckhardt would do well to temper her leadership style. At the same time, we recognize and applaud Eckhardt's abilities as a skilled, tough negotiator who would work in the best interest of the entire county. We believe the current court is often too easily swayed by monied interests, and voters would be wise to elect a county judge with a backbone.
Precinct 2 Commissioner: Brigid Shea
There are three very qualified candidates in this race to fill the seat vacated by former commissioner Sarah Eckhardt: Brigid Shea, Richard Jung, and Garry Brown. Two of the candidates might find themselves in an equally competitive run-off – one reason the campaign has become more polarized in the final laps. Jung brings a legal résumé and business experience, and is keen on addressing economic inequities in the county; Brown's Democratic Party work and depth of knowledge about county operations are impressive; and Shea's lengthy record of activism – working on progressive causes ranging from environmental issues and affordability to education advocacy – has made her a leading figure in the community. Of the three, however, Shea offers a formidable combination of policy and political skills that would benefit the entire court as it navigates weighty regional issues like water and transportation. We believe Shea's demonstrated ability to bring people together and her capacity to reach across the aisle to find common ground make her the best of three good choices here.
Precinct 4 Commissioner: No Endorsement
We are disappointed that incumbent Margaret Gómez did not draw a strong opponent in her bid to retain the seat she has held since 1995. Darla Wegner, a Del Valle ISD trustee, filed for the Democratic nomination but has done little to mount any sort of serious campaign in this historically low-voter-turnout precinct concentrated in southeast Austin and Travis County. That's too bad, because Gómez has done little in the last four years to convince us she deserves another term. Though she was absent for much of the first part of her current term due to poor health, she nevertheless managed to secure for herself an office on the 15th floor of a newly renovated county building, literally putting her needs and desires – whatever those may be – above the county judge and fellow commissioners who maintain offices on the second floor. And we're still not convinced, as Gómez would have us believe, that the fast-tracked road work at the Circuit of the Americas racetrack was needed to improve economic development opportunities in her disadvantaged precinct. No, we believe bond dollars – $16.6 million – were fast-tracked to benefit COTA, ironically at a time when some of her constituents were – and still are – trying to recover from the Halloween flood that devastated their Onion Creek neighborhood. While we cannot recommend her underqualified opponent, neither can we lend another endorsement to an incumbent who appears to have become a careerist politician whose priorities are no longer those of her constituents.
County Court-at-Law #3: John Lipscombe
Lipscombe was first elected to this bench in 2010 after spending most of his career as a prosecutor. While we crave more diversity on the bench – that is, the inclusion of other points of view, such as those offered by Lipscombe's opponent, defense attorney Paul Evans – we think Lipscombe should remain on the bench so that he can continue to work on the rehabilitative justice programs he vowed to embrace in the last election. He's instituted a night docket for youthful offenders and others who have trouble making it to the courthouse during regular business hours. This is a good first step to leveling the playing field for those who can afford justice and everyone else.
County Treasurer: Ramey Ko
In her 27 years as county treasurer, Dolores Ortega Carter has been a competent office holder, fulfilling her fiduciary responsibilities. But Ko – an immigration attorney, former municipal judge and longtime Democratic activist – makes a convincing argument that she has allowed the post to become moribund. He has a point: How many people even know we have a county treasurer? He proposes new blood at a time when county finances will only become more challenging. Even as Travis County becomes more heavily populated, the inevitable result is that the city of Austin will incorporate its wealthiest bits, and leave county government to do more with less. Ko's experience and proven ability on bringing disparate groups together, and his understanding of both the county itself and its governmental entities, could provide vital new collaborations that can help fill some of the funding gaps. He will also be a bridge to a community that so far had worryingly little involvement in local politics. As co-founder of the Capital Area Asian American Democrats, a lecturer at UT Austin's Center for Asian American Studies, and a commissioner on President Obama's White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Ko can give a voice in local affairs to Central Texas' growing Asian-American population. We thank treasurer Carter for her service, but believe that is time |
prison MORE hits his 200th day in office. 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.) had set the 200th day as a bigger marker for Republicans than Trump's first 100 days.
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Republicans hold majorities in Congress and the White House for the first time since the 2006 elections, when they lost their House majority.
The website features a quiz where readers can answer questions comparing major events in the news, like former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before Congress and the shooting at a congressional baseball practice to legislation the House passed.
"Did you also know that the same week, the House passed bipartisan legislation to combat human trafficking?" one question asks, placing the bill in contrast to reports emerging that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer during the Trump campaign with the promise of compromising information on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE.
Republicans have so far been unable to win many big legislative achievements despite their control of the government.
The House did pass an ObamaCare repeal-and-replace plan, a big victory for Ryan.
But the bill was dead on arrival in the Senate, which also hit a stalemate on its own healthcare legislation.
Trump's biggest accomplishment so far is the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Trump has also been able to cut back on Obama-era regulations with the help of the House.
Other big agenda items for House Republicans or Trump, including tax reform and an infrastructure plan, have yet to be picked up. Work on tax reform was delayed in part by the long fight over ObamaCare.
Republicans did pass a spending measure earlier this year that kept the government open, but they now must do so again to prevent a shutdown after September.
Another Trump priority backed by Ryan, building a wall on the Mexican border, has been stuck. Some Republicans oppose the wall, but $1.6 billion targeted for its construction has been included in a spending bill for the next fiscal year.
The House GOP website rips the media's coverage of Trump, arguing its focus on investigations into Russia have unfairly overshadowed legislative work.
“House Republicans are focused on what matters to you,” the ad states.LOS ANGELES, United States (Kurdistan24) – After a century of statelessness, Kurdistan Region, which hosts a portion of the estimated 40-50 million Kurdish population scattered across the Middle East, announced its resolution to move toward independence from Iraq.
A referendum on September 25, 2017, is to ask Kurdish citizens if they would say yes to having their own country.
Although Kurds have faced genocide for their statelessness, the announcement was received with a mixed response: From utter excitement for potentially achieving an age-old dream to absolute resistance. A group went so far as hiring an American PR firm to internationally oppose the prospect of secession.
Although a section of the opposition is fuelled by petty party politics and personal ambitions, others are genuinely concerned that a stronger government would be harder to reform. They argue that KRG had decades to improve people’s lives and it failed and so they believe having a state would not improve day to day life.
The parliament has been closed for two years. The government, criticized for corruption, mismanagement, and authoritarianism, is just recovering from economic crisis, war with IS, the influx of refugees and IDPs, and federal government’s budget cut.
Others argue that independence is a matter much bigger than one party's failures and success and should be supported as a cause above and beyond the interests of a limited group.
INDEPENDENCE, BEGINNING OF GREATER ACCOUNTABILITY
Political analyst Hemn Seyedi told Kurdistan 24 independence is a century-overdue remedy and is the beginning of a new chapter.
Statehood "is a correction, a remedy of a historical mistake with a 100-year delay," Seyedi told Kurdistan 24 from England.
He pointed out the Kurds were "forced to abandon their own actual independence twice and [instead] back an artificial state in 1920 and 2003."
Therefore, achieving independence would be realizing an age-old dream but it does not solve most of the problems.
"Indeed getting independence and having a state is just a step not the final step [in achieving] the welfare of a nation. It cannot help a corrupt regime to survive, but it makes the government more responsible before the international community, more accountable to its opposition and more vulnerable to the public opinion," he explained.
LIBERALS and MARXISTS OPPOSITION TO STATEHOOD
Speaking of those who oppose the referendum, Seyedi Seyedi who recently graduated from Birkbeck, the University of London with a Master's Degree in "The Middle East in Global Politics," explained the main critiques on independence and building a new nation-state come from two different views Liberalism and Marxism.
Liberals are concerned with states' tendency to unify and assimilate, Seyedi said, adding that Marxists warn against centralization and aggregation of power and wealth in the upper or ruling class.
"Both critiques are valid but they cannot prevent the Kurds from having their own state in a world which is divided between 193 other states and its international system is designed based on nation-states," Seyedi pointed out.
Kurdish analyst recognized the inherent dangers in building a state and yet acknowledged that given the current laws and regulations, the disadvantages of not having a state is by far larger that having one.
"A world in which the system, the international relations, global trade organizations, international laws and other aspects all work with the principle of nation-state and with the recognition of state as its main unit, then no one can force the Kurds to scarify their interests because of liberals’ and Marxists’ concerns," Kurdish affairs analyst elaborated.
Once independence is achieved, Seyedi said, it is important to pressure Kurdish leaders to avoid the negative side effects of state-building.
Looking at successful examples such as Switzerland, Belgium or Canada, KRG can ensure diversity and avoid unifications, he said.
"Also there are some nation-states whose leaders and politicians do care about the welfare of their people. Kurdish leaders, while building their state, can learn from Scandinavians and do not allow a few to seize the wealth and power; provide services and welfare for the public," Seyedi added.
Speaking about Iranian Kurds, Seyedi said they support failed reformists mostly because they have no any other alternative.
Facts such as having a divided opposition, being located in a region plunged into the war, help Iran regime to impose their ideological and sectarian policies without much resistance from the population, Seyedi said.
"Iran’s security and propaganda strategy in comparing Iran’s internal stability with neighboring countries is successful and keeps people silent," he said.
Although the turnout for election has been less in the Kurdish region than the rest of Iran, Iranian Kurds mainly show the same behavior as the rest of the country and support Rouhani.
"The economic hardship is tougher in Kurdistan, the security measure is stronger in Kurdistan, and also Kurdish opposition has been even more divided in the last decade," Seyedi lamented.
"But I believe Iranian authorities cannot carry this policy for a long time internally, and they will also face many new challenges externally specifically from Trump administration," Seyedi concluded.French police are looking into reports that a gang of youths tasered a Jewish teenager in central Paris.
The National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, said it had contacted police based on reports in French Jewish media of the alleged assault, which according to the news site Alliance.fr happened on Tuesday on Paris’ iconic Place de La Republique square.
According to the report, a group of six black teenagers used an electric taser on a Jewish boy identified by Alliancefr.com only by his first name, Raphael. He was wearing a kippah and tzitzit and was attacked for his Jewish appearance in an apparent anti-Semitic assault, Alliancefr reported.
A passerby intervened and the gang left the scene before police could apprehend them, according to the news website. One of the gang members was armed with a club.
The report came amid a series of anti-Semitic incidents in the Paris area, including two beatings in Creteil last month and a similar incident in Sarcelles.
On Monday, Stars of David were spray-painted on several houses belonging to Jews in Gradignan near Bordeaux in southwestern France, the news site alyaexpress-news.com reported.
“Anti-Semitic incidents are an almost daily occurrence in France,” BNVCA President Sammy Ghozlan told JTA. “They are becoming more frequent and whereas the targets used to be synagogues, now there are more physical assaults on people: Young religious Jews.”
Ghozlan noted the current string of incidents could be a resurgence of anti-Semitic violence in the wake of the murder of four people on May 24 at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in central Brussels. Belgian and French authorities suspect the shooter was a 29-year-old jihadist.
“After every major act of violence committed recently, we’ve felt an increase in attacks, including the 2012 Toulouse attack,” Ghozlan said in reference to the murder of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school by a Muslim radical. “Sadly, these murders inspire the admirers of the killers to imitate their actions.”
While far-right nationalists like Jean-Marie Le Pen “certainly produce anti-Semitic hate speech, the vast majority of physical attacks are committed by Muslims,” Ghozlan said.
SPCJ, the security unit of France’s Jewish communities, recorded a slew of 90 anti-Semitic acts within 10 days of the March 19 murders at Toulouse – part of a 58-percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2012 over 2011.
This story "Jewish Teenager Wearing Kippah Attacked With Taser Stun Gun in Paris" was written by JTA.Jonathan Weisman reports on the White House.
The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.
But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.
Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”
The statement was prompted by Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona, who challenged the president and the Democratic leaders over the balance between the package’s spending and tax cuts, bringing up the traditional Republican notion that a tax credit for people who do not earn enough to pay income taxes is not a tax cut but a government check.
Obama noted that such workers pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, property taxes and sales taxes. The issue was widely debated during the presidential campaign, when Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, challenged Obama’s tax plan as “welfare.”
With those two words — “I won” — the Democratic president let the Republicans know that debate has been put to rest Nov. 4.
Democratic and Republican aides confirmed the exchange. A White House spokesman said he wasn’t immediately aware of the exchange. The aides who heard the remarks stressed that it wasn’t as boldly partisan as it might sound.
Still, other Democrats echoed the sentiment. As he left the White House, House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina was asked about Republican complaints that Democrats aren’t listening to what their GOP colleagues have to say. “We’re responding to the American people,” he said. “The American people didn’t listen to them too well during the election.”Our dear friends over at PCGamesHardware have conducted an interview with Creative Assembly, in which the development revealed some new details about its upcoming Alien title. According to Creative Assembly, the team is considering AMD’s new API, Mantle, as it looks very interesting and the game will not support Nvidia’s PhysX.
Moreover, Creative Assembly revealed that Alien: Isolation will be powered by an in-house engine. When asked about the game’s engine, Creative Assembly had this to say:
“We created our own engine for Alien: isolation. This allowed us to do focus on making the game as there was no info about next-gen consoles at that time. We knew the quality bar we wanted to achieve, the gameplay features and the visual fidelity. Thus we built an engine that could deliver in those areas.”
This in-house engine will also support multiple CPU cores. As the development team unveiled, that the game will take advantage of multiple cores, meaning that more cores will increase performance, provided you are not GPU limited.
It remains to be seen now whether Creative Assembly is telling the truth or not.
Alien: Isolation is currently planned for an October 7th release.
Enjoy!W hile Dutch race car designer Wiet Huidekoper doesn't have the name recognition of say Tony Southgate or even Nigel Stroud, the cars he's designed certainly do; Lola T92/10, Porsche 911 GT1-98, the Dallara LMP1, and the Porsche 9R3 LMP900; the stillborn Porsche LMP from 1999-2000. Our focus here is decidedly that car. hile Dutch race car designer Wiet Huidekoper doesn't have the name recognition of say Tony Southgate or even Nigel Stroud, the cars he's designed certainly do; Lola T92/10, Porsche 911 GT1-98, the Dallara LMP1, and the Porsche 9R3 LMP900; the stillborn Porsche LMP from 1999-2000. Our focus here is decidedly that car.
Huidekoper's relationship with Porsche began back in 1994. In 1992 Huidekoper's company, Motorsports Design Consultants (MDC) Ltd, had been commissioned by Dauer Racing to convert a Porsche 962 into a road legal road car. It was Dauer's intention to create road going super cars based on the eminently successful Porsche 962 race cars. Design work was begun in the fall of 1992, recalls Huidekoper, “The engineering included changes to the structure, mandatory visibility areas and such, as well as re-making the re-styled bodywork and adding creature comforts such as air conditioning, a fully upholstered interior, etc.” The car was completed and then presented at the IAA auto show in Frankfurt in September of 1993. Porsche's Norbert Singer took interest after seeing the car at the show, and by February of 1994 the decision was made to utilize the road-legal Dauer 962 as the basis for Porsche's 1994 Le Mans assault. Given the very shortened time frame, Dauer insisted on Huidekoper and MDC's involvement in the re-conversion of the Dauer 962 in order to aid Porsche with the more advanced composites.
Complicating the time schedule was the need to completely redesign the road car's aerodynamics in order to comply with the ACO's insistence on a flat bottom underbody, as well as the desire to optimize the car aerodynamically. “The ACO forced us to change to a flat bottom, as the Dauer version of the car still had the 962 Group C venturis. This called for a swift and all-out reaction. Singer went into his model wind tunnel and initially I was consulted to create downforce despite the flat underside. To cut a long story short, the overhangs had to be longer, double rear wing had to be added, which resulted in all new bodywork. In addition, the road car had to be road legal in this new format by late March of 1994 in order to even be eligible for Le Mans.” The Dauer Porsche 962 was Huidekoper's trail by fire. “It was a giant effort, but we got it done. We tested the car at Weissach in late March and then took it to the south of France to Miramas, a former racing track then owned by Goodyear and used as a private testing facility. The car won Le Mans that year, and the rest is history.”
“This is how Porsche and I got to know each other, so when they were planning their first GT1 in the summer of 1995, Singer rang me to ask if I was available to do the composite engineering once more as they did not have their own people for that. I agreed and MDC was once more deeply involved to create a part of Porsche history. The relationship continued to developed with the subsequent 1997 Porsche GT1 car. This was the first time that the Porsche racing department dared to rely 100% on CAD design and engineering. Their old process involved making clay models by hand from which they would eventually pull molds from. Singer had no confidence in the CAD and CNC process, but he trusted me and went along with it. It all worked out well and we set a new standard for them from then on.”
In 1997 Huidekoper was asked to lead Porsche Motorsport's design team following Horst Reitter's, Porsche's long time Chief of Construction, retirement. Huidekoper would direct the car's overall mechanical design, as well as directing the production detailing, with Porsche's Norbert Singer handling aerodynamics and car performance. This working relationship, established with the Dauer 962, was continuously developed with the 1996 Porsche GT1 and subsequent follow-on GT1 cars in 1997 and 1998.
Which brings us to post-Le Mans 1998 and the Porsche LMP. Porsche recognized that in order to continue to be competitive at Le Mans in the current rules structure would require a bespoke prototype. And with that in mind, design work had begun that summer with the idea of using the venerable Porsche turbo flat six as the power plant for the new LMP. This work was was completed by November, but then Porsche decided to not build the car.
Internally Porsche was debating the logic in continuing to utilize the traditional flat six, “If looks could kill I would not be around anymore, when I mentioned the traditional Porsche flat-6 engine as the design's major weakness!” recalls Huidekoper. In November Huidekoper sat down with Singer and Herbert Ampferer to discuss the LMP's design. “Previously this engine concept had been their strength, now it was old fashioned and their weakness. During this discussion I compared it with an average large capacity V8, giving the same horsepower and torque within these regulations, but typically weighing approximately 160kg, and being able to be structurally loaded.” Furthermore, Nissan, Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes were into their second year of their then-current sports car programs at Le Mans and would provide very formidable opposition. Huidekoper, “Looking at it like that, there was no choice; three days later the 1999 LMP900 car was officially canned.”
But that wasn't the end. Huidekoper, “In March 1999 I was asked to come to Weissach for a meeting. They showed me their 3.5 litre V10 F1 engine, produced for 1993 in great secrecy. A beautiful engine, proper compact F1 architecture, between 700 and 800bhp and with full pneumatic valve gear.” Porsche had supplied 3.5 liter V12 engines for the Footwork F1 team in 1991. They had a less than successful year; the Porsche engines were late, heavy, under powered, and unreliable. Zero for zero. Footwork would switch to Ford DFR power before mid-season and the Porsche engine contract was nulled. But Porsche being Porsche, they constructed the V10 engine as a post-Footwork design exercise. And there it sat until March of 1999 and a possible new purpose. Huidekoper continuing, “The question was if this would be a good idea for a new endurance engine. That was the re-start of the LMP900 project there and then, but now with the 5 litre version of the V10 engine and a new transmission, and it would compete in 2000 as we were too late to develop it all to compete effectively in 1999.”
Given the lightweight and small nature of the V10, it was a very good starting point for a new LMP power plant; modern and without the inherent disadvantages of the aging flat six. The engine was increased in capacity, with possibilities for both 5.0 and 5.5 liters configurations, through an increase in stroke and a slight increase in bore. The ACO mandated engine intake restrictors made the pneumatic valve system of the F1 engine redundant (with the inlet restrictors limiting revs by restricting airflow), so the system was discarded in order to fulfill the aim of longevity and simplicity of construction and maintenance.
The re-design of the LMP sports racing car around the new V10 endurance engine utilized most of the previous design work from the '99 car, Huidekoper, “The car was largely the 1999 LMP, but we reworked the suspension to suit the latest tire developments and made improvements in detail as we had more time, and it was of course made for the new engine installation. The designs were completed by the end of May 1999 and production could commence.”
But it never would. The LMP project was actually canceled before the prototype was completed, though the Porsche board allowed for its completion and brief testing. Testing was limited to two days at Porsche's Weissach complex with both Alan McNish and Bob Wollek doing the driving.
Various reasons for the cancellation have been stated, the most nefarious being to provide engineering manpower to develop the Cayenne SUV. Today it is accepted, and confirmed by insiders, that a deal was struck between Ferdinand Piech, then chairman of the VW-Audi board, and Porsche's Wendelin Wiedekin to co-operate on the SUV project. The VW Touareg and Porsche Cayenne are indeed the same car underneath except for engine specification and exterior styling. At the same time it was agreed that Porsche would halt its LMP project, and withdraw from top-echelon sportscar racing for a 10 year period.
The rest is matter of course as the press reported after the Porsche's cancellation that driver's Bob Wollek and Alan McNish commented very positively about the car's potential. And so it could have been quick. Alas it all was for naught when Porsche canceled the project.
Interestingly, the LMP's engine ended up in the Porsche Carrera GT supercar. Furthermore, the engine had a healthy racing life too, albeit with two-less cylinders and 4 liters of capacity, in the Porsche RS Sypder LMP2.
Porsche owners can find the best
You can find out more about Porsche history by downloading this android app on your mobile device You can find out more about Porsche history by downloading this android app on your mobile device Play Store download. This app includes all models made by Porsche throughout the years, from the 356 to the Panamera. Each model has its own photo and video gallery.
Wiet Huidekoper didn't get to see out the Porsche LMP project due to illness and had to bow out for a period, thus he never got to see it run. In 2004 he spoke with Norbert Singer at Le Mans, “When I asked Norbert Singer during our long, long, long, conversation at Le Mans, the Friday before the race, if I could come to see it, he said that it would be impossible as they are under instruction to deny its existence.” And while I hope Wiet is able to see it one day in the flesh, here's to Porsche for finally taking the tarp off.Porsche owners can find the best car seat covers available for their particular models online. Whether you drive a Porsche Cayenne or a Porsche Carrera, using car seat covers will help to keep your car's seats and interior in perfect shape.Texas Instrument launched SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3000 in Q1 2012 in order to bring WiFi connectivity to any device including 8-bit or 16-bit MCU, as CC3300 internally handled all networking tasks, and exchange data with the MCU via an SPI interface. This Wi-Fi processor allows to use Wi-Fi for data transmission for the Internet of Things, and offers much better battery than other system relying on software to handle network traffic. Today, the company has just announced SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3000 BoosterPack, a low cost evaluation platform that works with both MSP430 and Tiva C Series LaunchPad evaluation kits, and sells for $35.
SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3000 BoosterPack features and benefits as seen in the press release:
SmartConfig technology: One-step Wi-Fi configuration using smartphones, tablets or PCs Easy network setup for display-less (headless) devices Simultaneous multiple device provisioning iOS, Android and Java sample applications available Royalty-free software
Flexible memory size – Small memory foot print of CC3000 module for easy integration with low-cost MCUs such as ultra-low power MSP430 Value Line
Service discovery – Quick discovery of network-provisioned devices via smartphones and tablets using mDNS
Pre-certified $9.99 CC3000 module – Reduces costs to add Wi-Fi to MCU-based designs
Other interesting details is that it support 802.11 b/g, and IPv4 TCP/IP Stack. There’s no mention of IPv6, which might be an issue for some IoT applications. Transmisstion power is +18dBm at 11Mbps, CCK, and Rx Sensitivity -86dBm, 8% PER, at 11Mbps.
CC3300 BoosterPack measures 16.3mm × 13.5mm × 2mm, can operate in -20°C to 70°C temperature range, and comes with porting and user guides, an API guide, sample applications, and support via the community. There’s also a “Radio Tool Package” executable for Windows, which probably contains the tools needed for development.
You can watch the introduction video below.
The SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3000 BoosterPack is available now through TI eStore for $35 including shipping, or through distributors. Two other bundles are also available:
CC3000 BoosterPack with MSP430 LaunchPad (MSP-EXP430G2-CC3000BOOST) for $40.99, and available now.
CC3000 BoosterPack with the Tiva C Series LaunchPad (EK-TM4C123GXL-CC3000BOOST) for $43.99. Not available yet, and ETA has not been provided.
More information is available on www.ti.com/cc3000boost.Being John Terry: An English tragedy (Satire)
Gautam Mahajan FOLLOW FEATURED WRITER Humor 1.56K // 27 Sep 2012, 18:17 IST SHARE Share Options × Facebook Twitter Flipboard Reddit Google+ Email
So I see my last article, which you can read here (yes, I want MOAR READS!) got a lot of flak on Facebook and Twitter (yes, I’ve been following up with what people have to say). But I still stand by my word when I say Chelsea is the greatest club in HISTORY. I know I don’t have much to back this up on, but it is my opinion and I am standing by it, you cannot budge me. I mean, look at all the money we have! That counts for SOMETHING! Screw you, Manchester United and Arsenal fans, winning trophies on ‘home-grown talent’. Ha! We buy your home-grown talent and make them play for our reserve team. Sure, they may be world-class players and all, but we want to spend more money! That’s how we roll down here! But now, I’m done talking to your broke a**es. Right now, I wish to talk about the man, the legend, the figure of all women’s dreams (and some men’s nightmares), the one, the only, John Terry!
John Terry is one of the most caring men to have ever walked the face of Earth, but has been highly misunderstood. Not many of you may know this, but he was concerned about some American tourists at Heathrow airport soon after the events of September 11th and tried to explain to them how dangerous it was to fly in those uncertain times and that they too could be caught in a similar tragedy if they weren’t careful. But just because he was a couple (maybe thirteen) drinks down, they actually had the gall to complain that the compassionate man was ‘taunting’ them, and Chelsea (you know, when they were poor and I didn’t care about them) actually had the gall to not pay him for two weeks! Can you imagine a footballer not being paid for two weeks? He must have had to apply for welfare.
Despite this shoddy treatment, the man did not complain and continued playing for the club. But obviously, these two weeks of living on the street must have had an adverse effect on him, which culminated into a slight argument in a nightclub a few months later where he went to celebrate his teammate’s child’s birthday (what better place to celebrate a baby’s birthday than a nightclub?). But even here, he was accused of beating a receptionist up. This could not have been possible as some reports suggested that the alcohol in his system was enough to kill a small horse. How could any man possibly get into a fight in this condition? But Terry didn’t argue and continued to be strong as ever.
Then the media once again victimised him for peeing into a beer glass in a crowded bar. What does a man do when he has to pee? I’m sure if he would have tried to walk past the crowd and coincidently touched or brushed someone, they would have accused him of assault again. So he decided to not create any issues and just do his thing quietly and inconspicuously. But the controversy did not end there. A few months later, he was fined 60 pounds for parking in a disabled parking zone. I’m sure he must have picked up a knock and didn’t want to risk it for the sake of the millions of fans who depend on him every week. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of a disabled parking? But again, Terry was made the villain when in fact, he was the victim. Even now, people just wouldn’t leave him alone!
In 2004, he was reported to have spend 40,000 pounds on gambling. Well, he was rich then. Roman had taken over the club and was giving hand-outs. What is he supposed to do with so much money? SAVE it? I mean, seriously. What is he, poor like the rest of us? So he drinks and gambles. So what? Does that make him a bad person? At least he wasn’t cheating on his wife!(at this point..that we know of..I think)
But can controversy ever leave poor John alone? NEVER! In 2010, it was made public that dear John was having an affair with Vanessa Perroncel (the hottie in the pic above!), Wayne Bridge’s then-girlfriend. And who was made the scapegoat here? John Terry! (I am seeing a pattern here). How is this John Terry’s fault? I mean, it’s that beautiful seductress’s fault to tempt John. He is, after all, a man. And I’m sure he must have resisted as much as he could. But after five minutes, he realised this skank wasn’t going to leave him alone! Obviously, Wayne was on the bench not just at Chelsea (wink wink!), so someone had to take his position! And it had to be John! If anything, he was doing his best friend a favour! Sure, he was married and all, and I don’t condone cheating on your spouse, but if frigging Ashley Cole can cheat on Cheryl Cole, I think John Terry can cheat on anyone he damn well pleases! And that’s what he did! Not because he wanted to, but because he had to! His best friend’s wife was unhappy, all he was doing was cheering her up. And people continued giving him grief for it! This much pressure HAS to take its toll on a man.
Then came the big moment. Anton Ferdinand actually had the gall to accuse Terry of racist language to get his fifteen minutes of fame. This was the beginning of the darkest phase of Johnny boy’s life. A man who has been so ‘fair’ all his life being accused of such a heinous crime, breaks my heart. But John being John, decided to take it like a man. The court case acquitted him due to lack of substantial evidence. And when has a court verdict EVER been wrong? But that wasn’t enough. The FA decided they wanted to start their own little enquiry. Little men trying to play powerful. Poor John finally decided to stop all these free-loaders using him for their own petty power-games and decided to hang up his international boots. England lost their most legendary captain EVER! So what if he didn’t win anything, he was still legendary because he is a Chelsea player.
Now, I don’t care what people say about this great man. I stand by him always and forever as I know who he truly is. A legend. No, a God. Fifty years from now, when his statues and portraits are adorning bars, whorehouses and Neo-Nazi camps all over the world, people will know the true value of this magnificent human being. Like Nelson Mandela, history shall absolve him. I know I already have.
AdvertisementFrequently asked questions (FAQ) Q: Doesn't the spelling aluminum predate aluminium? A: Yes, and alumium predates both. IUPAC uses both, but prefers aluminium. Q: I still think aluminium sounds funny/odd/jarring. A: Someone from another country would say the same about aluminum. Q: I have new, pressing information that leads me to believe the spelling should still be changed. A: Feel free to start a new section and make your case, but please check to see if your point(s) have been raised in previous closed discussions. Q: Are you people seriously arguing about a single letter 'i'? A: Yes. Alternatively, no. It depends on whom you ask. Q: How about a compromise with alumin(i)um? A: A house divided against itself cannot stand. (For those unfamiliar with US history who may not understand this, see Lincoln's House Divided Speech) Q: Would searching for "aluminum" not turn up results effectively giving priority to the British spellers over the American spellers? A: No, because Wikipedia provides a redirect to the correct article and most search engines will be able to recognize (or recognise) alternative spellings.
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vote with your wallet [ edit ]
I won't restate any of the arguments listed above, as they clearly fall on deaf ears. Instead, I will vote in the only meaningful way I can. I refuse to donate to Wikipedia until ALUMINUM is recognized as the proper spelling. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.28.178.73 (talk) 03:20, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
I wonder how much difference it made? Double sharp (talk) 14:10, 25 October 2016 (UTC) How can 'aluminum' be the 'proper' spelling. The language is called 'English' and the English spell it aluminium. Because alumina is NOT an english word. It is Latin. In Latin the proper conversion of aluminA is to aluminUM. The original British inventor got it correct, but his descendants did not. - Theaveng (talk) 15:47, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
... next time foreigners decide to create their own localised English dictionary I suggest they enlist the services of a compiler who can actually spell English properly, rather than one who randomly distributes what appear to be typos everywhere. Or one who at least understands the reason for the proper spellings of things such as haemoglobin, haemophilia and haematite, rather than one who is insufficiently well-red(!) to know nor care. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.148.221.26 (talk) 10:22, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
This sounds logical, but languages don't really work that way. It's fairly accepted now that Brazilian Portuguese is the main form of Portuguese. Both British English and American English descend from 17th and 18th century forms with neither one being exactly like those. And even if "England" did somehow own English the Kingdom of England ceased to be in 1707, well before aluminum's discovery.--T. Anthony (talk) 03:52, 6 August 2015 (UTC) "the language is called English": Irrelevant. That's an archaic tradition that is no purely from inertia. There are more native speakers of "English" in the United States than ALL OTHER COUNTRIES COMBINED. More than England, Canada, Australia, and anywhere else, all added up at once. The US has the majority of all first language English speakers on the entire planet. — Kaz (talk) 15:53, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
"... There are more native speakers of "English" in the United States..." - the only native speakers of English are the English. That's why the language is called 'English', see. Just like the only 'native' Americans are the original inhabitants. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.173.13 (talk) 19:21, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
That's not what "native speaker" means. It's a specific term of art in linguistics that refers to the first language a person learns. Nohat (talk) 16:55, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
The Washington Monument used "aluminium" [ edit ]
I'm sorry but this is flat wrong. No such element is laying on top of our national capital's tallest building. The Americans topped the monument with aluminum (as documented in the citations linked to wikipedia) (and the writings of the engineers who built the thing). - Theaveng (talk) 15:53, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
Seems to me that with a direct quote, you should spell it the way it is in the original, with a (sic) if you want. Otherwise, there is no need to match the spelling of the original source, if the meaning is the same. Though once I corrected spelling where the primary source is an audio recording, with spelling in transcription. Someone can reference the WP:MOS on spelling and quotes. Gah4 (talk) 23:33, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
British people simply invented a new pronunciation and spelling to make it sound pretty. Dare I say it was a very French thing to do. [ edit ]
This is simple. Humphry Davy discovered it. He gets to name it.
“The confusion over the aluminum/aluminium spelling arose because of some uncharacteristic |
would be the 5 seed.
Loses against St. John’s, Seton Hall wins against Butler and Marquette wins against Creighton, the Friars would be the 6 seed.
If Seton Hall…
Wins against Butler and Providence loses against St. John’s, the Pirates would be the 4 seed.
Wins against Butler and Providence wins against St. John’s, the Pirates would be the 5 seed.
Loses against Butler, Providence loses against St. John’s, Marquette loses against Creighton and Xavier loses against DePaul, the Pirates would be the 5 seed.
Loses against Butler, Providence wins against St. John’s, the Pirates would be the 6 seed.
Loses against Butler, Providence loses against St. John’s and Marquette loses against Creighton and Xavier wins against DePaul, then the Pirates would be the 6 seed.
Loses against Butler and Marquette wins against Creighton, the Pirates would be the 6 seed.
If Marquette…
Wins against Creighton and Providence loses against St. John’s, the Golden Eagles would be the 3 seed.
Wins against Creighton and Providence wins against St. John’s, the Golden Eagles would be the 4 seed.
Loses against Creighton, Providence wins against St. John’s, Seton Hall loses against Butler and Xavier loses against DePaul, the Golden Eagles would be the 5 seed.
Loses against Creighton, Providence loses against St. John’s, Seton Hall loses against Butler and Xavier wins against DePaul, the Golden Eagles would be the 5 seed.
Loses against Creighton, Providence loses against St. John’s, Seton Hall loses against Butler and Xavier loses against DePaul, the Golden Eagles would be the 6 seed.
Loses against Creighton, Providence wins against St. John’s and Seton Hall wins against Butler, the Golden Eagles would be the 6 seed.
Loses against Creighton, Providence loses against St. John’s and Seton Hall wins against Butler, the Golden Eagles would be the 6 seed.
Have questions, comments or concerns? Hit me up in the comments or on Twitter @pcbb1917
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Liked it? Take a second to support pcbb1917.com on Patreon!PLA and ABS are the most popular materials on 3D Hubs. This comparison will help you select the best option for your project.
Introduction
PLA and ABS are the 2 most common FDM desktop printing materials. Both are thermoplastics, meaning they enter a soft and moldable state when heated and then return to a solid when cooled. Via the FDM process, both are melted and then extruded through a nozzle to build up the layers that create a final part.
This article will discuss the main differences between these two commonly used materials. To learn more about the FDM process itself, click here to read a full-article.
The table below compares the main properties of PLA vs. ABS:
Properties* ABS PLA Tensile Strength** 27 MPa 37 MPa Elongation 3.5 - 50% 6% Flexural Modulus 2.1 - 7.6 GPa 4 GPa Density 1.0 - 1.4 g/cm3 1.3 g/cm3 Melting Point N/A (amorphous) 173 ℃ Biodegradable No Yes, under the correct conditions Glass Transition Temperature 105 ℃ 60 ℃ Spool Price*** (1kg, 1.75mm, black) $USD 21.99 $USD 22.99 Common Products LEGO, electronic housings Cups, plastic bags, cutlery *Sourced from MakeItFrom **Sourced from Optimatter for a test specimen with 100% infill, 0.2mm layer height printed in a linear pattern *** Sourced from Amazon ABS & PLA
What are ABS and PLA?
ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) is a common thermoplastic well known in the injection molding industry. It is used for applications such as LEGO, electronic housings and automotive bumper parts.
PLA (Polylactic Acid) is a biodegradable (under the correct conditions) thermoplastic derived from renewable resources such as corn starch or sugarcane. It is one of the most popular bioplastics, used for many applications ranging from plastic cups to medical implants.
Part accuracy
Generally the tolerances and accuracy of FDM printed components are largely dependent upon printer calibration and model complexity. However, ABS and PLA can be used to create dimensionally accurate parts, printing details down to 0.8 mm and minimum features down to 1.2 mm. For connecting or interlocking parts, a tolerance of 0.5 mm is recommended and using a minimum wall thickness of 1-2 mm will ensure adequate strength in wall elements.
Due to its lower printing temperature, PLA, when properly cooled, is less likely to warp (making it easier to print with) and can print sharper corners and features compared to ABS.
Strength
With similar tensile strengths, ABS and PLA are both adequate for many prototyping applications. ABS is often preferred due to its improved ductility over PLA. With a higher flexural strength and better elongation before breaking, 3D printed ABS can be employed for end use applications whereas PLA remains popular for rapid prototyping when form is more critical than function.
Impact test of PLA vs. ABS
Surface finish and post processing
The nature of printing with FDM means that for both ABS and PLA, the print layers will be visible after printing. ABS typically prints in a matte finish while PLA is semi-transparent, often resulting in a glossier finish.
Acetone is often used in post processing to smooth ABS, also giving the part a glossy finish. ABS can be easily sanded and is often machined (for example, drilled) after printing. PLA can also be sanded and machined, however greater care is required.
A guide to post-processing FDM parts can be found here.
If the aesthetics of a part are critical, then printing using SLA or Material Jetting is recommended.
A 100 micron ABS print with Acetone treatment (Left), a 100 micron ABS print (middle) and a 200 micron ABS print (right).
Heat resistance
For high temperature applications, ABS (glass transition temperature of 105°C) is more suitable than PLA (glass transition temperature of 60°C). PLA can rapidly lose its structural integrity and can begin to droop and deform, particularly if under load, as it approaches 60°C.
Biodegradability
PLA is stable in general atmospheric conditions and will biodegrade within 50 days in industrial composters and 48 months in water. ABS is not biodegradable, however it is recyclable. PLA is regularly used for the production of food related items, however confirmation by the filament manufacturer that it is safe to do so is recommended.
PLA food industry prototypes
Rules of thumbJan. 14, 2014: Are we there yet?
One of the fastest spacecraft ever built -- NASA's New Horizons -- is hurtling through the void at nearly one million miles per day. Launched in 2006, it has been in flight longer than some missions last, and it is nearing its destination: Pluto.
“The encounter begins next January,” says Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute and the mission’s principal investigator. “We’re less than a year away.”
A new ScienceCast anticipates what New Horizons might find when it reaches Pluto in 2015. Play it
Closest approach is scheduled for July 2015 when New Horizons flies only 10,000 km from Pluto, but the spacecraft will be busy long before that date. The first step, in January 2015, is an intensive campaign of photography by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager or “LORRI.” This will help mission controllers pinpoint Pluto's location, which is uncertain by a few thousand kilometers.
"LORRI will photograph the planet against known background star fields," explains Stern. "We’ll use the images to refine Pluto’s distance from the spacecraft, and then fire the engines to make any necessary corrections.”
At first, Pluto and its large moon Charon will be little more than distant pinpricks—“a couple of fat pixels,” says Stern--but soon they will swell into full-fledged worlds.
By late April 2015, the approaching spacecraft will be taking pictures of Pluto that surpass the best images from Hubble. By closest approach in July 2015, a whole new world will open up to the spacecraft’s cameras. If New Horizons flew over Earth at the same altitude, it could see individual buildings and their shapes.
Stern is looking forward to one of the most exciting moments of the Space Age.
An artist's concept of the New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto. More
“Humankind hasn't had an experience like this--an encounter with a new planet--in a long time,” he says. “Everything we see on Pluto will be a revelation.”
He likens New Horizons to Mariner 4, which flew past Mars in July 1965. At the time, many people on Earth, even some scientists, thought the Red Planet was a relatively gentle world, with water and vegetation friendly to life. Instead, Mariner 4 revealed a desiccated wasteland of haunting beauty. New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto will occur almost exactly 50 years after Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars—and it could shock observers just as much.
Other than a few indistinct markings seen from afar by Hubble, Pluto’s landscape is totally unexplored. Although some astronomers call Pluto a “dwarf” planet, Stern says there’s nothing small about it. “If you drove a car around the equator of Pluto, the odometer would rack up almost 5,000 miles—as far as from Manhattan to Moscow.” Such a traveler might encounter icy geysers, craters, clouds, mountain ranges, rilles and valleys, alongside alien landforms no one has ever imagined.
“There is a real possibility that New Horizons will discover new moons and rings as well,” says Stern.
Yes, Pluto could have rings. Already, Pluto has five known moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. Numerical simulations show that meteoroids striking those satellites could send debris into orbit, forming a ring system that waxes and wanes over time in response to changes in bombardment.
“We’re flying into the unknown,” says Stern, “and there is no telling what we might find.”
Credits:
Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Production editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASAOptional Ham Radio License Manual The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual has all you need to get your first ham license and become an Amateur Radio Operator! It's the official ARRL license manual for the study and preparation of the Level 1 Technician License exam. New Third Edition!
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420-450MHZ (TX) / 420-520MHz (RX) UHF Frequencies
Repeater Capable
Full Duplex Cross-Band and Cross-Band Repeater
8 Group Scrambler
40W/50W Transmit Power
FM Radio
Memory Channel
Channel Scan
Priority Scan
Dual Watch
Busy Channel Lockout
Full Duplex Cross Band and Cross Band Repeater
CTCSS/DCS Encode/Decode
CTCSS/DCS Tone Scan
Selectable 3 Color Backlit LCD Display
Backlit Keypad
Channel Name Edit and Display
Battery Meter
Minimum Operating Voltage Alarm
Power Saver
Auto Power Off
Timeout Timer
Keypad Lock
Audible Button Beeps
Voice Promps
Dual 3.5mm Speaker Ports
Cloning Capable
PC Programmable (Requires Optional Cable)
Dual Speaker and Dual Output
Backlit DTMF Hand Microphone With Speaker
Cooling Fan
Remote Front Panel Installation Option
DTMF Encoding and Decoding
Stun and Kill Function
Reset
One Year Manufacturer Warranty
Included with the Wouxun KG-UV920P-A Ham Radio Starter Kit Wouxun KG-UV920P-A Dual Band Base/Mobile Two Way Radio
Hand Microphone
Inclined Switchboard Panel (Already Installed)
Flat Switchboard Panel
Mobile Mounting Bracket
Remote Front Panel Bracket
Mobile Power Cord
Extension Cable
Screw Sets
Hand Microphone Hook
2 Fuses 15A 32V
Owners Manual
Wouxun SPS30WIN 30A Switching Power Supply
AC Power Cord
Tram 1185 Amateur Dual-Band Magnet Antenn
Wouxun PCO-003 Mobile Radio USB Programming Cable
Wouxun KG-UV920P-A USB Cable Driver and Programming Software CD
Wouxun KG-UV920P-A Specifications Dimensions: 140mm × 44mm × 207mm
Weight: 1437.8g (Including Microphone)
The Ham Radio Starter Kit from BTWR Essentials is your discount ticket to the exciting world of amateur radio! Compiled by hams for hams, this kit has everything you need to get you started as an amateur radio operator at minimal cost!The Ham Radio Starter Kit Mobile/Base Station Edition is a great training package for an amateur radio club Technician License class or instructional program. It comes in handy for new hams who are just getting started and want to build a ham shack on a budget. It's the perfect gift for that ham in your life who wants a mobile or base station radio to Get On The Air.The Ham Radio Starter Kit Mobile Base Station includes:- One of the most powerfully versatile mobile/base ham radios on the market! It offers 40 watts UHF and 50 watts VHF. This radio features 999 programmable memory channels with CTCSS and DSC encode/decode, DTMF encoding/decoding, priority channel scanning, and twin band simultaneous reception. It also has Channel Name edit and display, 76-108Mhz FM radio, group calls, 8 group scrambler, low voltage voice prompt, stun and kill function, reduced noise settings, remote control setting and a built-in cooling fan. It has a large, dual frequency LCD display with a 3-color selectable backlight in blue, green or white and backlit buttons on the front panel. The KG-UV920P-A also sports dual speakers built right into the chassis plus a third speaker in the DTMF hand microphone.The Wouxun KG-UV920P-A is more than a radio, it's a cross-band mobile repeater! With a choice of five repeater settings you can connect two of these radios together using the 5m extension cable or the microphone connection cable (both included) to set up your own working repeater!- This full featured power supply turns your KG-UV920P-A mobile radio into a bona fide base station! It has an input voltage of 110V/220V AC and an output voltage of 13.8V DC adjustable between 9.0v and 15.0v.- This Dual band 144-148/440-450MHz antenna is 19" tall and offers great range and performance!- Connects your Wouxun radio to your computer for fast and easy programming!The Ham Radio Starter Kit Mobile/Base Station Edition also includes a hand microphone with built-in backlit keypad and speaker, inclined switchboard panel, flat switchboard panel, mobile mounting bracket, remote front panel bracket, mobile power cord, 14 foot extension cable, hand microphone hook, fuses, screw set, and an owner's manual.Astros Double-A Report: Corpus Christi Hooks (July 13-19)
Several members of the Double-A Corpus Christi Hooks are prime topics of Astros trade rumors as the July 31 deadline approaches. The Astros may actually be buyers for the first time in many years, and because the farm system is stocked with talent, players such as Brett Phillips, A.J. Reed, Josh Hader, and Joseph Musgrove are mentioned as possible trade bait.
Baseball America placed Hooks outfielder Phillips at #21 in their July 7 Midseason Top 50 Prospects, and although no other Hooks player made the list, all four of these men are serious prospects.
The upside to offering any of these four in a trade would be for Houston to obtain a front-line, premium starting pitcher. Considered by many to be the prime Astros need to contend for a playoff spot, such a pitcher will command a package of talent.
The downside, of course, is that the Astros spent the past four years or so building the farm system with the priority of giving the parent club the best possible lineup – building from within the organization. Obviously, only some of the minor league talent will end up on the Astros, and the tough choice is to decide whom to keep. Because these Astros minor leaguers are untested at the top level, any team willing to part with a big-name starter is going to ask for a large package of prospects. None of the four players mentioned above is on the 40-man roster, and without such protection, the Astros risk losing them via the Rule Five draft.
Trade proponents insist that it is better to trade prospects rather than risk losing them with no compensation (other than the dollar amount associated with a team taking a player by Rule Five). Trade opponents insist that some on the current 40-man roster should be dealt, or DFA’d, leaving open spots for prospects we surely don’t want to lose. Those would include, in my opinion, Phillips, Reed, Colin Moran, Jack Mayfield, Jon Kemmer, and Chris Devenski.
This is what former Astros star Morgan Ensberg thinks of Jack Mayfield:
And another thing… @jackmayfield8 has decided to swing the bat like a BIG DOG! Just think Jose Bautista hack without the beard. #TrustFall — Morgan Ensberg (@MorganEnsberg) June 12, 2015
The recently promoted Phillips, Reed, and Mayfield are making substantial contributions to this team that already had a core of good young players. Kemmer is not often mentioned in trade talks, and his name is not on the Baseball America prospects list. However, his potent bat is a big part of the picture at Whataburger Field. Third baseman Moran got off to a slow start and spent some time on the disabled list, but has begun to hit and has raised his average to.291 in 53 games.
This week the Hooks went 3-3, bringing their record to 60-33 overall, but only 12-11 in the second half. They are now in third place in the South Division, two games behind first-place Midland.
Teoscar Hernandez leads the Texas League in runs (59). He is the only Hooks player near the top of the league’s offensive leader board.
Kyle Westwood leads Texas League pitchers in complete games (2), and Jandel Gustave is tied for the lead in saves (11). Devenski is second in the league in ERA (1.92), and WHIP (1.02) and, along with Westwood, is tied for second place in wins (7).
Hooks batters lead the league in runs (477), hits (834), RBI (433), stolen bases (111), OBP (.354), and average (.273).
Corpus Christi pitchers lead the league in wins (60), 11 more than second place Midland. They are also first in ERA (3.26), saves (30), fewest runs and earned runs allowed (327, 295), and fewest walks (263).
The cover photo is courtesy of @QCBanditPhotog.
Other notes:Maryland Officials Deny Trump Panel's Voter Data Request
Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh on Monday said the Maryland State Board of Elections should not comply with a White House panel's sweeping request for voter data.
He said in a statement that assistant attorneys general have advised the board that doing so would be "prohibited by law."
Accordingly, State Board of Elections Administrator Linda Lamone sent the panel a letter denying the request.
Head of Maryland Board of Elections denies request of Trump Election Comm for voter info. Her letter: pic.twitter.com/NUgsV0mgD9 — Jayne Miller (@jemillerwbal) July 3, 2017
Last week, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity asked secretaries of state about two weeks to provide about a dozen points of voter data. That includes names, party affiliations, addresses and voting history, as well as dates of birth, the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers and any information about felony convictions and military status.
"I find this request for the personal information of millions of Marylanders repugnant; it appears designed only to intimidate voters and to indulge President [Donald] Trump's fantasy that he won the popular vote," Frosh, a Democrat, said.
Trump lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton but has alleged, without evidence, that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally. In addition to the voter information, the letter asks state officials for suggestions on improving election integrity and to share any evidence of fraud and election-related crimes in their states.
"Repeating incessantly a false story of expansive voter fraud, and then creating a commission to fuel that narrative, does not make it any more true," Frosh said.
He said there was no evidence that Maryland's 2016 election, or any state's election, was compromised, and urged Gov. Larry Hogan and elections officials to vociferously reject the panel's efforts.
Watchdog group Common Cause Maryland last week urged officials not to comply with the request.
Some of the most populous states, including California and New York, are refusing to comply. But even some conservative states that voted for Trump, such as Texas, say they can provide only partial responses based on what is legally allowed under state law.
“Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?” Trump said in a tweet Saturday.
Given the mishmash of information Trump’s commission will receive, it’s unclear how useful it will be or what the commission will do with it. Trump established the commission to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the 2016 elections, but Democrats, like Frosh, have blasted it as a biased panel that is merely looking for ways to suppress the vote.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, a Democrat who is a member of Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, defended the request Friday. He said the commission expected that many states would only partially comply because open records laws differ from state to state.
“If only half the states agree, we’ll have to talk about that. I think, whatever they do, we’ll work with that,” said Gardner, adding that the commission will discuss the survey at its July 19 meeting.
It’s not just Democrats bristling at the requested information.
Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican serving his third term, said in a statement he had not received the commission’s request.
If he does receive it?
“My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” he said. “Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”
No state election official planned to provide the commission with all of the information requested — even Kansas, where commission vice chairman Kris Kobach is secretary of state. He sent the letter asking for the names, party affiliations, addresses, voting histories, felony convictions, military service and the last four digits of Social Security numbers for all voters.
A spokeswoman for Kobach’s office said the last four digits of Social Security numbers are not publicly available under Kansas law and would not be handed over. That was the case in many other states, noted in statements from top election officials and responses to queries from reporters for The Associated Press.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Russian cyber security firm Kaspersky published a report last night (PDF) that reveals the notorious activities of a US cyber espionage group dubbed “Equation Group” which has used tools that somehow seem similar to ones used by another US intelligence agency NSA to infiltrate key institutions in countries including India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia among others.
The report reveals that the “Equation Group” embedded surveillance tools on the hard drives produced by a number of well-known manufacturers including Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi and Toshiba. Targets in the aforementioned countries include military, government, research institutions, telecommunications, among others. The report, however, couldn’t tell how many people were affected.
In addition to the hard drives, the report claims, that the Group had the ability to indulge in low-level acts such as infect the interface between hardware and software. These malware — also true for the ones shipped with hard-drives — could only be accessed through a secret API. What’s even more scary is how difficult was it to get rid of the malware once affected. Kaspersky says that even disk reformatting or reinstalling the operating system won’t eliminate the malware.
Existing antivirus products and most security protocols are also incapable of removing the said malware. “If the malware gets into the firmware, it is able to resurrect itself forever,” Costin Raiu, a Kaspersky threat researcher, said in the report. “It means that we are practically blind and cannot detect hard drives that have been infected with this malware.”
The malware — two zero-day exploits — were also coded into Stuxnet, the security firm reveals. Stuxnet was a Windows worm which was triggered jointly by Israel and the United States to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment operations. The resemblance between them led Kaspersky to conclude that both NSA and Equation Group were either the same or had worked closely. These tools were designed to infiltrate “air-gapped” networks. (the systems that are not connected to the Internet.)
In addition to mingling hard drives with malware, the Equation Group also tampered with CDs meant to be sent to researchers and institutions. Kaspersky described one case where participants of a scientific conference were sent with the material of the conference. But these optical discs were tampered by the vicious group as they had added two zero-day exploits with the disk.
“We do not believe the conference organizers did this on purpose. At the same time, the super-rare DOUBLEFANTASY malware, together with its installer with two zero-day exploits, don’t end up on a CD by accident,” the security firm noted in the report. The firm notes that Equation Group “surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques, and that has been active for almost two decades.”
In a statement to Reuters, a former intelligence worker confirmed that the NSA had built sophisticated techniques for hiding spyware on hard drives. The expertise required to find a workaround in firmware codes of so many reputed hard drive brands — the codes that are kept from the public — suggests that the hard drive companies could also be participating in it. “There is zero chance that someone could rewrite the [hard drive] operating system using public information,” said Raiu.Margaret, that Sarah Palin sure seems to be enjoying her moment in the spotlight. And it appears she got another one of her Tea Party candidates one step closer to November 2nd. Now, I for one don’t begrudge her all this newly found fame and fortune. I still think she is an idiot, but I don’t begrudge her all this success. I just wish she came by it in a way that didn’t involve the fate of our nation…. like maybe being on The Real Housewives of Wasilla.
I hear she is about to have her own television show on the Learning Channel. Do you think she will learn anything? And when exactly did the Learning Channel become the Learning Deficiency Channel?
Well, I say good for her. If there was ever a person who was destined to be on one of those dysfunctional reality shows it would be Sarah Palin. Maybe she will eat a rat like that little one on the The View. I hope she has huge ratings and gets out of politics for good. Because stupid on television is one thing. But stupid running our nation… well George Bush proved that to be a really bad idea.
Before that jackass preacher down in Florida decided not to burn the Quran, Ms. Palin sent out a little one of those face tweeter things. She said she thought burning the Quran was as bad as building that mosque in Manhattan. Leave it to an idiot to denounce one form of religious intolerance by promoting another form of religious intolerance.
It’s a damn Burlington Coat Factory. Did you know that Margaret? This building they consider to be on sacred ground – or at least sacred ground for everyone but Muslims – is a Burlington Coat Factory. Has everyone gone crazy? It’s not at ground zero and it’s not even a mosque, honey. It’s a cultural center. And as far as sacred ground goes, we really should be careful. They have a whole lot of “sacred ground” in the Middle East and it tends to cause never-ending wars. This country already goes to war too often for sacred oil. We don’t need to add sacred ground to the list.
When exactly will common sense return to America? Just how far can the Republican Party – now called the Tea Party – throw the bullshit before someone calls them on it? You just have to pay attention to Sarah Palin for all of ten minutes before you realize just how deep it gets. And now this Christine O’Donnell has waded into the mess.
Margaret, it just makes me want to cry sometimes. But you know me. When faced with idiots and jackasses, I don’t cry. I bake a pie.
So have some pie and a little coffee. I know you prefer tea, dear, but skip the tea and have some coffee for me until after November. I mean it. Really.
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Taproot is proudly made in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.CHICAGO (CN) – A couple acquitted of animal cruelty can sue two Cook County investigators who allegedly leveled bogus charges about cages full of feces, a federal judge ruled.
Demetria Hayes-Newell and David Hayes say they met Cook County Sherriff Investigator Tyra Brown when she appeared at their home undercover with the purported interest of buying a puppy.
Though investigator Larry Draus had not been present, according to the complaint, he allegedly signed an affidavit for a search warrant against the couple. The affidavit said he saw “wire cages” that were “full of feces” in the home, and that there was a “very strong” smell of urine, according to the complaint. He also allegedly claimed the dogs appeared to be “very weak” or “did not move.”
Chicago police executed the warrant the next day and seized dozens of dogs as they arrested the couple on charges of animal cruelty.
After they were acquitted in November 2009, Hayes-Newell and Hayes filed suit for punitive damages. They claim that Brown observed the “well-nourished, healthy, safe, warm and secure conditions of the puppies and dogs,” but the department nevertheless chose to maliciously prosecute false charges.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheila Finnigan refused to dismiss last week, finding that the investigators may not have had probable cause to obtain a search warrant.
“Plaintiffs here claim that defendants affirmatively knew from personal observation that the dogs in question were healthy and secure, but arrested them anyway,” Finnigan wrote. “The search warrant affidavit does indicate that Brown received information about the dogs from a confidential source, but the second amended complaint alleges that she learned the information was false when she visited plaintiffs’ residence before she obtained the warrant and effected the arrests.”
Although the search warrant was valid, plaintiffs may be able to prove that “the issuing judge was misled by information in an affidavit that the affiant knew was false or would have known was false except for his reckless disregard of the truth,” the decision states.
Finnigan also denied the investigators’ claim to qualified immunity. “Once again, defendants’ argument ignores plaintiffs’ allegations that they made misrepresentations to the circuit court judge in obtaining a search warrant, and personally observed that the dogs in question were healthy, clean, safe and well-nourished at the time of the detentions, arrests and seizure,” she wrote.
“Assuming, as the court must, that these facts are true, a reasonable officer arguably would have known that he was violating plaintiffs’ rights,” she added.
Like this: Like Loading...Scientific experiments with the herpes virus strain that causes Marek's disease in poultry have confirmed, for the first time, the highly controversial theory that some types of vaccines allow for the evolution and survival of increasingly virulent versions of a virus, putting unvaccinated individuals at greater risk of severe illness. The research has important implications for food-chain security and food-chain economics, as well as for other diseases that affect humans and agricultural animals.
The new research, which will be published in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on July 27th, investigates how the use of "leaky" or "imperfect" vaccines can influence the evolution of virulence in viruses. The work was carried out by an international group led by Prof. Andrew Read, the Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Entomology and Eberly Professor in Biotechnology at Penn State University, USA and Prof. Venugopal Nair, the Head of the Avian Viral Diseases programme at The Pirbright Institute, UK.
Imperfect, or leaky, vaccines are known as such because they prevent the vaccinated host from getting sick but do not prevent the transmission of the virus, thus the virus is able to survive and to spread throughout a population. "In our tests of the leaky Marek's disease virus in groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated chickens, the unvaccinated died while those that were vaccinated survived, and transmitted the virus to other birds left in contact," Nair said. "Our research demonstrates that the use of leaky vaccines can promote the evolution of nastier 'hot' viral strains that put unvaccinated individuals at greater risk."
"When a vaccine works perfectly, as do the childhood vaccines for smallpox, polio, mumps, rubella, and measles, it prevents vaccinated individuals from being sickened by the disease, and it also prevents them from transmitting the virus to others," Read said. These vaccines are "perfect" because they are designed to mimic the strong immunity that humans naturally develop after having been exposed to one of these diseases. "Our research demonstrates that another vaccine type allows extremely virulent forms of a virus to survive -- like the one for Marek's disease in poultry, against which the poultry industry is heavily reliant on vaccination for disease control," said Prof. Nair. "These vaccines also allow the virulent virus to continue evolving precisely because they allow the vaccinated individuals, and therefore themselves, to survive".
"Vaccines for human diseases are the least-expensive, most-effective public-health interventions we ever have had," Read said. "But the concern now is about the next-generation vaccines. If the next-generation vaccines are leaky, they could drive the evolution of more-virulent strains of the virus." He said it is critical now to determine as quickly as possible that the Ebola vaccines that now are in clinical trials are not leaky -- that they completely prevent the transmission of the Ebola virus among people. "We do not want the evolution of viral diseases as deadly as Ebola evolving in the direction that our research has demonstrated is possible with less-than-perfect, leaky vaccines," Read said.
He also recommends vaccination for individual protection. "When evolution toward more-virulent virus strains takes place as a result of vaccination practices, it is the unvaccinated individuals who are at the greatest risk. Those who are not vaccinated will be exposed, without any protection, to the hottest strains of a virus. Our research provides strong evidence for the importance of getting vaccinated."
###
Please mention PLOS Biology as the source for this article and include the links below in your coverage to take readers to the online, open access articles.
All works published in PLOS Biology are open access, which means that everything is immediately and freely available. Use this URL in your coverage to provide readers access to the paper upon publication: http://www. plosbiology. org/ article/ info:doi/ 10. 1371/ journal. pbio. 1002198
Contact:
Dr Andrew Read
Penn State University
a.read@psu.edu
814 321 5004
Citation:
Read AF, Baigent SJ, Powers C, Kgosana LB, Blackwell L, Smith LP, et al. (2015) Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens. PLoS Biol 13(7): e1002198. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198
Funding:
This work was funded by the Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health (R01GM105244) and by UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council as part of the joint NSF-NIH-USDA Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program. 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.
Video: https:/ / psu. box. com/ Read7-2015At one point Mr. Obama made a major gaffe; he identified Abraham Lincoln as the founder of the Republican Party.
Barack Obama has gone to Congress asking for more money to spend. The President, in a rambling and tedious exercise mixing blame with demands, made quite a few dubious statements in laying out the case for Congress to vote for the plan which as yet does not exist. Much like Obamacare, Congress must ultimately vote for |
after { /* to clear float */ content: ""; display: table; clear: both; }
See how it's safer:
And a video:
Using Custom Properties
This is perhaps the coolest idea of all!
Thierry Koblentz recently wrote this up, crediting Sérgio Gomes for the idea.
To use it, you set a custom property scoped right to the element you need it on:
<div style="--aspect-ratio:815/419;"> </div> <div style="--aspect-ratio:16/9;"> </div> <!-- even single value --> <div style="--aspect-ratio:1.4;"> </div>
The CSS that styles this is gosh-danged genius:
[style*="--aspect-ratio"] > :first-child { width: 100%; } [style*="--aspect-ratio"] > img { height: auto; } @supports (--custom:property) { [style*="--aspect-ratio"] { position: relative; } [style*="--aspect-ratio"]::before { content: ""; display: block; padding-bottom: calc(100% / (var(--aspect-ratio))); } [style*="--aspect-ratio"] > :first-child { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; height: 100%; } }
Allow me to quote Thierry's step-by-step explanation:
We use [style*="--aspect-ratio"] as a hook to target the appropriate boxes
as a hook to target the appropriate boxes We stretch the inner box regardless of support for custom property
We make sure the height of images comes from their intrinsic ratio rather than their height attribute
attribute We style the container as a containing block (so the inner box references that ancestor for its positioning)
We create a pseudo-element to be used with the “padding hack” (it is that element that creates the aspect ratio)
We use calc() and var() to calculate padding based on the value of the custom property
and to calculate padding based on the value of the custom property We style the inner box so it matches the dimensions of its containing block
Other Ideas & Tools
Lisi Linhart tipped me off to Ratio Buddy, which is super cool:
Notice that it uses a pseudo element, but then still absolutely positions the inside container. That's kinda weird. You'd probably either skip the pseudo element and put the padding right on the container, or float the pseudo-element so you don't need that inner container. Still, I like the idea of a little generator for this.
Tommy Hodgins has CSSplus which features Aspecty which is just for this, assuming you're cool with a JavaScript parsing and changing your CSS kinda thing:
See the Pen Aspect Ratio for Chris by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.
I've actually seen quite a bit of real world usage of aspect ratio boxes over the years. Feel free to share if you've had some experience!#116 "The Hickey Mousse Club"
P.S.
A hickey has its own separate consciousness and voice. Its personality is one that loves to embarrass us about something that we really shouldn't be embarrassed about. It makes itself the complete focus of the hickey-receiver's (hickeyee) life, so much so that many hickeyees go to great lengths to cover it up. It is like the person who needs to be the center of attention at every gathering. "Look at me! Look at my beautiful purple and black colors and my gorgeous, irregular shape. Look at me!"
For the hickey-giver (the hickeyer), it is akin to a dog peeing on a telephone pole. It is a mark of his or her territory. For the artistic hickeyer, it is a work of art not unlike some of Warhol's work where he just painted over a photo. For the evil hickeyer, the hickey is made and then given consciousness (those of you with short-term memory problems, see the first paragraph).
The hickeyee goes home and is horrified when a parent, sibling, or a spouse (noooo!) points out the mark of the horny beast on his or her porcelain neck (some men have very supple necks). The hickeyee then proceeds to either cover it up, wear it as a badge of honor and conquest, or spends the rest of the night trying to avoid divorce.
A hickey is a bruising bruise often caused by too many brews that is rarely a good thing. Funny how it looks the same as a black eye.
Creative Stuff I Like
License
Welcome
Thanks for stopping by. Occasionally, this comic might not be safe for kids (NSFK). To keep updated, please connect to my RSS feed
Crusted Salt comics by Jimmy Brunelle
©2012-2018Welcome back to the Central Valley Café Scientifique, beginning its new season (belatedly) in the new year, at a new venue. We begin with a bee in our bonnet…
Why do we need bees?
Although bees are vital to both wild and agricultural ecosystems, both wild and managed bee populations are in decline. Dr. Quinn McFrederick, newest member of the Department of Biology at California State University, Fresno, will discuss what we know about the causes of these declines, and what we are trying to do about it. The talk will focus mainly on one avenue of pollinator conservation: understanding the role that microbes play in pollinator health. New technologies have allowed us to get a better understanding of the role of microbes that are both beneficial and detrimental to bee health, and we will discuss how this understanding may contribute to the conservation of wild bees.
When: 6 January 2014, 7:00-8:30 PM; Dinner will be served from 6:00PM.
Where:Peeve’s Public House, 1243 Fulton Mall, Fresno, CA 93721
Contact: 559-278-2460 (cafe inquiries) / 559-573-5735 (Pub’s number)
Here’s the full poster for this event – please feel free to download, print, and share with your friends and family.
Here’s the full poster for this event – please feel free to download, print, and share with your friends and family.We are now in the 21st century and technology has taken over the world! We have smartphones, laptops, computers, etc. Each of these devices has a set of software and apps which are specially designed to run on a particular operating system! However, you can install Bluestacks on your computer and start using apps which belong to the Android operating system!
This software comes in handy for gamers who wish to have a larger screen and better controls for android games! Also, it is highly used by developers to test their app’s compatibility!
But, there are some people who do not know much about Bluestacks and how to install it on their computer. Thus, here we are with all the information one might need before installing Bluestacks!
What is Bluestacks?
Bluestacks is an Android emulator which creates a virtual Android environment due to which you can run Android applications on your computer. There are numerous Android emulators available for the people but, Bluestacks has its user all around the world due to its compatibility with almost every Android application and a user-friendly interface.
Some of the features of Bluestacks Android emulator include:
1. It is compatible with almost every version on Windows and Mac.
2. It supports most of the apps which are available on the Google Play Store as well as the App Store!
3. You can use external controllers to play Android and iOS games on Bluestacks.
4. You can easily download and install any application and start using it just like you do on your smartphone.
5. This software is considerably small in terms of size but provides with all the required features.
Some prerequisites
1. Your computer must have a minimum of 2GB RAM.
2. At least 4GB HDD space must be free for the software and the program files to be stored.
3. To have a better experience, you can have a graphics card!
4. Your computer should have Direct X 9.0 or its higher installed on it.
How to install Bluestacks on your Windows PC?
There are a series of steps which you need to follow to install Bluestacks Android emulator on your Windows or Mac computer.
For Windows
Step 1- Launch a web browser and go to ‘https://www.bluestacks.com‘ this website.
Step 2- Here, click on the ‘DOWNLOAD‘ option to start downloading the system files of Bluestacks on your Windows PC.
p.s you can simply download bluestacks for windows 10 from here.
Step 3- Once downloaded, head over to the ‘Downloads‘ section and click on the downloaded file to initiate the installation process.
Step 4- Wait till the software is successfully installed. Then, follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation process.
You can then launch this software through the shortcut icon created on your desktop itself!
For Mac
Step 1- Launch a web browser and go to ‘https://www.bluestacks.com‘ this website.
Step 2- Here, click on the ‘DOWNLOAD‘ option to start downloading the system files of Bluestacks on your Mac PC.
Step 3- Double-click the downloaded DMG file and then, double-click the Bluestacks icon.
Step 4- Now, click on ‘Install‘ when prompted and then, follow the on-screen instructions to completely install Bluestacks on your Mac PC.
If Bluestacks did not launch automatically, you can use the icon to launch and start using it on your Mac PC.
Conclusion
This is all you must know about Bluestacks before you install it on your Windows/Mac PC. The steps listed above are quite simple to understand and execute. Thus, you shouldn’t face any error while installing Bluestacks on your computer after reading this article.
However, if you know of any better method or if we have missed out on any useful information about installing Bluestacks on your computer, then please let us know about it in the comments section below.Well, as a certified white guy in the Philippines, let me tell you:
By Nathan W. Allen
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Everywhere you go, beautiful women will stare, smile and giggle. Actually, some men will do this as well. Filipinos and their bags are fully screened at security checkpoints. However, if you're a white guy in the Philippines, the officers will just greet you and smile. Then they'll wave you through without checking the contents of your giant, suspicious backpack. How could a white man possibly have bad intentions? (Think: Timothy Mcveigh)
Taxi drivers will automatically stop when they see you on the sidewalk - whether you flag them down or not. Speaking of taxis, if the drivers see a white man waiting next to a queue of Filipinos, they will often skip the Filipinos and pick up the white man first. They won't do it for Filipinos, but drivers will stop so that you can cross the street (it seems that hitting a white person is every Filipino driver's worst nightmare). If a white guy in the Philippines gets a job, he can be half as qualified as Filipinos, and still get paid twice as much. Caucasians seem to have automatic credibility, and are instant celebrities just about everywhere they go.
Sounds good, right? Well, yes...too good. A white guy in the Philippines is treated like a king! The problem is that he can become quite unpleasant when he gets used to this...and starts acting like a king.
Foreigners Behaving Badly
I heard a story which, unfortunately, is entirely believable. At a bar in Cebu, a very drunk foreigner walked over to a group of Filipinos and tried to talk to a pretty girl who was with her boyfriend. Despite the fact that she was already with a guy, the drunk foreigner demanded that she get up and dance with him. She politely declined and explained that she was there with her boyfriend and their friends. That was simply not acceptable to this man - he refused to accept that she wasn't interested in him. After all...he's white, right? Again, he demanded, and even tried to drag her from the table onto the dance floor.
When she firmly yelled "no!" to him, this jerk actually had the nerve to take his beer and DUMP it on her! This is what I'm talking about - the kind of mentality that some of these white men develop in the Philippines. I had to leave the city because this sense of entitlement sickened me so much. I didn't feel like I fit in with much of the expat community there.
They Should Be Held Accountable
There is a certain mayor in the Philippines who is known for being tough on foreigners who behave badly. He backs up his word, too - he will just deport them! I applaud this man. Caucasians should have to abide by the rules just like everybody else - and not get a free pass.
Fellow Expats: This is Not Our World
On a recent bus trip to Bacolod, I found the inspiration to write this article. You see, I am 6ft 2 inches tall, and my legs are so long that they frequently hit the back of the seat in front of me. For me, legroom is hard to come by in the Philippines. I have adapted to it. Still, I thought about the many foreigners who would just complain in that situation.
This world was not made for us - for example, if the commuter buses in the Philippines had more legroom, it would be wasted on 98% of Filipinos who don't need it. There would be less people on each bus, longer wait times at the stations, and less profit to distribute to the drivers and employees.
No, I didn't come to the Philippines to mold and shape the culture to my liking...I came to observe and appreciate it - to find my place in the Filipino world.
If that means I have to squish into a packed bus on the way to Bacolod, then I will do it with a smile on my face. It's a small price to pay for so many incredible experiences I've had in this country.
Perfect Romblon Island Sunset (Pin it!)
If You Don't Like It, You Don't Have to be Here
I remember watching a youtube video that a white guy in the Philippines made after living here for 3 years. He ranted and complained about all the ways the country was "backward" and "disgusting". This video made me furious, because after all, this man was here for THREE YEARS! Why stick around and complain about it for 3 years when you can just leave after 2 weeks? My guess is that he enjoyed the economic advantages and attention from young girls. Afterward, he enjoyed the staggering web traffic generated by angering the "social media capital of the world". Of course, the Philippines also has its share of decent, respectful foreigners. For the rest of you, however, please don't forget that you can always go home. In fact, I'll show you to the airport.
See that plane taking off? That could be you, man
If You're Dating or Married to a Filipina...
I can speak a tiny bit of different Filipino languages. Sometimes I meet Filipinas married to foreigners, and this impresses them. They have been living in the Philippines for years, but their husbands barely know how to say say "thank you" in Filipino. Perhaps they don't feel the need to learn the language. Perhaps they just expect the culture to adapt to them?
If you are dating or married to a Filipina, please make an effort to connect with her culture. For goodness sake, this is your wife...possibly the mother of your children. At the very least, you will help to lift a barrier between you and her family. I'm sure you know by now, family is everything in the Philippines. Filipinos have opened their homes, hearts, and minds to us. The least we can do is treat them with the respect that everybody deserves.
A White Guy In The Philippines is an Ambassador...of sorts
In closing, there was a Chinese man who moved to the U.S. In the 1970s, he told his young daughters to always clean up after themselves and behave well. He said this because their actions reflected on all Chinese people. For the same reason, I think being a white guy in the Philippines comes with some responsibility. Here in Asia, we represent not only our countries, but also our race. I try not to forget that.
Connect to FacebookSir Ernest Shackleton
Expedition Leader
An Irish-born polar expedition veteran, Shackleton approached to within 745 miles of the South Pole with Robert Scott on the 1901 Discovery expedition, then pressed to within 97 miles on his own Nimrod expedition of 1908. Imperious, single-minded, ferociously loyal to his men, he once said "Optimism is true moral courage," a tenet he lived by until his death on South Georgia Island in 1922.
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Frank Worsley
Captain
A New Zealander, Worsley ran away to sea at 16, apprenticing on a wool clipper, and went on to become an expert sailor with the Royal Naval Reserve in England. Despite some eccentricities - claiming that his cabin was too stuffy, for instance, he slept every night on the passageway floor - he was respected and would truly earn his salt when he navigated Shackleton's lifeboat the James Caird across 800 miles of dangerous seas to South Georgia Island.
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Frank Wild
Second-in-Command
A veteran of Scott's Discovery, Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic, and Shackleton's Nimrod expeditions and utterly loyal to Shackleton, Wild had "a rare tact," wrote Orde-Lees, "and the happy knack of saying nothing and yet getting people to do things just as he requires them..."
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Lionel Greenstreet
First Officer
Drawn from the merchant service, Greenstreet had joined Shackleton's expedition just 24 hours before it left Plymouth, England, when the original first officer quit to lend his services to the war effort. On the expedition, he ended up befriending two quite different fish: the proud Hurley and the reserved Clark.
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Tom Crean
Second Officer
Born one of ten children in County Kerry, Ireland, Crean was tall and tough as an oak. At 16, he joined the Royal Navy and eventually joined Robert Scott on both the Discovery and Terra Nova expeditions, receiving the Albert Medal for saving two companions during the latter journey.
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Alfred Cheetham
Third Officer
An old Antarctic hand with three trips into the Deep South under his belt, including a stint as third officer on Shackleton's Nimrod expedition, Cheetham was a small man with a gung-ho attitude.
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Frank Hurley
Photographer
An independent-minded Australian, Hurley ran away from home at age 13, working in an ironworks and the Sydney dockyards before becoming a photographer. Nicknamed "the Prince" on the expedition for his susceptibility to flattery, he quickly gained a reputation for stopping at nothing to secure a memorable photograph.
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George Marston
Artist
Physically robust, Marston joined three sledging journeys while accompanying Shackleton on the Nimrod. Graduate of a London art school, he was friends with Shackleton's two sisters, who prodded him to put his name in for expedition artist. He was said to have the best voice in the ship's company.
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Robert Clark
Biologist
A taciturn man, Clark engendered respect from the crew. He could usually be found out for a bit of exercise on his skis, skinning penguins for scientific study, or using his dredging nets to bring up biological specimens from the deep Antarctic seas.
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Leonard Hussey
Meteorologist
Odd as it may seem, Hussey worked as an archeologist in the Sudan before joining the Endurance. Perhaps that's one reason why his meteorological skills came up a tad short in the Antarctic. As Orde-Lees observed, "The vagaries of the climate quite bewilder Hussey. For just when he thinks it is going to do one thing the precise opposite happens."
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Reginald James
Physicist
The expedition's magnetician and physicist, the studious academic "Gentle Jimmy" owned "some wonderful electrical machines which none of us understood," wrote Macklin, "and a joke of ours that annoyed him very much was that he did not either."
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James Wordie
Geologist
A bearded, bespectacled Scot from Glasgow, jocular "Jock" Wordie was one of the most popular members of the expedition. Before the journey, he advanced Shackleton some of his own funds to help buy fuel for the ship.
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Alexander Macklin
Surgeon
As with McIlroy, Shackleton assigned Macklin a team of sledge dogs to drive, and also the duty of caring for the ship's canines. Son of a doctor from Scotland's Scilly Isles, Macklin, according to his son Sandy Macklin, had intended to remove his glasses for his initial interview with Shackleton, for fear the great man would not hire him as surgeon, but he forgot. When Shackleton asked him if he required glasses, Macklin replied with the first thought that came to his mind: "Many a wise face would look foolish without glasses." Shackleton hired him on the spot.
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James McIlroy
Surgeon
Before joining Shackleton, McIlroy had been both a practicing surgeon in Japan, Malaysia, and Egypt, and a ship's doctor aboard passenger ships in the East Indies. Like Macklin, he was appointed kennel commander and sledge-team driver.
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Huberht Hudson
Navigator
"One never quite knows whether he is on the brink of a mental breakdown or bubbling over with suppressed intellectuality," wrote Orde-Lees of this son of a London minister, who was a mate in the merchant service when he signed on. He turned out to be the expedition's most accomplished penguin-catcher.
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Thomas Orde-Lees
Ski Expert and Storekeeper
A captain in the Royal Marines, Orde-Lees was in charge of the motor-sledges that would have helped carry Shackleton's team across the continent. A graduate of the English public-school system, he was a bit of a prima donna and generally disliked, though his diary is one of the more perceptive kept by Shackleton's crew.
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Charles Green
Cook
The son of a master baker, Green went to sea at the age of 21, becoming a cook in the Merchant Navy. With Blackborow's help, he worked in the galley - both aboard ship and on the ice—from early morning till evening, preparing meals for 28 mouths.
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Perce Blackborow
Steward
When Shackleton refused him a job, Blackborow, with the help of Bakewell and How, slipped aboard the Endurance and hid in a locker until the ship was at sea. Stuck with him, Shackleton made Blackborow steward and eventually came to appreciate the conscientiousness of this 20-year-old Welshman. In an operation on Elephant Island, Blackborow had all the toes on his left foot removed due to severe frostbite.
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Henry McNeish
Carpenter
One of the oldest members of the expedition, McNeish was a rugged Scot whom Shackleton claimed was "the only man I'm not dead certain of." Known as "Chippy," he was a slightly odd, but much-respected shipwright and old-time sailor with the Royal Naval Reserve. He reportedly never forgave Shackleton for having his cat, "Mrs. Chippy," shot when many of the dogs were also put down.
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John Vincent
Boatswain
A former navy sailor and trawlerhand, Vincent was the strongest man aboard, and he used his brawniness at times in a bullying way—until Shackleton put him in his place. Shackleton chose him for the journey to South Georgia, very likely both for his strength and to keep an eye on him. Note: No photo is available of Vincent.
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Alfred Kerr
Engineer
A reticent man in his early 20s, Kerr had some experience working on oil tank steamers before joining the Endurance. Like his mate Rickinson, he kept largely to himself and did his job well.
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Louis Rickinson
Engineer
Why someone with a particular aversion to cold would join an expedition to the Antarctic is a mystery, but Louis Rickinson did. His condition might have had a medical basis, for it is believed he suffered a heart attack while on Elephant Island. Rickinson was deemed a solid engineer who had a knack with internal combustion engines.
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Ernest Holness
Stoker
Orde-Lees considered Holness, who hailed from Yorkshire, "the most loyal to the expedition." Holness was so desperate to smoke during the long wait on Elephant Island that, according to Orde-Lees, he "sits up in the cold every night after everyone else has turned in, gazing intently at Wild & McIlroy in the hopes that one of them will give him the unsmokeable part of a toilet-paper cigarette."
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William Stephenson
Stoker
The senior stoker, Stephenson was a former officer's servant and Royal Marine. When the ice crushed the Endurance, his job as tender of the marine steam boiler came to an abrupt end, as did that of his mate Holness. For some reason, he and Holness were two of only four people (the other two were Vincent and McNeish), whom Shackleton did not recommend for Polar Medal after the crew's return to England.
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William Bakewell
Seaman
The only American on the expedition, Bakewell posed as a Canadian when applying for a position aboard the Endurance. He had quite the roamer's resume, having been a farm worker, logger, railwayman, and ranch hand before going to sea. He helped his pal Blackborow stow away on the ship at Buenos Aires.
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Walter How
Seaman
Though Marston was the expedition's official artist, one reason the publicity-minded Shackleton may have chosen How was for his capabilities as an amateur artist. How also had experience in cold climates, having worked in the sub-Arctic with the Canadian Auxiliary Survey Ship.
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Timothy McCarthy
Seaman
"[He] is the most irrepressable [sic] optimist I've ever met," Worsley wrote about this Irishman from the merchant service, who joined him, Shackleton, and three others on the James Caird journey to South Georgia. "When I relieve him at the helm, boat iced and seas [pouring] down yr [sic] neck, he informs me with a happy grin, `It's a grand day, sir.'" Note: No photo is available of McCarthy.
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Thomas McLeod
Seaman
When he joined the crew of the Endurance, McLeod had a full 27 years of experience as a sailor, having adopted a life at sea at the tender age of 14. He had been to the Antarctic twice, once with Scott on Terra Nova and again with Shackleton aboard Nimrod.
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Giulio Berruti’s unusual cult horror film casts former sex symbol Anita Ekberg as Sister Gertrude, a nun working in a mental institution. Gertrude is clearly insane, and takes a great deal of morphine for her self-diagnosed cancer. She goes to town and picks up men, seduces a younger nun (Paola Morra) who was abused by her grandfather, and supposedly murders patients until the Mother Superior (Alida Valli) has her poisoned.
Luigi Casellato appears as a crippled painter who gets kicked to death, and genre favorite Joe Dallesandro leads the supporting cast as a handsome doctor. Antonio Maccoppi’s skillful cinematography gives the film a harsh, intimidating look and Ekberg creates a sympathetic character, although certain scenes — such as her stepping on a patient’s dentures — cross the line into unintentional humor.Video: A cunning Asian elephant wins a simple counting game
Add elephants to the growing menagerie of animals that can count.
An Asian elephant named Ashya beat this reporter at a devilishly simple addition problem. When a trainer dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples in the first and five more in the second, the pachyderm recognised that three plus four is greater than one plus five, and snacked on the seven apples. (In my defence, I watched the video in a noisy and crowded auditorium.)
“I even get confused when I’m dropping the bait,” says Naoko Irie, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan, who uncovered the elephant’s inner genius. She presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology‘s annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.
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Moreover, Irie found that as well as summing small numbers with almost 90% accuracy, elephants can discriminate between small numbers.
That’s not so surprising, considering that animals from salamanders to pigeons to chimpanzees can discern numerical values. But all animals, including humans when forced to make split-second decisions, are best at telling apart two quantities when the ratio between the large and small number is greatest.
Spot the difference
Not so for elephants, Irie says. The four that she tested distinguished between five and six apples as well as they did between five and one. They picked the bucket with the most fruit 74% of the time, on average, far above 50-50.
“It really is tough to figure out why [elephants] would need to count,” says Mya Thompson, an ecologist at Cornell University who studies elephants and attended Irie’s talk. Asian elephants live in close-knit groups of six to eight, and they may count one another to make sure the herd sticks to together. “You really don’t want to lose your group members,” she says.
Alternatively, the mathematical prowess of elephants may be a side effect of their bulging brains and an evolutionary kinship to other “smart” animals, Irie says.
Evolution – Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report.When hunt supporters visit the office of a Tory cabinet minister these days, they like to turn up armed and dangerous. And so it was when a delegation from the Countryside Alliance arrived for a private meeting with the Environment Secretary Owen Paterson a few weeks ago, wielding an alarming new poll of their membership. Setting the dossier down in front of Mr Paterson (one of their few allies in government), they spelt out the bottom line: 13 per cent of Countryside Alliance members now intend to vote Ukip in the next general election.
Let’s be clear: given that the CA is basically the voice of the shires, that is only a shade less shocking than saying that 13 per cent of Mr Cameron’s own family intend to vote Ukip, although that is always possible, I suppose.
According to the poll, 66 per cent of Countryside Alliance members would vote Conservative if there were an election tomorrow, an almost 20 per cent drop in just a couple of years, while 13 per cent would vote Ukip and 2 per cent Labour. It’s particularly significant because this same poll a few years ago showed negligible support for Ukip and other parties.
Mr Paterson, who understands the countryside, was rightly worried. He saw at once that this wasn’t just about the vote, but about the whole network of support for the Tories outside London. It’s difficult to over-emphasise, for instance, how much the Conservatives rely on the hunt. Some 12,000 hunt supporters campaigned and leafleted for the Tories at the last election. They were the backbone of the party’s effort, pouring into marginal seats in an operation of military precision co-ordinated by a campaign group called Vote OK.
These farmers and squires had a spring in their step as they pounded pavements back then; they were looking forward to Cameron fulfilling his pledge to overturn the ban on hunting, showing that Labour’s class war against them was over.
But of course, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Three years into a Tory-led administration and the once clear promise to hold a free vote on repealing the Hunting Act has come to nothing, the aggressive prosecutions of hunts by the RSPCA continue, and the closest the hunting community can get to vindication is a hint that the government might relax the ban slightly to allow Welsh hill farmers to protect their flocks by using more than two dogs to flush out foxes.
But the hunting issue is only the tip of this iceberg of resentment. To understand why rural Tories are so angry, you need to consider the rest of the CA’s poll findings. Asked what motivates them, they reel out a long list including HS2, fuel prices and planning laws that give developers greater power to override local communities.
The anguish over planning really isn’t just nimbyism. People who actually live in the country care about the communities there. They feel it is profoundly wrong to build thousands of houses in areas that don’t have the necessary schools, hospitals and transport links. And yet when they object — to housing on green belt or the high speed rail link ruining lives — they are dismissed as small-minded and self-interested. Nick Boles, the planning minister (and pal of Dave), suggests in response that green fields are overrated, which I suppose they are if you live in Notting Hill.
Hunting, meanwhile, has become totemic. As it did once for the Labour party, the issue has assumed for rural Tories the symbolism of everything they feel is wrong about the prevailing order. They are appalled, for instance, that the RSPCA seems to have been given unlimited access to the police national computer. They feel let down by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, who would not even consider changing the law so that film and video evidence gathered by saboteurs is subject to the same rules as that gathered by the police. They are shocked that the party that ought to be protecting them is effectively delivering them on a platter to left-wing animal rights nutters who want their guts for garters. The war against hunting folk that Labour started has escalated, and a Tory-led government has sat back and watched it happen. The sense of betrayal in these communities is visceral.
Whatever you think of hunting and fox welfare, the hunt supporters do have a point. Cameron was happy to stand up for them when they were wearing their shoe leather thin for him in the run-up to the last election, but now he’s lost interest — or, worse than that, he seems actually disgusted by them. Cameroonians talk quite openly of the fact that they’d actually rather be in coalition with the Lib Dems than win an outright majority at the next election, so as to be protected from what they call ‘swivel–eyed loons on the wrong side of history’. And yet they still expect the grass roots to support them in 2015?
I wouldn’t count on it. The CA polling shows that 64 per cent of people living in the countryside do not believe coalition policies are helping them, and nearly three quarters (73 per cent) think politicians are more interested in the views and values of city dwellers. They feel Cameron — always a keen follower of fashion — has abandoned them for fear of offending trendy urbanites who have no understanding of the realities of country life.
Just look at South Thanet, where A-lister Laura Sandys beat Labour with hunting help, only to declare her opposition to repealing the ban once elected. Traditional Tories pretty much burst blood vessels when they talk about Ms Sandys in her constituency now. Nigel Farage is tipped to contest the seat for Ukip at the next election — and why not?
The people I meet when I am out trail hunting, as the law demands, are at the very limits of their endurance. Take Julian Price, a 31-year-old farmer from Oxfordshire who canvassed for the Conservatives at the last two elections. Mr Price, who runs a 400-acre farm near Bicester which has been in his family for three generations, spent eight days canvassing in 2010 and estimates that he must have put thousands of leaflets through doors in target seats which then returned Tory MPs — Milton Keynes, North and South. The former saw a notional 6.2 per cent swing to the Tories, while the latter saw an even more thumping 9.2 per cent swing, both well above the average.
Three years later, Mr Price finds himself farming three fields away from the proposed site of HS2, which will cut his neighbour’s farm in half. And he is still banned from his favourite hobby, hunting with hounds. ‘I genuinely believe that Cameron has used us to get in and is now wiping his hands of us,’ he says, breathless with indignation. ‘All my family have always been Conservatives. But what they promised they would do for me they have gone back on. I genuinely feel that Ukip are more for us country people and farmers now.’
If Mr Cameron still doubts that the desertion of people like Mr Price is something to regret, he should consider the figures. According to independent assessments, rural campaigners were instrumental in winning 36 target seats in 2010. Overall, Vote OK leafleters were present in 58 constituencies which saw a significant swing to the Tories. A survey conducted by Professor David Denver of Lancaster university for the Electoral Commission following the 2005 election concluded: ‘There is no doubt that turnout was indeed higher in Vote OK targets than anywhere else. In targeted seats the greater the effort of Vote OK, the better the Conservative performance.’
‘What amazes me about David Cameron,’ says Mr Price, ‘is that I genuinely thought that with his background he would be better at representing the rural community. But he’s turned against us.’
Insiders say it is Mr Cameron’s firm belief that rural Tories are making empty threats. He’s quite convinced that even if they vote Ukip in the European elections, just to blow off steam, they’ll come through in 2015. He’s betting that they’ll be too horrified by the thought of a Labour government to actually put their cross in the Ukip box. But what Cameron doesn’t understand is that increasingly, Tories in the shires see no difference between Cameron and Miliband.
Perhaps Cameron is also relying on the fact that Vote OK is organised in part by his stepfather-in-law Viscount Astor, who is on the advisory board. Perhaps he feels that these people are essentially loyal |
believes the Greens are trying to "capture the anger that exists around the housing affordability issue."
Josh Gordon of SFU's Centre for Public Policy Research (right) was one of two economists who examined the Green party's affordable homes strategy for CBC's fact-check team (Dillon Hodgin, CBC)
"I think there's cooling, and then there's clobbering. And this would be more towards the latter" says Gordon. "Once you include all (taxes), that would be quite a shock to the system."
Tom Davidoff of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia believes the Green party has some "great ideas," but also worries about the combined effect of the proposed taxes, saying they could have "a serious impact on property values."
Capital gains: what sellers would pay
Currently, when homeowners sell, they don't have to pay capital gains tax on the increase in value of their home as long as it's been their primary residence.
Under the Green Party's plan, you'd have to live in the home for more than five years before selling, otherwise any profit over $750,000 would be subject to capital gains tax. Any profit under that amount would be added to a "lifetime capital gains cap" of $750,000.
The key is the five-year-wait before selling. But Green party leader Andrew Weaver got that wrong during the televised leader's debate on April 26.
B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver got part of his affordable homes tax policy wrong during the leaders' debate April 26 in Vancouver (CBC pool camera)
"We're addressing people who flip homes" Weaver told the audience. "Our lifetime capital gains does not apply to…someone living in a house for three or four years."
The party's policy says it definitely would apply.
Josh Gordon of SFU says there's a reason for the muddled message.
"The roll out to the policy has been unclear at best, perhaps confused at worst. It's not even clear how it's going to operate, so it's hard to discuss."
Large property tax hike proposed
The Greens are proposing big increases to the property transfer tax (PTT) — paid by buyers — depending on the value of the home.
Currently, the PTT starts at one per cent on the first $200,000 of property value, 2 per cent up to $2 million, and climbing to 3 per cent on any portion over $2 million.
The Greens would introduce a new sliding scale, from zero per cent on properties under $200,000, up to 12 per cent on properties over $3 million.
British Columbia Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver is flanked by local candidates as he speaks about the party's affordable housing strategy during a campaign stop in Vancouver, B.C., on Tuesday April 11, 2017. (Darryl Dyck/THE CANADIAN PRESS)
According to an example provided by the party, a single-family home valued at just over $1.7 million would see its PTT nearly double, from $32,500 to $59,500.
Complicating matters, the Greens say they "still haven't worked out the details" on an additional "speculation property transfer tax."
Again, SFU's Josh Gordon is critical. "I think this is indicative of them making things up on the fly a little bit and tossing out a lot of ideas that have been put forward, but not necessarily well thought through," said Gordon.
Foreign buyers taxed again
Both economists think the Green's third idea — a 30 per cent foreign buyers tax province wide — wouldn't work.
"You should not have a 'one-size-fits-all' taxation," said Davidoff. "If you look at a place like Whistler, or any other resort community, affluent foreign buyers are great for the local economy. If you got rid of the affluent foreign buyer, you might clobber the resort economy."
The Green party's 'one-size-fits-all' foreign buyers tax could 'clobber' the real estate market outside southern B.C., according to economists. (Alex Lamic/CBC)
Gordon said raising the tax wouldn't generate much cash for the province because foreign buyers would just abandon B.C.
"Raising it to 30 per cent seems a bit like overkill. Already, that type of buying has dropped off substantially. So you'd get very little revenue if you raised it that high.
"And I don't think that's the way to go."
Both economists say they have no affiliation with any political party, but have their own idea of what would work to cool B.C.'s real estate market.
Developed at Davidoff's UBC's Sauder school of Business and Gordon's SFU's Centre for Public policy, the plan calls for increased property taxes, with a rebate in income taxes for residents of the province.
That would provide a tax offset for people who live and work in B.C. while foreign buyers not paying income tax here, would get no break.
Gordon says early indications were the Greens were going to embrace that plan, but the party went with its own "scattergun" approach.
"There are some good ideas here," said Gordon. "But some of them are a little too draconian."TORONTO -- Defenseman Justin Faulk emerged as an offensive force with the Carolina Hurricanes last season.
The Hurricanes were 26th in the NHL standings in 2014-15 with 71 points and missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the sixth straight season. But Faulk's 49 points (15 goals) were 12th among NHL defensemen.
He believes he's capable of even more this season.
"I hope I didn't hit my ceiling at 23 years old," Faulk said with a smile while at the NHL's Player Media Tour earlier this month. "I think the biggest thing for me is to be consistent; work hard in practices and games. The best team's best players are the guys who do it every day. That is what I am working toward."
Carolina's second-round pick (No. 37) at 2010 NHL Draft, Faulk (6-foot, 215 pounds) left the University of Minnesota-Duluth after one season to turn pro. He spent the majority of the 2011-12 season with Carolina, scoring eight goals and 22 points in 66 games, but also spent a part of that season and the following one with the Charlotte Checkers of the American Hockey League.
Faulk is now established as a full-time NHL player, and Hurricanes general manager Ron Francis believes the formative years will play a huge role in Faulk's development as a leader in Carolina's rebuild.
"Justin is very critical to our group," Francis said. "He's a guy who came in at an early age and has gone through some ups and downs to get where he is. Some of the younger guys we drafted who we are projecting will get into our lineup in the next couple of years will be able to use him as a sounding board and someone to guide them through their transition stage."
Bill Peters is entering his second season as Hurricanes coach, and Faulk believes familiarity will be helpful.
"I think the biggest thing is we know what to expect of our head coach," Faulk said. "It took us a little bit of time to get used to his way of doing things, although I don't view that as an excuse for our performance. We know what he expects from us and what he wants from us on a daily basis."
Faulk believes Francis has been selective in making moves that carefully fit the Hurricanes' goal of becoming a playoff contender. Francis wants players who will not only help in the near future, but more importantly down the road. It helps, Faulk said, when your team is being built by a Hockey Hall of Fame member.
"If you walk into the room and see Ron Francis, it perks you up a little bit," Faulk said. "Everyone knows who he is and what he has done in this league. It's not just that; it's how he treats the guys the right way. He takes care of his players."
Even though Carolina ended last season losing six of its last eight, Faulk likes its chances of finding success as a hard-working team. He pointed to a stretch between Jan. 2 and Feb. 28 when the Hurricanes went 14-7-3 as proof they can be competitive.
If they are to find consistency, Francis believes Faulk will be an important cog in the wheel.
"We think he's a heck of a defenseman and a good player, but he is really coming into his own as a leader for our young guys," Francis said. "That has been great to see as well. He wants to be a great player and he is really focused on doing that."
Faulk got off to a slow start last season, with one assist in Carolina's first eight games. He didn't score his first goal until the Hurricanes' 11th game.
"I remember having a conversation with him at the end of the season and he told me he woke up one day and asked himself if he just wanted to be an average player in the NHL or did he want to be a really good player," Francis said. "He went about changing his habits and how he went about things on and off the ice. From there, he took off. His confidence was better. Not only was he on our top pair in terms of defending, he was able to chip in with 15 goals. That was pretty impressive. He played with a ton of confidence in all situations."Publicly-traded marijuana companies had a rough week but got a bounce Thursday following news of raids at the Cannabis Culture dispensary chain owned by Marc and Jodie Emery.
The outspoken marijuana activists were arrested at Toronto’s Pearson Airport and a series of Cannabis Culture dispensaries, which are not licensed to sell medical marijuana, were raided in Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto.
Investors may have interpreted the raids as the government attempting to “draw a line” between the kind of operations that will eventually be allowed in the legal recreational market and those that will be forbidden, said an analyst who did not want to be named because he does not follow dispensaries.
“Once there’s a line drawn, they’re going to crack down significantly harder on whoever is out,” he said.
A task force report on legalization has recommended the government allow storefront locations in addition to the current mail-order system for medical marijuana and acknowledged a majority of people who participated in the consultation process prefer a distribution system that includes dispensaries. But for now, they remain illegal.
Shares of licensed Canadian medical marijuana providers rose alongside news of the raids, with Canopy Growth Corp. closing nearly six per cent higher at $11.07, Aphria Inc. up six per cent to close at $6.67 and Aurora Cannabis Inc. rising six per cent to close at $2.41 Thursday on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Pot stocks rebounded after being hammered by a bout of bad news for the fledgling industry.
Developments included two class-action lawsuits filed against Canadian companies and statements by Canada’s point man on marijuana, Bill Blair, suggesting the legalization roll-out would not be rushed.
Many investors had been pricing in the impact of the coming legal recreational market to medical marijuana stock valuations, expecting that demand for their product is set to grow immensely and immediately.
“These Canadian stocks are a huge battleground for traders and investors right now,” said Alan Brochstein, founding partner at New Cannabis Ventures.
“I don’t think there was any sort of change that was communicated there (by Blair) but it was maybe it was a wake-up call to people who don’t understand the process,” he said.
“I think there are a large number of people trading these stocks that don’t understand the timeline very well. Traders and investors get excited without really understanding these delays and lags.”
However, a lag could open the current licensed producers to more competition, eroding their first-mover advantage.
He said stocks were also punished after two class action lawsuits, which could result in liabilities and “just makes the system look bad.” Mettrum Ltd., which was acquired by Canopy, and Organigram were both hit with class action lawsuits this week from patients who ingested tainted marijuana after their products were found to contain unauthorized chemicals.
Vahan Ajamian, an analyst at Beacon Securities, said he still expects legislation to be introduced this spring and regulations to be fast-tracked at the federal level so the market will be in effect ahead of the next federal election in 2019.
“I think everybody wants to see this live for at least six months if not a full year before then.”
Financial PostI've got to say, 8 years of going to conventions and this was probably the best con I've ever been to. Everyone's super nice and talkative, all have a common interest, awesome panels that actually taught good skills in my career field, tons of activities, no worries of panels being overcrowded due to HUGE rooms, and just general nonstop fun and laughs. I'll be honest, I was a bit unsure of what to expect from this weekend, but I'm glad I went and now have even more incentive to continue pushing towards freelance art and animation! Also got to do a lot of networking and handed out a ton of business cards, so that's a plus.
(Freelance Rule #1: ALWAYS have business cards at the ready. They're your #1 tool as an artist...besides a pencil)
I'm finishing up the last of my big-ass commission list, so hopefully I'll have more time now to start working on other stuff and some original work again. Lots of ponies lately, due to reasons, but don't expect that to be the only thing coming out of me.
And finally, I'd like to announce that I've been invited onto the team at Silly Filly Studios! I'm really excited to work with them and think it's a great step towards making my way into freelance art and animation.
That's all for now. Ciao!
Ho boy, probably should've said something about how Bronycon was.I now have a Twitter account! Or rather I've had one for 2 years and never used it until now. I'll be uploading artwork, sketches, and general shenanigans, so if you wanna more closely follow what I'm doing (in a completely non-stalker way) then go ahead and follow me there!Marc Hollerbach, right, and his sons Ian, from left, Nathan and Adam will be on board for the 50th annual Port Huron to Mackinac Race this weekend. (Photo: Courtesy of Marc Hollerbach)
Detroit – All these years, all the races up to Mackinac, they all leave Marc Hollerbach a bit wistful.
As Hollerbach prepares for his 50th Bayview Port Huron to Mackinac race this weekend, he’s amazed.
It’s been fun, no question. But there’s another thing.
“How did I get old that quick?” said Hollerbach with a laugh. “I look around now, look at the other crews with all the young turks, and I’m sure no young turk anymore.”
Maybe not a young turk, but definitely a savvy veteran.
Hollerbach, Al Declercq, and Hank Mistele are three veteran sailors who will compete in their 50th race to Mackinac race, a milestone that’s been accomplished few and far between in Bayvew history.
Only 17 sailors have completed 50 races – designated as Grand Rams by Bayview – and the signifance of the accomplishment isn’t lost on any of this year’s class.
They know it takes some luck, a supportive family, and a good boat with a hard-working crew.
One other thing.
When they aren’t in Port Huron preparing their boats in mid-July for the long journey to Mackinac, it just doesn’t feel right.
“Twice I’ve missed this race,” said Mistele, 74, of Grosse Pointe, who missed the race for duties on shore which kept him off boats. “It just didn’t feel right. I felt like I was missing something, and thinking to myself ‘what I am doing here?’ I should be on a boat.
“You see your friends getting ready, getting everything together, and you feel like you’re missing out on something.”
It’s that family aspect of this race that appeals most to Declercq, 62, from Grosse Pointe Park, who has raced all over the world but views Bayview’s Mackinac race unique.
“In other races, you simply do not see the families involved as in this race,” said Declercq, whose boat Flying Buffalo is a nod to his father’s boat. “You see the wife and kids on Friday night helping out (on the boat) and having fun, then they’re on their way to Mackinac and they’re waiting for the crews to come in (on Mackinac, Monday or Tuesday).
“The party Tuesday (at the completion) is such a fun time. You see all the families together there. It’s just a little different from other races, and it’s one of the things that’s always stood out.”
Hollerbach will have his three sons, Adam (who will be in his 25th Mackinac, making him an Old Goat), Nathan and Ian, all aboard Dynamis this weekend, a rare opportunity to have all four Hollerbach sailors together.
“We did last year for the first time, and it was so much fun,” Hollerbach, 66, of Grosse Pointe Shores, said. “It’s a special opportunity and we’re excited.”
Declercq remembers his first Mackinac race, aboard his father’s boat Flying Buffalo, when Al was 12.
“We won the race and I was hooked,” Declercq said. “I loved it. Another that stands out was in 2012 we restored Bernia, a 93-year-old boat that had won the 1925 (Mackinac) race and we won it with her.
“This time of year, you can’t wait to get back at it.”
All three of the veteran sailors have been success in this race and feel the strategy involved is one of the appeals of racing to Mackinac.
Mistele’s boat Night Moves has won Mackinac once, but is annually near the top of the standings and happened to win the Great Lakes championship last summer.
The key, Mistele feels, is achieving speed at night.
“It’s that time after 2 a.m., when everyone is tired and you’re going in shifts, that’s the most crucial time,” Mistele said. “It’s one thing to sail during the day. It’s different at night, when you can’t see everything, you can get disoriented, and it’s so much more of a challenge.
“That’s when the race can be won or lost.”
Winning this weekend would be great, especially in the milestone 50th race, but you get the sense just being on the water this weekend will be memorable.
“There’s such a continuity to this race,” Hollerbach said. “A wonderful tradition. The sailing community isn’t very large, it’s a tight-knit group, and you look forward to this race every summer.”
Port Huron to Mackinac Race
What: 92nd Bell’s Beer Bayview Port Huron to Mackinac Race.
When: Saturday, 11:30 a.m.
Start/finish: Southern Lake Huron, just north of Blue Water Bridge; finish on Mackinac Island, near Grand Hotel.
Course: Cove Island Course (259 nautical miles) and the shorter Shore Course (204 nautical miles) along the Michigan shoreline.
ted.kulfan@detroitnews.com
twitter.com/tkulfanMOSUL, Iraq—On the six-lane highway leading into eastern Mosul, Hussein and his brother Omar are pushing a cart laden with frozen chicken toward the sound of battle.
Few cars venture down the road, which is blocked by the black Humvees of the elite Iraqi counterterror forces that have been engaged in a lethal contest over the city for the past three months.
So Mosul residents have taken to the streets by foot to stock up on supplies that had run low as the fighting raged around them.
The 20-year-old Hussein and his 14-year-old brother live in the Al Quds neighborhood, which was fully liberated from the so-called Islamic State by the Iraqi military two weeks ago.
Their family had to close a small restaurant it runs four months ago when the rising price for foodstuffs put them out of business. But they reopened only days after ISIS was expelled, and the brothers are already on their second supply run to a market that has sprung up in Gogjali, the first Mosul neighborhood to be liberated.
The residents of Al Quds had hunkered down as the front line approached them like a tidal wave. The Humvees of the Iraqi military were met by fanatical fighters holed up in well-prepared defenses, and suicide car bombs that claimed the lives of soldiers and civilians alike.
But as soon as the terrorist menace had been banished, life returned. Every day, residents from the liberated areas stream to and from Gogjali, bringing in food, fuel, and other essentials. Shops and restaurants are reopening, putting an end to the shortages and price inflation that had become acute in the final weeks prior to liberation.
With the government and the international aid agencies failing to deliver, it is private enterprise that is resuscitating the city.
Every day, trucks laden with goods cross the checkpoints into what is still a militarized zone, pumping lifeblood into the commerce at the Gogjali bazaar.
With increasing supply, prices have fallen: A 20-liter canister of cooking oil changes hands for 50,000 Iraqi dinars, almost $40, in ISIS-controlled Mosul, but can be had for 12,000 dinars in Gogjali. One kilo of sugar costs 10,000 dinars where the jihadists still retain control, more than 10 times the normal price.
Despite the drop, many residents continue to struggle.
ISIS stormed into Mosul in June 2014, a few hundred of its fighters routing security forces as they took over the country's second largest city. Since then, around 1.5 million people have had to comply with the terror group’s strictures, and economic stagnation set in as the city was cut off from the outside world and trade was restricted to ISIS territories in Iraq and Syria.
Baghdad at first continued to pay salaries to government workers in Mosul, but eventually balked at the ISIS practice of skimming a portion of these as “taxes.”
In a country where the public sector employs a big part of the workforce, the absence of government salaries proved disastrous for the finances of many families in Mosul.
“Food is cheaper now, but he have had no work for over two years, so we are running low on money. We are waiting for aid organizations to come but there has been nothing so far,” said Abu Issam, an older man carrying shopping bags home on the highway from Gogjali to Al Quds.
Because of the proximity to the front lines, the delivery of goods does not reach deep into the city, with trucks coming from the Kurdish-controlled territories bordering Mosul venturing no further than Gogjali. Residents living in other areas of the city have to travel by foot for hours to purchase affordable goods at the market.
On Oct. 17, Iraqi forces began their campaign to retake Mosul, and on Nov. 1 elite counterterrorism troops first entered Gogjali. Iraqi forces have since retaken about 70 percent of the eastern part of Mosul, which is bisected by the Tigris River.
They have been greeted by jubilant civilians, but not everything is back to normal in the liberated areas. Basic services have been interrupted by the fighting, and have still not been restored.
“We have no electricity or water. Still, life is better now,” says Abu Issam, who says his family drilled a 7-meter-deep water well in their garden after a water main was destroyed by a coalition airstrike.
As he speaks, the thuds of explosions are carried over the rooftops of Al Quds from Hay Sumer, a neighborhood a few kilometers to the southeast, where attack helicopters and ground forces are battering a pocket of ISIS resistance. The timpani of automatic fire mixes in as the helicopters take aim with their cannons. To the southwest, a plume of white smoke rises to the sky, indicating that a suicide bomber has detonated his carload of explosives.
It is to this ominous backdrop that people indulge in individual liberties that had been denied to them for the past two and a half years. Gone are the beards that the jihadists forced the men to grow, and men once again sport fashionable haircuts and a clean shave.
“I feel that I am alive again,” says Ziad, who sits smoking a shisha pipe in a metal shed at the edge of the market in Gogjali. The 25-year-old runs this makeshift shisha and tea shop with a friend since the market sprang to life two months ago. Previously he’d had a job in a water treatment plant that he held before and during the ISIS occupation.
The shop is equipped with little more than two water pipes and a teapot, but Ziad is happy.
“My job is smoking shisha and drinking tea all day,” he says with a grin. With an ample supply of product shaping his hair, and wearing fashionable clothes, he is enjoying a freedom that was taken from him for over two years.
“Under Daesh, if you went outside with a group of friends, they would ask you questions and tell you to visit the mosque. We never left the house. You wouldn't have recognized me with the beard I was wearing,” he says.
All around Ziad, the market buzzes with life. Fruit and vegetable stalls compete for space with stands selling cigarettes, which are bought with relish. Packs of the local Akhtamar brand would be sold secretly for 2,000 dinars when ISIS ruled, they now sell for 500 dinars at Gogjali, says Ashraf Shahab, who used to run a grocery shop and now sells cigarettes at the market.
Other stands sell mobile phones, SIM cards, and phone credits. ISIS conducted house-to-house searches to confiscate mobile phones to prevent the population passing information to the military. Those who could not find a good place to hide their phones now come to the market to buy a new device.
Whenever a neighborhood is liberated, sales spike as people from the area come to him, says Jassem Mohammed, who has a small assortment of cheap phones spread out on a stool in front of him. Jassem gets his wares from friends in the Kurdish region, and he quit selling vegetables to engage in this lucrative trade.
Having had no access to the outside world, people are taken aback by the developments in phone technology. The twenty-two year-old Hassan is amazed that he was able to purchase a shiny Samsung J3 Galaxy smartphone for only $150.
But then, after over two years of archaic ISIS rule, “everything is a surprise to us,” says Hassan.Big business and big labour will no longer be able to bankroll Ontario political parties thanks to sweeping new legislative reforms triggered by a Toronto Star probe. Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals are banning union and corporate donations, lowering contribution limits for individuals, and introducing partial public funding for parties.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne's new fundraising rules include a ban on union and corporate donations and lower contribution limits for individuals. ( Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
In the wake of a Star investigation in March that revealed Liberal cabinet ministers had secret annual party fundraising targets of up to $500,000 apiece, Wynne immediately pledged to revamp Ontario’s lax laws. Government House leader Yasir Naqvi finally made good on that Tuesday by announcing legislation that would also severely limit the amount of money so-called third-party advocacy groups can spend before and during elections. As well, Ontarians would publicly subsidize political parties for a transitional five-year period.
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Next year, the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democrats, and Greens would get $2.26 for each vote collected in the 2014 campaign. That means the Liberals would receive $4,212,581, the Tories $3,408,251, the New Democrats $2,587,297, and the Green Party $525,531. The subsidy, based on the most recent election results, would gradually decline to $1.70 per vote in 2022, when it would be reviewed and possibly eliminated. “Democracy is not free,” Naqvi told reporters at Queen’s Park. Under the changes, individual donors would be allowed to give $1,550 to a party each year, down from the current $9,975.
Contributors would also be allowed to donate an additional $1,550 for up to two of a party’s candidates to a maximum of $3,100, and $1,550 for as many as two of a party’s constituency associations to a maximum of another $3,100. Currently, you can give $6,650 to candidates and $6,650 to constituency associations on top of the $9,975 party contribution.
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That means the most a person could give annually under the new rules would be $7,750, down from $23,275. The legislation will also close the loophole that allows donors to double up and give an extra $9,975 to party if there is a byelection. Naqvi said the new rules, expected to take effect Jan. 1, would severely restrict the use of loan guarantees, by considering them contributions. That would outlaw the NDP’s union-financed holding company, Cornerstone, which recently sold party headquarters on Richmond St. E. for $3.5 million. Cornerstone guaranteed the NDP a $6-million loan to cover the party’s 2014 campaign. There is still a debt of around $5 million. While the New Democrats are not co-operating with the reform process, which they believe is being rammed through by the Liberals, the Conservatives and Greens have been involved. Naqvi said several suggestions from the opposition are in his bill, including reducing a candidate’s threshold for being partially reimbursed for election expenses from 15 per cent of the popular vote to 10 per cent. Tory Leader Patrick Brown welcomed the changes, but worries “loopholes” remain that would allow union members or corporate employees to be paid to volunteer on campaigns. “It’s considered a donation in kind,” said Brown. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath complained the Liberals had given themselves an advantage with the new rules. “The Liberals’ legislation has set no limits on advertising by the government even as they restrict public participation by limiting non-partisan advertising during a campaign period and the six months preceding the campaign,” she said. Indeed, not all Liberals are happy with capping “third-party” advertising at $600,000 in the six months before a scheduled election and $100,000 during the writ. Marcel Wieder, key architect of the Working Families coalition of unions that helped the Grits win elections in 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2014 with labour-sponsored ad blitzes attacking the Tories, expressed concern at those restrictions. “Governments need to remember that elections belong to the people, not politicians,” said Wieder, whose group has spent millions of dollars promoting progressive causes over the past 13 years. “While there may be some merit in the government’s proposed campaign finance reform bill, it contains some significant flaws that are anti-democratic. Elections should be robust debates that encourage participation, not limit it,” he said from Israel, where he is a business delegate on Wynne’s trade mission there. “Third-party ads introduce new issues to the election debate and deserve a chance to be heard. Allowing only the political parties to control the election agenda is unfair, unhealthy and anti-democratic.” Naqvi said there would be new “anti-collusion measures” so unions and other groups cannot skirt the law, which are similar to federal measures in place for more than a decade. The third-party advertising curbs will be aimed at “associated issue” advertising, which could encompass current marketing campaigns aimed at boosting doctors’ salaries, stopping the government’s sell-off of Hydro One, and other advocacy pushes. Elections Ontario will oversee the new regime and scofflaws face fines of five times the amount they overspend the $600,000 and $100,000 limits. There will be other restrictions, including a new maximum contribution of a candidate to his or her campaign of $5,000 and a $25,000 cap on self-funding leadership bids. Parties will be allowed to spend only $1 million on advertising during the six months before a scheduled election, although the existing in-writ spending, which works out to $2.28 per voter plus an additional $9,310 in remote rural ridings, will continue. Green Leader Mike Schreiner said the legislation is a start; he favours the per-vote subsidy, but would like to see stricter contribution caps. “There’s still big money in politics,” warned Schreiner.
