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of Bush-administration torture tactics include Jay Bybee, who supervised and signed John Yoo’s 2002 “Torture Memo” effectively authorizing the United States’ use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in Iraq; and Timothy Flanigan, deputy White House counsel who participated with Alberto Gonzalez in Bush’s “War Council” and testified before a Senate panel that waterboarding and other torture techniques should not necessarily be “off-limits” and that “inhumane can’t be coherently defined.”
When dozens of religious leaders and organizations issued a 2005 statement calling on the Bush administration to rule out torture as anti-biblical, the LDS Church through a spokesman issued a statement “condemning inhumane treatment of any person under any circumstance.”
Romney, however, appears to be lining up with Jessen, Mitchell, Bybee, and Flanigan.
Last month, the New York Times disclosed a September 2011 memo drafted by Romney’s advisors advocating the resumption of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” initiated under President George W. Bush but banned by President Barack Obama on his second day in office.
In a December 17, 2011 Town Hall meeting, Romney said, “I will not authorize torture.” But at the press conference after the Town Hall meeting, when a reporter asked him if he considered waterboarding to be torture, Romney responded “I don’t.”
Romney’s stance led one UN official to warn last week that his election would amount to “a democratic mandate for torture.”
While some LDS media observers have denied a pattern of Mormon involvement in torture, others in the Mormon community have called for closer consideration of this serious moral and ethical matter.
And it does matter. It matters because unlike in most contemporary American religious communities, Mormons are routinely expected to assess their own moral “worthiness” to participate in religious rites and to serve in their local congregations—including in positions of pastoral responsibility such as bishop (which both Governor Romney and Mr. Jessen have served). And moral worthiness in Mormon communities is now widely framed in terms of highly individualistic choices like payment of tithes, sexual chastity, and observance of restrictions on consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and coffee.
It matters because it points to grave underdevelopment in the public morality and political theology of contemporary Mormonism. As Mormon Studies expert Professor Patrick Mason has told RD, Mormonism has “no systematic theology” on issues like human rights or poverty or war. Its view of morality is “highly individualized.”
And the torture issue matters to the question of how Romney will govern. We’ve consistently seen that the candidate will be essentially values-neutral in his approach in his approach to foreign and economic policy and centered on defending and promoting the interests of large institutions that reward loyalty. The chain of command and tactical advantages matter more than time-honored humane ideals. That’s a disposition Romney has in common with Jessen, Mitchell, Bybee, and other Mormons who have been in a position not only to support torture but to develop and implement it.
Once again, the issue is not that Mitt Romney is unduly influenced by his faith. It’s that his faith has little influence when it comes to some extremely serious moral questions.Google Glass owners got a surprise on Tuesday when Google revealed its iOS version of MyGlass a bit too early.
The company subsequently removed the app from Apple’s App Store, but later unveiled a new round of Glass updates (along with an explanation regarding the app store mishap). Included was a controversial feature that allows users to wink to snap a photo.
The wink to snap a photo feature was previously enabled via an app called Winky. It led critics of the device to wonder if the tool was intended to take surreptitious photos of people in public spaces.
Privacy concerns surrounding the device have been so widespread that Congress sent the company a letter earlier this year specifically addressing the device and its use.
Google doesn’t appear to be worried about the winking feature being viewed negatively by the general public. In a message accompanying the update, the Glass team wrote:
We’re starting with pictures, but just think about what else is possible. Imagine a day where you’re riding in the back of a cab and you just wink at the meter to pay. You wink at a pair of shoes in a shop window and your size is shipped to your door. You wink at a cookbook recipe and the instructions appear right in front of you –- hands-free, no mess, no fuss. Pretty cool, right?
Aside from the winking function, the Glass update includes a new Lock Screen feature, requiring a specific set of taps and swipes to enable the device, the ability to get Hangouts messages on the device and easy uploading of videos recorded on Glass to YouTube.
Image: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty ImagesJune 19, 2014
LUBBOCK, Texas - Texas Tech senior outfielder/designated hitter Adam Kirsch (Spring, Texas) has signed a free agent contract with the New York Yankees. He becomes the fifth Red Raider to be drafted/sign free agent with a Major League Baseball organization this June.
Kirsch will report Monday to Tampa, Fla., the site of the Yankees Class-A Advanced organization, the Tampa Yankees.
Kirsch, an All-Big 12 first team selection and the Big 12 Newcomer of the Year, played one season at Tech batting.307 (69-for-225) with 37 runs, 21 doubles, three triples, 10 home runs and 51 RBI.
He ranked among the top players in the Big 12 in total bases (126, 2nd), home runs (3rd) and RBI (3rd). He led the league in slugging percentage (.560) and tied for the Big 12 lead with teammate Bryant Burleson with 21 doubles.
Kirsch paced the Red Raiders in eight NCAA Tournament games leading the team batting.360 (9-for-25) with four extra-base hits, three RBI and six walks with a.484 on-base percentage. Kirsch also led Tech at the College World Series batting.500 (4-for-8) in two games.
Kirsch hit safely in 12 of the final 13 games of the season, posted six game-winning RBI and ranked second on the team with 15 two-out RBI.
Kirsch is the first Red Raider to be drafted by or sign free agent with the Yankees since 2003 when right-handed pitcher Jeff Karstens was selected in the 19th round (No. 574 overall) by the Yankees.
2014 TEXAS TECH PLAYERS DRAFTED/SIGNED FREE AGENT IN MLB DRAFT
- 6th Round - LHP Chris Sadberry (Miami Marlins)
- 8th Round - C Hunter Redman (Los Angeles Dodgers)
- 21st Round - SS Tim Proudfoot (Oakland Athletics)
- 33rd Round - RHP Dominic Moreno (St. Louis Cardinals)
- Free Agent - OF/DH Adam Kirsch (New York Yankees)Sanders Issues New Report Documenting Republican Effort to Cut Social Security
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said that he would fight Republican attempts to cut Social Security and today issued a report detailing the importance of Social Security and how attempts to cut it are unnecessary.
“Republicans are manufacturing a phony crisis in Social Security in order to cut the earned benefits of millions of the most vulnerable people in this country,” Sanders said. “The American people won’t let them get away with it.”
“At a time when millions of Americans with disabilities and senior citizens are struggling to pay for food, medicine and heat, we should expand, not cut, Social Security,” Sanders added.
National senior organizations representing more than 60 million older Americans –including the AARP, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the Alliance for Retired Americans and others – are opposed to Republican attempts to block a reallocation of Social Security retirement funds into the Social Security disability fund. Such a reallocation has happened 11 times since the 1960’s and was embraced by Presidents Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton. President Barack Obama recently asked Congress to do it again this year.
But last month, House Republicans passed a rule to make reallocation more difficult and now the Senate may be poised to attempt the same thing, Sanders warned.
This despite the fact that the combined Social Security retirement and disability insurance trust funds have a $2.8 trillion surplus and can pay every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 18 years.
“If Republicans are serious about extending the solvency of Social Security beyond 2033, I hope they will join me in scrapping the cap that allows multi-millionaires to pay a much smaller percentage of their income into Social Security than the middle class,” Sanders said.
According to the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, applying the Social Security payroll tax on income above $250,000 would extend the solvency of Social Security until 2060. Sanders is working on legislation to do just that.
The Sanders’ report also explains how the Social Security disability program is affected by trends in the economy and the increase in income inequality. The report also notes that the American disability insurance system is actually less generous and more rigorous than programs in other countries. Finally, the report shows that many Americans rely on the program to buy food and other essentials and offers some anecdotes from people in Vermont and elsewhere.
Tomorrow, Sanders will speak in favor of reallocation to preserve Social Security for nearly 11 million disabled Americans and their children when the GOP-controlled committee convenes a hearing to review the disability program. The report can be found here.Actor Woody Harrelson's father, Charles Harrelson, died of a heart attack in the Supermax federal prison where he was serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge, officials said Wednesday.
Charles Harrelson, 69, was found unresponsive in his cell on the morning of March 15, said Felicia Ponce, a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman in Washington.
Fremont County Coroner Dorothy Twellman said an autopsy showed Harrelson had severe coronary artery disease. She said he probably died in his sleep. "It appears it was very sudden."
Charles Harrelson was convicted of murder in the May 29, 1979, slaying of U.S. District Judge John Wood Jr. outside his San Antonio home. Prosecutors said a drug dealer hired him to kill Wood because he did not want the judge to preside at his upcoming trial.
Charles Harrelson denied the killing, saying he was in Dallas, 270 miles away, at the time.
Wood, known as "Maximum John" for the sentences he gave in drug cases, was the first federal judge to be killed in the 20th century.
Charles Harrelson was transferred to Supermax, the highest-security federal prison, after attempting to break out of an Atlanta federal prison in 1995. Other inmates at Supermax, about 90 miles south of Denver, include Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, Oklahoma City bombing coconspirator Terry Nichols and Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph.
His son got his start in acting as Woody the bartender on TV's "Cheers" beginning in 1985 and went on to star in films including "Natural Born Killers," "White Men Can't Jump" and "The People vs. Larry Flynt."
Woody Harrelson's publicist did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday.
The actor was just 7 when his father was first sent to prison, for murdering a Texas businessman. He was in college when his father was convicted of the judge's assassination.The last letter from the ATF didn’t change their opinion on the pistol arm brace, but this one definitely and clearly has. People have been saying that the ATF is about to do a 180 degree about face on the idea that using a pistol arm brace as a stock is perfectly legal, and it appears that the day has come. Released at about 3:45 PM central time, the latest missive is an open letter from the acting ATF chief (instead of an individual letter) that states exactly what we most feared: that using a pistol arm brace as a stock “redesigns” the firearm and “makes” it a NFA device. Make the jump for the full letter...
OPEN LETTER ON THE REDESIGN OF “STABILIZING BRACES”
The Firearms and Ammunition Technology Division (FATD), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has received inquiries from the public concerning the proper use of devices recently marketed as “stabilizing braces.” These devices are described as “a shooter’s aid that is designed to improve the single-handed shooting performance of buffer tube equipped pistols.” The device claims to enhance accuracy and reduce felt recoil when using an AR-style pistol.
These items are intended to improve accuracy by using the operator’s forearm to provide stable support for the AR-type pistol. ATF has previously determined that attaching the brace to a firearm does not alter the classification of the firearm or subject the firearm to National Firearms Act (NFA) control. However, this classification is based upon the use of the device as designed. When the device is redesigned for use as a shoulder stock on a handgun with a rifled barrel under 16 inches in length, the firearm is properly classified as a firearm under the NFA.
The NFA, 26 USCS § 5845, defines “firearm,” in relevant part, as “a shotgun having a barrel or barrels of less than 18 inches in length” and “a rifle having a barrel or barrels of less than 16 inches in length.” That section defines both “rifle” and “shotgun” as “a weapon designed or redesigned, made or remade, and intended to be fired from the shoulder….” (Emphasis added).
Pursuant to the plain language of the statute, ATF and its predecessor agency have long held that a pistol with a barrel less than 16 inches in length and an attached shoulder stock is a NFA “firearm.” For example, in Revenue Ruling 61-45, Luger and Mauser pistols “having a barrel of less than 16 inches in length with an attachable shoulder stock affixed” were each classified as a “short barrel rifle…within the purview of the National Firearms Act.”
In classifying the originally submitted design, ATF considered the objective design of the item as well as the stated purpose of the item. In submitting this device for classification, the designer noted that
The intent of the buffer tube forearm brace is to facilitate one handed firing of the AR15 pistol for those with limited strength or mobility due to a handicap. It also performs the function of sufficiently padding the buffer tube in order to reduce bruising to the forearm while firing with one hand. Sliding and securing the brace onto ones forearm and latching the Velcro straps, distributes the weight of the weapon evenly and assures a snug fit. Therefore, it is no longer necessary to dangerously “muscle” this large pistol during the one handed aiming process, and recoil is dispersed significantly, resulting in more accurate shooting without compromising safety or comfort.
In the classification letter of November 26, 2012, ATF noted that a “shooter would insert his or her forearm into the device while gripping the pistol’s handgrip-then tighten the Velcro straps for additional support and retention. Thus configured, the device provides the shooter with additional support of a firearm while it is still held and operated with one hand.” When strapped to the wrist and used as designed, it is clear the device does not allow the firearm to be fired from the shoulder. Therefore, ATF concluded that, pursuant to the information provided, “the device is not designed or intended to fire a weapon from the shoulder.” In making the classification ATF determined that the objective design characteristics of the stabilizing brace supported the stated intent.
ATF hereby confirms that if used as designed—to assist shooters in stabilizing a handgun while shooting with a single hand—the device is not considered a shoulder stock and therefore may be attached to a handgun without making a NFA firearm. However, ATF has received numerous inquiries regarding alternate uses for this device, including use as a shoulder stock. Because the NFA defines both rifle and shotgun to include any “weapon designed or redesigned, made or remade, and intended to be fired from the shoulder,” any person who redesigns a stabilizing brace for use as a shoulder stock makes a NFA firearm when attached to a pistol with a rifled barrel under 16 inches in length or a handgun with a smooth bore under 18 inches in length.
The GCA does not define the term “redesign” and therefore ATF applies the common meaning. “Redesign” is defined as “to alter the appearance or function of.” See e.g. Webster’s II New College Dictionary, Third Ed. (2005). This is not a novel interpretation. For example ATF has previously advised that an individual possesses a destructive device when possessing anti-personnel ammunition with an otherwise unregulated 37/38mm flare launcher. See ATF Ruling 95-3. Further, ATF has advised that even use of an unregulated flare and flare launcher as a weapon results in the making of a NFA weapon. Similarly, ATF has advised that, although otherwise unregulated, the use of certain nail guns as weapons may result in classification as an “any other weapon.”
The pistol stabilizing brace was neither “designed” nor approved to be used as a shoulder stock, and therefore use as a shoulder stock constitutes a “redesign” of the device because a possessor has changed the very function of the item. Any individual letters stating otherwise are contrary to the plain language of the NFA, misapply Federal law, and are hereby revoked.
Any person who intends to use a handgun stabilizing brace as a shoulder stock on a pistol (having a rifled barrel under 16 inches in length or a smooth bore firearm with a barrel under 18 inches in length) must first file an ATF Form 1 and pay the applicable tax because the resulting firearm will be subject to all provisions of the NFA.
If you have any questions about the issues addressed in this letter, you may contact the Firearms and Ammunition Technology Division at [email protected] or by phone at (304) 616-4300.
Max M. Kingery
Acting Chief
Firearms Technology Criminal Branch
Firearms and Ammunition Technology DivisionIn my summer role as 3D Printing Intern at Colgate University, I've been researching the Maker* movement, the (New) Liberal Arts, and their intersections. Some thoughts follow:
*Unpacking Language
As I've quickly come to realize, the language of the Maker movement can be tricky. First off, we have'maker' and'makerspace'. Just what, exactly, do these terms mean? And therein lies the problem; they simultaneously mean too much and practically nothing.
There are too many different communities loosely clustered together to properly capture in a single word. Making activities can apply to every field, discipline, hobby, or inclination. Yes, we're all makers. And just that fast, the term becomes meaningless. Worse, many perceive maker identity as being pretty strongly classed, gendered, and raced.
'Makerspace' is even trickier since it is used to describe organizations (ranging from companies and startup incubators to skill-sharing communities or social clubs) and places (from garage workbenches and industrial-grade workshops to mobile 3D printshop or community science laboratory). And now that'maker' anything is in vogue, outside interests are slapping the label on everything even vaguely nerdy, techy, artisnal, crafty, or DIYish.
'Makerspace','maker' - these terms aren't worth the etymological hassle. 'Makerspace' describes something that typically isn't defined defined by the space. But, an entire constellation of identities and communities coexist, collaborate, and cross-pollinate.
I hereby announce my upcoming retirement from using these terms. I already can't expect much using them when pitching, or explaining, or answering about 'Maker' stuff. It's time to pick a different set of terms that actually communicate what they describe. Hopefully a set that is perceived as less excluding.
A Different Set of Terms
If I'm going to ask for help in identifying this different set of terms, I should probably explain what I view as the major common themes in the cluster of groups known as the Maker movement.
I think any maker common core is a set of shared values that stem from a set of shared character traits. Openness, collaboration, authenticity, civic activity, empowerment, generosity, technical and material literacy, proficiency; these are the kinds things that makers value. We can trace all of these, and more, back to a smaller set of shared character traits: curiosity, a tendency towards passion, and drive.
Recipe for a _______ (maker)
Curiosity : "Curiosity is the antidote to orthodoxy." (Dr. Max Rayneard, co-creator of The Telling Project)
: "Curiosity is the antidote to orthodoxy." (Dr. Max Rayneard, co-creator of The Telling Project) Tendency towards Passion : I don't have a fancy quote for this, but passion is the feedback loop for both curiosity and drive. Passion is informed by and helps steer curiosity. Passion fuels drive during the long sprints, drive keeps us going when passion falters.
: I don't have a fancy quote for this, but passion is the feedback loop for both curiosity and drive. Passion is informed by and helps steer curiosity. Passion fuels drive during the long sprints, drive keeps us going when passion falters. Drive: "We shall teach each other: first, because we have a vast amount of experience behind us, and secondly, in my opinion it is only through free criticism of each other's ideas can be thrashed about... During your course here no one is going to compel you to work, for the simple reason that a [person] who requires to be driven is not worth the driving... thus you will become your own students and until you learn how to teach yourselves, you will never be taught by others." (JFC Fuller, by way of LTC Smith, US Army. Page 2 of this PDF)
The neat thing is, participating in the process of making builds those very traits - it's a virtuous cycle.
If you think about these things, please help me improve the quality of my thinking. Ideas or suggestions for new terminology, other cases of fraught language, insight into issues of identity - I welcome it all!Two male co-hosts of Fox News’ “The Five” cracked sexist jokes Wednesday about the United Arab Emirates’ first female fighter pilot.
Kimberly Guilfoyle took a moment to salute Major Mariam Al Mansouri, who reportedly led her country’s airstrikes Monday against the Islamic State. Guilfoyle noted how rich it was that an Arab woman was leading the charge against the militant group, given that women aren’t even allowed to drive in some countries in the region.
“The problem is after she bombed it she couldn’t park it,” co-host Greg Gutfield quipped. “I salute her.”
“Would that be considered boobs on the ground or no?” Eric Bolling chimed in.
Guilfoyle wasn’t happy with that turn in the conversation.
“Oh my gosh, why did they ruin my thing?” she said as she hung her head.
Watch below:
h/t MediaiteExpanding our collection of free tape processed drum machine samples, I am proud to announce the release of the Cassette 909 drum sample library. Based on an extensive set of clean 909 drum machine recordings created by Edgar Maguyon, this free sample pack adds a touch of that lo-fi audio cassette crunch to the iconic 909 drum sound.
A while ago, Edgar Maguyon (aka Edgar M) has released an epic collection of 909 drum machine recordings. His goal was to capture all the possible settings of the 909, resulting in over 8,000 individual drum hits in digital format. It is perhaps the most versatile collection of 909 sounds out there, and you can purchase the entire pack in Edgar Maguyon’s online shop.
In agreement with Edgar, I took these long 909 recordings and trimmed them down to individual one-shots. The best drum hits were then recorded to a CrO2 cassette tape using my trusty cassette deck pictured below. I recorded the samples to a cassette at two different gain settings, in order to get two different cassette saturation flavors for this kit.
Finally, the samples were re-sampled back to the DAW and trimmed down to individual hits. The result is a collection of 155 carefully edited one-shot samples of the 909 drum machine, with 71 clean samples and 84 tape processed hits (these are organized into two separate folders, according to the gain setting).
The cassette samples are available in two flavors. The Cassette 1 folder contains slightly distorted samples, while the Cassette 2 folder contains fully distorted drum shots which have been recorded to an audio cassette at full gain. The third folder labeled Clean contains the original clean sounds of the 909 drum machine.
If you’re interested in collaborating on a project similar to this one, get in touch! If happen to you use these drum samples in a tune, please feel free to post the SoundCloud link in the comments section below and I will include your track in the article.
Also, if you happen to create the mappings for Cassette 909 in your favorite sampler, feel free to send them over and I will include them in the download pack (you will be credited, of course).
UPDATE: Frederik Krautwald (check out his SoundCloud page) has kindly provided a custom Reason ReFill featuring the Cassette 909 sounds. You’ll find it in the downloads section below.
A special thank you goes to Edgar Maguyon (aka Edgar M) for providing the source material for this sample pack!
Contents
The Cassette 909 download pack contains:
155 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format
71 clean 909 drum samples
84 tape processed 909 drum samples
Demo track (320 kbps MP3)
License
The samples contained in this sample pack are free to use in both free and commercial audio projects, video projects, etc. Re-distributing any part of this drum sample library or claiming the included recordings as your own is strictly prohibited.
Want More 909?
You can purchase the original 909 drum sample pack recorded by Edgar M in his online shop. The free samples which you can download below are a small portion of tape-processed versions of his original 909 samples.
Download
It would really rock if you helped BPB spread the word about this free sample pack by sharing the link on one of the social network listed below! This step is completely optional and you can skip it by clicking the close button.
Download Cassette 909 (8.9 MB download size, ZIP archive, 156 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format) *** Download Reason ReFill (5.9 MB)
Enjoy your free 909 samples and thanks for reading BPB!
DISCLAIMER: This sample pack is in no way affiliated or endorsed by the Roland Corporation.KFC is testing Nashville hot chicken. (Photo: KFC)
Nashville hot chicken fans, get ready: You’ll soon be able to get the spicy stuff at a KFC near you.
KFC is testing the chicken, a regional delicacy known for being hot, smoky, and a little bit sweet, in 32 restaurants in the Pittsburgh area this week and has plans to roll out the product nationwide “very soon,” according to executives.
The company exclusively shared the new product with Yahoo Food and YouTube food personality Daym Drops Friday. Executives think the limited-time product has big potential because it’s spicy, difficult to find outside of Nashville, and nearly impossible to make at home.
MORE: Where to Get the Best Fried Chicken in America
“It can take four and half hours to prep,” said Kevin Hochman, the chief marketing officer for KFC, referring to a recipe published in Bon Appétit last summer. “And when you do find a restaurant that serves it, it can be pretty pricy.”
Unlike the chain’s Original Recipe chicken, which is pressure fried, the Nashville Hot Chicken is cooked in an open fryer so it develops a crispier skin. The chain that keeps the secrets to the “11 herbs and spices” under a double-vaulted safe also doesn’t share too many details about what goes in the Nashville recipe, other than cayenne pepper and smoked paprika. It’s served topped with slices of dill pickle.
MORE: Taco Bell Launches Certified Vegetarian Menu
So what can you expect?
It’s not so hot that it’s a novelty product or a challenge for diners to complete. But the heat does build and have a kick — you’ll need to take a break after a few bites to eat a bite of a biscuit or a spoonful of coleslaw. After you’re done, your lips will tingle for a few minutes. It’s also not going to be confused with health food — after eating, your fingers will glisten with a sheen of red oil.
“There is more flavor than just spice,” said KFC head chef Bob Das. “We’ve done a lot of research on the chicken, and it’s amazing the cult following this product has.”
MORE: Rejoice! Chipotle Carnitas Are Back
The chicken is available in both tenders and on-the-bone varieties. It starts at $5.49 for a one-piece breast basket with coleslaw and a biscuit. The chicken will be available in the Pittsburgh area for the next eight weeks for the trial period.
Norm McDonald, the latest actor to take on the mantle of Colonel Sanders, has even recorded a commercial for the product that’s currently airing in the Pittsburgh area.
MORE: Burger King’s Halloween Whopper Is Legit ScaryOver the last two weeks, I’ve written a series of posts about affirmative action initiated by the fight over SCA5, a bill that would have amended the California constitution to repeal Prop 209 for public education and restore narrow considerations of race to the college admissions process as part of holistic review of qualified applicants. SCA5 was withdrawn after backlash from Asian American voters, but the fight over the morality of race-based affirmative action rages on — particularly in the comments section of my posts, where I’ve been privileged to host several forums to encourage further discussion on this subject.
One significant point of contention is the use of race vs. class in affirmative action. Whereas some SCA5 opponents have lobbed radically non-factual charges against race-based affirmative action, others are more moderate in their counter arguments; they assert that whereas use of race-based information is discriminatory, class-based affirmative action is a reasonable alternative.
And, indeed, the fight over race vs. class-based affirmative action has persisted in liberal circles for years; most recently, support of class-based affirmative action was cited as part of Tanner Colby’s diatribe against race-based affirmative action in Slate.
The focus on class-based affirmative action is appealing to some liberals precisely because it rejects the unseemly conversations of race that can force a conversation on White privilege. Instead, it blames minority underachievement on classism, not racism, and leaves liberals comfortably in support of increased state spending on social services. Tacitly, they argue, if poor minorities can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps after we address the impacts of their poverty, their failures must then be their fault. In short, arguments in support of class-based affirmative action is viewed as a panacea for social iniquity, with a concurrent, explicit denial of any further impact of institutional racism on underrepresented minority students.
Ironically, the UC system under Prop 209 provides the perfect counter-argument to these charges. California’s public education system, with its late-90’s rejection of race-based admissions, provide the ideal demonstration of the inadequacies of purportedly “colour-blind” admissions policies that engage in class-based affirmative action in the absence of racial consideration.
Or, as Scot Nakagawa points out, post-Prop 209 college admissions in the UC system demonstrate that “in a racially inequitable society, color blind solutions end up reflecting that inequitable context and often even contributes to its perpetuation.”
The logic is actually fairly straightforward. If, as class-based affirmative action supporters argue, the sole cause for academic underachievement in minority communities is based on disparities in income level, then “color-blind” class-based affirmative action should alone be sufficient to adjust for these disparities, resulting in similar admission rates between URM and non-URM applicant groups after holistic review even in the absence of racial consideration.
Yet, as I published last week, the effect of eliminating race-based affirmative action resulted in an immediate drop in admission rates for Black, Chicano and Native American students between 1997 and 1998.
The immediate drop in admission rate for URM students under “colour-blind” class-based affirmative action is striking, and can only be explained by two general possibilities:
The model of minority pathology: In a model where a significantly higher fraction of URM applicants are deficient or underqualified in some way outside of the effects of class, we would expect URM students to have lower admission rates than Whites or Asians. Perhaps it is a cultural focus on academics, the argument goes, or the increased work ethic of Asian kids; either way, the argument boils down to this: class-based affirmative action approaches an objective meritocracy, and a higher fraction of URM kids just don’t cut it because there’s something inadequate about them. We’ll call this theory the “Triple Package” Model.
In a model where a significantly higher fraction of URM applicants are deficient or underqualified in some way, we would expect URM students to have lower admission rates than Whites or Asians. Perhaps it is a cultural focus on academics, the argument goes, or the increased work ethic of Asian kids; either way, the argument boils down to this: class-based affirmative action approaches an objective meritocracy, and a higher fraction of URM kids just don’t cut it because there’s something inadequate about them. We’ll call this theory the “Triple Package” Model. Class-based affirmative action cannot alone adjust for the disparities associated with race and racism: In this model, URM students are culturally and biologically as intellectually capable as their non-URM counterparts, but academically disadvantaged by the (inextricably entangled) effects of both class and race. Thus, class-based affirmative action practiced in the absence of racial consideration is an imperfect adjustment that fails to consider the full (and typically overlapping) impacts of both class and race on a minority kid’s college portfolio. Consequently, the absence of racial consideration impacts URM kids even when disparities in socioeconomic status (SES) are adjusted for.
The “Triple Package” Model appears distasteful to consider, yet this is the core assertion — if unadorned by euphemism — of those who would have us focus on the Asian American exceptional work ethic contrasted against the uncommitted nature of their Black peers. To challenge this conclusion, we must ask ourselves if the science reveals any obvious cultural or racial gaps in educational commitment or work ethic between minority and non-minority students, that persist beyond the effects of class.
As it turns out, the myth of minority pathology has been repeatedly demonstrated as just that: a myth. In fact, there is very little evidence to support any sort of racial or cultural rejection of academic pursuits among minority students. In this 1998 study by Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, investigators found that Black students expressed equal or greater commitment to educational pursuits compared to both White and Asian American peers. In this 2007 article by Charles et al, the gap in parental investment between Black and White families is entirely attributable to disparities in parental income and education; the authors note that according to their data, parental investment would be equal across the races if all families had equal access to equal resources. They write:
With the exception of immigrant Hispanics, gaps in cultural capital [Jenn’s note: extracurricular activities that promote learning; e.g. museum visits] are completely accounted for when background disparities are controlled. Nearly half of the gaps in school parental involvement and household educational items are explained for African-Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics, and disparities in the likelihood of saving for college early either disappear or actually reverse direction — suggesting that, given equal resources, there is no difference for most groups. Black parents are actually more likely to invest early in the future education of their children relative to white parents.
It is also worth noting that in this same study, the authors conclude that the “high achievement” of children of Asian American families can — in the aggregate — be almost entirely accounted for through the combination of 1) our high median family income, and 2) the opportunities afforded by having parents with significantly higher parental education levels relative to other racial groups; both situations are most predominantly found among first-generation Chinese American and South Asian American immigrant families. And, not coincidentally, these are the two ethnic Asian American groups who are demographically “overrepresented” on UC college campuses.
The story for Asian American students is distinct, and thus worth noting. The Asian advantage in parental expectations, cultural capital, and saving money for college relative to whites is partially or entirely explained by background attributes and, most likely, the higher educational training of Asian parents.
Sadly, as with most studies, the data are not disaggregated to consider Southeast Asian or Pacific Islander families, where parental education is not typically high given low overall secondary education rates. Either way, the point here is that Asian American achievement is not a straightforward result of Asian American cultural or racial exceptionalism; instead it arises as a combination of Asian American discipline and opportunity. Thus, these data would assert the achievement gap between Asian Americans and non-Asian minorities is due primarily to absence of the latter — the resources associated with economic and educational opportunity — and not a cultural absence of the former.
And just this week, the Monthly Labor Review published a research article by Luo and Holden that challenged the notion that African American families are less culturally invested in secondary education for their children: upon controlling for SES, there was no notable difference in either college enrollment or degree of educational expenditures between Black, Latino, Asian or White families.
Given these data (and many more supporting studies), it becomes clear that minority students are not pathologically unqualified students who simply prefer to focus their attention in non-academic pursuits. Given a level playing field, the science tells us that minority students can and will achieve.
Yet, despite their clear racial and cultural commitment to education, minority students are still admitted to the UC system under class-based affirmative action at lower rates than their White and Asian peers. What explains this admissions gap?
Well, quite simply: class-based affirmative action alone does not adjust the playing field; something else is at play — racism. According to our second model, we should be able to identify examples where race and racism impact educational success even when class disparities are neutralized. And, while such situations are far harder to quantify, there are indeed some studies that have pointed to just such impacts of race and racism. I have cited an anecdotal example of a school district in Virginia that constituted of three separate high schools — one predominantly White, one predominantly Black, and one mixed — covering several single- or mixed-race neighbourhoods. Despite being funded by a common pool of state and local taxpayer money, investments in academic and |
found competent, a preliminary hearing will be held to determine if there is probable cause to bind the case over to 4th District Court. If he is found incompetent, he will remain at the Utah State Hospital until he becomes competent.
Judy, a resident of Bakersfield, Calif., told the Deseret News he came to Salt Lake City three weeks ago to take over the LDS Church and bring its members to repentance.
"The members of the LDS Church are under condemnation because they have the most truth and are not living it," Judy said.
Judy said his motive Sunday night was to have Howard W. Hunter, president of the Council of the Twelve of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, read a three-page letter that released the Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency of the church and confirmed Judy as president of the church.
"I have seen the resurrected Joseph Smith, Jesus Christ and ancient apostles. They have told me this is what I have to do," Judy said.
Judy was apprehended Sunday after he held what he said was a bomb detonator next to President Hunter's head and threatened to blow up an audience of 17,000 at BYU's Marriott Center.
"I had no ill intent. The only dynamite I had was the scriptures. The so-called detonator was only a toy. I had my arm around President Hunter telling him everything would be OK," Judy said.
Police found books in the briefcase Judy said was dynamite.
Judy said his "visions and visitations" began after his wife left him two years ago. He said he hasn't seen his three children in almost two years.
Judy said the frightened audience at BYU should not have been afraid.
"If they would have faith they would not have feared, it was a warning to the saints for their own good," Judy said.
But Ron Rodda, President Hunter's niece's husband, who was on the stand with the general authority and who grabbed the letter and put it in his pocket, said it instructed President Hunter in effect to "not goof this up or there will be a lot of people killed." He did not quote directly from the note because, he said, it contained many profanities.
When the audience started singing the LDS hymn, "We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet," Judy thought they were singing to him.We don't know much about the US Air Force's X-37B uncrewed space plane. Although it resembles the space shuttle, it's much smaller (at about 30 feet in length), and it has a cargo bay that could hold something about the size of a standard refrigerator. It seems to fly in a relatively low orbit below the International Space Station. Oh—and it can fly in space for a long, long time before it needs to return to Earth.
Since 2010, two identical space planes have completed three missions of increasing lengths: 224 days, 468 days, and 674 days. One of the planes most recently launched on May 20, 2015, and there are signs that this space plane might finally be coming home soon, perhaps even on Tuesday. According to NASASpaceFlight.com, the X-37B may land in Florida on Tuesday after 636 days in space. Notably, it would land at Kennedy Space Center's historic Shuttle Landing Facility for the first time.
However, Spaceflight Now reports that the orbital maneuvers interpreted as preparation for landing may have just been an exercise. “The X-37 is still on-orbit. The program is conducting a regularly scheduled exercise this week,” Capt. Annmarie Annicelli, media operations officer at the Pentagon’s Air Force Press Desk, told the publication on Tuesday.
So what has the X-37B been doing up in space? The military isn't saying, but about a year ago Air & Space spoke with a number of space plane experts to get a sense of what the Air Force might be up to. According to the magazine, the vehicle is likely testing autonomous systems for navigation and other functions, including landing. Additionally, most of the experts believe the Air Force is interested in using the vehicle as an on-orbit test bed for developing advanced surveillance sensors, as the military looks to transition from massive, expensive, and vulnerable observation satellites to smaller, cheaper, but just-as-capable reconnaissance satellites.
The experts also speculated that the Air Force might be testing technologies that could be incorporated into a human-rated version of the vehicle that could carry a flight crew. Among the applications contemplated for the X-37B would be the recovery of satellites for repair on Earth.Privacy advocates worried about x-ray scanners making their way around U.S. airports may be surprised to know the technology is also making its way onto America's streets.
The Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. military and even local law enforcement agencies are buying and deploying mobile X-ray vans that can see into the interior of vehicles around them.
The Z Backscatter Van (ZBV), manufactured by American Science and Engineering (AS&E), can be used to detect contraband such as car bombs, drugs and people in hiding.
But the vans, which can also see through clothing and into some buildings, are raising privacy concerns as well as questions about health risks -- and what might happen if the technology gets into the wrong hands.
FoxNews.com was given a rare ride-along in a ZBV at a U.S. seaport in Elizabeth, N.J.
Click here to see FoxNews.com's video report on the ZBV.
Like airport scanners, the ZBVs use Z Backscatter technology to detect materials that contain low atomic numbers. This allows them to detect organic matter that doesn't show up well in traditional X-ray images -- including explosives and plastic weapons – in addition to metal and other materials.
The technology also works in such a way that the X-Ray mechanism has no need for a detector on the far side of an object, allowing it to be extremely mobile, versatile and capable of being into a commercially available van.
Once equipped, the van -- which looks like a standard delivery van -- takes less than 15 seconds to scan a vehicle; it can be operated remotely from more than 1,500 feet and can be equipped with optional technology to identify radioactivity as well.
The Z Backscatter vans range in cost from $729,000 to $825,000. The DHS says they have been a huge asset at the nation's ports and borders, and at major crowd events like the Super bowl.
"Using the ZBV vans over the past couple of years, we've gotten over a thousand seizures and 89,000 pounds worth of narcotics, approximately $4 million worth of currency, and we've also uncovered 10 or 11 undeclared aliens within vehicles," said Patrick Simmons, Director of Non-Intrusive Inspection at Customs and Border Protection. "Again, we don't purposely scan for people, but if they're in there hiding, the ZBV will be able to spot them."
But according to the AS&E website, ZBVs also can peer through clothing and into "lightly constructed" buildings, raising serious concerns among privacy advocates.
"A van that can drive down the street and look through people's clothes, look into vehicles and even peer into your home? I think that's an invasion of privacy and not what we should be doing," Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz told FoxNews.com.
AS&E says the system's primary purpose is to screen vehicles and containers for contraband and security threats, and it doesn't violate a person's privacy in the rare event an individual is scanned.
"If a person, such as an illegal stowaway, is present in the vehicle or container being scanned, the system creates only a silhouette with no facial or body detail," the website says. "The system cannot be used to identify an individual, or the race or age of the person."
But Chaffetz, who is working on legislation aimed at limiting the use of the backscatter body scanners in airports, says the vans need restrictions.
"There's an appropriate use for these machines -- at ports for instance, coming across the border and inspecting vehicles, hostage situations. But the company that develops these vans says they've sold more than 500 of these roving vans and I don't know who's purchased them," he said. "I think we need to know."
But it's hard to know exactly who owns ZBVs, because AS&E has never fully disclosed its buyers.
"Due to the highly sensitive nature of the markets that our products serve, AS&E respects the individual requests of our customers to be confidential," the company says on its website.
In a June 2009 press release the company said it sold 400 ZBVs to 85 customers in 46 countries. The company has since raised that number to 500, saying some of those purchases are now going to local U.S. law enforcement agencies.
A search of the site and additional company press releases showed that its clients include:
- U.S. Customs and Border Protection
- U.S. Transportation Security Administration
- U.S. Domestic Nuclear Detection Office
- U.S. Department of Defense, including U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Marines
- North Atlantic Treaty Organization
- Royal Thai Police
- HM Customs & Excise (U.K.)
- New Zealand Customs Service
- Hong Kong Customs
- Singapore's Immigration and Checkpoints Authority
- National Customs Agency of Bulgaria
Other releases are more vague, however, identifying the purchasers only as "the U.S government," a "Latin American customs agency," an "international government agency," "U.S. law enforcement officials," a "South American government," a "Middle Eastern country," a "Middle Eastern government," a "Middle East government agency," a "Middle East law enforcement agency," a "South American law enforcement agency," a "new African customer," a "European Union (EU) and an Asia Pacific (APAC) client," and a "Middle Eastern customer."
That ambiguity has Chaffetz worried.
"In a hostage situation you want to be able to peer into the house, I buy that," Chaffetz said. "But in the hands of a private individual? That scares the living daylights out of me.
"It was cute when Superman had these powers, but now that it's reality we need to think through how we're going to do this. I don't want a stranger peering through the walls of my home watching my kids."
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the ACLU, says knowing the vans are being used on the streets, even by local law enforcement agencies, is troublesome.
"We don't know who all those agencies are or what they're using them for," he said. "…This technology has the potential to be a tremendous invasion of people's privacy."
FoxNews.com asked police departments in the Department of Homeland Security's five highest-ranked terror risk areas -- New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Chicago -- if they use ZBVs. The New York Police Department confirmed it does but wouldn't say how.
"Yes, we do utilize this technology; however, we're unable to divulge any specifics of the use due to confidentiality concerns," Det. Cheryl Crispin of the NYPD told FoxNews.com.
San Francisco PD said they do not use the vans. The other departments did not respond.
Constitution Attorney Noel Francisco says most, if not all, state privacy laws would prohibit individuals or private companies from abusing the vans, while the Fourth Amendment prohibits law enforcement agencies from doing the same.
"If you take this thing and point it at somebody's house or point it at somebody's car, you're engaging in a search of that individual," Francisco said. "You can't do that without a warrant or probable cause."
But since it's virtually impossible to detect a ZBV search, Francisco said the law would be harder to enforce, raising the need for more guidelines.
"It's certainly very useful for certain types of things, like anti-terror detection, but we may want to put into place some kind of guidelines on where and when they can use that. Much like wiretapping," he said.
Another issue with the machines is their potential health hazards.
"So long as a person is somewhere away, like tens of feet, the dose isn't that high, it's very, very low indeed," Arizona State University Professor Peter Rez, an expert in radiation physics, told FoxNews.com. But if a person were to walk next to the van while it was scanning, Rez said, "Then I would start getting worried."
AS&E says the system is safe for operators and subjects, and that "one scan of the ZBV is equivalent to flying in an airplane at altitude for two minutes."
Rez says the levels would be fine in most cases, but in certain circumstances they could pose a small risk.
"Let's assume a pregnant woman pushing a stroller slowly walks by this van and is quite close to the side of the van, maybe within one to two feet. This woman and her baby could receive a few micro Sv, still not a high number but more than the NS 43.17 standard allows," he told FoxNews.com.
Kevin McCabe, Chief of U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Antiterrorism Contraband Enforcement Team, says DHS takes all the proper precautions when it comes to safety.
"When we utilize these machines we actually have people deployed around our perimeter to ensure that no one is radiated inadvertently… and my general understanding is even if you were exposed to a dosage from one of these machines, it would be equivalent to a chest x-ray or less," McCabe told FoxNews.com.
Simmons adds that given the limited image the ZBVs show of a person, the only reason to scan someone would be to detect contraband, and given the limited image it would show of a home, there's little use for them outside their intended security purposes.
"You'd have to be inches away from the house, you'd be better off just looking into the window," Simmons said. "And, again, a house has a pretty thick foundation. If it was brick or something like that I'm not sure the ZBV's even powerful enough to get through that."
Rez says one of his students reported using a ZBV at the U.N. while he was serving in the military.
"It was a secondary screening mechanism for trucks going into a loading dock, but it was on a public street and they were just scanning people and nobody was being told this was going on," Rez told FoxNews.com. "That kind of shocked me. …I think they're being used in a more widespread manner than people would have one believe."
Regardless of whether regulations are passed in relation to the vans, McCabe says the benefits far outweigh the risks.
"If local law enforcement had intelligence information that something was going to happen, there was going to be some sort of an attack and they have identified an area… it would be very useful to know where a problem might be before it happens," he said.IS militants recapture oil refinery town of Iraq's Baiji
A militant group of the Islamic State (IS) recaptured the oil refinery town of Baiji which has been freed recently by the Iraqi security forces, a source from the northern central province of Salahudin said on Sunday.
On late Saturday afternoon, dozens of IS militants carried out a massive attacks on several points of the main road that bisected the town of Baiji, some 200 km north of Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and seized government and security compounds, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The extremist
militants also surrounded the oil refinery in north of the town, where some of the withdrawing troops and their allied Shiite and Sunni tribal militiamen resorted after the attacks, while other forces and militiamen withdrew to the villages of al-Mazraa and al-Malha in south, the source said.
On Sunday morning, the IS militants fired dozens of mortar rounds on the oil refinery and started to fortify their positions in the town and booby trapped many buildings in center of the town, the source added.
According to the source, at least three army brigades, including an armored one, arrived on Saturday night to an air base on Saturday, 30 km south of Baiji, apparently preparing for a counter attack in the coming hours or days.
The provincial Governor Raed al-Jubouri issued a statement urging Baghdad government to "immediately intervene to save Baiji and the forces who are in an unenviable situation because the weapons and equipment of the militant are more sophisticated than the troops."
Iraqi security forces fought a series of battles about three weeks ago, freeing the town of Baiji and breaking the siege of the adjacent oil refinery after driving out the IS militants, but sporadic skirmishes occurred later on.
Salahudin, a predominantly Sunni province with its capital of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, is the hometown of former President Saddam Hussein. The seizure of Salahudin province was part of the June 10 drastic security deterioration in the country, when bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and Sunni militants who took control of the country's northern city of Mosul and the later swathes of territories in Nineveh and other predominantly Sunni provinces.WASHINGTON -- Americans were outraged to learn they were being spied on by the National Security Agency, but many support law enforcement profiling of Muslims, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Arab American Institute.
The survey, conducted by Zogby Analytics for the advocacy group, found that 42 percent of Americans believe law enforcement is justified in using profiling tactics against Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans. The survey also shows American attitudes toward Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans have turned for the worse since the Arab American Institute first began polling on the subject in 2010. The new poll found favorability toward Arab-Americans at 36 percent, down from 43 percent in 2010. For Muslim-Americans, favorability was just 27 percent, compared with 36 percent in 2010.
Recent news headlines associated with Muslims have focused on the ongoing civil war in Syria; the rise of ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, in Iraq; the abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls by the Islamist group Boko Haram; and the 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
"The way forward is clear," the pollsters wrote in the survey's executive summary. "Education about and greater exposure to Arab Americans and American Muslims are the keys both to greater understanding of these growing communities of American citizens and to ensuring that their rights are secured."
The poll found a growing number of Americans doubt that Muslim-Americans or Arab-Americans would be able to perform in a government post without their ethnicity or religion affecting their work. Thirty-six percent of respondents felt that Arab-Americans would be influenced by their ethnicity, and 42 percent said Muslim-Americans would be influenced by religion.
Results differed by political party, with the majority of Republicans holding negative views of both Arab-Americans and Muslims. Democrats gave Arab-Americans a 30 percent unfavorable rating and Muslim-Americans a 33 percent unfavorable rating, while Republicans gave Arab-Americans a 54 percent unfavorable rating and Muslim-Americans a 63 percent unfavorable rating.
Similarly, Republicans were more likely to think that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans unable to hold a role in government without being influenced by ethnicity or religion. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans said they believed Muslim-Americans would be influenced by their religion, while half said the same for Arab-Americans. Almost half of Democrats said they were confident Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans could do their jobs without influence.
The survey also showed a generational gap in attitudes toward Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans, with younger respondents showing more favorability toward both groups. Part of that, according to the pollsters, has to do with exposure -- those ages 18 to 29 were likely to know Arab-Americans or Muslim-Americans, while respondents older than 65 were almost evenly split on that question.
Previous polls also have shown Americans holding a cold view of Muslims. A Pew poll this month found that Muslims were perceived as negatively as atheists.
The Arab American Institute survey was conducted online among 1,110 likely U.S. voters from June 27 to June 29, a period of unrest in the Muslim world.There are few more buttoned-down owners in the NFL than Stan Kroenke, and most of our sources are having a very hard time getting any real sense of what the futures of head coach Jeff Fisher and general manager Les Snead will be.
But what little we are hearing is that Fisher will most likely be out at the end of the season.
How bad has it gotten under Fisher?
This marks the fourth straight season under Fisher in which the Rams are 4-6. Fisher’s Hard Knocks proclamation that any more "7-9 Bullsh*t" won’t cut it seems safe. With games remaining at New Orleans, New England and Seattle, and home games with Atlanta, San Francisco and Arizona, The Rams, we think, will be hard-pressed to find more than two more wins on the schedule.
And it gets much worse than that.
Fisher’s all-time 173-162-1 record ties him with Tom Landry for the second-most losses in NFL head-coaches’ history, but Landry has 250 wins and six ties.
Fisher needs just four more losses to break Dan Reeves' all-time record of 165 losses, and Reeves has 190 wins.
Of the 20 least winning coaches in NFL history, only Weeb Ewbank and Norv Turner have lower winning percentages, and Ewbank has 33 fewer losses and Turner has 40 less.
Fisher’s limitations are obvious: he’s a Buddy Ryan disciple who is a very good defensive coach but who doesn’t appear to have a clue on offense.
Strangely, Snead seems to suffer the same flaws as his head coach.
Snead’s picks on defense of Aaron Donald, Michael Brockers, Janoris Jenkins, Alec Ogletree, Trumaine Johnson, Aaron Donald and Lamarcus Joyner have been impressive.
Offensive choices including Greg Robinson, Isaiah Pead, Brian Quick, Tavon Austin and Rob Havenstein are not so great.
Todd Gurley looked like a home run last year, but he has disappeared as a sophomore. With Jared Goff it’s too soon to tell. Snead took him because he was allegedly the most ready-to-go of the top QBs, but it took him 11 weeks to get on the field and be every bit as mediocre in his first start as Case Keenum.
Is it a blind spot for Snead, or that Fisher doesn’t know what to do with the offensive picks he’s been given?
Since Fisher was involved in the hiring of Snead, the Rams have a general manager who’s never hired a head coach. Based on the brilliance of the RGIII trade and his defensive picks, it’s possible Fisher goes and Snead gets a chance to stay and pick his own coach.
The conventional wisdom is both will be let go at the end of the year, but here is something we are hearing from very good sources close to Fisher:
Whether it’s part of a campaign to get a contract extension or an actual epiphany, Fisher has decided if he is retained he will bring in a new, veteran offensive coordinator with a free hand to develop Goff and run the offense.
We’re also hearing that this year’s castoffs – Greg Roman, Turner and Greg Olson – could all be candidates, with Turner a heavy favorite right now to get the job.
The question is, do Fisher and/or Snead get the chance to make the move they clearly should have made some time ago?By Andrew Zolli
For decades, people who concern themselves with the world’s “wicked problems”—interconnected issues like environmental degradation, poverty, food security, and climate change—have marched together under the banner of “sustainability”: the idea that with the right mix of incentives, technology substitutions, and social change, humanity might finally achieve a lasting equilibrium with our planet and with each other.
It’s an alluring and moral vision, and following a year that has brought us the single hottest month in recorded American history (July), a midwestern drought that plunged more than half the country into a state of emergency, a heat wave across the eastern part of the country powerful enough to melt the tarmac below jetliners in Washington, and, most recently, the ravages of Hurricane Sandy, it would seem a pressing one, too.
Yet today, precisely because the world is so increasingly out of balance, the sustainability regime is being quietly challenged, not from without but from within. Among a growing number of scientists, social innovators, community leaders, NGOs, philanthropies, governments, and corporations, a new, complementary dialogue is emerging around a new idea—resilience: how to help vulnerable people, organizations, and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions. Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage an imbalanced world.
It’s a broad-spectrum agenda which at one end seeks to imbue our communities, institutions, and infrastructure with greater flexibility, intelligence, and responsiveness to extreme events, and at the other centers on bolstering people’s psychological and physiological capacity to deal with high-stress circumstances.
For example, “resilience thinking” is starting to shape how urban planners in big cities think about updating antiquated infrastructure, much of which is robust in the face of normal threats like equipment failures but—as was just demonstrated in the New York region—fragile in the face of unanticipated shocks like flooding, pandemics, terrorism, or energy shortages.
Combating those kinds of disruptions isn’t just about building higher walls—it’s about accommodating the waves. For extreme weather events, that means developing the kinds of infrastructure more commonly associated with the Army: temporary bridges that can be “inflated” or repositioned across rivers when tunnels flood, for example, or wireless “mesh” networks and electrical microgrids that can compensate for exploding transformers.
We’ll also need to use nature itself as a form of “soft” infrastructure. Along the Gulf Coast, civic leaders have begun to take seriously the restoration of the wetlands that serve as a vital buffer against hurricanes. A future New York may be ringed with them, too, as it was centuries ago.
Hurricane Sandy hit New York hardest right where it was most recently redeveloped: Lower Manhattan, which should have been the least vulnerable part of the island. But it was rebuilt to be “sustainable,” not resilient, noted Jonathan Rose, an urban planner and developer.
“After 9/11, Lower Manhattan contained the largest collection of LEED-certified, green buildings in the world,” he said, referring to a common standards program for ecofriendly design. “But that was answering only part of the problem. The buildings were designed to generate lower environmental impacts, but not to respond to the impacts of the environment”—for example, by having redundant power systems. In an age of volatility, the extremophilic trumps the ecoperfect.
In a reversal of our stereotypes about the flow of innovation, many of the most important resilience tools will come to us from developing countries, which have long had to contend with large disruptions and limited budgets.
In Kenya, Kilimo Salama, a microinsurance program for agriculture, uses wireless weather sensors to help small farmers protect themselves financially against climate volatility. In India, Husk Power Systems converts agricultural waste into locally generated electricity for off-grid villages. And around the world, a service called Ushahidi empowers communities worldwide to “crowdsource” information during a crisis, using their mobile phones.
None of these is a permanent solution, and none roots out the underlying problems they address. But each helps a vulnerable community contend with the shocks that, especially at the margins of a society, can be devastating. In lieu of master plans, these approaches offer a diverse array of tools and platforms that enable greater self-reliance, cooperation, and creativity before, during, and after a crisis.
Yet as wise as this all may sound, a shift from sustainability to resilience leaves many old-school environmentalists and social activists feeling uneasy, as it smacks of adaptation, a word that is still taboo in many quarters. If we adapt to unwanted change, the reasoning goes, we give a pass to those responsible for putting us in this mess in the first place—and we lose the moral authority to pressure them to stop. Better, they argue, to mitigate the risk at the source.
Unfortunately, the sustainability movement’s politics, not to mention its marketing, have led to a popular misunderstanding: that a perfect, stasis-under-glass equilibrium is achievable. But the world doesn’t work that way: it exists in a constant disequilibrium—trying, failing, adapting, learning, and evolving in endless cycles. Indeed, it’s the failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth. That’s why some of the most resilient places are, paradoxically, also the places that regularly experience modest disruptions—they carry the shared memory that things can go wrong.
“Resilience” takes this as a given and is commensurately humble. It doesn’t propose a single, fixed future. It assumes we don’t know exactly how things will unfold, that we’ll be surprised, that we’ll make mistakes along the way. That doesn’t mean there aren’t genuine bad guys and bad ideas at work, or that there aren’t things we should do to mitigate our risks. But we also have to acknowledge that holy war against bogeymen hasn’t worked, and isn’t likely to anytime soon. In its place, we need approaches that are both more pragmatic and more politically inclusive—rolling with the waves, instead of trying to stop the ocean.
A version of this article originally appeared in The New York Times. ©2012 by Andrew Zolli. Reprinted with permission.
Photo ©Cristiana CeppasHappiness -- in your business life and your personal life -- is often a matter of subtraction and not addition. You may not need more of some things; you might simply need less of others.
Like what can happen when you stop doing the following:
1. Blaming.
People make mistakes. Employees don't meet your expectations. Vendors don't deliver on time.
So you blame them for your problems.
But you are also to blame. Maybe you didn't provide enough training. Maybe you didn't build in enough of a buffer. Maybe you asked too much, too soon.
Taking responsibility when things go wrong instead of blaming others isn't masochistic, it's empowering--because then you focus on doing things better or smarter next time.
And when you get better or smarter, you also get happier.
2. Impressing.
No one likes you for your clothes, your car, your possessions, your title, or your accomplishments. Those are all "things."
People may like your things… but that doesn't mean they like you. While superficially they might appear to like you, superficial is also insubstantial, and a relationship that is not based on substance is not a real relationship.
Genuine relationships make you happier. You'll only form genuine relationships when you stop trying to impress and start trying to just be yourself.
3. Clinging.
When you're afraid or insecure you hold on tightly to what you know even if what you know isn't particularly good for you.
An absence of fear or insecurity isn't happiness: It's just an absence of fear or insecurity.
Holding on to what you think you need won't make you happier; letting go so you can reach for and try to earn what you want will.
Even if you don't succeed in earning what you want, the act of trying alone will make you feel better about yourself.
4. Interrupting.
Interrupting isn't just rude. When you interrupt someone, what you're really saying is, "I'm not listening to you so I can understand what you're saying; I'm listening to you so I can decide what I want to say."
Want people to like you? Listen to what they say. Focus on what they say. Ask questions to make sure you understand what they say.
They'll love you for it--and you'll love how that makes you feel.
5. Whining.
Your words have power, especially over you. Whining about your problems makes you feel worse, not better.
If something is wrong, don't waste time complaining. Put that effort into making the situation better. Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually you'll have to do that. So why waste time? Fix it now.
Don't talk about what's wrong. Talk about how you'll make things better, even if that conversation is only with yourself.
And do the same with your friends or colleagues. Don't just be a shoulder they cry on.
Friends don't let friends whine--friends help friends make their lives better.
6. Controlling.
Yeah, you're the boss. Yeah, you're the titan of industry. Yeah, you're the small tail that wags a huge dog.
Still, the only thing you really control is you. If you find yourself trying hard to control other people that means you've decided that your goals, your dreams, or your opinions are more important than theirs.
Plus, control is short term at best because it often requires force, or fear, or authority, or some form of pressure—and none of those let you feel good about yourself.
Find people who want to go where you're going. They'll work harder, have more fun, and create better business and personal relationships.
And all of you will be happier.
7. Criticizing.
Yeah, you're more educated. Yeah, you're more experienced. Yeah, you've been around more blocks and climbed more mountains and slayed more dragons.
That doesn't make you smarter, or better, or more insightful.
That just makes you you: unique, matchless, one of a kind, but in the end, just you.
Just like everyone else--including your employees.
Everyone is different: not better, not worse, just different. Appreciate the differences instead of the shortcomings and you'll see people--and yourself--in a better light.
8. Preaching.
Criticizing has a brother. His name is Preaching. They share the same father: Judging.
The higher you rise and the more you accomplish, the more likely you are to think you know everything--and to tell people everything you think you know.
When you speak with more finality than foundation, people may hear you but they don't listen. Few things are sadder and leave you feeling less happy.
9. Dwelling.
The past is valuable. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of others.
Then let it go.
Easier said than done? It depends on your focus. When something bad happens to you, see it as a chance to learn something you didn't know. When another person makes a mistake, see that as an opportunity to be kind, forgiving, and understanding.
The past is just training; it doesn't define you. Think about what went wrong, but only in terms of how you will make sure that, next time, you and the people around you will know how to make sure it goes right.
10. Fearing.
We're all afraid: of what might or might not happen, of what we can't change, or what we won't be able to do, or how other people might perceive us.
So it's easier to hesitate, to wait for the right moment, to decide we need to think a little longer or do some more research or explore a few more alternatives.
Meanwhile days, weeks, months, and even years pass us by.
And so do our dreams.
Don't let your fears hold you back. Whatever you've been planning, whatever you've imagined, whatever you've dreamed of, get started on it today.
If you want to start a business, take the first step. If you want to change careers, take the first step. If you want to expand or enter a new market or offer new products or services, take the first step.
Put your fears aside and get started. Do something. Do anything.
Otherwise, today is gone. Once tomorrow comes, today is lost forever.
Today is the most precious asset you own--and is the one thing you should truly fear wasting.
If you like this post, please check these out too:
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(a version of this post originally appeared on Inc.com)Former President Jimmy Carter in an op-ed Saturday called for neighbors to help each other recover from the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey.
Carter wrote in a piece published by CNN that after natural disasters like Harvey, he has always been touched by the images of people helping each other after the destruction.
“And yet there are also equally powerful images of regular people -- individuals just like you and me -- who come alongside those who are suffering and offer comfort, support and resources,” Carter wrote. “When the waters rise, so do our better angels. I've seen it again and again. We all have.”
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Carter, who often works with Habitat for Humanity, said that he is also often moved by people helping each other even when a disastrous event hasn’t taken place.
He encouraged Americans to continue to help each other in the wake of Harvey and to commit themselves to being part of the long recovery process.
“There are storms that bring us together and storms that divide us. We have a chance now to choose. Harvey already has reminded us what we're capable of, when we come together,” Carter wrote.
“The recovery ahead will be long. Our neighbors need to know they can count on us. The families affected will need our help and our attention as the work of rebuilding unfolds. If we hold our focus on the important matters at hand, we can use the power of the people to create that world we all know exists -- if we will simply give it life.”OLYMPIA, Wash. – A state lawmaker said Thursday she will be proposing a bill in the new legislative session that would require all school buses to be outfitted with three-point harness seat belts.
“Kids on a school bus on a rollover are equivalent to clothes in a dryer,” said state Rep. Gina McCabe, R-Goldendale, who represents Washington’s 14th Legislative District, which includes all of Klickitat and Skamania counties, most of western Yakima County, and a slice of eastern Clark County.
“I just visually see my child turning and turning, when they could’ve been held safe with a lap shoulder safety belt,” she said.
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McCabe is proposing a multimillion-dollar overhaul for every school bus in our state.
“As a parent I would like them,” said D. Ann Peters, walking outside in Olympia. She said her biggest concern is funding for already cash-strapped school districts. Retrofitting a bus with three-point harness belts could cost upwards of $10,000. For the Olympia School District, that would be a cost of $350,000, and there are more than 200 school districts in the state.
“I wouldn’t run the bill if I didn’t have a solution for that,” said McCabe.
She said the solution can be found when talking to bus drivers about their number one complaint -- stop-paddle violations, where drivers pass stopped school buses despite the stop paddles being out.
“In May this last year, 2016, there were over 1,500 violations in one day,” said McCabe. At $430 dollars a ticket, that’s more than $600,000 a day that McCabe said could be used to pay for seat belts.
“And those are the |
that pride, saying, 'We support your view of the world,'" Rozman said.
The all-smiles display at the Moscow meetings ignored the ups and downs of Sino-Russian ties over the last four centuries. A documentary, "Russia and China: The Heart of Eurasia," that aired on state-run television Friday night suggested that any historical animosity between the two powers was largely behind them.
Among the deals signed during Xi's visit are a Chinese-financed and Russian-guaranteed investment fund aimed at drawing $25 billion in Chinese projects to Russia, a nearly $6-billion investment by Beijing in a high-speed rail line from Moscow to Kazan, $2 billion for agricultural projects and a $3-billion joint venture to build 100 long-haul Sukhoi jumbo jets for lease to carriers throughout Asia.
Talks are still underway on China's plan to purchase two dozen Su-35 fighter jets and to jointly upgrade the Mi-26 helicopter. In addition to diversifying Russia's energy-intensive trade, the deals are forecast to double Russia-China annual trade to $200 billion within a few years. China's trade volume with the United States, its most significant economic relationship, was $592 billion last year.
Despite the upbeat outlooks, the shift from West to East can't happen overnight.
Russia's main market for its energy exports has long been Europe, and the pipeline network that carries supplies to the West isn't going to be easily redirected, said Sijbren de Jong, an analyst of Russian and Central Asian affairs at the Hague Center for Strategic Studies.
"China profits off the fact that the negotiating position of Russia is weak," said De Jong, explaining that Putin has been unable to prevail in the negotiations to get the energy projects underway with any hope of meeting the 2017 target delivery start.
Putin used the weekend talks to push his Eurasian Economic Union as a component of regionwide collaboration, suggesting the bloc uniting Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia could be extended to the rest of Central Asia, where it could dovetail with Beijing's Silk Road Economic Belt.
The Chinese initiative is aimed at creating more efficient resource extraction, as well as transportation to the underdeveloped states on China's western flank.
An agreement signed Friday by Xi and Putin called vaguely for cooperation between the two countries' plans for Central Asia, which Putin said "means reaching a new level of partnership that envisages common economic space on the entire Eurasian continent." Xi was less effusive, saying only that China will "coordinate closely" with Putin's alliance.This article is about the event in the life of the Holy Family. For for the liturgical feast, see Candlemas
The Presentation of Jesus at (or in) the Temple is an early episode in the life of Jesus, describing his presentation at the Temple in Jerusalem in order to officially induct him into Judaism, that is celebrated by many Christian Churches on the holiday of Candlemas. It is described in the Gospel of Luke of the New Testament in the Christian Bible.[1] Within the account, "Luke's narration of the Presentation in the Temple combines the purification rite with the Jewish ceremony of the redemption of the firstborn (Luke 2:23–24)."[2]
In the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Presentation of Jesus at the temple is celebrated as one of the twelve Great Feasts, and is sometimes called Hypapante (Ὑπαπαντή, = "Meeting" in Greek). In Western Christianity, the additional name for the Service the day, Candlemas, is added. This Feast-day is also known as the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin or the Meeting of the Lord. [3]In some liturgical churches, Vespers (or Compline) on the Feast of the Presentation marks the end of the Epiphany season. In the Church of England, the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple is a Principal Feast celebrated either on 2 February or on the Sunday between 28 January and 3 February. In the Catholic Church, especially since the time of Pope Gelasius I (492-496) who in the fifth century contributed to its expansion, the Presentation is celebrated on 2 February and is the fourth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary.
In the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran Church, the episode was also reflected in the once-prevalent custom of churching new mothers forty days after the birth of a child.
Scripture [ edit ]
The event is described in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 2:22–40). According to the gospel, Mary and Joseph took the Infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days (inclusive) after his birth to complete Mary's ritual purification after childbirth, and to perform the redemption of the firstborn son, in obedience to the Torah (Leviticus 12, Exodus 13:12–15, etc.). Luke explicitly says that Joseph and Mary take the option provided for poor people (those who could not afford a lamb; Leviticus 12:8), sacrificing "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons." Leviticus 12:1–4 indicates that this event should take place forty days after birth for a male child, hence the Presentation is celebrated forty days after Christmas.
Upon bringing Jesus into the temple, they encountered Simeon. The Gospel records that Simeon had been promised that "he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ" (Luke 2:26). Simeon then uttered the prayer that would become known as the Nunc Dimittis, or Canticle of Simeon, which prophesied the redemption of the world by Jesus:
“Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2:29–32).
Simeon then prophesied to Mary: "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed. (Luke 2:34–35).
The elderly prophetess Anna was also in the Temple, and offered prayers and praise to God for Jesus, and spoke to everyone there of His importance to redemption in Jerusalem (Luke 2:36–38).
In art [ edit ]
The event forms a usual component of extensive cycles of the Life of Christ and also of the Life of the Virgin. Often either the Presentation of Jesus or the visually similar Circumcision of Jesus was shown, but by the late Middle Ages the two were sometimes combined. Early images concentrated on the moment of meeting with Simeon, typically shown at the entrance to the Temple, and this is continued in Byzantine art and Eastern Orthodox icons to the present day.
In the West, beginning in the 8th or 9th century, a different depiction at an altar emerged, where Simeon eventually by the Late Middle Ages came to be shown wearing the elaborate vestments attributed to the Jewish High Priest, and conducting a liturgical ceremony surrounded by the family and Anna. In the West, Simeon is more often already holding the infant, or the moment of handover is shown; in Eastern images the Virgin is more likely still to hold Jesus.[4]
Music [ edit ]
Many motets and anthems have been composed to celebrate this feast and are performed as part of the liturgy, among them an anthem by 16th century German composer Johannes Eccard (1553–1611), Maria wallt zum Heiligtum, often translated in English as "When Mary to the Temple went".
The Lutheran church of the Baroque observed the feast as "Mariae Reinigung" (Purification of Mary). Johann Sebastian Bach composed several cantatas to be performed in the church service of the day, related to Simeon's canticle Nunc dimittis as part of the prescribed readings.
Liturgical celebration [ edit ]
Name of the celebration [ edit ]
In addition to being known as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, other traditional names include Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin,[5] and the Meeting of the Lord.[6]
The date of Candlemas is established by the date set for the Nativity of Jesus, for it comes forty days afterwards. Under Mosaic law as found in the Torah, a mother who had given birth to a boy was considered unclean for seven days; moreover she was to remain for three and thirty days "in the blood of her purification." Candlemas therefore corresponds to the day on which Mary, according to Jewish law, should have attended a ceremony of ritual purification (Leviticus 12:2–8). The Gospel of Luke 2:22–39 relates that Mary was purified according to the religious law, followed by Jesus' presentation in the Jerusalem temple, and this explains the formal names given to the festival, as well as its falling 40 days after the Nativity.
In the Roman Catholic Church, it is known as the "Presentation of the Lord" in the liturgical books first issued by Paul VI,[7] and as the "Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary" in earlier editions. In the Eastern Orthodox Church and Greek Catholic Churches (Eastern Catholic Churches which use the Byzantine rite), it is known as the "Feast of the Presentation of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ in the Temple" or as "The Meeting of Our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ".
In the churches of the Anglican Communion, it is known by various names, including: The Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in The Temple (Candlemas) (Episcopal Church),[5] The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, and The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Anglican Church of Canada),[8] The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas) (Church of England),[9] and The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Anglican Church of Australia).
It is known as the Presentation of Our Lord in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod observes 2 February as The Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Our Lord.[10] In some Protestant churches, the feast is known as the Naming of Jesus (though historically he would have been named on the eighth day after the Nativity, when he was circumcised).
"Candlemas" is a northern European name for the festival because there had long been a procession with lighted candles at the mass on this day, reflecting Simeon's proclamation of "a light for revelation to the Gentiles", which, in turn, echoes Isaiah 49:6 in the second of the “servant of the Lord” oracles. [9]
Practices [ edit ]
Traditionally, Candlemas had been the last feast day in the Christian year that was dated by reference to Christmas. It is another "epiphany" type feast as Jesus is revealed as the messiah by the canticle of Simeon and the prophetess Anna.[11] It also fits into this theme, as the earliest manifestation of Jesus inside the house of his heavenly Father.[9] Subsequent moveable feasts are calculated with reference to Easter.
Western Christianity [ edit ]
Candlemas occurs 40 days after Christmas.
Traditionally, the Western term "Candlemas" (or Candle Mass) referred to the practice whereby a priest on 2 February blessed beeswax candles for use throughout the year, some of which were distributed to the faithful for use in the home. In Poland the feast is called Święto Matki Bożej Gromnicznej (Feast of Our Lady of Thunder candles). This name refers to the candles that are blessed on this day, called gromnice, since these candles are lit during (thunder) storms and placed in windows to ward off storms.
This feast has been referred to as the Feast of Presentation of the Lord within the Roman Catholic Church since the liturgical revisions of the Second Vatican Council, with references to candles and the purification of Mary de-emphasised in favor of the Prophecy of Simeon the Righteous. Pope John Paul II connected the feast day with the renewal of religious vows. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple is the fourth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary.[12]
In the Liturgy of the Hours, the Marian antiphon Alma Redemptoris Mater is used from Advent through February 2, after which Ave Regina Caelorum is used through Good Friday.[13]
Eastern Christianity [ edit ]
In the Byzantine tradition practiced by the Eastern Orthodox, the Meeting of the Lord is unique among the Great Feasts in that it combines elements of both a Great Feast of the Lord and a Great Feast of the Theotokos (Mother of God). It has a forefeast of one day, and an afterfeast of seven days. However, if the feast falls during Cheesefare Week or Great Lent, the afterfeast is either shortened or eliminated altogether.
The holiday is celebrated with an all-night vigil on the eve of the feast, and a celebration of the Divine Liturgy the next morning, at which beeswax candles are blessed. This blessing traditionally takes place after the Little Hours and before the beginning of the Divine Liturgy (though in some places it is done after). The priest reads four prayers, and then a fifth one during which all present bow their heads before God. He then censes the candles and blesses them with holy water. The candles are then distributed to the people and the Liturgy begins.
It is because of the biblical events recounted in the second chapter of Luke that the Churching of Women came to be practiced in both Eastern and Western Christianity. The usage has mostly died out in the West, except among Western Rite Orthodoxy, very occasionally still among Anglicans, and Traditionalist Catholics, but the ritual is still practiced in the Orthodox Church. In addition, babies, both boys and girls are taken to the Church on the fortieth day after their birth in remembrance of the Theotokos and Joseph taking the infant Jesus to the Temple.[6]
Some Christians observe the practice of leaving Christmas decorations up until Candlemas.
Meeting of the Lord, Orthodox, Orthodox icon from Belarus (1731).
In the Eastern and Western liturgical calendars the Presentation of the Lord falls on 2 February, forty days (inclusive) after Christmas. In the Church of England it may be celebrated on this day, or on the Sunday between 28 January and 3 February. This feast never falls in Lent; the earliest that Ash Wednesday can fall is 4 February, for the case of Easter on 22 March in a non-leap year. However, in the Tridentine rite, it can fall in the pre-Lenten season if Easter is early enough, and "Alleluia" has to be omitted from this feast's liturgy when that happens.
In Swedish and Finnish Lutheran Churches, Candlemas is (since 1774) always celebrated on a Sunday, at earliest on 2 February and at latest on 8 February, except if this Sunday happens to be the last Sunday before Lent, i.e. Shrove Sunday or Quinquagesima (Swedish: Fastlagssöndagen, Finnish: Laskiaissunnuntai), in which case Candlemas is celebrated one week earlier.[14][15]
In the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Feast, called "The Coming of the Son of God into the Temple"[3] (Tiarn'ndaraj, from Tyarn-, "the Lord", and -undarach "going forward"), is celebrated on 14 February. The Armenians do not celebrate the Nativity on 25 December, but on 6 January, and thus their date of the feast is 40 days after that: 14 February. The night before the feast, Armenians traditionally light candles during an evening church service, carrying the flame out into the darkness (symbolically bringing light into the void) and either take it home to light lamps or light a bonfire in the church courtyard.
History [ edit ]
The Feast of the Presentation is among the most ancient feasts of the Church. Celebration of the feast dates from the fourth century in Jerusalem.[5] There are sermons on the Feast by the bishops Methodius of Patara († 312),[16] Cyril of Jerusalem[17] († 360), Gregory the Theologian († 389), Amphilochius of Iconium († 394),[18] Gregory of Nyssa († 400),[19] and John Chrysostom († 407).[20]
The earliest reference to specific liturgical rites surrounding the feast are by the intrepid Egeria, during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land (381–384). She reported that 14 February was a day solemnly kept in Jerusalem with a procession to Constantine I's Basilica of the Resurrection, with a homily preached on Luke 2:22 (which makes the occasion perfectly clear), and a Divine Liturgy. This so-called Itinerarium Peregrinatio ("Pilgrimage Itinerary") of Egeria does not, however, offer a specific name for the Feast. The date of 14 February indicates that in Jerusalem at that time, Christ's birth was celebrated on 6 January, Epiphany. Egeria writes for her beloved fellow nuns at home:
XXVI. "The fortieth day after the Epiphany is undoubtedly celebrated here with the very highest honor, for on that day there is a procession, in which all take part, in the Anastasis, and all things are done in their order with the greatest joy, just as at Easter. All the priests, and after them the bishop, preach, always taking for their subject that part of the Gospel where Joseph and Mary brought the Lord into the Temple on the fortieth day, and Symeon and Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, saw him, treating of the words which they spake when they saw the Lord, and of that offering which his parents made. And when everything that is customary has been done in order, the sacrament is celebrated, and the dismissal takes place."
About 450 AD in Jerusalem, people began the custom of holding lighted candles during the Divine Liturgy of this feast day.[6] Originally, the feast was a minor celebration. But then in 541, a terrible plague broke out in Constantinople, killing thousands. The Emperor Justinian I, in consultation with the Patriarch of Constantinople, ordered a period of fasting and prayer throughout the entire Empire. And, on the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord, arranged great processions throughout the towns and villages and a solemn prayer service (Litia) to ask for deliverance from evils, and the plague ceased. In thanksgiving, in 542 the feast was elevated to a more solemn celebration and established throughout the Eastern Empire by the Emperor.
In Rome, the feast appears in the Gelasian Sacramentary, a manuscript collection of the seventh and eighth centuries associated with Pope Gelasius I. There it carries for the first time the new title of the feast of Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Late in time though it may be, Candlemas is still the most ancient of all the festivals in honor of the Virgin Mary.[3] The date of the feast in Rome was 2 February because the Roman date for Christ's nativity had been 25 December since at least the early fourth century.
Though modern laymen picture Candlemas as an important feast throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, in fact it spread slowly in the West; it is not found in the Lectionary of Silos (650) nor in the Calendar (731–741) of Sainte-Geneviève of Paris.
The tenth-century Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, has a formula used for blessing the candles. Candlemas did become important enough to find its way into the secular calendar. It was the traditional day to remove the cattle from the hay meadows, and from the field that was to be ploughed and sown that spring. References to it are common in later medieval and early Modern literature; Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is recorded as having its first performance on Candlemas Day 1602. It remains one of the Scottish quarter days, at which debts are paid and law courts are in session.
Relation to other celebrations [ edit ]
The Feast of the Presentation depends on the date for Christmas: As per the passage from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 2:22–40) describing the event in the life of Jesus, the celebration of the Presentation of the Lord follows 40 days after. The blessing of candles on this day recalls Simeon's reference to the infant Jesus as the "light for revelation to the Gentiles" (Luke 2:32).
Modern Pagans believe that Candlemas is a Christianization[21][22][23] of the Gaelic festival of Imbolc, which was celebrated in pre-Christian Europe (and especially the Celtic Nations) at about the same time of year.[24][25] Imbolc is called "St. Brigid's Day" or "Brigid" in Ireland.[26] Both the goddess Brigid and the Christian Saint Brigid—who was the Abbess of Kildare—are associated with sacred flames, holy wells and springs, healing, and smithcraft. Brigid is a virgin, yet also the patron of midwives. However, a connection with Roman (rather than Celtic or Germanic) polytheism is more plausible, since the feast was celebrated before any serious attempt to expand Christianity into non-Roman countries.