Read more about:Lupus anticoagulant Synonyms Lupus antibody, LA, LAC, lupus inhibitors
Lupus anticoagulant is an immunoglobulin[1] that binds to phospholipids and proteins associated with the cell membrane. Lupus anticoagulant is a misnomer, as it is actually a prothrombotic agent. Lupus anticoagulant antibodies in living systems cause an increase in inappropriate blood clotting. The name derives from their properties in vitro, as these antibodies increase laboratory coagulation tests such as the aPTT. Investigators speculate that the antibodies interfere with phospholipids used to induce in vitro coagulation. In vivo, the antibodies are thought to interact with platelet membrane phospholipids, increasing adhesion and aggregation of platelets, which accounts for the in vivo prothrombotic characteristics.
The condition was first described by hematologist C. Lockard Conley.[2][3]
Terminology [ edit ]
Both words in the term "lupus anticoagulant" can be misleading:
Most patients with a lupus anticoagulant do not actually have lupus erythematosus, and only a small proportion will proceed to develop this disease (which causes joint pains, skin problems and renal failure, amongst other complications). Patients with lupus erythematosus are more likely to develop a lupus anticoagulant than the general population.
The term "anticoagulant" accurately describes its function in vitro. However in vivo, it functions as a procoagulant.[4]
Workup [ edit ]
The presence of prolonged clotting times on a routine plasma test often triggers functional testing of the blood clotting function, as well as serological testing to identify common autoantibodies such as antiphospholipid antibodies. These antibodies tend to delay in-vitro coagulation in phospholipid-dependent laboratory tests such as the partial thromboplastin time.
The initial workup of a prolonged PTT is a mixing test whereby the patient's plasma is mixed with normal pooled plasma and the clotting is re-assessed. If a clotting inhibitor such as a lupus anticoagulant is present, the inhibitor will interact with the normal pooled plasma and the clotting time will remain abnormal. However, if the clotting time of the mixed plasma corrects towards normal, the presence of an inhibitor such as the lupus anticoagulant is excluded, and instead a deficient quantity of clotting factor (that is replenished by the normal plasma) is likely.
If the mixing test indicates an inhibitor, diagnosis of a lupus anticoagulant is then confirmed with prolonged phospholipid-sensitive functional clotting testing, such as the dilute Russell's viper venom time, or the Kaolin clotting time. As a further confirmation, a second test with the addition of excess phospholipid will correct the prolongation (conceptually known as "phospholipid neutralization"), confirming the diagnosis of a lupus anticoagulant.
Treatment [ edit ]
Treatment for a lupus anticoagulant is usually undertaken in the context of documented thrombosis, such as extremity phlebitis or dural sinus vein thrombosis. Patients with a well-documented (i.e., present at least twice) lupus anticoagulant and a history of thrombosis should be considered candidates for indefinite treatment with anticoagulants. Patients with no history of thrombosis and a lupus anticoagulant should probably be observed. Current evidence suggests that the risk of recurrent thrombosis in patients with an antiphospholipid antibody is enhanced whether that antibody is measured on serological testing or functional testing. The Sapporo criteria specify that both serological and functional tests must be positive to diagnose the antiphospholipid antibody syndrome.[5]
Miscarriages may be more prevalent in patients with a lupus anticoagulant. Some of these miscarriages may potentially be prevented with the administration of aspirin and unfractionated heparin. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews provide a deeper understanding on the subject.[6]
Thrombosis is treated with anticoagulants (LMWHs and warfarin).[7]Israelis celebrate Independence Day at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2014. (Reuters photo: Amir Cohen)
Pretending that Israel’s capital is not in Jerusalem hasn’t helped the peace process one bit.
President Trump’s recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and begin the process of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv does more than fulfill a campaign promise. It corrects a historic imbalance in U.S. policy and removes accumulated scar tissue that has restricted the flow of new perspectives after a quarter century of U.S.-mediated peace negotiations. It necessitates challenging old and worn assumptions on one of the issues at the heart of the conflict: the Jerusalem fiction.
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The crux of the issue as it relates to any form of Palestinian–Israeli peace talks is who will control the Holy City, or Old City, of Jerusalem. That space accounts for 0.38 square miles of land, including where the Jewish temples once stood, and where the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, today houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is also where the Western Wall is located, along with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Leaving aside the various religious claims on this tiny parcel of land, having a read on the modern-day history that shaped the city’s status is essential to understanding why U.S. policy has contributed to the negotiating stalemate and will ultimately be helpful in gauging the implications of a policy shift.
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In 1947, the United Nations endorsed a partition plan for two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The Jerusalem-Bethlehem region was to be an enclave under international administration. While the Jews accepted the plan, the Arabs rejected it and launched a war to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state. Without the help of foreign powers, and to the surprise of many, the Jews prevailed, declaring the establishment and independence of Israel on May 14, 1948.
By the war’s end |
of coordinator Bill Arnsparger’s ever-stunting defenses, the Dolphins surrendered just 12.4 points a game and blanked the defending champ Colts in the AFC championship. By then the assault on Buoniconti’s body and brain was well underway. He says he was knocked unconscious four or five times over his 14-year career, the worst during the Cowboys’ 24–3 rout of Miami in Super Bowl VI that January. Buoniconti smashed into a player in the third quarter and blacked out—but stayed on his feet and on the field until game’s end. “I was gone,” he says. “That was the worst one. I don’t remember playing.”
The subsequent Perfect Season in ’72—the undefeated, untied campaign culminating in a 14–7 win over Washington in Super Bowl VI—remains the team’s monument, but in ’73, on the way to another Super Bowl title, the Dolphins allowed even fewer points, just five touchdown passes all season, and Buoniconti set a team record with 162 tackles.
Buoniconti has estimated that he absorbed 520,000 hits to the head. “My last game, I got on my hands and knees and kissed the ground and thanked God that I’d never gotten seriously hurt.”
Of those, 91 came unassisted, and over time it would become clear which flank he favored. Buoniconti’s right wrist, knee and ankle would become arthritic; his right hip would need to be replaced; range of motion in his right shoulder was limited. Buoniconti has publicly estimated that over his 14-year pro career (not to mention 13 more years in boyhood, high school and college football) he has absorbed some 520,000 hits to the head. That MRIs in 2015 and ’16 would reveal brain shrinkage—surfacing first in the right frontal and temporal regions—seemed almost logical.
At the time Buoniconti noticed none of it. A broken right thumb forced him to miss the 1975 season, and he gladly began working as a CBS analyst. A spate of injuries prompted the Dolphins to ask him back in ’76, twice; Buoniconti demanded $125,000 and got it. He started just four games that season, then said goodbye for good. He was 36, certain he’d gotten out clean.
“My last game, at the end I got on my hands and knees and kissed the ground and thanked God that I’d never gotten seriously hurt,” Buoniconti says. “Fourteen-year career? I could’ve been maimed.”
* * *
Instead, he looked great. Wavy hair just starting to gray, hawkish nose: From the neck up Nick looked like Michelangelo’s David, done slinging rocks and ready to be anointed king. He radiated authority, though that on-field ferocity needed softening, first in the courtroom, and later as the agent for Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent, Expos outfielder Andre Dawson and others.
Loaded with leverage after Dent’s epic playoff home run over the Red Sox in 1978, Buoniconti nearly laughed when New York owner George Steinbrenner threatened to trade Dent the following winter. “Go ahead!” Buoniconti told him over lunch. “There’ll be a lot of takers.”
Nick Buoniconti, 1972. AP
Steinbrenner stonewalled through the 1979 season, and Dent walked out of Yankee Stadium after the final game certain his time in the Bronx was over. Buoniconti, unfazed, mused to reporters about the team’s hardships, told the Yankees’ GM that Dent was signing with the Angels and booked their flight to L.A. Steinbrenner signed Dent to a five-year extension. “Good luck with your prenup, honey,” Steinbrenner later told Lynn, when Nick introduced her as his fiancée at a New York benefit. “That’s the meanest guy I ever negotiated with.”
Because he could walk away—from just about anyone. Buoniconti loved corporate work, pushing paper, because, he says, “I didn’t have to deal with clients.” In 1980 he landed Dawson’s first $1 million-a-year salary; four years later, after Dawson hadn’t heard from Buoniconti for 14 months, Dawson fired him. “When I got traded, I didn’t hear from him, either,” Dent says of his midseason departure from the Yankees in ’82. “I was like, What’s going on here? Nick wasn’t one of those warm-and-fuzzy guys... but he did a good job for me.”
To be fair, Buoniconti’s plate was piled high. People kept tapping him for leadership, for connections to his old buddies from his days in Boston and the AFL, guys like congressmen Jack Kemp and Tip O’Neill. In 1982 the Dade County Democratic party named Nick chairman; he quickly organized a $250-a-plate dinner, induced the governor to come, and raised $80,000. Meanwhile, his long association with U.S. Tobacco, the nation’s largest purveyor of smokeless products, like Skoal and Copenhagen, was beginning to pay off.
UST’s president, Louis Bantle, first asked Buoniconti and some other Dolphins to mingle at a client cocktail party in the early 1970s. Then he hired Nick for legal work. In ’83 Nick was named executive VP in charge of legal and federal affairs and public relations. Sales had spiked fivefold over the previous decade, but clouds loomed; the business was becoming viewed as a health menace. In ’88, the U.S. surgeon general declared nicotine goods such as chewing tobacco to be as addictive as heroin.
But even as Buoniconti lobbied over the years for the tobacco industry, his image as an athlete—and a perfect one, at that—prevailed. Indeed, he proved so valuable a spokesman that in ’85, Bantle made him UST’s president and COO. The one-time tobacco picker—who had never smoked or dipped himself—became the industry’s most famous, and ardent, defender.
In one typical interview that fall, with the Chicago Tribune, Buoniconti railed against “anti-tobacco forces” and touted scientists who, he said, maintained “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your product.” He went on: “We’ll survive. We were the first packaged-good product in the United States. We helped fund the Revolutionary War!”
It wasn’t the last time Buoniconti’s mind, shrewd and curious, would dodge a discomfiting truth. He’s not incapable of irony—“I thought 1985 would be a great year because 85 was my jersey number and so great to me, and actually it was the worst year of my life”—but Buoniconti sprang out of an era when guilt didn’t travel over generations. He liked to believe that the world came at a man head on, laid out choices and left him free to choose. Use tobacco or don’t. Play football or don’t.
It’s not in Buoniconti to admit the sheer weirdness of the fact that in ’85 he became a human fulcrum—at once seller and sufferer, perpetrator and victim—of public health crises involving two titanic American pastimes. “I’m not getting into that, O.K.?” he yells. “One has nothing to do with the other!”
A day after Marc’s injury, Terry found her husband sitting on the floor outside intensive care, tears streaming, saying, “God is punishing me, God is punishing me.”
The first blow came in the summer when Big Nick, a lifetime smoker, died at 75 of lung cancer, just as his son was taking over UST. Of his four-year stint on top of the company, Buoniconti says, “I loved it. I loved being in charge; it was like being a middle linebacker and calling the defenses.” Asked if he ever felt conflicted, considering tobacco’s now-confirmed harmful effects, he says, “Yeah, we were under fire a lot, mostly taxes. But in my mind, we never marketed it to kids. It was a good job. I enjoyed it.”
The second blow came 12 days after he invoked the American Revolution in the Tribune. Nick and Terry were at the New Jersey spread of his old roomie, Richie Catenacci. It was a perfect Saturday, the kind where you can’t help but think, Yes, we made it: 72 degrees, sitting in the gazebo, sipping champagne. Nick asked Catenacci’s nephew to check the football scores; both games featuring his linebacker sons—Marc at The Citadel, Nick III at Duke—had been going for an hour. The phone rang.
It was Bantle. Marc had been hurt; no one knew how bad. Bantle gave Nick a number to call. He dialed thinking, Shoulder, maybe a knee.... A doctor answered. His first words were, “Mr. Buoniconti, your son dislocated his neck and he’s going to be paralyzed for the rest of his life.”
Nick fell to his knees. Richie reached down to grab him but, for the first time in their 27-year friendship, Nick looked lost. “How am I going to tell his mother?” he begged. But he did it; he went outside and blasted a hole in Terry’s world. She’ll never forget that day, how beautiful it was, Nick’s face coming closer, his mouth saying that Marc would never walk again. She’ll never forget, too, how a day later, outside of intensive care, she found her husband sitting on the floor, tears streaming, saying, “God is punishing me, God is punishing me.”
And right then, amid a mother’s worst nightmare and a scuttling fear, Terry had this one moment of clarity. She leaned over to her husband. “God doesn’t work that way,” she said.
* * *
Nick with son Marc at the Citadel. Courtesy the Buoniconti Family/AP
Before she became Nick’s wife, in 2000, Lynn could well imagine the black-hole enormity that paralysis becomes to anyone within its orbit. But it still took years of fundraisers and medical crises for her to realize this: “I say that Nick is married to Marc, because the No. 1 priority in Nick Buoniconti’s life is Marc Buoniconti,” Lynn says.
But she didn’t understand that fully until 2008, when Justin, her then-21-year-old son by her first marriage, was assaulted outside a Cambridge, Mass., bar and nearly died of a traumatic brain injury. “I know now: It’s as if Nick carries Marc’s weight on his shoulders,” Lynn says. “You move heaven and earth to help your child, especially when they go through a life-or-death experience.”
Once Marc was stabilized and placed into Barth Green’s care in October 1985, Nick moved fast. He landed a $100,000 pledge from UST immediately and within a month organized a fundraiser at a Dolphins game that raised another $300,000. The Miami Project was underway. “Nick is extraordinary,” Green says. “I’ve taken care of thousands of patients with brain and spinal cord injuries and paralysis, but I’ve never had a person stay so committed so long. Everybody’s gung-ho for a year or two, then they disappear. Nick has raised several hundred million dollars, and I attribute almost all of it to his charisma, his national presence, his intelligence and ability to articulate the importance of curing paralysis.”
Some believe the accident changed Nick. How could it not? Before, he was ensconced at UST headquarters in Greenwich, Conn., hardly a presence as Marc smoked pot, vandalized cars and homes, and bombed grades at South Miami’s Columbus High. Before, he’d see someone in a wheelchair, think Too bad, and keep walking. Marc’s paralysis humbled Nick, grounded him in a way that fame and fortune never could. His focus shifted south, to Miami and Marc and the Project and home.
“To the degree that he got fired from UST,” Green says. “The CEO said, ‘Look, we need a full-time president. You’ve got to give this your all. Otherwise....’ And that’s when Nick left.”
The fact that UST health insurance, as part of his separation agreement, would continue to cover most of Marc’s estimated $500,000 in annual expenses made the move easier. And hustling for the Miami Project filled the void of attention and purpose felt by many retired athletes. But Nick also found himself more tolerant. A squeamish Nick held Marc during each of Marc’s ensuing health scares. In 2014, when a near-fatal respiratory infection had his son saying, for the first time, “Just let it end,” Nick spent eight hours a day, for six weeks, by Marc’s side.
“Every day in the hospital—and he hates a hospital—he sat there with me,” Marc says. Then, after a deep breath, his eyes widen and he adds, “And with my mom!”
Such emphasis assumes a knowledge of how tough that might be. After all, his parents’ spiky relationship was hardly a secret in Miami after their bitter split in 1997—and basic chronology made it easy to figure. In the fall of ’95 the 54-year-old Nick met Lynn Weiss at Dakota, a bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Monday Night Football was on the TV, she was 12 years his junior and vivacious, the owner of a successful travel business. “The smartest person I’ve ever met,” Nick says. He was entranced; Lynn wasn’t. But soon they were an item.
Nick, Marc and Terry return to The Citadel in 2006, two decades after Marc’s paralyzing accident. Alice Keeney/AP
Nick and Terry, together since Cathedral High, were still married. She was furious when she found out about Lynn. At least once Buoniconti wondered, to Catenacci, why they couldn’t carry on: Growing up, a mistress—a goumad—wasn’t unheard of in some Italian households.
“There’s a side of Nick that wants to have it all and a side that recognizes you can’t,” says Catenacci. “I said, ‘The world has changed and you can’t have a wife and a goumad anymore. That’s original sin, and you know Terry’s not going to put up with that. You know the right thing—do it.’ And he did.”
That may sound like the morality of a man cornered, but Buoniconti resists glib pigeonholing. A former Democratic leader once horrified by cannabis, he supports Donald Trump and now entertains the idea of using medical marijuana. Appalled by the racist welcome doled out to black players upon their arrival for the 1965 AFL All-Star Game in New Orleans, Buoniconti joined—and fully backed—a boycott that forced the game’s move to Houston.
After decades of dating women, in the early 1990s Catenacci fell in love with a man, but he didn’t tell Nick. Years passed. Finally, on an Aspen ski lift, Buoniconti confronted his old roommate. “So when are you going to tell me?”
“What do you want to know?” Catenacci asked.
“Does he love you? Because you know I love you, and I would never want anybody to hurt you.”
* * *
Lynn’s first real scare came with Nick behind the wheel. This was in 2013. During a drive in Fort Lauderdale, all the stimuli absorbed without thinking—lights, pedestrians, directions, chitchat, radio—came confusingly alive for Nick. A simple turn across oncoming traffic became a mess, and his car jumped a curb. But he was also 72, had been forgetting things: a phone number here, a social commitment there. Lynn chalked it up to age. Then he started falling. Yet even to his doctors, it was hard to see anything out of the ordinary.
His falling had become commonplace—taking out the garbage, walking the dog. With each spill, Nick got angrier, resenting his body—the instrument that gave him everything—for betraying him.
Because unlike Mike Webster or Duerson or Seau, who suffered dramatic depression in their 30s and 40s and were dead at 50, Buoniconti’s brain trouble only surfaced in his early 70s, when even non-football playing brains present signs of shrinkage and decay. And even then, he was still speaking and flying and golfing; a February 2014 MRI at the University of Miami attributed the “mild asymmetric volume loss” in Nick’s right anterior temporal lobe—and his balance and memory issues—as “compatible with age-appropriate involutional changes.”
But then food became an obsession. Dinner out with friends would start off well—wine flowing, fun couple—then they’d notice Nick hadn’t spoken for a bit. Ordering took on urgency. He spent long minutes staring down at his plate. Lynn tried alerting his children, Gina and Nick III and Marc, but they didn’t see Nick daily. And besides, he’d always been a handful. That’s just Dad: Intense, likes to be waited on....
His handwriting slowed, and became spidery. On a freezing day he came home distressed from the gym; he couldn’t figure out how to put on his coat. By then his falling had become commonplace—taking out the garbage, walking the dog, standing up from a chair. He’d drop like a sack of cement, face-first, and bleed plenty but feel no pain; by the end of 2014 he was averaging nearly one serious spill a month. And with each fall he got angrier, resenting his body—the instrument that gave him everything—for betraying him.
Doctors at the University of Miami seemed less alarmed, recommending close observation. A December 2014 exam noted that Buoniconti “does seem to be altered in his mental status,” but attributed that to, among other things, a recent fever. Lynn felt otherwise. In January ’15 she arranged a summit meeting at the Miami Project offices attended by Barth Green; scientific director Dalton Dietrich; Nick’s personal physician, Eugene Sayfie; Lynn; Nick and Gina. Marc attended via conference call.
* * *
Lynn, Nick and Gina recall that the medical staff in the meeting seemed settled on the idea that Buoniconti’s balance and mental issues were typical markers of aging, probably compounded by his football history. Green insists that he and the rest of the UM doctors were hardly that casual, that they told the family “that Nick had a post-traumatic syndrome,” Green says, “that some of the things that were happening to him were definitely related to his multiple head injuries, but he also had other stuff going on and it wasn’t classical for anything—for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.”
At one point Marc, by phone, speculated that, by harping on Nick’s difficulties, Lynn was creating a “self-fulfilling prophecy”—and only making matters worse. “I still don’t know what that means. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Nick says. “If I didn’t have this issue, I wouldn’t be talking about it.”
Finally, Gina cut in. “No: You have to listen to Lynn,” she said. “She lives with him.”
Nick and Lynn at home, May 2017. Jeffery A. Salter for The MMQB/Sports Illustrated
A subsequent round of neuropsychological tests found that, though Buoniconti did not “meet criteria for dementia or mild cognitive impairment,” he had mild decrements; another brain MRI that same month, however, again revealed only “age-appropriate involutional changes.” But if the medical picture was foggy, other proof seemed clear. On April 13, 2015, an ambulance rushed Buoniconti to the ER after he gashed his nose and eye in another fall. A month later, Lynn filmed Nick’s tortuous, nearly two-minute process of figuring out how to put on a T-shirt and ball cap. And both were losing patience with Buoniconti’s longtime colleagues at the Miami Project.
“I felt let down, that they didn’t understand what I’m going through—or they didn’t seem interested in finding out what I’m going through,” Buoniconti says.
In fact, Green says, the UM team had long been concerned by Buoniconti’s “cascade of sequelae”—physical and mental symptoms—and suspected CTE and its precipitating brain-clogging protein, tau, as one possible cause. But “I think all of us were in denial,” Green says. “And then once we saw what was going on, we faced a dilemma : As Nick’s friends and family here at the Miami Project, are we going to tell him, ‘Nick, you’re going downhill, and you’ve got a disease’—when there’s really no treatment or any of the symptoms? Or should we say, ‘Nick, you look great and you’re doing well and I wouldn’t worry about this’?
“So we decided, as a group, that we weren’t going to shove it down his throat unless we have something that could stop this cascade of neurological events and reverse it. As his symptoms grew, we tried to reinforce the positive—the fact he still was a kick-ass guy, he could get in front of these people and empty their pockets of millions of dollars to help research, and he could play in a golf tournament.
“Lynn was never ignored,” Green continues. “She loves Nick a lot, but in her zealousness to get help for him she’s constantly—publicly and in private—telling him that he’s going to hell. So: different philosophy. We didn’t think that was the way to go. And I still don’t think so. I don’t think it does any damn good to tell him, ‘Your whole brain is going to be full of tau. You’re dying and people aren’t caring about you, and you’re just going to keep getting worse and you need to be taken care of.’ What did that accomplish then, and what does it accomplish now? That’s not the way I fly, and it’s not because I’m stupid. It’s not because I don’t love him. It’s just a different strategy.”
At the same time, Green did recommend the testing regimen that led University of Miami doctors to a more specific diagnosis. In the spring of 2015, the head of UM’s Neuropsychology Department, Bonnie Levin, became the first to cite CTE as a possible cause of Buoniconti’s mental decline. Another UM neurologist, Carlos Singer, declared in a May ’15 summary that Buoniconti’s physical and mental symptoms were most compatible with senile dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, CTE and frontotemporal dementia.
A definitive CTE diagnosis is possible only by autopsy. But experimental testing (involving PET scans after the injection of radioactive dye that highlights the protein tau, which can be an indicator of the disease) has increasingly showed evidence of CTE in small samples of living patients. In November 2013, Hall of Fame running back Tony Dorsett—the most famous of a cadre of 14 NFL veterans who underwent that testing—revealed to ESPN that his exam at UCLA confirmed the presence of tau and other signs of CTE. A year and a half later, in May 2015, at Lynn’s suggestion, Singer agreed to refer Buoniconti for an experimental PET scan at the Feinstein Institute in Manhasset, N.Y., on Long Island.
But Nick was tired of the prodding. They flew to their Long Island home, and summer and fall passed there with him refusing to go. Lynn issued a winter ultimatum: Do the scans or I’m not going back to Miami. Now he knew how Robbie and Steinbrenner felt.
Though they did not measure specifically for tau, the two Feinstein scans indicated damage that went beyond “involutional”—consistent with Parkinsonian syndrome and CTE. The Feinstein neurologist, Andrew Feigin, confirmed to Nick that atrophy had set in on the right side of his brain and believed it was due to abnormal amounts of tau. He said the protein would soon spread to the left side, and that it could never be reversed.
“It was like a car accident,” Lynn says. “The point of impact.”
The couple stopped at a diner on the way home. Nick said “yeah” when she asked if he understood, and then they sat there crying.
* * *
It felt like a death sentence. There was no word, no possible treatment, offering any hope. And Buoniconti wasn’t a glass-half-full guy to begin with. Even when his life had seemed a testament to optimism, his disposition had folks calling him Negative Nick. Now, with neither work nor golf to distract him, Buoniconti’s lifelong terror of dying had room to run. The Mercolino darkness kicked in hard.
“We’re the players who built the game, but have been forgotten,” Nick says. “The settlement is a joke. They are waiting for us to die.”
“He’s frustrated and depressed,” Marc said in November. “He’s lost in his own physical disability and there’s no break from it. He’s sitting at his house; he has no outlets. He falls down, and that conversation only exacerbates it. That’s his life, man-—a vicious cycle.”
Marc calls it “heartbreaking” to watch his rock crumble, but he didn’t doubt the reason. For decades he had pushed back against those who cited his paralysis as Exhibit A in the case against the game, celebrating it as a vehicle for character building and teamwork. No more.
“If someone asked if their child should play organized contact football, I could not in good conscience recommend it,” Marc says. “I don’t think it’s safe. It’s pretty evident that something significant is happening to the brain as far as disrupted development over time. I cannot recommend football for, really, anybody. I was 50-50 on this already but, then, watching my dad—that sealed it for me.”
Though he knows this admission cements the Buonicontis as the first family of football tragedy, Marc won’t play the victim. Early predictions had him living 20 years, tops, as a quadriplegic, and he’s survived at least four near-death scares in the 31 years since. He calls his existence “gravy.” And in his 32nd year inside a lifeless body, something has changed; for the first time, father and son’s roles have reversed. Now Marc’s the one urging Nick to stop with the self-pity. There’s always someone worse off than you..
Says Marc: “I’ve told him, ‘You’ve got to get your s--- together. Look at me. My life sucks, but I make the best of it.’ And he’s like, ‘I know, I know.’ But it hasn’t changed his approach to life.”
Though he knows Lynn’s lot is thankless—“God bless her for taking care of him; my dad’s a pain in the ass”—Marc still wonders if her focus on Nick’s deficits makes them worse. Nick and Lynn scoff at this; it remains a touchy issue. But drained of family drama, Marc’s theory on positive reinforcement seems less a potshot than one more desperate response to an epidemic without cure. Everybody’s searching.
Nick and Lynn at home, May 2017. Jeffery A. Salter for The MMQB/Sports Illustrated
And the fact is, one reason Nick decided to make public his decline was to mine some good of it. No ailing ex-player, after all, has had more resources—a blue-ribbon health care plan, money for the travel and costs of experimental tests that insurance won’t cover, instant access to an innovative and grateful medical staff, a partner with patience enough to research studies and sift medical files and schedule appointments—with which to navigate his condition. Yet even he is a confused mess.
“So if I’m having this problem and Lynn is hovering over me making sure things get done, can you imagine someone in the same situation who can’t figure it out?” Nick asks. “I feel for these guys. They have no direction. It’s not fair that you make the league all this money, and they don’t care about you anymore. You think they care about a player who no longer can contribute to their financial success? Come on.”
The NFL, the Players Association and the Hall of Fame Players Foundation do have various outreach programs for former players; NFL Player Care, set up in 2007, has provided more than $12 million to 980 former players in financial need and contributed $6.6 million to medical research studies. (In late April Nick hired three medical aides for round-the-clock assistance, tapping into the NFL and NFLPA’s jointly-run 88 Plan, which provides up to $118,000 per year for in-home care.) In 2010 the NFL added a neurological care program to evaluate and treat “possible” conditions for vested retirees. But the outreach for all of the above has hardly been ideal, and the $1 billion concussion settlement has added a huge new layer of bureaucracy—and resentment.
Few of the estimated 20,000 players covered by the settlement would seem better equipped to understand its legal issues and jargon than Buoniconti. The older the former player, the less likely that diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS or dementia can be attributed solely to football; CTE remains undiagnosable in the living. That means that virtually all those who played before 1993, when NFL free agency took effect, will again miss out on the big money. For example: Nick’s dementia diagnosis, combined with his age and 14-year career, make him eligible for a settlement of just $132,000.
He doesn’t need that money to finance his evaluations and travel costs and treatments, but others of his era do. “The NFL should be volunteering to pay for this,” Buoniconti screamed abruptly in a UCLA examination room last November. “I’m so f------ pissed off at them!
“We’re the players who built the game, but have been forgotten. The settlement is a joke; the way it was structured is a joke. They are waiting for us to die. They’re going to play the clock out until everybody dies.”
* * *
Jeffery A. Salter for The MMQB/Sports Illustrated
So Buoniconti has one last fight on his hands. It’s not simple, like his rookie scuffle with the Reverend Romeo. It’s not clear, like his mission to cure paralysis. No, this battle lies within, between warring impulses. There are days he wants to know exactly what’s wrong with his brain, if only because naming an enemy gives you a better chance of defeating it. And there are days when he doesn’t. What difference will it make? He’s not looking to end football. The game was his steel mill, his coal mine—a way up and out.
“I didn’t have any idea the price would be this debilitating,” Buoniconti says. “Had I known, would I have played? I had no alternative; there was no other way for me to get a college education. Football kept rewarding me—I can’t deny that. But I’m paying the price.” He shrugs, grins. “Everybody pays the piper.”
He’s hardly so resigned day to day. Buoniconti’s temper ignites over the smallest frustrations—a ringing phone, bed blankets, a hand proffered to help him stand. In January 2016 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and Lynn with breast cancer, and the treatment has been draining. Just before the family gathered for the annual Miami Project gala in New York City last September, Nick tumbled over a chair and gashed up his forehead and nose again.
“When you marry your best friend and now he’s not your best friend anymore because there’s someone else in there, it’s very difficult,” Lynn says. “He looks like the person I married. But he really isn’t there.”
In September 2016, Gina, Marc and Nick III urged their dad to hire a driver and live-in aide, and stick to his prescribed therapies, if for nothing else than to save his marriage. “She was ready to leave him,” Marc says. “I don’t blame her.”
“Had I known, would I have played?” Buoniconti says. “I had no alternative. Football kept rewarding me—I can’t deny that.”
The night Buoniconti was to emcee the gala in New York, an HBO makeup artist slathered pancake on the fresh gashes on his face. A New York Times videographer tried interviewing him, but his mind derailed 46 seconds in. “I’m not ready for this,” Nick said, wandering abruptly off camera. It took 20 minutes of sitting alone in the Waldorf ballroom before Lynn could calm him down. (Terry, who is remarried and goes months without seeing Nick, was there and struck by his vacant stare. “I thought, ‘Is he going to be able to even get through speaking?’” she says. “But he got up there and did great.”)
Still, it was to placate Lynn, as much as anything, that Buoniconti agreed to ride from Pebble Beach to Westwood last November for a preliminary workup at UCLA’s groundbreaking BrainSPORT Program. But that set off another roller coaster. First, a lift: Initial exams there seemed to rule out Alzheimer’s disease and CTE. Then, six weeks later, a drop: Buoniconti’s UCLA MRI revealed significant atrophy in his frontal lobes, and the resulting diagnosis of corticobasal syndrome was what Green had been wrestling with all along. Not only is CBS a catchall that could indicate Alzheimer’s and CTE, but it’s often paired with corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a disease with a sharply defined prognosis. With no treatment or cure, “we didn’t want to pin that diagnosis on Nick because he could Google it,” Green says, “and see that the average life expectancy is six or seven years.”
The UCLA team thus recommended a cerebrospinal tap and an experimental PET scan to test for Alzheimer’s-type amyloid and the tau prominent in CTE. Nick wanted nothing to do with either. For months Lynn pushed, and he dug in. She wanted confirmation of what they were facing; he wanted only reversal.
Then, in early February, the thinnest straw presented itself: One of Nick’s brothers emailed about a newspaper story in which Joe Namath controversially claimed marked brain improvement following 120 sessions of breathing pure oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber. Despite being claustrophobic, Nick lunged for it.
He called Namath, who described a complete cure. He called Green, who was skeptical. Four University of Miami doctors weighed in, calling the procedure—which is highly effective for wound care—“relatively safe” but utterly unproven to render long-term brain improvement. Nick didn’t care. He stopped physical therapy and insisted instead on going to UM Hospital for a 140-minute, five-day-a-week experimental course of inhaling pure oxygen at high pressure in what looks like a giant transparent tanning bed.
At first he came home exhausted but “mentally brighter,” says Magaly Rodriguez, the UM surgeon in charge of Nick’s hyperbaric course. “By the end of the first week I was very encouraged. He was lighter on his feet, more focused, sharper.”
But on March 11 Buoniconti fell again while walking his dog, cutting and bruising his head, hand and elbow and requiring five stitches in one leg. His temper flared again, and the dizzy spells hit; he began to dread going inside the chamber. All signs of progress faded. On the night of March 26 Rodriguez was at home. She watched the movie Concussion, again, and prayed for Nick Buoniconti.
“We have to find a way to stop the progression of this ailment,” she says. “I remember watching him as a child, growing up [in Miami]. It’s a labor of love.”
The next morning, Buoniconti phoned four times to say that he would meet me at the chamber at 10:30 a.m. “Did I already call you?” he said after the third. After having viewed his stagnant results and rising anxiety, Rodriguez decided that, after 25 sessions, it was time to hit pause. She recommended Buoniconti undergo a new round of cognitive tests. He was relieved, really, but still sighed: another dead end.
Jeffery A. Salter for The MMQB/Sports Illustrated
Waiting for Nick's car outside the hospital, the building that holds Buoniconti's monument—the Miami Project—loomed tall and white across the street. Later, at a nearby Starbucks, Lynn mulled a rushed retrofit of their bathroom, the mechanics of arranging 24-hour in-home care. Nick ate cheese and crackers and said his dizziness had passed. At one point he stood, one of the great names of a generation, and asked for help slipping his phone into his front-left pocket. The table went quiet, and he sat again.
“I really would like to know what the hell is going on,” Buoniconti said. Outside a breeze pushed the palms just enough so you could hear them. “But I’m going to deteriorate anyway, so do we go back to UCLA? I’m up in the air.”
Wednesday at The MMQB: The family of Jim Kiick, another of the greats from the Super Bowl-champion Dolphins of the ’70s, battles to understand his dramatic and gut-wrenching decline.WASHINGTON (JTA) – President Barack Obama urged Turkish students to help overcome the tendency in the Muslim world to blame Israel.
Obama told university students at a round table in Istanbul on Tuesday that he was committed to bringing about an Israeli Palestinian peace, whatever the difficulties, and appreciated Turkey’s role in helping to broker such a peace.
"It will depend on young people like you being open to new ideas and new possibilities," he said. "And it will require young people like you never to stereotype or assume the worst about other people. In the Muslim world, this notion that somehow everything is the fault of the Israelis lacks balance — because there’s two sides to every question. That doesn’t mean that sometimes one side has done something wrong and should not be condemned. But it does mean there’s always two sides to an issue.
"I say the same thing to my Jewish friends, which is you have to see the perspective of the Palestinians," Obama continued. "Learning to stand in somebody else’s shoes to see through their eyes, that’s how peace begins. And it’s up to you to make that happen."
Obama later made a surprise visit to U.S. troops in Iraq.Gladstone and Oregon City
Integrity: 6.75
Brains: 8.04
Effectiveness: 6.13
Still baby-faced at 35, this Harvard-educated lawyer crossed caucus leadership in 2014, voting against a bill Democrats supported that would |
a decade of decline in Scotland's military footprint but has instead confirmed further massive and disproportionate cuts Angus Robertson, SNP
Dr Fox said the move would mean more service personnel being stationed in Scotland, and that therefore the ''defence footprint'' would "increase by well over 2,000 posts".
The defence secretary added: "The planning work, including the investment required to adapt sites, will now get under way based on this strategic direction.
"It will involve consultations as appropriate with local communities and other statutory obligations we will need to fulfil.
"I am very conscious of the uncertainties that these changes will cause for service personnel and their families.
"Let me reassure them that the majority of the moves I have announced today will take place after 2015.
"The overall package I have announced today is good news for our Armed Forces and means that they can look forward to the future with renewed confidence because the defence programme I have announced is underpinned with real resources."
Responding in parliament to Dr Fox's statement, Labour's Shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy said: "Today's announcement of a smaller army comes from a party that promised thousands of extra troops in opposition.
"It is hard to conclude anything other than that this is strategic shrinkage by stealth, because today's cut in the army is bigger than the entire current deployment of all UK forces in Afghanistan."
Image caption It has been confirmed that RAF Leuchars will close as an RAF base
The SNP said the announcement confirmed the "massive and disproportionate defence cuts to the Royal Air Force and Royal Marines in Scotland that had been feared".
The party's defence spokesman Angus Robertson said: "The UK government had the opportunity to reverse more than a decade of decline in Scotland's military footprint but has instead confirmed further massive and disproportionate cuts to the RAF and Royal Marines as well as the closure of military facilities."
And the Liberal Democrats' Sir Menzies Campbell, who is MP for North East Fife, said: "I cannot support the decision not to retain Leuchars in my constituency as an RAF base because I believe it to be fundamentally wrong, strategically inept, and likely to increase the risk to our citizens."The way the Thomsons read their insurance plan, they thought any emergency medical transportation was covered.
But it turns out, the air-ambulance company was out of their network, and they got a bill for $56,000.
“Coming back and looking at that bill and thinking you’ve got to be kidding me,” Thomson said. “Here is the flight that ultimately saved Isla’s life by getting her to where she needs to be. And yet [it] is going to put us potentially in financial ruin. Or at least kill our future dreams as a family.”
When patients need an air ambulance, the first priority is getting them the care they need as fast as possible. So, patients don’t always know who is going to pick them up or if the ambulance is an in-network provider.
That can lead to surprise expenses if the companies ask patients to pay the bill or any balance left after the insurance plan’s out-of-network coverage is applied.
“Of all the complaints we have received in our office, not one person was uninsured,” said Jesse Laslovich, the legal counsel for Montana’s insurance commissioner. “They’re all insured. And they are frustrated as heck that they’re still getting $50,000 balance bills.”
States can regulate some medical aspects of air ambulances, but federal laws prevent states from limiting aviation rates, routes, and services.
The cost of an air-ambulance bill is split into two main parts, according to a study completed by the Montana legislature. First, a liftoff fee, which ranges from $8,500 to $15,200 in Montana, and then a per-mile charge for the flight, which ranges from $26 to $133 a mile.
Some air ambulance companies offer membership programs as protection from big bills. For an annual fee of about $60 to $100, patients face no cost beyond what their health insurance pays if they use that company’s services.
But Laslovich said that doesn’t always work, because a patient can’t always know who is going to pick them up.
There is a lack of understanding about the actual costs of running an air-ambulance business, said Rick Sherlock, the president of the Association of Air Medical Services. The costs include specialized labor, training, equipment, and fuel.
“So those cost drivers are there and [it’s necessary] to maintain readiness to respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Sherlock said.
He says some air-ambulance companies remain out of insurance networks because they can’t always reach in-network deals that allow them to stay profitable.
“I think what you also have to look at is that negotiations between [air ambulance] companies and insurance companies take place when there’s good negotiations on both sides,” Sherlock said. “In situations where there may be only one or two insurance options in an area, it’s harder and harder to negotiate on a level playing field.”While Apple has had its share of enterprise partners in recent years including IBM, Cisco and SAP, today’s announcement that it will be working directly with GE feels a bit different with the two companies more closely intertwined than in previous deals.
Apple and GE have committed to build a set of development tools and to develop apps together using Apple’s design sensibility and deep understanding of iOS, but the deal doesn’t stop there. Apple’s sales team will also push the GE Predix platform with its industrial customers when it makes sense, and GE has committed to standardizing on the iPhone and iPad for its 330,000 employees, while offering the Mac as a computer choice. All of this adds up to a level of cooperation we have not seen in Apple’s previous enterprise partnerships.
For starters, the two companies announced an iOS software development kit (SDK) for GE’s Predix platform, which is a set of cloud services designed to help industrial customers track the health of the huge industrial equipment GE sells and services. It can help predict failures before they happen and bring down this expensive equipment such as jet engines, wind turbines and train locomotives.
The key here is that the new SDK gives both external developers and those inside GE the ability to build native apps on top of the Predix platform, allowing them to take advantage of the full Apple ecosystem whether that’s iBeacons, the internal gyroscope sensor inside iPhone or even augmented reality in the latest iPhones.
To prime that software development pump, GE has built a new Applications Performance Management case management app built on top of Predix. Using this tool, customers can see the health of their industrial equipment on an iPad and collaborate more easily, sharing information like last action taken, notes and photos; all designed to provide the data to make decisions in real time.
Susan Prescott, VP for apps, markets and services at Apple was clearly charged by the possibilities that this partnership brings. “For the first time, we’re unlocking incredible new potential for industrial workers by giving them access to native apps that tap the functionality of iOS devices in exciting ways. Now employees can make better informed decisions through the native capabilities of the apps right at their fingertips,” Prescott told TechCrunch.
She offers some examples of how this could work: “A technician can now use the iPhone’s built-in camera to capture a thermal image of a piece of equipment to diagnose an issue or iBeacons and built-in location services can push critical information to a nearby worker’s iPhone or iPad in real time to help quickly flag an issue. We’re essentially closing the feedback loop between the employee in the industrial environment and the analytics and data that’s stored in the cloud,” she said.
Surely GE, an industrial company that was launched by Thomas Edison in 1888 couldn’t be more different than Apple, a computer company launched almost a 100 years later in 1976, but there is more in common than you might imagine.
There are the strong charismatic and demanding founders in Steve Jobs and Edison. There was also an internal mission to change the world with technology. GE has done it with giant industrial equipment like wind turbines and airplane engines, while Apple has gone smaller with phones, computers and watches.
In recent years, GE has been making a hard push to modernize and this partnership is clearly part of that.
The SDK and the APM app will be available for download on October 26th as part of GE’s Mind + Machines conference.When Ashlee Evans-Smith made her UFC debut in December 2014, it did not go as planned. The former CFA tournament champion was submitted by Raquel “Rocky” Pennington at 4:59 in the first round of their fight.
Pennington locked in a bulldog choke at UFC 181 that left Evans-Smith bleeding. The added stinger was Evans-Smith tested positive for a diuretic and was issued a nine-month suspension from the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
Almost two years have passed and Evans-Smith is coming off a third-round TKO finish over Veronica Macedo, who was making her octagon debut, yesterday afternoon. Now she’s got her sights set on a rematch with Pennington.
During an interview with MMA Junkie, Evans-Smith said a rematch with Pennington is first on her list.
“She is on a good winning streak, and who am I to say, give me a higher-ranked opponent, since I’m only 13 (in the promotion’s rankings),” Evans-Smith said. “But yeah, I’ll say it: I would like to fight Raquel Pennington again.”
After her win over Evans-Smith, Pennington’s dropped a split-decision to Holly Holm in the former titleholder’s Octagon debut. She followed it up with a second-round submission win over Jessica Andrade – earning her first “Performance of the Night” bonus – then earned decision wins over Bethe Correia and Elizabeth Phillips.
Evans-Smith captured her first Octagon victory in February when she defeated Marion Reneau. Before the UFC, Evans-Smith won her first three fights, including winning the CFA women’s featherweight tournament – defeating Fallon Fox in the finals – and third-round finish over Marceia Allen in World Series of Fighting.
As for an Evans-Smith vs. Pennington II happening, it might be down the road if the former CFA champion can pick up another win or two – or if Rocky loses a fight. Evans-Smith is hovering on the outside of That said, the UFC likes to pride themselves on giving fighters opportunities if they want them – in this case Evans-Smith wanting to face Pennington again.
Another possibility would be if Evans-Smith stepped up to face Pennington on short notice.But with Pennington at No. 8, she might be booked against Cat Zingano or even Holm.This article first appeared in the June 2006 issue of BBC History Magazine
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Walk round any museum in the UK with a Roman Britain display and you’ll probably see coloured mosaics, wall-plaster, coins, pottery, altars, and tombstones. Watch any television programme about British archaeology and you’ll see Roman sites yielding anything from an amphitheatre’s ruins to the foundations of a Roman villa.
Compared to almost any other period until the 1700s, Roman Britain was a cavalcade of phenomenal change. The population of prehistoric Britain was dragged into a world of fortresses, towns, and roads after the Romans invaded in AD 43. That world disappeared almost as quickly after Roman rule ended in 410.
Visibility is the key word. Roman stuff is easy to find because a lot was made, and a lot survives. But I’ve been wondering just how true that picture is. The physical remains are beyond doubt but are we so dazzled by them that we overlook the possibility that being Roman in Britain was the preserve of only a few? It’s always been hard to explain why Roman culture disappeared in the fifth century. All this high-visibility evidence really belongs to a very small proportion of the population, mostly soldiers, foreigners, and the indigenous tribal upper-class – in other words, only those with a stake in the Roman system of patronage where power and position were conferred as a reward for being “Roman”.
Coin depicting Britannia on the reverse, issued by Antoninus Pius in AD 143. (Guy de la Bédoyère)
Evidence from the military
A word of caution. Excavation and conservation techniques have advanced so far that now we have the celebrated Vindolanda writing tablets. They record the minutiae of everyday life in a Northumberland fort about a generation before Hadrian’s Wall was built. Vindolanda is a paradox. The preservation in waterlogged conditions of wooden writing tablets, and other perishable items, shows us that the Roman period was even more crowded with manufactured items and documentary records than the usual range of more durable artefacts like pottery suggests.
But Vindolanda is a military site. Roman military sites always produce more archaeological finds than anywhere else apart from towns. Although the Romans influenced our road layout, the location of some of our towns and left a few words behind, perhaps they had a minimal permanent effect on much of society.
On closer examination the archaeological evidence isn’t what it always seems. Let’s take the example of Roman inscriptions, invaluable items that give us unadulterated texts from antiquity – they name Celtic gods we’d never know about otherwise, date public buildings, name governors of the province, while tombstones name some of those millions of Roman Britons now lost to the ages like Claudia Crysis of Lincoln who died at the age of 90.
Inscriptions are evidence of Latin literacy in a completely Roman style, however provincial or clumsy the execution. Over two thousand survive in Britain. But this is tiny compared to most Roman provinces. The vast majority of them come from the military zone in the north and Wales. Only a few name anyone demonstrably British. Head off abroad to the rest of the Roman Empire and there’s scarcely a single instance of a Briton recorded there either. Yet in Britain we have inscriptions recording people from all over the Roman world.
Even in towns like London almost all the inscriptions we have name Roman officials, soldiers, their families or foreigners. Silchester or St Albans, which were never forts, have produced only a handful of inscriptions. So how much of all the rest of what we call Roman in Britain like Gaulish Samian ware had little or nothing to do with the millions of ordinary people? I don’t want to over-egg the pudding. Roman coins and pottery do turn up widely across Britain, even in modest rural farmsteads. But there’s a galactic difference in proportionate quality and quantity compared to what we find in forts and towns.
In the fourth century, 260 years after the invasion, the age of the wealthy villas really took off. Adopting a grand Roman tradition of rural splendour, Britain’s villa owners installed mosaics and other expensive comforts. The classical images they chose for their mosaics show that many were out to show they were Romanised. This hypothesis is supported by crucial numismatic evidence produced by a British-based rebel emperor called Carausius (AD 286–93) who quoted Virgil on his coins to show what a proper Roman he was. We don’t know who the villa-owners were, but many were probably the descendants of tribal leaders who accepted Roman patronage in return for their loyalty to Rome after the invasion.
But the villa owners, their families and attendants, could never have accounted for more than a tiny proportion of the rural population. Like the rich and elite of every era, and especially in the Roman period, they are simply far more visible in the archaeological record than everyone else. That’s what makes the disappearance of that way of life in the fifth century so difficult to explain. Unless we take the view that this high visibility was caused by only a small part of the population, in which case it might not take much to cause a dramatic change in the record.
This slab dedicating a stage is the only evidence that a theatre existed at Brough on Humber in the Roman period. The donor of the stage was probably a military veteran. (Guy de la Bédoyère)
Facing the apocalypse
The excavations at the fort of Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall, and the town of Wroxeter in Shropshire are usually feted for having uncovered evidence that a Roman way of life carried on amongst the decaying Roman buildings, with timber halls and other prestige structures being erected in these former key military and urban centres.
But those excavations have confirmed that the end of Roman Britain was genuinely apocalyptic, at least for the people who used those high-visibility Roman goods. The people living in those timber halls were unable or unwilling to repair or rebuild the stone structures, and had little or no access to coins and pottery. The end of taxation and the paying of soldiers meant that coinage disappeared, and as the whole economy crumbled so the whole financial system that could support lavish country villas went with it. In archaeological terms the effect is incredibly dramatic. It’s almost like a switch had been thrown. But perhaps most of the population, who’d never had much of a share in all this, continued to be as invisible to us as they’ve always been.
Why? Because Roman Britain was a phenomenon driven by a system and when that system fell apart many of the archaeological phenomena of what we know as Roman Britain went with it. In the beginning some of Britain’s tribal leaders saw Rome as a means to enhancing their own power and prestige. By adopting Roman ways that elite becomes more visible in the record available to us because Roman “things” just are more visible.
In the end some of Britain’s leaders continued to see Rome as the source of prestige and authority by which they sought to control their communities. But when Rome ceased either to be able to fulfil those expectations or to show any interest in doing so then the nature of power in Britain changed forever. As society fragmented, creating the building blocks for a different way of life based on regional kingdoms, patronage and power derived their strength from other sources or concepts.
The new post-Roman leaders defined themselves with different possessions and status symbols which happen to be relatively invisible, reflected in the lack of a material record easily available to us. It begs all sorts of questions about just how reliable the broader archaeological record is, especially when there isn’t any history to back it up.
Discovering Roman Britain: places to visit
A Roman town: Wroxeter
Known as Viroconium, Wroxeter was the fourth largest city in Roman Britain, and features impressive second-century municipal baths.
A Roman villa: Lullingstone
Mosaics, paintings, and fourth-century baths can still be seen at this Kent villa occupied for 300 years.
A Roman fort: Vindolanda
Near Hadrian’s Wall, the remains include Roman buildings and artefacts, and a Northumbrian croft.
A native village: Chysauster
Nine stone houses of an Iron Age village in Cornwall during the Roman period. Roman-style goods have been found, but its inhabitants were probably not dominated by the occupation unlike settlements further east.
Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian, archaeologist and broadcaster. He has written many books on Roman Britain and has appeared on Channel 4’s Time Team. He is the author of Roman Britain: A new history, published by Thames and Hudson.Google today is rolling out a change to its AMP integration in Google Search that will let you view, copy and share the publisher’s own link to the webpage in question, instead of the AMP URL. The decision to make this change follows some backlash from publishers who believed Google was stealing their traffic by changing their own URLs to those that had “Google” in the name, all in the name of mobile optimization.
Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), as you may recall, is Google’s project to speed up web browsing on mobile devices by offering optimized versions of publishers’ sites that aren’t bogged down by third-party scripts and other extension mechanisms that can slow or stop the page from rendering.
However, there has been some misunderstanding about how AMP works. One widely circulated blog post written back in October claimed Google was stealing traffic from publishers via its AMP pages. But that wasn’t true. Google does display the AMP URL in the search results, which serves up the page content from Google’s cache, but the traffic remains the publisher’s, and the content is served from the publisher’s site.
Still, there has been concern over this URL system.
The AMP URLs would redirect visitors to the publisher’s site as temporary redirects, not permanent ones, Search Engine Land explained last fall. Without support for direct links, some were worried that bookmarked URLs might stop working in the future, if Google made any changes. Plus, there was just general confusion from users over how to share the links. People would see the AMP URL in the address field, and they would not want to copy and paste it because it wasn’t the “real” link to the webpage.
As Google says today in a blog post announcing the change:
“URLs and origins represent, to some extent, trust and ownership of content. When you’re reading a New York Times article, a quick glimpse at the URL gives you a level of trust that what you’re reading represents the voice of the New York Times. Attribution, brand, and ownership are clear.”
Google AMP messed with that system.
Instead of one URL (the publisher’s), there were three. This includes the publisher’s URL, the AMP Cache URL – the document that’s served up through AMP’s cache, but generally invisible to users – and the Google AMP Viewer URL, which is the AMP URL you see in the search results.
Google goes on to detail why those design choices were made, citing ease-of-use for publishers as one example. The company also explains how it’s able to pre-render AMP documents in hidden iframes on the search results page in order to speed up the time it takes to load the link the user eventually clicks on. But this also means that the URLs users see have to be on the google.com origin.
To make users understand where the webpage content is actually coming from – that is, not Google – it pops up a header bar on the top of the page that will display the true origin of the page (e.g. “nytimes.com”).
But when a user wants to copy or share a webpage, they generally look to the address bar. Since this is showing a google.com address, it’s not the link people want to bookmark or share with others.
Now Google is adding a button to the header bar that will provide this info. This will display the publisher’s own permalink for the page in question. The feature allows users to use their browser’s native share functionality by long-tapping on this link, says Google.
The feature is already available in the iOS Google app and will roll out to the Android version in the coming weeks.
It also has under development a Web Share API that would allow AMP viewers to pull the original URL into the native sharing flow on the platform, instead of the AMP Viewer URL.
Working on a direct path from AMP pages loaded from Google Search to the canonical & sharing will use the canonical if technically possible. — Malte Ubl (@cramforce) November 4, 2016
Google had already indicated it was working on just such a solution, given both publisher backlash and user confusion. Now that it has come to pass, more publishers may choose to participate in AMP since their own links will no longer be entirely hidden.Thousands protest Iran vote in San Francisco San Francisco
Bahare Shabani from Houston Texas holds the Iranian flag as she joined several thousand who took part in a "Global Day of Action" at San Francisco Civic Center Plaza Saturday, July 25, 2009. Bahare Shabani from Houston Texas holds the Iranian flag as she joined several thousand who took part in a "Global Day of Action" at San Francisco Civic Center Plaza Saturday, July 25, 2009. Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close Thousands protest Iran vote in San Francisco 1 / 9 Back to Gallery
Thousands of demonstrators shouting "Free Iran" thronged San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza Saturday to show solidarity with Iranian protesters who have taken to the streets of Tehran for weeks to dispute the June 12 presidential election there.
"A turning point has been made," city Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, the first Iranian American elected to office in San Francisco, told the crowd. "This day is historic."
Mirkarimi, a main rally organizer, said the gathering and dozens like it around the globe Saturday marked the rise of a citizen diplomacy movement he compared to those that helped end the Cold War.
The rally is part of a global effort sparked by Firuzeh Mahmoudi, an Iranian American mother in Berkeley whose organizing through traditional channels and social networking sites fueled demonstrations in more than 105 cities from Amsterdam to Tokyo.
Mahmoudi, an environmental consultant on leave from United Nations work, said she was moved to act after watching online videos of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's violent crackdown on supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
One showed an unknown woman reciting a poem from a rooftop, calling to God for help.
"I just want that woman to know she's not alone," Mahmoudi said. "Seeing people, innocent people, being killed and beaten in broad daylight, one can only imagine what goes on behind prison walls."
Mirkarimi had already been organizing a San Francisco rally in support of democracy in Iran, and then melded it with the global day of action Mahmoudi sparked.
The crowd, with a cross section of ethnicities, ranged from infants in strollers to grandmothers waving pre-Islamic Revolution Iranian flags. The gathering filled the center promenade of the plaza between two rows of trees a block long and spilled out onto the grass on either side, where children frolicked. It was studded with people in green shirts and armbands - the color of the Iranian opposition.
One sign depicted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the disputed winner of the election, as Adolf Hitler. Organizers estimated the crowd at 10,000, which could not be confirmed. State Attorney General Jerry Brown and a host of city leaders spoke. Turaj Zaim, a 32-year-old San Francisco poet and musician, fled Iran with his mother when he was 6 years old. His father, Kourosh Zaim, an Iranian democracy advocate, was jailed after the recent election.
"International awareness," Zaim said, "seems to be the only pressure that is working on this regime."The NT has known about mistreatment of juveniles for years. So why has nothing happened?
Updated
ABC reporter Kate Wild has been covering the treatment of children in the NT juvenile justice system for years, from the gassing of children to the controversial use of restraint chairs. She explains why it has taken so long for politicians to take action.
There have been two very consistent responses from the Northern Territory Government over the years I've been covering this story.
The first has been 'nothing to see here, there are no problems, we're dealing with them, we're addressing them'.
But over the top of that response has always been this very strong message from NT Corrections Minister John Elferink, and to a lesser extent from NT Corrections boss Ken Middlebrook up until late last year, that we're not to feel too sorry for the young men in Don Dale because they are bad kids, tough kids, they've done terrible things to people in the community.
We can't forget that yes, these kids have broken into people's homes, they have stolen their cars, they have assaulted people, they have done some very serious things, some of them.
But the emphasis politically that has been put on the character of these kids and the bad behaviour of these kids has pushed a really, really strong law and order line in the Northern Territory to excuse any allegations or any reports of poor treatment of these kids in Don Dale.
There is a culture, and has always been a culture in the Northern Territory, that we're a long way from anywhere, that we don't have a lot of independent bodies outside of politics to keep an eye on things or to take action when poor behaviour or poor policy or overlooking important, serious issues happens.
There's no-one really in the Northern Territory to take action.
Because the Territory's a long way from anywhere, there's a culture of 'we'll ignore it, it will go away, the rest of the country's attention will turn somewhere else and we'll get on with what we always do'.
And so, as a journalist who has been working here for a while, it does get very difficult to be reporting on these things continually for years and to not see things change locally.
The Territory rocked to the core
While people in the Northern Territory have been aware of these stories and these incidents in Don Dale for a long time, seeing the pictures of them last night on Four Corners I know has rocked some people absolutely to the core.
Sorry, this video has expired Video: CCTV shows minor being gassed by prison guards (ABC News)
I had a phone call last night from a very senior bureaucrat who has worked in the Aboriginal medical space and the Aboriginal homecare space for a long time.
She was in tears, saying to me: "I can't believe that finally something's being done about this. I can't believe that the pictures that were shown on Four Corners last night are finally going to take the lid off this and something is happening and people are paying attention."
"I'm shocked, I don't know what to do. I'm just so grateful that something has finally happened."
This is a person who has seen and done it all and who has lived through the intervention, who has lived through a lot of difficult things in the Northern Territory, and her shock and her gratitude last night really said to me how big a deal this is and how big a change this might bring to the Territory.
Topics: community-and-society, youth, law-crime-and-justice, crime, darwin-0800, alice-springs-0870, nt, australia
First postedAs a biologist, I’ve learned that there are two related issues that are taboo for academics to discuss openly. The first is the issue of “races”—or genetic differences between human populations. Cultural anthropologists tell us that races are “social constructs.” Well, there’s a bit of truth in that, insofar as there is no finite number of races that can be unambiguously demarcated from each other. But there are genetic differences between groups, and clustering algorithms can divide populations into five or six fairly distinguishable groups corresponding to their geographic localities. Those differences in marker genes undoubtedly evolved via either genetic drift or natural selection in early human populations that were geographically isolated.
But the issue of whether there are genetically-based differences in behavior, physiology, mentation, and other non-physical attributes of populations is simply off the table. It’s not just that we shouldn’t investigate them (for one can make a case that such research might itself have invidious social consequences), but that those differences don’t exist. I’ve even heard people called “racists” by cultural anthropologists—one of the worst fields for ideologically motivated scholarship— simply for suggesting that there might be behavioral genetic differences between human groups. You can discuss the issue, but there’s only one position considered acceptable.
My own take is that the separation of human subgroups has been so recent that there hasn’t been a lot of time for extensive genetic differences to evolve, though clearly there’s been time for marked physical differences to evolve. And it’s clear that human intermixing, facilitated by transportation and increased mobility, will tend to efface all of these differences. But we shouldn’t assert that any trait beyond the most obvious physical differences between groups shows complete equality among them.
When it comes to the sexes, though, it’s a different matter. In the hominin lineage males and females have been coevolving (either cooperatively or antagonistically) for 6 million years or so—ample time for differences in behavior, wants, thought patterns, and so on to evolve, just as morphological differences between men and women have clearly evolved. Do those genetic differences in thought and behavior exist? I suspect they do, at least for traits connected to sexuality and sexual behavior. Just as animals ranging from flies to mammals show consistent (though not universal) patterns of male/female differences in sexual behavior—differences explainable by sexual selection—so I expect the human lineage evolved similar patterns. After all, males are larger and stronger than females, and you have to explain that somehow. How do you do so without explaining evolved differences in behavior—probably based on sexual selection?
Yet the idea that males and females show evolutionary/genetic differences in behavior is also anathema in liberal academia, and for the same reason that population differences are anathema. Such differences, so the thinking goes, would support either racism (on the part of populations) or sexism (on the part of males and females). But of course that thinking is false: we can accept evolved differences without turning them into social policy. And it’s of interest to many evolutionists, including me, to know the extent to which groups and sexes have evolved along divergent pathways.
Still, many feminists, liberals, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists deny any such divergence. Yes, men and women differ in body size, strength, and structure, but there are, so they say, no such differences in the brain and behavior. In all other traits, so the trope goes, men and women are equal. And given equal interests and talents, then the only thing enforcing anything other than a 50% representation of men and women in professions must be cultural pressures: viz., sexism. Thus, unequal representation in professions is prima facie evidence of sex discrimination. But as Jon Haidt mentioned in the lecture I posted the other day (watch the video; it’s good!), one first has to determine the cause of such unequal representation before one decides what to do about it.
At any rate, in the humanities and especially cultural anthropology, which in its ideological slant really counts as (sloppy) humanities rather than science, these attitudes are not only religious in nature, lacking empirical substantiation, but are also theological in enforcement. Authors (as I’ve pointed out recently) assume what they want to prove, and then go ahead and collect just those data that support their hypothesis. Confirmation bias is rife. This is what theologians do, not scientists.
The paper I’m highlighting today (link and free download below) is by Charlotta Stern, associate professor and deputy chair of the sociology department at Stockholm University. She is a brave woman, for her paper aims at calling out those sociologists who simply refuse to consider biology as an explanation of sex-distinguishing behaviors. As she says, not pulling her punches:
The present investigation is informed by my long and ongoing experience as a sociologist at Stockholm University. My teaching and research often touch on gender issues. I have served on about five thesis committees that addressed gender sociology or related matters, and I have participated in dozens of seminars that touch on gender sociology. My relationships with my colleagues and students are not heated. When I raise ideas that would challenge the sacred beliefs, I do so only at the edges. I have seen how people react when I or another suggests that maybe there is a difference in math skills between men and women, or that men and women have different preferences and motivations. In my experience, gender sociologists frown upon such remarks about innate differences in aptitude or motivations. I perceive deep and widespread taboo and insularity among gender sociologists. It saddens me. I feel impelled to make available some expression of my concern, hoping that students and others will hear it before sinking into the sacred beliefs and sacred causes addressed here. Her method was simple, and somewhat subjective. She examined a set of 23 highly-cited articles in sociology journals, all of which cite a classic paper in the field, “Doing gender,” by Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987); reference and free link below). West and Zimmer concluded (or decided in advance) that behavioral and non-physical differences between men and women were “constructed” based on their genitalia, so that all differences we observe in later life are the result of socialization. As Stern notes, “Doing gender” is presented as part of a lamentable system of social control. The paper’s final para- graph reads: “Gender is a powerful ideological device, which produces, reproduces, and legitimates the choices and limits that are predicated on sex category. An understanding of how gender is produced in social situations will afford clarification of the interactional scaffolding of social structure and the social control processes that sustain it. (West and Zimmerman 1987, 147).” Stern examined 23 highly-cited sociology papers published between 2004 and 2014 (two per year) that themselves cited West and Zimmer’s influential paper. Then, developing a spreadsheet, she coded each of the articles as whether or not they took the hypothesis of biological differences between men and women as a serious possibility. Her classification was as follows:
Neutral. Discussions of gender differnces but no discussion of their biological bases, nor dismissal of them. (4 articles).
Blinkered. These are the articles in which, according to Stern, biological differences are relevant hypotheses, but are either ignored or dismissed out of hand (15 articles).
Unblinkered. Stern found only one article that considered biology as a possible explanation for sex differences in things like time spent with children, savings for education, and other “family processes.” Stern says the article has a “nuanced discussion of causality.”
Not rated. These articles “do not deal with matters for which biological difference ideas would clearly be relevant.” Four articles.
Here is Stern’s list of the articles and their ratings:
Now of course you can debate Stern’s methods and assessments, but what’s clear even without this analysis is that it’s taboo in much of academia to suggest that measurable differences between populations or sexes (excluding the most obvious physical differences) have any biological basis. But there should be no taboos in academics. One can debate the wisdom of investigating some questions (e.g., “Are Jews genetically acquisitive?”), but what one should not do is assume what’s true before investigating it. And, as Jon Haidt noted, if you don’t know the empirical basis for differences that are considered problematic (such as the underrepresentation of women in mathematics), you’re hampered from addressing them.
Stern’s conclusion is low key (my emphasis):
One cannot draw quantitative estimates on the basis of my investigation, but its findings are consistent with an image of gender sociology as a subfield that has insulated its sacred beliefs from important scientific challenges.
I have extensive first-hand experience with gender sociology’s insularity. But I also know of pervasive preference falsification (Kuran 1995), and I have seen students awaken with an ‘a-ha!’ moment when exposed to unorthodox thinkers such as Catherine Hakim (1995; 2000; 2008). I believe reform is possible. Whether people should ‘do gender’ less, and how they should ‘do gender,’ are questions worthy of personal reflection, scholarly exploration, and public discourse. More definite, to my mind, is that people should do less insularity.
h/t: Grania
____________
Stern, Charlotta. 2016. Undoing insularity: A small study of gender sociology’s big problem |
.[5] Originally meant as a psychological assessment of how one approaches a question with more than one "right" answer, the problem has produced a number of alternate explanations, from the pragmatic ("Manhole covers are round because manholes are round.")[5] to the philosophical. For other uses of terms redirecting here, see US (disambiguation), USA (disambiguation), and United States (disambiguation) Motto In God We Trust(since 1956) (From Many, One; Latin, traditional) Anthem The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington, D.C. Largest city New York City National language English (de facto)1 Demonym American... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44....
Reasons for the shape include:
A round manhole cover cannot fall through its circular opening, whereas a square manhole cover may fall in if it were inserted diagonally in the aperture (A Reuleaux triangle or other curve of constant width would also serve this purpose, but round covers are much easier to manufacture.)
Round tubes are the strongest and most material-efficient shape against the compression of the earth around them, and so it is natural that the cover of a round tube assume a circular shape.
The bearing surfaces of manhole frames and covers are machined to assure flatness and prevent them from becoming dislodged by traffic. Round castings are much easier to machine using horizontal boring mills.
Circular covers do not need to be rotated to align them when covering a circular manhole.
Human beings have a roughly circular cross-section.
A round manhole cover can be more easily moved by being rolled.
If an automobile rolls over a dislodged manhole of another shape, the sharp corners could puncture the automobile's tire, whereas a circle doesn't have corners.
It's easier to dig a circular hole.
Tradition
Aesthetics
Supply. Most manhole covers are made by a few large companies. If you want a different shape, you will have to pay more to have them custom-made or you will have to make them yourself.
Other manhole shapes can be found, usually squares or rectangles. Nashua, New Hampshire may be unique in the U.S. for having triangular manhole covers that point in the direction of the underlying flow. The city is phasing out the triangles, which were made by a local foundry, because they are not large enough to meet modern safety standards, and larger triangles cannot be found. [1] The Reuleaux triangle is a constant width curve based on an equilateral triangle.... For closed convex planar bodies whose boundary is a smooth curve, one notes that there are exactly two parallel tangent lines to the boundary curve in any given direction.... Nickname: Gate City Location in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire Coordinates: Country United States State New Hampshire County Hillsborough Incorporated 1746 Government - Mayor Bernard A. Streeter Area - City 31.... A foundry is a factory which produces castings of metal, both ferrous and non-ferrous....
Can a race car lift a manhole cover?
Modern racing cars create so much vacuum due to their aerodynamics that they can lift a manhole cover off the ground. During races on city streets, the manhole covers must therefore be welded down to prevent injury. In 1990, during the Group C World Sportscar Championship race in Montreal, racer Jésus Pareja's car struck a manhole cover that was lifted by the ground effect of the car he was following, causing his car to catch fire.[6] Auto racing (also known as automobile racing or autosport) is a sport involving racing automobiles.... Look up Vacuum in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.... The 1990 World Sportscar Championship season was the 38th FIA World Sports-Prototype Championship season.... Group C was a category of auto racing, and was introduced into sports car racing by the FIA (the governing body of World motor racing) during the early 1980s.... The World Sportscar Championship was a series run by the FIA from 1953 to 1992.... Nickname: Motto: Concordia Salus (well-being through harmony) Coordinates:, Country Province Region Montréal Founded 1642 Established 1832 Government - Mayor Gérald Tremblay Area [1][2][3] - City 365.... Ground effect is an aerodynamic effect used in car design, which has been exploited to create downforce, particularly in racing cars....
The first nuclear propelled manmade object in space?
According to urban legend, a manhole cover was accidentally launched from its shaft during an underground nuclear test in the 1950s, at great enough speed to achieve escape velocity. The myth is based on a real incident during the Operation Plumbbob nuclear tests, where a heavy (900 kg) steel plate cap was blasted off the test shaft at an unknown velocity, and appears as a blur on a single frame of film of the test, and was never recovered. A calculation before the event gave a predicted speed of 6 times Earth escape velocity, but the calculation is unlikely to have been accurate and they did not believe that it would leave the Earth in reality. After the event, Dr. Robert R. Brownlee described the best estimate of the cover's speed from the photographic evidence as "going like a bat!!"[7] [8] For other uses, see Urban legend (disambiguation).... The 1950s decade refers to the years of 1950 to 1959 inclusive.... For other senses of this term, see escape velocity (disambiguation).... The Smoky shot of Operation Plumbbob.... For other senses of this term, see escape velocity (disambiguation)....
This incident was used as part of the technical justification for the Orion project.'An artists conception of the NASA reference design for the Project Orion spacecraft powered by nuclear propulsion....
See also
.... A public utility is a company that maintains the infrastructure for a public service.... Storm drain in use A storm drain, storm sewer, stormwater drain (Australia and New Zealand) or surface water system (UK) is designed to drain excess rain and ground water from paved streets, parking lots, sidewalks, and roofs.... For the art of stitching, see Sewing.... For the series of murder mystery novels, see SPQR series....
References
Printed references:
Melnick, Mimi (1994). Manhole Covers, MIT Press, USA. ISBN 0-262-13302-4
, MIT Press, USA. ISBN 0-262-13302-4 Stuart, Diana (2003). Designs Underfoot: The Art of Manhole Covers in New York City, The Lyons Press, USA. ISBN 1-58574-639-8
, The Lyons Press, USA. ISBN 1-58574-639-8 Raymond, Douglas (2007). Transylvanian Street Metal, http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/77885
External links
Manhole covers Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
This article does not cite any references or sources....NEW YORK (Reuters) - For anyone who believes crime doesn’t pay, tell that to the New York state legislator who introduced a “Madoff” bill on Monday. Rich New Yorkers convicted of crimes would be forced — if his bill becomes law — to pay the state and federal governments for how much it costs to keep them in jail.
Prisoners place their hands on a wall as they are brought to jail by Orange County sheriff's deputies in Fullerton, California, June 23, 2009. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
The bill’s moniker is a nod to Bernard Madoff, who began serving a 150-year prison sentence last week in a federal prison in North Carolina for running a Ponzi scheme considered to be Wall Street’s biggest investment fraud. Before his arrest in December, Madoff had lived a life of luxury with a Park Avenue penthouse apartment and luxury homes in other glamorous locales, as well as yachts, designer clothes and collectible watches with eye-popping price tags.
“Far too often, taxpayers are stuck with the bill for criminals who have extensive personal wealth waiting for them once they are discharged from our state’s penal system,” Republican Assemblyman Jim Tedisco said in a statement.
Like many states, New York has looked at various ways of driving drive down the cost of keeping people in jail.
NEW YORK ON $90 A DAY
The state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, a Democrat, estimated in 2007 that it costs the counties around $1 billion a year, based on daily costs of $80 to $90 a day for each inmate.
Though federal prosecutors sought to strip Madoff of all of his assets before he went to prison, Tedisco told Reuters that his bill would force drug dealers and other high-profile people who serve jail time to pay for their prison upkeep.
If such a law had been in effect at the time, it could have targeted such wealthy inmates as Martha Stewart, the lifestyle guru who was sentenced to five months in prison in 2004 for lying to investigators about a stock trade, and Leona Helmsley, the high-end hotelier who was sentenced to prison in 1989 for tax evasion. Helmsley’s prison sentence was reduced to four years, but she only served about a year and a half.
Tedisco said the need for his bill was demonstrated by “an incident in lower Manhattan’s Tombs prison,” a reference to an inmate’s costly bar mitzvah that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said the city is investigating.
A sliding scale would determine how much convicts would have to pay, based on their assets, under Tedisco’s bill. Those who are worth $200,000 or more would pay the entire tab, while those whose net worth is $40,000 or less would pay nothing.
Convicts’ homes “or any equity found in it” would not be counted in determining their assets nor would their mortgage payments, tax bills or payments for child or spousal support, Tedisco said. The idea, Tedisco said, is not to punish the convict’s family, and in particular, it is not meant to deprive an inmate’s children of a home or parental support.itmeJP Profile Joined February 2010 United States 1101 Posts Last Edited: 2010-09-28 16:32:14 #1 UPDATE #5: On September 24 2010 02:17 MLG Deimos wrote:
Seeding for Washington DC will be done in the following manner:
Players will be seeded using SC2 Pro Circuit Rank Points. Ties will be broken randomly. Players with no SC2 Rank Points will be seeded randomly. No Players will have SC2 Rank Points until the Washington D.C. Competition.
The top 32 players from the Raleigh event will have Pro Rank Points based on their final placing in Raleigh. So, the top 32 will be seeded according to the amount of Pro Rank Points they have. The other 32 players will be seeded randomly.
Rank Points: Players will be seeded using SC2 Pro Circuit Rank Points. Ties will be broken randomly. Players with no SC2 Rank Points will be seeded randomly. No Players will have SC2 Rank Points until the Washington D.C. Competition.The top 32 players from the Raleigh event will have Pro Rank Points based on their final placing in Raleigh. So, the top 32 will be seeded according to the amount of Pro Rank Points they have. The other 32 players will be seeded randomly.Rank Points: http://pro-circuit.mlgpro.com/pro-circuit/2010/washington-dc/starcraft-2-1v1/rank-points
UPDATE(S) #4: Players must bring their own mouse, keyboard, headsets, and mouse pad. Players must use the PC and Monitor provided by MLG.
Players must bring their own mouse, keyboard, headsets, and mouse pad. Players must use the PC and Monitor provided by MLG. On September 23 2010 20:50 MLG Deimos wrote:
We were able to talk to the hotel to get you more time and they have extended the deadline by a week.
The deadline for booking a room at MLG's discounted rate is September 29: only a week away. Space is limited and we will not be able to extend the deadline. Be sure to book yourself a room now, before they are gone, and we'll see you in DC!
Hotel Info
Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center
201 Waterfront Street
National Harbor, MD 20745
Rate: $189 + $15 Resort Fee per night.
(One night's deposit will be charged by the hotel at the time of reservation.)
Deadline: September 29th 2010
Reservation phone: 301-965-4000 and say you are with Major League Gaming
Your headset has to meet the following criteria:
Headsets must utilize a standard 3.5mm stereo headset jack with a separate 3.5mm microphone jack. Players may not use USB headsets.
UPDATE #3: On September 21 2010 19:29 MLG Deimos wrote:
TO EVERYBODY, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING RULES REGARDING EQUIPMENT:
Players must bring their own mouse, keyboard, headsets, and mouse pad. Players must use the PC and Monitor provided by MLG.
Headsets must utilize a standard 3.5mm stereo headset jack with a separate 3.5mm microphone jack. Players may not use USB headsets.
Mice and keyboards must utilize standard USB interfaces. Players may not use PS2 interface equipment.
All Players must submit their mouse, keyboard, and headset driver requirements by 11:59 PM ET on Monday, October 11th. No drivers, that have not been previously submitted, will be installed at the Washington D.C. Competition.
All Player equipment is subject to approval.
Players may not use 3rd party Add-ons.
Keyboards and mice must have USB inputs. PS2s are NOT allowed. PS2>USB adapters are NOT permitted. NO EXCEPTIONS TO EVERYBODY, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING RULES REGARDING EQUIPMENT:
UPDATE #2: We have single digit spots we are unable to fill by invites so we are opening them up to PM submission here on TeamLiquid. If you are interested in attending MLG DC, please PM me the following:
Subject: MLG DC Invite
Name:
Handle:
Bnet ID and Character Code:
E-mail:
MLGPro Username:
Race:
ELO:
Accomplishments:
If your PM does not match the prior criteria (both format, subject, and information) I WILL NOT OPEN IT. Thanks!
UPDATE: Earlier tonight an error on the MLGPro website occurred that was unable to be known about beforehand. The passes went on sale and they sold out so fast that by the time the problem was found, the passes were already "sold out," but we were supposed to have sold 15 more.
To be fair to everyone that was attempting to buy a pass, the last 15 passes were not added afterwards. The rest of these 15 passes are going to be sold tomorrow at Your headset has to meet the following criteria:Headsets must utilize a standard 3.5mm stereo headset jack with a separate 3.5mm microphone jack. Players may not use USB headsets.We have single digit spots we are unable to fill by invites so we are opening them up to PM submission here on TeamLiquid. If you are interested in attending MLG DC, please PM me the following:Subject: MLG DC InviteName:Handle:Bnet ID and Character Code:E-mail:MLGPro Username:Race:ELO:Accomplishments:If your PM does not match the prior criteria (both format, subject, and information)Thanks!Earlier tonight an error on the MLGPro website occurred that was unable to be known about beforehand. The passes went on sale and they sold out so fast that by the time the problem was found, the passes were already "sold out," but we were supposed to have sold 15 more.To be fair to everyone that was attempting to buy a pass, the last 15 passes were not added afterwards. The rest of these 15 passes are going to be sold tomorrow at 23:00 GMT (+00:00) (Wednesday) for $60. Nothing is changing with the tournament structure.
Just a reminder to the TeamLiquid.net community: MLG D.C. Passes will be going on sale September 14, 2010, (this upcoming Tuesday) at 23:00 GMT (+00:00).
Thirty-two (32) passes will be available for purchase ($60 per pass for one player) so if you're wanting to show your stuff at MLG in Washington DC on October 15-17th and battle it out for part of that $7000 prize pool, make sure to buy your pass ASAP because these will go very fast. It should be noted that the Top 16 teams from MLG Raleigh will receive reserved passes for this Competition.
If you have any questions regarding anything about the event feel free to post in this thread and I'll do my best to answer it. Please do not turn this thread into a 'invite-only vs. open registration' thread. If it gets that way I will ask TL.net to close it.
The link to purchase the pass can be found
The venue for the event will be the:
The three Airports closest to the venue: BWI (Baltimore),
IAD (Dulles),
Reagan (DCA) The hotel is a 15-minute drive from Reagan National Airport and within a 45-minute drive from both Dulles and Baltimore Washington International Airports.
Transportation from Airport:
Super Shuttle services all three airports. Rates and more are available here. Parking $5.00 for first hour
$12.00 for 0-3 hours self parking
$19.00 per day self parking/overnight
$17.00 for 0-3 hours valet parking
$28.00 per day valet parking/overnight If you simply wish to come and see the event for yourself, (Wednesday) for $60. Nothing is changing with the tournament structure.Just a reminder to the TeamLiquid.net community:Thirty-two (32) passes will be available for purchase ($60 per pass for one player) so if you're wanting to show your stuff at MLG in Washington DC on October 15-17th and battle it out for part of that $7000 prize pool, make sure to buy your pass ASAP because these will go very fast. It should be noted that the Top 16 teams from MLG Raleigh will receive reserved passes for this Competition.If you have any questions regarding anything about the event feel free to post in this thread and I'll do my best to answer it. Please do not turn this thread into a 'invite-only vs. open registration' thread. If it gets that way I will ask TL.net to close it.The link to purchase the pass can be found HERE The venue for the event will be the: Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. Rates begin at $189 + $15 Resort Fee per night and the deadline is September 22nd 2010. The reservation phone number is 301-965-4000. If the Gaylord fills up a secondary hotel should be opened.The hotel is a 15-minute drive from Reagan National Airport and within a 45-minute drive from both Dulles and Baltimore Washington International Airports.If you simply wish to come and see the event for yourself, spectator passes are FREE. Sorry for the confusion.
Thanks everyone!
. Sorry for the confusion.Thanks everyone! On September 15 2010 18:32 MLG Deimos wrote:
So since my thread was closed, just wanted to post this here since this was a popular question for those needing to make travel arrangements to DC.
StarCraft 2 will be played on Friday and Saturday in DC. There will not be play on Sunday.
Twitter.com/itmeJP -- Twitch.tv/itmeJP -- YouTube.com/itmeJPOakland Raiders running back Marshawn Lynch sits on a cooler during the national anthem before an away game against the Miami Dolphins at Hard Rock Stadium on Nov. 5. (Jasen Vinlove/USA Today Sports)
President Trump expanded his attack on the patriotism of protesting NFL athletes by introducing a new topic into the conversation: Mexico.
Since his attacks on NFL players intensified while he was campaigning for the Alabama Senate race, Trump has tried to paint the athletes as disloyal to America — and, just as important, to American citizens.
A frequent pivot of the president's was to focus on how disrespectful he thinks the protests are to veterans and soldiers.
Very important that NFL players STAND tomorrow, and always, for the playing of our National Anthem. Respect our Flag and our Country! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017
But in the past month or so, the sincerity of Trump's commitment to soldiers and veterans has been called into question, given some of his recent actions and policy decisions.
The president's much-criticized response to the deaths of four U.S. soldiers in Niger led some Americans to conclude that Trump uses the military as a weapon against political opponents, be they transgender Americans, undocumented immigrants or athletes.
A federal judge said this month that Trump’s proposed transgender military ban stigmatizes an entire group of people and probably is already having a negative effect on active-duty service members trying to plan for future military assignments.
And The Post's Monkey Cage wrote about a recent Military Times poll that claimed that “although active-duty service members support Trump slightly more than civilians do — though not by much — more than half of the officer corps sees him unfavorably.”
And an increasing number of veterans refuse to allow themselves to be pitted against athletes protesting racism.
My grandpa is a 97 year-old WWII vet & Missouri farmer who wanted to join w/ those who #TakeaKnee: "those kids have every right to protest." pic.twitter.com/LurCj7SLUB — Brennan Gilmore (@brennanmgilmore) September 24, 2017
But in his most recent comments wading into the NFL protests discussion, Trump attempted to cast the patriotism of one frequent critic of his into question by suggesting that he is more loyal to Mexico than to the United States.
In an early-morning tweet Monday, the president wrote: “Marshawn Lynch of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders stands for the Mexican Anthem and sits down to boos for our national anthem. Great disrespect! Next time NFL should suspend him for remainder of season. Attendance and ratings way down.”
Marshawn Lynch of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders stands for the Mexican Anthem and sits down to boos for our National Anthem. Great disrespect! Next time NFL should suspend him for remainder of season. Attendance and ratings way down. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2017
From the day Trump launched his presidential run, he sought to portray Mexico as a threat to America's safety.
He said:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
And on multiple occasions since that day more than two years ago, when Trump wants to talk about making the United States safe from criminal activity, he points to Mexico.
With Mexico being one of the highest crime Nations in the world, we must have THE WALL. Mexico will pay for it through reimbursement/other. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2017
Or when he wants to address drug-trafficking and related crimes.
Mexico was just ranked the second deadliest country in the world, after only Syria. Drug trade is largely the cause. We will BUILD THE WALL! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2017
Or even when he wants to talk about the harm done to the U.S. economy.
Mexico has taken advantage of the U.S. for long enough. Massive trade deficits & little help on the very weak border must change, NOW! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 27, 2017
Trump has not gone on the record to seriously engage the concerns of the athletes who have repeatedly described the reasons behind their protest. But for some of his supporters, the president doesn't have to. Multiple polls show that support for the protests are low among many Americans.
So is Trump's overall approval rating. But in a news cycle highlighting the expanding investigation into the relationship between Russia and the Trump campaign, most Americans' belief that the GOP tax plan only benefits the wealthy, and Trump's continued support for a GOP Senate candidate accused of sexually assaulting minors, appealing to the “cultural anxiety” of his base may be the president's effort to win some favorability points with his supporters.By Caroline Burlingham Ellis
On May 15, Acton’s Pedal Power joined members of the Concord-based Monsters in the Basement bicycling club to share their bike-repair expertise with young people at Lowell’s UTEC, who wanted to acquire bikes and learn to maintain them.
As Concord resident and UTEC director of Special Projects Dan Holin put it, the community event would give UTEC young people two basic things they need: “transportation and fun. Bicycles can provide both.”
UTEC is a nonprofit that helps young people from Lowell and Lawrence trade violence and poverty for social and economic success. It works to remove barriers that confront them when they want to turn their lives around and offers young people paid work experience through UTEC’s social enterprises: mattress recycling, food services and woodworking. Some of the youth need bikes to get to work on time but can’t afford one or don’t know how to do repairs when there’s a problem.
Monsters in the Basement is community bicycling with over 500 members, four different speed groups and rides departing almost daily during the riding season. The club is also completely volunteer run.
“We wanted to experiment by taking the club’s spirit of volunteerism to support a local community cause,” said Tom Farnsworth, a Monster mechanic who participated in the day. Club members donated thousands of dollars worth bikes, accessories, clothing and expertise.
Joyce Reischutz, owner of the 41-year-old, family-run Pedal Power, believes in doing community work and is helping four charities this month alone.
On Sunday, Reischutz came to Lowell with two of her master mechanics, Malen Anderson and Dan Hurley, bringing along donated and traded-in bicycles and plenty of bike parts and gear.
“I put out a call for bikes on our email list and got 20 bikes right away,” Reischutz said. “People are just generous. That’s all there is to it.”
Among the UTEC young people fixing bikes Sunday was Leeno. He first learned about UTEC from its “streetworkers.”
“They wander around places like Lowell High and talk to kids,” he said. He liked what they told him about getting training with a stipend and joined UTEC in December 2015. Within two months, he had passed the HiSET, a high school equivalency program, and earned his ServSafe Food Handler certificate. Sinlong now works in UTEC’s wood shop, helping to fill Whole Foods Market orders for chopping boards and stands that can display barbecue sauces. His goal is to be a cabinet builder.
Devlin “Sav” had his own story of change.
“Before UTEC I never talked to anyone. I was a problem child on the streets,” he said. “I was hanging around with gangs, selling drugs. I don’t do that now. I let my family know I’m ready to live life. It was hard for me to get into something good. I’ve got a lot of tattoos and a record. But I’m in the culinary program here. It’s a family. They make you feel like you are somebody that has a chance. They give me love like a family. They changed my life for the better. There are so many new things to do here. Yesterday I went kayaking.”
Marcos was also at the event, and he got a kick out of donning all the gear— helmet and biking shorts included. He said he was invited to join the nonprofit by UTEC Streetworkers who visited the jail where he had been incarcerated. “I wanted to change my life around. I’m in the woodworking program. Someday, I’d like to be an EMT,” he said.
Taina chose a bike for herself. She said she originally came to UTEC because of a streetworker. A member for eight months so far, she said, “I like everything. The people became my family. We’re so close to each other. It’s been really positive. Changed my attitude. Someday I want to be a streetworker and work with young women in jail.”
Every weekday morning at 9 a.m., “The Eye of the Tiger” is piped on the public address system in UTEC’s renovated church headquarters (a LEED Platinum-certified green building). The upbeat song calls staff and young people together to start the day.
The positive vibes are reinforced around the building. On one wall are motivational words that begin, “UTEC is a family. We assume goodness behind everyone’s actions.” A giant mural in the auditorium reads, “Trading violence for social and economic success. Peace, positivity, empowerment.” Pictured in the artwork are Lowell streets and buildings, a streetworker talking at night to worried-looking kid with a rip in his jeans. The painting also shows young people learning skills, pursuing arts and music, carrying placards and influencing policy at the statehouse—all UTEC activities.
Giving back at UTEC is rewarding for both staff and volunteers. As Holin points out, “There is a suburban-urban divide, but we are geographically so close. You can see from the people who came to help today, there’s an incredible amount of good will and expertise right next door. It’s crazy not to put them together. These young people are so motivated to improve their lives. Look at how they are showing up on a Sunday morning.”
Monster volunteer and software professional Mark Longwell, who bikes 15,000 to 16,000 miles a year, agreed that helping the kids learn about bikes is rewarding. “I grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, I’ve seen the effects of rundown cities on youth. Having a bike is freedom to these guys. Today they are working to fix bikes, and then they get a bike. They earn it.”
At a desk near the building exit sat Michael Tucker, an AmeriCorps volunteer at UTEC who said he is usually in UTEC’s Lawrence warehouse, where the mattresses for recycling are collected.
“The kids start there. I get to see them first,” he said. He has loved his AmeriCorps service year. When it is over, he plans to return to his home state and look for someplace like UTEC. “UTEC needs to be everywhere,” he said. “But there’s nothing like it. Can you imagine? They just sent us on a weekend retreat. What other youth organization would do that?”
Getting to hear the stories of UTEC colleagues and kids was what Tucker wanted to convey about the retreat. He was so focused on the interpersonal bonding, he didn’t even mention that the getaway weekend was spent on Cape Cod.About
Earlier this year the world has spun out of control into the newest craze, the hand spinner, a fidgeting toy that everyone needed, wanted and couldn’t get enough of. We knew right away what had to be done, we needed to make it tech! So we took our most fidgetiest of fidgeters and put them to work. Once we went to the drawing board it all started to come together. Portable memory, additional USB ports and sharing audio in the form of a hand spinner - Fidget Tech™ was born!
Our goal is to bring these products directly to the consumers, so we decided to join the Kickstarter community. Select from any of our 3 favorite designs; the Fidget Drive (USB Portable Storage), Audio Spinner (2 port splitter) and our USB Fidget Hub (a dual port USB Hub). Go ahead and Get Fidget with it!
"When we first got our hands on fidget spinners, we fell in love. It was only a matter of time before we put our own Spin on it" - Issac Kopolovitz (CMO)
The Fidget Tech™ USB Flash drive combines what you want with what you need! This hand spinner features built-in memory for saving files, music, movies, photos and more. Put stress at bay by distracting your thoughts and focusing them on an incredibly calming fun fidgeting gadget by DE world.
The Fidget Tech™ Dual Port 3.5mm Audio Splitter combines the fun fidgeting spinner with your audio needs! This hand spinner features two extra audio ports for transforming any single 3.5mm connection into two. So go ahead and share your audio, great for road trips, traveling or just kicking it with friends!
The Fidget Tech™ Dual Port USB Hub features two extra USB ports for transforming any single connection into two. Great for adding more ports to any computer / laptop or any other USB connection. Never get stuck without enough ports to plug into!
Designed with your hand in mind!
Sometimes we get bored and when we get bored we tend to fidget, these 3 sided hand spinners are the perfect solution. Small and compact, fits in your pocket, purse, or bag. Take these spinners with you anywhere.What you'll save on petrol, what you'll spend on servicing - and what's the deal with replacing the batteries?
Hundreds of Australians lined up outside Tesla stores last week, ready to place a $1500 deposit on the latest addition to the range, the Model 3 – a car they hadn't even seen. Some blindly ordered the car because they have faith Tesla will show them what they want. Others want to be early adopters of the first electric car designed for the masses to reach Australia.
Tesla revealed the Model 3 more than a day later, on Friday 1 April. Unlike the Model S, which has a prohibitive starting price of around $130,000, the third generation Tesla will be much more affordable; reports suggest the local price will be around $60,000. Within less than 24 hours, more than 180,000 orders had been placed globally, according to Elon Musk, the company's chief executive and founder.
Many will justify paying a little more for a Model 3 because buying an electric car eliminates the cost of petrol. The base variant is expected to hold charge for 346 kilometres and accelerate to 100km in less than six seconds. But will the maths hold up?
No petrol? How much will I save?
Lining the underside of the Model 3 is a floor filled with batteries. Driving 346km off a single charge is possible – theoretically. But in the real world, with human error and variables such as wind speeds, the practical range is expected to be less.
Tesla has remained tight lipped on the details of the Model 3. Without knowing the specifics, any estimates of its running cost will be vague. A closer look at its sibling, the Tesla Model S, can provide some insight into how much money an electric vehicle can save.
The Tesla calculator can be used to figure out how much it will cost to top up a charging Tesla. The data it asks for includes your hourly cost of electricity, the distance travelled per day and what kind of outlet is used.
CHOICE surveyed Australian energy resellers in August 2015 and found the average price of electricity to be 25 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), while research conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals the average Australian drives 40km per day.
When the battery of a Tesla is replenished, the charge is switched off so that only what is needed is used. Topping up the charge of a Model S, then, would take 51 minutes and use 8.3kWh for a cost of $2.06 a night.
Separating Tesla from every other car brand is its network of Supercharger stations. These charging stations can replenish 80% of a Tesla's charge in 40 minutes. Supercharger stations are free, and owners will likely make use of them once per week, when possible.
For example, let's say an owner tops up their car at home six nights a week and makes use of a Supercharger station on the seventh. This would cost $12.36 a week for up to 280km of driving, or over a year, $642.72 for more than 14,500km. Households with solar panels will likely pay less.
The Tesla Model 3 is comparable to Audi's similarly sized A4 sedan. The 2.0 TFSI variant uses 7.5L of petrol for every hundred kilometres travelled – a figure calculated based on the car's performance in Audi's testing facilities. NRMA's most recent petrol report cites an average cost of 109.9 cents per litre. Driving 280km a week in the Audi would cost $23.08, or $1200.11 over a year.
So the switch to the electric Model S represents a 46% saving of $557.40 a year. This provides some context on the kind of savings we can expect from its mass produced sibling, the Model 3.
Competitive servicing – until the battery needs replacing
Contrary to popular belief, servicing an electric vehicle is not cheaper than a petrol alternative. Pricing is best described as competitive – even though electric vehicles do not have a mechanical engine – right up until the batteries powering them need to be replaced.
Let's compare the servicing plans for a new Audi A4, a BMW 3 series and a Tesla Model S.
The Audi plan is priced at $1620, covering three years or a distance of 45,000km, for a yearly average cost of $540.
The BMW basic plan is priced at $1340, covering five years or a distance of 80,000km, for a yearly average cost of $268.
The Tesla plan is priced at $1525, covering a distance of 60,000km, for a yearly cost of $508.
Replacement costs for lithium ion batteries in an electric car raise concerns on account of high pricing and a short lifespan. Any smartphone user will notice that the performance of their phone's battery will deplete over time; the same degradation is anticipated in the batteries powering Tesla's cars. A loss of 30% could be expected after ten years of inefficient use, said Heath Walker, the head of marketing and communications of Tesla Australia.
Tesla Australia has never confirmed how much it will cost to replace a degrading battery pack. However, Tesla's global website estimates replacing a Model S 85's battery to be $US12,000 ($AU15,799). The company is banking on the cost depreciating within eight years, which is when the warranty provided for the batteries expires. Helping drive this cost down will be its Gigafactory, a manufacturing |
, under the very altar of the Lord’s Supper, in the hearing of Saints who assemble to worship God, and spit out their venom, or make ridicule of everything that we hold sacred.
But the most despicable characters are the overly righteous souls, who are filled with such holy horror at the mention of “Mormon” polygamy, and are the ones whom we look upon with suspicion, and set them down as among the most corrupt of hypocrites. It is through their paintings and misrepresentations that those at a distance join in the cry of the hunters and the hounds, for no other reason only because they see others do it. Many who are among us (for self-interest or jealousy) keep up the hue and cry about the dreaded “Mormons” who are spreading over these territories, etc., till their ignorant dupes might easily suppose that this people, who sought refuge in the Rocky Mountains, were preparing to swallow them up at one mouthful; and more than likely take in the whole planet.
If everybody had been as much concerned and interested in their own affairs, and attended as strictly to them, as have their far off peaceable neighbors (who believe in and practice the principle of “minding their own business”), they might possibly have kept their own gardens from being overrun with those rank weeds and briars, the thorns of which will yet tear and pierce their tender flesh till they are reminded of the innocent blood which they have caused to be shed, and of the tears of the widow and the fatherless and the oppressed exiles, who patiently endured long years of poverty and suffering, brought upon us in consequence of their cruel and wicked and falsehoods. It would be well for them if they would stop and reflect a little, and instead of shutting their eyes and ears listen to the voice of truth, and let common sense and reason govern them instead of that “green-eyed monster,” that fills their mouths with lying words, and “Slander, the foulest whelp of sin.” It was this that caused Cain to slay his righteous brother, Abel, and the Jews to hate and crucify the Savior, and to kill the apostles and prophets, because they would not forsake their religion; and as they have severely felt the result of it, so is this nation now feeling the scourging hand of the Almighty.
Woman’s Exponent, vol. 10, no. 13,
1 December 1881, pp. 97–99
As Rogers (author of “Pleasures of Memory”) says, “He who feels the infirmities of age, dwells most on whatever reminds him of the vigor and vivacity of his youth.” We know this to be true; and there is a tender and pleasant melancholy which arises in the mind of every one in the decline of life. He continues: “Nor are we pleased only with a review of the brighter passages of life. Events, the most distressing in their immediate consequences, are often cherished in remembrance with a degree of enthusiasm. This,” he says, “is the language of the heart, and will remind the reader of that good-humored remark in one of Pope’s letters, ‘I should hardly care to have an old post pulled up, that I remembered ever since I was a child.’” These words come home to the heart, and remind us of similar attachment to the place of our birth and objects and associations familiar to us in early youth.
Though pleasing the task, I often find it a very difficult one to gather up the many broken threads of the almost forgotten past, and weave them into a shape for the perusal of others, and it is a pleasant relief, like a cooling draught to the thirsty traveler, to find here and there a scrap of our history interwoven with that of others, bringing before us objects and scenes which were once familiar, but had become dim and nearly effaced from our memory by the hand of time, which has been to me unsparing in its ravages. How forcibly I am here reminded of my father’s request, in a letter written me in 1844, while upon his last mission to the eastern states, urging me to commence then to write my life as far back as I could remember, and to tell my brother William to do the same; “And then,” said he, “you can put all the letters I write you in their proper places, and when I write my history yours shall go in with it, to be handed down to our children for them to read.” I neglected to do so, and can only look back with regret at not heeding his wishes.
In the spring of 1842 father, with my brother William’s assistance, plowed and planted us a garden. This he did every season, but never had the privilege of reaping the fruits of his labor until after he came to this valley. It was a common thing for the elders, who left all to go forth to other lands to preach the gospel without purse or scrip, to return empty handed and go to work chopping wood, building houses, planting, or any kind of labor to support and provide food and raiment for themselves and families. They never thought of complaining, but rejoiced in the knowledge that they had been faithful in declaring the truth to the honest in heart, and thought no sacrifice too great in such a cause; and this they have continued to do until the present time. But where in all Christendom can there be found any other class of men who would willingly go forth, with no other source to look to for assistance, but to Him who commanded that His apostles should go forth into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, saying, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned; and these signs shall follow them that believe: in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak in new tongues; they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.” Peter said, “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord,” etc.
These are among the doctrines which have been taught and practised by the Latter-day Saints, and for which they were persecuted, murdered, robbed and driven from state to state and finally out of the Union, and the majority of its inhabitants rejoiced at our calamities.
On the 10th of September my father left us to go on a mission through the southern part of Illinois, in company with Prest. Brigham Young, Elders George A. Smith and Amasa Lyman. The following is from my father’s journal.
“We proceeded to Quincy, and preached at that place several times. The indifference of the people and the little regard they appeared to have for the gospel, led me to reflect considerably upon the hardness of their hearts and situation. I went to bed and dreamed the following dream:
“I thought I went out on a fishing excursion, and whilst traveling up and down the stream to find a good fishing place, I was astonished to see so very few fish in the stream, and they were small and very shy. After traveling a while, I discovered some large fish lying across the stream, dead, and which smelled exceedingly bad. I then saw the reason why so few fish went up stream, and why they were so small and shy; it was in consequence of those dead ones lying across the stream.
“This is the dream; and in the morning the following interpretation was strongly impressed upon my mind. These dead fish represent the dead members scattered abroad, hither and thither, who are considered as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but are in fact but dead branches; they are not complying with the revelations of God, which command them to gather together to the body. And as the branch of the vine cannot gather sap and nourishment from the body when separated from it, so the members of the Church abroad, when commanded to gather to the body, cannot receive life and intelligence away from it, nor grow in the things of the Kingdom of God, as is their privilege; and such characters stand in the way of the gospel, and prevent many from obeying the gospel, through their neglect. I further thought that it was not impossible that the bad smell of the dead fish represented those people who are to be met with, some with a chew of tobacco in their mouths, and some a pipe, and others whose breath smells sufficiently strong of whiskey to sicken a sober man when he comes near them.
“Much of our time was spent in endeavoring to remove these obstacles, by persuading the members to comply with the commandments given on the subject, that the channel might be cleared and a way opened for more live fish to pass up the stream; and we hoped that we should yet see the stream full of live fish, and the fishing places become exceedingly good and live fish plentiful.”
The following interesting incident happened in the family of Elder Sidney Rigdon, and I heard him relate it upon the stand in the little grove by the temple. It was printed in the Nauvoo Times and Seasons, where I read it a short time since. It created quite a sensation at the time among both old and young. Elder Rigdon and family had been greatly afflicted, and his body had become considerably emaciated. For some time previous to this he had been slackening in his duty and his faith accordingly had weakened. His presence in the congregation, sitting once more in his place by the Prophet and his brethren, caused great rejoicing among the Saints.
He came, he said, not to renounce his faith in Mormonism, as had been stated by enemies and licentious presses, but to bear his testimony of its truth, and add another to the many miraculous evidences of the power of God, and unfold unto the audience a scene of deep interest which had occurred in his own family. He had witnessed many instances of the power of God in this Church, but never before had seen the dead raised; yet this was a thing that had actually taken place in his own family. His youngest daughter, Eliza, who had been very sick for a time, died. The doctor told them that she was dead. After she had lain in this state for a certain length of time, she rose up in the bed, and in a very powerful and supernatural tone spoke to the family to the following effect: said she was going to leave them, and had only come back to deliver her message, and then depart again. The Lord had said to her the very words she was about to relate. She was so particular in relating it that she would not allow them to leave out or add one word. Before dying she had expressed a great desire to live; but after her return to earth she expressed as strong a desire to go back. She called her family around her and bade them farewell. To her eldest sister she said: “Nancy, it is in your heart to deny this work; and if you do, the Lord says it will be the damnation of your soul.” To her sister Sarah she said, “Sarah, we have but once to die, and I would rather die now than wait for another time.” She told her sisters that the Lord had great blessings in store for them if they continued in the faith; and after delivering her message she swooned, but recovered again. During this time she was cold, and the only appearance of life was the power of speech. She continued in this state till the following evening—for the space of thirty-six hours—when she called her father and told him that the Lord had said to her, if he would cease weeping for his sick daughter, and dry up his tears, that he should have all the desires of his heart; and that if he would go to bed and rest, he should be comforted over his sick daughter, for in the morning she should be getting better and should get well. That the Lord had said unto her, because that her father had dedicated her to God and prayed to Him for her, that He would give her back again. This ceremony of dedicating and praying took place when she was struggling in death, and continued to the very moment of her departure; and she said the Lord told her that it was because of this that she must go back again, though she desired to stay.
She said concerning G. W. Robinson, her brother-in-law, as he had denied the faith the Lord had taken away one of his eye teeth; and unless he repented He would take away another. And concerning Dr. Bennett, that he was a wicked man, and that the Lord would tread him under His feet.
This is but a small portion of what she related. It aroused Elder Rigdon from his morbid state for a little season, but he soon sank again into the same lethargy, from which he never awoke until he heard of the martyrdom of the Prophet, when he hurried back to Nauvoo to claim the leadership of the Church. Previous to this, having become weary in well-doing, and having suffered enough, as he thought, he had left his post and moved with his family to Pittsburg.
Woman’s Exponent, vol. 10, no. 14,
15 December 1881, p. 106
For a long time there has been a secret something whispering, “Publish to the world not only the principles of your faith, but a true history of facts concerning the injustice done to an innocent people, and the trials and sufferings which they have endured from the world, because they would not deny their faith in revelation. Publish them upon the housetops, that they may reach the ears of the just and the honest in heart in all nations.” And I ask, is this not a duty devolving upon the sisters, in Zion as well as the brethren, who were partakers of their injustice, and therefore living witnesses against them? Should we not write them, to be handed down to our children and all future generations, that they may know the true history of those who endured all things which their enemies saw fit to place upon them, for the sake of establishing this work upon the earth.
Having lately enjoyed the privilege of looking over my father’s papers and journals, which had lain undisturbed ever since his death, I cannot express the joy I felt in finding among them the long-desired treasures—my father’s and mother’s letters—which I had feared were no longer in existence. Many of them were written when I was very young and during the deepest trials of their faith, the reading of which has awakened the memory of a thousand scenes and associations that would have remained buried in oblivion, had it not been for these records, which, to me, are more precious than gold.
A letter written by the Prophet Joseph and his brethren while in Liberty jail, Missouri, was among my father’s papers, and a portion of it being as appropriate today as then, I will copy a few lines:
“LIBERTY JAIL, JAN. 10, 1839.
“BROTHERS H. C. KIMBALL AND B. YOUNG:
“Joseph Smith, Jr., Sidney Rigdon and Hyrum Smith, prisoners for Jesus’ sake, send greeting. * * * * *
“Brethren, fear not, but be strong in the Lord and in the favor of his might. What is man, that the servant of God should fear him? or the son of man, that he should tremble at him? Neither think strange concerning the fiery trials with which we are tried, as though some strange thing had happened unto us. Remember that all have been partakers of like afflictions. Therefore rejoice in our afflictions, by which we are perfected, and through which the Captain of our salvation was perfected also. Let your hearts and the hearts of all the Saints be comforted with you, and let them rejoice exceedingly, for great is our reward in heaven; for so persecuted the wicked, the prophets which were before us.
“America will be a Zion to all that choose to come to it, and if the churches in foreign countries wish to come, let them do so. * *
“Brethren, pray for us, and cease not till our deliverance comes, which we hope may come. We hope, we say, for our families’ sake. Let the elders preach nothing but the first principles of the gospel, and let them publish our afflictions, the injustice and cruelty thereof, upon the hilltops. Let them write it, and publish it in all the papers where they go; charge them particularly upon this point.
“Brethren, we remain yours in hope of eternal life,
JOSEPH SMITH,
SIDNEY RIGDON,
HYRUM SMITH.”
Where is there any other people who would endure tribulation, or think it needful to make such sacrifices through this life, for the sake of the life to come? Ministers of different creeds have picked out just such passages as they could turn into a proper shape to suit themselves, or their hearers—preaching more to their heads than to their hearts—pandering to popular feeling, to bring popularity and dollars, though the Bible (which they profess to believe) lays down but one rule for mankind to walk in, points out but one road to heaven, and these are laid down so plain by our Savior, that “a man, though a fool, need not err therein.”
The prejudice of the various sects against the Mormons was the same then as it is today. Hundreds were heard to say that they had never known Joseph Smith, but he was a false prophet and ought to die, and if they could come across him they would kill him as soon as they would a rattlesnake; and if the Mormons did not renounce their doctrine they would exterminate or drive them from the country. When asked what they had against the Mormons, the answer was, with an oath, “They believe in Joe Smith and the Book of Mormon,” and with another oath, “we believe Joe Smith to be a d——d rascal.”
This is a sample of the present toleration and inhuman conduct towards a little handful of people under a Republican government, and by professors of Christianity who pre-judge and enjoy listening to every falsehood against the Latter-day Saints, and would like to again drive us from our homes; but they will find it a more difficult task, as it happens (this time) that we are the first settlers and have a prior right, which we intend to hold and maintain. The majority of the world seem to have chosen to walk in the broad road which leadeth to destruction. The gate is too straight for them, and the way too narrow, and for this reason but few find eternal life.
When my father left us to go on his second mission, he made mother promise to write to him every particular concerning our situation, and I feel prompted to copy a portion of her first letter, which was dated Sept. 21, 1839. It gives a fair description of our condition and of the families of the elders who left them in Commerce, Illinois, to go forth in obedience to the command of the Almighty, to preach the Gospel to foreign nations.
“MY DEAR HUSBAND:
“With a weak and trembling hand I attempt to write a few lines, agreeable to your request, to let you know how we do, which is very poorly, I assure you. As to my feelings, I don’t know but I am perfectly reconciled to your going away, but I must say I have a trial of my faith such as I never had before. The day you left home was as sick a one as I ever experienced. The pain in my back and head was almost intolerable—no doubt the pain in my head was worse on account of my much weeping; but I did not weep after you left, for my distress was so great that I could not think of much else. William mourned and cried about all day, and had a chill in the evening. Sister Bentley stayed with me through the day; she was sick, but did all she could for me. Fanny Dort came over and stayed all night with me. I was alone a little while before she came. I then crawled out of bed and bowed before the Lord, and plead with Him to give us a good night’s rest, and He did so; and be assured I did not forget to pray for you.
“The next morning I felt free from pain, but was so weak and dizzy-headed that I could not walk without staggering. William and Helen were not able to do anything, so I was obliged to crawl around and do my chores and wash a little for the babe. No one to help me but little Heber, and I was soon overdone and brought on another chill, so that I had a very sick afternoon, and rested but little last night; have not been able to do anything today. I was taken this morning with a shake, and shook for an hour and a half as hard as I ever saw anybody in my life, and then weltered under a fever and extreme pain until almost night. William has just had the hardest chill that he has had in a number of days. Brother Rogers has been here and left more medicine, but it has done us no good, and what to do I don’t know. I have no one to get anything for me, or to do anything for my comfort. Brother Bentley has moved here, but Sister Bentley is very feeble, hardly able to do her own work. She is very kind, and would be glad to doctor us if she was able. Helen is not well any of the time, but is able to do some chores today.
“Now, I have given you a statement of our situation, not to make you feel bad, but because you requested it of me. * * * Thus you see, as I said before, I have a trial of my weak faith; but all that I can ask of you is, to pray that I may have patience to endure to the end, whether it be long or short. I feel as though if you ever see your family all alive again; it will be through your faith. “Saturday Morning.
“Dear Heber, we are all alive and tolerably comfortable this morning—would to God we could remain so through the day. We will hope for the best. Unless my health should improve I shall not be able to write you next week, as you requested, for I am growing weak every day. So farewell, my dear Heber; I pray that it may be well with you.
“VILATE KIMBALL.”
Woman’s Exponent, vol. 10, no. 15,
1 January 1882, p. 114
It being truths instead of fiction that I am writing, I hope to be pardoned for wandering back again to gather up life incidents. The history of the apostles, or the Latter-day Saints in Commerce, might be read with profit, particularly by those who, in these days, may possibly think their lot the hardest. Then the world might well have called the “Mormons” wretched, and a decrepit and dying-out people; but their spirits were generally buoyant—even in the darkest hour the Comforter was with them. Though left as our mothers were, struggling with poverty, disease and death, it was no wonder that, at times, their faith should almost fail them. The husband and father called to leave them in this sad and helpless condition, not knowing whether they would ever meet again upon this earth; taking their lives in their hands, with no worldly compensation offered them for their sufferings and the sacrifice of their beloved wives, children and homes, they went forth without purse or scrip to carry glad tidings to the nations of the earth, where they would have to combat all the evils, the prejudices and difficulties with which the world was filled. What more could they do to prove their integrity, their zeal and sublime devotion to the work which they had espoused? Truly “they went forth weeping, bearing precious seed; but returned rejoicing, bearing their sheaves with them.”
The following lines are from a letter written by my father after a very narrow escape from death, occasioned by an overdose of morphine, administered by a drunken doctor to give him relief. It is dated
“Pleasant Garden, Oct. 24, 1837.
“MY DEAR COMPANION:
“Through the goodness of God I am permitted this morning to sit down to write a few lines to you, that you may know how I get along upon my journey. I assure you that it is with trembling limbs that I do it, but to fulfil my word that I made to you I proceed.” After giving the particulars concerning his suffering and miraculous escape (which have been published) he continues: “My courage is good, and has been ever since I left home. Do not feel concerned about me, for I am in the hands of God. Never in my life have I undergone more in my feelings than since I left home about you and the children. Tell me all about them; how they get along. Tell William and Helen I think of them all the time; that I pray for them, and that I want them to pray for me. Tell little Heber to be a good boy, and kiss little David for me. Be prudent, and take care of yourself. * * * Give my love to all my friends. And now I bid you farewell for a little season.
“HEBER C. KIMBALL”
His next letter is dated Kirtland, Nov. 16, 1839; but being too feeble to sit up, Brother Dean Gould wrote the most of it for him. He says:
“I have arrived safe in Kirtland, but at the present time I am confined to my bed; have been quite low for several days, but through the grace of God I shall be able to go forth on my way rejoicing to do the will of my heavenly Master. * * I have made it my home at Bro. John Young’s, Brother Bond’s and Dean Gould’s, and have received the best of care. Last Sabbath Bro. John Taylor spoke in the forenoon, and I in the afternoon; had very good liberty. I spoke in parables generally, and some of them being so applicable to those that were before me; a judge came to me and wanted to know to whom I referred; I told him to no one in particular, but if the coat fit anyone they might put it on.
“Some others of the brethren have preached and gave good satisfaction; but as a general thing there cannot be a meeting without some dispute, yet there are some few who stand firm in the faith. I am greatly disappointed; I expected to find the brethren united and enjoying the blessings of the people of God, but found them broken up and divided into several parties. * * *
“Brother Taylor has been sick several days with the ague, and the rest of the brethren have been quite unwell, but are now on the gain. We still, God being our helper, feel determined to press our way onward. We have but little means to prosecute our journey, but still we think that some of us will be able to start within a few days.” He closes the letter with his own hand. He says: “You see that this letter is written by a strange hand. Bro. Bond and wife are true and steadfast; are much pleased that you are coming here. I have seen but few of the brethren, only in public; they have had several evening meetings. I have not been able to attend but one, and that was last Sabbath. I have got a very bad cough; took cold riding nights. I think I came near the time of my release when at Pleasant Garden. But be of good cheer, my dear Vilate, for this is only one more trial above the rest, so we have gained one more victory over the devil.”
In the suffering condition of the Saints who had sought refuge from the Christian mobbers of Missouri, and were lying sick and dying in Commerce, it looked impossible for their families to exist in their absence and under their impoverished circumstances. My father, Brigham Young and others felt that there would be no objections raised to their visiting among kindred and friends during their missionary labors in Europe. According to the following letter from father, dated “Victor, State of New York, Dec. 27,” he and brethren left Kirtland on the 22d of November for Fairport, where they were detained until the 26th by a tremendous snow storm; took steamer and landed at Buffalo on the morning of the 27th. Took stage the same day and went to Batavia; stayed there till the next day, and in the afternoon took the cars for Rochester. Father says: “When we got to Byron I got out and left the brethren, supposing Hall (his sister Eliza’s husband) was living there; had not more than got out before I was told that he had gone to Rochester. I think I never felt worse in my life—my anticipations were so great to see them; but I could not get away until the next night. Just at evening got aboard the cars and got to Hall’s at eight o’clock in the evening; found them well and rejoiced to see me. I stayed there one week, and was confined to my bed part of the time. I took cold on board the steamboat; had to take deck fare for want of means. The cold settled in my right side, and was so bad I could hardly draw my breath. Brother Thayre carried me to brother Solomon’s; found them well and glad enough to see me. Your letter got to Mendon about three weeks before I did. Sister Hall was at Solomon’s, and advised him to take it out. He did so; they broke it open, but could not tell where I was, supposed that I was dead, and had many bad feelings about me. There seems to be a great feeling of sympathy for us here. I have received great kindness from our friends in Victor. Several strangers have called to see me, and Lucretia (my mother’s sister) introduced me as her ‘Mormon’ brother. They appeared to take a great interest in our sufferings. This seems to be the feeling of all candid people. When I presented the presents you sent Lucretia, she wept over them, desiring to see your dear face once more. They wept over some of your letters, and laughed at the rest. *
* All of our friends want you to come here next spring and make them a visit. Caroline (his brother Solomon’s wife) says she will keep you three months or more, and all our friends seem to have the same feeling. They want me to go after you, which would be a pleasure for me to do, but this will not do; for my face is turned thitherward, for he that looketh back is not fit for the kingdom of heaven, and you would consider yourself disgraced in the sight of God and man.
“My dear Vilate, you know what we are called to do; we will press forward to the mark which is laid before us at the expense of all things. I was thankful to God to hear of your health, for I believe it is He who has raised you and the children up, for when I was in the town of Winchester, at Father Murray’s, I had such a travail of soul for you as I never had before. I would go into the woods four and five times a day to call on the Father in the name of Jesus for you. I saw you in a dream in a sickly state, almost dead; I clasped my hands on each side of your face and raised you upon your feet. And since that I have felt contented about you and the children; but once in a while, being among our kindred, it brings home back to me, and I feel a little homesick. They are all pleading with me to stay till warm weather, on account of my poor health. A little fatigue brings me down again.
* * *
“Dear Vilate, I hardly know how to express my joy, but suffice it to say, on the first day of the year one thousand eight hundred and forty I went into the water and baptized William E. Murray and wife, and they are rejoicing in God. The weather was as cold as it was when we joined ourselves to the Baptist church. They are very faithful, and remember you in their prayers. Your father says Gould can’t begin to pray like them; says it beats all that he ever saw. He has become firm in the faith and preaches it wherever he goes. He said to me one day,
‘Heber, I am as good a “Mormon” as you are.’ He is a great advocate for this work, and seems uneasy here, and wants to go back to the West. Says he would not stay here if he could have all the town of Victor, for the people don’t seem to him as they did. Your brother Gould and wife are about the same as ever, very proud. * *
“Bring all the little chickens with you. Sister Eliza would like to have one of them come there and go to school. Sister Malvina would take one, and I will pay them for it. Now, my dear Vilate, you know this would be better than to have them strolling around the country. Take counsel of some of our fathers in Israel, and see what they think best to do, for in much counsel there is safety. As for going to Kirtland to live, as things are now it is against my will; for I had rather live in a cave, or be driven with the Saints every year while I live, and be one with them, than to have all the good things of the earth and be at variance one with the other as they are there. I had rather go forth amongst the unbelieving gentiles, and suffer by them, than be among such people as those who have named the name of Mormon. I pray my Heavenly Father to deliver me from such while I live. If it be possible let the cup pass from me. Amen.”
My Grandfather Murray, though a believer in this gospel, had not obeyed the ordinance of baptism; but when he went back with father to visit his family and friends, he could see the beauties of “Mormonism,” which made him a strong advocate; but he died there in Victor not long after father left him, and on his deathbed he expressed his sorrow at not rendering obedience to its requirements.
Woman’s Exponent, vol. 10, no. 16,
15 January 1882, p. 122
The following correspondence between my father and mother may prove interesting to others, more particularly to the ones who were connected with the Church in an early day and know something of its history. The first, written by my mother, is in answer to father’s, and it expresses the joy and consolation which nothing but this gospel brings; and this is enjoyed by every true Latter-day Saint.
“In every condition, in sickness, in health,
In poverty’s vale, or abounding in wealth,
At home or abroad, on the land or the sea,
As thy days may demand so thy succor shall be.”
“COMMERCE, Feb. 2, 1840.
“My Dear Husband:—I have received your letter of January 27, which gave me great joy; not to hear of your sickness, for that pains my heart, but that you have been an instrument in the hands of God of converting some of my dear kindred to a knowledge of the truth. Yea, I feel that this is a recompense for all my privations in having you gone from me; for how great in the sight of God is the worth of one soul. Is it possible that my dear brother has become a praying man? Do you think he has got the root of the matter in him, so that he will hold out to the end? If so, what an unspeakable blessing!
“You have very kindly offered me the privilege of visiting my friends the coming summer; at the first thought my heart leaped for joy, but upon more mature consideration, I think perhaps it would not be wisdom. I should have to sell everything we have to bear our expenses, and then to be visiting so long with the children, it would be quite a task; and if I should get ever so tired of it, I should have no home, nor anything to keep house with. I feel as you do about settling in Kirtland; I cannot think of changing my good neighbors here for the society of those who are at variance one with the other. There is a perfect union here, and we have meetings at our house twice a week. But I cannot make up my mind what I shall do until Joseph gets home from Washington; I shall take counsel from him. It will then be time enough to let you know.
“You will be so long getting to your journey’s end, I very much fear that you will not get home next fall. The time seems long, and I want to hear from you often. I feel more anxious about your poor health; I long to get one letter that will not give the painful intelligence that you have been sick again.
“William is very anxious to go East, and no wonder, for he has not been able to do a day’s work this winter, and thinks he never shall if he stays here. * * I have been sorely afflicted with a cancer wart in the palm of my hand, but thank the Lord it is now as well as ever. I often think that the hand of affliction is not taken from you, or we should all be well, for your faith would be stronger; but I have great cause to be thankful, for through the kindness and generosity of our neighbors we are made comfortable for food and wood.
“Brother Don C. Smith called in and saw me writing, and wished me to give you his respects; also Bro. Charles C. Rich. He and family have been very kind to me; I think they are the best of neighbors. * * Our children talk much about their poor father, and long to see him. They join with me in love.
“From your affectionate wife,
VILATE KIMBALL.”
The next received from father was dated New York, Feb. 19, 1840. He says:
“My health is much better and my spirits good. I feel to press forward in the name of Jesus Christ. I am sensible that the Lord will try His Saints to the uttermost, for it seems as though the devil was determined to destroy my life and the lives of my brethren, the Twelve; but they all seem to have good courage as yet. Brother Brigham fell and hurt himself quite bad, but is getting better, and his health is improving. Brother George A. Smith has the chills yet and is quite poorly. Brothers Orson and Parley enjoy good health. * * *
“While in Mendon I preached four times, and had many calls to go and preach in other towns and places. Brother Solomon did not go to hear me; I think I never saw him more set against this work; I did not stay with him but four or five nights. The sun of peace did not abide there, and I felt greatly distressed while with him. In Victor I had several calls to |
spend money otherwise.
Bodenburger admits Krush has received complaints about the policy in the past and is always evaluating its stance.
“I don’t believe that’s good business for anyone, really,” Jorden said. “If they’re interested in the health of their clientele and they want them coming back, they should be doing things that support that.”
He said he’d be fine with a cover charge.
“If I had to choose, I’d rather pay cover, because you never know how much water you’re going to consume in a night,” Jorden explained.
Krush said in a later statement it has consulted its regular customers on the issue.
“The vast majority have stated they prefer to not spend their hard-earned monies at the door on a cover charge and be able to choose to buy the refreshments of their choice when and how they want.”
Bars and lounges are not obliged to provide free tap water.
“Non-alcoholic drinks must be provided, but it is up to the licensee if they charge or not. Most venues, however, do provide free water because it’s good customer service and it’s just the socially responsible thing to do,” said Eric Baich, manager of social responsibility with the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission.
Baich says he doesn’t believe the practice is widespread because the AGLC doesn’t receive many complaints about it.
He noted that having a few glasses of water is part of the AGLC DrinkSense program’s recommendations on drinking safely.
“Mixing in water and meals, making sure you’re rested, and pacing yourself are all part of consuming liquor responsibly,” Baich said.
At the MKT beer market on Gateway Boulevard, bartenders get requests for water all the time.
“If somebody asks for water, we give them water,” said MKT’s general manager, Grant Sanderson.
“We are very happy and proud to serve free water from the North Saskatchewan river.”
Sanderson said MKT would never deny someone tap water, as he considers it part of being a responsible drinking establishment.
“We want to make sure our guests are hydrated, that they’re not seeing any negative effects of alcohol consumption over a longer period… and we want to make sure we’re exercising our duty of care for them.”
Jorden said he plans on filing a complaint with the AGLC because he does not want other bars or clubs to mimic Krush’s policy.Suspend belief for a moment. Ignore the imminent reality that is the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Allow yourself, instead, to imagine an alternate sporting universe:
It is the year 2012. Tim Tebow has just purchased an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a short limousine ride from his new home stadium, just southwest of Times Square. The Jets are preparing for their fourth season at Goldman Sachs Field, where the New Orleans Saints lost Super Bowl XLIV when organizers left open the roof and Drew Brees’s high-powered offense was slowed by below-freezing temperatures. The Mets and Yankees have only just finished construction on their new stadiums, after the exclusion of baseball and softball from the Olympic slate made the facilities unnecessary for New York’s hosting of the 2012 Summer Games. The Giants, demoralized by being left behind in New Jersey and becoming New York City’s no. 2 football franchise, never make it to Super Bowls XLII and XLVI. Tebow was in Goldman Sachs Field — rebranded, for two weeks, as the Olympic Stadium — along with hometown favorites Dwight Howard and LeBron James as they watch the Martin Scorsese–directed Opening Ceremony. Howard had joined the Nets a year earlier, with the enticement of the team’s Frank Gehry–designed Brooklyn arena and the opportunity to battle in the same city with LeBron James. James is welcoming his Team USA teammates to Madison Square Garden, where he plays home games as a member of the Knicks, having been wooed by the arena’s lavish Olympic renovations and the chance to call the Olympic basketball arena his home. James, Amar’e Stoudemire, and Carmelo Anthony have just won their first NBA championship.
This is but one version of events, some more likely than others, as they might have happened if the 2012 Summer Olympics had been granted to New York. In 2005, New York and London were two of five cities, along with Moscow, Madrid, and Paris, bidding for the Games. The bid would have produced an altered sporting landscape in the city, with many unforeseen consequences. Some of that development has come to fruition. Much of it remains only in plans. “Much of what we wanted has been done,” Alex Garvin, an urban planner and lead designer on the New York bid, said. “Still, I really wanted to see the world on the boardwalk on Coney Island looking out at the sailing races. It would have been spectacular.”
To understand the impact the Olympics would have had on New York, as well as the impact the losing bid has had, even without the Games, it’s useful to trace the conception and development of the West Side Stadium. When Jay Cross joined the Jets to head development in 2000 (he became team president the next year), his first meeting was with Dan Doctoroff, a private equity manager leading New York’s Olympic bid. After a failed effort by the Yankees to build a new stadium on an undeveloped rail yard north of Madison Square Garden, Doctoroff swooped in to propose the site as a location for an Olympic stadium. (Doctoroff, currently the CEO of Bloomberg LP, has succeeded at nearly every stop in his career but this one. He declined an interview request.) Doctoroff hoped to avoid the empty, leftover stadiums that plague so many post-Olympic cities, so he needed a tenant to take over the stadium. The Jets were interested. “The driving force for the Jets was a move to New York City,” Cross told me recently. “Sharing a facility with the Giants, while it’s proven to be possible at the New Meadowlands, is not optimal from a team culture point of view.”
The Jets agreed to shoulder much of the cost of the new stadium, which would have been completed in time for the 2009 NFL season, hosted the 2010 Super Bowl, and, when the time came, be converted to host the Opening Ceremony, track and field, and seven other Olympic events. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had canceled tentative stadium agreements reached between the city’s two baseball teams and his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, supported the football plan. He bartered for support from an otherwise hesitant West Side community by pledging not to tear down the High Line, an elevated railroad that was scheduled to be demolished but had become a cause célèbre to residents of Greenwich Village and Chelsea. (It has since become a much-loved park.) “The West Side Stadium would have been first, as the priorities went,” Cross said. “Second, third, and fourth would have been the Nets, Mets, and Yankees.”
Then Jim Dolan got involved. In 2004, his company, Cablevision, which owns the Knicks, Rangers, and Madison Square Garden, began advertising against the stadium. One study found that Cablevision spent $22.1 million on anti-stadium advertisements — more than the Olympic planning committee spent advertising its entire bid. The attacks worked. On June 6, 2005, one month before the bid was to be presented to the IOC, the state’s two most powerful legislators, Sheldon Silver and Joseph Bruno, rejected a request for $300 million in state funding. The Olympics were left without a stadium.
In just 72 hours, a new plan was developed. Olympic organizers approached the Mets with the possibility of building a stadium in Queens, next to Shea Stadium, for use by the team once the Olympics ended. (The Jets had originally identified Flushing as a possible site for their stadium, and briefly entered discussions with the Mets to build a dual-purpose facility that would host both teams and the Olympics.) The Mets, like the Yankees, had spent years unsuccessfully lobbying the city for a new stadium. With the Olympic bid in crisis, the city moved quickly to an agreement with the Mets. Had the plan been accepted, the Mets would have spent the 2012 season alternating home stands with the Yankees in the Bronx. The Yankees had no interest in assisting the Mets’ stadium push without getting something of their own. Three days later, the city reached a similar agreement for a new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
All of a sudden, a decades-long debate over new stadiums in New York City had been resolved in just a week. “Without the immediate need to find a substitute for the Olympic stadium … the issue [of the baseball stadiums] might have continued unresolved for years to come,” Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, wrote in a paper titled “How New York City Won the Olympics.” Even an earlier threat by George Steinbrenner to take the Yankees to New Jersey, no matter how serious it was, had not moved the needle in the way the Olympic bid had. Suddenly, the West Side Stadium was dead, and the Mets and Yankees had new ballparks. “The politics of it were, ‘Whatever the city did for the Mets, the Yankees demanded the same treatment,'” Cross, who left the Jets in 2008, said. “That put the city in this mad scramble to please the Yankees, Mets, and then the Jets. We got left behind.”
But was the West Side Stadium really dead? Alex Garvin, the Olympic bid’s lead planner, said it wasn’t. “We always intended, if we won, to push for the West Side Stadium again,” he said. “We believed that [State Assembly Speaker] Sheldon Silver would come around if the Olympics were a reality.” The bid planners, according to Garvin, would have made a second attempt at securing state funding for the stadium, with the Jets as the primary tenant. If the stadium had been built, the proposals for its use could have been limitless. Cross said there were plans to host major college football games and an annual match between the winners of Europe’s Champions League and South America’s Copa Libertadores. There was talk that the stadium could attract the first Premier League team outside the U.K. as an additional tenant. And, of course, the Jets would be in Manhattan. “Location does matter,” Cross said. “If the competitive records were equal, to be the New York team would be an advantage, just the way the Knicks and Rangers have had an advantage over the Nets and Devils … [Tebow] would have been God’s gift to sports in Manhattan.”
Now, there is no stadium, just as there is no Olympic-quality equestrian center in Staten Island, no white-water kayaking course in Queens, no velodrome in the Bronx. Each of these facilities would have been world-class, and, the organizers like to say, would have turned New York into a center of national athletic training and competition. “There’s a lot of sports that New Yorkers play beyond basketball and football,” Cross said, envisioning the city spawning a new generation of Olympic talent. Despite its self-declared title as the center of the universe, New York is not as well-equipped as some smaller cities to host certain major sporting events. This is one reason why many U.S. national championships end up in San Antonio or Indianapolis. “There are a number of events and championships that would love to come to New York, but the city doesn’t have some of the unique facilities to support them,” said Jerry Anderson, who consulted on both the New York and London bids as a designer at the sports architecture firm Populous. “If these Olympics had occurred, it would have left the legacy to support national or international sporting events.”
What is notable about New York’s failed bid is how much of it has been actualized. “The bid was designed so that, win or lose, we would be able to get done the bulk of what we wanted to do,” said Jay Kriegel, the bid’s executive director. Dan Doctoroff was named deputy mayor, a position that allowed him to pursue many of the Olympic projects he had already begun. It’s possible to look at what has happened in New York and determine that, by and large, the city received many of the benefits of Olympic development without enduring many of the negatives such as cost overruns, security concerns, and an inconvenienced populace. The Barclays Center, which would have hosted gymnastics, was built. The Mets and Yankees, of course, got their new stadiums.
The changes have been even more significant beyond sports, driven in large part — close your ears, non-urban policy geeks — by the rezoning of large swaths of New York City. A once-dilapidated section of the Queens neighborhood Hunters Point, meant for the Olympic Village, was rezoned and is now dotted with apartment buildings. A vacant waterfront area in Brooklyn meant for beach volleyball was turned into a park. An extension to the 7 train, first proposed in the Olympic bid, is under construction and will open up Manhattan’s West Side, which, yes, was also rezoned. Since the demise of the Olympic bid and stadium plan, the West Side has seen the construction of high-rise apartment and office buildings, the opening of Clyde Frazier’s Wine and Dine, and a mixed-use development that, when completed, will be New York’s largest such project since Rockefeller Center. “Doctoroff, by the time he gets done, will have a greater impact on this city, I think, than Robert Moses,” Mayor Bloomberg told the New York Times, referring to New York’s mid-century “master builder,” who himself had advocated for a 70,000-seat stadium on Randall’s Island, in the East River, capable of holding Olympic events. “We don’t need the Games,” Mitchell Moss, the author of “How New York City Won the Olympics,” said recently. “The city is a constant series of contests. We just had the triathlon, the U.S. Open in August, then the marathon in November. People in New York are playing tennis and Ultimate Frisbee and golf. We have more walkathons than any city in the world. As for the Olympics, we got everything that really mattered.”
Would the Jets be a better team in Manhattan? And what about the Giants, alone in New Jersey, with a stadium decked out in their colors? Would the Nets’ lineup be different if their arena were already finished — if they had moved to Brooklyn sooner? Would the Mets and Yankees have new stadiums without the Olympic push, and if so, would they look any different? All of these questions are impossible to answer definitively, although similar questions will return as whispers emerge that the city might bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. (It is all but impossible for New York to host a Winter Olympics, unless an artificial ski run could be constructed from the tip of the Empire State Building to Grand Central Station.) San Francisco, Dallas, and Los Angeles have been rumored as other possibilities, but the actual consideration of bids is still several years away. “Of course we could do it,” Alex Garvin, the lead planner on the 2012 bid, said. “We’ve got all the hotel rooms you need. We have a subway system that can move 500,000 people a day on off-peak hours. Maybe in 2024 the demand for soccer could warrant another stadium.”
The Olympic stadium, along with the fact that, perhaps, the city has simply moved on, would be one of the major obstacles to a future bid — both of the proposed sites for the 2012 stadium are now otherwise occupied. “There is no city that needs an 80,000-seat track stadium,” Jerry Anderson, of Populous, said. “The more likely thing to do is find a piece of grass or asphalt for a temporary facility. Could it be adjacent to Citi Field? Could it be over at the Meadowlands? This would be sacrilege, but could you put it in Central Park, knowing it was temporary? If you want the Olympics, those are the questions you have to ask yourself.”
Correction: A previously published version of this article stated that Dan Doctoroff was named deputy mayor of New York after the IOC vote, when in fact he was already deputy mayor before the vote took place. The text has been corrected.
Reeves Wiedeman is a member of the editorial staff of The New Yorker, and writes the magazine’s Sporting Scene blog.There’s unrest in Dota 2’s community this week, as several artists responsible for many of the free-to-play game’s popular cosmetic items allege that Steam owner and Dota 2 developer Valve Software has systematically reduced their earnings and may be permanently damaging the long-term viability of Dota 2’s business model.
Dota 2 is completely free to play — all characters and mechanics are available to every player. Valve makes its money through the sale of in-game cosmetic items — colloquially referred to “hats” or “skins” by the community. Among other things, these cosmetic items give heroes completely new appearances.
The majority of these alternate skins are created by independent creators or teams who submit their designs via Steam’s Workshop feature, which lets community members sell game content for titles that support it. Creators who have cosmetic items accepted by Valve for sale within Dota 2, or for inclusion in in-game promotions, are not paid a flat rate. They receive royalties on the sale of each item.
Initially, these cosmetics were offered directly through Dota 2’s in-game store. Over time, these independent releases have dwindled, forcing creators to rely on inclusion in specific, event-related initiatives. These often reward players with cosmetics for purchases of in-game tickets and treasures. The biggest Dota 2 events are, unsurprisingly, Valve’s own Majors, high profile tournaments with $3 million prize pools that lead to The International Dota 2 Championships each summer. That event’s crowdfunded prize pool in 2016 exceeded $20,000,000 — which was funded in large part due to sale of “blind-box” treasure chests full of largely community-created items.
Complicating the situation further are “Battle Passes.” Offered in advance of Majors, the International, and other third-party tournaments, Battle Passes allow players to earn cosmetic items through completing quests. Players may also purchase blind-box, Battle Pass-specific treasures. These contain a random item from the Pass’s cosmetic collection — assuming the player has also purchased the appropriate Battle Pass — but other items can only be earned.
Originally, creators and teams who contributed an item to a Battle Pass received an even share of royalties from sales of the pass and all related treasures for each set or item included. For example, a creator with two accepted cosmetics would receive two shares, but a creator with only one accepted cosmetic would receive one share. Treasures and event-related collections followed this by changing the manner Valve determines and allocates royalties.
This has, according to multiple creators Polygon spoke with, caused increasing consternation and concern.
Things reached a boiling point this week with an anonymous posting on the Dota 2 sub-forum on Reddit, which purported to be the combined observations and criticism of several high profile Dota 2 cosmetics designers. As of publication, Valve has not responded to a request for comment, and Polygon has not been able to determine who contributed to this “open letter.” However, we have spoken with more than half a dozen Steam Workshop creators responsible for some of the game’s most popular items to confirm the basic claims made in the Reddit post. These are as follows.
In 2015, in the lead up to the fifth International Dota 2 Championship, Valve reduced the royalty rate from cosmetic items for its International and Majors promotions to 12.5 percent of net revenue — split evenly across all cosmetics contributors involved in that event — down from 25 percent. This change was not negotiated, according to multiple sources. Instead, Valve informed creators their items had been accepted for inclusion in the event in question, and that they would need to accept the new reduced royalty rate or forfeit participation. Valve has asserted to creators that this is in part because of a “substantial” contribution to the Battle Passes for Majors and The International. After the 2016 International, artists learned they would no longer receive royalties from the sale of Battle Passes (which coincided with a reduced schedule of Majors, from three yearly tournaments in advance of the International to just two). This caused two issues, according to workshop creators who spoke with Polygon. First, quests and experience within Battle Passes yield the same chests that players can opt to spend money for instead. A player who reaches level 60 in the most recent Battle Pass will earn 17 treasures without spending any additional money beyond the initial Battle Pass cost, meaning that creators’ work is often given to players without compensation. Second, some creators feel that their earnings are being unfairly diluted, with shares of revenue from Battle Pass-specific chests going to creators whose cosmetics are only available via in-game quests. Workshop submissions are curated by the Dota 2 community, but Valve must give the final go ahead before a cosmetic item can go on sale within the game. Valve’s move to release cosmetics predominantly around Majors and The International limits the opportunities for artists to sell sets within Dota 2’s marketplace. Creators are also frustrated by what they allege is poor communication by Valve regarding events and their expected themes. Events often have specific motifs — this year’s International, for example, is themed “A Call to Arms,” with an oceanic, pirate-oriented concept. This conceit isn’t a problem, but it means that any items already in progress that can’t conform to it must be shelved until after the 2017 International in August, or scrapped entirely.
In speaking with many creators, all of whom wish to remain anonymous, there is a palpable sense of frustration. “The amount of content Valve creates yearly for Dota is beyond miserable for a company of their size, experience, and financial status,” said one creator. “It is incredibly clear that the workshop fuels Dota, and creates a consistent stream of income for it. There's no other studio that I'm aware of that is in this type of position.”
Other creators explained that the value proposition of creating sets has diminished precipitously. “Assuming the same artist to artist split on each item, you would need to have five or even six items in Winter 2017 Battle Pass to make the same amount of money as ONE item in the Winter 2016 pass,” said another creator. Several others reiterated the feeling: “Things are effectively six times worse compared to a year ago, as of right now,” said one.
No creator would go on record with specific financial figures, as this is expressly prohibited by the terms they agree to in order to participate. However, speaking in general terms, there were commonalities. “It appears that artists involved in the Fall 2016 Major made about half of what they did in the Fall 2015 one, assuming the same amount of content,” said one creator. “It's also looking like the Winter 2017 Major is making about 50 percent of what the Fall 2016 did, maybe even less.”
This giant drop is causing some of the scene’s most prominent voices to consider leaving Dota 2 entirely. “Many of us simply cannot afford to continue making items, even if we are lucky enough to see some work accepted.” As the number of free-to-play titles with financial incentives for creatives appear — and as more and more AAA releases incorporate freemium models and cosmetic microtransactions — the competition for creators increases, and Dota 2 is becoming less and less attractive. According to several creators who spoke with Polygon, many former Dota 2 Workshop contributors have already abandoned the game, choosing instead to create items for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, another Valve title with a burgeoning cosmetics market.
Valve does create some Dota 2 cosmetic items — each International brings a set of “Immortals,” and once or twice a year a Dota 2 hero will receive an “Arcana,” an expensive collection that involves a completely overhauled character appearance, including new voicework, effects, and other bells and whistles. However, the overwhelming majority of cosmetics in Dota 2 are created by artists independently via the Workshop. If too many creators leave, this could lead to serious complications for Dota 2, a game whose business model is entirely oriented around cosmetics.
This isn’t the first time Valve has encountered challenges with a cosmetics-driven business model. In 2011, the developer’s popular Team Fortress 2 went from a retail-priced title to an entirely free-to-play business model that in retrospect acted as a prelude to Valve’s strategy with Dota 2. One prominent Team Fortress 2 Workshop creator Polygon spoke with — and who also wished to remain anonymous — explained that many of the changes to Dota 2’s cosmetic sales mirror events in TF2’s community.
“TF2 has always been Valve's testbed for a lot of these changes, and a few years ago, it started to implement the same methods that are now affecting Dota,” the TF2 Workshop contributor said. “‘Limited’ cosmetics were implemented and available through crates in TF2 for a certain amount of time. The items could only be found through unlocking these crates, and only while these crates were active.
“Before the implementation, more often than not, cosmetics were also made available on the in-game Mann Co. Store, where items could be bought at full-cost upfront,” the contributor explained. “With the Mann Co. Store, contributors would receive the standard allocation of royalties from their items, while the limited crates drastically lowered those allocations. The artificial scarcity ultimately led to a smaller profit for the contributors involved, and the aspect of having your work be limited to a small time frame was a demoralizing lack of incentive for workshop contributors.”
And in a comment mirroring some of the complaints expressed by the Dota 2 creative community, the TF2 cosmetic creator we spoke with explained the detrimental effect on community morale that’s resulted. “When there's no communication or incentive, it's hard to justify keeping it up.”
"It's scraps compared to what used to be a thriving system,” they said.
“(TF2) used to be a thriving system”
A common refrain from the people Polygon spoke to for this story was one of passion for not only the games, but the communities that have grown around them. And there’s a continual hope that things will improve. There have been some signs of change at Valve in recent weeks.
One example: cosmetics creators, as important parts of the Dota 2 community, have traditionally been invited to attend The International, often to hold panels and tutorial sessions on site for aspiring designers and creators to break into the Workshop themselves. In 2016, however, Polygon has been told that creators were not given a clear commitment from Valve until just weeks prior to the event, leaving several scrambling to make last minute arrangements for flights and accommodations. This year, creators received invites to the event at around the same time dates were announced for it, a dramatic improvement.
“This community works very hard, and it's good to see people stepping up to talk about change for the better,” our TF2 Workshop source said. “A lot of the voices being heard are very prominent members of the workshop community, all coming together to say that something needs to be done. Valve had been doing things reasonably fine to an extent for years, but now, it needs fixing. I don't know exactly how, but I hope something can be done.”
Correction (4/2/2017): A previous version of this story said creators were told by Valve Corp. that they would no longer be compensated for Battle Pass sales of their content. They were given no such notification.December 16, 2009 Hardware blender, building, furniture, powertools, wood, yafray The coffee table
Coffee tables are expensive! After perusing online for coffee tables to get an idea of styles and prices, I found that the ones that liked looking at, weren’t ones that I’d like paying for. So for this project, I decided to try and build my own. The hook or gimmick that I cam up with for this design would be that you could look down through the table into a built in drawer. Also, to keep price down I used almost all two-by-fours in it’s construction.
The first thing I did was ‘sketch’ a design in blender. After I was happy with the design I did some math to figure out the length and number of boards necessary for my furniture piece. Since the construction was mostly two by fours, the build process went quickly. The most complicated part was making sure the drawer’s slide out mechanism was properly aligned. If it weren’t it wouldn’t work very well. To make this easier, instead of building a table then attaching the drawer, I essentially built the table around the drawer. Not much chance of it being the wrong size then! The final result won’t be confused as the work of a professional carpenter but was good enough to live in my living room :)
And here’s the pictures to prove that it happened:
The table worked out but after coming up with the idea to have a see-through table top and interesting contents I can’t think of interesting things to put in the drawer! Doh… If you have any ideas, why not leave a suggestion in the comments. :)
πKENDALL — When asked how important it was to him that this Heat team stayed together this offseason, Tyler Johnson flashed his toothless grin.
Johnson was happy to see the Heat re-sign James Johnson and Dion Waiters, and find room to retain Wayne Ellington. As it stands right now, the Heat have 11 players returning from last year’s season-ending roster.
Johnson spoke to a few reporters on Tuesday afternoon at the Heat’s summer youth basketball camp at Miami-Dade College. He answered questions on the Heat’s potential for this upcoming season, first-round pick Bam Adebayo and even the toothless look he keeps going with.
Here’s what Johnson had to say …
Q: How important is it to you that the Heat decided to keep this team together this offseason?
Tyler: “I remember [Pat] Riley telling us after the trade deadline he wanted to keep the team together just to give us a chance. He wanted to give us the opportunity to compete and try to make the playoffs. Obviously we fell short of that goal. But with the way that team was headed and the way we bonded and the way things have been going this summer, all I was hoping for during free agency was that we brought back the guys who were in the trenches last year.”
Q: You hear people talking about Cleveland, Boston, Washington and Toronto. Do you feel the current Heat roster has the talent to crack the top four in the East?
Tyler: “Yeah. We’re not worried about that. We know what we’re capable of. If we continue building on the habits that we picked up last season, we’re not putting no numbers on it. We just know that we’re going to be in every single game that we play in. So who’s to say that we couldn’t make it and crack that top four.”
Q: Were you surprised the Heat were able to keep this team together this offseason?
Tyler: “I won’t say surprised. But in this business nothing is guaranteed, as far as guys coming after James [Johnson], coming after Dion [Waiters], whether the team picked up Wayne [Ellington’s contract] or not. Once all those pieces fell into place, I was definitely excited. But obviously, nothing is guaranteed in this league. But I wouldn’t say I was surprised when we brought everybody back.”
Q: Not only do you have the chemistry of a returning cast, but having a style that you guys established that works for you in terms of spreading the floor around Hassan Whiteside. How much of an advantage does that give you guys?
Tyler: “It’s a huge advantage. Hassan has been putting in work. If he picks up where he left off last year, he has the potential to be an All-Star. When he plays the way he’s capable of playing, he’s the best center in the league hands down. There’s nobody who can do what he does on both ends of the floor, in my opinion. His stats kind of went down in the later part of the season, but he was probably more important to our team during that stretch than he was the first 11-30 stretch.”
Q: What was your first impression of first-round pick Bam Adebayo in summer league?
Tyler: “I didn’t realize how versatile he was. He was pushing the floor, grabbing rebounds and then leading the break. I wasn’t expecting that, especially for a guy as big as he is. So that kind of caught me off guard, and then his athleticism. You throw the ball anywhere, and he’s going to go up and go get it. And also how mature he was for being 19. I was definitely surprised by that.”
Q: How do you see Kelly Olynyk fitting in with this Heat team?
Tyler: “I know I hated playing against him. I’m assuming he’s one of those guys that you hate to play against but you love to have on your team. I saw how important he was to that Boston squad, so I think he’ll be a good fit for this team.”
Q: You keep telling us that you’re going to replace your missing front tooth, but the toothless look is still there. Is this just your look?
Tyler: “I don’t know. My mom’s been pushing me, too. So I think she might be the one to finally get me to get one. But I don’t see why it’s necessary right now, because I’m sure eventually it’s going to get knocked out again. I mean, if I play 10 years in the NBA, I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose it two, three more times.”
Q: You said you’ve lost seven teeth. Did they all come while playing basketball?
Tyler: “Yeah. I had one incident in college where I dove on the floor. Somebody fell on top of the back of my head and all my teeth went into the court. So I lost five or six at that time. And then when I broke my jaw, I think that was my seventh.”
[Who should be the Heat’s starting small forward — Rodney McGruder or Justise Winslow?]
[A look at a few roster decisions that await the Heat in August]
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“Tread on the Ku Klux Klan,” says Gerald Scarfe, as I step gingerly over what he calls his “filing system”. Computer-printed pictures of politicians, rioters and racists strew the fifth-floor studio atop his Chelsea townhouse where Britain’s best-known cartoonist works pretty much all day, every day. The walls are crammed too, with mementos of a career spanning more than seven decades and several artistic incarnations: savage political caricatures, his designs for Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Disney’s Hercules, a Bafta award. On one side, six fresh, sharp, brilliantly brutal drawings show a porcine Donald Trump talking (literally) out of his anus, riding with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse or waving a missile in place of his genitals.
Scarfe, a dapper and sprightly 81, left The Sunday Times in June after 50 years and this week joins the Evening Standard to contribute a new Friday illustration, Scarfe’s Week, to complement the daily political cartoon by Adams on the comment pages. “I am a compulsive worker,” he says, folding himself into an Eames armchair bought by his wife, the actress Jane Asher. “Drawing is what I have done all my life since I was a child: it’s my way of getting my rocks off or my anxieties out. It’s been nice drawing for myself for a couple of months and I can publish these [Trump drawings] later in a book but a newspaper deadline can produce things that otherwise wouldn’t exist — it’s that last bit of energy that’s squeezed out of the toothpaste tube.”
He is a fan of Adams’s work. “I admire his line and I admire his ability to get up at 6am and come up with a drawing in two hours. A daily cartoon is a very hard job to do.” We seem to be in a golden age of illustration, akin to the revolution of the Sixties when Scarfe and his sometime friend, Ralph Steadman, shook up the staid cartooning world of Giles, Trog and Vicky. “It’s such a weird job to do because you are part artist and part journalist,” Scarfe muses. “But most editors realise it is a big asset to a newspaper, to have a visual joke that takes the piss out of the high and mighty. I think the cartoonist’s job is to give the man in the street a broad-sweep, black-and-white picture of things, as simple as possible.”
Scarfe first began submitting drawings to the Standard and others in the late Fifties in a bid to escape his job in his uncle’s commercial art studio at the Elephant and Castle. But it wasn’t until Private Eye launched in 1961 that he settled (if that’s the word) into the elegantly grotesque, ferocious style that remains instantly recognisable: the swooping line that turns a nose into a stabbing beak, the deft shading that unmasks a dead-eyed dictator as a cannibal feasting on his people.
These days he is in the studio by 7am, often earlier: he listens to Radio 4’s Today programme, reads three newspapers, and often works into the evening, when he’ll watch one major news bulletin and Newsnight. Although he has his own website, he is a stranger to social media. “I am not computer-literate.” He draws every day, whether he has a commission or not. Is it a rage that drives him? “Yeah, over the misuse of power. But that doesn’t mean I walk around in a terrible fury every day. If I feel angry about Blair and Bush I can just draw it and get it out of my system. Until the next day.”
There is more to him than journalism: a new exhibition opening at the House of Illustration in King’s Cross on Friday celebrates his work in theatre, opera, television and film. “I was at a party a couple of years ago and Damian Lewis came up to me and said, ‘I was your banana’,” says Scarfe. “When I started in stage design I did Orpheus in the Underworld and dressed some poor actors up as fruit: he was one of them. There is a Pygmalion thing for artists: they want to get the thing off the paper, make it-three dimensional and breathe life into it.” But it is drawing that has been his obsession and his salvation.
He was born in 1936 in St John’s Wood, his father a banker and his mother a teacher, and was an only child until he was nine, when his brother was born. “I was a timid, frightened child,” he recalls. “It was wartime so I was aware my parents were anxious, and my father was away most of the time anyway in the RAF. I was a chronic asthmatic and during my childhood my parents truly thought I was going to die. There were nights I could not get my breath, |
neuro-engineers may find that the physical and computational limits of neurons to be sub-optimal, and theycould seek to either supplement them with BCI or replace them with artificial neurons. These technologies, while promising, are still at the dawn of their development, and they are far from human cogno-enhancement applications. While these technologies are limited right now, it seems machine interfacing and bio-engineering could be the only means of making us truly limitless.
In mean time, as avid Hub followers should know, you can build your cognitive prowess without pharmacological or technological intervention. Firstly, start by getting plenty of sleep every night and exercising to increase hippocampal volume. If you find the improvement negligible, try meditation, which has been shown to attenuate stress-induced cognitive deficits. You could also master the art of mnemonics to broaden your memory capacity several fold. Forward-thinking futurists may refer to this as “mind-hacking,” but these tricks are nearly as old as civilization itself.
To Enhance or Not to Enhance
Despite the potential of neuro-enhancement, bio-conservatives argue that we should stick with these “natural” means of improving cognition, leaving the smart drugs, genetic engineering, and BCI to science fiction. There are also those who compare smart drugs to steroids, claiming it’s unethical to use any substance as a performance enhancer. If taken to boost an SAT score, then I would agree. However, to both bio-conservatives and performance ethicists, I say there are scenarios where it’s morally imperative to utilize neuro-enhancement, especially when it could reduce suffering in the world.
How, you say? While athletic performance can uplift a nation (as seen in the film Invictus), cognitive performance can bring about novel insights about the world. As we’ve covered, brain-doping is already common in scientific circles. There’s even speculation that Francis Crick envisioned the double-helix structure of DNA on LSD, and fellow Nobel Laureate, Kary Mullis, outright admitted that the drug influenced the development of PCR. Undoubtedly, the downstream fruits of these platform biotechnologies have the potential to reduce suffering on a global scale. If you “cheat” to hasten trailblazing discoveries, through drugs or other neuro-enhancements, should you be condemned and vilified? With any luck, we’ll reach consensus on this issue by the time safe, effective, and reliable cogno-enhancers enter the scene. Until then, feel free to call me a pharma-fuelled fraud for a stimulating nootropic – a double-shot dirty chai – expedited the writing of this article. Guilty as charged. Now pass the NZT!
<Images: Virgin Produced (modified), Wikimedia Commons>
<Videos: Virgin Produced>
<Sources: Virgin Produced, Erowid, Essential Psychopharmacology>James Franco is almost over the hill. On a recent Los Angeles afternoon, as he climbs up a steep path on a hike to Griffith Observatory, he starts ruminating about his life. “I realize, ‘James, you’re 40,’” says the actor, who is actually 39. “I have achieved all the things that I dreamed when I was younger. And realizing, ‘Oh, those things are not going to fill the hole.’” As he approaches this milestone, he says he’s not afraid to slow down and focus, after bouncing from one project to the next for most of his life: “Do fewer things, and do things that you really love, and give them the attention they deserve.”
For Franco, a constant state of frenzy has been a shield, to protect him from failure. “It was a defense mechanism,” he says. “If I do a lot of things and one of them comes out and people don’t like it, I’m already on to the next thing. I’m not even listening to the criticism. But it’s also an escape.” He pauses. “If I kept myself busy, I never had to look at myself or my life.”
Danielle Levitt for Variety
For now, Franco is taking his foot off the pedal (he’s even started clocking at least seven hours of sleep a night), and his most recent work suggests that he’s ready to be taken more seriously as a filmmaker and actor. He’s only acted for two weeks total this year, in the Coen brothers’ Western anthology series “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” for Netflix, which will debut in 2018. He directed and stars in the upcoming movie “The Disaster Artist,” which opens in theaters on Dec. 1. And his HBO show “The Deuce,” in which he plays twins in David Simon’s Dickensian drama about the mob and the porn industry in 1970s New York, has been picked up for a second season. “I wanted to stop going out there and doing these indies on my own, where I was the complete master and nobody was telling me no,” Franco says.
Like a post-millennial “Where’s Waldo,” there’s been a nonstop search for the real James Franco. “My public persona is this weird part of me, but not part of me,” he says a few weeks before our hike, during a 7:30 a.m. breakfast at the Soho House in downtown Manhattan. “Other outlets use it to sell magazines,” Franco says, as he inhales a plate of scrambled eggs with bacon. “Why can’t I have fun with it? On the other hand, it becomes you. There was a period 10 years ago that I wasn’t the James Franco that everyone suddenly knew, doing all these things. It’s almost like the mask gets fused to your face. That mask of fame sort of gets stuck on your face whether you’re being facetious or being serious. It’s a hard thing to talk about because you start sounding like a douche.”
Franco, who broke out in the industry as a high school heartthrob on the 1999 TV show “Freaks and Geeks,” has patched together one of the most intriguing, if at times schizophrenic, trajectories in Hollywood. It’s actually more like a series of careers that could keep a small army busy. There was his time as a chiseled leading man (in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” trilogy), a soap opera actor (a meta-twist where he played a character named Franco on “General Hospital”), a Broadway performer (“Of Mice and Men”), a sometime indie director (“The Sound and the Fury”), a short story writer (“Palo Alto”) and a Hulu star (“11.22.63”).
“I wanted to stop going out there and doing these indies on my own, where I was the complete master and nobody was telling me no.”
James Franco
“Not to compare myself to Kurt Cobain,” Franco says. “But he’s such a great example of this. You read the journals, and he’s writing about how he wants success and fame. And then he gets it, and he’s like, ‘This is hell.’”
The new Franco also wants to work harder on his personal relationships. He tells a story about how he accompanied his girlfriend, Isabel Pakzad, to the emergency room after she developed a nasty throat infection at the San Sebastian Film Festival in September. “There was one instance,” he says. “This old girlfriend was visiting me in New York. I had come out here for school. My cat had scratched her in the eye. I had so much work to get done for the next day, I didn’t take her to the hospital. I had my assistant take her. That moment haunted me so much. What kind of selfish, self-centered boyfriend are you?”
He’s made other adjustments, such as quitting Instagram. “It’s very liberating,” Franco says. “I just got rid of it. When I first got on, it just felt silly. I treated it like it was a joke. You get in that weird seductive space where it feels private, but it’s also public. And you get hooked on the reaction.”
He still can’t parse the different identities that he used to project. “I was testing the bounds,” he says. “It’s sort of the way I see people like the Kardashians. They are staking out new ground and what these spaces are. They are making a lot of money off of it. What will happen if I do that? And you get reactions. There was some photo I did. I wasn’t naked. I’m sure Rihanna has posted a bunch more risqué photos. It was just the attitude of the photo. It was sweaty. My hand was in my boxers. It just looked gross. And I remember Gucci” — which had an endorsement deal with him — “saying, ‘Don’t do any more photos like that.’”
The story of “The Disaster Artist” was a match made in heaven for Franco, who loves old Hollywood tales. In the film, he plays the real-life actor and director Tommy Wiseau, who was behind what’s largely regarded as the worst movie ever made, the 2003 indie “The Room.” It’s a role that required an on-screen metamorphosis (think Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line” meets Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman in “Man on the Moon”). In addition to producing and starring, Franco directed in full character mode, sporting a shaggy wig and barking out commands to his cast in Wiseau’s indistinct accent.
James Franco stayed in character while directing his film about Tommy Wiseau.
Justina Mintz
Franco’s younger brother Dave Franco, who plays Tommy’s best friend and “Room” collaborator Greg Sestero, says he believes audiences will respond to “The Disaster Artist.” “I think it’s his best performance to date,” says Dave, who is launching a production company, Ramona Films, with James named after the street they grew up on. “He keeps you on your toes.”
In the late ’90s, Wiseau and Sestero were two acting-class buddies trying to crash into Hollywood. They made the trek from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but the industry wouldn’t take them seriously. Wiseau, with his Eastern European upbringing (despite pretending to be from New Orleans) and hulking figure, was told that he was less of a leading man than a Frankenstein. To push back, he financed his first script out of his own pocket, intent on proving to the world that he was the next James Dean.
“The Room” is a convoluted drama about a man (Wiseau) who discovers that his best pal (Sestero) has betrayed him by stealing his girlfriend. The movie has a cheesy dubbed track, sex scenes that bring to mind soft-core porn and lines that are delivered with such exaggeration, they become instant camp. At “The Room’s” rather unglamorous premiere, the crowd laughed in all the wrong moments. But instead of disappearing forever, Wiseau started to screen his opus at midnight to college students. They watched “The Room” to mock it, and the movie became a cult phenomenon. “I always say ‘The Room’ is successful because it has heart,” says Wiseau, who dismisses his critics with a shrug. “It has heart like a human being.”
Franco is fascinated by Wiseau’s ability to make a drastic U-turn, to take something that was widely ridiculed and act like he was in on the joke. After he read “The Disaster Artist,” a non-fiction book written by Sestero, Franco optioned the rights in 2014. “When he reached out, I couldn’t believe it,” Sestero says. “I had known Tommy for 20 years. To pull him off and not be a cartoon I felt would be really difficult.”
Franco had an early conversation with Wiseau, who wanted Johnny Depp to play him. Wiseau says that Franco was a suitable second choice because he’d portrayed Dean in a 2001 TNT biopic. “I don’t know if you know the movie ‘Sonny,’” Wiseau says, referring to a little-seen 2002 film that stars Franco as a prostitute. “I watched that movie several times — at least 10.”
Franco wanted to build Wiseau from the inside out. He studied the original dailies from “The Room,” and he listened to Wiseau’s private taped journals. To prepare for his film’s climactic sex scene, he stuck to a lengthy diet that consisted of Whole Foods salads for lunch and dinner, on top of 300 daily sit-ups and push-ups. “He’s muscular, but it’s a very strange muscularity,” Franco says of Wiseau’s physique.
The actor underwent a dramatic transformation, right down to a fake Virginia Woolf-like snout. “I had two and a half hours of prosthetics,” he says. “We used cheeks because he has very severe cheekbones. A nosepiece not for the full nose but for the bridge. We did a little piece on the eyelid because he has a lazy eye on one side. And blue contacts.”
“My public persona is this weird part of me, but not part of me. The mask of fame sort of gets stuck on your face whether you’re being facetious or being serious.”
James Franco
The cast, which included Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith and Judd Apatow in A-list cameos, had to adjust to Franco directing in character. “To me, one of the most interesting things about the movie is how many talented people are in it,” says Seth Rogen, who produced the film through his company Point Grey Pictures and plays the script supervisor Sandy Schklair. “A lot of them did it because they wanted to be in a movie that James Franco was directing, because they thought it would be a strange, surreal, bizarre experience. And then it was like a thousand points beyond what they ever conceived.”
In their own way, Wiseau and Franco are kindred spirits. Despite all his bravado, Franco is sincere about his work. He says that growing up in Palo Alto, he was an introvert who fell into acting while doing plays as a senior in high school. There are actually three Franco boys. Tom, the middle child, is a sculptor. Their mom, Betsy, who is a prolific children’s book writer and occasional actress, keeps up the Twitter account @FrancosMom. Their dad, Doug, who was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, died in 2011.
One of James’ first jobs, after he dropped out of UCLA, was at the overnight drive-through of a McDonald’s, where he practiced accents while taking orders. “I had very little work experience,” he says. “I couldn’t get a restaurant job. I would show up smelly.” A friend suggested trying a fast-food chain. “‘What, are you too good to work at McDonald’s?’ I guess not.” He shrugs. “I was following my dreams.”
When “The Disaster Artist” premiered at SXSW in March, it earned some of the biggest laughs ever at Austin’s Paramount Theatre, a tall order given the venue’s history of launching breakout comedic hits like “Sausage Party” and “21 Jump Street.” The movie, which is being marketed and released by indie distributor A24, has become this year’s dark horse awards darling. Franco’s already picked up a nomination at the Gotham Independent Spirit Awards. “I think this is the upside-down ‘La La Land,’” he says. “It’s about two people trying to make it and follow their dreams.” It’s possible that the gonzo valentine to Hollywood can catapult the actor all the way to the Oscars.
Danielle Levitt for Variety
He’s been there before, of course. In 2011, he was nominated for “127 Hours,” which coincided with a widely panned turn as the co-emcee of the Academy Awards with Anne Hathaway. “At the time I justified it to myself,” Franco says. “‘This will be an experiment. This will be weird.’ Part of me was so uncomfortable with the attention of being nominated, but also fear of losing, because everybody was talking about Colin Firth,” he says about the eventual winner in his category.
By taking on extra duties as Oscar host, he thought it wouldn’t look so bad if he went home empty-handed. He didn’t even know he was tanking during the telecast because there was laughter in the auditorium. “I mean, I shouldn’t have been doing it,” he says. “Honestly, I think the biggest criticism of me, it seemed like I was high or low energy. In my head, I was trying to be the straight man. I guess I just went too far or came across as the dead man.”
Before our hike, Franco is behind the wheel of his car, fiddling with an old cell phone. As part of the advertising campaign for “The Disaster Artist,” A24 has taken over a Los Angeles billboard with a toll-free number (an homage to the original billboard that Wiseau took out for “The Room”). Every day, Franco fields five to 10 calls as Tommy, to the delighted laughter of the groupies who manage to get through. After “The Disaster Artist” charmed the pants off SXSW, the film’s original distributor, New Line, wasn’t sure if it was the right home, given a lack of recent box office success with midsize comedies. So A24 picked up the project instead. “It was an incredibly cool thing that they did,” Rogen says. “You don’t see that happen very often, studios financing movies and selling them to independent distribution houses.”
Driving to Griffith Observatory was Franco’s idea. He first came up here when he was playing Dean in his early 20s, shortly after “Freaks and Geeks” was canceled. At the time, Franco wasn’t too torn up about it. “I didn’t know how rare it is to find a group of people working on such incredible material,” he says. “I just thought, ‘Oh, perfect, now I can start my movie career.’” Wiseau also made the pilgrimage because he saw himself as the next Dean, who wound up at the famed location in “Rebel Without a Cause.” “To me, his fascination and desire to be James Dean epitomizes his lack of touch with reality,” says Franco, who is drawn to the gap between perception and truth. It’s plainly on display in the Hollywood Hills. For the rest of the day, the actor, who is wearing glasses and a hat, blends in with the crowd. He dodges past cell phone-wielding tourists taking selfies, oblivious to the fact that they just missed a major celebrity sighting.
When we reach the observatory, Franco pauses, letting it all sink in. He says that the movie industry is in a tricky place. “It’s a cliché now to say, but I think it’s very true,” he says. “The movies are like short stories, and television is like novels.” He makes a weekly trek to his local multiplex, listing off a quadruple feature at the ArcLight that included the horror movie “Happy Death Day,” the drama “Una,” the crime thriller “The Snowman” and the action story “Only the Brave.” “This was just a fun day at the movies,” he says sheepishly of the eclectic list. “I see everything.”This product was a winner of the ThinkGeek Bounty Program, which means the design was an original submission by one of you. Unfortunately this program doesn't exist anymore, but to all who participated in the past, we're forever grateful for your brains.
Go Away
Geeks: we're one big group of loners. Most of us are not much good at the whole social interaction thing. In fact, we've trained our whole lives to be Not Good at it. From playing house alone to petitioning to be the project manager, technical lead, designer, and tester all in one on your next project, you know that other people just make life more complicated. But don't worry. You're in good company here. You're amongst people who understand, cause we're like that, too. For most of us, if it starts with "social," it better end with "networking sites."
Pretty much whenever we're out in public, geeks take a circumstance penalty to our CHA-based skills (except Handle Animal), and if you want to land some sort of bonus to offset that, you'd have to down a lot of alcohol or wear a shirt that forewarns people of the situation in a humorous manner and automatically breaks the ice with no effort whatsoever on your part. Oh wait. That's what this is! How convenient is that?
This is a 100% cotton charcoal grey t-shirt with the declaration "You read my t-shirt. That's enough social interaction for one day." printed in white upon it.A five-run fifth helped lift the Lehigh Valley IronPigs (9-7) to a 7-4 win over the Pawtucket Red Sox (10-7) on Saturday afternoon at McCoy Stadium.
The win is the first of the year for the IronPigs over Pawtucket.
In the afore-mentioned five-run fifth, a walk and a single started the inning before Ryan Jackson laid down a bunt and a throwing error on the play charged to PawSox catcher Blake Swihart allowed two runs to score and give the Pigs a 3-2 lead. The other runs in the inning came via a Darnell Sweeney RBI double that plated Jackson, a Nick Williams RBI single and an RBI groundout from Brock Stassi that extended the lead to 6-2.
Pawtucket starter Keith Couch (0-1) allowed the six runs (four earned) on eight hits to go along with two walks and three strikeouts in 7.0 IP.
The Pigs took a 1-0 lead in the top of the fourth as Taylor Featherston led off with a double, moved to third on a groundout and scored on Stassi's (1-3, 2B, 2 RBI) two-out RBI double.
Featherston's double extended his hitting streak to 13 games, which is the longest by an IronPig since Pete Orr had a 13-gamer from August 1-15, 2013.
Justin Maxwell's two-run shot in the home half of the fourth off of Pigs starter Mark Appel gave Pawtucket a 2-1 lead. It was the first home run of the season for Maxwell.
Appel (3-0) gave up two runs on five hits while walking one and fanning three over his five innings of work. RHP Edward Mujica (2.0 IP, H, K) recorded the final six outs to notch his league leading fourth save of the season.
Pawtucket cut the lead to 6-4 with a pair of runs in the sixth as Ryan LaMarre and Mike Miller each knocked home runs with RBI singles. Trailing 6-4, the PawSox had runners at the corners with two outs, but RHP Luis Garcia (1.1 IP, BB, 3 K) was able to fan Sean Coyle and end the threat. Both runs in the inning were charged to Lehigh Valley RHP Gregory Infante (0.2 IP, 2 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 2 BB).
J.P. Arencibia's solo shot off of RHP Jorge Marban (2.0 IP, H, R, ER, BB, 2 K) in the top of the eighth opened up a 7-4 lead for the IronPigs. It was Arencibia's first home run of the season.
Cedric Hunter (2-4, R) had a multi-hit game for manager Dave Brundage's squad.
The series wraps up on Sunday at 1:05 p.m. from McCoy Stadium when RHP David Buchanan (0-1, 4.91) heads to the hill for the IronPigs against PawSox RHP Sean O'Sullivan (2-1, 2.89).Former boxing champion and rising MMA bantamweight Holly Holm has a fight scheduled April 4 (against Juliana Werner at Legacy FC 30 in New Mexico) but her management was busy this past weekend negotiating to bringing her to the UFC.
“Offers went back and forth,” Holm's manager Lenny Fresquez told MMA Junkie.
“We already had guidelines of what we were going to agree on and what we weren’t going to agree on. We’re still a little ways [apart] and there’s still a couple of items. We’re very excited about getting Holly into the UFC. It’s just my job to put Holly in the right hands.”
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Fresquez says that it's his goal to get Holm a title fight against UFC bantamweight champ Ronda Rousey, and to get her paid well for the privilege. The manager also claimed that the UFC is indeed considering former Strikeforce champions Gina Carano and "Cyborg" Justino as possible opponents for Rousey.
“I asked them, ‘Who’s Ronda going to fight?’” Fresquez went on.
“They said, ‘She could fight ‘Cyborg’ or fight Gina Carano.’ Those were the couple of other options that they were looking at. But I also know ‘Cyborg’ can’t make 135 pounds, and Gina can’t make 135 pounds, so I know those fights can’t be made for the UFC title.”
Who would you rather watch Rousey fight - Carano, "Cyborg" or Holm? Let us know in the comments section.
Follow Elias on Twitter @EliasCepeda & @YahooCagewriterA MAN who found a meteorite in his back garden has swapped it for a Harley-Davidson.
Jim Griffey, 63 from Cabot, Arkansas, was using a hole-boring tool in preparation to plant trees in his back garden when he hit a rock. He dug the rock out and tossed it aside.
Later on he went back to inspect the rock: "I've got a few interesting rocks in my shed. One has some fossils in it another is some fool's gold," said Griffey.
After looking at the strange rock, he grabbed a magnet to see if was metal: "The dang magnet shot right to it. I'm pretty sure it charged the magnet," Griffey said.
Because of his love of motorcycles, Griffey called his local Harley-Davidson dealer, Landers Harley Davidson, to see if they would trade the rock for a motorcycle.
Griffey said: "You know I don't mind taking an old Harley that will smoke cause I'm 63 and I smoke a little bit too."
Quite bizarrely, the local dealer said yes and Griffey will pick up his new motorcycle in exchange for the meteorite. Not bad for a morning's work.Canada's restaurant sector is warning of reduced hours and the possibility that some businesses may have to shut down in response to the federal government's decision to to impose an immediate moratorium on allowing restaurants to hire temporary foreign workers.
Joyce Reynolds, Executive Vice-President of Government Affairs for Restaurants Canada, said restaurant shut downs and long lineups were a reality in Alberta before Ottawa approved the program and those problems are now likely to return.
"We're getting calls from members saying we don't know how we're going to be able to keep our restaurants open," she said in an interview.
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"We're expecting that we may return to the days when restaurants close due to lack of staff and huge lineups out the door and hours of operation curtailed and parts of the operation shut down. We can only serve you on the patio. We're going to have to close our restaurant inside. Those are the types of things that happened in Alberta and we anticipate that these types of things are going to start happening again."
On Thursday Employment Minister Jason Kenney announced a surprise decision to impose an immediate moratorium on allowing restaurants to hire temporary foreign workers.
The federal announcement – which came in an e-mail to reporters at 8:46 p.m. Thursday – represents a major change to a federal program that has been gripped by controversy over the past year. Employees across the country have complained publicly about being replaced by temporary foreign workers. Mr. Kenney said in a statement Thursday evening that his earlier effort to sanction specific outlets wasn't working and that wider action was needed.
"There remain serious concerns regarding the use of the temporary foreign worker program in the food services sector," he said.
The decision took businesses by surprise, as they decried a lack of consultation and said the move would force some employers to close shop.
"I knew a shoe was going to drop, but this was both shoes. This is a far bigger reaction than what I thought," said Dan Kelly, head of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
"In the minister's province of Alberta many small businesses will teeter on [the brink of] survival based on this decision."
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Mr. Kenney said his office will not process any new or pending labour market opinion applications in the food sector. The opinions are required before permission is granted to hire a temporary foreign worker. As well, any restaurant that has already obtained an LMO but hasn't yet filled the position will be unable to do so.
"Abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program will not be tolerated," Mr. Kenney said in the statement.
Ian Tostenson, president of the B.C. Restaurant and Foodservices Association, said he agreed the program needs review but that Mr. Kenney has overreacted. "There are a lot of small business people in British Columbia who are wondering what this means for them. It's chaos. We would have really liked a heads up."
Mr. Kenney had hinted earlier this month that he was considering such a move.
He told CBC Radio in British Columbia last week that it was not an "unreasonable question" to ask about limiting the use of the program for fast-food restaurants.
"I am skeptical that food-service jobs in urban areas with still relatively high youth unemployment need to use this program," he said at the time.
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Those comments got a cool reception from the food industry, as well as the governments of British Columbia and Alberta, where the program is more commonly used by businesses to fill job vacancies.
Alberta Labour Minister Thomas Lukaszuk told The Globe and Mail last week that the government should not be "picking out one industry and making an assumption there is a problem."
Mr. Kenney's move comes on the same day that Tim Hortons announced it would inspect each of its franchises that employ temporary foreign workers after reports that two stores belonging to the Canadian coffee chain breached labour rules.
The chain confirmed Thursday that it had terminated franchisee control of locations in Fernie, B.C., and Blairmore, Alta., after foreign workers in the neighbouring Rocky Mountain towns claimed they were denied overtime pay. About 4,500 temporary foreign workers are employed by Tim Hortons, most of them in Western Canada.
With 5 per cent of its 90,000-strong work force made up of foreign workers on temporary permits, Tim Hortons spokeswoman Olga Petrycki said the company is expanding an existing audit program. A new mandatory independent audit will start "over the next few months."
McDonald's Canada put a stop to all new foreign hires on Wednesday after criticism that the fast-food giant was favouring foreign workers over Canadian applicants.
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Three McDonald's locations in Victoria were blacklisted by the federal government last week and forbidden from using the temporary worker program after applicants complained they were being turned away and locals were offered fewer hours than foreign workers.
Earlier this week, two long-time waitresses at a small pizzeria in Weyburn, Sask., complained they had been fired and replaced by foreign workers. Weyburn has been cited in the past as an example of the type of small Canadian community dealing with worker shortages and best served by the temporary work permits.
Mr. Kenney questioned last week whether the food-services sector should be eligible to use the program. Tim Hortons and McDonald's collectively employ nearly 9,000 temporary foreign workers. A study released by the C.D. Howe Institute on Thursday was sharply critical of the federal program and blamed it for a higher youth unemployment rate in Western Canada.
The report also argued that a new $275 user fee imposed in 2013 was not high enough to serve as an incentive for employers to seek out Canadians. The report noted that fees in the United States and elsewhere are much higher for similar programs, and part of the money raised is used to fund programs to train domestic workers.
The Temporary Foreign Worker Program has grown quickly under the Conservatives. The Globe and Mail reported this week that use of the program by the service sector rose sharply between 2006 and 2012, the most recent date that statistics are publicly available.
The number of approved foreign worker positions in accommodation and food services in that period grew from 4,360 to 44,740 – an increase of 926 per cent, according to public data from Employment and Social Development Canada.
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Workers under the program are approved for two-year stints, although many can work for longer by stringing together multiple jobs and immigration initiatives.
NDP employment critic Jinny Sims said she welcomed the government's decision.
"We had been calling for a moratorium and I'm glad the government is finally listening," she said in a statement. "But a moratorium on its own is not enough. We need an independent review of the whole program to end its abuse. The minister has the responsibility to ensure that people living in Canada get first access to Canadian jobs."
Mr. Kelly of the CFIB had just returned from a small Indian restaurant in Scarborough when he heard the news. A spokesman for Canadian business, he has taken a large public role during the debate on temporary foreign workers as many businesses fear public shaming.
The owner of the Indian restaurant told him during his supper that he needed nine cooks, with skills learned only in India. The restaurateur currently has five cooks, of which four are in Canada on temporary permits that expire next year.
"I doubt that a restaurant like that would survive if this moratorium lasts more than a few weeks," Mr. Kelly said.Since last week, the political news has been dominated not by the Bob Menendez corruption trial, not by the fight to pass tax reform in the House, which happened Thursday, not by the rather stupendous accomplishments of the president and his team during his Asia trip — including bailing out three UCLA basketball players who stupidly got themselves arrested for shoplifting at a Louis Vuitton store in China — but instead by a series of allegations about the Republican nominee in the special election in Alabama to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate.
It seems that Moore, as a younger man in his early 30’s during the latter years of the 1970’s, engaged in a marital strategy which was falling quickly out of fashion — namely, that he was searching for a bride either in or barely out of her teens. A few years later when he was 38 Moore did marry a 24-year old former beauty queen; the couple have been together some 33 years.
Doing so was significant of a couple of things. First, that Moore wanted a wife who didn’t have a career, something which observers of his well-established and long-held traditionalist positions on cultural and social issues won’t find surprising. And second, that he was looking for a big family with lots of children. Marry someone young who doesn’t have a career, and raising four or five kids is a lot easier to make happen. In the 1970s, and particularly in Alabama, and particularly in a small town like Gadsden where Moore lived, this was not all that uncommon. Nor was Alabama unique in this respect — the pursuit of young brides was a societal norm in the generation before Moore’s and had been for a long time. Practically every Jane Austen novel you had to read in high school or college covers that subject.
But because Moore acted out scenes from those Jane Austen novels, it appears he’s vulnerable to accusations that his pursuits led him somewhere darker. A host of women have leveled a spectrum of charges against him, most of which don’t reflect anything particularly disqualifying to his Senate bid but a couple of them would make him unpalatable, to put it kindly. In both of those cases the accuser is less than 100 percent credible (one of them, whose stepson immediately surfaced to inform the public his dad divorced her because she’s a serial liar, actually hired Gloria Allred — nobody with anything truthful to say does that), and the timing of this spate of accusations so close to next month’s election pitting Moore against the pro-abort socialist creep Doug Jones suggests that stealing an election for the Democrats in a red state is really what all this is about.
It hasn’t helped Moore’s cause that his defense to these charges has been at times inarticulate and wishy-washy. He was apparently taken much aback that he would be defending his lifestyle of nearly 40 years ago, as any husband forced to publicly discuss his romantic life before meeting his wife might be, but in the hyper-partisan and sexual harassment-addicted environment we currently see that response has been deemed suspicious.
And so Moore has struggled to fend off the charges. In Alabama, where he’s known and has a loyal following and where the Washington Post, which originally published the allegations, is roundly hated, he fares better than he does nationally. The polls vary wildly, but Moore still leads in as many as he doesn’t — an indication he might yet survive the firestorm. His would-be Senate colleagues have rushed to condemn him, which hardly affects the voting public in the Heart of Dixie. What respect might one afford Lindsey Graham, who has split his time between serving as a character witness at Menendez’s trial and heaping opprobrium on Moore, after all?
And yet on Thursday came manna from heaven descending on Moore, almost as though the prayers of the candidate, his wife and their followers were answered. On Thursday Leeann Tweeden, the model, TV personality and morning radio anchor at KABC-AM in Los Angeles, posted to the station’s website a long story about a December 2006 USO tour of Afghanistan in which she participated, along with then-comedian and now-Senator Al Franken. Tweeden accused Franken of forcing his tongue down her throat during the “rehearsal” of a kiss included in a skit he’d written for the tour, and then dropped a larger bomb — posting a photograph of Franken feeling her up while she was sleeping on the plane back from Bagram Air Base.
And just like that, Moore was gone from the top of the front page.
Just like that it’s no longer Moore who’s the Bad Boy of the Senate — as if he ever was, given Menendez’s reported dalliances with teenaged Dominican hookers as part of his corruption scandal. Now it’s Franken who will allegedly be the subject of a Senate Ethics probe, and it’s Franken who will likely be hounded by a parade of accusers tumbling forth from the ether.
All of which is fine.
I said at my site that Moore ought to offer to withdraw from the race in Alabama the minute the Senate votes to expel Menendez, a suggestion which would never have to be acted on — and that fact would expose the |
ated or frozen (Choose a piece that’s pretty fatty – fat is a good thing in Spam making.)
3 ounces ham
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon + 1/2 teaspoon Morton’s Tender Quick
Directions:
Preheat oven to 300 F. Grind the pork shoulder in a meat grinder (I used a tabletop meat grinder, but the KitchenAid meat grinder attachment would probably have been easier). Set aside.
Finely mince the ham with the garlic in a food processor (I used my mini Cuisinart).
Dump the pork shoulder, ham/garlic, and Tender Quick into a large bowl and mix by hand until fully combined.
Pack the meat mixture into a bread pan and cover with foil. Place the bread pan into a large baking dish filled 3/4 full with water.
Place the baking dish in the oven and bake for three hours (the internal temperature of the Spam should reach 155 F). Remove from the oven, uncover the bread pan and try not to be too grossed out by all of the fat that has emerged from the meat. Nonchalantly dump all of the fat into a jar or can to dispose of later. Note: During my first attempt at making homemade Spam, I neglected that step. When I later pulled the Spam out of the fridge, it had a layer of white creamy fat on top of it and a layer of natural Jello under that. I could barely stomach it.
Cover the bread pan loosely with foil and place a heavy weight on top of the foil. I took bricks and put them in another bread pan and put that bread pan on the Spam. You may need to get creative, but I’m sure you can find something in your house that will work.Prepare for Shifting Temps and Conditions.
Ah, spring. Is there any single word that evokes so much promise for skiers of every stripe. From diehard powderhounds to weekend warriors, spring conjures images of breathtaking blue skies, dazzling sunshine, and some of the best conditions of the season.
Of course, spring can have a nasty side as well. No one knows that better than New England skiers. After all, the Northeast is where skiers jokingly refer to our famous boilerplate “blue ice” as “New England powder.”
Warmer temperatures also mean shifting conditions, on several fronts. We all dream of perfect surroundings, but Mother Nature doesn’t always cooperate. Some years ago, at my brother Sean’s early-April Sunday River bachelor weekend in Maine, the snow was in great shape, but a pelting rainfall forced us to ski with trash bags to protect ourselves, and a thick, heavy fog reduced our visibility to just a few feet.
So what’s a spring skier to do? To get answers, we reached out to Keri Reid, assistant director for Okemo’s Ski + Ride School in Vermont, for a better idea of how to handle any spring surprise, good and bad. Her first recommendation? Don’t trust the weather report.
“Be prepared for any and all conditions,” said Reid. “Dressing right becomes quite the conundrum. One minute you’re freezing, the next you’re sweating.”
Reid suggests getting a high-quality shell – an un-insulated jacket – that can be worn with many or a few layers underneath.
“Gore-Tex and similar fabrics offer breathability and waterproofness for those pesky wet days,” she said. “Layers are the name of the game. As the day progressively warms, you can peel off fleeces and such to stay comfortable.”
Proper preparation includes making sure you not only have the right clothing, but also that your gear is ready to go. Skis and snowboards can be tuned differently to address the variable conditions you should expect to find after February.
“A good tuning tech can prepare your skis to best deal with the slushy spring conditions,” said Reid. “The right base structure can help to shed water and ensure maximum gliding capacity.”
Regardless of your gear, spring skiing can present unique challenges for skiers unfamiliar with the impact of fluctuating temperatures. One of my most vivid spring skiing memories of recent vintage dates back about six years. My family and I were having a great March outing at New Hampshire’s Mount Cranmore. It was the quintessential spring outing, with great conditions from top to bottom at the start of the day. But by late morning, the snow near the bottom of the hill had softened up considerably. My daughter Maddi, who was 12 at the time, wasn’t quite prepared for it.
After a half dozen runs, we decided to head in for lunch. On a long, flat run-in to the base, Maddi turned to cheer us on. What she didn’t account for was the heavy, mashed potato snow under her skis. Poor kid caught an edge, and launched. Skis, poles, goggles, and gloves went everywhere. Maddi went down hard.
Even with her helmet, Maddi suffered a mild concussion. The lesson, of course, is that spring can bring conditions that are at least every bit as unpredictable as mid-winter. According to Reid, spring skiing is a “a mixed bag. You never know what the day is going to throw at you.”
“The mornings usually start out cooler and firmer, with conditions morphing throughout the day,” she said. “The mountain becomes a true challenge, testing your stance and balance. With temperatures rising, skier traffic causes natural moguls to form in places that may typically be groomed. Bumps can be even more difficult as they set early and late in the day.”
Since conditions can change dramatically over the course of the day, your approach to the trails needs to be flexible as well.
“Mornings in the spring should be about warming your body up, same as the snow does,” said Reid. “Stick to runs that were groomed the night before and schuss out the runs that are in the sun early. Those are the ones that you’ll want to hit up first.”
As my Maddi learned, when that morning corn snow softens, it can be treacherous. If your legs start to tire while pushing around the afternoon mashed potato snow, don’t be shy about finishing up early. Which brings us to technique.
“When going down trails that have really gotten slushy, try to look ahead and anticipate how the snow will impact your skis and, subsequently, your balance,” said Reid. “If you’re headed towards a mound or mogul, you’ll likely be pushed to the rear. Fight back by moving your feet forwards through the snow.
“A strong, athletic stance helps to set skiers up right for these kinds of conditions,” she said. “Think stacked: knees over toes, and hips over boots.”
See our listing of great spring ski festivals and mountain events. Don’t forget the sunscreen!
Photo Courtesy of Crystal Mountain
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Store Skis in the SummerA Northern Irish evangelical preacher could face prosecution after he referred to Islam as “Satanic” and a “heathen” religion.
Pastor James McConnell came under fire after delivering a sermon at his Belfast church in June 2014 in which he claimed he did not trust any Muslims.
It has now been confirmed by the Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service (PPS) that he will face prosecution after he refused to accept a lesser punishment.
READ MORE: Neo-Nazis threaten to burn Jewish Talmud, destroy Israeli flag at London march
A spokeswoman for the PPS said: “I can confirm that following consideration of a complaint in relation to an internet broadcast of a sermon in May 2014, a decision was taken to offer an individual an informed warning for an offence contrary to the Communications Act 2003.”
“That offence was one of sending, or causing to be sent, by means of a public electronic communications network, a message or other matter that was grossly offensive.
“The offer of an informed warning was refused by the defendant and accordingly the matter is now proceeding by way of a summary prosecution in the magistrates’ court.”
Speaking at the time, McConnell said he “had no intention of causing any offence or insulting any member of the Muslim community,” nor any plans to “arouse fear or stir up or incite hatred.”
READ MORE: Muslim woman attacked in London 'for wearing hijab'
“My sermon was drawing attention to how many followers of Islam have, regrettably, interpreted the doctrine of Islam as justification for violence,” McConnell said.
“I have qualified my comments by reference to those who use their religion as justification for violence. As a preacher of the word of God, it is this interpretation of the doctrine of Islam which I am condemning.
“I abhor violence and condemn anyone, of any faith, who uses religion to justify it,” he added.
But during his sermon he is reported to have said “a new evil had arisen,” adding “there are cells of Muslims right throughout Britain.”
“Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell,” McConnell said.
Police were asked to investigate McConnell for an alleged hate crime and Northern Ireland’s First Minister Peter Robinson was forced to issue a public apology for initially defending the cleric.
Robinson previously caused controversy when he said he would not trust Muslims in a spiritual capacity, but he would allow them to “go down the shops” for him.John Maynard Keynes,The General Theory (BN Publishing, 2008), pp. 3–22.
Chapter 1
This chapter acts more as an introduction to what Keynes sets out to do, and those who are particularly adverse to Keynes will like it since it is only one paragraph long. Keynes establishes his aim as that of dethroning the Classical school, defined as “the followers of Ricardo.”
I will take this space to lay out my own objective. I am going to post notes on the book and refrain, as much as possible, to insert my own criticism. My goal is to understand Keynes’ “general theory,” assuming that this understanding will allow me to better critique the book in the future (in a series of review articles). However, those who want to criticize something, you are welcome to do so in the comments! I will happily give my own two cents, as well (as I usually do).
Chapter 2
“Most treatises,” begins Keynes, “on the theory of Value and Production are primarily concerned with the distribution of a given volume of employed resources between different uses and with the conditions which, assuming the employment of this quantity of resources, determine their relative rewards and the relative values of their products.” That is, the purpose of the Ricardian tradition is not so much to study what contributes to the stock of wealth, but to explain how this wealth is distributed amongst those who contribute to its production (Keynes, ftn#1, quotes a latter from Ricardo to Malthus, saying much of the same). Keynes adds to this objective of economics the study of what decides which resources, including (especially?) labor, are employed where and when. He holds that these two questions have not been adequately addressed in Classical economics, pointing specifically to the contributions of Arthur Pigou.
I.
Keynes observes that the Classical theory of employment is based on two postulates,
Wages are equal to the marginal productivity of labor; Wages (their utility to the laborer) are equal to the marginal disutility of labor.
The former is the demand-side and the latter the supply-side in the Classical determination of the level of employment. These two postulates are compatible with the idea of “frictional” and “voluntary” unemployment. The former refers to those who are laid off for whatever reason and have troubles immediately finding a new job (time-lags). In a “non-static” society (or one in disequilibrium), where there are always changes, there will be frictionally unemployed persons. Those who are naturally unemployed are those who prefer not to sell their labor at the market price.
Keynes wants to reformulate the theory of labor, because according to him the Classical theory does not allow for a third category, or those who are “involuntarily” unemployed. I imagine that this goes beyond “cyclical” unemployment, and deals more with an issue of finding full employment at the market clearing price. It is a more fundamental issue than price rigidities and things of that nature.
In any case, in the Classical theory there are four ways to increase employment,
Improvement in what today we might call “search functions” (my own term), where the disequilibrating factors which lead to frictional unemployment may be solved; A fall in the marginal disutility of labor, so that a voluntarily unemployed person may accept a lower wage (a fall in the reservation wage); An increase in the marginal productivity of labor in the “wage-goods industries” (i.e. an increase in the number of employable persons in a firm); “An increase in the price of non-wage-goods compared with the price of wage-goods associated with a shift in the expenditure of non-wage-earners from wage-goods to non-wage-goods.” If I understand the terminology correctly, what Keynes is referring to is a fall in the prices of goods (bought by wage-earners), increasing real wages.
This is Keynes’ summary of the theory of employment as elucidated in Pigou’s Theory of Unemployment (he chooses Pigou’s book, because he claims that this is the only comprehensive treatment from the Classical perspective).
II.
Keynes looks to introduce to us the gist of his argument against the Classical theory of employment. He poses the question: can the Classical theory account for the fact that at any given wage level there are always those who would like a job, but cannot find one?
The Classical economists, Keynes argues, attribute involuntary unemployment to wage rigidity, or an agreement “amongst themselves” (i.e. labor unions) to refuse to work for a lower wage. In other words, there is something stopping wages from falling to a level which would employ all those willing and able to work (minus the frictionally unemployed). Keynes presents two arguments against this claim, one of them casual and the second fundamental.
First, nominal wages may not be equal to real wages, in the sense that the hypothetical market clearing wage is tied to the marginal productivity of labor. For example, while a fall in nominal wages might cause a certain number of workers to leave the labor market, out of protest, these same workers may not respond the same way if there were a reduction in their real wage as a result of an increase in prices. This brings in an element of subjectivity: how do workers themselves decide what their reservation wage is (on the basis of real wages or nominal wages)? According to the Classical theory, a fall in real wages (due to an increase in prices) ought to increase voluntary unemployment, yet empirically we can verify that the exact opposite has occurred.
Neither does Keynes buy the argument that mass cyclical unemployment is caused by a refusal to accept lower wages (amongst those who are employed). He suggests that, empirically (the Great Depression), we see “wide variations in the volume of employment” despite the fact that the we see no change in the “minimum real demands of labor” nor in its marginal productivity. Keynes also notes that the relationship between nominal and real wages tends to be inversely direct, in that as nominal wages rise real wages fall and vice versa.
Concludes Keynes, if it were true that below the market clearing price no greater supply of labor would make itself available, then in reality we would not see involuntarily unemployed persons despite a fall in real wage rates (i.e. as occurs during periods of depression). Therefore, real wages are not a good indication for what the marginal distutility of labor is (a subjective factor).
As aforementioned, there is a second, more fundamental, criticism Keynes makes. He notes that the second postulate of the Classical theory of employment stems from the understanding that real wages are decided through bargaining between labor and the employer (or, in more familiar terms, that the wage rate agreed upon in a labor contract is based on real wages). It is accepted that all wages are money wages, but it is held that a reduction in the nominal wage will lead to a reduction in the real wage. Thus, there is a tendency for real wages to fall to the marginal disutility of labor. (Keynes will return to this topic in chapter 19, to discuss some more specific factors which relate to the topic.)
Keynes, interestingly, observes that if one adopts the Classical theory of value, where the price of labor is a prime determinant of the prices of goods, changes in nominal wages will lead to changes in real wages in the same direction, so that in the end there is no change in the ratio between the two. To clarify between what was mentioned in the above paragraph, there is no contradiction in what Keynes writes. What the Classicals argued is that by accepting a reduction in nominal wages, the wage level can return to that dictated by the marginal productivity of labor (i.e. in a situation where the nominal wage is too high). What Keynes is saying is that this cannot possibly be true within the Classical paradigm, given that according to their theory of prices the ratio between nominal and real wages will always be the same (so, no nominal wage can ever be “too high”). In short, there is no means by which labor, in general, can adjust its nominal wage to match the marginal productivity of labor.
III.
Keynes looks to point out that labor unions cannot possibly be the only, or even the principal, factor to blame for cyclical unemployment. He already postulated that real wages are not set in the bargaining process between employers and employees, thus the purpose of bargaining must be something else. This something else is the avoidance of relative losses in real wages. In other words, bargaining between employee and employer simply affects the distribution of wages between industries. It does not stop a fall in real wages due to an increase in prices, nor is it an “insuperable bar” against any overall reduction in real wage rates.
Thus, while labor unions might combat changes in nominal wages, where they affect the singular industry (or firm), they cannot be to blame for a failure for the overall real wage rate to fall to the marginal productivity of labor, leaving relative wages unchanged.
IV.
How does Keynes define “involuntary unemployment?” He, of course, admits that there is a limit to what can be described as unemployment. For example, that an individual could work beyond an eight hour workday does not mean that each of those hours not worked constitutes as hours unemployed. Nor are those whose reservation wage is higher than the given nominal wage included. Finally, Keynes also leaves out those “frictionally” unemployed. Involuntary unemployment, therefore, is constituted by those, who in the event of a small fall in real wages (and a rise in the aggregate demand for their labor), are willing and able to work.”
The second postulate of the Classical theory of employment does not allow for the advent of involuntary unemployment, even though we witness it empirically. The Classical theory describes the distribution of wages in an environment of full employment, or where a reduction in real wages would not lead to a rise in the amount of those willing and able to work. Keynes concludes that given that we know involuntary unemployment exists, we cannot possibly accept the Classical theory. He suggests that there needs to be some change in the study of economics, similar to the transition from Euclidean geometry to non-Euclidean geometry.
V.
One should note that the first postulate of the Classical theory is not in dispute. At least in the short run, where capital is held fixed, an increase in employment must come with a fall in real wages. That is, the employment of n + 1 laborer will lead to a fall in the wage level, and would also transfer some income to profit. Keynes notes that this is the obverse of the principle of marginal decreasing returns. His intentions, rather, are only to throw over the second postulate, since Keynes believes that a cyclical rise in real wages is not due to a demand for greater real wages, nor is a willingness for workers to accept a lower nominal wage a remedy for cyclical unemployment. (We will understand his own theory of wages by chapter 19, according to Keynes).
VI.
[Ludwig von Mises’ article “Lord Keynes and Say’s Law” is relevant to this section, although I, personally, would have held Mises to a higher standard (not that this necessarily means I endorse Keynes’ criticism of Say’s Law).]
This section contains Keynes’ famed refutation of Say’s Law (or his failed attempt, depending on who you ask).
Say’s Law, as defined by J.S. Mill (Keynes quotes a paragraph from Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, Book III, chapter 14, paragraph two), basically amounts to the idea that supply creates its own demand. This is true in the sense that “the whole of the costs of production must necessarily be spent in the aggregate, directly or indirectly, on purchasing the product.” In the same sense, income unconsumed is necessarily income spent on productive activities (i.e. a demand for labor and commodities). Keynes attaches blame on the notion that money is but a veil on the economy — where the real economy is simply in the exchange of goods. Keynes also suggests that some confusion stems from a false equivocation of Say’s Law with the fact that the income derived from an aggregate stock of wealth is equal to the value of output.
Thus, Classical economists believe that an act of saving must necessarily be met by an increase in investment. Keynes argues that this is a mistake, as the two acts are separate, and that the motives of the saver are not the same as the motives of the entrepreneur. From Say’s Law stems several beliefs, including the classical theory of unemployment, the loanable funds theory of interest, the quantity theory of money, and the advantages of “thrift.”
VII.
Keynes summarizes his characterization of the Classical school in the following way. The latter makes the following assumptions,
Real wages = the marginal disutility of those current employed; There is no such thing as involuntary unemployment, strictly speaking; Supply creates its own demand.
As such, Keynes claims that as these assumptions are proven wrong, they collapse on each other.At the current rate of HIV infection in the US, more than half of all young gay black men could be infected with the virus in the next ten years.
Nearly 6 percent of black men under the age of 30 become infected with HIV each year in the United States – a terrifying statistic that is leading to increased efforts to get unwilling Americans tested.
Gay and bisexual black men account for one in four new HIV infections in the US, even though they only make up one in 500 Americans overall. A gay black man has a 60 percent chance of being infected with the virus by age 40, but is 22 percent less likely to get treatment if he is HIV-positive.
If the trend continues, more than 50 percent of all young black gay men will be infected with HIV in 10 years, claims Kenneth Mayer, a medical research director at Boston’s Fenway Health.
“This is extremely concerning,” he told USA TODAY. “Here we are, this far into the epidemic, and we have these rates.”
Arick Buckles, a 40-year old gay black man who grew up in Chicago’s Cabini Green public housing project, described his struggle with the stigma of HIV in his neighborhood. Refusing care for six years after testing positive for HIV, Buckles became thin and sick, he told Reuters.
“I didn’t want to accept it was the HIV that was disfiguring my face, my neck. It was visible,” Buckles said, describing his swollen lymph nodes that he tried to hide by wearing turtleneck sweaters.
His neighborhood residents considered HIV to be a “gay disease,” and he was afraid that disclosing his illness would bring his sexual orientation out of the closet. But when Buckles fell ill to a severe lung infection that affects weakened victims of HIV, he finally gave in to get treatment.
“Stigma is a huge issue,” preventing people from getting tested and treated, said Kevin Fenton, director of the National Center for HIV/AIDS Prevention.
Because of the stigma associated with HIV, particularly among blacks living in poverty and with poor access to treatment and prevention services, one in five of the estimated 1.1 million Americans living with HIV do not know they are infected.
Up to 44 percent of new infections occur in 12 major US cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles, with HIV rates in these areas being highest among blacks, Hispanics and gay and bisexual men.
But while gay and bisexual black men are at highest risk of infection, Fenton said the trend is simply a result of healthcare inequalities in communities where HIV is already more common than elsewhere.
“The infection is becoming concentrated in these minority groups as a reflection of the social and structural drivers of health inequalities overall,” Fenton said.
Washington has one of the highest infection rates in the country, and some estimated infection rate statistics place the city in par with some of the worst afflicted areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Approximately 5,000 Washington residents have HIV but do not know it, and the CDC has been working with local health officials to increase testing.
Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick, who sees HIV-positive patients in Washington, said many blacks are hesitant to discuss HIV and sex, considering it a gay-only issue. Additionally, many of the young gay men she sees have accepted the fact that they will get HIV anyway and are “not terribly concerned about it.”
But while increased testing could help reduce the spread of HIV, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, said reaching those at highest risk of HIV is difficult.
“They’re still, relatively speaking, a disenfranchised population,” he told Reuters. “Many of them are in inner cities; many of them don’t have access to healthcare.”
In a desperate attempt to stop the spread of HIV, especially among gay black men, some organizations are paying people to get tested. The Black AIDS Institute is paying Washington residents seven dollars to get tested – a perhaps desperate attempt to slow the 50,000 new HIV infections in the US every year.Websites like Reddit, Airbnb and Github are experiencing outages, according to several reports.
The Next Web reports that sites hosted by Amazon web service (AWS) and Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) are experiencing service disruptions. Airbnb, GitHub, Coursera and Flipboard went down Monday. It looks like GitHub and Flipboard are back online, however, Airbnb and Coursera are still currently inaccessible.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian tweeted that it was Amazon web services that took down Reddit.
Ladies + gents, @amazon AWS outage has brought @reddit + others down. Be strong. Let's all book a flight/hotel on hipmunk.com -- Alexis Ohanian (@alexisohanian) October 22, 2012
Fast Company reported a major dip in traffic during the outage.
Here's what an aws outage looks like from within: notice the dip to zero, then how chaotic things are to the right. twitter.com/mankins/status... -- mankins (@mankins) October 22, 2012
The Washington Post notes that Compuware's Outage Analyzer reported 60 domains may be affected by the outage.
A quick check of Amazon's status shows connectivity issues at its North Virginia data center, starting at 2:03 p.m. ET. Amazon did not immediately respond to CBS News' request for comment.Time is running out for Jay Leno to reunite with David Letterman in late night – and right now the ball is in Leno's court. According to sources inside Late Show with David Letterman, the program has reached out to Leno about coming on as a guest before Letterman departs CBS on May 20.
We asked Leno last week in Miami at the National Association of Television Program Executives conference if he was mulling the offer. “I haven't heard that,” he said. “I'll have to check into that.”
Indeed, the request was first made a year ago, back when Leno was wrapping up his Tonight Show run. It’s unclear whether the ask ever reached Leno himself. More likely, the invite was discussed between Leno's and Letterman's producers.
A year later, Leno has been busy performing standup around the country and working on his cars (including for CNBC's upcoming Jay Leno's Garage). But with just four months left before Letterman retires from Late Show, producers are expected to renew the request in order to get Leno on the show before then.
Such a reunion would be historic in the annals of late night history – and probably a big audience draw. Leno and Letterman previously reunited, with Oprah Winfrey in the middle, for a Late Show Super Bowl ad on CBS in 2010.
But the last time Leno appeared as a guest on Letterman’s show was May 7, 1992 – three weeks before the debut of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Leno has never been on Letterman’s CBS show, and Letterman never appeared on Leno’s Tonight Show.
Leno was one of Letterman’s favorite comedian guests during the run of NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in the 1980s. That all changed after NBC picked Leno over Letterman to replace Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show. The rift that developed between the two has been well documented.
But now that the so-called “late night wars” have faded into the sunset, it may be time for these two estranged friends to meet up one more time after dark.
Last year, Leno told us that he was open to visiting Letterman on the Late Show: “That could happen, why not,” he said while conducting an interview about the end of his Tonight Show reign. “It's certainly a possibility. Some of my best moments were doing the show with Dave.”
In the interview, Leno said he didn’t expect to renew his relationship with Letterman, even though they would no longer be in direct competition: “It’s the same. I don’t think it changes anything.”
But he also went on to recount some of his fond memories of appearing on Late Night with David Letterman.
“The real trick to being a comedian is finding that perfect audience. Seinfeld is a perfect audience, as I am with him, and Letterman is too,” Leno said. “With Dave it was never about the joke, it was the joke-on-the-way-to-the-joke that always would get the laugh. Dave would always laugh. I remember talking to Dave once and saying, ‘You know, Dave, I was out in California, out at the old Manson place,’ and Dave would go, ‘The old Manson place!’ And I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, the old Manson place!’ I knew he would think that was funny and he did.
“When you know another person and you know what makes them tick, you know what’s going to work. With Dave, whenever I would do his show it was one of those simpatico deals. Dave is a nervous person. So whenever I would do his show I would walk out with a huge meatball sandwich and I would eat it. And Dave could not eat hours before the show. Maybe he'd have soup at noon. So I would go out with the sandwich and offer him some. It was just fun, he was like, ‘How can you eat and be out here?’ It was just so different for him.
“So it was fun to know what makes the other person laugh. Great fun. So I wouldn't rule it out.”ORLANDO – AUGUST 20, 2015 – Tickets for the World Cup champion U.S. Women’s National Team’s Victory Tour match against Brazil in Orlando will go on sale on Tuesday, Sept. 1 at 10 a.m. ET. A special presale will be available for Orlando City SC Season Ticket Members. More information will be made available shortly.
The on-sale date for the Orlando match was originally scheduled for Aug. 21, but will now be the first day of September.
The match is the second leg of a two-game set against Brazil and will be played on Sunday, Oct. 25, at the Orlando Citrus Bowl in central Florida (2:30 p.m. ET on FOX Sports 1, FOX Sports Go). Tickets will be sold through ussoccer.com and by phone at 1-800-745-3000. Groups of 20 or more can obtain an order form at ussoccer.com or call 312-528-1290. Ultimate Fan Tickets (special VIP packages that include a premium ticket, a custom-made official U.S. National Team jersey with name and number, VIP access to the field before and after the game, and other unique benefits) are also available exclusively through ussoccer.com.
Tickets will also be available at all Ticketmaster ticket centers (including most Walmart locations) as well as the Amway Center ticket office (open Monday-Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) [Note: Tickets are not sold at the Orlando Citrus Bowl except on the day of the event.]
U.S. Soccer will also offer a four-day Girls Fantasy Camp (Oct. 23-26) in Orlando for players born in 2000, 2001 and 2002. This exclusive fan-player opportunity includes training sessions with a former WNT player, accommodations at the official U.S. Soccer hotel, access to one WNT training session, premium match tickets & game-day Ultimate Fan Experience, U.S. Soccer training apparel and more. The Camp is a fundraiser to support U.S. Soccer development initiatives. Participation is made possible through a generous donation to U.S. Soccer, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, part of which is tax-deductible. For more information, please contact fantasycamp@ussoccer.org.
Fans will also have the opportunity to enjoy the weekend as part of the U.S. Soccer Delegation in a four-day U.S. Soccer VIP Experience (Oct. 23-26). The VIP Experience includes premium match seats and Ultimate Fan Ticket, accommodations at the official U.S. Soccer hotel, VIP access to a WNT training, dinner with U.S. Soccer leadership, gifts and more. Part of the cost to participate is a tax-deductible donation and proceeds from the VIP Experience support U.S. Soccer development programs. For more information, contact vip@ussoccer.org.Editor's note: FanDuel.com is hosting a one-week long $350,000 Fantasy Football contest for Week 3. It's only $10 to join and first prize is $30,000. Starts Sunday, September 21st at 1 p.m. ET. Enter now to join Dave.
Kudos to those of you who either drafted Josh Gordon or snagged him off waivers when word about a reduced suspension came down. It looks as if he'll be allowed to play for the Browns starting in Week 12.
But it's just Week 3. So now what?
Gordon is going to have an impact in most every Fantasy league's postseason, guaranteed. That's because those who hold on to him and make their league's playoffs will use him and those who have to fight for a wild card berth will trade him to one of the top teams for a player who can help win now. Even if he's a free agent in your league right now, he won't be for much longer.
The beauty of Gordon in Fantasy is that he's a trade chip based on his potential. So if you're in need of a quick fix to solve a bye-week problem, Gordon's a guy you can trade for help. He's also a throw-in on a two-for-one deal to upgrade to a quality starter. And he can be a sweetener in a transaction to help get a deal done. But in all of those scenarios, his value isn't very high... for now.
That's because there are two clear downsides to owning Gordon: One, he takes up a roster space, and if your league only has five or six bench spots, that can become a real pain in the butt to manage around. Two, there's no guarantee that Gordon will be as good as he was last year when he does return. Can we say with absolute certainty that Gordon is keeping himself in game shape between selling cars in Northeast Ohio? Or that he knows the new offense? I don't mean to put a damper on the optimism here, but he had just three catches for 40 yards in the preseason and really didn't quite look the same as he did last year.
I have Gordon on my bench in a few of my leagues and the plan for now is to sit on him until I either have to make a move or try to make a move when interest in him picks up after Week 10. Teams that have a great shot at a playoff berth will also aim to move players to get Gordon on their bench for the postseason run that starts in Week 14.
But it doesn't mean people aren't making deals right now. Here are some actual trades people are making involving Gordon:
Josh Gordon for Antonio Gates and Anquan Boldin: There's no telling how much glue the owner who parted with Gates and Boldin sniffed before making this deal. Maybe the guy had Jimmy Graham and Gates, so Gates was expendable. But why throw in Boldin? This was too much to give for Gordon.
Via @SidCohen32 on Twitter: Josh Gordon and Matt Asiata to the Adrian Peterson owner for Percy Harvin and Jonathan Stewart: Again, this is just too much for Gordon, though it's a deal the Peterson owner probably felt he had to make.
Via @CitizenZac on Twitter: Josh Gordon for Jeremy Maclin and Terrance West (before Week 2): Insanity. There's no reason to give this much for Gordon.
Josh Gordon for Larry Fitzgerald: Owners are definitely disenchanted with Fitzgerald right now, but they shouldn't be this impatient with him. He nearly scored last week and he's still playing a bunch with the Cardinals. He's not going to be terrible forever. Trading him for Gordon is basically quitting on Fitz. Now's not the time to do that.
Josh Gordon for Philip Rivers: Though I believe Rivers is more valuable, I understand why this trade makes sense. To many owners, Rivers is a backup quarterback. Dealing him for a player who can be helpful down the line (or helpful in making another deal) makes sense. Rivers is worth starting pretty much every week.
Josh Gordon for Knile Davis: This deal makes sense, especially if Davis is being acquired to help replace Jamaal Charles, Knowshon Moreno or Ryan Mathews. In fact, Gordon is the perfect trade chip to fill a hole in your lineup, be it with a high-value handcuff or otherwise.Religion provides a sense of meaning and comfort for believers, and studies show that such beliefs intensify during threatening situations. Now research suggests that some people's faith in science may serve the same role.
Miguel Farias and other researchers at the University of Oxford and Yale University investigated whether it is belief in religion that is beneficial or in fact any belief about the world's order and our place in it. In two related experiments published in November 2013 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the scientists developed a scale to measure belief in science—the view that scientific inquiry |
he was registered as a candidate. This happened just before the Kirovles sentence was handed down.
The authorities’ reasoning in this can only be guessed at, but I think that from the beginning Sobyanin did not really intend Navalny to stand in the election. The fact that he would be found guilty was never in doubt, and under Russian law Navalny’s candidature will be annulled immediately after his appeal has been considered in the Kirov court. There’s no question but that the appeal will be turned down. The authorities only intended to neutralise accusations levelled at Sobyanin that he went into the election with no real opponents. One of the rhetorical tricks of the Russian authorities, as we saw in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is that they are not responsible for the decisions of the courts they control, even if the political reasons for these decisions are abundantly clear.
Now what?
Having sentenced Navalny to five years in prison, the district court at the same time instructed that he be held in custody until the sentence comes into effect i.e. until the appeal has been heard. This decision actually made Navalny ineligible to stand in the election, although formally he was still a mayoral candidate. This was probably the authorities’ main idea, relying on the fact that Navalny has already played his last card and it’s time to get back to business as usual. But, despite it being the ‘dead season’, the court decision provoked furious reactions in the public. There were fairly large protests in Moscow and Petersburg but, more importantly, some of the independent media universally described the effective removal of Navalny (his office, naturally, announced that he would not take further part in the election) as making a farce of the electoral campaign. Not at all what the authorities planned.
Navalny's wife Yuliya embraces him upon release. The photo of her hugging him goodbye after hearing yesterday's sentence went viral on social networks. The caption was simple: 'A Decembrist's wife'. Photo: RIA Novosti/Ilya Pitalyov
As a result, the court decision to hold Navalny in custody was protested by the prosecution and the next day, 19 July, was overturned by the regional court. We must stress that this small change to government strategy will on the whole work in its favour. Sobyanin will be able to run his campaign against an opponent, who actually still can’t take part in the election. It is highly probable that the sentence will be upheld a few days before the election, which disorientates the opposition and leaves no time to develop an alternative strategy. Meaning that Sobyanin will win the election and Navalny will find himself in prison.
The only ways of dealing with this turn of events, which is by far the most natural for current Russian reality, would be if Navalny’s campaign was so energetic that without him the election risks being wrecked. I am not sure that Navalny has enough organisational or other resources to run such a campaign, but it is clear that wide-ranging energetic public support will be of critical importance, as will be appropriate behaviour on the part of the various parts of the Russian opposition.
The fact of the matter is that Navalny is the most promising leader. The situation around the Moscow election has once more – and justifiably – put him at the front of the political stage. Now he must not let himself give in to gloom, but try to make use of this opportunity. A lot depends on Navalny himself. Possibly, the authorities have calculated that he now he will simply leave Russia.Germany: Large-scale police operation against refugees in Berlin
Since yesterday, August 25th, 2014, after reports in the mainstream media that the migration office rejected the applications for asylum of 108 refugees, there have been preparations for the eviction of these refugees, who occupied the Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg in the past (and were evicted in early April 2014) but later signed contracts with the Senate of Berlin, which promised them among others places to stay for at least six months and a single case examination of each of their asylum applications. It is known that parts of the agreements mentioned in the contract have been broken already in the beginning, e.g. that some refugees got their applications rejected without the promised single case examination and have been threatened with deportation already before the six months’ period was over. So yesterday the Senate sent officials to the respective refugees to inform them about the rejection of their applications and to order them to immediately leave their homes.
Yesterday, around hundred policemen and the Press appeared close to and in front of the refugee house in Gürtelstraße, a former hostel in the district of Friedrichshain. Also, on Gürtelstraße, they stored street barriers already two or three days ago. All of this indicated that soon there would be police operations.
Police also appeared at Oranienplatz yesterday, where one of their patrol cars got attacked with stones by angry people. According to reports, one of the rejected refugees covered himself in gasoline and threatened to torch himself.
A part of the refugees from the Oranienplatz have been in Marienfelde, a district in the outskirts of Berlin. There are no independent reports yet about what has happened to them (only mainstream media reports, stating they left without visible protests).
The situation right now (after 16:00 local time) in Gürtelstraße, Friedrichshain is that at least 2 refugees are on the roof of the house. According to street reports, several refugees have already left the former hostel where they were living. There are several hundreds of cops besieging the area. Also the Press is there in huge numbers. What is missing are people in solidarity with the refugees. There are only a couple of people, who are quite passive. No banners, no slogans yet, just a few slogans written with chalk on the sidewalk. The area is not closed; people in solidarity can reach the place from all directions. Anti-riot cops are located on Gürtelstraße, Dossestraße and Scharnweberstraße. There are also lots of undercover cops in the area. Right now police are waiting for orders of their bosses. Any kind of action in solidarity with the refugees, and in order to distract the cops from the area, is more than welcome!
Sources: linksunten.indymedia.org and the street
Update (at about 17:30 local time):
There are currently three refugees on the rooftop of the hostel in Gürtelstraße, Friedrichshain (see map). Several cop barriers are located at the junction of dosse str. and oderstr., dosse str. and ede-und-unku-weg, gürtelstraße and oderstr., gürtelstr. and scharnweberstr. Entrance to the blocked area is only allowed for residents with identity card, or members of the Press. Shouted slogans in support of the refugees, as well as cop sirens, could be heard from farther away.
Update (circa 19:00 local time):
There is a small gathering with sit-in at the barrier at the junction of guertelstr. and scharnweberstr. There are no people behind the other cop barriers. The fire brigade is inside dossestr. with two inflatable mattresses (they use these things when people jump for some reason from the window, etc.).
∙ Related article: Street blockade in solidarity with the dead and the alive and fighting
∙ Call for a demo at Frankfurter Tor (Friedrichshain) today, August 26th, at 8pm – Kommt alle!
Update (circa 20:00 local time):
Τhere are still at least three refugees on the rooftop of the hostel in Gürtelstraße. Supporters are still somewhat passive and waiting. Anti-riot cops are stationed on the roof of hotel Georgenhof, which is the building next to the former hostel (the two roofs are not connected). At the junction of guertelstr. and scharnweberstr., there are around 50 people (curious bystanders included).
∙ Words from Badra Ali Diarra, who signed an agreement with the Berlin Senate and now is imprisoned: Some statements from our friend in deportation prison
Update (after 22:00 local time):
The demo from Frankfurter Tor arrived close to the refugee home on Gürtelstraße. There were 150 to 200 protesters at the police barrier at the junction of Gürtelstraße and Scharnweberstraße. Gradually people got less and lesser there. Slogans were shouted, e.g. “We are here, we will fight, freedom of movement is everybody’s right.” There were also a few solidarity banners. Demonstrators set up a PA opposite the barrier, where speeches were held by people in solidarity and refugees who informed about their situation. In one of these speeches, it was stated that there are more than 60 people from the former hostel in Gürtelstraße among those who had their applications rejected; most of them have left. Sleeping places are needed for evicted refugees. It is estimated that 10 people remain inside the hostel or on the rooftop. Further affected refugees are from a second accommodation in Marienfelde and a third one in Hardenbergstraße (Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf?). It was pointed out that this is just the beginning: everyone from the refugees who have signed the agreement and have not appeared in an appointment with the authorities, or have had their application rejected, are in serious danger of losing their accommodation plus the financial assistance. There is also a huge threat of deportation, since the migration office has ruled that for all those concerned (at least 108 cases) there is no right of residence in Berlin.
Update – August 27th (at about 08:30 local time):
There are still refugees on the rooftop of the hostel in Gürtelstraße. Few supporters spent the night behind the barrier at the junction of Scharnweberstraße and Gürtelstraße. The aforementioned locations are still blocked off by the cops. During the night, police started to impose a ‘special service’ on residents who live inside the besieged and blocked area; every single resident was escorted by one robocop ‘safely’ to the entrance door of their homes.
∙ Related posts in greek, portuguese, french...Recent Trump's back and forth against clear condemnation of racist violence on the context of the horrible incident in Charlottesville, proved that he is completely incapable of leaving behind, or at least smoothing, his dangerous far-right rhetoric and positions. Trump already finds himself in a difficult position as he sees his popularity in free fall, and the only way to maintain his hard core of white nationalist voters, is to keep the profile of the 'hothead cowboy', even if he has to dangerously provoke North Korea.
On the other side, the neoliberal establishment of the Democratic party appeared to be completely incapable to acknowledge responsibility for the shocking defeat in 2016 election. Almost everyone else was blamed apart from Hillary Clinton, or the DNC failed strategy: Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, the Russians, the most progressive voters who didn't want to vote another corrupted and warmongering banking/corporate puppet like Clinton.
No matter what's happening around, the DNC establishment simply ignores the scream of the American society for a radical change down to the roots of the Party, away from the lobbyists and the super PACs. The Dems are in total denial. They can't even give a chance to someone that simply supported by Bernie Sanders, as has been proved by the election of Tom Perez as the chair of the DNC, early this year. Perez defeated Keith Ellison, who was supported by progressives within the party, including Sanders and Massachusetts Senator, Elizabeth Warren.
Indeed, the Democrats seem to promote another establishment puppet for 2020, instead of seeking a true, radical change for the Democratic Party. As Mintpress News reports:
Kamala Harris, a career prosecutor who served as California’s attorney general and is now a United States senator, is seen by liberals as the Democratic Party new “rising star”. Democrats are already touting the possibility of a 2020 presidential run, and any inkling of criticism, regardless of how genuine, faces a backlash from influential people in the political and media arena.
Critics are attacked on multiple levels. First, defenders argue Harris is a cog working within a larger unjust machine. Condemning her political decisions is frivolous because “she’s doing her job.” They also argue critics are “purists” in search of a politician without imperfections. This assertion, while undoubtedly pretentious, is intended to malign leftists as immature and unable to understand the dirty realities of politics.
The third component of attacks involves malicious misrepresentation, a claim that critics reject Harris because she is a woman, or more specifically, a black woman. By weaponizing neoliberal identity politics, even the whitest liberals freely manipulate the wider discourse on race and gender in order to shape it into their favor.
Trump's behavior becomes the perfect tool in the hands of the DNC establishment to demonize the most progressive voters and force them to compromise with a neoliberal candidate for the 2020 election. People around the Democratic party have gone as far as equalizing the alternative right with the -now called - alternative left, in terms of violence.
This was a tactic that was excessively implemented in Greece, where after the burst of the crisis, the then political establishment which bankrupted the country, with the help of the mainstream media, was equalizing the 'radical left' with the Golden Dawn neo-nazis, in order to prevent voters to vote for the then unpredictable, rising political power, the leftist SYRIZA.
Liberal and centrist Democrats did not necessarily coin the label “alt-left,” however, in recent months, the term was popularized by them. It was deployed against anyone on the left who challenged their politics, especially those perceived as supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders or members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
But in a recent press conference, President Donald Trump blamed “both sides” for violence in Charlottesville on August 12. He invoked the “alt-left,” a term largely unknown to the wider public and establishment press, and promoted a false equivalency in remarks rife with apologism for neo-Nazis. Republican politicians from Speaker Paul Ryan to Senator Marco Rubio condemned Trump for refusing to assign all of the blame to white supremacy groups. And, in the span of seconds, Trump made a label liberals and Democrats had reflexively employed toxic.
[...]
The Washington Post’s Alex Horton and Dave Weigel produced a piece attempting to define the genesis of the “alt-left” label. Horton and Weigel acknowledged the term was used by “some right-wing websites, commentators and Fox News personalities” to describe “a violent segment of left-wing activists — the alt-left.” Both ignored its prevalent use by Clinton Democrats and other centrists and liberals fed up with Sanders supporters and their “purism.”
Several prominent Democrats, who see themselves as a part of #TheResistance, suggested progressive critiques of identity politics and demands from the left were the product of an “alt-left” that increasingly seems to be converging with the worst elements of the “alt-right” (the term for far right groups that includes white nationalists).
[...]
There simply can be no equivalency between the “alt-right” and the “alt-left.” Nor is the “alt-left” responsible for any threat the rise of the “alt-right” may pose to the country. It is neo-Nazis and neo-Nazis alone, who are responsible for their acts, and any centrist or liberal Democrat, who equates their acts with the behavior of the “alt-left” or invokes the “alt-left” to marginalize dissent is cravenly attempting to stunt movements for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice, which threaten the Democratic Party establishment.
There is no doubt that the DNC establishment seeks to restore power without changing current status. Which means that it is completely devoted to its corporate donors who have been enormously benefited from the domination on the neoliberal ideology at the expense of the majority of the American citizens.
The hypocrites around DNC establishment demand from everyone to align with them in order to confront the'scary monster', Donald Trump. While they openly condemn Trump's racism, they pray quietly for more far-right provocative behavior by him because this will give them more power to crush any truly progressive criticism against their routine functioning, dominated by these rich donors.
Most importantly, they seek to crush any prospect for a new, truly progressive and independent political movement under Bernie Sanders, away from the bipartisan dictatorship. Once Bernie will dare to make such an attempt, they will fiercely seek to finish him politically by using the known story: he will be considered responsible for breaking the unity of the Democratic Party and letting someone like Trump remain in power. Bernie knows it. That's why he rushed to endorse Hillary Clinton after his defeat in the primaries due to the dirty war from inside the DNC.HTC has reported its financial results for the third quarter of the year, showing a continuation of the slump in revenues that has characterized the company's 2012 performance. From July to September, HTC's net revenue was $2.397 billion (NT$70.2 billion), down from $3 billion (NT$91.04 billion) in the second quarter. Net income after tax is reported at $133 million (NT$3.9 billion), down from $247 million (NT$7.40 billion) in Q2. According to reports from Bloomberg, today's numbers represent a 48 percent fall in revenues over the past year. The NT$70.2 figure sees HTC narrowly land within the forecasted NT$70-80 billion window.
HTC has faced strong competition from the likes of Samsung and Apple over the past year, and despite putting out critically-acclaimed phones like the One X, HTC has failed to shift its devices in as great a quantity as Samsung's Galaxy line. The company will be hoping to reverse its fortunes with refreshed Android handsets this fall, along with a renewed focus on Windows Phone, through its Windows Phone 8X and 8S handsets.
Source: Bloomberg, TNWTO: Mayor and City Council
THROUGH: Steve Powers, City Manager
FROM: Peter Fernandez, PE, Public Works Director
SUBJECT:
title
Preserving an area in Riverfront Park for a performance facility
Ward(s): Ward 1
Councilor(s): Councilor Kaser
Neighborhood(s): CAN DO
end
ISSUE:
Shall the City Council reserve an area for a performance facility at the current location of the amphitheater, in advance of completing a full master planning process for Riverfront Park?
RECOMMENDATION:
recommendation
Authorize reservation of the area (Attachment 1) for a performance facility at the current location of the amphitheater, in advance of completing a full master planning process for the Riverfront Park.
body
SUMMARY AND BACKGROUND:
The Rotary Club of Salem, in celebration of its centennial in 2020, will be donating a new covered stage and supports for lighting, rigging, sound systems, and other features. At this early stage in both Rotary’s fundraising and the City’s master planning process for Riverfront Park, staff recommends Council approve the proposed area to be reserved and incorporated into the new Riverfront Park Master Plan. The purpose of Council’s adoption of Attachment 1 ahead of the full master planning process is to reserve the amphitheater space for the planned donation by the Rotary Club of Salem. Council’s action will provide assurance to potential contributors that this area has been reserved specifically for the new performance facility and potential future enhancements to the area peripheral to the stage, avoiding any potential conflicts on plans and intentions during the public process for the new master plan.
In 2018, the City will conduct a public process leading to a new master plan for Riverfront Park. A new Riverfront Park Master Plan is expected to come to Council for adoption in late-2018 or early-2019. Riverfront Park consists of 23 acres of developed park property and 3.8 acres of undeveloped land.
The proposal to donate a covered stage was positively received by members of the Salem Parks and Recreation Advisory Board when it was presented at their meeting on January 12, 2017. The Board also responded favorably to reserving a footprint for the performance facility at their March 9, 2017, meeting.
The construction phase is expected to begin in 2019 and the new facility is targeted to be completed in early-2020.
The new stage will be situated at site of the current raised platform of the Amphitheater. The area recommended to be reserved for the future donated covered stage and other potential improvements to the Amphitheater, seating area, and peripheral space is approximately 2.2 acres. Depending on the total amount of funds raised by Rotary and the City’s ability to secure additional funding from other sources, the project may also include improvements to the seating area and the spaces peripheral to the stage.
FACTS AND FINDINGS:
This project is a public/private partnership between the Rotary Club of Salem and the City of Salem. The Rotary Club of Salem is responsible for raising all the funds necessary for constructing the stage, cover, and ancillary elements, and for conducting the selection process leading to Council’s approval of a final design. The Rotary Club of Salem is also responsible for ensuring bid-ready construction documents are delivered to the City of Salem. The City will be responsible for managing project construction, which includes bidding, contracting, permitting, inspections, and related services.