In Irish homes, there were many rituals revolving around welcoming Brigid into the home. Some of Brigid's rituals and legends later became attached to Saint Brigid, who was seen by Celtic Christians as the midwife of Christ and "Mary of the Gael". In Ireland and Scotland she is the "foster mother of Jesus." The exact date of the Imbolc festival may have varied from place to place based on local tradition and regional climate. Imbolc is celebrated by modern Pagans[citation needed] on the eve of 2 February, at the astronomical midpoint, or on the full moon closest to the first spring thaw.
Frederick Holweck, writing in the Catholic Encyclopædia says definite in its rejection of this argument: "The feast was certainly not introduced by Pope Gelasius to suppress the excesses of the Lupercalia," (referencing J.P. Migne, Missale Gothicum, 691)[27] The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica agrees: the association with Gelasius "has led some to suppose that it was ordained by Pope Gelasius I in 492 as a counter-attraction to the pagan Lupercalia; but for this there is no warrant."[3] Since the two festivals are both concerned with the ritual purification of women, not all historians are convinced that the connection is purely coincidental. Gelasius certainly did write a treatise against Lupercalia, and this still exists.
Pope Innocent XII believed Candlemas was created as an alternative to Roman Paganism, as stated in a sermon on the subject:
Why do we in this feast carry candles? Because the Gentiles dedicated the month of February to the infernal gods, and as at the beginning of it Pluto stole Proserpine, and her mother Ceres sought her in the night with lighted candles, so they, at the beginning of the month, walked about the city with lighted candles. Because the holy fathers could not extirpate the custom, they ordained that Christians should carry about candles in honor of the Blessed Virgin; and thus what was done before in the honor of Ceres is now done in honor of the Blessed Virgin.[28]
There is no contemporary evidence to support the popular notions that Gelasius abolished the Lupercalia, or that he, or any other prelate, replaced it with the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.[29]
In Armenia, celebrations at the Presentation have been influenced by pre-Christian customs, such as: the spreading of ashes by farmers in their fields each year to ensure a better harvest, keeping ashes on the roof of a house to keep evil spirits away, and the belief that newlywed women needed to jump over fire to purify themselves before getting pregnant. Young men will also leap over a bonfire.
The tradition of lighting a candle in each window is not the origin of the name "Candlemas", which instead refers to a blessing of candles.
On the day following Candlemas, the feast of St. Blaise is celebrated. It is connected to the rite of Blessing of the Throats – which is, for to be available to reach more people, also often transferred to Candlemas day. By coincidence, the rite includes crossed candles.
Traditions and superstitions [ edit ]
"Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and mistletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall" Robert Herrick (1591–1674), "Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve"
As the poem by Robert Herrick records, the eve of Candlemas was the day on which Christmas decorations of greenery were removed from people's homes; for traces of berries, holly and so forth will bring death among the congregation before another year is out.[30]
In Scotland, until a change in the law in 1991 (see Scottish term days), and in much of northern England until the 18th century, Candlemas was one of the traditional quarter days when quarterly rents were due for payment, as well as the day or term for various other business transactions, including the hiring of servants.
In the United Kingdom, good weather at Candlemas is taken to indicate severe winter weather later: "If Candlemas Day is clear and bright, / winter will have another bite. / If Candlemas Day brings cloud and rain, / winter is gone and will not come again."[31] It is also alleged to be the date that bears emerge from hibernation to inspect the weather as well as wolves, who if they choose to return to their lairs on this day is interpreted as meaning severe weather will continue for another forty days at least.[citation needed] The same is true in Italy, where it is called Candelora.
The Carmina Gadelica, a seminal collection of Scottish folklore, refers to a serpent coming out of the mound on Latha Fheill Bride, as the Scots call Candlemas. This rhyme is still used in the West Highlands and Hebrides.
Moch maduinn Bhride, Thig an nimhir as an toll; Cha bhoin mise ris an nimhir, Cha bhoin an nimhir rium. (Early on Bride's morn, the serpent will come from the hollow I will not molest the serpent, nor will the serpent molest me) Thig an nathair as an toll, la donn Bride Ged robh tri traighean dh' an t-sneachd air leachd an lair. (The serpent will come from the hollow on the brown day of Bridget Though there should be three feet of snow on the flat surface of the ground)
Candlemas Day in the Carpathian region
In the United States, Candlemas coincides with Groundhog Day, the earliest American reference to which can be found at the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College. The reference implies that Groundhog Day may have come from a German-American Candlemas tradition:
Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate. 4 February 1841—from Morgantown, Berks County (Pennsylvania) storekeeper James Morris' diary, [1]
In France and Belgium, Candlemas (French: La Chandeleur) is celebrated with crêpes.
In Italy, traditionally, it (Italian: La Candelora) is considered the last cold day of winter.
Tenerife (Spain), Is the day of the Virgin of Candelaria (Saint Patron of the Canary Islands). 2 February.
In Southern and Central Mexico, and Guatemala City, Candlemas (Spanish: Día de La Candelaria) is celebrated with tamales. Tradition indicates that on 5 January, the night before Three Kings Day (the Epiphany), whoever gets one or more of the few plastic or metal dolls (originally coins) buried within the Rosca de Reyes must pay for the tamales and throw a party on Candlemas.[citation needed] In certain regions of Mexico, this is the day in which the baby Jesus of each household is taken up from the nativity scene and dressed up in various colorful, whimsical outfits.[citation needed]
In Luxembourg, Liichtmëss sees children carrying lighted sticks visiting neighbors and singing a traditional song in exchange for sweets.[32]
Sailors are often reluctant to set sail on Candlemas Day, believing that any voyage begun then will end in disaster—given the frequency of severe storms in February, this is not entirely without sense.[citation needed]
According to over eight centuries of tradition, the swaddling clothes that baby Jesus wore during the presentation at the Temple are kept in Dubrovnik Cathedral, Croatia.[33]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
Schiller, Gertud, Iconography of Christian Art, Vol. I, 1971 (English trans from German), Lund Humphries, London, ISBN 0-85331-270-2Nevada has temporarily called off its first inmate execution in 11 years. Scott Dozier, sentenced for the 2002 murder of his 22-year-old drug associate, Jeremiah Miller, was to be put to death on Nov. 14. Dozier instructed his lawyer in August not to file any more appeals.
On Thursday, Nov. 9, however, Judge Jennifer Togliatti temporarily postponed the execution. Judge Togliatti said she was “loath to stop” Dozier’s execution, but she did so because she was concerned about the untested and controversial drug protocol that would be used to put him to death. She wanted to give the state Supreme Court a chance to evaluate.
From my perspective as a scholar of capital punishment, Nevada’s new drug protocol sheds a glaring light on the troubled state of lethal injections in the United States. It also raises some serious ethical questions.
Lethal Injection’s Crisis
The first lethal injection protocol was developed by Oklahoma’s medical examiner, Jay Chapman, in the late 1970s. Back then, Oklahoma was looking for an alternative to electrocution, which was considered inhuman and brutal.
The protocol Chapman developed called for the use of three drugs : The first, sodium thiopental, would anesthetize inmates and put them to sleep before the lethal drugs were administered. The second drug, pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant, was meant to render the inmate unable to show pain. The third drug, potassium chloride, led to a cardiac arrest and eventual death. This protocol soon became the standard and was adopted by all death penalty states – now numbering at 31.
However, by the start of this decade, pharmaceutical companies, “citing either moral or business reasons,” refused to allow their products to be used in executions.
The difficulty of securing the drugs that had been part of the standard protocol led death penalty states to experiment with many different drugs in many different combinations.
States likes Alabama and Arkansas, for example, maintained the three-drug protocol but replaced sodium thiopental in the standard drug cocktail with midazolam or pentobarbital, which doctors normally use as sedatives or for anesthesia. Other states, including Arizona and Ohio, started using a two-drug protocol, while a few, such as Georgia, Missouri and South Dakota, adopted a single drug.
Nevada’s new protocol involves a three-drug combination – the sedative diazepam (better known as Valium), the muscle relaxant and paralytic cisatracurium and the opioid fentanyl.
My research on methods of execution reveals that this combination of drugs has never been used in an execution.
What Is The Problem With This
Execution by a lethal injection, even when it follows the standard protocol, is a surprisingly complicated procedure. Finding usable veins and getting the drug dosages right has proved to be particularly difficult. As I found out, it has often been an unreliable method of execution. Since its introduction, 7 percent of all lethal injections have been botched.
Those complications and difficulties increase when states try out new, untested drugs or drug combinations. Convicts have taken a leading role in opposing such experimentation. In February 2017, a death row inmate in Alabama appealed to the United States Supreme Court saying that he preferred death by firing squad to an injection of midazolam. While it recognized lethal injection’s history of problems, the majority held that since Alabama did not offer the firing squad as an execution method, his preference could not be honored. In a dissenting view, however, Justice Sonya Sotomayor called the use of new drugs in lethal injection the “most cruel experiment yet.”
Nevada’s Dozier too has said that he is opposed to “the state’s plan to kill him using a drug protocol that has never been used in an execution.”
There are other troubling issues as well. Using fentanyl, a drug that is killing thousands of Americans annually during the current opioid crisis, is horrifying, to say the least.
In addition, figuring out the right dosage of diazepam and fentanyl in Nevada’s new protocol will not be easy. And if this is not done correctly, Dozier could even wake up in the middle of the execution, as Susi Vassallo, a New York University professor of emergency medicine, has written on lethal injection notes. In the words of Judge Togliatti, he could be “aware of pain” and struggle to breathe.
Employing the powerful paralytic cisatracurium in this new drug protocol raises other ethical concerns.
If the combination of diazepam and fentanyl fails to work, cisatracurium will prevent Dozier from signaling to his executioners that they are botching the execution even as it happens. As David Waisel, an anesthesiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, claimed, “Cisatracurium can hide signs of inadequate anesthesia.” That is its only purpose.
In other lethal injection protocols, the muscle relaxant was also designed to stop the heart. Thus, those who conduct the execution and those who witness it will not be able to see the visible signs of Dozier’s suffering if it occurs.
Do Citizens Have A Duty?
In my view, if Nevada and other death penalty states insist on experimenting with new drugs to keep the machinery of death running, citizens and government officials alike need to take responsibility to prevent any cruelty.
Writing about the use of the guillotine in France more than half a century ago, Albert Camus, philosopher, author and journalist, said,
“Society must display the executioner’s hands on each occasion, and require the most squeamish citizens to look at them, as well as those who, directly or remotely, have supported the work of those hands from the first.”
While lethal injection is different from the guillotine, in modern times the imperative remains the same.
Austin Sarat is Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article.State House budget writers have restored much of the ferry system cut proposed by the governor for the next fiscal year.
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The House Finance Committee on Thursday added about $2.1 million to the Alaska Marine Highway budget. Gov. Bill Walker’s spending plan, released in December, included $2.8 million – or two percent – less than this year’s budget.
Marine highway officials did not request the extra money. Spokeswoman Meadow Bailey said if it makes it through the budget process, the system will add a little more than seven weeks of sailings.
“That service would likely be added in May and June of 2018,” Bailey said. And that would be to the vessel Fairweather and it would add three port calls per week to Lynn Canal and one additional run per week between Sitka and Juneau.
The Fairweather is a fast ferry that carries a little more than 200 passengers. It can hold about 30 cars and trucks.
Ketchikan independent Rep. Dan Ortiz proposed the funding increase.
“Mainly it came out of the numerous comments that I received that talked about real issues that have developed because of the overall reduction in service that the marine highway system has had to adapt to due to their reduced funding,” Ortiz said.
One hotel owner told Ortiz his cuts cost him $100,000 in business, the lawmaker said. Others told him reduced ferry service makes travel more expensive, including trips for food or medical care.
Ortiz said marine highway reductions have totaled about 13 percent over two years. He said the rest of the Transportation Department has been cut far less and he wants to reduce the difference.
“While it certainly doesn’t equate to complete equity, it puts the whole equity picture a little bit closer to parity between coastal Alaska and the money we spend on roads and airports and things like that,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz did not suggest how the extra money would be used.
He proposed the extra money in an amendment to House Bill 57, the chamber’s version of the operating budget for the fiscal year starting in July.
It will have to make it through a House floor vote and the Senate to become official.
The governor could also veto the increase, as he has some other extra money in the Legislature’s budget.
Correction: A previous version of this story used a photo that was not of the Ferry Fairweather. It has since been updated.Campuses across Scotland will be picketed in a day of action on Thursday.
© STV
Staff at Scottish universities will strike on Thursday in protest at a "miserly" pay offer from bosses.
The walk-out is the first industrial dispute over pay in universities for seven years, and will see classes cancelled in every Scottish university except the University of the Highlands and Islands, which negotiates pay separately.
Staff will be on picket lines from 8am in a co-ordinated day of action involving three unions and campuses across Scotland.
Rallies will also be held at Bristo Square in Edinburgh and on Glasgow's Bath Street at noon.
The University and College Union (UCU), UNISON and Unite all said they were disappointed employers had made "no effort" to come back to the negotiating table for talks after a 1% pay rise - branded "miserly" by the unions - was rejected.
In a joint statement, the unions said: "University staff have faced a real-terms pay cut |
owner know you're paying attention.“Were You Sober?”: Hannity BLASTS “Bitter” Boehner For Fake Phone Call Story
‘Political Twitter’ is buzzing tonight over a new John Boehner profile by POLITICO. The former House Speaker opined on the Freedom Caucus and took shots at conservative media figures like radio host Mark Levin and Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Former House Speaker Boehner complained Levin, Hannity and Limbaugh went to the “dark side,” espousing a right-wing political view that was too right-wing for establishment Republicans like himself.
Boehner complained to POLITICO:
“[Mark Levin] went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys—I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.” Boehner, seated in his favorite recliner, lights another cigarette. “I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, ‘Listen, you’re nuts.’ We had this really blunt conversation. Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.”
Hannity took to Twitter to respond to Boehner’s account of the 2015 phone call.
“John were you sober when you said this? That conversation never happened. I’m sorry you are bitter and u failed!,” tweeted Hannity.
Tweet credit: Sean Hannity
https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/924808952008921089
Boehner also blamed “social media,” for polarizing Americans.
“It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide,” said Boehner.
As MSNBC staffer Kyle Griffin tweeted, Boehner also had choice words for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT)
“Fuck [Jim] Jordan. Fuck [Jason] Chaffetz. They’re both assholes,” fumed Boehner.
Tweet credit: Kyle Griffin
John Boehner: "Fuck [Jim] Jordan. Fuck [Jason] Chaffetz. They're both assholes." https://t.co/6UEXIvpSPF — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 30, 2017(Mental Floss) -- If you've ever collected baseball cards, comic books, stamps, or maybe those limited edition commemorative plates, you understand the concept of the "Holy Grail" item.
It's that last, hard-to-find, incredibly rare, usually expensive piece that you have to have before you can officially say your collection is complete. If you're a collector of vintage home video game cartridges (or "carts"), sometimes that can mean paying a pretty penny for the pièce de résistance.
1. Stadium Events (Nintendo Entertainment System)
Price Range: $13,000 -- $41,300; $10,000 for the box alone
Why So Expensive?: Stadium Events was released by Bandai in 1987 as one of the few games available in America that was made for the company's Family Fun Fitness mat, a soft, plastic controller you walked, ran, and jumped on to make the characters move.
Nintendo bought the rights to the game and the Fitness mat in 1988 and re-released them as World Class Track Meet and the Power Pad controller. To avoid consumer confusion, Nintendo pulled all copies of Stadium Events from shelves and had them destroyed, but not before approximately 200 carts had already been sold. Of those 200, collectors believe that only 10 to 20 complete copies of the game exist today, making them a real rarity.
Stadium Events recently made headlines with two high-profile eBay sales. A North Carolina woman was cleaning out her garage and found an old Nintendo and a handful of games, including Stadium Events. She put them up on eBay without high expectations and was amazed to see the bids steadily climb up to $13,105.
While the game itself is valuable, the winning bidder was most interested in the cardboard box it came in. Since most kids threw the box away after tearing open a new game, intact boxes for any game are really hard to come by, but especially so for Stadium Events. Empty Stadium Event boxes have been known to sell for $10,000 alone.
After hearing of the success of this eBay seller, a man in Kansas dug up a factory-sealed copy of the game that he thought was worthless. However, his game became only the second known sealed copy in existence. He'd purchased the game in 1987, but could never find the Fitness mat to go with it. It was still sealed because he'd meant to return it. When his eBay auction ended on February 26, 2010, the game sold for an amazing $41,300.
The same game repackaged by Nintendo, World Class Track Meet, generally sells for less than $3 on eBay.
Mental Floss: 6 people who accidentally found a fortune
2. 1990 Nintendo World Championships (NES)
Price Range: Gray: $4,000 -- $6,100; Gold: $15,000 -- $21,000
Why So Expensive?: In 1990, Nintendo held a 30-city gaming tournament to find the best player in the world. Players had to get the best score in demo versions of three games -- Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris -- all within a six-minute time limit.
At the end of each city's tournament, the winners of each of three age groups were given special gray Championship cartridges exactly like those used in the competition, which means only 90 of these cartridges were distributed. The gold version was sent out to those who won a promotional contest in the pages of Nintendo Power magazine. Only 26 gold games were produced, so they're especially hard to find and command a higher price today.
3. Nintendo Campus Challenge (NES)
Price Range: $14,000 -- $20,100
Why So Expensive?: In the early 1990s, Nintendo held competitions on college campuses and at popular Spring Break destinations. Like the World Championships, players had six minutes to play for high scores on demo versions of Super Mario Bros. 3, PinBot, and Dr. Mario.
Most copies of the game were destroyed after the competition ended, but one Nintendo employee kept his cart and sold it to Rob Walters at a garage sale in 2006.
This garage sale is legendary among retrogamers, as Rob bought all kinds of NES Holy Grails for only $1,000. By the time he re-sold everything, he'd made 50 times that. Part of that $50,000 was the Campus Challenge cartridge, which went for $14,000. Shortly after, the buyer of the cart turned around and sold it on eBay for $20,100. As far as anyone knows, it's the only copy of the game in the world.
4. Atlantis II (Atari 2600)
Price Range: $5,000 -- $6,000
Why So Expensive?: It's never mentioned in the same breath as Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, but Atlantis was a pretty popular game in 1982. The gameplay was similar to Missile Command, with players defending their base from overhead attack by enemy ships. The developer held a tournament called Destination Atlantis, where players were invited to send in photos of their TV screens displaying their high scores. The best players were then sent Atlantis II, a special edition of the game that featured faster enemy ships worth fewer points, making it harder to get a high score, but easier to determine the true champions.
Because this version was not mass produced, its pretty rare today. But if you find a copy of the original Atlantis at a garage sale, it might be a good idea to pick it up anyway. The competition cart had the exact same colorful label of the regular Atlantis, but had a small, white sticker slapped on the front that read "Atlantis II." The label was easily peeled off, so a quick Google search will show you how to determine if you bought a $3 Atari game or a $6,000 one.
Mental Floss: 8 video game lawsuits
5. Air Raid (Atari 2600)
Price Range: $1,000 -- $3,000
Why So Expensive?: Air Raid is a bit of an enigma for Atari fans. Some say it was the one and only game produced by a company called "Menavision" (or perhaps "Menovision"). The game is so shrouded in mystery, it can't even be verified that "Air Raid" is its official title -- there's no name on the label.
The name was based on the gameplay, which is similar to Atlantis and Missile Command, and by the picture on the label of a city being attacked by flying saucers, jets, and helicopters.
This strange cartridge appeared around 1984 in a bright blue "T-handle" casing that is very different from the standard, square, black Atari carts sold in North America, but is similar in style to those sold in Brazil. Furthermore, while a few second-hand copies have been sold, no one can ever say they were the original owner. The mystery, as well as the fact there are only 12 known copies, make it a must-have for serious Atari collectors.
6. Star Wars Ewok Adventure (Atari 2600)
Price: $1,680
Why So Expensive?: Advertised in Parker Brothers' 1983 retail catalog as Revenge of the Jedi: Game I but affectionately known as Ewok Adventure, the cart became legendary for never being sold. In the game, players took control of an Ewok and flew a hang glider over the forest moon of Endor in an attempt to blow up an Imperial base. You could avoid or kill enemy Stormtroopers, Speeder Bikes, or Imperial AT-ST Walkers, or you could instead commandeer these vehicles to take out the base.
The game was shot down by Parker Brothers' marketing department, which felt the controls were too hard to master, so it was never produced. The game's designer, Larry Gelberg, gave the one and only known prototype copy to a friend's son, who later sold it for $1680.
Mental Floss: Cheetos, lip balm and other weird brand extensions
7. Kizuna Encounter (Neo Geo)
Price Range: $12,000 -- $13,500
Why So Expensive?: One of the main games that all Neo Geo fanatics are looking for is a particular version of Kizuna Encounter, a 1996 fighting game similar to Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. The game itself has received solid reviews, but isn't groundbreaking by any means.
However, it was produced in such small quantities for the European market that collectors speculate fewer than 15 copies were made. The Japanese version, which is exactly the same except for different packaging, is fairly common and sells for about $50.
8. Ultimate 11 (Neo Geo)
Price Range: $8,000 -- $10,000
Why So Expensive?: Ultimate 11 was the final game in the Super Sidekicks series, a popular franchise of soccer games that sold very well. For some reason, though, Ultimate 11 was not produced in large quantities, and there are now fewer than 10 known copies in existence. That kind of rarity makes it a must-have for collectors.
In late 2009, a private sale was reportedly made between two members of the collectors' forums at neo-geo.com. The buyer paid an astonishing $55,000 to acquire both Kizuna Encounter and Ultimate 11. The original owner purchased the games around 10 years ago, when Kizuna was selling for $500 and Ultimate for $400. The new owner has said he will not sell them, even if he were offered $100,000.
For more mental_floss articles, visit mentalfloss.com
Entire contents of this article copyright, Mental Floss LLC. All rights reserved.It's a dirty word in American politics. But Bernie Sanders embraces it.
"I wouldn't deny it, not for one second, " Sanders told the Washington Post when he was running for Vermont's senate seat back in 2006. "I'm a democratic socialist."
Sanders is not a conventional American politician. He's the longest serving independent in the history of the US Congress. Though he's long worked with Democrats, Sanders officially joined the party just this year to challenge Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination.
Initially considered a fringe candidate, he's defying expectations. In May, Sanders trailed Clinton by 45 percent in Iowa, a key early primary state. He's reduced the margin to 19 percent. In New Hampshire, the Vermont senator is behind by only eight points.
Sanders drew a crowd of some 10,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this month. It was easily one of the largest rallies of the 2016 campaign to date - in either party. And he's no one-hit wonder. On Monday, he drew more than 7,000 people in Portland, Maine.
"No one in the White House will have the power to take on Wall Street alone, corporate America alone, the billionaire classes alone," Sanders told his supporters in Maine.
"The only way that change takes place is when we develop that strong grassroots movement, make that political revolution, stand together, and then we bring about change," he said.
Scandinavian America
What would the US look like after Sanders' political revolution? Think Scandinavia - Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
"In those countries health care is a right of all people, in those countries college education, graduate school is free, in those countries retirement benefits, child care are stronger than in the United States of America," Sanders said in an interview on the Sunday morning talk show This Week.
"In those countries, by and large, the government works for ordinary people and the middle class rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class," Sanders said.
It's a message that appeals to progressives. But will the broader American public support a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who wants the nation to look more like northern Europe?
"This is a country that had a McCarthy era and a red scare," John Nichols, Washington correspondent for "The Nation" magazine, told DW. "It had red baiting and attacks on socialists, that's part of our media life even in recent years."
Challenging economic orthodoxy
Nichols has covered Sanders for years and introduced the Vermont senator at his packed rally in Wisconsin. Though America is very different from Europe structurally and economically, Nichols believes the country is ripe for the populist anti-austerity message that has swept the Old Continent in recent months, and Sanders is trying to tap into that sentiment.
According to Gallup, two out of every three Americans are dissatisfied with the way wealth is distributed in the United States. It's a bi-partisan issue. Three-quarters of Democrats and even 54 percent of Republicans are concerned about income inequality.
"There's space in the 2016 race for messages that really do challenge the economic orthodoxies of the United States," Nichols said.
Generational gap
While the older baby-boom generation is more invested in the status quo and came of age when the socialist label was taboo, Alexandra Reckendorf believes the younger millennial generation is more open to radical change.
"They're a little bit more compassionate and empathetic on these issues of economic inequality,"
Reckendorf, an expert on US politics at Virginia Commonwealth University, told DW. "A lot of them either find themselves in that boat or are still young and idealistic enough to think that these changes could work."
Young Americans have racked up $1.2 trillion (1.08 trillion euros) in student debt due to the rising cost of college tuition. Sanders has introduced legislation to make all four-year public colleges tuition free, and would finance it through a tax on Wall Street speculation.
Uphill battle
But according to Arthur Sanders (no relation), the broader public just is not there yet. The US politics expert points to Obamacare. Only 43 percent of the public has a favorable view of President Obama's signature domestic accomplishment, according to a Kaiser Health Tracking poll. Senator Sanders, on the other hand, thinks Obama's health care reforms don't go far enough.
"If he's going to argue as he did in the past for single-payer government health care, the public is not ready for that, they're barely ready for Obamacare," Arthur Sanders, a professor at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, told DW.
And so far, Senator Sanders also hasn't made inroads with African American and Latino voters, who overwhelmingly support Hillary Clinton. Though he was involved in the civil rights movement in Chicago during the 1960s, he now represents an overwhelmingly white state in New England.
He's also refused to accept corporate money out of principle. While Hillary Clinton has raised $45 million, Senator Sanders has pulled in $15 million from small donors. Regardless of whether or not he can secure the nomination, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont is already having a significant influence on the debate. And perhaps that's his real objective.
"He'll push Clinton to the left, he'll push the debate to the left," Arthur Sanders said. "He'll never say that's why he's running, because you can't say that's why you're running."© Zak Keith, 2009
If you answered “Alexander Graham Bell,” then you, along with millions of people around the world have been misinformed.
In 2001, the US Congress finally succumbed to the nagging truth and “changed its mind” on the issue, according credit to the real inventor and declaring that the original telephone was in fact invented by Antonio Meucci, a penniless Italian who did not speak a word of English and could not afford to patent his discovery.
As to Alexander Graham Bell? Well, he was just a successful patent applicant and, some would say, thief.
According to the US Congress, Bell was a cunning opportunist who took all the credit for a more brilliant scientist’s work. The House of Representatives voted to recognise mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as the father of modern communications, following a protracted battle by historians and Italian Americans.
The real inventor of the telephone, Meucci (1808—1989), had been working in Cuba in the 1830s, developing methods for treating illnesses using electric shocks, when he discovered the ability of sound to travel through electrical impulses. He later moved to Staten Island to follow up on his discovery. In 1860—16 years before Bell claimed to have invented the telephone—Meucci demonstrated his teletrofono in New York, but could not afford the $250 required to register a patent.
Bell, who took an interest in Meucci’s invention, convinced him to share his research material. They shared a lab together and Bell had full access to Meucci’s materials. Bell made good and clever use of Meucci before coming up with his own “invention” and applying for a patent in his own name. Meucci duly protested, but lacking connections, was unable to convince anyone that Alexander Graham Bell had stolen his ideas. Under general patent laws, then and today, Bell should have credited Meucci and agreed to share royalties with him.
Beset with debt, Meucci could not afford the $10 fee for maintaining the patent caveat and temporarily gave up pursuit of Bell in 1874. Two years later, Bell, uncontested by Meucci, was granted ownership of the patent. Interestingly, another contender, Elisha Gray, had also submitted a patent for the telephone some hours before Bell, but due to a technicality, Bell was the registrant whose application won.
Meucci finally decided to sue Bell, charging him with fraud in the Supreme Court. The case looked rather promising for Meucci, but unfortunately, before any proceedings could begin, Meucci died on October 18, 1889.
In 2001, the United States Congress took the extraordinary decision of doing justice to Meucci, passing a resolution officially according recognition to Meucci as the real inventor of the telephone, stating that “if Meucci had been able to pay the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell.” The US Congress further stated that given all the facts of the patent disputes between Gray and Bell, under no terms should Alexander Graham Bell have been awarded the patent for the telephone by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 1876. Alexander Graham Bell was posthumously stripped of his dubious honor as the inventor of the telephone.
“Justice” was finally served... Well, sort of...
In effect, the Congressional resolution served only as a declaration and did not technically annul or modify the patent received by Bell in 1876. The resolution was also subsequently followed by another legislative declaration upholding Bell’s priority and his status as the inventor (patent holder) of the telephone.
Credit where credit is due:
Both Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray should be credited with successfully inventing telephones in the United States before Alexander Graham Bell “invented” it in 1876. Others who performed pioneering experimental work with electrical voice transmissions over wires included Thomas Edison, Innocenzo Manzetti, Charles Bourseul and Johann Philipp Reis. The telephone, as we know it today, is largely based on improvements made by Thomas Edison on the original design—which was not Bell’s but Meucci’s.
REFERENCES:
©Zak Keith, 2009It’s often reported that the recession turned Americans into frugal shoppers. Well, here’s a bargain: spending about ten cents more on a piece of clothing produced in Bangladesh could prevent disasters like the horrific collapse, last month, of the Rana Plaza factory, which killed over a thousand people, the deadliest accident in history of the garment industry.
The ten-cent figure was derived by the Worker Rights Consortium, a group that investigates working conditions in factories around the world, and first gained currency late last year, after a November fire at a different factory in Bangladesh killed over a hundred people (eight more died in yet another fire last week). Their analysis is based on the estimated three billion dollars, spread out over five years, that would be required to bring Bangladesh’s forty-five hundred factories in line with Western safety standards.
Hopefully, the math won’t remain hypothetical. On April 24th, the day of the collapse at Rana Plaza, the Worker Rights Consortium employed the economics of shame, and started naming names among the retailers that produced garments in the collapsed factory (Walmart, Benetton, and Dress Barn, among others). Then a coalition of unions, N.G.O.s, and, Sarah Stillman writes, former factory workers proposed a binding accord on fire and building safety, and set yesterday as the deadline for businesses to agree to its terms. As of this morning, the agreement covers thirty-four retailers supplied by over a thousand factories in Bangladesh.
There are some notable holdouts to the Bangladesh agreement. Walmart, preferring to follow its own safety initiatives, did not sign. Neither did Gap, despite announcing it was “six sentences” away from agreeing to the accord yesterday afternoon.
Still, there is reason to believe that changes enacted by the companies that did sign the agreement will save lives. In this week’s magazine, James Surowiecki writes that in Cambodia, a program administered by the International Labour Organization, in collaboration with the government, significantly improved working conditions, along with worker rights, while exports continued to grow.
But, Surowiecki warns, “As long as consumers and companies insist on the lowest price and endless variety, there’ll always be factories that are willing to cut corners to get the business.” The question that remains is whether an extra ten cents on a shirt or a pair of socks, measured against the potential value of hundreds of human lives, will prove to be a corner worth cutting.
Illustration by Larry Buchanan.It's hard not to notice how fast Los Angeles is changing. We all know that feeling of walking down a street and hardly being able to recognize it — what happened to that doughnut shop/Mexican place/porn store? The feeling is often bittersweet — a changing city is a vibrant city. The old makes way for the new. And yet some things we can't stand to lose.
But you know what they say, 'tis better to have loved and lost than so on and so forth. So let's not mourn the loss but celebrate these 10 things in Los Angeles that are going the way of the dinosaur — or, at the very least, have seen their quantity greatly reduced.
10) Indoor Malls
Life as a teenager in the 1980s and '90s revolved around the mall: sheltered, antiseptic, cavernous. The medium arguably reached its peak in Los Angeles with the Beverly Center in 1982. But it was another Los Angeles locale that helped kill the indoor mall — the Grove, built in 2002, and designed to look just like the city of Europe. Rick Caruso's brainchild quickly taught Californians that if you're gonna spend all day watching your wife try on pants, you may as well get a few minutes of sunshine.
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Outdoor malls are in; indoor malls are out. In South L.A., Marlton Square Shopping Mall was demolished in 2011. Hawthorne's Mall remains eerily abandoned. And Santa Monica Place, designed by none other than Frank Gehry, tore off its roof in 2010, begetting this wonderful headline: "SANTA MONICA PLACE SWAPS GEHRY FOR AIRY." (It really only works if you say it aloud.)
At least we still have the Beverly Center, which is planning yet another expensive renovation.
9) Palm trees
There is no greater visual signifier of Los Angeles than the beloved palm tree. Unfortunately, they're dying. As the Associated Press reported in 2006:
The trees are dying of old age and a fungal disease, disappearing one by one from parks and streets, and city planners are replacing them with oaks, sycamores and other species that are actually native to Los Angeles and offer more shade, too...
The problem, says Steve Dunlap, a supervising tree surgeon with the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department, is that large numbers of the Canary Island date palm — trees with rough trunks and a topknot of fronds that look like green dreadlocks — are succumbing to a fungal disease. Tree surgeons don’t know how to stop the fungus, which gets into the soil. Dunlap said it doesn’t make sense to replace dying palms with new ones that will probably fall victim to the same ailment. So the city has been planting other varieties of trees.
Thankfully, not all species are dying, and there are still more than a million of them left.
8) Drive-by shootings
The Los Angeles drive-by shooting, immortalized in films, rap music and even a George Carlin joke, used to be as iconic as the palm tree or the Hollywood Sign. And yes, there are still drive-by shootings. But — although there aren't really any statistics about this — experts agree: There are far fewer drive-bys than there used to be.
Why? They killed too many innocent victims and drew too much unwanted attention to gangs. As the L.A. Times reported last year, "In 1993, the Mexican Mafia prison gang — known by police as 'La Eme' — ordered thousands of Latino gang members to halt them."
Criminal gangs are still a force, but there are fewer turf wars nowadays. And when violence does break out, gang members prefer more targeted killings — "walk-ups," as they're called.
7) Smog
L.A. may still be the smoggiest city in America — like Denver and Mexico City, the topography is a natural trap for smog, thanks to surrounding mountains and something called temperature inversions. But take a look at some statistics from the American Lung Association's annual State of the Air Report:
Air pollution in L.A. has been steadily falling for decades; since the year 2000, it's fallen by nearly half.
There are many reasons for the cleaner air — fewer steel factories, the banning of trash incinerators, the feds requiring cars to have catalytic converters, the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Clean Air Act of 1970 and so on.
6) Book stores
Remember Borders? Dutton's? The Bodhi Tree (where this reporter once saw Donovan play)? Samuel French, where every single actor had to go to get plays for acting classes? Remember like a million fucking Barnes & Nobles?
Yes, it's a national trend, and yes, we still have some great bookstores — Stories, Skylight Books, Book Soup, the Last Bookstore, Vroman's, hell, I'll even throw in the Barnes & Nobles at the Grove — but the list grows ever shorter. Kevin Roderick has been faithfully keeping track of all the closures at L.A. Observed; it's a sobering list.
EXPAND Hollywood Park jondoeforty1/Flickr
5) Horseracing
The decline of horseracing, once known as the "sport of kings," has been felt especially sharply in California, which saw the closing of the Bay Meadows Racetrack in San Mateo in 2008, followed by the closing of Hollywood Park in Inglewood in 2013. The former playground of Bing Crosby and Jimmy Stewart soon will be the site of Inglewood's new $2.5 billion NFL stadium.
Now there's only one racetrack left in L.A. — Santa Anita.
4) Black widow spiders
Here's another thing we're glad to see go — poisonous black widow spiders, which are becoming increasingly uncommon in their native L.A. Instead, researchers are seeing more non-native brown widow spiders, which are also poisonous but less aggressive.
3) Babies
While babies themselves appear to be doing just fine, Angelenos, and indeed all Californians, are having fewer of them. As the Sacramento Bee recently reported:
Californians gave birth to about 504,000 children in 2013, equivalent to 13.1 births per 1,000 residents. That's the lowest birth rate in California since 1933 — the heart of the Great Depression.
And the birthrate in Los Angeles is even lower. According to the County Department of Public Health:
In 2011, there were 130,312 births, a substantial decrease from 204,124 births in 1990. The number of children under the age of 10 years residing in the County has also fallen nearly 17% since 2000. This decline is projected to continue, and is much larger than the 4% decrease reported for California or for the United States, where the number increased by 2%.
Immigration is also way down; Los Angeles County once was expected to have 12 million people by the year 2030; now that's been pushed back to 2060.
You might be thinking this is excellent news — less traffic! Smaller crowds at brunch! Fewer crying babies! But there's a dark cloud to that silver lining. Our school district will have to make some serious cuts if it wants to remain a "going concern." And a graying population could keep our economy in the doldrums for decades to come.
2) Diners
R.I.P. Ships, 1956 to 1996. (According to Wikipedia: "The Ships menu included Shrimp Louie, navy bean soup and cottage cheese with peach or pineapple. Toasters were located at tables and on the counters for customers to prepare their own toast.")
R.I.P. Tiny Naylor's. R.I.P. Twains. R.I.P. Jan's. R.I.P. Junior's. R.I.P. Victor's. R.I.P. Zucky's. R.I.P. Ed Debevic's (!). And of course, R.I.P. Johnnie's, 1956 to 2000, which became, and remains, a Potemkin Village diner, available only as a filming location.
At least there's still Norms.
1) An affordable place to live
Neil Diamond once sang of L.A.: "Palm trees grow and rents are low." Whelp. Palm trees are dying. And the rent, well, I don't have to tell you. It's too damn high.
L.A. may have "only" the eighth most expensive median rental prices in the country, but rents increased 11 percent in 2015, and certainly show no signs of slowing down. And because our average wages lag behind many other big cities, L.A.'s rents are deemed the "least affordable" in the country.This uninspired document has led to an interesting debate about content, wireless, and the future of broadband.
I love the irony: The Net Neutrality Debate is a debate in which virtually no one can stay neutral. We're all picking sides. Now that Google and Verizon tried to step in (with a new Legislative Framework Proposal) and guide us all to a theoretically better place, many have chosen to stand on the opposite side of these two giant companies.
I was on vacation when this story broke. I watched it all somewhat removed. I'd step into Disney World's Animal Kingdom Park, check my phone, and see that Google and Verizon had cooked upwithout anyone really asking them toa possible solution for the Net Neutrality conundrum. In a nutshell, the regular broadband world would remain neutral (with some fuzzy exceptions) to all online traffic, but the cellular wireless broadband environment would not.
I'll be honest, when I first read the proposal, I wasn't shocked or outraged. I've had numerous conversations with our Mobile Expert Sascha Segan who has explained the fundamental limitations of most cellular wireless networks, networks which were never built to handle broadband Internet access. This dialog was usually in response to my complaint that broadband data plans are too expensive. Segan told me that if they were too cheap and everyone signed on, it would cripple the networks. This was some years ago, and now I'm watching his vision come true. The new 4G networks should be better equipped to handle the load, but 4G is far from ubiquitous, and typical 3G networks, which everyone seems to find a way to afford, are showing signs of strain.
Google and Verizon, which both have a serious stake in the future of broadband (wired and wireless), appeared to offer a reasonable proposal. But as I boarded Toy Story Mania at Disney's Hollywood Studios (you don 3D glasses and shoot virtual 3D targets), I saw numerous reports and commentary calling the plan evil. By the time I made it to Space Mountain, there were actually physical protests against the proposal. People were picketing a proposal. What would they do if it became a plan?
I don't know if Google and Verizon are doing something evil. AT&T has thrown its support behind the plan. Does that make it more evil?
Broadband as a Right
Based on a survey I did a while ago, I know most people believe broadband Internet access should be a right, not a privilege. Certainly, Internet access has to be a right, but I don't know if our rights can extend to guaranteeing a certain level of service (which is what we mean by "broadband"). Access to information is critical for the progress and betterment of society. On the other hand, access to the Internet is not free. It's still provided by countless private companies paying for servers, land lines, backbones, and towers. These companies are making money, but the public's need for access-anywhere data is growing fast. To support it, companies like Google, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and others have to support their existing infrastructure as well as build out new ones (like 4G networks). That costs money, too.
One school of thought on the plan the freely available, or neutral, Internet will become a wasteland of dull PBS-like educational information for both cellular and land-line broadband. All of the entertainment and action (games, video, big downloads, social interaction, etc.) will be moved up to the managed Internet where you can pay more for clear, fast, unfettered access.
That's clearly the darkest view of Google and Verizon's intentions and I don't think I'm buying.
Let's try to separate this argument into two parts: There's the health and development of the networks and then there is the content.
On the network side, we have land-line cable, DSL, satellite, and fiber networks. The best of these services still do not blanket the entire country, but we're getting there. In the cellular broadband space, we have giants like AT&T and Verizon that fear a rich, media-devouring populace living on their networks. I don't see 3G supporting the same level of desktop media we've come to enjoy. The newer 4G can definitely hack it, but it remains a pipedream for most people. And what happens if any portion of existing file-sharing activity moves to the wireless Web? Even 4G could be crippled if a BitTorrent army decides broadband wireless is the new file-sharing frontier. If you read the proposal, you'll notice the repeated use of the word "lawful." It's obviously a veiled reference to all illegal file-sharing activities.
On the content side, we have the promise of the Internet as a delivery mechanism for every kind of content. In general, the companies creating online content are not the same ones running the networks (ISPs). Google, however, is one of the few trying to do both (You have heard about its fiber initiative, haven't you?). If Google were, in fact, making anything other than proposals, this would be a clear red flag. Those who manage both the content and transport mechanism could have simply too much private interest to deliver a plan that keeps the public's interests intact. Those who think Google is evil ("they're tracking our activities and selling our data!") are clearly piling this new plan atop that already dim view. There's no way a company that makes money connecting our personal searches with advertising pitches could have anyone's best interests in mind. Verizon doesn't make or deliver content, per se, but it's a network with a delivery mechanism. The thinking is that it can't be trusted either. These networks could, the argument goes, operate like cable networks and charge sites to be on their networks and then turn around and charge you for the best Internet content.PeopleImages/GettyImages
When we drink lots of booze, we have a tendency to find other people more attractive than we otherwise would if we were sober. You probably knew that. Here's what you probably didn't know: This phenomenon—known as "beer goggles"—has been scientifically documented.
For example, in one study, researchers approached straight male and female college students in a bar and asked them to rate their attraction to several people of the opposite sex. The drunker the students were—as determined by a breathalyzer—the higher the ratings they gave.
But a new study just published in The Journal of Social Psychology adds an intriguing twist to that experiment, suggesting that beer goggles don't just increase straight men and women |
the intake manifold.
Another good place to cook is on or near the exhaust system. Convection from the piping-hot exhaust gases ensures that every part of that exhaust system—especially parts close to the engine like the catalytic converter and exhaust manifold—gets very hot.
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But you don’t necessarily have to place food against hot metal objects to get them warm, thanks to radiation (heat transfer via electromagnetic waves) and convection (heat transfer via fluid flow).
If you want to roast a marshmallow, you can place it close to the exhaust manifold and allow radiation to get the job done. Or if you want to just warm up some ravioli, placing it in the warm fan blast (the air entering the radiator through the grille and picking up heat) will do the trick. Still, if you’re looking to quickly and thoroughly cook something, conduction is the way to go, so try to have your food package actually touch the hot heat source.
Don’t do what Fox and Friends did, though. (That’s good advice in general.) They tried to cook on top of plastic engine and air filter covers. The issue with that is that the only heat cooking their food came from the fan blast, and at probably less than 200 degrees, they had to spend a long time cooking, and even then, much of it was still undercooked.
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So just remember: if you want to cook something thoroughly and quickly, your exhaust system and engine block are your friends. If you want to just slowly cook something, the valve cover or maybe even the intake manifold might do.
But if you’ve got something like a roll that you’d just like to warm up, slap it anywhere underhood (even on a plastic cover), as the heat from the radiator fan-blast will keep it toasty.
Of course, this is all engine and vehicle dependent, as underhood packaging environments vary greatly between cars.
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My Experiment
Once I got thinking about car cooking, I had to try it myself. The first thing I did was drive to the grocery store and pick up some fine meats: pork cutlets, bacon and a steak.
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I’ll admit that it’s not a particularly imaginative meal, and if I keep eating like this, I’ll probably die of a heart attack at 29. But for now, meat it is.
As for packaging, I followed Manifold Destiny’s advice by wrapping the meat in three layers of aluminum foil, alternating which side had the seam. This makes a lot of sense, as the layers of foil keep the juices in, but are also tough enough to allow me to cram the food package into little nooks and crannies without worrying about tearing and contamination.
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Once I dumped some spices on the meat and wrapped it in foil, it was time to head to my rusty-but-trusty 1995 Jeep Cherokee to find a good place to fasten these food packages.
That’s when things went to hell.
This Can Be Dangerous
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A lot of people wonder if it’s safe to cook food in your engine bay, and I think the answer is “yes,” assuming you’ve got a fairly clean engine. The only concern might be oil and grime contaminating your food, but if you’re placing the food on a clean metal surface with three layers of aluminum foil in between, you’ll probably be fine.
Are you worried about carbon monoxide somehow seeping into your food? I don’t think you should be, as I agree with Manifold Destiny whey say that if your exhaust leak is that bad, you’ve got bigger problems than just food contamination.
Another thing that’s worth mentioning, and something that the book talks about numerous times, is to stay away from the throttle linkage. The last thing you want to do is pack food in a way that will keep your throttle plate open and thus cause the car (and steak) to accelerate on its own. Note that most modern cars use drive-by-wire, so there’s no throttle cable or linkage to worry about.
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You should also remember to stay clear of the sharp, rotating fan. Well, unless you need to dice some carrots.
What Manifold Destiny didn’t mention was the battery, so I’ll talk about that now, because I just burned the crap out of my hand.
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I purchased some aluminum wire to help keep my food packages tied to the engine (the last thing I wanted to do was lose a steak on Woodward Avenue), but after cutting a foot-length of the stuff, disaster struck.
The aluminum wire in my hand touched the positive battery post and a ground, creating a thunderous spark. Before I could figure out what was happening, my hand was on fire. Figuratively, but almost literally.
I shook my hand to try to let go of the wire, but the melted skin meant the damned thing wouldn’t shake free. After what felt like several minutes of jumping up and down, screaming, swearing, and shaking my hand profusely, the red-hot wire came free from my vaporized skin, leaving sear marks on my paw. If you look carefully, you can see the little grooves that the wire scorched into my skin.
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Here’s where the wire touched the battery terminal. There’s a little chunk of aluminum missing.
The burn hurt a lot worse than it looks, trust me. To prevent such a catastrophe, I’d recommend placing an insulator over the top of your battery posts—maybe a blanket, a piece of plastic or a chunk of cardboard, but for god’s sake, make sure whatever you place over that battery isn’t moist.
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Food Placement
After weeping like a little baby from my burn, I went ahead and placed my bacon on the valve cover, figuring that it was far enough away from my exhaust and engine block to keep my bacon from getting crispy. (I like my bacon chewy; the closer it is to German Speck, the better.)
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I strung up some marshmallows just above the exhaust, hoping to brown them using radiative heat transfer, and I tucked a pork cutlet right against the exhaust manifold:
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I placed the other pack of port cutlets just between the distributor and engine block:
And the steak, I tied to the top of my catalytic converter:
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With the food in place, I cruised down Woodward Avenue just outside of Detroit, worried with every bump that I might lose some dinner. I kept an eye on my rearview ready to see a steaming square of aluminum foil on the ground, but my tie-downs held.
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I cruised down Michigan’s most famous road, the delicious smell of steak emanating through the copious holes in my floorboards. My friend drove behind me in his convertible Jeep, making sure that a runaway pork cutlet wouldn’t cause an accident and enjoying the glorious aroma.
In the end, the food turned out better than I had expected. The bacon needed a little more time on the valve cover, but the steak, which I had cooked on the catalytic converter, was well-done.
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The marshmallows were s’more-worthy, and the pack of pork that I had placed between the distributor and engine block came out moist, juicy and delectable. As for the pork packet on the exhaust manifold, that one cooked far too hot, and lost all of its juices, so it tasted like charcoal. You can’t win them all, I guess.
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It was the best self-made meal I had eaten in a while, besting even my finest batch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. By anyone else’s standards, it was probably garbage, but with a bit of KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce, I thought it was a fine meal.
If you have any car-cooking tips or stories, I welcome them as well. Don’t be afraid to try it—just wear proper protection when you do.The 2016 CFL season was one of lost opportunities for Ricky Foley and the Toronto Argonauts.
Foley and his teammates cleaned out their lockers Sunday following a disappointing 41-17 road loss to the Edmonton Eskimos on Saturday night. Toronto (5-13) finished tied with the Saskatchewan Roughriders for the league's worst record and missed the CFL playoffs.
And with the Grey Cup game being held Nov. 27 at BMO Field, Toronto lost out on a chance to play for a championship on home soil. That's something the franchise did successfully in 2012, beating Calgary in the 100th Grey Cup game at Rogers Centre.
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Much was expected of the Argos this year with the franchise under new ownership – Bell and Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment chairman Larry Tanenbaum – and relocating to a refurbished BMO Field. But the Argos allowed a CFL-high 586 points and were a dismal 2-7 at BMO Field.The legality of purchasing cannabis seeds is frustratingly like all other legal matters pertaining to marijuana; tricky. Depending on the Country, State, and a variety of other circumstantial factors, one may or may not be legally permitted to purchase them.
This blog post is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice.
United States
As a general matter, and certainly on a purely federal level, purchasing cannabis seeds in the United States seeds is illegal. This is because marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substance Act and the purchasing (and importing) of an illegal substance is of course illegal. However, on a State level where cannabis may be legal in either a medicinal or recreational capacity, approved cannabis dispensaries and (in some cases) individuals may purchase and possess seeds.
The laws and regulations governing the purchase of seeds will vary according to the legislation passed by the state and depending on the license the business has acquired, will limit the quantity and source of the acquired seeds. Similarly, the number of seeds that an individual can possess varies by state. For example, if an individual lives in Colorado, he or she can legally purchase enough seeds to grow six marijuana plants for recreational use. Washington D.C. has a similar framework in place for individual growers whose intent is to use the seeds purely for personal use.
Due to the federal prohibition, importing cannabis seeds from outside of the United States may prove challenging and risky, even if one intends to use them in a State where cannabis is legal. Indeed, there is a distinct possibility that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents may seize the cannabis seeds that are shipped from foreign countries upon arrival into the U.S at the risk and expense of the importer.
To avoid some of these legal hurdles, seed banks in other countries officially sell their products for ‘souvenir purposes’, rather than for the purpose of marijuana cultivation.
Additionally, in certain circumstances, cannabis seeds can be purchased for alternative uses within the U.S., such as bird food or fishing bait additives. These seeds are often sterilized to ensure that they will not germinate. Responsible companies that sell cannabis seeds through their website warn purchasers that by placing an order, the individual must act in accordance with the laws of their country and respective state.
Canada
Currently, it is legal to purchase cannabis seeds in Canada for recreational or medical use. The cannabis act which came into effect on October 17th 2018 states anyone over 18 can grow, from licensed seed or seedlings, up to 4 cannabis plants per residence for personal use. However, the true ablity to grow at home varies per province with New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, and Nova Scotia only allowing for the sale of cannabis at government stores as of late 2018.
Given the adherence to certain restrictions, seeds can be purchased from licensed distributors in Canada or online seed banks and shipped to various locations throughout the country.
The troubling legality of growing marijuana in Canada is surely frustrating to the severely ill patients who seek to alleviate their pain with some of mother earth’s finest medicine.
United Kingdom
The possession and trafficking of cannabis seeds is legal in the UK. However, for 99.99% of the population, individuals and companies alike, the cultivation, growth, and sale of any subsequently derived marijuana is illegal in the U.K. One could easily imagine why this is such a confusing (even schizophrenic?) legal dynamic – what good is it to allow for the possession of seeds if one cannot legally do anything with them?
It is legal to buy and sell the seeds over the counter as well as through the mail to and from a U.K. address, provided the seeds are never germinated. Online cannabis seed banks operating from the U. K. emphasize that seeds are not to be germinated under any circumstances. Seeds are sold for non-cultivation purposes such as use as collector items, bird food, and fish bait.
Ultimately, the potential liability of buying and/or selling cannabis seeds in the UK is largely dependent on the perceived intent of the seller/purchaser.
Australia
The possession of cannabis seeds in Australia is only legal for medical purposes. Cannabis, under Australian law is summarized to include seeds, concentrates, tars, the plant, and any piece of the plant, disregarding hemp and hemp products.
In spite of this, Australia’s National Drug Strategy favors sanctions and minimal penalties for recreational cannabis use and to a smaller extent, trafficking. The legal consequences of buying cannabis seeds exists along a continuum and is to a large extent, a function of both the the perceived intent of the seller or purchaser and the state/province where the purchase has taken place.
Spain
Like the United States, Spain has a marijuana legal regime that draws distinctions along national and regional levels. Certain regions of the country are massively amenable to the consumption of the plant (Catalonia and Barcelona in particular) while other regions have instituted laws and policies that are less favorable.
When purchasing seeds, make sure you are familiar with the laws of the locality. While it is fair to say that Spain as a matter of national policy has a rather relaxed view on Cannabis, its criminal code still officially prohibits the sale of cannabis. Critically, it does not prohibit the consumption of marijuana and for this reason, there are hundreds and hundreds of smoking clubs across the country.
Principally, Spain is interested in preventing mass scale trafficking of the plant. Officials and law enforcement are not overly concerned with individuals growing the plant for their own consumption. As this pertains to purchasing cannabis seeds, it seems that being caught with the seeds would not be particularly burdensome; hence the many cannabis seed banks and breeders located in Spain – it is legal to buy and sell seeds and other ‘hemp’ products.
Italy
In Italy, the sale, purchase and possession of cannabis seeds is essentially legal, as seeds do not contain THC. Italian law states that cannabis plants or products from the plant are illegal when containing an excess of 0.6% THC. Marijuana seeds in Italy are often labeled as collectors items, among other disclaimers.
Italian law makes it somewhat legal to grow cannabis provided that the plant’s THC content does not exceed 0.6%. Immature, vegetative plants do not produce enough THC to be considered illegal. Italy’s first cannabis clone shop, the Hemp Embassy, takes advantage of this legal loophole. Buyers of cannabis genetics must take steps to ensure that plants do not flower.
France
Along with Germany, France is one of the toughest countries in the European Union regarding it’s laws on cannabis. The use, possession, cultivation, sale and purchase of cannabis is illegal in France. The country does have an industrial hemp industry, with 20 recognized strains producing less that 0.2% THC.
Due to certain interpretations of EU free-trade laws, cannabis seeds may get shipped to France by cannabis seed banks in the European Union, but not bought or sold in the French market.
Germany
As a general matter, buying cannabis seeds in Germany is illegal if they seem to be sold or possessed for any intended illegal cultivation. Cannabis seeds, excluding hemp varieties, are are listed as plant parts in Annex I of the BtMG narcotics law. Where the confusion lies is when considering that selling or possessing cannabis seeds is deemed punishable if used for illegal cultivation. The legal status of marijuana seeds for use outside of illegal cultivation is not explained, such as for souvenir purposes, use as bird food or as fishing bait additives.
Medical cannabis patients in Germany are not permitted to grow their own plants, therefore buying seeds to grow medicinal cannabis would be against the law. However, in 2017 the German Federal Administrative Court made a groundbreaking decision when it ruled in favor of a medical patient wishing to cultivate his own cannabis at home.
Belgium
In Belgium, the sale of cannabis seeds is a grey area; it is not specifically prohibited by law, in part to seeds not containing the illegal substance THC, but seed vendors in Belgium have had trouble selling cannabis seeds locally.
During the mid-2000’s, many grow equipment/cannabis seed shops in Belgium were shut down by authorities. As a result, vendors left Belgium flocking to the more liberal Netherlands laws regarding cannabis.
The Netherlands
The Netherlands is known for its progressive attitude towards cannabis use and prefers regulation to prohibition in a broader effort to curtail substance abuse. Cannabis seeds, along with fully developed marijuana flowers, can be sold in coffee shops throughout the country, given proper adherence to regulatory guidelines.
However, foreign tourists in the Netherlands are only permitted to purchase cannabis seeds from coffee shops in cities like Amsterdam that have refused to implement the Weed Pass rule; a law which prevents non-residents from purchasing cannabis seeds.
Austria
In Austria, cannabis seeds can be purchased somewhat legally. The ambiguous wording of Austrian Narcotics Decree, annex IV, focuses on Δ9-THC and prohibits substances containing above the legal limit of 0.3%. Cannabis seeds, along with non-flowering cannabis plants do not contain enough THC to be considered an illegal substance by that measure.
As a result of this legal loophole, Austrian hemp and cannabis trade shows are able to feature immature, vegetating cannabis clones and seedlings that are sold for “aromatherapy purposes”.
Czech Republic
It is legal to sell and buy cannabis seeds as well as all equipment for cultivation in the Czech Republic, for use as collectors items. Cannabis seeds do not contain the illegal substance THC. However, one must act in accordance with Czech laws; cannabis cultivation and possession remains illegal for recreational use in the Czech Republic.
Since the 2010 amendment (467/2009 Coll) to the penal code, cultivation of cannabis in Czech has been decriminalized provided that plant count is five or below.
Poland
According to the Act on Drug Prevention, the possession and sale of cannabis seeds in Poland legal. Marijuana seeds do not contain the illegal substance THC, so are not considered a controlled substance. However, under Polish law cultivating marijuana remains illegal. Cannabis seeds are sold strictly for intended use outside of marijuana growing, such as collectables.
On July 20, 2017 Poland legalized marijuana for medical use. However, the new law doesn’t allow for domestic cultivation. Cannabis is imported into the country and sold at pharmacies to qualified patients in various forms.
Switzerland
The sale and purchase of cannabis seeds in Switzerland is not clearly defined; current Swiss legislation does not target marijuana seeds specifically, but rather prohibits this sale of non-authorized hemp seeds. It is legal to grow hemp in Switzerland, with restrictions on THC levels exceeding 1%.
Slovakia
Since March of 2014, cannabis seeds are no longer illegal in Slovakia. However, the law change applies only to marijuana seeds; possession or cultivation of the cannabis plant remains illegal. The current active legislation forged by the Health Ministry states that cannabis seeds do not contain the psychoactive chemical compounds known as cannabinoids.
South Africa
The purchase, cultivation and/or trafficking of cannabis seeds in South Africa is fundamentally illegal. If an individual is caught engaging in any of these activities, the police will nearly certainly confiscate the seeds and depending on the quantity of seeds in question, impose stiff or lax penalties.
Indeed, possessing a small number of cannabis seeds will likely yield only a small fine however, if the individual is found to have a large quantity of seeds, he/she may be imprisoned.
India
Cannabis seeds and leaves are excluded from India’s list of banned substances, making the possession of cannabis seeds in India legal. The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act reads “…b) ganja, that is, the flowering or fruiting tops of the cannabis plant (excluding the seeds and leaves when not accompanied by the tops.”
Other marijuana laws vary by state in India. Bhang is an edible cannabis preparation available in India, and can be made using cannabis seeds and leaves exclusively to stay in accordance with the law.
Uruguay
Citizens of Uruguay and registered residents 18 or older are allowed to grow up to 6 marijuana plants at home. Personal use of cannabis is is not penalized nor specified – Uruguay’s law allows for possession of an unspecified “personal amount” of usable marijuana. This includes seeds.
Marijuana seeds can be obtained at the various state-controlled dispensaries, and “Club de Cannabis” clubs. Regarding to sale, purchase and possession of cannabis seeds, citizens and registered residents will be protected under the law, while tourists are not.
Cannabis (Marijuana) Seeds
Cannabis (marijuana) seeds are a product of cannabis plants; these plants are dioecious, which means that their male and female organs appear on separate individuals. Cannabis plants that are solely female are used to produce high potency cannabis and seeds that drop from matured plants are harvested for the production of hemp products or for the production of more plants.
Although the price of seeds depends a number of factors (availability, location, breeder etc.), seeds typically cost between $10 to $20 dollars per seed. Thus, a pack of ten seeds can cost well over $100. Individuals can physically, although not necessarily legally, purchase seeds on various online seed banks.
Some of the more common productions sites can be found within Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, and the Netherlands. The laws concerning the production and sale of cannabis seeds in these countries are less stringent and therefore more attractive (and less risky) to growers.
The Takeaway
Ultimately, both sellers and buyers of marijuana seeds must be aware of three key factors; the national legality of the purchase, the regional legality of the purchase, and the quantity of the purchase. Depending on how these factors interface with one another, one may expect greater or less severe penalties for the purchasing of marijuana seeds. Stay safe, stay free.
Abe Cohn is COO of THC Legal Group, a team of Marijuana Lawyers specializing in legal protection for the cannabis industry. For more information, please visit their website at www.THCLegalGroup.com
——————-Fifty years and millions of words ago, when Joyce Carol Oates was in her late 20s, she wrote a story about an unhappy teenager named Connie who accepts a ride, unwisely, from a dark, glib young man who calls himself Arnold Friend, and although that story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” is scrupulously realistic, it is also a classic tale of horror. It is, in its chillingly objective way, scarier than anything in Oates’s new collection, THE DOLL-MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF TERROR (Mysterious Press, $24) — which, as it happens, contains a story about another teenage girl who gets in the wrong car. The smooth-talking male predator in this new one, “Big Momma,” keeps a very large metaphor as a house pet: the title character is a 20-foot-long reticulated python. There’s nothing of the supernatural in either story, or for that matter in any of the “tales of terror” in the present collection, but Oates’s brand of horror has never required the invocation of other worlds: This world is terrible enough for her. Everything she writes, in whatever genre, has an air of dread, because she deals in vulnerabilities and inevitabilities, in the desperate needs that drive people like Connie and poor young Violet of “Big Momma” to their fates. A sense of helplessness is the essence of horror, and Oates conveys that feeling as well as any writer around, whether the powerlessness in question is that of a victim or, as in the title story of “The Doll-Master,” that of someone who is unable to stop doing harm to others: Obsession can be a kind of vulnerability, too.
Lately I’ve been thinking about what constitutes “horror” in fiction, because the forms the genre takes have become so fluid, so different from the older models of stories about monsters and otherworldly creatures and even malign lingering spirits. Although all those sorts of things still creep and crawl and slither through the popular imagination, and reliably generate the desired fear and loathing in the reader, a lot of fiction these days seems less interested in producing great shocks than in creating a pervasive, generalized sense of unease — monsters that don’t so much chase us as surround us, like something toxic in the air. Peter Straub has been writing that kind of fiction for nearly as long as Joyce Carol Oates has, and like her he doesn’t always need a ghost or a vampire or, God knows, a horde of zombies to give his readers the willies. In his fat recent volume of selected stories, the perfectly named INTERIOR DARKNESS (Doubleday, $28.95), the supernatural content is relatively light. The book’s first, and most horrifying, story, “Blue Rose,” is about a psychopathic boy who becomes adept at hypnotizing his little brother; it’s about the need to bend the world to the shape of one’s own warped perceptions, to wring reality’s neck until everything goes blessedly quiet. There are stories here that play with language and time for the purpose, it seems, of recreating the sheer noise of existence, stories that wonder what kind of narrative we can make out in the fog and chaos of words.
Even when Straub goes a little Lovecraft, as he does in the late novella “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” the effect he’s aiming for isn’t quivering terror, but something more like muted awe — an eye-widening revelation of a wrongness at the heart of the universe. In all his stories, the interior and the exterior darknesses tend to leak into each other. Eight years ago, he edited a terrific anthology called “Poe’s Children,” subtitled “The New Horror,” which made a persuasive case for broadening the definition of the genre, or maybe ceasing to think of it as a genre at all. The book included writers as diverse as Kelly Link, Dan Chaon, Elizabeth Hand, Neil Gaiman, Graham Joyce and M. John Harrison, and the stories, different as they were from one another, shared a sense of horror as something numinous and elusive, too tricky to be approached head-on. One of those writers, Brian Evenson, has a new collection of stories called A COLLAPSE OF HORSES (Coffee House, paper, $16.95), which embodies this hard-to-define aesthetic pretty strikingly — or maybe what it’s actually doing is disembodying something else. Evenson’s fiction is stark and often jaw-droppingly funny. In “The Dust,” a nearly conventional science-fiction horror tale, you will find, for example, this sentence: “Orvar was certain, or fairly certain, that he hadn’t slit the man’s throat himself.” Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called “BearHeart™,” even Stephen King, but Evenson’s deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won’t come out right.
“How is he to know where one thing starts and another ends?” asks one of Evenson’s characters, and that, in a nutshell, is the nature of horror in his fiction: the condition of being unable to identify any boundaries. A character in the brilliant title story suffers from a sort of epistemological panic: “Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment,” he thinks. “No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an explicably dead family, it must be faced.” He puts the people in his fiction through a lot: confinement, mutilation, cognitive blurring and quite a bit of what Daffy Duck once characterized as “pronoun trouble”: His characters can misplace their sense of themselves in midsentence. “No, I doesn’t sound right. I can’t do it: he.” They’re as mad as Poe’s narrators and as stoic as Buster Keaton. Is this horror? I think it is. Or he does.The Steelers and Browns begin their season in Cleveland for an AFC North tilt for a 1:00 pm Eastern kick-off at FirstEnergy Stadium. The Browns have struggled mightily in Week 1 in the last dozen years. Cleveland has been outscored 316-168 while going 0-for-their-last-12 to open the season. The average margin of victory of Cleveland’s opponents in Week 1? 12.3 points over the last 12 years.
Pittsburgh Steelers at Cleveland Browns
Point spread: Steelers – 9.5 Over/under: 47.0 Date: Sunday, September 10, 2017 Location: FirstEnergy Stadium, Cleveland.
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Point Spread and Betting Odds
NFL odds have the visiting team Steelers set as 9.5-point favourites with the total currently sitting at 47.0. Pittsburgh has owned Cleveland in the new millennium going 30-5 overall against the Browns in the 2000s. The last time the Browns beat the Steelers in Cleveland was on October 12th, 2014 in Week 6 thanks to a 31-10 decision.
Pittsburgh Steelers
The Steelers secondary could be a major cause for concern again this season. The Patriots torched Pittsburgh through the air in the AFC championship game last year. The Steelers need to be better against the pass if they hope to challenge New England for the AFC’s top seed. Pittsburgh added former Browns CB Joe Haden late in the preseason and will pair him opposite Artie Burns. Nickelback and safety are up in the air with Cameron Sutton likely to start the regular season on injured reserve and Mike Mitchell recovering from a lower-body injury that forced him to miss all of training camp.
Cleveland Browns
The DeShone Kizer era begins in Cleveland. The rookie out of Notre Dame will be the Browns’ 27th starting QB since 1999. Kizer will certainly have some help because of Cleveland’s revamped offensive line. The Browns committed more than $120 million, including $64.5 million guaranteed to guard Kevin Zeitler, interior lineman JC Tretter and guard Joel Bitonio who inked a huge extension. The unit is anchored by 10-time Pro Bowler Joe Thomas, who has never missed a play in his career and has been on the field for nearly 10,000 consecutive snaps. Pro Football Focus ranks Cleveland’s offensive line 2nd overall in the NFL.
Steelers vs. Browns Prediction
Steelers 24 Browns 17Tiny Doodle Tease
Today on Disney Infinity’s Toy Box TV Twitch Live Stream we got an unofficial tease at an upcoming character!
After a fun Dictionary type game with everyone on stage drawing characters from Disney Infinity, John Diesta was brought back up for a bonus round.
JV whispered into John D’s ear and announced to the crowd that the bonus round would be a quick tease of a yet announced Disney Infinity Marvel Character.
John waved his arms around and then shrunk down to a quick drawing on the board.
While “Ant Man” wasn’t said by anyone on stage, it was quickly shouted out by the audience and members of the Twitch Stream.
The screen then changed over to a promo still with several Marvel Infinity characters looking down into the Hulk’s palm.
An Ant Man Marvel Infinity character would make for some seriously fun game play, taking the enlarging / shrinking goo from Toy Story in Space to a whole new level.
Looking forward to the official announcement!
Here are some of the other drawings by the Infinity / Avalanche team!
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Community experiences of revitalization
Data management
Ethical issues
Language planning
Lexicography and reference grammar design
Methods of assessing ethnolinguistic vitality
Orthography design
Teaching/learning small languages
Technology in documentation – methods and pitfalls
Topics in areal language documentation
Training in documentation methods – beyond the university
Assessing success in documentation and revitalization strategies
Abstract submission Abstracts should be submitted in English, but presentations can be in any language. We particularly welcome presentations in languages of the region discussed. Authors may submit no more than one individual and one joint (co-authored) proposal. Abstracts are due by August 31, 2012, with notification of acceptance by October 1, 2012. NOTE: The Call for Proposals deadline has already passed. We are no longer accepting proposals.
We ask for abstracts of no more than 400 words for online publication so that conference participants will have a good idea of the content of your paper, and a 50-word summary for inclusion in the conference program. All abstracts will be submitted to blind peer review by international experts on the topic (see below for review criteria). We will only be accepting proposal submissions for papers or posters. Please note that the Advisory Committee may ask that some abstracts submitted as conference talks be presented as posters instead. NOTE: We regret that we are unable to accept proposals for organized panel sessions this year due to our tight schedule of Master Classes. We would also like to be able to accept as many regular paper presentations as possible. We will do our best to group accepted presentations on similar topics in the same time frame. Selected authors will be invited to submit their conference papers to the journal Language Documentation & Conservation for publication. Proposal review criteria Appropriateness of the Topic: Does the paper address the themes of the conference?
Does the paper address the themes of the conference? Presentation: Is the abstract well-written? Does it suggest that the paper will be well organized and clearly presented?
Is the abstract well-written? Does it suggest that the paper will be well organized and clearly presented? Importance of the Topic: Is this an important topic within the area? Is the paper likely to make an original contribution to
knowledge in the field? Will the paper stimulate discussion? Scholarships To help defray travel expenses to come and present at the conference, scholarships of up to US$1,500 will be awarded to the six best abstracts by (i) students and/or (ii) members of an endangered language community who are actively working to document their heritage language and who are not employed by a college or university. If you are eligible and wish to be considered for a scholarship, please select the appropriate "Yes" button on the proposal submission form.
Presentation formats Papers will be allowed 20 minutes for presentation with 10 minutes of question time. Posters will be on display throughout the conference. Poster presentations will run during the lunch breaks.The PC gaming market has been pretty strong market over the last couple of years, and recent developments have pushed the boundaries again. With the impending launches of virtual reality headsets, we’ve seen even notebook manufacturers getting prepared to drive these new devices, but it takes a lot of compute to do it. Manufacturers going after sales of gaming notebooks are going to be able to eke out better margins too, so it’s an area many of them focus on. But the typical gaming notebook is going to be quite expensive. A powerful mobile GPU, nice display, and good processor, are all going to add to the bill of materials. For those that want to get into the market for a gaming notebook, sometimes you don’t want to break the bank.
When you try to define what makes up a gaming notebook, it’s not always cut and dry. You are certainly going to expect a discrete graphics card in the mix, along with enough processing power and storage to keep some of the latest games, which are now often times 50 GB or more. Proper gaming notebooks are going to have sufficient cooling to keep everything working at peak capacity for extended sessions of high use.
Lenovo markets their gaming lineup under the Y branding, and they offer both notebooks and desktops targeted towards this market. To round out the collection, they also offer gaming keyboards, 7.1 headphones, and even a backpack to haul the equipment around in. Today we are going to take a look at the IdeaPad Y700 gaming notebook, which was launched with Skylake processors at IFA 2015. Lenovo offers a very impressive entry level price on the Y700, with it starting at just $899 for the 15.6-inch model. This is not the only Y700 they have on offer, and Ian was able to test out a pre-production model with AMD’s Carrizo APU and R9 M380 graphics. The model Lenovo sent for review though is the Intel Core i7-6700HQ version with NVIDA GTX 960M graphics and touch display. The touch version starts at $1099 with 8 GB of memory, and the model we have is the $1149 version with 16 GB of memory.
Lenovo Ideapad Y700
As Tested: Core i7-6700HQ, 16GB RAM, 128GB+1TB, 1920x1080 Touch Non Touch 15 Touch 15 CPU Intel Core i5-6300HQ (45W)
2.3-3.2 GHz Quad-Core 6MB Cache
Intel Core i7-6700HQ (45W)
2.6-3.5 GHz Quad-Core with Hyperthreading 6MB Cache Intel Core i7-6700HQ (45W)
2. |
Hall in London on Wednesday and Thursday.
He had been scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Saturday from Moscow on his way to Pyongyang, a source with knowledge of the stopover said.
However, the name of Jong-chol was not on the registry of the flight from London to Moscow, according to the source. He also wasn’t seen at the Beijing airport Saturday.
It was the first time Jong-chol has been seen in public since the current leader came to power following the death of his father and late leader, Kim Jong-il, in late 2011.
Jong-chol is the second of the three known sons of the late leader.
He and the North’s current leader were born to the late leader’s third wife, Ko Yong-hi, who died of breast cancer at age 51 in 2004, while the eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, was born to Kim’s second wife, Song Hae-rim.
The youngest son was chosen as leader because the first son fell out of his father’s favor after he was caught using a fake passport while trying to enter Japan to visit Tokyo Disneyland in 2001. The late leader reportedly determined the second son was too “girlish” to be a leader.On Monday morning, the Syrian Arab Army’s 5th Armored Division – in coordination with the National Defense Forces (NDF) and Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) – have captured 5 villages in northeast Dara’a after fierce clashes with the Syrian Al-Qaeda group “Jabhat Al-Nusra” and Liwaa Al-Yarmouk.
The 5th Division and their allies surprised Jabhat Al-Nusra with a powerful assault at 8 A.M. on Monday that resulted in the capture of East Maseekat, West Maseekat, Rassum Al-Khawaabi, Ishnaan, and Al-Dalasat in northeast Dara’a.
Also in northeast Dara’a, Al-‘Alam journalist, Hussein Murtada, has reported that the SAA has encircled the villages of Busra Al-Hareer and Milayhat Al-‘Atrash.
According to preliminary reports from Dara’a, the 5th Division and their allies killed just over 30 militants from Jabhat Al-Nusra and Liwaa Al-Yarmouk – number has yet to be confirmed.
As of recently, the border of Dara’a and As-Sweida has erupted in violence, as the SAA and rebel forces continue this tug-of-war battle for control of southern Syria.
The recent surge of activity from the SAA is likely due to the increased rebel presence outside of the town of Al-Lijat; this had forced the SAA to take the offensive in order to protect the Khalkhalah Airbase in northwest As-Sweida.
In southern Dara’a, the militants from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Jabhat Al-Nusra are preparing for a offensive at the provincial capital; however, no date has been set for this alleged offensive.
AdvertisementsSean Edwards and Tom Kenyon at Nano this week.
An inauspicious morning coffee in Adelaide’s East End this week could symbolise the beginning of the first genuinely bipartisan support for a local nuclear industry since the 1970s.
Liberal Senator Sean Edwards and State Labor MP Tom Kenyon were spotted together at a local café, a cross-party and cross-jurisdiction dalliance that raised eyebrows. InDaily has confirmed the meeting was inspired by Edwards’ recent submission to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission, a document that outlines a substantial business case for not merely storing spent fuel, but recycling it.
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It’s an approach Edwards, together with a formidable scientific team whose research underpinned his conclusions, believes will not only generate billions of dollars in revenue, but will create an industry that will provide jobs and cheap energy.
“I got a copy of his submission and was very impressed with it,” Kenyon said when contacted by InDaily.
“He’s put a huge amount of work in.”
Kenyon’s own submission to the inquiry focussed on potential revenues created from accepting and storing the world’s nuclear waste, but he says Edwards is “going a slightly different direction”.
“He’s looking at Generation Four resources, and how you’d work them into processing waste and generating heat at the same time… it’s a really intriguing proposition,” he said.
“My view was always ‘get the spent fuel here and people will pay us to do that, and that’s great … and we’ll use that to build infrastructure’ … but this is almost a step further. It suddenly becomes a resource, and we use that to lower the cost of electricity across the state and give SA a competitive advantage in energy costs.”
Edwards says his proposal has “certainly met with a great deal of interest”.
“I’ve been absolutely delighted with it,” he said.
“There’s plenty of support within the parliamentary party, and right across a number of parliamentary parties.”
He says critics such as Professor Mark Diesendorf, who this week led the charge against his proposal, have “been on the record forever on their position (and) they’re easy to rebut because they’re just not modern concepts”.
He said his mission was to “socialise” the nuclear debate, to help spearhead public awareness and acceptance of the industry’s benefits, which “I fundamentally believe will turn around the economic future of this state for the next 100 years”.