Staff believes that the cost for the donated facility will be between $1 million and $2 million. The Rotary Club of Salem will conduct a two-year fundraising effort for the project commencing in the spring 2017. Design and funding to effect changes to the area peripheral to the covered stage, such as seating, walkways, lighting, landscaping, and fencing, are not initially included in the Rotary-backed portion of the project. The degree to which improvements in this area are incorporated into the overall project depends on the total amount of funds made available by Rotary and on the City’s ability to secure funding from other sources
Concurrent with the fundraising effort, the Rotary Club of Salem will conduct a public process to solicit feedback on various conceptual designs for the facility. The design selection process consists of two phases. In the first phase, a public process will be conducted during which feedback will be solicited on potential designs. In the second phase, the preferred design will be brought before the Salem Parks and Recreation Advisory Board for endorsement and then to City Council for approval in 2018. The second phase concludes with bid-ready construction documents delivered by the Rotary Club of Salem to the City of Salem, which will then assume responsibility for project construction. Attachment 2 contains early renderings of potential designs for the enhanced performance facility.
Many of the amenities currently located in Riverfront Park have been donated over the past 20 years. Examples include: Salem Riverfront Carousel (1996), Salem Living Christmas Tree (1996), Rotary Children’s Playground (1997), Eco-Earth Globe (2003), Salem Rotary Centennial Pavilion (2005), Tom McCall Memorial (2008), Asher Anderson Spray Fountain (2009), Angel of Hope Statue (2011), and number of bench seats, covered tables, plantings, and landscaped areas.
Attachments:
1. Area to be preserved for stage, seating area, and peripheral space for future donated facility at Riverfront Park
2. Early Draft Conceptual Designs for Enhanced Performance Facility at Riverfront Park
3/15/17Welcome back to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast! Statistics show that American boys are in trouble. They’re more likely to have depression, abuse alcohol and drugs, and perform poorly in school. What can we do to help these troubled boys? To get some answers we talk to Dr. Michael Thompson, author of the book Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys. Dr. Thompson is a psychologist specializing in boys, and he’s a clinical consultant at The Belmont Hill School, an all boys school in Massachusetts.
Dr. Thompson and I discuss the emotional problems boys face, what dads can do to help boys develop a solid emotional toolkit, and what we can do to help boys perform to their potential in school.
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of The Art of Manliness podcast. Now, statistic show that boys are in trouble. They’re falling further and further behind in school and an alarming number of boys are at a high risk for depression, alcohol and drug abuse, violence and suicide. But what’s cause of these problems and what can we do to help boys. Well, our guest today has written a book about this topic. His name is Dr. Michael Thompson and he is the co-author of the book Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. The book was later turned into PBS documentary with same title which Dr. Thompson wrote and narrated. And Dr. Thompson is a psychologist specializing in children and families. He is the clinical consultant at Belmont High School and All-Boy School in Massachusetts. And in addition to writing about psychology of boys Dr. Thompson travels the country speaking and educating audiences about the emotional and psychological needs of boys today. Dr. Thompson, welcome to the show.
Dr. Thompson: Thank you very much, Brett.
Brett McKay: Well, Dr. Thompson what are the emotional problems that boys are facing these days?
Dr. Thompson: It’s problems of growing up, it’s problems of feeling good about yourself as a boy and a man in a society which is super focused on school performance where you can’t play outdoors because your parents are so frightened of pedophiles and so you don’t have the kind of practice being a boy that you had when there was neighborhood play. I think that’s the biggest challenge to boys today, is that they don’t get to create their own society in the neighborhood and their own definition of boyhood. They often feel pending by school, but they’re pounded continuously with the idea that school is so important. And finally, there is a problem that boys have always had, which is how to maintain your sensitive inner feelings and look strong on the outside and feel strong to yourself.
Brett McKay: And so you mentioned that school–– the way that are schools set up kind of a detriment to boys, what about the larger culture, are there are any cultural ideas that kind of have a detrimental effect on boys?
Dr. Thompson: Yes. The United States is the most violent society in the industrialized world. Our murder rate is 20 to 60 times higher than Western Europe. Even though our rates of violence have been going down since 1995 after a tremendous 20-year run up, even though they’ve been going down in this country they’re still much higher than anywhere else in the industrialized world and I think it makes people jumpy about boys. I think it makes them not trust boy play, be afraid of boys in the school. And, of course boys who are being raised in high risk neighborhoods are at risk for seeing violence and being pulled into violence themselves. So, that’s really how can you feel strong in this life without actually ending up violent.
Brett McKay: So, what’s the solution to, you know, these emotional inner problems that boys face today?
Dr. Thompson: Well, I mean it’s simple stuff, it’s good parenting. It’s having fathers who model self-control, who model studiousness, who model many different ways to be a man. The problem is 35% of American boys don’t have a biological father at home and they were dependent on the media to shape what they think of is masculinity. I mean I ask suburban boys with hard working busy preoccupied fathers what their image of muscularity is and they say NFL football players. I mean that’s a little weird, isn’t it? Because these football players aren’t absolutely the best models for boys because so few boys have that size and that narrow skill, most of them going to have to make it in the world thinking of themselves as men in some other way.
Brett McKay: And it’s not an athlete, sometimes it is often times now a celebrity or some sort of…
Dr. Thompson: Yes, that’s right, that’s right.
Brett McKay: You talk in your book a lot about developing the emotional literacy in boys, can you explain what emotional literacy is?
Dr. Thompson: Yeah, it’s an ability to identify your feelings and be able to speak about them. Many boys–– look I believe boys have the full range of emotional feeling girls do. But in boy’s society when you’re supposed to look strong you don’t admit to feelings of shame or inadequacy or if you admit to, you admit to only in a humorous way. Boy society is different, it shapes a boy’s emotional reaction. I think of a fifth grade girl walking into the classroom and saying, “Oh, I’m so upset with my stepmother. Last night we fought and fought and I just went to my room and cried.” Okay, the girls are going to gather around her and tend her and be sympathetic. What is that had happened to a boy who fought with his stepmother and gone to his room and cried? Is he is going to come in the school and be able to say that? If he did say that other the boys would back away, oh, oh, you know.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Dr. Thompson: He’s a weakling, like that and I can’t–– I don’t want to catch that. So boys often, they’ll come in and curse the stepmother or look tough or threaten or revenge or something else which allows them to think of themselves as manly but excuse them away from the depths of bad feeling they had and excuse them away from more realistic types of problem solving. They kind of identify how humiliated and helpless they felt and it’s helpful to boys to be able to talk about that but boys society doesn’t allow it.
Brett McKay: So, one part of emotional literacy is recognizing the feelings that a boy might have. You also talk about empathy a lot in the book.
Dr. Thompson: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Why is it that boys have a hard time empathizing with other people?
Dr. Thompson: I don’t we give them practice, I think they want to. The Japanese have you know five and six-year-old boys go down and work with two-year-old children every day in the school and they say it so that the boys can develop omeati which is Japanese for empathy. They think kids need to look after other children in order to develop these feelings. As I say if you’re taking American boys and you’re putting them on competitive talent on soccer teams of five and six, they never have it–– you’re racing them to be ferocious and competitive but not empathic.
Brett McKay: Dr. Thompson, a lot of people will hear this and think okay that’s fine and you know it’s great, we should teach emotional literacy to boys but it sounds like we’re just turning them into little girls, how did you respond to that? I mean is it possible to teach emotional literacy while encouraging masculine strength in boys, kind of innate boyish characteristics?
Dr. Thompson: You know I had a friend who was born and raised in Germany and teaches in Boston University, has for years and teaches of this old university in Germany and he said many American boys would be stunned by how emotionally open German boys are, which is now on the most pacific countries in the world. I mean Germans after World War II made a huge, huge effort to redefine what was masculine and they raised German boys differently so they didn’t turn out to be so warlike. And he said you know German boys are so emotionally open that American boys would read them as gay. They’re not gay. They’re sleeping girls but they’re talking to them a lot and that a culture of openness and talking is–– comes from the notions we’ve muscularity. You know, the masculinity varies from culture to culture. What we regard as manly changes in culture to culture. There is a lot about the American definition of masculinity which I like the independence, the entrepreneurial, kind of do it on your own attitude and there are lots of things which I think are very helpful to American men. But the tough silent definition of masculinity is, of course, for psychologists worrisome because it means boys put down and don’t express the actual feeling and then they go out touched with their feelings and we’re getting a lot of young male depression in later adolescence and early adulthood and that’s worrisome to me. So, I try and teach boys that emotional courage is correct, showing your feelings requires some guts, you know.
Brett McKay: Is that why you mentioned about how German men are emotionally open, it seems like there was a time in America that men used to be like that. I mean if we go back to 19th century, even before World War II, you’ll read men you know they’re were affection with each other, you look at photos of men and they would have their arm around each other and…
Dr. Thompson: Yeah, that’s right…
Brett McKay: You know I was reading his diary and he writes you know, you can tell he was very in touch with his inner self and kind of emotions. What change, I mean what happened, where we got away from that and until where this manliness and masculinity kind of stoic silent type, was it World War II that caused this?
Dr. Thompson: I must say I don’t know, I don’t know the answer to that. I think it will take a social historian, a social critic to know. But I do think that the definition of masculinity changed from when ––I’m 62 years old, when I was a child there were TV shows with you know ‘Warm-Hearted Fathers and including the show called–– which I used to watch regularly called Father Knows Best and somebody–– the study of TV sitcoms some years ago and found that of 112 fathers on TV shows, they’re only about seven of them who were competent. The rest were a boys, adolescent, irresponsible, nit-wit irresponsible fathers. I mean which father–– if you’re a boy and you’re watching to Two and a Half Men, which of those two men is the man you can admire as a father figure.
Brett McKay: Yeah, well, I don’t think either one of them was that great, but…
Dr. Thompson: Right, I mean there’s a mini, the real for father of the boy and then there’s Charlie Shane right, excuse me, you know, he is a permanent 17 for life.
Brett McKay: And what do you think –– let me just on that tangent there, I mean why do you think we put fatherhood out there just kind of you know mean a dad means kind of being the dumb, overgrown child and just another kid in the family, why do you we love that so much in our society?
Dr. Thompson: I don’t know, it’s very painful to me.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Dr. Thompson: And why do we–– you know why did the media grab hold of this attenuated adolescent father? It’s on all of their commercials. You know the women were responsible and the men are nit-wit.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and something I think that is frustrating a lot of men these days. And speaking of dads and fathers, what is a father’s role in teaching emotional literacy to their sons and what can dads do?
Dr. Thompson: I think as a father you take your son–– you know I was scared in the middle school sometimes, I was worried about police, I wanted to be stronger, but didn’t turn out that way you know. I turned out to be a writer, an actor and something we didn’t know perhaps to be a football player and many of us found their deepest connections with our friends who are boys, meaningful connections. I think father should absolutely demonstrate to their sons the power of male friendship, the power of male loves for woman and respect for woman. I mean just you have to show boy what a real man is, not the two dimensional kinds of characters you see in sports.
Brett McKay: And one thing that kind of struck me in your book that was interesting was that, you know one thing you can do to teach your sons about emotional literacy and is to show you vulnerability sometimes.
Dr. Thompson: Right. And you’re terrified if your son is weak and you’re terrified if your son is going to be picked on but it’s better to say what you faced and how you met it with resilience so your son knows that the most important thing is not to be just strong to everything, but in fact to be resilient and have some balance.
Brett McKay: So, Dr. Thompson you work with boys in All-Boys School, what are some things that parents or dads can do to help their sons in schools? It just it seems like boys are falling further and further behind and there is, you can go every month you read in article or see something on the television about how test scores amongst boys are falling down, graduation rates are going down for boys.
Dr. Thompson: Right.
Brett McKay: So…
Dr. Thompson: Well, you know it’s dads who want to send their sons upstairs to do their homework and they sit downstairs watching you know basketball or ice hockey that won’t work. We know that fathers who do their homework with their sons have sons who get higher grades. We know that fathers who attend school PTA meetings and come to things other than dumb sports, have sons who gets higher grades. We know that sons whose fathers read to them at night do better academically. So, I think when you’ve a little boy, you shouldn’t always let the mom read to them, you should go up and read to your sons so they know being a man is being a reader.
Brett McKay: And one thing you talked about in your book too is how––and we talked a little bit in the beginning of the interview about how schools are not really designed the way they are––in most public schools aren’t designed with boys in mind and that is one of other reasons why boys are struggling and teachers struggle with behavioral problems with boys. I mean what we can do to kind of guide our schools in making them more boy-friendly.
Dr. Thompson: Well, in every school I visit and that’s my work as a school consultant, there are schools that are gifted––excuse me, there are teachers that are gifted with boys and there are teachers who are not so good with boys. And I want the secrets of teachers who are good with boys to be advertised, that is highlighted, you know, this is what works with boys in the classroom. Now, there is a Philadelphia Psychologist, Michael Reichert who is coming out with a book called ‘Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys’ and it’s based on the best kind of lessons from 600 teachers in boys schools around the world and you can actually teach people what are the best kinds of lessons for boys, what really works for them and that’s what I want because constantly disciplined, constantly telling them they’re in trouble, just makes them pissed off withdrawn from school.
Brett McKay: Yeah. One thing I did or I’ve heard around by people particularly with regard to boys in the schools is actually to enroll boys in the school later than you would girls, is there are any truth to |
put their kids to the test.
We rigged a car with hidden cameras and hired an actor to approach their children, pretending he needs directions to the Denver Zoo, just three blocks away.
First he pulled up on 8-year-old Addie, on her bike. She knows exactly where the zoo is, but when approached by our “stranger,” she lied and said “no.”
Next we test 10-year-old Sofia. As soon our actor approaches her she dumps her scooter and runs to the nearest house. Sofia told us, “What went through my mind is what happened to that little girl and it scared me so much.”
But when our actor approaches Molly son’s Jake, he not only talks to the stranger, he comes right up to the car. It’s only when our actor asks Jake, “Do you want to get in the car and show me how to get there,” that Jake step backs from the vehicle and says, “No thank you.”
Jake's mother Molly is disturbed by her son’s reaction. “This man could have gotten out and grabbed him and nobody could have done anything about it.”
Aurora police Sgt. Cassidee Carlson told us, “There’s no reason an adult should be asking a kid for directions.”
Carlson also said Jake’s kindness could have gotten him hurt or worse. “He wants to be so helpful, but his helpfulness and his kindness could have gotten him seriously hurt.”
Even when he asks him to get in the car he still says, “No thank you.”
Carlson said parents need to teach their kids to be rude and cause a commotion. “A complete stranger, you can yell at them, you can tell them no!”
Molly now realizes her son has a lot to learn. “He did exactly what I told him not to do.” She plans to use our test as a teaching tool down the road.
Aurora Police have a few tips on keeping kids safe:Follow John
It appears that the 2015 Ford Focus Electric will get a major price cut of $6,000, bringing the suggested retail price to $29,995--more in line with the best-selling Nissan Leaf.
The battery-electric Focus is now in its fourth model year, and only about 4,000 have been sold since it first went on sale in December 2011.
That's roughly one-fifteenth the number of Nissan Leaf electric cars that have been sold (over a period one year longer).
2015 Nissan Leaf
Both the Focus Electric and the Leaf are five-door hatchbacks the size of conventional compact cars, with rated ranges between 80 and 85 miles.
The report comes via LeftLaneNews, which sources it to a dealer document it acquired.
The site also reports that Ford will similarly discount any remaining 2014 Focus Electric models now on dealer lots.
ALSO SEE: 2014 Ford Focus Electric Gets $4,000 Price Cut To Boost Sales (Jul 2013)
Earlier this year, Ford had authorized $6,000 of cash back on all Focus Electrics.
Such actions are often the prelude to a price reduction, as a $5,000 price cut on 2013 models proved to be for the 2014 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car.
This isn't the first time Ford has cut prices on the Focus Electric, either. The 2014 model was $4,000 less than its 2012 and 2013 predecessors, which were launched at $39,995.
2015 Ford Focus Electric
That means the 2015 electric Focus carries a base price fully $10,000 lower than its launch price--fairly unusual among so-called volume models.
But the cut may have been a necessity for Ford to make even the minimum number of sales required under California's zero-emission vehicle sales rules.
Focus Electric sales were 1,738 in 2013, and are running at a rate of about 2,000 so far this year.
DON'T MISS: 2015 Ford Focus Energi Rumored: 25 Miles Of Range, $27,500? (Jan 2014)
The price cut would seem to lessen any chances that the rumored Ford Focus Energi plug-in hybrid model will be launched.
The 2015 Focus lineup, a "mid-cycle refresh" with updated styling and additional features, came and went with little change to the electric version and no added Energi model.
Through September, Ford has sold 15,809 Energi plug-in hybrid models, against only 1,534 Focus Electrics.
2012 Ford Focus Electric launch, New York City, January 2011 - Nancy Gioia
The company has long downplayed its only battery-electric vehicle, stressing its limitations and suggesting that it will be unsuitable for many buyers--startling behavior for any automaker.
That has generated much debate over whether the Focus Electric is a compliance car, built only in minimal numbers to meet regulations, or a genuine effort to sell electric cars beyond states that have adopted California's rules.
This year's price cut may give Ford another chance to show it's serious about selling electric cars, but advocates will likely remain to be convinced.
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Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.My best friend was having a really bad time in work recently and was feeling really down about everything going on, but as it’s a long distance friendship, I wasn’t able to be there physically for her.
Hot chocolate has always been the thing that connected us right from the beginning, and for many people I know it’s the same. Hot chocolate can make you feel so much better – and being made hot chocolate by someone you love is just sublime.
But because I couldn’t be there, I wanted to give her something small so she could make the hot chocolate without me, but still feel it was made by me. We both love Harry Potter, so I decided to write a potion for her, complete with renamed ingredients and a potions recipe to make it that much more authentic.
So I googled and wiki’d away, and came up with this! I hope you like it, though please be aware this isn’t an official potion from the Potterverse, just something I put together myself!
Equipment and Ingredients
Ingredients:
Pot of hot chocolate.
Pot of cinnamon
Gold edible glitter
Blue edible glitter
Marshmellows
The edible glitter isn’t absolutely necessary, but I felt it gave the potion more of a magical look. You could also have whipped cream for the top, but my friend doesn’t like cream on her hot chocolate so it was unnecessary for me to create this. It is something you could look into if you want to make this potion and personalise it further.
Equipment:
Brown paper (I used scrap)
Pen
PritStik/glue
The Recipe
Knowing my real life ingredients, I then used the Harry Potter Wikia pages for Potions Ingredients and for Creatures to pick out what I wanted to make my potion out of.
I made sure I found things that were positive (remember this potion is for good feelings and to raise your mood) and would create a nice overall image of what I was making.
Once I’d picked out what I wanted each ingredient to be, I rewrote a basic step-by-step to make hot chocolate, working in the ingredients and a little magical theory to give it an authentic feel.
This is the conversion I came up with. I have also linked each item to the wikia page to give a little background into why I picked each. You’ll also see that I altered some items because they weren’t quite what I wanted; for example the Golden Snidget was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to include, and I had gold glitter, so I decided to modify the potion ingredient into Powdered Golden Snidget Feather, which isn’t an official ingredient.
Ingredient Conversion
Milk – Bicorn Milk
Hot chocolate powder – Ashes from an Ashwinder Egg Fire
Cinnamon – Common Rue
Edible glitter (gold) – Powdered Golden Snidget Feathers
Edible glitter (blue) – Dried Billywig Poison
Marshmallows – Condensed Niffler Dreams
The most out-there ingredient is obviously the Condensed Niffler Dreams. My friend and I loved the Niffler creature in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them; for us it totally stole the show. For this reason I was very sure from the beginning that marshmallows should be Niffler Dreams.
Crafting
The first thing I did with each product was to remove as much labelling and packaging I could without compromising the containment of the ingredients.
1. Remove Labels 2. Wrap in paper. 3. Fold and stick into the middle of the bottom. 4. Stick a circle of paper to the bottom to disguise the folds. 5. Complete & right way up.
2. Next wrap the brown paper around each item, and stick into place. I did this very haphazardly because I was looking for a rougher finish – as if some bored shopkeeper wizard had already made and wrapped 50 of these items today and couldn’t be bothered to perfect them.
3. Then fold the bottom into the middle. At this point I found I needed to cut excess off some items to get it to fold and stick neatly.
4. Lastly I put a circle of paper on the bottom of the pot to hide where I’d folded it into itself.
5. Now complete, they were ready to write on.
I was careful to add details to each based on what was on the Wikia. For example Dried Billywig Poison, I put a warning that too much might cause permanent levitation. I also put the ‘prices’ of each item on the label – as they would be in any good potions shop!
The very last thing I needed to do was write out the recipe, as seen above. Unfortunately I only had one piece of brown paper left, and I did make a couple mistakes in my handwriting, but I didn’t sweat the small stuff.
External Oh look an advert!
In the middle of the recipe booklet, I also put an advert for to train your Southern Red Crested House Dragon in potion warming – which is a semi-personalised advert, as my friend’s boyfriend has red hair, is from the south and works in a coffee shop. This is also something that you’re able to personalise for yourself.
The name of the spell is literally ‘stress disappear’ put through google translate and then altered by myself so it sounds like a potion name/incantation. Because I’m thorough but not imaginative.
Recipe in full:
Pour milk into mug. Do not send a beloved husband to milk a Bicorn. If husband is eaten by Bicorn, common cow’s milk will do. Add 2 teaspoons of Ashwinder Egg Ashes. Stir 9 times widdershins or until smooth (briskly). Heat milk with Callesco spell. If this spell is unknown, use Muggle MeeCrowWav for 2 mins. And learn Callesco spell. Remove, add common rue & stir a further 4 times, clockwise. Heat 1 more min. Add 1/2 teaspoon Dried Billywig Poison & 1/2 teaspoon Powdered Golden Snidget Feathers. Top with Niffler Dreams to taste. Wave wand over concoction thrice in a Northern direction, saying ‘Accentia Evanesctum’ clearly.
Drink while still warm.
I intentionally made the ingredients on the recipe not perfectly match the ingredient names on the items because in real recipes, sometimes you can’t find the exact thing the recipe is asking for.
Completed Recipe Set
Tada!
Here it all is!
It didn’t take that much to put together, and it cost about £10 in total, with the glitter being the most expensive items. However, it was a really simple gesture to let someone you love know that you’re thinking of them.
I hope you enjoyed this how-to, and I hope it inspires your own potion! Let me know in the comments if you’ve made your own, using my example or just in the past. I’d love to hear from you!
You can support Start Somewhere on Patreon.
AdvertisementsThe National Security Agency released documents on Christmas Eve revealing surveillance activities that “may have violated the law for U.S. policy over more than a decade,” reports David Lerman at Bloomberg.
Compelled by an ACLU FOIA request, the agency published 12 years of quarterly reports that were created for the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board between 2001 and mid-2013.
The reports are heavily redacted but include details of intentional and unintentional misuse of the NSA’s signals intelligence gathering systems.
The reports detail unauthorized signals intelligence gathering that included data about U.S. citizens, unauthorized personnel using the intelligence gathering systems and abuses of the NSA’s spying tools for personal use. NSA signals intelligence includes phone call metadata gathered through the NSA’s links to telecommunications companies, as well as much more granular communications scooped up by the agency’s electronic spy network. There are also several references to employees failing to complete required “refresher” training on signals intelligence systems.
In many instances, NSA employees ran poorly constructed or unauthorized queries in the NSA systems, and ended up gathering data on U.S. citizens or unintended targets. In most of these cases the data was then destroyed.
In one case, detailed in the third quarter of 2007, an NSA instructor ran an unauthorized search during a training session:
Misuse of the U.S. SIGINT System. While teaching a class on analyzing communication networks, the instructor purposely entered the phone number of his friend, who was neither a U.S. person nor living in the United States. [sentence redacted] The Instructor was counseled on the restrictions on NSA authorities and was mandated to attend training on USSID SP0018, which he completed in July 2007.
Lerman also reports on instances of NSA systems misuse that were already publicly known:
Those cases included a member of a U.S. military intelligence unit who violated policy by obtaining the communications of his wife, who was stationed in another country. After a military proceeding, the violator was punished by a reduction in rank, 45 days of extra duty and forfeiture of half of his pay for two months, according to the letter. In a 2003 case, a civilian employee ordered intelligence collection “of the telephone number of his foreign-national girlfriend without an authorized purpose for approximately one month” to determine whether she was being faithful to him, according to the letter. The employee retired before an investigation could be completed.
In August, 2013, Judy Woodruff spoke with former NSA analyst Russell Tice who said the agency collects every domestic communication, “word for word.”F 1 and F 2 A lemniscate of Bernoulli and its two fociand
In geometry, the lemniscate of Bernoulli is a plane curve defined from two given points F 1 and F 2, known as foci, at distance 2a from each other as the locus of points P so that PF 1 ·PF 2 = a2. The curve has a shape similar to the numeral 8 and to the ∞ symbol. Its name is from lemniscatus, which is Latin for "decorated with hanging ribbons". It is a special case of the Cassini oval and is a rational algebraic curve of degree 4.
This lemniscate was first described in 1694 by Jakob Bernoulli as a modification of an ellipse, which is the locus of points for which the sum of the distances to each of two fixed focal points is a constant. A Cassini oval, by contrast, is the locus of points for which the product of these distances is constant. In the case where the curve passes through the point midway between the foci, the oval is a lemniscate of Bernoulli.
This curve can be obtained as the inverse transform of a hyperbola, with the inversion circle centered at the center of the hyperbola (bisector of its two foci). It may also be drawn by a mechanical linkage in the form of Watt's linkage, with the lengths of the three bars of the linkage and the distance between its endpoints chosen to form a crossed square.[1]BAGHDAD—Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq's ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.
It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting.
The attack also made plain the kind of lapses in security that have left Iraqis wary of the U.S. drawdown and distrustful of the ability of Iraqi forces now taking up ultimate responsibility for protecting the country.
Sunday's hour-long assault was the second in as many weeks on the facility, the headquarters for the Iraqi Army's 11th Division, pointing to the failure of Iraqi forces to plug even the most obvious holes in their security.
Two of the four attackers even managed to fight their way inside the compound and were only killed after running out of ammunition and detonating explosives belts they were wearing.
The American troops who joined the fight and provided cover fire for Iraqi soldiers pursuing the attackers were based at the compound to train Iraqi forces, said U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Bloom. Iraqi forces also requested help from U.S. helicopters, drones and explosives experts, he said. No American troops were hurt, Bloom said.
Under an agreement between the two countries, Iraq can still call on American forces to assist in combat and U.S. troops can defend themselves if attacked.
In Sunday's assault, six militants wearing explosives vests and matching track suits and armed with machine guns and hand grenades pulled up at a checkpoint with an explosives-laden car, said a senior Iraqi military intelligence official who was inside the building at the time.
The six assailants left the car and started shooting, killing a soldier at the checkpoint, he said. Guards at an observation tower returned fire, killing four militants, while two entered a building in the military compound.
Iraqi soldiers shot and killed a seventh attacker who was driving the vehicle, causing the car bomb to explode, the official said. The blast left behind a gaping crater in the ground.
The fighting came to an end after the two assailants who breached the compound ran out of bullets and detonated their explosives vests, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
Two weeks earlier, an al-Qaida-linked suicide bomber waded into a crowd of hundreds of army recruits outside the building and detonated a blast that killed 61 people. That was the deadliest act of violence in Baghdad in months.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Sunday's attack.
Baghdad has been on high alert since President Barack Obama declared the official end to U.S. combat operations on Wednesday, setting up more checkpoints, intensifying searches of people and vehicles and handing out more guns and bullets to troops guarding the capital.
The number of U.S. troops has fallen from a high of 170,000 to just under 50,000 this August; all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by 2012.
The remaining American soldiers have a noncombat role and mostly assist Iraqis in stabilizing the country. However, U.S. forces can still help Iraqi forces hunt down al-Qaida and other militants and can defend themselves or their bases against attacks.
Insurgents have intensified their strikes on Iraqi police and soldiers to mark the change in the U.S. mission.
Iraq's political instability now appears to be threatening the country's security. Six months after an inconclusive election, Iraq still has no new government. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, is struggling to keep his job after his political coalition came in a close second to a Sunni-backed alliance in the March 7 vote.
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Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Rebecca Santana and Hamid Ahmed contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.December 13, 2016
MSM Create #Fakenews Storm As Rebel Aleppo Vanishes
I have not ever experienced a #fakenews onslaught as today. Every mainstream media and agency seems to have lost all inhibitions and is reporting any rumor claim regarding the liberation of east-Aleppo as fact.
Consider this BBC headline and opener:
Aleppo battle: UN says 82 civilians shot on the spot
Syrian pro-government forces have been entering homes in eastern Aleppo and killing those inside, including women and children, the UN says. The UN's human rights office said it had reliable evidence that in four areas 82 civilians were shot on sight.
1. A UN human rights office does not exists. What the BBC means is the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR). That commissioner is the Jordanian Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a Hashemite educated in the UK and U.S. and a relative of the Jordanian dictator king. That is relevant to note as Jordan is heavily involved in the supporting the "rebels" against the Syrian government.
2. The office has not "said" that "82 civilians were shot" or other such gruesome stuff. It said that there were "sources" that have "reports" that such happened. From its press statement today:
Multiple sources have reports that tens of civilians were shot dead yesterday in al-Ahrar Square in al-Kallaseh neighbourhood, and also in Bustan al-Qasr, by Government forces and their allies, including allegedly the Iraqi al-Nujabaa armed group.
The OHCHR claiming that "multiple sources have reports" of XYZ, without revealing neither the "sources" nor the provenance of the alleged "reports" of XYZ, certainly does not translate into "The UN said XYZ happened."
I find it irresponsible that the OHCHR even mentions such unverified stuff in its press conferences. But it is even more irresponsible that the BBC then uses a "UN says..." headline and intro about such rumors especially without any further qualification in the rest of its "reporting".
There is also this recent report that cats were killed in Aleppo.
#BREAKING - Activists: All residents and guests of last cat shelter in Aleppo killed in Hezbollah gas attack.
The spokesman of the OHCHR has been notified of the above report. We are now awaiting the BBC headline: "UN says Hezbollah gassed last cats in Aleppo".
The BBC is not the only #fakenews outlet in this. Indeed it seems that news agencies seek "safety in the pack" by all reporting the same nonsense through each and every channel.
Again - the UN only says that it knows of such reports. It does not verify or vouches for these. Still the usual "humanitarian" influence operations, like Amnesty International, then join in on the "UN Says..." falsehoods. Thousands of news outlets and websites copy from the fake agency reports and "humanitarian" outlets and try to sensationalize their take even further. Its a total disinformation mess.
But there are also the wonders of Aleppo.
Real inhabitants and reporters in Aleppo say that any internet connection there is slow and unstable. But those "activists" under intense artillery fire in the east seem to have gigabits of reliable bandwidth available. It's a miracle. Pictures and videos in tweets like this one come "out of Aleppo" each and every minute.
Of course such gigabits could be put to better use than for grabbing screenshots of old music videos, but nobody is perfect, especially when under heavy artillery fire.
The news agencies and mainstream media take all the "activist" tweets, WhatsUp talks, video uploads and livestreaming by Periscope as the truth without even knowing where those come from. Those "activists" could sit anywhere in the world and there is no way for reporters to verify their location.
The security of all these information operations (pdf) have me concerned. When those "last activists in Aleppo" tweet that the Syrian army is moving in towards them do they mean that Assad's tanks rumble onto Vauxhall Cross?
But as long as everyone repeats the lying "reports from the ground" of said "activists" no one can be held responsible. "We all honestly erred," is the usual and well accepted apology.
We should try, wherever we can, to hold those news people to higher standards.
Posted by b on December 13, 2016 at 11:57 AM | Permalink
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next page »You may have heard of crows, magpies, and mockingbirds recognizing individual people. These birds live among people, so it may be natural that they learn to differentiate people. But what about the animals that live in remote areas?
Scientists in South Korea studied brown skuas living in Antarctica and reported that these birds too recognize people who had previously accessed the nests to measure their eggs and nestlings. "I had to defend myself against the skuas' attack," says Yeong-Deok Han, a PhD student at Inha University. "When I was with other researchers, the birds flew over me and tried to hit me. Even when I changed my field clothes, they followed me. The birds seemed to know me no matter what I wear."
The research team performed a series of experiments. The researchers checked the nests once a week to monitor the breeding status, and the skuas attacked at closer distances with repeated visits of the researchers. To test if the birds specifically distinguish the researchers who visited the nests from those who did not, a pair of humans consisting of nest intruder (who accessed the nests) and neutral human (who never accessed the nests before) approached to the nests and walked towards the opposite directions. All seven skua pairs followed and tried to attack the nest intruder but never followed the neutral human.
"It is amazing that brown skuas, which evolved and lived in human-free habitats, recognized individual humans just after 3 or 4 visits. It seems that they have very high levels of cognitive abilities." says Dr. Won Young Lee, a Senior Researcher from Korea Polar Research Institute who led the research. The cognitive abilities of Antarctic animals have not been well studied before. Brown skuas have been recorded to steal food from other birds or even steal breast milk of nursing elephant seals. According to the researchers, this opportunistic feeding habits may make them cleverer with time.
Dr. Lee commented: "Since this area has been inhabited by humans only after the Antarctic research stations were installed, we think that the skuas could acquire the discriminatory abilities during a short-term period of living near humans."
These findings are published in the journal Animal Cognition.
Check out the video to see how the birds reacted to the nest intruder in the discriminatory experiment.
https:/ / youtu. be/ 5INsdKej0ow
###Full length clip coming in the new few days
Lana Del Rey's 'West Coast' video is expected to premiere this week, having been named in a Vevo programming update, listing this week's new online releases.
The track is the first to be taken from Del Rey's second album, Ultraviolence, and the star is known to have recently shot a video for the track on an LA beach - an extract of which was seen in the looped video which accompanied the recent audio of the downbeat, melancholy track. Now, fans can expect to see the full length version in the coming days. See the Vevo update below, via fan Twitter account, Lana Del Rey Spain.
El vídeo de Lana Del Rey, 'West Coast', saldrá esta semana según ha anunciando VEVO. pic.twitter.com/ev7HUIHOBa — Lana Del Rey Spain (@LanaDReySpain) April 22, 2014
'West Coast' is currently available across the globe, but for no apparent reason, will not be released in the UK until 18 May 2014. The track is set to make a big splash in the US charts this week, having sold up to 120,000 download copies in the days since its release.
Below: everything we know about Lana Del Rey's UltraviolenceI'm using MongoSpark scala connector to load a collection, process it in spark and I want to update the same collection with the result.
I have a dataframe with the structure:
root |-- _id: struct (nullable = true) | |-- oid: string (nullable = true) |-- provider: string (nullable = true) |-- solution: string (nullable = true)
_id and provider are the sharded keys in mongo but when I run the update with:
MongoSpark.write(df_update).option("uri","mongodb://127.0.0.1/").option("database", "test").option("collection", "solutions").option("replaceDocument", "false").mode("append").save()
I get:
Write errors: [BulkWriteError{index=0, code=61, message='upsert { q: { _id: ObjectId('57ebd3d227e9c712d83737c9') }, u: { $set: { provider: "someProvider", solution: "blahblahblah" } }, upsert: true } does not contain shard key for pattern { provider: 1.0 }', details={ }}]
It looks like mongospark is not using provider as part of the query and because of that I get the shard stuff error...
Is there a way to force mongospark to use X columns to query and Y columns to update?
I'm using mongo 3.4.7 and spark 2.2.0
Thanks!With a fresh $225 million in its pocket, Pinterest is gearing up to spend a little of it to build out its platform and the data that powers it — and close up a copyright hole in the process. Pinterest today announced a deal with Getty Images — the image agency that holds digital rights to some 80 million still images and illustrations and over 50,000 hours of stock film footage. Getty will provide Pinterest with metadata, and in exchange, Pinterest will pay Getty a fee.
Metadata will start to get added in the coming months, the companies say.
Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but offering a fee for image metadata is a first for Pinterest. Up to now, Pinterest has offered traffic to partners for more data — such as in the case of the recent article pins it introduced, or the Flickr deal from last year that added a Pin-it button to Flickr.com and Flickr backlinks for images posted on Pinterest.
“As part of our agreement, we’ll pay Getty Images a fee for the data they share and will help make sure that their images get proper attribution,” Pinterest notes today. “We’re just getting started with Getty Images but we’re excited about the possibilities of what their data can help us deliver.”
Shareaholic recently noted that Pinterest is the second-biggest referrer of traffic on the Internet after Facebook, so for consumer sites based around advertising and (hence) traffic, this makes sense.
But in the case of Getty, traffic is less important than the data it is able to provide about the images that it holds.
And of course it has photographers and illustrators that want to be compensated for their images getting used. Getty says that it will be sharing the fee with its contributors (that is, those photographers and illustrators) — which means that this deal closes up another awkward copyright hole for Pinterest.
As Getty Images co-founder and CEO Jonathan Klein laid out for us last year, this was something that the company was gearing up to address.
“We’re comfortable with people using our images to build traffic,” he said. “The point in time when they have a business model, they have to have some sort of license.” Pinterest, which is now starting to court more advertising and really focus on monetization, definitely fits into that category of now having a business model.
For Pinterest, it will be able to use this data to provide more detail to its users about what they’re looking at, including photographers’ names and what’s in the picture.
But it sounds like Pinterest will also go much deeper with that data. For example, in the example of the picture of scallops with brussels sprouts above, Pinterest will be able to use the metadata to suggest more pins for recipes using those ingredients, or maybe more images from Thomas Barwick (the photographer). That will make it more likely that a user will spend more time on Pinterest looking at more content. And creating a stronger web of linked pins will also help Pinterest then monetize against that content better — more tags to match against relevant ads, and more of the all-important “engagement” that has become such an important metric for social media sites.
While Pinterest these days sometimes leads people to “dead ends” when there is not enough information about a picture that has been shared — a fetching handbag, yes, but who is the designer? — this potentially will open up more avenues for users to travel further, so to speak (at least where Getty pictures are concerned).
Getty says that it will be providing two pieces of technology for this service. The first is its PicScout image-recognition technology — which will crawl Pinterest to identify Getty Images. It will then link those images with Getty’s metadata using its Connect API. “We’ll get a photo credit for our images on Pinterest’s site and a link back. Pinterest users get more context and have more fun,” Getty noted today.
The service will go live first with Getty Images house content and will later expand to iStock content and other Getty collections.
[Image: Getty]— Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman will announce his decision Wednesday morning on whether to file charges against the two Minneapolis Police officers involved in the shooting death Jamar Clark, sources tell WCCO.
Clark, 24, was shot and killed by a police officer on Nov. 15 of last year. The Minneapolis Police union says Clark was shot in a struggle, and that Clark reached for an officer’s gun. Protesters and some witnesses dispute that, saying Clark was handcuffed and on the ground when he was shot.
The shooting sparked weeks of protest, including an occupation of the area surrounding the Minneapolis Police Department’s 4th Precinct in north Minneapolis, where tents stayed up for 18 days before officers removed them.
Ahead of the announcement, Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau released a video Tuesday saying violence and vandalism would not be tolerated in the aftermath of the Hennepin County Attorney’s decision.
Black Lives Matter Minneapolis also recently called for a gathering in Elliot Park downtown before the decision is announced.Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized the need for constitutional reform in Ukraine, and has urged Kiev to carry it out at the so-called “Normandy Four” meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
“A constitutional reform is indispensable for Donbass to achieve its permanent status, and must also lead to the appropriate legislation – and not just for three years, but on a permanent basis,” Lavrov told reporters on Saturday, following a meeting of the foreign ministers from France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.
“Following on from this, a discussion on amnesty, as well as the modality of the local elections, must take place – something that Kiev systematically avoids.”
Joining Lavrov at the negotiating table were the German and Ukrainian foreign ministers. Their French counterpart Laurent Fabius, who resigned this week to take up a new post in President Francois Hollande’s administration, was unable to attend.
READ MORE: Munich Security Conference report: Europe at odds amid ‘boundless crises’
Germany’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier agreed on the need for a common strategy on the upcoming elections, adding that there were still points that needed to be ironed out, but declining to say what they were.
“I hope that all who occupy responsible positions in Kiev and Moscow, it is clear that we no longer have eternity to realize what was agreed in Minsk,” the German FM said. “We must not cease our efforts to push the parties to the conflict to take further steps.”
Steinmeier and others, including the US, were reminded by Lavrov earlier that Kiev does not view the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as equal partners in the negotiations. The Russian official reiterated: “It is indeed humorous that those were the very people signing the Minsk agreements in the first place; therefore, their legitimacy as parties to the conflict is beyond question.”
Read more
At the briefing, Lavrov also stated that “transgressions are being observed on both sides” security-wise, and that “the important part is that no one doubts the importance of the ceasefire agreement reached, nor the agreements regarding the pullback of heavy weapons.”
The FM further informed Kiev of Russia’s refusal to accept the kind of arrangement where, despite prior agreement, Russian specialists are not participating in the work of the center on security coordination. This, apparently, is due to the fact that “Russian soldiers would somehow pass messages on to the Donbass opposition,” Lavrov added, saying that such a position is “completely counterproductive and takes its roots in ideological posturing when Kiev won’t consider Russian representatives as its partners.”
READ MORE: Russia-NATO relations have fallen to new Cold War level – Russian PM
The next meeting of the Normandy Four has been scheduled to take place in March in Paris, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin said. Like Lavrov, he agreed the current talks were more of a “preamble” to the ones coming up, due to the French FM Fabius’s absence.Latest News MAngband preview server 11th February 2019 We're finally gearing up for the next major release. It's time to give our preview server a good shake-down. The preview server is currently in the alpha status, meaning we expect horrible bugs, regressions, things being broken or otherwise wrong. But you can help! Join the test! Forums are back 10th February 2019 We have restored our forum. At the moment we are not accepting new registrations, as we'd like our old players to retain their old accounts. If you can't login, try using the "forgot password" link, and if that doesn't work either, ask on Discord. MAngband v1.4.0 1st December 2018 A change of strategy will see frequent and small incremental changes to the game. This is the first of these new MAngband releases. This release brings combining of wands and staves and stacking of rods, you won't find the same artifacts over and over again, and some other small changes. Full list of changes is here. You don't need to download a new client. Updated Windows Client (v1.1.4) 29th November 2018 A new version of the Windows client is available in the downloads area. This is a bug fix release, mostly fixing the crash on chat and problems with saving config files. This version doesn't need administrator access to install. Full change list is here. We recommend you uninstall your current client before installing this, or things might get wierd. Note that if you have saved macros or window layout ensure you copy the existing files before uninstalling. The file C:\Program Files (x86)\mangband\mangclient.ini and the files in C:\Program Files |
replacement tips in the future, a promise it has now made good on.Apple Pencil tips can be replaced by unscrewing the old tip, inserting the new tip, and screwing it in place.The launch of the new Apple Pencil tips comes as Apple debuts the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, a second iPad in the iPad Pro family able to take advantage of the Apple Pencil.(Thanks, Michael!)Comic-Con 2014: Star Trek Kickstarter Film "Prelude to Axanar" July 29, 2014 |
My colleague, Nell Minow the Movie Mom, noted that Klingons were not making their presence felt at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. That may change thanks to Richard Hatch and a fan film. Saturday night, Hatch and other cast members were at a private screening for the Kickstarter film, “Prelude to Axanar” at the Horton Plaza UA Cinema.
If you read my Demanders piece on “The Captains,” you’ll know that I’m a fan of The Original Series. So is Hatch.
Geeks know Hatch as Captain Apollo in the original “Battlestar Galactica” TV series that only lasted one season (1978-1979), but was revived in a 2003 three-hour mini-series that was followed by a weekly TV series in which Hatch had a recurring role as Tom Zarek, a political leader. With the screening of “Prelude to Axanar,” Hatch joins the Star Trek family and the fan-verse of both series collide.
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The 69-year-old Hatch sat down behind me at the “Prelude” premiere, cheerfully and passionately talking Star Trek with fans. His favorite Star Trek series is TOS and he also watched a bit of “Deep Space 9.” Moreover, he approves of the recent reboot believing it stays true to the “chemistry of the original characters” and moves the story lines past the 1960s conventions of the TV series and into this century of movie making.
There was an Apollo in TOS, but that’s not how “Prelude to Axanar” connects with Star Trek. Taking place two decades before James T. Kirk commanded the USS Enterprise on its mission, “Prelude to Axanar” includes one of Kirk’s heroes—Garth of Izar.
Garth of Izar was a highly decorated officer of the Federation Starfleet (full name Kelvar Leonard Garth) during the 23rd century. Garth is the main antagonist in TOS third season episode “Whom Gods Destroy.” Although Garth’s exploits in the Battle of Axanar were required reading at the Starfleet Academy, Garth has become criminally insane and was committed to Elba II asylum after attempting to annihilate the creatures who had helped him recover from serious injuries by gifting him with the ability to shape shift. That episode featured another celebrity of geekdom (Batgirl from the Batman TV series Yvonne Craig as the green-skinned Orion Marta) and allowed Kirk to save his hero through a new drug which cured Garth’s insanity.
Taking over for the late Steve Ihnat, Alec Peters plays Garth of Izar and “Prelude” brings back Gary Graham as Vulcan Ambassador Soval (a character in the 2001-2005 TV series “Star Trek: Enterprise”). “Prelude to Axanar” is a complete movie unto itself, but serves as an introduction to a more ambitious project: The tale of the Battle of Axanar and how the Federation defeated the Klingon Empire. Funded on Kickstarter, the 20-minute “Prelude” introduces us to the characters: Admiral Ramirez (Tony Todd, an actor with multiple connections to the Star Trek family with appearances as Worf’s brother Kurn as well as portraying different characters in different Star Trek series), Captain Sonya Alexander (Kate Vernon who also has Battlestar Galactica connections), Captain Samuel Travis (J.G. Hertzler) and the legendary Klingon warrior General Kharn (Hatch).
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Director Christian Gossett commented during the Q & A that followed the screening that he shot this short film like a History Channel documentary, taking inspiration from the 2009 documentary “Facing Ali.” Expect close-ups where the talking heads fill the screen, but don’t allow you to see the entire head. Gossett, who co-wrote the script for “Prelude” with Alec Peters, mixes the retrospective interviews with supposedly archival footage. We see the cities and the destruction of starships as well as the building of better starships: The Battle of Axanar is a war where technology counts, not an arms race, but a race to have better, faster and more powerful ships.
As the fallen hero, Hatch portrays Kharn as a proud, but intelligent Klingon. Hatch commented that after all, this race had command of space and developed high technology. His Kharn is a man of action who has no time for diplomacy because “If words were water, the humans would drown us all.”
If you want to see this production team go where no Star Trek movie has gone before—to the Four Years War and the Battle of Axanar, highlighting the Klingon point of view, then you’ll want to seek out the Kickstarter campaign for “Star Trek: Axanar.” With 26 days to go (ending Sunday, August 24, 2014, the Kickstarter campaign already has met its goal of $100,000 but this is a discrete goal that covers the sound stage and set construction. The overall estimated cost is $650,000, but the Axanar production team has broken this up into “significant milestones.”
Next Article: Comic-Con 2014: "Stripped: The Comics Documentary" Previous Article: Book Excerpt: "Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor" by Glenn Kenny
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DisqusAmerica's relationship with China could potentially be in jeopardy after President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen by phone Friday. It marked the first time a U.S. president or incoming president has spoken with the leader of the island nation since the 1970s, when formal diplomatic ties between the countries were severed.
The Financial Times initially reported about the phone call between the two leaders.
The U.S. cut formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan when it shifted diplomatic recognition of China to the communist government on the mainland, but the two countries have maintained unofficial diplomatic relations since 1979 — the same year the U.S. embassy in Taiwan closed.
"President-elect Trump spoke with President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, who offered her congratulations," according to a readout of the call from Trump's transition team obtained by Newsmax.
"During the discussion, they noted the close economic, political, and security ties exists between Taiwan and the United States. President-elect Trump also congratulated President Tsai on becoming President of Taiwan earlier this year."
The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2016
Evan Medeiros, the former Asia director at the White House national security council, told the Times Friday's phone call could be seen as "highly provocative" in China's view.
"The Chinese leadership will see this as a highly provocative action, of historic proportions," Medeiros said.
"Regardless if it was deliberate or accidental, this phone call will fundamentally change China's perceptions of Trump's strategic intentions for the negative. With this kind of move, Trump is setting a foundation of enduring mistrust and strategic competition for U.S.-China relations."
Trump spoke with other world leaders on Friday as well, including Philippines President Rodrigo Roa Duterte and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
The Trump transition team had this to say about the call with Duterte: "In their conversation, they noted the long history of friendship and cooperation between the two nations, and agreed that the two governments would continue to work together closely on matters of shared interest and concern."
Regarding the phone call between Trump and Loong, the transition team said: "The two men discussed the long history of good economic, political, and security relations between the United States and Singapore."
The New York Times reports that the White House was not aware of the call until after it occurred.
Trump has had conversations with more than 50 world leaders, according to The Wall Street Journal. One of those leaders was Chinese President Xi Jinping.You might remember a previous article where we talked about what songs in the Rocksmith library would be best to make you into a Campfire Guitarist. Now, that we have a Microphone Mode specifically for acoustic guitars we’d like to revisit some of the available content in the past three years.
1. Bob Dylan “Like A Rolling Stone”
Can you believe this came out shortly after the first article? In any event this is the epitome of a folk rock anthem, and it’s not too hard to play. If you don’t have the Bob Dylan Song Pack, you could always check out Knockin on Heaven’s Door on the on disc setlist of Rocksmith Remastered/2014.
2. Duran Duran “Ordinary World”
Still very surprised this made it into the three pack.
3. Sublime “Santeria”
Sublime is a band that translates to acoustic very well. This would be my second choice (despite it’s familiarity) the real winner is Badfish from Hit Singles IV
4. Sixpence None the Richer “Kiss Me”
If you don’t mind the capo, give it a go!
5. Outkast “Hey Ya!”
Lose yourself in that catchy chord progression emulating 11/4.
6. Heart “Crazy on You”
If you can make it past the intro and still keep that strumming up, well… Good on ya!
7. Don McLean “American Pie”
This is a no-brainer. There are few more iconic acoustic songs than American Pie.
8. Kansas “Dust In The Wind”
If fingerpicking isn’t your thing the rhythm arrangement is far more approachable
9. Green Day “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”
You must have seen this one coming…
10. 3 Doors Down “Kryptonite”
This 3 Doors Down hit will translate to an acoustic guitar perfectly
11. Of Monsters and Men “Little Talks”
Hey!
12. The Neighborhood “Sweater Weather”
Tune down to D Standard for this one
13. Collective Soul “December”
It’s a toss up between this or The World I Know but either way you should definitely check out Collective Soul!
14. Shinedown “Simple Man”
Or play the original
15. David Bowie “Space Oddity”
Couldn’t have the article without this gem
16. Stone Temple Pilots “Plush”
Good practice for those thumb chords.
17. Oasis “Wonderwall”
Anyway here’s Wonderwall
18. Fleetwood Mac “Go Your Own Way”
Go your own way, but you need a Capo for this one as well
19. Staind “So Far Away”
Eb Standard isn’t too far away of a tuning we hope
20. Creedence Clearwater Revival “Proud Mary”
Got some good songs in the library
21. Avril Lavigne “Complicated”
This song isn’t that… Difficult
What songs have you tried since the microphone mode patch? Let us know!People in the Bergen area felt an unusual sensation this morning – an earthquake reaching 3.8 on the Richter scale.
The epicentre of the Norwegian quake was registered at just west of the Øygarden island group in the south west of the Scandinavian country, reports newspaper Bergens Tidende.
The earthquake, recorded at 9:46am on Tuesday, measured in at a strength of 3.8 according to the Richter scale, according to the newspaper’s report.
According to the scale, a rating of 3.8 puts the quake at the upper end of the ‘minor’ rating, meaning it is unlikely to cause damage but can be felt by people as well as cause indoor objects to shake.
“This is a quake that can easily be felt,” senior engineer Berit Storheim of the University of Bergen’s Department of Earth Science told VG.
Earthquakes strong enough to be noticed are unusual in Norway, the engineer added.
“In Norwegian terms, this doesn’t happen often. It has probably been ten years since there was such a strong earthquake in Norway. We have received reports of it being felt over a large area,” she said.
Øygarden resident Natalie Turøy told Bergens Tidende that she was at home when the earthquake hit.
“The whole house shook. I have a baby who was sleeping, and he woke up and started laughing,” Turøy said.
“There was a fair bit of shaking, and I soon realised it was an earthquake,” she added.
READ ALSO: Major Arctic quake rocks Norwegian islandYou wanted more Ports, and - by Hubbub's briny beard - that's what you're getting today.
Manage voyages anywhere in game, meet three new adventurers, embark on a whole new voyage type and enjoy some exotic rewards, including a level-85 katana and wakizashi, and seasinger wand and orb.
Read on to find out more!
Members only You must have level 90 in at least one of a number of skills to access Player-Owned Ports. Each of the new adventurers requires level 90 in a particular skill: Agility for the Tengu Divination for the Memory Dungeoneering for the Exile
Manage Voyages Anywhere
You can now manage your voyages from anywhere in game with the captain's log.
This allows you to send your ships out on new voyages and find out the outcome of existing ones without interrupting your other activities. The only exceptions are story voyages, and the few voyages that require you to receive an item in your inventory upon completion.
You do - of course - need to visit your port to do anything else.
New Adventurers
There are three new adventurers who can come to your port, taking your crews on new story missions:
The Tengu is a living mask controlling a willing host - not to mention a brave vanquisher of evil. Requires 90 Agility.
is a living mask controlling a willing host - not to mention a brave vanquisher of evil. Requires 90 Agility. The Memory is a young girl born of divine energy, whose first concern is not being harvested! Requires 90 Divination.
is a young girl born of divine energy, whose first concern is not being harvested! Requires 90 Divination. The Exile is a gorajo searching the Eastern Lands for her brother. Requires 90 Dungeoneering.
is a gorajo searching the Eastern Lands for her brother. Requires 90 Dungeoneering. Their adventures will take your crews throughout the existing Eastern Lands regions, culminating in a team mission that features monsters from the deep, uncharted lands, and an enemy who may be familiar from elsewhere in RuneScape.
Clue Voyages
There's an all-new voyage type, too: clue voyages.
When you get the opportunity to embark on a clue voyage, you'll be required to send one of the adventurers to an island. You'll have a clue as to which one that is - get it right, and you'll unlock the next in the chain.
Succeed in finding the final island, and you'll enjoy any of a number of rewards, including Tengu cosmetic gear, trait removal for your captains, and stat boosts.
Consider building the new map table port improvement, which increases the likelihood of getting the new clue voyages and gives you hints as to the correct destinations.
New Gear and Port Improvements
There's plenty of new gear to make at your port's item-crafting stations, too:
The tetsu katana and wakizashi are level 85 melee weapons.
The seasinger kiba and makigai are level 85 magic weapons.
Fishing fans will enjoy the new scrimshaws :
: Whopper-baiting scrimshaws give you the chance to hook a whopper fish. It'll get away, but you'll gain extra Fishing XP as you grapple with it.
Casket-salvaging scrimshaws give you the chance to dredge up caskets of loot, including divine locations, gems, and port resources.
Note that - for each - there is a more powerful, non-tradeable'superior' version.
There's a whole batch of azure and terracotta-based port improvements to build, too - including the new map table.
Ninja Fixes
Finally, the Ninja Team have snuck in a batch of your most-requested tweaks and fixes and features:
Exiting your port via the portal can be done with just one click.
The current ship selection is kept when moving between the voyages and ship interfaces.
Meg's lamps can give XP in Agility, Divination and Dungeoneering.
Extra lifeboats are no longer offered once you have reached the maximum of four.
You can remove tutorials from random events.
The Effects interface closes when a ship is sent out.
You can re-roll your captain in the Crew interface.
You can re-roll your special voyages in the Voyages interface.
Using the captain's log's teleport function inside your port teleports you outside.
Current XP is displayed on crew and captains.
The exit portal is no longer active during random events.
The Black Marketeer's random event has been tweaked, making it quicker to complete.
Set Sail!
Have fun exploring the never-richer Eastern Lands. This update was voted for by you, so do let us know what you think on the forums.
The RuneScape Team
In Other News
Love the Orb of Oculus? Experiment with the new Selfie view mode!
view mode! Mod Lee's running a Soul Wars event at 17:00 PST/01:00 UTC, 28th January on World 44. Join the 'Mod Events' friends chat, and meet at the Soul Wars portal in Edgeville.
The Event Support Team is a PMod-led initiative to run in-game events and help others organise their own. Feel free to pop in and say hi.
Read the patch notes for other updates released today.CHENNAI: Islam should not be suppressed out of fear that it breeds extremism, India-born philosopher and academic Akeel Bilgrami said on Monday. He contended that there is a kind of religious fundamentalism in the heart of the United States “comparable to the fundamentalism in Iran and Saudi Arabia”.Speaking on ‘Mentality of Democracy’ in his inaugural address to the 2012-13 class of students at the Asian College of Journalism here, Bilgrami while alluding to Islamic resurgence in the world, observed, “A cold war is being fought against Islam”. This, he said, paved the way for expansion of a military-industrial complex in the United States where suppression is never overt but has taken the form of marginalization of alien viewpoints. “The opposite of freedom is not coercion… they just pity you… say poor chap, 50 years out of date. The marginalization is pervasive …you are treated as an eccentric, people snigger in corridors,” he explained.“In the heart of America… in Nebraska and Kansas... deeply conservative Christians go to the Church because it is part of human nature to seek solidarity and community,” said Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York. Obviously, common people’s need for well-being born out an alienation spawned by consumerist and exploitative capitalism could not be satiated by visiting a bowling alley, as political scientists may suggest, or obsession with entertainment or an icon like Sachin Tendulkar, he said. In the heart of America, a hub of religiosity, not surprisingly there is talk of ‘Armageddon’ reminiscent of the crusades, he said.In contrast, there was an absence of religiosity in Europe though its people had experienced a similar kind of alienation due to the capitalist culture. However, since the late 19th century, there had been vibrant labour movements that provided the feeling of solidarity and community at weekly union hall meetings.Reputed in the western academic world as a philosopher of language and mind, Bilgrami said the Arab Spring and revolutionary movements in West Asia could be attributed to a “change in the mental map of people brought about through public education by one television channel, Al Jazeera, telling people how corrupt their ruling elites are.”Catholic World News
Rebel rockets rain down on Christian quarter in Aleppo
July 20, 2016
On a single day last week, 250 rockets rained down on the largely Christian quarter of west Aleppo, which is controlled by the Assad regime.
In west Aleppo, Christians “at least have the right to live and the right to believe in our faith,” Father Ibrahim Alsabagh, a Franciscan friar, told Aid to the Church in Need—with the situation far different in rebel-held areas.
With Aleppo now experiencing “the worst moments in its history,” and prayers and cries of despair filling the air in his neighborhood, the priest appealed to the West to close the border from Turkey to Syria, “through which the weapons, food, and fighters” pass to support the rebels.
“Anyone who shoots rockets at residential houses, churches, schools, and hospitals is not a ‘moderate rebel,’” he added.
For all current news, visit our News home page.Pro-European demonstrators toppled the statue of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, from its plinth in central Kiev on Sunday as record numbers flooded the city streets to demonstrate against government’s decision to pursue closer ties with Moscow at the expense of the West.
In jubilant scenes that dramatically demonstrated President Victor Yanukovich had lost control of the heart of the capital, the crowd pulled down the statue and took turns with a sledge hammer to smash its marble hulk to bits.
Riot police stand in a line in front of the Presidential office in Kiev (EPA)
Sparks flew as each blow landed to a cacophony of cheers. A priest emerged from the throng with holy water and proceeded to bless the hammer as the mood hovered between euphoria and a frenzy of happiness.
The statue of the Kremlin’s first Communist ruler is the symbol of Ukraine’s shared history with Russia and sits on one of Kiev's main boulevards some 900 metres from Independence Square.
But Russia is the enemy for the hundreds of thousands who marched on Sunday to stop Kiev joining a new Moscow-led customs union.
One protester Valera Klinchuk, a builder who held a fragment of the 7-metre statute, told of his joy of grabbing a piece. “I’m overjoyed,” he said. “For me this moment means the freedom of Ukraine is won. I have a couple of pieces of history in my hand.”
As if to underline the dilemma confronting the government as its hopes of riding out the wave of protests fade away, a clutch of riot police who had been tasked with guarding the statue stood with their helmets in their hands, watching passive near their van.
Officially the authorities spent the day preparing to nip the protests in the bud. The security service warned on Sunday that the protest leaders faced arrest for participating in a coup attempt.
A man dressed as a Cossack sits on a horse during a Pro-European Union rally in Independence Square in Kiev (AP)
“Today, December 8, data on individual politicians perpetrating illegal acts aimed at seizing power was entered in the universal register of pre-trial investigations,” said a statement from the State Security Service, Ukraine’s main successor agency to the KGBs.
The massive crowds in a Kiev square demanding the resignation of the president, who infuriated the Western half of the country by pulling out of a deal to align the country to Europe, respesented the biggest challenge to the state since the 2004 Orange Revolution.
Rallying amid the driving snow on Kiev’s Independence Square, the pro-European protesters vowed to maintain their occupation of central Kiev until the government reverses its strategic tilt away from the West toward Russia.
Pro-European Union activists shout slogans during a rally in the Independence Square, KIev, Ukraine (AP)
Leaders of the protest movement, which aims to turn out a one million strong crowd against President Victor Yanukovich, told the crowd the country was on the “razor’s edge” between dictatorship and European democracy. Vitali Klitschko, the former world boxing champion who is increasingly seen as a president in waiting, called on the crowd of at least 200,000 to maintain pressure on the government.
“The dictator will not go away himself. He must be made to leave.
Therefore, we are expanding our pressure on the government and we will force Yanukovich to fulfill the demands of the people,” he told the crowd.
Pro-European protesters rallying on Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine (EPA)
The call for perseverance was echoed by Yulia Tymoshenko, the jailed former prime minister, whose daughter Yevgenia read out a statement calling on protesters not to lose their nerve.
“Do not surrender, to not take a single step backwards, do not sit at the negotiating table,” said Ms Tymoshenko as she read out a statement from her imprisoned mother. “Our goal is the immediate removal of Yanukovich as the president of Ukraine.”
“We are on a razor’s edge between a final plunge into cruel dictatorship and a return home to the European community.”
Pro-European activists who have occupied Central Kiev since last Sunday are demanding the resignation of Mr Yanukovich over his refusal to sign an association and free trade deal with the EU and a subsequent crackdown on protesters last weekend.
As thousands packed into the vast square early on Sunday afternoon, volunteers in camouflage uniforms bearing the red and black shoulder patches of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army scrambled to widen gaps in the barricades around the square in order avoid a disastrous crush.
Sunday’s rally was peaceful despite fears of a repetition of the violence that marred a similar demonstration last weekend.
Clashes between protesters and police last Sunday led to pro-European opposition activists, many from the West of the country, seizing control of Independence Square and two government buildings in the surrounding streets. They have vowed to continue their occupation until Mr Yanukovich fires his government or resigns himself.
But the government has so far defied the protesters’ demands, and some fear the opposition, which includes an uneasy alliance of pro-European liberals and hard-right nationalists, is struggling to maintain momentum.Tens of thousands of protesters poured into Warsaw's streets on Wednesday for a demonstration organised by the far right, marching under the slogan "Poland for the Polish" and burning an EU flag.
Police said 25,000 people joined the march, which marked the anniversary of Poland's return to independence after the First World War, while organisers put the numbers at 50,000.
"God, honour, homeland," chanted the protesters as they marched under a sea of red-and-white Polish flags.
Demonstrators trampled and burned a European Union flag at one point, while a banner added to the anti-EU theme with the slogan "EU macht frei" ("Work makes you free" in German), a reference to the slogan over the gates at Auschwitz.
"Yesterday it was Moscow, today it's Brussels which takes away our freedom," chanted one group of protesters.
Other banners read "Great Catholic Poland" and "Stop Islamisation".
Photo: EPA
Several thousand riot police officers were deployed for the protest, which was punctuated by numerous firecrackers and smoke bombs but otherwise went off peacefully.
Photo: AFP
The annual march, organised by Poland's nationalist right, has seen clashes in previous years.
"I came here because I love Poland and want to show it," said 27-year-old Piotr, who came with his fiancee. He added: "I came here for my grandfather, who fought in the Warsaw Uprising (against the Nazi occupation of the Polish capital), and for his father, who fought for independence".
Photo: AP
Poland is returning to conservative rule after eight years of centrist government, following the Law and Justice (PiS) party's landslide election victory last month on a platform playing strongly on fears over the European migrant crisis.The value of water as a liquid is obvious. We can drink it, use it to clean ourselves and our things, swim in it to cool off and to play, and build dams across it to harvest its energy. Water as clouds are also essential: they are key for the way they deliver precipitation to cropland and forests. But scientists now say we may have been overlooking the most useful stage of the water cycle.
Ahmet-Hamdi Cavusoglu and his colleagues at the Sahin Laboratory of Columbia University published a study earlier this week in the journal Nature Communications theoretically proving that harnessing the latent energy contained in the process of evaporation from all of the US’s bodies of water can generate 325 GW of electricity. That’s 70% of current US electricity production. And unlike other renewables, energy from evaporation will be available whenever we want it, whether or not the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, and with minimal environmental impact.
Cavusoglu’s work builds on an earlier study out of the same Columbia lab. That paper described and demonstrated the world’s first machines powered by water evaporation. As reported in Popular Mechanics, the “Evaporation Engine” works using what the study’s lead author Ozghur Sahin calls HYDRAs. It’s short for ”hygroscopy-driven artificial muscles” which Sahin describes as “muscle-like plastic bands that contract and expand with tiny changes in humidity.” As seen in the video below, as the water content in the air changes, the HYDRAs expand or contract, transferring the evaporation energy into mechanical energy that can be harnessed to power a lightbulb or even a small electric car.
Cavusoglu and his co-authors calculated the average rate of evaporation of all the US’s fresh inland waterways (excluding the Great Lakes and coastal waterways, because the motion of these oceans makes it harder to estimate their rate of evaporation). They then extrapolated to estimate the potential energy created if the Evaporation Engine was used to harness these waterways’ latent power. They found an overwhelmingly powerful renewable energy source.
Almost as important, utilizing the natural heat-storing abilities of water can make for more efficient energy production and use. When there’s too little demand to use all the electricity produced by the Evaporation Engine, that excess energy can be used to heat up the water below the engine, effectively storing it for later use.
As if that wasn’t enough, the researchers also found that harnessing energy in this manner could have a huge impact on water conservation, possibly saving trillions of gallons a year. A good thing too, as the areas with greatest potential for producing this kind of energy are the inland lakes and waterways of hot, arid, drought-prone states like Arizona and California.
All of this is still theoretical, of course. The Evaporation Engines in existence are very small and exist only in a lab. Also, as noted in the study, “Using evaporation driven materials and devices on lakes or reservoirs could affect freshwater resources (e.g., altering the water withdrawal rate, gas exchanges, water quality, and recreational use).” And it’s hard to enjoy the picturesque splendor of a lake under a plastic cover.
That said, even utilizing just a small portion of the nearly 37,000 sq miles of the US’s available inland water, combined with the on-demand potential of the technology, could add huge value to the renewable energy picture.So, I had free time and ended up translating the entire staff comment section from Shin Megami Tensei Final Story - Official Replay Novel. If you see any mistakes please let me know, etc.
STORY (Suzuki Ichinari, Itou Ryuutarou)
VISUALS (Kaneko Kazuma)
MUSIC (Masuko Tsukasa)
PROGRAMMING (Okada Kouji)
PRODUCER (Yokoyama Hideyuki)
PUBLICITY (Aibara Seigo)
DIRECTION (Niino Yosuke)
STORY
Suzuki Ichinari, Itou Ryuutarou
Itou: One of the things that didn’t go well in Shin Megami Tensei was Law Hero’s character. Chaos Hero unintentionally became too emotional, while Law Hero ended up sounding fake. I wish we made him more sympathetic in the player’s eyes.
Suzuki: I’m concerned with the fusion. We planned it with the differentiation of Law and Chaos in mind but that resulted in little variety. Also, this allowed the players to form a proper strategy from the beginning to the ending of the game, fusing new demons that would help them to advance smoothly towards the end, but it was too difficult. We should have added some more gentle advice or the likes.
Itou: But well, we did manage to represent the riskier parts of Megaten and were able to create something distinctive. This is a big step for what will come next.
Suzuki: That’s right. The opening, for example, ended up very good. From the very beginning the player is dragged into a incomprehensible strange 3D world. And it all happens naturally. It helps the player enter the game smoothly. But, you know, there’s a pile of expectations for the next game. For the time being, I want the system connections to be on the dot! If pushed to say, I’m not worried about the world building. I think we’ll be able to create a world setting different from the previous Megaten games. Moreover, the main point of Megaten won’t be omitted.
Itou: Right, the system. Item selection, autobattles, 3D automapping, all easy to use at least! I want to aim for a similar system, with content that will please the players even more. Basically, the main theme is how much we can polish the system of the previous game.
Suzuki: I want to delve into all kinds of matters, story-wise. The Old Testament for example is extremely interesting. I’d like to use several of its motifs as inspiration: Armageddon, God’s judgement from the Revelation…Maybe the story might actually stem from this…Well, we can expand on so many ideas based on it. Stories about the relationships between gods and demons from the future or from the past, or about the peoples exiled from earth. If we want to do this, we’d end up with nine installments, like Star Wars’ initial plan (laughs).
Itou: When I think about the new game, I think about something the players will seriously commit to. If they seriously strive for it, we’d seriously work on it too in turn.
Suzuki: The people who payed attention during their playthroughs can accept the story developments better. One tradition of the Megaten series is that the players’ actions will affect the story directly. The staff is also working hard in order to satisfy them, so please put all your hopes in the next game! By the way, I’m also planning to make a surprising backchannel, so look forward to it!
VISUALS
Kaneko Kazuma
Shin Megami Tensei? I’m definitely not satisfied with it. 3D eats electrical capacitance and because of the change in colours you have to show several dungeons. I wanted to spend more time working on the 2D map, for example. I wanted to draw that particular computerised flat world. In the beginning, I wanted to make the 2D map using a wire frame model but the lining ate too much capacity and the idea had to be discarded.
I designed the characters as usual. I want to play more with designs in the next game though. For example, the Book of Ezekiel describes the angels as having unthinkable forms. Several legs, several heads…mostly like the Apollo Lunar Module (laughs). I want to draw angels that look like monsters, so you shouldn’t worry if I make some really, really crazy designs..
There are various unexplored demons and gods in the Megami Tensei series, like Celtic ones or those from Southeast Asia, so I want to do something with them as well. And well, the theme I choose when drawing the subjects is “fear”; not only fear caused by sharp teeth or blood, but a more internal dread. For example, the reason demons exist, the sadness and anger put into their existence, I think that drawing that makes me able to show real fear.
I went to Kyoto a few days ago to see the statues of Buddha at the Sanjuusangendou. There was a huge number of Buddha statues and each of them had a different expression…Passing by the designs, it felt like stepping into the territory of gods, of Buddha. I want to create such a powerful presence as well!
MUSIC
Masuko Tsukasa
Honestly, Shin Megami Tensei was a big experiment in a way. This was the first time I created music for the SNES, so I wasn’t very familiar with the specs. I was verifying them as I was making the tracks. There were also capacity limitations…
I learnt from Nintendo how to use energy better so it seems that I’ll be able to work more freely on the next game. The synthetiser patches will increase and I’ll be able to use more effects like echoes and so on. Even so, my schedule is packed. Truth be told, this is the biggest problem of them all (laughs).
What I want to try is create sounds like vocoder ones. Rap sounds good too. I don’t know if I can do it or not but it’d be something like covering the rhythm with a sound similar to a voice…
After that, I believe songs will become longer overall. This time they were probably a bit too short. I will be able to use synthetiser patches freely but I would like to perfect the tunes without relying on them too much.
I’ve always been a fan of Queen, Yes and Led Zeppelin so I’m glad I can apply these influences directly to the world of Megami Tensei. Even strange, dark melodies fit it. Well, I’ve already worked on three games and added my own style though. However, even if we call this a series, the setting changes each time and each time I make new songs for it. If you look at it that way, I’m experimenting every single time and it’s fun!
PROGRAMMING
Okada Kouji
Shin Megami Tensei’s continuation is already in the works. Compared to the previous game, we plan on upping the electric capacitance of this title. The balance in this additional capacity is important: it’s not about quantity, like enlarging the map or making the story longer, but about quality.
Take the fusion for example. I am not talking about a four-way fusion or complicating the process, but about something like the sword fusion in Shin Megami Tensei, between two similar unexpected items. That would be interesting. After that would come the perfecting of event graphics. I also want to increase and add more detail to every single event conversation.
I noticed after looking back over the previous game that there were too many items and the players couldn’t use them all. I think it’s because we didn’t show what kind of effects they have so in the next title I plan to introduce a factor that will give an “ |
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Like when the value was set, we pass in self and the address of our property identifying key variable to the method. Note we return the value right away instead of casting it; again, as it is an id reference, no type will be enforced by the compiler.
Next
So there you have it; while you can’t technically have instance variables backing category defined properties, through the use of Associated References you can implement their functionality rather easily.
In the next and final post in the series, we will see how to use the technique of swizzling to accomplish something we were warned off last time; truly overriding and extending existing methods, even those core to the operation of iOS.
You can add properties through categories but NOT instance variables; @syntesize will fail.
instance variables; will fail. Use Associated References to replicate the behavior of instance variables.
The property is identified using a fixed memory address; define a static char variable whose address is the identifier.
variable whose address is the identifier. Use the objc_setAssociatedObject to implement the setter, passing in self as the object, the address of your key variable, the value of the property and the appropriate policy.
to implement the setter, passing in as the object, the address of your key variable, the value of the property and the appropriate policy. Use objc_getAssociatedObject to implement the getter.
to implement the getter. Check out a related bonus trick below!
BONUS: The Exception to the Rule
There is ONE exception to the rule of categories being unable to define instance variables using @synthesize for properties defined in the category; when it’s a [class extension][categores]. For example, the code below defines a property foo in an extension, which appears as an “anonymous” category with empty () paratheses:Nearly 500 film and TV writers have sent letters to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo calling for a new tax incentive for television producers who hire women and minority writers and directors. Writers who sent letters include Tina Fey and Oscar winners Tom McCarthy, Paul Haggis, Marshall Brickman and Michael Arndt.
Legislation to amend the tax incentives program, which has bipartisan support in the New York State Legislature, would allocate $5 million from the state’s existing $420 million annual rebates to go toward the salaries of female and minority writers and directors.
Introduced by state Sen. Kemp Hannon (R-Nassau County) and Assemblyman Keith Wright (D-Harlem), the bill “recognizes that providing tax incentives to enhance diversity in the ranks of television writers and directors will also enhance the diversity of stories and casts.”
“New York has the opportunity to make diversity a reality in television,” said Lowell Peterson, executive director of the WGA East. “This legislation would create opportunities for women and people of color to build sustainable careers in New York. More diverse storytelling makes more compelling shows, strengthening an industry which has created so many thousands of jobs across the state.”
Other writers who have sent supporting letters to the governor include Nicholas Pileggi, Shari Springer Berman, Robin Thede, Andrew Bergman, Tom Fontana, Sarah Treem, Lucy Alibar, Tony Gilroy, Beau Willimon, Matt Williams, Richard LaGravenese, Julie Martin, Rebecca Miller, Anya Epstein, David Simon), Theresa Rebeck and Michael H. Weber.A strong undersea earthquake rocked Indonesia's Aceh province early on Wednesday, killing nearly 100 people and sparking a frantic rescue effort in the rubble of dozens of collapsed and damaged buildings.
Maj. Gen. Tatang Sulaiman, chief of the army in Aceh province, said at least 97 died while four people were pulled from the rubble alive. Another four or five are still believed to be buried, but it was not known if they are dead or alive.
The tremors felt even stronger than 2004. — Resident Musman Aziz
Sulaiman expressed hope that evacuation efforts would be complete before sunset, but efforts were hampered by rain and power blackouts.
Officials said they hope to continue search and rescue operations, to some extent, through the night.
"The search this night depends on the location and the weather conditions," said Aiyub Abbas, chief of Pidie Jaya district which took the brunt of the quake.
The rescue effort involving thousands of villagers, soldiers and police is concentrated on Meureudu, a severely affected town in Pidie Jaya district. Excavators were trying to remove debris from shop houses and other buildings where people were believed buried. TV footage showed rescuers in orange uniforms shining flashlight into the interiors of broken buildings as they searched for signs of life.
The National Disaster Mitigation Agency said 273 people were injured, about a quarter of them seriously. Some 245 buildings were seriously damaged or destroyed, mostly in Pidie Jaya, including 14 mosques and the remainder largely dwellings and shop houses. Roads also cracked and power poles toppled over.
A collapsed mosque minaret is seen after a 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck the town of Pidie, in Indonesia's Aceh province in northern Sumatra on Wednesday. (Zian Muttaqien/AFP/Getty Images)
Urgent need for equipment
Aiyub Abbas, the chief of Pidie Jaya district, which is located 18 kilometres southwest of the epicentre, said there was urgent need for excavation equipment to move heavy debris and emergency supplies. Footage showed rescue personnel taking bodies in black bags away from the rubble.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the shallow 6.5 magnitude earthquake that struck at 5:03 a.m. local time was centred about 19 kilometres southeast of Sigli, a town on the northern tip of Aceh, at a depth of eight kilometres. It did not generate a tsunami.
For Acehnese, the quake was a terrifying reminder of their region's vulnerability to natural disasters. More than 100,000 died in Aceh after the Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake triggered a devastating tsunami.
"It was very bad, the tremors felt even stronger than 2004 earthquake," said Musman Aziz, a Meureudu resident. "I was so scared the tsunami was coming."
Injured people receive medical attention at a hospital following an earthquake in Sigli, Pidie regency, in the northern province of Aceh on Wednesday. (Antara Foto/Irwansyah Putra via Reuters )
'It terrified me'
In the capital Jakarta, President Joko (Jokowi) Widodo said he has ordered all government agencies to take part in the rescue efforts. The Red Cross Indonesia has deployed emergency response teams and advertised bank accounts for donations. The International Organization for Migration said it had sent an assessment team to Aceh.
Seaside resident Fitri Abidin in Pidie Jaya said she fled with her husband and wailing children to a nearby hill after the quake jolted the family awake early in the morning. They stayed there for several hours until authorities reassured them there was no tsunami risk.
"It terrified me. I was having difficulty breathing or walking," said Abidin.
She said her husband grabbed hold of her and carried her out of the house.
The family's house didn't collapse but the homes of some neighbours did and Abidin is afraid three friends were buried in building collapses.
Indonesian search-and-rescue personnel work to rescue people trapped under the rubble of a collapsed building in Pidie, Aceh on Wednesday. (Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP/Getty Images)
In Pidie Jaya's neighbouring district of Bireuen, a teacher at an Islamic building school died after being hit by falling debris, said health worker Achmad Taufiq.
Residents of the nearby town of Lhokseumawe ran out of their houses in panic during the quake and many people fled to higher ground.
The world's largest archipelago, Indonesia is prone to earthquakes due to its location on the Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin. The 2004 quake and tsunami killed a total of 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Aceh.Rose McGowan’s first nine years were anything but traditional. They were spent in the Children of God sect, a group that extolled the virtues of free love and prepared for the second coming of Jesus.
Although it proved a harrowing experience – she fled with her family, she says, once the cult began advocating child-adult sexual relations – as the setting at first “was really idyllic,” remembers the actress, 38, who rose to fame on TV’s Charmed and now stars in Conan the Barbarian 3D.
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“I grew up in pastoral settings” – specifically, the Italian countryside, where her parents were members of the local branch of the Children of God. But McGowan, who was born in Florence, knew instinctively that she didn’t belong in such a place.
“I’ve always been who I am,” she says, explaining that while she did believe in God, she wasn’t in accord with the hippie lifestyle, and certainly not with their aesthetic or the subservient role of females in the sect.
Frank Ockenfels 3
Even at her tender age, McGowan rebelled. “I did not want to be like those women. There were basically there to serve the men sexually,” she says.
When her father began to fear that Rose might be molested, she says, “My dad was strong enough to realize that this hippie love had gone south.”
She fled the Children of God with her father and siblings and moved to the U.S. McGowan recalls that “it was not an easy assimilation” into the mainstream way of life. “My brothers and sisters, we thought everyone was boring.”
Rose McGowan as a young girl Courtesy Rose McGowan
Many years later, she returned to the small town in Italy with her then-boyfriend, rocker Marilyn Manson. “We created quite a stir,” she admits.
Looking back at her early experiences, McGowan deflects with humor some of the dangers and difficulties she faced. In contrast to the dressed-down hippie look of the cult, she says, “I came out of the womb waving red lipstick.”
RELATED VIDEO: Rose McGowan Claims Harvey Weinstein ‘Raped Me’ — and She Told Amazon Studios
Still, the remembrances left quite an impression. While expressing gratitude to her father, who died in 2008, McGowan tears up. Mostly, though, she realizes the experience is all she ever knew and made her who she is.
“There are people who will read this story and think I had a strange existence,” she says. “I think they‘ve had a strange existence!”
For more on McGowan’s time in the cult and photos of her childhood, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands FridayImage copyright Tidal Lagoon Power Image caption The proposed Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay project would be the world's first man-made, energy-generating lagoon
Chancellor George Osborne has said negotiations are opening on a £1bn tidal lagoon scheme in Swansea, in his Budget speech in the House of Commons.
The plan would see a giant man-made lagoon generating power to run 120,000 homes for 120 years.
Talks will focus on the amount of subsidy the scheme will get from a guaranteed price for its power.
In December, Energy Secretary Ed Davey announced "in-depth discussions" on the project had started.
'Fantastic' opportunities
Following confirmation on Wednesday that commercial negotiations had begun, Mr Davey said: "Tidal lagoons could provide 8% of our electricity needs, replacing foreign fossil fuels with clean, reliable home-grown electricity and creating fantastic economic opportunities."
His department said the negotiations would establish whether a guaranteed price for power generated by the lagoon would be "affordable and value for money", adding that the project was still subject to a planning decision.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Swansea Bay City Region board chair Sir Terry Matthews: Budget speech announcement a "major step"
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Lagoon development director Ioan Jenkins: "We will need to employ 35,000 in the supply chain"
It would capture incoming and outgoing tides behind a giant sea wall and use the weight of the water to power turbines.
The cost of generating power from the Swansea project will be very high, but the firm behind the plan says five subsequent lagoons it hopes to build will be able to produce electricity much more cheaply.
The other proposed lagoon sites are in Cardiff, Newport, and Colwyn Bay in Wales; Bridgwater in Somerset; and West Cumbria.
Analysis by Iolo ap Dafydd, BBC Wales environment correspondent
Swansea Bay's tidal lagoon is seen as a first of its kind - a concept to draw power for electricity from the ebb and flow of the tide.
That could lead to construction jobs, but crucially a new assembly plant in south Wales for undersea turbines which would be placed in Swansea, and the much larger lagoons in future which are planned for the Severn Estuary and north Wales.
The UK government's support is significant, and the chancellor has confirmed in his Budget speech that negotiations have opened with Tidal Lagoon Power Ltd.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption BBC Wales Economics Correspondent Sarah Dickins said the lagoon plan was 'about building a new industry for the UK'
The company is asking for £168 per megawatt hour of energy, for 35 years. That's far higher than what the UK government agreed to pay developers of a new nuclear reactor at Hinckley. That "strike price" is £92.50.
However, anticipating the calls for cheaper energy, with less taxpayer subsidy, the developers have said they estimate that bigger energy lagoons near Cardiff and Newport would need government support of around £90-£95 per megawatt hour of energy.
They argue it is a price worth paying - as a new source of clean energy comes online within 10-12 years, it will lead to thousands of manufacturing, building and construction jobs.
It could see Britain building the world's first man made tidal energy lagoons that could be operational for up to 120 years.Financial Dependence Can Cause Bias
Generally when I find myself having to clarify my position from a previous column, I find that I did not explain myself as well as I should have. Such is the case with last week’s column Environmentalism is a Profitable Business.
There were several ways in which that column was misunderstood, but I want to be clear that I was not arguing that people are drawn to environmentalism for the money. I believe that in most cases they are drawn to the cause because they genuinely care, but in some cases that has led to the creation of organizations that have done very well financially. Because these organizations often put out misleading information, and due to the fact that some peoples’ livelihoods have become tied into the success of these organizations, I questioned money’s role in the promotion of misinformation.
A friend suggested that sometimes organizations go “off the deep end” because they have large donors who are off the deep end and want their cause promoted. And that would be exactly what I am talking about; an example of money leading to misinformation.
Misinformation for the Greater Good?
Last week’s post discussed misinformation about fossil fuel subsidies. To recap, there was a recent “Twitter storm” in which the message was that fossil fuel companies are wallowing in subsidies of up to a trillion dollars a year. The truth of the matter is that nearly 90% of the subsidies cited were for fuel subsidies for poor people. So I questioned whether promoters of the “trillion dollar story” are unaware of this, or whether they are knowingly misleading people “for the greater good.” But my larger point was whether a problem can be solved if you don’t understand the nature of that problem.
Many environmental organizations focus their efforts on U.S. oil consumption because of its role in global carbon dioxide emissions. I suspect people overestimate that role. So what I want to do here is to quantify that role, because my impression is that they are focusing a disproportionate amount of time and energy on a tiny portion of the problem. (I also wanted to satisfy my own curiosity; the truth is that I didn’t know the answer when I started writing this post).
So the question I want to answer is this: Of the 70 PPM rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in the past 46 years, how much of that was due to U.S. oil consumption?
U.S. Oil Consumption & Carbon Emissions – Drilling Down Into the Numbers
While the U.S. does consume a lot of oil per capita — and to be clear I have advocated for policies to cut down on our oil consumption — Americans represent only 5% of the global population. Hence, while our impact may be disproportionate, in total it is a relatively small fraction of the total.
In Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions — Facts and Figures, I noted that over the past 46 years (since 1965), the global carbon dioxide concentration has increased by 70 parts per million (PPM). I calculated that cumulative U.S. emissions over that time frame were 255 billion tons of CO 2, which would have contributed 18 PPM toward the 70 PPM rise. Certainly 5% of the global population contributing 26% of the total rise in carbon dioxide concentrations is a disproportionate impact.
However, this was the total for oil, coal, and natural gas. Cumulative oil consumption for the U.S. from 1965 through 2011 was 37 billion metric tons. I contacted BP to ensure that my calculations were consistent with theirs, and they indicated that they are assuming 3.07 metric tons of carbon dioxide released per metric ton of oil equivalent consumed.
In the past 46 years, the U.S. has consumed 37 billion metric tons of oil which would have contributed 114 billion metric tons of CO 2 to the atmosphere. Plugging back into our correlation between tons of CO 2 and PPM of CO 2 in the atmosphere (see footnote), we can see that U.S. consumption of oil in the past 46 years contributed 8 PPM of the 70 PPM rise in the atmospheric CO 2 concentration.
On an annual basis, at current rates of consumption, U.S. oil use would be responsible for a 1 PPM increase in the global CO 2 concentration every 5.5 years. Certainly, that’s a measurable contribution, but it pales in comparison to the other contributors. If we could cut oil consumption in half in the U.S. for the next 30 years, it would only make a 3 PPM difference. Global coal consumption — dominated by Asia Pacific with 69% of global demand in 2011 — emits enough CO 2 to add more than 1 PPM to the global CO 2 concentration every single year.
Conclusion: Fighting the Relatively Minor Problem
My point is that we have a small problem and a big problem. Fixing the small problem does not fix the big problem, and yet the resources of these organizations are primarily directed at the small problem. I certainly have not gotten press releases from environmental organizations discussing how they are fighting against rising emissions in China, but I am besieged by emails calling for more support in their fight against the Keystone XL Pipeline.
It’s as if a man goes to a doctor and is diagnosed with lung cancer and an ingrown toenail. The doctor throws all of his time and effort into fixing the ingrown toenail, while the man dies of cancer. Certainly the ingrown toenail may need treatment, but treating it is really irrelevant with respect to the larger problem. That’s not just my opinion — that’s what the numbers indicate. U.S. oil consumption is nearly irrelevant with respect to the big picture, and a lot of time and energy are being spent on a minor part of a much larger problem.
In my next column, I want to look at some of the specific claims around the Keystone XL pipeline and about Canadian oil sands to put those numbers in perspective.
Footnote: According to this analysis, the average amount of CO 2 emissions that causes an atmospheric increase of 1 ppm is 14.138 billion metric tons of CO 2. The U.S. contribution of 255 billion tons over the past 36 years would then contribute 255/14.138 = 18.1.
Note to readers: I am traveling over the next two weeks, and my Internet access may be spotty. So responses to comments and emails may be delayed.
Link to Original Article: The Contribution of U.S. Oil Consumption to Global Carbon Emissions
By Robert RapierIt has been a while since my last post….but summer is here! I’ll try to make my posts more regular as I’ll have more free time than usual.
SO, for today’s recipe.
I’m absolutely obsessed with the Food Network. I don’t usually watch the Chew, but I couldn’t resist their “Ultimate Meatless Monday” themed episode. The recipe that really looked amazing to me was Daphne Oz’s Utlimate Dragon Bowl. I eat too much rice already so i changed the ratios a bit (more kale, less rice) but kept almost everything else as it was in the original recipe. When I made this originally, I doubled it but I’ll half everything back to about the original, so it should be about 4 servings.
All that aside and with no further ado, here’s the recipe:
Ingredients
1 large sweet potato, peeled and sliced into 1/2″ pieces
EVOO
1 – 14 ounce can of chick peas, rinsed and well drained
2 teaspoons dried cumin
2 teaspoons paprika
2 cloves of roasted garlic and/or smashed garlic
about one cup rice or quinoa
crushed red pepper flakes
sprinkle of dried oregano
about 3/4 of a bag of pre-washed and cut kale (take out the bigger stems if there are any left)
1 diced avocado
4 eggs over-easy, or sunny side-up (or even poached if you’re feeling adventurous!) Omit this step to make it 100% vegan
Something spicy – the original calls for sriracha but that’s too much for me. I used bibimbap sauce (a Korean red sauce with a bit of heat) but really anything would work.
Directions
First, toss the potatoes in EVOO, salt, and pepper, and roast on a baking sheet in an oven at 425 for about 20 mins
then, heat 1/2″ of EVOO in a pan (med/high) and fry the chickpeas until they’re golden brown and hopefully pretty crisp. take the chickpeas out and drain them, but before they cool toss them in the cumin and paprika (and a little salt).
heat a castiron skillet with a couple tablespoons of EVOO and the garlic, taking out the garlic after it flavors the oil (and is fragrant) so it doesn’t burn
add the red pepper flakes and oregano to the skillet, then the rice. Let the rice sit in there so it crisps up – you may have to turn the heat up a bit. Spread it out in the pan until the bottom layer is crunchy, then break it into bite sized chunks, then let get a bit crispier again. Be very careful not to burn yourself!
While you’re waiting for the rice…in a separate pan (I used the same one that I’d fried the chickpeas in to minimize cleanup) saute the kale with a little salt and pepper until slightly wilted. Then mix in with the crispy rice.
Fry up a couple eggs and get your hot sauce ready….
To serve: Toss kale/rice mixture with fried chickpeas and roasted sweet potato, then top with your friend egg, diced avocado, (some extra chickpeas and potatoes to make it look extra pretty if you want) and hot sauce if you have it.
ENJOY!From First to Last are an American post-hardcore band based in the Los Angeles Area and Tampa, Florida. Formed by Matt Good, Scott Oord, and Parker Nelms in November 1999, the current line-up consists of Good (lead guitar), Sonny Moore (lead vocals), Travis Richter (rhythm guitar), and Derek Bloom (drums).
The band released their first EP titled Aesthetic in 2003 which they recorded with founding member and vocalist Phillip Reardon who left the band in 2004 due to personal and creative differences. Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Body Count followed in 2004 and Heroine in 2006, both with Moore.
Following the departure of Moore in February 2007 to work on his solo electronic project, Skrillex, the band added permanent bassist Matt Manning, and Good moved to lead vocals/guitar. Their third self-titled studio album was released in 2008 on Suretone Records. In August 2009 the band signed to Rise Records. In late 2009, Richter left the band. Their fourth studio album, Throne to the Wolves was released on March 16, 2010. On July 28, 2010, the band entered a hiatus.
In November 2013, the band re-formed, with Periphery vocalist Spencer Sotelo as the new lead vocalist, as well as Richter rejoining the band. They released their fifth album Dead Trees in August 2015. Sotelo departed the band in July 2016. Former vocalist Sonny Moore rejoined the band in January 2017 and they are currently working on their sixth studio album.
History [ edit ]
Formation and Aesthetic (1999–2003) [ edit ]
First Too Last[2] was created in November 1999 in Tampa by Matt Good, Michael Blanchard and Scott Oord. Scott played bass, while Matt took on lead vocals and was convinced by Scott to also play guitar. The first drummer, Nelms Parker, was quickly replaced by Steve Pullman to round out the lineup that, for the next three years, would play small shows in Florida.
In 2002, Matt joined the grindcore band The Color of Violence (at that time, called Slaughter vs Skeleton, Fetus Destroyer), where he met Travis Richter (guitar), who would later join First To Last, and Joey Antillion (bass). Some time later, Greg Taylor joined as (drums), who wrote about 4 songs, in which the Aesthetic Demos were created. After hearing the demos of what would be their first EP, Phillip Reardon (lead vocals) and Derek Bloom (drums) joined the band.
In 2003, the band released their debut EP Aesthetic on Four Leaf Recordings which featured the vocals of Reardon, Good and Richter. By the end of the year, they had changed their name to From First To Last and signed to Epitaph Records.[1]
Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Body Count (2004) [ edit ]
After the Aesthetic EP, the band wanted to move Matt Good to lead vocals. However, Good was reluctant to take on both lead vocal and lead guitar duties. He wanted From First to Last to have a frontman, to connect with the crowd better. Using the social networking site MySpace, Good came in contact with a guitarist and singer from California, Sonny Moore. Moore flew to Valdosta, Georgia, where Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Bodycount was being recorded, and was set to be the band's rhythm guitarist. However, when the other band members heard Moore singing "Featuring Some of Your Favorite Words", they decided that he was much better suited for lead singer than guitarist.[3]
Matt Good wrote the album in two weeks. Moore came in after the music was tracked and completed the vocals. Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Body Count was released on June 29, 2004.
From late May to mid June 2005, From First to Last participated in the "Dead by Dawn" tour with bands Emanuel, Halifax and He Is Legend.[4]
Heroine (2006) [ edit ]
The band went to Radio Star Studios in Weed, California to record their second album, produced by Ross Robinson.[5] As their previous bassist Weisberg had been formally asked to leave the band due to internal conflicts, producer Ross Robinson asked Wes Borland, former Limp Bizkit guitarist, to play bass on the album.[1] Borland later played several tours with the band. The album was released on March 21, 2006. It opened on the Billboard albums chart at No. 25, with first-week sales of over 33,000.[6] Shortly thereafter in April, they signed to major label Capitol Records[1] after bidding between that label and Warner Bros..[6]
From mid March to mid May the band toured alongside Fall Out Boy, Hawthorne Heights and The All-American Rejects for the "Black Clouds and Underdogs Tour" in support of their release Heroine.[7]
FFTL then did a short European Tour with various bands. The band then played several dates on the 2006 Vans Warped Tour, but were forced to drop out due to surgical removal of a nodule on Moore's vocal cords. He received his second nodule surgery in early July (his first being in May 2005).[8] Following his recovery, From First to Last went out on the "World Championship Tour" supporting Atreyu along with Every Time I Die and Chiodos. While on that tour, Moore once again had vocal cord problems and had to leave the tour. The band had planned to have guitarists Good and Richter cover Moore's vocal duties for the duration of the tour until singer of Chiodos, Craig Owens, insisted that he provide lead vocals for their sets.[9] Atreyu eventually forced From First to Last to drop the tour.[1] The band later explained, "Our plan to enable us to play the rest of the tour was disregarded and as our crew was setting up for the show in Worcester, MA we were informed that we were being kicked off of the tour. Understand that it was not our choice to leave this tour... we were forced to leave."[9] Atreyu then returned a statement about the controversy concerning From First to Last's departure, saying, "They couldn't perform as FFTL and are no longer on this tour."[10]
Borland toured with From First To Last roughly since early 2006. He announced plans for a Fall 2006 tour that never went through due to Black Light Burns needing to find a new record label after Borland left Geffen Records. Borland has discussed plans to write and perform on the next From First To Last album, but he left the band due to Black Light Burns' busy schedule started to pick up, leaving no room for work with From First to Last.
Moore's departure, lineup instability and self-titled album (2007–2009) [ edit ]
In February 2007, lead singer Moore left From First to Last to pursue a solo career.[11] His decision to leave was based on his urge to create his own music, and also due to the fact that singing in the band was putting an immense strain on his vocal cords, resulting in serious damage which needed multiple surgeries in order to be fixed. Moore posted new recordings on his Myspace and was part of a group of a band called Sonny and the Blood Monkeys. Moore now writes, produces, and performs music under the alias/stage name Skrillex, who has won 8 Grammy Awards for his electronic dance music, and now has 7 EP's and 2 Albums.
After vocalist Moore's departure, From First to Last faced a crisis. Their label, Capitol Records, had dropped them due to financial problems. Without a vocalist, label, permanent bassist, or any money, the band almost split. Guitarist/Vocalist Matt Good, however, decided to take on lead vocals while still providing a backup guitar role. The band also quickly picked up Matt Manning to become a full-time bassist. The band then spent their remaining money on a studio in which to continue work on their already-written third album.
The remaining members of From First to Last finished a headlining tour from July 21 through August 5 with guests Alesana, Vanna, Brighten, and Four Year Strong. Shortly before recording another album, the band played for a portion of the Show Must Go on tour with Hawthorne Heights, Secondhand Serenade, Powerspace, and Brighten, but later cancelled their dates on the last part of the tour to open for Deftones on a separate Canadian tour.
After completing a full mix of their new material, From First to Last was picked up by Suretone Records. Shortly after, they re-entered the studio to record their album again, this time with a professional crew and better quality. The band recorded this time in Los Angeles, with producer Josh Abraham and seasoned engineer Ryan Williams. At midnight on November 14, 2007, they released the first single from the album, Two as One, on their Myspace account, and they later played that song live on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. A video was made for the song Worlds Away which was highly publicized. Although this record was widely promoted and the band had one of its biggest years ever, they personally feel the album was a failure in that it did not portray the true band as it was meant to be portrayed. Currently, they rarely, if ever, play any songs off this album, the only occasional one being the song "Deliverance".
From First to Last began their fall headlining tour, RATHER BE SLAYIN' N00BZ, starting November 1 with guests Blessthefall, A Skylit Drive, and Vanna. Around the middle of the tour, the guests changed to Envy on the Coast, Pierce The Veil, Four Year Strong, and Mayday Parade.
On November 29, From First to Last announced they were going to be a part of the 2008 Hot Topic Take Action Tour. They played at the MTV Winter Valencia in Spain on March 6. On December 6, they announced they were going to be part of the 2008 Vans Warped Tour.
On May 6, 2008, From First to Last released their self-titled album, and starting June 20, hit the road on the Vans Warped Tour for its entirety.[12]
On June 28, From First to Last updated their band members section of their MySpace, making Chris Lent a full-time member.
From the end of September to October 12, From First to Last played on The Blackout's "Sleep All Day, Party All Night" tour in the UK, along with The Medic Droid and We Are The Ocean.
Throne to the Wolves (2009–2010) [ edit ]
FFTL stated that they would be on a break from touring in late 2008. Members Travis Richter and Derek Bloom were focusing on their side project, The Color of Violence, with tours soon after and a full-length debut album, Youthanize, which was released April 7, 2009. Member Chris Lent toured as the drummer for the band I Set My Friends on Fire as well as one of the two drummers for The Color of Violence (along with Jon Syverson of the band Daughters); Lent also confirmed that he is no longer a member of FFTL and is now writing/recording with ISMFOF. FFTL began writing new songs early 2009 and started demoing new songs in March 2009 for their next album, expected to be released March 2010. A full length demo of a song on the new album was put on their Myspace at that time, as well as the previously unheard b-side from Heroine, Save Us. A Second Full Length Demo was added on July 3, 2009, and a message to fans that they would be announcing their recording schedule and tentative label. As of August 6, 2009, the band had begun to track drums for the new record at EarthSound studios in Valdosta Georgia, with Lee Dyess.
In September 2009, Miss May I announced they would be touring with From First to Last in October 2009.
On October 1, 2009 FFTL announced that they would be touring with Greeley Estates and Therefore I Am in October and November, and also that they had signed to Rise Records.[13]
“ "I want to announce officially that we've signed with Rise Records. We are all very excited about this move and think that together with Rise we can accomplish amazing things! If you're asking yourself why we made the change, well... There's a lot of aspects about being a major label that just didn't agree with the way we like to present our band and our music and I think that by ridding ourselves of that world, we are finally gonna set ourselves free to make the best music we can and that is the most important thing for us at the end of the day". ”
The band toured on the "You'd Be Way Cuter in a Coffin Tour" with Alesana, The Word Alive, Asking Alexandria, and Memphis May Fire in December 2009. Though recording was supposedly finished, the band was called off the road and was forced to cancel the last two weeks worth of performances – much to the dismay of fans, some of whom began to complain that the band could never finish a tour, and start rumors of a breakup – in order to go back home to Valdosta and put finishing touches on their recording. Matt Good responded to these claims and rumors[14]
“ "Guys we're not breaking up no worries. we just came home from the tour early because we have to finish our record before our next tour with alesana and our time frame was looking pretty small and stressful so Rise suggested we come home a little early. It will result in our record being the best it can be, which is our No. 1 priority right now. I hope everyone can understand". ”
From First to Last released a new song off the album, "Going Lohan", on their MySpace page in November.[15] The new album, Throne to the Wolves, was announced and slated for release on March 16, 2010.[16]
In late 2009 FFTL went through yet another lineup change with Travis Richter leaving the band; no official announcement had yet been made by the band and no reason was given for his departure. Matt Good and Matt Manning have been taking over Travis's screaming role and Blake Steiner (ex-Mia Medusa guitarist), who recorded on Throne to the Wolves, is his replacement. On December 31 FFTL released the song "I'll Inoculate The World with the Virus of My Disillusionment" on their MySpace.
On Travis' departure from the band:[17]
“ "It kinda just grew and grew until the dudes parted ways with me..I'd never just up and leave FFTL, I feel like they thought it was their time to move away from me, so they told me to leave.." ”
On January 20, 2010, From First |
weak on Russia and plays up the damage done by Moscow through the electoral interference.
The rhetoric also puts Republicans — who often characterize themselves as more hawkish on Russia and defense — in a bind as they try to defend to the new administration’s strategy on Russia.
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Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) most recently accused Russia of engaging in warfare.
“I think this attack that we’ve experienced is a form of war, a form of war on our fundamental democratic principles,” Coleman said during a hearing this week at the House Homeland Security Committee.
She lambasted Trump for his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking a panel of experts and former officials what message Trump’s “borderline dismissive attitude” toward Moscow’s cyberattack sends to the Kremlin and other nations.
Two other Democrats made similar charges at the House Intelligence Committee hearing where Comey testified.
“I actually think that their engagement was an act of war, an act of hybrid warfare, and I think that’s why the American people should be concerned about it,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.).
“This past election, our country was attacked. We were attacked by Russia,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). “I see this as an opportunity for everyone on this committee, Republicans and Democrats, to not look in the rearview window but to look forward and do everything we can to make sure that our country never again allows a foreign adversary to attack us.”
Sen. Ben Cardin Benjamin (Ben) Louis CardinThe Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump looks for boost from Korea summit The Hill's Morning Report - A pivotal week for Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Anticipation builds for Mueller report MORE (D-Md.), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking member, has similarly described the election meddling as an “attack” and likened it to the United States’ “political Pearl Harbor.”
Doug Heye, a former communications operative for former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Eric Ivan CantorPelosi warns GOP: Next president could declare national emergency on guns Ousted GOP lawmaker David Brat named dean at Liberty University business school Trump, GOP seek to shift blame for shutdown to Pelosi MORE (R-Va.), described the rhetoric as “alarmist” and indicative of partisan politics.
He said some lawmakers have raised good questions about potential ties between Trump associates and Russia, but that Democrats are largely trying to delegitimize Trump’s victory.
“The Democrats either still don’t believe or don’t want to send the message that they lost the election,” he said.
Michael Schmitt, an international law professor at the University of Exeter in Britain, told The Hill that public officials need to choose their words carefully to “control escalation.”
“I find that sort of talk dangerous,” said Schmitt, who led the team of legal experts that formulated the Tallinn Manual 2.0, a comprehensive analysis of how international law applies to cyberspace.
The Army’s top officer, Mark Milley, also cautioned individuals about using the term “war” to refer to the cyberattacks, saying at a conference on Tuesday, “If it’s an act of war, then you’ve got to start thinking of your response to that sort of thing.”
Democrats don’t appear to be calling for a military response to what they say was an act of war.
They’ve instead called for tightening sanctions on Moscow or creating an independent commission similar to the one that investigated the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
“I’ll tell you what our next step should not be,” Swalwell told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Monday when pressed on what a “counterattack” should look like. “It should not be a warmer embrace of Russia, as the president clearly has intimated he wants to do. The sanctions should get tougher. We should expand NATO’s role, not contract it, and we should talk tough with Russia.”
The Trump administration has shown no signs of increasing sanctions or retaliating against Moscow by other means for the hacks.
Intelligence committees in both chambers of Congress are probing Russian interference in the presidential election. However, those investigations have been complicated by Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations that the Obama administration “wire tapped” Trump Tower and leaks to the press about investigations into contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials.
While Republicans have been less inclined to accuse Russia of warfare, one GOP Trump critic has said the hacking during the election amounted to an act of war.
Sen. 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.) came out early with the charge in December, even before the U.S. intelligence community released its unclassified report on the election meddling.
“When you attack a country, it’s an act of war,” McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said during an appearance on Ukrainian television. “And so we have to make sure that there is a price to pay so that we can perhaps persuade Russians to stop this kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy.”
Congress does not yet have a clear handle on what defines war in cyberspace and has through annual defense policy legislation directed the new administration to spell out what actions in cyberspace may warrant a military response.
Schmitt assesses that the hacking campaign was not an act of war but rather a violation of two prohibitions: one on violating another state’s sovereignty and another on intervention into another state’s affairs.
“Without a scintilla of a doubt, it is not an act of war,” Schmitt said.Disney’s The Jungle Book just became the highest-grossing Hollywood release ever in India, a country where 90% of the box office grosses go to films that are home grown. To make the record in India, little Mowgli ran past both Furious 7 and Jurassic World. After only 12 days in release in the country, the CGI/live action film has grossed (through yesterday) $24.6M which makes it the second biggest market behind China right now which has $63.9M.
The record in India follows The Jungle Book posting the biggest opening week for any Hollywood release ever there when it opened to $15.1M; it’s also the highest grossing Disney release of all time there.
Two local titles are is competition right now and both are playing well. The first is Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s Fan and the second is the Tamil title Theri. While The Jungle Book took over the box office in India, Fan enjoyed the biggest 2016 Bollywood debut in North America this past weekend with $1.36M at 280 locations. Fan initially was ahead of The Jungle Book in India, but no more as the CGI/live-action take on the studio’s own 1967 animated film based on the Rudyard Kipling classics has swung past it and will continue strong this weekend.
The Jungle Book, which debuted a week before in India before it was released stateside, has taken in $232.7M internationally to date on a global haul of $357.4M. And that’s before it heads into what is anticipated to be another strong weekend both abroad and domestically. It is set to dominate both box offices again this weekend and should only drop about 50% to 55% this weekend for another easy No. 1.David Bowie Wasn't Just An Incredible Music Visionary, But An Internet & Business Model Visionary Too
from the rip dept
If I was 19 again, I’d bypass music and go right to the internet.
It had a sort of 'call to arms' feeling to it. This is the thing that will change things. It is a dead-dodgy occupation to have. It still produced signs of horror from people if you said 'I'm in rock and roll.'... Now it's a career opportunity. And the internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic and nihilistic.... Forget about the Microsoft element. The monopolies do not have a monopoly....
... I like the idea that there's a demystification process going on between the artist and the audience....
... I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think what the internet is going to do to society -- both good and bad -- is unimaginable. I think we're on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying....
... The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can envisage at the moment – the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it's going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.
... Artists like Duchamp were so prescient here – the idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience comes to it and adds their own interpretation, and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be all about.
His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet's effect on careers. ''I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way,'' he said. ''The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.''
''Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,'' he added. ''So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen.''
As I'm sure you've heard by now, famed musician David Bowie passed away yesterday at age 69 due to cancer. As someone who influenced so many people in so many different ways, it's great to see basically everyone celebrating his life and his music. But, given that this is Techdirt, I also thought that Bowie deserved a shoutout on topics that we discuss around here as well: Bowie wasn't just an amazingvisionary, but he was similarly visionary aboutandas well.All the way back in 1996, he was the first major musician to release music only on the internet, launching the single for "Telling Lies" as a direct download off of his website, and announcing it in an online chat session. Yes, nearly 20 years ago, Bowie embraced internet distribution for his music.Then, in 1997, he wentbeyond basically any other music business model experiment by issuing Bowie Bonds, creating a financial instrument that was backed by the royalties from his music, without losing control of the actual music itself.That same year, he also became the first major musician to "cybercast" a live concert online. Other musicians had tried similar things around that time, but Bowie was by far the most well-known (though the technology basically sucked for all of them, including Bowie).Just a year later, in 1998, David Bowie launched BowieNet, his very own internet service provider (ISP), saying:Again, that was 1998 -- the same year that Google was founded (and a little site called Techdirt first came online too, but we'll leave that aside for now).By 2000, he was already talking about just how revolutionary the internet was going to be for music There's so much good stuff in that interview. He talks about how he doesn't view himself in the music industry at all any more because of the way the industry works, and how much he just wants to do his own thing. And the internet is incredibly exciting to him. He talks about how he got into music because it was a rebellious thing to do, but then:That same year, Bowie also launched BowieBanc, an online banking operation, that offered ATM cards and checks (with Bowie's image on them), exploring new ways of connecting with fans and building his own brand online.Given all this, it's hardly surprising that in 2002, he gave an interview to the NY Times in which he predicted the end of copyright altogether, as well as record labels, as they would no longer serve a useful purpose:It hasn't totally played out the way he expected, but there's no doubt that Bowie's ability to be a visionary wasn't merely limited to the incredible music he wrote, performed and recorded, but to the internet and music/internet business models as well.
Filed Under: business models, copyright, david bowie, internet, musicPresident Obama went on the "Tonight Show With Jay Leno" on Thursday March 19. The full transcript is below. Watch video of Obama's appearance:
Below, the full transcript of President Barack Obama's appearance on the Tonight Show:
* * * * *
Q The 44th President of the United States, please welcome President Barack Obama. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.)
Q Good to see you.
THE PRESIDENT: It is good to see you and -- (applause.) Thank you. Let me just say, I think Kevin looks good in a suit. (Laughter.)
Q Thank you, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: He looks a little like Secret Service. (Laughter.)
Q He does, doesn't he? Yes. And you're the only guy who can get him to wear it. (Laughter.)
Now, you know, it's funny, because the last time you were here, you walked in, you had your jacket on your finger and you had the two guys with you.
THE PRESIDENT: Right.
Q And that was it. Big change?
THE PRESIDENT: You know, I was mentioning earlier, we landed yesterday and then -- this is an example of life in the bubble. We landed at the fairground down in Costa Mesa. And I see the fairground where I think we're having this town hall and I said, well, why don't we walk over there? Secret Service says, no, sir, it's 750 yards. (Laughter.)
So I was trying to calculate -- well, that's like a five-minute walk? "Yes, sir. Sorry." (Laughter.)
Now, they let me walk on the way back. But, you know, the doctor is behind me with the defibrillator. (Laughter.)
Q Wow.
THE PRESIDENT: Michelle jokes about how our motorcade -- you know, we've got the ambulance and then the caboose and then the dog sled. (Laughter.) The submarine. (Laughter.) There's a whole bunch of stuff going on.
Q Now it's only, what, 59 days now, right?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, 59 days.
Q And so much scrutiny. Is it fair to judge so quickly? I mean --
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, we are going through a difficult time. I welcome the challenge. You know, I ran for President because I thought we needed big changes. I do think in Washington it's a little bit like "American Idol," except everybody is Simon Cowell. (Laughter.)
Q Wow. Wow. That's rough. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Everybody's got an opinion. But that's part of what makes for a democracy. You know, it's contentious and people are hitting back.
I do think, though, that the American people are all in a place where they understand it took us a while to get into this mess, it's going to take a while for us to get out of it. And if they have confidence that I'm making steps to deal with issues like health care and energy and education, that matter deeply to their daily lives, then I think they're going to give us some time. (Applause.)
Q Let me ask you about this. I know you are angry -- because, you know, doing what I do, you kind of study body language a little bit. And you looked very angry about these bonuses. Actually, stunned.
THE PRESIDENT: Stunned. "Stunned" is the word.
Q Tell people what happened. I know people have been over it, just --
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, here's what happened. You've got a company, AIG, which used to be just a regular, old insurance company. Then they insured a whole bunch of stuff and they were very profitable and it was a good, solid company.
Then they decided -- some smart person decided, let's put a hedge fund on top of the insurance company and let's sell these derivative products to banks all around the world -- which are basically guarantees or insurance policies on all these sub-prime mortgages.
And this smart person said, you know, none of these things are going to go bust; this sub-prime thing, it's a great deal, you can make a lot of profit. So they sold a whole bunch of them -- billions and billions of dollars. And what happened is, is that when people started going bust on sub-prime mortgages you had $30 worth of debt on every dollar worth of mortgage -- and the whole house of cards just started falling down.
So the problem with AIG was that it owed so much and was tangled up with so many banks and institutions that if you had allowed it to just liquidate, to go into bankruptcy, it could have brought the whole financial system down. So it was the right thing to do to intervene in AIG.
Now, the question is, who in their right mind, when your company is going bust, decides we're going to be paying a whole bunch of bonuses to people? And that, I think, speaks to a broader culture that existed on Wall Street, where I think people just had this general attitude of entitlement, where, we must be the best and the brightest, we deserve $10 million or $50 million or $100 million dollar payouts --
Q Right.
THE PRESIDENT: And, you know, the immediate bonuses that went to AIG are a problem. But the larger problem is we've got to get back to an attitude where people know enough is enough, and people have a sense of responsibility and they understand that their actions are going to have an impact on everybody. And if we can get back to those values that built America, then I think we're going to be okay. (Applause.)
Q Well, you know, it's interesting, when you said -- it's, like, I had to laugh the other day when the CEO of AIG said, okay, I've asked them to give half the bonuses back. Now, if you rob a bank and you go into court -- (laughter) -- and you go, Your Honor, I'm going to give you half the money back. (Laughter.) And they seem stunned that we're not jumping at this wonderful offer.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, you know, the only place I think that might work is in Hollywood. (Laughter.)
Q Let me ask you this. Now, I heard them say, well, one of the problems is it's contractual and if we don't pay these bonuses, well, they can sue us. All the time people say, so sue me.
THE PRESIDENT: So sue me, right.
Q I mean, the federal government is in debt a trillion dollars. We're broke -- sue us. Sue me. (Laughter and applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: In fairness, I think that part of the calculation they were making was the way the contracts were written said, if you don't pay us immediately, then we can claim three times as much as we were owed under the bonuses. And so they were making a legal calculation, and their legal judgment was not necessarily wrong.
But there's a moral and an ethical aspect to this, as well. And I think that's what has gotten everybody so fired up. The main thing -- we're going to do everything we can to see if we can get these bonuses back. But I think the most important thing that we can do is make sure that we put in a bunch of financial regulatory mechanisms to prevent companies like an AIG holding the rest of us hostage. Because that's -- that's the real problem.
The problem is not just what's happened over the last six months. The problem is what was happening for years, where people were able to take huge, excessive risks with other people's money, putting the entire financial system at risk -- and there were no checks, there were no balances, there was nobody overseeing the process.
And so what we're going to be moving very aggressively on -- even as we try to fix the current mess -- is make sure that before somebody makes a bad bet you say, hold on, you can't do that.
Q Well, here's something that kind of scared me. Today they passed this thing that says we're going to tax 90 percent of these bonuses. And the part that scares me is, I mean, you're a good guy -- if the government decides they don't like a guy, all of a sudden, hey, we're going to tax you and then, boom, and it passes. I mean, that seems a little scary as a taxpayer, they can just decide -- you want to take a break and answer that when we come back? Okay, hold that answer.
THE PRESIDENT: I will. I've got a good answer, too. (Applause.)
* * * * *
Q Welcome back. We are talking with President Barack Obama.
Before the break I mentioned that they had just passed this new bill which will tax them 90 percent -- and I said it was frightening to me as an American that Congress, whoever, could decide, I don't like that group, let's pass a law and tax them at 90 percent.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, I understand Congress' frustrations, and they're responding to, I think, everybody's anger. But I think that the best way to handle this is to make sure that you've closed the door before the horse gets out of the barn. And what happened here was the money has already gone out and people are scrambling to try to find ways to get back at them.
The change I'd like to see in terms of tax policy is that we have a system, going back to where we were back in the 1990s, where you and I who are doing pretty well pay a little bit more to pay for health care, to pay for energy, to make sure that kids can go to college who aren't as fortunate as our -- as my kids might be. Those are the kinds of measured steps that we can take. But the important thing over the next several months is making sure that we don't lurch from thing to thing, but we try to make steady progress, build a foundation for long-term economic growth. That's what I think the American people expect. (Applause.)
Q I just read today about Merrill Lynch. They handed out $3.6 billion -- it's not even million anymore, it's billions in bonuses. I know it would make me feel good -- shouldn't somebody go to jail? (Laughter and applause.) I say that because I watch those people in New York, even people who had lost everything -- when Bernard Madoff went to jail, at least they felt they got something.
THE PRESIDENT: Right. They got some satisfaction. Here's the dirty little secret, though. Most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal. And that is a sign of how much we've got to change our laws -- right? We were talking earlier about credit cards, and it's legal to charge somebody 30 percent on their credit card, and charge fees and so forth that people don't always know what they're getting into. So the answer is to deal with those laws in a way that gives the average consumer a break.
When you buy a toaster, if it explodes in your face there's a law that says your toasters need to be safe. But when you get a credit card, or you get a mortgage, there's no law on the books that says if that explodes in your face financially, somehow you're going to be protected.
So this is -- the need for getting back to some common sense regulations -- there's nothing wrong with innovation in the financial markets. We want people to be successful; we want people to be able to make a profit. Banks are critical to our economy and we want credit to flow again. But we just want to make sure that there's enough regulatory common sense in place that ordinary Americans aren't taken advantage of, and taxpayers, after the fact, aren't taken advantage of. (Applause.)
Q Yes -- because when I was a kid, we would -- banks or credit cards would lend you money so you would pay it back. Now they lend you money so you can't pay it back. (Laughter.) It's like we were talking before, I mentioned we all saw A Wonderful Life -- Mr. Potter, the meanest man -- remember he owned the whole town? You know what he charged on a mortgage? Two percent. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: He's like Mother Teresa now. (Laughter.)
Q Like Mother Teresa now. (Laughter.) He makes VISA look like ohhhh --
THE PRESIDENT: Well, and part of what happened over the last 15, 20 years is that so much money was made in finance that about 40 percent, I think, of our overall growth, our overall economic growth was in the financial sector. Well, now what we're finding out is a lot of that growth wasn't real. It was paper money, paper profits on the books, but it could be easily wiped out.
And what we need is steady growth; we need young people, instead of -- a smart kid coming out of school, instead of wanting to be an investment banker, we need them to decide they want to be an engineer, they want to be a scientist, they want to be a doctor or a teacher. And if we're rewarding those kinds of things that actually contribute to making things and making people's lives better, that's going to put our economy on solid footing. We won't have this kind of bubble-and-bust economy that we've gotten so caught up in for the last several years.
Q Now, Treasury Secretary Geithner, he seems to be taking a little bit of heat here. How is he holding up with this? He seems like a smart guy --
THE PRESIDENT: He is a smart guy and he's a calm and steady guy. I don't think people fully appreciate the plate that was handed him. This guy has not just a banking crisis; he's got the worst recession since the Great Depression, he's got an auto industry on -- that has been on the verge of collapse. We've got to figure out how to coordinate with other countries internationally. He's got to deal with me; he's got to deal with Congress. And he's doing it with grace and good humor. And he understands that he's on the hot seat, but I actually think that he is taking the right steps, and we're going to have our economy back on the move.
Q Now, see, I love that it's all his problem. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, no --
Q -- I mean, when he came in you probably said, hey, this is not a problem. Now, it's, hey, you got this, you got that, hey, good luck. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, but this is the point that I made, I think two days ago, when somebody asked, well, do you have confidence in Tim Geithner. I said, look, I'm the President, so ultimately all this stuff is my responsibility. If I'm not giving him the tools that he needs to make sure that we're moving things forward, then people need to look at me.
On the AIG thing, all these contracts were written well before I took office, but ultimately I'm now the guy who's responsible to fix it. And one of the things that I'm trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame. And I think Geithner is doing an outstanding job. I think that we have a big mess on our hands. It's not going to be solved immediately, but it is going to get solved. And the key thing is for everybody just to stay focused on doing the job instead of trying to figure out who you can pass blame on to.
Q Well, when will the money -- this money was given out to the banks. I would have thought by this time it would have sort of trickled down to Main Street, to people wanting to get loans -- I mean, it all went out there months and months ago. Where is it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, what's happening is a lot of these banks are keeping it in the bank because their balance sheets had gotten so bad that they decided, you know what, for us to stay solvent we need to maintain certain capital ratios; we've got to have a certain amount of capital in the bank -- and they haven't started lending it yet. And that's why what we've got to do -- right now what we're doing is essentially doing a diagnostic test -- trying to use some auto language here so you -- (laughter) -- we're doing a diagnostic on each of the banks, figuring out what are their capital levels? Can they sustain lending? And then I think we're going to separate out -- those banks that are in good shape, we're going to say to them, all right, you're on your own; go start lending again. Those banks that still have problems, we'll do a little more intervention to try to clean some of those toxic assets off their books.
But I actually have confidence that we'll get that done. In the meantime, we're taking a lot of steps to, for example, opening up -- open up separate credit lines outside of banks for small businesses so that they can get credit -- because there are a lot of small businesses out here who are just barely hanging on. Their credit lines are starting to be cut. We're trying to set up a securitized market for student loans and auto loans outside of the banking system. So there are other ways of getting credit flowing again.
But that's why we've got to solve the banking problem and we've got to solve issues like health care, energy, and education that will put us on a pathway for long-term economic growth.
Q We're going to take a break. When we come back I want to ask you what we can do -- (applause) -- all right, we'll take a break. We'll be right back.
* * * * *
Q Welcome back. Talking with President Barack Obama. So I was going to ask you before we went to the break. So you have -- obviously we have a lot of people with a few dollars -- couple of hundred, couple of thousand -- but there's millions of them. Okay, obviously that's a tremendous financial forest. What should they do? Put their money in the bank? Should they be spending money? Should they hide it under their mattress?
THE PRESIDENT: Look, first of all, everybody should have complete confidence in the banks. They're deposits are protected. They shouldn't be putting it in their mattresses. I will leave it up to others to provide individual, personal financial advice.
But I will say this, that if you're working right now, obviously you've got to be prudent and you've got to recognize that the economy has been in a tough way. But, you know, we've still got kids who are going to need a coat for winter or a computer for school. You know, that young family is still going to at some point need to buy a house. And right now cars, for example, we know that typically you need about 14 million cars for this population -- and right now only 9 million are being sold every year. So at some point those inventories are going to run down and people are going to start buying cars again.
So, you know, what people should not do is forget that what has built America has always been a faith and a confidence in the future. And our future is bright if we take some smart steps right now. And that's what we're working on in Washington. And I think if everybody stays focused on getting through these tough times, the future is going to be very bright for all of us.
Q Now, you mentioned cars a minute ago. You went to the electric car, you went to look at some batteries today.
THE PRESIDENT: I did. It's spectacular what is being down now with plug-in hybrids, where not only are you getting the hybrid technology, but now you can plug it in at home in your garage. And potentially we could see cars getting 150 miles to a gallon of gas.
And when you get home you could potentially sell the energy in your car back into the grid, back to your utility and get money.
So we're going to be investing billions of dollars in research and development around these technologies. I know that you were mentioning you've got a hydrogen car --
Q I've got the GM hydrogen car. That's a whole new --
THE PRESIDENT: That's a whole new level of technology. That's what's going to create the auto industry of the future. That's where we're going to win back manufacturing. But right now we're behind. These batteries are being made in Japan -- just like wind power is being made in Europe. We need to bring that here, and that's part of what my budget and part of what our Recovery Act is all about.
Q Let me ask you some personal things. Now, how cool is it to fly in Air Force One? (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Now, let me tell you, I personally think it's pretty cool. Especially because they give you, you know, the jacket with the seal on it. (Laughter.)
Q Oh, yeah. See, I still get the little wings when I fly.
THE PRESIDENT: So you have the jacket. I will tell you, though, Malia and Sasha, my daughters, they're just not as impressed. The first time we went on Marine One -- right, you've got the Marines in front and they're saluting you. And we go up and we're passing the Washington Monument, circling around on the way to Camp David -- and Sasha looks over and she says, "Are those Starbursts?" (Laughter.) There's, like, the candy in the little canister. (Laughter.) That's -- "Can we have some?" (Laughter.)
So they're splitting up the Starbursts and we're flying over the Lincoln Memorial. So they got a whole 'nother level of cool. (Laughter.)
Q Now, are they going to put a basketball -- I imagine the bowling alley has been just burned and closed down.
THE PRESIDENT: No, no. I have been practicing all -- (laughter.)
Q Really? Really?
THE PRESIDENT: I bowled a 129. (Laughter and applause.)
Q No, that's very good. Yes. That's very good, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: It's like -- it was like Special Olympics, or something. (Laughter.)
Q No, that's very good.
THE PRESIDENT: No, listen, I'm making progress on the bowling, yes.
Q And how about, are you going to put in a basketball court?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, yes. Yes. Well, we have a basketball court already at Camp David. We just had a little rim that was inadequate -- (laughter) -- at the White House. But there are tennis courts, so we're going to just get those -- you know, those rims that you can roll in and out. And then we'll just put them on either --
Q Let me ask you, when people -- Mr. President, would you like to play? Yes, I would. Do they throw the game? Come on. (Laughter and applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: I don't see why they would throw the game -- except for all those Secret Service guys with guns around. (Laughter.)
Q Yes, exactly.
THE PRESIDENT: I will say that I don't think I get the hard fouls that I used to. Usually I don't --
Q Yes, Reggie goes, ohhh, I missed, ohhh. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Reggie doesn't do that. This is Reggie Love, my assistant. He played for Duke, very competitive guy. He doesn't let me win because, as he pointed out, if you lose to Obama you never hear the end of it. (Laughter.)
Q See, there you go. Now, have you picked a final four?
THE PRESIDENT: I did.
Q Okay. How about your final one, who do you got?
THE PRESIDENT: I got North Carolina Tar Heels. (Applause.)
Q North Carolina.
THE PRESIDENT: I think I got -- I got a hard time from Reggie, because he played at Duke, and you know, Coach K, being competitive, I think was a little -- you know, pushed back a little bit today. And I understand that. That's what you want. You want everybody to be competitive. I think these are all great teams.
Q Like, do you look at the whole picture when you do that? For example, isn't that a swing state? (Laughter and applause.) I'm just saying, are you looking at the whole picture when you pick?
THE PRESIDENT: I mean, the fact that teams from North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, all seem to do well in my bracket -- (laughter) -- I think is a complete coincidence. Absolutely.
Q All right, one last question. Now, when is the dog coming? I keep hearing about the dog. It seems to me -- when was the dog supposed to be there by? I thought it was, like, as soon as --
THE PRESIDENT: Listen, this is Washington -- (laughter) -- that was a campaign promise. (Laughter.)
Q Oh, wow. Wow. Man. (Laughter and applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: I'm teasing. The dog will be there shortly. (Laughter.)
Q How soon?
THE PRESIDENT: We have actually sort of been laying the groundwork here. We've got a trip, I've got to go to the NATO summit. When we get back, dog will be in place.
Q Wow. And it's, what, a Portuguese water head? (Laughter.) What is it, what kind of dog is it?
THE PRESIDENT: It's not that. (Laughter.)
Q It's not that.
THE PRESIDENT: It's not a "water head." (Laughter.)
Q Whatever they are, I don't know what they are.
THE PRESIDENT: That sounds like a scary dog. (Laughter.) Sort of dripping around the house |
Westar Energy was an early adopter of EVs with 10 percent of on-road fleet being electric, and has committed more than 5 percent of annual spending on EVs. Westar also installed 65 charging stations throughout its service territory. Additionally, Westar has responded to the DOE Workplace Charging Challenge by making EVs available to employees through a centralized vehicle pool for business travel and by providing free workplace charging to employees who purchase EVs.
###The big idea: Business can positively affect how we live through cooperation, innovation and increased trust.
The scenario: Thirty years ago, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking extra-strength Tylenol capsules that had been poisoned with potassium cyanide. Investigators established that at least eight bottles of the Johnson & Johnson product had been taken from store shelves, laced with cyanide and returned to stores. At the time, medicine bottles lacked inner seals or other safety components that enabled consumers to determine whether someone had tampered with the medications.
The sudden deaths caused panic in Illinois and beyond.
Johnson & Johnson’s then-chief executive James E. Burke decided immediately, and without government urging, that the company had to take action. With no way to determine whether other poisoned products were sitting on store shelves, Johnson & Johnson recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol, which had a combined retail value of more than $100 million. This event remains one of the largest consumer product recalls in history. To this day, the culprit has not been found.
While the recall decision was swift, the foundation of this action had been laid six years earlier during a company-wide initiative that engaged all employees in committing to the company values. Its values statement declares that the company’s first responsibility is to its customers and that the organization must enact good citizenship. This credo provided the leadership and all employees with a framework for making business decisions that have a positive impact on society.
The resolution: Although Tylenol market share dropped from 35 percent to 8 percent after the 1982 recall, it rebounded within a year. Johnson & Johnson innovated a triple-sealed package, which quickly became the industry standard. Additionally, working with Johnson & Johnson and other industry leaders, the Food and Drug Administration developed more stringent product tampering regulations. These guidelines led to the replacement of drug capsules with caplets.
Burke, who died in September, left a lasting legacy. Beyond a seminal event of crisis management, his recall decision provided a blueprint for corporate and public leadership. Many other leading companies have followed his example by viewing society as a partner in creating value and driving innovation.
For instance, recognizing the shared economic interests in preserving and replenishing the world’s freshwater resources, Coca-Cola has conducted hundreds of community water projects in 94 countries.
The telecom company Digicel employs 70,000 people in Haiti. After a devastating earthquake hit the country in 2010, the company partnered with Port-au-Prince’s mayor, Jean Yves Jason, to rebuild the capital city.
The lesson: Understanding the role that business plays in society is a core competency for current and future business leaders. Given the ever-increasing complexity of the global environment, this business in society mind-set must be embedded in the way we operate every day — not just a point of focus when responding to a crisis — if we are to create value for society. Paying attention to social needs spurs innovation. It is “good” business, in every sense of the word.
— Dean Krehmeyer
Krehmeyer is the executive director of the Initiative for Business in Society at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.Vacationers heading into the state have been greeted by the “Welcome to Maine” sign in Kittery all summer, which also informs them that the state offers life the way “it should be.”
Now they’ll know that Maine’s “Open for Business,” too.
A group of businessmen pitched in to buy a new “open” sign to fix underneath the “welcome” sign after a previous sign was stolen in late May.
After the first sign was stolen, a gravel pit owner talked to Ted Johnston, a consultant who does lobbying work for the Maine Aggregate Association, about buying a replacement.
The construction industry has been hit hard by the recession, said Johnston, with about 12,000 workers unemployed in Maine. The group’s members decided to pitch in to buy a sign. Some gave $50, some gave a few hundred, he said.
“No one gave much, because no one had much,” he said, adding that he didn’t have a total price tag on the sign, which was made by White Sign in Stillwater.
Maine Department of Transportation workers put the new sign up in the last few days when they had other work to do in that area, Johnston said. Johnston said the group’s members had a simple reason for donating the sign: They want to stress the importance of jobs.
“This has nothing to do with partisan politics. This has a lot to do with the fact that people need to be working,” said Johnston. “We think the sign, ‘open for business,’ symbolizes the need for us to create jobs, symbolizes how important it is to have jobs and recognizes the hard work done by the governor and the Legislature.”
The new sign is somewhat smaller than the original sign, which Gov. Paul LePage had himself ceremonially placed on Interstate 95.
The original sign was presented to LePage on the night of his inauguration as a gift from supporters inspired by his campaign pledge to erect an “Open for Business” sign on I-95 if elected to the Blaine House. The supporters raised about $1,300 to purchase the sign.
State police have been investigating the original sign’s disappearance. Whoever illegally removed the sign could face felony theft charges — punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine — because it is valued at more than $1,000.
After the theft, a tongue-in-cheek advertisement appeared briefly on Craiglist offering a “right-wing political sign” for $1,000. The ad said the seller would trade for a “multi-panel mural depicting the labor movement,” a reference to a mural LePage removed from the state Labor Department.Octopus ceviche was the first ceviche I really enjoyed. I was very picky about seafood when I was a kid, I could only handle a few bites of shrimp or fish (in ceviches or any other dish) and that was it. I found the taste of most seafood dishes to be overpowering (not anymore though), except ceviche de pulpo, I loved it. The octopus ceviche I remember was perfect, in particular the octopus was just perfectly tender and it had that perfect balance of seafood taste. I’ve always wanted to make octopus ceviche, but it’s hard to find fresh octopus. Whole Foods can order it for you. The guys at one of the Pike Place Market seafood stalls told me the only time you can find it fresh is when it is caught by accident. It just so happens that I was at the market on a day they had some, so I snatched it up, and was so excited to finally make octopus ceviche.
En Español
Print Octopus ceviche {Ceviche de pulpo} Rate this recipe 1 2 3 4 5 173 ratings Author: Layla Pujol OUR LATEST RECIPES Yield: 4 people as large appetizer or 8 people as a small tasting appetizer Recipe for octopus ceviche made with cooked octopus, onions, hot peppers, lime juice, and cilantro. Ingredients 1 ½ lb cooked octopus meat
1 small red onion, thinly sliced, about 1 ½ cups
Juice of 8 limes + 2 juice of limes to pickle onions
2-3 tbs finely chopped cilantro
2 tbs oil
Salt to taste
Optional: 2-3 hot peppers, serranos or red chilies, seeded and diced or sliced Serve with: Chifles or thin green plantain chips
[Patacones or tostones/https://www.laylita.com/recipes/2008/06/30/patacones-or-tostones/]
Hot sauce Instructions Cut the octopus meat into small bit size slices. Place the sliced onions in a bowl, add some salt and cover with water. Let rest for about 10 minutes, drain and rinse well. Place the octopus in a non-reactive container, add the lime juice, ½ of the onions, hot peppers and salt, let marinate for a couple of hours. Place the remaining onions in a non-reactive bowl, add the remaining lime juice, some salt and let marinate for a couple of hours. Combine the marinating octopus with the pickled onions, the sunflower oil, and the cilantro, mix well. Add additional salt if needed. Serve with chifles, patacones, popcorn, or corn nuts. Notes For a more classic Ecuadorian octopus ceviche you can also add diced tomatoes, diced bell peppers, and a bit of freshly blended tomatoes. 5.0 ©Laylita.com
However, I have never cooked octopus before, so I did some Google research and found out that it was quite complicated to cook it just right, first you had to pound it with a heavy object, another person mentioned that the secret was to add a cork to the boiling water, another site said to steam it, another one said to boil it for 3 minutes and then alternate with ice water and boiling, so I tried this last suggestion plus the cork, and it was a disaster, my poor beautiful octopus shrunk into a tiny rubbery disgusting brown looking thing. I was determined to have octopus ceviche (and was having a small lunch for some friends), and I remembered seeing cooked octopus at Uwajimaya, a local Asian supermarket, so I used it instead. The cooked (steamed) octopus that they sell in the sushi/sashimi section of Uwajimaya is perfect for ceviche – it’s fairly tender, but if you want it even extra tender, I recommend putting it in the freezer a few hours before making the ceviche, then cut it very thinly (it won’t be completely fozen and will be perfect by the time the ceviche is done marinating.
The ceviche was pretty good and my food tasters (friends) said they liked it (they ate it), but my memory of Ecuadorian octopus ceviche has the fresh from the sea flavor that is hard to match. I have assigned my brother Ramon the super important mission of finding the best octopus ceviche on the coast of Ecuador and obtaining the secret to cooking the octopus, hopefully he will succeed and I will have the perfect octopus ceviche recipe.
Step by step preparation photos for octopus ceviche
Looking for a different type of ceviche?
Shrimp ceviche
Mango ceviche
Ramon’s fish ceviche
Mafi’s fish cevicheHaving problems when it comes to waking up in the morning? It is our great wicked pleasure to present this creative alarm clock that will surely solve whatever “oversleeping issues” you may have. The design of the money shredding alarm clock is definitely for the strong-hearted, for the rich of for the desperate. Funny and clever, this device will make sure you get to work on time, even if it means compromising the earnings you are about to make that day. If for some money is not a problem, the machine can also shred other important papers, such as holiday airplane tickets, homeworks, “to do” lists and so on. But keep an eye out … willfully destroying U.S. currency is considered a federal crime and is punishable by law: “Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association […] shall be fined not more than $100 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.” Witty though! So… what would you shred for the sake of waking up in the morning?Both houses of the Indiana legislature are Republican-controlled. Gov. Mike Pence is a Republican too. So why did these supposed believers in small business and economic competition create this slimy chunk of crony capitalism that looks like something out of Tammany Hall? Were they paid off by Big Tobacco, or were they influenced – as happens in so many states -- by pharma-financed “public health” groups like the Campaign For Tobacco-Free Kids or the American Heart Association?
Actually, although the legislators exempted closed-system products like the tobacco companies' cigalikes from the law's strict standards, that was probably just a ploy to keep tobacco lobbyists from interfering with the real game being played. Tobacco and pharmaceutical interests had nothing to do with this law. None of the usual clueless vaping opponents had anything to do with it.
It’s just a case of local greed and influence, and it’s nothing new in Indiana.
Indianapolis Star political columnist Matthew Tully wrote about corruption in the Indiana legislature two years before HB 1432 was even introduced. What Tully found was that influence peddling and backroom deals were a bipartisan enterprise, and that they were common, accepted and shockingly casual.
Walk the Statehouse corridors when the General Assembly is in session and among the most common sights is the presence of former lawmakers and legislative staffers, now working as paid lobbyists. They fill the halls outside the House and Senate chambers, looking for help from lawmakers with whom they once served. The lobbying industry spends millions to shape public policy; the state’s casino industry alone spent at least $5.8 million to lobby 150 lawmakers over the past five years at the same time it repeatedly sought legislative changes that would save the industry far more money. High-ranking operatives in both major political parties also work as Statehouse lobbyists, seeking to influence the same members they help get elected. And many lawmakers...don’t shy from participating in debates over bills despite having close ties to the businesses or industries affected by the legislation.
Conflicts of interest are as routine in the General Assembly as partisan spats, and the atmosphere of coziness between lawmakers and special interests is both deeply entrenched and widely accepted.
Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the culture of coziness is that it is often not a secret -- it’s tolerated and even applauded.A stunning new report out Thursday uncovered an abuse scandal in the world of gymnastics whose scope is shockingly vast.
According to a comprehensive report in the Indianapolis Star, there have been 368 cases of alleged child sexual abuse in gymnastics over the past 20 years. The acts were allegedly committed against gymnasts by coaches, gym owners, and other adults who work in and around the sport.
The report claims that predatory coaches often move from gym to gym, with the new gyms either unaware of or indifferent towards the previous charges.
“It’s just too easy for coaches to keep getting hired and hired and hired,” Nancy Hogshead-Makar — a former Olympic Gold Medal winning swimmer who now chairs an advocacy group called Champion Women — told the Star. “Sexual abuse thrives on the fact that people are embarrassed about the topic, ashamed to talk about it, and they keep quiet about it. And that’s exactly why molesting coaches keep getting hired at the next place. Nobody talks about a coach that is inappropriate with athletes; the coach quietly moves away and gets hired someplace else.”
Marci Hamilton, the CEO of CHILD USA, a research and advocacy group based at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that there may actually be as many as three to five times more victims than the Star reported.
“I’m sad for all the parents and athletes who didn’t have the kind of warning that that number gives you,” Hamilton told the Star. “But my guess is that it’s a pretty severe undercount.”
USA Gymnastics, a leading Olympic organization which presides over the sport, gave a statement to the Star which said:
“Nothing is more important to USA Gymnastics, the Board of Directors and CEO Steve Penny than protecting athletes, which requires sustained vigilance by everyone — coaches, athletes, parents, administrators and officials. We are saddened when any athlete has been harmed in the course of his or her gymnastics career.”
Read the full report here, via the Indianapolis Star.
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Follow Joe DePaolo (@joe_depaolo) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comThough it never reached hurricane strength, Tropical Storm Roanu made landfall in Bangladesh with deadly consequences. The storm unleashed heavy winds and rain on the country’s populous coastal communities, killing at least 24 people and affecting up to half a million.
At 10:50 a.m. local time (04:50 Universal Time) on May 21, 2016, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this natural-color image of the storm. Roanu progressed northeast over the Bay of Bengal before making landfall in Bangladesh.
When the image was acquired, the storm’s maximum sustained winds neared 55 knots (102 kilometers or 63 miles per hour)—the highest sustained wind speed reached during the life of the storm. Based on the Saffir-Simpson scale, the 55-knot winds categorize Roanu as a tropical storm. That’s stronger than a tropical depression but weaker than a category-1 hurricane.
In addition to winds, the storm produced widespread rainfall that contributed to life-threatening floods and landslides. The map above shows a satellite-based estimate of rainfall from May 15-22, 2016. The data come from the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG), a product of the Global Precipitation Measurement mission. The brightest shades on the maps represent rainfall totals of at least 800 millimeters (more than 30 inches) during that period. Blue areas saw less rain, and gray areas received no rain. These regional, remotely-sensed estimates may differ from the totals measured by ground-based weather stations.
The wind and rain hit the coastal cities of Barisal and Chittagong particularly hard; deaths there resulted from storm-damaged houses, landslides, and uprooted trees, according to news reports. Another report noted that many deaths in Chittagong were due to a storm surge that breached the area’s dams.
NASA image (top) by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. NASA Earth Observatory map (bottom) by Joshua Stevens, using IMERG data provided courtesy of the Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) Science Team's Precipitation Processing System (PPS). Caption by Kathryn Hansen.A protein required to regrow injured peripheral nerves has been identified by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The finding, in mice, has implications for improving recovery after nerve injury in the extremities. It also opens new avenues of investigation toward triggering nerve regeneration in the central nervous system, notorious for its inability to heal.
Peripheral nerves provide the sense of touch and drive the muscles that move arms and legs, hands and feet. Unlike nerves of the central nervous system, peripheral nerves can regenerate after they are cut or crushed. But the mechanisms behind the regeneration are not well understood.
In the new study, published online June 20 in Neuron, the scientists show that a protein called dual leucine zipper kinase (DLK) regulates signals that tell the nerve cell it has been injured – often communicating over distances of several feet. The protein governs whether the neuron turns on its regeneration program.
“DLK is a key molecule linking an injury to the nerve’s response to that injury, allowing the nerve to regenerate,” says Aaron DiAntonio, MD, PhD, professor of developmental biology. “How does an injured nerve know that it is injured? How does it take that information and turn on a regenerative program and regrow connections? And why does only the peripheral nervous system respond this way, while the central nervous system does not? We think DLK is part of the answer.”
The nerve cell body containing the nucleus or “brain” of a peripheral nerve resides in the spinal cord. During early development, these nerves send long, thin, branching wires, called axons, out to the tips of the fingers and toes. Once the axons reach their targets (a muscle, for example), they stop extending and remain mostly unchanged for the life of the organism. Unless they’re damaged.
If an axon is severed somewhere between the cell body in the spinal cord and the muscle, the piece of axon that is no longer connected to the cell body begins to disintegrate. Earlier work showed that DLK helps regulate this axonal degeneration. And in worms and flies, DLK also is known to govern the formation of an axon’s growth cone, the structure responsible for extending the tip of a growing axon whether after injury or during development.
The formation of the growth cone is an important part of the early, local response of a nerve to injury. But a later response, traveling over greater distances, proves vital for relaying the signals that activate genes promoting regeneration. This late response can happen hours or even days after injury.
But in mice, unlike worms and flies, DiAntonio and his colleagues found that DLK is not involved in an axon’s early response to injury. Even without DLK, the growth cone forms. But a lack of DLK means the nerve cell body, nestled in the spinal cord far from the injury, doesn’t get the message that it’s injured. Without the signals relaying the injury message, the cell body doesn’t turn on its regeneration program and the growth cone’s progress in extending the axon stalls.
In addition, it was shown many years ago that axons regrow faster after a second injury than axons injured only once. In other words, injury itself increases an axon’s ability to regenerate. Furthering this work, first author Jung Eun Shin, graduate research assistant, and her colleagues found that DLK is required to promote this accelerated growth.
“A neuron that has seen a previous injury now has a different regenerative program than one that has never been damaged,” Shin says. “We hope to be able to identify what is different between these two neurons — specifically what factors lead to the improved regeneration after a second injury. We have found that activated DLK is one such factor. We would like to activate DLK in a newly injured neuron to see if it has improved regeneration.”
In addition to speeding peripheral nerve recovery, DiAntonio and Shin see possible implications in the central nervous system. It is known for example, that some of the important factors regulated and ramped up by DLK are not activated in the central nervous system.
“Since this sort of signaling doesn’t appear to happen in the central nervous system, it’s possible these nerves don’t ‘know’ when they are injured,” DiAntonio says. “It’s an exciting idea — but not at all proven — that activating DLK in the central nervous system could promote its regeneration.”As sea levels rise along the New York City waterfront, “100-year” storm surges may eventually happen as often as every three years, with more chances of Sandy-like damage if the city doesn’t rebuild its borders. One redesign under consideration now: Big U, a 10-mile long shield of parks and community spaces that would help protect Manhattan neighborhoods from flooding.
Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and a network of collaborators over the last 10 months, Big U is one of 10 finalists in the Rebuild by Design competition launched by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last year.
The design is focused as much on the everyday needs of local neighborhoods as on flood protection–an approach that’s very different than how infrastructure has been built in the past. In New Orleans after Katrina, floodwalls were made to meet engineering criteria, not social needs. And New York has its own long past of large-scale projects that focused more on efficiency than people.
“In the history of New York with the legacy of Robert Moses, most of the infrastructure–whether that’s highways or parks–have generally been imposed without a lot of regard for existing community fabric,” says Jeremy Siegel, who led the Big U project.
“If you’re going to be investing so much money into an infrastructure for resiliency–that’s going to be sitting along one of the most spectacular coastlines in the world–there’s a huge opportunity there to also improve civic infrastructure, so it can protect the city, but also become a platform for civic life,” he adds.
The design stretches from West 57th Street to the tip of the Battery and then up to East 42nd Street, covering the coastline in a series of separate and autonomous flood protection zones.
“Because they all work individually, you end up with a system that’s resilient. If you have a breach in one area, it’s localized and you can organize evacuation into neighboring compartments,” Siegel explains. “It’s a little bit like the hull of a ship, where you’ve got different segments, and breaching one area doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole system fails.”Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans discusses Caitlyn Jenner and the Politics of Transgender
Think: Leicester does not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Leicester - it expresses the independent views and opinions of the academic who has authored the piece. If you do not agree with the opinions expressed, and you are a doctoral student/academic at the University of Leicester, you may write a counter opinion for Think: Leicester and send to ap507@le.ac.uk
The politics of transgender is highlighted again today, June 9, with the publication of Vanity Fair and its interview with Caitlyn Jenner about her male to female transition. Jenner is a 65 years old, a one-time American athlete who won the gold for the decathlon at the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976, and the step-mother to Kim Kardashian.
She now wants to be known as Caitlyn, having recently undergone some gender transitioning, which, she tells us, includes a recent 10 hour facial feminization operation, breast augmentation although not genital surgery. Next to the headline ‘Call me Caitlyn’, her photo-shopped front cover image bears all the hall-marks of the sexualized performance of femininity: a state of semi-undress in a satin corset; long, tumbling hair; exposed ‘look-at-me’ breasts in a push-up bra; and a cinched waist to give an hour-glass figure.
In my view it is a cause of celebration that within a relatively short historical period we have transitioned into a sufficiently tolerant society that a populist mainstream publication now seemingly supports the identity struggles of a non-normatively gendered individual. On the other hand the image, the immediate populist media response to it last week, and today’s interview, point to issues that are far larger than the narrow individualism of one (famous) person’s transition. Collectively they point to ongoing unresolved conflicts between neo-liberal and radical analyses of femininity, sexuality and freedom that characterise our current society’s approach to ‘woman’ and ‘women’.
The Jenner Publicity Machine
The publicity machine in support of Jenner began last week when Vanity Fair published the front cover online on June 1st, although public access to the interview and of Jenner’s disclosure of the medical details of transitioning, of her feelings about the surgery, and of the time the photo-shoot took to transform her into a ‘woman’, were tantalizingly held back.
The online image was immediately followed by an explosive endorsement of it as iconic by social and print media alike. The Guardian journalist, Paris Lees, a transwoman herself, described it as ‘instantly iconic’. The image is ‘life-affirming, provocative and downright fabulous’. In posing for Vanity Fair ‘Caitlyn Jenner has pulled off the most provocative and downright fabulous transition ever – one which will do great things for trans awareness’
The Guardian journalist Jess Cartner-Morley (Guardian June 3rd) tells us that having just opened a twitter account as a woman to correspond with the publication of the image, Jenner broke President Obama’s five hour record by achieving over 1 million followers in just 5 hours. Although political activists have been fighting passionately for years to bring about equality for transgender people, 140 characters by Kim Kardashian in support of her step-mother has immediately functioned as catalyst for ‘progressive social change’.
She posits that ‘The Kardashians are often dismissed as vacuous irritants, but the astonishingly positive reaction to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover proves they have blazed a trail for tolerance’. Cartner-Morley opines that the combined efforts of Jenner, the photographer Annie Leibovitz and Vanity Fair as having ‘united’ the internet and ‘won the world over’.
A 21st Century Morality Tale
Lees presents the humane argument for the support of transgender people in the following terms. Unlike Jenner the majority of transgender people ‘face such hideous discrimination in the job market, not to mention social and familial rejection’. ‘Many trans people are forced into sex work in order to pay for the medical aspects of gender transition, and often this puts them at risk of drug abuse and physical harm’. Despite the privileged position Jenner occupies both materially and symbolically, Lees reminds us ‘she has endured years of hiding who she is, of trying to live up to other people’s expectations of who she was supposed to be and, more recently, cruel tabloid speculation, ridicule and bullying’. Lees points out ‘Jenner matters culturally – and we need people who inhabit that space to complement the work being done at grassroots level to improve life for transpeople’.
Who could possibly oppose this evaluation of Jenner’s transitioning without appearing to be a heartless and reactionary bigot?
The Silencing and Policing of Dissent
The media-monitoring organisation GLAAD immediately issued a number of general guidelines on the day that Vanity Fair image was published on-line directing us to what is good and what is bad with regard to what we should say. It told us: ‘DO use female pronouns (she, her, hers) when referring to Caitlyn Jenner’. ‘DO avoid male pronouns and Caitlyn's prior name, even when referring to events in her past’. ‘AVOID the phrase "born a man" when referring to Jenner. If it is necessary to describe what it means to be transgender, consider: "While Caitlyn Jenner was designated male on her birth certificate, as a young child she knew that she was a girl. ‘DON'T indulge in superficial critiques of a transgender person's femininity or masculinity. Commenting on how well a transgender person conforms to conventional standards of femininity or masculinity is reductive and insulting’.
In a society where free speech is lauded as an unequivocal good there is a current powerful hierarchy of what one is ‘allowed’ to say without incurring the wrath of social media. Brendan O’Neill comments that the photograph of Jenner is indeed iconic ‘in the traditional sense … in that it’s being venerated as an actual icon … It’s an image we’re all expected to bow down to, and whose essential truth we must imbibe; an image you question or ridicule at your peril, with those who refuse to genuflect before it facing excommunication from polite society. Yesterday’s Jennermania confirms how weirdly authoritarian, even idolatrous, trans politics has become’.
GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation)
A Catalyst for Social Change or a Reproduction of Traditional Norms?
At the risk of appearing reductive and insulting, I suggest a more effective catalyst for progressive social change is the following: firstly, unpack some of the conceptual terms that GLAAD uses to direct our responses not only to Jenner but to transgender people in general; secondly, move beyond the neo-liberal language of personal choice, voluntarism, and individualism, and return to analyses of the social context out of which our gender identities and choices emerge; thirdly, problematize Jenner’s inner woman as a simulacrum
One of the greatest challenges to hetero-normativity and biological essentialism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been the philosophical and sociological theory of social constructionism. I suggest that social constructionism and its influence on gender politics partially accounts for the approach to transgender. The approaches are however antithetical, although initially they appear to coalesce.
Great thinkers such as Simone De Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler posit, in their different ways, there is no pre-social reality of femininity or masculinity but rather the biological body is invested at birth with gendered meaning. To paraphrase de Beauvoir one is not born but rather is made into a woman (or man) by culture and society. Womanhood and manhood are then experienced as authentic, as Butler argues, through our seemingly voluntary and repeated performative iterations of our femininity or masculinity from childhood onwards.
I argue the idea of social constructionism has morphed into the confused ‘logic’ of transgender concepts as these are articulated by GLAAD. On the one hand being a woman has been dislocated from biology – so far, so good. In the words of GLAAD: ‘For transgender people, their own internal gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth’. On the other hand womanhood is reified as ‘authentic’, pre-existing culture and society, and as somehow embedded ‘in’ the person. GLAAD posits transwomen have always been women: ‘Yes, even when they were “fathering” children. Gender is what’s inside – and for Caitlyn, finally on the outside too’.
Thus, in an Orwellian twist, since the Vanity Fair photo-shoot (with all its constructions, fabrications and deceptions as all glamour photo-shoots have) Caitlyn’s airbrushed and siliconed body has apparently transitioned her into an authentic woman, but his fathering of children as a man is a fiction.
A transwoman writes: ‘Whose victory is this but Jenner’s already bloated bank account, and a publicity hungry Kardashian tornado of bad taste? We know the scrutiny on us as trans will be distorted by this event. When the cameras are gone, and Jenner is playing golf as a hyper-feminised corpus, we’re the ugly trannies on the job market’. ‘What Jenner has done is to demonstrate … that “becoming woman” is Autogynokaradashian — the self-fashioning of object-ideal into subject-body’.
The ‘Inner Woman’ as Reactionary Simulacrum
In contrast to supporters, people who believe Jenner’s image frees people from restrictive understandings of gender, Jenner’s inner ‘woman’ is utterly conventional and normative. It conforms to the perspective of the male gaze and the consumerist neoliberal ideal of the ‘authentic’ woman that is in reality no more than a sexist and patriarchal simulacrum.
I argue that neo-liberalism and the pornification of culture have colonised our imaginations. Jenner’s fabricated inner ‘woman’ is as fixed as any biologically determined approach to femininity. If we genuinely want to create a just society we need to return to an older ideal of politics and equality that move beyond individual ‘choice’, ‘agency’ and of ‘hyper-femininity’ as ‘empowerment’ and collectively work to create social conditions where gender is less reified and exaggerated, more fluid and not directly mapped onto biological bodies. In other words it is time in my view that we return to the theory and politics of radical feminism, and the freedoms it promises for men as well as women.President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday managed to cast his first veto, a month before taking office — effectively killing an Israel-bashing UN resolution.
The Security Council measure called for an immediate halt to all Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank. Egypt had floated it as a favor to the Palestinian Authority, which is eager to delegitimize the Jewish state.
Team Obama could have quashed the move long ago by simply telling Cairo it opposed the resolution. But it stayed silent — so the Egyptians cautiously went ahead.
Then Trump announced that the resolution “should be vetoed.” Why? “As the United States has long maintained, peace between the Israelis and Palestinians will only come through direct negotiations between the parties, and not through the imposition of terms by the United Nations.”
Exactly: Should Palestinian leaders ever be willing to negotiate a final peace deal, the settlements can get resolved along with everything else. Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza shows it can force settlers to un-settle.
Soon after Trump’s statement dropped, Cairo — at its wits’ end with the Obama crew, and hoping for better US relations — shelved the resolution indefinitely.
Obama’s diplomats vetoed a similar resolution in 2011. Letting this one pass would’ve been a drastic break with US policy — which makes the US silence all the more bizarre.
Hand it to Trump for breaking the logjam — and for showing the kind of leadership the world sorely needs."I clearly knew I had to do something, and I failed to do it. The CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up." When do you ever hear a chief executive issue a mea culpa that plain and straightforward? That's what Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said last night about cutting a deal with Facebook when he was CEO of Google and knew he had to move fast to get on top of social networking. Schmidt was being interviewed at the AllThingsD's D9 Conference, in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
He said he was aware he needed to act, but he just didn't push hard enough: "Three years ago I wrote memos talking about this general problem. I knew that I had to do something and I failed to do it."
He had a few other startlingly straightforward things to say, too.
He said four big companies dominate the Internet: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Google has all the world's information; Apple is the king of elegant design; Facebook is where your social life is; Amazon is where you buy everything. Between them the four are worth about a half a trillion dollars. Microsoft was glaringly missing from the list.
Speaking of Apple, he offered a glib solution for people's concerns about Internet security: "You could use a Mac instead of a PC," he said. He did note that he used to be an Apple board member, and he also recommended using Google's Chrome browser and Gmail service to enhance your safety. What did he have to say about Microsoft? It "is not driving the consumer revolution in the minds of consumers," he remarked.
He also said that Google had developed facial recognition technology but decided not to pursue it: "We built that technology, and we withheld it. As far as I know it's the only technology Google has built, and, after looking at it, we decided to stop." He explained that "I'm very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition," fearing that it could be used "in a very bad way."
Apparently Google's "Don't be evil" philosophy—that exact wording is apocryphal, by the way—still obtains. As does: Do make mistakes, but admit them. Which is, all in all, also a very good idea.Casinos
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affect the results.
A second study in which the experimenter left the room showed that dogs took the food almost every time, and took it more quickly when the food was in the light. In a final experiment similar to the first, the areas of the room that were lit up changed without affecting the overall level of light in the room. This time, if the lighting focussed on the food then dogs took longer to get it.
This shows that dogs prefer to steal food if it is in the dark. The sight of a human does not put them off, but if the food is lit up they delay taking it. This could mean they understand that if they can see the food, then the human also can see it.
Another approach to studying whether dogs can take a human perspective is described in a new paper by Juliane Bräuer of Leipzig University. Instead of turning the lights out, clear vs opaque materials were used to test dogs’ use of visual information, and a second study tested the effects of noise. In all cases, dogs were first trained to remove food with their paw from a tunnel. The food was placed further and further back in the tunnel, and once dogs would get it from the far end they were ready to begin the study.
In the first experiment, one side of the tunnel was clear and the other side was opaque. During the training, dogs were switched between clear and opaque tunnels so they would not have a preference for one or the other. The experimenter began by placing a piece of food in the tunnel in full view of the dog, and giving an instruction. In the first condition, they told the dog ‘No’, the food was forbidden, and then stood in a set location where they could see the tunnel but the dog could not see them. In the second condition, they told the dog ‘No’, and then left the room. In the final condition, they told the dog that it was allowed the food, as a test of motivation.
The dogs’ behaviour was videotaped and analyzed in terms of the length of time before the dog approached the tunnel, and the side which it approached. The results showed no differences between the conditions, and no preference for either the opaque or clear side of the tunnel.
So the dogs did not act differently in the case where the experimenter could see them, but they could not see the experimenter. This suggests they took an egocentric point of view, unlike in Kaminski’s study.
In the second experiment, auditory information was used instead. On one side of the tunnel there was a flat mat that did not make noise, and on the other side there was a mat made of crinkly material that was noisy when the dog trod on it. The dogs were trained using both mats, so they would not have a preference for one or the other. Again there were three conditions: the dog was told ‘no’ and the experimenter stood in a set location with their eyes closed; the dog was told ‘no’ and the experimenter left the room; or the dog was told the food was allowed.
This time, dogs showed a clear preference for the side of the tunnel with the silent mat when the experimenter was in the room. In the other two conditions, they had no preference for the silent or noisy side.
The authors conclude that “when taking forbidden food from a tunnel, the dogs preferred to be silent, but not to be hidden.” It seems the dogs took an egocentric approach in the visual condition, assuming that because they could not see the experimenter, she could not see them. But in the auditory condition, they tried to hide their approach by choosing the quiet side of the tunnel. Interestingly, this has some similarities to studies with chimpanzees and scrub jays, in which they were shown to avoid making noise when they find a food source.
One explanation is that because the dogs could hear the noise themselves, they could hear what the human could hear; this made the problem easier to solve than in the visual experiment. The set-up of the experiment was complicated, with plywood walls around the tunnel, so it is possible they did not fully understand the visual condition.
Overall these studies suggest that in some circumstances a dog seems to understand a human perspective, but more research is needed because the design of the study seems to affect the results.
Has your dog ever stolen food?
Reference
Animal Cognition DOI: Bräuer, J., Keckeisen, M., Pitsch, A., Kaminski, J., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Domestic dogs conceal auditory but not visual information from othersDOI: 10.1007/s10071-012-0576-9
Animal cognition, 7 (3), 144-53 PMID: Gácsi M, Miklósi A, Varga O, Topál J, & Csányi V (2004). Are readers of our face readers of our minds? Dogs (Canis familiaris) show situation-dependent recognition of human's attention.(3), 144-53 PMID: 14669075
Animal Cognition DOI: Kaminski, J., Pitsch, A., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Dogs steal in the darkDOI: 10.1007/s10071-012-0579-6
Will your dog steal food even if you can see or hear the theft take place? Two new studies investigate whether dogs can take a human’s perspective in deciding whether to take a piece of forbidden food.You might also like Do dogs or hand-reared wolves pay more attention to people? Companion Animal Psychology is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Companion Animal Psychology is also a participant in the Etsy Affiliate Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Etsy.com.Jill of the Jungle is a trilogy of scrolling platform computer games released in 1992 by Epic MegaGames. It was intended to rival platform games previously released as shareware by id Software and Apogee Software. The three episodes in the trilogy are Jill of the Jungle, Jill Goes Underground, and Jill Saves the Prince. Though each game was initially released separately, the three were combined into Jill of the Jungle: The Complete Trilogy a year later.
Gameplay [ edit ]
Jill of the Jungle gameplay gameplay
Players play as an Amazon woman who can use various types of weapons and enhancements as she progresses through levels slaying monsters and finding keys. The first episode in the trilogy contains 15 playable levels, including a bonus level, each of which can be entered from an overworld resembling another level. The second episode uses 20 sequential levels without an overworld. The third episode's overworld is a top-down perspective, changing to the traditional platformer style when entering one of the 15 levels.
Various puzzles include keys, transforming into different creatures, and making jumps among others. The same graphics are used in the trilogy, except that Jill's costume is recoloured in each episode (green in Episode 1, red in Episode 2, and blue in Episode 3). Every episode has several unique music tracks and sound effects but some songs and sounds are shared between two different episodes.
Development [ edit ]
Tim Sweeney was inspired to a Nintendo-style game featuring a female playable character as a unique feature. The game started out as a platforming level editor.[1] Lacking the skills to do the art and music, Sweeney hired four people.[2]
Jill of the Jungle: The Complete Trilogy was released for free at GOG.com on November 2, 2018.[3]
Reception [ edit ]
Reception Review score Publication Score GameSpot 7.7/10 [4]
Shortly after its release, Jill of the Jungle sold 20 to 30 copies daily.[2] The successful sales provided market recognition and allowed Epic MegaGames to produce future titles, such as Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall: 2097, and the very successful Unreal series of games. The game Xargon, a later creation of Epic, was very similar in terms of gameplay.
Legacy [ edit ]
The engine of Jill Saves the Prince was licensed to a company called Ark Multimedia Publishing and used for a Christian-themed game called Onesimus: A Quest for Freedom. Most of the graphics and many level designs from the original game were recycled into Onesimus, which is also known as Escape From Rome, though some text and enemies such as the demon creatures were replaced. The plot follows the story of Paul the Apostle's Epistle to Philemon from the Bible with Onesimus as the protagonist. While it seems to be that Jill Saves the Prince (along with the rest of the trilogy) was developed first, references to Onesimus can be found in the string section and level code of the Jill games. However, the credits for Onesimus include a "thanks" to the Epic MegaGames staff, which suggests that Onesimus was developed either simultaneously with Jill Saves the Prince or developed immediately after it.
Epic MegaGames' 1993 title Epic Pinball featured a Jill-theme pinball game called "Jungle Pinball".For many men, getting an erection is as simple as breathing. But it's an incredibly complex process involving a precise sequence of psychological and physiological events that can easily go wrong. Here's how erections work — and how science is helping millions of men keep it up.
Back in 1992, the U.S. National Institutes of Health organized a conference on impotence. One of it's primary recommendations was to do away with the term itself, replacing it with the now standard "erectile dysfunction," or just ED.
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Erectile dysfunction is defined as the inability to get or keep an erection firm enough to have satisfactory sexual intercourse, however you define that. It can describe a complete or inconsistent inability to achieve an erection, or a tendency to sustain only brief erections.
Today, the NIH estimates that ED affects some 30 million men in the United States alone. As is well known, incidence increases with age; about 4% of men in their 50s and nearly 17% of men in their 60s experience a total inability to achieve an erection. After the age of 75, it jumps to 47%. Given our aging population, this is quickly becoming a public health issue. ED can impact negatively on a man's well being, relationships, and quality of life. It's estimated that, by 2025, some 300 million men will experience ED.
From the Brain to the Sponge
To understand what causes it, and how doctors are treating ED, it's important to understand how erections work.
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For centuries, scientists have understood that the two paired cylinders within the penis, the corpora cavernosa, when trapped with blood, are responsible for the rigidity of an erection. But as late as the 1980s, scientists still weren't sure how the blood became trapped within the penis in the first place.
Indeed, without some kind of mechanism to trap the blood that's released during the initial stage of the erection, the increased blood flow stemming from sexual arousal would just flow into the penis and then flow out through the veins, making the penis full — or tumescent — but never hard. Interesting, there's no other part of human anatomy with a draining system that allows blood to leave at one time and then change to a system where the blood is trapped at high pressures.
Today, scientists have solved the mystery through an increased understanding of the corpora cavernosa. The interior of these cylindrical structures are like a sponge, with cavernous spaces lined with smooth muscle.
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As every man knows, an erection starts in the brain. Sensory or mental stimulation (i.e. sexual arousal) is followed by a burst of a brain chemical called nitric oxide which functions as a neurotransmitter.
Nitric oxide causes the smooth muscle enzyme guanylate cyclase to produce a messenger called cyclic guanine monophosphate (cGMP), which acts to increase the size of blood vessels carrying blood to the penis, and decrease the size of vessels carrying the blood out.
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When the smooth muscles are relaxed, blood can flow in through the arteries and fill the spaces. This influx of blood creates pressure in the corpora cavernosa, making the penis expand. The tunica albuginea then acts like a trap door, keeping the blood in the corpora cavernosa, allowing for sustained erections.
The whole thing comes to an end when muscles in the penis contract to stop the inflow of blood and open the veins for blood outflow.
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Potential Points of Failure
Decades ago, scientists figured that the majority of ED (upwards of 90% of cases, in fact) could be attributed to psychological factors, which was dubbed 'psychogenic impotence.' But we now know there's much more to ED than what's in your head.
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Image: CPD
Needless to say, erections are a complex physiological and psychological process with many potential points of failure, including nerve impulses in the brain (nearly 20% of ED is of neurogenic origin), the spinal column, the area around the penis, and the response in muscles, fibrous tissues, veins, and arteries in and near the corpora cavernosa. Any of these areas of anatomy, and/or the precise sequence of events, when disrupted, can result in ED.
All sorts of classifications have been proposed for ED, some based on the psychological causes and some on the neurovascular and physical processes behind the erectile process.
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Here's how the NIH breaks it down:
Typically, ED has an underlying physical cause, such as disease, injury, or the side effects of drugs. ED is often the result of injury to the nerves, or an impairment to how the blood flows to the penis.
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The most common cause of ED is damage to nerves, arteries, smooth muscles, and fibrous tissues. This is often caused by a disease, including diabetes, high blood pressure, nerve damage, multiple sclerosis, atherosclerosis, and heart disease. Lifestyle choices are also a contributing factor, such as smoking, alcohol, obesity, and not exercising. Certain surgeries, like radical prostate and bladder surgery for cancer, can also cause ED.
There are also hormonal factors to consider, namely low levels of testosterone.
Many common medicines also produce side effects that can cause ED, like blood pressure drugs, antihistamines, antidepressants, tranquilizers, appetite suppressants, and cimetidine (an ulcer drug).
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There's also psychology to consider. ED can arise from feelings of stress, anxiety, guilt, depression, low self-esteem, and fear of sexual failure.
A Trove of Treatments
There are many treatment options, including psychotherapy, drug therapy, oral medications, injectable medications, vacuum devices, and surgery. Needless to say, treatment will depend on the underlying health condition. In many cases, such as heart disease or diabetes, the condition will need to be treated before treatment of ED can begin. And in some cases, treating the underlying cause resolves the problem of ED.
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Changing Lifestyles
If ED is lifestyle related, men are typically asked to lose weight, give up smoking, moderate alcohol consumption, exercise, and reduce stress.
Psychotherapy
Doctors also recommend that some patients get treated psychologically, like behavioral therapy, to help decrease the anxiety associated with sex. Sometimes the patient's partner can help with the techniques.
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Better Living Through Pharmacology
Medications are usually the first thing men are prescribed when coping with ED. In the late 1990s, the first effective medication, sildenafil (Viagra), became available. It was soon followed by similar drugs like vardenafil hydrochloride (Levitra) and tadalafil (Cialis). They've been nothing less than revolutionary in the treatment of ED.
These drugs are classified as phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitors, and they're some of the most widely used and effective types of medication for treating ED. They work by temporarily increasing the blood flow to the penis. These drugs, which are taken just prior to sex, enhance erectile function during sexual stimulation by penetrating into smooth muscle cells and inhibiting PDE-5 — an enzyme that degrades CGMP (as noted, a compound that contributes to smooth muscle relaxation). Basically, PDE-5 increases relaxation of the smooth muscle, resulting in increased blood flow — and sustained erections.
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Local Therapies
Both injectable and intraurethral agents have been around since the 1980s. Vasoactive drugs, when injected into the penis's erectile tissue, can help to initiate and maintain an erection. Examples include Intracavernosal Prostaglandin E1 (PGE1; Alprostadil), Vasoactive Intestinal Polypeptide and Phentolamine, and Papaverine.
But owing to the effectiveness of PDE-5 inhibitors, these are now considered second line therapies. That said, they're still useful for the 25-32% of men for whom PDE-5 inhibitors do not work or cause unwanted side-effects.
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Vacuum Devices
These devices, called a vacuum constriction device (VCD), consist of a clear plastic tube that's connected to a pump, which is either hand or battery operated. The pumped-out air creates a vacuum, which in turn causes blood to rush into the penis, causing an erection. A rubber ring is then placed around the base of the penis to keep the blood in place. This can allow for an erection to last for about 30 minutes. It takes practice, but 9 out of 10 men are able to have sex, regardless of the cause of their ED.
Surgery
If all else fails, there's also surgery to consider. A common procedure involves penile implants, either semi-rigid implants (suitable for older men who don't have regular sex) and inflatable implants (consisting of two or three parts that can be inflated to give a more natural erection). These surgeries are well established (being around since the 1970s), are expensive — but some 75% of men report satisfaction after getting it done. Regrettably, like with any surgery, penile implants can result in infections.
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Future Therapies
Looking to the future, scientists speculate about novel ways of treating ED, including advanced pharmacotherapy, gene therapy (in which defective genes in the corporal tissue can be restored or the mutant gene antagonized), regenerative medicine (like nerve grafts), and a new drug called avanafil — a PDE5 inhibitor that's currently going through Phase III clinical trials (which is being seen as a viable substitute for men who can't take conventional PDE-5 inhibitors).
And last but not least, there's always spider venom to consider; studies have shown that the Tx2-6 toxin of the Phoneutria nigriventer spider facilitates an erection. Well, at least in rats. Tx2-6 could be important for development of new pharmacological agents for treatment of erectile dysfunction.
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Additional reporting by Joseph Bennington-Castro.
Other sources: NIH | Why Men Fake it | NHSWhite House staff decided to use holiday decorations to pull a prank on President Obama, with White House photographer Pete Souza catching the whole thing on camera.
In an Instagram post this weekend, Souza showed a snowman decoration looking in on Obama through a window in the Oval office. Many online saw the photo and commented the snowman looked as if it were stalking the president.
In the post, Souza explained it was part of a prank.
"Sometimes you gotta have fun. For the past three weeks, there have been four snowmen on display in the Rose Garden (see photo in earlier post). We've been joking that we should move the snowmen a few feet closer to the Oval Office every day to see if anyone noticed. Then we realized the snowmen were too heavy to easily lift," Souza wrote.
"But finally this morning before the President came to the office, some helpful staff — I won't say who — moved all the snowmen so each one was peeking through a different window into the Oval," the post continued. "This photo was taken this afternoon as the President signed end-of-the-year bills.By Andrew Emett
(Editor’s Note: Even if you are against all synthetic drugs and feel they should never be taken under any circumstances, this type of criminality and lack of basic decency typifies the sordid state of Big Pharma healthcare.)
After purchasing the rights to a drug that prevents infections in people with weakened immune systems, including AIDS patients and cancer survivors undergoing chemotherapy, a pharmaceutical company has raised the price of the drug by 5,000%. Instead of paying $13.50 per pill, patients with life-threatening illnesses are now forced to pay $750 per pill.
Led by a former hedge fund manager, Turing Pharmaceuticals was founded by Martin Shkreli after his first startup biotech company, Retrophin, ousted him last year amid accusations of stock impropriety. Shortly after founding Turing Pharmaceuticals, Shkreli secured the exclusive rights to sell Daraprim (pyrimethamine), which helps prevent malaria and treats toxoplasmosis.
According to the CDC, toxoplasmosis is the second most common foodborne disease and can easily infect people whose immune systems have been weakened by AIDS, chemotherapy, or even pregnancy. Approximately 60 million people in the U.S. carry the Toxoplasma parasite. Exposure to the parasite can occur by eating undercooked meat, cooking with contaminated knives and boards, drinking unclean water, or contact with infected cat feces.
A report from the Prime Institute at the University of Minnesota found that the average cost of brand-name medications rose 13% in 2013. According to the report, new cancer drugs routinely cost over $100,000 a year, while a new hepatitis drug called Sovaldi costs $84,000 for only three months of treatment.
Instead of directly addressing the inordinate price hike, Turing Pharmaceuticals sent out a press release on Friday acknowledging “that some healthcare facilities have encountered challenges securing DARAPRIM® (pyrimethamine) for patients diagnosed with toxoplasmosis.”
“Our number one priority is to ensure that all patients diagnosed with toxoplasmosis have an efficient and affordable means to access Daraprim,” stated Turing’s Chief Commercial Officer, Nancy Retzlaff. “As soon as we learned that some hospitals and clinics were having trouble accessing the product, we developed an immediate corrective plan to ensure quick, efficient access for patients in need.”
The trouble patients have in accessing the product is due to the recent price gouge. Even patients whose insurance plans require them to cover 20% of the cost still have to pay at least $150 per pill. Nowhere in the press release does Turing Pharmaceuticals justify raising the cost of the drug by 5,000%.
Instead of displaying an ounce of compassion for patients with life-threatening diseases, pregnant mothers, and organ donor recipients, Martin Shkreli appears to be running Turing Pharmaceuticals like a reckless hedge fund manager. Besides acquiring the rights to Daraprim, Turing has also picked up a hypertension drug that Shkreli believes could treat autism. Turing is also reportedly working on a nasal spray containing oxytocin and ketamine for treating depression.
Image Credit
Andrew Emett writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.comMinnesota United FC is exploring Target Field and TCF Bank Stadium as home game sites for the 2017 season as the professional soccer team makes plans for its move to Major League Soccer.
On Tuesday, a member of the league’s operations department visited both venues, primarily to look at infrastructure including data hookups and press boxes. United President Nick Rogers said Thursday that 2017 is the preferred date for Minnesota to join the league.
“As a club, we would like to start in 2017 and I think MLS would like to start in 2017,” said Rogers, who offered no timetable for “finalizing a plan everyone feels good about.”
United would need a place to play in 2017 because its planned $120 million, 20,000-seat stadium in St. Paul won’t be ready. City and team officials have expressed confidence in garnering legislative approval for the project, scheduled to be started later this year and completed in 2018.
Both TCF Bank Stadium and Target Field boast ready-made infrastructure and significantly more seating than United’s current home field at the National Sports Center in Blaine, which was not part of Tuesday’s visit.
And both stadiums have experienced high-profile events. TCF Bank Stadium, a turf field, played host to Vikings home games the past two seasons. Target Field, a natural-grass field and the Twins home, was the site of the 2014 All-Star Game.
“I think MLS felt good before the visit,” Rogers said. “They still wanted to kick the tires and see how these stadiums would work for soccer.”
TCF Bank Stadium played host to a 2014 soccer match featuring Greek club Olympiakos and Manchester City of the English Premier League that drew an announced 34,047 fans. But Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini was critical of the sod laid over the artificial turf.
Blaine has a soccer specific, grass-field facility that has been the home of Minnesota pro soccer since 2008. Asked about Blaine, Rogers said, “I don’t get the feeling the MLS is very interested.”
Readying the Blaine venue for MLS would require a new press box plus upgrades to the concessions stands and restrooms, said Barclay Kruse, chief communications officer for the National Sports Center. Parking is also a concern given the myriad events the campus holds.
Then there is seating. MLS averaged 21,574 fans per game this season, more than double what the NSC Stadium holds. MLS teams played a 34-game schedule last season, evenly split between home and away games.
Adding seating, Kruse said, would be the easiest part. Construction would have to begin right after United’s North American Soccer League season ended in the fall.
“We’re moving forward with the assumption that United won’t be here in 2017,” Kruse said.
Minnesota United was approved in March to become the 24th franchise in the MLS. Atlanta, Miami and Los Angeles had previously been awarded franchises.
The MLS had originally planned on expansion teams in Atlanta and Los Angeles beginning play in 2017. But while Los Angeles has an agreement on a stadium deal, the construction will not be completed in time to allow the team to begin before 2018.
– New York and Orlando – in 2015 for 20 teams. New York plays its home games at Yankee Stadium.
It appears now that if the league sticks to its plan of two teams opening in 2017, the second team will be Minnesota. The other option is to go with a 21-team league in 2017 and have Atlanta as the only expansion team coming in that season.
In Miami, the city has no stadium deal with the franchise, headed by former pro star David Beckham.Running Atlanta’s new streetcar system will cost 50 percent more than the city estimated a year ago – from a projected $3.2 million to $4.8 million, according to data provided by Atlanta officials.
In addition, ridership on the sleek blue cars is 18 percent lower than projected. And that’s during an introductory period when it’s free to ride the Atlanta Streetcar.
Michael Geisler, the city’s chief operating officer, said an extra layer of oversight by MARTA is responsible for part of the additional cost, while creation of a new office to seek federal transit money accounts for much of the rest. Paying MARTA for its services will cost about $575,000 the first year, with an additional $50,000 next year. But the expense disappears after that, according to a draft operating budget of the streetcar.
The Atlanta Streetcar system, which cost about $98 million to build, travels from Centennial Olympic Park on the western side of downtown to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site on the eastern side. It began passenger runs Dec. 30.
The city decided it would run the system because it could do so more economically than either MARTA or a private contractor. But the federal government, which is paying a large part of the expense, insisted that MARTA have some role in the project, at least at first.
“So (part of) the additional cost is basically related to MARTA staffing,” Geisler said.
The city also will spend more than $1 million a year on the new office dedicated to amassing federal transit funding. Geisler said that cost will not go down.
City Hall had estimated earlier that it would cost slightly less than $3.2 million a year to operate the system. Now the city says it will cost $4.8 million — a 52 percent increase.
Six weeks into the Atlanta Streetcar’s first three months – that special period when it’s free to ride –102,000 people rode on the cars. The city’s target for the period was 124,800.
But Geisler is upbeat.
“We’re quite satisfied with the way ridership has progressed,” he said, “and we think that people are going to get in the habit of riding the streetcar and using for any number of different activities.”
Fares from the streetcar – it will cost $1 to ride – will only cover about 20 percent to 25 percent of the expense of operating the system. The rest is coming from a federal grant and contributions from city tax money and the downtown business community.Politicians and industry stakeholders are raising concerns about some specific points regarding regulation and costs after the P.E.I. government unveiled its marijuana legislation this week.
The provincial government provided some preliminary information Thursday on what the legalization of marijuana will look like for Islanders. The legal age of use and purchase will be 19 and cannabis will be sold through the Liquor Control Commission at retail outlets separate from their current stores.
Edwin Jewell is the president of Canada's Island Garden, the only licensed facility to grow medical marijuana on the island.
He says they were not surprised with the details in government's announcement as they align with other Maritime provinces.
The P.E.I. Liquor Control Commission will sell cannabis products but it will not be sold through existing liquor stores. (CBC News)
Jewell said there's some opportunity for those getting into the recreational suppliers' market.
"There is going to be demand there and I think it's an opportunity for our company to participate in that market and other licensed producers as well," Jewell said.
"It's a great opportunity for new industry and we are fortunate to be at the ground floor as we are right now."
'Just cover the costs'
Charlottetown's Mayor Clifford Lee says the rules at this stage make sense, but he raised concerns about expenses related to enforcement.
He doesn't expect the city to get a share of the cannabis tax revenue but he also doesn't want Charlottetown to cover any extra costs.
I think it is key that municipal police forces be considered and part of the compensation deal. — Clifford Lee
Lee is looking to see if the Federation of Canadian Municipalities can work with the federal government to get money for local law enforcement.
"It is key that municipal police forces be considered and part of the compensation deal," Lee said. "All I am looking for is the actual cost that the taxpayers of Charlottetown are going to incur to be covered."
'Same regulations as smoking areas'
Dennis MacKenzie, a medical marijuana advocate, was disappointed by some of the province's decisions.
While he agrees with the legal age, he said he would like cannabis sales to be expanded into the private sector.
MacKenzie is also questioning the rules around where cannabis products can be used.
The P.E.I. government announced details of its legalization plan on Dec. 7 in Charlottetown. (John Robertson/CBC)
"It should follow the same regulations as smoking areas," Mackenzie said."One of my main concerns with this whole ordeal is the not having a separation between medicinal and recreational cannabis."
P.E.I. Finance Minister Allen Roach said Thursday that more details will be released in the new year.
The provincial government plans for legislation to be implemented by July 1, 2018.The NBA2K franchise has been one of the most popular sports games for years, but this year's version, "NBA 2K18," faces a pretty significant problem. That's because Kyrie Irving -- who graces this year's game cover in a Cavaliers uniform -- just got traded to the Boston Celtics.
We knew this could be a problem when Irving requested a trade earlier this summer, but on Tuesday it became a real issue when Irving was dealt for Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, Ante Zizic and the Brooklyn Nets' 2018 first-round pick. The NBA2K Twitter account was quick to acknowledge the messy situation.
The NBA2K franchise has developed its own curse of sorts when it comes to cover athletes. Last year Paul George was the 2K17 cover athlete as an Indiana Pacer -- he was traded to the Thunder earlier this summer.
To this point they've never had a cover athlete traded before the season even starts. There is precedent, however, as Brett Favre was traded to the Jets before the release of "Madden 09" and the EA Sports folks scrambled to change the cover art before the season.
Kyrie Irving isn't the first athlete to be traded the same season he made the cover of a video game pic.twitter.com/35wCJ2cgln — SB Nation (@SBNation) August 23, 2017
As for the NBA2K franchise, it shouldn't be too hard to change the cover art -- TNT did a redesign in less than an hour.
Whatever they decide to do, they better do it quickly -- "NBA2K18" is available for customers who pre-order on Sept. 15.Making a fan film about Uncharted can get you places. It can even get you a tour of the Naughty Dog studio and an exclusive first look at Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. This is exactly what Martin Sofiedal just did and he’s pretty impressed at what he saw.
– I got to see some pretty raw stuff from the new game, including drawings of planned action sequences and how all the characters look like now with upgraded graphics. It was almost scary to see Sully as an almost living person. I also got to see a few seconds of the opening scene, which is still under development, but already looking incredible.” Martin Sofiedal
Martin goes on and compares the graphical leap as PlayStation 2 to a Pixar movie.
They showed some tests where Drake was going through a bit of tall grass and how every straw reacted to his movements while also responding to the wind. It was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it. Martin Sofiedal
Source PressFire.noU.S. Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) offered his resignation on Friday amidst accusations that he had propositioned at least two female aides with sex so that he may impregnate them, offering one of them $5 million to carry his child, according to NY Times.
“After discussing options with my family,” he said in his statement, “we came to the conclusion that the best thing for our family now would be for me to tender my previous resignation effective today.”
Franks and his wife, Josephine Franks, who emigrated from the Philippines, married in 1980 and struggled to have children for over twenty years. They finally conceived twins through in vitro fertilization with a donor egg and surrogate mother in 2008 and became parents of twins Joshua Lane and Emily Grace shortly thereafter.
Looking to expand their family, Franks apparently approached at least two female aides about possibly carrying his child, one of whom was offered $5 million. Both of the aides allege that Franks, under no uncertain terms, wanted to impregnate them sexually. Andrea Lafferty, the executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, said one of the women confided in her about Franks’ inappropriate behavior last year. “She is a strong person,” Ms. Lafferty said, “and she can handle a discussion of surrogacy. This was not a policy discussion. This was a request with a $5 million payout.”
The aide, who remains anonymous, declined his offer, but he persisted in his misconduct. “She rebuffed him many times,” Ms. Lafferty said.
Lafferty urged the aide who confided in her to go to Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s office to discuss the matter, personally contacting him herself when the aide felt comfortable to go forward with her story. “I do think that they thought that she brought a credible story,” Ms. Lafferty said, one “that they needed to look into”.
After hearing the aide’s story, the House Ethics Committee launched an investigation into Franks’ misconduct, and Ryan’s office released an official statement disavowing Franks’ actions.
“The speaker told Rep. Franks that he intended to refer the allegations directly to the House Ethics Committee and told him that he should resign from Congress,” the statement read. “The speaker takes seriously his obligation to ensure a safe workplace in the House.”
The investigation is ongoing.
Feature Image via Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)In July 1968, the well-known war photographer Don McCullin was commissioned to photograph the Beatles in different locations around London, for a session known as the Mad Day Out. It was for Life magazine. I think they moved around a lot to avoid big crowds gathering.
This is St Pancras Old Church and gardens, in north London, where some of the best-known pictures were taken. My grandad, Jack, was the head gardener. He was visiting family in Derbyshire that day: he always said if he had been there, he wouldn’t have allowed the Beatles in, because they were the sort of “long-haired layabouts” he disapproved of. He was upright and Victorian, dressed in corduroy trousers, waistcoat, jacket and tie, even when he was working.
I’m the little boy on the left in the light blue jumper, and I’m six years old. Standing next to me is my younger brother Neil and behind us is our nan, Eunice. She’s holding paper and a pencil, as we got three of the Beatles’ autographs. Yoko Ono, who was there that day, kept calling John Lennon away, so we only got Paul, George and Ringo’s signatures. As young boys, we lived on and off with my grandparents for years, staying with them before we were finally offered a council flat in Shepherd’s Bush, west London.
There was no announcement that the Beatles were coming – they just turned up, with a small group of friends, assistants, photographers and hangers-on. The other kids were just knocking about in the park that day, as we were. King’s Cross and St Pancras was a poor area then; parts of it were Dickensian. According to my nan, I sat on Paul’s knee. At one point, she brought them out tea.
‘Quiffs were a must’: teddy boys and girls in London, 1955 Read more
It was a beautiful park, much bigger than it is now. There was a Victorian bedding scheme, which my grandad was very proud of, a fountain, |
able to do physically.”
Not bad for a kid from Thornhill.
Wiggins joins a growing list of Canadian basketball players turning heads south of the border and gives Thornhill residents a reason to pay attention to NCAA basketball this season, especially during March Madness. Don’t touch that dial.West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey’s office fired a spokesperson Thursday after it was revealed she had played a prominent role in a white supremacist video that was first posted online in 2012.
According to the Charleston Gazette-Mail who reported the video and subsequent firing first, Carrie Bowe served as a spokeswoman to the attorney general and appeared to be let go immediately after it her participation in the video was revealed by the paper.
“The employee’s conduct and statements, which occurred years before being
employed by the attorney general’s office, were not previously disclosed until today, which is contrary to the transparency requirements for being a member of this office, do not reflect the opinion or the perspective of the attorney general or this office,” Morrisey spokesman Curtis Johnson told the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
In the six-minute video, which features several women dressed in white tank tops, Bowe repeatedly makes the case that a “white genocide” is occurring, citing immigration and forced assimilation of whites.
“Throughout elementary school, junior high, high school and college, I was told
that my race, the white race, was the cause of all the world’s
problems,” Bowe said in the video that was also posted by the Gazette-Mail.
On her Facebook page, which was cited by the Gazette-Mail, Bowe apologized her involvement in a “project,” which she claimed she had never seen finished earlier in the week.
“Unfortunately, I did not view the finished edit – my understanding of the project was not the reality of the completed product or the malice intentions of its creators. And while this action cannot be undone, I am working with all of my power to remove the content,” she said. “I have prayed and mourned about this and I hope others can find the grace to hear my heart. I offer my most sincere apologies. Please know that I am TRULY sorry.
View the original video below:Iraq deserter ordered deported from Canada Associated Press
Published: Wednesday August 13, 2008
Print This Email This TORONTO (AP) -- A U.S. Army specialist who fled Fort Bragg for Canada after learning his unit was to be deployed to Iraq was ordered deported Wednesday. Jeremy Hinzman, 29, is likely to be court-martialed when he returns to the United States and could face up to five years in prison. Hinzman said Canada's Border Services Agency ordered him to leave the country by Sept. 23 and he would be handed over to U.S. authorities. Before he fled Fort Bragg, N.C., in January 2004, Hinzman had already served a tour of duty with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan. He served in a non-combat position because before his unit left in 2002, he applied for conscientious objector status. In December 2003, the unit was ordered to Iraq, but he left for Canada with his wife and son shortly thereafter. He had served three years in the Army and was one of the first U.S. deserters from Iraq to seek refugee status in Canada. He said he refused to participate in what he calls an immoral and illegal war. "I'm disappointed, but I think that every soldier that has refused to fight in Iraq has done a good thing and I'm not ashamed," Hinzman told The Associated Press moments after learning of the decision. "I don't know how political it was. I had a high profile case," he added. He said Canada's Border Services agency said there would not be any undue hardship on him if was deported. An agency spokeswoman Vanessa Barrasa confirmed he was ordered deported. The Immigration and Refugee Board rejected his claim for refugee status in 2005 and the Federal Court of Appeal held that he would not face any serious punishment if returned to the United States. Hinzman took his pleas to the Supreme Court of Canada, which also refused to hear the case. Hinzman enlisted voluntarily and said he joined the army for a variety of reasons, including the college fund, the adventure and the stability. But after joining, he realized he could not bring himself to kill any one. "I went through all the training. I served honorably in my unit. I used army provisions to try become a noncombatant and remain in the army as a medic or something, but I still would be subject to going on combat missions as a medic," Hinzman said. "I can't bring myself to shoot another person. If people want to criticize me for that, then I'm honored to be criticized because I'm not a killer." About 200 American deserters are believed to have come to Canada trying to avoid service in Iraq. So far, Canadian immigration officials and the courts have rejected efforts to grant them refugee status. Last month, Robin Long became the first American resister to the Iraq war to be removed by Canadian authorities. During the Vietnam War, up to 90,000 Americans successfully won refuge in Canada, most of them to avoid the military draft. The majority went home after the United States granted amnesty in the late 1970s. Many also were given permanent residence status in Canada that eventually resulted in citizenship. Canadian parliament's lower house passed a nonbinding motion in June allowing U.S. military deserters to stay in Canada, but the conservative government ignored the vote. Conservative government party members opposed the motion, not willing to risk straining ties with Washington over the issue or fight rulings already made by the courts and immigration officials.Satellite image of Michigan. (Photo: Courtesy of NASA)
No injuries or damages were reported today after a magnitude 4.2 earthquake rattled Michigan and surrounding states shortly after noon.
John Bellini, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., said the earthquake's epicenter was about 5 miles south of Galesburg, or 9 miles southeast of Kalamazoo in central Michigan.
He said the earthquake at 12:23 p.m. could be felt widely across lower portions of the state and into northern Indiana, northwestern Ohio, eastern Illinois, southeastern Wisconsin, and western Ontario.
Gov. Rick Snyder's office said there were no immediate reports of damages or injuries.
"It is rare for Michigan to experience earthquakes," Snyder said in a statement, "but as we were reminded today, it does happen." State officials, he said, continue to monitor the situation.
Bellini said Michigan has had only one other earthquake of this magnitude, a 4.6 earthquake that shook the state in August 1947. Its epicenter was close to today's — about 30 miles to the southeast.
Seismogram of Saturday, May 2, 2015, magnitude-4.2 Michigan earthquake recorded at the University of Michigan seismic station in Ann Arbor. (Photo: University of Michigan)
He said earthquakes of this magnitude are capable of causing minor damages, such as knocking items from shelves, cracking plaster or windows, or damaging brickwork or chimneys on older buildings. Earthquakes tend to cause major damage beginning at a magnitude of 5.
Bellini said that Michigan does not have a lot of active faults and is not near any plate boundaries. He said most of the earthquakes that happen east of the Rockies are on faults that are poorly studied, very small and underground.
He said that between 1973 and 2012, the state has had only two other recorded earthquakes — one in the western reaches of the Upper Peninsula, the other in central Michigan. He said dates for those quakes were not available.
He said he would not be surprised if Michigan has no aftershocks, or a few small ones that would not be felt.
On social media, Michigan residents reported feeling the Earth shake in Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor and Troy.
Comments on Twitter included: "felt the earth shake in Livonia. Don't need to experience that ever again," "felt the building shake at metro airport" and "Kalamazoo shook hard!"
David Fletcher, who lives in Lawton, about 30 miles from Galesburg, said he was in his kitchen when he felt the ground shake.
"Went outside to make sure the apocalypse wasn't beginning," he said. "Then came to the conclusion it was an earthquake. I immediately posted on Facebook. Because, well that's the rule these days."
Scott Brown of Albion said that "it almost seemed like a vehicle was crashing into the house." He said his children knew what he was talking about when he said to get in a doorway.
"I guess they teach what to do in school," Brown said. "They remembered."
Residents reported that they felt it last for a few seconds. Some say their house shook; others said it startled their pets. We've compiled some tweets of their accounts below. (View on mobile)
DId you feel it, as well? Any other details you can share? Submit them in the comments.
Free Press sports web editor Brian Manzullo and Andy Fitzpatrick and Jennifer Bowman from Michigan.com contributed.
Reports have started to filter in. If you felt the shake around 1225 PM - you can report it at the link below. http://t.co/MbTnO4818t — NWS Detroit (@NWSDetroit) May 2, 2015
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/1GP3gmAWhat is it?
A very small electric city car. Or a tandem scooter with four wheels. Or go-kart with a roof. Or all of these. It's part of Renault's plan to build more electric cars than anyone else, and to do it now. The Twizy you see here is a prototype, but you'll be able to buy a fully-finished, fully-styled production one from December.
Technical highlights
Power comes from a rear-mounted electric motor able to give up to 20bhp in bursts or 10bhp continuously. Peak torque is 42lb ft. That's enough for an official 47mph top speed, but it will actually do a little more than that. Charging the battery pack from full flatness takes 3.5 hours, after which the Twizy should run for between 34 and 72 miles depending on how vigorously you drive it.
As standard the Twizy has no doors, but you can add openable side bars and transparent lower panels – they open upwards and forwards, supercar-fashion. The chassis is tubular steel, the body is plastic, and the suspension is halfway between a real car's and a radio-controlled model's. It has cute little MacPherson struts at the front and old-Lotus-like Chapman struts at the back. Brakes are discs; neither they nor the steering have power assistance because the Twizy weighs just 450kg including 100kg of battery.
There's also a half-power, 28mph version for the French market, which can be driven without a licence – great if you've lost yours for whatever reason. This concession is denied to UK buyers, however…
One point for the anoraks. Alpine sports cars excepted, this is the first rear-engine, rear-wheel drive Renault since the Renault 10 faded out in the 1970s.
What's it like to drive?
Brilliant fun. It has a 6.8m (22ft) turning circle so it's super-manoeuvrable in a tight spot, and it's just 1.19m (under 4ft) wide so the Twizy squeezes through tiny gaps. Once you've switched on and released the fly-off handbrake, it takes off from rest with the rush of energy usual in an electric car. You can hear the narrow, exposed front tyres working and scrubbing as you tackle your first fast bend, but the Twizy scoots through the corner with nothing more than a little understeer.
We saw an indicated 85km/h (53mph) on a long straight, but the windscreen and side deflectors kept the draughts at bay. There's no need for a crash helmet as the Twizy is officially a quadricycle or small car, but there's a belt loop for your right shoulder to augment the standard lap-and-diagonal seatbelt which passes over your left shoulder. The steering and brakes are go-kart positive, although the steering is slower-geared for easy parking in impossible spaces, while the low centre of gravity minimises body roll and the ride is pretty smooth.
You get a great feeling of being in the picture, but you're also protected if you crash your Twizy – better than in, say, a G-Wiz. You wouldn't want a side impact with an SUV, though.
How does it compare?
Depends what you're comparing it with. It's far cheaper to run than a secondhand supermini of similar price, more stable than a scooter with more storage space (37 litres in total under the rear seat and either side of the dashboard), far more sophisticated than a G-Wiz. Price will be about £7000 with another £45 a month to lease the battery pack.
Anything else I need to know?
Options include a rain apron to seal you in up to the waist, a luggage box on top of the rear seat and a Parrot multimedia system with BlueTooth iPod/phone connection and rear speakers. It all sounds a great idea for urban living – except that you need somewhere to charge it up. That's the biggest fly in the ointment.JERSEY CITY - A 25-year-old Jersey City man punched a woman then told her to fight his current girlfriend, according to police reports.
Mark Riddick, of Fulton Avenue, turned himself in at the South District last night and was charged with aggravated assault, police said. An arrest warrant has been issued for the 26-year-old girlfriend who remains at-large.
Shortly before 6 p.m. yesterday, police were called to Fulton and Ocean avenues on a report of a woman stabbed.
When police arrived, they met the 25-year-old victim who was "bleeding profusely from the left side of her face," having sustained "a large laceration from the top of her forehead (left-side) down to the left eyelid," police said.
The woman told cops that she was leaving a Fulton Avenue residence with her two children when Riddick's current girlfriend attacked her, reports said.
But when the girlfriend pounced on the victim, the victim's 10-year-old daughter tried to keep the girlfriend off her mommy, reports said.
At that point, Riddick reared back and punched the 25-year-old victim in the face with a closed fist and then announced to the two adult women, "Aight, now y'all can fight," reports said.
The girlfriend knocked the woman to the ground, reports said. The victim told cops she felt she was being struck by an object and blood was pouring into her eyes. The victim said at one point, the girlfriend was biting the ring finger on her right hand, reports said.
When someone said the cops were coming, both Riddick and the girlfriend fled, according to reports.
An emergency room doctor at Jersey City Medical Center-Barnabas Health told police the victim needed "numerous stitches" to close her wound, reports said.
The girlfriend faces a slew of charges, including aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon, and criminal attempted murder, according to police reports.
The reports do not disclose the relationship between Riddick and the victim.
Editor's note: This story was edited at 5:40 p.m. to reflect updated information.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Another elephant killed for its tusks, this time in the Democratic Republic of Congo
The number of elephants being killed for their ivory has stabilised but overall species numbers have continued to decline.
Data produced for 2015 shows that poachers are still killing more elephants than are born every year.
The report also highlighted a rising trend in poaching in South Africa's Kruger National Park, considered one of the safest havens.
But there was positive news from Eastern Africa where elephant number have outpaced poachers for the fourth year in a row.
Peak deaths
The Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) compiles an authoritative set of figures on the annual trends in elephant numbers.
Called MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants), the latest data indicate that the rise in the numbers of elephant deaths, witnessed since 2006, peaked in 2011.
Since then the numbers have stabilised but the level remains "unacceptably high overall".
In 2015, the programme recorded the deaths of 14,606.
The researchers estimate that half of these were illegally killed putting the population well above the sustainability threshold, where deaths outweigh births.
"African elephant populations continue to face an immediate threat to their survival from unacceptably high levels of poaching for their ivory, especially in Central and West Africa where high levels of poaching are still evident," said John Scanlon, CITES Secretary General.
"There are some encouraging signs, including in certain parts of Eastern Africa, such as in Kenya, where the overall poaching trends have declined, showing us all what is possible through a sustained and collective effort with strong political support."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption An elephant in Kruger National Park in South Africa, which saw a rise in killings in 2015
The mixed picture for the iconic species continued in Southern Africa. The overall levels of poaching remained below the sustainability threshold, but an upward trend in killing was seen in Kruger National Park for the first time.
CITES have demanded that the 19 countries most heavily involved in the killing of elephants or the consumption of ivory produce national ivory action plans to show how they plan to tackle the issue.
In January the trade body said that China, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, all countries of primary concern, have "substantially achieved" the goals outlined in their plans.
Several other countries including Angola, Cambodia and the Lao People's Democratic Republic were told to improve their efforts and report to the CITES governing body, the Conference of the Parties, taking place in South Africa in September this year.
"The momentum generated over the past few years is translating into deeper and stronger efforts to fight these crimes on the front line, where it is needed most - from the rangers in the field, to police and customs at ports of entry and exit and across illicit markets," said John Scanlon.
"Governments must continue to strengthen these front line efforts, whilst the UN, other intergovernmental bodies and civil society must further enhance their much needed support, if we are to move from stabilising to reversing the devastating poaching trends of the past decade."
The September meeting will likely see intense debate between those who want to see some limited sales of ivory stockpiles and those in favour of closing all markets.
The latest figures on the numbers of elephants killed have been released on the UN's world wildlife day in New York, an event that this year will have special focus on the future of elephants.
Follow Matt on Twitter @mattmcgrathbbc and on Facebook.Prime Minister Tony Abbott has confirmed Australia will acquire two additional Boeing C-17 airlifters.
The Royal Australian Air Force’s 36 Squadron already operates a fleet of six C-17 Globemasters from its Amberley base, with the seventh to be delivered in July/August and the eighth aircraft to be delivered by the end of this year, the Prime Minister announced at Amberley on Friday.
The $1 billion acquisiton comprises $700 million for the two aircraft plus sustainment, and a further $300 million for a new, dedicated C-17 maintenance hangar and aircraft hardstand and taxiway upgrades at Amberley. Currently 36SQN utilises the KC-30 maintenance hangar at Amberley when needed.
“The two additional C-17s will provide vital heavy airlift support to a range of regional and global coalition operations and greatly increase Australia’s capacity to provide rapid and effective disaster rescue and relief and humanitarian aid,” Prime Minister Abbott said.
The acquisition of the two extra C-17s was first announced by then Defence Minister Senator David Johnston last October. At the time Johnston said Australia would also consider the acquisition of a ninth and tenth C-17, with decisions regarding the acquisition of those aircraft to be informed by the Force Structure Review being developed as part of the 2015 Defence White Paper process.
Then on November 12 a US Defense Security Cooperation Agency notification revealed Australia had formally requested “up to four” more C-17s from the US government.
With production of the C-17 ending this year, Boeing has built about 10 “white tail” aircraft in anticipation that these could be sold to new or existing customers of the airlifter. New Zealand has shown interest in two while there is believed to be interest for additional aircraft from India, Canada and the UK, as well as new customers in the Middle East.
Australia initially ordered four C-17s in 2006 which were delivered between December that year and January 2008. The fifth and sixth aircraft were delivered in 2011 and 2012.
“Boeing is honoured by Australia’s decision to acquire two additional C-17A Globemaster III aircraft, which further highlights the enduring relationship between Boeing and the Commonwealth,” Boeing said in a statement welcoming the announcement of the additional aircraft.
“Since 2006, the Royal Australian Air Force has operated its six C-17s on the frontlines of military operations and humanitarian missions. As Australia and customers around the world have experienced first-hand, the C-17 remains unmatched in its ability to transport troops and heavy cargo, support airdrops and aeromedical evacuations, and land and takeoff in remote airfields.”Spread the love
Standing Rock, ND — Dramatic video from Intercept reporter, Jihan Hafiz, was released this week from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests showing a full on assault by militarized police on peaceful people. The video is from Saturday but took several days to be released as cops confiscated the camera used to film it.
The video was taken as water protectors and reporters covering the protests marched toward the construction site. However, their peaceful walk was swiftly interrupted by militarized shock troops armed with massive cans of pepper spray, batons, rubber bullets, and assault rifles.
According to Hafiz, the march was undertaken in solidarity with several protesters who had chained themselves to bulldozers and pipeline machinery at the construction site. But the marchers never made it to their destination. Instead, they were attacked by police forces who used pepper spray and beat protesters with batons. Dozens of officers, backed by military trucks, police vans, machine guns, and nonlethal weapons, violently approached the group without warning.
“Don’t move, everyone is under arrest,” a voice says from the military vehicle that appears to be equipped with a Long Range Acoustic Hailing Device, or LRAD.
As protesters attempted to leave, the police surrounded them and began their attack. According to Hafiz, several women were targeted for leading the march and dragged from the crowd to be arrested. Police body slammed one man and another woman’s ankle was broken as she ran.
The militarized police then circled the protesters in an apparent move to ‘kettle’ them — a tactic usually reserved for urban protests in which riot police force large crowds into corners to seemingly provoke them. However, the protesters stayed entirely peaceful.
Police continued their mass arrests even though the people were trying to leave. Some natives were seen running for the hills as the assault began.
One officer is seen in military camouflage with a ski mask and a tear gas grenade launcher — as if he were going to war. In total, reports Hafiz, more than 140 people were detained in half an hour. It was the largest roundup of protesters since the movement against the pipelines intensified two months ago. A majority of those arrested were charged with rioting and criminal trespass. Overall, close to 300 people have been arrested since protests against the pipeline kicked off over the summer.
Among those arrested were journalists, a teen child who was also pregnant, and an elderly woman.
They were all brought to the jail where protesters were forced to sit in the jail’s common area as police had no other place to put them. According to Hafiz, women were strip searched, protesters were refused phone calls, and no one received food or water. One woman even had her medication confiscated by police, causing her to shake and sweat profusely.
When Hafiz was finally released, she attempted to get back her camera and was told that she could not have it back. “Your camera is being held as evidence in a crime,” they said.
In the land of the free, filming cops assault peaceful men, women, and children is considered a ‘crime.’
Over the past several weeks, the police state has come out in full force as Native Americans fight to protect their water sources from the threat of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Mainstream media has remained largely silent as federal, state and local authorities worked on behalf of Energy Transfer Partners to squash dissent.
Even prominent journalists, like Hafiz, have found themselves targets of the State, charged with dubious “crimes” such as “inciting a riot” and “conspiracy to theft of services” – for doing nothing more than filming protests and the ensuing violent crackdowns.
As the video below shows, the First Amendment is no obstacle when it comes to advancing the interests of the corporatocracy.(CNN) -- Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Sunday he was heading to Iran to join nuclear talks in Tehran involving Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The meeting in Tehran sought to reach a breakthrough in the showdown over Iran's nuclear program, according to Erdogan.
The last-minute trip followed a "signal" from the talks, which are intended to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear energy program, Erdogan told reporters before departing. Erdogan indicated the signal involved Iran's agreement to swap its low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, CNN Turk reported.
Erdogan said he hoped an agreement in Tehran would stop the U.N. Security Council from its negotiations on tougher sanctions on Iran.
"The Security Council was contemplating a step in the direction of sanctions as of yesterday," Erdogan said. "As a part of our talks, this has been postponed. Now with this step we are going to take, I hope that we will have the opportunity to overcome these problems."
Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency made no mention of the nuclear issue in reporting earlier that Lula was sitting down with Ahmadinejad. But French President Nicolas Sarkozy and President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia both have said they back Lula's efforts to resolve the long-running, high-stakes stalemate.
"This could be the last chance before the U.N. Security Council makes the already known decisions," Medvedev said, referring to the U.N. decision on imposing sanctions against Iran.
Sarkozy said earlier that he had spoken with Lula by phone to assure him that Paris supports his efforts to resolve the impasse.
The United States and many other countries believe that Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.
On Saturday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu left for Tehran to join the Iran-Brazil talks. Erdogan said Sunday the anticipated signal from Iran was received and he was changing his schedule to travel to Tehran, postponing a planned visit to Azerbaijan.
Erdogan's statement indicated an agreement in which Iran would send most of its low-enriched uranium to be turned into fuel rods suitable for Turkey's nuclear power reactor that makes medical isotopes.
"After our high-level meeting in Tehran, I believe we will have the opportunity to start the process regarding the swap," Erdogan said. "We said that we will go to Tehran if the swap takes place in Turkey, and we received news that the text includes a reference to this. That's why we are going. Otherwise we wouldn't have gone."
Turkey and Brazil have been working on a joint offer based on the nuclear swap deal offered previously to Tehran. Both countries are temporary members of the U.N. Security Council and have been working toward a diplomatic solution that does not involve sanctions.
Lula is in Iran ahead of the Group of 15 developing nations meeting in Tehran. The group actually has 17 members -- Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
Lula also met separately with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on his trip, according to Iranian media reports. State-run Press TV reported Khameini emphasized to Lula the need for relations between independent states such as Brazil and Iran in order to reduce the influence of superpowers such as the United States.
"The only way to change the oppressive relations in the world today is through the formation of closer ties between independent states," Khameini said, according to Press TV. "Superpowers have defined vertical relations in the world which places a superpower at the top. These relations must be changed and their change is possible."TMBA 355: (Nate Duncan Interview) - How The Dunc'd On Basketball Podcast Became a Business in Just a Year
Podcast 45:54 | Download | Stitcher | iTunes | Comment
This week’s episode is the final instalment of our three-part series about people who have turned their passions (which just happen to be some of Dan and Ian‘s personal obsessions) into successful businesses.
Today’s guest is the podcaster that Dan has listened to the most in 2016: Nate Duncan, founder and host of the Dunc’d On Basketball Podcast. Nate has only been podcasting for a little over a year but has already turned it into his full-time job.
On the show, you’ll hear Nate share how he started his podcast, grew his audience, and made the decision to leave his job as a lawyer to concentrate on developing ‘Dunc’d On Basketball’.
Stay tuned after the credits for some hardcore hoop talk as well.
Transcript
Listen to this week’s show and learn:
Why Nate decided that he was going to quit being a lawyer and create a basketball podcast. (3:56)
Whether or not Nate was worried about jumping into a very saturated market of sports journalism. (11:02)
What kind of preparation goes into each episode of the Dunc’d On podcast. (16:13)
How Nate went about monetizing his podcast and what kind of advertisers he is working with. (19:51)
What Nate would do differently if he had to start over right now. (26:14)
Mentioned in the episode:
Enjoyed this podcast? Check out these:
Listening options:
Thanks for listening to our show! We’ll be back next Thursday morning 8AM EST.
Cheers,
Dan & IanIntro
Cluster schedulers promise us ease of deployment with ultimate scalability. We designed an ambitious challenge to test these promises: schedule one million containers. We call this the Million Container Challenge (C1M). HashiCorp prides itself on creating technically excellent software, and the C1M is a test to showcase this. We tested Nomad against the C1M to ensure that we meet the needs of our users at any scale. A cluster of five Nomad servers scheduled one million containers in less than five minutes, a rate of 3,750 containers per second. Details and observations of this benchmark are explained below. Thank you to Google for providing the credits and support necessary to run the infrastructure for the C1M on Google Cloud.
C1M Setup
We ran both a C100K (100,000 containers) and C1M with the following cluster configurations. For each cluster configuration, we ran five Nomad servers. The cluster size below is number of Nomad clients, and does not include the additional servers. Cluster Size Jobs Tasks per Job Total Tasks 500 318 315 100,170 5,000 1,000 1,000 1,000,000
Our partners at Google generously provided the credits to run this amount of compute on Google Compute Engine. The strong and consistent performance of Google Cloud made the entire testing process efficient. We used Terraform to spin up thousands of resources in minutes. A job is a declaration of work submitted to the scheduler. A job is composed of many tasks. A task is an application to run, which is a Docker container running a simple Go service in this test. Nomad can also schedule other tasks such as VMs, binaries, etc. We could have submitted 1 job with 1,000,000 tasks for the C1M. Instead, we broke down the tasks into many jobs in an even split in order to provide more strain on the scheduler as well as better represent real world scenarios where many jobs would be running. To make the benchmark even more strenuous and realistic, we designed the jobs to have constraints on which nodes can run the tasks. This forces the scheduler to evaluate and check constraints in addition to pure binpacking. For full technicals of the C1M setup, including the Docker images used, the Nomad job specification, Terraform scripts, and more please see the full technical README of the C1M. The linked repository can also be used to reproduce any of these results.
C100k Results
We begin by looking at the results for the C100K, since interesting observations can be drawn by comparing these results to the C1M results shown later. The Y-axis is number of containers. The X-axis is time (milliseconds). There are three lines on the graph: • Scheduled (Orange) - The scheduler chose where the container should be running. In other words, a container has been binpacked and scheduled. At this stage, it is now ready for the client to retrieve it. • Received (Grey) - The client has acknowledged that it received a container task and will begin starting it. • Running (Blue) - The container completed launching and is now running. In other words, if you went to this machine and ran docker ps, you would see this container in the "running" state. These results lead to interesting observations: First, the performance of Nomad in scheduling is nearly linear. Nomad completes scheduling and placement of all the containers in 18.1 seconds, exceeding 5,500 placements per second. By 19.5 seconds (less than 2 seconds after the placement is complete), all clients have acknowledged that they have received their placements. In less than 20 seconds, Nomad is now just waiting for all the containers to start. The final line (grey) is logarithmic. At 58.2 seconds Nomad has started 99% of the containers. In our investigation we found that the clients were simply saturated as they started hundreds of containers within a few seconds.
C1M Results
Next we look at the results for the C1M. The graph axes, line definitions, and colors are the same as the prior section. Even at 1,000,000 containers, Nomad provides near-linear performance. Nomad completes all scheduling in 266.7 seconds (less than five minutes). This is a rate of nearly 3,750 placements per second. The time it takes for clients to receive tasks is nearly realtime despite the vast scale. By the time a million containers have been scheduled, 99.4% of them have already been acknowledged by the clients. 99% of all containers are running in 370.5 seconds. As before, the time between client acknowledgement of placement and container start time is Nomad waiting for Docker to start the container. Still, scheduling and starting 1 million containers in just over six minutes is an impressive feat. There is one curiosity with C1M: the graph shows that we scheduled and ran more than 1M containers. Nomad actually scheduled and ran nearly 1.003M containers. There are two reasons for this: First, we found a bug in the Docker engine that appears to be a race condition by starting so many containers in a very short period of time. We have filed an issue, and there is a potential fix in master. Because Nomad is designed to self-heal and recover from these types of failures, Nomad rescheduled and restarted the failed jobs elsewhere. Second, we ran into machine failures. At a cluster size of 5,000 nodes, we experienced hardware failure, network issues, and more. Nomad detects this as a non-functioning client and moves that client's workload to another machine. This type of self-healing behavior is critical for large scale clusters where routine failures become the norm. Both of the above issues forced Nomad to revisit scheduling decisions and to start more containers. Ultimately, Nomad was able to complete the full benchmark.
Nomad Design Validation & Hardening
C1M uncovered some bugs and race conditions that we have now fixed and are a part of Nomad 0.3.1. This is the version that should be used to reproduce these results. Thanks to the C1M, we are fully confident that Nomad is robust at dramatically large scales, and can comfortably run the largest real-world workloads. In addition to hardening, the C1M provided validation for the design and architecture of Nomad. As clusters get larger and user jobs specify more complex placement constraints, the scheduler must spend more time finding resources to run applications. Nomad is the only free and open source optimistically concurrent scheduler, which allows it to make hundreds of scheduling decisions in parallel.
C1M Design
We ran the C1M against Nomad, our own cluster scheduler, but the C1M is runnable against other schedulers with a little bit of work. There are a number of other cluster schedulers available. We chose to only benchmark our own scheduler since we are not professionals in operating the other schedulers, and did not feel comfortable publicizing any benchmarks on systems we were not sure we configured properly. The C1M source is public for other schedulers to use if interested.
ConclusionGreatest Film Series Franchises: All-Time Top Box-Office Revenue
(in descending order of box-office (domestic) gross totals, unadjusted for inflation)
(over $450 million)
(as of early February 2019)
Franchises
(Clickable Links)
Individual Films in Franchise
(Listed chronologically)
(if clickable, links to reviews) Total Franchise Gross (domestic)
(approx.) # of Films # 1 Film
in Franchise Gross (Domestic) Revenue
of # 1 Film
Marvel's Cinematic Universe
Iron Man (2008)
The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Thor (2011)
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Marvel's The Avengers (2012)
Iron Man 3 (2013)
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Ant-Man (2015)
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Doctor Strange (2016)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
|
?” he said. “When he says he could shoot someone and you’d still support him, he’s saying he thinks you’re a sucker.”Example 2 : JavaScript Classical Inheritance diagram
This is an example from Kenneth, also about creating object by constructor but we are focus on the issue of prototype chain during those series of objects and instances. Prototype objects are also just simple objects and may have their own prototypes. If a prototype has a non-null reference to its prototype, and so on, this is called the prototype chain (by Dmitry).
The following is a chart of JavaScript Pseudo Classical Inheritance. The constructor Foo is just a class name for an imaginary class. The foo object is an instance of Foo.
And now we can see from the diagram why when we inherit Dog from Animal, we would do:
function Dog() {} // the usual constructor function
Dog.prototype = new Animal();
Dog.prototype.constructor = Dog;
What happens when new( ) an instance:
Note that the prototype in Foo.prototype is not to form a prototype chain. Foo.prototype points to some where in a prototype chain, but this prototype property of Foo is not to form the prototype chain. What constitute a prototype chain are the __proto__ pointing up the chain, and the objects pointed to by __proto__, such as going from foo.__proto__, going up to foo.__proto__.__proto__, and so forth, until null is reached.
Relation of __proto__ and prototype
JavaScript’s Pseudo Classical Inheritance works like this way: I am a constructor, and I am just a function, and I hold a prototype reference, and whenever foo = new Foo() is called, I will let foo.__proto__ point to my prototype object. So Foo.prototype and obj.__proto__ are two different concepts. Foo.prototype indicates that, when an object of Foois created, this is the point where the prototype chain of the new object should point to — that is, foo.__proto__ should point to where Foo.prototype is pointing at.
What if a function is needed to add
If woofie the object doesn’t have the move method, it will go up the prototype chain, just like any prototypal inheritance scenario, first to the object pointed to by woofie.__proto__, which is the same as the object that Dog.prototype refers to. If the method move is not a property of that object (meaning that the Dog class doesn’t have a method move), go up one level in the prototype chain, which is woofie.__proto__.__proto__, or the same as Animal.prototype.
Animal.prototype.move = function() {... };
Even though foo.constructor === Foo, the constructor property is not foo’s own property. It is actually obtained by going up the prototype chain, to where foo.__proto__ is pointing at. The same is for Function.constructor. The diagram can be complicated, and sometimes confusing when we see Constructor.prototype, foo.__proto__, Foo.prototype.constructor.
To verify the diagram, note that even though foo.constructor will show a value, the property constructor is not foo’s own property, but is obtained by following up the prototype chain, as foo.hasOwnProperty(“constructor”) can tell.Quantum physics illustrates that the classical, manifested world is not what it seems, yet the daily routine of waking up as an individual human being who is separated from the rest of the external world is our ordinary experience. However, every now and again, sometimes with a profound and ongoing impact in our life, we experience extraordinary feats of consciousness which blow our minds and hearts out of this world.
These feats occur in many different guises and in a very personal way. Some believe it to genuinely be an extraordinary experience; whilst others explain it away as ‘coincidence’ or a ‘figment of the imagination’. Yet unsurprisingly, a high amount of people do believe in Extrasensory Perception (ESP). In a 2002 poll, 57% believe it to be real.
Regardless of our personal beliefs, these occurrences have been recorded throughout the history of all tribal and traditional civilizations, so it’s not just a modern marvel. What is fresh about this phenomenon is the development of a discipline called ‘Parapsychology’, which is essentially a scientific framework designed to study the ‘psi’ or ‘psychic’ experiences of humanity.
Parapsychology is a field which is still considered pseudoscience by the scientific orthodoxy, however there is no justifiable or truly scientific reason why this is the case. It is therefore biased to omit the compelling evidence which illustrate that human minds can impact and connect with the world around it. Simply, the establishment is behaving unscientifically and has a lot to answer for due to their prejudiced position, especially because emerging from this legitimate methodology are very robust experiments of investigation which have produced statistically significant data sets as a result.
The reason why it’s not taken seriously by the academic community is because philosophical materialism – which is the unproven and dogmatic ‘belief’ that matter is the fundamental stuff of reality – has hijacked modern day science. Basically, it’s the interpretation model for any accumulating evidence, so if certain data doesn’t fit into that paradigm, it’s arrogantly and unscientifically rejected or explained away.
However, not all scientists have fallen victim to the materialist rhetoric. For example, in 2014 “A call for an open, informed study of all aspects of consciousness” was made by around 100 scientists. Another example in the same year was the creation of a “Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science … to visualize what an emerging scientific view may look like”, which was developed by eight respected scientists, including Rupert Sheldrake. Simply, both groups have called upon the scientific community to face their hypocrisy and transcend their philosophical bias.
Much of the dogma that makes up this charade has been reinforced by many so-called skeptics who don’t actually investigate the evidence objectively, something that sites like Skeptical about Skeptics have made embarrassingly clear. In addition, this ‘faith’ has evolved into ‘scientism’, something that many people who have been highly indoctrinated into scientific materialism hypocritically despise religious people for doing themselves. The irony would be hilarious if it wasn’t so harmful to our collective mindset, especially our value systems, which have been rotted from the inside by materialistic and individualistic ideologies.
The reality is parapsychological studies have accumulated a lot of convincing data which indicate that there is strong evidence for ESP of the human mind. As stated in the linked manifesto:
“Studies of the so-called “psi phenomena” indicate that we can sometimes receive meaningful information without the use of ordinary senses, and in ways that transcend the habitual space and time constraints. Furthermore, psi research demonstrates that we can mentally influence—at a distance—physical devices and living organisms (including other human beings). Psi research also shows that distant minds may behave in ways that are nonlocally correlated, i.e., the correlations between distant minds are hypothesized to be unmediated (they are not linked to any known energetic signal), unmitigated (they do not degrade with increasing distance), and immediate (they appear to be simultaneous). These events are so common that they cannot be viewed as anomalous or as exceptions to natural laws, but as indications of the need for a broader explanatory framework that cannot be predicated exclusively on materialism.”
The Way Forward? Officially Open Science to Consciousness Studies and a Post-Materialist Worldview
An interview with Dean Radin
Dean is the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and leading researcher into parapsychology. For around three decades he has developed and implemented robust scientific models for experimenting with and capturing data of a range of psychic experiences. He has also written some highly successful books, including ‘The Conscious Universe’, ‘Entangled Minds’ and ‘Supernormal’.
In this episode Dean explores the various experiments which occur in parapsychological studies, as well as some of the results they’ve derived. He also discusses the field of quantum mechanics and why it could potentially explain how psi phenomena occur. In addition, he talks about the philosophical shift that needs to occur in ‘mainstream’ science so that it can embrace its inevitable future as a discipline that finally deals with the greatest challenge it has ever faced: what consciousness is and how it relates to reality itself.
The Verdict
A worldview beyond the dogma of the materialist metaphysics is finally making a convincing comeback into the consensus of human rationale. The scientific model which will explain the mysterious phenomena observed in parapsychological research is still excitingly unclear; however it is likely to be elucidated through some form of quantum or energetic field theory.
In addition, the justified demise of materialism has been reinforced by contradictory evidence, as well as its epic failure to explain what consciousness actually is, at what point matter becomes ‘alive’ and why the human mind and its intangibilities have a direct impact on the external world, including the human body. We are now transforming into a philosophical worldview which is actually a rebirth of ancient wisdom. In very simple terms, this understanding accepts that consciousness or mind plays a fundamental and co-creating role in our interconnected and ‘life-full’ reality.
In terms of ESP experiences, if they’re really a genuine ability of the human mind, as parapsychological data indicate, then a valid question is why don’t they happen more often? Take a moment to think about how since our birth, we’ve been conditioned into our cultural and societal belief systems. We are literally brainwashed into our state of mind until some people actually fully embrace their innate capacity to ‘freely’ choose the belief systems that they have.
However, if we grew up around information that supported a natural ESP ability in humanity, then we would be neurologically wiring our brains and conceptually designing our minds to not just be more open to it, but amplify it too. Put another way, if given a supportive environment, the human brain would not just increase its awareness of what we would now know to be an ‘ordinary’ ability, but also increase its capacity to undertake these feats on a consistent, daily basis.
Ultimately, if we have already evolved our philosophy and experience of life beyond the illusory, disconnected state of the material world, then we continually perceive the intimate interconnection we have with it through synchronicity, symbolism and psi experience anyway. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that the scientific community shouldn’t catch up; they’ve got a genuine responsibility to become the ‘objective’, ‘unbiased’ and ‘unadulterated’ snapshot of reality that they so loudly claim to be, as well as provide an authentic opportunity for humanity to collectively explore the mystery and power of unity consciousness.
Please note: This article is part of the Redesigning Society series. Over the coming weeks, this series will present a range of expert perspectives on the current state of societal affairs, as well as the collective changes we desperately need both philosophically and practically. Details of upcoming and past guests and topics can be viewed here. You can subscribe to The Conscious Society Youtube Channel to get early access to each interview in the series.Tough, funny and pragmatic, she loved Alaska and Alaska loved her. Then came the national stage, a change of style and a move into the entertainment business
There was a time when Sarah Palin was normal by Alaska standards. Way back before the hoopla, and way before she endorsed Donald Trump, she made sense as a politician here. That’s not the case any more. I’m told she lives in Alaska most of the time, but she’s invisible in public life.
But back in the day, I liked her – and so did many in my community. I’m not conservative, but she grew on me when I worked as a reporter in Anchorage in the mid-2000s, and the reason had nothing to do with politics. She was a kind of regular person I recognized as of this place. Tough, funny, pragmatic. She loved Alaska like I did. If you didn’t know her then, it’s hard to explain or believe.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Laurie Serino, left, talks about the high food prices with Sarah Palin in Barrow, Alaska. Photograph: Al Grillo/AP
One day, during her time as governor, my editor pointed out a picture of her in our newspaper. The photograph had been taken in Barrow, the nation’s northernmost city. Palin was wearing a kuspuk (an Alaska Native-style jacket), holding her newborn, talking to a woman in a grocery store about the high price of food. The image had exactly the this-is-Alaska-life realness that resonates deeply here, where voters prize authenticity most of all.
If the grocery store photo-op was planned, my boss said, she was brilliant. If it wasn’t, she was a natural.
I don’t think it was planned – she wasn’t calculating like that, and most Alaska politicians aren’t that sophisticated. At the time, Palin’s politics could only be described as moderate. Democrats liked her. She had no problem with taxing oil companies or handing out money to help people with fuel costs. She believed in climate change. As for the word-salad syntax problem everybody makes fun of? Up north, nobody cared. Maybe it even added to her regular-person cred (our long-serving representative Don Young suffers from the same affliction).
Above all, Palin was nice. If a reporter called her office, she called back on their cellphone: “Hi, this is Sarah.” Like most people here, she was religious, but didn’t talk about it publicly. Like most people, her family hunted and owned guns, but she didn’t talk too much about that either. She was fuzzy on policy details, but only insiders noticed. She made a big deal about government corruption.
“She wanted to be liked and, as a result, was likable,” said a reporter friend of mine who covered her as governor. “Her only real enemies were white-guy boys’ club oil politicians who were getting indicted by the feds.”
Apocalypse now: Sarah Palin's bizarre Trump endorsement analyzed Read more
I interviewed her right after she announced she was pregnant. She laughed off people who said it would be a problem, calling them cavemen. I didn’t have children then but now that I do, I can better appreciate her hustle. She had four kids, including one serving in the army. A war was on. She was expecting a baby with Down’s syndrome (and pretty soon she’d have a teenage daughter who was pregnant). Through it all, she remained tough and positive.
Then the sky opened up and plucked her from this far-flung state. There she was, on national television. She quit calling us back. Soon afterwards came all the talk about God and guns. Being real had been her superpower, but a few months on she’d say anything just to stay in people’s Twitter feeds.