It’s a mission he’s been set on since his maiden speech four years ago, when he said: “We cannot sidestep uranium … we dig it up, yet others are reaping the greatest benefit by taking our raw product and employing hundreds of thousands of people to develop it.”
“Now is the time to have the debate about leveraging our competitive advantage for the betterment of South Australia and indeed all Australians.”
And to do that, he insists, he needs strong cross-party support.
This week’s discussions with Kenyon are a step in that direction.
“If I’m going to socialise this policy, I can’t put out a science journal,” Edwards said, referring to the thorough cost-benefit analysis detailed in his submission, which concludes the commercialisation of spent fuel recycling “represents approximately $28 billion in value for South Australia”, along with “the potential for wholesale electricity priced at $0 MWh” and “direct job creation in the thousands”.
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“Economically, socially and environmentally, our state would be transformed for the better,” his report states.
“That’s two years of solid policy work there, thousands of man hours, a lot of that contributed by engineers and nuclear scientists on a belief basis,” he reflected on the submission, which he began preparing even before Premier Jay Weatherill gave it an outlet by establishing the royal commission inquiry.
“I learnt last year the Premier was interested in this space, because we were obviously talking to the same people,” said Edwards.
“I give him great credit, he’s realised we have potentially an advantage over anyone else in the world, geographically and environmentally.
“For once, it’s a perfect storm in our favour, a really good opportunity to commercialise this technology and capitalise on that for generations.”
He is confident in the “build it and they will come” belief that “other countries will be happy to use us”, with hundreds of reactors around the world and more being built.
“They’re all potential customers, and there are exponential economic benefits that flow on from inexpensive energy,” he said.
“This is a deliverable project that SA can embark on… I’m talking about a policy that delivers a project, and that’s the difference.”
While not yet a card-carrying convert, Kenyon agrees the proposal is “certainly intriguing”.
“It’s good to see people are thinking about it, and good that the policy process is going on in this area,” he said.
“It’s not an industry you can enter into half-heartedly… I think our policy makers need to be active participants in the debate, because they’re going to be responsible for regulating it if we go ahead.”
He said if Australia is to enter into the “nuclear power game… it makes sense to come in at the next generation, rather than buying what’s the last of the current generation”.
“No-one’s done it commercially yet, so you’re really leading the world,” Kenyon said.
“As many people as possible should read (Edwards’) submission… it makes mine pale into insignificance, that’s for sure.”
We value local independent journalism. We hope you do too. InDaily provides valuable, local independent journalism in South Australia. As a news organisation it offers an alternative to The Advertiser, a different voice and a closer look at what is happening in our city and state for free. Any contribution to help fund our work is appreciated. Please click below to become an InDaily supporter. Powered by PressPatronHow many times have you heard the line: “It’s just a phase”? Or maybe, “You’ll grow out of it”? Yeah, I thought so. But what happens if it isn’t a phase and you never grow out of it?
It’s just gone 2am and the smell of sweet incense fills my nostrils as The Sisters Of Mercy’s ‘80s classic Walk Away pumps across the darkened dancefloor. I’m at Invocation, one of London’s regular goth nights, which has been running for nine years despite never advertising beyond printed flyers and Facebook. The club’s music policy blends classic goth and darkwave bands with new ones and tends to attract a slightly older audience. In fact, just moments earlier, I was talking to guitar teacher Flavio, who recently celebrated his 63rd birthday. He’s a familiar face around the capital’s goth events even though he didn’t actually discover the subculture until he was in his 30s. “For me, it wasn’t an act of rebellion,” he explains, “it was about finding a tribe that I felt comfortable being a part of. I liked the music and the ‘uniform’ too.” And he still does.
Goth, like metal, has evolved over the years. As a youth subculture, it originally emerged from the punk movement in the late 1970s, via Siouxsie And The Banshees and spooky art rockers Bauhaus. It travelled along The Sisters Of Mercy and Fields Of The Nephilim’s darkened paths of gothic rock in the ‘80s, and has even flirted with styles as diverse as industrial, folk and even country. There are festivals all over the world that celebrate different aspects of goth, from Germany’s massive Wave Gotik Treffen to the UK’s dark electronic music event, Infest. More recently, the likes of Grave Pleasures, New Years Day, Motionless In White and Kontinuum have brought new flavours of gothic to the masses. Their music is a far cry from the bands who helped define the early goth sound but their message is the same; life sucks so we’re going to make some dark, cathartic songs about it. Misery loves company, and all that.
Goth has been around for almost (gulp!) 40 years – its parent style, Gothic for several centuries – and yet it’s more relevant than ever. It’s everywhere now, from the high street to the big screen, especially at this time of year. Even The Sisters Of Mercy have recently been back on the road (just don’t call them goths to their faces). But what really happens when goths grow up? Do they wipe their eyeliner off and start wearing beige? Do they, bat bollocks! There’s far more to goth than wearing black and looking a bit depressed, which is probably why it’s not only lasted so long but continues to grow.
Goths work in IT, academia, libraries, the medical profession, accountancy, law, the media… there’s even one in my local supermarket! Just like older metallers, they might find their day job prevents them from going out as often as they’d like, and it might mean they have to tone their look down a bit, but go to any goth club, gig or festival and I guarantee you’ll see goths over the age of 30 there. In fact, if we’re talking about the more established events, you might be forgiven for viewing goth as an older scene. There’s even a growing trend for goth retro clubs, such as Birmingham’s Zombie Club and Whitby’s Nostalgia, which are squarely aimed at a more mature audience, although they do attract the under 30s as well.
Nostalgia DJ Martin ‘Oldgoth’ has been part of the scene since it all began and has been DJing at goth clubs and gigs for the last 30 years. Although he now lives in Colchester, he’s played in cities around the world, including New York, Athens, Berlin and Prague, and has watched goth music and fashion trends wax and wane over the decades. “Goth isn’t a scene you join; it’s one you become part of and that’s why you can’t grow out of it,” he says. “It’s not a fashion, it’s what you are.
Despite his nickname, the only thing he says ageing has affected is his dress sense. “I’m not going to wear PVC trousers in my 50s!” he laughs. “I’m more into jeans and Dr Martens these days, but I still have black hair with shaved sides. I suppose I’m more comfortable not standing out so much these days.”
Purple-haired accountant and DJ, Psyche has merged her passion for goth with her career choices. The former journalist retrained in finance in the early ‘00s, and her business Death And Taxes now provides accountancy services alternative and non-alternative clients alike, including bands, music promoters and even stand-up comedians.
Blue-haired Raven works in market research and came to goth via the punk scene back in the ‘80s. “I’ve looked this way since I left school in ’83 but it’s become more acceptable so I blend in more now,” she says. “A lot of people think goth is sombre and melancholic but it makes me happy and gets me dancing. It’s ever-evolving and I learn so many things from Gothic culture, I even went on a cemetery tour the other week.”
DJ Martin ‘Oldgoth’
And that’s the thing; goth isn’t just about clubs and gigs. Nowadays, there are groups that promote more thoughtful activities, such as BiblioGoth (a book club with emphasis on darker reading materials) and Gothic Valley WI, who aim to put the ‘black’ into blackberry jam. This women’s institute goes on cemetery tours, bakes spooky cupcakes and invites speakers to discuss themes such as corsetry and vampires. The average age of members is around 34, so they’re not OAPs either!
Someone who’s been paying close attention to our gothic elders is Dr Paul Hodkinson; a goth and Reader in Sociology at the University of Surrey. In fact, a few years ago, he published an essay titled The Collective Ageing Of A Goth Festival. It explored the findings of a long-term study he’s been carrying out on attendees at one of the UK’s biggest goth festivals, Whitby Goth Weekend. In his findings, he even ponders whether goth is a youth subculture anymore.
“‘Youth’ is not so clearly defined as it used to be,” he tells me. “People tend to get married and have kids later than they used to and, likewise, things like home ownership and stable careers tend to emerge later – if at all – which means that a lot of the traditional markers of ‘adulthood’ are less clear-cut than they used to be. My theory is that these changes… make it much easier for goths to carry on right through their 20s and that, crucially, once they have been involved in the scene for a decade or so, it has already become way more than an adolescent phase, which means, in turn, that they have greater motivation to stay involved even after they do get married, have kids and all the rest.”
Ah, yes, kids. Once upon a time, goth babies were unheard of but now even the babiest of bats can have a wardrobe to rival their parents’. No longer do little ones have to make do with pastel onesies as there are numerous companies offering spooky prints on sleeping suits, bibs, booties and even blankets. This theme continues right into children’s wear as well, with a number of goth bands now producing merchandise in youth sizes.
This is something London artist Matt knows all about. When not illustrating surrealist landscapes and designing tattoos, he splits his time between being a father and working as a welfare advice service manager. His son already has quite a selection of goth and ‘normal’ baby grows! But the big question is, will he and his wife encourage the little lad to be a goth once he’s old enough? “We won’t force him,” he says. “It should be his decision and if he wants to come to the music festivals with us, we’ll take him.”
From a London nightclub, to a quaint north Yorkshire fishing town; Whitby is where the fictional vampire Count Dracula first landed on British soil and it’s also become a bit of a spiritual home for goths over the last few decades. Whitby Goth Weekend is held here twice a year and it’s also home to the Bram Stoker International Film Festival, which is where I am right now. Although primarily an event for horror movie aficionados, live bands have recently been added to the line-up. Fields Of The Nephilim performed here last night and Gothminister are due on any moment but before they arrive, there’s a brief interlude. Glamorous compère Joe Black gets us all to sing ‘happy birthday’ to a Canadian attendee who’s celebrating his 60th today. He emerges from the audience, complete with vampire prosthetics and, while he might not actually be a goth, he’s clearly having a ball.
Now let’s get this straight, not all goths are fans of vampire-related culture and not all vampire fans are goths but, for quite a number, it is a shared passion. Scanning the audience I spot a familiar bearded face. Alan has been going to goth gigs and festivals for many, many years and this evening, he’s travelled all the way up from Watford to see the bands. “I’ve recently had my 50th and I’m still manically chasing around after bands,” he grins. “The only problem is getting enough holiday allowance to fit everything in!” Over the summer, he took advantage of this when he joined around 60 goths on a coach trip with a different. It was part of the annual Goths On A Bus pilgrimage to Germany for the dark music festival, M’era Luna. “Few of us really ‘grow up’,” he adds, “we just get older!”
Given the number of classic gothic rock concerts that have taken place already this year, it looks like a lot of goths agree. With Whitby Goth Weekend happening right now and Fields Of The Nephilim due to tip flour all over London again this December, it seems there’s no chance of this ‘phase’ ever ending.
Now excuse me while I get ready for another gig!
The best 10 obscure '90s goth songs, by Ville ValoStory highlights Members of parties appear skeptical that Mexico will pay for a border wall
With 52 Republicans, the party would need eight Democratic senators to break a filibuster
(CNN) Senior Democrats privately say that a funding bill to build the border wall will likely be blocked in the Senate -- especially if the plan would add to the deficit or impose a new tax on Mexican imports.
The threat, voiced by multiple sources, marks the clearest indication yet that President Donald Trump might not get Congress to foot the bill for the wall, imperiling his central goal that he made a centerpiece for his campaign.
Trump and GOP leaders have discussed advancing a new funding package that could cost upwards of $15 billion to pay for the wall -- as the new president has promised that Mexico will ultimately reimburse the United States for the project.
But many in both parties are skeptical that Mexico will pay for the wall as the country has insisted that it would not foot the bill. And it's unclear how Trump's funding package will be paid for or if it would be offset by new spending cuts.
With 52 Republicans, the party would need eight Democratic senators to break a likely filibuster. Democratic sources are already confident that most, if not, all of their members will join forces to try to block the plan. Even some fiscal conservative Republicans may balk at the price tag.
Read MoreTORONTO — David Onyemata is NFL-bound, but don’t expect CFL general managers to cross him off their draft list — or anyone else affected over the weekend by the National Football League Draft.
The CFL Scouting Bureau’s number one-ranked player was picked in the fourth round by the New Orleans Saints on Saturday, becoming the 12th player in CIS history to be selected in the NFL Draft.
As CFL.ca’s Justin Dunk says, however, the result shouldn’t have a major impact on how teams view one of Canada’s top amateur prospects.
“CFL scouts were not shocked to see David Onyemata picked high in the NFL Draft,” said Dunk. “He’s a player who many believe might never play in the three-down league. So Onyemata being selected by the Saints doesn’t change much in regards to the CFL Draft.”
Onyemata follows in the footsteps of Christian Covington, who was picked in the sixth round of the NFL Draft a year ago before the BC Lions took him with their fifth round pick in the CFL Draft. Teams have showed in the past a willingness to be patient in the draft, selecting players that may not play in the league until down the road — but can provide tremendous value.
Vaughn Martin and Cory Greenwood are recent examples of players selected as ‘futures’ who returned from the NFL over the last two years to provide a boost for the Alouettes and Argonauts respectively.
“Onyemata is worth a late round flyer on the off chance a player of his calibre ever does come to play in the CFL,” said Dunk.
There are other players teams will have a close eye on too heading into the weekend, ones whose draft stock could be more affected by what goes on down south.
The second- to fourth-ranked prospects, Tevaun Smith, Mehdi Abdesmad and Arjen Colquhoun, have all all signed undrafted free agent contracts with NFL teams along with the 18th-ranked prospect Elie Bouka. Others, meanwhile, have accepted mini-camp invites.
“Teams around the CFL will be keeping close tabs on NFL rookie mini-camps to see if any players earn a contract,” said Dunk. “If a deal is reached with an NFL team, that could lower a prospect’s CFL Draft position.”
Players signed to contracts:
Name Position Scouting Bureau Rank Status David Onyemata DL 1 Drafted, 4th round (New Orleans) Tevaun Smith WR 2 Signed, undrafted FA (Indianapolis) Mehdi Abdesmad DL 3 Signed, undrafted FA (Tennessee) Arjen Colquhoun DB 4 Signed, undrafted FA (Dallas) Elie Bouka DB 18 Signed, undrafted FA (Arizona)
Onyemata, a 6-foot-4, 300-pound interior defensive lineman, jumped to the top of the CFL Scouting Bureau rankings in the final edition following a strong pro day back in March. He was named a Canada West all-star for the second straight campaign, was recognized as an all-Canadian for the first time, and claimed the J.P. Metras Trophy as the top down lineman in CIS football.
Despite being double-teamed on most plays, the 23-year-old was second in his conference and ninth in the country with five sacks in eight league games and also ranked second in Canada West in tackles for a loss (7.5) and 12th in overall tackles (38.5).
While Onyemata was the only one drafted, four others receivers contracts and nine received invites to mini-camp. CFL teams will keep a close eye on those players in particular, as a contract signing would likely alter draft stock. Players invited to mini-camps are: Charles Vaillancourt (NYG and OAK), Alex Singleton (NE), Trent Corney (NYJ), Taylor Loffler (NYG), Mercer Timmis (NYG), Doug Corby (NYG), Mike Jones (WSH), Brandon Revenberg (NYG), and DJ Lalama (NYG).
The CFL Draft will be held May 10.Two Chinese tourists were arrested last Sunday after taking photos of each other giving the Nazi salute in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin. Unlike in the United States, certain types of speech are illegal in Germany, including almost any Nazi symbolism.
Supposed comedian Chelsea Handler, weighed in on the story, suggesting the U.S. be more like Germany, which would require eliminating the First Amendment.
Most people in a civilized society agree that Nazi salutes are offensive, even if given in jest. Labeling speech that we all agree to be wrong as "hate speech" and then banning it by law might seem like a simple solution to the problem of occasionally hearing things that decent people don't like. However, passing laws to weaken our own rights in response to somebody else's poor behavior is not the solution.
If we want to be aware of what can transpire on the fringe of society, everyone should be free to express all of their opinions, even the ones that offend us. The Constitution treats us as grown-ups, depending on us to have the sense to reject opinions that are genuinely evil.
Take the Westboro Baptist Church for example, a group consisting mostly of family members. They scream obscenities and anti-gay slurs as they picket events such as papal visits and the funerals of service members killed overseas. They offend virtually everyone on earth. America, with its population of over 300 million people, seems to have collectively ostracized the 70-member group despite our government never making it a law to do so. No one is terribly worried that their annoying behavior is causing a trend.
Making any type of speech illegal would in itself destroy the First Amendment, which contrary to the claims of some washed up politicians, contains no exception for hate speech. Nor should it. The definition of hate speech is subject to continuous change. There are words no decent person will say, but the banning of even one word would eliminate the right to freedom of speech, replacing it with a subjective list of prohibited terms to which the government could and would add to over time.
It is strange that those who depend on free speech to make their living are often its most vocal opponents. Handler, for example, wants to ban offensive speech, but she engages in it quite often, as when she made fun of the first lady's accent, claiming Melania Trump barely speaks English. It's her right to tell that joke, of course. But it might not be if she had her own way.
Today's "safe space" culture has created the concept that words — not threats, mind you, just unkind words — are equivalent to physical harm. It just isn't so. And the First Amendment is a treasure, even if it does subject us all to Kathy Griffin posing in ISIS-inspired photoshoots, Johnny Depp expressing his envy of John Wilkes Booth, and Snoop Dogg shooting a clown dressed as Trump in a music video. As always, the proper answer to offensive speech is more speech, not violence or government coercion.
At a moment when leftists can't seem to get enough of speaking out against the current administration, their sudden turn against the First Amendment is a puzzling and troubling development. Their short-sighted talk of giving our government unacceptable authority to regulate our personal lives should be rejected like all the other bad ideas that people are free to express.
Alana Mastrangelo is a political activist and writer.
If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions.The doors — or rather, windows — will soon open on the Tumbleweed Express Drive-Thru, the nation’s first legal drive-thru marijuana dispensary.
Located in a converted car wash space in Parachute, Colo., the dispensary will sell weed from 4 p.m. to midnight on the weekends, giving buyers late-night access. Naturally, the shop is planning to open on April 20, better known as 4/20.
“I didn’t set out thinking this would be national news,” CEO Mark Smith told the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent. “I didn’t have some big epiphany. I just saw a need for our customers.” Smith is the latest in a line of cannabis entrepreneurs, including celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg and Snoop Dogg, taking advantage of increasing mainstream interest in weed consumption.
The drive-thru counter is subject to the same strict regulations as all other recreational marijuana dealers. Namely: no one under the age of 21 is allowed on the premises; in this case, that includes the back seats of cars. And the substance is not allowed to be visible from outside the dispensary. Security measures must also be in place. But for the town of Parachute — population 1,100 — marijuana sales are an important component of the local economy, accounting for nearly 30% of the 2016 sales tax revenue. Cannabis sales have also been contentious, with a ban in place prior to 2015. With the weed market booming across the state, however, Parachute appears to be joining the bandwagon.
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“We think the drive-through is a very creative and innovative idea,” Parachute Town Manager Stuart McArthur said in February, when the store’s business license was initially procured, according to the Post-Independent.
The state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division added that it was not aware of this business model “ever coming up before,” giving the shop its claim to fame.
Tumbleweed Express Drive-Thru’s big opening day is set to coincide with the unofficial national holiday celebrating cannabis culture.
Write to Raisa Bruner at raisa.bruner@time.com.A battle over beer is brewing in Annapolis.
State lawmakers are faced with competing proposals to change the rules for breweries, which have exploded in popularity in recent years as drinkers turn away from mass-produced corporate beers in favor of craft brews.
And there's a big new player in the debate this year: Diageo, the international liquor giant that owns the Guinness beer brand and plans to open a brewery and taproom in an old rum bottling plant in Relay.
"We want to create a world-class beer tourism destination," said Dwayne Kratt, Diageo's senior director of state government affairs.
It's an idea that's drawn enthusiastic support from politicians and economic development officials, who are eager to pass a law to ensure that the Guinness project moves forward. Diageo says it will invest $50 million to renovate the building and create 70 jobs.
First, Diageo faces a fight with other brewers and the owners of bars and liquor stores over how it needs the General Assembly to alter the state laws that govern how breweries operate in Maryland.
While Diageo wants the state to create a special liquor license for its planned operation, the Brewers Association of Maryland argues that lawmakers shouldn't carve out an exception for one giant beer corporation at the expense of home-grown brands. The Maryland State Licensed Beverage Association, which represents owners of bars, restaurants and liquor stores, supports the brewing operation but not a taproom that might compete with existing retailers.
Diageo plans to brew and sell test beers at the Guinness plant, which also is likely to become home to Guinness Blonde American Lager, a relatively new beer that's currently brewed by a contractor in Pennsylvania. The company hopes to open the plant in October to coincide with the 200th anniversary of importing Guinness Draught — the company's signature dark stout — to America.
But current state law doesn't allow breweries to sell more than 500 barrels of beer a year to customers in on-site taprooms. That many barrels equates to about 125,000 pints, according to Diageo, which expects to see twice as many visitors in its first year.
The company also hopes visitors will provide feedback on test beers, helping determine whether it should brew more.
"When we get to a beer that we think is a winner, we'll brew that at a larger volume and sell that through our wholesale partners to retailers," Kratt said.
Both the Brewers Association and the Licensed Beverage Association have their own competing bills they're pushing in the General Assembly. The brewers are backing a bill that would extend to every brewery the changes Diageo is seeking, while the bar and liquor stores proposed legislation that would limit the ability of breweries to sell directly to consumers.
All three bills will be discussed by state lawmakers during public hearings this week.
Comptroller Peter Franchot, whose office regulates the liquor industry and collects alcohol taxes, supports the bill being pushed by the brewers association, said spokesman Alan Brody.
Gov. Larry Hogan is excited about the Guinness brewery and supports the growth of the industry, said his spokeswoman Amelia Chasse. But the governor is stopping short of endorsing any specific bill.
"Our administration is very supportive of allowing Maryland breweries to offer expanded tasting facilities, and we look forward to seeing what passes through the legislature this session," Chasse said in a statement.
Jim Caruso, CEO of Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, said it's unfair — and anti-free market — to approve a law that caters to a single business.
"I am completely opposed to legislation that favors any one of the 70" breweries in Maryland, he said.
Hugh Sisson, founder of Heavy Seas and a pioneer in the state's beer industry, said he welcomes Diageo as a neighbor — their site is just a couple of miles from his brewery. But he also argues that all breweries need the same rules.
"Nobody who is a Maryland brewer who is part of our association doesn't want to see Diageo come here and be successful," Sisson said. "But we don't want to pass another carve-out bill and have a large, international conglomerate have privileges that home-grown businesses don't have."
Diageo's Kratt said the bill promoted by the brewers association would work for his company. But he's concerned that a statewide bill may not pass. Bills that affect just one county — such as the Diageo-supported bill — have an easier path in the General Assembly if all of that county's legislators support it.
Kratt said it's "very crucial" for at least one of those two bills to pass for the Guinness plant to be successful.
Both would remove the 500-barrel cap for on-site beer sales at breweries. Diageo's bill would allow for 5,000 barrels, while the brewers association bill would raise the cap to 4,000 barrels.
Diageo's entrance alters the conversation about brewery laws in Annapolis, said Kevin Atticks, executive director of the Brewers Association of Maryland.
Diageo North America This is a rendering of the Guinness brewery that will be built in a former Diageo bottling plant in Relay. This is a rendering of the Guinness brewery that will be built in a former Diageo bottling plant in Relay. (Diageo North America) (Diageo North America)
The association has been trying for three years to raise the cap for on-site sales at breweries. Now that a well-known, massive liquor company is asking for the same thing, more people are paying attention, he said.
"There's a different dynamic," Atticks said. "It's a different voice in the conversation."
But the push from the breweries to sell more beer has the state's retailers nervous. They, too, like the idea of having Guinness in their backyard. But they don't like the idea of Guinness — or any other brewery, for that matter — operating what amounts to a full-scale bar.
"If they do that much retail, what's the effect going to be on the small restaurant or tavern in the area?" asked Jack Milani, owner of Monaghan's Pub in Woodlawn. Milani is also legislative chairman for the licensed beverage association.
He said it's important to keep the distinctions established decades ago in the state's "three-tier" system, with breweries limited to manufacturing beer, wholesalers limited to distributing beer, and stores and bars limited to selling beer to consumers.
Find out the latest news in Baltimore commercial development.
Advocates of the three-tier system system say it protects consumers and prevents corruption. Before Prohibition, for example, brewers owned bars and filled them with their own products, which may have been of questionable quality.
With the three tiers, "no one tier controls the industry," Milani said.
Others argue it's time for Maryland to move past an antiquated system that doesn't take into account changing consumer attitudes and innovations in the industry.Cafe Society writers consumed hundreds of meals in restaurants over the course of 2010, but a few really stood out. Next week, several of those writers will be serving up memories of their favorites (and we encourage you to post yours, too).
In the meantime, here are my top five meal memories of 2010:
Melted leeks and pizza at Pizzeria Basta, 3601 Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder
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My first date with my current boyfriend was supposed to be lunch and a beer, but it turned into a marathon tour of the Boulder gastronomic scene. Stop three was Pizzeria Basta, where we posted up to the bar and chattered away before the wood-fired oven. We shut up, though, when the melted leeks were placed in front of us, decadent and buttery, topped with lardons of bacon and dusted with salt. The dish was simple -- and it was perfect. By the time our pizza arrived, I'd decided my future man friend was a good egg. And so was the egg on top of our pie, poached center oozing forth, coating pork belly and arugula with its contents, a gooey complement to the airy, crisp crust.
The Hovey, Darwin's Ltd., Cambridge, Massachusetts
Every year, I meet friends in Boston for a wine expo. It's a touristy event, an exhibition hall full of people trying to say intelligent things about the nose and the palate but eventually giving up and just getting trashed. This year, head pounding the morning after, I braced myself against the cold of a February morning in Boston and trudged down to Darwin's for the Hovey, a magical concoction that sandwiched a runny, overeasy egg, thick slabs of cheddar, crisp bacon and chunks of sweet, smooth avocado between two halves of a flaky, buttery croissant. And when I consumed that perfectly engineered hangover-kicking breakfast, there was absolutely nothing wrong in the world.
Green Chile, Chubby's, 1231 West 38th Avenue
That I missed the original Chubby's for, oh, my entire childhood is both upsetting and baffling, but I'm glad that was remedied in 2010. One drunken |
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PURCHASING DETAILS (Starting Dec. 4th):
Online bottle sales start Fri. December 4th at noon and will end Friday December 11th at 11am (1 hours before release) or when bottles are sold out. Any additional bottles not sold online will be available for purchase the day of the event.
PICKUP DETAILS (Starting Friday Dec. 11th at noon):
Purchased bottles will be available at The Hermosillo starting on Friday, Dec. 11th at noon, and the beer will be on tap as well. Bottles will be available for pickup for two weeks following (until December 27th). Photo ID is required for pickup. Proxies are allowed, just email highlandparkbrewery@gmail.com providing both the purchaser and proxies names.
***Bottles not picked up by Dec. 27th will be considered forfeited.***
Please note that we will not issue refunds, exchanges, or returns. All sales are final.(Featured image is “Birth of Eden” by Noah Bradley. You should check out all his other work.)
I tend to DM for lots of newer players. I don’t have the time to play at the game store (though it’s always on my list to go and learn from the pros), so most of a groups are cobbled together from people who expressed interest in learning after they found out I play. As a result, many of these people don’t have a lot of background in the typical fantasy setting. Many times, they’re not aware of typical tropes that more seasoned players expect to encounter. Tropes such as knowing that when in doubt, head to the tavern; or the first town councilor-type who gives them a mission tends to be secretly evil. Over the time I’ve played, my view of this phenomenon has changed from negative to positive. I enjoy having players who don’t have preconceptions about how elves and dwarves interact, or how magic should or shouldn’t be. Rather than compare experiences, they interact, learn, and seek out new ones. But new players get nervous about the RP part of the RPG. This is where the DM steps in. It’s the Dungeon Master’s job not only to know the rules and how things play out, but also to prepare the storytelling element of the adventure. After all, no one is going to feel natural interacting with something that’s hard to visualize. If the DM hasn’t described the area effectively, then it becomes difficult to discern direction. (Our friend skunkenomics did a fantastic job in detailing how to detail your environments. Read all about it here.)
While descriptions are vital in engaging the player, too much of it might send them straight to their happy place. The way I like to provide quick snapshots is to give them one general piece (like the feel of the town, how many people are out and about, etc.) and one thing specific/atypical (the fountain in town is made of solid brass, all the villagers are wearing strange hats). From there, allow the players to interact to learn more. “Is the fountain actually brass?” “No! Upon closer inspection, it is actually a rare mineral found on the Plane of Fire.” Or: “I want to ask a villager about their hat (or steal a hat to look at)”. Curiosity can kill a cat, or it can drive the players to ask more about your lore. As a sidenote: I try my best to never introduce history or lore unless an in-game source is detailing it. Preferably an NPC, or something that can talk. Knowledge sticks best when the players ask for it.
Another obstacle in player interaction is character depth. If your barkeeper is portly, unkempt, and cleans mugs with a dirty rag, the players will all interact with him like he’s just another quest-giver from ‘genericMMO.net’. I’m not saying to throw out the stereotypes; they can be useful when it’s necessary to quickly convey a lot of information about a character (at the cost of specifics). But when every bartender in your universe has the same feel, don’t be surprised when your PCs have the same reactions for each one. By show of hands, how many of us have introduced an NPC by name and race alone? Can you imagine an author being allowed to do that? “You see Bart, the mayor of Shrekopolis. He’s white.” How far would that fly in a novel?
The freeing aspect of RPGs is the ability to run on the fly! Video-games pre-code personality; you can tweak it as you go. If you’re afraid of contradicting yourself, don’t be; properly handled, contradictions can serve as a point of depth. The nice mayor was rude and downright nasty the second time he met the PCs? Well, maybe he had a bad day; the farmer’s guild is acting up about the taxes recently imposed. While it has no bearing on the mission at hand, that is precisely why it creates depth; players who hear this might realize that a world exists beyond what they are tasked to save. It’s ok to make things up; more importantly, it’s ok to be wrong. Realizing that your storytelling will not always be perfect and well-thought out is one of the most freeing revelations. Trust me, you will only improve. It’s hard to BS at will initially, but practice improves everyone. And getting better is critical—improv is one of the most foundational abilities for a DM who is not bent on railroading their PCs. No group has ever stayed perfectly on the path of an adventure; the ability to flesh out the alleys they traverse is the difference between a good DM and a great DM. I personally have a secret that I use to do my best to help make the unexpected encounters smooth. If you’re not the DM of your group, I must implore you to stop reading. I am about to describe some cheap and dirty tactics that, when revealed, may cause you to lose all respect for the DM (or at least for me). On the other hand, I’m just a stranger on the Internet—can I really stop you from doing anything?
Bear with me, because I’ll take a while to get there.
The only reason things are the way they are is because you described them as such. The hero took 4 damage? That could an infinite number of things; club to the face, fall out a window, etc. The party has to fight 4 weak enemies? It could be four goblins, four orcs, four debilitated ogres with stomach aches. The bottom line is that a Stat Block is only that; a series of numbers that you bring to life by describing how it interacts with the players. What if the players decide to not fight into the warrens, and go after the thieves’ guild instead? Here’s my secret: use the same Stat Block. All you have to do is describe those Goblin stats as some rather puny humans (or halflings, if you want the size category to be the same). If you need to roll for a skill that a thief would have that a goblin would not, substitute the least relevant skill modifier (i.e. your “thief” need to sense motive, then replace the goblin’s +4 ride modifer with +4 sense motive). If the old monsters have an ability that the new one’s wouldn’t, find a simple but convincing way to incorporate it. Example: maybe the goblins were riding spiders. This means there would have been some poison, and maybe some wall-shenanigans. To compensate, give the new enemies poisoned daggers (conveniently using the Spider’s Poison provided) and a Potion of Spider-Climbing each to pop at the beginning of the fight. If the players note the Spider vibe, roll with it; throw some spider amulets and other ornaments on the corpses. At worst, it’s a one-off encounter that they remember because it was really odd. At best, they may decide to keep pursuing these spider thieves. If that’s the case, congratulations: your players have just created their own plot hook. And all because they decided to do the opposite of what you wanted. If you are afraid of losing an entire campaign that you planned, you can work on their new hook being in the larger scheme of things. Alternatively, let them go! As beautiful as your story is, it’s about the players. If they want to investigate spider thieves instead of fighting off a Goblin Uprising in the North, work with them to the best of your abilities.
The key here is to be convincing; players, much like wild beasts, can smell fear (and uncertainty). But they can also be very trusting. As long as you don’t give them any reason to doubt what is happening behind the screen, players tend to not question your methods. If you’re found out, some players might construe this tactic as railroading of it’s own. It could come off as “Oh, you don’t want the fight I made? Well I’ll make sure we do it my way regardless!” Which is not the case at all! A prepared DM is a happy party, so if I can keep part of my plans without them knowing, everyone wins. If we throw the expected plot out the window, then we can at least make the game smooth by keeping as much of the preplanned fight as possible. Much of the combat changes as well; the time of day could be affected, the terrain… You may keep the stats, but it won’t be the same fight.
These are all just bullet points in the grand scheme of DMing. But the big takeaway here is that you take away only as much as you put into the game, and PCs subconciously match that investment. Even the most dedicated Role-Player will lose steam in the face of a unresponsive, monotone DM. On the flip-side, all it takes is a little prep work and ability to roll with the players, and your new group will be in character in no time. Doing the voices is, however, optional.Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)
A small-time magician is swept away to an enchanted land and is forced into a power struggle between three witches. (IMDB)
Since Sharon chose The Wizard of Oz, Chris chose to follow it up with a prequel of sorts. Oz the Great and Powerful takes places years before the events of The Wizard of Oz, and tells the story of how the land came to be ruled by such a humbug of a wizard in the first place. Learn about Oz the wizard, and Oz the land, along with us.
Check out all the observations we had about this new twist on a familiar tale.
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PrintChairwoman Patty Murray at a Senate Budget Committee markup of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for FY2014. (Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call)
On one side of the Capitol, President Obama sought to convince House Republicans on Wednesday that he is serious about reining in the rising cost of federal health and retirement programs.
But on the other side of the Capitol, Senate Democrats rolled out a 10-year spending plan that sent a different message: Not so fast.
While Democratic leaders are offering quiet support for Obama’s renewed campaign to strike a grand bargain with Republicans that would include cuts to Social Security and Medicare, a significant number of Democratic lawmakers are digging in their heels and vowing to protest any reduction in promised benefits.
That sentiment was on display Wednesday, as Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) announced a budget blueprint that proposes only minor trims to Medicare and Medicaid — the biggest drivers of government spending — and vows to make the cuts “without harming beneficiaries.”
Meanwhile, a growing number of Democrats have declared their opposition to a proposal that has emerged as Obama’s biggest selling point to Republicans: his offer to apply a less-generous measure of inflation to Social Security, resulting in slightly smaller annual cost-of-living increases.
“I don’t want to break the bad news to you, but the president is not the only elected official in the United States,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Budget Committee, who pressed Murray to avoid any cuts to social programs in her spending plan. “Some of us believe very strongly that it would be absolutely wrong to cut Social Security benefits.”
Administration officials say Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are on board with the president’s push for a grand bargain and are willing to rally their rank and file to support politically touchy changes to health and retirement programs so long as Republicans sign off on significant new tax increases.
Obama got few complaints about his deficit-reduction plan during a lunchtime meeting Tuesday with Senate Democrats, administration officials said. But 107 House Democrats — more than half the caucus — have signed a letter declaring their “vigorous opposition to cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits.” And the complaints are likely to grow louder as Republicans press Obama for more details about his proposals to charge wealthy seniors more for Medicare coverage and to implement the Social Security inflation change, known as the chained consumer price index, or chained CPI.
That process is just now getting underway. In his meeting Wednesday with GOP lawmakers, Obama again outlined the offer he made in December to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and more recently to more than a dozen Senate Republicans.
That proposal would replace $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester, with $1.8 trillion in alternate policies over the next decade, including roughly $700 billion in fresh tax revenue. An additional $400 billion would come from reforms to Medicare, and $130 billion would come from applying the chained CPI to Social Security.
Republicans emerging from the meeting said the president was blunt about his willingness to pursue a deal over the objections of liberal Democrats. But he demurred, they said, when House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) asked whether the White House would proceed with changes to entitlement programs without raising taxes.
“The president insisted that — this is how I would put it — that he would extract a pound of flesh from Republicans before he does that,” said Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.). “I find that very frustrating.”
Noting that Democrats won a $600 billion tax increase in the Jan. 1 “fiscal cliff” deal, Gardner said, “Why can’t we move forward on some of these meaningful reforms?”
Republicans in the Senate are more willing to consider tax increases, but they are also pushing Obama more deeply into territory that troubles Democrats. The president’s proposal to cut Medicare leans more heavily on drug companies, hospitals and other providers than on beneficiaries.
But Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), one of a dozen GOP senators who dined with Obama at a downtown hotel last week, said Republicans oppose Obama’s biggest money-saver, a plan to reduce federal payments to drug companies by $140 billion over the next decade. And other dinner guests said they want to see more structural changes to reduce Medicare benefits.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) plans to press that point Thursday when Obama travels to the Capitol for a third straight day to meet with House Democrats and Senate Republicans. Aides said Hatch has prepared a list of health-care reforms he wants the president to consider, such as a higher eligibility age for Medicare, something Obama once supported but now opposes.
In the meantime, Senate Democrats are resisting the reforms the president has laid on the table. Instead of $400 billion in Medicare savings, Murray’s blueprint offers $275 billion from both Medicare and Medicaid. And instead of $700 billion in new tax revenue, her blueprint seeks nearly $1 trillion.
Murray offers additional spending cuts to the Pentagon and other programs, and her blueprint would slow the pace of government borrowing and stabilize the debt as a percentage of the economy.
But with annual deficits hovering around $500 billion for much of the decade, the debt would remain at historically high levels, rising from $16.7 trillion today to $24.3 trillion by 2023, or 94 percent of the nation’s economy.
As Murray’s Budget Committee began considering her proposals Wednesday, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) argued — to the “consternation” of people “on my side,” he said — that Democrats will have to do more to prevent Social Security and Medicare from bankrupting the nation as the population ages.
“I share the belief of even my most progressive colleagues that Medicare and Social Security are among the greatest programs ever implemented. But I also believe that the basic math around them doesn’t work anymore,” Warner said.
“The longer we put off this inevitable math problem,” he said, “the longer we fail to come up with a way to make sure that the promise of Medicare and Social Security is not just there for current seniors but for those 30 years out.”
Paul Kane and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.Death for dinner The most dangerously delicious meat on Earth
Pre-cooked for instant victory feasting
Red dragon meat is the tastiest and most tender
Fans of Radiant Farms' Unicorn Meat are probably looking at this product and thinking, "Wait a minute, ThinkGeek! Isn't Radiant Farms in Ireland and don't the nuns believe in nonviolence and wait until the unicorns die of natural causes before processing them?" To that, we say two things: 1) You are a little obsessed with us. and 2) You are right..
But you're also wrong. You see, Unicorns and Dragons require vastly different resources for their care. Also, if they lived next to each other, the Dragons would just eat the unicorns anyways, and there'd be none left for people to eat. FURTHERMORE, the nuns at Radiant Farms lead a tortured life. Think about it: they start out all-loving and kind and raising Unicorns and letting them die of old age. But year after year of watching such beauty die weighs on their souls. They become evil and cruel and despondent and angry and bitter. It's then that they're relocated to the Dragon Rendering plants of Scotland and... well, you know the rest.
Product SpecificationsWay of the Divine Form
Monks of the the Way of the Divine Form learn to channel the ki around them into a healing energy. They have a strong focus on the betterment of others and learn special techniques to transfer their ki into those around them.
Rejuvinating Ki
Starting when you choose this tradition at 3rd level, you can form your ki into a healing aura as you expend it. Whenever you spend a ki point, you can restore 1d4 hit points to a creature with 15 feet of you. This die changes as you gain monk levels, as shown in the Martial Arts column of the Monk table. This feature has no effect on undead or constructs.
Healing Wave
Starting at 6th level, you can spend 2 ki points to throw forth a wave of healing energy as an action on your turn. Up to six creatures of your choice in a 30 foot cone originating from yourself regain hit points equal to 4d6 + your monk level. This feature has no effect on undead or constructs.
Form Fortification
At 6th level, you learn techniques that allow you to harness your ki to impose certain fortifying effects. You can spend 2 ki points to cast aid, enhance ablility, gentle repose, or lesser restoration, without providing material components. Additionally, you gain the spare the dying cantrip if you don't already know it.
Ki Ward
By 11th level, you have learned a special technique that allows you to channel your ki into a protective shield for a moment. When a creature you can see within 30 feet of you is hit by an attack, you can use your reaction to spend ki points up to your proficiency bonus to increase the target's AC by the same amount for the attack, potentially causing the attack to miss.
Radiant Soul
At 16th level, when you or a creature you can see within 30 feet of you is dropped to 0 hit points as a result of taking damage, you can use your reaction to spend 7 ki points to instead restore the creature to hit points equal to three times your Wisdom score. Additionally, you are stunned until the end of you next turn next turn.
Once you use this feature, you must finish a long rest before you can use it again.A significant portion of British citizens are currently blocked from accessing the Chaos Computer Club's (CCC) website. On top of that, Vodafone customers are blocked from accessing the ticket sale to this year's Chaos Communication Congress (31C3). [1]
Since July 2013, a government-backed so-called opt out list censors the open internet. These internet filters, authorized by Prime Minister David Cameron, are implemented by UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs). Dubbed as the "Great Firewall of Britain", the lists block adult content as well as material related to alcohol, drugs, smoking, and even opinions deemed "extremist". [2]
Users can opt-out of censorship, or bypass it by technical means, but only a minority of users know how to bypass those filters. Accessing the server directly via http://213.73.89.123/ currently appears to work quite well, thereby rendering the censorship efforts useless.
Internet filters simply do not work, but leaving technical limitation aside, the CCC's example shows that unsolicited overblocking, meaning wrongly classified websites, is a common phenomenon in large censorship infrastructures. However, it may very well be that the CCC is considered "extremist" judged by British standards of freedom of speech.
"When these filters were introduced, their abuse was imminent. Today, we are shocked to learn that they not only block access to our site, but also to our conference," says CCC-spokesperson Dirk Engling. "We see this as proof that censorship infrastructure – no matter for which reasons it was set up, and no matter which country you are in – will always be abused for political reasons."
Links
31C3 ticket sale
Let’s make our Internet prettierUBC researchers have found a way to use an enzyme to turn different blood types into the universal Type O.
The discovery could help deal with blood shortages around the world.
"It's a step towards showing that these approaches are feasible," said Steve Withers, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at UBC.
"If there's an A type [blood] person that needs a blood transfusion but there's no A-type blood around or no O-type blood around, they could potentially take some B-type blood treat it with this enzyme and convert it to O-type blood and it would be ready."
The enzyme Withers is referring to cuts off the sugars in the A and B-type blood, making it more like the universal Type O blood.
"We produced a mutant enzyme that is very efficient at cutting off the sugars in A and B blood, and is much more proficient at removing the subtypes of the A-antigen that the parent enzyme struggles with," said David Kwan, the lead author of the study.
"The concept is not new but until now we needed so much of the enzyme to make it work that it was impractical," said Withers. "Now I'm confident that we can take this a whole lot further."
To create the mutant enzyme, the researchers used a process called directed evolution, which involves inserting mutations into the gene for the enzyme and then selecting the most effective mutations. In five generations the enzyme became 170 times more effective.
Withers said more research and clinical trials are needed so real world applications for the discovery are still five to 10 years away.Anti-choice activists and politicians really want women to believe that abortion causes mental illness. Nine states even have laws requiring doctors to scare women seeking abortion by telling them, without a shred of evidence, that such a link exists. A Texas pamphlet entitled "A Woman's Right to Know", despite paying lip service to the fact that many women feel relief after an abortion (around 90 percent, actually), is clearly geared toward terrifying women into believing that this safe and legal medical procedure will shut them off from ever feeling joy again.
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It's technically true, of course, that some women have negative mental health outcomes after abortion. It's also true that some women have negative mental health outcomes after eating lunch or a day at the beach. But that doesn't mean that beach outings or lunches cause depression, and there's no evidence that abortion does, either.
On the contrary, a new study published in JAMA Psychiatry, a journal of the American Medical Association, shows that poor mental health outcomes aren't linked with abortion at all. They may, however, be linked with being denied an abortion. The study, titled "Women’s Mental Health and Well-being 5 Years After Receiving or Being Denied an Abortion," was conducted by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), based at the University of California, San Francisco.
The study is part of an ongoing research project called the Turnaway Study, which follows 1,000 women who sought abortions and compares the outcomes of those who successfully aborted with those showed up at the clinic past the gestational limits and were turned away.
"We can say strongly at this point there is no evidence of emerging mental health problems after having an abortion," Dr. Antonia Biggs, a researcher on the study, explained over the phone.
If anything, it was in the aftermath of not getting an abortion where researchers found a linkage to mental health problems. What the Turnaway team found was that most women seeking an abortion had higher than usual rates of anxiety and low self-esteem. That's not surprising, considering how many cultural messages they may have absorbed depicting women who seek abortion services as promiscuous, lazy or stupid. As Biggs pointed out, unintended pregnancy is, in itself, a stressful event.
But women who were turned away at the clinic had even higher levels of negative mental health outcomes that women who got their abortions.
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“The women who were denied an abortion, at the time they were denied an abortion, they do have more anxiety, lower self-esteem and less life satisfaction," Biggs noted.
[caption id="attachment_14658843" align="alignnone" width="619"] Figure from "Women’s mental health and well-being five years after receiving or being denied an abortion" published in JAMA Psychiatry[/caption]
Both groups of women — women who had abortions and those who were turned away — saw a lessening of these symptoms over time. Within six months to a year, most women who were turned away saw their heightened anxiety levels drop toward the lower levels experienced by women who got abortions.
“What we found is that women are resilient, that they adapt to their current situation, and that they make the best of it," Biggs said. "At the same time, six months of feeling anxiety or low self-esteem is not something we want for women."
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[caption id="attachment_14658848" align="alignnone" width="618"] Figure from "Women’s mental health and well-being five years after receiving or being denied an abortion" published in JAMA Psychiatry[/caption]
In many states, anti-choice activists have defended restrictions on abortion, and propagandistic pamphlets like the one in Texas, on the grounds that abortion presents a genuine threat to women's mental health. To back this claim up, they have leaned on poorly designed studies, which the American Psychological Association finds unconvincing, that attempt to link mental illness and abortion.
One problem with many of these studies is they compare women who gave birth to those who had abortions. About two-thirds of women who give birth planned to become pregnant, whereas almost no women who get abortions did, which makes this a classic case of comparing apples to oranges.
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The Turnaway Study, in contrast, compares apples to apples.
“Previously, we didn’t have great evidence on the impact of abortion on mental health outcomes, so one could argue that we didn’t know," Biggs said. "But I feel that this study design is so strong, by comparing two very similar groups of women. It provides very solid evidence of what the effects of abortion on women’s mental health are."
Furthermore, she says, the evidence is strong that while getting an abortion has no negative impact on women's mental health, being denied an abortion can do real damage. “If we want to protect women’s mental health, this evidence shows we want to expand access to abortion, not restrict it," Dr. Biggs said.
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Despite this study's careful design and rigorous methodology, it's unlikely that the anti-choice movement will accept the findings. After all, many in the religious right continue to assert that homosexuality is a mental illness that can be "cured" through Christian-themed therapy, even though the scientific consensus, as expressed by the American Psychological Association, is that there's nothing wrong with being gay and there's no evidence you can change someone's sexual orientation by therapeutic means.
Many of the same characters promoting the homosexuality-as-disease line are pushing the notion that abortion causes mental illness. These two beliefs are clearly linked, not by scientific evidence — since there is none, for either — but by a belief that there's something unnatural or unhealthy about a person who makes sexual choices outside the confines of conservative Christian morality. Since religious conservatives believe that the primary purpose of women is to have babies, women who choose not to do so — even if they have had a baby before an abortion, or choose to have one later — must be damaged or broken.
That is an ideological or religious belief about the roles of women, not a hypothesis with any scientific support. This new study shows, yet again, that there's nothing wrong with women who have abortions, either before or after they have the procedure. On the contrary, the relationship between negative mental health outcomes and being denied an abortion suggests that women are better judges of what they need than a bunch of scolds and puritans who want to force childbirth on them.(CNN) The man accused of blowing up a homemade explosive in a pedestrian subway tunnel in the heart of New York posted on Facebook earlier in the day, saying, "Trump you failed to protect your nation," according to a criminal complaint.
Akayed Ullah, a 27-year-old Bangladeshi man, faces a number of federal and state terrorism charges after he allegedly detonated a device made of a battery, wires, metal screws and a Christmas tree lightbulb during the busy morning commute on Monday.
Five people were treated for minor injuries at area hospitals, while the suspect was said to be seriously injured.
In an interview with investigators, Ullah admitted that he built and detonated the device and said he was inspired to do so by ISIS.
"I did it for the Islamic State," Ullah told investigators, according to the federal complaint.
He faces five federal terrorism-related charges and three state terrorism-related charges, according to court documents.
Here's what we know so far about the explosion and attack:
The location
The blast detonated around 7:20 a.m. in an underground walkway connecting two subway lines beneath the Port Authority Bus Terminal, near Times Square, which accommodates 220,000 passenger trips a day.
The suspect was first spotted on a security camera as he began to climb the subway station stairs to the 18th Avenue F. train platform in Brooklyn at 6:25 a.m., according to one law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.
He then switched to the A train at Jay St./MetroTech stop in Brooklyn before exiting the train at the Port Authority Bus Terminal stop in Manhattan, the same law enforcement official said.
On grainy surveillance footage, commuters are seen walking through a tunnel when a burst of smoke erupts into the hallway, quickly filling it. Commuters flinch and take cover. When the smoke clears, a man can be seen lying on the ground in the hallway.
According to a law enforcement official, through his comments to investigators, Ullah indicated he was prepared to die. The source also said the suspect was wired up with the self-made device during his entire trip on the subway system.
JUST WATCHED Video shows Port Authority explosion Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Video shows Port Authority explosion 01:02
The suspect
Akayed Ullah is a Bangladeshi who has been living in the United States since 2011 on an F43 family immigrant visa, according to Department of Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Houlton. He is a lawful permanent resident who lives in Brooklyn and has no criminal record in the United States, according to a preliminary background check.
He had pledged allegiance to ISIS, according to one law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation, and said he acted in response to Israeli actions in Gaza.
Ullah recently carried out electrical work close to the Port Authority along with his brother, who lives in the same apartment building as the suspect, according to law enforcement.
He is at Bellevue Hospital, where he is being treated for lacerations and burns to his hands and abdomen, New York City Fire Department Commissioner Daniel Nigro said. He is said to be seriously injured.
Ullah's ISIS radicalization began in 2014, according to the federal complaint. He began researching how to build improvised explosive devices about a year ago, began collecting the necessary items two to three weeks ago, and built the bomb in his home a week ago, the complaint states.
Investigators recovered a passport in his name with a handwritten message: "O America, die in your rage."
Ullah told investigators he was motivated in part by pro-ISIS Christmas attack propaganda circulated about a month ago online with an image of Santa Claus over Times Square, a law enforcement source told CNN.
Ullah did not pray at a mosque, according to the source, but prayed at his home in Brooklyn. The source also said several of Ullah's family members are not cooperating with authorities in the investigation at this time.
From March 2012 to March 2015, Ullah held a Taxi & Limousine Commission license, which had not been renewed, TLC spokesman Allan Fromberg said. It's unclear "whether he drove for any particular base, or whether he simply got the license but didn't drive at all," Fromberg said.
Ullah has no criminal record in his native Bangladesh, according to Sahely Ferdous, a Bangladesh police spokeswoman. Ferdous said Ullah last traveled to Bangladesh's capital Dhaka -- where he was born and raised -- in September, but police had no information on why he was there. The federal law enforcement source said Ullah's travel overseas was not significant for the planning of this attack.
Police in Bangladesh have been speaking with Ullah's wife in an effort to learn more about "how he was influenced and how he joined these activities," Ferdous said, adding that authorities went to the wife's residence in Dhaka to question her.
Ferdous said Ullah and his wife have a 1-year-old child, but she was not sure of the gender and had no information as to whether the wife was living in Dhaka or just visiting.
The bomb
Ullah had at least two devices, a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation tells CNN.
Only one detonated -- a foot-long pipe that contained black powder, a battery, wiring, nails and screws. It was attached to Ullah with Velcro and zip ties. Investigators did not elaborate on the second device.
The suspect made the bomb last week at his apartment in Brooklyn, according to an official. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said it was an amateur, "effectively low-tech device."
JUST WATCHED Governor: Attack suspect influenced online Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Governor: Attack suspect influenced online 01:19
The explosive chemical ignited, but the pipe itself did not explode, lessening its impact, Cuomo told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
"Fortunately for us, the bomb partially detonated," he said. "He did detonate it, but it did not fully have the effect that he was hoping for."
CNN law enforcement analyst James Gagliano said the explosion could have been much worse.
"We really dodged a bullet yesterday," he said.
The victims
Five people were treated for minor injuries in area hospitals.
"Mount Sinai Health System received and treated five patients with minor injuries as a result of the explosion today at Port Authority; four at Mount Sinai West and one at Mount Sinai Queens," a statement from the hospital group said.
"All were in stable condition and were released today. We are working closely with officials in law enforcement in the wake of this event."
JUST WATCHED Witness: Dozens of ambulances in the area Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Witness: Dozens of ambulances in the area 01:58
The response
Ullah was apprehended by Port Authority police officers shortly after the blast. Four of the officers involved in the apprehension and arrest of the suspect have been named as Sean Gallagher, Drew Preston, John Collins and Anthony Manfredini.
"Today, four courageous Port Authority police officers risked their lives confronting an armed terrorist to protect others from harm," Port Authority Police Benevolent Association President Paul Nunziato said in a statement.
"I am so thankful there was no loss of life and I could not be prouder of our Port Authority police officers, their actions and dedication to their sworn duty."
Bobby Egbert, public information officer for the Port Authority Police Benevolent Association, said Manfredini was the first responding officer and he described a "smoke and debris-filled" scene.
Manfredini was on patrol in the area when he observed panicked people running out of the passageway. He then made a radio transmission, and three other officers immediately responded, Egbert said.
Officers first encountered the suspect lying on the floor in the passageway, Egbert said. Manfredini described the injuries to the suspect as what appeared to be shrapnel-type wounds.
The officers noticed the suspect reach for a cellphone, Egbert said. Because of their training, they knew that a cellphone can often be used as a detonator and treated the object as a secondary device. The officers struggled with the suspect, but were able to separate him from his cellphone, Egbert said.
All subways and trains are running as scheduled, except the passageway where the incident occurred. Some exits and transfers may be blocked so passengers may be affected.
Cuomo praised the courage of the authorities, first responders and the city's residents.
"I am deeply grateful to the first responders and security personnel who kept people safe after today's attack and brought the suspect into custody," he said.
"Despite this morning's terrible incident, New Yorkers went about their lives unafraid, undeterred and more united than ever before. We will not allow this to disrupt us."
He added that he was directing the World Trade Center spire to be lit in red, white and blue "as a symbol of our essential values of freedom and democracy."
Ullah's family released a statement through the Council on American-Islamic Relations saying they are heartbroken by the attack, but simultaneously "outraged" by the behavior of unspecified law enforcement officials during the investigation.
"Today, we have seen our children, |
a new repeating pattern, while clearly preserving key elements" from the original carpet.[4] Linstrom said, "The Port hopes that travelers will grow to appreciate elements of the new carpet design over time, just as much as the old."[4]
Portland International Airport carpet on display at the Moda Center
In January 2015, removal of the nearly-30-year-old carpet began in front of a crowd of airport employees and media. The Port of Portland's chief operating officer said: "Normally we do these ribbon cuttings when we’re introducing a new thing, but it’s actually the reverse of that in removing the old carpet. We’re going to miss the carpet and we appreciate the community and the love of this carpet."[6] Any businesses that were able to receive, stockpile, and redistribute carpet could request 1,000 square yards (840 m2) from the Port of Portland.[5][6]
The airport's new carpet design features natural and man-made shapes found around the airport—referencing flight, nature, and structures such as airplane wings, hiking trails, leaves, runways, and waterways.[4][5][6] According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, the old and new carpet designs are similar in appearance "to the untrained, out-of-towner eye."[6] Installation was scheduled to continue through November 2015.[6] Local firm Hennebery Eddy Architects is overseeing its installation, having been contracted in June 2013 to select materials and manage logistics.[4] The new carpet is made of materials from recycled carpet and plastic bottles and jars.[5]
References [ edit ]5.6K shares
Get some tails wagging with these healthy 3 ingredient Banana Peanut Butter Dog Treats. Full of peanut buttery goodness and officially taste tested & approved by Chester!
Have you ever looked at the ingredients in the dog cookies that are available at the grocery store?
When Chester joined our family last year I was pretty shocked at the junk that is in most of them and as I make an effort to fuel myself with healthy, unprocessed foods I don’t see why what he eats should be any different. When I did find some that I was happy with they were pretty expensive.
That’s when I decided that I would make my own Banana Peanut Butter Dog Treats and Sweet Potato Dog Treats. I have been making them weekly ever since.
I kept meaning to post the recipe as I am sure quite a lot of you also have dogs, but until just over a week ago I only had a Christmas tree shaped cookie cutter. Chester really couldn’t care less what shape they are but the pictures wouldn’t have been very appropriate! I finally got round to picking up a bone shaped cookie cutter last week so now I present to you my Chester’s Banana Peanut Butter Dog Treats.
HOW TO MAKE BANANA PEANUT BUTTER DOG TREATS
These Banana Peanut Butter Dog Treats are so easy to make and only have three ingredients. The dough is made in minutes in a food processor, then rolled out and cut into cookie shapes. They cook for longer than regular human cookies as they need to dry out completely and become hard.
Once cooked and cooled they keep well in an airtight container for a couple of weeks.
I struggled like mad to get the photographs for this post and we went through nearly an entire batch of cookies. We got there in the end though and Chester enjoyed his photo shoot rather a lot.
Check out that satisfied little face…And the crumbs stuck in the chin hair!
Chester always knows when I am making his cookies and lurks in the kitchen under my feet the whole time. He absolutely loves them and has even been known to eat them as cookie dough.
They have been thoroughly taste tested and approved!
These cookies are designed to be eaten by dogs but all of the ingredients are suitable for humans too. I actually quite like them and have been known to steal one occasionally!
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU MAKE THESE DOG COOKIES
Now for the boring bit but I felt I should mention this so please bear with me….
This is regarding the peanut butter you buy and use. A lot of the varieties available at the store have all sorts of added ingredients. Make absolutely sure in this recipe that the peanut butter you use has NO additives and just has peanuts as an ingredient. There are peanut butters available with xylitol as an ingredient which is extremely toxic for dogs to eat. A lot of them also have added salt which is not good for dogs either.
Also bear in mind that these additives are no good for you or your children either. Personally I only ever buy peanut butter that has one ingredient and that is peanuts. I would advise that you do too. It is pretty easy to come by in most stores.
See this article regarding xylitol and dogs.
Banana Peanut Butter Dog Treats Get some tails wagging with these healthy 3 ingredient Peanut Butter Banana Dog Treats. Full of peanut buttery goodness and officially taste tested & approved by Chester! 5 from 5 votes Print Pin Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 30 minutes Total time: 35 minutes Makes: 34 cookies Calories: 40 kcal Author: Melanie McDonald Ingredients 180g | 2 cups rolled oats, or quick oats
85g | 1/3 cup peanut butter (make sure your peanut butter has just peanuts as an ingredient and no salt or other additives)
1 medium banana, make sure it is very ripe Instructions Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
Add oats to a food processor and process until a flour like consistency
Add peanut butter and banana
Process until a dough ball starts to form. Add a drop or two of water if it wont come together. Usually it does without any though.
Turn out onto a clean surface and roll out to about 3 mm thick
Cut into shapes with a cookie cutter and place on a baking tray lined with parchment paper or a silpat
Place in oven and bake for 20 - 30 minutes. Watch them carefully near the end. You want them hard but keep an eye on the bottoms so they don't go too brown.
Leave to cool on the tray then transfer to an air tight container. Nutrition Serving: 1 cookies | Calories: 40 kcal | Protein: 1.3 g | Fat: 1.7 g | Sodium: 0.7 mg | Fiber: 1 g | Sugar: 0.8 g | Vitamin C: 1 % | Iron: 2 % Tried this recipe? Tag @avirtualvegan on Instagram and hashtag it #avirtualveganH ouse Republicans in the judicial redistricting committee and two Democrats voted Wednesday to move judicial maps forward despite nearly four hours of debate and public comment that included numerous requests to slow down.
With few favorable amendments, the maps in House Bill 717 will remake the structure of the state’s court system, with particularly dramatic changes to urban areas.
The superior and district court and prosecutorial maps were secretly drawn by Rep. Justin Burr (R-Stanly, Montgomery) and released on Twitter in June without notice to or consultation of judicial stakeholders. They were reviewed over about a month, tweaked once by Burr and once through the committee process and then passed in a 21-8 vote to be sent to the full House for consideration.
The committee that met Wednesday was made up of 19 Republicans and 10 Democrats, with only one of the minority party’s several amendments for changes in the maps passing. Rep. Michael Wray (D-Halifax, Northampton) and Rep. William D. Brisson (D-Bladen, Johnston, Sampson) voted with Republicans to pass Burr’s maps.
“It is long overdue for the General Assembly to update the framework of our judicial districts to reflect North Carolina’s changing needs and growth,” Burr said.
He told the committee that “disenfranchised voters” in certain Mecklenburg County districts inspired him to reform the state’s judiciary. He added that he considered available resources, population, geography and only recently caseload, but not race, in the mapmaking process.
The maps
The most recent version of the judicial maps, before amendments, were released just before midnight Monday.
The maps released by the legislature did not include information about which judges and district attorneys in which districts would be affected. NC Policy Watch released maps Tuesday containing that information.
Most of the counties in the district and superior court maps are whole districts but urban counties are split into multiple districts. Wake, Durham, Guilford, Forsyth and Buncombe counties would no longer vote county-wide in district court judicial elections.
There are 12 district court districts that double-bunk judges (pitting incumbents against each other in an election), 10 of which are majority Democrat. They include the following counties: Northampton, New Hanover, Cumberland, Hoke, Wake, Durham, Granville, Guilford, Gaston, Mecklenburg, Forsyth and Buncombe.
There are judicial vacancies in 24 district court districts, 13 of which are majority Republican. They include the following counties: Nash, Lenoir, Pender, Columbus, Robeson, Cumberland, Harnett, Wake, Durham, Alamance, Rockingham, Durham, Guilford, Surry, Forsyth, Davie, Mecklenburg, Iredell, Wilkes, Burke, Rutherford, Henderson, Buncombe, Stanly and Chatham.
In the superior court map, there are 9 districts with judges who are double-bunked, of which seven are majority Democrat. They include the following counties: Nash, New Hanover, Cumberland, Robeson, Union, Guilford, Rockingham, Orange and Buncombe.
There are 18 superior court districts with judicial vacancies — three are majority Republican and six don’t currently have any sitting judges. They include the following counties: Beaufort, Granville, Duplin, New Hanover, Bladen, Johnston, Cumberland, Moore, Stanley, Randolph, Guilford, Iredell, Wake, Mecklenburg, Cabarrus, Gaston, Cleveland and Buncombe.
There are three counties in the prosecutorial districts that double-bunk district attorneys — one Democrat and one Republican in Hoke and Moore counties; two Republicans in Henderson, Transylvania and Polk counties; and two Republicans in Surry and Stokes counties.
Democratic legislators relayed concerns about double-bunking judges, noting that quality and experience would be at stake as a result. Several judges also relayed their own concerns about double-bunking.
Republican lawmakers repeatedly in both Wednesday’s committee meeting and over the past couple weeks have criticized judges for seeking incumbency protection despite voting for such criterion themselves during recent legislative redistricting.
Despite their criticisms, the committee voted Wednesday to change one precinct in one Mecklenburg County district to accommodate one Republican judge, Sean Patrick Smith.
Rep. Andy Dulin (R-Mecklenburg) presented the amendment, which moved Smith from a district where he would have been double-bunked with 15 other judges in a 12-judge district to a district in the same county with four vacancies.
A short time later, when Rep. Marcia Morey (D-Durham) spoke against an amendment that reduced judges in her home county, Dulin chastised her for “sticking up for her district.”
The amendment, which was introduced by Wray, was passed and in addition to reducing the judges in Durham County, adds one to Halifax County — a district with a population of 51,766 compared to Durham’s 306,212, according to 2016 Census data.
“This amendment is robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Morey argued.
House Minority Leader Darren Jackson also spoke against the amendment, noting that Durham needs more resources, not less. He currently practices law in Durham and Morey served as a chief district court judge there.
‘Final piece of the puzzle’
Every member of the public who spoke at Wednesday’s hearing, which included two retired judges, opposed Burr’s maps.
“This is an attempt to take over the final piece of the puzzle and to gerrymander the judiciary in favor of the Republicans,” said Michael Eisenberg, of Raleigh. “How can you look yourselves in the mirror at what you are doing to us? … I fear for the future of our state.”
Burr rarely looked up from the maps on his podium during public comment, even when addressed by name. At one point, he smiled, and Eisenberg told him “it’s not funny, sir.”
Nancy Gordon, a retired district court judge from Durham who is currently serving on the active emergency judge list, told lawmakers that judges are supposed to be politically neutral and “stacking the deck” does not support the Constitution or due process.
“I trust that as you all are in public service, we can agree that service is bigger than us individually,” she said. “It’s bigger than party affiliation; it’s bigger than personal ambition. It’s an allegiance to governing and working in the best interest of all citizens of our state.”
Gordon and retired judge Pat Devine from Orange and Chatham counties were the only judicial officials who turned out at the public hearing Wednesday, although the heads of district and superior court organizations spoke at a committee meeting last week.
Judges Athena Brooks and Joe Crosswhite, both registered Republicans, asked lawmakers last week to slow down the judicial redistricting process.
“Redistricting is a process that should be accomplished in a deliberate manner; a thorough process which includes all judicial and legal stakeholders with the ultimate goal of the fair and impartial administration of law and justice always at the forefront of the process,” Brooks said.
Crosswhite similarly urged House lawmakers to take “a measured approach, to do your research, to gather your facts, and to make a systematic, collaborative decision on what is going to be best for our court system.”
“We want to make sure this is a systematic and collaborative approach,” he added. We don’t want anything to happen that’s gonna cause this to be destabilized or to cause us to go back. I guess the bottom line of my message is: We don’t need to rush to make any changes. We have the time. We have the luxury. We have the experts on the ground.”
The State Bar and Bar Association, which represents attorneys in the state also echoed those judges sentiments last week.
‘Tearing’ Chatham from Orange
A number of North Carolinians and legislators spoke against a major change in Burr’s maps which would separate Chatham and Orange counties and pair the former with Randolph County.
Devine and Morey also presented a letter to lawmakers signed by all judicial stakeholders in Orange and Chatham counties asking them not split the two.
“The bill, if enacted into law, would terminate the cooperative judicial and prosecutorial relationship enjoyed for more than 40 years by the residents of Chatham and Orange counties,” the letter states. “The purpose of multi-county districts is to promote equity and economy in the administration of justice in the district and superior courts. Associated Chatham County with Randolph County does neither.”
Chatham and Orange counties share a juvenile justice office, community corrections office, guardian ad litem office and attorney services, the letter states. Separating the two counties and pairing Chatham with Randolph “would disrupt a fully-functioning system and cause confusion and unnecessary complications to the administration of justice in all three counties,” it adds.
Divine told lawmakers the bottom line is that HB717 as it’s written “is terribly unfair to the citizens of Chatham County.”
“The point is that you tear Chatham away from Orange County, Chatham County will experience a complete upheaval at every level of court services, not just in their judges,” she said.
Becca Zirken, an Orange County resident, asked lawmakers not to pass HB717.
“Rep. Burr, nothing about HB717 suggests good will or fairness or care for the people of this state,” she said. “Instead, this ill-conceived bill steamrolls us again. You’ve rushed this plan against the advice and will of the legal community and many judges who know the system inside and out.”
Jackson introduced an amendment to keep Orange and Chatham counties in the same district, leaving Randolph on its own, and it failed.
‘Open and transparent’
Rep. Joe John (D-Wake), a former state Court of Appeals judge, introduced an amendment to employ an independent judicial redistricting committee to complete the process that HB717 accomplishes.
“I sincerely believe this bill presents an opportunity to establish a regular, orderly, controlled, common-sense process for keeping up with changing conditions which may affect the composition of our judicial divisions, judicial district and prosecutorial districts,” he told his colleagues. “Because it is an independent commission, it has the benefit of engendering public confidence in its work.”
Burr called the proposal “insane” and it failed the committee.
Before the final discussion on HB717, Jackson asked for a roll call vote, indicating that the maps could end up in litigation.
Morey spoke against the bill, urging the committee to consider a more thoughtful approach.
Rep. David Lewis (R-Harnett), who chaired the recent legislative redistricting committee, spoke in favor of the bill, noting that the process had been “open and transparent.”
“If we keep saying now is not the right time to go, we just won’t ever go,” he said of requests to slow down the process.
HB717 is expected to be taken up by the Courts Commission Friday and the full House chamber next week.Machinima, Inc., the vintage video game site that morphed into a cross-platform online juggernaut, must now disclose when it compensated “influencers” on YouTube for promoting products without explicitly saying that the ad was paid for, thanks to a Federal Trade Commission order
According to an FTC complaint from 2015, Machinima, Inc. paid “influencers” to post YouTube videos promoting the Xbox One and several games. Machinima, Inc. reportedly called these “influencer campaigns,” but the FTC preferred the label “deceptive advertising.” According to the complaint, two of these influencers were paid $15,000, and $30,000, respectively.
Now, after the FTC’s comment period has closed, the final order for Machinima, Inc. prevents the company from passing paid campaigns off as objective opinions from influencers, and requires it to inform all influencers of their duty to inform their audience about the nature of the promotion.
The FTC also found Microsoft and its advertising firm, Starcom, to be responsible for the lack of disclosure in Machinima, Inc.’s influencer campaigns, but ultimately decided that the lapses were isolated incidents. The FTC requires social media users to disclose when they are being compensated to advertise a product in any way.
As a casual gamer and Xbox One owner, none of this is making me feel any better about my choice in console.
--performed by the Arditti quartet, or below by the Belcea Quartet
The piece, as discussed below, is in a total of eleven different sections. For specific links to these sections within this recording, please see below. There’s also a video included in the article that is a must watch for this piece. It can be viewed here or below.
There’s a tendency—it’s almost entirely intuitive—not to present the theme in its definitive state at the beginning. [T]here are small cells which develop bit by bit. …This may perhaps show the influence of literature, of Proust and his notions about memory.
As a prelude to our musical thoughts, a thought about thoughts.
Recently (sometime in the past century), doctors and neurologists and that ilk have come to understand quite well the physical form the brain takes, with synapses and neurons and cells and nerves and everything that makes up that enormous system that we call the brain. That’s fine. But have you ever wondered what chemical form your thoughts take? I have.
Characteristics like hair and eye color, height, complexion, propensity for certain diseases, and on and on and on have all been linked to certain genes; they have a physical form that can be identified and monitored. But what about our thoughts? What combination of chemicals, proteins, amino acids or otherwise, combine in whatever way to allow you to remember your first day of Kindergarten or your wedding day? And if that could be identified, could they not be cooked up in a lab and poured onto some blank slate like a cake batter and voila a fresh new memory? I don’t know, but the idea of ideas has fascinated me for a while.
* * *
It was only upon reading about this piece in much more detail around a month ago that I began to see the composer’s real intentions and concepts behind the piece, and it’s an entirely new concept for me. Call it impressionist, but if Ravel or Debussy were dressing their music in costumes to make it look and sound and feel like other things, Dutilleux’s approach is to jump into your head and play with the wires in your brain until he achieves his desired result. But we’ll talk about that a bit later. First, about the composer.
Our first work out of four 20th century quartets chosen not quite at random is also the most modern piece we’ve written about on the blog so far, carrying a publishing date of 1976.
I found Dutilleux interesting, as he represents an important segment of French composition.
Perhaps it’s just me, but when I think of modern French music, a few names come to mind: Messiaen, Boulez (teacher and pupil), and Milhaud (who brings to mind Honegger and Poulenc) but among those two major groups, Dutilleux doesn’t really have a place. For one, the members of Les Six were much older than Dutilleux (b. 1916) who fits right between Messiaen (1908) and Boulez (1925) in age. He never did, however, go down any serialist paths. Dutilleux’s Wikipedia page says it this way:
That’s an interesting way to think about it. Ravel and Debussy were ahead of their time in many ways, especially harmonically, and he ‘extended their legacies.’ I’ll buy that.
I say that, but granted, I have listened closely to very few of his works, a few piano pieces and some other things, so I can’t really speak to his entire output. Let’s keep it to this quartet.
This quartet, in fact, was the result of a Google search I made at some point as one of the most important things written for the string quartet in like, the past few hundred years. Wikipedia says “It is considered one of the most important works in the genre and has been called “… one of the treasures of the 20th century quartet repertoire.””
That was enough for me, so I started listening. Those two things were the most intriguing: important work, and NOT serialist or minimalist or complexity or spectralist or Darmstadt or any of those 20th century labels, but still modern, and so it kicks off our discussion of four semi-unrelated string quartets focused mainly on the more modern-ish of pieces.
We jump head first next week into serialist music, so I won’t go into that now, but suffice it to say, it’s a rigorous system of its own, embodying ideas and concepts that have the potential to be incredibly complex and strict, but at the same time seem so fluid and extemporaneous. Dutilleux’s music does not ‘belong’ to any particular system or school of thought, except maybe
just ‘French Impressionism,’ but not even that. Debussy relied and focused on the end result, the texture, the final product for his harmonies and compositional technique, and it seems that, at least while we’re making general statements, Dutilleux is doing the same.
It’s perhaps critical here to leave another caveat, that I am entirely unqualified to speak intelligently on this piece (and really the others in this little series), so… the happy medium I’m going for is barely, slightly more than layman’s terms… because there’s just a lot going on here I can’t discuss at any real depth.
That does lead me to another point, though, that I feel is of significance here. I believe I may have mentioned it before, or will soon, that much music that lacks a tonal center (avoiding the “atonal” appellation), especially music based on nontraditional patterns (be they impressionist/neurological or serialist) almost demand repeated listenings to digest and comprehend. By their very nature they are complex and unfamiliar, and require time to get to know. At least for me anyway. Steeper learning curve.
So upon first listening to this piece, it was, unsurprisingly, perplexing. I distinctly remember, strangely enough, the first time listening to this piece being on one of my rare trips to McDonald’s. In any case, it demands much greater attention to begin to appreciate than just background music.
After all, what’s going on is the developing of motifs, needless to say not your standard-issue harmonically plain melodies, either. What becomes readily apparent is that two things are very important: texture and structure. It’s these two things, at least to me, that the piece is built from rather than charming tunes. The piece does seem to outline or suggest a D major chord at times in the score, but it is by no means in the key of D. Wikipedia says:
The piece is based on series of studies which focus on different aspects of sound production: pizzicatos, harmonics, dynamics, contrasts, opposition of register.[1] It is built from a single hexachord that contains the notes C♯ – G♯ – F – G – C – D, thus highlighting the intervals of fifth and major second.[8] This chord constitutes the basis from which the whole string quartet is derived. The octatonic mode is also used extensively throughout the work.
The piece is laid out in seven major sections (the numbered ones below), and the first thirty seconds or so of the piece is a section not actually labeled introduction; it’s just what comes before the first titled section. The first five sections are each separated by ‘parentheses,’ small sections of about thirty or forty seconds long (at least in this recording).
Watch this video below. It could not be any better said than in this brief but educational and fascinating analysis:
What more is there to say?
The piece began (as quoted from Wikipedia above) as a series of studies on different techniques and methods of sound production, called Nuits (nights), in preparation for this work. Wikipedia continues to describe it:
Ainsi la nuit displays progressive growth, a technique frequently used by Dutilleux and through which musical motifs can both recall music that was heard in earlier sections or hint at music that will be fully developed in later movements.[1][9] … Other techniques that are typical of Dutilleux can be found in the work such as fan-shaped phrases, a modal quality reminiscent of Gregorian chant as well as the highlighting of tonal triads in an atonal context.