I rode along in the motorcade the day she came back to the state to vote. We whizzed out to Wasilla, and she emerged from her black SUV wearing a Carhartt jacket. The outfit was self-conscious. Alaska schtick. Not her thing. But she’d already recalibrated for an audience that wasn’t us. Then John McCain lost. She peaced-out on being governor.
For many here, that was the end.
It’s hard to keep track of what happened next. The internet Sarah-ploded. There was Fox News, reality television, the book, the steady stream of social media snits, the house in Arizona, a family run-in with the cops and Bristol’s baby-mama drama.
When I read the news story recently about Track Palin assaulting his girlfriend and threatening to kill himself, I remembered this sweet interview with Palin years ago in a running magazine. It was about Track as a teen, planting water bottles for his mother on her training route. Politics is a messed-up prism, and he didn’t ask to have his life examined through it. Could she have known how hard this would be on her children?
Anybody who lives here has occasional bouts of a far-north inferiority complex. You start to wonder if you’d be as successful in the Lower 48, or if you’re just benefiting from the state being basically a big small town. You imagine a larger stage. Palin probably felt that way, and then she got her stage. She made money. She got famous. But does she seem happy to you? The world has been mean. Beneath the toxicity, I detect brittleness. I wonder if she thinks about what she left behind in Alaska. I wonder if she misses it.
These days, you can’t find people here who have something nice to say about her last decade in politics. Nobody wants to talk about Palin.
There is speculation from time to time about her running for state office, but chances seem remote. Dermot Cole, a columnist at the Alaska Dispatch News, told me Alaskans don’t take her seriously.
“She has long since become part of the entertainment business, which is what she has in common with Trump,” he wrote in an email.
Dave Stieren, a conservative radio personality in Anchorage, told me Palin’s story is full of irony.
“Even though she doesn’t know who Shakespeare is, she’s a figure out of Shakespearean tragedy,” he said. “She’s a person of exceptional means with no place to really call home.”
On occasion someone I know sees her in a yoga class or in the stands at a hockey game. Once, a friend encountered her really early in the morning, with no makeup, in Wasilla Walmart. She looked tired, almost ghostly, the friend said.
Who knows why Palin was up that early, but I imagine it was to shop in peace in her home town. Just like the regular Alaskan she used to be.BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgian prosecutors appealed for help in finding a man suspected of leaving a bomb at Brussels Airport on March 22, saying they were eager to find a coat he had discarded and to speak to people who saw him on his hour-long walk back into the city.
Federal prosecutors released new pictures of the suspect, dubbed the "man in the hat", who appeared to arrive at the airport with two suicide bombers and left along with passengers after the first two bombs exploded.
In a video to accompany their appeal, investigators indicate the route the man took, out of the airport, through the nearby town of Zaventem and along a main road into the city. His last appearance on security cameras was in the district of Schaerbeek almost an hour after the bombing.
Along the way, he took off his light-colored coat and was then seen in a light blue shirt with dark patches. He was wearing a dark hat throughout.
"It is especially the coat which interests us," prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt told a news conference, asking if anyone might have seen it along the suspect's route.
Prosecutors also want to people to come forward who might have filmed or taken a photograph of the suspect or may be able to determine where he went.
Twin bombs at Brussels Airport and another on the city's metro killed 32 people, excluding the suspected bombers. A controlled explosion destroyed a third bomb at the airport about six hours after the initial attack.
(Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek; editing by Philip Blenkinsop)Reading to your children is one of the great joys of parenthood. And it lasts until exactly the day your children discover Thomas the Tank Engine, at which point you start developing mysterious headaches come bedtime and, Oh darling, I know you're only three, but you can probably work this one out yourself from the pictures while I lie on the floor with the duvet over my face. Tricky word? It's probably "coupling", or maybe "gauge". Shhhh. Mummy's resting down here.
The awful truth is: kids love Thomas. They love him so much that Barbie-hawker Mattel has bought the entire stable of Hit Entertainment, apparently mostly in order to get their corporate fingers on the Rev W Awdry's coal-powered progeny. They love him, even though the island of Sodor belongs to a far-off postwar world where things like "coal" and "steam" and "public transport" – unimaginable to the modern child-brain – were still comprehensible concepts. And they love him, despite the fact that his stories are the crazed authoritarian fantasies of a father figure who would make the sternest Freudian blanch.
In the Railway Series, mechanical whimsy (Look! A steam train! With a face!) is balanced by a taste for punishment that is both brutal and peremptory. The very first book in the Railway Series includes The Sad Story of Henry – in which a sentient engine is immured in a tunnel as punishment for being a tiny bit vain about keeping his paint job out of the rain.
There are few more chilling parental moments than looking on that last page, with Henry's imploring eyes peeping out over the wall that the Fat Controller (to all attachment-anxiety-invoking intents and purposes, Henry's own father) has erected in order to teach the poor engine that trying to stay dry is a wicked, wicked business. And then you turn to your hopeful youngster and say: "That's the end. Sleep tight!"
And it's not just Henry who receives the Reverend's fossil-fuelled justice. Sodor experiences its own miniature version of the cold war with the arrival of Bulgy, a red (yes, red, just like a Soviet) double-decker bus who cries "Free the roads!" and anticipates the revolutionary overthrow of rail transport.
Bulgy gets trapped under a bridge, painted green and converted into a henhouse. That's what you get for being a blow-hard socialist. But in terms of class warfare, Bulgy's doom has nothing on what's done to the truculent Troublesome Truck who refuses to learn his place during one of the later stories. Having caused intolerable levels of confusion and delay, the offending blue-collar worker is coupled (see how much I've learnt about railway management from these terrible bedtimes?) between two engines pulling in opposite directions and yanked until he flies apart.
The climactic frame of that story, with a wincing truck-face lying splintered on the ground, is one of the most disturbing in children's literature. Is he dead? Does he suffer? Could he be recombined – and if he was, would he feel the thirst for vengeance against those who tried to murder him?
Such questions of existential enginism are never answered, because by this stage in the series, the Rev was more interested in nerding out over various heritage railways and attempting to preserve them in fiction than he was in maintaining a consistent fictional world of developing characters. And so the number of similar-coloured-but-slightly-differently-proportioned engines begins to puff uncontrollably towards infinity.
That, of course, is where the lure for Mattel lies. Even without the tender pressure of a merchandising arm leaning on him, Awdry was a natural expander of intellectual property – and that was before anyone was gender-savvy enough to note the dearth of girl engines and start multiplying the catalogue by painting eyelashes onto each model and distributing them through the Early Learning Centre.
Of the Awdry original lady characters, the wimpering, speed-averse carriages Annie and Clarabel are worse than no female role models at all, while tramcar Toby's companion Henrietta doesn't even get the dignity of a face as she chugs along behind her master. And while that lot demonstrate their feminine forbearance, we're supposed to celebrate Thomas himself, an incompetent little dipstick of an engine who's constantly bashing into buffers and rolling off the rails.
In fact, the sooner that blue bastard is carted off for scrap, the better for parents everywhere. No more forced laughter as – oh ho ho! – Thomas once again causes a cheeky logistical disaster for his colleagues by running a red light. No more scouring eBay for mythical engines from the narrow-gauge stories.
And no more having to explain to your children that no, diesel isn't actually the fuel of the devil, it's that the Rev W Awdry inexplicably found solid fuel more seductive than Sophia Loren. (Though, had Sophia Loren had a tender and a dome, he may have felt differently.) My children's Thomas days are now behind them, but even so, I'd prefer the dark of a bricked-up tunnel to ever reading Awdry's opus again.
• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfreeFor years, Conservative ministers have pledged to tackle the abuse at the heart of the Paradise Papers. If they won’t do it, Labour will
The revelations in the Paradise Papers leak have showed, once again, that our economy is rigged to the benefit of the powerful, the wealthy and giant corporations. While most of us are expected to – and do – pay the taxes that are due from us, a tiny minority operate under different rules. If you’re rich enough, you can join the same exclusive club – a world of offshore trusts and secretive tax havens, administered by offshore specialists like Appleby’s, the firm at the centre of current revelations. It is one rule for the super-rich and another for the rest of us.
Paradise Papers: Theresa May refuses to promise register of offshore trusts Read more
What the 13.4m documents that comprise the Paradise Papers show, like the Panama Papers before them, is the sheer extent of offshore tax avoidance. The problem is endemic to the global financial system, and Britain is at the centre of it. Investigations over the summer revealed that more than £1 in every £7 that corporations placed in tax havens came through the UK – making it, with the Netherlands, the largest single conduit for corporate avoidance by some distance. Our historical connections to notorious tax havens such as Bermuda and the Channel Islands, along with the City of London’s massive financial infrastructure, make Britain an ideal sluice for finances seeking secrecy and dodging taxes.
This is not about a few individuals seeking to undermine the system, it is the system. It developed over decades, and ending the unfairness of it will require the serious, systematic efforts from committed governments here and across the world. Thanks to its historical links, Britain is uniquely placed to help end the scourge of tax avoidance, freeing up resources for essential public services like the NHS after years of grinding Tory spending cuts. Labour is absolutely committed to stamping out tax avoidance once and for all. We announced before the election the most comprehensive anti-avoidance programme ever published by a major political party in Britain and are pushing this government hard on the issue.
The Tories have attempted some of the same rhetoric. David Cameron called tax avoidance “morally wrong”. His chancellor, George Osborne, called tax avoiders “leeches on society”. Prime Minister Theresa May said companies have a “duty” and “responsibility” to pay their taxes.
But at every step of the way, whatever fine words are said in public, Tory governments consistently seek to undermine and reverse efforts to clamp down on tax dodging.
Play Video 2:18 Lord Ashcroft hides in toilets to avoid questions on tax – video
HMRC set up a specialist unit to investigate “high net worth individuals” in 2009. When the House of Commons public accounts committee examined the unit earlier this year, they discovered it was today bringing in £1bn less than when it was set up. The same report found that of the 72 investigations into wealthy individuals opened by HMRC in the five years to 2016, only one resulted in a prosecution. HMRC has been woefully under-resourced by this government, losing 40% of its staff in a decade.
Tory failure has antagonised our closest international partners. The European parliament has directly criticised this government for obstructing the fight against money-laundering, tax evasion and tax avoidance, with Tory MEPs repeatedly seeking to block anti-avoidance measures. Osborne’s changes to the “controlled foreign company” regime – allowing multinationals a further tax loophole through which to funnel funds – has been placed under investigation by the European commission.
Despite promises made by David Cameron as far back as 2013 – and despite her rhetoric upon becoming prime minister – Theresa May is today pointedly refusing to back a full, public register of offshore companies and trusts. Campaigners have demanded this as an essential step towards shining a light on the activities of tax dodgers and the structures they exploit. Yet successive Conservative ministers have now spent four years rowing back from Cameron’s promise.
This year’s finance bill contained important amendments, tabled by Labour, to secure full transparency for offshore trusts. But the Tories voted them down, and preferred instead to keep protections in place for the ludicrous, anachronistic “non-dom” tax status that means someone born, living, and working here need never pay the full rate of tax.
Again and again, the Tories have failed to act on avoidance and have blocked the efforts of others. The only person who seems to believe the Tories are serious about tackling avoidance is Theresa May, who vainly clings to her “impossible to corroborate” figure for extra taxes collected by her government. Yet her own senior colleagues and associates now have serious questions to answer after the Paradise Papers revelations.
Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite's hidden wealth Read more
Lord Ashcroft is a former deputy chair of the Conservative party and one of the Tories’ biggest donors, reportedly handing over half a million pounds to the Conservatives for this year’s general election campaign. He let it be known, as a condition of receiving his peerage, that he had given up his non-dom status. But he is named in the Paradise Papers as receiving $200m from his offshore trust in the tax haven of Bermuda.
Was Lord Ashcroft subject to proper due diligence checks before his donation was accepted by the Tories? Can the Conservatives assure us that he was paying taxes on his considerable wealth while he was a major donor to the Tory party? HMRC needs to investigate the amount of tax paid by Lord Ashcroft, and clarify his non-dom status. But beyond that we need a full public inquiry into aggressive tax avoidance and UK companies’ and individuals’ role in it.
There is the faint smell of venality hanging over this affair and this government that will only be cleared by a credible investigation through a public inquiry. But if this government is not prepared to take the action needed to end the scourge of tax avoidance, it must step aside for a Labour government that will.
• John McDonnell MP is shadow chancellor of the exchequerSir Alex Ferguson says football would become a “shambles” if more technology was introduced into the game beyond the goalline technology brought in at the start of last season.
The former Manchester United manager, who clashed with referees on many occasions during his time at Old Trafford, believes any additional technology would be detrimental to the flow of the game, though, and would also undermine the officials in charge.
“Technology will advance the game, I suppose, but you can’t have too many things because then it takes a lot of power away from the referees at which case it becomes a bit of a shambles because the game is stop-start, stop-start and you cannot have that,” Ferguson told the New York radio station SiriusXM FC.
“Goal-line technology is fine. Let’s just leave it there. I don’t think you can introduce it for things they are talking about like free-kicks or yellow and red cards. I think it becomes really difficult.”The Prime Minister took some of the UK's top hackers and data experts with him to India this week. David McCandless was with them
This week, I was lucky enough to accompany UK Prime Minister's delegation to India.
I was part of a small contingent of politically active programmers and civic-minded dataheads out to explore links between tech, transparency and community-based democracy in India. The raw stuff of David Cameron's 'Big Society' initiative.
(To the businessmen, journos and politicos in the delegation, we were known simply as "The Hackers" - an image we played up by sometimes rebelliously removing our ties)
The key event of the trip was a hackday hosted by Google India in the southern central city of Bangalore.
I have to confess a slight colonial attitude going into the meet. Thinking of the UK as a great hacking nation and leading data port, I was expecting to be helping the collected Indian IT professionals and activists improve their skills and give them fresh ideas on how to bootstrap their democracy.
However, our Indian counterparts very quickly astonished us with brilliant and powerful data projects and grass roots hacks using simple tools and technologies to solve everyday civic issues. Some of which I wanted to exhibit here.
Bus Map Hack
Information designer Arun Ganesh was frustrated by the bus maps in his native Chennai.
Chennai's bus map goes from this…
The official map was incomplete and incomprehensible - and had been 'under construction' for six years.
Passionate about maps and geo-mapping, Arun took it upon himself to design a new map to help the enormous number of people (Chennai has a population of over 4 million) who used the buses every day. Unfortunately, he faced a major challenge: over 5,000 separate buses & bus routes.
… to this
So he turned to crowd-sourcing on the web to gather data on all the routes. Local travellers poured timetables and bus details into his app. And in just 3 days he had compiled enough data to create a fresh map with a clean comprehensible design. And an accompanying interactive app BusRoutes.in for painless route planning.
Then he went further. Using the data - and a fair walking distance of 500 metres - he visualised the areas covered by all the bus routes. The resulting heatmap instantly and cleverly reveals which areas of the city are poorly served by the bus network.
Karnataka Learning Partnership
Education is a big issue in India, where close to 35% of the population are illiterate. The Karnataka Learning Partnership works to improve government schools in Karnataka region by running literacy, maths and library-use programs across the southern Indian state.
Karnataka schools monitored
Mashing Googlemaps and their detailed data through a web interface, the Akshara Foundation provides a dynamic monitoring and look up service for the quality of schools in each area. It's not unlike the recently launched SchooloScope here in the UK.
(Please note: the site is in beta and not live yet. You can see their work at blog.klp.org.in.)
National Election Watch
Using information liberated by the 2006 Right to Information Act in India, Nationalelectionwatch.org tracks the backgrounds of every single politician in India. An incredible feat given the enormity and intricacies of Indian democracy.
Over 1200 NGOs work to collect data from affidavits filed by the candidates on their financial, criminal and educational background. The myneta.info website acts as an instant power check on a system unfortunately tainted by widespread corruption and bribery.
The crime-o-meter
Pages on particularly criminal MPs feature a 'crime dial' visualisation to get the message across.
Missed Calls
Despite a thriving tech-sector, India still has relatively low internet uptake. Just 0.05% of the 1.2 billion population are active internet users. Compared to around 40% in the UK and 29% in China.
But nearly half the population own mobile phones. So SMS and missed calls have become a dominant form of free information exchange, especially when ingeniously hacked together.
In a typical hacked service, information providers set up phone numbers. Information seekers phone the number and then immediately hang up, registering a'missed call'. The information provider then sends them an SMS with the info they might be seeking. Carpenter jobs or internet cafes in the locality, for example.
Ironically, lax privacy protection - by our standards - in the country actually improves this service. While banned here, triangulation of mobile signals to determine the location of a call is freely permitted in India. So services are able to text back localised information. All for free.
Hacktastic!
Thanks to Harry Metcalfe at TellThemWhatYouThink.Org, Tim Green from DemocracyClub.org.uk, Edmund von der Burg at YourNextMp.com, and Pranesh Prakash at the Centre for Internet and Society for their help and input.
About David McCandless
I run the website InformationIsBeautiful.net, dedicated to visualising information, ideas, stories and data.
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A Statistics Canada study of public confidence in Canadian institutions during 2013 and 2014, released this morning, reveals that only a minority of Canadians trust media, Federal Parliament, and major corporations.
The findings show that 40 per cent of Canadians are confident in media, 38 per cent are confident in Federal Parliament, and 30 per cent are confident in major corporations. Only one out of ten people, or fewer, regard these institutions with a “great deal of confidence.”
The survey asked Canadians their confidence in the police, the school system, banks, the justice system and courts, media, Federal Parliament, and major corporations.
Residents of the Maritimes reported some of the least confidence in Federal Parliament, while residents of Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec reported the most confidence.
In British Columbia, confidence in every institution ranked lower than the provincial average, with the exception of media, which was on par with the provincial average.
Out of all the institutions, the police ranked the highest in public confidence across the country.
Some six out of ten Canadians stated they were confident in the school system, banks, and the justice system and courts.
In general, women, older Canadians, visible minorities, Canadians with a household income of $80,000 or more, and immigrants were more likely to express confidence in government and institutions.
Residents of Toronto and Calgary generally expressed more confidence in institutions compared to other cities, with residents of Toronto having reported the most confidence in the justice system and courts, banks, and Federal Parliament, as well as higher than average confidence in major corporations.
On the other side of the scale, confidence was the lowest in Quebec’s metropolitan areas, with residents of Montreal having reported lower than average confidence in the police, the school system, banks, the justice system and courts, and major corporations.
[Photo Credit: joiseyshowaa]Acting Detective Inspector Luke Peachey, Officer in Charge of the Rockhampton Criminal Investigation Branch said a team of detectives and intelligence officers were working around the clock to find those responsible for a recent spate of generator thefts in the disaster declared Rockhampton area.
“We are determined to bring to justice those responsible for these irresponsible and dangerous thefts.
“It is beyond belief that in a time when the community of Rockhampton is pulling together, helping each other out, that some people think it is okay to steal much needed and invaluable generators.
“Some of these have been stolen from intersections where the possibility of serious crashes due to traffic lights being out remains high.
“Others have been stolen from businesses and while some of these thefts appear to be opportunistic it would appear that others may be more targeted and organised.
“And while we have a number of positive lines of investigation underway at the moment, and have suspects in our sights, I would still appeal to members of the public to |
to 2017. But by 2018, however, commuters would be paying an average of 8 per cent more per journey.
The reforms would mark the end of commuters being able to travel for free after they have paid for eight journeys or spent $60 on fares in a week.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Jan. 7, 2017, 9:03 AM GMT / Updated Jan. 7, 2017, 9:22 AM GMT / Source: People By Ed Flanagan
BEIJING – As smog levels in northern China reach historic levels, millions are learning to live with what has been dubbed “airpocalypse.”
“Physically, if I don’t wear a [face] mask when I go out I feel dizzy and have problems breathing,” Jiang Yuwei, 23, a student at Beijing Foreign Studies University told NBC News. “Even if I wear a mask, I still feel quite depressed. During smoggy days, my mood is ruined and that I don’t want to go out or work.”
As many as 32 cities in northern China were under “red alert,” the most severe pollution warning in the country’s four-tier system, earlier this week. Another 27 cities, including Beijing, were under “orange alert.”
People wearing masks dance at a square during a polluted day in Fuyang, Anhui province,on Jan. 3. Reuters
PHOTOS: China Issues Red Alert Amid Heavy Smog
China uses the Air Quality Index as a measuring stick for gauging the level of air pollution. The levels go from 0-500 and measure six atmospheric pollutants, including sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and ozone among others. Once the Air Quality Index surpasses 200 for three or more days, it’s an “orange alert”; once it’s surpassed 300 for two consecutive days or 500 for any one 24-hour period, a city is under “red alert” and Chinese authorities recommend all physical outdoor activity be suspended.
The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency considers an Air Quality Index between 0-50 to be “Good.”
Since the smog alert was raised on Dec. 31, Beijing has skirted on the edge of 300 and regularly surpassed it as it did on Jan. 3 when the Air Quality Index breached 700.
For comparison, the Air Quality Index measured by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Jan. 6 was at 298, considered “Very Unhealthy,” on the same day in New York City the Air Quality Index measured 43 or “Good.”
Winter is typically the most polluted season in China because the country burns more coal to power heaters. Manufacturers also often increase production ahead of the Chinese New Year, this year it will be on Jan. 28, also increasing pollution levels. Cold air inversions during the winter months can also trap smog lower to the surface.
Cities under red alert must take measures to limit pollution — like limiting the number of cars on the roads and halting construction and factory production. Schools are also closed while residents are urged to stay in-doors and avoid physical outdoor activity.
A woman wearing a mask walks past a construction site as smog continues to choke Beijing on Jan. 6, 2017. Ng Han Guan / AP
For Maggie Li, the mother of a 5-year-old kindergartner in Beijing, every morning in 2017 has started with the same question: How do I get my child safely to school?
"There is nothing else I can do, I put a mask on my boy, but he was so frustrated because he could hardly breathe,” Li told NBC News.
Li bemoaned that the pollution has only grown worse over the years. “I've been living here in Beijing for 40 years, so it is really hard for me to leave. But I do miss the blue skies from when I was a kid, the blue sky that my kid barely sees."
Short, intense periods of bad air are commonplace in Beijing — but the fact that city has now been under “orange alert” since Dec. 31 is frustrating locals.
“I think it is pathetic that we have to purify the air with our own lungs, or wait for the wind,” said Beijing resident Xu Huiren. “The smog has been here since October and nothing is really improved till now. I feel like nobody is working for environmental protection.”
Even Chinese state media has been critical over the smog, with the reliably nationalist Global Times newspaper noting in an article on Jan. 4 that, “the heavy smog has also been corroding the government’s credibility.”
Beijing is well aware of the growing public backlash on air pollution. It is currently in the third year of a public campaign against smog as it tries to walk back environmental damage caused by three decades of breakneck economic development.
While organizations like Greenpeace report some progress has been made in cleaning up the air, China’s own Ministry of Environmental Protection reports nearly 62% of Chinese cities are still coping with severe air pollution.
In a nod to the growing concerns of parents in the region and the outrage starting to spill into Chinese society, the Beijing city government announced Jan. 6 in local media that a new initiative was being started to fund the installation of air purifiers in kindergartens, primary and middle schools in the capital. The move will likely mollify families, many of whom have already invested thousands of dollars in their own home air purifying systems and masks to combat pollution at home.
Despite the air pollution and the need for extreme precautionary measures, many — like the student Jiang who wears a face mask — plan to stay in Beijing because job prospects are still good.
“Today I just want to work hard and have no intention of leaving Beijing,” said Jiang. “But in the future when I have children if there is no sign of environment improvement here, I will consider moving somewhere else.”
NBC News’ Dawn Liu and Sami Tseng contributed to this report.Illini Bird Fanciers Bird Fairs
We sponsor and conduct two major bird fairs in Springfield, IL each year, the Illini Bird Fanciers Spring Bird Fair and the Illini Bird Fanciers Fall Bird Fair.
Illini Bird Fanciers 2019 Bird Fair Calendar Sunday, May 19, 2019 9am-4pm - Illini Bird Fanciers 2019 Spring Bird Fair - Illinois State Fairgrounds Illinois Building Sunday, September 15, 2019 9am-4pm - Illini Bird Fanciers 2019 Fall Bird Fair - Illinois State Fairgrounds Illinois Building
We email a fair announcement and reminder to our IBF Bird Fair Email List subscribers at two weeks and again two days before our spring and fall bird fairs. You may add or remove yourself, or check your subscription status here. Be sure to select both Spring and Fall Fair Reminders.
Our bird fairs feature a wide variety of pet birds for sale by professional and hobbyist breeders as well as specialty vendors offering extensive selections of cages, bird foods and feeders, breeding nests and boxes, bird toys and related bird keeping accessories.
Among the diverse selection of birds available for sale at our bird fairs you are likely to find Macaws, Cockatoos, Amazons, African Greys, Eclectus, Ringnecks, Caiques, Senegals, Pionus, Rosellas, Conures, Quakers, Love Birds, Linnies, Parrotlets, Cockatiels, Parakeets, Canaries, Doves, Quail, and numerous varieties of Finches. Many of the professional and hobbyist breeders vending at our shows hand raise companion birds, so if you are searching for that special bundle of love don't miss our bird fairs.
Whether you are looking to increase your flock, are shopping for larger or additional cages, want to enhance your bird's health and well being with premium foods and entertaining toys, need aviculture advice from the experts, or just enjoy visiting with a fabulous variety of pet and companion birds, we guarantee you will appreciate and enjoy our bird fairs!
To better accommodate additional vendors and increased attendance by the public at our popular bird fairs, we have expanded our Illini Bird Fanciers Spring and Fall Bird Fairs into the 12,272 square foot Illinois Building auditorium, a larger venue and newer facility at the Illinois State Fairgrounds.
[ View Street Map ] [ Fairgrounds Map ]
Our 2019 bird fairs will be bigger and better than ever, with even more vendors and spacious free on-site parking with easy access for visitors and vendors alike.
An on site food vendor will serve breakfast sandwiches, muffins and rolls for breakfast, sandwiches, hot dogs and fries for lunch, snack items and beverages during our fairs.
Illini Bird Fanciers information specialists will be on hand at our aviculture booth to answer questions and provide experienced advice about the needs of pet birds and properly caring for them.
Be sure and check out our silent auction booth throughout the day for opportunities to bid on and win bargains of bird related and other items donated by our members and participating members of the Springfield area business community.
A transfer tent to circumvent escape accidents while transferring flighted birds between cages or carriers will be provided.
General admission to our Bird Fairs is only $3 with no charge for children 12 years of age or younger. Join Illini Bird Fanciers before or at our bird fairs for free admission among the many other benefits of membership.
Illini Bird Fanciers Bird Fair Vendor Opportunities
Vendor space for our 2019 Spring Bird Fair is limited. Please contact our bird fair manager Richie Sandage at (217)-414-9377 regarding available space, vendor fees, our bird fair policies and other IBF bird fair related questions.
We feature a mix of both professional and hobbyist breeders and vendors at our bird fairs. Our established fair vendors are awarded priority advanced booking for future fairs, and most return to participate in our annual fairs year after year. As a result of changing and increasing the size of our venue to the Illinois Building at the Illinois State Fairgrounds, we are now able to offer a limited number of unreserved bookings to additional vendors.
Our bird fair vendors pay a per space fee and all vendor participation and applications are subject to approval by our fair manager. An 8x8 foot vendor space at our upcoming 2019 Spring Bird Fair furnished with one 6-foot table and two chairs is only $40 if paid by May 12th, 2019. Electrical power and additional 6-foot tables are available. Vendor applications must be submitted and approved in advance - consult our vendor application for further details and information.
Illini Bird Fanciers 2019 Spring Bird Fair Vendor Application
Out-of-town vendors needing a motel that accepts pet birds and that also provides a rate discount to our bird fair vendors may contact:
Howard Johnson Inn and Suites
1701 J David Jones Parkway
Springfield, Illinois
(217) 541-8762About
Pedobear is a cartoon mascot that became a well-known icon through its usage on 4chan to signal moderators and other users that illegal pornographic content had been posted. Due to the widespread nature of its application, Pedobear has been often misinterpreted as a symbol of pedophilia and lolita complex, especially in the news media and law enforcement agencies.
Origin
くまくま━━━━━━ヽ（ ・(ｪ)・ ）ノ━━━━━━!!
The character known today as Pedobear used to be simply known as "Kumar" or "Kumā" (bear) on the Japanese textboard 2channel. It originated as an ASCII art image created by ぶる ~ 3, who was instrumental in starting an emoticon-only board on 2ch. One of the earliest 2ch threads with this ASCII was posted on February 27th, 2003. The bear would be posted as a reaction to threads where the original poster would be fishing for attention, as a way to highlight the thread was an obvious troll.
The ASCII character gradually evolved to encompass several lines instead of just one, before becoming a drawn character, popular enough to be turned into papercraft.
Spread
Due to 4chan's anonymous environment, people tend to act without fear of retribution. Because of this, there are the occasional pedophiles swapping Child Pornography, or CP on the site.
Pedobear had become associated with pedophilia as early as February 2005 when it was defined on Urban Dictionary as a character used on hentai “lolikon” [sic] boards and on 4chan. Some of the earliest threads with Pedobear photoshopped into photos of young girls date back to February 10th, 2006, archived via screenshot, and November 29th, 2006.
Pedobear.org was created on January 14th, 2008 hosting a pedobear image gallery and shop. DesuToys has sold a Pedobear plush since early 2009. Also that year, Pedobear was voted Miley Cyrus's number 1 fan. In February 2010, the Times of Malta reported that a graffiti artist had stenciled Pedobear on to billboards advertising the Pope's trip to Malta. The stenciler was never found, but the story about the incident brought over 300,000 readers to the Times of Malta in two months. Since its appearance in the media and blog coverage, Pedobear has been frequently misinterpreted as a symbol of pedophilia.
Various Examples
Notable Appearances
Polish Newspaper: Vancouver Olympics Mascot
On July 3rd, 2009, blogger Michael Barrick created a composite image depicting Pedobear grouped together with fan art of the cartoon mascots of the Vancouver Winter Olympics created by artist Angela Melick. On Thursday, February 4th, 2010 Polish newspaper The Gazeta Olsztynska mistakenly used the image for a front page story about the Olympics in Vancouver.
Doubt Parody
On July 13th, 2009, CollegeHumor.com produced a short parody of the film Doubt starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The Parody placed Pedobear in the role of the priest.
Florida Newspaper: Pedobear in Computer Parts Ad
On March 22nd, 2011, Urlesque posted a photograph of a coupon book advertisement for a Florida-based computer parts distribution service called "CP Distributor." Whether the inclusion of Pedobear was intentional or accidental remains unclear, but the combination of anti-child pornography mascot and the "CP Distributor" seems highly exploitable.
University Dormitory Prank
On September 6th, 2011, Redditor noahhk submitted a post to AskReddit seeking help after his dorm’s residential director brought him into a disciplinary meeting for pranking his dormmates by placing a printout of Pedobear on an elevator door.
According to the OP (original poster), the director called in the campus police, who went onto investigate the meaning of Pedobear on the Internet and came to believe it was a symbol that directly supported pedophiles. The OP also quoted one of the officers who told him that his prank is "as offensive as posting swastikas all over the walls, it’s the same thing." Almost a month later, Redditor noahhk submitted a follow-up post noting that he was initially charged for disorderly conduct and indecent conduct by the school's Judicial Affairs Office, but they were eventually dropped after he cleared up the confusion with the residential director.
TicketCity Bowl Match: Penn State vs. Houston
During the post-season TicketCity Bowl college football match held between Penn State and Houston on January 2nd, 2012, a Houston fan dressed in a Pedobear costume was seen tailgating in the parking lot as well as in the stadium. Organized as a prank by Houston supporters on the Texas Longhorns fan site Shaggy Bevo, the costume was aimed at the long-time Penn State football team coach Joe Paterno, who was fired from his post in December 2011 following a sexual abuse scandal involving one of Paterno's assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.
Donning a sign with Penn State's Nittany Lion emblem and a message that read "Keep Quiet and Don't Tell Anyone," the fan was allowed to enter the stadium and even seen on the Jumbotron, as reported by sports blog Deadspin on January 2nd, 2011.
Jerry Sandusky Trial
On June 20th, 2012, an unidentified individual dressed as Pedobear showed up at the Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, where former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky's child molestation trial took place. The mascot's seemingly inevitable appearance was quickly recognized by Ben Jones, one of the Penn State students on the scene, who then tweeted a picture of Pedobear interacting with news reporters outside the courthouse:
Because this is what today has amounted to. The Pedobear Presser. twitpic.com/9ylycd — Ben Jones (@Ben_Jones88) June 20, 2012
Later that same day, photographs of Pedobear ouside the courthouse were featured on various internet culture websites like Deadspin, Mashable and Huffington Post, as well as sports news blogs like Bleacher Report and Big Lead Sports among others.
Kit Kat's Facebook Announcement
On July 19th, 2012, Nestle's chocolate candy brand Kit Kat uploaded an Instagram photo of a man in a bear suit resembling Pedobear via its Facebook page to announce the launch of its official Instagram account. The similarity in appearance was immediately pointed out by Facebook commenters and the post was taken down shortly after.
A spokeswoman for Nestle Australia and New Zealand told the Sydney Morning Herald that they had never heard of Pedobear and did not intend for the photo to represent him. The incident was covered on Mashable, the Huffington Post, Gawker and Gizmodo Australia.
Search Interest
Search for Pedobear peaked in February 2010, when images of the character were stenciled onto the Pope's billboards in Italy.
External ReferencesWind back the clock half a century, and you’d find yourself amid the heyday of British engineering and design. The likes of Jaguar, MG, Triumph, Aston Martin and countless others were coming up with new and daring sports cars by the dozen – some which go for record fees at auction today.
Given the fondness for the era, it’s no surprise that when Auto Express ran a poll asking our readers which legendary car they’d most want to see resurrected, the MGB emerged as the clear favourite.
• Most wanted car - MGB roadster
The original MGB remains one of the great icons of early British sports cars and a pillar of the nation’s automotive history. The roadster first saw daylight in 1962, powered by a raspy 1.8-litre four-cylinder petrol engine, good for 94bhp and 145Nm of torque.
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As with its Midget, MG chose to build the MGB around a monocoque structure, instead of the more traditional body-on-frame design, making the car lighter and more rigid – this resulted in excellent steering and handling.
As sales began to grow, more models appeared. A fixed-roof MGB GT penned by Pininfarina joined the ranks in 1965 with a sloping roof structure, while the MGC saw a straight-six cylinder engine replacing the in-line four in the late sixties. A MGB GT V8, with an eight-cylinder engine from Rover, hit the roads during the early seventies, too.
The front-engined sports car was also ideal for motorsport. MGBs have graced the special stages, competed at the Targa Florio in Sicily and survived endurance stints at Germany’s fearsome Nurburgring.
For 18 years, the MGB came off the line at the Abingdon plant in Oxfordshire, with over half a million models finding new homes. The MGB remains MG’s best selling car to date.
It’s now over 30 years since the last MGB rolled off the line and with the brand now making a comeback in the UK with the MG3 and MG6, we wondered what an MGB might look like if it was reimagined for the modern era. To find out, Auto Express joined the UK MG Car Club and laid down the challenge to the next crop of design talent at Staffordshire University’s Transport Design course.
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The club was quite clear on what it wanted to see, advising the students that any new MGB must be “the definition of what a British sports car should be”.
• Best sports cars on sale right now
It added: “The success of the MGA, MGB and MGF was down to the balanced mix of modern design and connection with heritage. The new look shouldn’t be retro, but needs to combine the two aforementioned details to create the classic MG look and inviting feel. The modern MGB would ideally have the open headlights that everyone recognises, along with an open top.”
So what did our students come up with and how did the Car Club rate their efforts? Read on as we reveal all...
MG GE (George Eyston) by Phillip Haynes
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Although designer Phillip Haynes sees the modern MGB as an electric roadster, he hasn’t forgotten the car’s roots.
The single bulging headrest-fairing is classic British sports car, while the silver zip-line running across the side, rear and interior is a modern take on the chrome overhangs found on the original MGB. Other details include the use of materials found in cars preceding the original MGB.
Haynes told Auto Express: “The bonnet fastening holds a leather belt; it’s a nod to the MG K3 driven by George Eyston which won the Mille Miglia in 1933, as is the circular decal on the side of the vehicle.”
The sport-inspired two-tone paint job is made all the more attractive with the metallic British flag engraved on top, too.
New MGB by Sam Such
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“I wanted my car to be a traditional roadster,” designer Sam Such explained. “The front-engine rear-wheel-drive layout allows space for a long bonnet, and means the driver would sit almost over the rear wheels – just how a roadster should be.”
He also added a subtle design touch with the styling of the A-pillars. Such explained: “By having the paintwork stop halfway up, it gives the impression that the windscreen has been chopped down, bringing with it a heightened sense of speed.”
MG 6R2 by Jack Carter
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Designer Jack Carter describes his idea as a “track focused car for the road”. He told us: “The 6R2 has a very short rear overhang with large bulging arches to exaggerate its low, wide stance.
“It also features an integrated splitter at the front and a large intake inside the door, creating a very aggressive looking car.” The original MGB was a lightweight sports car, something Carter mimicked.
He added: “There is no roof at all for the car, which helps keep the weight low.”
MG Horizon concept by Dwayne Graafland
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Thanks to a lightweight design and nippy handling, the MGB didn’t fare too badly as a race and rally car. Designer Dwayne Graafland wanted to bring some of this motorsport heritage to his interpretation of the modern MG.
He told us: “The MG Horizon Concept combines the historical roots of previous MGs with the brand’s rally heritage; the foglights have been inspired by those found in early race cars, and the colour combination looks back at the GT rally cars.
“The overriders in the rear are inspired by the 1973 MGB GT, but have been redesigned to fit the Horizon Concept’s design language.”
Graafland also envisions his car using electric power, while the interior keeps to a clean layout, with a touchscreen replacing many of the buttons found in the old car. The original oval lights have been replaced with a more aggressive set of LEDs.
MG Roadster by Kerem Sayan
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Designer Kerem Sayan also referenced MG’s motorsport heritage when designing his car. He said: “I wanted to keep some of the key features of the classic car, like the long bonnet and British racing green, plus bring something new.”
Sayan introduced some innovative aerodynamic designs to his car. He told us: “As a designer, I could not help but to try out something new. There’s some fun features in my design, like an active aero wing on the front bumper, and a gap that feeds air through the grille and exits at the top of the bonnet.”
And what did the MG Car club have to say?
UK MG Car Club general manager Adam Sloman was impressed with the effort that had gone into all of our designs, but had one clear favourite.
He told us: “I really like the Horizon concept. The targa top is back in fashion these days – it looks great on the current Porsche 911. It reminds me of the Midget with its short, squat dimensions.” Sloman also liked the GE, and added: “It is a great looking car, but perhaps a little generic. It needs a bit more character to give it the stand-out factor of the original.”
Which is your favourite MG roadster design? Let us know in the comments section below...It’s been just under seven months since Red Hat became the world’s first $1 billion open-source company. Now the question is who will follow suit and become the next open source company to hit this milestone?
Before sorting through the list of likely candidates, it’s important to define what we’re talking about when we say “$1 billion company.” Primarily, we’re talking actual annual revenue, not market valuation. That’s a key difference, since under the valuation definition, Red Hat would not have been the first billion-dollar open source company; MySQL AB would have had that distinction, when Sun Microsystems bought it for $1 billion in 2008.
And, when we’re talking open source, the idea is a company that bases its business on the sale and distribution of open-source software. Things get a bit tricky here, since many companies could be assigned the “open source” moniker – and some might argue against it. This is particularly true of companies that follow the so-called “open core model,” which typically release a free version of the software as a “community” edition as well as a more feature-rich but closed edition that’s available for a licensing fee or support subscription.
Red Hat is not open core, because even though it sells a “closed” enterprise version, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and helps distribute a free version of the product, Fedora, the truth is that the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is still freely available, so one can, if desired, use RHEL without support.
While it would be possible to reject open-core model companies, the fact is that this would sharply limit the field of potential candidates for the next $1 billion open source company, so I’m going to keep them in mind and note them as such.
Our three top candidates – all private companies – definitely vary in the kind of software they offer, but each one has an opportunity to be the next open-source company that crosses the billion-dollar line.
The Database Candidate
With all the hullaballoo about Big Data (see next candidate), it’s important not to forget there are still a lot of fast and flexible offerings in database-land that still follow the old rules of managing data. Big data doesn’t mean that relational databases are dead; in fact, such databases are more important then ever.
EnterpriseDB is in the business of distributing commercial products built on one such open source database, PostgreSQL, a direct competitor to the MySQL mentioned earlier that was snatched up by Sun and subsequently acquired by Oracle.
On its own, PostgreSQL (or Postgres as geeks call it), is hot right now. The open source Postgres is getting a lot of new features and the pace of development is perceived as faster than its MySQL counterpart. Plus, there is a definite interest in Postgres driven by a movement away from MySQL. While MySQL is still very powerful software, there is a lot of tension in the marketplace about Oracle’s stewardship of that project, since Oracle dropped the ball on several of the open source projects it acquired from Sun and many feel that eventually MySQL will suffer from the same problem, with Oracle either not pursuing development as much as it could or (as some fear) closing MySQL altogether.
While MySQL’s loss is PostgreSQL’s gain, Postgres is getting attention on its own merits. EnterpriseDB, which offers an enterprise version known as Postgres Plus, is making big inroads with customers like Sony Entertainment.
Data on a smaller scale will always be more prevalent than Big Data, which means Postgres and the vendors that package it have a nice, wide market into which to play. That gives EnterpriseDB a clear path to becoming the first $1 billion open source database company.
The Big Data Candidate
Nevertheless, you can’t ignore the hype… Big data is a big driver for commerce right now, and any big data vendor has to be considered for billion-dollar revenue status.
The technology that’s leading the big data charge is the open source data framework known as Apache Hadoop. Hadoop is not a database, but rather a distributed storage tool that enables programmers devise jobs in Java code to search for desired information – without formal database structure.
Hadoop is not the only big data tech, but right now it’s the top technology in the sector. And right now the biggest Hadoop company is Cloudera.
Though MapR and Hortonworks are strong Hadoop contenders, Cloudera has managed to establish an early lead in this sector. Cloudera has developed its own tools to make it easier to seek information from Hadoop stores and is building a rich partner ecosystem to enable different applications of Hadoop-stored data.
If Hadoop continues its rocket-ship rise, it’s not hard to envision Cloudera becoming the first $1 billion open source Big Data company.
The Cloud Computing Candidate
In the world of open source cloud computing, OpenStack is the name that gets the most attention, thanks to the combined marketing prowess of Rackspace, HP, Dell and Red Hat, just to name a few.
But OpenStack is not a company or even a product – it’s a project. Eventually, one of the OpenStack vendors may come up with a commercial product and run with it, but if its someone like Red Hat or HP, they’ve already made their mark. Piston Cloud or SUSE may also succeed as billion-dollar candidates, but right now the OpenStack system is a free-for-all and no one seems to have a commanding lead.
So I’m betting on an open source cloud player that’s not even in the OpenStack ecosystem: Eucalyptus.
Eucalyptus gets the nod because of OpenStack’s lack of product and the fact the other open product in this space, CloudStack, has Citrix as its flagship commercial vendor and it’s not really an open source company. Eucalyptus also gets marks for being very well connected to the Amazon Web Services ecosystem. While you may argue that sticking to AWS frameworks is really not all that open (in fact, I have made that very argument), there’s no denying that AWS is killing in this space and a lot of customers interested in private or hybrid cloud computing are very content to keep swimming in Amazon’s pond.
But there is more to Eucalyptus than being in the right place at the right time. It has got a whip-smart team, led by Marten Mickos, who – in one of those “small world” things – was the CEO of MySQL AB, the same company Oracle now has in its portfolio and was valued at $1 billion upon acquisition.
With all of these stars aligned, Eucalyptus could soon be the first billion-dollar open source cloud computing company.
Sure, other candidates may be in the running for the next billion-dollar open source company. And there is always a chance that someone new, like Big Switch Networks and its virtual networking systems, could come out of nowhere and snatch the title.
But these three candidates, based on what I see right now in the open source world, are presently the most likely contenders for becoming the next $1 billion open source company.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.1. There’s a big difference between “knowing” something and “mastering” it. If you know a scale shape that’s fine, but if you MASTER it then you’ll be able to use it in any situation with ease. Don’t aim to know – aim to master.
2. Start by playing the shape slowly up and down, paying attention to where each note is and what it sounds like. Is the shape similar to any others that you know? What are the differences?
3. Try singing the scale as you play it slowly up and down; see how accurately you can sing the pitches. This is GREAT for developing your fretboard-to-ear connection, which is vital for creating catchy melodies and solos. Once you’ve done that, try singing the scale without playing it!
4. Now, learn the intervals that are present in the scale shape. This is a great way of comparing it to other scales and seeing what the similarities and differences are. For a book on intervals, scales and more, check out Guitar Scales Revealed.
5. Next, try some sequencing. A good one to start with is playing three notes up, and then skipping back down a note, and then playing up another three notes, going down one, etc. This is not only a great way to learn scale shapes, but also a good way to come up with interesting melodies and parts for songs. By this point you should know the scale pretty well; all that’s left is to take it to mastery.
6. Sing a sequence as you play it. If you get good at this, you’ll have great aural skills and be able to create far catchier songs and solos than before.
7. Now comes the fun bit – improvising! Grab a free backing track from www.tomguitar.co.uk/38-free-backing-tracks and get playing. Do this every day – try to make it a habit. It’s great for improving your scale knowledge.
8. Next, improvise while singing every note that you play. This requires you to know the scale shape REALLY well, but once you can do it the benefits are enormous. You’ll be able to play anything you hear in your head (in that scale, at least) immediately, as well as being able to figure out songs by ear. Get good enough, and you’ll be able to write songs and figure out melodies in your head – without even touching the guitar – because your knowledge of how the notes sound is so good. This is where you reach mastery.CLOSE KPD Chief Rausch moves plaque with a Bible verse to a different wall in KPD headquarters after an atheist organization prompted the city to take it down. Calvin Mattheis/News Sentinel
Andrew L. Seidel (Photo: Submitted)
There can never be true freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion. The Rev. Clarence Sexton missed this simple yet powerful fact in his recent guest column, “Our first freedom is a gift from God.” In his op-ed, Sexton argues that the organization I represent, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and our local chapter, are denying his God-given right to express his religion with a Bible verse in a police station. He could not be more wrong.
At the outset, Sexton makes two sizable mistakes. The first freedom contained in our Bill of Rights is not the freedom of religion, but freedom from religion — a secular government. This makes sense because a secular government is a prerequisite for genuine religious freedom. “[T]he rights of conscience... will little bear the gentlest touch of the governmental hand” said Daniel Carroll, a Catholic representative to the Constitutional Convention from Maryland.
The American Constitution is a beautiful and unique document. It was the first godless national charter, deliberately omitting any mention of gods or the divine. Its only original mention of religion was to exclude religion from all requirements to public office in Article VI: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Guest column: Rev. Clarence Sexton: Our first freedom is a gift from God
The Bill of Rights, later amendments to the Constitution, reinforced this mutual exclusion. Religion was to stay out of government and government out of religion.
The Bill of Rights removes certain rights, which all humans possess, from the jurisdiction of the government: freedom of conscience, thought, speech, press, assembly and more. Though we have a representative government where majority often rules, majority rule is irrelevant when it comes to the above rights. The Bill of Rights exists in part to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
Put a bit more simply, America invented the separation of state and church. We ought to be proud of that contribution to the world, not seek to undermine it with pious displays.
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This freedom is a product of the human mind, not a gift from a god. If it is a gift, it was bestowed on us by Americans who fought and died to protect this great nation, from the American Revolution up to today, not handed down from on high. Attributing their sacrifice to God cheapens that sacrifice and diminishes the monumental human achievement that is the American experiment.
Not only is our freedom not a gift from God, but that freedom is guaranteed by a godless document: the U.S. Constitution.
Sexton’s biggest mistake is that he conflates his personal faith with our government. He mistakenly believes that his right to “express our faith” includes the right to display that faith in a government building belonging to we the people. It doesn’t. His right to freely express his faith allows him to display any message about his God on his property or in his church, but he has no right to use the machinery of Knox County to impose his religion on all citizens.
Of course, Sexton and Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch and every citizen of this great nation have freedom of religion, but only because we have a government that is free from religion. And that means that citizens cannot use government offices that they temporarily occupy to promote their personal religion.
The Founding Fathers chose to keep state and church separate because religion is divisive and they were seeking to build a pluralistic nation. They didn’t build that nation or |
action to protect children from the risk of abuse, sometimes for years. Their inaction left these priests in positions where they had ongoing access to children in Catholic schools. It was left to principals and teachers to attempt to manage the risk that these individuals posed to children.
In relation to Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Melbourne, we found that the employment structure, where the parish priest is the employer of the school principal and staff for parish schools, is dysfunctional. There is a risk that having the priest as employer could act as a barrier to people reporting concerns about child sexual abuse. We recommend that parish priests not be the employer of principals and teachers in Catholic schools (Recommendation 16.6).
A common feature of cases we examined regarding Christian Brothers or Marist Brothers was that provincial leaders of these religious orders allowed religious brothers teaching in Catholic schools to remain in positions where they had access to children, or to move to different schools, despite allegations – in some cases numerous allegations – of child sexual abuse being made against them. During the time period considered by our case studies, the highly centralised structures for decision-making within the Marist Brothers and the Christian Brothers contributed to failures to respond appropriately to allegations of child sexual abuse.
Contributing factors in the Catholic Church
We considered a range of factors that may have contributed to the occurrence of child sexual abuse in Catholic institutions or affected institutional responses to such abuse.
Child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and religious may be explained by a combination of psychosexual and other related factors on the part of the individual perpetrator, and a range of institutional factors, including theological, governance and cultural factors. The same theological, governance and cultural factors that contributed to the occurrence of abuse also contributed to the inadequate responses of Catholic institutions to that abuse.
Individual factors
Individual pathology on its own is insufficient to explain child sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy and religious. Rather, a heightened risk of child sexual abuse arises when specific factors in relation to an individual’s psychosexual immaturity or psychosexual dysfunction combine with a range of situational and institutional factors.
Compared with perpetrators of child sexual abuse in the wider community, research suggests that Catholic clergy perpetrators are an atypical group. They tend to begin offending later in life and to be better educated, less antisocial and more likely to have male than female victims.
Factors that may influence whether a priest or religious is susceptible to sexually abusing a child may include confusion about sexual identity, childish interests and behaviour, lack of peer relationships, and a history of having been sexually abused as a child. Further, some clergy and religious perpetrators appear to have been vulnerable to mental health issues, substance abuse and psychosexual immaturity. We heard that personality factors that may be associated with clergy and religious perpetrators include narcissism, dependency, cognitive rigidity and fear of intimacy.
Although most of the perpetrators of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church that we heard about were male adults, and most victims were boys or adolescents, it is a misconception that all perpetrators who sexually abuse children of the same gender as them are samesex attracted. Research suggests that child sexual abuse is not related to sexual orientation: perpetrators can be straight, gay, lesbian or bisexual. Research has indicated that men who identify as heterosexual are just as likely as men who identify as homosexual to perpetrate child sexual abuse. Vatican documents that link homosexuality to child sexual abuse are not in keeping with current psychological evidence or understanding about healthy human sexuality.
Clericalism
Clericalism is at the centre of a tightly interconnected cluster of contributing factors. Clericalism is the idealisation of the priesthood, and by extension, the idealisation of the Catholic Church. Clericalism is linked to a sense of entitlement, superiority and exclusion, and abuse of power.
Clericalism nurtured ideas that the Catholic Church was autonomous and self-sufficient, and promoted the idea that child sexual abuse by clergy and religious was a matter to be dealt with internally and in secret.
The theological notion that the priest undergoes an ‘ontological change’ at ordination, so that he is different to ordinary human beings and permanently a priest, is a dangerous component of the culture of clericalism. The notion that the priest is a sacred person contributed to exaggerated levels of unregulated power and trust which perpetrators of child sexual abuse were able to exploit.
Clericalism caused some bishops and religious superiors to identify with perpetrators of child sexual abuse rather than victims and their families, and in some cases led to denial that clergy and religious were capable of child sexual abuse. It was the culture of clericalism that led bishops and religious superiors to attempt to avoid public scandal to protect the reputation of the Catholic Church and the status of the priesthood.
We heard that the culture of clericalism continues in the Catholic Church and is on the rise in some seminaries in Australia and worldwide.
Organisational structure and governance
The governance of the Catholic Church is hierarchical. We heard that the decentralisation and autonomy of Catholic dioceses and religious institutes contributed to ineffective responses of Catholic Church authorities to child sexual abuse, as did the personalised nature of power in the Catholic Church and the limited accountability of bishops.
The powers of governance held by individual diocesan bishops and provincials are not subject to adequate checks and balances. There is no separation of powers, and the executive, legislative and judicial aspects of governance are combined in the person of the pope and in diocesan bishops. Diocesan bishops have not been sufficiently accountable to any other body for decision-making in their handling of allegations of child sexual abuse or alleged perpetrators. There has been no requirement for their decisions to be made transparent or subject to due process. The tragic consequences of this lack of accountability have been seen in the failures of those in authority in the Catholic Church to respond adequately to allegations and occurrences of child sexual abuse.
The hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church created a culture of deferential obedience in which poor responses to child sexual abuse went unchallenged. Where senior clergy and religious with advisory roles to diocesan bishops or provincials of religious institutes were aware of allegations of child sexual abuse, often they did not challenge or attempt to remedy the inadequate responses of their bishop or provincial, or believed that they could not do so.
The exclusion of lay people and women from leadership positions in the Catholic Church may have contributed to inadequate responses to child sexual abuse. In accordance with contemporary standards of good governance, we encourage the Catholic Church in Australia to explore and develop ways in which its structures and practices of governance may be made more accountable, more transparent, more meaningfully consultative and more participatory, including at the diocesan and parish level. We recommend that the ACBC conduct a national review of the governance and management structures of dioceses and parishes, including in relation to issues of transparency, accountability, consultation and participation of lay men and women (Recommendation 16.7).
We accept that diocesan bishops and provincials of religious institutes are increasingly making use of professional expertise in the management of their various institutions, including in the administration of their responses to child sexual abuse. We also accept that the Catholic education and Catholic community services sectors have increasing lay involvement in their governance, operate professionally and are subject to significant government regulation.
Leadership
In its responses to child sexual abuse, the leadership of the Catholic Church has failed the people of the Catholic Church in Australia, in particular its children. The results of that failure have been catastrophic.
It appears that some candidates for leadership positions have been selected on the basis of their adherence to specific aspects of church doctrine and their commitment to the defence and promotion of the institutional Catholic Church, rather than on their capacity for leadership. This meant that some bishops were ill equipped and unprepared for the challenges of dealing with child sexual abuse and responding to emerging claims. Catholic Church leaders in Australia have prioritised protecting the reputation of the church at the expense of the welfare of individuals when responding to child sexual abuse.
Meaningful and direct consultation with, and participation of, lay people in the appointment of bishops, as well as greater transparency in that process, would make bishops more accountable and responsive to the lay people of the Catholic Church, including in responding to child sexual abuse. We recommend that the ACBC request that the Holy See amend the appointment process for bishops (Recommendation 16.8).
We also recommend that each religious institution in Australia ensure that its religious leaders are provided with leadership training, both before and after their appointment, including in the promotion of child safety (Recommendation 16.36).
Canon law
The disciplinary system imposed by canon law for dealing with clergy and religious who sexually abuse children contributed to the failure of the Catholic Church to provide an effective and timely response to alleged perpetrators and perpetrators. We heard that canon law as it applied to child sexual abuse was cumbersome, complex and confusing. We recommend that the ACBC request that the Holy See amend a number of provisions in canon law.
We recommend that canon law should be amended so that offences related to child sexual abuse are framed as crimes against the child rather than ‘delicts’ against morals or a breach of the obligation to observe celibacy (Recommendation 16.9).
There should be no provision in canon law that attempts to prevent, hinder or discourage compliance with mandatory reporting laws by bishops or religious superiors. While we do not make any findings about the proper interpretation of canon law in relation to mandatory reporting to civil authorities, it appears that during the 1990s and early 2000s, the Holy See considered that bishops were not free to report allegations of child sexual abuse by clergy to civil authorities. However, the Holy See’s approach to mandatory reporting changed significantly in 2010. We recommend that canon law be amended so that the ‘pontifical secret’ does not apply to any aspect of allegations or canonical disciplinary processes relating to child sexual abuse (Recommendation 16.10).
We conclude that the emphasis in canon law on the ‘pastoral approach’, which requires bishops and religious superiors to treat withdrawal from ministry and dismissal from the priesthood or religious life as a ‘last resort’, has been a significant obstacle for bishops and religious superiors who wanted to initiate a canonical disciplinary process. It has also contributed to the mistaken view that child sexual abuse was a forgivable moral failing rather than a crime that should be reported to police. We recommend that canon law be amended to ensure that the ‘pastoral approach’ is not an essential precondition to the commencement of canonical action relating to child sexual abuse (Recommendation 16.11).
Other aspects of the canon law disciplinary system that should be reformed include the statute of limitations (‘prescription’) on initiating a canon law process, given that many victims take years to disclose their experience of abuse (Recommendation 16.12), and the ‘imputability’ defence, which allows responsibility for a delict to be reduced if the individual has a diagnosis of paedophilia (Recommendation 16.13).
A number of the issues we identified have impeded the permanent removal from ministry of priests or religious against whom complaints of child sexual abuse have been substantiated, or the dismissal of priests or religious convicted of offences related to child sexual abuse. We recommend that if a complaint of child sexual abuse against a person in religious ministry is substantiated, the person be permanently removed from ministry. Canon law should be amended to this effect (Recommendations 16.14 and 16.55). We also recommend that canon law be amended to ensure that priests and religious who are convicted of a child sexual abuse-related offence in a civil court are dismissed from the priesthood and/or religious life (Recommendations 16.14 and 16.56).
Further, we recommend that decisions of Vatican Congregations and canonical appeal courts with respect to priests and religious accused of child sexual abuse be published in a timely manner (Recommendation 16.16).
Celibacy
While not a direct cause of child sexual abuse, we are satisfied that compulsory celibacy (for clergy) and vowed chastity (for members of religious institutes) have contributed to the occurrence of child sexual abuse, especially when combined with other risk factors. We acknowledge that only a minority of Catholic clergy and religious have sexually abused children. However, based on research we conclude that there is an elevated risk of child sexual abuse where compulsorily celibate male clergy or religious have privileged access to children in certain types of Catholic institutions, including schools, residential institutions and parishes.
For many Catholic clergy and religious, celibacy is implicated in emotional isolation, loneliness, depression and mental illness. Compulsory celibacy may also have contributed to various forms of psychosexual dysfunction, including psychosexual immaturity, which pose an ongoing risk to the safety of children. For many clergy and religious, celibacy is an unattainable ideal that leads to clergy and religious living double lives, and contributes to a culture of secrecy and hypocrisy. This culture appears to have contributed to some clergy and religious overlooking violations of celibacy and minimising child sexual abuse as forgivable moral lapses committed by colleagues who were struggling to live up to an ideal that for many proved impossible.
We recommend that the ACBC request that the Holy See consider introducing voluntary celibacy for diocesan clergy (Recommendation 16.18). We also recommend that Catholic religious institutes implement measures to address the risks of harm to children and the potential psychological and sexual dysfunction associated with celibacy (Recommendation 16.19). Further, we recommend that, to promote healthy lives for those who choose to be celibate, Catholic Church authorities improve their processes of selection, screening and training of candidates for the clergy and religious life, and their processes of ongoing formation, support and supervision of clergy and religious (Recommendation 16.20).
Selection, screening and initial formation
It is apparent that initial formation practices were inadequate in the past, particularly before the 1970s, in relation to the screening of candidates for admission, preparing seminarians and novices to lead a celibate life, and preparing them for the realities of a life in religious or pastoral ministry. The initial training of priests and religious occurred in segregated, regimented, monastic and clericalist environments, and was based on obedience and conformity. These arrangements are likely to have been detrimental to psychosexual maturity, and to have produced clergy and religious who were cognitively rigid. This increased the risk of child sexual abuse.
Although from the 1970s there have been improvements in the selection, screening and formation of candidates for the priesthood and religious life, it appears that these have largely been implemented in an ad hoc and inconsistent manner. In particular, there is still a lack of consistency between seminaries and houses of religious formation in relation to the selection and screening of candidates. We recommend that the Catholic Church adopt a national protocol for screening candidates and that bishops and religious superiors draw on wide-ranging professional advice in their decision-making in relation to the admission of individuals to ordination or the profession of vows (Recommendations 16.21 and 16.22). We also recommend that guideline policy documents relating to the formation of clergy and religious be revised to explicitly address child sexual abuse and its prevention (Recommendation 16.23).
We also heard that certain models of formation may be instrumental in inculcating a culture of clericalism. We recommend that the ACBC and Catholic Religious Australia conduct a national review of current models of initial formation (Recommendation 16.24).
Oversight, support and ongoing training of people in ministry
It is apparent that Catholic clergy and religious have not received adequate training in relation to professional responsibility, the maintenance of healthy boundaries, and ministerial and professional ethics. It is clear that inadequate preparation for ministry, loneliness, social isolation, and personal distress related to the difficulties of celibacy, have contributed to the sexual abuse of children.
Processes for the management and oversight of clergy and religious in their working ministry have been poor. Bishops and religious superiors have limited capacity to personally oversee the activities of clergy or religious, and, especially within dioceses, ‘middle management’ structures have been inadequate. We heard that there has been a view, particularly on the part of some Catholic clergy, that following ordination they do not need ongoing training. We heard that the Catholic Church in Australia has developed a code of conduct for clergy and religious that includes standards in relation to professional development, professional supervision and appraisal. However, we also heard that most clergy do not fully comply with ongoing formation activities.
Improved and updated policies and practices in relation to the oversight, support and ongoing training of all people in religious and pastoral ministry in the Catholic Church are essential to reducing the risk of child sexual abuse and ensuring better institutional responses to abuse.
We recommend the development and implementation of mandatory national standards to ensure that all people in religious or pastoral ministry in the Catholic Church in Australia undertake regular professional development, undertake professional/pastoral supervision and undergo regular performance appraisals (Recommendation 16.25).
We also heard that specialised programs for the screening, induction, and professional support and supervision of priests and religious recruited from overseas are inadequate. We recommend the creation of targeted programs for these purposes (Recommendation 16.46).
Sacrament of reconciliation (confession)
We are satisfied that the practice of the sacrament of reconciliation (confession) contributed to both the occurrence of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and to inadequate institutional responses to abuse. We heard in case studies and private sessions that disclosures of child sexual abuse by perpetrators or victims during confession were not reported to civil authorities or otherwise acted on. We heard that the sacrament is based in a theology of sin and forgiveness, and that some Catholic Church leaders have viewed child sexual abuse as a sin to be dealt with through private absolution and penance rather than as a crime to be reported to police. The sacrament of reconciliation enabled perpetrators to resolve their sense of guilt without fear of being reported. Also, the sacrament created a situation where children were alone with a priest. In some cases we heard that children experienced sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests in confessionals.
We recommend that any religious institution with a rite of religious confession implement a policy that confession for children be conducted in an open space and in a clear line of sight of another adult (Recommendation 16.48).
We make recommendations in our Criminal justice report (Recommendation 33) and in Volume 7, Improving institutional responding and reporting (Recommendation 7.3) in relation to the introduction of a ‘failure to report’ offence, and amending laws concerning mandatory reporting to child protection authorities to ensure that people in religious ministry are included as a mandatory reporter group. We also recommend that there should be no exemption to obligations to report under mandatory reporting laws or the proposed ‘failure to report’ offence in circumstances where knowledge or suspicions of child sexual abuse are formed on the basis of information received in or in connection with a religious confession (Recommendation 7.4 and Recommendation 35).
During our public hearings on the Catholic Church, it emerged that Catholic archbishops and canon lawyers were unclear about whether information received from a child during the sacrament of reconciliation that they had been sexually abused would be covered by the seal of confession, and about whether absolution could and should be withheld if a person confessed to perpetrating child sexual abuse, until they report themselves to civil authorities. We recommend that the ACBC seek clarification on these matters from the Holy See, and make public any advice it receives (Recommendation 16.26).PVS-Studio is a static code analyzer, that searches for errors and vulnerabilities in programs written in C, C++ and C#. In this article, I am going to uncover the technologies that we use in PVS-Studio analyzer. In addition to the general theoretical information, I will show practical examples of how certain technology allows the detection of bugs.
Introduction
The reason for writing this article, was my report on the open conference ISPRAS OPEN 2016 that took place in the beginning of December, in the main building of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The subject of the report: "The operation principles of PVS-Studio static code analyzer" (presentation in the pptx format)
Unfortunately, the time for the report was very limited, so I had to come up with a very short presentation, and I couldn't cover all the topics I wanted to cover. And so I decided to write this article, where I will give more details on the approaches and algorithms that we use in the development of the PVS-Studio analyzer.
At the moment, PVS-Studio is, in fact, two separate analyzers, one for C++ and another for C#. Moreover, they are written in different languages; we develop the kernel of C++ analyzer in C++, and the C# kernel - in C#.
However, developing these two kernels, we use similar approaches. Besides this, a number of employees participate in the development of both C++ and C # diagnostics at the same time. This is why I won't separate these analyzers any further in this article. The description of the mechanisms will be the same for both analyzers. Of course, there are some differences, but they are quite insignificant for the analyzer overview. If there is a need to specify the analyzer, I will say if I am talking about the C++ analyzer or C#.
The team
Before I get into the description of the analyzer, I will say a couple of words about our company, and our team.
The PVS-Studio analyzer is developed by the Russian company - OOO "Program Verification Systems". The company is growing and developing solely on profit gained from product sales. The company office is located in Tula, 200 km to the south of Moscow.
The site: http://www.viva64.com/en/pvs-studio/.
At the time of writing this article, the company has 24 employees.
To some people it may seem that one person would be enough to create the analyzer. However, the job is much more complicated and requires a lot of work-years. The maintenance and further development of the product requires even more work-years.
We see our mission in the promoting the methodology of static code analysis. And of course, to get financial reward, developing a powerful tool that allows the detection of a large number of bugs at the earliest stages of development.
Our achievements
To spread the word about PVS-Studio, we regularly check open source projects, and describe the findings in our articles. At the moment, we have checked about 270 projects.
Since the moment we started writing articles we have found more than 10 000 errors, and reported them to the authors of the projects. We are quite proud of this, and I should explain why.
If we divide the number of bugs found by the number of projects, we get quite an unimpressive number: 40 errors per project. So I want to highlight an important point; these 10000 bugs are a side effect. We have never had the goal to find as many errors as possible. Quite often, we stop when we find enough errors for an article.
This shows quite well the convenience, and the abilities, of the analyzer. We are proud that we can simply take different projects and start searching for bugs immediately, almost without the need to set up the analyzer. If it weren't so, we wouldn't be able to detect 10000 bugs just as a side effect of writing the articles.
PVS-Studio
Briefly, PVS-Studio is:
More than 340 diagnostics for C, C++
More than 120 diagnostics for C#
Windows;
Linux;
Plugin for Visual Studio
Quick Start (compilation monitoring)
Various additional abilities, integration with SonarQube and IncrediBuild for example.
Why C and C++
The C and C++ languages are extremely effective and graceful. But in return they require a lot of attention, and deep knowledge of the subject. This is why static analyzers are so popular among C and C++ developers. Despite the fact that the compilers and development tools are also evolving, nothing really changes. I will explain what I mean by that.
We did a check of the first Cfront compiler, written in 1985 in honor of the 30-year anniversary. If you are interested, you may find more details in the article: "Celebrating the 30-th anniversary of the first C++ compiler: let's find the bugs in it".
There, we found the following bug:
Pexpr expr::typ(Ptable tbl) {.... Pclass cl;.... cl = (Pclass) nn->tp; cl->permanent=1; // <= use if (cl == 0) error('i',"%k %s'sT missing",CLASS,s); // <= test....
First, the pointer cl is dereferenced, and only then it is verified against NULL.
30 years passed.
Here is the modern Clang compiler, not Cfront. And here is what PVS-Studio detects in it:
.... Value *StrippedPtr = PtrOp->stripPointerCasts(); PointerType *StrippedPtrTy = dyn_cast<PointerType>(StrippedPtr->getType()); // <= use if (!StrippedPtr) // <= test return 0;....
There is a saying: "Bugs. C++ bugs never change". The pointer StrippedPtr is dereferenced first, and then verified against NULL.
The analyzers are extremely helpful for C and C++ languages. This is why we started developing PVS-Studio analyzer for these languages, and will continue doing so. There is a high probability that PVS-Studio won't have less job in the future, as these languages are really popular, and dangerous, at the same time.
Why C #
Of course, in some regard, C# is more thought-out, and safer than C++. Still, it is not perfect and it also causes a lot of hassle for programmers. I'll give only one example, because it is a topic for a separate article.
Here is our old good buddy - the error we described before. A fragment from the project PowerShell:
.... _parameters = new Dictionary<string, ParameterMetadata>( other.Parameters.Count, // <= use StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); if (other.Parameters!= null) // <= test....
First, the reference other.Parameters is used to get the property Count, and only then verified against null.
As you can see, in C# the pointers are now called references, but it didn't really help. If we touch upon the topic of typos, they are made everywhere, regardless of the language. In general, there is a lot to do in C#, so we continue developing this direction.
What's next?
For now we don't have exact plans on what language we want to support next. We have two candidates: Objective-C and Java. We are leaning more towards Java, but it is not decided yet.
Technologies we do not use in PVS-Studio
Before speaking about the inner structure of PVS-Studio, I should briefly state what you won't find there.
PVS-Studio has nothing to do with the Prototype Verification System (PVS). It's just a coincidence. PVS-Studio is a contraction of 'Program Verification Systems' (OOO "Program Verification Systems").
PVS-Studio does not use formal grammar for the bug search. The analyzer works on a higher level. The analysis is done on the basis of the derivation tree.
PVS-Studio does not use the Clang compiler to analyze C/C++ code; we use Clang to do the preprocessing. More details can be found in the article: "A few words about interaction between PVS-Studio and Clang". To build the derivation tree, we use our own parser that was based on the OpenC++ library, which has been quite forgotten now in the programming world. Actually there is almost nothing left from this library and we implement the support of new constructions ourselves.
When working with C# code we take Roslyn as the basis. The C# analyzer of PVS-Studio checks the source code of a program, which increases the quality of the analysis compared with binary code analysis (Common Intermediate Language).
PVS-Studio does not use the string matching and regular expressions. This way, is a dead-end. This approach has so many disadvantages that it's impossible to create a more or less qualitative analyzer based on it, and some diagnostics cannot be implemented at all. This topic is covered in more details in the article "Static analysis and regular expressions".
Technologies we use in PVS-Studio
To ensure high quality in our static analysis results, we use advanced methods of source code analysis for the program and its control flow graph: let's see what they are.
Note. Further on, we'll have a look at several diagnostics, and take a look at the principles of their work. It is important to note that I deliberately omit the description of those cases when the diagnostic should not issue warnings, so as not to overload this article with details. I have written this note for those who didn't have any experience in the development of an analyzer: don't think that it's as simple as it may seem after reading the material below. It is only 5% of the task to create the diagnostic. It's not hard for the analyzer to complain about suspicious code, it's much harder to not complain about the correct code. We spend 95% of our time "teaching" the analyzer to detect various programming techniques, which may seem suspicious for the diagnostic, but in reality they are correct.
Pattern-based analysis
Pattern-based analysis is used to search for fragments in the source code that are similar to known error containing code. The number of patterns is huge, and the complexity of their detection varies greatly.
Moreover, in some cases, the diagnostics use empirical algorithms to detect typos.
For now, let's consider two simplest cases that are detected with the help of the pattern-based analysis. The first simple case:
if ((*path)[0]->e->dest->loop_father!= path->last()->e->....) { delete_jump_thread_path (path); e->aux = NULL; ei_next (&ei;); } else { delete_jump_thread_path (path); e->aux = NULL; ei_next (&ei;); }
PVS-Studio warning: V523 The 'then' statement is equivalent to the 'else' statement. tree-ssa-threadupdate.c 2596
The same set of actions is performed regardless of the condition. I think everything is so simple that it requires no special explanation. By the way, this code fragment is not taken from a student's coursework, but from the code of the GCC compiler. The article "Finding bugs in the code of GCC compiler with the help of PVS-Studio" describes those bugs we found in GCC.
Here is the second simple case (the code is taken from the FCEUX project):
if((t=(char *)realloc(next->name,strlen(name+1))))
PVS-Studio warning: V518 The'realloc' function allocates strange amount of memory calculated by'strlen(expr)'. Perhaps the correct variant is'strlen(expr) + 1'. fceux cheat.cpp 609
The following erroneous pattern gets analyzed. Programmers know that when they allocate memory to store a string, it is necessary to allocate the memory for a character, where the end of line character will be stored (terminal null). In other words, programmers know that they must add +1 or +sizeof(TCHAR). But sometimes they do it rather carelessly. As a result, they add 1 not to the value, which returns the strlen function, but to a pointer.
This is exactly what happened in our case. strlen(name)+1 should be written instead of strlen(name+1).
There will be less memory allocated than is necessary, because of such an error. Then we'll have the access out of the allocated buffer bound, and the consequences will be unpredictable. Moreover, the program can pretend that it works correctly, if the two bytes after the allocated buffer aren't used thanks to mere luck. With a worse-case scenario, this defect can cause induced errors that will show up in a completely different place.
Now let's have a look at the analysis of the medium complexity level.
The diagnostic is formulated like this: we warn that after using the as operator, the original object is verified against null instead of the result of the as operator.
Let's take a look at a code fragment taken from CodeContracts:
public override Predicate JoinWith(Predicate other) { var right = other as PredicateNullness; if (other!= null) { if (this.value == right.value) {
PVS-Studio warning: V3019 Possibly an incorrect variable is compared to null after type conversion using 'as' keyword. Check variables 'other', 'right'. CallerInvariant.cs 189
Pay attention, that the variable other gets verified against null, not the right variable. This is clearly a mistake, because further the program works with the right variable.
And in the end - here is a complex pattern, related to the usage of macros.
The macro is defined in such a way that the operation precedence inside the macro is higher than the priority outside of the macro. Example:
#define RShift(a) a >> 3.... RShift(a & 0xFFF) // a & 0xFFF >> 3
To solve this problem we should enclose the a argument in the parenthesis in the macro (it would be better to enclose entire macro too), then it will be like this:
#define RShift(a) ((a) >> 3),
Then the macro will be correctly expanded into:
RShift(a & 0xFFF) // ((a & 0xFFF) >> 3)
The definition of the pattern looks quite simple, but in practice the implementation of the diagnostic is quite complicated. It's not enough just to analyze only "#define RShift(a) a >> 3". If warnings are issued for all strings of this kind, there will be too many of them. We should have a look at the way the macro expands in every particular case, and try to define the situations where it was done intentionally, and when the brackets are really missing.
Let's have a look at this bug in a real project; FreeBSD:
#define ICB2400_VPINFO_PORT_OFF(chan) \ (ICB2400_VPINFO_OFF + \ sizeof (isp_icb_2400_vpinfo_t) + \ (chan * ICB2400_VPOPT_WRITE_SIZE)).... off += ICB2400_VPINFO_PORT_OFF(chan - 1);
PVS-Studio warning: V733 It is possible that macro expansion resulted in incorrect evaluation order. Check expression: chan - 1 * 20. isp.c 2301
Type inference
The type inference based on the semantic model of the program, allows the analyzer to have full information about all variables and statements in the code.
In other words, the analyzer has to know if the token Foo is a variable name, or the class name or a function. The analyzer repeats the work of the compiler, which also needs to know the type of an object and all additional information about the type: the size, signed/unsigned type; if it is a class, then how is it inherited and so on.
This is why PVS-Studio needs to preprocess the *.c/*.cpp files. The analyzer can get the information about the types only by analyzing the preprocessed file. Without having such information, it would be impossible to implement many diagnostics, or, they will issue too many false positives.
Note. If someone claims that their analyzer can check *.c/*.cpp files as a text document, without complete preprocessing, then it's just playing around. Yes, such an analyzer is able to find something, but in general it's a mere toy to play with.
So, information about the types is necessary both to detect errors, and also so as not to issue false positives. The information about classes is especially important.
Let's take a look at some examples of how information about the types is used.
The first example demonstrates that information about the type is needed to detect an error when working with the fprintf function (the code is taken from the Cocos2d-x project):
WCHAR *gai_strerrorW(int ecode);.... #define gai_strerror gai_strerrorW.... fprintf(stderr, "net_listen error for %s: %s", serv, gai_strerror(n));
PVS-Studio warning: V576 Incorrect format. Consider checking the fourth actual argument of the 'fprintf' function. The pointer to string of char type symbols is expected. ccconsole.cpp 341
The function frintf receives the pointer of the char * type as the fourth argument. It accidentally happened so that the actual argument is a string of the wchar_t * type.
To detect this error, we need to know the type that is returned by the function gai_strerrorW. If there is no such information, it will be impossible to detect the error.
Now let's examine an example where data about the type helps to avoid a false positive.
The code "*A = *A;" will be definitely considered suspicious. However, they analyzer will be silent if it sees the following:
volatile char *ptr;.... *ptr = *ptr; // <= No V570 warning
The volatile specifier gives a hint that it is not a bug, but the deliberate action of a programmer. The developer has to "touch" this memory cell. Why is it needed? It's hard to say, but if he does it, then there is a reason for it, and the analyzer shouldn't issue a warning.
Let's take a look at an example of how we can detect a bug, based on knowledge about the class.
The fragment is taken from the CoreCLR project.
struct GCStatistics : public StatisticsBase {.... virtual void Initialize(); virtual void DisplayAndUpdate();.... GCStatistics g_LastGCStatistics;.... memcpy(&g_LastGCStatistics, this, sizeof(g_LastGCStatistics));
PVS-Studio warning: V598 The'memcpy' function is used to copy the fields of 'GCStatistics' class. Virtual table pointer will be damaged by this. cee_wks gc.cpp 287.
It's acceptable to copy one object into another using the memcpy function, if the objects are POD-structures. However, there are virtual methods in the class, which means that there is pointer to a virtual methods table. It's very dangerous to copy this pointer from one object to another.
So, this diagnostic is possible due to the fact that we know that the variable of the g_LastGCStatistics is a class instance, and that this class isn't a POD-type.
Symbolic execution
Symbolic execution allows the evaluation of variable values that can lead to errors, and perform range checking of values. Sometimes we call this a mechanism of virtual values evaluation: see the article "Searching for errors by means of virtual values evaluation".
Knowing the probable values of the variables, we can detect errors such as:
memory leaks;
overflows;
array index out of bounds;
null pointer dereference in C++/access by a null reference in C#;
meaningless conditions;
division by zero;
and so on.
Let's see how we can find various errors, knowing the probable values of the variables. Let's start with a code fragment taken from the QuantLib project:
Handle<YieldTermStructure> md0Yts() { double q6mh[] = { 0.0001,0.0001,0.0001,0.0003,0.00055,0.0009,0.0014,0.0019, 0.0025,0.0031,0.00325,0.00313,0.0031,0.00307,0.00309,........................................................ 0.02336,0.02407,0.0245 }; // 60 elements.... for(int i=0;i<10+18+37;i++) { // i < 65 q6m.push_back( boost::shared |
million, even more than the wheelbarrow-load given to the head of the BBC.
No Government department had more of its officials on the inflated-salary list than the Ministry of Defence, headed by the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, on £245,000 a year. Yet this is a ministry whose record in recent years has been one of almost unmitigated failure, ranging from the humiliations it has presided over in Iraq and Afghanistan to the billions it has wasted on buying inappropriate or wholly unnecessary equipment.
One specific, truly shocking scandal was lately highlighted by Stuart Fisher, a Lincolnshire coroner, after hearing how in July last year Captain Daniel Shepherd had been blown up in Helmand after trying to defuse by hand an improvised explosive device (IED). Recording a verdict of “unlawful killing”, Mr Fisher said: “It seems to me to be crucially important that wherever possible those working in this desperately dangerous area should seek to use remote-controlled devices.” He urged the MoD to supply them to the Army as soon as possible.
Mr Fisher was right in suggesting that this is a crucially important issue. Of the 250 British troops killed in action in Afghanistan, some 80 per cent, more than 200, have been blown up by IEDs, many trying to defuse these deadly devices by hand.
What the coroner was clearly not aware of, however, was that other national forces in Afghanistan – Americans, Canadians, French, even the Italians – have been supplied with heavily-armoured mechanical equipment for mine clearance which makes the job of detecting and destroying IEDs infinitely safer. In particular, they use a combination of Huskies and giant Buffalo machines, supplied to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as early as 2003. These can spot and explode IEDs without having to send in men on foot such as Captain Shepherd, equipped with little more than hand-held mine detectors and their unbounded courage.
The MoD announced that it was belatedly proposing to equip our troops in Afghanistan with Buffalos, available “off the shelf”, as long ago as October 2008. But stilll, it seems, not one has arrived in theatre. What makes this even more disturbing is that, until the 1990s, the British Army led the world in using machines for detecting and clearing mines, as it did in mine-protected patrol vehicles. But, under the Blair government, these were all sold off or given away, the last of them just when he and the MoD were sending to Iraq those unprotected Snatch Land Rovers in which so many soldiers needlessly died.
Although the MoD was responsible for this deadly catalogue of failures long before he was promoted to his present post, the one man at the top of the MoD who could have had the clout to ensure that our troops in Afghanistan were equipped with mine-clearing machines as a top priority was Sir Jock Stirrup. But still, for lack of the Buffalos and Huskies that protect their allies, men like Captain Shepherd continue to die. Scarcely a day now goes by when we do not hear of another British soldier being blown up, usually by an IED. And still Sir Jock continues to draw his £245,000 a year. The more all these public servants are paid, it seems, the less they understand what it is the rest of us are paying them for.PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans are skeptical that President Obama's healthcare plan will be able to accomplish all he intends -- to expand coverage to nearly all Americans without raising taxes on middle-class Americans or affecting the quality of care. Thirty-eight percent believe his plan will achieve all of these goals, while 60% do not think it will.
Republicans are nearly united in thinking the plan will not accomplish these stated goals (90% believe it will not), and most independents (64%) agree. Two in three Democrats (66%), on the other hand, express optimism that the plan will achieve these aims.
"The poll suggests that support could drop if Americans come to believe the middle class will be asked to bear an increased burden in terms of higher taxes, higher medical costs, or diminished quality in order to expand healthcare coverage to those who currently lack it."
These results are based on a Sept. 11-13 USA Today/Gallup poll, conducted in the days after Obama's prime-time address to Congress last Wednesday. The speech served as a renewed call to action for the American public and legislators to support healthcare reform. However, it does not appear to have materially increased support for the plan, and the poll reveals that Americans have doubts that the plan, as Obama described it, will work.
For example, less than a majority (43%) say they are confident that Obama's plan can be paid for mostly through cost savings in Medicare and other parts of the healthcare system, as Obama has proposed. Eleven percent are very confident of this.
On a more basic level, Americans do not expect healthcare legislation to improve the U.S. healthcare system in a number of areas -- including quality, coverage, cost, and insurance-company requirements they would have to meet in order to get procedures covered. Although the public stops short of saying reform will make these things worse -- given that about one in five expect the reforms not to make a difference either way -- in three of the four areas, more predict healthcare legislation would make the situation worse rather than better.
These are key considerations given that support for a healthcare plan -- currently 50%, including "soft" support -- could drop considerably if Americans were convinced that reform would have a harmful effect on the middle class through higher taxes, higher costs for healthcare, or reduced coverage or quality of care.
For example, the poll finds 26% of Americans saying they would support expanding health insurance coverage if it would result in higher taxes on the middle class; 13% would support expanded coverage if it would reduce the quality of care middle-class Americans receive.
Bottom Line
Despite the fact that half of Americans support the idea of new healthcare legislation, many fewer are convinced that President Obama's healthcare reform plan can expand coverage and maintain quality while not increasing middle-class taxes, and that the plan can be paid for mostly through cost savings in the existing healthcare system.
The poll suggests that support could drop if Americans come to believe the middle class will be asked to bear an increased burden in terms of higher taxes, higher medical costs, or diminished quality in order to expand healthcare coverage to those who currently lack it.
With 50% of Americans backing healthcare reform in principle, it is unclear whether the president has enough of a public mandate at this point to convince reluctant members of Congress to vote for healthcare reform. Equally unclear is whether public support for healthcare reform will grow or decrease in the coming weeks as more details of the plan are hammered out in Congress. But as Congress continues to do its work, the president and other supporters of healthcare reform have an opportunity to continue making their case to Americans, and to allay some of the public's doubts about what their vision of reform would accomplish and at what cost.
Survey Methods
Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,030 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Sept. 11-13, 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.People who have a “good reason” to feel threatened — for example, stalking victims — would be able to seek a concealed carry permit for a legally owned handgun under a new D.C. law proposed Thursday. But those with generalized fears, such as apprehension about living in a neighborhood with high crime, would not be considered eligible for such a permit, officials say.
The distinction is an aspect of legislation being grudgingly crafted by D.C. officials in response to a federal court decision that in July struck down the city’s longstanding ban on carrying guns in public.
Among the requirements for gun owners to obtain concealed carry permits under the proposed law, gun owners must justify their need for a permit and undertake new safety training. City laws would continue to restrict the carrying of firearms in certain “sensitive locations” such as government buildings, bars, schools and at public demonstrations.
When questioned about the proposal at a press conference Wednesday, officials defended the city’s approach.
“Living in a high-crime area is not sufficient to establish the good cause,” Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan said. “Getting death threats, being the victim of domestic violence and having the threats or reoccurrence, that would be good cause. It has to be personalized. It has to be something specific.”
Mr. Nathan said the city modeled its “may issue” approach to permits, which is virtually certain to face a lawsuit, on states such as New York and Maryland, where such statutes have withstood challenges in federal courts. But a similar requirement in California stating that a person seeking the permit prove they were confronted with a “clear and present danger” was struck in February. That ruling is on hold pending appeals.
The Supreme Court has declined to take up the issue of whether governments can restrict concealed carry permits only to those who demonstrate a justification for them.
Lawmakers in the District were open about their ambivalence toward the statute, noting that the legislation is only meant to bring the city in compliance with the federal court’s ruling, which is on hold until Oct. 22 to give the city time to draft new regulations.
“It’s my view that the District needs less guns, not more guns,” D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray said, mentioning last year’s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard as an example of the need for stricter gun laws.
The D.C. police chief would grant the city’s concealed carry permits under the law. Mr. Nathan said the city’s “may issue” stance dates back to a law enacted by Congress in 1931 that granted the police chief authority to issue such permits. The Metropolitan Police Department is already tasked with overseeing the gun registry process, which requires gun owners to complete a safety course, be fingerprinted and photographed and for the firearm to be reregistered every three years.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Wednesday she is comfortable deciding who should or should not be granted the right to carry a firearm but declined to give her own opinion on whether residents should be allowed to do so.
“As a reviewer, my job is to make sure you’re in the compliance of the law,” Chief Lanier said. “There is no opinion in the law.”
While the department will make the initial decision on a permit, a five-member Concealed Pistol Licensing Review Board will be appointed by the mayor to review any permit denials or license revocations.
“If there is a gray area, and somebody feels that they meet this criteria, and the chief has been unreasonable, then the appeals board would look at that,” D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said.
Other requirements for a person to qualify for a concealed carry permit include registration of the gun with the police department, 16 hours of safety training and two hours of range training, as well as a determination that the person has not suffered from a mental illness or condition that puts them at risk of being a danger to others. Open carry would not be permitted.
Gun owners from other states could apply for concealed carry permits in the District but would have to meet the same requirements.
The law would also bar the carrying of firearms in “sensitive locations,” including within 1,000 feet of the movement of dignitaries or public demonstrations. The provision raised the comical question of whether licensed gun owners should flee from dignitaries’ motorcades in order to stay in compliance with the law.
“The police would have to give notice,” Mr. Mendelson said, noting that criminal penalties could only be applied when police inform people they are violating the concealed carry law and they fail to comply.
Alan Gura, an attorney for plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told The Associated Press that the proposal did not comply with the judge’s order.
“In America, the police don’t determine what rights we have good reason to enjoy,” Mr. Gura said. “You don’t need a good reason to speak, to worship, to vote or to carry a gun for self-defense.”
Approximately 3,000 residents have registered handguns since the city’s near-total ban on gun ownership was overturned in 2008. Mr. Mendelson said he expects somewhere in the realm of “hundreds” of people might be able to get concealed carry permits under the proposed law.
“It’s not going to be a large number, and it’s not going to be soon,” he said.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Lou Pearlman, Backstreet Boys founder, dies in prison
Lou Pearlman, the producer who launched the hit 1990s boy band groups Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, has died in prison while serving a 25-year sentence for bilking investors of $300 million.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons said the disgraced businessman died on Friday, providing no other details. He was 62.
Inspired by the success of the boy band New Kids on the Block, Pearlman recruited a group of unknowns to form the Backstreet Boys, which soared to stardom in 1996, becoming one of the best-selling boy bands of all-time.
Record impresario Lou Pearlman, pictured on March 6, 2005, died in prison at age 62 ©Evan Agostini (Getty/AFP/File)
The group sold more than 130 million records, its website says.
Some members of Pearlman's other bands, including Justin Timberlake of NSYNC and Britney Spears, went on to achieve major stardom with solo careers.
But Pearlman was convicted in 2008 of fraud and cheating investors -- including friends and family -- out of more than $300 million through Ponzi and bank-fraud schemes that lasted two decades.
He had been serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas.
Timberlake tweeted Sunday that he hoped Pearlman had "found some peace."The Most Dangerous Ideas In Science
Enlarge this image toggle caption Alain Riazuelo/IAP/UPMC/CNRS Alain Riazuelo/IAP/UPMC/CNRS
There's a battle going on at the edge of the universe, but it's getting fought right here on Earth. With roots stretching back as far as the ancient Greeks, in the eyes of champions on either side, this fight is a contest over nothing less than the future of science. It's a conflict over the biggest cosmic questions humans can ask and the methods we use — or can use — to get answers for those questions.
Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole: its structure, its origins and its fate. Fundamental physics is the study of reality's bedrock entities and their interactions. With these job descriptions it's no surprise that cosmology and fundamental physics share a lot of territory. You can't understand how the universe evolves after the Big Bang (a cosmology question) without understanding how matter, energy, space and time interact (a fundamental physics question). Recently, however, something remarkable has been happening in both these fields that's raising hackles with some scientists. As physicists George Ellis and Joseph Silk recently put it in Nature:
"This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical."
The root of the problem rests with two ideas/theories now central for some workers in cosmology (even if they remain problematic for physicists as a whole). The first is string theory, which posits that the world is made up not of point particles but of tiny vibrating strings. String theory only works if the universe has many "extra" dimensions of space other than the three we experience. The second idea is the so-called multiverse which, in its most popular form, claims more than one distinct universe emerged from the Big Bang. Instead, adherents claim, there may be an almost infinite (if not truly infinite) number of parallel "pocket universes," each with their own version of physics.
Both string theory and the multiverse are big, bold reformulations of what we mean when we say the words "physical reality." That is reason enough for them to be contentious topics in scientific circles. But in the pursuit of these ideas, something else — something new — has emerged. Rather than focusing just on questions about the nature of the cosmos, the new developments raise critical questions about the basic rules of science when applied to something like the universe as a whole.
Here is the problem: Both string theory and the multiverse posit entities that may, in principle or in practice, be unobservable. Evidence for the extra dimensions needed to make string theory work is likely to require a particle accelerator of astronomical proportions. And the other pocket universes making up the multiverse may lie permanently over our "horizon," such that we will never get direct observations of their existence. It's this specific aspect of the theories that has scientists like Ellis and Silk so concerned. As they put it:
"These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any."
What they, and others, find particularly worrisome is the claim that our attempts to push back frontiers in cosmology and fundamental physics have taken us into a new domain where new rules of science are needed. Some call this domain "post-empirical" science. Recently, for example, the philosopher of physics Richard Dawid has argued that in spite of the fact that no evidence for string theory exists (even after three decades of intense study), it must still be considered the best candidate for a path forward. As Dawid puts it, such arguments include "no-one has found a good alternative to string theory. Another [reason to accept string theory is] one uses the observation that theories without alternatives tended to be viable in the past."
Sean Carroll, a highly respected and philosophically astute physicist, takes a different approach from Dawid. For Carroll, it is the concept of falsifiability, which was central to Karl Popper's famous philosophy of science, that is too limited for the playing fields we now find ourselves working on. As Carroll writes:
"Whether or not we can observe [extra dimensions or other universes] directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a priori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets."
Thus, for Carroll, even if a theory predicts entities that can't be directly observed, if there are indirect consequences of their existence we can confirm, then those theories (and those entities) must be included in our considerations.
Other scientists, however, are not convinced. High-energy physicist Sabine Hossenfelder called Dawid's kind of post-empirical science an "oxymoron." More importantly, for scientists like Paul Steinhardt and collaborators, the new ideas are becoming "post-modern." They use the term in the sense that without more definitive connections to data, the ideas will not be abandoned because a community exists that continues to support them.
This is the possibility that troubles Ellis and Silk most of all:
"In our view, the issue boils down to clarifying one question: What potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandoning it? If there is none, it is not a scientific theory."
String theory and the multiverse are exciting ideas in and of themselves. If either one were true, it would have revolutionary consequences for our understanding of the cosmos. But, as debates about post-empirical science and falsifiability demonstrate, critics of these untested theories fear they may be leading the field down a difficult — and ultimately damaging — path. That's why, one way or another, they may be science's most dangerous ideas.
Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described "evangelist of science." You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4.Anonymous, the left-wing “hacktivist” collective, attacked online divisions of the food and agriculture empire belonging to Andrej Babis, the billionaire Czech finance minister and deputy prime minister, this week, in protests over the country’s new online gambling laws.
Specifically, Anonymous was targeting internet censorship, as the Czech Republic’s new gambling regime, introduced at the end of last month, contains provisions to blacklist non-licensed gambling sites.
This is creating the possibility of future ISP-blocking in the Central European state.
“The Finance Ministry led by Andrej Babis gets almost limitless power to censor the internet. It is time to move against it,” Anonymous said in a video posted on YouTube.
According to Czech news agency Lupa.cz, the group took down two of Babis’ websites on Monday evening, including that of his holding company, Agrofert.
“The Czech Donald Trump”
Babis is the country’s second-richest man and founder of the ANO 2011 party (YES 2011), which finished second in the Czech general elections of 2013, permitting him to form a coalition government with the incumbent Christian Democrat Party.
He has been accused, variously, of being an ex-Soviet secret policeman, a post-Communist oligarch and the Czech Donald Trump.
Babis swept to power (-sharing) on a populist platform that promised to fight the widespread corruption he perceived to be endemic in his country’s politics. He has placed increased emphasis on fighting tax fraud and improving collection methods in order to boost state revenue.
This includes his online gaming regulations, which were approved by the Czech legislature by an emphatic 42-0 vote. The regulations seek to open up the market to foreign operators, but its tax rates are unlikely to have many companies lining up to apply for licenses.
Unworkable Taxation
Initial proposals of a 40 percent tax rate on gross gaming revenue were eventually amended to 35 percent, on top of a 19 percent corporate tax rate. The system would be unworkable for online gambling operators who would have no choice but to shut the Czech Republic out of their operations if they wish to comply with EU law. This means that Czech citizens are likely to continue to bet an estimated $6 billion per year on the black market but not through trusted sites.
The regulations also include a provision that prevents online poker bets from exceeding 1,000 Czech Koruna ($40.98), while winnings in any specific game, including tournaments, are capped at 50,000 Czech Koruna ($2,049).
“We only want to apply rules used by 18 [EU] countries already,” Babis told Reuters in response to the Anonymous attacks. “Nobody wants to censor the internet. It is aimed against gambling companies that do not pay taxes.”
Babis said he would file a criminal complaint, while Anonymous said the attacks would continue until the new law was revoked.We're Black and Blue All Over:
The Chicago Bears disappointed many of their fans and confused many of the players in their locker room when they traded tight end Greg Olsen just before training camp. But as Dan Pompei of the Chicago Tribune points out, Sunday's season-opening victory over the Atlanta Falcons provided a good explanation for the move.
Olsen's replacements, Kellen Davis and Matt Spaeth, lined up next to each other on a number of running plays to seal the edge. There were also some occasions when the Bears used an unbalanced line that essentially made the tight end a left tackle.
Olsen is a strong pass-catcher but an average blocker. Using him in the kind of role Davis and Spaeth played Sunday isn't the best utilization of his talents. You could argue the Bears could have adjusted their scheme to make better use of Olsen's skills. But if they weren't going to do that, it appears they have two tight ends who are better suited for the role that Bears tight ends will be asked to play.
Continuing around the NFC North:What are the restaurants that altogether define dining in America? For nearly four years, I’ve been chasing this consuming riddle around the country as Eater's national critic. There will never be an immutable answer, and that’s what makes eating across the nation so riveting. But this annual roadmap — the apex of my work, the result of 32 weeks of travel and over 500 meals in 36 cities — attempts to encapsulate our astonishing food culture at this moment.
As with the city-based Eater 38 maps upon which the list is patterned, restaurants rotate on and off gradually. Choosing which paragons to oust from the list is always agony. Eight remain from the original guide, published in January 2015, while a record 18 newcomers join the ranks in 2017.
In polarizing times, these places don’t just exemplify culinary excellence — they foster hospitality and pleasure and purpose in their communities. They show us who we are and who we can be. The roster includes a 24-seat destination for fiery Filipino dishes in Washington, D.C., a revolutionary steakhouse in Seattle, a Los Angeles kaiseki restaurant whose food uniquely marries intellect and emotion, and a New Orleans draw for finely calibrated Caribbean cuisine.
I’ve also named a Restaurant of the Year, an of-the-moment union of breathtaking design and rooted, spectacular cooking in one of the country’s most timeless towns — Savannah.
Among these national essentials, some are decades-old classics, while others represent the frontlines of culinary thinking and emerging cuisines (though all must be 18 months old to qualify). Taken together, they embody a definition of American dining that we can all savor.
America’s Essential Restaurants 2017
★ = an Eater Hall of Fame restaurant, on this list for three consecutive years
The 2016 list | The 2015 list | The 2014 list
Al Ameer, Dearborn, MI | ★ Alinea, Chicago, IL | Bad Saint, Washington, D.C. | Bateau, Seattle, WA | ★ Benu, San Francisco, CA | Bertha’s, Charleston, SC | ★ Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Pocantico Hills, NY | Cala, San Francisco, CA | Compère Lapin, New Orleans, LA | Le Coucou, New York City, NY | Dumpling Galaxy, New York City, NY | ★ Eventide Oyster Co., Portland, ME | ★ Franklin Barbecue, Austin, TX | ★ Frasca Food & Wine, Boulder, CO | The Grey, Savannah, GA | The Grocery, Charleston, SC | Highlands Bar & Grill, Birmingham, AL | Hugo’s, Houston, TX | ★ Kachka, Portland, OR | Mariscos Jalisco, Los Angeles, CA | Milktooth, Indianapolis, IN | Miller Union, Atlanta, GA | Mister Jiu’s, San Francisco, CA | Monteverde, Chicago, IL | Mud Hen Water, Honolulu, HI | n/naka, Los Angeles, CA | La Petite Grocery, New Orleans, LA | ★ Poole’s Downtown Diner, Raleigh, NC | ★ Prince’s Hot Chicken, Nashville, TN | Prune, New York City, NY | ★ The Publican, Chicago, IL | Republique, Los Angeles, CA | Willows Inn, Lummi Island, WA | Sally’s Apizza, New Haven, CT | Spoon and Stable, Minneapolis, MN | Sqirl, Los Angeles, CA | Staplehouse, Atlanta, GA | ★ Zahav, Philadelphia, PA
Restaurant of the Year
Savannah, Georgia
Everything that it takes to propel an ambitious restaurant to greatness — a coherent vision, a distaste for complacency, and singular leadership — Mashama Bailey accomplishes at the Grey in Savannah, Georgia. The restaurant synthesizes much of what’s relevant about this moment in American dining: an amalgamation of global and regional flavors; a big-city chef making a seismic impact in a smaller town; and an acute awareness of, and reckoning with, complex racial, economic, and cultural histories. The Grey doesn’t trade in tasting menu extravaganzas or modernist shenanigans. It’s an unabashed stunner of a space, staffed with kind-hearted souls. Beyond that, the cooking bursts with utter humanity. Bailey’s food — curried roast chicken, melting leeks with country ham and curls of grassy tomme, lamb shoulder braised with Senegalese spices — speaks to love of the region and devotion to the craft. Read more about The Grey, 2017’s Restaurant of The Year ->
Meet the Newcomers
Bad Saint
Washington, D.C.
With a no-reservations policy and only 24 seats, Bad Saint compels people to camp out (or pay someone to wait, a booming business in D.C.) for several hours before it even opens to feast on the most exciting Filipino cooking in the country. The generous payoff for the wait: Tom Cunanan’s extraordinary interpretation of his home country’s cuisine, gleaned from his mother’s recipes and his own ingenuity. His dishes are narcotic in their potency. Tear into his take on ukoy, a giant sweet potato fritter nearly the size of a basketball, to find shrimp or soft-shell crabs enmeshed in its crunchy tangles. By the second sherry-laced cocktail, the hassle of getting in recedes entirely from memory. 3226 11th Street NW, Washington, D.C., badsaintdc.com
Bateau
Seattle, W ashington
Renee Erickson may be most famous for her oyster bar the Walrus and the Carpenter, but Bateau is her magnum opus — a steakhouse that should change the way America thinks about one of its most codified dining experiences. The restaurant butchers whole cows, dry-ages its own steaks, and offers two dozen cuts written on chalkboards. When the few nightly orders of New York strips and rib-eyes are gone, they’re gone, and diners must explore lesser-known cuts that are as intensely pleasurable and often more affordable. Some chophouse signifiers carry over — the composed salads, the steak tartare, the insightfully curated wine list — but forget yesteryear’s burgundy booths and mahogany paneling: Erickson went for sunny, corner-bistro elegance. 1040 East Union St., Seattle, WA (206) 900-8699, restaurantbateau.com
Bertha’s
Charleston, S outh C arolina
Bertha’s azure-blue building pops against its surroundings, a stretch of stark, coastal flatness in industrial North Charleston. Albertha Grant founded the restaurant in the early 1980s, and many of her specialties — meaty okra stew, tomato-stained red rice, creamy lima beans, and turkey prioleau (a sustaining rice dish available only on Tuesdays) — originate from the culinary traditions of the Gullah, former slaves who established themselves in Lowcountry hamlets and the nearby islands. Grant died in 2007, and her daughters Sharon Grant Coakley, Julie Grant, and Linda Pinckney now own this community polestar. 2332 Meeting Street Road, Charleston, SC (843) 554-6519
Cala
San Francisco
The flavors of California and Mexico, already inherently entwined, meld into a singular expression of place in the hands of Gabriela Cámara. Start with the tostadas. One version overlaid with trout and avocado recalls the famous tuna tostadas served at Cámara’s groundbreaking seafood restaurant, Contramar, in Mexico City. At Cala, she delves further into the medium, painting landscapes on crisp tortillas using Dungeness crab and avocado, or abalone with trout roe, or trumpet mushrooms with sea palm. In Mexico, mariscos are Cámara’s trademark; in the Bay Area, she flaunts her mastery of carne. Brunch in the light-filled restaurant showcases sumptuous carnitas; weekday lunchtime focuses on tacos ladled with chicken tinga or stewed pork. 149 Fell St., San Francisco, CA (415) 660-7701, calarestaurant.com
Compère Lapin
New Orleans
New Orleans’s centuries-old ties to the Caribbean come into modern focus on the menu of Nina Compton, who was born in St. Lucia. Her goat curry is a one-dish history lesson in the global spice routes, while local black drum is rubbed with tingling jerk seasoning and scorching conch croquettes are quelled with pickled pineapple tartar sauce. This is all an obvious departure from meunière-bathed Creole cuisine, but this is the NOLA restaurant I find myself most endorsing to friends. It’s also a favorite haunt for a drink; star bartender Abigail Gullo concocts beauts like Wry Smile, made with East India Sherry, Grand Poppy amaro, and rye whiskey. 535 Tchoupitoulas, New Orleans, LA, (504) 599-2119, comperelapin.com
Le Coucou
New York City
With our recent captivations with regional American and far-flung global cuisines, it was only a matter of time before once-pervasive grand French returned to our restaurant lives. Stephen Starr’s Gallic fairytale Le Coucou — helmed by Daniel Rose, the Chicago-born chef who also oversees two restaurants in Paris — leads the French revival that’s currently surging across the country. The room’s high ceilings, whitewashed brick, and spiraling chandeliers embody a certain studied European elegance. Wallow in butter and cream and gamy meats, particularly in the forms of pike quenelles in lobster sauce and a duo of grilled squab and lobster fricassee over pureed potatoes. This is also the choice backdrop for a downtown New York power breakfast. 138 Lafayette Street, New York, NY, (212) 271-4252, lecoucou.com
Dumpling Galaxy
Queens, N ew York
In Helen You’s spicy beef dumplings, grated ginger isn’t just a flavor — it’s a deliberate physical sensation, its juicy crunch a bolded exclamation point against the highly seasoned meat. You doesn’t compress the fillings, so the elements blend but never quite lose their distinctiveness; she knows ingredient textures the way Van Gogh knew the feel of spreading paint across a canvas with his fingers. The restaurant serves dozens of variations on jiaozi, the pleated dumplings You mastered during her childhood in northeastern China. They look homely, but they contain multitudes. Try the version with lamb and squash, and then the pork and chive, and then her impeccable har gau. Are there better soup dumplings in New York? I haven’t found them. 42-35 Main St, Flushing, NY, (212) 518-3265, dumplinggalaxy.com
The Grocery
Charleston, S outh Carolina
Kevin Johnson’s bustling haven in Charleston’s Upper King Street area doesn’t pull in the same national press as big-name darlings like FIG and Husk, but over the last six years, The Grocery has steadily bloomed into one of the city’s most remarkable and welcoming restaurants. This is the circa-right-now modern American menu, Lowcountry edition: delicata squash with pomegranate and herbed tahini-yogurt sauce; smoked mackerel flanked by crackers with everything-bagel seasoning; triggerfish over cornbread puree, bacon, and pickled mushrooms. Johnson’s biggest triumph is his ace treatment of seasonal delicacies, including sublime shad roe in early spring, followed a few weeks later by soft-shell crabs precisely fried or sauteed. His take on a seafood pilau (Charleston gold rice, field peas, fried fish, shrimp, and clams) delights year-round. 4 Cannon Street, Charleston, SC (843) 302-8825, thegrocerycharleston.com
Mariscos Jalisco
Los Angeles
If I could only eat a single taco in America for the rest of my days, it would be the taco dorado de camaron from Raul Ortega’s mariscos truck, which parks in LA’s Boyle Heights community. This five-bite wonder is the apotheosis of taco engineering. A corn tortilla seizes to crispness in the deep fryer so that it cradles spiced shrimp whose ends frizzle in the hot oil. The tacos come two to an order, splashed with salsa roja and covered with avocado slices. They scorch and cool, crunch and yield, zigzag with flavors and calm with their harmonies, all in microseconds. Other creations entice, including the mighty Poseidon — a mashup of aguachile and ceviche heaped on a tostada. But Ortega deserves immortality for his shrimp taco. 3040 E Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, (323) 528-6701
Mister Jiu’s
San Francisco
In a storied, circa-1880s building in the nation’s oldest Chinatown, chef-owner Brandon Jew reinterprets the Cantonese cuisine of his youth and lays the footing for a fresh expression of Chinese-American gastronomy. There’s freewheeling joy in the mixing and matching of dishes — some that channel dim sum mainstays, a few generous meat or seafood platters for sharing, and many options that express Jew’s love of California abundance. Note his clever allusions to Bay Area culture, such as scallion pancakes that twang with the distinct taste of sourdough. The dining room, a beautiful tableau where midcentury modern themes meet Chinese banquet hall adornments, is nearly as striking as the iconic city view out the wall of windows. Read Bill’s full review of Mister Jiu’s. 28 Waverly Place, San Francisco, CA 415-857-9688, misterjius.com
Monteverde
Chicago
Sarah Grueneberg opened her corner West Loop Italian haven in 2015; her pastas deliver plenty of primal comfort, but she brings exceptional skill and respectful imagination to the genre. She toys with classics in sneaky-brilliant ways. Her cacio e pepe, for example, includes the traditional pecorino Romano but also incorporates ricotta whey, which smoothes the textures and softens the saltiness. She brings full-throttle Italian-American gusto to her ragù alla Napoletana, a Vesuvius of soppressata meatballs, sausage, and pork shank over fusilli |
to ‘both harbors’).
In fact, the building boom and great prosperity of Ostia continued till the earlier part of the 3rd century. This momentous rise of commercialism was accompanied by large scale import of slaves from far and wide lands. According to various estimates, almost 17,000 people among the peak 50,000 population were slaves – who not only worked in households but also in the harbor and storage facilities. These slaves were accompanied by middle-class freemen and freed immigrants, who hailed from varied regions like North Africa, Gaul, Spain and even Egypt and Syria. The latter immigrants mainly played their roles as traders and merchants.
5) The Gradual Decline (post 4th century AD) –
Unfortunately for Ostia, by the time of Constantine, Portus and its neighborhoods were integrated as a newly independent city, renamed as Civitas Flavia Constantiniana. And while this new urban area grew commercially at the expense of the old harbor city, Ostia was gradually transformed into an upscale residential area with the construction of many domus (big Roman houses – refer to this article), mainly owned by rich merchants who worked in Portus.
However the slow decay had already set in, and Ostia was relegated to an average Roman provincial town, in stark contrast to the commercial vibrancy of Portus – so much so that even the invading Goths and Alans captured Portus but left Ostia unharmed in 410 AD. And by the end of 5th century, the main aqueduct had stopped functioning, thus cutting of the ‘lifeline’ of the settlement. Finally, in 537 AD, it was the great Eastern Roman general Belisarius who defended this deprecated coastal town (along with Portus) from the Goths by using Agrippa’s ancient theater as a makeshift fortress.
Video Sources: Altair4 Multimedia (YouTube) / Colonia Ostiensis (YouTube)
Article Sources: Ostia-Antica.org (link here) / InItaly / ItalyGuides
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Updated at 2:20 a.m. April 1, 2015
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Warwick’s in La Jolla has canceled a book-signing event by former SeaWorld trainer John Hargrove in the wake of a video being released that shows him repeatedly using the N-word in a phone chat.
Hargrove has been on a promotional tour that included appearances last week on NPR, CNN and “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart.
But the author asserts that if SeaWorld had its way, the book would never have seen the light of day. In fact, SeaWorld disseminated the video and later declined to give details on how it obtained the smartphone clip and decide to make it public.
Titled “Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld and the Truth Beyond Blackfish,” the book published March 24 has spawned a battle over “whistle-blower” Hargrove, a former Pacific Beach resident who alleges mistreatment of killer whales at the marine parks.
U-T San Diego quoted Julie Slavinsky, the bookstore’s director of events and community relations, as saying: “The cancellation is a statement of our feelings about what is in the video.”
The U-T report followed the Orlando Sentinel, which posted the same video earlier Tuesday. Warwick’s pulled the plug only a day before the scheduled event “after the store started receiving phone inquiries about the video and a subsequent email from SeaWorld that included a link to the conversation.”
Hargrove, who worked at SeaWorld San Diego from 1995 to 2001, accuses the parent company of trying to silence him via legal threats starting in November and as recently as a couple of months ago — “that if we didn’t stop [with release plans], they would file an injunction to stop the book, which they never did.”
A SeaWorld spokesman said flatly: “We never threatened Hargrove with a lawsuit.”
On Tuesday, the Orlando Sentinel posted a nearly 5-year-old video depicting Hargrove as drunk and using the N-word in a chat with an unidentified woman.
SeaWorld sent reporters the video, the paper said, and a spokesman said the company received the video during the weekend “from an internal whistle-blower.”
“These are all just personal attacks to try to slander me and my character,” Hargrove is quoted as saying. “This is so typical of SeaWorld. If they’re going to pull up videos and say he was drunk one night and used a derogatory word … these are petty, childish attempts to discredit somebody.”
Speaking by phone Monday from Seattle, former orca trainer Hargrove told Times of San Diego that SeaWorld is using surrogates, including bloggers, to discredit him and challenge his story — told most famously in the documentary “Blackfish.”
“That way, SeaWorld can try to keep their hands clean and let these people do their dirty work,” he said in a half-hour interview.
Hargrove, 41, was hardest on Eric M. Davis, a 33-year-old Orlando man behind the pro-SeaWorld Awesome Ocean website and a recent offshoot, RealJohnHargrove.com, which “is here to let you know the truth about the hypocrisy of a former killer whale trainer who has a book he really, really wants you to buy.”
Davis — whom he called vile, vicious and a SeaWorld “mouthpiece” — is “just a blogger,” Hargrove says.
“He’s not a trainer or a researcher. … This isn’t someone who’s going to be on CNN discussing their viewpoints — because he doesn’t have have any credentials. Just a hate person — a coward behind a keyboard.
“He’s just a nobody.”
Davis asserts his independence and says: “John Hargrove will say anything to deflect legitimate criticism.”
Hargrove says SeaWorld gives bloggers special access to its parks in Orlando, San Antonio and here, even free food, and hands them “talking points” that defend the parks and attack critics like Hargrove, who has testified for legislation to end killer whale breeding and displays.
The company, which has suffered declines in attendance and stock values, responded to the latest accusations Monday night. SeaWorld recently launched a reputation-boosting campaign.
“I’m sure you’ve already seen the many examples of Hargrove contradicting himself,” said Fred Jacobs, SeaWorld Entertainment vice president for communications. “You can judge for yourself whether he is credible.”
He called “food deprivation” an example.
“In his book, Hargrove contends that he witnessed food deprivation with killer whales at SeaWorld,” Jacobs said. “Yet in 2014 – a full year after the premiere of ‘Blackfish’ — he wrote on Twitter, ‘Any (SeaWorld) trainer that (sic) held back food from a whale was a poor trainer and using techniques not taught to us in the SeaWorld system.’ Nine months after the premiere of Blackfish, Hargrove wrote, ‘Food deprivation is not really used.’”
Davis said: “Mr. Hargrove’s accusations are expected from someone who has a flexible understanding of the truth. It seems that he is doing a lot of lashing out in recent media interviews rather than addressing some glaring issues,” such as the food deprivation claim.
Davis and Jacobs readily acknowledge that the Awesome Ocean website received a “small start-up grant” from SeaWorld, but the SeaWorld spokesman said: “We don’t make any attempt to control what’s written by Awesome Ocean. We tell our story to bloggers and other journalists every day in the hope that coverage of us is fair and balanced.”
Davis echoed: “They have absolutely zero editorial input or control. That is the extent of my relationship with SeaWorld.”
Jacobs said SeaWorld has given free admission to members of the media, including bloggers, for decades.
“I don’t know whether we’ve extended that courtesy to Eric,” he said, “but we certainly would and without hesitation. As far as access, we provide all manner of experiences to journalists who cover our parks, including behind-the-scenes tours and the opportunity to meet animals. I don’t know whether we’ve given food to Eric Davis, but I’d buy him lunch tomorrow.”
Davis says he pays his own way.
“Since 2011, I have spent more than $3,100 at SeaWorld parks by myself, and since January of 2015 I have spent $537.47 in the parks,” he said. “Like many locals, I buy passes to attend the park.”
Why was RealJohnHargrove.com launched?
Davis said he created the site “after reading [Hargrove’s] book and comparing what he has said publicly in the past.”
However, according to domain records, RealJohnHargrove.com was registered March 17 — a week before the book was published.
Davis said: “Copies were available to purchase online via eBay.”
“It wasn’t hard to use his own extensive public comments against him,” Davis said. “SeaWorld did not provide me any funding for the website; nor do they have any contact with me about the content.”
The issue of coordinated attacks was raised by Jon Stewart last Thursday, when he told guest Hargrove: “We have never had a Twitter response aimed at us [like this],” noting how people were tweeting “Don’t trust this guy. He’s a liar.”
Stewart noted (to laughs) that the tweets were “mainly from SeaWorld Twitter handle addresses.”
SeaWorld spokesman Jacobs said: “‘The Daily Show’ never contacted us and we never reached out to them. Anyone who did acted on their own accord.”
Hargrove, now living in New York City, told Times of San Diego that SeaWorld had an “attack plan” that includes social media messages of “Don’t have him in your show. He’s not telling the truth.”
He said the current SeaWorld twitter campaign with the hashtag #AskSeaWorld has “totally backfired because that controversy draws even more attention.”
SeaWorld’s Jacobs said he has no regrets about the campaign, pointing to the SeaWorldCares website and saying:
“The AskSeaWorld.com site is part of the campaign we launched last week. We chose Twitter to solicit questions from the public because it was the most public and transparent way possible. We knew that PETA and other animal rights activists would harass us and bully those with legitimate questions, but our goal was simple: Take and answer questions, which we’ve done more than 100 times in just the past few days. And, we will continue to do so.”
How long will the #AskSeaWorld Twitter program last?
“We have no plans to stop this program,” Jacobs said. “If anyone reading this has legitimate questions and an open mind, contact us.”
Hargrove says that if SeaWorld truly wanted to stop his “lies,” the Orlando-based company would take him to court.
“I have every right to speak about my life and my experiences,” he said. “And if SeaWorld wants to claim that I’m lying, then they’d better get ready for court and … pull out their animal training records, which I promise you will be the end of that company.”
A class-action suit filed Wednesday on behalf of Temecula resident Holly Hall alleges that grandmother Hall would not have bought tickets to SeaWorld in 2011 and 2012 had it disclosed facts about the condition and behavior of its captive whales.
The San Antonio Business Journal said SeaWorld challenged the allegations.
A SeaWorld statement quoted by the publication said: “The class-action lawsuit was filed today by attorneys who represent John Hargrove. This is clearly a publicity stunt intended to generate more news coverage of John Hargrove’s anti-SeaWorld book.”
Hargrove said: “I know SeaWorld very well and the games that they play. And the tactics. … They play dirty. It’s not about the issues. It’s all personal attacks.”
The trainer was at SeaWorld for 12 years of his 14-year marine mammal career, ending in 2012 — the last time he was in San Diego. “Being a trainer at Shamu Stadium, we were brought up to have a thick skin,” he said, and his decision to go public with his captivity critique was “not an overnight decision.”
He said he lived in PB the entire time he worked in San Diego. “I loved it,” he said.
Hargrove concedes he’s lost former SeaWorld colleague friends but insists high-ranking staffers “are secretly cheering for me” while keeping quiet for fear for losing their jobs — part of what he called “a very unfortunate and cultlike mentality” at SeaWorld.
“They shouldn’t have any control over people’s lives and who you decide to be friends with, but they do,” he said. “That’s the level of control they assert.”
Hargrove’s backers have answered his critics, including a blog post titled “3 LIES THAT SEAWORLD FANS BELIEVE ABOUT JOHN HARGROVE.”
Since spending nearly a year taking part in the “Blackfish” production, Hargrove has fashioned a new life for himself. He says he promotes his book (with coming visits to San Francisco, Los Angeles and a tour schedule including Europe and ending in July). He’s a guest speaker at “various universities that invited me” and forums such as the recent WhaleFest in Brighton, England. (See his remarks.)
He’s active in efforts to pass bans on killer whale shows in California, New York as well as federal drives in Washington and even Europe, such as the Dolphin Project.
“This is my living now,” he says.
His publisher, Macmillan, has deployed lawyers on his behalf, but Hargrove says he’s hired his own legal defenders from a “top-10” firm that also dealt with Enron and the Exxon Valdez.
In any case, Hargrove says an end to orca breeding is coming.
“The writing’s on the wall,” he said, noting the “historic” decision by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to phase out elephants in their shows by 2018.
“Right now, we’re focused on killer whales,” he said, hoping to halt breeding and “forcibly artificially inseminating whales.” He wants this generation of orcas to be the last in captivity.
“If we can’t get to a point of a sea sanctuary, at least build them larger pools,” he said. (SeaWorld last year announced plans for “Blue World,” a $300 million expansion of its orca tanks.)
Hargrove lauded SeaWorld efforts to rescue sea lions, sea turtles, manatees and other marine life.
“The actual people who do that are wonderful people,” he said. “I’ve worked with them. … Their heart is in the right place.” But he said SeaWorld uses such conservation efforts as a mask.
“People don’t realize that less than 1 percent of their revenue [goes] toward conservation efforts. [They are] using it as a front to try to defend … greed and exploitation.”
Before the book-signing cancellation in La Jolla, Warwick’s marketing coordinator Joe Holland on Monday said “Beneath the Surface” would be available for $26.
Holland said the bookstore had contacted the publisher, seeking Hargrove’s visit. He didn’t know how many copies of “Beneath the Surface” he had in stock, but “we just placed another order.”
@cpsully99 http://t.co/HbQHNXbr6F His words, his work and his hypocrisy. It speaks for itself, what about that is unprofessional or sketchy? — Erin (@SeaWorldErin) March 21, 2015
#BeneathTheSurface or Book John Hargrove, do you remember the REAL John Hargrove? http://t.co/gBmF7syGgR — Awesome Ocean (@1AwesomeOcean) March 21, 2015
Thanks John Hargrove for standing against #SeaWorld making the truth known about their egregious practices. https://t.co/MYTEBVrD5F #AB2140 — The Whale Warrior (@pnwwhalewarrior) March 20, 2015
Ex-SeaWorld trainer John Hargrove’s book “Beneath the Surface” debuts soon – Orlando Sentinel @johnjhargrove http://t.co/ekaKr3uLvS — HealthTo50 (@HealthTo50) March 20, 2015
N-Word Video Sinks Book-Signing by Ex-SeaWorld Trainer was last modified: by
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Follow Us:The U.S. Marine Corps is about to finish training its first women Stinger anti-aircraft missile-shooters. Low Altitude Air Defense Gunner’s Course 3-15 at Yuma...
The U.S. Marine Corps is about to finish training its first women Stinger anti-aircraft missile-shooters. Low Altitude Air Defense Gunner’s Course 3-15 at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona will graduate four enlisted female gunners.
“I couldn’t be more proud of my [military occupational specialty] or my job,” said Lance Cpl. Cody Meade, LAAD gunner. “It feels really good to be part of a class that’s made history, but at the end of the day, we’re all Marines and gender doesn’t matter.”
Stinger crews can get pretty close to the front line. The shoulder-fired missile can hit aircraft only around five miles away. So a job shooting Stingers is pretty close to direct combat.
The Army opened up most of its own Stinger crews to women back in 2003.
“A force that is less gender-specific leads to the creation of more multifunctional soldiers and leaders within the air defense branch. With this change, the personnel pool is much larger and, when trained and ready, they can assume positions of greater responsibility allowing them to grow into leaders that are experienced in the totality of the battlespace rather than a segmented portion of it,” Maj. Gen. Stan Green, then chief of Air Defense Artillery, said at the time.In the wake of Monday’s Boston Marathon tragedy, many across the country and the world have reached out in support of the city of Boston. That support has gone far and wide, including some of the city’s most bitter sports rivals.
The New York Yankees have become the latest organization to lend their support to the grief-stricken city of Boston. The Yanks paid tribute to Boston in two ways Tuesday. First, there was a moment of silence prior to their game with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Second, Neil Diamond‘s “Sweet Caroline” was played following the third inning, in homage to the tradition of playing the same song at Fenway Park before the bottom of the eighth inning.
Our thoughts are with the Boston community. Tonight there will be a special moment of silence & Fenway favorite Sweet Caroline @ end of 3rd. —
New York Yankees (@Yankees) April 16, 2013
The Yanks also posted a sign on Yankee Stadium’s outer wall that said “United We Stand” between a Yankees and Red Sox logo, as seen below.
We stand united with the @RedSox: http://t.co/RgMKEOxRmR —
New York Yankees (@Yankees) April 16, 2013
After the New York’s classy gesture, Diamond thanked the Yankees for their compassion.
Thank you NY Yankees for playing 'Sweet Caroline' for the people of Boston. You scored a home run in my heart. With respect, Neil #OneBoston —
Neil Diamond (@NeilDiamond) April 17, 2013
Watch the fans sing along to the classic Fenway tune in the video below, with a hat tip to Barstool Sports.WASHINGTON - Texas politicians are increasing pressure on President Donald Trump to pull back a federal ethanol mandate created to reduce the nation's thirst for oil.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and other Republican senators met with the president on Thursday to discuss altering the mandate, after the Environmental Protection Agency said earlier this year that it would slightly increase the amount biofuel that must be blended into gasoline for 2018 and would not make changes to the program long sought by Republicans from oil-rich states.
In a letter in late October, Cruz and eight other Republican senators, including Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., asked Trump to meet so they could "discuss a pathway forward toward a mutually agreeable solution" on the biofuel mandate, known as the renewable fuel standard.
"If your administration does not make adjustments or reforms on matters related to the renewable fuel standard," the senators said in the letter, "it will result in a loss of jobs around the country, particularly in our states."
At Thursday's meeting were Trump, Chief of Staff John Kelly, EPA chief Scott Pruitt, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette and Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn, as well as 11 senators, including Cruz and Cornyn.
Trump is "aware that workers in the refining sector believe the program isn't working as intended," a White House spokesman said. "He will listen to the concerns of senators who represent these workers, with the hope of finding common ground."
During the meeting, Trump encouraged senators to find a solution that was "win-win" for refineries, biofuels producers and consumers, a lobbyist briefed on the meeting said.
"We had a productive meeting today with the president to discuss how to fix the compliance problem in a way that protects both refinery workers and corn farmers," Cruz and other senators said in a statement.
An aide to Cornyn said the senator was "working hard to unify all stakeholders in a consensus effort to reform" the biofuel program.
For Cruz, the debate over ethanol comes as he gears up for next year's election, in which he is being challenged by Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-El Paso.
Cruz is considered a strong frontrunner in that race, but as he prepares for his campaign he has been a more regular presence in Texas, with frequent public events and meetings in recent weeks with Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and the Texas Farm Bureau. The meeting at the White House came after Cruz and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., blocked a confirmation vote in the Senate on Bill Northey, Trump's nominee to be a undersecretary of agriculture.
But the White House faces opposing pressure from politicians in the Midwest, a region for which the mandate, enacted more than a decade ago, has created an economic boom through increased demand for corn, the principal source of ethanol in this country. Earlier this week Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, downplayed the White House meeting with Cruz, telling the Des Moines Register, "the president keeps doing what he's told the voters of Iowa, me and Sen. Ernst so many times - that he supports ethanol."
Sen. Joni Ernst is Iowa's junior U.S. senator.
Ethanol represents 10 percent of the nation's motor fuel supply, and refiners in and around the Houston area have long complained not only about the loss of demand for gasoline, but the cost of buying the Renewable Identification Numbers - or RINs - that are required by Washington.
The EPA assigns RINs to individual batches of biofuels, to ensure they are being added to the fuel supply. For those refineries that don't blend ethanol themselves, they must buy RINs, which are traded in financial markets.
The cost of RINs has fluctuated dramatically in recent years. Earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote to Pruitt, asking for a waiver from the mandate for Texas. "The escalating and unjustified RINs prices are creating a severe economic hardship for refiners, small retailers, consumers, skilled labor and others," Abbott wrote. "The strength and resiliency of the industry and by extension, Texas' economy - is threatened by a restrictive federal mandate."Once again, we have people pushing the idiotic notion that restricting free speech can be used to protect oppressed groups. This paper was written by Ann Bartow, Director of the Franklin Pierce Center for Intellectual Property and Professor of Law at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. In it she calls for an end to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). This law gives sites like YouTube, Facebook, and others immunity from liability regarding content that is posted on their sites by users. The exception to this immunity is content that violates criminal law and content that violates IP law. That second exception is why we have to deal with DMCA takedown nonsense, because sites will be held liable for copyright violations if they don’t respond promptly to takedown requests.
Speaking of the DMCA, it turns out that’s exactly where Bartow is drawing inspiration for a proposed alternative to Section 230 of the CDA. She wants a notice and takedown system for dealing with online harassment. Now this isn’t a new idea, opponents of free speech have gone after Section 230 before.
Recently and notably, Arthur Chu called for an end to this law, and for it to be replaced by a DMCA style system. Chu is a pseudo-celebrity whose biggest claim to fame is being a Jeopardy! contestant. I highly doubt any politicians are using his comments as a guide when crafting legislation, so his opposition to Section 230 wasn’t too concerning. When actual law professors start writing papers about this topic, it becomes a bit more worrisome. Politicians might take these suggestions seriously.
Bartow begins by showing her utter disdain for the idea of free speech in her opening paragraphs. She criticizes liberals in particular for being against the regulation of speech when they are in favor of regulating everything else. She states: “Speech, however, is often an outlier. Many liberals staunchly oppose any regulation of speech. The U.S. government has made so many truly bad speech interventions, this is understandable, but still problematic.” While she might consider free speech “problematic,” I actually think the hypothetical liberals she’s arguing against have a point: The government, or all governments for that matter, have a terrible track record when it comes to regulating speech. They tend to use it for oppressive purposes. It might actually be better not to give the government that kind of power.
In typical social justice fashion, she tries to dress up her authoritarian agenda by appealing to poor oppressed women and minorities: “On a much bigger scale the same incentives apply to the largest ISPs. They create and host platforms designed to attract as much online traffic as possible. They benefit monetarily from popular content that is often hostile and offensive to groups with less power in society, such as sexual minorities, racial minorities, religious minorities, and, as Citron describes in such harrowing detail, to women generally.”
After this, we finally get to the meat of the paper, her proposed solution to the problem of free speech:
Reform must be bolder to have any measurable effect. A more conditional ISP immunity could be framed somewhat along the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under the so called “notice and takedown” provisions of the DMCA, when an ISP takes down online information that has been used in a way that a copyright holder alleges was not authorized, it is essentially immune from copyright based liability for distributing infringing materials. If it chooses not to respond to the copyright holder’s demand, however, the ISP may later have to defend its decision not to takedown the disputed material on the merits. Risk aversion usually motivates takedowns. Even now, when victims hold the copyright in photos used to torment them, and ask ISPs to remove them for copyright reasons, ISPs generally remove them with great alacrity to avoid potential liability for copyright infringement. A recalibration of Section 230 immunity could establish a similar framework that creates potential liability when ISPs refuse to assist people whose victimization through online bullying, stalking and harassment they are facilitating and profiting from. Because speech torts are so much harder to prove than intellectual property infringement, takedowns in this realm are less likely to be routine.
Now this proposal should be raising alarm bells. The DMCA is not what most people would consider to be a great model to emulate. It is already abused like crazy. IP holders regularly abuse the takedown system to go after critical reviews and other examples of fair use, or in cases of extreme incompetence simply issue takedown notices based on the title even though the content is not in any way related to their IP. And then we have people who aren’t even attempting to defend their IP but are just issuing bogus claims to censor content they disagree with.
Now if a phony DMCA claim is made against you, that’s not necessarily the end of the story. You can challenge the claim. Of course this requires you to give up personal information so that the other party can take you to court. In fact, sometimes censorship is not even the reason for issuing the claim, but merely to get access to someone’s personal information. It’s absurd that Bartow lists stalking as a type of harassment she is working to stop with this proposal, when DMCA and similar systems greatly assist stalkers in obtaining information about their targets. It can also be used as a tool for doxxing, which is supposed to be a major form of online harassment. I would expect anyone seriously concerned with online harassment would want to reform the DMCA, not spread its nonsense further.
The next step after giving up your personal information is for the other party to take you to court. Sometimes the people who make the claims are bluffing and will drop the claim after you challenge them, but certain companies are intent on crushing fair use and will take you to court. This can be a long and expensive process, possibly having multiple appeals, and many people can’t bear the financial burden. The fact of the matter is the current DMCA regime benefits the rich and powerful disproportionately because the average user doesn’t have the money to fight the claim in court and will just let their videos be censored rather than fight the claim.
With that in mind, it’s hard to see how using the DMCA model to deal with harassment will benefit any oppressed, downtrodden, or marginalized groups. The big winners will be the rich and powerful who can make harassment claims against any criticism of them, and have the bulk of that content wiped off the Internet because the average user can’t put up a costly court battle to defend it.
A major theme throughout the paper is the argument that many social media companies fight for Section 230 because it’s financially beneficial to them, and she may have a point here. I don’t pretend to believe that Google or Facebook are completely benevolent, and they are likely against regulating speech online because it keeps them safe from lawsuits, more so than any ideal of protecting free speech. On the other hand, just because some companies are supporting it for selfish reasons doesn’t automatically make the law bad. Even if companies are only interested in protecting this law to make more profit, that doesn’t provide any reason why we should get rid of it.
The final section of the paper is arguing that Section 230 isn’t really necessary because many other countries have no equivalent law and yet social media sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to do business in them. The final paragraph basically says censorship is no big deal because companies still do business in China. She states: “If Section 230 style immunity was critical for any reason other than maximizing profits, no ISP would do business in China, which has a highly censored Internet infrastructure, and actively jails people for criminal speech offenses such as ‘spreading rumors.’ Yet Google is actively trying to expand its presence there. So are Microsoft, Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter just to name a few.”
The fact that some companies choose to do business under authoritarian regimes is not at all a convincing reason as to why we should emulate their speech policing. China provides a great example of censorship being used by the powerful against the powerless, and should be taken as a warning of what to avoid—not a target to aim for.
Despite claiming that she is looking out for groups with less power in society, her proposal would seem to disproportionately benefit those who have power, and there is no reason to believe any genuinely oppressed group will benefit from it.
Share Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!Analysis A few years ago, Andy Grove took the Davos crowd to task. The received wisdom at the time – and it still is – was that America's future was as a "knowledge economy."
It was 2010, and the former Intel CEO lamented that Foxconn employed more people – 800,000 in total – than Sony, Intel, Apple, Dell, Microsoft and HP combined.
Grove was fed up with being told that prosperity would come if the US continued to export jobs and manufacturing skills. And that the future was startups. This was a load of rubbish, he pointed out in a comment piece.
The lesson Grove had learned at Intel was that success was all about scale. As soon as a country loses its high-tech manufacturing base, it forgets how to do many things, and loses its ability to scale in a new marketplace. The spoils go to those who retain a competitive manufacturing base.
TVs were a good example, Grove wrote. Princeton economist Alan Blinder had written that the absence of TV production in the USA, as TVs became a low cost "commodity," was a good thing.
"I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today's 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry."
He compared it to a condemned engineer fixing a faulty guillotine, so it successfully chops off his head.
"Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs – we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate."
Grove was sympathetic to the mixed model of free markets and strategic prioritization that Asian companies used, but with a more corporatist model, where the governments choose winners. He suggested imposing levies on manufactured imports, with the money raised being doled out on strategic loans.
The lessons to be learned from these eras of post-WW2 growth are ambiguous at best. There was lots of catch-up and lots of low-hanging fruit for Asian economies looking for growth. Their domestic markets were getting white goods (large electrical goods like refrigerators) and new technology for the first time, and for a while, everyone was happy.
Central planning during an early phase of industrial development – deciding where the roads and power stations go – is much less controversial than government involvement during later stages of development, when the giant industrial conglomerates have become uncompetitive and enjoy a cozy relationship with ministers.
And it seemed that no sooner had one economy (eg, Japan) been anointed then it fell into a slump. In recent years another model, the Korean chaebols, have hit a limit in the face of Chinese competition.
But what Grove – who died this week aged 79 – railed against has even more resonance today than it did six years ago, before "Uberization."
Donald Trump said: "Everybody does it. We don't do it and we do nothing about it. We're losing a lot of our very good jobs."
The billionaire demagogue wants a 45 per cent levy imposed on Chinese imports. Today, there's no shortage of people willing to give that a hearing. Although it is hard to see how that could create any instant results. The short-term beneficiaries would be Korean or Japanese exporters, rather than domestic US manufacturers.
Here, Sir James Dyson has echoed the warning. Dyson too has lamented the wonk-babble that infests innovation policy, taking aim at Cameron's crush on "Silicon Roundabout," (ironically named, presumably, for its complete absence of silicon). Dyson is proof that you can stay competitive in a ferocious global market if you invest wisely in high tech manufacturing. Dyson is booming in China.
"All of our IP, patents, inventions and technologies are generated in the UK. They create highly valued, well-paid British jobs [and] most of the taxes we pay in the world are paid in Britain," Dyson CEO Max Conze could boast [paywalled] this week.
So we could do worse than pay more heed to Dyson's advice: better retention of engineering graduates, strong IP protection, and disentangling ourselves from Brussels regulations designed to featherbed Europe's corporations.
(He's a Brexit man, naturally.) ®MUMBAI: When Nerul teenager Rani's (name changed) `sore eyes' didn't heal for over 15 days, little did her parents imagine that multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) could be the cause. Rani didn't have any of the symptoms associated with TB--coughing, breathlessness or loss of weight--except for some dark red lesions in both her eyes, said her parents.“We thought it was a stubborn case of sore eyes,“ her father told TOI. But when eye surgeon Dr P Suresh examined Rani's eyes in Fortis Hospital, Mulund, he felt that wasn't the case. “It didn't seem like a sore eyes symptom. I thought it could be an associated condition to, say, pneumo nia as there have been cases reported in medical literature of pneumonia affecting the eye,“ he said. Rani underwent an X-Ray scan that showed a lesion in her chest.The 15-year-old girl, who is in Class XI, was referred to infectious diseases specialist Dr Anita Mathew. “We put her through blood tests and a CT scan that confirmed she had MDR TB. A rapid test cal led GeneXpert confirmed that she had MDR TB,“ said Dr Mathew, adding that this was a rare case in which an eye symptom led to a diagnosis of TB.TB has re-emerged as one of the biggest public health challenges in India, claiming 3 lakh lives every year or one life every two minutes. Mumbai is referred to as the epicentre of the deadly drug-re sistant TB in which patients show resistance to two or more known anti-TB drugs; treatment involves newer antibiotics that are expensive.“We couldn't afford the two-year-long treatment that runs into Rs 2 lakh or more, so Dr Mathew referred us to a government centre for free medicines,“ said Rani's mother.“She has to take daily injections for six months as a part of the treatment, but they are painful,“ she added.An eye specialist with a government hospital said the eye symptom could be an “immunological response to TB“. Dr Suresh added that the “dramatic presentation“ could be because MDR TB is more virulent.Chest specialist Dr Yatin Dholakia, however, said that eye involvement in TB isn't uncommon. “Even eye TB is common these days. Involvement of the eye in chest TB is seen and can be resolved easily with steroidal treatment,“ he added.New Jersey Governor Chris Christie launched a federal political action committee, or PAC, Monday as he seeks to lay the groundwork for a likely 2016 presidential campaign.
The new group, Leadership Matters for America PAC, will allow the 52-year-old to travel the country to raise money and support like-minded politicians, but it can’t specifically advocate on his behalf. The launch comes two days after Christie appeared at a conservative cattle call in Iowa, where he sought to prove he could reach out to a skeptical |
% in the 12 months to mid-March, and by 14.7% in Melbourne. From January 2009, prices in Sydney have surged by 106%. Melbourne price growth has been similarly strong, increasing by 89%.
The rate of price growth has concerned policymakers, with the federal government examining a range of policy responses in its forthcoming budget to address affordability, and the central bank flagging increasing concerns about financial stability.
“In New South Wales there were 1,503 properties settled involving foreign buyers from October 2016 to January 2017 and they totaled $1.63 billion in value.
“Chinese buyers settled on 1,211 or 80% of them and accounted for 77% of the total purchase value.”
Source: Credit Suisse
Tevfik and Liu say that the Chinese figures include buyers from not only mainland China but also Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
There is also little indication that they are having trouble in meeting their settlement obligations, yet.
“In New South Wales there were $225 million of foreign settlements in October 2016 and this rose to more than $450 million in both November and December. In Victoria the value of December settlements was 50% higher than in November,” they say.
“So despite the capital controls put in place in China, and the local banks refusing to lend to purchasers from abroad, foreign buyers were still able to find the financing to complete their transactions.”
In late 2016, China’s central bank begun vetting capital transfers abroad worth $US5 million or more. Previously, only transfers worth $US50 million were required to be reported to authorities.
Those restrictions were tightened further at the beginning of this year with regulators stipulating that people could not purchase foreign exchange for overseas investment, including for buying houses.
With the tax data on foreign purchases now several months old, whether this is impacting the ability of Chinese investors to settle is, as yet, unknown.
According to a report in The Australian earlier this month, many Chinese buyers were struggling to settle upon apartments that they had previously purchased in Melbourne.
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Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.By Paul Tomkins.
One thing that has bothered me in the past when defending Luis Suarez – or, if not defending, at least, asking that he be given a fair trial and a punishment commensurate with his ‘crimes’ – is that I got dismissed by many for being part of a tribe, and not seeing things clearly.
Well yes, I am part of a tribe. But then so too is everyone else. As you’ll no doubt know, I’m in the Liverpool FC tribe (and in other tribes at other times, such as the Bald Community, as outlined by Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm).
My issue is that no-one takes ownership of the tribe they are in when condemning Suarez, or Liverpool fans. And yet there are always two tribes: us and them.
If you’re a football fan who doesn’t support Liverpool, chances are you’re in the anti-LFC tribe at certain times, just as, if some crazy shit goes down at Southampton or Spurs or Swansea – clubs we have no real beef with – we, as outsiders, will pounce on their misfortune, or get outraged about something that we want to see punished (partly for the thrill of watching something kicking off at a safe distance, like a fight in the corner of a pub; partly because we want to see anyone who could do well against our team banned for as long as possible, perhaps even deported).
It doesn’t have to be about hatred and rivalries; this isn’t about Liverpool against Manchester United. If you support Millwall, or Reading, or Crewe Alexandra, you are united when there’s something to be ‘outraged’ about at another club. And if it’s a big club, there’s that extra sense of ‘well, they deserved it’. Schadenfreude is an ever-bigger part of the football experience. Indeed, it’s also part of our TV programming and takes up a fair chunk of our tabloids. Everything is geared towards conflict, as it makes good telly and sells newspapers.
If you don’t like football, then you are in the anti-football tribe. You’ll use something that happens on a football pitch – such as one man biting another – as proof that the game is out of control; that it’s barbaric. While we expect better behaviour when there’s a global audience, it’s fair to say that a million worse things happened around the world the other night: rapes, murders, serious assaults, child abuse and neglect, drunk driving, drug-pushing, and countless financial scams that will leave people without homes, jobs or maybe even lives.
Football is tribal, but so is life. The Guardian has its tribe, just as the Daily Mail has its tribe. We may favour one over the other, but these days, if you’re not for something, you better bloody-well be against it. The man and woman on the street aren’t interested in indifference – or aren’t thought to be, at least; they have to feel love or hate; compassion or condemnation.
Luis Suarez bit someone, which is wrong. It’s not nice to see. But he didn’t maim them, or rape them, or kill them. No-one was seriously hurt, or was ever going to get seriously hurt. You shouldn’t bite someone on a football pitch. But one football pundit – Danny Mills – said that Suarez deserves locking up for life. Even the sickest criminals rarely get such a sentence. Had he still been alive, Jimmy Saville wouldn’t have got a life sentence, and he raped little girls and allegedly had sex with corpses.
People find biting disgusting, and maybe it is; but once we start getting onto the subject of ‘disgusting’ then everyone is different. I find eating insects disgusting, but in some countries it’s a staple. I don’t find eating parts of a cow disgusting, people from other cultures (and vegetarians) do. And yet in Britain we’re not disgusted by a deliberately-swung elbow to break nose, jaw or cheek.
Biting is a primal instinct, something children do and then usually grow out of. And yet so too is forming a gang – a witch hunt, if you will, dating back well before the existence of witches – to drive the outsider out of town.
Someone noted in the comments section of TTT that if John Terry had done this we’d be up in arms. And he was right – we probably would; because John Terry is not only not part of our tribe, he’s seen (as captain of a rival club) as a threat to it. We’d have got it all out of perspective, because what’s better than John Terry getting a two-year ban for some low-key violence? We’d have been high on the scent of blood, readying our pitchforks and sharpening our sense of moral outrage.
Here’s a thought. Ex-Premier League striker Marlon King gets an easier time in England than Luis Suarez. He’s not as famous, obviously, but he doesn’t elicit the same tribal responses because he’s English, and doesn’t play for such a high profile club. He’s certainly not a threat to Premier League sides, or the English national team; he’s merely a threat to the general public.
Here’s part of his rap sheet:
“As of October 2009, King had convictions for 14 offences. Three cases led to imprisonment. In May 2002 he received an eighteen-month prison sentence for receiving stolen goods, in relation to a BMW convertible that he was found driving, but was found not guilty of a charge of assaulting a police officer in a related case. Gillingham continued to pay his salary while he was in jail, and supported in his appeal, which resulted in the sentence being reduced to nine months, with King being released on licence after five months, returning to the Gillingham team within two days of his release. … In December 2008, again in the Soho area, King was arrested on suspicion of punching a 20-year-old female university student in the face, causing a broken nose and split lip for which she was treated in hospital. He was later convicted of sexual assault and assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and sentenced to 18 months in prison and placed on the Sex Offender Register for seven years. … King was arrested and bailed once more in April 2013 after a car crash which left one man seriously injured, and in July of the same year, he was again arrested in connection with a hit-and-run incident which had left a second man injured.”
King is now back in jail, serving another 18-month term, but was still playing in the Championship last season. Coventry, Birmingham and Sheffield United all employed him despite his record as a woman-beater, car-stealer and sexual offender. Then there’s Lee Hughes, who killed someone with dangerous driving, and later played for a number of professional clubs. And yet I expect a fair few fans of all those clubs are amongst the millions up in arms as Suarez’s bite.
Plenty of footballers have (allegedly) been involved in gang-rapes, assaults, match-fixing (that defrauds thousands of paying customers and thousands of betting punters), and other far more serious incidents. They may not happen on the pitch, but they still get to play football without mass hysteria following them around. Suarez is part of the “dirty foreigner” tribe, and a target for anyone in the upright, moral English tribe.
Mental
For me, it seems that Suarez is not so much a “winner” as someone who cannot take losing; or rather, that he takes it incredibly personally. Which Liverpool player was most upset by the Reds not winning the league? As you’ll recall, Gerrard was upset but Suarez was inconsolable. Psychologically speaking, it’s as if his entire world crumbles if his team loses; and it’s even worse if he’s the leader, the talisman. That’s not healthy, but it is part of what makes him a remarkable player.
Clearly it needs to be slightly recalibrated, so that the good isn’t lost but the bad is toned down to acceptable levels (even if he doesn’t go around doing really bad things like trying to break legs to win games). Remember, he’s not ended anyone’s career, put someone in hospital, risked anyone’s life.
He plays on a knife-edge, and yet that knife is too sharp. He fears that if his team loses, it’s the end – he falls, and is sliced in two. And yet he makes mistakes that ultimately cost his teams their best player. In the situation – where he’s opening his mouth and nuzzling it into a defender – he is clearly not thinking, is he?
The second part of this article is for Subscribers only.Celebrities rushed to social media Friday to celebrate the news that the Robert Mueller-led Special Counsel investigating President Donald Trump’s campaign announced a plea hearing for former National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who has reportedly entered a guilty plea and is set to testify against Trump.
Outspoken Trump critic Rosie O’Donnell tweeted the hashtag “Best day ever” with a screenshot depicting breaking news alerts about Flynn.
Flynn has been charged with lying to the FBI, according to court documents released by the special counsel.
“On or about January 24, 2017, defendant MICHAEL T. FLYNN did willfully and knowingly make materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations in a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive branch of the Government of the United States,” the documents said.
Star Wars star Mark Hamill tweeted: “If you guessed Michael (“Fear of Mueller is Rational”) Flynn as the next to go down- CONGRATULATIONS! (you’re even closer to a #TraitorBINGO!) Wonder how the “#POTUS” will strategize & pick his next move?”
Hamill’s tweet included the hashtag that spelled out the phrase “All I Want 4 Xmas Is 4 Santa 2 Lock Them Up LOCKTHEM UP.”
If you guessed Michael ("Fear of Mueller is Rational") Flynn as the next to go down- CONGRATULATIONS! (you're even closer to a #TraitorBINGO!) Wonder how the "#POTUS" will strategize & pick his next move? #AllIWant4XmasIs4Santa2LockThemUpLOCKTHEMUP #tRumPutin pic.twitter.com/mt7gdARdhF — Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) December 1, 2017
Actor Jeff Daniels tweeted, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”
“…it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…” #FlynnFriday — Jeff Daniels (@Jeff_Daniels) December 1, 2017
Flynn appeared Friday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia where he entered his guilty plea, as part of a plea deal.
Below is a roundup of all the celebrity reaction, from gloating to the outright praise of Mueller.
'Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones' – proverb I learned when I was 5yrs old https://t.co/o0wymNCYqE — Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) December 1, 2017
Not collusion treason –
If he -as candidate -asked for help from any foreign power to swing an election for ANY reason is a crime https://t.co/s8sDvq2TDz — John Cusack (@johncusack) December 1, 2017
If this is true it’s breath taking. https://t.co/koQ3zFNyCV — Adam McKay (@GhostPanther) December 1, 2017
United States Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn has disgraced the Military and all who serve by lying to the FBI. He was more loyal to the Turkish Govt than to our own. The man who led the charge “LOCK HER UP” is about to be locked up. — Ron Perlman (@perlmutations) December 1, 2017
Trump has learned one thing from bannon. Every time there is bad news coming, get ahead of it by appealing to the bigotry of your supporters. It enrages the liberal media and energises the supporters. — Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) December 1, 2017
I’ll just leave this here https://t.co/FBl0RsIBuH — Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) December 1, 2017
Flynn! What a fantastic birthday gift! — christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) December 1, 2017
Bye!!!! 👋 — Emmy Rossum (@emmyrossum) December 1, 2017
https://twitter.com/JoyVBehar/status/936646147585859584
"He is prepared to testify against President Trump, members of the Trump family and others in the White House." Let's do this. https://t.co/gmThu9HTUJ — Ava DuVernay (@ava) December 1, 2017
Flynn said he had a story to tell. Doesn't look like Donald Trump's Christmas will be all that merry. — Rob Reiner (@robreiner) December 1, 2017
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudsonThe Russian Air Force that started its anti-terrorism mission in Syria in September 2015 has thus far bombed over 62,000 bases, positions, concentration centers and gatherings of terrorists in Syria, the country's Aerospace Force said.
The Russian Aerospace Force said that its warplanes have targeted over 62,000 military centers of the terrorists in over 30,000 air attacks since September 2015.
"Till December 20, 2016 the Aerospace Force has carried out more than 30,000 sorties hitting more than 62,000 military targets of terrorists," the deputy chief of Russia’s General Staff and first deputy chief of the Aerospace Force, Pavel Kurachenko told a conference of the extra-departmental council of experts for aerospace issues.
Russia began its air campaign against the terrorist groups in Syria on September 2015, at the request of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. While killing thousands of militants, Moscow also suffered military losses.
On September 30, 2015 Russian bombers conducted their first strikes against terrorist targets in Syria, hitting ISIL positions near the cities of Homs and Hama.
By that time the US-led coalition had been already active in Syria for over a year. Yet Russia became the only state which received an official request from Bashar Assad to carry out air strikes in the country. The Russian fighter jets operated from the Humeimim air base located in Lattakia province.
During its mission, the Russian Air Force aided the Syrian army in liberating one of the country’s key cities and a world heritage site – Palmyra (Tadmur) in Homs province.
The ancient city had been under the control of ISIL since May 2015 before it was retaken by Syrian government forces backed by Russian air raids in March this year. However, ISIL kicked off a large-scale operation on December 8, 2016, with thousands of forces in Homs province to take control of Palmyra, and finally managed to capture the city on December 11.
On March 15, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the withdrawal of the majority of Russian warplanes and personnel from Syria, stressing that the major part of the operation in Syria was over.
"I believe that the objectives with which the Ministry of Defense has been tasked have been largely reached," Putin said, adding that "Therefore, starting with tomorrow I order the withdrawal of the main part of our military from the Syrian Arab Republic."Why did Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. abruptly drop a criminal case against Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump in August 2012? A new report suggests money may have something to do with it.
The DA’s office believed the Trump children repeatedly lied to condo buyers by inflating their sales success at the Trump Soho development, had solid email evidence to support it, and were deep into a criminal investigation, according to a joint report by ProPublica, the New Yorker and WNYC. Then, on Aug. 3, 2012, Vance dropped the case. The decision came four months after a private meeting between Vance and Trump’s personal attorney Marc Kasowitz.
A month after the decision, in September, Kasowitz contacted Vance’s campaign about hosting a fundraiser for his re-election that would raise $32,000 in January. He raised another $9,000 at another fundraiser in October 2013. And Kasowitz had also donated $25,000 to Vance in early 2012, although the DA returned that money prior to the meeting.
“We did the right thing,” Vance told the reporters. “Another five and a half months go by. Marc Kasowitz has no matter pending before the office for the Trumps or anybody else. It’s 2013 and it’s an election—and I welcome his support.” Still, Vance said he plans to return the donations.
“I don’t want the money to be a millstone around anybody’s neck, including the office’s,” he said.
The Trump Soho case goes back to 2008. Amid a tanking real estate market, the newly built Trump Soho at 246 Spring Street was struggling to find buyers for its hotel-condo units. Donald Jr. and Ivanka repeatedly claimed that more than 50 percent of units had been sold even though that figure was widely inflated. As The Real Deal has previously reported, inflating sales numbers can give buyers a false sense of what a unit is really worth. It also violates the Martin Act, which regulates the sale of condos like securities.
Trump’s lawyers had long told prosecutors that Donald Jr. and Ivanka’s statements might have been exaggerations but did not rise to the level of criminality. They also framed the sales disputes as simple “buyers remorse.” In August 2010, some buyers sued the Trump Organization, eventually winning a settlement. Under the terms of the deal, they agreed to state that no law was broken and that they would only cooperate with a criminal investigation if subpoenaed.
Still, the report claims prosecutors were bullish on the case, largely because they had email evidence clearly showing that Donald Jr. and others in the company were aware they had lied to buyers. [WNYC] — Konrad PutzierIn NASCAR Cup Series competition the #24 car has started 1485 races with 64 drivers and has 93 wins, 85 poles, 386 top 5s, 664 top 10s, and 303 DNFs.
Chevrolet: 1152 races
Ford: 100 races
Mercury: 76 races
Oldsmobile: 62 races
Buick: 51 races
Pontiac: 50 races
Plymouth: 38 races
Chrysler: 11 races
Dodge: 4 races
Hudson: 1 race
Lincoln: 1 race
Jeff Gordon drove the #24 in every single consecutive 797 starts of his career from 1992-2015 for 93 wins, 3rd most all time. In 1992, Roush Racing owner Jack Roush expressed interest in signing Gordon, which would keep him in the Ford Racing stable, but Gordon’s stepfather John Bickford had wanted Ray Evernham as crew chief, but Roush stated he selected crew chiefs, not his drivers. Gordon and Evernham were signed away from Bill Davis Racing after Rick Hendrick watched Gordon’s first Busch Series victory at Atlanta Motor Speedway in March of 1992.
The car number was originally to have been 46, a car fielded by Hendrick for Greg Sacks for the filming of Days of Thunder in 1989, but was changed after a licencing conflict with Paramount Pictures. The number 24 was selected due to it having little significance in NASCAR history prior to Gordon. Gordon debuted in the 1992 Hooters 500, with the now iconic DuPont rainbow paint scheme designed by Sam Bass, qualifying twenty-first and finishing thirty-first following a crash.
The team went full-time in 1993 with crew chief Ray Evernham. Gordon won his Twin 125 qualifying race at Daytona and finished fifth in the Daytona 500. He finished fourteenth in points and took home rookie of the year honors. In 1994, Gordon won his first career race at the Coca-Cola 600 and also won the inaugural Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis. Gordon improved to eighth in the points that year. The following year, Gordon would go on to win the 1995 Winston Cup (Sprint Cup)championship. He finished runner-up to teammate Terry Labonte for the 1996 championship. He was given the nickname “Wonder Boy” by Dale Earnhardt, and his crew was called the “Rainbow Warriors”. In addition to the 1997 Daytona 500, Gordon won back-to-back championships in 1997 and 1998 and also tied Richard Petty’s modern era record for most victories in a season with thirteen.
Gordon won the 1999 Daytona 500, but the team struggled with consistency that year. Crew chief Ray Evernham announced he was leaving the team to help with Dodge’s return to NASCAR that September. He was replaced by Brian Whitesell, who guided Gordon to wins in the first two races after Evernham’s departure. At the end of the season, Gordon signed a lifetime contract with the team that gave him part ownership. In 2000, Whitesell moved to a new position within the organization and was replaced by Robbie Loomis. Gordon picked up his fiftieth career victory at Talladega but finished ninth in points. He bounced back in 2001, winning his fourth championship.
In 2002, Gordon became car owner for Jimmie Johnson and announced his first wife Brooke had filed for divorce. He finished fourth in points in 2003. In 2004, Gordon finished third in the inaugural Chase for the Nextel Cup. After winning three of the first nine races in 2005 including the Daytona 500, his season fell into a downward spiral. Gordon missed the chase for the Nextel Cup and finished eleventh in points that year, which was the first time since his rookie season that he finished outside the top ten in points. 2006 was Gordon’s comeback year. With the help of new crew chief Steve Letarte, Gordon would rebound to make the Chase for the Sprint Cup and finish sixth in points. In 2006 he also married his second wife Ingrid Vandebosch.
In 2007, despite winning six races and scoring a modern era record thirty top 10s, Gordon wound up finishing second in points to teammate Jimmie Johnson. In 2008 Gordon returned to the Chase, but he failed to win a race for the first time since his rookie year. Despite that statistic, he managed to enter the Chase and finish seventh in the season points standings. At the end of the 2008 season, Gordon unveiled on The Today Show his new Firestorm paint scheme for 2009 and beyond. Beginning in 2011, Alan Gustafson became the crew chief of the No. 24 team. Gordon’s primary sponsor changed to AARP and Gordon partnering to form the “Drive to End Hunger” initiative. The deal lasts for 22 races over the next two years, with Pepsi and DuPont continuing their associate deals. The new combination saw a resurgence for Gordon, as he won at Phoenix, Pocono, and Atlanta and finished 8th in points.
The following season, Gordon would be hampered by bad luck during most of the regular season. However, a win at Pocono and a 2nd place finish at Richmond vaulted Gordon into the 2012 Chase. At the Phoenix race, Gordon would tangle with fellow Chase contender Clint Bowyer, intentionally taking him out late in the race after initial contact early on. Gordon was fined $100,000 by NASCAR for the incident.
Gordon bounced back to take his first win in the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, the first time a Hendrick team had won at the circuit in Sprint Cup, in the final race for DuPont as Gordon’s sponsor, as a restructuring of DuPont meant the Performance Coatings group that sponsored Gordon would be spun off. That spinoff company, Axalta Coating Systems, owned by The Carlyle Group, replaced DuPont as the primary sponsor for the 14 races not covered by the AARP or Pepsi in 2013.
During the 2014 Coca-Cola 600 weekend, Gordon complained of back spasms, and skipped final practice; Regan Smith was tabbed to run in the event Gordon needed to be substituted, but Gordon ran the full 600 miles, finishing seventh. During the AAA Texas 500, Gordon and Keselowski were racing along with Jimmie Johnson for the win with a handful of laps left when Gordon collided with Keselowski, which cut out his own tire and led to him spinning. Gordon would fall to 29th, while Keselowski would finish third. Following the race, Gordon verbally confronted Keselowski in pit road over the incident with both drivers being surrounded by their pit crews. However, it escalated into a brawl due to Keselowski being shoved from behind by Harvick, who had also battled with Keselowski in the final laps. The brawl ended up involving the crew chiefs of both teams as well as other members from Kahne, Danica Patrick and Paul Menard’s teams. Both Gordon and Keselowski sustained facial cuts.
At Phoenix, Gordon finished 2nd to Harvick, but Newman edged him out for the fourth and final championship spot by one point to transfer to the final four in contention for the championship. Gordon won the pole for the final race at Homestead, and led a race-high 161 laps, but the decision to pit with 13 laps to go relegated him to 24th, and he finished 10th. The finish marked his 454th top-ten, surpassing Mark Martin for second in all-time top tens, behind Richard Petty’s 712. After the season ended, Gordon finished sixth in points; had the Chase not existed, he would have won a series record-tying 7th title based on total points scored in a season. Gordon, along with Austin Dillon, were the only drivers in 2014 to finish every race
On January 22, 2015, Gordon announced that 2015 would be his last as a full-time driver, but did not rule out retirement entirely. Three days later, USA Today writer Jeff Gluck reported that Gordon was hired by NASCAR on Fox to work as a rotating analyst for Xfinity Series races alongside Kevin Harvick and Brad Keselowski. Gordon’s 2015 season climaxed at Martinsville in October where he would win his only race of the season, clinching a spot in the Championship 4. Gordon finished 3rd in the final standings.
Starting in 2016, Gordon became a full-time member of the NASCAR on FOX broadcasting team, sharing the booth with Mike Joy and Darrell Waltrip. He was brought out of retirement in late 2016 to fill-in for injured Dale Earnhardt Jr and Hendrick Motorsports. These 8 starts in car #88 are the only races in Gordon’s Cup Career in a number that is not #24.
After Jeff Gordon’s retirement, 2014 XFINITY Series Champion Chase Elliott was promoted to the Cup series to take the helm of the #24 car, bringing his sponsor NAPA Auto Parts with him.
In his Daytona 500 debut, Elliott won the pole and, at the age of 20, became the youngest pole-sitter in 500 history. Elliott led three laps in the race, but on lap 18, spun exiting turn four and slid into the grass, damaging the front of the car. Elliott returned to the race on lap 59, 40 laps down, and finished 37th.
The next week he finished 8th at Atlanta for his first Sprint Cup top ten finish. The following week, at Las Vegas, Elliott showed a strong car all day and even had his car inside the top 5 with 40 laps to go, but crashed and finished 38th. Elliott picked up more top tens during the spring, finishing 5th at Texas for his first career Top-5, 4th at Bristol, 5th at Talladega, 9th at Kansas, 3rd at Dover, 8th in the Coca-Cola 600, and a career best 2nd at Michigan.
He won the fan vote to advance into the All-Star Race along with Danica Patrick where he finished a respectable 7th after nearly winning the final segment of the Sprint Showdown, losing to Kyle Larson in a photo finish.
At Pocono for the running of the Axalta “We Paint Winners” 400, Elliott would have his breakout race of his Sprint Cup career, Elliott would start 13th and later get the lead in the race and he would lead a race high of 51 laps, leading the most laps in a Sprint Cup race for the first time in his career. On a restart Elliott would lose the lead and then race came down close to fuel but the fuel would hold and he would finish 4th. At Michigan in June, Elliott finished second after he missed a shift in the lead.
He was one of the first rookies to qualify for The Chase for the Sprint Cup, along with Chris Buescher, since Denny Hamlin in 2006.
His sophomore season of 2017 showed improvement and frustration. Elliott started the 2017 season by winning the pole for the Daytona 500 for the second year in a row. He followed it up with a win in the first Can-Am Duel race, becoming the first driver since Dale Earnhardt in 1996 to win both the Daytona 500 pole and a qualifying race and the third in NASCAR history.
At Talladega on May 7, 2017 he was involved in a 16 car pileup that nearly saw him flip over, as his car got airborne. At Michigan in June Elliott got his 3rd second place finish in a row at the track. On October 1st, Elliott had another chance at his first career win leading his first 138 laps at Dover and having a 4 second lead over Kyle Busch with 50 laps to go, but caught lap traffic and allowed Busch to pass Elliott with 2 laps to go for the win while Elliott finished second.
At the fall race at Martinsville, Elliott was able to take the lead from Brad Keslowski with 4 to go, but his winning chances were ruined after being hit by Denny Hamlin from behind and spun out with 3 to go. Unhappy with Hamlin, he drove him to the outside wall after the race ended on the cooling lap. “My mom always said if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all,” Elliott told NBCSN. “He’s not even worth my time. … We had a good opportunity. I can’t control his decisions and whatever the hell that was. On to Texas.” He later got an apology from Hamlin after the race via twitter.
At Phoenix, Elliott was in a must-win situation to advance to Miami. He did lead two final laps of the race but once again, his win got taken away as Matt Kenseth passed him late in the race and ended up finishing 2nd that ended his championship hopes. Elliott would finish 5th in Cup Series points that year.
Elliott returned to Hendrick Motorsports and the Cup series in 2018, but not driving #24. His car was be re-branded as #9, the number his father famously drove, and the #24 transferred to his new teammate- William Byron. Elliott started a total of 72 races in car #24, third all time.
William Byron inherited Kasey Kahne’s No. 5 team, renumbered to No. 24, including crew chief Darian Grubb. In his first season in the Cup Series, Byron earned 4 top-10 finishes and failed to finish 9 times. Byron clinched rookie of the year honors after the penultimate race of the year at ISM Raceway, becoming the second driver next to Erik Jones to win rookie of the year in all three national series. On October 10, 2018, Hendrick Motorsports announced that Darian Grubb will move on to a technical director position while Chad Knaus takes over crew chief duties for Byron and the No. 24 in 2019. Byron has 36 Cup Series starts to date, all in car No. 24.
The only other driver to make more than just a few starts in #24 was also named Gordon, no relation to Jeff or Robby. Cecil Gordon drove in the NASCAR Grand National (Cup) Series, for 17 years and drove in a total of 449 races, 373 in #24 from 1970-1983. He never won and never got a pole, but got 29 top fives, 111 top tens. He finished third in points in 1971 and 1973. He completed 112,908 laps and only led 23 of them.
Other notable names in #24
Bobby Allison, 11 starts
Lennie Pond, 11 starts
Bob Welborn, 8 starts
Morgan Shepherd, 7 starts
Dick Trickle, 6 starts
Tiny Lund, 3 starts
Butch Gilliland, 3 starts
Kenny Wallace, 3 starts
Glen Wood, 1 start
Richard Petty, 1 start
Curtis Turner, 1 start
In the Truck Series, Jack Sprague is a 3 time series Champion in the #24 with 23 wins. The late Ricky Hendrick made 16 XFINITY Series starts in #24 from 1999-2001. From 2001-2002 Jack Sprague drove the #24 in the XFINITY Series earning 1 win ( a total of 24 wins in the number between the 2 series).
AdvertisementsCarmelo Anthony surfaced for the first time since the end of the season on Wednesday, 192 miles southwest of New York City. It wasn’t James Dolan, or new president Steve Mills, or even Rockets GM Daryl Morey joining the Knicks forward on the podium, but Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh. The ceremony wasn’t about the NBA at all—Melo was given a mayor’s medallion after hosting the Basketball Tournament’s Day of Giving in the city, his hometown—but like all things good in this world, eventually, the conversation turned back to the Knicks.
"I'm not talking about basketball right now," Melo said at the event. He did talk basketball, before and after this statement, but mostly only to emphasise how little basketball he is talking, especially with his bosses in New York. According to Carmelo, the parties haven’t spoken in over a month, since Mills officially became president, and since the hiring of new GM Scott Perry, whom he’s known for years. "I’m pretty sure I’ll talk to [Perry] when the time comes."
That statement is 36 percent commitment—"I’ll talk to him"—and 64 percent hedging. Being "pretty" sure something will happen "when the time comes" holds all the certainty of those "we should meet up!" plans you made on Facebook with the guy from sophomore year of college.
The Daily News reported that Melo’s camp is quiet because Mills paused negotiations with the Rockets in an effort to keep the veteran. Houston is reportedly the lone remaining franchise that Carmelo will waive his no-trade clause for, despite Portland’s best efforts and former rumors about Cleveland. Forcing a trade is no foreign venture to the 33-year-old, and neither, apparently, is working a crowd a couple of states away from New York.
Other than a sly, "You know I can’t talk about that," response when asked about the possibility of playing with his buddy Chris Paul, Melo responded to the other Knicks questions in language best described as the flourishing, filtered Instagram feed of someone post-breakup.
"I've been good. I've been away from the fray," he said, and what follows is literally bits and pieces of various songs from Drake, the no-love-lost-but-kind-of pedagogue of our generation:
"You haven't heard comments from me. I'm growing my hair out right now, spending time with the family. I'm being an AAU dad right now. That's what matters to me at this point. Nothing else really matters."
Which is to say, New York: Carmelo isn’t blinking.Everyone with just an even rudimentary understanding of basketball gave their head a shake when the Pacers traded the all-world Paul George to the Thunder for Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis -- and a grand total of zero draft picks -- last week.
It almost goes without saying that the Pacers rejected better offers.
The immediate leaks in the aftermath of the deal confirmed that, too, as it was reported that the Celtics made incredible offers to the Pacers, one of which included a |
(@NBCNews) November 13, 2017
McConnell is looking into supporting a “write-in candidate.”
After Roy Moore allegations, is Senate GOP considering a write-in campaign in Alabama? Sen. McConnell: "That's an option we're looking at" pic.twitter.com/aAnx6wWjVI — NBC News (@NBCNews) November 13, 2017
Moore responded to McConnell on Twitter, saying “The person who should step aside is @SenateMajLdr Mitch McConnell. He has failed conservatives and must be replaced. #DrainTheSwamp“
https://twitter.com/MooreSenate/status/930128259035082756?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2017%2F11%2Fjudge-roy-moore-responds-mitch-mcconnell-amid-calls-bow-al-senate-race%2F
As The Gateway Pundit reported, Axios says Republican swamp creatures may ask RINO hack Luther Strange who lost to Moore during the primary and Republican Rep. Robert Aderholtto to run as a write-in candidates.
It gets worse…
According to this Axios report, the Republican establishment hacks may even try to delay the Senate race or block Moore if he wins since it’s too late to remove him from the ballot!
Axios reports:
They’ve also weighed asking Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to delay the Dec. 12 election to early next year. But she has already pushed it back once, after she assumed the role of governor in April when her predecessor was removed, and this option would likely inspire Moore and his team to file a lawsuit in court.
The New York Times reported that McConnell may not seat Moore even if he wins!
Republican senators and their advisers, in a flurry of phone calls, emails and text messages, discussed fielding a write-in candidate, pushing Alabama’s governor to delay the Dec. 12 special election or even not seating Mr. Moore at all should he be elected. In an interview, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, declined to say whether he would agree to seat Mr. Moore should he win. Mr. McConnell deferred a question about a possible write-in campaign by Senator Luther Strange, the current occupant of the seat, to Mr. Strange.
On Monday afternoon, NRSC chairman Cory Gardner released a statement saying, “I believe the individuals speaking out against Roy Moore spoke with courage and truth, proving he is unfit to serve in the United States Senate and he should not run for office.”
JUST IN: NRSC Chairman Cory Gardner on Roy Moore: "If he refuses to withdraw and wins, the Senate should vote to expel him" pic.twitter.com/UoM1ll8zk1 — NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) November 13, 2017Today I read about the new iamallwoman project. Iamallwoman was born by a model, Charlie Howard, who broke with the “normal” modelling industry less than a year ago. The idea behind this project is to go against the lack of diversity in the modelling industry. The idea is that every woman is beautiful, what we have been preaching for years.
The most important thing is that the iamallwoman project is about all women of all shapes and sizes, without retouching. When we launched our #unretouchedbeauty campaign, we were singing the same chords. Beauty as it really is, perfect in its imperfection and beautiful in its entirety. So why is this body-positive message so important, especially for you, who are looking skeptically at your own reflection?
Why the iamallwoman matters?
The iamallwoman project is important. Not only it focuses on the right message to send to all the women, like similar projects including our own #unretouchedbeauty. The iamallwoman is a key message because it generates from the models whose bodies are so often reshaped and manipulated. It is a message that even the subject of the “pixel perfect photo” had enough.
The iamallwoman project does not matter just for models. That’s not the big deal. The iamallwoman matter to you, because the message that is sent out is for everyone. It is about shape, size, colour and it is about liberating yourself from the pressure of the perfect body.
iamallwoman means stop to the body shaming
Pushing so hard on retouching lead to a terrible body image in women. What many women that read the glossy magazines don’t realise is that the first women to be shamed for their bodies are the ones that are on the pages of those magazines. The message that editors and brands are sending out is that you are not good enough.
Media are absolutely shaming the body of women. The less perfect you are, the more they will sell. The more perfect the model in the magazine look, the more ashamed you will feel. All this sells beauty product, in an industry that makes billions by telling us we are not good enough. Paraphrasing Charlie I say “Here’s a big F*** YOU” to this! We say: forget about what media want you to think as perfection, as the “perfect bodies” you relate to are the first to have enough!
Why did we stop shooting fashion? The grape incident
Our brand has always drawn inspiration from the editorial and fashion world. That is where we pushed our career in our early days of photography. Alas, we decided to move away from the fashion world very early thanks to “the grape incident”. Actually, we went the other way around, by shooting women which were not model.
The grape incident was nothing more than a simple chat with a model. A stylist in one of our editorial was complaining that the model was not thin enough. Funnily enough, at least if you do sarcasm, was the fact that Faby and I were looking at the model thinking she should have eaten a bit more. Actually, we went on and offered everyone in the team something to nibble. When I offered the model some grape, she said that she loved grape, especially frozen grape. I thought that it was a great idea to cool ourselves down with frozen grape. Unfortunately the model went on saying:
“When you eat frozen grape, it takes time to suckle it, so in 20 minutes you can eat just one or two, and by that time your body feels full, so you can eat less.”
That was the last time we shoot a fashion editorial with the typical fashion models. It is about healthy and positive body image.
What can you do?
The real thing behind iamallwoman is body acceptance. You may not feel perfect, or you may even feel ashamed to look at your bare body in front of the mirror. Now, what these models are telling you is that they had enough of being treated as imperfect pieces of meat. They had enough of feeling ashamed for being normal women, with cellulites, with some gentle curves here and there. These models are telling you that you are gorgeous for who you truly are. They are showing their bodies in their “perfect imperfection” to show you that there is nothing you should fear. So, what is the iamallwoman all about if not everything about the real you?
Take the bull by the horn and join them in saying iamallwoman. No matter your age, your size, shape and colour. You are all that matters, because you are beautiful for who you truly are!
To celebrate the iamallwoman project and our own #unretouchedbeauty campaign, we have added some stunning unretouched images to this post. They are about being true to yourself, because if she can do it, you can do it!We need your help to open John Boyd Thacher State Park in New York to climbing!
John Boyd Thacher State Park is just east of Albany, New York and contains approximately 3 miles of undeveloped limestone cliffs. Climbing is currently prohibited, but the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation is developing a new master plan for Thacher. The Access Fund and Thacher Climbing Coalition are working together to have climbing authorized in the new master plan and now is the time for climbers to get involved.
You can provide comments at an open house at the Emma Treadwell Thacher Nature Center on Saturday, April 28 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. No decisions about the elements of the master plan have been made so this great opportunity for climbers to contribute comments at the earliest stage of planning. For more information about the open house and the new master plan, contact Salim Chishti, Park Planner.
More information and photos of the cliffs are available on Facebook.com/ ThacherClimbingCoalition.
Sincerely,
Your Friends at the Access Fund and Thacher Climbing CoalitionSAN ANTONIO — On paper, Texas should be a swing state.
Urban growth and suburban sprawl have radically changed Lone Star country, which not so long ago was largely rural.
A demographic shift is also underway. Forty-three percent of residents now are non-Hispanic white.
Thirty-nine percent are Hispanic, another 13 percent are African-American, and almost 5 percent are Asian Americans.
Yet amid all this change, Texas has become more solidly red.
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Republicans control supermajorities in both the state House and Senate, every statewide elected office and the vast majority of the 5,000 or so local elected positions throughout the state.
Still, there are some hints, if only slight, that Texas represents new possibilities for a Democratic comeback.
Of the millions of new residents pouring into the state, a little more than half come from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and other South and Central American countries. The rest largely come from California, Florida, New York and Illinois.
Democrats say this demographic change suggests the state has purple characteristics, if only people would go to the polls.
“We’re not a red state. We’re a low-turnout state,” said Rafael Anchia, a Democratic state representative from Dallas.
This is the sixteenth story in The Hill’s Changing America series, in which we examine the demographic and economic trends driving American politics today.
Texas was once a bastion of Yellow Dog Democrats, a state where Lyndon Johnson helped John F. Kennedy capture the presidency. But slowly, the state’s politics changed.
The East Texas counties that helped Kennedy beat Richard Nixon are now among the most solidly Republican in America. Fort Worth is one of the largest cities in America that consistently elects Republican leaders. Former Gov. George W. Bush’s election in 1994, when he beat popular Gov. Ann Richards, marked the beginning of what has so far been a three-decade-long drought for Democrats.
The story of Texas is one of growth: Across the state, new migrants are moving in so fast that simply building the infrastructure necessary to serve the population has become a policymaker’s greatest challenge.
Even at midday on a recent Friday, the stretch of Interstate 35 that connects Austin to San Antonio was jammed with pickup trucks and tractor trailers flying south at 75 miles per hour. A reporter had been warned to leave especially early. Traffic these days is always bad.
This drive through the rolling scrubland of Texas Hill County was once dotted with small oases of civilization. Today, most of the 80 or so miles between Texas’s two fastest-growing metropolitan areas are taken up by urban sprawl, as new developments wind ever farther into the most rapidly expanding counties in America.
Since Bush quit the governorship in 2000 to become president, San Antonio’s Bexar County has added half a million new residents. Travis County, where the red granite dome of the state capitol looms over downtown Austin, has added 350,000 new residents. Among the top six fastest-growing counties in America, three are suburbs of San Antonio or Austin.
“People have gone from a rural setting in Texas to a largely urban setting,” Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said in an interview, just moments after the reporter who had not heeded advice to leave Austin early showed up at his reelection kickoff in San Antonio.
Most of the state’s population lives in a triangle between San Antonio, Dallas and Houston.
“The cities and the counties that are growing fast, they basically can’t build roads fast enough and can’t build schools fast enough and can’t build the infrastructure they need,” said Lloyd Potter, who heads the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio and serves as the state’s official demographer.
About 86 percent of Texans live east of Interstate 35, Potter said. And about 80 percent of all Texas voters live in just 40 of the state’s 254 counties.
Many have come for the economic opportunity, which Abbott’s predecessor, Gov. Rick Perry James (Rick) Richard PerryHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Nevada governor to boycott Trump meeting MORE (R), called the “Texas miracle.” Since Perry was sworn in, the state has added about 2.8 million jobs. Texas has added jobs every month since March 2009, even before the rest of the country hit the depths of the recession.
“The Texas miracle was not a cosmic accident,” said Jeff Moseley, the former head of economic development under Bush and Perry who now heads the Texas Association of Business.
Democrats believe the votes exist to make Texas a competitive state. Hundreds of thousands of people eligible to vote have not bothered to register. Millions more simply don’t show up on Election Day. A state court has found that hundreds of thousands who might vote do not have access to the ballot box because they lack the necessary identification under a strict voter ID law passed earlier this decade.
The pace of demographic change has given Democrats hope that they can compete once again. Hispanic voters turn out at markedly lower rates than blacks or whites; if those numbers increase, Democrats believe they have a chance to be competitive. Younger voters are aging into the electorate, and Democrats will spend millions registering and turning out older voters in the future.
“Much of [the Hispanic] growth is being driven by natural increase. That means they tend to have a younger population,” Potter said.
They point to the 2016 presidential race when, without the aid of any paid advertising, Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE came closer to winning Texas, which she lost by nine percentage points, than she did to winning Iowa.
“The political awakening is happening now,” Anchia said. “We are now seeing in the Hispanic community a great deal of fear and loathing in the Trump/Abbott brand.”
But at a time when Republicans like President Trump are alienating Hispanic voters with intemperate language, Texas Republicans have made a concerted effort to build bridges where none had existed — beginning with Bush, who won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote when he sought reelection in 2004.
It was no accident that Abbott, after kicking off his campaign in his wife’s hometown of San Antonio, headed south for a swing through the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley. In the four main counties that make up the valley, the Republican share of the vote has grown from about 32 percent in 2002 to 36 percent for Abbott in 2016.
“We spent time and money and resources down there, and statewide, courting Hispanic voters,” said David Carney, Abbott’s chief strategist. “You can’t expect people to support you if you don’t go out there and aggressively court their vote.”
Most demographers believe the pace of growth, and the much slower increase in voter participation, will eventually make Texas a swing state. If Texas is in play, it will be a huge advantage for a Democratic candidate’s path to the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the White House.
Already, two of the nation’s four largest states — California and New York — are solidly in the Democratic column. The third, Florida, is the consummate swing state. Together, those four states represent 151 electoral votes, more than half those necessary to get to 270.
But Democrats are still parched from their three-decade drought, and the rains seem a long way off.
Abbott has yet to draw a serious Democratic challenger. Sen. Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE (R) has a credible rival in Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D), but other prominent Democrats — including Rep. Joaquin Castro (D), former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, Anchia and a handful of others — have decided against statewide races.
Several months ago, some of the biggest donors to Texas Democratic candidates sat down with the Castros, Anchia and former Houston Mayor Annise Parker (D). One donor pledged to write a $1 million check if he saw a plan that could get a Democratic candidate to the 50 percent threshold necessary to win. The check remains unwritten.
“I still think we’re a couple of years away,” Anchia admitted. “We just want to win one.”KRISHNAGIRI: The deputy director of the ISRO’s satellite center S.V.Sharma on Saturday said there is a need of 75 new satellites in next four years as the requirement for the space-based research and application increases in the country.
He was in Hosur in Krishnagiri district to inaugu rate a science exhibition of students, ‘MARS 2017’, organised in a private school. Sharma after visiting the stalls in which the projects of the students were displayed said, “India needs 75 new satellites in the next four years because of the interest showed by the government departments in using the space-based resource and applications (SBRA) services.”
The Isro scientist added, “already Isro supports 86 government offices by providing SBRA for 60 different services required by them.”
According to Sharma, the applications are earth observation, satellite communication, disaster management, satellite navigation, climate change and environment and others.
Mr. Sharma, talking about ‘Chandrayan-2’, said the mission is scheduled to be launched in March 2018.
“The Chandrayan-2 mission will be launched in March next year. It will have an orbiter, lander and rover. The orbiter will position Chandrayan-2 near the planet; the lander will help Chandrayan-2 to land on moon and the rover (robot) will do all the research there,” Sharma explained about the next lunar mission.
To a question about students in India launching cube satellite using NASA platform, Sharma said such services are available in Isro to help students launch small satellites below ten kilos in weight. But, the mission should be project-oriented and also reliable.
“As other countries, India also launched small satellites called 'nano satellites' with load below 10 kilos. The ‘INS 1A’ and ‘INS 1B’ were launched in February this year and one more small satellite is to be launched soon,” Sharma said.
Mr. Sharma further explained that, “we have a capacity of making and launching one nano satellite each day, which means 365 small satellites in a year. This will reduce the need for big satellites because of projects shared by the nano satellite where big satellites are not required.”
In regard to chances of junk which may accumulate in the outer space if more numbers of nano satellites were sent, Sharma said, “the Nano satellites are positioned 600-km above the earth surface and can be brought back if they failed for any reason.”
Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.In my mind, authentic and long-lasting happiness requires what positive psychologist Tal Ben-Sahar calls, “a permission to experience the full range of human emotions.”
This permission includes what are sometimes thought of as “negative” states of mind such as grief, anger, or sadness (the exact opposite of what we would usually consider to be “happiness”). As paradoxical as it sounds, I believe those lows can sometimes be necessary to help define our highs.
Like darkness and light, or yin and yang, happiness and depression are interdependent; you can’t have one concept without implying the other. In fact, even the happiest of individuals occasionally go through bouts of sadness and depression, and I think in many ways we need to occasionally engage with those states if we want to find true bliss in our lives.
A common theme that I try to emphasize on this blog is that all emotions are resources. Therefore, true emotional intelligence requires that we engage with all of our emotions if we want to learn from them.
This is because I consider emotions important signals of information, but if we try to run away or ignore the “negative” ones, then we neglect that information and what our minds are trying to tell us.
In extreme cases, the more we suppress our emotions, the more they bottle up inside of us, like when you ignore a toddler and they just yell louder and louder until they finally get your attention. In the same way, we need to pay attention to our feelings and the thoughts behind them, or they build up in our subconscious and can eventually explode in destructive ways.
Let me relate this to a personal experience of mine.
During my freshman year at college I found myself in the midst of a major depressive episode. It sucked up all the zest out of my life, as all my energy was being used to constantly ruminate over thoughts in my head. At this point, I wasn’t yet familiar with self improvement, but this depression actually sparked a turning point.
I had reached a period in my life where I knew I couldn’t go on living this way – I had to change something – and this depression motivated me to make that change.
Over a short amount of time, I took that energy that was making me ruminate and found more constructive ways to think about my life situation; and looking back, it was like self-administered Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Today, I still apply these lessons I’ve learned through my depression. Somehow, it has made me a better person. Now I think about that negative time in my life and I am strangely grateful for it.
And apparently I’m not the only one who has experienced benefits from depression.
A recent article by science blogger Jonah Lehrer is called “Does Depression Help Us Think Better?” In it he mentions how the ruminating tendency associated with depression may be a kind of cognitive mechanism to help us solve deep problems in our lives.
Several studies have illustrated that those who are more depressed actually turn out to be better thinkers and decision makers. When we are depressed, our brains often motivate us to reflect inwards and think about the issues in our life at a deeper level. This can be a great opportunity to re-evaluate our thoughts and values, and thus find different and more meaningful ways to look at our situation.
In many ways, sadness and depression can be a catalyst for personal problem-solving. Engaging with these emotions in a healthy and constructive manner can lead to long-term benefits.
So what is the takeaway?
I’m not saying we should actively seek to be more depressed or sad. What I’m saying is that if you find yourself depressed, don’t be so eager to run away or get rid of it in the quickest way you know how.
Instead, learn how to be comfortable sitting down with your thoughts and feelings, and reflecting. Don’t be afraid to dive deeper into the thoughts and beliefs that feed into your emotions, and be willing to adjust those thoughts and beliefs to something more constructive once you’ve learned from your negative emotions.
Suffering can at times be our greatest teacher.
Stay updated on new articles and resources in psychology and self improvement:Overnight, there had been numerous rumors that the newly appointed chief of the Ukraine navy, who was just made head of the navy on Saturday, had defected to the Crimean people explicitly, and to pro-Russian forced in the region implicitly. The sourcing of most were various Russian outlets so we discounted these until we got confirmation from a "western" source. The BBC did just that moments ago.
New head of Ukraine's navy 'defects' in Crimea The newly appointed head of Ukraine's navy has sworn allegiance to the Crimea region, in the presence of its unrecognised pro-Russian leader. Rear Admiral Denis Berezovsky was only made head of the navy on Saturday, as the government in Kiev reacted to the threat of Russian invasion. Russia's troops have been consolidating their hold on Crimea, which is home to its Black Sea Fleet.
The moment of defection allegedly caught on digital media:
The move is not entirely unexpected: while the US may not have many issues with facing the Russian navy head on as it did last summer in the Mediterranean over Syria, others are not quite as excited with being on the receiving end of the Russian military juggernaut.
So if this has been confirmed, the rest of the news reported earlier by RIA is also true. To wit:
Ukraine’s autonomous region of Crimea confirmed Sunday that the majority of Ukrainian military units stationed on the Crimean peninsula have expressed their support of legitimately elected Pro-Russian authorities. Earlier reports by Russian media about peaceful takeover of the military units by forces loyal to the Crimean government were denied by the Ukrainian defense ministry. However, Crimean authorities said that most of the Ukrainian units sided on Sunday with pro-Russian forces “without a single shot fired,” and warned the commanders of a few units that remain loyal to Kiev that they would face criminal action if refused to surrender. “I would like to warn commanders who force their subordinates to commit illegal actions that they will be punished according to existing laws,” Crimea’s Prime Minister Sergei Aksenov said in a statement. The Crimean government said earlier that some 10 warships from the Ukrainian navy left their naval base in Sevastopol apparently on orders from Kiev. Crimea is now at the center of the ongoing crisis in the country as pro-Russia groups move to distance themselves from a reformed national parliament that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych a week ago.
The map below is said to summarize all the Ukraine cities where the Russian flag has already been hoisted.
If anything, these bloodless victories will only embolden Russia to press on: hardly the resolution the west would like. Perhaps that explains why early unofficial quotes of the Russian Ruble see the currency dropping as much as 10%.New Mega Man Game In Development Says Capcom [UPDATE]
By Ishaan. March 22, 2013. 9:55am
Update: Siliconera had its own reporter at Capcom’s panel at PAX East, and he just sent in his report, clarifying that Capcom stated they are “working behind the scenes,” but aren’t ready to announce anything. You can read the full story here.
Original story: Capcom are developing a new Mega Man game but they aren’t ready to officially announce it just yet, Capcom community manager Brett Elston said at the ongoing Penny Arcade Expo, according to a Joystiq report.
While that’s happening, Capcom are bringing the previous Mega Man games to the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console. Mega Man 4 will be released on April 25th and Mega Man 5 on May 16th.
This is the first time Capcom have right out said that there’s a new Mega Man game in the works. Late last year, Capcom USA’s Senior Vice-President, Christian Svensson, stated: “I can say with certainty that you’ve not seen the last of the Blue Bomber on consoles and handhelds, and, with luck, we’ll be celebrating his 50th anniversary, including all of the games you’re going to enjoy over the next 25 years.”The Milky Way Galaxy is most significant to humans because it is home sweet home. But when it comes down to it, our galaxy is a typical barred spiral, much like billions of other galaxies in the universe. Let's take a look at the Milky Way.
Location, location, location
A glance up at the night sky reveals a broad swath of light. Described by the ancients as a river, as milk, and as a path, among other things, the band has been visible in the heavens since Earth first formed. In reality, this intriguing line of light is the center of our galaxy, as seen from one of its outer arms.
Understanding the structure of the Milky Way has long been challenging. The solar system sits on the outer edges of one arm in a disk of material, and no one can see across the dense center to the other side.
This picture of the nearby galaxy NGC 6744, a Milky Way look-alike, was taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla. (Image: © ESO)
"The sun's location within the dust-obscured galactic disk is a complicating factor to observe the galactic structure," Denilso Camargo, of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, said in a statement.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, about 100,000 light-years across. If you could look down on it from the top, you would see a central bulge surrounded by four large spiral arms that wrap around it. Spiral galaxies make up about two-third of the galaxies in the universe. [Infographic: Our Milky Way Galaxy: A Traveler's Guide]
Unlike a regular spiral, a barred spiral contains a bar across its center region, and has two major arms. The Milky Way also contains two significant minor arms, as well as two smaller spurs. One of the spurs, known as the Orion Arm, contains the sun and the solar system. The Orion arm is located between two major arms, Perseus and Sagittarius.
The Milky Way does not sit still, but is constantly rotating. As such, the arms are moving through space. The sun and the solar system travel with them. The solar system travels at an average speed of 515,000 mph (828,000 km/h). Even at this rapid speed, the solar system would take about 230 million years to travel all the way around the Milky Way.
"Spiral arms are like traffic jams in that the gas and stars crowd together and move more slowly in the arms. As material passes through the dense spiral arms, it is compressed and this triggers more star formation," said Camargo.
Our galaxy is surrounded by an enormous halo of hot gas that extends for hundreds of thousands of light-years. The gas halo is estimated to be as massive as all of the stars in the Milky Way. Like the galaxy itself, the halo is spinning rapidly.
This very wide-field view of the Milky Way shows the extent of the 84-million-star VISTA infrared image of the center of the galaxy (delineated by red rectangle). (Image: © ESO/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org))
"This flies in the face of expectations," Edmund Hodges-Kluck of the University of Michigan said in a statement. "People just assumed that the disk of the Milky Way spins while this enormous reservoir of hot gas is stationary – but that is wrong. This hot gas reservoir is rotating as well, just not quite as fast as the disk."
Curled around the center of the galaxy, the spiral arms contain a high amount of dust and gas. New stars are constantly formed within the arms. These arms are contained in what is called the disk of the galaxy. It is only about 1,000 light-years thick. [Photo Gallery: Stunning Photos of Our Milky Way Galaxy]
At the center of the galaxy is the galactic bulge. The heart of the Milky Way is crammed full of gas, dust, and stars. The bulge is the reason that you can only see a small percentage of the total stars in the galaxy. Dust and gas within it are so thick that you can't even peer into the bulge of the Milky Way, much less see out the other side.
Tucked inside the very center of the galaxy is a monstrous black hole, billions of times as massive as the sun. This supermassive black hole may have started off smaller, but the ample supply of dust and gas allowed it to gorge itself and grow into a giant. The greedy glutton also consumes whatever stars it can get a grip on. Although black holes cannot be directly viewed, scientists can see their gravitational effects as they change and distort the paths of the material around it, or as they fire off jets. Most galaxies are thought to have a black hole in their heart. [Photo Gallery: The Milky Way's Core]
This photo illustration depicts a view of the night sky just before the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. Image released May 31, 2012. (Image: © NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel (STScI), and A. Mellinger)
The bulge and the arms are the most obvious components of the Milky Way, but they are not the only pieces. The galaxy is surrounded by a spherical halo of hot gas, old stars and globular clusters. Although the halo stretches for hundreds of thousands of light-years, it only contains about two percent as many stars as are found within the disk.Scientists can't directly detect the material, but like black holes, they can measure it based on its effect on the objects around it. As such, dark matter is estimated to make up 90 percent of the mass of the galaxy.
Recent measurements have weighed the galaxy at between 400 billion and 780 billion times the mass of the sun. By focusing on how the Milky Way affects its neighboring globular clusters, dense groups of stars smaller than a galaxy, scientists were able to calculate the mass of the Milky Way at varying distances. The result can help them improve their understanding of how much of the galaxy is made up of ordinary material like dust and stars, and how much is composed of dark matter.
"Even though we know the dark matter should be there, [and] we think it should be there, the ratio of dark matter to luminous matter in particular galaxies may be under debate," Gwendolyn Eadie, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at McMasters University in Ontario, Canada, and co-author on the research, told Space.com.
The dark Coalsack is readily apparent in the middle of the image. The stars Alpha Centauri (the closest star to our solar system at 4.3-light years away) and Beta Century are to the left of the Coalsack, while the famous Southern Cross (Crux) is poised just above and to the right of the Coalsack. The Southern Milky Way is far more spectacular than the Milky Way that those of us situated north of the equator can ever see. Taken from La Serena, Chile on April 6, 1986. (Image: © Joe Rao)
Milky Way facts
The Milky Way contains over 200 billion stars, and enough dust and gas to make billions more.
The solar system lies about 30,000 light-years from the galactic center, and about 20 light-years above the plane of the galaxy. Earth and its neighbors don't orbit within the plane of the galaxy but are instead tipped by about 63 degrees.
"It's almost like we're sailing through the galaxy sideways," Merav Opher, an astrophysicist at George Mason University in Virginia, told Space.com.
More than half the stars found in the Milky Way are older than the 4.5-billion-year-old sun. Galaxies like ours typically undergo a stellar baby boom, churning out stars in enormous quantities roughly 10 billion years ago.
The most common stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, a cool star about a tenth the mass of the sun. Once thought unsuitable for potential life-bearing planets because such bodies would have to be too close to meet the criteria, red dwarfs are now considered potential suspects.
As late as the 1920s, astronomers thought all of the stars in the universe were contained inside of the Milky Way. It wasn't until Edwin Hubble discovered a special star known as a Cepheid variable, which allowed him to precisely measure distances, that astronomers realized that the fuzzy patches once classified as nebula were actually separate galaxies.
NASA recently selected the Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory (GUSTO) mission to fly a telescope carried by balloon to map out large sections in the Milky Way and nearby Large Magellenic Cloud. The mission plans to launch in 2021 from McMurdo, Antarctica and should remain in the air between 100 and 170 days, depending on weather conditions.The North Carolina Courage began their inaugural season on the road in a rematch of sorts, taking on the Washington Spirit at Maryland SoccerPlex. The Courage came away with a 1–0 win thanks to a goal by McCall Zerboni. How did the team fare in DC?
The Good
McCall and Debinha
These two ladies are workhorses. McCall was all over the midfield, and definitely set the tone in terms of physicality and pace. Debinha, a new pickup in the offseason, was dangerous in front of goal, and created space for not only herself, but also for Lynn Williams and Jessica McDonald. Both are gonna be a threat later in the season: look out NWSL.
The Goal
The first goal in club history, and it was pretty: a wonderful cross into the box that McCall controls. She uses one touch to set up on her left foot, and slotted it right into the far post. Really was a work of art, and a goal that was long overdue.
Our Attack
An attack of Lynn Williams, Debinha, McCall Zerboni, Jess McDonald, and Sam Mewis will be lethal. Give these ladies a couple games to get *more* familiar with each other, and the goals will start flying. Again, look out NWSL.
Stephanie Labbe
She’s not on the Courage, but she was an absolute bright spot in this game. She will be the reason the Spirit stay in games this season. She stood on her head after her back line let her down time and time again. After blanking Lynn Williams twice and tipping a few of Debinha’ and Jess’ shots over the bar, she definitely deserves some praise.
The Bad
Our Finishing
This game could’ve easily been 4–0. While Labbe stood on her head, there were several balls that should have been in the back of the net, regardless of Labbe. Whether it’s the final pass, or the finish, it’s gotta get better. That will come with time, but boy it would’ve been fun to see in Week 1. The potential is there, though.
The Ugly
The Spirit
Oh boy. It’s gonna be a rough season for them. They can barely get fans in the stands, and the product on the field is not really giving fans a reason to come. Only time will tell if the back line will start to gel more, but right now, they have a problem that |
her unwitting celebrity, and is reportedly "very upset."
Meanwhile, the Internet is doing what the Internet does: Turning the whole thing into a meme. But some are speaking out against the ridicule, reminding folks that just because you can be a jackass, "does not mean that you should be a jack-ass."
And 4chan is busy trying to pin the whole thing on 9gag (the meme actually originated on FunnyJunk).
It remains to be seen what, if anything, will come of humanizing the meme. In the US and most other places, likely nothing. But in the UK, where a student was recently sent to jail for two months for making racist comments about Fabrice Muamba on Twitter, trolls might want to pick on someone else.
[screengrab via BBC]Instagram, Facebook’s hotter, snootier subsidiary, may have a massive data breach on its hands.
This week, a security flaw within Instagram allowed hackers to assemble a database of what appeared to be verified users’ contact information—some of those affected purportedly being celebrities and politicians. According to the Verge, Instagram now says the known scope of the breach has expanded to include at least some unverified Instagrammers.
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“... We recently discovered a bug on Instagram that could be used to access some people’s email address and phone number even if they were not public,” Instagram CTO Mike Krieger wrote in a blog post. “No passwords or other Instagram activity was revealed. We quickly fixed the bug, and have been working with law enforcement on the matter. Although we cannot determine which specific accounts may have been impacted, we believe it was a low percentage of Instagram accounts.”
“We are very sorry this happened,” Krieger added.
As the Daily Beast reported last week, the unknown hackers behind the breach claim to have compromised six million accounts and set up a website called “Doxagram,” which allegedly offered access to phone numbers, email addresses or both for 1,000 Instagram accounts at $10 a search.
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While a few of the addresses were public information, “many did not return any relevant Google results, implying they were obtained from some private source.” The Beast was able to confirm some of the leaked accounts had valid contact information; the site was later taken offline.
Per the Verge, cybersecurity firm RepKnight said supposed contact information for a number of celebrities featured on Doxagram was circulating on the dark web, ranging from Hollywood celebs like Emma Watson and Leonardo DiCaprio to musician Harry Styles and boxer Floyd Mayweather. The Beast claimed the site even purported to have contact info behind President Donald Trump’s official Instagram profile, which was managed by White House social media director Dan Scavino.
In addition to potentially exposing users to harassment, the breach could allow hackers to target them for social engineering attacks which could compromise their accounts. Instagram’s security hole may be linked to an incident on August 28th, when someone accessed the account of Selena Gomez—the most-followed user on the site—and posted nude photographs of Justin Bieber.
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Data breaches are not the only major problem reported at the social-media giant in recent days. On Friday, Mashable reported the site’s staff is rife with individuals willing to verify Instagram accounts for prices “anywhere from a bottle of wine to $15,000, according to a dozen sources who have sold verification, bought verification for someone else, or directly know someone who has done one or the other.”
[The Verge]CAUGHT RED-HANDED: Media Backtracks on Irans Anti-Israel 'Threat'
For close to two years, the media has stubbornly clung to a long discredited story about the Iranian Presidents alleged threat to "destroy Israel" with nuclear weapons Iran doesnt have and denies any intent to acquire. 'Wiped off the map, wiped off the map,' they bleat incessantly, even though his actual words, "The Imam [Khomeini] said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time," were paralleled with the fall of regimes like the Soviet Union and Irans former U.S.-installed monarchy [see: "WIPED OFF THE MAP" - The Rumor of the Century for a thorough disassembly of this claim]. From the start of his Presidency, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has rhapsodized regularly about the demise of the 'Zionist regime' in various metaphorical terms. He and his associates in the Iranian government have compared its fate to the Pharaohs of Egypt and the former apartheid regime in South Africa (which they also did not recognize), but never have they threatened to start a war with any country.
Yet the rumor persists. Top respected journalists, advocates for peace and dialogue with Iran, and individual Iranians themselves bring up the misquote regularly, as do noted Iranian-American scholars. The medias constant drumbeat has even duped top world leaders into believing the myth. On October 29, 2005, the false quote was officially condemned by all 15 Security Council members in a United Nations statement, just following Israels prior demand that the Security Council expel Iran from the UN due to the remark.
The effect this misquote has had on American policy towards Iran is undeniable. The majority of 2008 Presidential candidates in both parties have repeatedly mentioned the alleged threat in speeches and interviews, obviously influenced by media reports.
And yet suddenly, after all this hoopla, at least two of the biggest media titans, the BBC and the Associated Press, appear to be backing away from the incorrect "wiped off the map" quotation theyve been drilling into peoples minds for so long. Its happening quietly and undemonstratively, but some recent subtle changes in their presentation indicate a tacit acknowledgement of their previous misreporting.
The details of how this reversal came to be, their curious handling of the subject in some of their recent news items, and contradictory arguments defending their work, is a story in itself. Lets begin with the legendary British Broadcasting Company.
The BBCs Adolescent Excuses Formed in 1922, the BBC has a history of disinformation campaigns against Iran. In the early 1950s, Irans democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, had enraged Britain by nationalizing his countrys British-dominated oil industry. The BBC, which was funded by the Foreign Office (FCO), was directed by the government to "destroy Persian confidence in the present policy of the Persian government," which they branded as "stupid and obstinate." The BBCs Persian Service broadcasts in Iran reflected this to a tee, pumping out anti-nationalization propaganda to the Iranian people regularly, which pleased the folks in Tehrans British embassy immensely.
In the summer of 1953, at the request of the British government and in coordination with the American CIA, the BBC broadcast a code word over its radio airwaves to signal the young Shah of the start of the coup which Britain and America had plotted to overthrow Mossadegh. The BBCs role in the coup détat is confirmed by the CIAs own declassified documents and by the BBC itself. Britains use of the BBC as a state propaganda arm and extension of the British Empire was not denied by the head of the BBCs Eastern Service, Gordon Waterfield, who admitted at the time, "There is, on the whole, little divergence between what the Foreign Office want us to do, and what in actual fact, we are doing." London based news agency Reuters was also not immune from state influence. Their official biography states, "During both World Wars, Reuters came under pressure from the British government to serve British interests."
Misinformation continues to thrive in the 'information age' of the 21st century. In 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted on Sky TV his complete ignorance of the British-American coup which caused Irans young democracy to vanish from the page of time, claiming that he had never even heard of Mossadegh. But in a speech given the same year, Blair warned ominously, "Irans President has called for Israel to be—and I quote—"wiped off the map." And hes trying to acquire a nuclear weapon." Yes, the most powerful man in Britain has never even heard of the monumental 1953 coup—one of the most significant events of the 20th century-which his own country helped carry out, yet a mistranslated sound bite and an unproven suspicion about Irans nuclear intentions, that he knows.
With over 85 years of history, the BBC, which continues to receive funding from the Foreign Office, cannot include juvenilia among its reasons for getting Ahmadinejads words wrong. The BBC was just one of countless organizations which jumped on the "wiped off the map" bandwagon in 2005. Yet mention of the phrase largely disappeared from their reports in 2007. Then, in a June 8th, 2007 article, the BBC finally published the following reversal: "In October 2005, the Iranian president made a statement in which he envisaged the replacement of Israel with a Palestinian state. This was widely translated as a call for Israel to be "wiped off the map."
While he has repeated similar comments many times, he has insisted that Iran is not a threat to Israel." The first statement referencing Palestinian statehood is an astonishing departure from what has been consistently presented in the media as Mahmoud Ahmadinejads 'calls for the destruction of Israel.' As for the "widely translated" plea—this same phrase was reported ad nauseam by the BBC itself in its print, radio and television outlets. In essence, the BBCs rationale recollects that typical adolescent excuse: 'but everybody was doing it!'
In passing the blame to others, the BBC seems to indicate that it did no independent verification, translation or fact checking with regard to the quote, and merely repeated what everyone else was saying. Yet three months earlier, a BBC journalist made a claim that totally contradicts this version of events.
On March 6, 2007, BBC editor Peter Rippon wrote a blog post on the BBC web site, "Wiped off the Map?", which acknowledged that although the BBC has regularly cited the quote, "others" have argued that a "more accurate" translation would be: "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Rippon did not bother to mention who any of those "others" would be, or acknowledge his source for the alternate quote.
Moreover, Rippon claims to have looked into the matter and reports matter-of-factly that the phrase "was picked up and translated from the Farsi" by BBC Monitoring, and even quotes unnamed "experts" at the service defending their translation. Ah, but this story is completely negated by the BBCs own original reports from October 2005, which clearly and unmistakably named Irans state media department IRNA [Islamic Republic News Agency], as the source of the quote. For proof, see the following passage, which occurred repeatedly in several BBC articles on October 27th and 28th, 2005, just after the October 26th World Without Zionism conference where Ahmadinejad first made his statement: "He was addressing a conference entitled The World without Zionism and his comments were reported by the Iranian state news agency Irna.
"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," he said, referring to Irans late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini."
BBC Monitoring is a government funded subscription service founded in 1939 with a staff of about 500, translating press and agency reports spanning a claimed reach of over 150 countries in more than 100 languages. If, in fact they did independently translate the quote as Rippon reports, then their contributions appear to have been disregarded in the final analysis. British journalist Jonathan Steele wrote about the mistranslation in his June 14, 2006 column in The Guardian ["Lost in Translation"], and reports querying a BBC Monitoring spokesperson (who, as in Rippons piece, spoke on the condition of anonymity), who said their original translation was "eliminated from the map of the world." Upon further inspection, the spokesperson said their Farsi translators were in a rush, and if they had to do it all over again, would have gone with "eliminated from the pages of history." Whoops.
To quote the anonymous spokesperson:
"The monitor has checked again. Its a difficult expression to translate. Theyre under time pressure to produce a translation quickly and they were searching for the right phrase. With more time to reflect they would say the translation should be "eliminated from the page of history." Does this level of professionalism square with BBC Monitorings own assessment of its service and standards? "Editors at BBC Monitoring possess specialised knowledge of countries they cover... they translate reports in a way that preserves the tone of the original, allowing subscribers to draw their own conclusions from what they read." Rippons piece also relates a relatively frivolous viewer complaint over BBC One host Andrew Marrs presentation of the quote on October 30, 2005. It seems Mr. Marr referred to the phrase as "wiped off the face of the map" rather than "wiped off the map", and this viewer objected to the change, which he felt contained several false implications. What is noteworthy, however, is the BBC Governors Complaints Committees careful examination of the matter in their complaint review process (which ultimately did not uphold the complaint), evaluated under the criteria of Accuracy, Impartiality, and Fairness.
In their explanation, the BBC states:
"The Committee carefully considered the wording of the translation of the speech from a number of sources, including translations from BBC Monitoring and from the Middle East Research Institute in Washington. The Committee also reflected on how the speech had been translated in British newspapers and on Al Jazeera Online."
According to this explanation, having pondered over what other media were saying, including some of their own British competitors, the BBC felt satisfied that the quote was acceptable to run. The mention of Al Jazeera is also specious, as they too relied on the same wrongly worded IRNA press item from which the rest of the international media took the quote. Even the committees reference to BBC Monitoring is highly dubious, since, as previously mentioned, their own reporting already credited IRNA with the quote.
Most curious of all, though, is the mention of The Middle East Research Institute [MEMRI] as a major source. Thats because MEMRI had an entirely different interpretation of Ahmadinejads words, bearing almost no similarity whatsoever to the BBCs favored "wiped off the map" selection. MEMRIs version was:
"Imam [Khomeini] said: 'This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history'."
Note again the absence of words such as "Israel", "wipe out" and "map". MEMRI is no impartial body either—its an organization which focuses almost solely on translating and exposing examples of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda, hate speech, and terrorist ideology in the Arab and Iranian media. Founded by former Israeli Defense Force colonel Yigal Carmon, its supporters include many figures from far right and pro-Israel media such as The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The National Post, and FOX News Channel. MEMRIs web site lists glowing praise for its work from people such as right wing columnist Charles Krauthammer, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and Israeli political figure Natan Sharansky, who cites MEMRIs "invaluable contribution to the struggle against antisemitism, hate, and racism." So an outfit such as MEMRI, with a clear political agenda, has produced a far less inflammatory version of the quote than the venerable British Broadcasting Company.The BBC implicates itself further by admitting that translations of foreign languages are inherently fraught with inaccuracies:
"The Committee noted the inherent problem with accuracy in translations. It noted that all the translations varied to a greater or lesser degree, and it was difficult to decide which, if any, was the most accurate."
If the act of translation is such a delicate guessing game, then why trust translations? According to the BBCs logic, journalists apparently have a license to interpret foreign languages in a myriad of ways. With so many options on the table, whats to stop a media outlet with a political bias from choosing a preferred interpretation?The BBC also rationalized:Do these visceral, buck-passing comments sound consistent with the BBCs stated editorial standards?
"The BBCs commitment to accuracy is a core editorial value and fundamental to our reputation. Our output must be well sourced, based on sound evidence, thoroughly tested and presented in clear, precise language. We should be honest and open about what we dont know and avoid unfounded speculation."
How does the BBC achieve accuracy?
"We aim to achieve accuracy by: · the accurate gathering of material using first hand sources wherever possible.
· checking and cross checking the facts.
· validating the authenticity of documentary evidence and digital material.
· corroborating claims and allegations made by contributors wherever possible."
The bottom line: the BBCs various stories do not check out. Their initial reports cite IRNA as the source of the quote, later documents list a hodgepodge of sources and rationalizations, and they later reported that the entire quote was translated "directly from the Farsi" by BBC Monitoring. Finally, a June 2007 article seems to assign responsibility to others, saying that the quote was "widely translated as a call for Israel to be wiped off the map," making no mention of their own alleged hand in the translation process, or the responsibility incumbent upon them to verify its accuracy.
Reuters: Deny, Deny, Deny
A global news juggernaut, Reuters has been in existence since the mid 1800s and bills itself as "the largest international multi-media news agency." Though Reuters has stuck to its guns on the'map' quote, they are well aware of the controversy surrounding it. In January 2007, they responded to a reader concern about their story, "Iran President Says Israels Days Are Numbered", which repeated the'map' rumor and also contained the misquote,
The reader wrote:
You continue to report that "Irans President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' even though many Mideast experts have stated that the interpretation of what Ahmadinejad actually said was that the "Zionist regime will not last."
In other words, rather than calling for ethnic cleansing, as your news stories imply, Iranian officials are calling for regime change--a common enough phrase these days. Are your reporters and editors deliberately misinforming the public?
Jan
"We actually had access to this speech, and heard the presidents words verbatim from our own TV footage. We stand behind our translation. In this case, he used the word "mahv", which in Farsi means "wiped off":
Editor
Reuters response skips over the readers major point—that regime change, not genocide, was the true message, and ignores the crucial context of Ahmadinejads words as they related to the other faded regimes, including Irans previous ruler, the Shah Reuters again responded to a reader complaint on the matter on June 14th, 2007:
President Ahmadinejad never said any such thing. That "quote" is a complete fabrication. Its an urban myth. What he REALLY said is "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."
Youll note that there is an enormous difference between an active threat "to wipe something of the map" and a passive comment that "something must vanish from the page of time." You will also note that the Farsi word for map, "nagsheh," appears nowhere in the speech text.
I would think that if a multi-million dollar organisation such as Reuters News Service is going to continue agitating for an American attack on Iran it could afford to spend two or three hundred dollars to have Ahmadinejads speeches professionally translated into English.
Mark K.
Thanks for your interest in this matter. Reuters is confident that its translation of what Ahmadinejad said is correct. We watched the original speech in 2005 and have not altered our rendering into English since. The Iranian authorities have never challenged our translation of the words, which echoed those of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, when he spoke on the same issue:
GBU Editor
Like the BBC, Reuters has just publicly stated that they translated the quote by themselves, on their own. And, as with the BBC, this far-fetched story can easily be disproved. In their very first reports in 2005, Reuters clearly identified IRNA as the source of the quote in the opening sentence!For proof, see: October 26th, 2005 and October 27th, 2005 Reuters news items:
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday that Israel should be "wiped off the map," the official IRNA news agency reported.
Contrary to Reuters claims, Iranian officials and Foreign Ministry officerefuted the quotes interpretation numerous times. Reuters itself has reported on this.Take, for example, Reuters own article from February 20, 2006, "Iran Denies Wanting to "Wipe Israel Off the Map". In this piece, Irans Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki directly refutes the quote in English, acknowledges the reality of the Holocaust, and reiterates that Irans nuclear program is purely peaceful.
"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference, speaking in English, after addressing the European Parliament.
"How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime," he said."
Not only that, the February 2006 article again cites IRNA as the source of the infamous quote, which contradicts their repeated claim that the translation was their own. As Reuters noted:Reuters must have overlooked the April 2006 CNN interviewwith Irans ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, where he said,
"Iran...will not threaten any country, and we want peace in the Middle East and the whole world... but if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there [In Israel] have to be removed or they have to be massacred...this is [a] fabricated, unfortunate, selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so."
Perhaps Reuters also missed Ahmadinejads Feb 13, 2007 ABC News interviewwith Diane Sawyer in which he responds to the "map" charge: "There are many other examples.Reuters may claim 'plausible deniability', but they already had early warning of the issue long before these complaints and rebuttals. After helping organize a workshop in Beirut in December 2005 which brought together 6 American and 6 Middle Eastern journalists, Reuters republished a St. Louis Dispatch article about the event by participant Jon Sawyer. The piece quoted another participant, Tehran Dailys Khosrow Soltani Kasseb, who explained his take on Irans recent "map" outrage:
"For the journalists at the Beirut workshop, there was a lesson a few days after they headed home in how words can inflame - and confuse.
The only thing missing, said Iranian journalist Soltani, was any acknowledgment that Ahmadinejads remarks were neither new nor, in the Iranian context, incendiary - not in a country where "Death to Israel" chants have been a staple of Friday prayers since the era of Ayatollah Khomeini two decades ago.
"These slogans remain slogans and nothing more," Soltani told fellow journalists in an e-mail. "Lets not forget the occasion in which Ahmadinejad said those things," he added - ";a conference dubbed 'The World Without Zionism.' What else did you expect him to say? Viva Israel?"
"What is certain is that no one here (I mean the officials) has any intention of wiping out a state by killing its people!" Soltani said. "They just wish Israel did not exist or would somehow perish for the cause of Palestine."
So Reuters has had plenty of opportunities to rectify the error, yet have chosen not to do so. According to Reuters editorial policy, "We are committed to accurate and balanced reporting. Errors of fact are always promptly corrected and clearly published." Further:
"We are committed to reporting the facts and in all situations avoid the use of emotive terms... We aim to report objectively actions, identity and background and pay particular attention to all our coverage in extremely sensitive regions.
We do not take sides and attempt to reflect... the views of all sides. We are not in the business of glorifying one side or another or of disseminating propaganda. Reuters journalists do not offer their own opinions or views.
The world relies on Reuters journalists to provide accurate, clearly sourced accounts of events as they occur, wherever they occur, so that individuals, organisations and governments can make their own decisions based on the facts."
Reuters also adds that they do pay attention to feedback, and in fact, "we often spot and correct errors faster with the help of sharp-eyed readers. Other e-mails have made us question and sometimes change the way we describe people, countries, concepts and controversies." Yet to date, despite reader complaints, media articles to the contrary, and their own blatantly contradictory explanations, Reuters is still standing by its story, which they are "confident" is accurate.
The Associated Press and those imaginary "Supporters"
Along with Reuters, there may be no other source that has exploited this misquote more relentlessly than The Associated Press, which calls itself "the largest and oldest news organization in the world".The misquote has infected hundreds of AP articles since 2005, and is almost certainly one of the most frequently repeated quotes attributed to any individual in their history of reporting. Since October 2005, the AP has hammered this fake quote into the consciousness of millions of people around the world, and continues to do so. But in May 2007, a change occurred. Whereas before the APs quote always read, "Israel must be wiped off the map", as of May 24th, a new version has begun appearing in some of their articles:
"[The] Zionist regime should be wiped off the map."
"Israel" has now magically transformed into the "Zionist regime", i.e. the government. "Must" has become "should". The distinction is enormous. If Ahmadinejad was referring to the regime, then it cannot be claimed that he has made "genocidal" threats to physically and militarily "destroy Israel". This new interpretation is further validation for those who have disputed the quotes accuracy.Here is the APs new "Zionist regime" version in its context. On May 24th, AP introduced the following block of text in some articles. The entire passage reads:
"In October 2005, he raised outrage in the West when he said in a speech that Israels "Zionist regime should be wiped off the map."
His supporters and some independent analysts have since argued Ahmadinejads words were mistranslated from Farsi and should have been better translated as "vanish from the pages of time" — implying Israel would vanish on its own rather be destroyed."
Beginning June 3rd, AP articles re-using the stock text were suddenly missing the words "independent analysts" and "from Farsi":
"His supporters have argued Ahmadinejads words were mistranslated and should have been better translated as "vanish from the pages of time" — implying Israel would vanish on its own rather be destroyed."
While APs acknowledgement of those who have disputed the quote is a victory, the gratuitous and misleading inclusion of the phrase "his supporters" sabotages the clarification—readers are less likely to take the claim seriously if they believe that Ahmadinejads fans dispute it. The unnecessary removal of the "independent analysts" phrase in subsequent reports is additionally suspect.In May 2006, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, squarely refuted the quote on his blog, where, by the way, he denounced the Islamic Republic, saying,In June 2006, veteran journalist Jonathan Steele took Coles correct translation as his lead and examined the controversy further in his own column in The Guardian. There is nothing to suggest that Mr. Steele'supports' Ahmadinejad.As the rumor rampaged on despite the new analysis and protests, I recognized the need for greater critical mass to influence the discourse. In January 2007, I wrote a comprehensive examination of the quote and its context in Ahmadinejads speech. The piece has become something of a phenomenon. To date, the " Rumor of the Century " article has traveled the world and been translated into languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Slovak and Swedish. In Thailand, The Bangkok Post featured an entire column about it. Numerous writers, academics, and authors quote it and reference it. Newspapers have printed Letters to the Editor which quote from it, and others have created YouTube videos inspired by it. I have discussed it on American and Canadian radio programs, and it was recently selected for an award and inclusion in a forthcoming book.Since the'map' quote was first called into question over at least a year earlier, and these revisions were only made after my January 2007 article was released, I believe that Im one of the people being referenced here. If the AP is attempting to include my article as a defense of Ahmadinejad, then they have conveniently overlooked my association with The Mossadegh Project and condemnation of his "backwards regime". There is no comparison whatsoever between the benevolent, secular democracy of Dr. Mossadegh and the Islamic Republics oppressive, fundamentalist dictatorship, which has always openly despised him. Since none of the prominent media critiques are pro-Ahmadinejad, just who are these "supporters" to whom the AP refers?
House of Representatives Charges Iran with Inciting 'Genocide'
Two years after Ahmadinejads speech, the quote is still causing a stir. On June 20, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on the UN to charge Ahmadinejad with the crime of inciting genocide "because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel"—specifically citing the erroneous "wiped off the map" statement. (Somehow the person whom Ahmadinejad was quoting, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seems to have averted all international condemnation and censure over the statement in the 1980s).In his June 18testimony before the House, the resolutions co-sponsor, Congressman Steve Rothman (D-NJ) referred to Ahmadinejad as a "lunatic" five times and a "madman" twice, compared him to Hitler, and falsely accused Iran of openlyto a nuclear weapons program with the purpose of destroying Israel. Said Rothman:
"Here we have the President of a sovereign nation... who says that a fellow nation... should be wiped off the face of the Earth, the people killed.
... Lest one think that Mr. Ahmadinejad, a twisted, backward, lunatic, be some non-threatening individual crazy man who happens to talk about the death of millions of innocent people, this is the head of a nation, a sovereign nation with oil wealth and an army and with a stated goal of acquiring nuclear weapons to use to carry out his homicidal, genocidal, lunatic delusions of wiping out the State of Israel."
The only Congressmen who voted against the resolution were Ron Paul (R-TX) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), both of whom recognized H. Con.Res.21 as a pretext to lay the groundwork for war. Paul called it "an exercise in propaganda that serves one purpose: to move us closer to initiating a war against Iran", and questioned how the U.S. could not consider its own threats of a possible nuclear attack on Iran as an incitement to genocide itself. "Does anyone believe that dropping nuclear weapons on Iran will not wipe a people off the map?" he asked.Congressman Kucinich has said the resolution "sets a dangerous precedent in foreign affairs. A mistranslation could become a cause of war. The United States House may unwittingly be setting the stage for a war with Iran." He repeatedly raised questions about the accuracy of the words being condemned. "There is reasonable doubt with regard to the accuracy of the translations of President Ahmadinejads words in this resolution", he said in a subsequent press release. "President Ahmadinejads speeches can also be translated as a call for regime change, much in the same manner the Bush Administration has called for regime change in Iraq and Iran, making this resolution very ironic."Kucinichs attempts during his June 18testimony to insert four other alternate translationsinto the Congressional Record [including my own article, parts of which he read into the official record], were formally blocked by House members. None of Kucinichs suggested texts were taken seriously by the resolutions supporters, who continuously interrupted his testimony."When I learned of these translations, I felt obligated to bring it to the attention of the House", Kucinich said in a press statement. "It seems that much has been lost in translation. Members have a right to know of the translations and the refusal to permit them to become a part of the Congressional Record does a disservice to Members."In his testimony, Kucinich quoted from significantly different translations from MEMRI and The New York Times Tehran Bureau. The members remained unimpressed, and the suggested documents were dismissed without any logical explanation. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who herself has publicly called for the illegal assassination of Fidel Castro (which she denied and later admitted to), gave the baffling reasoning, "I would hate to have Ahmadinejads statements be included as a part of the record in this part of the debate where we are saying that he is a despot." In other words, she and her colleagues, like countless others, have already made up their mind.
The Truth — Wars First Casualty
[1] Reuters reports:
March 4, 2007
"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has fueled fears... by urging that the Jewish state be "wiped off the map", though Tehran officials said this did not constitute a threat."
June 4, 2007:
"He has often referred to the demise of the Jewish state but says Iran does not pose a threat to it."
June 8, 2007:
"He has often referred to the destruction of the Jewish state but says Iran is not a threat."
[2] CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, April 2, 2006: Interview with Irans ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh [http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/02/le.01.html]:
..these are fabricated news that they are... using... as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy." "...the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran... is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle. Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. That is the message, and Im sure that we are -- this message is shared with all the international community and peace-loving people of the whole world."
"And I assure the whole world that Iran is for peaceful activities and will will try to continue it, and we spare no effort to assure that these activities will be peaceful and will not threaten any country, and we want peace in the Middle East and the whole world."
"... But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or they have to be massacred... this is [a] fabricated, unfortunate, selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so."
[3] ABC News, Diane Sawyer Interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad- Good Morning America, February 13, 2007 [http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2868077 and http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2869108]:
"We shy away from any kind of conflict and any kind of bloodshed, and we will be sad by such. We are opposed to any kind of conflict and as we have said repeatedly we think the world problem can be solved through dialogue, the use of logic and a sense of friendship. There is no need for the use of force."
"And what we have said about Palestine, its quite clear, based on the charter of the U.N., based on international regulations, we say let Palestinians decide.Please allow the Palestinians to decide. Please respect their decision. But please give them the opportunity for decision making."
"We believe that in Palestine, there should be a referendum and Palestinians, Muslims, Jews, any Palestinians, and this is based on international regulations and I think its their right to determine their future. Any decision made by Palestinians must be respected, and I think this is a very clear proposition."
"Why are people opposed, what we say is clear. If you continue massacring innocent people, if you continue to make them refugees, and if you continue attacking neighboring countries, then the countries and the people of those countries, regions.get angry, because the Zionist regime was imposed upon them."
"We are opposed to any proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons. We believe that the time is now over for nuclear weapons. It is a time for logic, for rationality and for civilization. Instead of thinking of finding new weapons, we are trying to find new ways to love people. And if talking about the "Death to America" slogans, I think you know it yourself, it is not related in any way to American public. Our people have no problem with American public, and we have a very friendly relationship."
[4] Congressman Dennis Kucinich, June 18th, 2007: "At this time, Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask unanimous consent to include a New York Times translation of the text of President Ahmadinejads speech, a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute of his speech, articles relating to an analysis of the speech, and the words that were used by Virginia Tilley of Johannesburg, South Africa and by Arash Norouzi written on the 18th of January 2007."
The U.S. war against Iraq has caused enormous tragedy for both countries, with hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost on the basis of a flawed narrative. Clarifying the narrative vis-à-vis Iran has nothing to do with supporting a |
in participating, you can sign up to be a delegate. Find the registration form on the Minneapolis DFL website.
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We want to know – Are you planning on heading out to your caucus? Plan to be a delegate?A large scale and well-planned attack in a suburban living room was shut down before it began today, after a raid by Australian Federal Police.
Dozens of weapons were seized – some automatic, others with battery powered lasers – as well as several magazines of brightly coloured bullets.
“This was to be a sophisticated attack, with sophisticated arsenal,” an AFP spokesperson said. “Some of the weapons we found had special glow-in-the-dark technology. Others were loaded with bullets that have the ability to stick to walls”.
It is believed the attack was designed in a nearby bedroom and was to be carried out in the living room, before moving into the kitchen. “We have intelligence to suggest it may have then moved into a study area where an innocent adult was sitting,” the spokesperson revealed.
The adult – who did not wish to be named – said she had witnessed, and survived, a similar attack before. “It all happened very quickly,” she said of the former attack. “There was a spray of bullets, a lot of shouting, and then they were gone. They didn’t even clean up afterwards,” she said.
The AFP have reminded Australians that it is important to remain alert, even though school holidays are now over.
The Shovel is Australia’s satire news service. For more breaking stories, follow The Shovel on Facebook and Twitter.Overview
The garden is named after the College of Pharmacy’s founding dean, the late Heber W. Youngken Jr., a pioneer in the study of medicinal plants. Now, with 200 medicinal plants, 500 ornamental plants, 9 birch trees, sodded areas, walkways, benches shaped in the form of birch leaves and a translucent sculptural frieze featuring panels that depict plant life in laboratory slides, the courtyard and garden are places for research and respite from the demands of 21st century life.
The courtyard and medicinal garden are URI’s response to the state’s requirement that each building funded by taxpayers have an element of art as part of the project. The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts funded the courtyard portion of the project. A stunning example of public space that draws on nature, science and art, the site is a central piece of the health and life sciences facilities in the north district of the Kingston Campus.The Italian – throws the cup against the wall, breaks it and walks away in a fit of rage!
The German – carefully washes the cup, sterilizes it and makes a new cup of coffee.
The Frenchman – takes out the fly and drinks the coffee.
The Chinese – eats the fly and throws away the coffee.
The Russian – drinks the coffee with the fly, since it came with no extra charge.
The Israeli – sells the coffee to the Frenchman, sells the fly to the Chinese, sells the cup to the Italian, drinks a cup of coffee and uses the extra money to invent a device that prevents flies from falling into coffee.
The Palestinian – blames the Israeli for the fly falling into his coffee, protests the act to the UN as an act of aggression, takes a loan from the European Union to buy a new cup of coffee, uses the money to purchase explosives and then blows up the coffee house where the Italian, Frenchman, Chinese, German and Russian are all trying to explain to the Israeli that he should give his cup of coffee to the Palestinian.WASHINGTON — Fiery wrecks of trains hauling crude oil have intensified pressure on the Obama administration to approve tougher standards for railroads and tank cars despite industry complaints that it could cost billions and slow freight deliveries.
On Feb. 5, the Transportation Department sent the White House draft rules that would require oil trains to use stronger tank cars and make other safety improvements.
Nine days later a 100-car train hauling crude oil and petroleum distillates derailed and caught fire in a remote part of Ontario, Canada. Less than 48 hours later, a 109-car oil train derailed and caught fire in West Virginia, leaking oil into a Kanawha River tributary and burning a house to its foundation. As the fire spread across 19 of the cars, a nearby resident said the explosions sounded like an “atomic bomb.” Both fires burned for nearly a week.
The most serious killed 47 people and destroyed the town center of Lac Megantic in Quebec, Canada, just across the border from Maine, in 2013.The two accidents follow a spate of other fiery oil train derailments in the U.S. and Canada over the past few years. The most serious killed 47 people and destroyed the town center of Lac Megantic in Quebec, Canada, just across the border from Maine, in 2013.