There’s very little in this piece that evokes ‘night’ or ‘nocturnal’ stuff in the way that, say, Chopin’s nocturnes did. These are night-ish in a dark, kind of Guillermo del Toro fairytale way, if that makes sense. It’s dark and kind of frightening and spooky at times, but intricate and rich, at times subtle and luscious, at others terrifying. But again the main focus or purpose behind the piece is exploring this ‘neural pathways’ idea of identification and memory, so in its repetition and suggestion, Dutilleux is in some ways, spinning a Labyrinth of his own.
To summarize the video above, which is entirely unnecessary because it’s so perfect, you could think of the development or progress of the piece as an evolution. The rich, critically important opening double-stopped, interlocked perfect fifths as our jumping off point. From there, we have Nocturnes at the beginning and end, the slowest Miroir d’espace, two livelier Litanies, the fastest and liveliest Constellations, and the Temps Suspendu.
There’s a balance to be struck with variation or development. No similarity at all, and the piece is through composed, with nothing having any familiarity, but too much familiarity and it’s all very repetitive. What happens in this piece is such subtle change of our opening idea, with embellishment by means of texture, that the changes are hardly noticeable, almost meant not to be noticeable, so that by the end, it all feels familiar, as the video above calls it, a “perpetual and inescapable moment of deja vu.” Perhaps this biggest impact, the greatest revelation of this is in the final section, perhaps the ultimate goal of the piece, when the original material returns. There’s really nothing much more to say but what was in the video. It’s sensual and rich and kind of spellbinding. Perhaps the strength or impact of this final section is a testament to the effectiveness of the tendrils the composer has grown out of this piece, how familiar they’ve become, what they suggest and recall.
I’m sure if I did some more studying and score analysis and the like that I’d find the answers to some of my questions, and they are these. I’m curious about a few main things: why do the ‘parentheses’ disappear after the fourth section? Is there some kind of symmetry between them, or do they just delineate sections and introduce the subsequent one? Parenthese III is, if counting the seven sections and four parentheses (but not the introduction, which isn’t titled as a section), the ‘center’ section of the piece, bookended by the ‘Litanies.’ Is this significant? The above video describes the relationships between the Litanies, the Nocturnes, but not as much the potential significance of the parentheses.
Maybe you question your own ability to recognize or appreciate the effects at play here. But is the music enjoyable? Or… do you at least not hate it? What will become even more important next week is to remember that it’s less important to understand than it is to listen and appreciate. Many people (many many of them) couldn’t explain to you why Chopin’s nocturnes are so appealing, or why Mozart’s works sound the way they do, or why Russian music sounds so Russian, but that doesn’t stop them from enjoying it. As complex as this work is, it’s a good example of the fact that you can (and perhaps even should, if you’re not a musician) enjoy these modern works without understanding a lick of the theory behind it, although I would argue that greater understanding leads to greater appreciation, fascination of the work, and next week’s pieces assuredly bear this out.
See you then.
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I think I eat an avocado every day. In some form or another.
I’ve been known to drown myself in a bowl of guacamole and I love avocado with just lemon juice and salt. (In fact, I had one like that with lunch today…just mash it right in the skin and scoop it out!
I like to mix it up and add to sandwiches, salad and now toast!
This could totally be breakfast, lunch or snack after a run!
PRO TIP: When the avocado is ripe, give it a few squeezes BEFORE you slice it open. Then it will be nice and mashed and ready to spread onto toast when you slice it open.
This is the perfectly balanced meal/snack – carbs, healthy fat, veggie and protein! *fist bump*
Enjoy!!!
Yield – 4 servings Preparation Time – 10 minutes Cooking Time – 5 minutes Ingredients 8 slices sandwich bread (sourdough is amazing!)
2 ripe avocados, mashed
Seasoning salt
1 tomato, sliced
16 slices turkey breast
Fresh veggies, as side dish
Chips, as side dish Directions Toast the bread slices and let cool.
Mash the ripe avocado and spread onto the toasted bread.
Season with Mrs. Dash or salt & pepper.
To each slice of toasted bread, add 1-2 slices of turkey and top with a slice of tomato.
Prepare fresh veggies.
Serve Avocado Toast open face (or as a sandwich) with fresh veggies and chips.David Cameron said that the cannon, previously only used in Ulster, would be available at 24 hours’ notice to deal with the “despicable violence” being seen in cities. Police had already been authorised to use baton rounds, he said. In a sign that other, more draconian, measures will now be at their disposal, he added: “We will do whatever is necessary. Nothing is off the table.”
In his strongest comments yet on the perpetrators of the violence, Mr Cameron said: “There are pockets of our society that are not only broken, but frankly sick it is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to feel that the world owes them something.”
He added: “The sight of those young people running down streets smashing windows, taking property, looting, laughing as they go – the problem with that is a complete lack of responsibility, a lack of proper parenting, a lack of proper upbringing, a lack of proper ethics, a lack of proper morals. That is what we need to change.”
Mr Cameron, who had chaired a meeting of the Government’s Cobra emergency committee to assess the situation, said: “We needed a fightback, and a fightback is under way.
“We have seen the worst of Britain, but I also believe we have seen some of the best of Britain – the million people who have signed up on Facebook to support the police, coming together in the clean-up operations.”Karl Kaufmann, an emergency room physician at Washington's Valley Medical Center, spends a lot of time at the end of a shift doing administrative work, like typing words and checking boxes into electronic medical records.
But recently, he's been testing out a virtual medical scribe called SayKara.
SayKara was developed by a group of former employees from companies like speech recognition giant Nuance and Amazon. The team is based in Seattle and is launching this week after several years quietly developing the technology and securing a $2.5 million seed round from local investment firm Madrona Venture Group.
"I use SayKara in two ways, both to recap a patient visit and to incorporate the pertinent details of a patient interaction into the medical record," said Kaufmann. Similarly to Amazon Alexa, SayKara starts working when a physician says a hot word, like "OK Kara" or taps on the app that runs on iOS devices, including iPhone and iPad.
Kaufmann was one of the first to try out SayKara, which aims to be an alternative to human scribes and existing dictation tools like Nuance's Dragon. The goal is to accurately transcribe audio to text, parse the information to make it structured, and insert it cleanly into an electronic health record.
Voice is rapidly becoming big business in health care, as medical systems look for new ways to help doctors focus on the patient interaction, rather than the computer. Studies have shown that doctors today spend about a quarter of their time on the patient visit, with nearly half on desk work and charting in the electronic health record.CLOSE Riders talk up the Detroit-area's refleX service, which connects Downtown Detroit to Mt. Clemens and the Somerset Collection. It runs 7 days a week, and no transfers are needed when crossing between city and suburb.
Buy Photo Tiffany Gunter will step down as interim CEO of the RTA. (Photo: Jessica J. Trevino, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo
The Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan is losing its leader.
Tiffany Gunter, who has been the interim CEO at the organization since March, is resigning, effective Jan. 2.
Gunter has accepted a position elsewhere. She declined to say where until her new employer is ready for such an announcement, but she said it would in the public sector in Michigan.
Gunter said she has a great working relationship with the RTA board but that this is the right time for her to leave because her next position is a great opportunity and she has a chance to shore up her future.
Related:
She offered some advice for her successor.
"My advice would be that (the individual) continue to tackle the big problems that people believe are impossible to solve," she said.
The RTA functions as an umbrella organization for the Detroit Department of Transportation, Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation, Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority and Detroit People Mover, and Gunter's leaving means more uncertainty for regional transit.
The RTA is tasked with creating a regional transit plan, but the organization has been unable so far to put forward a new millage attempt after a 20-year, $4.7-billion plan was rejected by voters last year. That effort has been in limbo as discussions have focused on issues such as whether a future plan should include the entire four-county region of Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw and Wayne counties.
Buy Photo The Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan will need to find a new leader after interim CEO Tiffany Gunter announced she was resigning. (Photo: Regina H. Boone, Detroit Free Press)
The RTA helped bring together DDOT and SMART to operate a limited-stop and more frequent bus service known as Reflex on Woodward and Gratiot avenues, but that service is expected to end in January as SMART launches its own limited-stop service that will be more expansive but could have implications for regional cooperation.
Read more:
With Amazon bid on table, SMART pitches new regional transit plan for Detroit area
CEO Michael Ford is ousted at Regional Transit Authority
Carmine Palombo, deputy director at the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, will be on loan to the RTA until a permanent CEO has been hired.
Board Chairman Paul Hillegonds said in a statement that Gunter "has done a stellar job during a very difficult period."
Gunter has been with the RTA since 2014 and has served in a variety of roles. She was elevated to interim CEO after Michael Ford was ousted in March.
Gunter said the leadership, both at the board level and regionally, "needs to set objectives for a future (RTA) leader so that leader knows what's expected of them and so they know they're either meeting the goals or they aren’t."
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @_ericdlawrence.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2ALQRSvA planet with two suns may be a familiar sight to fans of the Star Wars film series, but not, until now, to scientists. A team of researchers, including Carnegie's Alan Boss, has discovered a planet that orbits around a pair of stars.
This is the first instance of astronomers finding direct evidence of a so-called circumbinary planet. A few other planets have been suspected of orbiting around both members of a dual-star system, but the transits of the circumbinary planet have never been detected previously.
The team, led by Laurance Doyle from the Carl Sagan Center |
over the handlebars. Even Ivan Provorov had his wipeout moment in a minus-5 game against the Blackhawks in Chicago last season.
The expectation coming into camp was that two of the three young defensemen would separate themselves from the other guy, but collectively, the open competition has been beneficial and you can make a solid case for either Sam Morin, Travis Sanheim or Robert Hagg to make this team.
Although general manager Ron Hextall and head coach Dave Hakstol are probably very hesitant to begin the season with three rookies on defense, here’s why they shouldn’t:
1. The rookies' ability to bounce back
It’s crucial, if not vital, to have a short-term memory. Make a mistake and move on. One of the most impressive aspects of Sanheim’s camp was the manner in which he handled adversity early on. After a lackluster preseason opener at Nassau Coliseum, Sanheim didn’t beat himself up as he was “demoted” to the Phantoms' practice squad. In a matter of days, the 21-year-old displayed the necessary maturity and work ethic, which left Hakstol impressed.
“Sometimes you learn as much about a player and where he’s at coming off a night like that,” Hakstol said.
Sanheim quickly worked his way back into the main group after stringing together solid back-to-back games. Hagg had a slow start to the game at Madison Square Garden Monday night, but he kept his composure and turned in a solid effort over the final 50 minutes. Part of the seasoning process is escaping those moments that can potentially linger. When playing three games over three consecutive days at the AHL level, you’re forced to move on to the next shift and the next game very quickly.
2. They don't have to play every game
It’s a balancing act. You don’t want your young promising talent to sit for an extended period of time, but as part of the process, there’s a benefit to having a rookie take a step back and assess the situation from a different vantage point.
A coaching staff usually has a sense of when a young player needs to regroup coming off a tough game or tough stretch of games. Watching from the press box for a game or two can help a player gain a much different perspective. The 82-game schedule is a grind and when Shayne Gostisbehere was a healthy scratch, justified or not, for three games last season, he reverted back to the type of assertive offensive defenseman he was during his rookie season, and "Ghost" responded with 17 points in his last 27 games while firing shots more frequently.
3. What's the alternative?
Are the Flyers considerably better with Andrew MacDonald or Brandon Manning in the lineup? The Flyers thought so much of MacDonald that they stashed him in the minors in 2015-16, as he played just 28 games at the NHL level that season. He was left exposed during the expansion draft and Vegas elected to go with fourth-line center Pierre-Edouard Bellemare instead. Both MacDonald and Manning are serviceable defensemen, but on many teams, they are probably that team’s sixth or seventh option.
Since 2011-12, the Flyers have finished 20th, 22nd, 20th, 21st, 12th (Hakstol’s first season) and 19th in goals allowed. Whether that’s a product of poor goaltending, overall defense or a combination of the two, stopping the opponent from scoring has proven to be a real weakness, even with a veteran lineup.
4. The future begins now
If the Flyers were one or two pieces away from Stanley Cup contention, then it would make perfect sense to be a little more selective on how you work in young players into your lineup. I’ll contend with Hextall’s assertion that the organization isn’t in a rebuilding phase, but it's undoubtedly in a transitional period. The Flyers are seriously looking at starting a pair of rookie forwards (Nolan Patrick and Oskar Lindblom) in their top six.
Teams vying for championships aren’t making those roster decisions. The Flyers' franchise goaltender appears to be a good two to three years away as well. Once Carter Hart, Felix Sandstrom or whoever it is makes that jump to the NHL, wouldn’t you prefer to have veteran defensemen with several years of NHL experience in front of them to ease the pressure that might come with a first-year player in net?
5. Injuries will lead to the inevitable
Even if the Flyers start with a combination of Morin and Sanheim or Morin and Hagg, it’s only a matter of time before all three will be playing here at some point. How long before the Flyers lose a defenseman to injury and the team is forced to recall a replacement from Lehigh Valley?
Over the past five years, the Flyers have utilized on average 10 different defensemen throughout the course of the season, whether it's been the result of injuries or trades completed near the deadline. The one quirk with bringing up a defenseman from Lehigh Valley is that the player you call up will likely serve as the team’s seventh defenseman and probably wouldn’t play right away, which would seem counterproductive.
In that event, if Hextall elects to recall T.J. Brennan or Mark Alt, then what message does that send to one of those three guys (Morin/Sanheim/Hagg), who are currently on the fringe and capable of making the Flyers' opening night roster?
Here’s how I’d pair the rookies going into the regular season from what I’ve seen so far.
Ivan Provorov-Robert Hagg
Sam Morin-Shayne Gostisbehere
Travis Sanheim-Radko Gudas
Andrew MacDonaldBeing a responsible speaker, I have started preparing my talk – A tour of the language landscape – for NDC Oslo months ahead of time! When I first came up with the idea for this talk, I asked on Twitter if anyone else thought it was a good idea. Phil made a great point about including some information on how I go about learning a new language.
I came across this TEDx talk by Josh Kaufman a while back and found it useful in helping me formulate a learning strategy that works for me.
Truth about the 10,000 hours rule
In the talk, Josh debunked the often misquoted 10,000 hours rule. When the study was first published, the finding was that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach the top of an ultra-competitive field. But through a collective Chinese whisper the message was warped into ‘it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to be good at something’.
Instead, Josh found that researches suggest 20 hours is all it takes for you to be reasonably good at something so long you make those hours count.
This is important, because for us busy programmers – who, by the way, have a tendency to work long hours – the time to learn new skills is both limited and necessary given how fast our industry moves.
4 steps to learn
Josh proposed these 4 steps to learning anything.
Deconstruct the skill
Most things we consider as skills are actually bundles of skills. The more we are able to break them up into smaller skills the better we can decide which of them actually helps us achieve what we want out of our learning. We can then prioritise the skills that are most useful to us and improve our ability in the least time possible.
For learning a programming language, you can deconstruct most languages into smaller chunks:
variable assignment
common data types
control flows (if-else, loops, recursions, etc.)
working with collection types
working with strings
error handling
concurrency
…
Most introductory books and tutorials follow this structure already.
Learn enough to self-correct
You should first focus on getting to the point where you can self-correct and self-edit as you learn. For learning a programming language, I interpret this point as:
know how to compile and run your code
able to put simple programs together, and tweak it to start getting a ‘feel’ of it
Again, most introductory books and tutorials follow this pattern already and have you build a Hello World example very early on.
Remove practice barriers
Remove distractions – TV, internet, twitter, etc. – so that you can focus on learning. This can be hard when distractions are all around us and so readily available!
I once heard a story about John Carmack that, before a new project, he’d check in to a hotel with a bunch of good books and literally cut himself off from the outside world for days so he can soak up the ideas and inspirations before starting any work on the project.
I’m not saying that you should do the same, obviously different approaches work for different people. Personally I’m most effective between the hours of 10PM and 2AM because my wife goes to bed early and I’m able to just zone out.
I’m not a heavy Twitter user, or any other social network for that matter, so they’re not a problem for me.
On the other hand, comic-based TV shows is my poison – The Flash, Gotham, Arrow, Agents of SHIELD, etc. To limit the amount of disruption these bring, I binge watch them in one night so I can have the rest of the nights that week for more constructive uses.
Practice at least 20 hours
Josh raised a good point that, for most things you learn, there is a frustration barrier – the moment when we become consciously incompetent and realise how little we know and how much more we need to learn.
It’s not a great feeling as no one likes to feel stupid, and this is often the point where we lose our momentum and derail our hard-earned progress.
Which is why it’s important that we pre-commit at least 20 hours of our time, so that if and when we hit this frustration point we have a good reason to push on since we already budgeted 20 hours anyway.
Set your goal
Before you start investing a minimum of 20 hours into learning a new language, it helps if you could decide what you want to get out of the process. Depending on your situation and needs this could be quite different, e.g.
are you looking to move to a different language stack and trying to make yourself employable?
are you trying to understand the hype around a new language and see what it’s all about?
…
Personally, most of my learning is aimed at expanding my horizon and allowing me to see beyond the possibilities and options I have at my disposal with the stack that I work with day-to-day.
Other times I might have specific goals of what I want to be able to do in that new language, for instance:
I learnt Dart as a replacement to JavaScript for my web development needs
I learnt Elm to be better acquainted with functional-reactive programming (FRP) and with the aim of being able to make games using FRP
Prioritise learning a new paradigm
One mistake that I see many people make is to choose to learn a new language over a new paradigm. For example, making the jump from C# to Java is a relative easy one, but at the end of day you have learnt a new syntax without necessarily taught yourself a new way to solve problems.
Learning a new paradigm on the other hand, fundamentally change the way you see programming and allow you to see new ways to solve problems. From personal experience, each time I ventured into a new paradigm – Functional Programming, Aspect-Oriented Programming, Functional Reactive Programming, etc. – has allowed me to see programming in a new light.
If you’re interested in exploring some less travelled roads, check out these three paradigms recommended by John Croisant.
These two books by Bruce Tate are also a great source for exploratory learning:
And finally, I leave you with a great quote from none other than Alan Perlis.
A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. – Alan Perlis
Happy learning!
Links735 Bracketeers voted in Batch 36, and 9.09m votes have now been cast.
Visual results are here and today’s results are:
Jhoira of the Ghitu defeats Festival of the Guildpact with 93.09% of the vote
Woodland Bellower defeats Boros Mastiff with 92.11% of the vote
Genesis Wave defeats Corpse Harvester with 91.84% of the vote
Snapcaster Mage defeats Declaration of Naught with 91.84% of the vote
Overgrown Tomb defeats Planeswalker’s Scorn with 86.09% of the vote
Magus of the Coffers defeats Suffer the Past with 84.81% of the vote
Overgrown Battlement defeats Pine Walker with 82.90% of the vote
Myojin of Life’s Web defeats Deepwood Drummer with 82.10% of the vote
In Garruk’s Wake defeats Ocular Halo with 81.39% of the vote
Voice of Resurgence defeats Key to the City with 81.20% of the vote
Bogbrew Witch defeats Hint of Insanity with 80.94% of the vote
Bestial Menace defeats Specter’s Shroud with 77.70% of the vote
Maelstrom Wanderer defeats Dryad Militant with 77.12% of the vote
Llanowar Mentor defeats Pit Trap with 76.05% of the vote
Commander’s Sphere defeats Bog Serpent with 75.73% of the vote
Basandra, Battle Seraph defeats Stop That with 75.14% of the vote
Battle of Wits defeats Tolsimir Wolfblood with 71.19% of the vote
Master of Waves defeats Gift of Orzhova with 67.54% of the vote
Orim’s Thunder defeats Woolly Loxodon with 65.59% of the vote
Ageless Sentinels defeats Gatstaf Arsonists with 65.23% of the vote
Duergar Cave-Guard defeats Penance with 65.21% of the vote
Exploration defeats Savage Punch with 64.06% of the vote
Blatant Thievery defeats Fanatic of Mogis with 63.14% of the vote
Domineering Will defeats Dwarven Recruiter with 62.80% of the vote
Servant of Nefarox defeats Bladed Pinions with 61.34% of the vote
Barren Glory defeats Plasm Capture with 60.50% of the vote
Aven Squire defeats Cenn’s Enlistment with 58.20% of the vote
Watery Grave defeats Angel of Serenity with 57.79% of the vote
Destructive Flow defeats Flame Burst with 57.26% of the vote
Viridian Zealot defeats Theft of Dreams with 56.15% of the vote
Shock defeats Nissa, Worldwaker with 50.41% of the vote
Mourner’s Shield defeats Déjà Vu with 50.34% of the vote
Full results to date can be seen here.Transgender student Sage Lovell, Walton High junior gets elected to Homecoming Court
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Sage Lovell stands with her adoring dad making history in conservative Cob County Georgia.
As transgender people have gained acceptance, the real battle for our future, and one we are wining is in the nation’s schools. Even so, Sage wasn’t expecting the cheers and shouts of joy heralding her win.
Her school erupted in cheers
“I couldn’t stop smiling,” said Sage, who said she heard word of the final vote count while in her homeroom class. “My entire homeroom erupted in very loud cheering. Apparently it was able to be heard from across the school.” So excited and honored to be on the Junior class homecoming court!! — Sage Lovell (@sagey_ragey) October 2, 2014 As for being elected to homecoming court as a transgender student in traditionally conservative Cobb County, Lovell understands the significance of the achievement. Fun Fact: I’m the first trans woman to get on homecoming court in Georgia (I think at least) — Sage Lovell (@sagey_ragey) October 6, 2014 “It means a lot to me, in a place where people tend to be extremely conservative, that something this liberal would happen,” she said. “It means so much.”
She said she is the only openly transgender woman at Walton, but there are others at the school who identify as something other than how they were born.
When she needs to use the restroom, Sage said there are two facilities on Walton’s campus that have a single toilet and doors that lock that have been dubbed the unofficial “gender neutral” bathrooms for herself and other transgender or “non-conforming” students.
That was an issue members of the Cobb Board of Education said they have not dealt with before, and they were surprised to learn of Sage’s nomination Friday. Interim Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said there is no policy for bathroom usage for transgender students.
CBS46 NewsCBS46 News
Kelli Busey Editor in Chief at Planet Transgender Kelli Busey an outspoken gonzo style journalist has been writing since 2007. In 2008, she brought the Dallas Advocate on-line and has articles published by the Reconciling Ministries Network, The Transsexual Menace, The Daily Kos, Frock Magazine the TransAdvocate, the Dallas Voice and The Advocate. Kelli, an avid runner is editor in chief at Planet Transgender which she founded in 2007.
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Facebook CommentsCirqoid - your PCB lab on your desk!
Cirqoid is a printed circuit board prototyping machine, aimed at anyone involved in electronics development. It allows you to produce a PCB of your design right on your desk. No ordering, no waiting, no stencils and you don't have to hold your breath placing a chip with 0.5mm pitch.
What can it do for me?
Cirqoid can do isolation milling of your PCB (aka mechanical etching), drill holes, dispense solder paste and even populate the board with SMD components. That's right - complete production cycle of a printed circuit board.
Tell me more about this...
How does it work?
Cirqoid is a CNC machine. It is designed to be 100% compatible with a simple and easy to use open source CAM software cirQWizard
After you are done with the design of your PCB, you export your PCB design data from EDA software you use in Gerber format. No worries here - Gerber is industry standard and all EDA packages (including popular free software like Eagle, KiCad, etc.) support export to this format.
The software will then guide you through all the steps necessary to produce and assemble your circuit board.
What will my end result look like?
Here are some examples of PCBs made with Cirqoid
What are all these add-ons?
To be able to better serve customers with different needs, we offer the machine separately from all possible add-ons. Here's how it works: whichever feature you want to use, you you'll need the Cirqoid machine itself.
If you want to be able to mill traces and drill holes, you'll need Spindle add-on. If you prefer another way of producing the board itself and are only interested in dispensing or pick and place functions, you won't need one.
If you want to dispense solder paste, you'll need dispensing add-on. If you feel stencils are way to go, or you are a wizard of hand soldering - feel free to skip this one.
Finally, should you wish to be able to place your SMD components automagically, you'll need a Pick-and-place add-on. If you swear by good old tweezers - do whatever you feel comfortable with.
And of course don't forget to check our consumables section to make sure you are fully stocked and as soon as your Cirqoid arrives nothing stands between you and your first PCB.
And if this all sounds irresistible, why not take advantage of a complete package offer?
I'd like to find out more
Feel free to shoot us an email at sales@cirqoid.com We'll be happy to answer all your questions!
I'm sold, I want one
Just put one in the cart, checkout and next business day your Cirqoid is on its way to you.In an abrupt policy reversal, President Clinton today agreed to allow some 20,000 Cuban refugees currently detained at Guantanamo Bay into the U.S. Any other Cubans who flee their country will be forcibly returned home -- a provision to which Havana had not previously agreed. TIME Diplomatic correspondent J.F.O. McAllister says the unexpected pact, announced this afternoon, is an effort to avert what the U.S. military worried would be new riots in the refugee camps in the hot summer months. (The Administration said it was increasingly concerned about the safety of some 6,000 American troops now stationed at Guantanamo.) That's not the only reason, McAllister adds: Clinton, ever mindful of Florida's 25 electoral votes, has been working both to appease the Cuban-American lobby and to solve the refugee problem without giving too much of a boost to Cuban President Fidel Castro. Today's solution "should be seen as part of Clinton's campaign to contain and please the Cuban Americans," McAllister says.Image caption Sammy Wilson was reported to the Stormont standards commissioner after he called TUV leader Jim Allister a "thug" during a committee hearing
The DUP have blocked a censure motion against Sammy Wilson in the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Its standards commissioner found Mr Wilson breached the code of conduct by calling TUV leader Jim Allister a thug.
At Stormont on Tuesday evening, 37 MLAs voted to sanction Mr Wilson and 33 supported him.
But the motion was defeated because the DUP tabled a petition of concern meaning cross-community support was required.
Mr Wilson said he would not apologise.
He told MLAs: "I believe there is an important issue at stake here.
"And that is whether or not we, as an assembly, tolerate the interference in the freedom of speech in this assembly by a bureaucrat who wishes to impose his standards on us, rather than allow the freedom of expression which there should be in any debating chamber."
He said he thought his use of the word "thug" was appropriate.
The original incident happened during a session of the social development committee in October.
The committee was holding an inquiry into allegations of political interference in the Housing Executive.
Mr Wilson objected to Mr Allister's questioning of DUP Special Advisor Stephen Brimstone, accusing Mr Allister of "bullying" and describing him as a "thug."
The assembly's commissioner for standards and privileges, Douglas Bain, found that the use of "thug" by Mr Wilson had breached the MLAs' code of conduct.
Three other charges against him arising out of the incident were not upheld.
The Standards and Privileges Committee brought the motion to censure Mr Wilson.
SDLP MLA Dolores Kelly brought the complaint against the East Antrim MLA.
"Anyone who observed the social development committee's proceedings on the day in which this incident occurred could not but be appalled at the behaviour of Mr Wilson and some of his colleagues in relation to the disruption caused to the work of the committee," she said.
Mr Allister told MLAs that he did not "quibble at all with the rough and tumble of politics".
"I'm probably one who gives as good as he gets. But when a remark is made which conveys that I am of criminal and violent tendency then I do object," he said.
DUP MLAs Gregory Campbell, Jimmy Spratt and Tom Buchanan spoke in favour of Mr Wilson.
.As if on cue, riots broke out in a heavily immigrant suburb of Stockholm as soon as the media mocked President Donald Trump for a vague warning about immigration-related problems in Sweden.
At a campaign rally over the weekend, Trump issued forth with a mystifyingly ominous statement. “You look,” he declared, “at what’s happening last night in Sweden.” What? Had the president invented a nonexistent terror attack? As it turned out, the reference was to a segment on Sweden he had watched on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight the previous night, rather than to any specific event in the Nordic country.
The ensuing discussion quickly took on the character of much of the debate in the early Trump years — a blunderbuss president matched against a snotty and hyperventilating press, with a legitimate issue lurking underneath.
By welcoming a historic number of asylum-seekers proportionate to its population, Sweden has indeed embarked on a vast social experiment that wasn’t well thought out and isn’t going very well. The unrest in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby after police made an arrest the other night underscored the problems inherent in Sweden’s immigration surge.
Sweden’s admirable humanitarianism is outstripping its capacity to absorb newcomers. Nothing if not an earnest and well-meaning society, Sweden has always accepted more than its share of refugees. Immigration was already at elevated levels before the latest influx into Europe from the Middle East, which prompted Sweden to try to see and raise the reckless open-borders policy of German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Sweden welcomed more than 160,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, including nearly 40,000 in October of that year alone. For a country of fewer than 10 million, this was almost equal to 2 percent of the population — in one year. The flow doubled the number of asylum-seekers at the height of the Balkans crisis in 1992.
The foreign-born proportion of the Swedish population was 18 percent in 2016, double that of 1990. As of 2015, the most common county of origin for the foreign-born was Finland, which makes sense as it is a neighboring Scandinavian country. Next are Iraq and Syria.
Predictably, it isn’t easy to integrate people who don’t know the language, aren’t highly skilled, and come from a foreign culture. Sweden’s economic policies don’t help. As a report of the Migration Policy Institute put it politely, Sweden is “an interesting case” because “the state is committed to fostering large-scale immigration despite huge integration challenges in the labor market.”
There is a stark gap in the labor-force-participation rate between the native born (82 percent) and the foreign born (57 percent). As the Migration Policy Institute points out, Sweden is an advanced economy with relatively few low-skills jobs to begin with. On top of this, high minimum wages and stringent labor protections make it harder for marginal workers to find employment, while social assistance discourages the unemployed from getting work.
None of this is a formula for assimilation or social tranquility. In a piece for The Spectator, Swedish journalist Tove Lifvendahl writes, “A parallel society is emerging where the state’s monopoly on law and order is being challenged.”
And the fiscal cost is high. According to Swedish economist Tino Sanandaji, the country spends 1.5 percent of its GDP on the asylum-seekers, more than on its defense budget. Sweden is spending twice the entire budget of the United Nations High Commissioner responsible for refugees worldwide. Pressed for housing, Sweden has spent as much on sheltering 3,000 people in tents as it would cost to care for 100,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan.
It is little wonder that Sweden, where so recently it was forbidden to question the open-handed orthodoxy on immigration, has now clamped down on its borders. Sweden is a unique case, but clearly one of the lessons of its recent experience is, Don’t try this at home.
© 2017 King Features Syndicate
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has been described as “economically illiterate” by the head of a group of economists lobbying for the UK to ditch tariffs and embrace free trade after Brexit.
Hammond threatens EU with aggressive tax changes after Brexit Read more
Patrick Minford, an economics professor at Cardiff University, said Hammond and other politicians risked setting the UK on a course of serious self harm if they pushed for a trade deal with the EU that put customs charges on goods and services imported to the country.
Minford was speaking as his previous group, Economists for Brexit, relaunched on Thursday itself as Economists for Free Trade. He argued that if the UK removed all import tariffs, even if the EU did not reciprocate, GDP would rise, government receipts would be boosted and retail prices paid by British consumers would fall.
Hammond and others have warned that such unilateral free trade models could harm some exporting industries and cost jobs.
Asked how he would shift the present chancellor’s view, Minford replied: “Well this is just economic illiteracy. I don’t know how one deals with an economic illiterate other than say ‘come to my lectures’ or something.”
Patrick Minford believes government receipts will rise under a unilateral free trade model. Photograph: Cardiff University
It is not the first time Minford has taken aim at a UK chancellor. Campaigning for Brexit ahead of last year’s referendum, the economist turned on George Osborne, who had insisted that those campaigning to leave the EU were economically illiterate. “Osborne is the one who is economically illiterate here,” Minford said at the time.
A source close to Hammond said: “To suggest that two successive chancellors don’t know what they are doing but if they had listened to Mr Minford the world would be at rights, is preposterous. Mr Minford does not appear to understand the challenges that the UK economy will have to navigate as it exits the EU, nor the full potential of the opportunities that await.”
Minford’s panel comprises 15 economists and has an advisory group that includes the MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, as well as John Longworth, co-chair of Leave Means Leave and former head of the British Chambers of Commerce who resigned from that post over his support for Brexit.
One of the panel’s reasons for wanting to drop tariffs on imports to the UK is the potential benefit to consumers from lower prices. They say that currently the EU customs union raises prices through protection and business regulation, to the benefit of producers and at the expense of consumers.
Brexit migration rules could harm City's lead in financial services technology Read more
Roger Bootle, another member of Economists for Free Trade, said it was a “battle” to get the idea of zero import tariffs across to people. But he highlighted Theresa May’s recent assertion that the UK would leave the Europe’s single market when it left the union.
“Think of where we have come from already. I don’t know how long in the run-up to the Brexit referendum I would keep hearing how vital it was to stay in the single market... we have come an awful long way from there... So I wouldn’t give up on Philip Hammond, I think we can convince him,” said Bootle.
In her speech on Brexit, in January, the prime minister said that instead of membership of the single market Britain would seek “the greatest possible access to it through a new, comprehensive, bold and ambitious free trade agreement”.
Setting out free-trade supporters’ views ahead of those negotiations, Minford said there was a risk the UK would end up in a “tit-for-tat” battle with an un-cooperative EU if it maintained tariffs. “Any strategy that involves the UK putting up tariffs against the EU will cause significant self harm, which is entirely avoidable.”Will Romine, the fan with one of the most ingenious cosplay costumes ever devised, reports from Baltimore:
The DC Panel at Baltimore Comic Con marked the first DC panel following the first year of the New 52. Present were Dan Didio, Scott Snyder, Jeff Lemire, and Greg Capullo. The panel started off with DiDio stating that he skipped Baltimore Comic Con in 2011 because he was afraid of the reaction to the New 52. Other than that, the panel ran like most other DC panels I’ve been to, so I’ll share a few of the juicer bullet points:
Starro will appear in Rot World
When the New 52 began, writers were told to “write as if they were writing fan fiction.”
Though the numbering was reset, DiDio says that DC will recognize when Action and Detective Comics hit their 1,000th issue. (can anyone do the math as to which issue that will be in the new 52 numbering scheme?)
To the whole “Was Tim a Robin?” confusion, DiDio says that Tim called himself “Red Robin” out of respect to Jason. DiDio was unclear whether he began with the Red Robin costume, or adopted that later in his career.
Black Lanterns are not connected to the Rot.
Greg Capullo showed me a sketch on his iPhone of the Joker’s new look. I wasn’t allowed to take a snapshot for myself, so I’ll paint you a word-picture. The best way I can describe Mr. J’s new look is to say that it’s like the Joker made a mask of his own face. The eyeholes don’t quite line up with his eye sockets and the borders of the skin look frayed, almost like the scarecrow’s mask rendered in skin.
Hope you learned something new, and don’t be afraid to follow me @notacomplainer
About Mark Seifert Co-founder and Creative director of Bleeding Cool parent company Avatar Press. Bleeding Cool Managing Editor, tech and data wrangler. Machine Learning hobbyist. Vintage paper addict.
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None foundThe British Columbia Court of Appeal has upheld the right of a Vancouver strata corporation to limit rentals to just a single unit in a tower of 158 apartments.
The ruling on Friday states that the strata council of Hycroft Towers in Vancouver's South Granville neighbourhood can restrict its owners from renting out their suites – without explaining why – because anyone who feels they have been treated unfairly can take their case to the B.C. Supreme Court.
The dismissal of the appeal reinforces the right of strata councils to stop rentals in their buildings, a tactic that experts say might be creating more pressure on the region's extremely tight rental market.
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The case centred around a family that began renting out one of the three units they owned at Hycroft Towers last September – despite an earlier rejection of their application to expand the rental pool in the building by the strata council.
The family argued that, under the province's strata laws, the council must also provide the criteria by which it grants permission for owners to rent their units.
However, Justice Gregory James Fitch ruled that it is "difficult to imagine that an acceptable screening criteria for administering the rent restriction cap [such as the 'needs-based' system proposed by the appellants] could be devised that would comply with [provincial law]."
He added, "By default, adoption of a wait list is, practically speaking, the only permissible way of administering the limit that is open to a strata corporation."
Politicians and experts are searching for tools that could help Metro Vancouver renters, who are competing for units amid historically low vacancy rates that are near zero in most communities.
Tom Davidoff, a University of British Columbia economist, said once Vancouver's vacancy tax comes online, it could unfairly penalize certain owners who are banned by their strata councils from renting their homes.
In the wake of a Vancouver study that found 10,800 homes – almost all of them condominiums – were vacant in 2014 for at least one year – Mayor Gregor Robertson said the province might be able to reduce that number by amending the Strata Act. His staff recommended that developers could be forced to obtain 100-per-cent support – not 75 – from owners before changing the number of lots that may be rented out.
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But Premier Christy Clark has said she is reluctant to force strata councils into accepting unwanted rentals, and courts have generally sided with these bodies in disputes with owners who want to rent out their units.
Both the City of Vancouver's study on empty homes and recent data from the condo owners' trade association showed that the condo units most likely to be left vacant the majority of the year tend to be in newer, denser developmentsThe University of Queensland has advanced nine places to be ranked 65 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2012-13 released today.
UQ is one of six Australian universities ranked in the top 100, two more than last year.
UQ is ranked fourth in Australia and, over two years, has improved its world ranking by 16 places, from 81 in 2010.
The rankings also recognised UQ’s commitment to research excellence, with UQ achieving the third highest score for research impact in Australia.
UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor Debbie Terry said the improvement in rankings reaffirmed the University’s strong global performance.
“In our highly competitive global environment, any improvement by an Australian university is an achievement,” Professor Terry said.
“An improvement of this magnitude – 16 places in two years – is very significant, and reflects the excellence of UQ researchers and teachers.
“It is also a credit to former staff and students whose published research continues to influence our global position.
“As well, it speaks to the authenticity of internationalisation at UQ, and to the value of our partnerships.”
The Times Higher Education World editor at large Phil Baty said UQ’s achievement was “outstanding” in an increasingly competitive field.
“The top 100 universities represent just 0.5 per cent of the world’s higher education institutions, so UQ’s consolidation into that elite group is an outstanding achievement, especially given that there’s been heavy focus – backed by hard cash – on building more competitive world class universities in many of the Asian countries, so competition has been even tougher,” Mr Baty said.
“Australia’s strong performance is thanks to a very strong performance in research – and UQ is at the heart of that, registering the third highest score for research impact among all the Australian institutions.”
The Times Higher Education result is the third major, independent ranking to rate UQ in the world’s top 100 universities this year: the Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked UQ 90th and the QS World University rankings at 46th.
In September, UQ was also awarded a QS Five Stars Plus ranking, made to only 73 universities globally.
The THE rankings use 13 performance indicators, grouped into five broad categories:
• Teaching – the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score) – UQ’s score was 54.4
• Research – volume, income and reputation (30 per cent) – UQ’s score was 66.1
• Citations – research influence (30 per cent) – UQ’s score was 69.6
• International outlook – staff, students and research (7.5 per cent) – UQ’s score was 77.8
• Industry income – innovation (2.5 per cent) – UQ’s score was 64.0
The 2012-13 THE World University Rankings also used the results of the annual invitation-only Academic Reputation Survey, carried out by Thomson Reuters and Ipsos.
UQ’s upcoming Options Evening is designed to help guide students and their parents through the range of study choices available at UQ.
• For details of the range of undergraduate and postgraduate programs |
ings. This illusory state of detachment can become addictive as we isolate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are flawed, powerless and inconsequential. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and project a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine, and so we become more entrenched in this illusion. As Jean Baudrillard might have put it, this alternative world is "more real than the real."
So it is that we live in an impersonal era, where names and faces represent two different levels of intimacy, where working relationships occur solely through the magic of email and where love can flourish or fizzle through text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital transactions. Social media, e-mail, text messaging—they all have that rare quality, like a narcotic, to be both the cause and the solution to a problem.
Would Mr Weiner have been so emboldened to contact Ginger Lee, a porn-star, and a whole coterie of other women if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that allowed him to present himself as something quite different from his public self. Ultimately he was lulled into believing his digital self could abide by different stakes, as if he could continually push the boundaries of what's acceptable without facing the consequences of "real life."
Poor Anthony must never have taken into account these sound words from Kurt Vonnegut in his novel "Mother Night": "We are who we pretend to be. So we must be careful who we pretend to be."The Vinyl Factory are set to release a new vinyl-only release by AIR as a limited edition EP titled ‘Music For Museum’.
Originally commissioned by the Palais de Beaux Arts in Lille for their Open Museum project, which takes place this summer, the music – ambient, intoxicating and melodic soundscapes – represent Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin’s first new material since 2012. It is also the very first soundtrack of a museum.
AIR’s new compositions have been inspired by four contemporary artists featured in the museum – Linda Bujoli, Mathias Kiss, Xavier Veilhan and Yi Zhou – whose artwork is integral to this limited edition. Their soundscapes will be played from eight loudspeakers suspended from the glass roof in the atrium at the very heart of the museum, immersing visitors in a three-dimensional musical experience – using the software SPACES developed at the INA-GRM by Emmanuel Favreau – in which the music slows down, speeds up and responds to the characteristics of the space.
Released exclusively on vinyl (that means no digital, folks) ‘Music For Museum’ has been conceived to be enjoyed as an audio-visual experience – with the music accompanied by bespoke artwork from the museum, presented on a gatefold sleeve with an oversized fold out poster.
Having previously collaborated with The Vinyl Factory for their re-imagined soundtrack to classic French film Le Voyage Dans La Lune, AIR have built a reputation for an arresting, cinematic sound, and list soundtracks for The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation in their impressive discography.
Speaking of the decision to invite AIR to reinvent the works of the museum, the curators Bruno Girveau and Régis Cotentin say: “This choice was a fairly obvious way: the music of AIR inspires mental images, suggests a fantasy film… This is music that creates images and stimulates the imagination.”
Limited to 1000 copies, Music For Museum will be released on double heavyweight clear vinyl on June 26. Available exclusively from The Vinyl Factory and the Museum – click here for more info and to pre-order a copy.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
Land Me (8 min 13s)
Reverse Bubble (7 min 21s)
Side B:
The Dream Of Yi (5 min 27s)
Angel Palace (10 min 42s)
Side C:
Art Tatoo (15 min 46s)
Vulcano Kiss (10 min 43s)
Side D:
Integration Desintegration (8 min 42s)
Octogum (4 min 50s)
North Cloud (4 min 23s)“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under the conditions of absolute reality.” Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House 1959
In 1963 Robert Wise created the perfect haunted house film. In The Haunting, Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) is a woman with a troubled past. From the film’s beginning we know she is not psychologically sound. When she begins experiencing the paranormal her condition can only get worse. The film evokes a primordial sense of dread by exploiting the imagination of its audience. Robert Wise utilized the simplest special effects to promote the greatest fear. During the last fifty years of haunted house movies this template has been altered and pushed to its extremes – normally to a lesser effect. In the case of The House On Pine Street the groundwork of what Robert Wise created is thoroughly intact. Aaron and Austin Keeling have incorporated similar themes into their film while also painting fully dimensional characters that we actually worry about.
Luckily for us, the brothers rejected the trend of modern haunting films that says they must wrap up all loose ends and defeat the malevolent spirit. If we look at the remakes of The Haunting (1999) and House On Haunted Hill (1999), the evil is put to rest, and everyone goes home happy. This also occurs in Rose Red (2002), The Shining mini-series (1997), and more recently with The Haunting In Connecticut (2009) and The Conjuring (2013). It is actually a disservice to make any comparisons to these films when discussing The House On Pine Street.
Emily Goss perfectly embodies her character Jennifer. She is able to say more with a deadpan stare than most actors can with a monologue. The film opens with various shots of a nearly deserted Midwest town, which seem to relate to the isolation Jennifer will feel later. Jennifer and Luke (Taylor Bottles), her husband, move into a fully furnished home. We learn early on that a mysterious incident begrudgingly forced them out of Chicago (mysterious, in that, we are not given this information). The move is supposed to be temporary. They choose Kansas to be closer to Meredith (Cathy Barnett) – Jennifer’s mother. Meredith has agreed to help them during Jennifer’s pregnancy. Once Luke goes off to begin his new job and Jennifer is left alone in the new house, strange things begin to happen. We have all the normal trappings of a haunted house: closed doors open on their own, dark figures using the bathroom, phantom knocking, and crock pot lids moving. The biggest difference here is what is at stake. Can and will this entity harm the mother-to-be?
The Keeling twins use little in the way of digital effects. Most of the scares come from practical effects and are intensified by our adoration of Jennifer. We really don’t want to see anything happen to her. We are left alone with Jennifer for long stretches of the film, which affects how we react to the narrative. By spending time with only her, we see only what she sees. This means that when she’s afraid so are we. The composition of every shot lingers as if Jennifer is painted into the scene. The cinematography works to unconsciously bring us closer to her. The film’s aesthetic is beautiful. Through symmetrical framing, the Keeling brothers draw us further into the story and more importantly into Jennifer’s psyche. The camera’s movement is slow and subtle which allows us our only comfort from the potential dread around every corner.
When no one believes Jennifer, she becomes more isolated from the world around her. Through the film she grows more paranoid of others. Eventually, we too begin to question her sanity. Though we never fully believe she’s become like Carol (Catherine Deneuve) from Polanski’s Repulsion, the idea of Jennifer being crazy is a palpable one. Carol completely cuts herself off from the outside world and assumes everyone is out to harm her. We never reach that level with Jennifer. Instead, her mental health reminds us most of Eleanor from The Haunting. Eleanor was seen as mentally disturbed by each of the other participants in the study, but not to us. No matter what the intellectuals may have experienced in the house, everything had a “logical” explanation. The same happens with Jennifer. Her husband and her mother both believe she is ill rather than the alternative. The brothers Keeling have created a beautifully intricate character whose vulnerability immerses us within the story.
It has been a whirlwind year and a half for Aaron and Austin. The twin brothers – along with their friend Natalie Jones – moved back to Kansas, wrote a film, gained partial funding through Kickstarter, shot a nearly two hour feature in nineteen days, and premiered it at Cinequest Film Festival. With this quick pace, one might assume that the finished film would be riddled with faults. On the contrary, The House On Pine Street is another example of what haunted house movies should strive to be. Forget Insidious 4 or the Poltergeist remake, if you want a good scare that delivers more than cheap thrills look no further.The global burden of atmospheric methane has been increasing over the past decade, but the causes are not well understood. National inventory estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency indicate no significant trend in U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions from 2002 to present. Here we use satellite retrievals and surface observations of atmospheric methane to suggest that U.S. methane emissions have increased by more than 30% over the 2002–2014 period. The trend is largest in the central part of the country, but we cannot readily attribute it to any specific source type. This large increase in U.S. methane emissions could account for 30–60% of the global growth of atmospheric methane seen in the past decade.
1 Introduction Methane is the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas, with a radiative forcing of 0.97 W m−2 since preindustrial times on an emission basis, as compared to 1.68 W m−2 for CO 2 [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2013]. The global burden of atmospheric methane rose by 1–2% a−1 in the 1970s and 1980s, stabilized in the 1990s [Dlugokencky, 2003], and has been rising again since the mid‐2000s [Rigby et al., 2008; Dlugokencky et al., 2009]. There has been much speculation as to the cause for the recent trends with explanations including oil and gas production [Wang et al., 2004; Aydin et al., 2011; Simpson et al., 2012; Bruhwiler et al., 2014; Franco et al., 2015], microbial sources [Kai et al., 2011; Levin et al., 2012], wetlands [Dlugokencky et al., 2009; Bousquet et al., 2011; Pison et al., 2013; Bergamaschi et al., 2013], and changes in the OH sink [Fiore et al., 2006; Rigby et al., 2008]. Here we show evidence from atmospheric observations to suggest that U.S. methane emissions have increased by more than 30% over the past decade, which would represent a major contribution to the global increase of methane concentrations. Major anthropogenic sources of atmospheric methane include oil and gas systems, livestock (enteric fermentation and manure management), coal mining, and waste (landfills and wastewater). Wetlands are the dominant natural source. Oxidation by the hydroxyl radical is the main sink of methane, imposing an atmospheric lifetime of about 10 years [IPCC, 2013; Kirschke et al., 2013]. The current global source of methane is constrained to 550 ± 60 Tg a−1 from knowledge of the global sink [Prather et al., 2012]. However, estimating the contributions from different source types and regions is difficult due to spatial overlap in the sources and because sources mostly involve biological processes and fossil fuel losses that are hard to quantify [Dlugokencky et al., 2011]. Methane emissions can be estimated using “bottom‐up” methods that compute emissions as the product of activity rates (e.g., number of gas wells drilled) and emission factors per unit of activity (e.g., methane emission per well drilled), thus relating emissions to the underlying physical processes. Emission factors often have large uncertainties. Bottom‐up estimates can be tested by “top‐down” methods that use atmospheric observations of methane to constrain emissions on the basis of a chemical transport model relating emissions to concentrations. Inverse studies optimize emission estimates by combining bottom‐up and top‐down constraints, often using Bayesian inference.
2 U.S. Methane Emissions The Greenhouse Gas Inventory of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [US EPA, 2014] provides the most detailed bottom‐up estimate of U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions, following IPCC guidelines for reporting [Eggleston et al., 2006]. Figure 1 shows yearly emissions from 2002 to 2012. Values vary between 27.0 and 28.9 Tg a−1 over the period with no significant trend. Over 98% of emissions are in the contiguous U.S. (CONUS), excluding Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico [Maasakkers et al., 2015]. The EDGAR v4.2FT2010 global inventory [European Commission, 2013] also shows no significant trend in U.S. emissions from 2002 to 2010 (see Figure S10 in the supporting information). Major contributions in the U.S. EPA inventory and their interannual ranges are 30–32% from oil and gas, 31–34% from livestock, 21–22% from waste, and 10–13% from coal. Natural wetland emissions in CONUS are estimated to be 8.5 ± 5 Tg a−1 for 1993–2004 based on the Wetland CH4 Inter‐comparison of Models Project ensemble of bottom‐up models [Melton et al., 2013; Wania et al., 2013]. Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Miller et al., 2013 Wecht et al., 2014 Turner et al., 2015 US EPA, 2014 Biraud et al., 2013 NOAA ESRL, 2015 US EIA, 2015 The 2002–2014 trends in U.S. methane emissions, atmospheric mixing ratios, and gas production rates. (top) The total contiguous U.S. (CONUS) methane emissions from three recent inverse studies [] with horizontal bars indicating the temporal averaging periods and vertical bars indicating reported uncertainties. U.S. EPA anthropogenic emission estimates from the Greenhouse Gas Inventory for 2002–2012 are also shown, with shading indicating reported uncertainties []. (middle) The monthly atmospheric methane mixing ratios measured in surface air by the U.S. DOE at the Southern Great Plains site [SGP;] near Billings, Oklahoma (36.62°N, 97.48°W) and the NOAA/ESRL site (BMW) [] at Bermuda (32.27°N, 64.87°W), along with the corresponding SGP‐BMW difference (black), a deseasonalized difference (gold line), and the ordinary least squares trend expressed as the percent change from 2004 (dashed black line). (bottom) The trend in CONUS oil and gas production and drilling activity as measured by active rig counts [] (number of active rigs at a given time). Oil and gas production data are from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Recent work by Wecht et al. [2014], Miller et al. [2013], and Turner et al. [2015] used inverse methods to derive CONUS methane emissions of 38.8 ± 1.3, 47.2 ± 1.9, and 52.5 ± 2.1 Tg a−1, respectively. Wecht et al. [2014] used Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY) satellite data for July–August 2004. Miller et al. [2013] used NOAA Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network in situ observations for 2007–2008 from ground stations and aircraft. Turner et al. [2015] used Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) data for June 2009 to December 2011. Wecht et al. [2014] found the total CONUS anthropogenic emissions to be consistent with the U.S. EPA bottom‐up estimates, while Miller et al. [2013] and Turner et al. [2015] found much higher values. All three found maximum emissions in the South Central U.S., a region with large sources from livestock and oil and gas production. The reported uncertainties in these studies are likely too low because they do not properly account for systematic errors [Peylin, 2002; Heald et al., 2004; Ganesan et al., 2014]. The U.S. EPA inventory gives only national totals, so pinpointing specific regions of discrepancy is difficult, and the spatial overlap between livestock and oil and gas sources makes it difficult to attribute the high South Central U.S. emissions to a specific source type [Turner et al., 2015]. A spatially resolved version of the U.S. EPA inventory is currently under development [Maasakkers et al., 2015]. A possible factor contributing to the difference in CONUS emissions between the three inverse modeling studies is the time period investigated, as shown in Figure 1. Treating the results of the inverse studies as a time series and applying a least squares regression implies an increasing trend of 2.2 Tg a−2 in U.S. methane emissions. This corresponds to a 38% increase from 2004 to 2011 or a 5.4% a−1. Natural gas production and drilling activity increased greatly during that period [US EIA, 2015] (Figure 1, bottom) though the U.S. EPA inventory indicates a 3% decrease in national oil and gas emissions over the period due to lower emission factors (better control of leaks).
3 Trends in U.S. Surface Observations Long‐term measurements of methane dry‐air molar mixing ratios from the DOE/Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) [Biraud et al., 2013] site in central Oklahoma offer independent evidence of a CONUS emission trend. There are other surface sites in the CONUS (Figure S6), but SGP has one of the longest continuous records and is most centrally located. Figure 1 (middle) shows the 2002–2014 trend in the deseasonalized difference between methane measured at SGP and at the Tudor Hill Atmospheric Observatory in Bermuda (BMW) [NOAA ESRL, 2015], taken as a Northern Hemispheric background. The SGP‐BMW difference shows a trend of 2.3 ppb a−1 (p < 0.01) from 2002 to 2014 and 3.9 ppb a−1 for the 2004–2011 period. This 2004–2011 period is relevant here because it is the time period covered by the inversion studies [Miller et al., 2013; Wecht et al., 2014; Turner et al., 2015]. A similar trend is found when using the NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory site in Hawaii (MLO) [NOAA ESRL, 2015] as reference background (see Figure S7). We may expect the difference with SGP to reflect the footprint of U.S. emissions affecting SGP, which implies a relative increase in these emissions of 3.6% a−1 for 2002–2014 and 6.0% a−1 for the 2004–2011 time period covered by the inversion studies [Miller et al., 2013; Wecht et al., 2014; Turner et al., 2015]. The 2004–2011 trend is larger because of the 2004 minimum apparent in Figure 1 and is consistent with the 5.4% a−1 CONUS trend for 2004–2011 implied by the inverse studies, as might be expected since SGP is in the South Central U.S. where inverse studies point to large underestimates in emissions. Scaling the SGP‐BMW difference correspondingly would suggest a CONUS trend in methane emissions of 3.2% a−1 or 1.3 Tg a−2 for 2002–2014. Bruhwiler et al. [2014] previously used a global inversion of NOAA/ESRL surface data to derive 2000–2010 emission trends for large continental regions. They found a 4 Tg a−1 increase in fossil fuel emissions from temperate North America (as defined by The Atmospheric Tracer Transport Model Intercomparison Project regions, which is larger than the CONUS) over that period (0.4 Tg a−2). This is a factor of 3–4 lower than what we derive. Their results showed an increasing residual difference in the simulation of SGP concentrations over the 2000–2010 period, suggesting a larger trend in CONUS emissions than derived in their inversion. Schneising et al. [2014] found from SCIAMACHY satellite data that methane emissions grew by 1.5 Tg a−1 in the Bakken (North Dakota) and Eagle ford (Texas) oil and gas basins during 2006–2011, which alone would drive an increase of 5% a−1 in CONUS methane emissions. Franco et al. [2015] reported a 4.90 ± 0.91% a−1 rise of ethane concentrations over 2009–2014 at the Jungfraujoch European mountain site and pointed to the growth of North American shale gas exploitation as a possible explanation. Vinciguerra et al. [2015] found an increase of ∼6% a−1 in ethane concentrations in Maryland over 2010–2013 and attributed it to gas production in the Marcellus Shale upwind. They found no such increase in Atlanta, where there is no nearby oil and gas production.
4 Trends in GOSAT Satellite Data The GOSAT satellite launched in Sun‐synchronous low Earth orbit in January 2009 provides retrievals at sampling locations separated by 90–280 km along the orbit tracks. GOSAT has three observing modes: high gain (nominal setting over land), medium gain (setting over highly reflective surfaces), and ocean glint (setting over the ocean). We use RemoTeC v2.3.6 proxy methane retrievals [Butz et al., 2011; Schepers et al., 2012] (data available at http://www.temis.nl/climate/methane.html) in the high‐gain nadir and ocean glint modes that pass all quality flags. The proxy methane retrieval method [Frankenberg et al., 2006] assumes knowledge of the CO 2 concentration, and RemoTeC uses CO 2 concentrations from CarbonTracker including long‐term trends [Peters et al., 2007]. Validation with data from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network [Wunch et al., 2011] shows that the RemoTeC retrieval has a single‐scene precision of 14 ppb and a differential accuracy of 3 ppb [Buchwitz et al., 2015]. GOSAT observations are spatially sparse, but they are temporally dense because the satellite always revisits the same ground pixels, every 3 days [Kuze et al., 2009]. They are therefore well suited for temporal trend analyses. For example, the 4° × 4° pixel encompassing SGP has 1937 data points from January 2010 to January 2014 (see Figure S15). We examined the spatial distribution of GOSAT CONUS trends from January 2010 to January 2014, using ocean glint retrievals over the North Pacific to subtract the background and correcting for spatial differences in tropospheric contributions to the total columns on the basis of local orography. We refer to the difference between CONUS methane and North Pacific background for the corresponding latitude as the enhancement (“Δ methane”) due to U.S. emissions. Pacific air generally provides a good estimate of the U.S. background at the corresponding latitude [Benmergui et al., 2015]. To check the consistency in background trends between nadir and glint modes, we compared the two at southern midlatitudes (using Patagonia for land) and found no significant differences (see Figure S5). To obtain the orography‐corrected Δ methane, we first normalize all the methane retrievals to account for variations in orography and tropopause height, similar to the approach of Kort et al. [2014]. The normalization is computed by determining the local (retrievals within a 300 km radial distance) relationship between column dry‐air mole fraction ( ) in the GOSAT retrieval and the fraction of air in the troposphere (F trop ), using all GOSAT retrievals within a 300 km radius. F trop is computed from the tropopause pressure in the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis [Kalnay et al., 1996] and the surface pressure used in the GOSAT retrieval. In this manner we obtain the methane enhancement (Δ methane) over the CONUS relative to the North Pacific at the same latitude as a difference in tropospheric columns. We then computed a 2010–2014 ordinary least squares trend in Δ methane for each 4° × 4° grid box. The horizontal resolution (4° × 4°) was chosen to minimize the impact of smearing due to atmospheric transport (see supporting information). Figure 2 shows the spatial distribution of trends in GOSAT methane enhancements over CONUS from 2010 to 2014. The trends are expressed as percentage changes relative to the mean 2010 Δ methane. Figure S14 shows the absolute trend in Δ methane. We find statistically significant (p < 0.01) increasing trends across the Midwest. Trends are weaker and/or insignificant in the West and over the eastern seaboard. Trends in Δ methane can be expected to be proportional to trends in CONUS emissions, and the corresponding emission trend averaged over the CONUS (2.8 ± 0.3% a−1) is comparable to those inferred in Figure 1 from the inverse studies and the surface sites. Figure 2 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint The 2010–2014 trend in U.S. methane enhancements as seen from GOSAT. The methane enhancement (Δ methane) is defined as the difference in the tropospheric column mixing ratio relative to the oceanic background measured in the glint mode over the North Pacific (176–128°W, 25–43°N) and normalized with the 2010 Δ methane. Trends are computed on a 4° × 4° grid. Statistically significant trends (p < 0.01) are indicated by a dot. Figure 3 shows the frequency distribution of GOSAT 2010–2014 trends for three selected regions: (1) the background North Pacific (176–128°W, 25–43°N), (2) the CONUS, and (3) the state of Oklahoma (for relation to the SGP site). Also shown is the trend inferred from surface observations at the MLO site for 2010–2014. North Pacific GOSAT trends are consistent with MLO, providing a check on the background trend used in our analysis. Using a Metropolis‐Hastings algorithm, we find that trends in the CONUS distribution are 1.7 ppb a−1 larger than the background, a significant difference (p < 0.01), corresponding to a relative increase in Δ methane of 2.5% a−1 over the 2010–2014 period. Trends in Oklahoma are 3.2 ppb a−1 larger than background, corresponding to a relative increase in Δ methane of 4.7% a−1. Figure 3 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Spatial frequency distributions of 2010–2014 methane increases seen from GOSAT. Values are shown for the state of Oklahoma, the contiguous U.S. (CONUS), and the North Pacific (176–128°W, 25–43°N). The 2010–2014 trend at the NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory site (MLO) is also shown. GOSAT trends were computed on a 0.5° × 0.5° grid, weighted by the square root of the number of retrievals, and distributions were computed with kernel density estimation.
5 Discussion Long‐term surface observations and satellite retrievals of atmospheric methane, interpreted directly and using inverse methods, point to an increase of more than 30% in U.S. methane emissions over the past decade. The increase is largest in the central part of the country. The U.S. has seen a 20% increase in oil and gas production [US EIA, 2015] and a ninefold increase in shale gas production from 2002 to 2014 (Figure 1, bottom), but the spatial pattern of the methane increase seen by GOSAT does not clearly point to these sources. More work is needed to attribute the observed increase to specific sources. Kirschke et al. [2013] found that the renewed growth in atmospheric methane between 2005 and 2010 could be explained by a 17–22 Tg a−1 increase in global methane emissions. Our results suggest that increasing U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions could account for up to 30–60% of this global increase. Other studies have pointed to tropical sources as a major driver for this increase [Bousquet et al., 2011; Bergamaschi et al., 2013]. Better understanding of U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions, particularly those from the livestock and oil and gas sectors, is obviously needed.
Acknowledgments This work was supported by the NASA Carbon Monitoring System and a Department of Energy (DOE) Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) to A.J.T. Observations collected in the Southern Great Plains were supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE‐AC02‐05CH11231 as part of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM), ARM Aerial Facility, and Terrestrial Ecosystem Science Program. A.B. is supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Emmy‐Noether programme, grant BU2599/1‐1 (RemoTeC). GOSAT retrieval algorithm development and processing was partly funded by the ESA GHG‐CCI project. We thank E. Dlugokencky for providing data from the MLO and BMW sites.
Erratum Edward Dlugokencky had been listed as an author on the submitted manuscript but was removed from the final published version by mutual agreement. His contribution has been described in the Acknowledgment.
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Christmas is a time for families to come together, enjoy the day with their loved ones and indulge in the warmth of sparkling wrapping paper, surprise gifts and sumptuous food. But, more often than not, we fail to feel that true essence of Christmas lies in the happiness of others. Sean, the owner of the Old Nags pub in Manchester seems to have a similar opinion. And to substantiate this, he has decided to keep the doors of his pub open on Christmas to offer free food and drink for the needy and impoverished.
The motivation for this was the result of an incident that had a deep infliction on him. One day Sam was on his way to work as usual. Suddenly he observed a woman lying on the floor, unconscious, outside his pub. He immediately called the authorities, but what he heard was even more surprising for him. They told him that someone had already rung them about her and had left her there.
Sam realized that he witnessed individuals with deep vulnerabilities around his pub every day and nobody seemed to do anything for them. Sean lamented, but instead of feeling sorry, he decided to act for this and thus decided to give free food on Christmas.
After the announcement, he got an overwhelming response on social media with people pouring in from everywhere, desperate to lend a hand. Thousands have volunteered to help, including a hairdresser who has offered to provide free haircuts and an expat from Manchester who has made an offer to pay 1000 Euros. Sean, however, has made it clear that he wants people to help in kind rather than donations in cash and anyone who wants to offer food, clothes or other items for the needy is welcome.
Sam is extremely happy with the support and believes that the city of Manchester would be a witness to the true joy of Christmas; the joy of giving.
SONAL PALIWAL & SWETTA SRIVASTAV | TOCLeftist professor whose racist diatribe got him ejected from a Ch. 2 debate says he got a new career: producing anti-Israel propaganda.
Professor Amir Hetzroni, the left-wing provocateur who caused a storm following the recent Israeli elections with a racist rant against a Sephardic TV host, has finally made good on his promise to leave Israel.
Few Israelis will be sorry to see the long-haired demagogue - who made a career out of attacking Israel and regularly complaining about how much he disliked the country - out the door, but this will not be the last they see of him.
In a post on his Facebook page Sunday, Hetzroni revealed he was embarking on a new career, specifically: "Strong anti-Israel propaganda in the first-person, with an emphasis on my past work as a senior scientist in the service of the occupation, and that I have been banned just because of my disillusionment."
His work "in service of the occupation" is a reference to his time as a lecturer at Ariel University in Samaria, where the leftist professor was suspended last year after posting insulting comments about a forum for female victims of sexual assault.
Hetzroni claimed at the time that he was being "persecuted" by the "right wing university" for his left wing views, especially for his stance against IDF actions during last summer's Operation Protective Edge. The university fired Hetzroni last August, but a labor court ruled that the dismissal had violated procedural and union rules. The case is still pending.
But he rose to national notoriety after a stormy live post-election debate on Channel Two during which he blamed Sephardic voters for the victory of Binyamin Netanyahu in the elections, and told his interviewer - herself a Sephardic Jew - that "nothing bad would have happened if your parents had stayed in Morocco and rotted there."
Hetzroni was eventually ejected from the debate, and a complaint was filed with police over his racist rant.
Hetzroni says he believes the Jews who immigrated to Israel following the founding of the State of Israel - and in particular those from "non-Western" countries - should never have been allowed in, and regularly makes public disparaging remarks about nearly every element of the Jewish population in Israel, who he considers "primitive."
Despite those inglorious credentials, Hetzroni says he has already secured himself a first assignment. He says he will be starring in "an Al Jazeera documentary film which seeks to explain why it would be preferable to close shop on the State of Israel and split the shares among the founders who arrived up until 1948."
Watch: Hetzroni's racist rant on Channel 2
Last week, in announcing his plans to leave Israel, Hetzroni penned a typically hyperbolic and offensive message, which he posted on his Facebook page.
"Congratulations, the State of Israel and I have reached the end of our joint journey. It isn't possible to say we enjoyed it. It's difficult to enjoy (yourself) in a place where practically every family spawns three toddlers clutching greasy kebabs, getting drunk on cheap vodka and emitting CO2 on commercial levels."
Not content with insulting Sephardim and Jews of Russian descent, he also took aim at Ethiopian Jews.
"It's not pleasant to live somewhere where if you say a word bad about Blacks whose hobby is to beat people and smash display windows you are considered a racist," he continued.
"After all my efforts to improve the situation from within came to naught, there is no choice left but to leave."
Upon arriving for his departure flight on Sunday he fired a parting, racist shot, sardonically describing the departures area in Ben Gurion International Airport as "the most beautiful place in Israel."
"I'd be happy for you to join me for a high-quality dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant," he said "It is important to me - before I leave - to teach this fantastic community how to eat with a knife and fork."
Hetzroni refused to reveal where he was going, but Channel Two claimed his ticket was a one-way flight to Copenhagen.
A gaggle of journalists were present for his departure, during which Hetzroni explained at length to a Walla! news reporter why he hates the Jewish state.
But it appears the feeling is mutual, if the responses of the Israeli travelers asked what they would buy for him a as a parting gift is anything to go by.
"Poison," one answered simply when asked, while another responded: "A one-way ticket to wherever he’s going…and maybe some chocolate from duty free."
Or the personal message one man had for Hetzroni: "Die and don't come back - they should bury him wherever he is going."Dan McCall has been making T-shirts and mugs that parody the National Security Agency as "the only part of government that actually listens" for over a decade. In 2011, he got a cease-and-desist letter from the NSA and from the Department of Homeland Security, insisting that his goods be removed from Zazzle.com.
McCall was forced to take his items off Zazzle, although he later re-opened his online shop at CafePress (selling his shirt as "Censored by the NSA!"). Last October—when NSA was already in the spotlight due to disclosures over widespread surveillance—McCall filed a lawsuit saying that his T-shirts and mugs, |
Hockey Tournament — he was 14 years old, and anxious to be part of the fledgling event with his local team, the Ross River Renegades.
The trouble was, the event was a few hundred kilometres away in Whitehorse, and Risby's dad wasn't so keen.
"He said no," Risby recalled.
Fortunately, there was a quick change of heart.
It'll be standing-room only for many games this weekend. (Wayne Vallevand/CBC)
"Later on in the evening he said, 'Okay, I'll drive you.'"
That was the start of what became an annual tradition for Risby and the Yukon. The tournament — formally known as the Kilrich Building Centres Yukon Native Hockey Tournament — is marking its 40th year this weekend, and Risby hasn't missed a single one.
"I've been saying this is going to be my last one but you never know, as it gets closer you get more excited and want to be part of it."
An undated photo of the Ross River Renegades. Wayne Risby is in the back row, fifth from right. (Margaret Thomson/CBC)
'An event everybody waits for'
That first tournament in 1977 was a relatively small affair, with just a handful of teams from Yukon, most from Whitehorse.
This year there are 43 teams from across Yukon, the N.W.T. and Northern B.C. It's become one of the biggest annual events in Whitehorse, if not the biggest.
"It's an event that everybody waits for," says Gord Loverin, a local filmmaker and tournament alumnus.
His new short film, Yukon Ice Bandits, is about the tournament's history and its significance to First Nations communities. It was screened in Whitehorse this week, and will also be screened during the weekend tournament.
'We live and die by the puck, so to speak,' said filmmaker Gord Loverin. (Wayne Vallevand/CBC)
"Hockey is in your blood, it's in Yukon First Nations blood. We live and die by the puck, so to speak," he said.
"It allows communities, people, First Nations of different tribes to come together and have an opportunity to re-acquaint themselves with their friendships, to look at how everybody is doing."
Jeanie Dendys, Yukon Minister of Tourism and Culture, past president of the the Yukon Indian Hockey Association, and a self-described "hockey mom", says Loverin's film is significant because it also shows how important the tournament was for young people who'd been through the residential school system.
"It helped them to survive, in a lot of ways," she said, as she watched a game on Friday. "It saved lives back then, it's saving lives today.
"The more that we put into our youth, to give them opportunities, to be involved in team sport, to be focussed on their goals — we're going to have stronger generations coming forward."
'Back in the day.' Undated photo from the Yukon Native Hockey Tournament in Whitehorse. (submitted by Wayne Risby)
'They come... they get hooked'
The event has now become so big and so popular there's talk of adding another day to future tournaments.
Michelle Dawson-Beattie, current president of the Yukon Indian Hockey Association, says whenever registration opens in February, there's a rush. By the end of the first registration day, all but a few spots on the roster are full.
"We're getting calls from Manitoba asking if they can bring teams up, and we have players from all over the country coming and talking about this tournament," she said.
"Then they come and they get hooked and they still keep coming back."
Wayne Risby, however, feels the tournament's success has come at a bit of a cost: the loss of a small-town feel. The play has become faster, tougher, and more competitive.
"Back in the day, the community showed up with their team and when you went and played certain teams, the two communities would show up and cheer."
Now, he says, "it's drifted to a lot of importing players, and somewhat stacking of teams, and I think we've sort of lost some of the community concept of it," he said.
Still, Risby recognizes the tournament as a great success story that people can take pride in.
'It's the biggest stage they'll play on all year, or maybe for many years.' (Wayne Vallevand/CBC)
Dawson-Beattie says for many players, coming from smaller communities like Ross River, or Inuvik, or Fort Nelson, "it's the biggest stage they'll play on all year, or maybe for many years," she said.
"Just to see the pride on their faces when they step onto that ice, and they get to play in front of a crowd of people like their peers, co-workers, family — it's really great to see, and that's what makes me do it or that's why I keep doing it."
The tournament, which began Friday, continues through until Sunday night.The Hermit Pope Who Set The Precedent For Benedict XVI
Enlarge this image toggle caption AP/L'Osservatore Romano AP/L'Osservatore Romano
Beneath a glass coffin, wearing a pontiff's miter and faded vestments of gold and purple, there lies a tiny man with a wax head.
This represents an Italian priest who, until this month, was the only pope in history to voluntarily resign.
His name is Celestine V.
Celestine became pope at 84, some seven centuries ago, after a long and self-punishing career as a hermit.
Though a celebrated spiritual leader, and founder of a new branch of the Benedictine order, his papacy lasted just over five months. It's widely viewed as an utter disaster.
He left at 85 — the same age as Benedict XVI.
Enlarge this image toggle caption AP/L'Osservsatore Romano AP/L'Osservsatore Romano
Celestine's resignation proved controversial, and divided medieval intellectual opinion: Many believe he is a shadowy cowardly figure seen in hell in Dante's Inferno.
A few other popes have quit over the centuries; the last one was Gregory XII in 1415. But as one expert on the Vatican's turbulent history put it: "They did so with the medieval equivalent of a gun to the heads."
Experts say there's an important link between Celestine's voluntary resignation and Benedict's. There is evidence that Celestine provided inspiration, and a foundation in religious law, for Benedict's astonishing departure this month.
Celestine's coffin lies in Santa Maria di Collemagio, a glorious honey-colored basilica that he built in the city of L'Aquila amid the mountains of central Italy.
In 1294, he was crowned pope in this same building.
Celestine was a monk, a hermit and a saint who, it's widely acknowledged, never wanted to be pope. "He just wanted to guide the faithful," says Patrizia Innamorati, who works in the basilica, in maintenance.
Celestine came from the mountains not far from the basilica and led an austere life.
George Ferzoco of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Bristol University in England, is an expert on Celestine V — or Pietro del Morrone, as Celestine was known before becoming pope.
During his life as a hermit, Pietro slept on bare rock in a cave on a mountainside, Ferzoco says.
Pietro also practiced mortification of the flesh — the belief that pain distracts the mind away from worldly temptations and toward God. He wore a horsehair shirt and an iron girdle.
"The combination of the hair shirt and the iron chains, which he would wear around his skin, these would have cut very deeply into his skin and caused profuse regular bleeding," Ferzoco says.
Pietro's fame spread. He attracted many followers and set up his own branch of the Benedictine order.
The Accidental Pope
Then, in 1292, Pope Nicholas IV died. For the next two years, the church's endlessly scheming cardinals were deadlocked over a successor.
They had heard about 84-year-old Pietro, or Peter, as some call him. He was old, and they thought he would be easy to manipulate. So they set off on horseback to his mountain cave to tell him that he was the new pope.
The job did not work out.
Eamon Duffy, a professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge University and author of a book about the popes, sums it up this way: "He was really rather an appalling pope."
"For a start, he was extremely feeble," Duffy says. "He was also very much under the influence of the king of Sicily and appointed a number of stooge cardinals. And he really had no head for administration or business, so it was a rather inglorious period."
After slightly more than five months, Celestine quit.
To do so, he signed a document legalizing his resignation. The document was drafted by a cardinal, who promptly became the next pope — Boniface VIII.
About 700 years on, it's proved crucial, says Bristol University's Ferzoco.
"The law passed by Celestine the day before he actually resigned served as the legal bedrock for the decision that Benedict XVI made to resign the papacy," Ferzoco says.
Benedict's Visit
Back outside the basilica, Angelo Micheri arrives to pray, as he does every day. He reveres Celestine.
"He's important because he helps people in need," Micheri says.
Times are tough in Italy these days. Micheri is a carpenter who can't get a job. To survive, he begs.
Micheri is confident Celestine will answer his prayers for work.
"Yes, I think he will. I asked him before, and I found work," he says.
Some construction laborers who do have jobs are working on the basilica. It's still being repaired after part of the roof caved in during a big earthquake that struck L'Aquila four years ago.
After the quake, Pope Benedict came to console victims. He prayed before Celestine's coffin. In a highly symbolic gesture, Benedict laid upon it a most sacred vestment — his pallium, or a kind of scarf.
Shortly after that, Celestine's coffin was moved for a while. It was paraded slowly though the narrow streets, on the back of a small truck, to the nearby town of Sulmona.
Benedict went to pray before Celestine's remains there, too.
The significance of the two visits is "quite staggering," says Ferzoco. To him, it's amazing no one saw the message behind Benedict's actions.
"He was showing that it is permissible, licit, and in some cases spiritually beneficial that a pope may resign for the good of his soul and for the benefit of his flock," Ferzoco says.
Coward Or Hero?
As he performs his final acts as pope, Benedict will be aware that controversy is continuing over his resignation.
That happened to Celestine, too. Celestine's departure divided intellectual opinion in the medieval world.
The poet Dante, in his Inferno, describes an unnamed figure in hell: "He whose cowardice made the Great Refusal."
For centuries, many have assumed that's a damning reference to Celestine — though some scholars disagree.
Others, though, saw Celestine's resignation as heroic: the rejection of a church mired by greed and politics.
Celestine's story has a grim footnote. After quitting, he wanted to go back to being a hermit and headed for his cave.
Boniface, his successor, was worried by the idea of two living popes and feared that people would still rally round Celestine. So he had Celestine arrested and imprisoned in a castle.
Soon afterward, Celestine died.
As she stands next to Celestine's glass coffin, Patrizia Innamorati hopes the world will be a lot kinder to Benedict.
"I will miss him a lot," she says, "because he was a person of great sensibility and courage."Even though Al Jefferson‘s time with the Charlotte Hornets was plagued by multiple injuries, his signing put the team back on the map and helped them rebuild their franchise.
If you asked NBA fans and executives who the most poorly ran franchise has been over the past decade or so, many would point directly at the Charlotte Hornets/Bobcats organization. The team was consistently at the bottom of the league in wins and their bad draft picks and free agent signings were starting to pile up. It would seem as if there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
Things started to look better when the team made the playoffs for the first time in the 2009-2010 season since returning to Charlotte. That quickly changed when just two years later, they had the worst season in NBA history. Then things suddenly changed again as the team had made a big splash in free agency during the summer of 2013 by signing Al Jefferson.
This was the first big name signing that the team had made in some time. Many would argue that it was the biggest signing in franchise history or at least since the team returned to Charlotte. In more ways than one, Big Al was about to change the landscape of professional basketball in the Queen City.
The then Bobcats signed Jefferson to a three-year, $40.5 million deal making him the highest paid player on the team. The deal included a player option for the third year that he would eventually end up accepting. Big Al was one of the best offensive big men in the game at the time and after many successful seasons with the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Utah Jazz, many were shocked with his move to Charlotte.
Al immediately made a huge impact on the team and success soon followed as they won 43 games in his first season with the franchise and they were able to secure a playoff berth. He averaged a team-high 21.8 points per game and 10.8 rebounds per game during his first season with Charlotte.
After an amazing start to his career with the Hornets, things went downhill from there. Jefferson’s points, rebounds, and games played all went down in the following two seasons. Injuries caught up with him and limited his effectiveness with the team. While he still showed some signs of brilliance, Big Al was ultimately a shell of his former self because of the constantly nagging injuries.
But Jefferson’s impact on the organization and the city went far beyond that of just the court. He completely changed the franchise’s direction. In 2014, the team brought back the Hornets name to Charlotte. They also began to make significant improvements in their quality of play as well as their drafting, trading, and free agent signings.
The success of the franchise can be seen from this past season as they won 48 games and were tied for the third best record in the Eastern Conference in the 2015-16 season. The Charlotte Hornets’ plans were panning out as their draft picks were developing into quality players and the acquisition of Nicolas Batum was one of the best moves of the offseason.
Now this could be chalked up to great management, a quality front office, or a good owner and general manager but I think the success of the team directly correlates to the singing of Al Jefferson back in 2013. Big Al’s decision to go against the norm and sign with a small market team was a shocking move but it help put Charlotte back on the map. It also led the team to have a winning mentality where they could go out and sign big name players and actually compete for a playoff spot every year.
The Charlotte Hornets have become a small market team that can compete with some big market teams and that is rare in today’s NBA. This league can be difficult for teams like Charlotte but they have found a way to be successful. They are now making smart moves and re-signing players like Nic Batum and Marvin Williams to team friendly deals that are worth less than they could have gotten on the open market.
This is all a credit to not only the organization but to the city, the fans, and the culture that has been created in Charlotte since Jefferson was signed three years ago. It will be interesting to see if they can keep up the success without Jefferson going forward.
While his time in Charlotte may have been a bit disappointing because of his lack of production at times, Jefferson can be directly linked to the team’s success. Now that Big Al is moving onto another team after singing with the Indiana Pacers this summer, his impact on the Hornets’ franchise can still be felt today. And it will continue to be there for years to come as the team continues to strive for success and improve.In September non-farm payrolls declined 263k, versus a consensus forecast of -175k, and a revised decline in August of -201K. Payrolls have now declined for 21 consecutive months. Over the last 21 months 7.2mn people have lost their jobs. September’s unemployment rate rose to 9.8% from 9.7%, this was inline with expectations, but the highest level since June 1983. This data continues to indicate that there will be no quick fix for the labor market, and that consumers will continue to face significant challenges. Most forward looking indicators toward employment, especially initial jobless claims, are still indicating further deterioration to the nation’s employment situation, despite second derivative improvements. Job losses will remain a reality into 2010, and in all likelihood the unemployment rate will top 10% before leveling off. It is important to note that employment does tend to lag economic recoveries, however, it will be hard for any recovery to gain traction with an increasing number of consumers out of work and without and/or unwilling to use credit.
Looking behind the headline, a decline in the average work week and hours work will likely lead to stagnant performance for September’s income. A worsening employment situation will assuredly keep the FOMC’s punch bowl in place while other parts of the economy show modest gains.On the first day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
A Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the second day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the third day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the fourth day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the fifth day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Five Golden Showers!!!
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the sixth day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Six Girls Ahegao
Five Golden Showers!!!
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the seventh day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Seven Sluts A Swallowing
Six Girls Ahegao
Five Golden Showers!!!
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the eighth day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Eight Boobs a Milking
Seven Sluts A Swallowing
Six Girls Ahegao
Five Golden Showers!!!
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the ninth day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Nine Ladies Stripping
Eight Boobs a Milking
Seven Sluts A Swallowing
Six Girls Ahegao
Five Golden Showers!!!
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the tenth day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Ten Snatches Stretching
Nine Ladies Stripping
Eight Boobs a Milking
Seven Sluts A Swallowing
Six Girls Ahegao
Five Golden Showers!!!
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the eleventh day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Eleven Whores Whoring
Ten Snatches Stretching
Nine Ladies Stripping
Eight Boobs a Milking
Seven Sluts A Swallowing
Six Girls Ahegao
Five Golden Showers!!!
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape Spree
On the twelfth day of Christmas
Machineslicedbread released for me:
Twelve Cummers Cumming
Eleven Whores Whoring
Ten Snatches Stretching
Nine Ladies Stripping
Eight Boobs a Milking
Seven Sluts A Swallowing
Six Girls Ahegao
Five Golden Showers!!!
Four Thirsty Bitches
Three French Maids
Two bouncing titties
And a Megalomaniac’s Rape SpreeIran-Russia alliance: Tactical or strategic?
Shahir Shahidsaless
Russia’s strategic foreign policy goal is to prevent the consolidation of the United States’ global dominance. This strategy became even more apparent in 2014 from the strong Russian response to the ouster of the pro-Russian government in Ukraine and the emergence of a pro-Western leadership in the former Soviet state.
Russia was extremely worried about the close proximity of the newly pro-Western government and was concerned about the possibility of a NATO military presence in its back yard. This sparked a tit-for-tat chain of actions and reactions between Russia and the West, led by the United States.
In pursuit of the same objective, Russia began its intensive air campaign in Syria in September 2015. The Russian military operation in Syria elevated the US-Russia conflict into a geopolitical confrontation.
As events unfolded in Syria, the rise of jihadists added a new element for serious concern. Russia has been in a state of war with radical Islamists from Chechnya and other North Caucasian republics since the 1990s, and the country has been targeted by several terrorist attacks. In June 2015, the Chechen jihadi group pledged allegiance to Islamic State.
Iran’s strategic interest in Syria
For a host of reasons, Iran's hostility toward Israel has been the most entrenched determinant of its foreign policy since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
To counter Israel's unchallenged hegemony in the region, Iran organised Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s to serve as a proxy force. Iran viewed Hezbollah as a deterrent force and a constant potential threat to Israel's security.
In this respect, Syria, as an anti-Israel, anti-American strategic ally of Iran, served as a vital corridor connecting Damascus to Tartus on the Mediterranean coast. This corridor enabled Iran to continue to provide weapons to Hezbollah.
With the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in 2003, Iran emerged as a major player in Iraq thanks to the armed Iraqi opposition groups that Iran had supported for over two decades. This paved the way for the formation of the Iran-led "axis of resistance" which extends from Iran to Lebanon and passes unobstructed through Iraq and Syria. “Resistance,” as it is called by the Iranians, is also tasked to act as a deterrent to thwart American hegemony in the region.
As chaos grew in Syria, the rise of the anti-Shia Salafist group, Daesh (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Islamic State, or IS) became a formidable threat not only to Iran’s strategic interests in Iraq and Syria but also to its own national security. Iran could no longer rely on the Syrian army to continue to prop up the Bashar al-Assad regime, which was in a brutal asymmetric war with Daesh as well as with numerous opposition groups.
The opposition groups were being backed by several Arab countries in the region as well as by Turkey and the United States. The US supported these opposition groups in a strategic attempt to curb Iran’s influence in the region. To combat this situation, Iran created the National Defence Forces, a large paramilitary base in Syria modelled after its success at organising proxies in Iraq and Lebanon.
A temporary friendship?
As the Russia-Iran de facto alliance in Syria has emerged, opinion pieces and analyses increasingly appear in the Western media arguing that this partnership will not survive in the long term. The predominant arguments to support this position are as follows:
Distrust
Some experts argue that there is a history of distrust between the two countries dating back to the 19th century when Russia annexed Iranian territories. They also refer to the USSR’s support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Russia’s opposition to Iran’s nuclear programme and its support of UN sanctions on Iran. They also point to the suspension of the delivery of S-300 missiles in 2011 that Iran had already paid for. Tehran filed a lawsuit against Russia in return.
The reality is that alliances between countries are not based on trust - they are based on self-interest. A country’s self-interest leads a government to enter into alliances with other countries. The more these interests converge, the stronger the relations.
To determine the strength of the ties between two countries, one should examine how well their interests converge. Russia and Iran’s major common interest is denying US hegemony. The United States rejects the view of building friendly relations based on equal partnerships or on taking the interests of other parties into account. This frustrates its relations with countries whose worldview, principles, values, and interests are different from that of the United States.
Logically, it is in Russia’s national security interests to support sanctions if it perceives that there is a military dimension to Iran’s nuclear programme. However, that does not mean Russia will turn its back on Iran as the most reliable partner in the region helping it to thwart US dominance.
Competing in the global energy market
Some observers argue that Iran and Russia are competitors in energy markets. They claim that Iran may become Russia’s competitor if it begins exporting natural gas to Europe where Russia dominates the market. Contrary to this argument, Russia desperately needs Iran’s market and has already positioned itself as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the removal of sanctions on Iran.
Last September, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding worth $74bn to develop their trade and economic ties in an array of sectors. These sectors are mainly in gas and oil but also include heavy industries, mining, trade, agriculture, tourism, banking, technology and electricity. According to Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak, Iran and Russia are in the process of negotiating oil and gas swap contracts. They can also “establish a bank that will finance the joint [oil and gas] projects,” according to Novak. Further evidence that Russia does not view Iran as a competitor can be seen in the active role Russia played in the culmination of the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 (the UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany), a role that resulted in Iran’s leader expressing his appreciation for Russia’s help.
Iran, Russia have differing motives in Syria
A group of experts, in an effort to prove that the Iran-Russia alliance will be short-lived, claim that the national interests of the two countries differ in Syria. As described earlier, while it is true that Russia and Iran view their strategic interests in Syria from different angles, these are not contradictory.
Russia realises that without a motivated and reliable ground force, their military operations will not have the slightest chance of success in the Syrian asymmetric war. The two most severe bombing campaigns in history - by the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan - illustrate how insurgents can absorb tremendous losses and still continue to fight. This is where Iran’s presence, through its ally Hezbollah of Lebanon, and the National Defence Forces organised by Iran in Syria, becomes crucial to the realisation of Russian objectives in Syria. As Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed it, Russia’s “complex” campaign in Syria “would be impossible” without Iran. Without a highly ideologically and politically motivated ally, Russia would face what the Soviet Union faced in Afghanistan.
*Shahir Shahidsaless is a political analyst and freelance journalist writing primarily about Iranian domestic and foreign affairs. He is also the co-author of “Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace”.
Source: Middle East Eye
www.middleeasteye.net
More By Shahir ShahidSaless:
*An Overstretched Hezbollah Facing an Israeli Preemptive Strike?: http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/An-Overstretched-Hezbollah-Facing-an-Israeli-Preemptive-Strike-.htm
*US Congress and the Iran nuclear Deal: http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/US-Congress-and-the-Iran-nuclear-Deal.htm
*Netanyahu’s Gaza war: Changing Aims but Predictable Consequences: http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/Netanyahu-s-Gaza-war-Changing-Aims-but-Predictable-Consequences.htm
*Photo Credit: AFP
*These views represent those of the author and are not necessarily Iran Review's viewpointsOn September 8, 2011, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, VA returned an Indictment charging five individuals with one count of conspiracy and five substantive copyright infringement counts for their involvement with the Internet website NinjaVideo.net. See the Seizure Notice for the site.
NOTE: Criminal indictments are only charges and are not evidence of guilt. A defendant is presumed to be innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
The Defendants
Alleged Founders and Administrators of NinjaVideo: Hana Amal Beshara, 29, of North Brunswick, NJ (also indicated as from Las Vegas, NV); and Matthew David Howard Smith, 23, of Raleigh, NC
Alleged Most Active Uploaders of Copyrighted Material to the Site: Joshua David Evans, 34, of North Bend, WA; and Zoi Mertzanis, 36, a resident of Greece
Alleged Head of Security: Jeremy Lynn Andrew, 33, of Eugene, OR
Allegations
The Indictment alleges that NinjaVideo operated from February 2008 until its shut-down by law enforcement in June 2010, during which time the site provided millions of website visitors with the ability to illegally download infringing copies of copyright-protected high-quality-format movies and television programs (often while still showing in theaters or unreleased). Many copyrighted movies and television shows were available on the site free of charge, and visitors were offered the option of access to a larger selection upon the “donation” of at least $25.
The Indictment further alleges that NinjaVideo not only generated income from providing copyrighted content, but also realized significant revenue through advertising. An enterprising group of thieves -- apparently seeking to leverage their illegal downloading traffic with advertising revenue. Gotta love the unbridled spirit of Capitalism.
Altogether, it is alleged that the Defendants collected over $500,000 as a result of infringing on millions of dollars of copyrighted movies, television and software products.
Guilty Pleas
On September 29, 2011, Defendant Beshara pleaded guilty to conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement. At sentencing, scheduled for Jan. 6, 2012, Beshara faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison on each count. As part of her plea agreement, she agreed to an asset forfeiture including seized cash, an investment brokerage account, two bank accounts, a Paypal account and one Internet advertising account.
Allegedly, Beshara, described as the site’s day-to-day administrator, supervised the website and, at times, directed upload to computer servers in the US and abroad. Prosecutors alleged that Beshara referred to herself as “Queen Phara” and “the face and the name behind Ninja.” Beshara frequently appeared in podcasts seen by millions of NinjVideo’s visitors and, in one such presentation: “The NinjaVideo Manifesto,” she boasted about NinjaVideo’s “zero hour releases on TV and movies” – meaning that the website made infringing content available as soon as the legitimate product was released.
According to prosecutors, Beshara admitted negotiating online advertising agreements; and she personally received more than $200,000 of the $500,000 in revenues generated during NinjaVideo’s 2 ½ year run.
Co-defendant Matthew David Howard Smith pleaded guilty on Sept. 23, 2011, to conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, and will be sentenced on Dec. 16, 2011.
The remaining three defendants are scheduled for a jury trial on Feb. 6, 2012.North Precinct Anti-Crime Team officers arrested a man for narcotics and weapons violations following an undercover operation and search warrant service.
During the early evening hours of November 21, North Precinct Anti-Crime Team officers developed information regarding a suspected heroin dealer living in an RV near 85th and Greenwood. The officers arranged a meeting with the suspect with the promise of purchasing a gram of heroin from him. Once the suspect arrived at the agreed upon location, officer placed him under arrest. Officers found about 1.1 grams of suspected heroin in the suspect’s jacket pocket.
Continuing their investigation, the Anti-Crime Team officers applied for and received a search warrant for the suspect’s RV.
Officers returned to the RV and contacted two women who were inside. One of the two women had a warrant for forgery. Officers placed her under arrest.
Upon searching the RV, officers found another 5.3 grams of suspected heroin and about 15.5 grams of suspected cocaine. The officers also found $450 and a loaded semi-automatic pistol.
The suspect is a convicted felon and not allowed to possess firearms. The officers booked this man into King County Jail for the drug and weapons violations. Officers booked the woman wanted for forgery into King County Jail for her warrant.
Officers placed the gun, drugs, and money into evidence.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
LEON BEST has been made an offer he may find hard to turn down by Blackburn Rovers.
Sources in Lancashire have indicated to the Chronicle that Best has been offered an excellent package that could be enough to persuade him to drop down to the Championship, with Steve Kean’s side looking for promotion at the first attempt.
It is believed that Best’s pay offer at Blackburn will rise if he hits the heights next season and helps them back to the top flight with a string of personal incentives included in his contract.
Best, who has also attracted interest from Celtic, has slipped down the pecking order at St James’ Park and could find himself SIXTH choice at Newcastle with Papiss Cisse, Demba Ba, Shola Ameobi, Sammy Ameobi and the strong possibility of new faces leaving him with a tough future on Tyneside.
Despite reports that Blackburn bid £2million for Best, it is believed that Rovers have offered an extra £1million on top of that figure for the Republic of Ireland striker – and the fee will rise again should Kean’s side clinch promotion back to the Premier League.
United are keen to offload several players this term to freshen up their squad and while Best has enjoyed some good times since joining from Coventry City in 2010, injuries and the emergence of Cisse and Ba last term hardly helped his cause at St James’.
However, Kean will offer Best a place in his frontline and the chance to rejuvenate his international career.
Kean has already lost Nigerian star Yakubu to Chinese club Guangzhou and is desperate to add firepower to his relegated Rovers.“Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.” ~Louis L’Amour
These days I live in the city, but I spent my childhood in a rural English village. It was quaint and quiet and rather lovely—the sort of place you’re desperate to leave when you’re young and full of fire, but begin to hanker for when you get a little older.
Back then, to get to the local school, I had to walk down a long, winding country lane, which had rolling fields on both sides. For half an hour each morning and the same coming home, I had beautiful scenery as far as the eye could see—streams, woodlands, horses frolicking in the fields.
But I never really saw any of this.
You see, this being the countryside, it was common for residents to walk their dogs down lanes such as this one. And this also being the eighties, before people began cleaning up after their dogs, there were quite a few areas on my journey where dogs had relieved themselves.
Now, because of this you had to keep your eyes on the ground pretty much constantly—that’s if you didn’t want to be that kid who walked dog poop into school, (or worse into a friend’s parent’s house, which I did once, but that’s another, much less allegorical, story).
So there I was each morning, eyes on the path, making sure I didn’t step on anything unpleasant, ignoring everything else. Closed off from all the beauty around me.
I’m glad to say that one day I had an epiphany. I realized that by being so cautious, I was actually missing out on experiencing the amazing backdrop to my journey.
On that day I realized that I wanted to walk to school present and mindful of the wonderful world around me.
I wanted to look around more and experience life in all its glory, not just worry about whether I stepped in poop.
So I did.
And yes, perhaps on occasion my shoe may have met with something nasty, but it made that walk so much more enjoyable. I remember the feelings of oneness and freedom it instilled in me to this day.
And really, that’s what being mindful and present is. It’s saying yes to life and noticing your surroundings. Fully.
It’s saying yes, I might step in something unpleasant, I might get hurt, I might feel silly, I might expose my vulnerabilities, but at least I get to experience every remarkable nuance and opportunity life has to offer too.
I’m also glad to say that this has been a lesson that I’ve carried through to my adult life.
Sure, there have been many times in the past when I’ve stepped in something nasty; jobs haven’t worked out, relationships have ended, people close to me have gone away in various different ways.
But throughout any downtime I’ve always tried to keep looking around me, to see the scenery, the bigger picture. Even if this is just catching myself in a negative tailspin, taking a deep breath, centring myself, and realizing that there’s lots to appreciate out there.
So what if you step in something? So what if you expose the real you and then get hurt? |
exhaustive of every system on the network, although that would help tremendously. In many companies, a full inventory of all software is unrealistic. Starting with the most critical systems can protect businesses from catastrophic outages and losses.The football teams aren't doing much talking, but the fans don't seem to mind. The first bout of Michigan-Michigan State rivalry hijinks apparently took place either late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, as
spotted green spray paint over the block 'M' on the University of Michigan diag, which sits in the heart of campus. The letters "S" and "U" follow the "M." I think most can figure out what that spells. Michigan heads to Michigan State on Saturday (3:30 p.m., ABC). The Spartans have won five of six in the series, and opened as a 15-point favorite.
The block 'M' on Michigan's campus has been painted green. pic.twitter.com/lGFvnXeVbv — Alejandro Zuniga (@ByAZuniga) October 22, 2014
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WCMH web staff - WASHINGTON (AP/WCMH) - After more than a million people rallied at women's marches in the nation's capital and around the world on Saturday, President Donald Trump has now responded on Twitter.
"Watched the protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly," the president wrote.
Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly. - Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017
Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don't always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views. - Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017
Trump won the vote in the Electoral College, putting him in the White House, but Democrat Hillary Clinton captured the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.
A Trump administration official said that "The Trump administration welcomes a robust discussion regarding the critical issues facing America's women and families." The same statement slammed comments that were made by Madonna to the crowd in Washington, calling them "absolutely unacceptable."
Indeed, Madonna's speech was profanity-laced and she didn't hold back.
"Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House," the singer told the crowd. "But I know that this won't change anything. We cannot fall into despair." Instead, she called for a "revolution of love."
The statement from the Trump administration official also said that it was a "shame" that the March for Life on Jan. 27 would not get as much media coverage as the Women's March on Washington and said that the organizers turned away pro-life groups as partners for the event.
According to the event's website, the "Unity Principals" of the march included ending violence, LGBTQ rights, worker's rights, civil rights, disability rights, immigrant rights, environmental justice and reproductive rights - which included "open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control."
Press Secretary Sean Spicer also took to Twitter Sunday morning to say that the White House has not released a statement in response to the women's march.
The White House has not issued a statement https://t.co/7f9nqKgPze - Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) January 22, 2017
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved Protesters gather at the stage for the Women's March on Washington during the first full day of Donald Trump's presidency, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017 in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved Protesters gather at the stage for the Women's March on Washington during the first full day of Donald Trump's presidency, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017 in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
*The Associated Press contributed to this report.Former Florida State coach Bobby Bowden was secretly treated for prostate cancer before the 2007 season and has been in remission for four-plus years.
Bowden, who was forced into retirement after the 2009 season, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in February 2007, after FSU doctors gave him an annual physical exam. After undergoing a biopsy and ultrasound later that month, Bowden was treated with brachytherapy, a form of internal radiation, which places a radiation source inside or next to malignant tissue.
Bowden, 81, said he wanted to keep his condition private because he didn't want to deflect attention away from his team. He also was concerned that his health would be used against him in recruiting by rival coaches.
"I didn't say anything because of coaching," Bowden said. "In recruiting, if people find out you have some kind of problem, they're going to magnify it. If you have cancer, they're going to make it sound like you're dying. It would have been all over the country."Final Fantasy XIV Expands Further Into Asia With Hong Kong And Singapore
By Sato. July 15, 2016. 1:00am
Square Enix announced that they’re expanding their MMORPG title Final Fantasy XIV today by including new regions from Asia with Hong Kong and Singapore for PC and Mac.
Two new Asia regions in Hong Kong and Singapore will get Final Fantasy XIV. If you’re wondering why Hong Kong doesn’t count as part of China’s region, it is likely because the license with the Chinese company doesn’t cover Hong Kong. Considering that those in Singapore and Hong Kong speak English, they’re likely getting the standard version that includes English, French, German, and Japanese language options instead of the Chinese-language data center.
As a special introductory promotion for residents of Hong Kong and Singapore, all versions of Final Fantasy XIV available on the Square Enix Online Store will be offered at a 50% discount from the manufacturer’s suggested retail price.
Final Fantasy XIV is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PC, and Mac. The available regions for the game are now North America, Europe, Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore."Scrapping" redirects here. It is not to be confused with scraping
Collection of leftover scrap metal items
Scrap consists of recyclable materials left over from product manufacturing and consumption, such as parts of vehicles, building supplies, and surplus materials. Unlike waste, scrap has monetary value, especially recovered metals, and non-metallic materials are also recovered for recycling.
Processing [ edit ]
The "organized chaos" of a scrapyard
Scrap metal originates both in business and residential environments. Typically a "scrapper" will advertise their services to conveniently remove scrap metal for people who don't need it.
Scrap is often taken to a wrecking yard (also known as a scrapyard, junkyard, or breaker's yard), where it is processed for later melting into new products. A wrecking yard, depending on its location, may allow customers to browse their lot and purchase items before they are sent to the smelters, although many scrap yards that deal in large quantities of scrap usually do not, often selling entire units such as engines or machinery by weight with no regard to their functional status. Customers are typically required to supply all of their own tools and labor to extract parts, and some scrapyards may first require waiving liability for personal injury before entering. Many scrapyards also sell bulk metals (stainless steel, etc.) by weight, often at prices substantially below the retail purchasing costs of similar pieces.
A scrap metal shredder is often used to recycle items containing a variety of other materials in combination with steel. Examples are automobiles and white goods such as refrigerators, stoves, clothes washers etc. These items are labor-intensive to manually sort things like plastic, copper, aluminum and brass. By shredding into relatively small pieces, the steel can easily be separated out magnetically. The non-ferrous waste stream requires other techniques to sort.
In contrast to wrecking yards, scrapyards typically sell everything by weight, instead of by item. To the scrapyard, the primary value of the scrap is what the smelter will give them for it, rather than the value of whatever shape the metal may be in. An auto wrecker, on the other hand, would price exactly the same scrap based on what the item does, regardless of what it weighs. Typically, if a wrecker cannot sell something above the value of the metal in it, they would then take it to the scrapyard and sell it by weight. Equipment containing parts of various metals can often be purchased at a price below that of either of the metals, due to saving the scrapyard the labor of separating the metals before shipping them to be recycled.
Resources [ edit ]
Scrap prices may vary markedly over time and in different locations. Prices are often negotiated among buyers and sellers directly or indirectly over the Internet. Prices displayed as the market prices are not the prices that recyclers will see at the scrap yards. Other prices are ranges or older and not updated frequently. Some scrap yards' websites have updated scrap prices.
In the US, scrap prices are reported in a handful of publications, including American Metal Market, based on confirmed sales as well as reference sites such as Scrap Metal Prices and Auctions. Non-US domiciled publications, such as The Steel Index, also report on the US scrap price, which has become increasingly important to global export markets. Scrap yards directories are also used by recyclers to find facilities in the US and Canada, allowing users to get in contact with yards.
With resources online for recyclers to look at for scrapping tips, like web sites, blogs, and search engines, scrapping is often referred to as a hands and labor-intensive job. Taking apart and separating metals is important to making more money on scrap, for tips like using a magnet to determine ferrous and non-ferrous materials, that can help recyclers make more money on their metal recycling. When a magnet sticks to the metal, it will be a ferrous material, like steel or iron. This is usually a less expensive item that is recycled but usually is recycled in larger quantities of thousands of pounds. Non-ferrous metals like copper, aluminum, and brass do not stick to a magnet. Some cheaper grades of stainless steel are magnetic, other grades are not. These items are higher priced commodities for metal recycling and are important to separate when recycling them. The prices of non-ferrous metals also tend to fluctuate more than ferrous metals so it is important for recyclers to pay attention to these sources and the overall markets.
Hazards [ edit ]
Great potential exists in the scrap metal industry for accidents in which a hazardous material present in scrap causes death, injury, or environmental damage. A classic example is radioactivity in scrap; the Goiânia accident and the Mayapuri radiological accident were incidents involving radioactive materials. Toxic materials such as asbestos or metals such as beryllium, cadmium, or mercury may pose dangers to personnel, as well as contaminating materials intended for metal smelters.
Many specialized tools used in scrapyards are hazardous, such as the alligator shear which cuts metal using hydraulic force, compactors, and scrap metal shredders.
Benefits of recycling [ edit ]
Pile of shredded scrap in Norway
Scrap railway line repurposed as farm fencing corner post
According to research conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency, recycling scrap metals can be quite beneficial to the environment. Using recycled scrap metal in place of virgin iron ore can yield:[1]
75% savings in energy.
90% savings in raw materials used.
86% reduction in air pollution.
40% reduction in water use.
76% reduction in water pollution.
97% reduction in mining wastes.
Every ton of new steel made from scrap steel saves:
1,115 kg of iron ore.
625 kg of coal.
53 kg of limestone.
Energy savings from other metals include:
Aluminium savings of 95% energy.
Copper savings of 85% energy.
Lead savings of 65% energy.
Zinc savings of 60% energy.
Metal recycling industry [ edit ]
Scrap metal rusts in the snow (Finland)
The metal recycling industry encompasses a wide range of metals. The more frequently recycled metals are scrap steel, iron (ISS), lead, aluminium, copper, stainless steel and zinc. There are two main categories of metals: ferrous and non-ferrous. Metals which contain iron in them are known as ferrous where metals without iron are non-ferrous.
Common non-ferrous metals are copper, brass, aluminum, zinc, magnesium, tin, nickel, and lead.
Non-ferrous metals also include precious and exotic metals.
Precious metals are metals with a high market value in any form, such as gold, silver, and platinum group metals.
Exotic metals contain rare elements such as cobalt, mercury, titanium, tungsten, arsenic, beryllium, bismuth, cerium, cadmium, niobium, indium, gallium, germanium, lithium, selenium, tantalum, tellurium, vanadium, and zirconium. Some types of metals are radioactive. These may be “naturally occurring” or may be formed as by-products of nuclear reactions. Metals that have been exposed to radioactive sources may also become radioactive in settings such as medical environments, research laboratories, or nuclear power plants.
OSHA guidelines should be followed when recycling any type of scrap metal to ensure safety.[2]
Ferrous metal recycling [ edit ]
A pile of steel scrap in Brussels, waiting to be recycled
Ferrous metals are able to be recycled, with steel being one of the most recycled materials in the world.[3] Ferrous metals contain an appreciable percentage of iron and the addition of carbon and other substances creates steel.
Description [ edit ]
The Universal Symbol for Recyclable Steel
The CEN Symbol for Recyclable Steel
In the United States, steel containers, cans, automobiles, appliances, and construction materials contribute the greatest weight of recycled materials. For example, in 2008, more than 97% of structural steel and 106% of automobiles were recycled, comparing the current steel consumption for each industry with the amount of recycled steel being produced (the late 2000s recession and the associated sharp decline in automobile production in the US explains the over-100% calculation).[4] A typical appliance is about 75% steel by weight[5] and automobiles are about 65% steel and iron.[6]
The steel industry has been actively recycling for more than 150 years, in large part because it is economically advantageous to do so. It is cheaper to recycle steel than to mine iron ore and manipulate it through the production process to form new steel. Steel does not lose any of its inherent physical properties during the recycling process, and has drastically reduced energy and material requirements compared with refinement from iron ore. The energy saved by recycling reduces the annual energy consumption of the industry by about 75%, which is enough to power eighteen million homes for one year.[7] According to the International Resource Panel's Metal Stocks in Society report, the per capita stock of steel in use in Australia, Canada, the European Union EU15, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand and the US combined is 7,085 kilograms (15,620 lb) (about 860 million people in 2005).
Basic oxygen steelmaking (BOS) uses 25–35% recycled steel to make new steel. BOS steel usually contains lower concentrations of residual elements such as copper, nickel and molybdenum and is therefore more malleable than electric arc furnace (EAF) steel and is often used to make automotive fenders, tin cans, industrial drums or any product with a large degree of cold working. EAF steelmaking uses almost 100% recycled steel. This steel contains greater concentrations of residual elements that cannot be removed through the application of oxygen and lime. It is used to make structural beams, plates, reinforcing bar and other products that require little cold working.[8] Downcycling of steel by hard-to-separate impurities such as copper or tin can only be prevented by well-aimed scrap selection or dilution by pure steel.[9] Recycling one metric ton (1,000 kilograms) of steel saves 1.1 metric tons of iron ore, 630 kilograms of coal, and 55 kilograms of limestone.[10]
Types of scrap used in steelmaking [ edit ]
Heavy melting steel – Industrial or commercial scrap steel greater than 6 mm thick, such as plates, beams, columns, channels; may also include scrap machinery or implements or certain metal stampings
– Industrial or commercial scrap steel greater than 6 mm thick, such as plates, beams, columns, channels; may also include scrap machinery or implements or certain metal stampings Old car bodies – Vehicles with or without interiors and their original wheels
– Vehicles with or without interiors and their original wheels Cast iron – Cast iron bathtubs, machinery, pipe and engine blocks
– Cast iron bathtubs, machinery, pipe and engine blocks Pressing steel – Domestic scrap metal up to approx. 6 mm (0.24 in) thick. Examples - White goods (fridges, washing machines, etc.), roofing iron, water heaters, water tanks and sheet metal offcuts
– Domestic scrap metal up to approx. 6 mm (0.24 in) thick. Examples - White goods (fridges, washing machines, etc.), roofing iron, water heaters, water tanks and sheet metal offcuts Reinforcing bars or mesh – Used in the construction industry within concrete structures
– Used in the construction industry within concrete structures Turnings – Remains of drilling or shaping steels. Also known as "borings" or "swarf"
– Remains of drilling or shaping steels. Also known as "borings" or "swarf" Manganese steel – Non magnetic, hardened steel used in the mining industry, cement mixers, rock crushers, and other high impact and abrasive environments.
– Non magnetic, hardened steel used in the mining industry, cement mixers, rock crushers, and other high impact and abrasive environments. Rails – Rail or tram tracks[11]
Example [ edit ]
Shipbreaking [ edit ]
The hulls of ships, with any usable equipment salvaged and removed, can be broken up to provide scrap steel. For a time countries in south Asia carried out most ship breaking, often using manual methods that were hazardous to workers and the environment. International regulations now dictate treatment of old ships as sources of hazardous waste, so ship breaking has returned to ports in more developed countries. In 2013, about 29 million tons of scrap steel was recovered from broken ships. Some of the scrap can be reheated and rolled to make products such as concrete reinforcing bars, or the scrap may be melted to make new steel.
Economic role [ edit ]
United States [ edit ]
The scrap industry was valued at more than $90 billion in 2012, up from $54 billion in 2009 balance of trade, exporting $28 billion in scrap commodities to 160 countries. Since 2010, the industry has added more than 15,000 jobs, and supports 463,000 workers, both directly and indirectly. In addition, it generates more than $10 billion in revenue for federal, state, and local governments.[12] Scrap recycling also helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserves energy and natural resources. For example, scrap recycling diverts 135 million short tons (121,000,000 long tons; 122,000,000 t) of materials away from landfills. Recycled scrap is a raw material feedstock for nearly 60% of steel made in the US, for almost 50% of the copper and copper alloys produced in the US, for more than 75% of the US paper industry’s needs, and for 50% of US aluminum. Recycled scrap helps keep air and water cleaner by removing potentially hazardous materials and keeping them out of landfills.[13]
Image gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) Ohio State coach Urban Meyer doesn't waste a lot of time thinking about kickers, but even he had to admit that Tyler Durbin is a pretty cool story.
A walk-on kicker who played in his first football game at any level last Saturday, Durbin got the start and was perfect converting 11 extra points. He buried half of his dozen kickoffs in the end zone for touchbacks, and even made a tackle. Ohio State named him special teams player of the week.
''I don't know where the hell he came from,'' Meyer said this week. And he was only half kidding.
Meyer had never met Durbin until the coach saw him booming punts in training camp a few weeks ago, walked over and introduced himself. The former collegiate soccer player kicked a 62-yard field goal in practice and won the starting job after veteran kicker Sean Nuernberger was sidelined with a groin injury.
A Virginia native, Durbin, 22, played soccer for two years at James Madison University but left because the school didn't have the civil engineering program he wanted. That's when he decided to give kicking a football a try.
''I had thought about trying to kick in high school, but with my soccer schedule I just never found the opportunity,'' he said.
After working with a kicking tutor, Durbin sent tapes to schools that had recognized civil engineering programs as well as top-notch football teams: Ohio State, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech. He included Ohio State because his girlfriend-now-wife, Kristin, is from Dayton and comes from a Buckeyes family. Ohio State gave him a shot.
Durbin's first day on campus was the day Ohio State won the national championship in January 2015, but he didn't get a chance to show what he could do until training camp opened last month.
''I've always had a big leg, and it came pretty naturally to me,'' he said.
Now he's the starting kicker for the No. 4 team in the country, and Meyer is raving about the hang time on his booming kickoffs.
''I don't really know how all this happened, but it's been an incredible ride,'' Durbin said. ''I went out to dinner with my family and my wife's family (after the game) and we were just talking about it, how surreal it was that I played in a game for the Buckeyes.''
Durbin didn't get to attempt a field goal yet, but may get a chance before another home crowd of 100,000-plus when Tulsa visits Ohio Stadium Saturday.
At least his coach can pick him out of a crowd now.
''He's a really good guy, man,'' Meyer said. ''I love that kid. His effort is outstanding.''
TRAINER'S ROOM
Outside linebacker Chris Worley is questionable for Saturday's game with a knee injury suffered against Bowling Green. Meyer said Joe Burger or Jerome Baker would replace him in the starting lineup.
Meyer said wide receiver Corey Smith had a tight hamstring that affected his speed and hampered his performance last week. Smith was one of the few Ohio State receivers who didn't catch a pass as the Buckeyes piled up a school record 776 yards of offense.
—
Follow Mitch Stacy at http://twitter.com/mitchstacy
For some of his other recent stories: www.collegefootbal.ap.orgAboriginal people are so vastly over-represented in Canada's federal prison system that current policies are clearly failing them, according to a new report by the Office of the Correctional Investigator.
The report found "no new significant investments at the community level for federal aboriginal initiatives. No deputy commissioner dedicated solely to and responsible for aboriginal programs, planning, implementation and results. And worst of all, no progress in closing the large gaps in correctional outcomes between aboriginal and non-aboriginal inmates," Howard Sapers, the correctional investigator for Canada, said during a news conference in Ottawa.
The report was tabled in the House of Commons Thursday morning — only the second special report ever written by the investigator since the office's creation 40 years ago.
The trail of many social policies which have marginalized one group of our population "defines systemic discrimination," Sapers said.
"It's not that anybody designed the CSC programs to be discriminatory but in fact, there are differential outcomes between aboriginal and non-aboriginal inmates," Sapers said.
The correctional investigator pointed to what he called "alarming" statistics.
"There are just over 3,400 aboriginal men and women making up 23 per cent of the country's federal prison inmate population," Sapers said.
"In other words, while aboriginal people in Canada comprise just four per cent of the population, in federal prisons nearly one in four is Métis, Inuit, or First Nations."
Sapers found almost 40 per cent increase in the aboriginal incarcerated population between 2001-02 and 2010-11.
Additionally, aboriginal inmates are sentenced to longer terms, and spend more time in segregation and maximum security. They are less likely to be granted parole and are more likely to have parole revoked for minor problems.
"If I were releasing a report card on aboriginal corrections today, it would be filled with failing grades," Sapers said.
The correctional investigator called on CSC to implement the following actions:
To appoint a deputy commissioner for aboriginal corrections.
The development of a long-term strategy to increase opportunities for the care and custody of aboriginal offenders by aboriginal communities, and the re-allocation of adequate funds for these purposes.
The creation of more community-based healing lodges and permanent funding for them, equal to CSC facilities.
Ongoing training of CSC staff to ensure adequate understanding of aboriginal people, culture and traditions.
New and enhanced measures to ensure aboriginal leadership and elders are equal partners in the delivery of community release and re-integration program and services.
The immediate hiring of more aboriginal community development officers.
Improving and streamlining the process around accepting and monitoring released offenders into aboriginal communities.
A 'cloud' over Canada's human rights record
"The overrepresentation of aboriginal people in federal corrections and the lack of progress to improve the disparity in correctional outcomes continues to cloud Canada's domestic human rights record," Sapers said.
The acting chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, David Langtry, commended Sapers for a "bold" report, calling the findings "grave," "troubling," and requiring "urgent attention."
"We are still seeing a disproportionate number of aboriginal women in solitary confinement, which creates barriers to access to rehabilitation programs. As a result, aboriginal women in corrections do not get paroled early, if at all. Not only are they over-represented, they are serving more time. These facts were confirmed by the correctional investigator today," Langtry said in a written statement.
Shawn Atleo, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said the prison system needs to work with aboriginal communities to successfully reintegrate offenders into society, ending the revolving door many young aboriginals experience between prison and freedom.
"It’s a troubling pattern that has to be broken," he said. "When you open the door to a school, you close the door to a jail cell."
He said the government needs to invest in programs to prevent aboriginal Canadians from reoffending "or we see this pattern continue unabated, and that is obviously completely unacceptable."
NDP Public Safety critic Randall Garrison called the report's findings "a shocking indictment" of the federal government's policies.
The opposition New Democrats are calling on the federal government to invest additional funds in the next federal budget.
Liberal public safety critic Francis Scarpaleggia also blamed "the Harper Conservatives’ failed crime agenda" for the "the staggeringly disproportionate" number of aboriginal people in federal prisons.
Liberals called on the federal government to implement the recommendations in the report and commit to addressing this "unfairness" in the upcoming federal budget.
A spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews did not address the recommendations included in Sapers report but said "the only identifiable group that our tough on crime agenda targets are criminals."
"Aboriginal Canadians are more likely to be victims of crime. We are taking action to ensure that all Canadian communities are protected," said the spokesperson for Toews in a written statement.
On Monday, Toews committed to funding policing agreements with First Nations communities under the First Nations Policing Program for the next five years.
Report 'a wake-up call'
National Inuit Leader Terry Audla, and President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, called the report a "wake-up call"
"This report makes it clear that the status quo isn’t working and the federal government must engage directly with the Inuit to put in place support for those Inuit who are incarcerated."
Audla called on the federal government to take immediate action.
Jonathan Rudin, the program director of Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, said the government and prison services lack the commitment and resources to address these problems.
He said there are sections in law governing prisons that allows for special provisions for Aboriginal offenders, such as allowing offenders to serve their sentences in their community. However, these provisions are not frequently used.
"What's being done is not working," he said.
The Office of the Correctional Investigator is an impartial body that conducts investigations into how correctional services treats offenders in its care.
Sapers has served as the correctional investigator since 2004. He is in his third consecutive term."I wanna thank the internet for allowing their emperor to be here for the evening," opens Stephen Colbert as he introduces PewDiePie, the world's most popular YouTuber. In a meeting of two of the internet's favorite personalities, Colbert and PewDiePie (aka Felix Kjellberg) discuss the latter's unconventional career as a self-broadcasting gamer and his propensity for swearing. Though already accustomed to having millions of viewers online, it's still a pretty big deal for PewDiePie to be appearing on CBS, making a transition to mainstream TV entertainment that lends further legitimacy to other YouTube celebrities hoping to do the same.
The neat thing about seeing a YouTube star on TV is that you can then go to YouTube and find out exactly how he prepared for it, which PewDiePie has helpfully illustrated with a vlog. Kjellberg is spending a month in Los Angeles shooting a show, which may or may not be intended for TV broadcasting. In any case, he's now made his big US TV debut, guesting alongside US Secretary of State John Kerry and actress Claire Danes.MOSCOW, Sept. 4 (UPI) -- Russian media reported Thursday state-owned oil company Rosneft could shed as much as 25 percent of its staff as early as next month.
Rosenft's staff has swelled in recent years, growing at a steady clip after the company paid more than $50 billion last year to take on TNK-BP, a former joint venture between Russian billionaires and British energy company BP.
Russian business daily Kommersant said as many as 1,000 employees could lose their jobs as early as October as part of a cost-saving initiative.
Rosneft is the target of Western economic sanctions imposed in response to Russian policies in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists are gaining a foothold. Igor Sechin, its chief executive officer, is also the target of punitive economic measures.
Sechin in August asked the Kremlin to use a national welfare fund to support its growing debt. The company's total production, meanwhile, is down to its lowest level in more than a year.
Rosneft recently secured deals to work alongside Norwegian energy company Statoil. Norway and Russia are the top oil and gas suppliers to the European market, though Statoil said recently sanctions are complicating its relationship with Rosneft.
In July, Sechin said his company was braced for "volatility."I was told by several friends and tumblr users that my Fisher the Voidfish cosplay from The Adventure Zone was being shared uncredited via pintrest and tumblr, so I hurried to put out my big compilation post faster than I usually do. I would very much appreciate it if everyone could reblog this version of the post, instead of any other post floating around that doesn’t correctly credit the costume back to me!! As an artist and a fan, it was incredibly hurtful that this happened. Although the original reposter has apologized profusely for this and properly credited me afterwards, it’s incredibly difficult to undo the damage that results from the reposting of any uncredited image in a large fandom.
All photos in this post are taken by either myself, scribblesafterdark, or by cowbuttcrunchies!! My darling Magnus is the other half of cowbuttcrunchies. I would also like to take this time to shoutout to my friend automb, who provided endless support with this costume and helped me with cutting and trimming all the tentacles on Fisher’s dress. They also made Junior for me under my guidance, while I was going nutso over the rest of the costume.
Thank you again to everyone who commented and tagged me on the other post, and I hope that everyone reblogs this version instead!!! As usual, more information about my work process will be under the cut, so if you’re interested in that kind of thing, read on! 💙
Now, I was one of the last people in my friend group to get into and catch up to TAZ, and they had all been planning to cosplay TAZ to an upcoming convention as a large group. By the time I caught up, (right before the finale!!!!!) most of the characters were snatched up and we had three weeks left before the con. I was indifferent to any particular character (I loved them all equally, not that I didn’t like any) up until I heard the Voidfish’s song to Magnus about her baby. I fell in love right there and made the incredibly rash and stupid decision to make a Voidfish costume of my own design in the three weeks before Dragon*Con.
With the design process I basically knew exactly what I wanted to do from the beginning. I didn’t want to create a jellyfish inspired dress, I wanted to BE a magical space jellyfish. I avoided any decisions to make my skirt into a jellycap because it would detract from being a creature’s silhouette into being a very human one. The decision to make a headpiece instead of using an umbrella was also intentional; I wanted my hands free for posing and to hold Junior, and any wooden ducks that came my way!!
The dress base I used is made from cotton sateen and is my own pattern I drafted to fit my curves. I have a difficult body type to shop for and most commercial patterns don’t fit me without heavy alterations, so it’s much easier for me to create my own from scratch. It’s scoop necked dress with princess seams and a skirt that is hemmed slightly higher in the front than in the back. This was an intentional choice to reflect the decisions I made with the jellycap, in that I knew I wanted the cap to be balanced off center and at an angle instead of being parallel to the floor.
Once I had the dress made and added boning to the bodice, I used my airbrush and went over the whole dress to give it a galaxy aurora borealis effect. While the dress was wet in between layers, I sprinkled some coarse salt on the dress to get that sort of organic mottled look on my fabric. It was a risk that worked incredibly well in my favor after the dyes dried!!
The tentacles were all organza cut in spirals and serged on all sides. The fabric I used the most of was this glimmery, purple holographic organza from the little girls Halloween costume aisle in JoAnn’s, and supplemented with anything I found stored in my basement leftover from previous costumes!
My pride and joy and possibly the coolest item I have ever made is my jellycap!! 💙 The whole structure is a kind of cage formed from wire and Terraflex (if you follow any of my previous posts you all know that I use Terraflex over Worbla for its versatility and its availability; I can pick it up in a store near me rather than wait for it to get shipped to me), and shaped in ovals and loopies fused with itself with more Terraflex. The headpiece is very carefully balanced and the center of my head is actually towards the front of the cap, so the back is sloped longer at an angle, and is not a perfectly shaped circular dome. I think it looks much more visually interesting this way, and has the added bonus of looking like a real jellyfish from the back!!
The frame was gessoed and painted in glow in the dark paint which doesn’t glow as much as I wish it did, but the concept was cool anyways? It was then fully covered with the holographic organza and then stuffed with LEDs and strips of leftover organza. The whole cap is carefully weighted so it stays on my head without any clips!! The only way it falls off my head is if someone bumps into it while I’m walking. Automb made Junior for me the same way I made Fisher’s cap! While I worked on the bigger project, they used leftover scraps of wire and plastic to scrumble my baby together, and any leftover tentacles I had from the dress went straight to Junior.
The wig I used is an Arda wig!! It’s one of their Candy Stripers in the Nocturne color. I think that covers basically everything? As always, if you have any further questions on my work or want me to clear up any confusions in my wording, please send me an ask and I’ll do my best to reply!!!Juneau is hardly the top American target for terrorists, so what’s Blackwater doing in Alaska’s capital? Author Stuart Archer Cohen and Juneau’s KTOO News have reported sightings of uniformed guards from the private security contractor, and Cohen has some clues as to why they’re there.
Stuart Archer Cohen:
Blackwater is here to guard a radar station for tests of the National Missile Defense system now officially deployed and operational here in Alaska. Don’t let the words “deployed” and “operational” mislead you: the system can’t really shoot down hostile missiles. It can barely shoot down a single test missile when provided with its exact take-off time and trajectory, let alone detect and destroy a surprise attack by multiple missiles. Unbiased experts, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, assert that because the system can be so easily and cheaply defeated by countermeasures such as decoys, or overwhelmed by the complexity of a real attack, that it will never be a practical defense. Nevertheless, our government continues to divert billions of dollars into the pockets of defense contractors on this wildly expensive high-tech version of France’s Maginot Line, so gleefully outflanked by the Germans in 1940. This is more than just a constellation of pork barrel projects and misguided priorities. It’s theft on a massive scale.
Read moreThis month concludes Blizzard’s and the Texas e-Sports Association’s Heroes of the Dorm tournament, in which a huge number of collegiate Heroes of the Storm teams compete for a grand prize that pays for three years’ worth of college tuition.
On one level, the tournament has been |
accuracy will now be determined separately Pinpoint Rocket 2nd Enhancement: 40% damage boost has been changed into a 30%p damage boost
40% damage boost has been changed into a 30%p damage boost Purge Lob Masquerade: Snipe: accuracy boost has been removed, Purge Lob Masquerade: Snipe’s maximum damage cap has been increased from 50,000,000 to 55,000,000
accuracy boost has been removed, Purge Lob Masquerade: Snipe’s maximum damage cap has been increased from 50,000,000 to 55,000,000 OOPArts Code: an error where this skill would not stack with certain potions or skills that increased boss damage has been fixed
an error where this skill would not stack with certain potions or skills that increased boss damage has been fixed Maple Warrior: cast action has been removed
cast action has been removed Pinpoint Rocket Final Enhancement: 50% damage boost has been changed into a 40%p damage boost
Nova
Nova Warrior: cast action has been removed
Angelic Burster
Soul Seeker: Soul Seeker will now try to find a new target if the initial target dies while this skill is in the air
Soul Seeker will now try to find a new target if the initial target dies while this skill is in the air Trinity: damage has been decreased from 900% to 720%, 2nd attack’s number of hits has been increased from 2 to 3, 3rd attacks’ number of hits has been increased from 3 to 4
damage has been decreased from 900% to 720%, 2nd attack’s number of hits has been increased from 2 to 3, 3rd attacks’ number of hits has been increased from 3 to 4 Finitura Fettuccia: maximum damage cap boost for yourself has been increased from 15% to 30%
maximum damage cap boost for yourself has been increased from 15% to 30% Finitura Fettuccia – Maxed Reinforce: maximum damage cap boost for yourself has been increased from 20% to 40%
maximum damage cap boost for yourself has been increased from 20% to 40% Trinity – Split Attack: damage has been decreased from 720% to 650%
Zero
Retrace Temple: cooldown has been increased to 600 seconds
cooldown has been increased to 600 seconds Shadow Rain: in addition to existing effects, Shadow Rain now passively increases your maximum damage cap by 25,000,000
Kinesis
It was difficult to take advantage of Kinesis’ short skill durations so they have been increased.
Comeback: cooldown has been increased to 600 seconds
cooldown has been increased to 600 seconds Psychic Force: DoT damage’s duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, an error where monsters would recover HP when affected by the DoT has been fixed
DoT damage’s duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, an error where monsters would recover HP when affected by the DoT has been fixed Psychic Force 2: DoT damage’s duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, an error where monsters would recover HP when affected by the DoT has been fixed
DoT damage’s duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, an error where monsters would recover HP when affected by the DoT has been fixed Psychic Drain: duration has been increased from 6 seconds to 10 seconds
duration has been increased from 6 seconds to 10 seconds Psychic Grab: enemies that are a certain level higher than you can no longer be grabbed
enemies that are a certain level higher than you can no longer be grabbed Psychic Force 3: DoT damage’s duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, an error where monsters would recover HP when affected by the DoT has been fixed
DoT damage’s duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, an error where monsters would recover HP when affected by the DoT has been fixed Psychic Ground: duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, cooldown has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds
duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, cooldown has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds Psychic Grab 2: enemies that are a certain level higher than you can no longer be grabbed
enemies that are a certain level higher than you can no longer be grabbed Psychic Ground 2: duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, cooldown has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds
duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, cooldown has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds Another World’s Warrior: cast action has been removed
cast action has been removed Ever Psychic: Ever Psychic’s maximum damage cap has been increased from 50,000,000 to 99,999,999
Ever Psychic’s maximum damage cap has been increased from 50,000,000 to 99,999,999 Psychic Over: in addition to existing effects, Psychic Over now increases your maximum damage cap by 50% while active
Boss Content
In certain boss content with Death Counts, when you have remaining Death Count, you will now resurrect automatically after 30 seconds. You can revive manually like normal but after 30 seconds, you will be automatically resurrected after a 5 second delay. It will apply to:
Normal Cygnus
Chaos Zakum, Chaos Pierre, Chaos Von Bon, Chaos Bloody Queen, Chaos Vellum
Normal/Hard Suu, Normal/Hard Damien
Certain bosses have received various changes.
Horntail (Easy, Normal, Chaos) The area around the left and right heads has been modified to allow better skill usage.
Pierre (Normal, Chaos) An error where you would not be able to activate any skills if you revived after being killed by the 3rd hit has been fixed.
Von Bon (Chaos) Falling clocks will no longer be created after Von Bon’s death.
Suu (Normal, Hard) Suu (Normal)’s daily entry limit of 1 has been removed, you can now re-enter after 30 minutes. Through platform pattern and other gimmicks’ optimization, the memory usage of the client has been reduced.
Damien (Normal, Hard) Damien (Normal)’s daily entry limit of 1 has been removed, you can now re-enter after 30 minutes. The ‘Space’ key label on the Stigma skill has been changed to the ‘NPC Chat’ key. An error where Damien was set as a stationary monster has been fixed.
Monster Collection
The Commanding Suspicious Seal monster has been changed to a different monster.
You must now hunt the Magic Resisting Suspicious Seal to add it to your collection.
to add it to your collection. The number of Expedition Boxes rewarded for completing the line that includes the Magic Resistance Suspicious Seal has been increased.
You can now add Chaos Pierre to your collection by hunting the Chaos Red Pierre and Chaos Blue Pierre.
The amount of mesos and Mileage given from the Moderate, Good, and Great Expedition Boxes has been adjusted.
Game Related
The Meister ESP Limiter and Meister Gauntlet Revolver have been added to the Equipment Crafting profession.
You can no longer use Lie Detectors in the Mu Lung Dojo Hall.
The player satisfaction and suggestions message that appear when exiting the game have been consolidated into the Nexon survey. The Coordinator will no longer appear.
You must now use your 2nd password to use a Character Name Change Coupon.
A storage NPC has been added to the Fallen World Tree’s Abandoned Camp map.
When a Kritias Invasion begins, you will no longer be taken to a specific channel, you will immediately start the invasion in your current channel.
In the Maple Auction, the text input when selling items has been changed to be made more clear.
In the Maple Auction, when you sell a pet, their names will now be maintained.
Client lag when killing monsters that apply to a quest’s conditions has been improved.
Cash Shop
The March Royal Hair Coupon is on sale for 5,500 Cash until April 27.
The Trendy Royal Face Coupons have been updated with new faces, it costs 3,500 Cash.
The new Bling Cotton Candy pets have been released! They’ll be sold until April 13 and cost 21,900 Cash for a package of all 3 or 9,900 Cash each.
Events
Star Star Festival
The first event I’ll be talking about is one that already passed, the 14th season of the Star Star Festival! It’s a commonly recurring event in KMS where you can stay logged in to collect Stamps and trade them in on the website to get free items and real life prizes!
This year, the event was a bit different. It took place over 10 days (from March 9 to March 18) and had guaranteed prizes based on participation in addition to the redeemable ones.
Each day you got 5 stamps, you’d receive a Star Star Box. It could be opened to receive one of the following items:
Festival Badge (13 all stats, 10 attack/magic attack)
(13 all stats, 10 attack/magic attack) 10% Clean Slate Scroll (Mysterious Meso Bag for Reboot World)
50% Epic Potential Scroll
300 Scroll Traces
5~15 Rice Cake Soup Coins
10 Power Elixirs
Personality trait items
On the 3rd day, you’d receive the First Special Box. It gave all of the following items:
Special Medal of Honor
20 Rice Cake Soup Coins
30 Minute 2x Experience Coupon
On the 6th day, you’d receive the Second Special Box. It gave all of the following items:
4 Slot Choice Expansion Coupon
50 Rice Cake Soup Coins
30 Minute 2x Experience Coupon
Transcendent Stone Chair
On the 9th day, you’d receive the Third Special Box. It gave all of the following items:
2016 Spring Hair Coupon
Festival Star Damage Skin
4 Slot Choice Expansion Coupon
Character Slot Expansion Coupon
Personality Trait Growth Elixir
100 Rice Cake Soup Coins
30 Minute 2x Experience Coupon
Now, let’s talk about the redeemable prizes. There were 5 sets, which opened for redemption 30 minutes after each other (although the quantities were so low, they were pretty much gone in the first 10 seconds…) on the day after the event ended. Some prizes were first-come first-serve, some were given to the XXth people, and some were draws.
1st Set
Magnificent Soul Box (70 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 300 winners]
Mix Dye Coupon Voucher (45 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 1000 winners]
Bear Pet Package Voucher (Bear pet + Bear Ribbon) (25 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 1500 winners]
Bear Pet Package Voucher (Bear pet + Bear Ribbon) (25 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 1500 winners] Apple iPad Mini 4 Wi-Fi 16 GB (1 Stamp) [every 1000th person, 5 winners]
100,000 Maple Points (1 Stamp) [every 300th person, 30 winners]
3D Printing Character Model (every 300th person, 10 winners]
2nd Set
Damien Android + NEW Gold Heart (30 days) Voucher (70 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 500 winners]
12 Black Cubes (35 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 500 winners]
One-Two-Punch Cat Pet Package (One-Two-Punch Cat pet + One-Two-Punch Cat Earrings) (25 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 1500 winners]
One-Two-Punch Cat Pet Package (One-Two-Punch Cat pet + One-Two-Punch Cat Earrings) (25 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 1500 winners] 200,000 Maple Points (1 Stamp) [every 500th person, 20 winners]
Online Money Card (50,000 Won) (1 Stamp) [every 300th person, 20 winners]
3D Printing Character Model (every 300th person, 10 winners]
3rd Set
Epic Absolabs Weapon Box (70 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 200 winners]
Master Label Outfit Voucher (55 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 300 winners]
Iron Rabbit Pet Package (Iron Rabbit pet + Iron Rabbit Engine) (25 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 1500 winners]
Iron Rabbit Pet Package (Iron Rabbit pet + Iron Rabbit Engine) (25 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 1500 winners] XENON GeForce GTX970 JETSTREAM D5 4GB (1 Stamp) [2000th/4000th person, 2 winners]
3D Printing Character Model (every 300th person, 10 winners]
30,000 Maple Points (1 Stamp) [every 50th person, 100 winners]
Online Money Card (10,000 Won) (1 Stamp) [every 50th person, 200 winners]
4th Set
Shiny Star Box (70 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 500 winners] Gives the 100% 12 Star Force Enhancement Scroll or 100% 17 Star Force Enhancement Scroll (random)
Alicia Android + NEW Gold Heart (30 day) Voucher (55 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 800 winners]
12 Red Cubes (25 Stamps) [first-come first-serve, 1000 winners]
Microsoft Surface PRO4 (1 Stamp) [2016th person, 1 winner]
300,000 Maple Points (1 Stamp) [every 1000th person, 10 winners]
3D Printing Character Model (every 300th person, 10 winners]
5th Set
1 million Maple Points (draw, 1 Stamp) [1 winner]
Star Star Box (first-come first-serve, 1 Stamp) [unlimited]
Haste Event
The hunting accelerating Haste event has begun and will run until April 7!
During this event, the following changes will take place:
Elite Monster appearance rate will be increased.
Elite Monsters’ dropped Mileage Packages’s daily usage limit will be increased from 5 to 10.
Runes’ creation rate will be increased and their cooldowns will be decreased.
Runes’ experience buff effect will be enhanced.
Polo and Frito’s appearance rate will be increased.
The Flame Wolf’s experience reward will be increased by 50%.
The boss party formation buff’s effects will be enhanced.
Characters level 33 and higher will be able to start Haste missions. Each day, you can complete up to 9 daily Haste missions.
Hunt 999 monsters within your level range
Hunt 20 Elite Monsters
Hunt 1 Elite Boss
Clear Polo & Frito 3 times
Clear the Flame Wolf 1 time
Activate 5 runes
Clear 1 Sudden Mission
Achieve 500 Combo Kills
Achieve 300 Multi Kills
After clearing a Haste mission, you can receive prizes through the Haste event window based on the number of missions you have cleared.
The first 3 daily missions you complete will give you experience and a Basic Haste Box which can give one of the following items:
100 Scroll Traces
Strange Cube
10 Power Elixirs
Basic Hunter’s Medal of Honor
Silver Potential Stamp
100% Chaos Scroll
5% Clean Slate Scroll
The 4th~6th daily missions you complete will give you experience and an Intermediate Haste Box which can give one of the following items:
200 Scroll Traces
5 Strange Cubes
20 Power Elixirs
Intermediate Hunter’s Medal of Honor
Gold Potential Stamp
100% Chaos Scroll
50% Gold Hammer
10% Clean Slate Scroll
The 7th~8th daily missions you complete will give you experience and an Advanced Haste Box which can give one of the following items:
500 Scroll Traces
10 Strange Cubes
Intermediate Hunter’s Medal of Honor
50% Gold Hammer
50% Epic Potential Stamp
10% Clean Slate Scroll
50% Innocent Scroll
Strong Rebirth Flame
The 7th~8th daily missions you complete will give you experience, a 2x Experience Coupon, and the Best Haste Box which can give one of the following items:
800 Scroll Traces
20 Strange Cubes
Advanced Hunter’s Medal of Honor
10% Clean Slate Scroll
Strong Rebirth Flame
Eternal Rebirth Flame
Craftsman’s Cube
Meister’s Cube
If you clear all 9 missions in one day, you’ll receive a weekly hidden mission.
The first week will be from March 24 to March 31, and you’ll receive the following items if you complete the hidden mission (kill 44,444 monsters):
Experience based on your level
Haste Box Chair
100 13th Anniversary Coins Voucher
The second week will be from April 1 to April 7, and you’ll receive the following items if you complete the hidden mission (kill 88,888 monsters – reduced to 55,555 if you completed the first week):
Experience based on your level
Haste Damage Skin
200 13th Anniversary Coins Voucher
If you complete both weeks’ hidden missions, you’ll receive a title with high stats (although they expire in 30 days): I’m Really Hastened which gives 50 all stats, 20 attack/magic attack, 30% boss damage, 30% defense ignore, and 2000 HP/MP.
Solo Army vs Couple Army
The Solo Army vs Couple Army event has returned for Black Day! It will begin on April 7 and run until April 20.
You must decide to join either the Solo Army or the Couple Army. Note that you can’t switch after you choose!
After selecting one, you can hunt monsters around your level and acquire Love Cells which give 60 Honor Points.
You can also destroy the enemy army’s statues in hunting maps to acquire 1 Broken Gold Piece and 500 Honor Points (up to 20 times per day). However, if you destroy your own army’s statues, you’ll lose 200 Honor Points.
If you get more than 30,000 Honor Points in one day, you will help your Army’s statue be built and get prizes.
1 day: Solo Army Battle Cape/Couple Army Battle Cape (Cash item, expires in 60 days) – gives 20 bonus Honor Points when collecting Love Cells
Solo Army Battle Cape/Couple Army Battle Cape (Cash item, expires in 60 days) – gives 20 bonus Honor Points when collecting Love Cells 2 days: Solo Army Battle Armor/Couple Army Battle Armor (Cash item, expires in 60 days) – gives 20 bonus Honor Points when collecting Love Cells
Solo Army Battle Armor/Couple Army Battle Armor (Cash item, expires in 60 days) – gives 20 bonus Honor Points when collecting Love Cells 3 days: Solo Army Helmet/Couple Army Helmet (Cash item, expires in 60 days)
Solo Army Helmet/Couple Army Helmet (Cash item, expires in 60 days) 4 days: Solo Army Medal/Couple Army Medal
5 days: Solo Army Statue Chair/Couple Army Statue Chair
6 days: Black Day Damage Skin (account tradeable 1 time)
Black Day Damage Skin (account tradeable 1 time) 7 days: Eternal Rebirth Flame (can only be received 1 time per account, afterwards the reward will be 10,000 Honor)
Eternal Rebirth Flame (can only be received 1 time per account, afterwards the reward will be 10,000 Honor) 8 days: 10 Broken Gold Pieces, 5000 Honor
You can collect up to 100,000 Honor Points per day. You can trade in your Honor Points to receive Broken Gold Pieces which can be spent at the Mini Mur Coin Shop.
1,000 Honor Points -> 1 Broken Gold Piece
10,000 Honor Points -> 11 Broken Gold Pieces
100,000 Honor Points -> 120 Broken Gold Pieces
In addition, during this event, the chances of getting Magnificent Souls will be increased by 5x and the droprate of Soul Pieces will be increased by 2x!
Mini Mur Coin Shop
The Mini Mur Coin Shop is owned by Mini Mur and you can spend Broken Gold Pieces in exchange for special items.
Basic Soul Enchanter (10 pieces) [limit of 10]
(10 pieces) [limit of 10] Special Soul Enchanter (40 pieces) [limit of 3]
(40 pieces) [limit of 3] Murmur’s Soul Piece (70 pieces) [limit of 10]
(70 pieces) [limit of 10] Soul Piece Synergy (15 pieces) [limit of 5 per day]
(15 pieces) [limit of 5 per day] Murmur Damage Skin (300 pieces) [limit of 1]
(300 pieces) [limit of 1] Nine-tailed Fox Damage Skin (300 pieces) [limit of 1]
(300 pieces) [limit of 1] Murmur Feather Voucher (700 pieces) [limit of 1]
(700 pieces) [limit of 1] Spirit Nine Tail Voucher (700 pieces) [limit of 1]
(700 pieces) [limit of 1] Murmur Face Coupon Voucher (200 pieces) [limit of 1]
(200 pieces) [limit of 1] Nine-tailed Fox Face Coupon Voucher (200 pieces) [limit of 1]
Other World’s Face Coupon (M) (100 pieces)
(100 pieces) Other World’s Face Coupon (F) (100 pieces)
(100 pieces) Casentino Hair Wig (150 pieces) [limit of 1]
(150 pieces) [limit of 1] Windy and Balding Hair Wig (150 pieces) [limit of 1]
(150 pieces) [limit of 1] Rainbow Spore Wig (150 pieces) [limit of 1]
(150 pieces) [limit of 1] Rainbow ___ Hair Wig (150 pieces) [limit of 1]
(150 pieces) [limit of 1] Rainbow Street Hair Wig (150 pieces) [limit of 1]
(150 pieces) [limit of 1] Necromancer Murgoth Chair (600 pieces) [limit of 1]
(600 pieces) [limit of 1] Charming Nine-tailed Fox Chair (600 pieces) [limit of 1]
(600 pieces) [limit of 1] 8 Slot Soul Bag (100 pieces) [limit of 1]
The Soul Piece Synergy is a new item that lets you combine 2 Soul Pieces into a new, random Soul Piece. You can receive the following Soul Pieces:
July’s Soul Piece
CQ57’s Soul Piece
Balrog’s Soul Piece
Plaid’s Soul Piece
Zakum’s Soul Piece
Karianne’s Soul Piece
Von Leon’s Soul Piece
Mokadin’s Soul Piece
Pierre’s Soul Piece
Arkarium’s Soul Piece
Von Bon’s Soul Piece
Hilla’s Soul Piece
Pink Bean’s Soul Piece
Bloody Queen’s Soul Piece
Vellum’s Soul Piece
Magnus’ Soul Piece
Murmur’s Soul Piece
Cygnus’ Soul Piece
Suu’s Soul Piece
AdvertisementsWhy did we even need insurance? First, we wanted to know that, if we had a medical catastrophe, we would not exhaust our savings. Second, uninsured patients are billed more than the rates that insurers negotiate with doctors and hospitals, and we wanted to pay those lower rates. The difference is significant: my recent M.R.I. cost $1,300 at the “retail” rate, while the rate negotiated by the insurance company was $700.
An insurance broker helped me sort through the options. I settled on a high-deductible plan, and filled out the long application. I diligently listed the various minor complaints for which we had been seen over the years, knowing that these might turn up later and be a basis for revoking coverage if they were not disclosed.
Then the first letter arrived — denied. It never occurred to me that we would be denied! Yes, we had listed a bunch of minor ailments, but nothing serious. No cancer, no chronic diseases like asthma or diabetes, no hospital stays.
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Why were we denied? What were these pre-existing conditions that put us into high-risk categories? For me, it was a corn on my toe for which my podiatrist had recommended an in-office procedure. My daughter was denied because she takes regular medication for a common teenage issue. My husband was denied because his ophthalmologist had identified a slow-growing cataract. Basically, if there is any possible procedure in your future, insurers will deny you.
The broker then proposed that the three of us make individual applications. Perhaps one or two of us might be accepted, rather than the family as a group.
As I filled out more applications, I discovered a critical error in my strategy. The first question was “Have you ever been denied health insurance”? Now my answer was yes, giving the new companies reason to be wary of my application. I learned too late that the best tactic is to apply simultaneously to as many companies as possible, so that you don’t have to admit to a denial.
I completed four applications for each of the three of us, using reams of paper. I learned to read the questions carefully. I mulled over the difference between a “condition” and “something for which you have sought treatment.” I was precise and succinct. I felt as if I was doing a deposition: Give the minimum true information, and not a word more. I was accepted by exactly one insurance company. So was my daughter, although at a 50 percent premium over the standard charge for a girl her age. My husband was also accepted by one insurer but was denied by the company that approved me.
Our premiums, which were reasonable at first, have increased substantially over the last six years; the average annual increase has been 20 percent. I now am paying premiums that are more than double what they were initially. And because these are high-deductible policies, we still are paying most of the medical bills ourselves.
The new health care reform legislation is not perfect. Nothing that complex could be. But I have no doubt that the system is broken and reform is absolutely essential. If we are not going to have universal coverage but are going to rely on employer plans, then we must offer individuals, self-employed people and small businesses a place to purchase insurance at a reasonable price.
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If members of Congress feel so strongly about undoing this important legislation, perhaps we should stop providing them with health insurance. Let’s credit their pay for the amount that has been paid by the taxpayers, and let them try to buy health insurance in the individual market. My bet is that they all would be denied. Health insurance reform might suddenly not seem to them like such a bad idea.Business Insider recently posted an article entitled “Big U.S. Companies You Might Not Know Are Religious” which listed two “Mormon stocks” (or rather stocks founded by Mormons), JetBlue Airways Corporation (NASDAQ: JBLU) and Marriott International Inc (NYSE: MAR), while some further digging revealed other stocks such as Zions Bancorporation (NASDAQ: ZION) and Huntsman Corporation (NYSE: HUN). However, its probably safe to say that any company with origins in Utah was probably founded or is run by LDS members while the Salt Lake Tribune/Bloomberg Index has a total of 26 stocks and that index is up 29% since the start of the year and up 48.3% over the past year. I should also point out that there used to be something called the Mormon Stock Index listing companies owned or run by Mormons, but the webpage looks like it has not been updated in over a decade. Moreover, there are urban legends that the Mormon Church owns PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE: PEP) and/or The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO) which aren’t true (but the church apparently holds big chunks of stock in these or other publicly traded companies).
With that in mind, might Mormon business practices or perhaps higher rates of investment by the LDS church and its members or maybe even god be helping the investors in Mormon stocks? Here is a quick look at the four mentioned above:
JetBlue Airways Corporation. Known as New York's Hometown Airline™ with other focus cities in Boston, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles (Long Beach), San Juan and Orlando, JetBlue Airways Corporation serves 79 cities with 800 daily flights. Business Insider noted that JetBlue Airways Corporation’s founder David Neeleman was featured in a book titled "The Mormon Way Of Doing Business" where he said his missionary experience “obliterated class distinction” for him and that’s why his airline emphasizes customer service. So maybe all airline founders or CEO should be Mormons who have done missionary work. JetBlue Airways Corporation is up 14.7% since the start of the year, up 28.3% over the past year and up 64.9% over the past five years.
Marriott International. A lodging company with more than 3,700 properties in 74 countries and territories worldwide, Marriott International lists its core values as: “put people first, pursue excellence, embrace change, act with integrity and serve our world.” Business Insider noted that Marriott International’s founder John Willard Marriott was a devout Mormon who held leadership positions within the church plus his hotels are known for putting the Book of Mormons along with Bibles in hotel rooms. Moreover, Marriot has recently announced its dropping pay-per-view pornography in its hotel rooms, but not for religious reasons as in-room porn profits have apparently steadily declined because the porn industry has moved online. Marriott International is up 11.9% since the start of the year, up 7.48% over the past year and up 37.7% over the past five years.
Zions Bancorporation. Based in Salt Lake City with its origins dating back to 1873, appropriately named Zions Bancorporation had approximately $55.5 billion in total assets, 10,200 employees and 480 banking offices in ten Western and Southwestern states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington) at the end of last year. No doubt many Mormons are encouraged to do banking with bank named “Zions” whose history is no doubt intertwined with that of the LDS church. Zions Bancorporation is up 29.2% since the start of the year and up 46% over the past year, but its still down 21.8% over the past five years as god probably spared no bank from the housing bubble out West.
Huntsman Corporation. Mitt Romney was not the only Mormon in the last election as Jon Huntsman, Jr, whose father founded Huntsman Corporation, was also a contender in the GOP primaries. Huntsman Corporation is global manufacturer and marketer of differentiated chemicals with 2012 revenues of over $11 billion. These chemical products number in the thousands and are sold worldwide plus the company operates more than 75 manufacturing and R&D facilities in 30 countries and has 12,000 employees. Huntsman Corporation is up 15.7% since the start of the year, up 38.6% over the past year and down 14.4% over the past five years.
The Bottom Line. While the above Mormon stocks may not be the market’s best performers, they certainly are far from being the worst and it probably doesn’t hurt to have some biblical influence in the board room or the CEO’s office.Who is locked out of representation? Moderates and conservatives in our biggest metro areas, and liberals in the heartland. They are the tens of millions of voters who defy stereotypes of left and right, and are perfectly positioned to bridge our seemingly unbridgeable political divides. Our political life is being poisoned by the absence of their voices.
The reason is that when your district majority matches your party, you need only fear primary election voters who are quick to threaten apostasy from the party line. This intensifies polarization in Congress, making legislative compromises necessary for passing bills all but impossible. Power continues to shift dangerously to the executive. The end result is a death spiral for our constitutional order.
The good news is that there is a way out: replacing our winner-take-all elections with a form of proportional representation where every voter matters in every election. It comes in the form of the Fair Representation Act, a bill introduced recently by Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, that is centered on two key changes.
Step 1 is to elect House members with ranked choice voting in primary and general elections, a system proven in a dozen cities and adopted in Maine for congressional elections. Voters are able to rank candidates in order of choice, and their votes go to second choices if their first choice is in last place and loses.
Step 2 is to establish congressional districts with multiple representatives. Smaller states with fewer than six seats would elect all seats statewide. In bigger states, independent commissions would draw districts designed to elect up to five seats based on traditional criteria like keeping counties intact. Multi-winner districts were used in some House elections as recently as the 1960s and remain common in local and state elections.Military contractors spent millions lobbying Congress last year, and it seems to have worked. They stand to get billions in return.