The government hasn’t yet unveiled its proposed regulations. But among them are a stronger tank car design that includes thicker tank walls and electronically-controlled brakes that stop rail cars at the same time rather than sequentially, said Brigham McCown, a Washington-based consultant who was head of the federal agency responsible for safe transportation of hazardous materials during President George W. Bush’s administration.
Typically, safety regulators propose tough regulations and the Office of Management and Budget, which looks at economic and other implications of the rules, demands they be scaled back. This time, however, there may be less resistance.
“The more incidents we have, the less likely the administration will be willing to listen to industry,” McCown said. “I think the railroad industry starts to lose credibility every time there is an accident.”
Kevin Book, an energy industry analyst, said it has become harder to imagine the administration accommodating the industry.
The oil and rail industries want thinner tank walls — half an inch thick, instead of the 9/16ths-inch that regulators propose. The thicker the shell, the less oil a tank car can hold, and with about a half-million carloads of crude hauled by rail in the U.S. and Canada last year, the cost difference could add up.
The tank cars in the recent accidents were built to a voluntary standard written by industry in 2011 to answer criticism that cars used to transport flammable liquids were prone to rupture in an accident and spill their contents and ignite spectacular fires. But the two most recent accidents show that the newer cars — known as 1232s — also are prone to rupture, even at slow speeds. Both trains were traveling under 40 mph.
“Those folks who were arguing that the 1232s may in fact be puncture-proof really can’t make that argument anymore,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., told reporters.
A Transportation Department analysis predicts that trains hauling crude oil or ethanol will derail an average of 10 times a year over the next two decades, causing more than $4 billion in damage and possibly killing hundreds of people if an accident happens in a densely populated part of the U.S.
Chris Hart, the acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, urged federal regulators in a blog post this week to act swiftly to set new tank car standards, noting that while the government deliberates over new rules, more 1232 cars are entering service.
Industry officials say they need every car they can get to meet shipping demands, and it will take time for manufacturers to retool for a new design. U.S. and Canadian officials also have not agreed on a phase-out period for the train cars that regularly cross their border.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told The Associated Press that administration officials understand the gravity of the issue and are committed to a “comprehensive approach” that includes better braking and slower train speeds, as well as enhancing the ability of fire departments to respond to accidents.
Railroads complain that electronically-controlled brakes would cost them $12 billion to $21 billion and that lower train speeds would back up other rail traffic through much of the country, slowing freight deliveries and passenger service. Last year they agreed to reduce oil train speeds to 40 mph in high-population areas. Regulators have discussed turning that voluntary limit into a requirement.
But former NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said that until safety is improved, oil trains shouldn’t be allowed to travel any faster than the typical school bus — about 25 mph.The Saints and Northern Ireland captain topped the public vote to claim the award ahead of his teammates after a memorable 2016.
After being instrumental in helping to secure the Green and White Army’s first major tournament appearance since 1986, Davis was a major force as Northern Ireland reached the knockout stages in France.
Davis has been a key part of the national team since his debut in 2005, and is fourth on the list of all-time appearances with 92 caps.
After receiving the trophy from Vauxhall competition winner Stan Kee, Davis expressed his pride at receiving the award for the second year running.
“It’s an honour to be named Vauxhall Northern Ireland Player of the Year, especially after the fantastic year that we had,” said Davis.
“It’s great to be recognised by our loyal supporters and I am hugely thankful to each and every one of them for voting.
“We have put ourselves in a decent position in our qualifying group for the next major competition and it is up to us to build on the success that we had in 2016.”
Andrew Curley, Head of Sponsorship and Events at Vauxhall, said: “Steven has had a great year in leading his country to success on the field, and he thoroughly deserves his award.
“We are proud of what Northern Ireland have achieved and we look forward to continuing our support in 2017.”Turkey's Cüneyt Çakır will referee the 2015 UEFA Champions League final between Juventus and FC Barcelona following his appointment by the UEFA Referees Committee.
The match at the Olympiastadion in Berlin on Saturday 6 June will be officiated by the 38-year-old, who has been an international referee since 2006. In total, Çakır has taken charge of 70 UEFA matches. This season he has overseen three UEFA Europa League fixtures and four in the UEFA Champions League, including the round of 16 first leg between Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea FC in France.
Çakır will be assisted by his countrymen Bahattin Duran and Tarık Ongun. The fourth official will be Jonas Eriksson from Sweden, and the two additional assistant referees, Hüseyin Göçek and Barış Şimşek, are also from Turkey. A Turkish reserve assistant referee – Mustafa Emre Eyisoy – completes the refereeing team.
England's Martin Atkinson will take charge of the UEFA Europa League final between FC Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk and Sevilla FC.A Boone County judge has allowed what legal experts believe is the first divorce granted in a same-sex marriage in Missouri, which has a constitutional amendment against recognizing same-sex marriages.
In a ruling handed down last month, Boone County Circuit Judge Leslie Schneider granted a divorce for Dena and Samantha Latimer, who were married in Massachusetts in 2009 and lived in Columbia. She ruled that under the legal doctrine of "comity," which essentially means the recognition of the laws of another jurisdiction, a Missouri court can recognize the law of where the marriage was performed "for the limited purpose of granting equitable relief."
Schneider's ruling says that, while Missouri's Defense of Marriage Act prohibits a court from recognizing a same-sex marriage, Missouri courts have made judgments on marriages that were not valid to begin with, such as a 1993 Western District Missouri Court of Appeals judgment on a marriage in which the parties failed to obtain a marriage license.
Considering those cases, Schneider ruled, "the court maintains an authority to enter judgment with respect to a marriage that is not legally recognized."
Further, Schneider ruled that by denying same-sex couples the ability to void or dissolve their marriages, the state "runs afoul of its due process obligations" under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Columbia attorney Tana Benner, who represented Dena Latimer in the case, said that while divorces are rarely a positive experience for the parties involved, she felt that the Latimers were at least pleased that the judge granted the divorce.
"I think they just wanted to get some relief," Benner said. "They were in a position where they didn't think it would be possible."
Christopher Clark, a staff attorney for Lambda Legal's Chicago office, confirmed that the divorce is the first in Missouri that the organization is aware of, but said courts in other states that do not recognize same-sex marriages have granted divorces for same-sex couples using the same basic reasoning that Schneider used in the Latimers' divorce.
"Same-sex couples are like everybody else in that they have relationships that sometimes don't work out," Clark said.
When Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, it also made a requirement that a couple must "establish domicile" in the state. Thus, if a couple is married in the state and moves to a state that does not recognize their marriage, they cannot go back to Massachusetts to have their divorce granted.
In 2004, Missouri voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Seventy-one percent of ballots were cast in favor of the measure.
The amendment effectively prohibits state courts from recognizing a same-sex marriage.
About four years after the amendment was adopted, a same-sex couple who were also married in Massachusetts sought an annulment in Buchanan County.
An annulment differs from a divorce in that it is retroactive and essentially means that the marriage never happened. With divorce, the court recognizes that two people were married at some point and, at some later point, the marriage ended.
Then-state Sen. Delbert Scott, R-Lowry City, who was term limited out of office in 2010, filed an amicus brief in that case to call on the court not to recognize the marriage for the purposes of annulment because that would amount to recognizing that the marriage exists. Buchanan County Circuit Judge Dan Kellogg granted the annulment anyway.
Clark said that by granting divorces rather than annulments, a court is able to act as a "referee" between the two parties to ensure a fair split of assets and child custody.
This article was published in the Sunday, May 4, 2014 edition of the Columbia Daily Tribune with the headline "Local judge grants gay couple a divorce:�Might be the first time in the state."In speaking to investors last week, Sony has announced that it will be making changes to return the ailing electronics giant to profitability. Changes in the three year plan include spinning off Sony’s audio and video business into a wholly owned subsidiary. Additionally, Sony mentioned the possibility of selling off their smartphone and television business entirely, but clarified that there are no plans for that move just yet.
With spinning off these properties, Sony is left with a core business that focuses on their far more profitable products: Gaming, entertainment, and image sensors.
The moves are an effort to help Sony return to profitability, and their projections are ambitious. CEO Kazuo Hirai projects “a 25 fold increase in profit over three years,” adding that the spinoffs will help the company grow to see annual profits of 500 billion yen by the end of 2018, vastly improving over the 20 billion yen Sony hopes to hit by March of this year.
While these moves are a departure from Hirai’s vision of “One Sony” he put forth upon being appointed CEO in 2012, the projections are promising. The focus on image sensors is a direct result of Sony’s Devices segment performing incredibly well, particularly over the last three quarters. The Devices segment is responsible for the creation of CMOS sensors for mobile devices. Mobile shooters of the Apple, LG and Samsung variety should be able to breath a collective sigh of relief, as Sony's fine sensors should continue to help these devices perform.
Sony's technology in the area of mobile imaging has been some of the strongest for quite some time. As Sony puts it:
“Stacked CMOS image sensors deliver superior image quality and advanced functionality in a compact size. Demand for these image sensors is anticipated to further increase, particularly within the expanding market for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Sony is striving to bolster its production capacity for stacked CMOS image sensors and further strengthen its integrated supply operations in order to reinforce its leading position in the image sensor market.”
So, as they see it, their products are better than the competition, demand is increasing, and Sony will continue to seek to strengthen their position as leader of the mobile image sensor segment. With over three decades in the image sensor business, Sony imaging should have a bright future, even as other parts of the company work to regain their foothold in the industry.A little can go a long way for many things, right? With off-target dicamba movement, a little may go too far and cause significant damage. “Research shows as little as 0.01% contamination of dicamba can cause leaf puckering symptoms,” says Stephanie Porter, sales agronomist with Burrus Seed.
The approval of Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans, Xtendimax and FeXapan herbicides with VaporGrip Technology, and Engenia herbicide open the door for later, in-season dicamba applications in soybeans. How late? XtendiMax and FeXapan can be sprayed up to R1, or the beginning of flowering. Off-target dicamba injury can do the most harm when soybean plants reach the reproductive stage. “Growth stage and concentration will determine whether or not you’ll have yield issues,” Porter notes.
Burrus Seed
R1 is uncomfortably close to R3 through R6 growth stages, she adds, when protecting soybean plants is critical. During R3 to R6, pod and seed development begins in the soybean plant. “It could really screw things up, because that’s your time frame for your yield,” she explains. “Most of your soybean yield comes from the middle of the plant. If the middle of the plant is affected at a certain time, it could be bad.”
The application timing window for new dicamba formulations ends slightly ahead of the critical growth stages in soybeans, but neighboring nontolerant or non-GMO fields may be further along. Off-target applications could create challenges for neighboring sensitive fields if label requirements, discussed in this article, are not followed.
Signs to look for
How do you spot off–target dicamba injury? Porter shares four tell-tale signs and factors to consider:
• Puckered up. “The most common symptom is leaf puckering or crinkling,” Porter explains. Impacted leaves may “strap or narrow up” and have bumps. For soybeans further along, pods will curl under and stems may twist.
• Delayed reaction. Off-target dicamba movement symptoms will not appear for seven to 14 days, Porter notes. Farmers diagnosing injured soybeans should consider when dicamba applications were made in surrounding fields, going back more than two weeks.
• Kickback. “Dicamba impacts new growth,” Porter says. “Injury appears on the next four leaves.” The impact on new growth ultimately stunts the plant and causes it to fall behind in growth stages.
• Look-alikes. Dicamba injury can be mistaken for viruses like soybean mosaic, Porter explains, but viruses infect clusters or single plants. Dicamba-drift injuries will likely appear on the edges of fields, but ultimately the injury pattern will depend on how off target movement occurred — drift, vapor or a contaminated sprayer.
Aphids may cause leaves to pucker, but they haven’t been a challenge in recent growing seasons, Porter notes.
Burrus Seed
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Seedfill of dicamba-stunted plants compared to healthy plants. Dicamba injury may have lingering effects in soybeans planted for seed, including emergence issues and dicamba symptoms after planting. (Photos by Burrus Seeds)
Say your crop has injury. Will it impact yield? Determining potential yield loss is next to impossible, Porter says, but the concentration of dicamba and crop stage will determine the final outcome.
To estimate potential loss, pull plants and pods from the impacted areas and compare them to pod counts from healthy plant samples.
“Ultimately, the yield monitor will tell the tale,” Porter notes.
Higher concentrations of dicamba on soybeans well into the reproductive phase are at the highest risk for yield loss.
Soybeans planted for seed affected by dicamba from R1 to R6 may produce seed with emergence issues and show dicamba symptoms after planting.
Porter adds that soybeans are at a disadvantage from the start. “Soybeans are the most sensitive plants to dicamba,” she explains.NASA Chandra, Spitzer Study Suggests Black Holes Abundant Among The Earliest Stars
Credit: Karen Teramura, UHIfA
› Larger image
› Larger image (unlabeled) The cosmic microwave background, shown at left in this illustration, is a flash of light that occurred when the young universe cooled enough for electrons and protons to form the first atoms. It contains slight temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all cosmic structure we see around us today. The universe then went dark for hundreds of millions of years until the first stars shone and the first black holes began accreting gas. A portion of the infrared and X-ray signals from these sources is preserved in the cosmic infrared background, or CIB, and its X-ray equivalent, the CXB. At least 20 percent of the structure in these backgrounds changes in concert, indicating that black hole activity was hundreds of times more intense in the early universe than it is today.Karen Teramura, UHIfA
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(Text issued as NASA Headquarters release No. 13-170) Francis Reddy NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.(Text issued as NASA Headquarters release No. 13-170)
By comparing infrared and X-ray background signals across the same stretch of sky, an international team of astronomers has discovered evidence of a significant number of black holes that accompanied the first stars in the universe.Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes in the infrared, researchers have concluded one of every five sources contributing to the infrared signal is a black hole."Our results indicate black holes are responsible for at least 20 percent of the cosmic infrared background, which indicates intense activity from black holes feeding on gas during the epoch of the first stars," said Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.The cosmic infrared background (CIB) is the collective light from an epoch when structure first emerged in the universe. Astronomers think it arose from clusters of massive suns in the universe's first stellar generations, as well as black holes, which produce vast amounts of energy as they accumulate gas.Even the most powerful telescopes cannot see the most distant stars and black holes as individual sources. But their combined glow, traveling across billions of light-years, allows astronomers to begin deciphering the relative contributions of the first generation of stars and black holes in the young cosmos. This was at a time when dwarf galaxies assembled, merged and grew into majestic objects like our own Milky Way galaxy."We wanted to understand the nature of the sources in this era in more detail, so I suggested examining Chandra data to explore the possibility of X-ray emission associated with the lumpy glow of the CIB," said Guenther Hasinger, director of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, and a member of the study team.Hasinger discussed the findings Tuesday at the 222nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Indianapolis. A paper describing the study was published in the May 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.The work began in 2005, when Kashlinsky and his colleagues studying Spitzer observations first saw hints of a remnant glow. The glow became more obvious in further Spitzer studies by the same team in 2007 and 2012. The 2012 investigation examined a region known as the Extended Groth Strip, a single well-studied slice of sky in the constellation Bootes. In all cases, when the scientists carefully subtracted all known stars and galaxies from the data, what remained was a faint, irregular glow. There is no direct evidence this glow is extremely distant, but telltale characteristics lead researchers to conclude it represents the CIB.In 2007, Chandra took especially deep exposures of the Extended Groth Strip as part of a multiwavelength survey. Along a strip of sky slightly larger than the full moon, the deepest Chandra observations overlap with the deepest Spitzer observations. Using Chandra observations, lead researcher Nico Cappelluti, an astronomer with the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy, produced X-ray maps with all of the known sources removed in three wavelength bands. The result, paralleling the Spitzer studies, was a faint, diffuse X-ray glow that constitutes the cosmic X-ray background (CXB).Comparing these maps allowed the team to determine whether the irregularities of both backgrounds fluctuated independently or in concert. Their detailed study indicates fluctuations at the lowest X-ray energies are consistent with those in the infrared maps."This measurement took us some five years to complete and the results came as a great surprise to us," said Cappelluti, who also is affiliated with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in Baltimore.The process is similar to standing in Los Angeles while looking for signs of fireworks in New York. The individual pyrotechnics would be too faint to see, but removing all intervening light sources would allow the detection of some unresolved light. Detecting smoke would strengthen the conclusion at least part of this signal came from fireworks.In the case of the CIB and CXB maps, portions of both infrared and X-ray light seem to come from the same regions of the sky. The team reports black holes are the only plausible sources that can produce both energies at the intensities required. Regular star-forming galaxies, even those that vigorously form stars, cannot do this.By teasing out additional information from this background light, the astronomers are providing the first census of sources at the dawn of structure in the universe."This is an exciting and surprising result that may provide a first look into the era of initial galaxy formation in the universe," said another contributor to the study, Harvey Moseley, a senior astrophysicist at Goddard. "It is essential that we continue this work and confirm it."NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass. Data are archived at the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge.NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.Nano-thermite or super-thermite is a metastable intermolecular composite (MICs) characterized by a particle size of its main constituents, a metal and a metal oxide, under 100 nanometers. This allows for high and customizable reaction rates. Nano-thermites contain an oxidizer and a reducing agent, which are intimately mixed on the nanometer scale. MICs, including nano-thermitic materials, are a type of reactive materials investigated for military use, as well as for general applications involving propellants, explosives, and pyrotechnics.
What distinguishes MICs from traditional thermites is that the oxidizer and a reducing agent, normally iron oxide and aluminium, are in the form of extremely fine powders (nanoparticles). This dramatically increases the reactivity relative to micrometre-sized powder thermite. As the mass transport mechanisms that slow down the burning rates of traditional thermites are not so important at these scales, the reaction proceeds much more quickly.
Potential uses [ edit ]
Historically, pyrotechnic or explosive applications for traditional thermites have been limited due to their relatively slow energy release rates. Because nanothermites are created from reactant particles with proximities approaching the atomic scale, energy release rates are far greater.[1]
MICs or Super-thermites are generally developed for military use, propellants, explosives, incendiary devices, and pyrotechnics. Research into military applications of nano-sized materials began in the early 1990s.[2] Because of their highly increased reaction rate, nanosized thermitic materials are being studied by the U.S. military with the aim of developing new types of bombs several times more powerful than conventional explosives.[3] Nanoenergetic materials can store more energy than conventional energetic materials and can be used in innovative ways to tailor the release of this energy. Thermobaric weapons are one potential application of nanoenergetic materials.[4]
Types [ edit ]
There are many possible thermodynamically stable fuel-oxidizer combinations. Some of them are:
In military research, aluminium-molybdenum oxide, aluminium-Teflon and aluminium-copper(II) oxide have received considerable attention.[2] Other compositions tested were based on nanosized RDX and with thermoplastic elastomers. PTFE or other fluoropolymer can be used as a binder for the composition. Its reaction with the aluminium, similar to magnesium/teflon/viton thermite, adds energy to the reaction.[5] Of the listed compositions, that with potassium permanganate has the highest pressurization rate.[6]
Production [ edit ]
A method for producing nano scale, or ultra fine grain (UFG) aluminum powders, a key component of most nano-thermitic materials, is the dynamic gas-phase condensation method, pioneered by Wayne Danen and Steve Son at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A variant of the method is being used at the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. The powders made by both processes are indistinguishable.[7] A critical aspect of the production is the ability to produce particles of sizes in the tens of nano-meter range, as well as with a limited distribution of particle sizes. In 2002, the production of nano-sized aluminum particles required considerable effort, and commercial sources for the material were limited.[2] Current[when?] production levels are now beyond 100 kg/month.
An application of the sol-gel method, developed by Randall Simpson, Alexander Gash and others at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, can be used to make the actual mixtures of nano-structured composite energetic materials. Depending on the process, MICs of different density can be produced. Highly porous and uniform products can be achieved by super-critical extraction.[2]
Ignition [ edit ]
As with all explosives, research into control yet simplicity has been a goal of research into nanoscale explosives.[2] Some can be ignited with laser pulses.[2]
MICs have been investigated as a possible replacement for lead (e.g. lead styphnate, lead azide) in percussion caps and electric matches. Compositions based on Al-Bi 2 O 3 tend to be used. PETN may be optionally added.[8]
Aluminium powder can be added to nano explosives. Aluminium has a relatively low combustion rate and a high enthalpy of combustion.[9]
The products of a thermite reaction, resulting from ignition of the thermitic mixture, are usually metal oxides and elemental metals. At the temperatures prevailing during the reaction, the products can be solid, liquid or gaseous, depending on the components of the mixture.[10]
Hazards [ edit ]
Like conventional thermite, super thermite reacts at very high temperature and is difficult to extinguish. The reaction produces dangerous ultra-violet (UV) light requiring that the reaction not be viewed directly, or that special eye protection (for example, a welder's mask) be worn.
In addition, super thermites are very sensitive to electrostatic discharge (ESD). Surrounding the metal oxide particles with carbon nanofibers may make nanothermites safer to handle.[11]
See also [ edit ]Did you know that Los Angeles has already experienced an earthquake today? In fact, at the time of writing, six earthquakes have occurred in the last week, and 568 in the past year. This should come as no surprise to the citizens of Los Angeles, a city built on the truly massive San Andreas Fault, the slipping, grating boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Although these earthquakes – generated by the constantly moving fault – were far from devastating, residents of the City of Angels know that their metropolis has suffered cataclysmic tremors before, and it will one day do so again. A new study by NASA has revealed with 99.9% certainty that a magnitude 5.0 earthquake will hit the city of 3.9 million people before the summer of 2018.
The research, published in the journal Earth and Space Science, is a rare seismology study in that the authors state that they are essentially 100% confident such a quake will hit Los Angeles within a short time period. They also look into the likelihood of more powerful quakes; the probability for an M6.0 earthquake within the same time frame is lower, at 35%. The most powerful earthquake in the 20th century, measuring at M7.8, was centered on the nearby city of San Francisco in 1906, where 3,000 people died in the subsequent destruction.
Earthquakes occur on the San Andreas Fault line when stress builds up between the two tectonic plates, which are sliding against each other in opposite directions. When parts of the tectonic plates get stuck, the plates continue to try and keep moving, which builds up stress. Eventually, the stress is released, and the tectonic plates judder forwards, causing an earthquake. The greater this stress, the larger the eventual earthquake. The more powerful stress releases are far less common, so more energetic quakes happen less often.
A moderate M5.1 quake that impacted the greater Los Angeles area in 2014 appears to have been part of a series of more shallow tremors. Seismologists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who have been mapping the deformation under Los Angeles using GPS data and ground-penetrating radar, have concluded that this shallow trend of tremors suggests that there is a deeper part of the fault zone still accumulating stress that has yet to be released. The longer this stress builds up, the more powerful the eventual quake will be.
Earthquakes are measured these days by how much energy they release at the focal point of the fault rupture, known as the epicenter. This energy release (in joules) is placed on the moment magnitude scale (M), which is used by seismologists instead of the older Richter magnitude scale. To put this in perspective, an apple falling from a small tree to the ground releases one joule of energy. An M5.0, which according to NASA will definitely occur in the next three years in Los Angeles, typically releases one hundred billion joules, the equivalent of one million sticks of dynamite.
The certainty of the study’s prediction, however, is already being debated by the United States Geological Survey, who aren’t sure how the 99.9% value was attained.Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora": space is bigger than you think
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is the best book I read in 2015, and by "best" I mean, "most poetic" and "most thought provoking" and "most scientific," a triple-crown in science fiction that's practically unheard of. I wouldn't have believed it possible, even from Robinson, had I not read it for myself.
Aurora is an exciting novel on its own merits: the story of a generation ship finally decelerating at the Tau Ceti system after 150 years of travel at 10 percent of lightspeed, its many arcologies each a miniature Terran biome, ready to terraform a wet moon of a superjovian planet 12 light-years from Sol.
But Aurora is even more interesting for the way that it interacts with the science fiction that came before it. For Aurora is covering some well-trodden turf in its premise, but approaches it with a critical eye and an original point of view that makes its science fictional forbears look primitive and even laughable by comparison.
Like some of the best Golden Age science fiction, Aurora is a story about engineers troubleshooting hard technical problems. But for the most part, those novels took the simplistic view that the hard problem of interstellar travel would be about physics, and devoted themselves to engineers who occupied themselves with troublesome propulsion systems. Robinson's generation ship is plagued by biological problems that are much trickier than the mere physics of propulsion, navigation, acceleration and deceleration. His closed ecosystem has to exist without resupply and with very little opportunity for repair, and it is full of complicated living things whose relationships to one another are governed by homeostatic mechanisms that were evolved in an ecosystem one trillion times larger than a spaceship. The miniaturization of the living things' habitats is akin to an island ecosystem, but much exaggerated. Islands have to worry about mutations and disease, but at least they have the whole wide ocean to wash away some of their sins and the whole massive atmosphere to circulate their gases. On the spaceship in Aurora, salts build up in deadly concentrations. Elements bond to other elements and will not be liberated. The Coriolis effect of a ship spinning under acceleration is different enough from the decelerative forces that microorganisms fail in difficult-to-define ways, and these changes interact with things like mechanical connectors that have been accustomed to g-stresses from one direction and have bent themselves in subtle ways such that they can't function any longer when the way that they are pulled "down" changes minutely but persistently.
Troubleshooting makes for a brilliant backdrop for science fiction. It's the kind of story-puzzle that can serve as a pivot point for characters to rotate around, and it creates a drumbeat of rising tension as the critical technologies of the imaginary world fail in ever-more-dangerous way. Sometimes, the troubleshooting is just handwaving (think of Scotty shouting about dilithium crystals), but at its best, it describes problems that are viscerally recognizable as real and meaty and urgent.
Aurora gets off to a spectacular start, then, as a novel about troubleshooting on a generation ship, and about the sociology of that ship, and about the personal relationship between Devi, the chief engineer, and her daughter, Freya, who may or may not be mentally deficient in a way that may or may not be related to the ship's ecological problems. To make this even better, Robinson describes the settings -- the pocket-sized biomes -- with all the poetry of John Muir |
and Josephine County look to be most vulnerable, with almost 60 percent of jobs at risk of automation.
In previewing the report with the Business Tribune, economist John Tapogna, president of ECONorthwest, said this isn't the first time America has worried about robots. In the late 1960s there were great fears that we would be displaced at work by robots. However in at least one reputable report, "Their conclusion was, we are better at eliminating jobs than we are work. In that humans may figure out how to make things better but we always desire more and more," said Tapogna.
In 2017 it's different. "The pace that you are going to see automation come at you is going to be more rapid than ever. And that's why you need to sit down and think about it," and come up with preemptive policies.
Even Portland is not immune from such losses. The report says 49.1 percent of all jobs here are at risk. According to the report, only the Corvallis area is predicted to do better, although 48.6 percent of the jobs there are still at risk.
The report was prepared in conjunction with the Oregon Business Summit scheduled at the Oregon Convention Center on Monday, Dec. 4. "Is Oregon Future Ready?" is the announced topic of this year's annual gathering of elected and business leaders. Panel presentations include such titles as "Are Robots Going to Take Our Jobs? Which Ones? What Can We Do About It?"
The most vulnerable jobs to automation are in accommodation/retail, food services and manufacturing. (see bar chart)
As an example of a nuanced influence in automation, Tapogna said a skilled job such as looking at an X-ray might in a few decades be done by software. But telling the patient the results is likley to remain a human-to-human skill.
The report is believed to be the first macro-economic analysis of the potential effects of automation on a state's labor force.
"The next wave of automation, and the future of work, have risen to the top of economic and policy discussions," says the report, noting that 13 percent of prime employment age males in Oregon were not working in 2013. The highest percent of those who are not in the work force have only a high school degree or less.
By coincidence, the report was released the same day as a study saying that as many as 800 million workers worldwide may lose their jobs to robots and automation by 2030 — more than a fifth of today's global labor force.
The study, by the research arm of McKinsey & Co., says that could include up to 375 million jobs in America. Like the Oregon report, the study says most of the jobs at risk require lower skills, such as fast-food workers and back-office employees.
According to the report, many experts believe that job changes caused by automation are happening must faster than previous employment revolutions — and much faster than most people realize.
The Oregon report, which will be presented during the business summit, calls on policymakers to begin preparing for the challenges of automation. Among other things, says the education system needs to be approved to better prepare more students for the demanding jobs that are not likely to be replaced. It also says the state should take advantage of the opportunities created by automation by encouraging the growth of innovative companies with such attractions as more housing choices. And it says a better social safety net needs to be built for those most likely to be displaced by automation.
The concept of a universal basic income is now also part of the conversation, an idea imported from Scandinavia and Switzerland.
"Embracing innovation and being proactive will ensure Oregon can not only weather the changes that will undoubtedly occur as a result of automation, but actually benefit from them," the report says. "Now is the time to prepare."
Looking at prime age males (aged 25 to 54), who are traditionally expected to work, the proportion not working is set to rise especially amongst those with high school or less education. This includes the officially unemployed, those unable to work and those who have stopped looking for work. That number is approaching 20 percent now and is set to rise if jobs such as fast food and driving are taken over by software and robots.
"If I had to pick a slide that would speak to what might be which might be fueling some of the populist unrest in the country at this point I don't know of another economic chart showing this economic anxiety."
The Value of Jobs Coalition has released a series of reports on the state and regional economy in recent years. Its members include the Portland Business Alliance, the Oregon Business Council, Oregon Business and Industry, the Port of Portland, and Greater Portland, Inc.
With additional reporting by Joseph Gallivan
The Portland Tribune is a KOIN 6 media partner.SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Efforts to legalize marijuana in California got a boost this week after competing ballot measures joined forces behind the stronger of the two, backed by billionaire Sean Parker, a former president of Facebook Inc.
Entrepreneur Sean Parker, founder of Napster, takes part in a panel during the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in New York, September 29, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
The initiative has the support of Democratic Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and the Coalition for Cannabis Policy Reform. Coalition board member Antonio Gonzalez, who is also president of the Latino Voters League, said the coalition withdrew its rival initiative after Parker’s measure was modified to protect children, workers and small businesses.
The move brings to a close weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations aimed at closing the gaps between the initiatives, amid concerns that neither would succeed if both wound up on the ballot for 2016.
Marijuana use is illegal under federal law in the United States but 23 states allow the use of pot for medical purposes. Recently, Colorado, Washington and Oregon have approved recreational use and Alaska is set to allow it next year.
Voters in Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona could face ballot initiatives next year intended to legalize marijuana.
In California, amendments filed this week to Parker’s proposal would allow local governments a greater say in where marijuana can be sold, toughen protections for children, including a ban on marketing to minors and explicit warning labels on marijuana products, and require safety standards and enforcement of labor laws for people who work in the industry.
The measure would tax marijuana sales and cultivation, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the state, proponents say.
California has the largest marketplace for medical marijuana sales in the United States, according to the research group IBIS World. Nationwide, medical and recreational marijuana is expected to bring in $3.6 billion in revenue in 2015, growing to $13.4 billion over the next five years, the company says.
A marijuana legalization initiative failed in California in 2010, but public opinion is shifting.
Parker’s measure would legalize recreational marijuana use for adults over 21 and set up a framework for regulating and taxing sales.
Parker’s deep pockets suggest that his initiative will be well-funded, although campaign finance records do not show any contributions as of Wednesday.
In 2010 supporters invested $3.5 million in Proposition 19, outspending opponents nearly 8-1. But the measure failed amid concerns that it did not protect children or guard against driving under the influence.
California is home to ever-more expensive initiative campaigns. In 2012, supporters and opponents of Democratic Governor Jerry Brown’s successful bid to temporarily raise taxes spent about $85 million, records show.The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again -- and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in the Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a "tribal conflict" in "the Heart of Darkness." It isn't. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by "armies of business" to seize the metals that make our twenty-first century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.
Every day I think about the people I met in the warzones of Eastern Congo when I reported from there. The wards filled with women who had been gang-raped by the militias and shot in the vagina. The battalions of child soldiers -- drugged, dazed thirteen year olds who had been made to kill members of their own families so they couldn't try to escape and go home. But oddly, as I watch the war starting again on CNN, I find myself thinking about a woman I met who had, by Congolese standards, not suffered in extremis.
I was driving back to Goma from a diamond mine one day when my car got a puncture. As I waited for it to be fixed, I stood by the roadside and watched the great trails of women who stagger along every road in Eastern Congo, carrying all their belongings on their backs in mighty crippling heaps. I stopped a 27 year-old woman called Marie-Jean Bisimwa who had four little children toddling along beside her. She told me she was lucky. Yes, her village had been burned out. Yes, she had lost her husband somewhere in the chaos. Yes, her sister had been raped and gone insane. But she and her kids were alive.
I gave her a lift, and it was only after a few hours of chat along on cratered roads that I noticed there was something strange about Marie-Jean's children. They were slumped forward, their gazes fixed in front of them. They didn't look around, or speak, or smile. "I haven't ever been able to feed them," she said. "Because of the war." Their brains hadn't developed; they never would now. "Will they get better?" she asked. I left her in a village on the outskirts of Goma, and her kids stumbled after her, expressionless.
There are two stories about how this war began -- the official story, and the true story. The official story is that after the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu mass murderers fled across the border into Congo. The Rwandan government chased after them. But it's a lie. How do we know? The Rwandan government didn't go to where the Hutu genocidaires were; not at first. They went to where Congo's natural resources were -- and began to pillage them. They even told their troops to work with any Hutus they came across. Congo is the richest country in the world for gold, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite, and more. Everybody wanted a slice - so six other countries invaded.
These resources were not being stolen to be used in Africa. They were being seized so they could be sold on to us. The more we bought, the more the invaders stole -- and slaughtered. The rise of mobile phones caused a surge in deaths, because the coltan they contain is found primarily in Congo. The UN named the international corporations it believed were involved: Anglo-America, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and more than 100 others (they all deny the charges). But instead of stopping these corporations, our governments demanded the UN stop criticising them.
There were times when the fighting flagged. In 2003, a peace deal was finally brokered by the UN, and the international armies withdrew. Many continued to work via proxy militias -- but the carnage waned somewhat. Until now. As with the first war, there is a cover-story, and the truth. A Congolese militia leader called Laurent Nkunda -- backed by Rwanda -- claims he needs to protect the local Tutsi population from the same Hutu genocidaires who have been hiding out in the jungles of Eastern Congo since 1994. That's why he is seizing Congolese military bases and is poised to march on Goma.
It is a lie. Francois Grignon, Africa Director of the International Crisis Group, tells me the truth: "Nkunda is being funded by Rwandan businessmen so they can retain control of the mines in North Kivu. This is the absolute core of the conflict. What we are seeing now is the beneficiaries of the illegal war economy fighting to maintain their right to exploit." At the moment, Rwandan business interests make a fortune from the mines they illegally seized during the war. The global coltan price has collapsed, so now they focus hungrily on cassiterite, which is used to make tin cans and other consumer disposables. As the war began to wane, they faced slowly losing their control to the elected Congolese government -- so they have given it another bloody kick-start.
Yet the debate about Congo in the West -- when it exists at all -- focuses on our inability to provide a decent bandage, without mentioning that we are causing the wound. It's true the 17,000 UN forces in the country are abysmally failing to protect the civilian population, and urgently need to be super-charged. But it is even more important to stop fuelling the war in the first place by buying blood-soaked natural resources. Nkunda only has enough guns and grenades to take on the Congolese army and the UN because we buy his loot. We need to prosecute the corporations buying them for abetting Crimes Against Humanity, and introduce of a global coltan-tax to pay for a substantial peace-keeping force. To get there, we need to build an international system that values the lives of black people more than it values profit.
Somewhere out there -- lost in the great global heist of Congo's resources - are Marie-Jean and her children, limping along the road once more, carrying everything they own on their backs. They will probably never use a coltan-filled mobile phone, a cassiterite-smelted can of beans, or a gold necklace -- but they may yet die for one.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here.
To save the lives of the victims of Congo's sexual violence, you can donate money here.December 10, 2012 – Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 71 years ago this month was a “day that will live in infamy” according to US President Franklin Roosevelt.
Seven decades later, it increasingly appears that the president’s surprise and outrage may have been synthetic. Roosevelt had been maneuvering for more than a year to bring the United States into World War II.
However, most Americans were against joining Britain’s war against Germany, and had little interest in Asia.
Something dramatic was needed to arouse war fever in the United States – particularly so since American-Germans constituted one of the largest ethnic group in the United States. In 1900, New York City was the third largest German city after Berlin and Hamburg.
Washington had been demanding since the mid-1930’s that Japan cease its occupation of strategic Manchuria, an autonomous state on China’s northeastern border. America’s warnings to Tokyo intensified after Japan invaded China in 1937. By 1941, Japanese armies were deep in China, a nation that the US considered its sphere of commercial and political interest.
Roosevelt issued an ultimatum to Tokyo to get out of China – or else. When Japan ignored the warning, Roosevelt cut off all US exports to Japan of crude oil, aviation gas, scrap iron and other strategic commodities on which Japanese industry depended. At the time, the US produced over 50% of the world’s oil supply. Japan produced no oil and imported all of its strategic materials and much of its food.
Washington should have known an attack was coming. The 1904 Russo-Japanese War began with a surprise attack on Russia’s important northern China naval base of Port Arthur. When President George Bush I ordered US forces to war against Iraq in 1991, he justified the attack by claiming America’s oil supply was threatened.
Japan’s war against the ten times more powerful United States was folly. The architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who had lived in the United States, warned beforehand “we are going to war for oil, and I fear we will lose it because of oil.”
In 1941, Japan had a two-year strategic reserve of oil. The US embargo meant that Japan had to either go to war while it still had oil, see itself crippled by the embargo, or pull out of China, something the Imperial Army would not accept.
Yamamoto was absolutely correct. Japan’s main source of oil was the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), which it quickly conquered. But mid-1944, US submarines and mining had cut off 96% of Japan’s imports of oil, strategic material and food. Japan’s navy and air forces became inoperable. Japan began to starve; half its cities were leveled by US fire bomb raids.
From 1939, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been at samurai sword’s drawn with the Imperial Army. They in effect ran two separate wars: the Navy wanted the East Indies’s oil and to dominate the Pacific Ocean. The Army demanded resources be poured into its wars in China and Southeast Asia.
Strategists calling for Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria to attack Russia’s Far East were ignored. Had Japan done so, Stalin would not have been able to transfer 41 tough Siberian divisions just in time to halt the German advance on Moscow.
Had Germany and Japan coordinated their offensives, Russia would likely have been defeated. But they did not. Japan’s Emperor, Hirohito, dithered and failed to force the Army and Navy into a coordinated war effort. Recent research in Japan has uncovered the tragicomic bungling and squabbling of the Imperial generals and admirals, and a weak emperor paralyzed by indecision.
Even worse, Hitler for some reason declared war on the United States soon after Pearl Harbor, giving Roosevelt the pretext he had long sought to enter the war against Germany.
Historians will long battle over whether Roosevelt lured Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor. The absence of the only two US aircraft carriers in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor during the attack, and Washington’s ability to read Japan’s naval codes add suspicions that the White House saw the attack coming. At minimum, the embargo of strategic material to Japan was a huge provocation. Japan foolishly took the bait and paid a terrible price.
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This post is in: Asia, History, Japan, USAPresent(s): 1)Monopoly: Adventure Time Collector's Edition - 2)The Walking Dead shot glass set of 4 - 3} Scharfeen Berger Chocolate Tasting squares box (82% Extra Dark Chocolate, 70% Bittersweet Chocolate, & 62% Semisweet Chocolate)- 4) Fringe: The COMPLETE Series- 5)Vitakraft Rabbit Carrot Slims, 1.76oz-
6)Ty Beanie Boo- Penguin "Ice Cube" 7)Pooh Bear TY Ball 8)Tigger TY Ball 9)Bunny treats
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
*Response to Gift 1) I love monopoly boards and love AT.
2) <3 shot glasses and Walking Dead.
3) I personally love the min-tiny sizes of these! MINI things are AWESOME!! They are YUMMY and I am not a dark chocolate fan but I will eat these! 4) YAY FRINGE! 5) I own a mini-rex and was included too ^ _ ^ TY) I love all the plushies!!Evacuees make their way though floodwaters near the Addicks Reservoir as floodwaters from Tropical Storm Harvey rise Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
As the human toll and the strain on flood defenses mounted, the city of Houston moved Tuesday to open two and possibly three more mega-shelters, and the rain from Harvey officially became the heaviest tropical downpour in U.S. history.
Louisiana's governor offered to take in Harvey victims from Texas, and televangelist Joel Osteen opened his Houston megachurch, a 16,000-seat former arena, after critics blasted him on social media for not acting to help families displaced by the storm.
The city's largest shelter, the George R. Brown Convention Center, held more than 9,000 people, almost twice the number officials originally planned to house there, Mayor Sylvester Turner said. The crowds included many from areas outside Houston.
"We are not turning anyone away. But it does mean we need to expand our capabilities and our capacity," Turner said. "Relief is coming."
More than 17,000 people have sought refuge in Texas shelters and that number seemed certain to increase, the American Red Cross said.
Volunteers and donors lined up outside the Toyota Center, the downtown arena that is home to the Houston Rockets, in anticipation that it will be one of the new shelters. While details of the new shelters were expected later Tuesday, Charles Maltbie, a Red Cross shelter manager, said volunteers have done a "preliminary walk through" of the Toyota Center and are working to configure it for evacuees.
The mayor said the city has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for more supplies, including cots and food, for additional 10,000 people, which he hopes to get no later than Wednesday.
Gov. John Bel Edwards said Louisiana is offering to shelter storm victims from Texas while the state also helps its own residents who were rescued from Harvey's floodwaters overnight. Edwards said at a news conference Tuesday in Baton Rouge that he expects Texas officials to decide within 48 hours whether to accept the offer and transport flood victims to Louisiana shelters.
Also on Tuesday, Houston authorities confirmed that a 30-year city police officer drowned in his patrol car after he became trapped in high water while driving to work.
President Donald Trump visited Texas on Tuesday, and the White House said his stops in Corpus Christi and Austin were meant to highlight coordination at all levels of government and lay the groundwork for what is expected to be a lengthy recovery after the storm.
Trump traveled with the secretaries of health and human services and housing and urban development, and the head of the Small Business Administration.
The storm continued to take a toll even as the weather outlook improved slightly.
A pair of 70-year-old reservoir dams that protect downtown Houston and a levee in a suburban subdivision began overflowing Tuesday, adding to the rising floodwaters from Harvey that have crippled the area after five consecutive days of rain that set a new continental U.S. record for rainfall for a tropical system.
Brazoria County authorities posted a message on Twitter warning that the levee at Columbia Lakes south of Houston had been breached and telling people to "GET OUT NOW!!" Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebesta said residents were warned that the levee would be overtopped at some point, and a mandatory evacuation order was given Sunday.
Engineers began releasing water from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs Monday to ease the strain on the dams. But the releases were not enough to relieve the pressure after one of the heaviest downpours in U.S. history, Army Corps of Engineers officials said. Both reservoirs are at record highs.
The release of the water means that more homes and streets will flood, and some homes will be inundated for up to a month, said Jeff Lindner of the Harris County Flood Control District.
The county is trying to determine where the water will go, Lindner said.
A weather station southeast of Houston reported 49.32 inches of rain as of Tuesday morning, according to the National Weather Service. That breaks the previous record of 48 inches set in 1978 in Medina, Texas, by Tropical Storm Amelia.
Already 14 sites in Houston have recorded more than 40 inches of rain and 36 different locations have recorded more than 3 feet.
Although forecasters had feared that another 2 feet could fall in some places, it appeared that the outlook had improved somewhat on Tuesday. The weather service said the amount of rain falling in the Houston area would be 2 to 3 inches, perhaps a little less in Houston proper, as the storm moved east.
But southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana still would see "relentless torrential rains," with another 6 to 12 inches of rain across the upper Texas coast through Friday as Harvey continues to move slowly east over the Gulf of Mexico maintaining tropical storm force winds of 45 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.
It is expected to make landfall again Wednesday morning, probably in southwestern Louisiana.
Calls for rescue have so overwhelmed emergency teams that they have had little time to search for bodies. And officials acknowledge that fatalities from Harvey could soar once the floodwaters start to recede from one of America's most sprawling metropolitan centers.
More than four days after the storm ravaged the Texas coastline as a Category 4 hurricane, authorities had confirmed only three deaths including a woman killed Monday when heavy rains dislodged a large oak tree onto her trailer home in the small town of Porter. But unconfirmed reports of others missing or presumed dead were growing.
"We know in these kinds of events that, sadly, the death toll goes up historically," Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told The Associated Press. "I'm really worried about how many bodies we're going to find."
One Houston woman said Monday that she presumes six members of a family, including four of her grandchildren, died after their van sank into Greens Bayou in East Houston.
Virginia Saldivar told The Associated Press her brother-in-law was driving the van Sunday when a strong current took the vehicle over a bridge and into the bayou. The driver was able to get out and urged the children to escape through the back door, Saldivar said, but they could not.
"I'm just hoping we find the bodies," Saldivar said.
Houston emergency officials could not confirm the deaths.
A spokeswoman for a Houston hotel said one of its employees disappeared while helping about 100 guests and workers evacuate the building.
The disaster is unfolding on an epic scale, with the nation's fourth-largest city mostly paralyzed by the storm that arrived as a Category 4 hurricane and then parked over the Gulf Coast. The Houston metro area covers about 10,000 square miles (25,900 square kilometers), an area slightly bigger than New Jersey.
Harvey kept drenching Houston and the surrounding area. Rain fell Tuesday at about half an inch (1 centimeter) per hour over Harris County home to Houston and up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) per hour to the east.
Forecasters expect the storm to linger over the Gulf before heading back inland east of Houston sometime Wednesday. The system will then head north and lose its tropical strength.
It could creep as far east as Mississippi by Thursday, meaning New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina unleashed its full wrath in 2005, is in Harvey's path. Foreboding images of Harvey lit up weather radar screens early Tuesday, the 12th anniversary of the day Katrina made landfall in Plaquemines Parish.
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Associated Press writers Frank Bajak and Michael Graczyk in Houston, Diana Heidgerd and David Warren in Dallas, Seth Borenstein in Washington and Tammy Webber in Chicago contributed to this report.Photo by Gabriele Burton
This feature is part of 'The Noisey Guide to Music and Mental Health'. You can read more from this series right here, and follow 'Mental Health Awareness Week' on Twitter here.
Spirit Adrift’s new EP, Behind – Beyond, is one of 2016’s most promising metal releases. The two tracks of long-form elemental doom metal found thereon convey an honest yearning that is sometimes painfully absent within the genre, too often replaced by weed worship and lazy Conanisms. It makes sense that the anguish behind Spirit Adrift sounds somewhat more genuine and mature than that of its competitors, given what the EP’s maker had to go through to create.
Nate Garrett is best known as the lead guitarist of Arizona experimental metallers Take Over And Destroy (as well as a more recent addition to death metal killers Gatecreeper). He has until now kept his involvement in Spirit Adrift—his solo project—a secret. This is in no small part because Garrett has only recently kicked his alcoholism. That he is still alive is, in his own words, “a miracle”, and Spirit Adrift is his way of expressing both his gratitude and all the horrible shit that led to it to the world.
Garrett is excited to discuss the new band, which he claims has its full-length debut set to come out later this year. “It’s been done for a while,” he says from his Phoenix home. “Things happened pretty fast when I decided to quit fucking my life up. “
When Spirit Adrift first started becoming a concept, where were you, mentally?
I was in a really bad place with drinking. I remember the first time I ever got really drunk. I had that feeling of, Oh, there’s an out! There’s an out where I can go and I don’t have to deal with certain things! At the time, I didn’t fully realize it as that, I just felt as good as I ever have in my entire life. Looking back, I’ve had a problem with alcohol since the first time I drank. It’s a weird drug, because the half-life for it ruining your life is a little bit longer than that of most mind-altering substances. So the last couple of years leading up to [Spirit Adrift] were rough. I had a lot of personal stuff going on, which doesn’t make me special—everyone does—but I wanted to escape from it. And you’re never going to fix your problems that way. You have to deal with them eventually. A lot of people die instead of being able to get through it. I almost did.
Had you tried to get help before then?
For the last couple years of my drinking, I’ve wanted to quit, I just didn’t take the necessary actions. And then the week after my 27th birthday, I said fuck it and detoxed. I’d never done anything like that. There were many times I’d “tried” to quit on my own. And I’ve studied psychology at college in Arkansas, so I knew they gave you benzos [benzodiazepines] to keep you from having a seizure and dying. My brilliant idea was to use Xanax instead of drinking. And that just turned into me drinking as much as I already was and putting pills on top of that. So I finally decided, I need help from people who know what they’re doing. Everything I did revolved around drinking.
What happened on your 27th birthday?
I went to Arkansas for my birthday. I hadn’t really been eating for years. I was eating what I could maybe once a day, but my body was so poisoned that I really couldn’t handle food. But I went down there to meet up with a really good friend of mine, who actually helped me with some of the lyrics on the Spirit EP, who’s a chef. And he told my girlfriend, now my fiancé, “I’m going to make sure he eats.” She was letting him know, “Dude, this guy is not in good shape.” He was making all this food, and I couldn’t eat any of it, but I was drinking constantly while I was down there. And on the plane ride back, I finally had this thought—it’s kind of silly, but, Man, how stupid would it be if I died at 27? I would never want to be associated with that. I don’t want to join the dumbass 27 Club. There’s definitely moments in my personal life where things were getting worse and worse, but that trip to Arkansas was when I realized I was gonna die.
So you’d felt it had been building up before then.
It was a pretty slow burn. There were many mornings, and nights, and afternoons where I was so sick that…I might sound crazy saying this, but when you’re about to die, your brain chemistry sends out weird signals saying, You’re going to die. Not just throwing up, but this profound terror and despair, accompanied with physical sensations you can’t describe. Your bones vibrating, that sort of thing. I was miserable, man. Towards the end I start having psychosis. I was having paranoid delusions.
When did the music itself first begin to come out of this?
Shortly after I got out of detox, I came up with all these riffs. Some of them were about being back in Arkansas—I moved out [to Arizona] in 2011, and in Arkansas, those guys showed me the way—the Deadbird dudes, the guys in Rwake, the guys in Sea Hag. They were all very important to my development as a musician. So I had all these riffs, and I didn’t really think they could work for TOAD. And before I knew it, I had these songs done. I demo-ed them. Because I was so out of it…it’s hard to describe where your head’s at after a solid ten years of drinking every day. I don’t want to say a fugue state. I had a friend who’s a drummer who let me use his kit, so I just started playing drums. The last time I’d played drums was when I was sixteen for a church band. But I sat down and it kind of came back, so I recorded the drums, and the rest is history. I recorded the songs shortly thereafter. As far as headspace, it’s hard to describe. I was hopeful for my life, but I was terrified. We all know the statistics about people who get sober and stay sober on their first attempt. I’m not saying I’m badass. It was a really intense time. Hopefully some of that desperation, and hope, and terror made its way into the music.
It sounds like Spirit Adrift came about during the transfer process. It’s not mired in booze, and it’s not the voice of New Sober Nate. It was created during the tensions.
That’s absolutely correct, man. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with alcohol or being sober. In the words of Crowbar, existence is punishment, but there’s a way—all kinds of different ways, depending on who you are—of living your life where you’re not just consumed by misery and negativity all the time. One of my biggest fears getting sober was, Who will I be? Will my entire personality be gone? Drugs are so tricky, because they convince you, cognitively, of things that aren’t true. And I was kind of convinced that my whole personality was dependent on my drinking. But then I got sober and realized that I’m more like me than I ever have been. Alcohol just amplified all the horrible things in my mind and my personality. All of a sudden, I cared about music again. I’m excited to go to practice again. My favorite albums speak to me again.
Losing interest in your favorite music is a really scary concept.
That’s another time that I realized something was wrong. I’d put on Black Sabbath’s Sabotage, and I wouldn’t feel anything. And I thought, This is fucked up, man. I first heard Sabotage when I was seventeen, and it wasn’t the first Sabbath album I’d heard, but it had the most profound impact on me mentally. And I remember this specific moment, when I was thinking about how people grow up and get jobs, get married, and mellow out. And I told myself when I was seventeen, listening to that record, If there’s ever a moment in your life where you’re not totally in love with this record, something is fucking wrong. And I just realized, that happened, but not in the way I thought it would. I was worried that one day I’d “grow up” and not care about Black Sabbath. But what happened was, I just destroyed any sort of feeling I had, and wound up in a place where I just didn’t care about Black Sabbath, or anything else.
For a lot of people, there’s a feeling that alcohol—and drugs in general, weed, booze, heroin, whatever—that it amplifies the music. That when you’re drunk, Iron Maiden sounds so much better. It’s an interesting tell that music not being exciting is the problem.
And I would agree with you! Pantera sounds pretty good sober, but then you drink a fifth of whiskey and Pantera’s the greatest thing you could ever hear. There is some truth to that. But I think it’s just a tried and true thing, that eventually, if you do drugs and alcohol enough, it’s going to ruin you. And I would never preach against doing drugs and alcohol! That part of me hasn’t changed. I love for people to party, period. I think every drug on the planet should be legal, for a lot of different reasons.
Throughout all this, how much were the other guys in TOAD aware of what was going on? How much did you communicate to them?
They were aware of it, but I don’t think anyone knew exactly how bad it was, other than my fiancé. They were definitely concerned. Me and the guys in that band really have the relationship of brothers. We deeply love each other. Alex, our guitar player, he told me later that when I went on that trip to Arkansas, he was praying I’d come back. He was worried that I wouldn’t make it. Which I wasn’t aware of at the time—I wasn’t aware of a whole lot. As far as Spirit Adrift, I kept it to myself because I didn’t really know what was going to happen. I have this habit where I have something exciting in the works, and I get excited and tell everybody about it, and it falls through. I was in a place where I hadn’t done anything in a long time that I felt proud of. That I felt confident of. So it was kind of a strange transition. When I had the EP recorded, I was still having a hard time accepting or believing that I’d done something I should be even a little bit stoked about. I think it was a little bit confusing for them, when I told them about it, about why I hadn’t told them sooner. But they’re supportive of it. The whole secrecy thing was all about deeply personal self-consciousness.
Do you think you could’ve made Spirit Adrift happen if you’d kept drinking?
I can answer that with all certainty—there’s no way it would’ve happened. I would be lucky, if I was still drinking like I was, to be alive right now. I don’t think it’s even physically possible. I quit drinking and things started getting better. Things that, in my mind, were totally unrelated to my drinking. And I still sometimes catch myself in these thoughts, Well, these things happened, but it’s not because I quit drinking. And that’s bullshit. These things happened to me because I took the appropriate action and started putting my energy into my life, and the lives of others, in a constructive way. I always want to do more, be better. But now, I’m not sitting around and hating myself because I’m not better than I am. I’m just working on it.
Chris Krovatin is adrift on Twitter.In a breakthrough that could radically improve the care of people who suffer severe trauma to the face or skull, a team of scientists repaired a hole in a mouse’s skull by re-growing bone.
A joint team of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University researchers declared the results a resounding success. Using a powerful combination of technologies, they were able to regenerate the skull bone |
jo avoids any such human error by being sealed off from even well-intentioned tweaks. It auto-updates, asking the cloud platform for its own updates, and is port-less, bar the single Ethernet port to connect it to the router. So it’s designed to keep outsiders from getting in.
“Security has to be done by design,” he argues. “So that’s the reason we have standalone, external hardware which is totally independent from the rest of the components of the network… And it’s designed in a way that it’s totally unaccessible. Even if you take it as a hacker and you try to hack into it physically, even by breaking it, there is no way you’d ever get access to its operating system and to its code. This is how we designed it.
“It’s our own hardware, it’s not just a Raspberry Pi running some kind of software. We designed everything from scratch. So for example it doesn’t have any redundant interface, it doesn’t even have the interface that a lot of vendors forget in their products… We don’t allow any access to our device. Even our cloud cannot communicate with our device, it’s always the other way… It doesn’t listen to any requests coming from the outside.”
Ok, then, what about government requests for data? Pro-privacy folk might not like the idea that they are opening up a portal for overreaching government agencies to harvest the routine substance of their domestic digital life. “We don’t have any ties or any interactions with any government organization. We are a startup,” says Atias, although he confirms it will abide by the law of any country it is operating in — so given it holds encryption keys it could indeed be served a warrant to decrypt and hand over user network activity metadata.
“We are not familiar that we are obliged to provide any data to anyone without a legal procedures, like any other company. But certainly it’s nothing by design,” he adds.
Another slight issue with Dojo’s pro-privacy pitch is the structure of the system undermines the privacy of users on the same network by creating a master user — meaning someone in the family has absolute visibility of all devices on the network and, presumably, the ability to control/block the devices of other network users at will.
“Eventually there is one master owner of the app, and he needs to decide to whom he wants to give access to this control. What you certainly get is really the overall kind of view of your home,” he admits.
If you’re happy to trust an outside company with visibility of activity on your home network — albeit one that professes a strong pro-privacy position — and okay with handing control to a single “master” user of the app within your household, then Dojo’s approach to shoring up the creep, creep, creep of not-so-secure-by-design connected devices might help you sleep a little more peacefully amid all the hums, buzzes and bleeps of your smart home.
Price wise, the device is being offered at $99 during pre-order, initially targeting the U.S. market. That discounted pre-order price includes one year of subscription service. The Dojo will continue to work once the subscription lapses, but with reduced functionality. Those choosing one of the monthly packages can expect a greater level of interaction from the system and more security updates, according to Atias. He says there will be a range of subscription options to choose from once the first year’s bundle comes to an end, starting at $7.99 per month.
What’s left to do to get the Dojo into buyers’ hands at this stage? “We have the product already, we have already few hundreds of devices in production for friends and family so it’s really about finishing our software cycle after it was deployed in real houses,” adds Atias, noting the team already pulled in $1.8 million in seed funding earlier this year, led by Glilot Capital Partners along with some private Silicon Valley investors.
“There is a huge industry that evolved around less than two billion connected smart devices… laptops, tablets etc. They’re going to be 20 billion ‘not-smart operating system’ IoT devices. Those devices are going to be connected and someone needs to take care of their security and privacy. And this is what we intend to do,” he says.
“We don’t envisage millions of users in the first year, certainly not even in the second one. It will go by tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. And within five years hopefully millions. That’s the plan.”(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“Now this idea is for an exchange of prisoners for our American fighting man. I would be inclined to support such a thing depending on a lot of the details.”
— Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), interview on CNN, Feb. 18, 2014
“We were never told that there would be an exchange of Sergeant Bergdahl for five Taliban.”
— McCain, interview on CNN, June 3, 2014
Is Sen. John McCain a flip-flopper? Did he support a trade of five Taliban fighters for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl back in February, only to turn around and denounce it once the deal was made?
The Fact Checker began looking into this issue earlier this week, and the McCain team has been pushing back hard. Spokesman Brian Rogers issued a statement accusing the media of “selectively” quoting McCain, while McCain himself went on CNN’s “The Lead” on Thursday to defend himself after host Jake Tapper highlighted his contradictory statements the day before. McCain focused on the fact that his support was dependent on “the details.”
“The details are outrageous,” he said. “Like any other agreement it’s, as I said, in the details. The details as I found out here are unacceptable.” Among the details he objected to were the identities of the five Taliban and the requirement that they only remain in Qatar for a year.
“These are also war criminals,” McCain said. “A couple of them were accused of killing thousands of Shiite Muslims. These are the ones that used to take the women into the soccer stadium in Kabul and hang them from the goalposts.”
The Facts
First, let’s set the context for McCain’s interview in February. In a front-page article, headlined “U.S. seeks prisoner swap with Taliban,” The Washington Post on Feb. 17 reported that a potential deal was in works with the Taliban to secure Bergdahl’s release:
Five members of the Afghan Taliban who have been held at Guantanamo for years would be released to protective custody in Qatar in exchange for the release of Bergdahl, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2009 and is thought to be held in Pakistan by the Haqqani network, an allied insurgent group. To refresh the American offer, which has been on the table for more than two years, senior officials from the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies decided within the past month to allow the simultaneous release of all five men. Taliban representatives had objected to the previous plan to release the prisoners by ones or twos as a test of Taliban and Qatari intermediaries’ ability to make sure the men did not return to militancy.
As you can see, the key elements of the deal that was announced last week were apparent in the article four months ago — the exchange of five Taliban members held at Guantanamo for Bergdahl and the protective custody of Qatar.
Throughout the discussions, it has always been the same five men, so their identities would have been no surprise to any lawmaker keeping track of the discussions. The five are Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa, the former interior minister; Mullah Mohammed Fazi, a senior commander; Mullah Norullah Noori, a provincial governor; Abdul Haq Wasiq, deputy chief of intelligence; and Mohammned Nabi Omari, a member of a joint al-Qaeda-Taliban cell in eastern Khost province.
In August 2011, the Associated Press reported that Afghan negotiators were seeking the release of Taliban fighters in exchange for Bergdahl, naming specifically Khairkhwa, Fazi and Wasiq. In January 2012, the Guardian newspaper reported that Washington would free Khairkhwa and Noori, and possibly Fazi, in exchange for getting the Taliban to open an office in Qatar for peace talks.
In a March 9, 2012, report, the Afghanistan Analysts Network issued a long report on the Guantanamo Five, which actually found that the men were less hard-line than believed.
Then in August 2012, Reuters reported that the Obama administration had offered to trade “five senior Taliban leaders” — including Khairkhwa, Wasiq, Noori and Fazi — for Bergdahl. The headline on Business Insider’s Web site was: “The US Wants To Trade Five Taliban Leaders In Guantánamo For This One American POW.”
In April 2013, Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the same deal nearly came together in 2011: “They worked out a deal in which the United States would release five Taliban prisoners and send them to Qatar. The Taliban, in return, would condemn international terrorism and release U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, whom the militants had been holding since 2009.” But it fell through because of a conflict with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
In other words, these names were not a secret — and in any case, McCain sits on the relevant Senate committees (Armed Services and Foreign Relations), with security clearances, and thus could have found out about the names and the background of the individuals.
Indeed, Rolling Stone reported in 2012 that McCain called them “the five biggest murderers in world history” during a 2011 briefing on a possible prisoner exchange to spur peace negotiations. “McCain reluctantly came around on the prisoner exchange, according to those present at the meeting, but he has continued to speak out against negotiating with the Taliban,” the article added.
Now let’s turn to the conversation on Feb. 18 with Anderson Cooper. Here’s the full exchange, and note that, in the wake of The Washington Post article, Cooper announces that McCain “has a new position:”
COOPER: New efforts being made tonight to bring home the only American soldier in captivity. Bowe Bergdahl is his name. The Army sergeant was seized in Afghanistan back in 2009. He’s been held this long. He’s believed to be held by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network inside Pakistan. Over the years, several proof-of-life videos of Bergdahl have been released. CNN is unable to independently confirm their authenticity. But just weeks ago the U.S. military obtained a new video that’s never been publicly released. It’s raised concerns, though, about Bergdahl’s health. The Taliban has long demanded the release of five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo in exchange for his release. Well, today a U.S. official confirmed that new discussions led by diplomats and the Pentagon are underway. As you know the United States has long policy saying they don’t negotiate with terrorists. That’s the official policy. But time may be running out. With U.S. troops set to leave Afghanistan by the end of the year, there’s the prospect of leaving a man behind. Senator John McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, of course, has been a vocal opponent of negotiating with the Taliban in years past. Tonight only on 360 he has a new position. I spoke to him earlier. COOPER: Would you oppose the idea of some form of negotiations or prisoner exchange? I know back in 2012 you called the idea of even negotiating with the Taliban bizarre, highly questionable. McCAIN: Well, at that time the proposal was that they would release Taliban, some of them really hard-core, particularly five really hard-core Taliban leaders, as a confidence-building measure. Now this idea is for an exchange of prisoners for our American fighting man. I would be inclined to support such a thing depending on a lot of the details. COOPER: Of anybody on Capitol Hill, you know better than anybody what this young man must be going through. Obviously it’s a very different time. How do you get through something like this? I mean, for somebody in this situation? McCAIN: Well, I was fortunate in where he is not that I had fellow POWs that even though I was a long time in solitary confinement we would tap on the wall to each other and stay in communication. If it wasn’t for that, it would have been a very different story for most of us. And this is why I feel especially sympathetic for Mr. Bergdahl because he is all there by himself. COOPER: So if there was the possibility of some sort of exchange, that’s something you would support? McCAIN: I would support — obviously I’d have to know the details — but I would support ways of bringing him home, and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider.
While McCain twice offered the caveat of “the details,” he also specifically referenced “five really hard-core Taliban leaders” and said he was “inclined to support” the change in the proposal from a confidence-building measure to an exchange of prisoners. He made these remarks one day after the Post article appeared; that article specifically mentioned protective custody in Qatar.
(Note: Under all of the previous deals discussed, the protective custody was only expected to last until the end of 2014. But because of the delays in striking an agreement, that meant the released detainees would have only had six months left in Qatar. So the negotiators settled on a one year stay in Qatar. But if the deal had been reached in, say, 2012, the men would have been allowed to leave at the end of this year. The Post article in February did not mention a possible time limit for their stay in Qatar.)
But when McCain returned to Anderson Cooper’s show this week and was asked about those comments in February, this is what he said:
“Well, first of all, I said it twice: ‘Depending on a lot of the details.’ In other words, do not trade one person for five hard-core — the hardest of the hard-core murdering war criminals who will clearly reenter the fight and send them to Qatar, of all places, where they will be free to roam including to the Taliban headquarters there in Qatar and then after a year will be allowed to go back into the fight in Afghanistan.”
McCain is hanging a lot on the question of details — which are obviously important — but the issues he raises were apparent back in February. His previous dispute had been on releasing the men as a confidence-building measure, not on the character of the men themselves. He certainly did not say he would have objected to these men being part of the prisoner exchange.
In between February and June, he gave an interview to the Associated Press for an article on the status of the talks and apparent disorganization in the effort to win Bergdahl’s return. Here’s what he said:
McCain, who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than five years, also said Obama administration officials first told Congress that they wanted to release five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo as a confidence-building measure to jump-start talks with the Taliban. “I said that was insane … to do that,” said McCain, a frequent critic of the Obama administration who believes the government’s approach to getting Bergdahl back is in disarray. “Then it was the swap for Bergdahl. I said, ‘OK, fine. How are you going to do that?’ They never explained anything to anybody about how it would be done…. How can you get him back if you are totally disorganized?”
Yet, on CNN this week, McCain insisted he was never told about a possible exchange in briefings by the administration:
McCAIN: There was never discussion that any of us know about this straight-up and all of the aspects of this trade for Sergeant Bergdahl. And that’s just a fact. CHRIS CUOMO: Is this semantics? Is this semantics? McCAIN: Yeah, it’s semantics. CUOMO: Well, on whose side, senator? Is the president hiding the ball of what types of Taliban guys were involved? Or is your side hiding the ball that you knew, but you didn’t know everything, so you’re going to say you knew nothing? McCAIN: Well, we were never told that there would be an exchange of Sergeant Bergdahl for five Taliban. We told they were considering, and we steadfastly, both Republican and Democrats, rejected the notion that they were going to release some of these Taliban in exchange for, quote, “confidence-building measures,” so that negotiations could continue. What we were briefed on was an entirely different scenario from the one that took place.
“Had Cooper asked if Senator McCain would support a deal that freed five hard-core Taliban leaders, two of whom are wanted by the U.N. for war crimes for slaughtering thousands of Shiite Muslims, under terms that allowed them to potentially return to the battlefield against America in a year, the answer would have been ‘Hell no,’” Rogers said. “As he’s always said, Senator McCain does not oppose all prisoner exchanges, but his decision would depend directly on the details of any deal — as it would on any important issue — and he’d obviously oppose any deal that threatens the safety and security of our nation and our troops.”
The Pinocchio Test
We fully appreciate that the details of a prisoner exchange are important, and McCain certainly made that caveat clear. But since the deal was announced, he has suggested that the question of trading the Taliban Five for Bergdahl was a surprise — and that’s certainly not the case. These five men were always part of the prisoner swap, so that is not a detail that can be in dispute. Indeed, only a day after The Washington Post revealed that a deal was in the works to trade the five men for Bergdahl, McCain appeared on television with what was billed as a “new position.”
McCain is on a bit stronger ground when he objects to a one-year stay in Qatar. The length of the detention was not clear in February, though the former detainees will remain longer in Qatar (to mid 2015) than was contemplated under earlier proposals (end of 2014.)
But what is the point of a prisoner swap if the released prisoners are not at some point going to be free? By the very nature of such a deal, an experienced lawmaker (and former POW) like McCain should expect that the Taliban Five would have been able to go free eventually.
McCain may have thought he left himself an out when he said his support was dependent on the details. But then he can’t object to the most important detail — the identity of the prisoners — that was known at the time he indicated his support. McCain earns an upside-down Pinocchio, constituting a flip-flop.
An Upside-Down Pinocchio
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The Native Hawaiian population decrease rose at an alarming rate since the first notable contact with Westerners in 1778. Disease was a major factor in this decline. Smallpox, cholera, and even the flu were introduced, and then decimated the Hawaiian people in record numbers. Venereal disease such as gonorrhea also had an additionally insidious effect of sterilizing its victims!
The perfection of the marine chronometer aided European cartographers in map making and was a primary reason for increased foreign invasion in the Hawaiian Islands. When the Hawaiian Islands were charted on maps beginning in the 1700’s, sailors, merchants, and missionaries came in droves until devastating consequences were reflected in cultural losses, loss of lands, way of life, and most importantly, decreasing numbers of the Hawaiian people.
Foreigners were instrumental in exploiting the natural resources in the region. Discovery that large profits could be made from the whaling industry, the sandalwood trade, and the subsequent development of sugar plantations brought famine, cultural disruption, and intermarriage to Hawaiian families. Combined with diseases, these factors had a fatal effect on the population of Native Hawaiian people.
In 2003, only 5000 individuals identified themselves as Native Hawaiian. This figure does not include races that identify themselves as part-Hawaiian, which is an independent category. In 2010, the United States Census combined all races from the Pacific Island region into one category and counted 540,013 individuals. This category includes people from the Philippines, Guam, Micronesia, Samoa, Tonga, and other island nations.NEW YORK (Reuters) - Viacom Inc’s Paramount Pictures will receive a $1 billion cash investment from two Chinese film companies, Shanghai Film Group (SFG) and Huahua Media, giving the U.S. studio much-needed cash and support as it attempts to grow.
A security guard speaks into a microphone in his sleeve as he stands outside the Viacom Inc. headquarters in New York April 30, 2013. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File Photo
As part of the agreement, SFG and Huahua Media will finance a combined 25 percent of all of Paramount’s films for the next three years, with the option to extend to a fourth year, a source familiar with the situation said.
The deal comes as parent company Viacom focuses on a turnaround plan under new Chief Executive Officer Bob Bakish.
It also follows a spate of tie-ups between China and U.S. producers, with Chinese investors increasingly keen to lend their financial muscle to boost their stake in Hollywood.
U.S. studios such as Warner Bros, Walt Disney Co, Dreamworks, Lionsgate and STX Entertainment have all made tie-ups with Chinese firms to fund productions or help boost their presence in China’s fast-growing film market.
Last year, Chinese real estate conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group spent $3.5 billion to buy a controlling stake in U.S. film studio Legendary Entertainment, while Paramount worked with Alibaba Pictures Group Ltd in 2015 to promote “Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation” in China.
The studio could now use the latest partnership as an entry point into China, Paramount CEO Brad Grey told Reuters in an interview, adding that the studio would someday be interested in producing films in the country.
“Certainly Paramount would love to produce films (in China) and we think that should be a win for us,” Grey said.
The agreement marks the first major move by Grey since Viacom’s former CEO, Philippe Dauman, tried to sell a 49 percent stake in the movie studio to Dalian Wanda last year.
“This will give Paramount the wherewithal to build the slate and produce, as a major studio should, 15-17 movies a year,” Grey said. Over the past few years, under Dauman, Paramount’s production fell as low as eight films in a given year.
“You really can’t operate a major studio with that,” Grey said, referring to the lower figure.
Shanghai Film Group and Huahua Media said in a joint statement with Paramount that they were keen to deepen their cooperation on film projects through the deal. Both firms declined to comment further when contacted by Reuters on Friday.
Huahua has partnered with Paramount on several films, including “Transformers: the Age of Extinction” and “Star Trek Beyond”. State-linked Shanghai Film Group was an investor in “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”.
Viacom shares moved higher in Thursday afternoon trading but pared gains to close at $39.80.Amy Schumer is the latest celebrity to be listed as an honoree at the Britannia Awards Oct. 30 at the Beverly Hilton.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts/Los Angeles will award Schumer with the Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award for Excellence in Comedy, which the org said “recognizes talent whose popularity and cultural impact exemplifies the uniquely transcendent quality of excellent comedy.”
Those who have received this award in the past include Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sacha Baron Cohen, Matt Stone and Trey Parker as well as Ben Stiller.
“In just a few years, Amy Schumer has established herself as a performer of great courage and discipline. With ‘Trainwreck’ and ‘Inside Amy Schumer, ‘she has dared her peers to tackle the most difficult subject matter but in the smartest and most entertaining way,” said Kieran Breen, BAFTA/LA chairman.
“As one of the most fearless, incisive, and socially engaged contemporary artists in the comedy realm, she is more than deserving of an award bearing the name of Charlie Chaplin.”
During the ceremony, BAFTA/LA will award Schumer along with fellow honorees Meryl Streep, Sam Mendes and James Corden. The organization stated that it will release additional honorees at a later date.
The British Academy Britannia Awards presented by American Airlines are BAFTA/Los Angeles’ highest honors. The cross-national event celebrates British and American talent by virtue of their impact on the British community through their body of work.RockyGrass Live Broadcast & Archives
Our instruments are almost all tuned up for our live stream and broadcast from the 2018 RockyGrass festival at Planet Bluegrass in Lyons, CO! We're looking forward to the sharing the great music and getting a chance to chat with many of the people involved with the festival, from musicians, festivarians, and folks on the ground who help make RockyGrass possible.
Click Here to tune in. (The stream will go live Friday AM at 10:30).
We'll once again be offering a continuous live stream from the stage right here on AfterFM.com, KGNU's all music site. The non-stop RockyGrass stream will be available starting the morning of Friday July 28th, and during set breaks we'll featuring interviews and highlights from the festival.
Appreciate what you're hearing? Drop a tip in our Tip Jar!
2018 Broadcast + Streaming Schedule:
Date On Air Streaming Friday, July 27 11:00am - 12pm, 5:00-10:30pm 10:30am - End Saturday, July 28 9:00am - 1pm, 5:30pm-10:30pm 9:00am - End Sunday, July 29 11am - 3pm 10:30am - End
KGNU has been broadcasting live from RockyGrass every year since 2008. Listen, enjoy, and please spread the word about the live RockyGrass stream and archives.
If you're new to us, you'll likely be interested in our weekly Bluegrass show, Old Grass Gnu Grass. It's a Colorado tradtion that hits our airwaves Saturday mornings on KGNU from 9:00a-Noon (MT) since 1978.
RockyGrass 2018 Archives: Jeff Austin Band RockyGrass Archives 2018: Mandolinist and singer Jeff Austin returned to RockyGrass with his band in 2018 for a stellar set of music.
RockyGrass 2018 Our instruments are almost all tuned up for our live stream and broadcast from the 2018 RockyGrass festival at Planet Bluegrass in Lyons, CO! We're looking forward to the sharing the great music and getting a chance to chat with musicians, festivarians, and folks on the ground who help make RockyGrass possible.
2016 RockyGrass Live Broadcast and Stream We're gearing for our live stream and broadcast from the 2016 RockyGrass festival at Planet Bluegrass in Lyons, CO! We're looking forward to the sharing the great music and getting a chance to chat with many of the people involved with the festival, from musicians, festivarians, and folks on the ground who help make RockyGrass possible. You can listen to the festival stream right here on AfterFM starting Friday, July 29th at 9:30am. Broadcast + Stream Schedule and More!
RockyGrass 2015 Archives: Crooked Still RockyGrass Archives 2015: Crooked Still, featuring singer and guitar player Aoife O'Donovan, banjo player Gregory Liszt, bassist Corey DiMario, cellist Tristan Clarridge and Brittany Haas on violin, reunited for a special set at RockyGrass 2015.
RockyGrass 2015 Archives: Sierra Hull RockyGrass Archives 2015: Sierra Hull graced the stage at Rocky Grass. She began playing mandolin when she was eight years old and picked up the guitar a year later. Mentored by Alison Krauss, she quickly gained a reputation for her fluid playing and signed a record deal at the age of 13.
2015 RockyGrass Festival Lineup Announcement The official announcement of the 2015 RockyGrass Festival lineup is out. We're excited to see such an incredible list of artists. As you might imagine, AfterFM has big plans for our festival coverage in 2015. What could top our dedicated RockyGrass Festival stream and archives? Dare to dream festivarian.
RockyGrass 2014 Archives:
Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby with Kentucky Thunder RockyGrass Archives 2014: It's hard not to notice when a grand piano rolls onto the Planet Bluegrass festival grounds during a Bluegrass festival. But indeed it did and with it one of the hottest sets of 2014's RockyGrass festival. Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby with Kentucky Thunder brought the house down with their Friday night headlining set.
RockyGrass 2014 Archives: Hot Rize RockyGrass Archives 2014: For over 30 years Hot Rize has defined Colorado's traditional yet progressive bluegrass sound. The band was sounding truly hot as they made their way onto the stage for their 17th RockyGrass performance. The lineup consists of Tim O’Brien (vocals, mandolin, fiddle), Pete Wernick (banjo, vocals), Nick Forster (bass), Bryan Sutton (guitar).
RockyGrass 2014 Steep Canyon Rangers RockyGrass Archives 2014: The Steep Canyon Rangers took the stage at RockyGrass with an action-packed set. In between the tunes they talked about their first trip to RockyGrass from their home in North Carolina, drawn by the music as fans. They closed their show with a never before heard track about RockyGrass.Virender Sehwag and Randeep Hooda are being accused of bullying Gurmehar Kaur, the woman whose Facebook post against ABVP went viral. Photo courtesy: Twitter\@virendersehwag, @randeephooda, @mehartweets
Thank you for your attention.
We do not intend to tag Gurmehar Kaur only as a Kargil martyr's daughter, which she is and is proud of, but want her to be considered a citizen of India with the ability to think critically, has her own set of ideals and ideologies, and can speak and stand up for herself, even if that means disagreeing to millions of Indians.
Beauty of democracy, right?
Photo courtesy: Twitter (@mehartweets) Photo courtesy: Twitter (@mehartweets)
Kaur, a student of Delhi's Lady Sri Ram College, and daughter of Kargil martyr Captain Mandeep Singh, made a Facebook post on February 22 with a photo of herself holding a placard that said, "I am a student from Delhi University. I am not afraid of ABVP. I am not alone. Every student of India is with me," and #studentsagainstABVP. The post went viral with over 3,500 shares and many students followed suit and made similar posts.
Kaur's post came after the deplorable violence that took place at Delhi University's Ramjas College between members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and All India Students Association over an invitation sent to JNU's Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid for a cultural event. The ABVP has been accused of physically assaulting students and teachers, regardless of gender, and Delhi Police has been accused of inaction.
Gurmehar's campaign enraged right-wing loyalists, and as seen often on social media, many such people (with untraceable identities, thanks to the power of social media) even made rape threats to her for opposing ABVP.
Watch: ABVP enjoys government and institutional patronage, says Umar Khalid
VIRENDER SEHWAG'S ENTRY
Known for his witty tweets post his retirement from cricket, Virender Sehwag tweeted a photo of himself holding a placard carrying a (Photoshopped) message saying, "I didn't score two triple centuries, my bat did" and saying "Bat me hai Dum!" along with #BharatJaisiJagahNahi.
This was in response to learning that Gurmehar Kaur has been part of social media campaigns before as well. She was seen in one such campaign, to ensure better relationship with Pakistan, started by activist Ram Subramanian. Kaur was seen holding a placard that said, "Pakistan did not kill my dad. War killed him."
Photo courtesy: Twitter (@mehartweets) Photo courtesy: Twitter (@mehartweets)
#FYI: Twitter is out with memes and jokes on Kargil martyr's daughter for opposing ABVP
Sehwag's tweet didn't go down well with the sect of people known as "libtards and sickulars" but pleased the already enraged right-wing supporters. One fellow liked Sehwag's tweet so much that he said it is even better than Sehwag's triple century achievement.
RANDEEP HOODA CHEERS SEHWAG
Actor Randeep Hooda, who has in the past expressed his opinion about various socio-political issues, found Sehwag's sly tweet amusing. He quoted the tweet and lauded Sehwag for his wit. Hooda's tweet got 3,300 retweets and fueled more anger towards Gurmehar.
When senior journalists called him out for cheering Sehwag, Hooda said Kaur "is being used as a political pawn and a prop to spread hatred". This is what followed:
So when a girl speaks she is being "used"? How patronising (&sexist)to assume @mehartweets doesn't have a mind of her own. But that you do? https://t.co/1NggrZOhz4 barkha dutt (@BDUTT) February 26, 2017
none of these two "celebs" will match up to the dignity of this woman. Whatever her viewpoint is, she's lost her father, have some shame. pic.twitter.com/BrL0rG5Nsp Rituparna Chatterjee (@MasalaBai) February 26, 2017
Hats off to you for standing your ground, @mehartweets. A strong young woman like you gives us hope for India's future. https://t.co/tSNmMtoNvf Anna MM Vetticad (@annavetticad) February 26, 2017
You're welcome to call me what u want. She's no "poor girl" or "pawn." She's a strong, thinking adult who speaks her mind, handle patriarchy https://t.co/cKhgAumFcf Shekhar Gupta (@ShekharGupta) February 26, 2017
IS GURMEHAR BEING BULLIED?
There have been reports that the Bharatiya Janata Party pays to maintain an army of "trolls" that Trinamool Congress MP Derek O'Brien raised the issue in the Rajya Sabha. O'Brien had accused Twitter user Rahul Raj, who goes by the handle @bhak_sala, of making "rape and communal threats" on the platform.
#FYI: Bhak sala: Rahul Raj, Twitter user Derek O'Brien slammed in Parliament, takes a break from social media
Gurmehar's viral Facebook post said, "The brutal attack on innocent students by ABVP is very disturbing and should be stopped. It was not an attack on protesters, but an attack on every notion of democracy that is held dear in every Indians heart. It is an attack on ideals, morals, freedom and rights of every person born to this nation."
Standing up against supporters of the ruling party comes with a cost is possibly what many people think. Talking to NDTV, Kaur said, "I have been getting a lot of threats on social media. I think it is very scary when people threaten you with violence or with rape."
At such a time, when a fellow Indian citizen, a woman, is being threatened with violence and rape on social media, Sehwag's tweet -- even if it was meant to be a joke -- and Hooda's encouragement, is being considered as bullying.
ENTER KIREN RIJIJU
Quoting Randeep Hooda's tweet cheering Sehwag, Union Minister Kiren Rijiju asked, "Who's polluting this young girl's mind? A strong Arm Force prevents a war. India never attacked anyone but a weak India was always invaded," in response to the "Pakistan did not kill my dad" message Kaur tried to spread last May.
Who's polluting this young girl's mind? A strong Arm Force prevents a war. India never attacked anyone but a weak India was always invaded. https://t.co/gXHkAGi9sh Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) February 27, 2017
Many Twitter users are now wondering why Kaur, an adult, cannot have thought processes and opinions of her own and why a Union Minister would say that "her mind has been polluted".
Talking to the press, Rijiju also said people living in India should not talk against the nation.
It is due to this country India that you have freedom of expression. Iss desh ka namak khaa ke koi desh ke khilaf baat na kare: Kiren Rijiju pic.twitter.com/otqMRTR922 ANI (@ANI_news) February 27, 2017
MEANWHILE...
Union Minister Vijay Goel tweeted hailing Virender Sehwag and Randeep Hooda as youth icons, and said "we" are proud of the two "gems".
But the tweet was deleted soon after posting it.About This Game The Second Sino-Japanese War is part of the World War II, but this brutal war in Asia was, for a long time, forgotten by the world.
The war in Europe lasted six years, while the war in China lasted eight years.
Moreover, Chinese resistance against the invasion had already started since 1931, following the 918 Incident, also known as the Mukden Incident.
Decades of war and conflict led to thousands and millions of casualties within China, and the Chinese people persevered through a national crisis of unprecendented suffering.
We commemorate the warriors who sacrificed themselves for the nation, and express our gratitude to those foreign allies who rendered their assistance to China in the war.
"Company of Heroes: Far East War" is a modification for Company of Heroes, the product of years of work from many skilled modders from various countries and regions, who hold a great sense of historical responsibility.
This modification is centered around the 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War, in which players can command a company to regiment-sized |
climates, and is usually the result of high pH levels.
Zinc Deficiency Symptoms:NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Google.com, one of the most valuable domains on the Internet, was mistakenly sold for $12 last fall.
Google paid $12,000 to get it back.
The buyer was a former Googler, Sanmay Ved, who discovered Google.com on the list of domains available for sale on September 29. He bought it, charging the $12 fee to his Discover card, never really expecting the transaction to go through.
"I was hoping I would get an error at some time saying transaction did not go through, but I was able to complete the purchase, and my credit card was actually charged!" he wrote in a post on LinkedIn last fall.
The transaction did go through — for about a minute. Then he got an e-mail from Google canceling the transaction.
Ved worked for 5-1/2 years at Google, according to his LinkedIn page, and likes the company enough to have its logo as his profile picture on Facebook. He is now an MBA student at Babson College in suburban Boston.
Google admits Ved owned the domain, albeit very temporarily. The company said that it offered him $6006.13, which is a numerical version of the word Google. "Squint a little and you'll see it," the company said in blog post about the incident.
When Google learned that Ved didn't intend to keep the money but instead donate it to charity, the company doubled the reward.
Google regularly pays people who discover security problems with its systems and notifies the company. It said the largest single award it paid last year was $37,500 to an Android security researcher. (We assume that's a human, not a humanoid robot who performs security research. But given how strange and quirky this entire story is, who knows).
Copyright 2016 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
×Home insulation royal commission: No evidence Kevin Rudd ignored safety warnings, lawyer says
Updated
Kevin Rudd's lawyer says the royal commission into the home insulation scheme has heard no evidence the former prime minister received safety warnings and ignored them.
The inquiry is examining how decisions were made and how warnings were handled before the worksite deaths of four installers in 2009 and 2010.
Lawyer Bret Walker SC has lodged a submission with the inquiry to support the evidence Mr Rudd gave at a Brisbane hearing last month.
It says it has been publicly alleged Mr Rudd received at least 10 direct warnings of safety risks with his government's scheme, and that he ignored them.
But it says some of those claims relate to letters that do not exist, while others relate to safety advice that Mr Rudd accepted.
"No party represented at the commission nor the commission itself suggested, and nor could it reasonably or responsibly be suggested based on the evidence presented to the commission, that the then prime minister failed to respond to direct warnings to him personally about safety risks," the submission said.
"Nor has any party to the commission, nor the commission itself, suggested that the prime minister personally failed to take steps to avoid or prevent the tragic deaths of the four young men who lost their lives while working on the program."
The submission also says no party has contended or produced evidence the program was initiated or designed by Mr Rudd.
The families of killed installers Matthew Fuller and Rueben Barnes have also lodged a submission outlining what they say are the scheme's eight key failures.
They include its design, the scrapping of planned training requirements, a reliance on the states to enforce safety and the use of foil insulation and metal staples in spite of warnings.
They say it is clear public servants did not tell ministers, including Mr Rudd, about safety warnings.
But they say those ministers share blame by not implementing proper reporting protocols.
"The HIP (Home Insulation Program) has caused irreversible detriment to the lives of four families who have unnecessarily lost their loved ones," the submission said.
"In our submission, the Commonwealth Government should consider measures of redress for those impacted by the tragic deaths."
Lawyer Stephen Keim SC has also lodged a submission on behalf of the family of Mitchell Sweeney, who was electrocuted while installing foil insulation in far north Queensland in 2010.
It says the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts "had the means of knowing from almost the beginning of their work" that foil insulation carried unnecessarily high dangers.
"Those warnings were neglected; lost; or channelled into areas where they could have marginal effect," the submission said.
"It may be said that the mistakes that were made by public servants were brought about by the haste with which it was ordained that the HIP was to be rolled out and implemented.
"But another narrative that emerges from the evidence is the failure of senior public servants to call a halt to what must have appeared to most of them as madness.
"No senior public servant advised her political masters that [the start date of] 1 July was both dangerous and untenable."
Over more than seven weeks, the royal commission proceedings in Brisbane heard evidence of communication failures, missed warnings and public servants working under extraordinary pressure.
The commission is due to deliver its findings in August.
Topics: royal-commissions, law-crime-and-justice, workplace, federal-government, rudd-kevin, brisbane-4000, qld, australia
First postedMen speak 70 percent of the time in mixed gender groups, with degrading effects on group decision-making. Women are rarely viewed as among the most powerful, influential, or relevant speakers. Their introduction of topics, or attempts to shift conversation, are frequently ignored. And their speech is routinely interrupted.
Do you have listener bias? Do you think men are talking less and women more than they actually do? Most of us do. And it results in a distorted apportionment of who actually speaks.
Gender and speech dynamics are often very heated and personal flashpoints in conversations about sexism and gender gaps. It turns out that talking in mixed gender groups—the dinner table, classroom, boardroom, parliaments—is often much more highly fraught than casual observation might suggest. When confronted with facts about male speech dominance in the public sphere and the deleterious effects of expressive imbalances, everyone suddenly become deeply passionate about how many words men and women use, who interrupts whom, and what the meaning and quality of linguistic techniques, such as hedges and interruptions, really are.
In general, people would really rather not see sexism, even when it’s staring them in the face. The idea that words and speech, as much as habits, politeness, traditions, and boys club fun might be vectors for implicit bias and discrimination that women learn to adapt to, and pay a price for, is pretty unappealing information. Stereotypes abound about women who talk more and too much, and the idea that men dominate speech, speaking up to 75% of the time in mixed gender deliberative groups is hard for some people to swallow.
Examining and revealing everyday speech interactions challenges people’s perceptions of themselves, their sense of their relationships with others, and for many men, ultimately, the degree to which they may, unconsciously, be engaging in and benefitting from behavior that has sexist outcomes.
A year and a half after writing a viral piece about gender and speech, women from all over the world continue to write to me about their frustrations in meetings, in school, and at home, and they are often thankful for the recognition of the problems they encounter trying to be heard. Many report using the article to raise awareness and start professional and personal conversations about whose voices matter.
Whenever I tweet information about these dynamics, or people raise these issues as legitimate concerns, the predictable chorus of “feminism should focus on what’s ‘really important,’ and not forget ‘Those Women Over There'” breaks out. Words such as “mansplaining” or “manterrupting” spur cries of “reverse sexism.”
There are, however, few things as consequential to women as individuals living in societies who fail to understand or meet their needs.
Consider this chart, showing the gender distribution of legislatures, corporate leadership, media makers, and prestigious awards. It’s a chart of whose speech is considered most valuable, which experiences matter, and whose authority is respected. It’s also a chart of collective ignorance.
Enter Gender Time, created by two Swedes, Fredrik Eklöf and Andreas Bhagwani. It is a simple app (also available for your phone) that will let you track the gender breakdown of any conversation, film, video, panel conversation, or meeting. According to the app’s website, it “helps you see and discuss normative gender patterns. Just seeing the numbers helps people self-regulate and improve.” You should download it immediately, just for fun. Anyone can use it, anywhere, although introducing the app at the dinner table potentially has the greatest disruptive effect.
The app’s next version should add interruptions in relation to volubility. Interruptions are something everyone understands, and, increasingly, organizations are looking for ways to shift conduct during meetings to account for socialization that results in women being “the silent sex.” Some organizations use talking sticks, for example, others enforce no interrupting rules. However, finding ways to minimize interruptions isn’t a panacea in a world where gender role incongruity continues to hurt women at work and in politics. For example, one study of U.S. senators shows that men who spoke more often than their peers are rated 10 percent higher for competence. Women who do the same, however, are rated 14 percent lower.
In their 500-page book, The Silent Sex, Gender, Deliberation & Institutions, Chistopher F. Karpowitz and Tali Mendleberg examine the costs of gendered speech dynamics in deliberative spaces. Women, as they note, are no longer legally barred from participating in public space in most countries. However, lower status continues to affect the ways in which women are inhibited from doing so. Women may be filling schools and the workplace, and making incursions, albeit still limited, into political and corporate leadership, but their contributions are still relegated to the invisible, quiet, and supportive scaffolding of institutions.
One of the authors’ conclusions was the efficacy of an influential procedure, the decision rule, when women find themselves in a minority, which is almost always the case in public arenas. The rule disrupts typically gendered interactions that amplify women’s silence and reduce participation and impact. When Karpowitz and Mendleberg introduced the rule that group decisions had to be unanimous (rather than plurality/majority), groups became more inclusive and more people spoke up. Women, whose voices tend to be drowned out, got a larger share of speaking time and with it more influence on decision-making. The rule creates more egalitarian conversational norms and, they believe, can have “dramatic democratic effects.”
Democratic effects are not what are going through most people’s minds when women describe their frustrations when simply trying to get a thought out without interruption. Men speak 70 percent of the time in mixed gender groups, with degrading effects on group decision-making. Women are rarely viewed as among the most powerful, influential, or relevant speakers. Their introduction of topics, or attempts to shift conversation, are frequently ignored. Their speech is routinely interrupted.
Take, for example, the entire course of Congress’ hectoring of Cecile Richards during her Planned Parenthood testimony. A deliberative body made up almost entirely of men asked questions, talked over, interrupted and defined the structure, process, and content of the five hours during which she was questioned. What happened to her reflects the same patterns as well-studied courtroom dynamics, where a woman testifying, particularly about difficult and complicated topics, is routinely unable to finish a sentence, and is thought less authoritative.
While increasing understanding of women’s lower participation in parliamentary proceedings, board meetings, and classroom debates is important, the truth is that childhood socialization continues to teach girls subordination and boys domination. Women are now educated, can vote, and work for money. And yet stereotypes and gender role adherence continue to inform self-conceptions, identity, and relationships. Gender, as Cecilia Ridgeway put it, “is more than a trait of individuals, [it’s] an institutionalized system of social practices.” One that continues, despite women’s strides, to give more credence to what men think and say. That system starts at home.
Soraya L. Chemaly writes about gender, feminism and culture for several online media including Role Reboot, The Huffington Post, Fem2.0, RHReality Check, BitchFlicks, and Alternet among others. She is particularly interested in how systems of bias and oppression are transmitted to children through entertainment, media and religious cultures. She holds a History degree from Georgetown University, where she founded that schools first feminist undergraduate journal, studied post-grad at Radcliffe College. She is currently Director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project.
Related Links:The Rubik’s Cube has delighted and confounded millions of players since Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik created it in 1974. Now the company that makes the twisting puzzle wants to stop the maker of Duncan yo-yos from selling an alleged knockoff.
Rubik’s Brand Ltd has sued Duncan Toys and the retailer Toys “R” Us to halt sales of a puzzle cube, which Duncan calls “Quick Cube,” that it said copies the world’s best-selling puzzle game.
According to the complaint filed on Monday night in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Duncan’s 3X3 cube “mimics the features and overall appearance” of the Rubik’s Cube, mainly differing in its colors and “slight rounding” of the corners.
Rubik’s Brand, which is based in London, said this amounted to trademark infringement and unfair competition, and that Toys “R” Us was also liable for selling Duncan’s cubes.
“Consumers who expect to receive plaintiff’s Rubik’s Cube puzzle, for which plaintiff has developed a national and international reputation, will be disappointed when using defendants’ imitation,” which causes “irreparable harm” to Rubik’s Brand’s reputation and goodwill, the complaint said.
Toys “R” Us sells the Rubik’s Cube for $15.99 and Duncan’s Quick Cube for $4.99, according to its website.
Duncan spokesman Mike Burke on Tuesday said the allegations are without merit, and that the company intends to vigorously defend itself. Toys “R” Us did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit seeks to recoup alleged illegal profits and triple damages, and the destruction of unauthorized cubes.
Duncan is based in Middlefield, Ohio, and its parent, Baraboo, Wisconsin-based Flambeau Inc, is also a defendant. Toys “R” Us is based in Wayne, New Jersey.
Rubik’s Cube became a fad in the United States soon after its launch there in 1980, under a license to Ideal Toy Co, but remained on the market after demand fell. Roughly 100 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold worldwide, the complaint said.Reading Time: 1 minute
By Sarah Krichel
Ryerson plans to have a law school fully operational by 2020, according to a letter of intent that was released this week.
The proposal for the new juris doctor program at Ryerson has been in the works since 2007.
“The aim is to produce practice-ready legal professionals with the knowledge and transferable skills required to compete in a rapidly changing profession,” the letter states.
The process of building the program at Ryerson was postponed in the summer of 2008 because of the provincial government refusing to fund any new law school proposals, so the school put the process on hold and kept the idea active “by other means.”
Ryerson hosted a conference in the fall of the same year and decided to move forward with the proposal to bring together faculty that was already researching law-related topics. The following year, the proposal passed Senate.
A Feasibility Committee will look into institutional arrangements for establishing a Ryerson law school as its own faculty. A proposal will be introduced at Ryerson at two upcoming town halls.
Senate approval is expected by May 2017 and the first intake of students is expected to be in September 2018.We live in a post-billiards age. There was an age of billiards, and it has been over for so long, most of us have no idea how huge billiards once was. For many decades, starting in the mid-19th Century, billiards was the one of the most popular amusements.
A hundred years ago, there were 830 pool halls in the city of Chicago. Today, there are ten.
Billiards is not what it used to be—but we continue to live in a world affected by its former prominence. The growth of billiards led to the development of a material that would come to define the modern world. Without billiards, we might never have discovered plastic.
The story starts with a man named Michael Phelan, the father of American billiards.
Phelan was a brilliant player, and he also promoted the sport, arranging the biggest big-money matches.
He opened huge billiards halls in San Francisco and New York.
And Phelan believed that to further popularize the game of billiards, he would need to standardize the gear. If tables and balls weren’t the same from one location to another— well, you were basically playing a different game every time you went somewhere new.
So he patented a new kind of billiard cushion. And then, he took the money from that, as well as what he had won playing billiards and writing books on billiards, and used it to become the first big manufacturer of billiards tables and equipment.
But standardizing the billiard ball was no easy task. The ball has to have certain physical properties—it has to rebound properly, and be of uniform density.
And, at the time, there was really only one material that would do: ivory.
Ivory was not cheap. Going to Africa, shooting elephants, processing their tusks and shipping them across an ocean was dangerous and expensive. Not to mention horrible.
People in the billiards industry started looking for substitutes for ivory. They tried a variety of materials, like wood and iron, but they didn’t perform nearly as well. Ivory balls had just the right weight, the most even roll, the best rebound. Nothing was as good. And not only that, but only the best grade ivory would do. In fact, records from the ivory trade sometimes refer to the top grade as “billiard ball ivory.”
Billiard balls required a lot of billiard-ball grade ivory. Unlike the ivory on piano keys, which were just a veneer of over wood, billiard balls had to be made of 100% solid ivory.
The average number of billiard balls that could be obtained from a single tusk was three.
The cost of ivory billiard balls was a problem for Phelan, who was trying to grow his company. He and his colleagues were acutely aware that they needed another material to work with.
Phelan took out an ad in the paper, offering $10,000 to anyone who could come up with a suitable replacement for ivory. In terms of wages people earned at the time, that was like three million dollars.
A tinkerer named John Wesley Hyatt found the ad. Hyatt was a printer, not a scientist. But in his work he used a number of different chemicals, including nitrated cellulose. Nitrated cellulose was used by printers to protect their hands and is still sold today as liquid bandages.
Hyatt found that the material turned out to have very interesting properties. In particular, when dissolved, it created a kind of syrupy liquid. He tried making a film out of it, and then putting it through a press. In doing this, he created the first plastic. He called it “celluloid.”
But Hyatt did not win Phelan’s prize. Celluloid turned out be useful for a number of things, but it was not right for billiard balls. The balls just didn’t bounce right.
Hyatt tried to make a go of it anyway, setting up his own billiard ball company, making balls with a thin veneer of celluloid over a layer of plaster on the inside. But they were considered very inferior billiard balls.
Still, Hyatt didn’t give up on celluloid. He went into business with his brother Isaiah, setting up companies to try to find new uses for the material.
Eventually they find that the best use for celluloid is imitation ivory. Albeit, not for billiard balls, but for versions of popular ivory luxury goods, such as knife handles, combs, and hand mirrors. And of course, celluloid would eventually be used to make film for movies.
Though celluloid had one fatal flaw: it burned easily. Celluloid film caused several disastrous and fatal fires in movie theaters.
Celluloid hadn’t worked for billiard balls, but it did inspire others to make other types of plastics. One of them was Leo Baekeland, who, in 1907, came up with a new kind of petroleum-based plastic. He named it Bakelite, after himself. And Bakelite plastic was perfect for billiard balls.
By the 1940s, even top pool tournaments were being played with plastic balls. But by then, pool had passed its peak. It crashed as the Depression began, and never regained its former prominence. The age of billiards was over.
We have been in the post-billiards age—the age of plastics—ever since. Michael Phelan would be very sad about the state of billiard nows. He loved the game so much that he concluded his magnum opus on billiards with five pages of rhyming coupletsImage: Rauman satama
In a new economic forecast released on Monday, the Bank of Finland predicted that private consumption will increase on the back of growing employment and a boost to consumer purchasing power. However the Bank foresees households’ savings rate remaining negative and also expects them to continue to amass more debt.
By mid-2017, household debt amounted to nearly 128 percent of income and in 2020 that figure is set to reach 129 percent of income, according to the economic outlook.
Meanwhile the central bank expects the savings rate among households to decline due to the country’s ageing population. There has been long-term growth in the share of pensioners’ income as well as households’ disposal income in households' financial assets. A growing proportion of household incomes represent pensions and other social benefits.
"The debt burden among younger age groups has been growing continuously, so the main way that younger age cohorts will be able to save is by paying off their mortgages," the bank noted.
Overall, some 70 percent of household assets are tied up in home ownership. However financial assets invested in vacation homes are for the most part represented by older, generally debt-free households.
Bank of Finland governor Erkki Liikanen said on Twitter that the low employment rate among young Finnish men was also a great cause of concern for policymakers.
Economic growth to slump after this year
The central bank’s economic forecast predicts that economic growth in 2017 will reach 3.1 percent and come in at 2.5 percent in 2018. GDP will thereafter continue to expand, but at a slower rate – just 1.5 percent in 2019 and 2020.
The will be little upward pressure on costs and inflation – the annual increase in costs -- will remain below that of the rest of the eurozone between 2017 and 2020.
Although the current economic upswing appears to be stronger and more broad-based than previously expected, the rate of growth seen in 2017 will not persist into the years ahead. The Bank speculated that the economic surge was driven for the most part by external factors such as accelerated global trade.
According to the forecast, employment in Finland will gradually increase, fuelled by a surge in industrial activity. It predicted that a demand for labour in the workforce would step up employment, but imbalances in the labour market, structural changes in the population and other supply-side problems in the labour market would put the brakes on improved employment.
Improved public finances
The ratio of the public sector deficit to GDP will fall to 1.1 percent in 2017, and continue to decline to 0.7 percent by 2020.
According to the economic overview, the improved economy will not entirely resolve public finance imbalances in the long term. The public sector sustainability gap still stands at three percent.
The authors of the outlook stressed the problem of increased spending on elder care services and pensions as the population ages, as well as a slowdown in productivity growth.
"The situation in public finances can be eased by implementing structural reforms. The pension reform has already substantially improved the outlook. Other near-term policy decisions that will play an important role are social and health care reform as well as various measures aimed at strengthening employment over the long term," central banker Liikanen said in a release.This article originally appeared at Financial Times
Eastern European nations reacted with shock and anger to Russia’s decision to abandon South Stream, its $50bn gas pipeline across the Black Sea into Europe, as shares in some of the companies involved in the project dived.
Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary said they had received no advance warning that Moscow was scrapping South Stream, even though they all have substantial financial and political capital invested. Russia said it would export its gas to a trade hub in Turkey instead.
South Stream is so far the biggest casualty of the stand-off between Russia and Europe over Moscow’s military involvement in Ukraine.
The much-vaunted project, backed by Russia’s state-controlled gas group Gazprom, was designed to bring Russian gas into Europe by bypassing Ukraine. It gained momentum after a series of price disputes between Moscow and Kiev over the past decade led to supply cuts for some of Gazprom’s European customers.
But there were fears in Brussels that the pipeline would cement Gazprom’s domination of the European gas market. The European Commission insisted that other gas suppliers be given access to South Stream, arguing that the idea of Gazprom both providing the gas and owning the pipeline violated EU competition rules.
However, the project was backed by several countries in southeastern Europe, which saw it as a way to improve their energy security. They also looked forward to earning money from transit fees for South Stream’s gas as it crossed their territory.
Countries in the region lost another key supply option last year when a rival EU-backed project that would have carried gas from Azerbaijan into the heart of Europe, called Nabucco, was scrapped.
At a meeting in Brussels of EU ambassadors on Tuesday, the Hungarian representative asked Federica Mogherini, the new EU foreign policy chief: “First Nabucco, now South Stream. What are we supposed to do now?”
Peter Szijjarto, Hungary’s foreign minister, said alternative sources of energy would now have to be explored, including gas from Azerbaijan.
Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s prime minister, told the country’s RTS channel that the decision was bad news for Belgrade and said he would urgently seek to speak with Mr Putin.
“Serbia has been investing in this project for seven years, but now it has to pay the price of a clash between the great [powers],” he said.
Italy and Austria have also been vocal supporters of the venture, pitting themselves against the commission.
Shares in companies with contracts for South Stream also suffered. Stocks in Italian oil services group Saipem closed down 10.8 per cent, while Germany’s Salzgitter, whose joint venture is making pipes for the project, was down 7.4 per cent. Other businesses involved in South Stream include Italy’s Eniand Austria’s OMV.
Saipem and Salzgitter said that they had not received any notification from Moscow that their contracts were being terminated.
The dispute over South Stream also sowed such divisions in the EU that it proved difficult to agree on sanctions against Moscow, diplomats said.
The 28-member bloc insisted that its opposition to South Stream was legal, not political.
“Pipelines developed and operated in conflict with EU law endanger the functioning of the internal market and they may also fall short in any expected improvements in security of supply,” said Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, spokesperson for the European Commission.
In addition to its concerns about competition, the commission was also worried that South Stream could fuel corruption and launched an investigation into the legitimacy of the tender process in Bulgaria, where the pipeline was supposed to make landfall.
Ognian Shentov, head of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, a Sofia think-tank, said the cost of the Bulgarian stretch had been inflated from €1.2bn to more than €4bn for the benefit of local construction companies.
South Stream was supposed to have four parallel pipelines, each more than 930km long connecting Russia and Bulgaria under the Black Sea. The pipeline was then supposed to continue overland via Serbia and Hungary to Austria.
The tenders to supply and lay the first two subsea pipelines, each containing 75,000 12-metre pipes, were held this year and the contracts for the other two pipelines were expected to be awarded next year.
In January, Europipe, Salzgitter’s joint venture, won half of a €1bn tender for the first pipeline to supply specialised pipes capable of withstanding depths of 2,200 metres. The other winning contractors were Russia’s United Metallurgical Company (OMK) andSeverstal. Voestalpine supplies steel plates to OMK.
Salzgitter is relying on the project to take up capacity at the Europipe mill in Muelheim until 2015. Low orders previously forced the company to cut the hours of some of its workers. In 2013 Salzgitter made a €489.6m group net loss but forecasts a pre-tax result approaching break-even in 2014.
Ingo Martin Schachel at Commerzbank said the pipeline had not yet been installed under the sea and therefore the “‘sunk costs’ for South Stream offshore were not yet high – so the route could still be changed”.
However, he said because the possible alternative route to Turkey would involve a smaller undersea section “the potential change of plans could have significant negative earnings implications for Salzgitter, even if our assumption is true that the existing contract will be honoured”.
Like Salzgitter, Saipem was also counting on an income boost from South Stream after a dismal year in 2013 when it recorded a €404m net loss.Former yokozuna and 31-time champion Chiyonofuji died Sunday in Tokyo due to pancreatic cancer, a sumo source said. He was 61.
Chiyonofuji, whose real name was Mitsugu Akimoto, was the first sumo wrestler to receive the People’s Honor Award in 1989 and ranks third in championships won behind Hakuho (37) and Taiho (32).
A lean, muscular Hokkaido native, who was nicknamed “Wolf,” Chiyonofuji was promoted to sumo’s highest rank of yokozuna after the Nagoya tournament of 1981, when he won his second championship in his third tourney as ozeki, the sport’s second-highest rank.
Chiyonofuji won 53 straight bouts — the third-longest streak since the start of the Showa Era — through the Kyushu tourney in November 1988 and in 1990 became the first wrestler to win 1,000 bouts.
He retired after the 1991 Summer Grand Sumo Tournament with 1,045 career victories, currently the second most in sumo history. In April 1992, he took over the Kokonoe stable.Gorillaz Live @ Printworks — London: Thoughts and Reflections
Panel Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 27, 2017
On Friday morning I got an email saying a guest and I had the chance to attend Gorillaz’ secret show at Printworks — their first live show in 7 years.
The evening before I’d listened to Damon Albarn chat to MistaJam on BBC Radio 1, and to the subsequent official releases of Saturnz Barz (Featuring Popcaan) and Andromeda (Featuring D.R.A.M.) — the video for Saturnz Barz was then shortly released on YouTube and the album was made available to pre-order. The hype for Humanz had hit new extremes and Gorillaz were well and truly back.
The whole of the Panel team were given the chance to attend and when we arrived at Printworks that evening we were given commemorative tickets and ushered to Room 2. We took part in a couple of interviews, spoke to a few people about what we might expect and listened to rumours of who else might be appearing on-stage from Gorillaz’ extensive list of collaborators. There was no support act and the stage was set and ready from our arrival.
The Commemorative Ticket — I was given 2D, but the other band members also featured.
Damon came on to a bass heavy electronic beat (apparently, a live intro track called I Switched My Robot Off). The build was huge, so when Ascension hit and an enormous backing video of Vince Staples’ came up on screen, it’s drop-in was massive. Ascension is a huge track played live and feels even more electric than the studio version — especially toward the opening of the final chorus which enters with Damon screaming. Although Vince himself wasn’t there, across the whole night only him, D.R.A.M. and Popcaan were the only major absentees. Damon told the crowd that at the Demon Dayz festival in Margate every one of the collaborators will be performing, so there’s a lot to look forward to then, as well.
The whole album was played back to front. Sonically, to me, the album was more Plastic Beach then Demon Days or Gorillaz. You could create an argument that even the vocal performances from the collaborators were similar to their counterparts in Plastic Beach (eg. Kelala — Little Dragon; Anthony Hamilton — Bobby Womack). The reception to Let Me Out with Pusha T (!!) was so good that it was instantly performed again [I’ve uploaded a video of the opening verse below]. And the somewhat maligned Hallelujah Money took a welcome new form when given the surrounding contexts of an album.
Gorillaz & Pusha T perform Let Me Out (for the second time)
Danny Brown’s verse was a little short but waiting the entire track for him to come in at the end made his energy seem even more pronounced than it usually is. Zebra Katz wearing a full mesh mask absolutely owned the stage during Sex Murder Party. Kali Uchis and Damon performed a gorgeous duet for She’s My Collar. And both Noel Gallagher and Jean-Michel Jarre came together with Damon and Jhenny Beth to perform We Got The Power, a track which could easily fit into the end of Demon Days.
They finished with two encores. The first of which gave us Kids With Guns (a personal favourite), Feel Good Inc. with De La Soul and Clint Eastwood with Del the Funky Homosapien (who I’ve never seen perform live before, as Snoop Dogg or Kano often cover the track). During the second encore, everyone who performed on the night came back on stage to a rendition of Don’t Get Lost in Heaven.
The album sounds special performed live, and I think the themes and subject matter of the album is already apparent following the lyricism in Ascension, Hallelujah Money and We Got the Power; the album’s collaborators feed into these narratives too. The night had a fantastic energy to it and was a fantastic way to mark Gorillaz’ return. I can only be thankful that we were given the opportunity to attend.
Before attending the show, I didn’t expect as much as we got. I knew it would be special but I didn’t think it to be at a well-know venue, for many of the collaborators to be there and for the visuals to be as well prepared as they were. Esepcially, keeping in mind that this was a free show. You could see the excitement in Damon through the way he engaged with the crowd and everyone on stage. This had clearly been in planning for a long time and it showed.
Humanz is released on the 28th April and I’m (obviously) hugely eager to hear it again.Receiving nicknames from teachers. Having homework hidden by fellow classmates. Pushed into a toilet cell. Threatened with expulsion. Advised to change sexual orientation. Being told homosexuality is a sin.
These are just some examples of discrimination faced by LGBT students in Hong Kong given in the Equal Opportunities Commission’s’ Study on Legislation against Discrimination on the Grounds of Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status, released in January.
Fifty-three per cent of LGBT students faced different degrees of discrimination,the EOC said, citing a 2009 report conducted by the Boys’ and Girls’ Club Association (BGCA) in which 492 students were surveyed. This included 42 per cent of the interviewees being verbally insulted, 40 per cent socially excluded, and 14 per cent suffering physical injury and sexual harassment.
Discrimination on campus has a detrimental effect on the mental health of LGBT students; 52 per cent said they felt lonely and helpless, 37 per cent felt anxious, and 14 per cent even contemplated suicide.
Stigmatised at School
The results of the study ring true to Julian (name changed to protect privacy), a 23-year-old who attended St Paul’s College, an Anglican boys’ school. He discovered that he was gay sometime around the first year of secondary school. Since then, he said he has felt depressed and thought about suicide, although he has never “had the courage to do it.” While his classmates generally knew about his sexual orientation and were supportive, Julian attributes this to how common being gay was at his school: he estimates that 10 out of 30 pupils in his class have had a same-sex experience.
He said he did not seek help from any teachers or social workers during his secondary school years even if in need of support. Although the school would not explicitly make comments about homosexuality, he had witnessed discriminatory behaviour from the staff, including his form teacher. “The teacher is a Christian – her behaviour also makes me feel like she is not a gay-friendly person. For example, when someone behaves feminine, she would ask them to man up,” he says. “When we’re at camp and we’re playing games, she would pick the students who are more feminine and ask them to hold the balloons in their hands and make them burst, because she thinks they would be scared and scream.” And because his teacher and the school social worker are friends, he did not approach any of them: “In my mind they all belong in the same gang.”
Like Julian, an overwhelming 88 per cent of students did not seek help from teachers according to the BGCA study, because they believed that they would not be able to help, or were fearful of their potentially discriminatory attitudes. More than half also reported being worried that the teachers would inform their parents of their sexual orientation.
Sixty-four per cent of the students said that the schools did not provide with them resources to understand their sexual orientation, while 56 per cent could not find a teacher or social worker they could trust. Furthermore, gay students said that teachers stigmatised them, with 17 per cent believing |
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