The military-industrial complex has emerged as one of the big winners in the budget deal working its way through Congress, but headed for approval.
The omnibus spending bill basically eliminates $22 billion in proposed cuts to the Department of Defense -- cuts that were once part of the much-feared “sequester” that took effect in March 2013 due to the lack of a federal budget bill -- and hands the Pentagon nearly $500 million for 2014.
An analysis by The Hill says the defense budget was supposed to be around $475 billion before Congress decided to repeal the sequester cuts, bringing the final total to about $497 billion.
The Defense Department also is getting $85 billion -- an increase of $5 billion from last year -- for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which is not included in the baseline budget because wars are funded in a separate and sterile-sounding part of the budget known as “overseas contingency operations.”
“Congress made a deal to cut spending in exchange for raising the debt ceiling,” said Veronique de Rugy, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center and a Washington Examiner columnist.
“But some of the biggest and loudest voices calling for the restoration of the sequester was the defense contractors — as if the world would be in grave danger if their profit margins were cut,” de Rugy said.
According to lobbying information released Jan. 21, major defense contractors spent more than $65 million influencing Congress during 2013, with much of that effort likely aimed at rolling back the sequester cuts.
Boeing reported spending more than $15 million on lobbying in 2013 to lead the way, followed by Lockheed Martin ($14.4 million) and United Technologies Corp. ($13.6 million).
Those contractors stand to make out pretty well in the new budget.
Congress is preparing to approve all major weapons systems procurement processes, according to The Hill. That includes the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapon system in history, which is produced by Lockheed Martin.
The estimated price tag for the F-35 fighter is more than $1 trillion over 50 years. Even Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., known for his hawkish views and support of the military, has questioned that expense.
The F-35 is hardly alone. There are more than $7 billion in earmarks for the defense industry contained in the omnibus spending bill, according to an analysis by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, a Virginia-based nonprofit watchdog group that monitors federal spending.
That total includes more than $1.1 billion to fully fund the construction of several new Virginia-class submarines, and $90 million to upgrade existing Abrams tanks.
Congress authorized the spending for the tanks, even though the Pentagon proposed halting production of the vehicles as a cost-saving measure.
Members of both political parties and both chambers are to blame for the wasteful defense earmarks, said David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
“The picture has become clearer with each ‘bipartisan’ agreement we get from Congress: The sequester is on its way out; increased spending and appropriations is on the way back in,” he said.
De Rugy agreed that Congress ultimately was responsible for keeping spending in check or letting it run wild.
Members of Congress are unwilling to vote for spending cuts that affect defense contractors for fear of looking soft on defense or facing a potential political backlash from the loss of those jobs.
Even on the occasions — like with the Abrams tanks — when the Pentagon isn’t asking for more money, or when oversight committees find wasteful spending in the defense budget, the Appropriations Committee has a strong incentive to keep funding level or even increase it.
Although defense contractors can spend millions of dollars lobbying for their interests, they are really just protecting their turf, de Rugy said. Until Congress removes the incentive for them to do that, they will continue.
“The best way to improve oversight is to have less to oversee,” de Rugy said. “But part of the problem is that even conservatives who want to keep the budget in check don’t scrutinize the defense budget.”
The defense budget accounts for more than 40 percent of the overall $1.1 trillion spending bill.
Eric Boehm is a reporter for Watchdog.org, which is affiliated with the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.Politicians lack the skills to properly interpret and analyse science, according to a group of Australian and British scientists who have compiled a list of 20 tips for MPs to ponder.
The tips, published in Nature, have been compiled by William Sutherland, a zoologist, and David Spiegelhalter, a mathematician – both are from the University of Cambridge – and Mark Burgman, an ecologist at the University of Melbourne.
The trio argue the “immediate priority is to improve policy makers’ understanding of the imperfect nature of science” by suggesting 20 concepts that should be taught to government ministers and public servants.
These tips would “help decision makers to parse how evidence can contribute to a decision, and potentially to avoid undue influence |
fining political parties if they fail to run gender-balanced slates. That’s a significant impetus for the parties to recruit female candidates. After all, who wants to pay the fine when all you have to do is slap a woman’s name on the ballot? So what do the parties do? They pay the fine. They just can’t seem to recruit many women to run for office.
Now, feminists weren’t born yesterday and their long experience has allowed them to polish to a high gloss the art of victimhood. So it’s not enough to point out that, in order to get elected, one must toss one’s pillbox in the ring. They have a ready-made answer for that, as you knew they would.
The feminist answer is that the business of electoral politics simply isn’t conducive to participation from women. It’s a key part of The Patriarchy’s stranglehold on women that it’s convinced people – men and women alike – that women aren’t as good as men, not as worthy. So, given that, it’s no surprise that women (and men) don’t elect women to office. Both sexes look down on women, believing them to be insufficiently smart, tough, whatever, to do the important job of representing We the People.
Therefore, since The Patriarchy has so stacked the deck that women can’t get elected, women, not being fools, don’t run. Why play a game you can’t win?
With that excuse firmly in hand, feminists figure it’s a job well done. Once again, The Patriarchy is the all-purpose answer to every feminist complaint and, as an extra added bonus, they don’t even need to fudge the figures. What’s so inconvenient about things like domestic violence, child custody, violent crime, etc. is that, if you’re a feminist, you’re always having to make stuff up. But with electoral politics, the data are there for all to see. Women really do make up only a small percentage of office-holders.
But of course they’re wrong – again. The problem with the feminist claim that evil men have convinced everyone that women are too deficient to merit your vote is that it’s just not true. We know it’s not true. We’ve known it definitively for almost 20 years.
That’s when three political science researchers did the obvious thing. Prof. Richard A. Seltzer at Howard University, and Jody Newman and Melissa Voorhees-Leighton of the National Women’s Political Caucus looked at election results to find out if female candidates really did find themselves behind the 8-ball on election day.
And they didn’t go half measures either. For their 1997 book, Sex as a Political Variable, the three analyzed every single race for the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate from 1972 – 1994. They also examined every race for state legislatures in the years 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992 and 1994. That all added up to a whopping 61,603 candidates.
Knowing how important incumbency is to a candidate’s prospects for success at the ballot box, Seltzer, et al divided candidates into three types, incumbents, open-seat challengers, and challengers (i.e. those running against incumbents). They divided them further into male and female candidates.
And guess what. The findings were as clear as a mountain stream.
“When women run, women win… as often as men do. Our study found no difference between success rates for men and women in general elections. Based on the overwhelming weight of the data gathered, the conclusion is clear: A candidate’s sex does not affect his or her chances of winning an election.
…[W]hen men running as incumbents were compared with women running as incumbents, men running for open seats with women running for open seats, and men running as challengers with women running as challengers, men had no advantage over women; women won as high a percentage of their races as men.
The percentage of women holding office at each level is strikingly similar to the percentage of women candidates who have sought each public office. From 1972 – 1994, 8 percent of the candidates for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate were women, and in 1995, women made up 11 percent of the House and 8 percent of the Senate. Since 1986, 21 percent of state legislative candidates have been women and in 1995 women made up 22 percent of all state legislators.
So, for example, in state house races, male incumbents won 93.8% of the time while female incumbents won 93.6%. In open seat races, men won 53% and women 52.2%. Male challengers won 9.7% of the time and female challengers 10.9%.
In state senate races, it was more of the same. Male incumbents – 92.2%; female incumbents – 90.1%. Male open-seat candidates – 54.9%; female open-seat candidates – 55.8%. Male challengers – 11.6%; female challengers – 15.2%.
And in U.S. House races, male incumbents won 94.8% of the time while female incumbents won 93.6%. Male open-seat candidates – 51.2%; female open-seat candidates – 47.9%. Male challengers 6.2%; female challengers – 4.0%.
Why don’t women run for office? Good question. Maybe they’re smart enough to avoid the disgraceful clown act that electoral politics has increasingly become. Maybe the public ceremony of false sincerity, false humility and false gravitas sickens them. Maybe the deception of pretending to care about The People while carrying the water for moneyed interests fails to allure. Who knows? But whatever the reason, it’s not because they can’t get elected if they try.
What a surprise; the feminists are wrong again. It seems the mean ol’ Patriarchy has once again failed in its singular goal of keeping women in their place – pregnant and chained to the stove. The men who run things and who daily connive to persuade us that women are lesser beings seem to have blown it again.
People aren’t at all convinced that men are superior to women. In the author’s word, “overwhelmingly” they ignore the sex of the candidates on the ballot. The simple fact is that sex just doesn’t enter into the decision about whom to vote for (or against). Unlike feminists, people respect women every bit as much as they do men, at least in the realm of electoral politics.
I know this comes as terrible news to radical feminists who desperately hope and pray for everyday people to demean and despise women. If only the unwashed masses who’ve never attended a Women’s Studies course would fall into line and behave the way feminist discourse predicts, feminists would have a lot easier time of it. If only their voting patterns betrayed a deep-seated mistrust of women, those radical feminists would have something to point to when they say The Patriarchy brainwashes everyone to devalue women.
Sadly, people don’t share the anti-female bias of feminists. Most folks actually seem to think men and women are about equally deserving of respect.Ricky Burns went against the advice of promoter Eddie Hearn
Promoter Eddie Hearn described Ricky Burns' next opponent as a "nightmare" but praised the world champion for not taking an easier fight.
Burns will defend his WBA super-lightweight title against IBF world champion Julius Indongo on 15 April.
But Hearn wanted him to face a less dangerous foe.
"It's not wrong for him because he can't win the fight, it's just that there were easier options for more money," Hearn said.
"That's why you have to admire him, because he doesn't care about the money, he cares about creating a legacy, about creating history. That's inspirational."
Burns could have defended his world title against the American Paulie Malignaggi, but as soon as Indongo won the IBF belt against Eduard Troyanovsky in Russia, Burns wanted to face the Namibian.
The contest, at The Hydro in Glasgow, will be the first time a unification bout - when each opponent is putting a world title at the same weight on the line - will be held in Scotland.
"To get a unification fight in this division is very difficult, because it's either Terence Crawford [the WBC and WBO super-lightweight champion] or this guy," said Hearn.
"This was one we targeted and, in the meantime, the Malignaggi fights and other fights came up who were bigger names but were easier.
"I'm going to Ricky Burns and saying, 'you can fight this guy for x money or this horrible nightmare for less money, what do you want to do?'.
"And he said, 'I'll fight the horrible guy for less money'. So I thought I'd better phone Alex [Morrison, his manager] to talk him out of this.
Ricky Burns is confident of emerging with the two world title belts
"Alex agreed with me 100%, as any advisor would do. He phoned me back 10 minutes later and said, 'it's a complete waste of time, I've spoken to him and this is the only fight he wants'.
"It's a 50/50 fight. You'd like to think Indongo would fold, coming to Glasgow and the crowd, but he just went to Russia and knocked out the champion.
"But Ricky knows what he's doing. He's been around a long time."
Hearn believes that a Burns victory would immediately open up the opportunity of a rematch with Crawford, who defeated the Scot in 2014, with the American's promoters already having made contact with him.
Burns himself, though, is wholly focused on the prospect of facing Indongo and the challenges of preparing for the fight when so little video footage is available of the Namibian.
"I know that it's a much harder fight, a riskier fight, but the rewards are going to be so much better," Burns said. "I've taken the risk, so we'll soon find out.
"There have been a few times in my career when I've proved to myself and to other people that, when I'm up against it, when people are writing me off, that's when I'll always perform to my best.
"Fingers crossed that this is another one of those situations.
"He's tall, big long arms, southpaw. It's going to be a hard fight."
Burns said that his trainer, Tony Sim "has brought in sparring partners who are quite similar, so we're getting the best preparation that we can".
"I'm confident of getting the win," he added.Samsung has released a new advertisement for the upcoming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone this afternoon, ahead of the handset’s launch in October. The one-minute spot details how the Galaxy Note used to be ridiculed by tech publications for having such a large screen, yet now Apple is imitating the product line with its own 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus.
Samsung claims that the Galaxy Note 4 is not just about being big, but rather about being more productive, innovative and fun. The ad shows off several of the smartphone’s features, including split-screen multitasking, writing and drawing with a stylus and a third-party DJ app from the Google Play Store.
“Samsung Mobile invented the large display genre, but The Next Big Thing is about more than just size. As the rest of the world catches up to the ‘not everyone wants a tiny screen’ thing, the Galaxy Note 4 is more productive, more innovative and more fun than ever.”
Towards the end of the video, Samsung pokes fun at Apple by reading a tweet that says the iPhone 6 Plus looks a lot like the Galaxy Note 2 from 2012 without a stylus. It narrates another tweet made by Damian Holbrook, in which he says “it’s cute how Apple thinks their phablet is a fresh idea when Samsung has been excelling at them for years already.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxhSnNZH3Rk&feature=youtu.be
Apple unveiled the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus earlier this week with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screens respectively. The smartphones launch on September 19th in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the United Kingdom.
Do you think that the iPhone 6 Plus is a Galaxy Note imitator?
Like this post? Share it!Dogs listen to our words, not just our voices, says Sussex study
Victoria Ratcliffe's research shows how dogs process the information in speech in a similar way to humans
Dog owners often claim their pets understand everything they say. Now a new University of Sussex study shows that our canine friends do actually process human speech in a similar way to us.
Mammal communication researchers in the School of Psychology tested more than 250 dogs to see how they responded to a set of spoken commands, and found that, like humans, dogs use different parts of the brain to process the verbal components of a familiar sentence and the emotion or intonation of the speaker.
Doctoral candidate Victoria Ratcliffe and Dr David Reby, whose study is published today (26 November) in Current Biology, stress, however, that their research does not suggest dogs could understand the full complexity of human speech, only that their perception of speech parallels that of humans.
Miss Ratcliffe says: “Humans mainly use the left hemisphere of their brain to process the verbal content of speech and the right hemisphere to process the characteristics of the voice - whether it’s familiar, male or female - and its emotional content.
“Previous studies have shown that other mammals also have hemispheric biases when processing their own species’ vocalisations, but no one had ever looked at whether biases existed in domesticated animals in response to the different components of human speech.”
The researchers enlisted the help of dogs and their owners in Brighton (including dog walkers in Stanmer Park, and dogs at Brighton’s RSPCA centre) for the study.
Individual dogs were simultaneously played a human speech sound through speakers on both the left and the right of them, the significance being that the right ear sends information to the left-hand side of the brain, and vice-versa.
If the dog turned toward the left speaker, it would mean that the information they were listening to in the sound was primarily being processed in the right side of the dog’s brain. If it turned to the right, the information was being processed in the left side of the brain.
The results showed that when the speech was meaningful for the dogs (such as the command “come on then”), but the voice features such as gender or intonation had been attenuated or removed, the dogs were more likely to turn to the right, therefore showing a left-hemispheric bias.
But if the command was in a foreign language, or if the phonemes were put into the wrong order (“thon om ken”), so the sound ceased to be meaningful to the dog, the reverse bias was observed.
Miss Ratcliffe says: “Although we cannot say to what extent they understand the complexity of the verbal content, our study does suggest that dogs pay attention to this information in human speech and that they perceive its content in a way that broadly parallels human perception.”
Dr Reby says: “We would like to investigate if dogs show these similarities to humans because they have been selected to respond to human verbal commands during domestication, or if wild animals would also display these asymmetries if they were exposed to similar levels of speech during their development.
“This would advance our understanding of the evolution of speech perception in humans by revealing whether hemispheric specialisations for processing its different communicative components are uniquely human or instead shared with other mammals.”
Notes for editors
"Orienting asymmetries in dogs' responses to different communicatory components of human speech" by Miss Victoria Ratcliffe and Dr David Reby, is published online in Current Biology on 26 November 2014.
University of Sussex Press Office: Jacqui Bealing and James Hakner 01273 678888 press@sussex.ac.uk
Back to news listThen his cancer came back.
At a checkup last July, doctors found a spot on his right lung and the cycle resumed — removal, chemo, radiation, recovery.
Matthew was back on the ice by the end of January, but far from game shape. He was understandably and unsurprisingly weak (he's only nine, remember?), unable to skate the length of the rink or get back on his feet after making a save.
Still, his coach Chris Travale was hopeful he'd be ready before the end of the season.
"I knew I wanted to get him in there at some point," he says, "just because of everything he had fought for and battled through."
The only problem was time was running out. By now it was mid-March, and the Huskies season hinged on one final matchup with the rival Waterloo Wolves.
"If we won that game, we were going to the championship, and if we lost, we were going to be out," Travale says. "It was really our last opportunity to give this kid a chance to play."
So he talked to the kids, the parents, and the other coaches. Then he rang up Mike and said he wanted to give Matthew the start.
He said,'sure.' Then he started to think about it.
"Seventeen parents, they've all paid a lot of money to play AAA and now, all of a sudden, he's going to come in?" the dad-of-two says. "Let's say he doesn't have one of his best games, they lose and that's it for the season. They're finished, they're totally finished.
"I called him back and said, 'I don't think it's a good idea.'
Travale's response?
Too bad.
"He goes, 'I'm the coach and I'm going to do what I want,'" says Mike. "I didn't understand it."
He did later, though, at the end of the game — a 6-3 loss — when he looked around Chedoke arena and saw people in tears over his son's effort.
"It turned out to be an awesome day," he says.
Travale agreed, saying Matthew was "outstanding" in his comeback.
"We weren't successful, we didn't win, but it definitely wasn't on account of how he performed," he adds. "It was a loss, but in our eyes it was a win."
The only person, it seems, who wasn't happy was Matthew. He took Mike aside after the game and told him bluntly, "Dad, we've got some work to do."
Three weeks down the road, it's nearly impossible to find a night of the week the fourth grader isn't either at practice, goaltending lessons or in the gym (he even has a personal trainer). His goal is to successfully try out for the major atom squad and, next season, get at least a second AAA game under his belt.
Mike is quick to admit he likes to push his son "farther than most," but Caroline says in this case it's Matthew doing the pushing.
Her husband nods.
"All that stuff puts a smile on his face, and anything that puts a smile on his face is good," he says. "We try to explain to him that it's something really major that he fought, but he probably still doesn't really know what he did.
"Hopefully, this time it sticks."
Today Matthew #00 was the starting goalie for his team Hamilton Huskies in a playoff game. He played an incredible game!... Posted by Kathy Woodgate on Saturday, 12 March 2016
tpecoskie@thespec.com
905-526-3368 | @TeriatTheSpecThere are times when certain pundits baffle me. Today’s example: Michelle Barnard, lovely, teevee friendly, frequent Hardball guest…and woefully misinformed and legally gooberish for a Georgetown Law grad.
Watch this YouTube and see if you aren’t going "wtf?!?" within mere minutes.
Pay particular attention to how rapid her vocal cadence becomes as she spews out not-well-rehearsed talking points without much convincing belief in them until she gets to the trial lawyers ooogah-boogah part, and how she stumbles across the more ludicrous and dubious bits. It’s a tell.
Let’s try to address some of the more blatantly false inanities, shall we?
BARNARD: The problem with the…with the legislation that was signed yesterday is that we don’t know what the unintended consequences will be. Number one, it tells women that you’re a victim. Number two, we don’t know what the burdens are that are going to be put on employers. Will employers all of a sudden say if I…um…uh…maybe I should hire less women..uh…fewer women in the workplace because they might sue me twenty, thirty, forty years from now. Uh…Insurance is going to go up. Um…what is the negative impact this could possibly have on women?
Victim? Yes, I can see how giving women an opportunity to right a deliberate wrong perpetrated against them simply because they have boobies makes them a victim. As if being paid less because of their uterine-impaired status is so awesomely empowering and correct, and that discriminatory employers should just be able to keep that going with abandon as an empowering moment for the sisterhood. Mmmmm Hmmmmm.
Moving on from that logical blip, though, we get to the crux of Michelle’s argument: that companies will stop hiring women because they’ll be afraid to get sued.
Newsflash: if companies stop hiring women simply because they are women? They will get sued.
It’s called gender discrimination. We have these things I like to call "laws," among which are the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Here’s an excerpt from the latter, specifically from Title VII:
SEC. 2000e-2. [Section 703] (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer – (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
And, hard as it may be to believe for a law school graduate with years of legal practice at Patton Boggs and more years of work at an organization which styles itself the "Independent Women’s Forum," this has been the law of the United States and enforced by the EEOC since…um…1964.
Information. It’s useful.
Moving forward in the show:
MATTHEWS: …You predict there will be nuisance litigation? BARNARD: I think there will be…this is a payday for trial lawyers. I think they’re gonna be very happy. I think we’re gonna see the shuttle gates open up to all kinds of litigation, some of which will have merit and some of which will not.
Oooooh, the scary trial lawyers. Litigating cases with merit against discriminatory, law-breaking employers. Meaning there are employers out there discriminating based on gender if the cases have merit? Say it ain’t so! Doesn’t that undercut the whole premise of Michelle’s arguments?!?
But she goes on:
BARNARD: But see that…uh…the problem with that is that it’s a red herring. People say that this is about equal pay. That women earn 77 cents on the dollar for every dollar that a man earns, and it’s…just not necessarily true. If you go in and do the analysis, there are a lot of reasons…sex discrimination does exist, we’re not saying that it doesn’t exist, but there are a lot of reasons that women might earn less. If you decide you want to work for a nonprofit instead of working for a Fortune 500, you’re gonna earn less money. If you come out of the workforce for 10,15,20 years to raise your kids, you’re gonna earn less money. That’s not sex discrimination. So to say that this bill is a champion of women’s rights and the federal government is looking out for women is completely incorrect — it’s just not true. And we do our daughters a disservice and our sons truly a disservice when we say this is great legislation.
Good lord, where to start. Michelle is correct that there is difficulty calculating the pay differential because there are varying disparities among low wage, median wage and more highly-specialized and skilled wage jobs. Arguments abound on how to calculate that pay differential among sexes and races in order to get a clear picture of wage disparities across similar industry/job placements over time.
There is also a vast difference between pay equity issues and "median wage" disparities.
A good place to start on these issues is some more recent studies done by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank that has been analyzing gender pay issues for quite a while and publishes well-documented reports for peer review. Their "Still A Man’s Labor Market: The Long-Term Earnings Gap" (PDF) lays things out in simple, explanatory terms even a pundit could understand. Their more recent fact sheet on the gender wage gap is equally straightforward.
For some substantive analysis and comparative argument, Alas, A Blog has done a wage gap series that hits a lot of this. Bottom line: Michelle confuses apples and bacon, deliberately or inadvertently, to make her arguments seem more robust.
But the Ledbetter Act only deals with an apples to apples comparison — equal pay for equal work under current legal guidelines for comparison’s sake. Period.
I could keep going…because Michelle certainly does…but why? The law requires that women not be paid less simply because they have boobies. If it’s a negotiated salary in which the woman dickers for a lesser pay in exchange for more family flex time and other benefits? Then she doesn’t have a discrimination claim.
If the woman is being paid less because her boss thinks women are worth less and there are documented e-mails in which he says that she’s worth less because she’s not a man and men deserve more pay? What part of that isn’t utter crap? Especially for women who are heads of household, trying to support their families and eventually living on lower pension funds, too, than their male counterparts who did the same job? It isn’t just a few weeks of discrimination — this adds up to a hefty differential over a lifetime. What part of that seems fair to Michelle?
This isn’t rocket science folks, and it sure as hell isn’t new. And as the fellow mother of a daughter and fellow attorney, I cannot believe I have to tell another woman why it’s neither legal nor okay.Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has retired from political life after his humiliating defeat by party colleagues last night as he battled to regain the French presidency.
Mr Sarkozy finished third in the first round on the primary vote for the centre-right Republicans party, behind former Prime Ministers François Fillon and Alain Juppé.
“I did not manage to convince the voters,” Mr Sarkozy said. “I have no bitterness, no sadness, and I wish all the best for my country, for you my fellow citizens, and for the one who will lead this country I love so much.”
He added it was time for him to go back to a life with “more private and fewer public passions”.
Messrs Fillon and Juppé will now go forward to a second round to choose the Republican candidate for next year’s presidential election, with polls giving Fillon the edge.
Whoever wins will likely go head-to-head with National Front leader Marine Le Pen for the French Presidency. Ms Le Pen is currently riding high in the polls, although the establishment media still believe she faces defeat in a run-off.
An Ipsos poll this weekend gave the National Front leader 29 per cent support, eight points ahead of her nearest rival, and her strongest performance so far.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls conceded last week that it was now “possible” Ms Le Pen could be elected President next year.
“If she does make it to the second round she will face either a candidate of the left or the right. This means that the balance of politics will change completely.”
Under her leadership, the National Front has gone from strength-to-strength, moving to the mainstream of French politics and winning the 2014 European Elections in the country with 24.9 per cent of the vote.Universal Home Entertainment is bringing the action-thriller Eliminators to Blu-ray & DVD (read our review) on December 6, 2016. The film stars Scott Adkins (Close Range, Hard Target 2) and former WWE champ Wade Barrett. The film is directed by James Nunn, who previously worked with Adkins in Green Street 3: Never Back Down.
When his home in London is attacked, a former federal agent (Adkins) must come out of hiding of the witness protection program to protect his daughter. With his true identity exposed to the criminal underworld, he goes on the run with Europe’s most dangerous assassin (Barrett) on his trail and must use every trick he knows to keep his family alive.
Adkins fans should consider themselves spoiled for the next several months, as the action icon has an array of films in the works, including Boyka: Undisputed IV, Savage Dogs, Altar Rock, The Returner, a possible Ninja 3, and an appearance in Marvel’s upcoming Doctor Strange.
Updates: Watch the trailer for Eliminators down below:
Please visit our sponsor, Frank and Beanz Doggie Apparel.WASHINGTON -- In August 2011, Lafe Solomon received one of the least desirable overtures in modern Washington: a subpoena from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House oversight committee. Solomon was the top lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board at the time, and he'd infuriated Republicans with a complaint he pursued against a particularly powerful manufacturer and political donor, the Boeing Co.
As Solomon noted, it was the first time in 70 years that Congress had subpoenaed the general counsel of the labor board, an independent agency that enforces labor law on unions and employers. Solomon had read the congressional report from the last time it had happened, way back in 1940, when anti-union conservatives wanted to destroy the then-young agency and roll back New Deal labor reforms.
"The parallels are striking to me," Solomon said in a recent interview at the agency's headquarters in Washington, reflecting on his turbulent term as general counsel, which ended last summer. "If you read the committee report from 1940, and the report from the Issa committee, they're really quite similar in rhetoric."
In Solomon's more than three years as the NLRB's quasi-prosecutor, he oversaw thousands of complaints that were issued against businesses and unions. But it was his move on Boeing that most enraged conservatives. Solomon accused the manufacturer of breaking labor law by trying to establish a production line for its 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina. Based in part on statements by a Boeing executive, he said the move was retaliation against the company's unionized workers in Washington state for having gone on strike in the past.
The complaint spurred congressional hearings, inspired Republicans to try to defund and shut down the labor board, and, less directly, helped prompt a showdown in a divided Senate over the filibuster. Solomon was summoned for a flogging by House Republicans at a special field hearing in South Carolina, and he and the NLRB at large were blasted by the likes of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) as out-of-control job killers. (The American Bar Association disagreed, eventually naming Solomon labor attorney of the year.) Solomon watched as his work became a campaign issue in the presidential election.
"I certainly couldn't have anticipated any of it," Solomon said, noting that the Boeing charge originally came out of a regional office, before he assumed the general counsel post. "But I just tried to keep my head down and do the job and keep morale as high as we could facing these uncertainties."
A career employee at the labor board for more than three decades, Solomon said he never coveted the agency's prosecutorial post. He was asked to do it, he said, and he assumed he would serve merely as a placeholder until President Barack Obama nominated someone else for a complete term. But three months turned into three years, even though Solomon never even got a vote in the Senate on his nomination. For all his time, he was technically "acting" general counsel.
Solomon said he never really expected confirmation. He had rankled the business lobby and many conservatives even before the Boeing blowup, when he threatened to sue four states over their constitutional amendments guaranteeing secret-ballot union elections. Supported by businesses, the amendments were an attempt to preempt the Employee Free Choice Act, proposed federal legislation that would generally make it easier for workers to unionize. In the eyes of his critics, the move cemented Solomon as a union-favoring activist.
One of the less credible claims was that Solomon was doing the bidding of Obama. Politically speaking, the Boeing complaint and other purportedly pro-union actions by the labor board brought the White House little more than grief. Solomon insisted he never had any contact with the White House, noting that the NLRB is an independent agency. "I am sure that there were certainly people in the White House that would have preferred me not issuing the Boeing complaint," he said dryly.
The Boeing case was eventually settled short of a board decision, as most such cases are.
As for the accusations of activism, Solomon said he merely believes in the board's mission to protect workers and in the concept of collective bargaining.
"The scale is always tipped -- the employer has the economic power," Solomon said. "I believe in collective bargaining. I believe that the preamble of the National Labor Relations Act is as true today as when it was written in 1935. Collective bargaining is a way to level the playing field and to promote a middle class in this society. Income inequality isn't a good thing for workers and it isn't a good thing for society. There is nobody that benefits from this."
Solomon said there were plenty of rewarding cases that he worked on, all of them overshadowed by the Boeing controversy. His office made a point of expediting cases in which employers have fired workers in order to scuttle burgeoning union campaigns. According to Solomon, the initiative led to more than 2,000 work reinstatement offers from employers and millions of dollars in back pay.
Solomon also took a lead role in outlining what workers can and cannot be punished for saying in the new world of social media. Until he took up certain cases and established legal guidelines, labor law offered little clarity on what would be considered protected speech when employees criticize their companies on Facebook and Twitter. The guidance made the board's work relevant to the many people who wrongly believe the agency only has a say in matters between employers and labor unions.
And, of course, there were the thousands of labor cases that never made any news.
"I saw a case where the workers were not paid any minimum wage. They survived on tips," Solomon said. "And the employer sort of defended itself by saying he allowed the employee to live in the company bathroom. That's a deplorable situation. There are situations like that around the country, and workers are entitled to be treated better than that."
Those who wanted the labor board defunded or shut down nearly got their wish. With Senate Republicans blocking Obama's nominations, and one board member's term set to expire, the labor board nearly lost its quorum last summer, which would have left it unable to do business. As the government shutdown loomed, Democrats and Republicans hashed out a deal that gave the agency its first fully confirmed board in a decade. Solomon stepped aside for his replacement, Richard Griffin, who was confirmed by the Senate in October.
Solomon is still working as a lawyer at the board, in the lower profile role that he prefers. He said he never cared to have the spotlight, although he's much more comfortable under its glare than he used to be. For that, he credited the Republicans in Congress who called him to the special hearing in South Carolina.
"Literally, since that day, there isn't an audience that I won't speak in front of. I don't get nervous, and I don't speak from a prepared text," Solomon said. "It was a life-altering experience for me."Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Trump Doral golf course in Miami.
Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Trump Doral golf course in Miami. Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Businessman Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland.
Businessman Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland.
Businessman Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland.
What Donald Trump is doing on the campaign trail
What Donald Trump is doing on the campaign trail
Sheldon G. Adelson is chairman and chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corp.
At the outset of the 2016 election, the GOP primary field was nearly as large as that of last weekend’s Kentucky Derby. In total, 17 Republican hopefuls campaigned to win the party’s nomination for president.
1 of 14 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × These Republicans refuse to vote for Donald Trump View Photos And they’ll tell you why. Caption And they’ll tell you why. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell “General Powell said at a meeting of the Long Island Association that he would be voting for Hillary Clinton,” a spokeswoman confirmed Oct. 25. Powell added in an interview that he picked Clinton “because I think she’s qualified, and the other gentleman is not qualified.” Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Like the Derby, the race for the Republican nomination started from a wide gate — some entries with better post positions, others with more backing. We had candidates with such perceived advantages as wide name identification, large campaign war chests, supposed geographic benefits and other assets they hoped would tip the race in their direction.
Ultimately, each candidate had to convince the party’s primary voters across the country that he or she deserved to be the nominee.
One candidate has won that race, and now Republicans must join together to make sure he wins the next one.
While the primary cycle still has some important elections ahead, it is clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.
I am endorsing Trump’s bid for president and strongly encourage my fellow Republicans — especially our Republican elected officials, party loyalists and operatives, and those who provide important financial backing — to do the same.
The alternative to Trump being sworn in as the nation’s 45th president is frightening.
For nearly eight years, Republicans have fought tooth and nail against President Obama and his policies. We waged battles over debt, government spending, Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal — an issue of paramount importance to me personally and to many others around the world.
Republican presidential candidate Donald |
, the most popular post in reddit’s history had a score of 38,160 at the time of writing. Thus, despite a large number of unique visitors to the site (159 million in the month prior to writing) and a significant registered user base (1.6 million), many of these visitors do not appear to convert to registrations, and many of the registered users may not (or may only infrequently) vote on or comment on specific posts. In other words, many users of the site more broadly, and indeed the r/TotallyStraight subreddit appear to be invisible ‘lurkers’, accessing content but not participating or leaving a digital trace through votes or comments. Presumably this ‘lurker’ effect would be amplified in an explicit subreddit, where users may not want votes or comments visibly traced back to their account. My methodological choices in approaching this study meant that I also took on the role of ‘lurker researcher’. In order to convey some sense of the most popular posts on the subreddit, I will briefly describe here the top five posts during my data collection: A still image in the style of a ‘selfie’, depicting oral sex between two men with a score of 469 and 5 comments; A GIF (moving image on a short loop with no audio) depicting anal sex between two men with a score of 403 and 24 comments; A still image depicting two naked, well-endowed flaccid men not engaged in sexual contact, but staring into the camera with a score of 333 and 17 comments; A still image of a single man with an erect penis and a laptop with a score of 277 and 15 comments; and Another still image depicting a single naked man – identified in the comments as a gay porn star – with an erect penis with a score of 251 and 10 comments. It is worth noting that four of these five most popular posts are still images, and only two depict sexual contact between men. While 23% of the content posted to the subreddit during the study were videos, these posts did not appear to attract as many upvotes. One possible explanation for this might be the visual immediacy of still images and GIFs. An image is easier to quickly look at and make a determination around whether or not to upvote or downvote that content, whereas a video takes longer to load and watch. Mobile or tablet users may even need to load the video in a separate web browser. Labour: Who does the posting? The ‘labour’ involved in posting content to the subreddit is also worth exploring. While there were over 15,000 redditors subscribed to r/TotallyStraight at the time of writing, only 74 different redditors posted to the subreddit during the three weeks in total of data collection for this project. It is worth noting here that it is possible that a single individual could be posting under several aliases or accounts. While it may be a common practice to use a temporary or ‘throwaway’ account to post or discuss explicit content on reddit (Van der Nagel, 2013) so as to separate NSFW redditing from SFW redditing (as a digital trace of posts and interactions are recorded in the redditor’s profile), it is unlikely (although possible) that users would maintain multiple throwaway accounts for posting in a single subreddit. While there were some users who posted more than others, the ‘labour’ here seemed to be spread across a reasonably sized group: 73% of the redditors who posted to r/TotallyStraight during data collection only posted once. The remaining 23% posted more than once, and just three redditors posted more than 10 times during the three-week period. The third highest poster had 12 posts, the second highest poster had 16 posts, and the top poster had 19 posts over the study. The other kind of labour discovered in my analysis if this subreddit was ‘source requests’. Source requests come in the form of comments on still images or GIFs, asking for the source of images. For instance, source requests were made in the comments on the second and third most popular posts described above. Redditors may comment along the lines of ‘source?’ or ‘any idea which video this is from?’: 38% of the posts recorded during the study contained some kind of source request. Over half the time (56%) source requests were answered, by either providing a link to a full video or by providing the name of the actors and/or production house behind the video from which the image was taken. In one instance, responding to a source request for a GIF, one redditor provided not only a link to the full video, but also provided a time index for the sequence the GIF was taken from. I would argue that this represents a kind of ‘NSFW labour’ that is largely un-researched, but is at the core of the digital circulation of pornography through social sites like reddit. Occasionally, redditors will specifically post links to images with the intention of asking for a source, but on r/TotallyStraight this practice is usually discouraged and re-directed to another smaller, more niche subreddit that is specifically for source requests, r/GayPornHunters. Personal narratives In my analysis, the most complicated and compelling finding was the presence of posts that detailed personal narratives. These were text-only posts where redditors disclosed stories of their own sexual activities, anxieties, and experiences navigating a ‘mostly straight’ sexual identity. While they were rare (5 posts, <3% of the overall corpus), these personal narratives brought a completely new dimension to the subreddit, distinct from the porn that dominated it. These narratives revealed complicated processes of identity-work and experimentation, as narrators skirted around what was acceptable for straight men in order to pursue their desires. While there was no way to confirm these stories as true, they nonetheless serve as compelling texts in better understanding a phenomenon that is otherwise largely untold. I will briefly describe just two of these narratives here. The first narrative (2992 words in length) details the narrator’s alcohol-fuelled, first sexual encounter with another man. The 19-year-old narrator was in the dorm room of his girlfriend with two of her friends – another male/female couple. The narrator’s girlfriend began a game of ‘chicken’, involving gradual escalation (touching, kissing, oral sex, and the use of sex toys) between herself and her female friend, and compelled the narrator and the other male to ‘keep up’. As the encounter progresses, the narrator details his uncertainty and his surprise at enjoying sexual contact with another man, to the point of ejaculation, quickly followed by shame and embarrassment. The narrator explained that posting the story to r/TotallyStraight was a way to process the experience (potentially a form of catharsis), and to also receive feedback and advice on how to proceed. He left the dorm room quickly after the encounter, and hadn’t spoken to his girlfriend about it since. There were 21 comments in response to the story, variously expressing how ‘hot’ the scenario was (it was recounted in some detail), asking the narrator how he felt about it now, and generally providing supportive and warm comments. Two of the moderators of the subreddit also joined the conversation, reinforcing the importance of communication with partners, discussing boundaries, and knowing one’s own limits. Reinforcing individual agency was also a strong theme. Two days after the initial post, the narrator provided an update in the comments, explaining that he had spoken to his girlfriend and that they were okay. He expressed an openness to trying something like the initial encounter again, but was in no particular hurry. He thanked the subreddit for the support. The second narrative (3124 words in length) explores the narrator’s experience of falling in love with his straight best friend. This narrative was divided into three posts that updated the subreddit on the progress of the narrative as it progressed. This narrative is less explicit than the first, but deals more with the narrator’s emotional attachment and his negotiation of sexual identity and how to communicate that identity to others, rather than the detail around a single formative sexual encounter that constituted the first narrative. The narrator guides readers through an attraction that spans several years, eventually becoming an intense friendship of several months leading up to the posts to r/TotallyStraight. He explains his heartache at seeing his friend pursue sexual encounters with women, alongside his elation at building a close bond with this friend. While the narrator eventually comes to the conclusion that he is probably bisexual, he still considers himself as ‘more straight’. While he never discloses his love to his friend, he does discuss his sexuality with him. In the third instalment the narrator advises the subreddit that they are both now dating women. He went on to reflect on the value of the r/TotallyStraight subreddit in allowing him to express his feelings and his desires. There were 36 comments in total across the three posts/instalments, largely empathetic, sympathetic, and sharing similar experiences. Some commenters encouraged the narrator to be direct and share his feelings with his best friend, or provided other forms of advice relating to the specifics of his narrative, while others recounted their own stories of unrequited love and asked for updates. The narrator expressed his thanks for the replies and support. Are these narratives ‘authentic’, or fabricated? Did they really happen? Within the confines of this particular study, it’s impossible to know. However, what can be said is that these narratives – and others like them – were taken at face value within the subreddit itself, as other redditors responded with their own comments, advice, and (mostly) support, rarely questioning the authenticity of the stories. Taking these narratives at face value could be described as a kind of ‘suspension of disbelief’. In many ways, consumers of contemporary culture are regularly asked to suspend their disbelief to engage with a story, whether it’s dwarves and elves in Lord of the Rings or pornography depicting ostensibly straight men being lured into same-sex sexual encounters. Whether or not the redditors of r/TotallyStraight see the content in this sub as requiring a similar kind of suspension of disbelief is unclear, and requires further research. Despite questions about plausibility and authenticity, these two examples stand to demonstrate how reddit affords the sharing of these kinds of narratives in a relatively safe and anonymous space. Redditors are able to express themselves in their own time and in their own words. Beyond the inherent value for the narrators in expressing these narratives, there are potentially other users ‘lurking’ who consume these narratives alongside the pornography. This blend of the explicit and the non-explicit, the political, the personal, and the anonymous produces a rich social space that is in many ways unique.
Discussion: Telling sexual stories Section: Choose Top of page Abstract Reddit and r/TotallyStrai... Methodology Findings Discussion: Telling sexua... << Conclusion References CITING ARTICLES In the words of Plummer (1995: 101–2), ‘the Modern Western World has become cluttered with sexual stories … we have become the sexual storytelling, confessional society’. In making his case, Plummer points not only towards psychopathological stories, but also to paperback romance novels, television shows like Oprah, and to openness to stories of trauma around rape, abuse, and ‘coming out’. Twenty years on, Plummer’s words continue to ring true, even as the breadth of sexual stories grows. Inquiries into sexual abuse (especially within religious organizations) are played out publicly, legislative changes to recognize same-sex marriage continue to sweep around the globe, and most recently, the stories of trans* people have taken centre stage with the very public telling of sexual stories of celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox. What are the conditions under which these stories can be told? Stories can be heard when a community has been fattened up, rendered ripe and willing to hear such stories. They cannot easily be heard amongst isolated individuals; they gain a momentum from an interpretive community of support. Thus, for instance while people could ‘come out’ as gay in the 1960s and before, it really meant in isolation, to oneself, or in the disguised and furtive world of secret gay communities – the homosexual underworld as it was often then referred to. To turn it from a private, personal tale to one that can be told publicly and loudly is a task of immense political proportions. It requires a collective effort, creating spaces in the wider social order and the wider story telling spaces. Bit by bit – through the leaflet, the pamphlet, the booklet, the book, the meeting, the recording, the newspaper, the television programme, the film, the chat show and so on – the voice gains a little more space, and the claims become a little bigger. (Plummer, 1995: 116) Twenty years on, some of the media through which Plummer says sexual stories find a voice seem out-dated, but the sentiment around momentum and zeitgeist continues to resonate. Might r/TotallyStraight serve as an ‘interpretive community of support’? The internet, and specifically the affordances of the more participatory, democratized ‘web 2.0’, have enabled even greater reach for sexual stories, opening up the telling of these stories far beyond geographical boundaries to ‘networked publics’ (boyd, 2011). Sexual stories are told on and through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, and other forms of social media, both amongst close, intimate circles, and also to wider publics. While sexting as a practice (Albury and Crawford, 2012), for instance, might sit at the more closed, intimate spectrum of sexual storytelling (usually between partners, unless a confidence is betrayed), NSFW subreddits like r/GoneWild (Van der Nagel, 2013) and r/TotallyStraight sit at the more public end of that spectrum in terms of openness. On reddit, even if those stories (whether textual narratives, naked selfies, or professional pornography) are circulated amongst a relatively small public, one of reddit’s key affordances is surfacing texts to a wider audience. While texts are circulated on all of these platforms only through some kind of ‘collective effort’, in Plummer’s words, the key difference here is the changed interplay between producer and consumer. The potential reach of the pamphlet is limited, whereas a digital text can be circulated indefinitely (Baym, 2010), even beyond the control of an original producer. Plummer (1995) theorized that when it comes to telling sexual stories, there are ‘tellers’, ‘coaxers’, and ‘consumers’ (pp. 105–6). While people may move between these different roles, the ‘products’, those ‘social objects (texts), which harbour the meanings that have to be handled through interaction’ (p. 106) are at the core. The meanings of these texts are, for Plummer, never fixed, but rather ‘emerge out of a ceaselessly changing stream of interaction between producers and readers in shifting contexts and social worlds … meaning is a problematic emergent that is contextually based’ (p. 106). In this article, I have discussed the various ways in which r/TotallyStraight – as a text, or more accurately a set of texts – is produced. As my analysis revealed, only a small number of redditors assumed the role of ‘tellers’: of the ∼15,000 redditors subscribed to r/TotallyStraight at the time of this study, only 74 (.5%) users posted to the subreddit during the three weeks of data collection. However, the nature of reddit is such that it is not only the ‘original posters’ who tell the story, but also everyone who comments on the post becomes part of that story. This digital entanglement complicates the dynamic between Plummer’s (1995) tellers, coaxers, and consumers, and yet they serve as useful lenses through which to unpack the labour that goes in to producing r/TotallyStraight. The role of the coaxer is fulfilled on r/TotallyStraight in several ways. First, the subreddit – and perhaps the moderators themselves – invite (and thus ‘coax’) stories, be they pornography (if we can proceed on the basis that a single pornographic image represents or tells a story) or more elaborate textual narratives that I identified above as ‘personal narratives’. Second, the redditors requesting the source of particular images or GIFs (seeking the ‘full video’, for instance) could also be read as coaxers. Third, those redditors who upvote content could similarly be read as coaxers, as they reward (and further surface) certain content. The role of the consumer on r/TotallyStraight is a more open one, and indeed all subscribers and more casual visitors to the subreddit who are not subscribers can be read as consumers. At the same time, any single consumer is able to fulfil the role of coaxer or indeed producer, given the nature of reddit. They do not need to convince a book publisher or a television producer to authorize their voices to speak about particular sexual desires or traumas. In this sense, reddit provides a space for these narratives to play out in a networked public far beyond the slow momentum discussed by Plummer (1995). In turn, exercising these stories here can lead to identity-work in a social context (with input and support from likeminded others, as in the case of both personal narratives described in the previous section) that are not reliant on the zeitgeist of the day; before, in Plummer’s terms, ‘a community has been fattened up’ (1995: 116). The conceptual category of ‘mostly straight’ or ‘mostly heterosexual’ proposed by Savin-Williams and Vrangalova (2013) is productive for thinking through what r/TotallyStraight might tell us about nondominant sexual story telling in a broader, ‘confessional society … cluttered with sexual stories’ (Plummer, 1995: 102). The notion that men can actively consume gay pornography and still retain a straight identity troubles neat boundaries around sexualities. At its core, that is what r/TotallyStraight works to achieve. As Savin-Williams and Vrangalova (2013: 82) explain, the ‘three-group system of assessing sexual orientation is inadequate’, and this subreddit represents just one example to strengthen that argument. In my analysis, even if its actual user base is broader, r/TotallyStraight is intended to serve and provide a space for the ‘totally straight’ man who identifies as straight but consumes porn centred on men who have sex with men, thus further realizing the conceptual category of ‘mostly straight’.
Conclusion Section: Choose Top of page Abstract Reddit and r/TotallyStrai... Methodology Findings Discussion: Telling sexua... Conclusion << References CITING ARTICLES The purpose of this study was not to provide any generalizable findings about ‘mostly straights’ or even men who identify as straight and consume gay porn. Rather, this study was intended to cast a light on the ‘Totally Straight’ subreddit phenomenon, and to further nuance our understanding of mostly straight men more broadly. Although I have provided some very basic descriptive data in this article, they are limited by sample size and the relatively small number of subscribers (and visitors) to the subreddit who actually post, vote, and comment. The non-invasive nature of this study at the level of textual analysis is also limited, and further research into r/TotallyStraight would be enriched by interviews with the redditors who contribute to this subreddit. Further, of the almost 15,000 redditors who are visibly subscribed to the subreddit at the time of the study, it is unclear how many of those users identify as straight men. The study revealed the presence of (self-identified) straight men, gay men, bi men, and also straight women in the comments on posts. Beyond this particular subreddit, there are also myriad other subreddits worthy of deeper investigation. Indeed, aside from the pioneering work by Van der Nagel (2013) and Van der Nagel and Frith (2015) on anonymity and pseudonymity on r/GoneWild, there is very little scholarly research in this area. Further research here must also be concerned with research ethics. Reddit itself is still a relatively niche form of social media when compared to other sites and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, but it does appear to afford users a way of forming affinity groups, or perhaps ‘neo-tribes’ (Maffesoli, 1996; Robards and Bennett, 2011) around shared interests. The ways in which redditors experience floating levels of affinity to the site, or to specific subreddits, is an important avenue for further research. Beyond reddit, this study also points towards the importance of what I have described here as ‘NSFW labour’ involved in maintaining a subreddit like r/TotallyStraight, and clearly there is more work to be done in this area. Some of the sites that posts to r/TotallyStraight point to – like Tumblr, Redtube and Pornhub – also operate on the basis of NSFW labour, and this labour requires further research. More broadly still, this whole range of avenues for further research might also contribute to our understanding of how the social web – enabled by the internet – is implicated in broader socio-cultural changes around sexuality. To conclude, the ‘Totally Straight’ subreddit serves two central functions: first, as a space for sharing pornography; and second, as a space for sharing personal narratives about sexual identity. The first function – sharing porn – should not be quickly dismissed. As discussed earlier, porn can ‘re-affirm’ sexual identity (McKee et al., 2008: 89) and can also serve as a pedagogical text (Albury, 2014) for individuals socialized under heteronormative conditions. For men who identity as straight or mostly straight and consume gay porn, this might be especially resonant. Rather than seeking out pornographic videos, images, and text, the users of r/TotallyStraight are presented with this content, alongside comments and signifiers of value (via votes) from other users. It is unclear how this social dimension of porn might figure into its consumption, but it is clear that at least for a small group of redditors who keep the subreddit active through their own labour of posting, commenting on and moderating content, there is something significant about r/TotallyStraight. The second function of the subreddit is, potentially, even more significant. By providing a space for the reflexive ordering and communication of narratives about sexual identity, r/TotallyStraight becomes a visible, accessible, and ongoing ‘text’ of the mostly straight phenomenon. I would argue that it both represents and propels (even in a small way) a broader socio-cultural shift towards less rigidly defined categories and acceptance when it comes to sexual identity (further evidenced, for instance by Anderson and McCormack, 2014; and Morris and Anderson, 2015). The consumption of diverse forms of pornography writes back onto popular understandings of sexuality, and on to dynamic personal accounts of sexuality that also intersect with the political. Reddit serves here as a confessional space where porn consumption practices and preferences can be openly discussed and reflected upon, and where personal, elsewhere contested narratives related to nondominant sexual identities can be exercised, archived, and communicated to others.The marijuana legalization movement needs to bank on the fact that Americans are currently pessimistic about the government and society in general, at least according to Eaun Wilson. In a recent online interview with Blooomberg Business Week, Wilson, a researcher at Gainsville, Georgia based think tank the Socionomics Institute, says that negative social moods drive major social change.
His organization studies how the general mood of society as a whole affects financial markets and other social trends, and his interview highlights how marijuana prohibition steps forward just so happen to be occurring during a time where more Americans than not are displeased with Washington, the federal government, and lots of things in general.
A similar study from Socionomics on the relationship between hard times and happy music also confirms that people tend to create art when they’re bummed out or generally angry about things. The more you think about it, the more it makes plenty of sense- of course people would want to have legalized weed in a time where it seems like not too many other things are looking up.
Is is any wonder that other social changes are also taking place at the same time? Major strides in legal same-sex marriage are also happening at the same time that marijuana prohibition is, both instances where advocates are fighting decades-long stigma against what is otherwise a totally harmless thing.
Now that more Americans are for marijuana prohibition that not for it, it’s hard to believe that things would start going back in the other direction if the national mood picks up, since two states will now begin selling cannabis for strictly recreational purposes in less than a month. But just in case, I’m hoping that US congress continues its new trend of history-setting dysfunction; that way, at least we all get safe, legal, and easy access to herb.By Reynaldo "Papi Chulo" Sanchez
Former heavyweight champion Shannon "The Cannon" Briggs (59-6-2, 52KOs) will return to the ring on December 11th in Panama as part of a big card being put together.
Briggs has not seen a lot of ring time in 2015, when compared to his activity rate in 2014. He entered the ring six times last year and went the full twelve round distance in one of those bouts.
In 2015, Briggs did not get started until late March when he scored a first round knockout of Zoltan Petranyi and then came back in early September to knock out Michael Marrone in one.
Briggs says he is now scheduled to have one more fight before the year is over, on December 11 in Panama.
After that fight, he plans to go after WBO/IBO/WBA/IBF heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko in 2016. Klitschko defends his titles in two weeks against mandatory challenger Tyson Fury is Dusseldorf, Germany.
"I'm doing great. I'm training. I'm in great shape. I'm 43-years-old, but I feel like I'm 23-years-old. Looking at the landscape of the heavyweight division, everyone is saying 'let's go champ.' I'll be back on December 11th in Panama, let's go champ. I'm not sure yet [who I'm fighting], but it's going to be a great fight whoever it is. And then I got Klitschko next. I'm going after Wladimir Klitschko, next year, in 2016, the champ. Let's go champ," Briggs told BoxingScene.com.Disclaimer: I do not own either RWBY or any of the characters in this story! All belong to RoosterTeeth.
Snow. It is both beautiful and dangerous. The white fluff falls, slowly from the heavens, decorating the skies with glitter in a dance. Some people enjoy its company, while others stay inside, sheltering themselves from the blistering cold that comes with it. But not Weiss.
The equally beautiful heiress walks the lonely nighttime streets of Vale wearing a white puff coat over her usual combat skirt and boots pondering the only question that has bothered her for years- why is she the way she is? She's pretty. She's talented. And above all else, she's cold-hearted and judgmental. But why? Was it her family that made her become this way? Or was it natural and unavoidable? Really, her family was unavoidable, too. Certainly, all the things that have happened to her by her father's hand have moulded her to be the way she is. But could she have avoided it?
Weiss lets out a sigh and with it, steam rises from her lips as her warm breath meets the frigid air. She had just had a fall out with the faunus member of her team two hours earlier. The cause was Weiss herself attacking Yang and her party habits. Why is the brawler so sought after by guys and girls alike? All she does is party, drink, fight, and has no care in the world. Her grades are suffering because of it and are bringing down the Team's overall grade. Weiss was simply trying to straighten her up. But Blake had defended Yang, turning the "straightening up" around on Weiss. Weiss was helpless against the partners both arguing against her. To hide her tears, she grabbed her coat, rushed outside, and just kept walking.
Bringing only this single coat outside was a mistake. Weiss began to shiver. She leaned up against the side of a "From Dust 'Til Dawn" shop and stared at the snow falling. Practicing her fake smile has become a regular thing for Weiss, moreso now that she will have to apologize to two of her teammates. Alas, the "ice queen" gives up on the futile attempts to create a smile. Tears stream down her face as the realization that she will never produce an actual smile hits her. Reaching a hand out, Weiss caught a few falling flakes of snow. Upon contact, the flakes melted in her hand, leaving nothing but little droplets of water. "Is this my fate?" She asks her self out loud as she interprets the meaning of the melting snow.
"Not if you don't let it be." A familiar voice came from the distance. Weiss turned towards the source of the sound, quickly wiping her face of any tears that may obstruct her vision. Glowing yellow eyes can be seen walking closer. Weiss placed her hand on Myrtenaster, ready for anything. The figure stepped closer and reveals itself to be Blake. "But, of course, water is always a good thing, too."
Weiss was about to scold Blake for sneaking up on her like that, but she refrained. Removing her hand from Myrtenaster, she crosses her arms in front of her chest. "Not if it freezes and becomes ice again." Weiss attempted to shoot down Blake's optimism.
"Well, what do people use during hot summer days to keep their drinks cold?" The faunus' reply was simple and uneducated, but she knew it would stop the heiress in her tracks. Sure enough, it did. Weiss, taken aback, puffs up her cheeks, turning her head away from Blake with a huff.
"That's besides the point. What are you doing out here?" Weiss turns back towards Blake and examines her. She notices that Blake is wearing a thick, gray coat with a purple scarf. She has black and white tights with a pattern on them reminiscent of an ugly sweater with Black snow boots covering her feet. "And where are the others?"
"I came to check on you. Ruby is asleep and Yang told me that you would be back, but I didn't want to wait," the faunus replied, her exposed cat ears twitching in the gentle frigid breeze. She steps closer to Weiss, noticing that there are dried tear-stains on the heiress' cheeks.
"Y-yeah, well-" Weiss sighs. "Who am I kidding? Thank you. I- I'm sorry about earlier." As Weiss reached the end of her sentence, her voice breaks and more tears fall from her crystal-blue eyes.
Blake takes a few steps forward and holds Weiss in a caring embrace. As Weiss is pulled into Blake's arms, she falls apart, sobbing relentlessly. "It's okay. It's not your fault, you were just doing what was right. And I'm sorry I attacked you like that. I didn't mean it, I was just angry," Blake consoles Weiss. With these gentle words, Weiss' tears slow. She looks up at Blake and into her golden eyes. Her pupils have shrunk into tiny slits underneath the streetlight just behind Weiss.
"I shouldn't have yelled. It was immature of me. I just..." her grip tightens on Blake's back, grasping onto any bit of jacket she can grab. "I don't want Yang to fail."
"I know." Blake says nothing more, trying to keep the moment. She can hear Weiss' crying slow to a sniffle. Weiss begins to talk, but is immediately interrupted as her face is pulled into Blake's and their lips meet.
Weiss, shocked at first, pulls away. Her heart pounds from the unexpected, but welcomed gesture. "What are you doing?!" She seems furious, but Blake's arms are still around her, preventing her from feeling any form of anger. Her face turns a bright pink and she doesn't move. She doesn't fight. She notices that Blake has a soft smirk on her face, showing that she knows that Weiss isn't actually mad. The only noise to be heard is the wind blowing the snow around as the two are locked in a staring contest. Defeated, Weiss turns away for a moment, steeling herself, only to turn back around and pulling Blake's scarf bringing her face into another kiss. This time, both girls participate in the affectionate embrace.
After several moments, they both break away. "So... Was it as good for you as it was for me?" Blake has a wide smirk drawn out across her face. The same look is reflected in Weiss'.
The heiress playfully smacks the other girl's arm. One final tear begins to well up in Weiss' eye. Blake takes a finger and carefully wipes it off of her face. Weiss sniffles then asks, "Did that kiss mean something? Or was it just another ploy to get closer to a member of the Schnee family?"
"You found out my master plan!" Blake retorts, sarcastically. With this, both the girls begin to giggle, lightening the mood. For such a touchy subject of the past, they have been able to overcome their differences and old prejudices. The faunus clears her throat and changes subjects. "As you can see... I like you, Weiss." Several shades of red color her face as she speaks her mind. "Equally as much as you are cold-hearted-"
"Hey!" The cold-hearted responds with her hands on her hips and a stomp of her foot, looking up into those glowing golden eyes.
"Equally as much as you are cold-hearted," Blake continues, "you are beautiful, talented, and deep down you are very caring. That's what I like about you. Underneath that prissy, regal, and disciplined exterior of yours, you're just this girl with a heart and dreams as big as anyone else."
"I don't know if I should be appalled by or grateful for that."
"Even your flaws," she says, ignoring Weiss' quip, gently stroking her scar, "I think are what make you special."
"I... I'm at a loss for words." Weiss doesn't know what to do. She's never been affectionate with anyone before, let alone a faunus.
"Once we had gotten over our differences, back in our first semester, I realized that I had always thought you were cute. You would always help me out, even indirectly through little compliments. When I realized I liked you, I overheard you singing while you were showering." Blake is visibly lost in thought as she remembers hearing the voice of an angel coming from the shower room.
"You heard that?!" Weiss, embarrassed, buries her face in Blake's scarf. She doesn't mind it when she's singing in front of a crowd of people, but the white-haired girl HATES it when people she personally knows hear her singing. As weird as it may sound, she refuses to sing for any one individual. Whenever she would practice singing back home, Weiss had her own sound-proof room where she would write songs and sing them in the privacy of her own "singing room" as she called it when she was a child. The only two people to ever hear her sing privately were her sister Winter and the family butler, Erik.
"Yes. 'Wings', was it?" Blake smirked. She knew. She knew the name of the song which means she must have heard it somewhere before. Weiss buried her face into the scarf further. Wings was Weiss' favorite song to sing. As a child, Erik would play the piano for her, using the same tune, which he had come up with. Weiss wrote the lyrics for it and together, they had produced 'Wings'.
"No one was supposed to hear that..." Weiss spoke, her voice muffled by the scarf.
"I have four ears, you know. I'd probably hear it, even if you whispered it," Blake chuckles. Weiss, flustered by this comment, remains with her face hidden in Blake's scarf. After a while, she removes it, the red disappearing from her face.
A moment of silence and staring into each others' eyes passes when Blake finally speaks up. It isn't awkward silence, no. It's a moment of longing. But, the girls know they have to be back. "So, what do we tell the others?"
Weiss looks down, lost in thought. What do they tell everyone? That all of the sudden, the two are in a relationship? If that's what this is, maybe that wouldn't be the best idea if they just broke the news after a really rocky day. Or maybe it would be. She shakes her head violently to snap herself out of the equally violent storm of thoughts this situation has spawned. As she shakes her head, her single ponytail smacks Blake in the face. Blake simply squints her eyes at Weiss, staring her down. "S-sorry!" The girls giggle with each other. "Well, I suppose we don't tell them. Not yet, at least. After our little quarrel, I don't think Yang specifically would be too happy about this."
Blake nods in agreement. "Come on. Let's head back." The girls intertwine their fingers together and walk hand-in-hand back to the dorm.
As they arrive, they stop in front of the door, looking at each other and letting go of their hands. They wanted one last kiss before having to hide their relationship for a little while. The couple exchanges a quick peck when suddenly the door swings open. In the doorway stands the blonde brawler, Yang, walking backwards out of the room. "I'm sure they aren't too f-" Yang turns her body as she steps out the door. But what stands before her isn't what she expected. Ever. Her jaw drops as her eyes lay upon her two teammates- both female for that matter- mid-smooch.
The two lovers pull apart, both of their faces begin to fill with embarrassment. Yang can almost see their skin emanating a light the shade of red. More awkward silence. Weiss has had just about enough of all these silent moments today. She swallows her pride to crack a joke, gritting her teeth and slowly turning her head towards Blake and manages to utter "So much for hiding it." The smile on her face isn't a convincing smile, but more of a cry for help. Blake is still wide-eyed and stuck at a standstill.
Weiss finally turns back towards Yang and presses her hands to her hips. "Aren't you going to say something?"
Just as soon as the words escape Weiss' mouth, the Blonde scoops both the girls into a hug and swings them around. "Awwww! You guys are sooooo cuuuUUUTE!"
"Yang! P- |
the goods or services, step 8. The date on which seller S released the goods or such other triggering event date as may have been agreed, will usually be made apparent from the invoice, and is used to establish a date certain for payment of the 2nd of exchange, which date is entered on the 2nd of exchange, prior to signing. The date certain is calculated by adding the term stated on the 2nd of exchange to the date of the event described on the 2nd of exchange. The date of the event can, for example, be the date of a transfer event, for example the date of transfer, or release, of the goods from the seller to a shipper. Such a transfer date can be determined from the transport document provided by the carrier, which document records the event of shipment, or receipt of the goods for shipment. The transfer event may be as specified with INCOTERMS 1990. Since both the 1st and 2nd of exchange have the same term which runs from the same event date, they also mature on the same date.
In step 9, B's bank holds the buyer-signed 2nd of exchange to maturity when the bank debits B's account and remits cash to the appropriate party such as financial institution FI/SI, see step 13 hereinbelow.
In step 10, seller S furnishes to the FI/SI the buyer-accepted 1st of exchange received in step 2, along with evidence verifiable by the FI/SI, for example a paper or electronic document, of shipment according to the accepted pro-forma invoice.
The nature of the evidence of shipment of goods, delivery of services, or other event will depend upon upon the carrier or service provider and prevailing law or regulations, as will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art from time to time. Whereas certain paper documents such as waybills and bills of lading have traditionally been relied upon for verification of shipment, it may be expected that suitably authenticated electronic versions of these and other documents will become widely used and acceptable in the future for the purposes of the invention. Carriers or providers having electronic tracking and query capabilities are preferred to facilitate obtaining of the requisite event evidence, and to facilitate management of the process.
After such verification, the FI/SI issues, or causes to be issued and accepted, a bill of exchange drawn on the FI, the banker's acceptance. The banker's acceptance will have a maturity related to the maturity of the 1st and 2nd of exchange, for example, 0, 7 or 14 days, up to about 30 days, or in unusual cases even 60 days, after the maturity date of the 1st and 2nd of exchange.
In step 11, if a pre-transactional agreement has been made between seller S and the FI, as described above, and seller S has provided the necessary documents, for pre-acceptance, the FI will issue a pre-approved banker's acceptance quickly and routinely.
In step 12, the banker's acceptance, executed by financial institution FI/SI, is delivered to seller S. In step 13, which is optional, seller S can negotiate the pre-approved banker's acceptance for a cash instrument with one of many commercial banks or financial institutions who recognize the issuer's paper. The cashing institution becomes the holder H in due course of the banker's acceptance. If preferred, seller S can hold the pre-approved banker's acceptance until maturity and cash it with the issuing financial institution FI/SI.
The banker's acceptance is separately issued by the FI to seller S without recourse to seller S, less agreed fees, if any. In the event that buyer B does not pay the 1st of exchange or the 2nd of exchange, the FI has no recourse to seller S in that regard. A banker's acceptance is an unconditional promise to pay at a future date. The FI holds the 1st of exchange as collateral for issuance of the BA. Upon collection of the 1st of exchange (second unpaid) or the 2nd of exchange (first unpaid), the FI substitutes cash collateral less fees for the bill of exchange collateral underlying the issuance of the (pre-accepted) BA.
In step 14, upon the date certain, the buyer B's bank re-presents the 2nd of exchange (first unpaid) to buyer B in the normal course of banking events and receives payment. By agreement between the buyer and the seller, or by treaty or banking practice, collection of the 2nd of exchange may employ an electronic version of the draft rather than requiring a hard copy, or paper, document.
In the event of non-acceptance of the 2nd of exchange, holder H of the 1st of exchange completes the documentation of the 1st of exchange by attaching the invoice and the shipping documents to the 1st of exchange, (second unpaid) and submits the previously accepted 1st of exchange to the buyer's bank for payment (second unpaid).
In step 15, upon presentation of the BA at its due date, the BA-issuing institution pays out cash to holder H, who may be the first or a subsequent holder in due course.
FIG. 9 shows more clearly the life cycle of the 1st of exchange. It is created by seller S, and sent to buyer B for execution, Buyer B signs the 1st of exchange, indicating acceptance of the payment draft it embodies, and returns it to seller S. These steps are completed before seller S ships or releases the traded product. After releasing the traded product, seller S sends the buyer-accepted 1st of exchange to financial institution FI/SI requesting issuance of a banker's acceptance, which may have been pre-approved. When the 1st of exchange matures, financial institution FI/SI may or may not forward it to buyer B's bank for collection, along with proof of occurrence of the triggering event, e.g. shipment, or release for shipment. Payment of the 1st of exchange extinguishes the 2nd of exchange.
FIG. 10 shows more clearly the life cycle of the 2nd of exchange. It is created by seller S at the time of shipment with a date certain entered for its term, after the date of release of the traded product is known. The 2nd of exchange is then sent to buyer's bank B along with the invoice. Buyer's bank B then attempts to obtain the buyer's acceptance of the second exchange against release to the buyer of the invoice which the buyer will need to dear the traded product from customs or to receive it from a carrier. This document-against-release process is described more fully hereinbelow. Bank B holds the buyer-accepted second of exchange until maturity, when buyer B's account is debited, thereby extinguishing the 2nd of exchange. Because they are mutually extinguishable, the 1st is thereby automatically extinguished.
In the above-described process, the 1st bill of exchange becomes the collateral for the banker's acceptance, while the 2nd bill of exchange is used in a more conventional way to effect collection of payment for the purchase from buyer B. Because the 1st and 2nd bills of exchange are mutually extinguishable, payment of the 2nd extinguishes the 1st, and vice versa.
Preferably, the 1st or 2nd of exchange, or both, are embodied in a document which also contains, on its face, a transaction window 30, FIG. 6, reserved for information that includes unique transaction identifiers which enable the FI/SI to identify a transaction specifically. The transaction window, and the identifier information it contains, are preferably combined with the relevant bill of exchange instrument into a single paper or other hard copy document, in a manner which does not impair the character of the bill of exchange, preferably by occupying distinct and separate areas on the face of the document. It is preferred that the instrument of the bill of exchange be compliant with international treaty with regard to both form and content, one requirement of which is that the bill of exchange is a financial instrument ordering payment without reference to the underlying trade transaction. To this end, the transaction window can be visually or actually outside of the instrument of the bill of exchange or in an electronic sense, virtually outside the instrument of the bill of exchange. Thus, the 1st or 2nd of exchange, or both, can be identified as transaction-specific without impairing their legal significance.
Holding the 1st of exchange as collateral for future payment, subject only to payment upon the due date of the tenor specified, the seller can be indifferent to the intermediate mechanisms of payment, since in practice the buyer pays once (drafts are mutually extinguishable) and seller is satisfied with payment in whatever form.
A further object of the invention is to provide trade financing methods and instruments which are amenable to electronic commerce. A difficulty in this respect is that traditional discounting mechanisms use endorsements in blank on the back of a bill of exchange to enable recognition of a holder in due course. Such endorsements are inherently technically difficult to capture electronically from a two-sided paper or other document, in a legally acceptable manner, because of the difficulty of proving the relationship between the front and the back of the document.
While other solutions may be known or may become known, and can be employed in the general method of the invention, a further, more particular aspect of the invention solves the problem of endorsement capture by providing a novel paper financial instrument suitable for electronic capture which instrument has a face which comprises a documentary area containing essential information that characterizes the instrument and a transaction window for transactional and historical information, the documenting and transaction areas being distinct one from the other. Payment draft 10, as shown in FIG. 6 and the bills of exchange shown in FIGS. 9A-B (to be described hereinbelow) comprise three embodiments of such a financial instrument. Others will be apparent to those skilled in the art.
The information in the documentary area can comprise conventional financial information such as the text describing the instrument, the names of the parties to the instrument, an amount and terms of payment, but preferably the information is such as to characterize the instrument as a bill of exchange, and more preferably, as a 1st or 2nd of exchange as described herein. By accommodating all necessary information on one face, and leaving the other face blank, such a paper instrument, is amenable to single-side scanning to provide electronically captured proof of collateral.
The transaction window can serve one or a number of purposes. For example, the transaction window can accommodate a unique transaction identifier, or more preferably, a compilation of unique alphanumeric identifiers that describe a transaction pertinent to the instrument, and preferably also, document the flow of the transaction. The flow of the transaction can be indicated by successive entries in the transaction window, listing for example identifiers for the seller and buyer, for the transaction for each document in the transaction, for shipping or other release events, for payment events, draft substitution events and so on.
Optionally, the transaction window can provide space and textual directives for one or more endorsements, by one or more successive holders in due course. Alternatively, a separate endorsement window can be provided, also on the face of the document and also in an area distinct from the instrument area, for such one or more endorsements.
By positioning all of the relevant tracking information on one face with the documentary information, in a transaction window, geometrically and visually outside of the instrument area, without intruding into the documentary area which defines or characterizes the financial instrument, the invention enables an image capture system to record all relevant information in a secure and technologically efficient manner. The resultant electronic instrument may be, or may become acceptable as proof or verification of the history and holders of the instrument. While the paper document should preferably maintain a clear, preferably geometrical, demarkation between the instrument and transaction areas, in the electronic realm the distinction may be real or virtual, and may be achieved in a number of ways, as will be known to those skilled in the art.
By this process the invention accomodates paper documentation which is presently required by treaty for trade between two different legal jurisdictions, while providing for efficient electronic tracking, recordal and archiving, and accommodating the probable eventuality that electronic documentation will become an acceptable practice, by law or private contract, for trade within a single legal jurisdiction, or for trade between different jurisdictions, especially between national or supranational, jurisdictions. To this end, the novel 1st of exchange, as described herein, preferably comprises sufficient data, in an appropriate formal arrangement, to comply with relevant national and international law, more preferably with relevant international treaties and practices.
When and if the UNCITRAL convention becomes operative, electronic evidence of release, shipment or delivery documents will become acceptable enabling the invention to be practiced largely electronically reducing or eliminating the need for paper documentation.
If desired the buyer and seller, can agree by private contract to allow electronic payment or drafting of the amount due, using an electronic data interchange format such as ANSI.X12 format commonly employed in the US, or an international standard EDIFACT message syntax or other such standard e.g. SWIFT, as may be convenient or appropriate.
The sample bill of exchange forms shown in FIGS. 9A and 9B embody the particulars described above including, on its lefthand side areas for entry of transaction identifiers and buyer information, which areas are distinct from the bill of exchange itself. In this case the buyer is an importer, and the seller is an exporter.
The term of the 1st of exchange shown in FIG. 11A is described as “60 DAYS AFTER EVENT (DATE)” with the intent that the name of the event, for example, release of goods, will be entered on the document, and the parenthetical item, which if a date, is the date generated when the the specified event occurs.
The term of the 2nd of exchange shown in FIG. 11B is described as “60 DAYS AFTER DATE (OF EVENT)”. By the time the 2nd of exchange is issued the event date will be known and can be inserted as the issuance date. The 1st and 2nd of exchange have corresponding tenors from the same event, and therefore obtain the same maturities. Aside from this difference, and their dates of issue in the top rI have absolutely no intentions of housing a child inside of my womb any time soon (sorry, ma!), but for those of you who have a special pregnant woman in your life, there’s a new gadget on the market that’s sure to get her, but most importantly her little bundle of joy, bouncin’ around in no time.
Marrying the worlds of music and motherhood is Babypod, a small speaker that goes inside a woman’s vagina. Technology’s diving deep these days, folks.
Babypod, due to its placement, claims to deliver an unparalleled crispness in sound to babies in the womb. “The uterus is a place protected from the exterior, and it is the mother’s body that carries out this protecting role through multiple layers of soft tissue,” the device’s official website explains. “These attenuate the intensity of sound and distort it in its journey to the uterus; it’s similar to what happens when you hear a conversation in the next-door room without catching everything that is said.” (Babypod’s words, not mine.)
“By placing a speaker inside the vagina, we overcome the barrier formed by the abdominal wall and the baby can hear sounds with almost as much intensity and clarity as when emitted,” the site continues.
Why bother spinning music for your offspring at all? Well, aside from wanting to hip your kid to the latest Drake or Cary Rae Jepsen record, countless studies over the years have proven that sounds can play a part in a baby’s development.
“Exposure to sounds in the womb is important in terms of just helping the normal connections that have to form in the brain,” Dr. Deborah Campbell, director of neonatology at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, told New York. Research has also shown that babies listen and learn quite a bit during the final stages of pregnancy, and that “their brains do not wait for birth to start absorbing information.”
Below, watch a video of “the first concert for fetuses ever held in the world,” its sounds delivered through the magic of Babypod.Looking for news you can trust?
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With the first quarter of 2013 in the books, crime in Los Angeles has so far continued its decade-long decline, according to statistics released Friday.
OK, first off: can we please stop talking about LA’s “decade-long” crime drop? I know I’ve mentioned this often enough that I sound like a crank on the subject, but it’s important. If crime started declining in 2003, it might well be due to improved policing techniques introduced by Bill Bratton in 2002. But if it started declining in 1991—which it did—then the cause has to be something else, unless Bratton invented not just CompStat, but time travel as well. Moving on:
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief Charlie Beck announced the early but notable improvement at a press conference that served as a swan song for the mayor, who will leave office this summer after being termed out….Beck highlighted the significant declines in gang-related killings and other crimes — a result, he said, of close cooperation between his department and the city’s aggressive anti-gang programs that. ….”There is no other big city in America that can make these claims. I invite any of you to go to Chicago, go to New York, go to Houston … and see if you can find a replication of this effort. You cannot,” Beck said.
Look: the crime decline in Los Angeles has been impressive. More cops on the street have probably been effective. Beck’s gang initiatives have probably been effective—maybe even more effective than in other places. But no other city can make these claims? It’s exactly the opposite: nearly every big city can make these claims. The violent crime rate in Phoenix is down 52 percent from its peak. Washington DC is down 58 percent. Chicago is down 66 percent. Dallas is down 70 percent. New York is down 75 percent.
In California, San Jose is down 58 percent. San Francisco is down 61 percent. San Diego is down 67 percent.
We should all applaud anti-crime initiatives that seem to be effective. But we should also rigorously question whether they’re effective. And we shouldn’t mindlessly repeat claims that just flatly aren’t true, no matter who or where they come from. The public deserves to hear the full story about crime in America, not just the part that’s convenient for politicians singing their swan songs or police chiefs who want funding for more cops.Katie Heinrich, assistant professor of kinesiology, has been awarded a grant for approximately $2.52 million to study how the U.S. military conducts physical fitness.
Heinrich said there have always been concerns about how well the army physical fitness program prepared soldiers for combat. One concern, obesity, has also been increasing in the military – just as it has in the general population.
“What we’re proposing is a new type of physical program that honestly is already being done on a lot of our installations,” Heinrich said. “But we’re proposing a clinical trial to randomize people to either the usual physical training program that they do, or this high intensity functional training program to see which one works better at addressing body fat percentage.”
Heinrich is the principal K-State investigator to receive the grant along with Walker Poston of the National Research and Development Institutes in Leawood, Kansas.
“In the last two years, the (Department of Defense) has come out with a new perspective of fitness,” Poston said. “They think that fitness is much broader than the way they’ve been testing it.”
The current army physical fitness test includes two minutes in which soldiers do as many pushups as they can, two minutes in which they do as many sit-ups as they can and run two miles as fast as they can. This is done with 10-20 minute breaks in between each, according to the army physical fitness test manual.
Poston said the military has been working on ways of implementing balance, agility and other types of fitness into their tests. The study Heinrich and Poston is doing involves High Intensity Interval Training, which has some of the same exercises as CrossFit, as well as 400-meter sprints. Poston said the study itself won’t be using CrossFit necessarily, even though CrossFit provides a good model.
“It just so happens that CrossFit is a good template,” Poston said. “It implements a lot of that.”
John Buckwalter, dean of the College of Human Ecology, said the grant Heinrich received is a big deal.
“It’s sort of like the premier grant to get,” Buckwalter said.
Heinrich said the idea for the study came from her experiences in Hawaii, where she started doing CrossFit.
“When I started CrossFit in Hawaii, I met tons of people from all branches of the military,” Heinrich said. “In fact, the owner of CrossFit Oahu was a Navy SEAL. So, here I was working out next to Navy SEALs, and in time got to realize that they’re just regular people.”
Heinrich said soldiers often went to the gym for training similar to military physical fitness, because what their units were putting them through was not challenging enough to improve their fitness test scores. Some would do the gym training in addition to their unit’s training, while some would just do the gym training.
Heinrich said there were stories of people who took each approach and did amazingly well on their fitness tests, even though they weren’t necessarily doing the same type of training as their peers. That was one thing that gave Heinrich the idea for the study, she said.
“That was part of it,” Heinrich said. “The other part is you also have to look at what opportunities are being offered by the government for grants.”
Heinrich said there was a grant which involved addressing the health of military populations. Researchers had the option to look at diabetes, body fat or other measures of health.
Heinrich said she had also done some previous work looking at a study where the DOD examined body composition, and found their rates of overweight and obese soldiers were higher than ideal. She had also done work with a civilian at Fort Riley, who had done another version of the high intensity physical training Heinrich and her team will be using in their research. She said the civilian had seen fitness scores improve in his program.
For an article about how Heinrich is planning on doing this, see Thursday’s edition of The Collegian.State Supreme Court puts measure to speed up executions on hold
The state Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked enforcement of Proposition 66, an initiative that seeks to speed up executions in California, for at least the next five weeks while it considers a lawsuit challenging the measure.
The court halted implementation of Prop. 66 to give both sides time to submit written arguments, due by Jan. 23.
State voters approved Prop. 66 by a 51 percent majority on Nov. 8 while rejecting, by 54 to 46 percent, a competing measure, Prop. 62, that would have repealed California’s death penalty law.
Prop. 66, sponsored by prosecutors, would require the state Supreme Court to rule on death penalty appeals within five years of sentencing, more than twice as fast as its current pace. It would set the same five-year deadline for the second-stage appeals known as habeas corpus and would require defense lawyers to file those appeals to the trial judge within a year, compared with the current three-year deadline.
Another provision would expand the pool of defense lawyers by requiring attorneys to take capital cases if they accept court appointments to represent criminal defendants in other cases. Prop. 66 would also eliminate administrative review of the state’s newly adopted rules for executions by a single drug. Execution using a single drug replaced the state’s previous three-drug procedure.
The suit was filed a day after the election by former state Attorney General John Van de Kamp and Ron Briggs, a former El Dorado County supervisor whose father, state Sen. John Briggs, sponsored the state’s current death penalty law as a 1978 ballot measure.
The suit contends Prop. 66 would interfere with courts’ constitutional authority, cause “confusion and upheaval” in the state’s judiciary, and force both courts and lawyers into hurried and less-reliable decisions in capital cases.
One of the authors of the ballot measure said the court’s order did not mean the suit was likely to succeed, but probably was intended to preserve the status quo.
“There’s nothing wrong with waiting a month,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which backed Prop. 66. He said most of the arguments in the lawsuit were aimed at individual provisions of the measure, and the only argument that attacks the entire initiative — that it violates the constitutional ban on initiatives covering more than one subject — was “meritless to the point of being frivolous.”
Christina Von der Ahe Rayburn, a lawyer for Van de Kamp and Briggs, countered that the suit challenged several speedup provisions that, if upheld in court, would invalidate all of Prop. 66.
“We’re gratified that the court saw the importance of this issue,” she said.
Defendants in the case include the state Judicial Council. For that reason, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, chairwoman of the council, and Justice Ming Chin, the vice chairman, have removed themselves from the case and will be replaced by two appeals court justices, yet to be named. Tuesday’s order was approved by the court’s remaining five justices.
Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelkoReport Shows MPAA 'Experts' Seriously Misrepresented The Uses Of Hotfile
from the substantial-non-infringing-uses dept
Mr. Zebrak’s classification here was inexplicable tome in my rebuttal report and remains so now. He argues that there could be copyrightable selection and arrangement in the illustrations of this work, even though both the original work and the illustrations are clearly in the public domain. I dealt with and dismissed this possibility in my rebuttal report – indeed the site to which he cites in his original argument for infringing status explicitly identifies this exact book, in unchanged order and arrangement, as being published in 1871 in St. Petersburg. This book is at the most conservative possible classification,“highly likely in the public domain.” Mr. Zebrak will not concede even this, though he does at least change his classification to “Unknowable.” Again, I think the refusal to admit evenoverwhelming evidence like this indicates a predisposition to find infringement that is worryingly strong – and that predisposition appears to be a general one, which therefore has significance far beyond the files I was able to examine in the time available to me.
Photography 101 Podcast: This podcast is an example, again, of the same theme.As I pointed out in my rebuttal report, the podcast is in fact offered for free download online and its author confirms that he does not object to its redistribution. Mr. Zebrak – somewhat puzzlingly – introduces the iTunes terms of service into the picture, apparently imagining that iTunes has the ability to affect the copyright status of a work in which it holds no copyright. It does not. Mr. Wittenburg holds the copyright in his podcasts. He allows people to download them freely and to repost them and says so explicitly in his affidavit. There is no evidence that the version of the podcast posted on Hotfile even came from iTunes. Mr. Wittenburg refers to the podcasts being available in multiple locations online. Even if it did, the iTunes terms of service are a red herring. I may give a lecture which I record and post online, posting it also on iTunes. I hold the copyright and I may choose to allow posting and reposting as I wish. Copyright law gives iTunes no rights over the program and no rights to circumscribe what I allow with my own podcast – they have no copyright to infringe – and thus the claim that the file is "highly likely infringing" cannot be supported on this basis.
We've been following the surprisingly weak case that the MPAA filed against Hotfile for some time -- and, in some ways it's become even more important lately as a sort of "civil analog" to the criminal case against Megaupload. Hotfile and Megaupload have many similarities, and the arguments against both seem to make the same highly questionable assumptions -- taking perfectly legitimate actions and insisting that they must have been done for nefarious purposes. For example, in both cases, the fact that the companies offered "affiliate programs" that allowed users to make some revenue on frequently downloaded works was used as evidence that they were inducing infringement. But what the facts are showing is that this was quite often used to createandnew business models for creators themselves. When Megaupload was taken down, for example, hip hop superstar Busta Rhymes argued vociferously that it was a fantastic way to make money -- with much, much better terms than major labels. That's because he (and lots of other artists) could release their own content through these platforms, allow consumers to get them for free, and get a large cut of the ad and subscription revenue.It appears that this was also a popular use on Hotfile. TorrentFreak obtained a filing from copyright expert and law professor James Boyle, in which he points out that open source developers were using Hotfile's affiliate program as a business model, and, in fact that open source downloads were incredibly popular on the platform, very likely representing one-third of the top 100 downloads, adding up to millions of downloads.The standard for infringement under the Betamax ruling isto be if there are substantial non-infringing uses of the technology, and that certainly appears to be the case here.Boyle also points out other ridiculous problems with Hollywood's "expert" report trying to claim that Hotfile was almost always used for infringement. For example, he notes that the report appears to have purposely excluded approximatelyof the files on Hotfile. Hollywood's experts ignored files that were never downloaded or only downloaded once. Yet, as Boyle points out, the point of a cyberis to store files -- and many people likely put files up so that they could be stored in case they were ever needed. Thus ignoring the 60% of files that were never downloaded or only downloaded once, excludes the fact that many of those may have been for perfectly reasonable and legitimate purposes of backup, storage or place/time-shifting. Basically, it looks like the MPAA's "experts" ignored anything that was inconvenient.And it gets worse. The so-called "experts" that the MPAA found seemed to classify works as "highly likely infringing" despite there being significant evidence that they were perfectly legitimate works to be shared. Perhaps the most egregious example was a copy of a Russian book on embroidery published in 1871. No matter how you look at it, a book published in 1871 is in the public domain. But the MPAA's expert listed it as highly likely infringing. Then, when called out on that, the expert said that maybe there were new works in the book and would only downgrade his classification to "unknowable" rather than admitting it was public domain.Similarly troubling, the MPAA's experts took a freely distributable podcast, and insisted that, too, was "highly likely infringing." Podcasts are usually distributed for free, and since bandwidth costs are, many podcast creators love using cyberlockers like Hotfile or Megaupload as a free storage and distribution platform. But the MPAA's "expert" insists that it's highly likely infringing. And it gets worse: even after the, the MPAA's expert used iTunes terms of service to argue that it was still infringing. Except iTunes terms of service have nothing to do with the podcast:Reports like this raise significant concerns about the claims against Hotfile (and similar sites).
Filed Under: affiliate program, busta rhymes, mpaa, open source
Companies: hotfile, megauploadSo goes the headline on this interesting Eli Lake article at The Daily Beast about an emerging bipartisan civil liberties working group in the Senate. Excerpt:
For some time now, Wyden and Paul—along with two other senators, Republican Mike Lee of Utah and Democrat Mark Udall of Colorado—have been working together to try to curb the broad authorities the Obama administration has asserted in the war on terror. The advent of this group, which calls itself the Checks and Balances Caucus, is certainly not the first time in political history that the libertarian right has allied with the civil-liberties-minded left. Yet at a moment when inter-party cooperation is almost nonexistent in Washington, any bipartisan alliance—especially one that includes some of DC's most committed ideological opposites—is both unusual and noteworthy.
Lee said the four lawmakers began to reach out to each other in early 2011. "Little by little, those of us who share a lot of these beliefs in common found each other as people who saw the issues in a similar way," he explained, adding, "We definitely have each other's cell phone numbers." Around that time, Lee and Paul were two of the only three Republicans to vote against reauthorizing the Patriot Act, while Wyden used the reauthorization to launch an (unsuccessful) effort to force the Obama administration to disclose what he said was a classified interpretation of the law. [...]
[N]ow, on the question of drones—specifically their demand that the Obama administration release more details on the drone program before Brennan's nomination is allowed to proceed through the Senate Intelligence Committee—they seem to have found an issue with legs. "I feel very strongly that the intelligence committee has to have any and all legal opinions related to targeted killings before there is a committee vote," Wyden said.Amu wants the futa. a guest Dec 31st, 2012 124 Never a guest124Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 13.76 KB [09:43] <S> <Amuro Ray> that moment when you realize a girl has written you into a yaoi fanfic [09:43] <EwanMacIan> I STILL PLAY IT. [09:43] <S> <Amuro Ray> so do I? [09:43] <Sponce> link? [09:43] <RisenLM> 12 gig update, ehhh. [09:43] <jeroknite> I think my girlfriend has done that [09:43] <EwanMacIan> LINK? [09:43] <S> <Amuro Ray> she won't link it to me till she's done... [09:44] <jeroknite> Or maybe she was joking [09:44] <S> <Amuro Ray> she says it's a surprise [09:44] <S> <Amuro Ray> and I'm scared... [09:44] <Sponce> That's not something to joke about [09:44] <S> <Amuro Ray> no, she serious. she doesn't bullshit about that stuff [09:44] <EwanMacIan> Pretty sure it's a compliment. [09:44] <jeroknite> You get rape [09:44] <jeroknite> d [09:44] <S> <Amuro Ray> I'm a shotacon [09:44] <jeroknite> MY girlfriend may have been joking [09:44] <jeroknite> :/ [09:44] <Sponce> You're probably going to get raped [09:44] <S> <Amuro Ray> oh... this girl isn't dickin' around [09:44] <EwanMacIan> It's a compliment if you're pitching. [09:44] <EwanMacIan> in the story [09:45] <RisenLM> Still probably imminent rape. [09:45] <jeroknite> Good save, Evan [09:45] <S> <Amuro Ray> and if I'm fuckee? [09:45] <EwanMacIan> Thank you. [09:45] <EwanMacIan> Then just close your eyes and try to enjoy it. [09:45] <jeroknite> He can't read with his eyes closed [09:45] <S> <Amuro Ray> my god, Pinkie Pie breaks the fourth wall way too often. [09:45] <Sponce> Nothing wrong with dick in your butt, bro [09:45] <jeroknite>... Oh! [09:46] <S> <Amuro Ray> uh, I dunno sponce. [09:46] <S> <Amuro Ray> when you make me into a schoolboy [09:46] <jeroknite> Is the girl futa? [09:46] <EwanMacIan> She doesn't REALLY break the 4th wall. [09:46] <S> <Amuro Ray> yes she does? [09:46] <S> <Amuro Ray> she interupted the closing fade [09:46] <EwanMacIan> I mean, not like Shakespeare's characters do. [09:46] <Sponce> She doesn't address the audience doe [09:46] <S> <Amuro Ray> and opened the hole that was closing [09:46] <S> <Amuro Ray> well yeah. [09:46] <EwanMacIan> Yeah, but they do that in loony toons [09:46] <jeroknite> Is the girl futa? [09:46] <S> <Amuro Ray> she opens the fourth wall about as well as someone NOT in a play [09:46] <jeroknite> I need to know [09:47] <S> <Amuro Ray> uh... Jeroknite... I think it's two shotas [09:47] <S> <Amuro Ray> no lolis [09:47] <S> <Amuro Ray> no futa [09:47] <jeroknite> The irl human being girl [09:47] <jeroknite> :I [09:47] <S> <Amuro Ray> oh yeah [09:47] <jeroknite> ffs [09:47] <S> <Amuro Ray> she's a real chick [09:47] <S> <Amuro Ray> no dick [09:47] <jeroknite> So no penis? [09:47] <S> <Amuro Ray> NO [09:47] <jeroknite> Are you sure? [09:47] <Aniwork> That you know of. [09:47] <jeroknite> ^ [09:47] <S> <Amuro Ray> well, I haven't exactly seen her nude [09:48] <Sponce> There |
¢ Click the gold box on the right of the pot. Click the numbers to make 2538 and then click the switch to open the box. Inside you will find a yellow gem, take the yellow gem.
• Leave this exhibit and turn left once and then use the purple key to unlock the gate. Once the gate has lifted go inside the exhibit.
• Move right, take the hammer. Move left and then click the fossil to take a closer look. The fossil is cracked, use the hammer to break the fossil. Inside is a green gem, take the green gem.
• Leave this exhibit and then turn right 3 times. Move the picture that says spend the day at the museum. Behind the picture is a crack in the wall. Use the hammer on the crack to reveal a blue gem, take the blue gem.
• Go into the restroom and turn left. Open the door on the right. On the wall are 4 colored stars. From left to right Yellow, Green, Blue and Red. Move right, and then click on the metal box on the bottom of the cleaning cart.
• The box has 4 empty diamond shaped slots. Place the gems into the slots in the same colored order as the stars you just looked at. From left to right, Yellow, Green, Blue and Red. Once the gems are in the box click the switch to open the box. Inside you will find a blue key, take the blue key.
• Leave the restroom and turn right 3 times. Use the blue key to unlock the door and leave the museum.
• Congratulations! You escaped the museum!by
[Chocolate-Peppermint Popcorn is vegan, sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, egg free, soy-free, nut-free and yeast-free. Suitable for Stage 2 and beyond on an anti-candida diet.]
Some people think, “Santa Claus.” Some people think, “cranberries.” Some people think, “tofurkey.” Me? When I think of the holiday season, I think: “chocolate + peppermint.”
Of course, there’s no doubt that chocolate is my favorite food on the planet. (If we’re heading off the planet, well, then maybe it’s Klingon gach). But pair that sepia confection with sweet, fragrant peppermint, and my palate may just fall into paroxysms of delight.
This recipe is my anti-candida friendly version of a product I spied the other day while shopping for groceries: a bag of white chocolate-peppermint popcorn. As soon as I saw it, I knew instantly that I’d attempt a healthified version the moment I got home. I’ve been using my air-popper and this organic popcorn to ensure we’re not ingesting GMOs in our snack. You could use any kind of popped corn, or try the corn-free option in this recipe (scroll to the bottom for the recipe).
My first batch was, in fact, made exclusively with “white chocolate,” but I quickly realized that, without the crushed candy canes sprinkled over top, my treat seemed rather anemic looking (sort of like Kristen Stewart without makeup on). The solution? Dual drizzles of both dark and white chocolate!
This recipe is so easy to make, you might prefer to keep the process a secret so that everyone thinks you slaved for hours. That way, you can talk about how exhausted you are after concocting this gourmet treat (which is why you’ll be “too tired” to help clear up later–heh heh).
[In process–drizzled with chocolate and coconut butter, ready for the fridge.]
This popcorn is also really easy to eat, which makes it the perfect snack to set out in a big bowl on the counter throughout the holidays. Then you can pluck a handful as you pass by the kitchen to go sip nog by the fireplace, munch while you watch It’s A Wonderful Life, take along when you sneak upstairs to wrap gifts, or nibble when you head back to the kitchen to roast that tofurkey. Either way, it’s a delectable, festive snack.
Stay tuned: next time, I serve up TWO fantabulous appetizers for your holiday festivities!
Print This!
Super Easy Chocolate-Peppermint Popcorn (with Corn-Free option) Popcorn is the quintessential snack food, and here it gets a holiday makeover dressed in dark and “white chocolate” with a peppermint infusion. Be sure to use organic corn to avoid any GMOs. If you prefer not to use corn at all, try out the method for a corn-free option in this recipe. 10 cups (2.5 L) popped organic popcorn 2 ounces (55 g) unsweetened good-quality chocolate, melted (see note) 30-40 drops pure vanilla or peppermint stevia, to your taste (see note) 1/3 cup (80 ml) coconut butter (not oil), gently melted 20-25 drops peppermint stevia, to your taste Cover two large cookie sheets with parchment. Lay the popcorn on the sheets in a single layer (or as close as you can get). In a small bowl, combine the chocolate with the vanilla stevia. In another small bowl, mix together the coconut butter and peppermint stevia. Carefully drizzle the chocolate stevia across the top of the popcorn in thin, relatively parellel, lines. Next, drizzle the coconut butter in the opposite direction. Transfer the sheets to the refrigerator or freezer for the chocolate to set. Once the chocolate is set, break apart the popcorn into bite-sized segments. Store in a covered container at room temperature. Will keep up to 3 days. Makes 10 cups. NOTE 1: I found that the popcorn began to lose its crispness after a day or so. Storing it in the fridge helped to prevent this from happening. NOTE 2: If you are able to eat some sugar and want to simplify the preparation, use 2 ounces of semisweet chocolate chips instead of the unsweetened chocolate and vanilla stevia. Not ACD-compliant, obviously. Suitable for: ACD Stage 2 and beyond, sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, egg free, soy-free, nut free, yeast-free, vegan.
[Mum, you know that Elsie and I love popcorn, too, right? So why’d you have to go ruin it with that contra-canine chocolate??]
Never miss a recipe–or a comment from The Girls! Click here to subscribe to RickiHeller.com via email. You’ll get recipes as soon as they’re posted, plus cookbook updates and news about upcoming events! (“We love subscribers, Mum... almost as much as we love treats!”
[Disclosure: this post may contain affiliate links. If you buy using these links, at no cost to you, I will earn a small percentage of the sale.]Tuesday's edition of The New York Times featured a piece on Hillary Clinton's odd obsession with U.F.O.s, or, as she calls them, "unidentified aerial phenomenon" (the "latest nomenclature," the former secretary of state told Jimmy Kimmel in March).
Mrs. Clinton has vowed that barring any threats to national security, she would open up government files on the subject, a shift from President Obama, who typically dismisses the topic as a joke. Her position has elated U.F.O. enthusiasts, who have declared Mrs. Clinton the first "E.T. candidate." "Hillary has embraced this issue with an absolutely unprecedented level of interest in American politics," said Joseph G. Buchman, who has spent decades calling for government transparency about extraterrestrials. Mrs. Clinton, a cautious candidate who often bemoans being the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, has shown surprising ease plunging into the discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial beings. She has said in recent interviews that as president she would release information about Area 51, the remote Air Force base in Nevada believed by some to be a secret hub where the government stores classified information about aliens and U.F.O.s.
Clinton's interest in extraterrestrial activity does not seem to be politically motivated. Rather, her fixation seems to be home-brewed: Clinton confidante John Podesta is an avid fan of the television show "The X-Files," and has been pushing for the release of government files about martians for over a decade.
For more on Hillary's love of little green men, as well as a history of American alien sightings from the famous 1947 Roswell crash to today, see Charlotte Allen's piece in the May 9 issue of The Weekly Standard.Physicist Stephen Hawking sits on stage during an announcement of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with investor Yuri Milner in New York in 2016. (Lucas Jackson for Reuters)
As soon as physicist Stephen Hawking’s doctoral thesis became available online, thousands of people immediately downloaded it — so much demand that it crashed the website on which Cambridge University had posted it.
It’s not every half-century-old postgraduate scientific research paper that generates intense demand. But this one, in a win for scholarship, physics and knowledge-for-the-sheer-joy-of-knowledge, is sizzling.
“Properties of Expanding Universes,” which Hawking wrote when he was a 24-year-old graduate student in 1965, long before he became one of the world’s most famous scientists, is now available to all, with its faded typewriter keystrokes and scrawled handwriting.
[Stephen Hawking calls for a return to the moon as Earth’s clock runs out]
Or it will be.
“We have had a huge response to Professor Hawking’s decision to make his PhD thesis publicly available to download, with almost 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours,” Stuart Roberts, a spokesman for the University of Cambridge, said in an emailed statement.
“As a result, visitors to our open access site may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable.”
Instead of illumination, researchers, students and the simply curious who try to read it on the university’s Apollo open-access digital library are left with this:
This site can’t be reached
The connection was reset. Try: Checking the connection
Checking the proxy and the firewall
Running Windows Network Diagnostics
ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
A page from Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis. (Image courtesy of Cambridge University)
All Cambridge PhD students will now be required to submit an electronic copy of their doctoral work for preservation, and the university hopes to encourage many to allow that work to be open-access so that other scholars can build upon it.
They hope graduates will follow Hawking’s lead and allow access to their work, as well.
“Locking research away benefits no one because the only way to advance science and society is through the communication of ideas and knowledge,” said Arthur Smith of the Office of Scholarly Communication at the Cambridge University Library.
“I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet; to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos,” Hawking said in a written statement.
“Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.
“Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. It’s wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis — hopefully they won’t be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!”
The library had been getting many requests to read Hawking’s thesis but couldn’t fulfill them, Smith said, so it asked him whether he would be willing to make his work public.
Within a day, that page on the Apollo website had more than 400,000 views. As the university works to improve the page load time of the repository, which typically handles only a fraction of that traffic daily, Smith reflected, “It’s been a phenomenal 24 hours.”
What else are people clamoring to read?
There’s interest in everything from shuttlecocks to bubbles to manga. The library’s top 10 most-requested theses (after the runaway leader, Hawking’s) are:
Calculation of Unbalanced Magnetic Pull in Cage Induction Machines
Developing a comprehensive technology selection framework for practical application
Young British readers’ engagement with manga
Imperial succession in Tang China, 618-762
Aerodynamics and mechanics of shuttlecocks
Discourse processing during simultaneous interpreting: an expertise approach
Highly loaded compressors
Effects of tunnelling on buried pipes
Angles of friction of granular fills
Dynamics of bubbles, drops, and particles in motion in liquidsEkwee David Ethuro (born 31 December 1963) is a Kenyan politician. He was elected as the first Speaker of the modern Kenyan Senate on 28 March 2013.[1] From 1998 to 2013 he served as a Member of Parliament representing Turkana Central. He also served as the Assistant Minister for Planning and National Development from 1998 to 2002 under the government of President Daniel arap Moi. He was re-elected as Member of Parliament for Turkana Central in the 2007 general elections and steered the proceedings of the 10th Parliament in the position of acting Speaker of the House whenever the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker were absent. Contents
Early life, education and career Edit
Born on December 31, 1963, Ethuro attended secondary school at Lodwar High School from 1978 to 1981. He is an alumnus of The Alliance High School, holds an MSc degree from the Clemson University, and a BSc degree from the University of Nairobi. Before joining Parliament, Ethuro, an ardent soccer lover and member of the Bunge FC team, served as a deputy country representative for Oxfam and as a research scientist for the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute.
Political life Edit
Ethuro was first elected to Parliament as the Member for Turkana Central in the 1997 General Election, and has been re-elected three times, consecutively. He served as the Assistant Minister for Planning and National Development from 1998 to 2002 under President Moi's government, an appointment that came immediately after his first election to Parliament. Apart from the acting Speaker’s position, Ethuro featured in critical Parliamentary Select Committees of the House, top among them the Committees on the Constitution, the Budget Committee, and the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) Committee. He was among key members of Parliament that actively and successfully mid-wifed the Constitution, and served as a member of the Constitution Implementation Oversight Committee. He has served as the chairperson of the parliamentary committee on CDF for two terms of Parliament from 2002 to 2012. Ethuro played an active role in the Amani Forum — a Great Lakes regional parliamentary peace initiative that mobilised MPs and involved them in peace forums following the 2007 post-election violence and stalemate that came about from the presidential election result, which was disputed by ODM. As the chairman of the forum, and with the facilitation of Parliament, he convened an urgent meeting of MPs and dispatched various teams to the grassroots to preach peace, an initiative that contributed to calming down the political temperatures at the time. He has also served as a member of the Procedures Committee, which deals with the Standing Orders of Parliament.[2]
Baragoi Massacre Edit
In 2012, Ethuro and three other members of parliament from Turkana county were summoned by the CID director to shed some light on what they knew about the murder of 41 police officers in Suguta Valley.[3] Along with Turkana South MP Josephat Nanok, Ekwe Ethuro was charged with incitement to violence, becoming the second set of leaders to be put in the dock over the Baragoi killings. They appeared before chief magistrate Waweru Kiarie but did not plead to the charge, claiming it was a violation of their rights and an abuse of the judicial system. The two MPs were released on a cash bail awaiting a ruling on whether to refer the matter to the High Court.[4] The court later dismissed the incitement case against the two Members of Parliament. Chief magistrate Waweru Kiarie ruled that the charges preferred against Turkana South MP Josphat Nanok and his Turkana Central counterpart David Ekwe Ethuro were defective. Through lawyers Katwa Kigen and Jotham Arwa, the legislators claimed that the charges raised constitutional issues and asked the magistrate to suspend the plea and refer the matter to the High Court for interpretation.[5]
Speaker of the Senate Edit
The Jubilee coalition won a majority in the Senate during the 2013 general elections, with 30 seats. During his victory speech, Ethuro promised to uphold the rule of law and offer stewardship leadership. He also paid tribute to the pioneer Senators of post-independence, promising to look up to them for inspiration, guidance and advice. Ethuro was unanimously chosen by the Jubilee coalition as their nominee for Speaker after former Speaker of Parliament Francis ole Kaparo stepped down in his favour. Ethuro won the elections for Speaker of the Senate with the backing of the Jubilee coalition, managing 38 votes against CORD's Farah Maalim's 29 votes in the second round of voting. In the first round of voting, Ethuro garnered 35 votes, which was less than the two-thirds needed for a win, while Farah got 31 votes, Omondi had one vote and there was one spoilt vote.[6] On 31st August 2017 Kenneth Lusaka who had lost the Bungoma county gubernatorial race (and was until then the incumbent governor) was elected speaker of the Senate. Lusaka received 42 to NASA candidate Farah Maalim 25 votes, while Ethuro received only two votes.[7] This effectively put an end to Ethuro's term as senate speaker.Luis Suárez says he is "happy to stay" at Liverpool and wants to fire the club into the Champions League.
The striker had been determined to leave Anfield in the summer, with Liverpool rejecting a £40m plus £1 offer from Arsenal.
However, having scored another four goals against Norwich City in Wednesday's 5-1 rout to take his season's tally to 13, Suárez says he is only concentrating on helping the club finish in the top four.
"I think we can achieve what we set out to do," the Uruguayan, who became the first Premier League player to score three hat-tricks against the same side, told Marca when asked about Liverpool's Champions League chances. "My aim is just to help make the team better. My job is just to score the goals that mean we keep winning games and get as high in the table as possible.
"I am happy to be in the Premier League, the best league there is. I am happy here and I will stay. I don't know about challenging for the title, but we want to be as high up in the table as possible and do as well as we can. I think we can achieve our target."Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
BIRMINGHAM is facing a ‘tsunami of child sexual exploitation’ with reports that gang members are using TASERS on schoolgirl rape victims, a councillor claims.
Des Flood backed fears that schools and parents are being kept in the dark about the full dangers their children face from predatory paedophiles in the south of the city.
The Birmingham Mail revealed earlier this week how one suspected gang member was arrested for three schoolgirl rapes, but bailed each time.
Councillor Flood criticised Birmingham City Council’s handling of child sexual exploitation during a full council meeting last week
He had directed his statement to former Lord Mayor Carl Rice, who has just been handed Cabinet responsibility for children, schools and families.
“I am worried there is a tsunami of child sexual exploitation waiting to explode across this city,” said the Conservative councillor, who represents the Bartley Green ward.
“Young people, especially girls, are being sexually exploited on a daily basis. Some of this sexual exploitation is clearly linked to gangs.
“Schools are a vital part of our eyes and ears in the local community, on the ground, to identify vulnerable young people, especially in terms of concerns about child sexual exploitation.
“I know of cases whereby local schools in our community have done their duty and referred serious cases of child sexual exploitation about pupils to children’s services.
"But these schools nor their parents and carers have been invited to multi-agency child sexual exploitation meetings.”
He told Councillor Rice that the situation was a ‘disgrace’ and added: “Can you please ensure that no further child sexual exploitation meetings take place in this city which involve school pupils without the schools and, indeed, parents and carers invited to be an equal partner at the table?
“I still believe there is a serious failing in sharing information amongst agencies, especially with regards to children’s services."
Previous Birmingham Mail investigations have revealed how suspected gang members had allegedly filmed child sex attacks on their phones.
Councillor Flood told the meeting he had heard from residents other appalling claims which had never been included in official children’s services reports.
“I know of reports where residents have reported that young girls have been tasered and gang-raped,” he said.
“This information appears to have been diluted and not shared in reports.
“I know of one young girl who has had three social workers within the space of two months, two within the same month.
“I believe there are serious gaps that need to be closed, that vulnerable young people in this city, especially girls, are falling through the gaps.
“Is there an institutionalised attitude in children’s services to keep a lid on sharing information and therefore diluting the seriousness of child sexual exploitation against vulnerable children in our city?
”Newly appointed children, schools and families chief Councillor Rice responded that he had only been in post “half an hour” but pledged to take up the issue raised “to ensure that everybody who has a role in tackling CSE is heard loud and clear.”
He denied, however, that parents and schools were being kept in the dark about CSE.
“I strongly suggest that no-one working in the city council, especially children’s services, will deny any information that will lead to the prevention and prosecution of those evil characters who prey on vulnerable young people,” he said.
“If we are going to effectively work to tackle not just child sexual exploitation in this great city, particularly amongst the most vulnerable, the city council alone cannot hope to tackle a city of a million people.
"Partnership work is what has brought children’s services back from the brink of special measures.
“Schools, police, all agencies have a role in ensuring the safety of this city’s most vulnerable.”
Earlier this week, the Birmingham Mail reported how Councillor Debbie Clancy, Conservative lead for a Family Friendly City, accused the authority of ‘refusing’ to alert parents to the menace of gang members involved in CSE.
“I am horrified that schools and the council are not passing any information that could help protect children on to parents,” she said.
“If this information can help save just one extra child from the horrors of CSE then we have a moral duty to ensure parents are informed.”
The Mail told earlier this year how three new gangs had emerged in the south of the city – the Frankley Killers and the 247365 and 61 groups.
A gangs drugs war has contributed to a rise in gun and knife crime, leaving some communities terrorised.
The city council and West Midlands Police have been tackling child sexual exploitation, including the targeting suspected offenders and multi-agency awareness campaigns.
But hundreds of vulnerable children are still officially at risk of CSE in the city and across the West Midlands.
When the Birmingham Mail contacted Councillor Flood for comment, he said: “As a parent and a grandparent, I expect the best service and support for my children. Children's Services need to treat and support children as if they were their own children.
"They need to ask themselves, if they were the parent or carer, what service would they expect to receive for their child?
"Children's services should practise what they preach - and 'do with, not to'children and their families."
WHAT THE COUNCIL SAID: CLLR RICE STATEMENT
Cllr Carl Rice, cabinet member for children, families and schools: “This city council has zero tolerance of child sexual exploitation. We are doing a huge amount of work with partners to tackle this crime and to raise awareness among young people and families about how to spot the signs of exploitation and abuse.
“While I understand this is a very emotive issue and we all want to help in whatever way we can, everything we do must always be in the best interests of our children. This often means that the best thing to do is work in a targeted way, supporting individual children and families, rather than issue ‘general warnings’.
“Along with colleagues at West Midlands Police, we are aware of the concerns about gangs, sexual assaults and the potential link to CSE in South Birmingham and as a partnership we have been actively working together to safely address these.
“This will of course raise anxieties for parents, so there is a need to handle the situation sensitively. The decision has been taken not to issue a ‘general warning’ to parents but rather to support agencies through their designated safeguarding leads working with those individual children effected.
“We have via the Education Safeguarding Team ensured there is a coordinated, clear procedure for dealing with any enquiries from parents. This is in an attempt to ensure there is a consistent response across the schools in the area.
“In the south of the city there has been evidence of emerging gang activity, where sadly allegations of sexual exploitation of younger children by older children have been a feature.
“Together with the police, we have jointly investigated and responded to each child where a disclosure or allegation has been made. All the agencies working with vulnerable children have been tasked to support as appropriate the children involved.
“As more information comes to light so children’s social care, education and police will continue to work together to ensure that the needs of children who may be at risk of exploitation through CSE or gang affiliation are being safeguarded.
“Currently there are a number of police investigations open in response to these concerns. We have held a number of complex strategy meetings (as we always do in these situations) around this situation and will continue to work with our partners to agree strategies to disrupt, apprehend and support the children involved. The progress and outcome of these investigations is always incorporated into the planning for the children. As police investigations are ongoing, some of the measures being taken to disrupt activity, including possible legal action, remain confidential.
“For all schools, the safeguarding briefings and conferences provide current information and hands-on support for Designated Safeguarding Leads (including how to manage sexting).”Dean Lombardi is in a better place. The veteran hockey man needed time to decompress and do some soul-searching in the wake of his firing last April by the Los Angeles Kings after 11 years as GM. He has re-surfaced as a consultant/advisor to his old pal Ron Hextall in Philadelphia and is feeling re-energized (it’s his second tour of duty with the Flyers after also working for them after being let go as San Jose Sharks GM in 2003). After months of nagging him, Lombardi finally agreed to an interview with me this past Friday.
LEBRUN: Dean, thanks for taking the time. Hockey fans haven’t heard a whole lot from you since you left L.A. Perhaps you can recap what you’ve been up to since then?
LOMBARDI: Well, to make it simple, it takes time to regroup. Even though you see what’s happening, still when you’ve spent 12 years in a place, it takes an emotional toll. But then eventually you get your thoughts together, what you like to do, and you pick yourself up and...0 of 12
With just 17 goals scored across nine fixtures so far this Premier League weekend, the same kind of raptured excitement hasn’t exactly gripped the division as it did in the opening encounters.
That being said, with Manchester United playing host to Chelsea on Monday evening, the chance for Week 2 salvation is certainly there.
Aside from Cardiff City’s shocking 3-2 triumph over Manchester City and Fulham’s 3-1 loss at the hands of Arsenal, no other game managed to produce more than three goals, with five clashes having just one goal or less.
However, that doesn’t mean that the English top flight didn’t still produce its customary sample of Europe’s finest talents, the highlights of whom have been assembled into a neat 4-2-3-1 formation ahead.
Statistics are courtesy of WhoScored and Squawka.By
UCSB Arts & Lectures presents An Evening with Michael Lewis, acclaimed author of the mega best-sellers Moneyball, The Big Short and The Blind Side, Wednesday, April 4 at 8 PM at UCSB Campbell Hall.
He’ll be featured in conversation with Kai Ryssdal, host of American Public Media’s award-winning radio show, Marketplace.
A shrewd observer of politics, finance and the American scene, renowned author Michael Lewis combines keen insight with his signature wit, making him one of today’s foremost social commentators. Recent Hollywood flicks, Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, and The Blind Side, were adapted from his popular books probing professional sports. A darkly humorous chronicler of the financial meltdown and the era leading up to it, his books include The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine and, most recently, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World.
Based on articles Lewis wrote for Vanity Fair regarding the global debt crisis in Greece, Iceland and Germany, Boomerang (2011) captures the nonsensical madness that spread across both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade, as individuals, institutions and entire nations mindlessly embraced instant gratification over long-term planning. The Big Short (2010) is a razor-sharp analysis of how the event that was considered impossible – the free fall of the U.S. economy – finally occurred and a look at the heroes and villains behind it.
Lewis first made a name for himself in 1989 with the New York Times best-seller Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street, an inside look at his career as a bond trader that author Tom Wolfe called “the funniest book on Wall Street I’ve ever read” and earned Lewis the label of “America’s poet laureate of capital” from the Los Angeles Times. It remains one of the signature books of the 1980s. He traversed that era’s get-rich-quick jungle with The Money Culture (1992); chronicled the 1996 presidential campaign in Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House; crafted a 20-week New York Times best-seller in 2001 with The New, New Thing (“The book that does for Silicon Valley what Liar’s Poker did for Wall Street”); and explored the Internet boom in Next: The Future Just Happened (2002).
Lewis’ 2003 best-seller, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of Major League Baseball, detailing the effect an innovative personnel approach had in allowing the low-budget Oakland Athletics to rank among baseball’s best. The 2011 film adaptation starring Brad Pitt holds the record for the largest grossing opening weekend for a baseball movie ever. In 2006, Lewis delved into the substructure of professional football with The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, telling the inspirational true story of Baltimore Raven Michael Oher. The 2009 film adaptation, starring Sandra Bullock (who won an Academy Award for her role as Leigh Anne Tuohy, the woman who helped the football player rise to success), broke the box office record for the biggest opening weekend of a sports film in history.
A native of New Orleans, Michael Lewis graduated from Princeton University with a degree in art history and earned a master’s at the London School of Economics. Prior to his career as an author, he worked with Salomon Brothers on Wall Street and in London. Lewis is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Slate and Bloomberg.
About Kai Ryssdal
Kai Ryssdal has been the host and senior editor of Marketplace, public radio’s program on business and the economy, since 2005. He joined American Public Media in 2001 as the host of Marketplace Morning Report. His contributions to public radio have earned him first-place awards from the Radio and Television News Directors Association and the Public Radio News Directors Association. He has also appeared on regional and national television, from SoCal Connected on KCET to Piers Morgan Tonight and John King, USA on CNN.These athletes should be fired!: Opposing view
President Trump (Photo11: Evan Vucci, AP)
In past years, I had a front-row seat on Sunday, Monday and Thursday nights in my living room, watching NFL football. I loved it! Last year, I attended the Super Bowl in Houston and saw the game of all games with a Tom Brady, come-from-behind victory. I am a football fan.
However, President Trump said what millions of Americans, including myself, feel. You may not like our president, but he doesn’t take a poll before he says what he believes. He doesn’t check with his “political correctness advisers” like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton did before making a statement. Donald J. Trump is a great leader and is earning my respect as president.
Trump marches to the beat of his own drum. That drumbeat is the same sound he listened to as a businessman, taking risks, borrowing money, creating jobs and making millions. The guy is nothing but remarkable. Do I like everything he tweets and does? No! Do I respect his leadership? Yes! He understands the heartbeat of America.
OUR VIEW:Donald Trump, divider in chief, tackles NFL
When millionaire athletes refuse to honor America and pay homage to the men and women who died for our freedom, and instead, choose to use their field of occupation to make a statement, then I can choose to turn the channel. I will not give my time or attention to spoiled-brat, millionaire athletes. Their kneeling or fist-raising might be acceptable in some arenas, but not in my living room.
The president was right; these athletes should be fired!
America is the best thing going. Nothing compares. Everybody wishes they were born here. Come on America, we don’t have to all agree all of the time, but let’s get behind this guy. None of the other 2016 presidential candidates would have said what a lot of us were thinking about the NFL. Yet, he doesn’t care about the fallout. He says it, and he moves on. Wouldn’t it be nice if Republicans and Democrats in Congress didn’t give us all the lip service and just did what they said they would do? America needs leadership. Donald J. Trump is our leader; let’s try to get behind him on every play.
Former congressman Jon L. Christensen, R-Neb., is president of Appo-G Government Relations.
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Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2wQfvixThe blue boy and back and wow it's an RPG finally! MegaMan 64 is by no means a perfect game but I will say for a comprehensive interesting long-play megaman story it is quite fabulous. Typically Mega Man is with his sister Roll, and in this case it's not Dr. Thomas Light but an engineer older man that I believe is Roll's grandpa. Megaman 64 is set in an uber cartoonish world reminiscent of those cheesy 80s cartoons and Japanimations that I was so fond of growing up on, so it's quite a delight. Most of the regular Megaman games have been fun; particularly Megaman X and other side-scrolling platformers, but usually they are high octane, easy to die, and sometimes frustrating affairs in which robot monsters are continually bombarding you and you have to find endless villains before Dr. Wily with silly names such as Starman, Breakman, Woodman, Electroman; well you get the picture. As a kid you don't mind so much how silly Dr. Wily's henchman are and it's quite a lot of fun to play even the basic side-scrolling actioneer. However what MegaMan 64 does in spades is throw into the mix a legend of zelda element with Final fantasy ideas like airships, Iron Man upgrades of technology and power suits, and 80s cartoon nostalgia and whips it up into a very long game, and not always satisfying,but does manage to create an immersive world that is I do believe navigating in. I happen to love this game because it has quite a bit of nods to old fashioned styles and sometimes the dungeon or legend of Zelda first person mazes can get a bit tedious searching for these things, but I do appreciate Mega Man franchise doing something different and creating a Waterworld, Indiana Jones, Legend of Zelda, 80s Japanimation cartoon, and of course MegaMan mish-mash. To me this game is not a smash hit, but certainly an interesting experiment of Megaman being an RPG for once.Share. Release Date Coming This Week. Release Date Coming This Week.
A PS4 bundle consisting of the next-gen console and the limited edition of Infamous: Second Son has been confirmed.
After the below box art was leaked online through retail listings, Sucker Punch co-founder Brian Fleming explained the accompanying release date was incorrect, and that the real one would be revealed soon.
@Dzelly_igr @SuckerPunchProd No, that's not the correct date. We will announce the date this week officially. — Brian Fleming (@brian_fleming) November 13, 2013
If you're looking for something to do while waiting for the bundle to be officially announced, you can find out what's in the Second Son Collector's Edition, or check out any of the other PlayStation 4 launch content below.
More Must-See PS4 Launch Content:
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Junior Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.Rallies set up all-American beach day
Walsh Jennings and May-Treanor come back twice to win. Ross and Kessy also surge to make final.
The comeback stories weren't limited to Walsh Jennings and May-Treanor, who will play the U.S. team of April Ross and Jennifer Kessy in the final Wednesday.
Strikingly, a third gold medal might not be out of the question for the U.S. tandem in its last tournament after 11 years together.
Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor came back twice from uniquely ominous places to pull out a 22-20, 22-20 victory in a women's Olympic beach volleyball semifinal match Tuesday against China's Xue Chen and Zhang Xi.
L |
Biblical style debt jubilee, Graeber says, concluding that no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.
Thanks to Tony Gosling for the Andy Wightman interview
This episode rebroadcasts content from episode 90.
We conclude the show with a radio adaptation of an Adam Curtis'documentary from his 1992 series entitled Pandora's Box tells the story successive political leaders were tempted to believe that 'the economy' was governed by the predictable laws of economics, and thatadvisers had discovered them and could use them to create a path to prosperity no matter what. Curtis unpeels multiple layers of deceit to reveal a familiar pattern of self-interest masquerading as altruism beneath a veneer of academic and intellectual respectability. Login Required)Half a million EU passports given away to eastern Europeans by Hungary which allow them to live in Britain
Law introduced in 2011 has allowed 550,000 non-EU residents to apply
Gave citizenship to r esidents of former Austro-Hungarian Empire
System also attracted those who have little emotional attachment
Allows people to escape to wealthier countries, including Germany
Passport giveaway: A law introduced in 2011 has allowed an extra 550,000 non-EU residents to apply for Hungarian nationality and, with it, the right to live anywhere in Europe
A little-known loophole has enabled half a million people from some of eastern Europe’s poorest countries to obtain Hungarian citizenship and, as a consequence, a European Union passport.
A law introduced in 2011 has allowed an extra 550,000 non-EU residents to apply for Hungarian nationality and, with it, the right to live anywhere in Europe – including Britain.
The ‘passport giveaway’ was intended to enable people whose ancestors lived in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire to claim citizenship.
But the system has also attracted applicants who admit they have little emotional attachment to Hungary and only tenuous ancestry.
For some people in eastern Europe’s poverty-stricken nations, the scheme presents a chance to escape to wealthier countries such as Britain, Germany and Switzerland.
Yesterday a report by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, John Vine, said the ‘European citizenship route’ was becoming ‘an increasingly important way into the UK for those whose origins lie outside the EEA (European Economic Area)’.
His report looked at more than 100 sample cases from the Home Office between April and September last year. It found that more than a third of Western European nationals applying for citizenship for their partner were born outside the EU.
The Hungarian passport giveaway is just one route. In neighbouring Serbia alone, 112,000 new passports were issued between 2011 and the end of March this year.
Thousands of Serbian residents are eligible for citizenship because the northern province of Vojvodina belonged to Austro-Hungary Empire until 1918 when Hungary – allied with Germany – lost the First World War and was forced to hand over two-thirds of its territory.
All applicants need is a basic command of the language and Hungarian ancestry – and for many the benefits of applying are obvious. The average salary in Serbia is £5,200 before tax, compared with £26,500 in Britain.
In the Serbian town of Subotica, on the Hungarian border – one of dozens of centres where applications are processed – more than 12,000 Serbians were granted Hungarian citizenship last year.
Hungary’s general consul in Subotica, Tamas Korsos, admitted many Serbian citizens applied for Hungarian citizenship merely ‘to travel more easily with a Hungarian passport’.
‘I do not condemn that in any way. Everyone looks after his own interests,’ he said.
Outside the consulate in Subotica earlier this year, the Mail interviewed several Serbian residents as they emerged with their yellow certificates declaring them Hungarian citizens.
Lorry driver Jozsef Szucs, 47, admitted he applied for dual nationality ‘so I can move to the UK’, where he will earn five times his £5,000-a-year salary.
Floodgates: A report by Her Majesty¿s Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, John Vine, said the 'European citizenship route¿' was becoming 'an increasingly important way into the UK for those whose origins lie outside the EEA (European Economic Area)'
Struggling to support his wife and 15-year-old daughter on his meagre wage, he trawled European recruitment websites and found ‘many jobs’ for HGV drivers in Britain.
‘England is a nice country and it will be a new challenge for me. I cannot make a good life for my family here,’ he said.
In the town centre, there is a large poster advertising an English language school with the motto, ‘Money is coming’.
Klara Agatics, 56, said her son moved to Warrington, Cheshire, to work in a factory last year after obtaining a Hungarian passport.
She said: ‘The [Hungarian] law is a very good thing. In a couple of years, I think there won’t be any borders – England, Serbia, Hungary, it won’t matter, you will just go where you can find a job.’
Applicants for Hungarian passports must prove that they have ancestors ‘who were Hungarian or lived on the territory of ex-Hungary and can prove it by death or birth certificates’.
However, the vague language requirement, which states simply that you ‘know the language’, is open to exploitation. There is no exam or standardised list of questions, so it is down to busy clerks in individual offices around Serbia and Hungary to assess the skills during a brief meeting.
The Home Office admitted it had no way of monitoring how many of the 500,000 new Hungarian citizens had made their way to Britain.
A spokesman said its EU migration figures did not include a breakdown of people’s country of origin.
Bulgaria and Romania have introduced similar laws to Hungary, offering national status to people living in non-EU states such as Moldova, Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine and Turkey.
£13 PROFIT FOR EVERY UK PASSPORT
Under fire: HM Passport Chief Executive Paul Pugh Ministers were accused of ‘profiting from the public’s hardship’ last night after it emerged the shambolic Passport Office is making £13 profit on every document issued.
MPs said that, instead of the Government raking in £73million in surplus every year, the money should be poured into tackling the backlog of 480,000 outstanding passport applications that is threatening to wreck family holidays.
The Passport Office was forced to admit a profit margin of more than 20 per cent under pressure from the Home Affairs Committee.
In figures sent to MPs, under-fire chief executive Paul Pugh said the average cost of processing each application was just £59.40 – compared with a standard price of £72.50 for a passport.
He also released statistics which revealed ministers and officials should have realised as early as January this year that the service was heading for a crisis as there were 552,192 applications compared with only 482,356 in January last year.
The chaos has led to a huge increase in staff overtime, on rates of up to £70 per hour – with almost £1million being spent in May alone.
Almost three quarters of countries will not accept UK passports that have been given 12-month extensions under plans to alleviate the backlog in applications, it has been revealed.
Home Secretary Theresa May last week announced that expat Britons who need to renew their passports would be given one-year extensions.
But now the Government has admitted only 50 countries have confirmed they will accept the extended passports, with the US, Australia and India not on the list.THE owner of the Rio de Janeiro club visited by missing Australian man Rye Hunt a day before his disappearance has described the Tasmanian’s “terrified” state of mind.
It comes as information about the club reveals the party atmosphere the 25-year-old Tasmanian would have experienced at the time.
A Facebook video of the club, Raizes da Lapa, shows sweaty crowds bumping, grinding and twerking against each other and alchohol being poured into revellers’ mouths.
Owner Bruno Mouta told the ABC Mr Hunt and his travelling companion, Mitch Sheppard, stayed at the club until closing time and he had kept a watch on the pair because, “I could see they were like, high and they were not thinking straight, you know”.
“They were under effect of a kind of drug, I don’t know which one,” he said.
“So, they started to see things and they thought everyone there was staring at them, that everyone there wanted to kill them.
“They were really terrified, especially the one who is missing.”
Yesterday, Brazilian police spokeswoman Elen Souta alleged Mr Hunt had sniffed the drug MDMA in powder form before his disappearance and had a “psychotic episode”.
Ms Souta said Mr Hunt and Mr Sheppard took the drug MDMA at their hostel, then went to a party at Mr Mouta’s club in Lapa, located in the centre of Rio.
At the party, they sniffed more MDMA and mixed it with vodka, police say.
Mr Mouta, along with security guards from the club, walked the pair back to their hostel and stayed with the pair until Mr Sheppard was “feeling better”.
Overnight the nightclub shared this video, Bumbum Granada, on their Facebook page.
Mr Hunt went missing on May 21, after he argued with Mr Sheppard over their next travel destination.
After Mr Hunt went missing, Mr Sheppard contacted Mr Mouta asking if he had seen his friend.
The texts read:
May 21
Bruno: Hey mate. Hope yous (sic) get better tonight. Take care! See you. Bruno, owner of the disco you came.
Mitch: Thanks so much for everything Bruno your a legend! We will swing past some time tonight and give you and your security guards a tip!! Thanks so much again.
May 24
Mitch:Hey Bruno sorry to disturb you!! Just a quick question! Have you seen my friend Rye at all?? The bloke I was with the other night? He has been missing for 3 days now! Hasn’t turned his phone on or logged into Facebook at all! Really starting to worry, just thought I would ask the question??
Bruno: No I did not seen him... since I left you guys at the hotel that night I didn’t see any of you. You told me that you were going to my disco again to give a tip to my security guards but you didn’t go but I didn’t know about your friend. If there is anything I can do to help, let me know. Good luck.
Mitch: Yeh I’m sorry my friend was freaking out and then he thought I was after him and trying to kill him! So then we seperated at the airport and I haven’t seen him since!! It’s okay Bruno thanks for everything, I guess I will just keep on looking.
Bruno: Wtf!!! Well, good luck anyway and let me know when you get some news.
Mitch: Thanks so much Bruno appreciate it.
Later...
Bruno: Hi there mate. Any news about your friend?
Mitch: Nothing yet mate! They got footage of him leaving the airport in a taxi and then they found the apartment he checked into! And they found most of his belongings but not him.
Mr Mouta said despite rumours the pair were kicked out of the club, they weren’t stirring trouble and seemed out of their depth at the time.
“I remember they told me that they were not drug users, but as they were in Brazil, they were partying, and, you know, they tried [drugs],” he told the ABC.
“But they really looked like they were not drug users.”
TIMELINE OF MISSING BACKPACKER
Mr Hunt went missing on May 21 after he argued with Mr Sheppard over their next travel destination, Bolivia.
The travellers engaged in a verbal stoush over the pair’s travel plans and Mr Hunt’s paranoia, and were at Galeao International Airport to book a flight to Bolivia.
Mr Sheppard apparently then suggested the pair leave Brazil — a month ahead of schedule — and travel to Bolivia.
Apparently Mr Hunt accused his 22-year-old friend of stealing his passport and trying to kill him.
Mr Hunt went to “cool off” after the May 21 disagreement but vanished after footage revealed he hopped a taxi at the airport instead of meeting his mate to catch a flight to Bolivia.
It was 2:30pm local time in Rio.
The travelling duo had agreed to meet after half-an-hour, but in a strange twist Mr Hunt chose a new direction.
“They hadn’t booked a flight; they went to the airport with the intention of buying a ticket and looked online for flights,” Mr Hunt’s sister, Romany Brodribb, told news.com.au.
But when a fight erupted between the pair over the destination, Mr Hunt stormed off and was never to be seen again.
“They had a disagreement. My brother, as much as I love him to absolute bits, if he gets a bit grumpy about something he needs a little time to cool off sometimes,” Ms Brodribb said.
“I believe the disagreement had something to do with Bolivia and when they should be going and what they should do when they get there.
“He and Mitch had been travelling for seven weeks. It was the first disagreement they’d had in that time.”
Ms Brodribb suspects the long-time friends had the disagreement, Mr Hunt “got into a grump”, and Mr Sheppard suggested the pair “cool off” before meeting up in half an hour.
“I suspect that Rye probably was grumpy with Mitch and has left the airport and jumped,” Ms Brodribb said.
After his disagreement with Mr Sheppard, CCTV footage captured Mr Hunt checking into a Copacabana apartment.
Mr Hunt’s family confirmed he checked into the room an hour after leaving the airport, at approximately 2:30pm.
Almost three hours later, at 6:20pm, he left the apartment and hadn’t been seen since the latest reports.
The 25-year-old bought some beer, CCTV footage shows, before leaving his room wearing thongs.
Authorities scoured Mr Hunt’s Copacabana apartment and found his laptop, backpack, a camera and numerous other personal items.
- Know more?youngma@news.com.auOn Sunday Immigraton Minister Peter Dutton confirmed he issued a Notice of Intention to Consider Refusal to the pop star who was convicted in 2009 of assaulting and threatening to kill his partner at the time, singer Rihanna. "Over the course of the weekend a lot of people started reaching out to us and raising the issue of the racist aspects of this campaign," Oosting said. "We have a migration system that unfairly targets people of colour and this is a system that we inadvertently fed into. We caused angst and grief and we are unreservedly apologising for that." Oosting said the apology was only about the visa aspects of the campaign. "I find Chris Brown abhorrent and it's really damaging to society that men who commit domestic violence are granted celebrity status. There are wide range of white Australian men who have committed acts of domestic violence who enjoy celebrity status."
GetUp previously praised the government's decision to deny Brown entry after they mounted a substantial campaign against the singer being allowed into the country. GetUp! campaigner Sally Rugg said the campaign wasn't just about Brown, but the "horrifying" number of men who have been convicted of violence against women but still retain high profile careers in the entertainment industry. "This announcement sends a strong signal to Australians that the Federal Government are willing to show strong leadership on gendered violence and that they are prepared to condemn violence against women," she said. Brown has 28 days to present his case for being allowed to enter Australia. Brown said on Wednesday he believed his tour would be a "wake-up call" and he wanted to teach young people about the danger of domestic violence.
"I would be more than grateful to come to Australia to raise awareness about domestic violence. I'm not the pink elephant in the room anymore," he tweeted. "My life mistakes should be a wake up call for everyone. Showing the world that mistakes don't define you. Trying to prevent spousal abuse. "The youth don't listen to parents nor do they listen to PSAs. The power that we have as entertainers can change lives," he said. Oosting said GetUp! will continue to lobby the Government over issues of domestic violence, particularly funding for frontline services such as womens refuges. It is the first time GetUp! have made such a major change to a campaign.
"As an organisation with a small staff base we are not always going to get it right and we have to be open to changing our approach and acknowledging where we got things wrong," he said.Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE FRAS FInstP (; born 15 July 1943) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, co-discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. She was credited with "one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century". The discovery was recognised by the award of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, but despite the fact that she was the first to observe the pulsars, Bell was excluded from the recipients of the prize.
The paper announcing the discovery of pulsars had five authors. Bell's thesis supervisor Antony Hewish was listed first, Bell second. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with the astronomer Martin Ryle. Many prominent astronomers criticised Bell's omission, including Sir Fred Hoyle. In 1977, Bell Burnell played down this controversy, saying, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them." The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in its press release announcing the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, cited Ryle and Hewish for their pioneering work in radio-astrophysics, with particular mention of Ryle's work on aperture-synthesis technique, and Hewish's decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.
Bell served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, as president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and as interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011.
In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. She gave the whole of the £2.3m prize money to help women, ethnic minority, and refugee students become physics researchers.
Education and early life [ edit ]
Jocelyn Bell, June 1967
Jocelyn Bell was born in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, to M. Allison and G. Philip Bell. Her father was an architect who had helped design the Armagh Planetarium, and during visits she was encouraged by the staff to pursue astronomy professionally. Young Jocelyn also discovered her father's books on astronomy.
She grew up in Lurgan and attended the Preparatory Department[a] of Lurgan College from 1948 to 1956, where she, like the other girls, was not permitted to study science until her parents (and others) protested against the school's policy. Previously, the girls' curriculum had included such subjects as cooking and cross-stitching rather than science.
She failed the eleven-plus exam and her parents sent her to The Mount School, a Quaker girls' boarding school in York, England. There she was favourably impressed by her physics teacher, Mr Tillott, and stated:
You do not have to learn lots and lots... of facts; you just learn a few key things, and... then you can apply and build and develop from those... He was a really good teacher and showed me, actually, how easy physics was.
Bell Burnell was the subject of the first part of the BBC Four three-part series Beautiful Minds, directed by Jacqui Farnham.
Career and research [ edit ]
She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy (physics), with honours, in 1965 and obtained a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, she attended New Hall, Cambridge, and worked with Hewish and others to construct[b] the Interplanetary Scintillation Array to study quasars, which had recently been discovered.[c]
In July 1967, she detected a bit of "scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star. This was later documented by the BBC Horizon series.
She worked at the University of Southampton between 1968 and 1973, University College London from 1974 to 82 and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (1982–91). From 1973 to 1987 she was a tutor, consultant, examiner, and lecturer for the Open University. In 1986, she became the project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. She was Professor of Physics at the Open University from 1991 to 2001. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University in the United States and Dean of Science at the University of Bath (2001–04), and President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004.
Bell Burnell is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Mansfield College. She was President of the Institute of Physics between 2008 and 2010. In February 2018 she was appointed Chancellor of the University of Dundee. In 2018, Bell Burnell visited Parkes, NSW, to deliver the keynote John Bolton lecture at the CWAS AstroFest event.
In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth three million dollars (£2.3 million), for her discovery of radio pulsars. The Special Prize, in contrast to the regular annual prize, is not restricted to recent discoveries. She donated all of the money "to fund women, under-represented ethnic minority and refugee students to become physics researchers", the funds to be administered by the Institute of Physics.
Nobel Prize controversy [ edit ]
That Bell did not receive recognition in the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics has been a point of controversy ever since. She helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array over two years and initially noticed the anomaly, sometimes reviewing as much as 96 feet (29 m) of paper data per night. Bell later claimed that she had to be persistent in reporting the anomaly in the face of scepticism from Hewish, who was initially insistent that it was due to interference and man-made. She spoke of meetings held by Hewish and Ryle to which she was not invited. In 1977, she commented on the issue:
First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!
Awards [ edit ]
Honours [ edit ]
Publications [ edit ]
Her publications[58] include:
Personal and non-academic life [ edit ]
Bell Burnell is house patron of Burnell House at Cambridge House Grammar School in Ballymena. She has campaigned to improve the status and number of women in professional and academic posts in the fields of physics and astronomy.
Quaker activities and beliefs [ edit ]
From her school days, she has been an active Quaker and served as Clerk to the sessions of Britain Yearly Meeting in 1995, 1996 and 1997. She delivered a Swarthmore Lecture under the title Broken for Life, at Yearly Meeting in Aberdeen on 1 August 1989, and was the plenary speaker at the US Friends General Conference Gathering in 2000.[citation needed] She spoke of her personal religious history and beliefs in an interview with Joan Bakewell in 2006.
Bell Burnell served on the Quaker Peace and Social Witness Testimonies Committee, which produced Engaging with the Quaker Testimonies: a Toolkit in February 2007. In 2013 she gave a James Backhouse Lecture which was published in a book entitled A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist Also Be Religious?, in which Burnell reflects about how cosmological knowledge can be related to what the Bible, Quakerism or Christian faith states.
Marriage [ edit ]
In 1968, soon after her discovery, Bell married Martin Burnell; the couple divorced in 1993 after separating in 1989. Her husband was a local government officer, and his career took them to various parts of Britain. She worked part-time for many years while raising her son, Gavin Burnell, who is a member of the condensed matter physics group at the University of Leeds.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ The Preparatory Department of Lurgan College closed in 2004, the college becoming a selective grammar school for ages 14–19. ^ "... upon entering the faculty, each student was issued a set of tools: a pair of pliers, a pair of long-nose pliers, a wire cutter, and a screwdriver...", said during a public lecture in Montreal during the 40 Years of Pulsars conference, 14 August 2007 ^ [ citation needed ] Interplanetary scintillation allows compact sources to be distinguished from extended ones.
Citations [ edit ]
Works cited [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
Coroniti, Ferdinand V.; Williams, Gary A. (2006). "Jocelyn Bell Burnell". In Byers, Nina; Williams, Gary. Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-82197-1.
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Audio [ edit ]
Text [ edit ]For years, it’s been the same old mantra: if you want to make property more affordable, build more homes. It’s a simple case of supply and demand, the construction industry tells us.
But not once in 40 years has an increase in the supply of new homes led to a fall in property prices here. Even at the high water mark of construction in 2006, when a record 92,000 homes were built, property prices rose by 14 per cent.
Although that was a credit-fuelled boom it illustrates an essential point about modern property markets – supply is not a driver of price.
In fact, the opposite is true. Supply tends to be led by price albeit after a lag, which is consistent with the idea that rising prices and rents make development more commercially viable.
This is the essential thrust of a recent paper in the Engineers Journal by Dublin architect and property expert Mel Reynolds.
Having studied the undulations of prices and rents over an extended period, he concludes that the Government’s plan to make housing more affordable, envisaged in its Rebuilding Ireland strategy, is destined to fail.
Not that it won’t boost supply, it just won’t produce affordable homes or those within the reach of average incomes.
This is because the standard supply and demand paradigm – produce more and the price will come down – doesn’t apply to property, Reynolds says.
Developer earnings
“The more expensive a banana gets the more likely someone is going to buy an apple, the more expensive a house gets the more likely someone is going to trade up or buy more of them.
“Property behaves like a luxury good. The more expensive it becomes the more desirable it becomes and the bigger the potential capital gains,” he says.
The Government’s plan to crank up housing supply to a target level of 25,000-30,000 units a year – it’s currently at about 15,000, though this figure is disputed – will deliver a greater choice of what Reynolds describes as “executive homes”.
By this, he means homes in the €350,000 plus bracket, ideal for professionals fleeing London in the wake of Brexit, but too costly for those on average incomes and outside any reasonable definition of “affordable housing”.
While there is no specific pricing level that equates to affordable housing, Reynolds suggests a maximum of €280,000 might be a fair estimate. The calculation is based on a two-income family earning €80,000 and qualifying for a mortgage, under the current rules, of €280,000.
Juxtapose this spending power with the average sales price for a home in Dún Laoghaire last year, which was €450,000 or the average rent paid, which was €2,200.
People might quibble with the use of Dún Laoghaire as a barometer, given it contains some of the city’s most exclusive addresses, but Reynolds says “Dún Laoghaire is where the rest of Dublin will be in two years”.
In any case a search on property website Daft.ie brings up very few new Dublin developments for sale for less than €300,000 and those that are available are mainly in west Dublin at significant commuting distances from the city centre.
Reynolds points to the Hines development in Cherrywood in south Dublin, one of the most high-profile schemes in the city, as a bellwether.
Based on current market values and inflation, he predicts typical two-bed apartments will probably be selling for upwards of €450,000 when they come on stream in 2018.
“These are not affordable homes.” His point is that “the private speculative build model” will not produce houses in Dublin for less than €300,000, given current land prices, construction costs and VAT.
This assertion is echoed by the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI) which last year put the cost of developing a typical three-bed semi-detached house in Dublin at €330,493, which allows for a reasonable developer’s profit margin.
Windfall profits
This was €36,000 more than a couple earning a combined salary of €74,000 can afford, after having saved a deposit of €35,000.
Assuming an inflation rate of 8 per cent, the sales price will have risen to €356,000 by the middle of this year and to €385,000 by the summer of 2018.
“If the Government is going to rely on the private market for its housing needs, it has to understand how the private market works and it’s naive to expect the private sector to deliver housing at or below cost,” Reynolds says.
While demand for housing is governed by a complex set of factors, including interest rates and household formation levels, supply is led by price. That’s why construction all but dried up during the crash and four years later we have acute housing crisis and a return to high levels of inflation.
A recent report by Savills suggested that for every 10 per cent increase in a home’s sale price, land values increase by 35 per cent, a scenario which has led to land hoarding.
“Pro-cyclical Government policy has generated extraordinary windfall profits to land-owners and there is little incentive to assume development risk and build-out sites,” Reynolds says.
“Land-hoarding is a market feature. It appears to be more profitable to wait, to sell or engage in speculative planning applications than build homes,” he says.
To get the private market to increase supply the price has to inflate and this will be facilitated by inflationary measures like the Government’s new help-to-buy scheme for first-time buyers.
One way of making homes more affordable while prices are increasing is by reducing interest rates and allowing buyers take on bigger mortgages.
Drop interest rates
“If you dropped interest rates by one per cent you would straight away kick-start supply, particularly in areas where the construction costs are high,” Reynolds says.
This isn’t as forlorn an option as it seems given the State owns most of the banking sector here and interest rates are already well above the euro area average.
Ultimately the best way to square the affordability circle once and for all, Reynolds says, is for the State to step in and build affordable housing on large scale similar to projects undertaken in the early 1970s.
He cites University College Cork economist and chairman of the Fiscal Advisory Council Séamus Coffey, who has highlighted that there is no EU regulation precluding the State from borrowing to build social housing.
“The Government can go off and borrow at 1 per cent and build as much affordable housing as it wants.”
The average cost of a local authority-procured three-bed semi was recently confirmed by Minister for Housing Simon Coveney at €180,000.
“This could be rented out at less than €800 a month, significantly undercutting current market rents, at no loss to the State,” says Reynolds.
Councils also have the capacity to zone large areas of land for themselves as well as increase housing densities in certain areas. “When local authorities assume the role of developer they can provide affordable rentals and affordable housing at big market discounts,” he says.
Whether the Government has the appetite for this is another question.UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay went to the Maldives, and there she said some things. She said some things relevant to human rights.
In an address delivered in parliament last Thursday, Pillay said the practice of flogging women found guilty of extra-marital sex “constitutes one of the most inhumane and degrading forms of violence against women, and should have no place in the legal framework of a democratic country.” The UN human rights chief called for a public debate “on this issue of major concern.” In a press conference later in the day, Pillay called on the judiciary and the executive to issue a moratorium on flogging.
Well yes. Commissioners for human rights can be expected to say things like that, unless they are merely window-dressing commissioners for human rights. Flogging women for extra-marital sex does strike contemporary supporters of human rights as incompatible with respect for human rights. Flogging itself, flogging as such, is seen by people like that as incompatible with respect for human rights, and extra-marital sex is seen as a private concern as opposed to a state concern.
On article 9(d) of the constitution, which states “a non-Muslim may not become a citizen of the Maldives,” Pillay said the provision was “discriminatory and does not comply with international standards.”
There again – mandatory religion is widely considered incompatible with respect for human rights. So far so unsurprising. But the top people in the Maldives didn’t see it that way.
Statements by visiting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay calling for a moratorium on flogging as a punishment for fornication and criticising the Muslim-only clause for citizenship in the Maldivian constitution have been widely condemned by religious NGOs, public officials and political parties. … Shortly after Pillay’s speech in parliament, Islamic Minister Dr Abdul Majeed Abdul Bari told local media that “a tenet of Islam cannot be changed” and flogging was a hudud punishment prescribed in the Quran (24:2) and “revealed down to us from seven heavens.” Bari noted that article 10 of the constitution established Islam as “the basis of all the laws of the Maldives” and prohibited the enactment of any law “contrary to any tenet of Islam,” adding that the Maldives has acceded to international conventions with reservations on religious matters such as marriage equality. In his Friday prayer sermon the following day, Bari asserted that “no international institution or foreign nation” had the right to challenge the practice of Islam and adherence to its tenets in the Maldives.
And there you go – as usual. It’s in the Quran; it can’t be changed; it was revealed. Islam is the basis of all the laws; any law contrary to any tenet of Islam is prohibited; the end. Allah said we can flog women if we want to (and that we, meaning men, are the only ones who count), so we’re going to, so shut up and go back to UNistan where you belong. By the way if you were a Maldivian we could flog you, so ha.
Meanwhile, the religious conservative Adhaalath Party issued a statement on Thursday contending that tenets of Islam and the principles of Shariah were not subject to modification or change through public debate or democratic processes. Adhaalath Party suggested that senior government officials invited a foreign dignitary to make statements that they supported but were “hesitant to say in public.” The party called on President Mohamed Nasheed to condemn Pillay’s statements “at least to show to the people that there is no irreligious agenda of President Nasheed and senior government officials behind this.” The Adhaalath statement also criticised Speaker Abdulla Shahid and MPs in attendance on Thursday for neither informing Pillay that she “could not make such statements” nor making any attempt to stop her or object to the remarks.
Funny that the Adhaalath Party doesn’t seem to have read the memo about religion not being literal and being all about compassion.Cristiane Justino will fight in the UFC octagon for the second time while Renan Barao is set to face off with Phillipe Nover according to a report from Brazilian site UOL.
According to the report, Justino (16-1 MMA, 1-0 UFC) will battle Lina Akhtar Lansberg (6-1 MMA, 0-0 UFC) in the main event of UFC Fight Night 95. The bout would take place at 140 pounds, the second time Justino has fought at the catchweight in the UFC.
UFC Fight Night 95 takes place Sept. 24 at Nilson Nelson Gymnasium in the Brazilian capital of Brasilia. The card airs on FS1 following early prelims on UFC Fight Pass.
When reached for comment, Lansberg told MMAjunkie the bout is not yet official and she expects to hear more in the coming weeks.
Justino stopped Leslie Smith by TKO in just 81 seconds at UFC 198. The Invicta featherweight champ has since engaged in a bit of back and forth with the UFC over her place in the sport.
Lansberg, known as the “Elbow Princess,” is riding a six-fight winning streak since losing her professional debut. She has picked up four knockouts in her six professional victories.
Nover (11-6-1 MMA, 1-4 UFC) is on his second UFC stint. After taking a split decision over Yui Chul Nam at UFC Fight Night 66, Nover lost by split call to Zubaira Tukhugov in his most recent bout at UFC Fight Night 80.
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the City Hall’s banquet room to hear the City Council’s plan.
“We would like to have fewer smokers, a lower incidence of cannabis psychosis and less crime,” the deputy mayor for social affairs, Mikkel Warming (Enhedslisten), told the audience. “But criminalising cannabis doesn’t work. It’s here to stay. Legalisation won’t be a miracle cure, but it will open up solutions to some of the problems that cannabis creates.”
The conflict is this. One the one hand, the city wants to take the one billion kroner cannabis trade out of the hands of criminals. But the fear is that legalisation could increase consumption. Given the documented connections between mental illness and cannabis use, more users could mean higher rate of mental health problems in Copenhagen.
So the question becomes whether it is possible to decriminalise cannabis while also minimising the number of people who use it.
One of the primary goals of the trial is to take the cannabis trade out of the hands of criminals. This would require offering a competitive product at competitive prices from locations in the city that are as accessible as the illegal market.
The city is open to both external and domestic suppliers for its product, which would most likely be sold through an established chain of stores, such as pharmacies. This would be easier to implement during a trial period as having to construct new specialist outlets or expecting the private sector to step up would likely take much longer to get running.
The city has not settled on a final model, however, nor has it established a concrete plan for preventing cannabis tourism and ensuring that vulnerable users get the help they need.
Let the state control it
There was plenty of advice to be heard from experts today, however. Among them was Willy Pedersen, a professor of sociology at the University of Oslo. He argued that that the best way to legalise cannabis, while also minimising its use, would be to establish state-run dispensaries similar to the Swedish and Norwegian alcohol monopolies.
Pedersen argued that if weren’t state controlled, the private sector would seek to use ‘cannabis culture’ to encourage more people to consume cannabis and boost its profits.
“What we all want is a reduced consumption of cannabis,” Pedersen told The Copenhagen Post. “But the cannabis culture romanticises cannabis use and encourages people to consume it, while privatised sale creates an incentive for businesses to sell as much product as possible.”
But if pot were in the hands of the state, would crime really be reduced? This is one of the major goals of the trial as Copenhagen's increase in gun crime has been attributed to gangs fighting over a share in the highly lucrative illegal cannabis trade.
Speaking to the conference, Kim Møller from the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research at Aarhus University said that while crime may drop in the long-term after decriminalisation, in the short-term the gangs would simply move to fighting over other sources of income.
Mental health issues
The connection between mental health problems and cannabis use is seen by many as the most troubling aspect of legalising cannabis. The city argues, however, that a legal network of cannabis outlets would provide new points of contact between social workers and at-risk users. Their hope is that more users would find treatment if legalisation were to be enacted.
Dan Orbe from the council’s anonymous drug counselling organisation, U-Turn, argued that the city needed to recognise that it might need to set aside more funding for counselling and preventative programmes. Orbe also added that the city would probably have to completely overhaul its current strategy for preventing drug use among young people.
Laws and conventions
Gearing the police and social services to deal with changes brought about by legal cannabis may not be the most pressing problem facing the city, however. Denmark is a signatory of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs that controls the production and sale of cannabis.
Not wanting to break their commitment to the convention, the Netherlands’ novel solution was to make cannabis illegal but not punishable under certain conditions. This non-enforcement policy makes consumption in coffee shops legal, even though the coffee shops still have to source their products from illegal sources.
The Copenhagen Model will challenge the convention more directly, however, by decriminalising the possession and sale of cannabis. This approach more closely follow the strategy of the US state of Washington, where in November 2012, voters passed a law that legalised the possession and cultivation of cannabis.
Seattle's city attorney, Peter Holmes, explained that the initiative passed by promising voters that cannabis would be heavily taxed and regulated.
Cannabis possession and cultivation in the United States is still highly illegal under federal law, however, meaning that the state of Washington – along with Colorado, which also passed legalisation in November – has placed itself in a tricky position with Washington, DC.
But Holmes argues that there is no option left except legalising cannabis.
“The prohibition of cannabis has not achieved its stated objectives because the demand is too strong,” Holmes told The Copenhagen Post, adding that pressure from the US to maintain Draconian legislation on cannabis may be a reason why the Danish government has repeatedly turned down the city’s attempts to legalise the drug, most recently last year.
But as more countries move to legalise the drug, Holmes argues that the US will have to accept that prohibition has not worked
“The world hasn’t ended [after cannabis was legalised]. What we are witnessing now is just the crack in the dyke and more states will soon follow our lead with legalisation," he said. "The genie is out of the bottle.”
Holmes was careful to state that Copenhagen needed to find its own solution, however, and that what works in Seattle may not work in Copenhagen.
“The conference has confirmed that we need to find our own plan for Copenhagen,” Mayor Frank Jensen (Socialdemokraterne) said in his closing statements. “We need to end a failed policy and take responsibility. City Hall now needs to take the lead.”Among the great powers vying for influence in post-Soviet Central Asia, China has been the quietest, most systematic, and most dangerous. With its booming economy, growing population, and relentless need for energy, China needs Central Asia for its future energy security, as well as for expanded trade and for securing its restive Xinjiang Province.
Unlike the United States (and, to some extent, Russia), China never makes political demands and never criticizes the authoritarian regimes of the region. Bejing never discloses its political goals or positions.
While Obama and Putin react to events in Central Asian countries like the April revolution in Kyrgyzstan, China keeps silent, staying aloof and never losing sight of its real goals and tasks. It keeps doggedly following its policy of offering the poor nations of the region soft loans in exchange for access to raw materials.
Some of the U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks have shed light on China's approach to Central Asia. According to one cable, U.S. officials suspected China of offering Kyrgyzstan $3 billion to shut down the U.S. air base in the country. The February 13, 2009, cable describes a meeting between U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Tatiana Gfoeller and Chinese Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Zhang Yannian in which Gfoeller asked about the purported $3 billion offer. "Zhang temporarily lost the ability to speak Russian and began sputtering in Chinese to the silent aide diligently taking notes right behind him," the cable reads.
'All About Money'
When Gfoeller told Zhang that Washington was considering negotiating with Bishkek to keep the base open, he offered some "personal advice." "This is all about money," he said. He added that his Kyrgyz sources told him they needed $150 million. Gfoeller said the United States already provides that amount in assistance to Kyrgyzstan each year, and Zhang offered a simpler approach.
"Just give them $150 million in cash" each year and "you will have the base forever."
Zhang's words capture Chinese policies in Central Asia perfectly. It is all about money, not democracy or development or transparency.
Needless to say, this attitude rings a bell with the autocratic presidents of Central Asia. They noted, for instance, that unlike the United States, China gave its full support to Uzbek President Islam Karimov during the 2005 bloodshed in Andijon. Karimov's first foreign visit following the crackdown was to China, a trip that helped the Uzbek government face down mounting international pressure for an independent inquiry into Andijon.
The cooling of relations between Uzbekistan and the United States in 2004-05 gave a powerful push to Tashkent's economic relations with China. The leaders of the two countries met twice in 2005 (May in Beijing and July in Astana). In 2005 alone, China signed 20 investment agreements, credit contracts, and other deals for a total sum of about $2 billion.
Last June, Chinese President Hu Jintao agreed to a further $2 billion in Chinese investment in Uzbekistan. The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has agreed in principle to purchase 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from Uzbekneftegaz.
Such policies have secured the support of Central Asian autocrats for Chinese policies on the country's ethnic Uyghur minority. The Uyghurs are a Muslim group whose traditional home spans China's Xinjiang Province and three Central Asian countries. According to official statistics, some 210,000 Uyghurs live in Kazakhstan, 46,000 in Uzbekistan, and about 30,000 in Kyrgyzstan.
The Uyghurs of Central Asia have strong ties with those living in China, who have been struggling for greater autonomy for decades. Nonetheless, when Chinese security forces launched a brutal crackdown on Uyghur activists in the provincial capital of Urumqi in July 2009, an official statement of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (or SCO, which includes Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) expressed sympathy for the victims but emphasized that Urumqi was a domestic matter for China.
Beijing has effectively neutralized the Uyghur bid to gain support from the countries of Central Asia or the SCO as a whole.
Power Hungry
Central Asia is also crucial to China's drive for energy security. In 2004, China surpassed Japan to become the world's second-largest consumer of energy. Then in 2010 a United Nations agency reported that China had outstripped the United States to become the global leader.
To cope with this growing demand, China has pursued a wily strategy of distributing soft loans to the poor (and poorly governed) Central Asian states in exchange for access to key raw materials. In 2009, Kazakhstan got $10 billion from China to boost its flagging economy. At the same time, construction was completed on the Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline. Initially, the nearly 3,000-kilometer pipeline will carry 200,000 barrels a day, but by next year, that figure is expected to double.
With substantial resources of oil, gas, coal, iron ore, zinc, copper, titanium, aluminum, silver, and gold, Kazakhstan is a particularly important relationship for China. Kazakh Oil and Gas Minister Sauata Mynbaeva recently announced that some 15 majority Chinese (50 to 100 percent) companies are active in Kazakhstan. The number of companies with smaller Chinese stakes is higher.
These companies extract about 80 million tons of Kazakh oil each year, of which an estimated 25 million tons is sent to China. Increasingly, China is become a strong rival to Russia in the energy sectors of Central Asian countries, while India and Japan have lagged behind. Already, China has a bigger stake in the Kazakh energy sector than Russia does. In 2009, China imported 18 million tons of Kazakh oil, while Russian firms (lead by LUKoil) extracted just 6.4 million tons.
The picture is similar in energy-rich Turkmenistan. There, China seeks to monopolize Turkmen natural-gas exports. According to Chinese figures, China will need 200 billion cubic meters of gas annually by 2020, while its own domestic production will be about 120 billion cubic meters.
Beijing expects that by then Turkmenistan will be able to make up the shortfall. In the Soviet period, Turkmenistan produced up to 90 billion cubic meters annually and exported about 70 billion.
Beijing has already signed contracts to purchase up to 40 billion cubic meters of Turkmen gas annually. In December 2009, the first branch of the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan-Kazakhstan gas pipeline, with a throughput of 13 billion cubic meters a year, came on line. The second branch will be completed this year and the pipeline's total annual capacity will be 60 billion cubic meters.
In 2009, China gave Turkmenistan a $3 billion loan to develop the South Yolotan gas deposit. Last year, China approved an additional $4 billion to complete the first stage of this project.
Beijing sees Kyrgyzstan as a strategic base for trade expansion across Central Asia and the former Soviet space. Bishkek, for its part, seeks to maximize its profits from re-exporting Chinese goods. That trade is worth an estimated $250 million each year for Kyrgyzstan.
But the thing that concerns the populations of Central Asia most is the number of growing Chinese communities in each country. China always brings its own people, its own workers, to projects in Central Asia. According to best estimates more than 300,000 Chinese live in Kazakhstan now; there are about 200,000 in Kyrgyzstan, and about 150,000 in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan taken together. The growing Chinese presence in those countries often creates tensions with the local populations and creates suspicions about Beijing's intentions.
"We have to be very careful," a reader recently wrote on the website of RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service. "There is a danger that we will become a province of China."
Cholpon Orozobekova is a Kyrgyz journalist based in Geneva. She has worked for BBC radio, RFE/RL, IWPR, and as editor in chief of independent newspaper "De Facto." The views expressed in this commentary are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RLMayor Rob Ford’s executive committee meeting marks a crucial point in the debate over a downtown casino-resort and conference centre where the public has a chance to weigh in — but all who registered to speak may not get the chance.
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A motion will be presented by Ford that would avoid the kind of deputation marathon seen at the 2012 budget meetings by limiting speaking time to three minutes and ending public deputations Monday at 8 p.m. sharp. The committee will reconvene Tuesday to question staff on the report before deciding whether to put the issue on hold or endorse it to city council. On mobile? Click here to follow our live blog
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The meeting concerns city manager Joe Pennachetti’s report, which lists 43 conditions council could impose on the potential deal. Chief among the conditions is a call for at least $100 million in hosting fees. The report also specifies that the facility, envisioned as a convention centre combined with a casino resort, would generate about 10,000 net new jobs and 7,000 temporary construction jobs. It does not directly address the contention of critics that this would be offset by job losses at neighbouring businesses. Mayor Ford and Councillor Doug Ford, who have been championing casinos, discussed it Sunday on their weekly Newstalk 1010 radio show. Brantford Mayor Chris Friel, a guest on the show, was generally supportive of the idea of a casino but he cautioned the brothers on the city’s hosting fee hopes. “I think that your expectations for the hosting fees are way beyond what’s reasonable. I don’t think the OLG (Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp.) or the province can make that commitment,” said Friel. More from thestar.com: Hume: Rob Ford notwithstanding, downtown casino a bad bet
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In response the Ford brothers called for hard negotiating tactics with OLG and the province, and emphasized a minimum of $100 million. “What we should do is put an offer on the table because the province is just going to delay it and delay it and delay it,” the mayor said on the show. There is concern that not enough information on the fee is available for Monday’s meeting. “There’s been some discussion about deferral pending OLG divulging what their formula is and what the money part of it is,” Councillor Peter Milczyn, a member of the executive committee, said Thursday. The OLG has only said it will provide the hosting fee formula by the end of April. Councillor Frank Di Giorgio, budget chief and member of the committee, does not see a problem with the missing puzzle piece, emphasizing the importance of the project over its financial contribution. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be crystallized until final approvals are given,” he said. “I have to be convinced that the overall development is something that would add value to the city going forward.” Premier Kathleen Wynne declared in March that any deal between Toronto and OLG would have to use the same formula as other municipalities. Monday’s meeting, which gets underway at 9:30 a.m., is expected to attract the spectrum of casino commentators, including horse industry representatives, David McKeown, the city’s chief medical officer of health, residents and union spokespeople. By Friday afternoon, almost 200 people had signed up to give deputations. “Depending on the number of deputations on the list, there’s only a number of factors that people can bring to light,” said Di Giorgio. “It’s only a matter of time before the arguments become repetitive.” With files from David Rider
Read more about:Xiaomi have just announced on their official Weibo page that they have sold all 100,000 Xiaomi Mi3 phones in 1 minute 26 seconds!
We all knew that the first batch of Xiaomi Mi3 phones would sell out quickly, but even so 1 minute 26 seconds is quite amazing! The Beijing based company are also reporting that all 3000 Xiaomi TV’s sold out in 1 minute 58 seconds.
Although 100,000 Mi3 phones have been sold these versions will only work in China with China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA mobile phone network and many will have gone to scalpers who hope to sell the phones on for profit.
Xiaomi still haven’t announced what they plan to do about their international intentions, but those of you outside of China wanting an Mi3 which will work on 3G will have to wait until the company starts producing Mi3 phones with Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processors.ABC boss Mark Scott proposes 'friendly merger' with SBS, makes case against funding cuts
Updated
The ABC's outgoing managing director Mark Scott has called for a "grown-up conversation" about merging the nation's two public broadcasters, arguing it could save the Federal Government $40 million a year.
Key points: Mark Scott makes case to merge ABC and SBS
Says both could offer distinct brands, argues move would save $40m a year
Warns against further funding cuts to ABC
In his last National Press Club address as ABC boss, Mr Scott also made the case for the Government to at least maintain the ABC's current level of funding, warning the only way the broadcaster will be "strong and relevant" in the future is with adequate financial support.
Earlier this month, Mr Scott questioned whether there was still a need for both the ABC and SBS and today he revealed he discussed the idea of merger with his now retired SBS counterpart.
"Some years ago, towards the end of his term as SBS managing director, Shaun Brown and I had a number of conversations about how a peaceful merger might work," Mr Scott said.
"One that would safeguard a distinct identity and remit for SBS and allow the public broadcasters to be more distinctive, in clearly delineated spaces — with no overlap.
We could spend more of the funding serving audiences. Mark Scott
"But it wasn't to be. The idea was rejected at the SBS board level and Shaun wasn't given license to pursue the conversation further. It ended there."
Mr Scott told the Press Club that conversation needed to be refreshed and he proposed a kind of "friendly merger" that would preserve each broadcaster's identity while delivering substantial savings.
"By coming together, SBS and the ABC could still offer distinct brands under distinct charters," he said.
"But it could be done without an entire separate back office, stand-alone buildings, studios and technology, IT, legal, finance, HR and corporate divisions — or a separate board.
"We could spend more of the funding serving audiences."
Merge could save about $40 million
According to Mr Scott, merging the two broadcasters would save about $40 million of the $1.3 billion spent on public broadcasting each year.
"Increasingly, the ABC and SBS have tripped over each other, as each strives to meet audience and programming needs best, to maximise audience engagement," he said.
"At times we've even bid against each other for programs and content — and there have been scheduling frustrations as well.
It was our joint view that at the very least such a proposal deserved proper investigation. That was my recommendation... it was not accepted. Former SBS managing director Shaun Brown
"This has increasingly been the case as SBS has moved away from multi-lingual programming on its main channel in recent years as it pursues advertising revenue."
Mr Brown said in a statement that he and Mr Scott had indeed had "informal discussions about the most effective model for public broadcasting in Australia".
"We felt it would be possible to create a merged public broadcast entity that not only maintained but actually increased the range and distinctiveness of content and services that met the charters of both organisations," he said.
"Removing duplication of infrastructure and operations would free up significant funds for investment in distinctive content and enhanced services.
"Above all we believed such a model would be sustainable, ensuring the survival of a vigorous public broadcasting service in Australia. I also believed the savings would be sufficient to remove the obligation on SBS services to carry advertising.
"It was our joint view that at the very least such a proposal deserved proper investigation. That was my recommendation to the then chairman of the SBS Board, Joe Skrzynski. It was not accepted."
Scott makes case against more funding cuts
Mr Scott made his speech as the Federal Government finalises the ABC's funding arrangements for the next three years.
Mr Scott noted the Gillard Government gave the ABC an extra $20 million a year during the last funding round, and urged the Coalition to maintain that funding.
"That News funding represents 10 per cent of the ABC's News budget, and to cut it now will mean significant cuts to jobs and programming," he said.
"If it was not renewed, it would represent the third substantial cut to the ABC's budget since the Coalition Government was elected on a platform not to cut the budget."
Since the Coalition Government was elected, Mr Scott said the ABC's funding had been cut by $350 million.
"The ABC's share of Government expenditure is effectively at its lowest level in decades now and the per capita spend on public broadcasting is significantly lower than many other nations, and dramatically lower than the BBC," he said.
"The greatest challenge to the future of the ABC, ironically, comes from those who fund it on behalf of its owners.
"Today's Government. Future governments."
Topics: abc, journalism, information-and-communication, broadcasting, government-and-politics, australia
First postedWhy do we need psychology? And what does psychology need?
The winning entries in our first 'Voices In Psychology' programme.
We’re always listening out for ‘Voices in Psychology’. People who can take often complex ideas and communicate them in a way that will engage and inform our large and diverse audience. Writers with real impact, who are learning to avoid some of the traps of academic writing. They’re the future of our science, of our Society, of our magazine.
But perhaps you need help to find that voice. Perhaps you’ve got that certain something but you need practice, nurturing. We think we’ve made a real effort with this in recent years, providing opportunities and guidance to many first-time authors. Now we’ve started to develop a more formal structure to this process.
For 2018, we set a question which ran until the end of the year: Why do we need psychology? And what does psychology need? People were asked to address either or both of those questions, in any way they saw fit. While we were not exclusively aiming at students, we were mostly interested in identifying high potential amongst those starting their journey in psychology.
Now the fun begins… we are in discussions with some of these authors about playing a role in developing their ‘Voice in Psychology’, through the provision of advice and opportunities to write more in various contexts.
As this is a trial, we can’t be more specific at this stage. This will be about co-creating a Programme for the future. But we hope this will grow.
For 2019, the question we’re asking is ‘What makes a psychologist?’
Address this question, in any way you see fit. We recognise it’s a real challenge: the total word limit is just 1000, and it’s absolutely vital you write with our publication and audience in mind.
Deadline 20 September. Please submit by email to [email protected] and include a bit about yourself – your aspirations, and how you’re looking to engage with the communication of psychology. While we are not exclusively aiming this at students, we are mostly interested in identifying high potential amongst those starting out in their journey in psychology. One submission per person please, and unfortunately we cannot respond to everyone.
Around the end of 2019, we will publish a selection of the best responses online and in print too. Some of the winning entrants will be offered support in developing their ‘Voice in Psychology’, through the provision of advice and opportunities to write more in various contexts.
Get writing – and don’t be shy! If you’ve got a head bubbling with questions, original ideas about psychology beyond the lecture theatre, and a desire to make a difference, then that’s a good place to start. You don’t have to be the finished article to be Very Important to us!
Dr Jon Sutton (Managing Editor)
Madeleine Pownall (Associate Editor, VIP Programme)
Now for the winning entries from our 2018 scheme… remember, the question was: Why do we need psychology? And what does psychology need?
A critical revolution at work
Zoe Sanderson
In work psychology, we aim to study human behaviour in organisations and apply the knowledge we gain for beneficial ends. But what are these ends? Whose interests do our efforts serve? What assumptions lie beneath the knowledge we use and create? What better ways of doing research in work psychology could there be?
Questions like these invite us to consider the fundamental nature of what we do, perhaps leading us towards more ‘critical’ ways of thinking and being. In this context, ‘critical’ does not necessarily mean destructive or negative. Critical approaches – which are many and varied – highlight the limitations of how we usually do work psychology research, seeking to create alternatives that could generate a different future for our field.
The pursuit of social justice and individual freedoms lies at the heart of most critical perspectives, and this often involves examining the patterns of power in which individuals are embedded, in and beyond their workplaces. These ways of thinking also prompt us to consider how we personally relate to our research, promoting self-awareness of the concepts and paradigms we use, and the assumptions they rest upon. Qualitative methodologies and diverse epistemologies are valued alongside quantitative approaches in critical work. In mainstream academic work psychology, the desirability of some goals – such as the promotion of employee productivity and managerial authority – are often viewed as normal, universal, or even natural. Critical work identifies and challenges the assumptions that lie beneath these imperatives. We must look inwards at our own values and beliefs, outwards at the impact our research creates, and sideways at the diverse paradigms on hand in our field.
In a more critical future for work psychology, we would expand what gets researched, and how. Which questions get to the top of our research agendas, and how we address them, are values-laden issues. When we research, we take sides in debates, frame ideas, privilege certain kinds of data, shape possibilities for practice, and benefit or disadvantage groups of people. Creating knowledge is a powerful act that has considerable downstream impacts over which we have some control. If we undertake research that ultimately seeks to enhance employee productivity, we could reasonably foresee that this may be detrimental to certain groups of workers. A more critical research agenda might explore the challenges that the ‘productivity discourse’ poses to disabled workers or those with major non-work responsibilities. We might formulate a more inclusive conceptualisation of productivity itself. We could draw inspiration from post-structuralist, feminist, or post-modern scholarship in neighbouring academic fields. Expanding the repertoire of ‘legitimate’ work psychology research questions and approaches in this way would enable us to make different kinds of knowledge that eventually could benefit more people in the workplace.
This is not a new idea. Since at least the 1970s, critical psychologists have resisted individualist perspectives, pointed out the impact of the status quo on disadvantaged groups, and held other psychologists accountable for their role in perpetuating these impacts. Many social science disciplines have established critical traditions, several of which overlap with our focus on people in organisations. In our own field, pioneering thinkers have championed radical ideas that challenge the status quo. For example, Wendy Holloway’s 1991 history of work psychology and organizational behaviour dispelled the illusion of objective scientific enquiry by documenting how specific people, problems, and contexts have produced mainstream knowledge in our field. Gazi Islam and Michael Zyphur explored how the core subjects of work psychology such as job analysis, leadership, and motivation might be differently imagined in their chapter in 2009’s Critical Psychology: An Introduction. A few months ago, the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology published an article by Matthijs Bal and Edina Dóci on neo-liberal ideology in work psychology, alongside several responses. Unfortunately, these ideas and debates remain the exception rather than the norm.
This revolution is beginning to gather pace: researchers across the continent are voicing their desire for more critical work psychology. I’m working with European colleagues to plan an event on the future of work psychology that will allow us to explore together how our discipline can become more critical, healthy, equal, and relevant (www.futureofwop.com). This initiative mirrors the development of a Manifesto on the Future of Work and Organizational Psychology which encompasses critical aspirations. A substantial list of work psychology researchers from across Europe will sign the Manifesto, including me. Change is happening, and here in the UK we need to keep up.
This isn’t just an exercise in intellectual gymnastics. Many of us enter the field of work psychology with the intent to do good. In a more critical future, we could bring more of our values and beliefs to our work – provided we do so conscientiously, explicitly, and judiciously, as the proponents of evidence-based practice wisely advise. We would generate more (and more diverse) evidence on issues that concern the people who do not hold most power in organisations, and reappraise the extent to which the building blocks that form the edifice of today’s work psychology are still fit for our purposes. Critical approaches could offer a new sense of why our work matters in a society that is increasingly concerned with values-based issues of equality, sustainability, and freedom.
Work psychology won’t save the world, but we can individually make changes that accumulate to create a better impact in the future than we’ve made in the past. Our discipline is overdue for a critical revolution: will we make it happen?
Zoe Sanderson
‘I’m a doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol. I use qualitative methods to explore the psychological responses of employees towards organisational values. I’ve studied several social sciences and political philosophy, developed policy for public bodies, and run third-sector organisations. I’m an activist and a scholar, and curious about how we can make the future better than the present and the past. I bring all those identities to my work. I’m on Twitter or email [email protected]'
It’s the part that makes us all human
Gunjan Sharma
I work as a junior doctor in a hospital, and I am constantly aware of the need for psychology. When a young person walks into A&E with self-harm cuts down their arm, there is a clear psychological need. It is more difficult to appreciate the emotional side and even more so to offer psychological support when someone comes to hospital for a physical problem; a heart attack that has torn apart a person’s self-confidence or a twenty-year battle with Diabetes filled with constant anxiety and the dread of being perceived as a outsider. We as medical doctors are all too ready to treat the pathophysiology. We stack our offices with the British National Formulary and research papers citing the latest pharmacological breakthroughs.
What we leave to one side are the aspects of a person’s suffering that we feel we have no part to play in; the part that makes us all human.
There is a greater need to appreciate the psychological aspects of physical health. While this is already done in certain areas of healthcare such as chronic illness and palliative care, it is not part of our day-to-day role as physicians. There are barriers – the time available on a quick ward round being just one of them – but holistic care is the cornerstone of modern medicine.
Medicine is becoming more technological with every passing minute. We wrap our patients in wires, inserting needles into every pore in an attempt to nourish a body ravaged by disease. Everyday we note the minute changes in heart rate and blood pressure, staring at the X-rays as we view the interior of our patients’ bodies. Yet it is the interior of their minds that we are yet to fully appreciate. Our ten-minute ward rounds offer little incentive to sit down and listen to our patients’ fears and anxieties. Our prescriptive proformas offer little opportunity to appreciate the decades of isolation and bereavement, the fear of a loss of one’s identity and independence.
I do not speak here of Psychiatry or of the medical diagnosis of mental disorders. I am talking about the psychological implications of being a patient and the lack of care we attribute to these. We must not forget that people are at their most vulnerable when they are unwell. Psychology is needed not just for medicine but for medics as a profession; it allows us to step out of our tunnel of physiology and pathology and step into the world of our patient.
One particular study, the ongoing ‘Diabetes 360’ survey, highlights this need very well. Nearly half of healthcare professionals reported that their ability to care for their patients lay in their ability to understand their patients’ perspectives and adequately manage their patients’ emotional issues alongside their physical ones. This is of particular importance when one compared with the results from the patients; 30 per cent of patients felt their Diabetes was taking up a significant amount of their mental and physical energy, with 32 per cent feeling overwhelmed as a result of their Diabetes.
We know that physical and psychological health are closely linked. This can be illustrated with something as simple as a cold. Think back to when you were tied up in bed with a dribbling nose, a barking cough and a stone-cold headache. It was not just the awful pains down your neck and fatigue of the muscles that felt so horrible; it was the fact that you felt useless as a partner, guilty for not being able to get to work, frustrated at the helplessness to which you were bound, the anxiety of whether you would still be able to submit that paper in time. Being ill is more than just an increase in white cells in our bloodstreams or an imbalance of our vital signs; it is something that happens to a person as a whole, and it is this entirety that physicians need to appreciate and manage.
Things are changing. More focus is being placed on the psychological sphere of healthcare in medical education. We are treating the medical doctor as one who covers the patient as a whole (see, for example, Cordingley and colleagues’ 2015 article ‘What Psychology do medical students need to know?’). But there is a long way to go. Ward rounds are not conducive to emotional support when the patient in the next bed can hear the entire conversation; ten-minute appointments do not always get to the heart of the problem. But an appreciation that patients present not only with physical symptoms but psychological burdens is a strong place to start.
Gunjan Sharma
‘I am a junior doctor working in Devon. I have an interest in writing and psychology, and have aspirations of combining both of these interests. My aim is to become a Psychiatrist and continue my interest in writing non-fiction about topics that interest me, such as global mental health, mental illness and the criminal justice system, and social injustice and mental health. I’m looking to stimulate a discussion and exchange ideas.’
Using psychology to think about psychology
Beth Carrington
All of I sudden I got it. I understood it all. The embarrassment. The shame. The stigma. That is, once I left my ivory tower of perceived knowledge and sat one-to-one in a therapist’s office, with the chairs placed ‘just so’. All that was missing was the box of tissues. I thought working in mental health would make me immune to mental health difficulties; boy, was I wrong. Working in mental health in no way makes me immune to anything.
Looking back, it was a terrifying experience that I now wouldn’t change for the world; I was in the shoes of a service user. I saw everything as a user of mental health services for the very first time and it changed my whole perspective. At first I did feel embarrassed and awkward, especially when the trainee CBT therapist asked if it was ok for the sessions to be recorded, ‘for clinical supervision and training purposes’. I couldn’t say no… I was in similar shoes myself, bringing every experience to my own supervision to aid my enhancement and learning. But I panicked: what if other students on her course were to watch these videos, and I later worked with these people in the very same services?
It took me a little while to understand that if I expect myself to one day become a clinical psychologist and help people who are experiencing mental health difficulties, I need to be able to reflect on myself and my own struggles. I feel grateful that I now have an insight into what it actually feels like when you are on the other side of the table, with a person asking you potentially intrusive questions and asking you to reflect upon your thoughts and feelings – a very difficult task! As I see it, this can only make me a better psychologist in the future. I no longer feel as removed as perhaps I once did. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ ideology, albeit most likely an unconscious power in our minds, has been obliterated.
Psychology needs a kick up the ‘you know what’ to end stigma, not just amongst society, but within the profession itself. What could be more destigmatising than therapists seeking their own therapy? I acknowledge the concerns brought up in Research Digest coverage surrounding compulsory therapy for psychotherapists: the author Christian Jarrett discusses the fact that personal therapy put a strain on some trainees, which consequently affected their personal relationships. However I can’t help but applaud the trainees who have made it through this process and who may now possess the |
in orbit 22 operational, 2 testing only, 2 unavailable, and 2 retired (2/2019)[2] First launch 2011 Total launches 24 Orbital characteristics Regime(s) 3x MEO planes Orbital height 23,222 km (14,429 mi) Other details Cost €10bn[3]
Galileo is the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) that went live in 2016,[4] created by the European Union (EU) through the European GNSS Agency (GSA),[5] headquartered in Prague in the Czech Republic,[6] with two ground operations centres, Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich in Germany and Fucino in Italy. The €10 billion project[3][7] is named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. One of the aims of Galileo is to provide an independent high-precision positioning system so European nations do not have to rely on the U.S. GPS, or the Russian GLONASS systems, which could be disabled or degraded by their operators at any time.[8] The use of basic (lower-precision) Galileo services will be free and open to everyone. The higher-precision capabilities will be available for paying commercial users. Galileo is intended to provide horizontal and vertical position measurements within 1-metre precision, and better positioning services at higher latitudes than other positioning systems. Galileo is also to provide a new global search and rescue (SAR) function as part of the MEOSAR system.
The first Galileo test satellite, the GIOVE-A, was launched 28 December 2005, while the first satellite to be part of the operational system was launched on 21 October 2011. As of July 2018, 26 of the planned 30 active satellites are in orbit.[9][10] Galileo started offering Early Operational Capability (EOC) on 15 December 2016,[1] providing initial services with a weak signal, and is expected to reach Full Operational Capability (FOC) in 2019.[11] The complete 30-satellite Galileo system (24 operational and 6 active spares) is expected by 2020.[12] It is expected that the next generation of satellites will begin to become operational by 2025 to replace older equipment. Older systems can then be used for backup capabilities.
There are 22 satellites in usable condition (satellite is operational and contributing to the service provision), 2 satellites are in "testing" and 2 more are marked as not available. [13][14].
History [ edit ]
Headquarters of the Galileo system in Prague
Main objectives [ edit ]
In 1999, the different concepts of the three main contributors of ESA (Germany, France and Italy)[15] for Galileo were compared and reduced to one by a joint team of engineers from all three countries. The first stage of the Galileo programme was agreed upon officially on 26 May 2003 by the European Union and the European Space Agency. The system is intended primarily for civilian use, unlike the more military-oriented systems of the United States (GPS), Russia (GLONASS), and China (BeiDou-1/2). The European system will only be subject to shutdown for military purposes in extreme circumstances (like armed conflict).[16] It will be available at its full precision to both civil and military[17] users. The countries that contribute most to the Galileo Project are Germany and Italy.[18]
Funding [ edit ]
The European Commission had some difficulty funding the project's next stage, after several allegedly "per annum" sales projection graphs for the project were exposed in November 2001 as "cumulative" projections which for each year projected included all previous years of sales. The attention that was brought to this multibillion-euro growing error in sales forecasts resulted in a general awareness in the Commission and elsewhere that it was unlikely that the program would yield the return on investment that had previously been suggested to investors and decision-makers.[19][better source needed] On 17 January 2002, a spokesman for the project stated that, as a result of US pressure and economic difficulties, "Galileo is almost dead."[20]
A few months later, however, the situation changed dramatically. European Union member states decided it was important to have a satellite-based positioning and timing infrastructure that the US could not easily turn off in times of political conflict.[21]
The European Union and the European Space Agency agreed in March 2002 to fund the project, pending a review in 2003 (which was completed on 26 May 2003). The starting cost for the period ending in 2005 is estimated at €1.1 billion. The required satellites (the planned number is 30) were to be launched between 2011 and 2014, with the system up and running and under civilian control from 2019. The final cost is estimated at €3 billion, including the infrastructure on Earth, constructed in 2006 and 2007. The plan was for private companies and investors to invest at least two-thirds of the cost of implementation, with the EU and ESA dividing the remaining cost. The base Open Service is to be available without charge to anyone with a Galileo-compatible receiver, with an encrypted higher-bandwidth improved-precision Commercial Service available at a cost. By early 2011 costs for the project had run 50% over initial estimates.[22]
Tension with the United States [ edit ]
Galileo is intended to be an EU civilian GNSS that allows all users access to it. Initially GPS reserved the highest quality signal for military use, and the signal available for civilian use was intentionally degraded (Selective Availability). This changed with President Bill Clinton signing a policy directive in 1996 to turn off Selective Availability. Since May 2000 the same precision signal has been provided to both civilians and the military.[23]
Since Galileo was designed to provide the highest possible precision (greater than GPS) to anyone, the US was concerned that an enemy could use Galileo signals in military strikes against the US and its allies (some weapons like missiles use GNSSs for guidance). The frequency initially chosen for Galileo would have made it impossible for the US to block the Galileo signals without also interfering with its own GPS signals. The US did not want to lose their GNSS capability with GPS while denying enemies the use of GNSS. Some US officials became especially concerned when Chinese interest in Galileo was reported.[24]
An anonymous EU official claimed that the US officials implied that they might consider shooting down Galileo satellites in the event of a major conflict in which Galileo was used in attacks against American forces.[25] The EU's stance is that Galileo is a neutral technology, available to all countries and everyone. At first, EU officials did not want to change their original plans for Galileo, but have since reached the compromise that Galileo is to use a different frequency. This allowed the blocking or jamming of either GNSS without affecting the other.[26]
GPS and Galileo [ edit ]
One of the reasons given for developing Galileo as an independent system was that position information from GPS can be made significantly inaccurate by the deliberate application of universal Selective Availability (SA) by the US military. GPS is widely used worldwide for civilian applications; Galileo's proponents argued that civil infrastructure, including airplane navigation and landing, should not rely solely upon a system with this vulnerability.
On 2 May 2000, SA was disabled by the President of the United States, Bill Clinton; in late 2001 the entity managing the GPS confirmed that they did not intend to enable selective availability ever again.[27] Though Selective Availability capability still exists, on 19 September 2007 the US Department of Defense announced that newer GPS satellites would not be capable of implementing Selective Availability;[28] the wave of Block IIF satellites launched in 2009, and all subsequent GPS satellites, are stated not to support SA. As old satellites are replaced in the GPS Block IIIA program, SA will cease to be an option.[29] The modernisation programme also contains standardised features that allow GPS III and Galileo systems to inter-operate, allowing receivers to be developed to utilise GPS and Galileo together to create an even more accurate GNSS.
Cooperation with the United States [ edit ]
In June 2004, in a signed agreement with the United States, the European Union agreed to switch to a modulation known as BOC(1,1) (Binary Offset Carrier 1.1) allowing the coexistence of both GPS and Galileo, and the future combined use of both systems.
The European Union also agreed to address the "mutual concerns related to the protection of allied and US national security capabilities."[16]
First experimental satellites: GIOVE-A and GIOVE-B [ edit ]
The first experimental satellite, GIOVE-A, was launched in December 2005 and was followed by a second test satellite, GIOVE-B, launched in April 2008. After successful completion of the In-Orbit Validation (IOV) phase, additional satellites were launched. On 30 November 2007 the 27 EU transport ministers involved reached an agreement that Galileo should be operational by 2013,[30] but later press releases suggest it was delayed to 2014.[31]
Funding again, governance issues [ edit ]
In mid-2006 the public/private partnership fell apart, and the European Commission decided to nationalise the Galileo programme.[32]
In early 2007 the EU had yet to decide how to pay for the system and the project was said to be "in deep crisis" due to lack of more public funds.[33] German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee was particularly doubtful about the consortium's ability to end the infighting at a time when only one testbed satellite had been successfully launched.
Although a decision was yet to be reached, on 13 July 2007[34] EU countries discussed cutting €548m ($755m, £370m) from the union's competitiveness budget for the following year and shifting some of these funds to other parts of the financing pot, a move that could meet part of the cost of the union's Galileo satellite navigation system. European Union research and development projects could be scrapped to overcome a funding shortfall.
In November 2007, it was agreed to reallocate funds from the EU's agriculture and administration budgets[35] and to soften the tendering process in order to invite more EU companies.[36]
In April 2008, the EU transport ministers approved the Galileo Implementation Regulation. This allowed the €3.4bn to be released from the EU's agriculture and administration budgets[37] to allow the issuing of contracts to start construction of the ground station and the satellites.
In June 2009, the European Court of Auditors published a report, pointing out governance issues, substantial delays and budget overruns that led to project stalling in 2007, leading to further delays and failures.[38]
In October 2009, the European Commission cut the number of satellites definitively planned from 28 to 22, with plans to order the remaining six at a later time. It also announced that the first OS, PRS and SoL signal would be available in 2013, and the CS and SOL some time later. The €3.4 billion budget for the 2006–2013 period was considered insufficient.[39] In 2010 the think-tank Open Europe estimated the total cost of Galileo from start to 20 years after completion at €22.2 billion, borne entirely by taxpayers. Under the original estimates made in 2000, this cost would have been €7.7 billion, with €2.6 billion borne by taxpayers and the rest by private investors.[40]
In November 2009, a ground station for Galileo was inaugurated near Kourou (French Guiana).[41]
The launch of the first four in-orbit validation (IOV) satellites was planned for the second half of 2011, and the launch of full operational capability (FOC) satellites was planned to start in late 2012.
In March 2010 it was verified that the budget for Galileo would only be available to provide the 4 IOV and 14 FOC satellites by 2014, with no funds then committed to bring the constellation above this 60% capacity.[42] Paul Verhoef, the satellite navigation program manager at the European Commission, indicated that this limited funding would have serious consequences commenting at one point "To give you an idea, that would mean that for three weeks in the year you will not have satellite navigation" in reference to the proposed 18-vehicle constellation.
In July 2010, the European Commission estimated further delays and additional costs of the project to grow up to €1.5-€1.7 billion, and moved the estimated date of completion to 2018. After completion the system will need to be subsidised by governments at €750 million per year.[43] An additional €1.9 billion was planned to be spent bringing the system up to the full complement of 30 satellites (27 operational + 3 active spares).[22][44]
In December 2010, EU ministers in Brussels voted Prague, in the Czech Republic, as the headquarters of the Galileo project.[45]
In January 2011, infrastructure costs up to 2020 were estimated at €5.3 billion. In that same month, Wikileaks revealed that Berry Smutny, the CEO of the German satellite company OHB-System, said that Galileo "is a stupid idea that primarily serves French interests".[46] The BBC learned in 2011 that €500 million (£440M) would become available to make the extra purchase, taking Galileo within a few years from 18 operational satellites to 24.[47]
Galileo launch on a Soyuz rocket, 21 October 2011
The first two Galileo In-Orbit Validation satellites were launched by Soyuz ST-B flown from Guiana Space Centre on 21 October 2011,[48] and the remaining two on 12 October 2012.[49]
Twenty-two further satellites with Full Operational Capability (FOC) were on order as of 1 January 2018. The first four pairs of satellites were launched on 22 August 2014, 27 March 2015, 11 September 2015 and 17 December 2015.[50]
Clock failures [ edit ]
In January 2017, news agencies reported that six of the passive hydrogen masers and three of the rubidium atomic clocks had failed. Four of the full operational satellites have each lost at least one clock; but no satellite has lost more than two. The operation of the constellation has not been affected as each satellite is launched with three spare clocks. The possibility of a systemic flaw is being considered.[51][52][53] SpectraTime, the Swiss producer of both on-board clock types, declined to comment.[54] According to ESA they concluded with their industrial partners for the rubidium atomic clocks that some implemented testing and operational measures were required. Additionally some refurbishment is required for the rubidium atomic clocks that still have to be launched. For the passive hydrogen masers operational measures are being studied to reduce the risk of failure.[51] China and India use the same SpectraTime-built atomic clocks in their satellite navigation systems. ESA has contacted the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) who initially reported not having experienced similar failures.[54][53] However, at the end of January 2017, Indian news outlets reported that all three clocks aboard the IRNSS-1A satellite (launched in July 2013 with a 10-year life expectancy) had failed and that a replacement satellite would be launched in the second half of 2017, these atomic clocks were said to be supplied under a four-million-euro deal.[55][56][57][58] In July 2017 the European Commission reported that the main causes of the malfunctions have been identified and measures have been put in place to reduce the possibility of further malfunctions of the satellites already in space.[59][60] According to European sources ESA took measures to correct both identified sets of problems by replacing a faulty component that can cause a short circuit in the rubidium clocks and improve the passive hydrogen maser clocks as well on satellites still to be launched.[61][62]
International involvement [ edit ]
In September 2003, China joined the Galileo project. China was to invest €230 million (US$302 million, GBP 155 million, CNY 2.34 billion) in the project over the following years.[63]
In July 2004, Israel signed an agreement with the EU to become a partner in the Galileo project.[64]
On 3 June 2005 the EU and Ukraine signed an agreement for Ukraine to join the project, as noted in a press release.[65]
As of November 2005, Morocco also joined the programme.
In Mid-2006, the Public-Private Partnership fell apart and the European Commission decided to nationalise Galileo as an EU programme.[32]
In November 2006, China opted instead to upgrade BeiDou navigation system, its then-regional satellite navigation system.[66] The decision was due to security concerns and issues with Galileo financing.[67]
On 30 November 2007, the 27 member states of the European Union unanimously agreed to move forward with the project, with plans for bases in Germany and Italy. Spain did not approve during the initial vote, but approved it later that day. This greatly improved the viability of the Galileo project: "The EU's executive had previously said that if agreement was not reached by January 2008, the long-troubled project would essentially be dead."[68]
On 3 April 2009, Norway too joined the programme pledging €68.9 million toward development costs and allowing its companies to bid for the construction contracts. Norway, while not a member of the EU, is a member of ESA.[69]
On 18 December 2013, Switzerland signed a cooperation agreement to fully participate in the program, and retroactively contributed €80 million for the period 2008–2013. As a member of ESA, it already collaborated in the development of the Galileo satellites, contributing the state-of-the-art hydrogen-maser clocks. Switzerland's financial commitment for the period 2014–2020 will be calculated in accordance with the standard formula applied for the Swiss participation in the EU research Framework Programme.[70]
In March 2018, the European Commission announced that the United Kingdom may be excluded from parts of the project (especially relating to the secured service PRS) following its exit from the European Union (EU). As a result, Airbus plans to relocate work on the Ground Control Segment (GCS) from its Portsmouth premises to an EU state.[3] British officials have been reported to be seeking legal advice on whether they can reclaim the €1.4 billion invested by the United Kingdom, of the €10 billion spent to date.[71] In a speech at the EU Institute for Security Studies conference, the EU Chief Negotiator in charge of the Brexit negotiations, Michel Barnier, stressed the EU position that the UK had decided to leave the EU and thus all EU programmes, including Galileo.[72] In August 2018, it was reported the UK will look to create a competing satellite navigation system to Galileo post-Brexit.[73] In December 2018, British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the UK would no longer seek to reclaim the investment, and Science Minister Sam Gyimah resigned over the matter.[74]
System description [ edit ]
Space segment [ edit ]
Constellation visibility from a location on Earth's surface
As of 2012,[75] the system is scheduled to reach full operation in 2020 with the following specifications:
30 in-orbit spacecraft (24 in full service and 6 spares)
Orbital altitude: 23,222 km (MEO)
3 orbital planes, 56° inclination, ascending nodes separated by 120° longitude (8 operational satellites and 2 active spares per orbital plane)
Satellite lifetime: >12 years
Satellite mass: 675 kg
Satellite body dimensions: 2.7 m × 1.2 m × 1.1 m
Span of solar arrays: 18.7 m
Power of solar arrays: 1.5 kW (end of life)
Ground segment [ edit ]
The system's orbit and signal accuracy is controlled by a ground segment consisting of:
2 Ground Control Centres, located in Oberpfaffenhofen and Fucino for Satellite and Mission Control
6 telemetry, tracking & control (TT&C) stations, located in Kiruna, Kourou, Nouméa, Sainte-Marie, Réunion, Redu & Papeete
10 mission data uplink stations (ULS), two per site, located in Svalbard, Kourou, Papeete, Sainte-Marie, Réunion & Nouméa
Several worldwide distributed reference sensor stations (GSS)
A data dissemination network between all geographically distributed locations
Signals [ edit ]
The system transmits three signals: E1 (1575.42 MHz), E5 (1191.795 MHz) consisting of E5a (1176.45 MHz) and E5b (1207.14 MHz), and E6 (1278.75 MHz):[76]
Galileo FOC signals Parameters E1-I E1-Q E5a E5b E6-I E6-Q Carrier frequency, MHz 1575.42 1575.42 1176.45 1207.14 1278.75 1278.75 Modulation CBOC(6,1,1/11) BOCcos(15,2.5) AltBOC(15,10) AltBOC(15,10) BPSK(5) BOCcos(10,5)
Services [ edit ]
The Galileo system will have five main services:
Open access navigation This will be available without charge for use by anyone with appropriate mass-market equipment; simple timing, and positioning down to 1 metre. Commercial navigation (encrypted) Accuracy to 1 centimetre and guaranteed service for which service providers will charge fees. Safety of life navigation Open service; for applications where guaranteed precision is essential. Integrity messages will warn of errors. Public regulated navigation (encrypted) Continuous availability even if other services are disabled in time of crisis. Government agencies will be main users. Search and rescue System will pick up distress beacon locations; feasible to send feedback, e.g. confirming help is on its way.
Other secondary services will also be available.
Concept [ edit ]
Space Passive Hydrogen Maser used in Galileo satellites as a master clock for an onboard timing system
Each Galileo satellite has two master passive hydrogen maser atomic clocks and two secondary rubidium atomic clocks which are independent of one other.[77][78] As precise and stable space-qualified atomic clocks are critical components to any satellite-navigation system, the employed quadruple redundancy keeps Galileo functioning when onboard atomic clocks fail in space. The onboard passive hydrogen maser clocks' precision is four times better than the onboard rubidium atomic clocks and estimated at 1 second per 3 million years (a timing error of a nanosecond or 1 billionth of a second (10−9 or 1/ 1,000,000,000 s) translates into a 30 cm (11.8 in) positional error on Earth's surface), and will provide an accurate timing signal to allow a receiver to calculate the time that it takes the signal to reach it.[79][80][53] The Galileo satellites are configured to run one hydrogen maser clock in primary mode and a rubidium clock as hot backup. Under normal conditions, the operating hydrogen maser clock produces the reference frequency from which the navigation signal is generated. Should the hydrogen maser encounter any problem, an instantaneous switchover to the rubidium clock would be performed. In case of a failure of the primary hydrogen maser the secondary hydrogen maser could be activated by the ground segment to take over within a period of days as part of the redundant system. A clock monitoring and control unit provides the interface between the four clocks and the navigation signal generator unit (NSU). It passes the signal from the active hydrogen master clock to the NSU and also ensures that the frequencies produced by the master clock and the active spare are in phase, so that the spare can take over instantly should the master clock fail. The NSU information is used to calculate the position of the receiver by trilaterating the difference in received signals from multiple satellites.
The onboard passive hydrogen maser and rubidium clocks are very stable over a few hours. If they were left to run indefinitely, though, their timekeeping would drift, so they need to be synchronized regularly with a network of even more stable ground-based reference clocks. These include active hydrogen maser clocks and clocks based on the caesium frequency standard, which show a far better medium and long-term stability than rubidium or passive hydrogen maser clocks. These clocks on the ground are gathered together within the parallel functioning Precise Timing Facilities in the Fucino and Oberpfaffhofen Galileo Control Centres. The ground based clocks also generate a worldwide time reference called Galileo System Time (GST), the standard for the Galileo system and are routinely compared to the local realizations of UTC, the UTC(k) of the European frequency and time laboratories.[81]
For more information of the concept of global satellite navigation systems, see GNSS and GNSS positioning calculation.
Search and rescue [ edit ]
Galileo is to provide a new global search and rescue (SAR) function as part of the MEOSAR system. Satellites will be equipped with a transponder which will relay distress signals from emergency beacons to the Rescue coordination centre, which will then initiate a rescue operation. At the same time, the system is projected to provide a signal, the Return Link Message (RLM), to the emergency beacon, informing them that their situation has been detected and help is on the way. This latter feature is new and is considered a major upgrade compared to the existing Cospas-Sarsat system, which does not provide feedback to the user.[82] Tests in February 2014 found that for Galileo's search and rescue function, operating as part of the existing International Cospas-Sarsat Programme, 77% of simulated distress locations can be pinpointed within 2 km, and 95% within 5 km.[83]
Constellation [ edit ]
Summary of satellites Block Launch
Period Satellite launches Currently in operational orbit
and healthy Full success Failure Planned GIOVE 2005–2008 2 0 0 0 IOV 2011–2012 4 0 0 3 FOC From 2014 20 2* 12 20 Total 26 2 12 23 * One partial launch failure resulting in 2 satellites orbiting in a degraded orbit
(Last update: 29 July 2018)
For a more complete list, see list of Galileo satellites
Galileo satellite test beds: GIOVE [ edit ]
GIOVE-A was successfully launched 28 December 2005
In 2004 the Galileo System Test Bed Version 1 (GSTB-V1) project validated the on-ground algorithms for Orbit Determination and Time Synchronisation (OD&TS). This project, led by ESA and European Satellite Navigation Industries, has provided industry with fundamental knowledge to develop the mission segment of the Galileo positioning system.[84]
A third satellite, GIOVE-A2, was originally planned to be built by SSTL for launch in the second half of 2008.[85] Construction of GIOVE-A2 was terminated due to the successful launch and in-orbit operation of GIOVE-B.
The GIOVE Mission[86][87] segment operated by European Satellite Navigation Industries used the GIOVE-A/B satellites to provide experimental results based on real data to be used for risk mitigation for the IOV satellites that followed on from the testbeds. ESA organised the global network of ground stations to collect the measurements of GIOVE-A/B with the use of the GETR receivers for further systematic study. GETR receivers are supplied by Septentrio as well as the first Galileo navigation receivers to be used to test the functioning of the system at further stages of its deployment. Signal analysis of GIOVE-A/B data confirmed successful operation of all the Galileo signals with the tracking performance as expected.
In-Orbit Validation (IOV) satellites [ edit ]
These testbed satellites were followed by four IOV Galileo satellites that are much closer to the final Galileo satellite design. The Search & Rescue feature is also installed.[88] The first two satellites were launched on 21 October 2011 from Guiana Space Centre using a Soyuz launcher,[89] the other two on 12 October 2012.[90] This enables key validation tests, since earth-based receivers such as those in cars and phones need to "see" a minimum of four satellites in order to calculate their position in three dimensions.[90] Those 4 IOV Galileo satellites were constructed by Astrium GmbH and Thales Alenia Space. On 12 March 2013, a first fix was performed using those four IOV satellites.[91] Once this In-Orbit Validation (IOV) phase has been completed, the remaining satellites will be installed to reach the Full Operational Capability.
Full Operational Capability (FOC) satellites [ edit ]
On 7 January 2010, it was announced that the contract to build the first 14 FOC satellites was awarded to OHB System and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL). Fourteen satellites will be built at a cost of €566M (£510M; $811M).[92] Arianespace will launch the satellites for a cost of €397M (£358M; $569M). The European Commission also announced that the €85 million contract for system support covering industrial services required by ESA for integration and validation of the Galileo system had been awarded to Thales Alenia Space. Thales Alenia Space subcontract performances to Astrium GmbH and security to Thales Communications.
In February 2012, an additional order of eight satellites was awarded to OHB Systems for €250M ($327M), after outbidding EADS Astrium tender offer. Thus bringing the total to 22 FOC satellites.[93]
On 7 May 2014, the first two FOC satellites landed in Guyana for their joint launch planned in summer[94] Originally planned for launch during 2013, problems tooling and establishing the production line for assembly led to a delay of a year in serial production of Galileo satellites. These two satellites (Galileo satellites GSAT-201 and GSAT-202) were launched on 22 August 2014.[95] The names of these satellites are Doresa and Milena named after European children who had previously won a drawing contest.[96] On 23 August 2014, launch service provider Arianespace announced that the flight VS09 experienced an anomaly and the satellites were injected into an incorrect orbit.[97] They ended up in elliptical orbits and thus could not be used for navigation. However, it was later possible to use them to do a physics experiment, so they were not a complete loss.[98]
Satellites GSAT-203 and GSAT-204 were launched successfully on 27 March 2015 from Guiana Space Centre using a Soyuz four stage launcher.[99][100] Using the same Soyuz launcher and launchpad, satellites GSAT-205 (Alba) and GSAT-206 (Oriana) were launched successfully on 11 September 2015.[101]
Satellites GSAT-208 (Liene) and GSAT-209 (Andriana) were successfully launched from Kourou, French Guiana, using the Soyuz launcher on December 17, 2015.[102][103][104][105]
Satellites GSAT-210 (Daniele) and GSAT-211 (Alizée) were launched on 24 May 2016.[106][107]
Starting in November 2016, deployment of the last twelve satellites will use a modified Ariane 5 launcher, named Ariane 5 ES, capable of placing four Galileo satellites into orbit per launch.[108]
Satellites GSAT-207 (Antonianna), GSAT-212 (Lisa), GSAT-213 (Kimberley), GSAT-214 (Tijmen) were successfully launched from Kourou, French Guiana, on 17 November 2016 on an Ariane 5 ES.[109][110]
On 15 December 2016, Galileo started offering Initial Operational Capability (IOC). The services currently offered are Open Service, Public Regulated Service and Search and Rescue Service.[1]
Satellites GSAT-215 (Nicole), GSAT-216 (Zofia), GSAT-217 (Alexandre), GSAT-218 (Irina) were successfully launched from Kourou, French Guiana, on 12 December 2017 on an Ariane 5 ES.[111][112]
Satellites GSAT-219 (Tara), GSAT-220 (Samuel), GSAT-221 (Anna), GSAT-222 (Ellen) were successfully launched from Kourou, French Guiana, on 25 July 2018 on an Ariane 5 ES.[113]
Second generation (G2G) satellites [ edit ]
As of 2014, ESA and its industry partners have begun studies on Galileo Second Generation satellites, which will be presented to the EC for the late 2020s launch period.[114] One idea is to employ electric propulsion, which would eliminate the need for an upper stage during launch and allow satellites from a single batch to be inserted into more than one orbital plane. The new generation satellites are expected to be available by 2025.[115] and serve to augment the existing network.
Applications and impact [ edit ]
Science projects using Galileo [ edit ]
In July 2006 an international consortium of universities and research institutions embarked on a study of potential scientific applications of the Galileo constellation. This project, named GEO6,[116] is a broad study oriented to the general scientific community, aiming to define and implement new applications of Galileo.
Among the various GNSS users identified by the Galileo Joint Undertaking,[117] the GEO6,[116] project addresses the Scientific User Community (UC).
The GEO6[116] project aims at fostering possible novel applications within the scientific UC of GNSS signals, and particularly of Galileo.
The AGILE[118] project is an EU-funded project devoted to the study of the technical and commercial aspects of location-based services (LBS). It includes technical analysis of the benefits brought by Galileo (and EGNOS) and studies the hybridisation of Galileo with other positioning technologies (network-based, WLAN, etc.). Within these project, some pilot prototypes were implemented and demonstrated.
On the basis of the potential number of users, potential revenues for Galileo Operating Company or Concessionaire (GOC), international relevance, and level of innovation, a set of Priority Applications (PA) will be selected by the consortium and developed within the time-frame of the same project.
These applications will help to increase and optimise the use of the EGNOS services and the opportunities offered by the Galileo Signal Test-Bed (GSTB-V2) and the Galileo (IOV) phase.
Coins [ edit ]
The European Satellite Navigation project was selected as the main motif of a very high-value collectors' coin: the Austrian European Satellite Navigation commemorative coin, minted on 1 March 2006. The coin has a silver ring and gold-brown niobium "pill". In the reverse, the niobium portion depicts navigation satellites orbiting the Earth. The ring shows different modes of transport, for which satellite navigation was developed: an airplane, a car, a lorry, a train and a container ship.
Receivers [ edit ]
All major GNSS receiver chips support Galileo and hundreds of end-user devices are compatible with Galileo.[4][119][120] Since 2017, the first mainstream smartphones with this capability were Samsung Galaxy S8, Moto X4,[121][122] Apple iPhone 8 and Apple iPhone X.[123][124][125]
Until late 2018, GNSS was not authorized for use in the United States, and as such, only variably worked on devices that could receive Galileo signals, within United States territory.[126] The Federal Communications Commission's position on the matter was (and remains) that non-GPS radio navigation satellite systems (RNSS) receivers must be granted a license to receive said signals.[127] A waiver of this requirement for Galileo was requested by the EU and submitted in 2015, and on January 6, 2017, public comment on the matter was requested.[128] On November 15, 2018, the FCC granted the requested waiver, explicitly allowing non-federal consumer devices to access Galileo E1 and E5 frequencies.[129][130]
At the end of 2018, there were more than 70 Galileo smartphones on the market. As of 2018, Galileo is found in every new vehicle sold in Europe, thus enabling the eCall emergency response system.[131]
As of early 2019, the only dual-frequency GNSS (tracks more than one radio signal from each satellite, E1 and E5a frequencies for Galileo) on Android devices are Xiaomi Mi 8 and Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 (based on GPSTest app). Android support for dual frequency GNSS is therefore questioned.[132][133]
See also [ edit ]
Competing systems [ edit ]
Other [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Orbital periods and speeds are calculated using the relations 4π²R³ = T²GM and V²R = GM, where R = radius of orbit in metres, T = orbital period in seconds, V = orbital speed in m/s, G = gravitational constant ≈ 6.673 × 10− 11 Nm²/kg², M = mass of Earth ≈ 5.98 × 10 24 kg. ^ Approximately 8.6 times (in radius and length) when the moon is nearest (363 104 km ÷ 42 164 km) to 9.6 times when the moon is farthest (405 696 km ÷ 42 164 km).
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Noah Berger for The Chronicle Review Ryan Shapiro, 41, an animal-rights activist turned Ph.D. candidate in the department of science, technology, and society at MIT, is a self-taught expert on the Freedom of Information Act.
It’s the sort of scene that one imagines fuels President Trump’s sleepless, Twitter-trolling nights.
Some 75 politically active New Yorkers are gathered for a mid-April fund raiser in a tony, two-story apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood owned by a venture capitalist named Nihal Mehta and his wife, Reshma Saujani, a lawyer and former Democratic congressional candidate.
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as accurate as the SiRF chipset. The best results from the Fenix 2 are generally mediocre. The Fenix 2 records the right shape track, but offset by some distance. This does not look like a typical accuracy problem that would manifest itself randomly. Occasionally the Fenix 2 will report "lost satellite reception", and I have several instances of this where the date and time were wrong after reception was lost. If a GPS device has the wrong time, then it will expect the satellites to be in different positions and will be unable to acquire a position fix. I have four instances where the workout file was stored with a date in April 2019, indicating that was the date when I terminated the workout and attempted to reacquire satellite lock. In one case I noticed the date and time was set incorrectly on the watch display after the satellite lost message. There are also reports from various users about lost satellite reception and the 2019 date. This problem might also explain the offset track above, but only if the clock was out by a very small amount.
This is an example of just how bad the Fenix 2 can be. This is a short run, with the start and finish in the same place. The track up to marker 18 is not bad, but then the Fenix 2 loses reception for a couple of miles. When it gets reception back, it tracks wildly off course, ending up with a position that's out by around a mile. Another example of the Fenix 2 getting lost. You can see marker 41 is a long way off the route, probably about half a mile off. Notice how messy the rest of the track is as well. Here you can see the Fenix 2 track is a confused mess. The first part of this run goes okay, but at marker 61 things to go a little astray, and at marker 65 the GPS lock is lost, then briefly regained until marker 70. Not unreasonably, the Fenix 2 assumes straight-line movement until GPS lock is reacquired, but then rather bizarrely seems to assume that the straight-line movement is correct and records a track that is about half a mile/1 Km off. This is more how the GPS track should look, but even on this run the Fenix 2 lost nearly a mile in a 20 mile run. This GPS track looks reasonable until marker #54, and then the track gets offset, but strangely it stays offset until the last marker.
19 Next Steps
This is an initial analysis of the data I have, and there are a number of further evaluations to do.A growing backlash over Harvard's appointment of convicted Wikileaks leaker Chelsea Manning as a visiting fellow saw CIA Director Mike Pompeo cancel a planned appearance at the Ivy League school Thursday, while former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell resigned his position as a senior fellow.
In a letter to Harvard explaining his decision not to give a scheduled speech at the university, Pompeo described Manning as an "American traitor."
"[The decision to cancel] is a decision I did not make lightly," Pompeo wrote before adding, "my conscience and duty to the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency will not permit me to betray their trust by appearing to support Harvard's decision with my appearance at tonight's event."
The CIA released the letter sent by Pompeo, who has a law degree from Harvard, late Thursday evening.
Earlier Thursday, Morell, a former CIA deputy director who twice served as acting director, announced his resignation from Harvard's Belfer Center was a result of Manning's appointment, saying he couldn't be part of an organization "that honors a convicted felon and leaker of classified information."
"Senior leaders in our military have stated publicly that the leaks by Ms. Manning put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk," Morell said. "I have an obligation in my conscience -- and I believe to the country -- to stand against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information."
Manning reacted to Morell's resignation with a one-word Tweet: "good."
Manning will take on the role at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the school said on its website.
“She speaks on the social, technological and economic ramifications of Artificial Intelligence,” the Harvard announcement said. “As a trans woman, she advocates for queer and transgender rights as @xychelsea on Twitter.”
Many people were flabbergasted the university gave Manning the title, calling it “unbelievable” that a person convicted of espionage could be considered a “fellow.”
Former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who holds law and business degrees from Harvard, reacted to Morell's resignation by Tweeting, "Well done, Mike. And abject shame on Harvard."
“I'm loyal to Harvard, but I think I'll forego IOP events this fall. (I'd feel the same way if Chelsea Manning were still Bradley Manning.)” pundit and Harvard alum Bill Kristol said. Manning replied: “Awesome! can you ask @seanspicer to do the same? #WeGotThis.”
“#Bizarre; @Harvard names #ChelseaManning as #VisitingFellow on #LGBT.. He's more qualified to speak on #Treachery,” tweeted David Higgins, who identifies himself as having been in the U.S. Army.
“Seriously @Harvard?? Enabling a traitor to our country? You need to check your stupidity,” another user wrote on Twitter.
“How to become a Harvard Visiting Fellow: Leak 700,000 classified documents & get convicted of 6 espionage charges,” user J Michael Waller tweeted.
“Chelsea Manning Was Convicted of Leaking Classified Info — So Naturally, Harvard Sent Her a Job Offer,” a tweet read.
Manning, who was known as Bradley Manning before transitioning, was released from prison in May after serving seven years for leaking classified government materials to WikiLeaks. She was convicted in 2013 of espionage, theft and computer fraud, earning her a 35 year prison sentence -- until former President Barack Obama commuted the sentence.
CHELSEA MANNING FREED FROM KANSAS MILITARY PRISON
Manning's release from jail was widely criticized by members of Congress, who considered Manning's leaks of the nation's most sensitive secrets a danger to America's safety. House Speaker Paul Ryan called the move "just outrageous."
Manning will be joining former White House press secretary Sean Spicer and campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as fellows in the 2017-2018 school year.Aleksandra Sagan, The Canadian Press
TORONTO -- Loblaw said Tuesday it is planning to build 50 new stores and renovate 150 others this year in its latest effort to adapt to a rapidly evolving food retail sector.
The grocery and pharmacy giant said the $1.3 billion revamp and expansion project would cover stores of various banners. It is not yet releasing information on where the new stores will be located.
The number of new stores announced is not unusual, said Edward Jones analyst Brittany Weissman, though Loblaw (TSX:L) plans to renovate slightly more outlets than before.
Loblaw made a similar announcement early last year, when it said it would build 50 new stores and improve more than 100 others. Later, in July 2015, Loblaw said it was closing 52 locations across Canada that had fallen short of expectations -- more than the 10 to 15 stores it would typically shut down.
"They close some stores each year, they open some new stores each year," Weissman said.
Catherine Thomas, Loblaw's director of external communications, said in an email that the expansion would add about 5,000 new store employees while creating roughly 15,000 construction jobs.
The new jobs would beef up Loblaw's employee base by 2.6 per cent. Loblaw employs about 192,000 full- and part-time workers, according to its most recent annual information form.
The company plans to invest $1 billion in the expansion, while Choice Properties REIT (TSX:CHP.UN), a real estate investment trust, is expected to contribute $300 million.
"We continue to invest in our business in ways that matter for the Canadian economy and the millions of Canadians who shop with us each week," Galen G. Weston, the company's president and executive chairman, said in a statement.
The announcement is the company's most recent move to compete in an industry that has seen waves of change in recent months.
Inflation and the dropping value of the Canadian dollar earlier this year triggered sharp increases in some food prices, and both Loblaw and rival Metro have dipped their feet into the waters of online shopping and pickup services.
Just last month, Loblaw announced that it was expanding its Naturally Imperfect line of discount produce.
Thomas said the completion and success of multiple IT and supply chain investments over the past few years now allows Loblaw to increasingly focus its capital on stores. The investment announced Tuesday would also go towards increasing Loblaw's e-commerce, IT infrastructure and supply chain projects, the company said.
Loblaw will likely expand its click-and-collect program, said Weissman. The service allows customers to shop online and pick up their order at a participating store.
In February, Weston said the company planned to accelerate the program's rollout beyond its current 39 stores.
Loblaw already operates more than 2,300 stores. They include Loblaws, No Frills, Shoppers Drug Mart and Joe Fresh apparel outlets.
The company's most recent quarterly results in February showed profits slipped more than a third compared with the previous year. However, the decline was primarily due to costs and accounting items associated with unusual items, rather than store performance, Loblaw said.
It will release its first-quarter results on May 4.KANSAS CITY, MO—Speaking with a fiery passion about a deep hunger and desire, Chiefs coach Andy Reid reportedly motivated players Monday with an inspiring speech about an incredible burrito place he recently discovered. “I can tell you right now, the burrito at Taqueria El Comal had all the ingredients of a world champion,” said Reid, his voice reportedly quivering as he described the effect of combining roasted chicken and carne asada to the players huddled around him. “And they don’t just take tortillas from a package and steam them because, men, there are no shortcuts to perfection. They’ve got the trays of dough balls that they flatten out and grill to order, and that right there is the difference between a good burrito and a great one.” Reid reportedly concluded the rousing 10-minute speech by requesting that any player who goes to Taqueria El Comal take his punch card, as he only needs three more purchases for a free steak taco.
AdvertisementThe average family from western Sydney is paying around $22,000 a year in transport costs, representing as much as 17 per cent of total household income, a new report from a national motoring group finds.
The first national Transport Affordability Index, released by the Australian Automobile Association, whose members include the NRMA, shows a two-car Sydney household faces weekly transport costs of $419 per week.
Sydney households face the highest transport costs of any Australian city both in dollar terms and as a percentage of household income, the report found.
The AAA, which is the peak organisation for Australia's motoring groups and their 8 million members, says it commissioned the report so both consumers and policy makers "have a clear picture of exactly how much transport really costs, and how policy decisions at state and federal levels will affect household budgets over time".Luc Gnago / Reuters Immigrants, who are fleeing the unrest in Libya, unload their belongings in Agadez, northern Niger September 15, 2011.
Where the green of central Africa surrenders to the creeping dry talons of the Saharan desert, down a 14-hour drive from the closest thing Niger has to a city, the baked mud and sand outpost of Agadez is one of those corners of Africa where years get measured in the cracking of walls or the growth of a beard. But lately, town life in Agadez has picked up considerably. The market is stacked with refrigerators and video game consoles, a side product of the trucks full of weary and parched passengers that have been streaming into its streets from the north since the war in nearby Libya started. Nearly every household here had a family member sending money back from Libya's oil economy. Sometimes whole families migrated north. Now, these returnees are wondering what they are going to do back in their own country, one of the poorest in the world. "None of my friends have found any work," says Adoum Ghoumir, who fled through Algeria back to this Nigerien town. "What will these countries do with all of us?"
The Sahara's imposing terrain is obscuring the human and political fallout of the war in Libya from outside view. At least 80,000 people have flooded into Niger alone in recent months from its northeastern neighbor and Niger's government says the number is more than twice that. Usually, fleeing refugees signal humanitarian troubles. That's the case here too, as the needy absorb the needy and authorities fear a poor upcoming harvest. (See pictures of the lengthy battle for Libya.)
But there is a far greater danger to the cross-border wave, one that could reach far beyond these scorched lands to the West's doorsteps. Ghoumir is a Tuareg, the rugged Saharans who live mostly across the loose borders of Mali, Niger, Algeria, and western Libya. Towering, sword-wielding, and often fully shrouded but for their eyes, the fiercely independent Tuareg carry a reputation as the bad boys of the Sahara. They have historically rocky relations with their host governments, have launched a series of rebellions in the past two decades. But they had a fickle friend in Muammar Gaddafi, who at times supported their rebellions, invested in their areas, and opened up Libya's doors to them. Tens of thousands of Tuareg moved to Libya for work. Many joined his military 12,000, according to a senior Tuareg politician in Niger and thousands more picked up arms for him once the conflict began. Many of these were former rebels. Now, they are part of the flood home. And authorities doubt they are coming home empty-handed. "You can't travel this part of the desert without guns," says Baika Boudjamaha, head of the Nigerien polices anti-drug operations. "They could hide those weapons wherever they want in the desert or mountains and we'd never find them."
Besides serving as the base for previous Tuareg rebellions, this belt of the Sahara has in recent years turned into one of the world's most active smuggling routes. The Tuareg caravans of old that carried salts and slaves across the desert have been replaced with well-armed Land Rovers trafficking cocaine, migrants, and arms. This lucrative trade, which moves from West African coasts to the east across the Sahara and into Libya, Sudan, and Egypt are believed to help finance the West's chief new foe in the region, the al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a shadowy cross-ethnic network originating in southern Algeria that operates in the porous desert through Mauritania, northern Mali, Algeria, and across the border into Niger. Many now expect them to slide into Libya as well. (See portraits of refugees fleeing Libya.)
AQIM announced itself to the world through several high-profile hostage cases of Westerners that halted tourism and led the U.S. to pull its Peace Corps program from Mauritania and Niger. Some European governments say they have uncovered domestic cells and fear a possible attack on their shores, although many doubt AQIM's capabilities extend beyond its desert base. With an unstable Libya next door offering a possible new stomping ground, much of Gaddafi's arsenal now on the market, and tens of thousands of restless youth now flooding the region, the Libyan shakeup could prove one big boon for Al-Qaeda and the drug smugglers. Mohammed Anako, a former Tuareg rebel leader himself and now the highest elected official in Agadez, sums it all up grimly: "There are big troubles ahead."
So did the U.S. and its European allies shoot themselves in the foot by intervening in Libya? Here at the base of Africa's great desert, the popular consensus is a resounding yes, albeit from one of Gaddafi's core African constituencies. "You in the West should have planned this better. You wanted the end of Gaddafi, but didn't you know the consequences and disorder that would result?" Or so Aghaly ag Alambo, who led the last Nigerien Tuareg rebellion in 2007 and was part of the high-profile convoy carrying Gadhafi's security chief Abdullah Mansour Dhao to enter Niger from Libya three weeks ago, asked me with a sly smile in his comfortable house in the capital Niamey. Resentment at how Gaddafi fell wont fade fast. My Tuareg interpreter later informed me he introduced me to some interviewees as an Australian (I'm American), due to the popular local resentment against NATO. Locals say a recent France 24 TV crew was angrily run out of town.
For a brief period not long ago, Agadez's stasis was interrupted by an influx of adventure tourism, and Agadez brimmed with new jobs. That stopped with the Tuareg's 2007 rebellion. By the time the war ended in 2009, the tourism never returned. Today, all that remains of that heyday are vacant hotels and broken down ATMs. Locals don't expect them to open back up any time soon. "We could control the rebellion," said one Tuareg resident here in Agadez. "This Al-Qaeda we can't control."
See TIME's video about the youth in Libya looking beyond Gaddafi.- / AFP / Getty Images
It takes small triggers for tragedy to unfold, shining a spotlight on the state of a country's governance. In Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, the deaths of more than 60 children admitted at the the government-run Baba Raghav Das Medical College - in just under five days - is proving to be one such trigger.
Multiple agencies have reported in gruesome detail, how the children, suffering from encephalitis, choked to death due to their oxygen supply being cut off.
Initial focus fell on a blame-game between the vendor responsible for supplying oxygen and the hospital. The private contractor allegedly cut off the hospital’s oxygen supply over unpaid arrears amounting to around ₹ 68 lakh.
The state and central governments have failed collectively, killing not only sixty children this week, but nearly 50,000 people in the last 30 years.
The hospital initiated a payment of ₹ 22 lakh to the supplier after several patients succumbed to inadequate oxygen, indicating that they had the funds. The suppliers, meanwhile, are claiming that oxygen shortage has nothing to do with the deaths at all. So the question is: who is really responsible? A little bit of digging reveals that the bloody trail could lead all the way to the top of New Delhi. Various reports and records indicate that people in power at every level of administration have known for years that a tragedy like this was in the making - in Gorakhpur, and even specifically at Baba Raghav Das Hospital. The state and central governments have failed collectively, killing not only sixty children this week, but nearly 50,000 people in the last 30 years.
The State Government
Sanjay Kanojia / AFP / Getty Images
Health is a state subject, meaning the State Government is directly responsible for public healthcare. Although the CM’s chair in Uttar Pradesh recently passed from Akhilesh Yadav to Yogi Adityanath, this responsibility goes beyond who sits on the throne at any given point. The Government is a perpetual entity and dealing with encephalitis has been the Uttar Pradesh government’s perpetual failure.
While the state government’s resources were devoted to initiatives such as giving ambulances for cows, a fatal torch was simply passed up.
The government has long been aware that Baba Raghav Das Hospital, where hundreds of children die of encephalitis every year, is particularly susceptible. This April, the college requested ₹37 crore in funds from the state government, to improve their facilities. The state government forwarded the request to the central government, but funds are still awaited. Even the hospital staff hasn’t been paid since February due to shortage of funds, medical college sources told The Telegraph. While the state government’s resources were devoted to initiatives such as giving ambulances for cows and making Aadhaar mandatory for availing ambulances, this fatal torch was simply passed up.
The Central Government
Diptendu Dutta / AFP / Getty Images
The loss of lives to encephalitis is not a UP-specific problem. Nationwide, over 5000 deaths have been attributed to the disease over the past three years.
Lok Sabha question #2223 answered on 28 July 2017
Exactly a year ago, on 11 August 2016, Adityanath himself (then a fifth-term MP from Gorakhpur) had called the attention of the Ministry of Health And Family Welfare to the spread of Encephalitis throughout the country.
He mentioned that the Central Government has not been able to start a focused program to deal with the problem.
The Minister of Health and Family Welfare, JP Nadda, responded to Adityanath, saying that the Central government was aware and had sent a team to review the situation across the nation.
Gorakhpur was identified as one of the critical districts in UP. Remember, all of this happened a whole year ago.
The government's level of awareness of the problem gets ever more specific.
In the same Lok Sabha debate from August 2016, they identified BRD Hospital, where the recent tragedy unfolded, as key in the fight against encephalitis. They even promised a specialised Vector-borne Disease Surveillance Unit directly under the Central Government.
Uncorrected Debates, Lok Sabha, Page 78 / Via 164.100.47.193Over the past two years, Europe's premier League of Legends league has mostly been played during the week, featured a poorly justified best-of-two format that was later replaced by a group format and has seen a lot of its big name talent leave to play in other regions. Meanwhile, viewership has begun to stagnate, and the EU LCS appears to be in a rough place compared to its North American counterpart.
The data for the below graph was compiled from Twinge.tv, which pulls data from Twitch.tv every hour or so, meaning the numbers are not perfectly accurate. However, they are as accurate as we can get given that Riot does not release official viewership data. Unfortunately, Twinge also only archives data from the past 365 days, limiting the amount of splits we can track.
This chart also only tracks viewership from EULCS1, EULCS2, NALCS1 and NALCS2, and omits data from Europe's several regional streams. While those streams would bump up viewership, the increase is unlikely to change the data significantly, and would make the chart unreadable if included. With all that in mind though, the numbers paint a picture of a struggling EU LCS.
Editor's Note: This chart omits Week 10 of the 2017 EU LCS Spring Split but all data presented in the rest of this article does not.
It's worth noting that taken at face value, 2017 EU LCS viewership looks really good. It has the highest peak concurrent viewership over the past two splits, but it came in Week 1, which has higher viewership than average across every LCS stream. After that, viewership drops and trends downwards throughout the rest of the season.
Averaged out, this split actually beats the previous one's main stream by approximately 3,000 viewers. However, that does not take into account the second stream, which averaged out to 65,961 peak concurrent viewers across the 2016 Spring Split.
While it's safe to assume that a number of viewers were watching both streams at the same time, it's equally safe to assume that many weren't. The numbers can't be combined and taken as written, but it does show that the EU LCS viewership is either shrinking or stagnating, not growing, while the NA LCS viewership has exploded this past split.
It's unclear exactly why this is happening, but prominent members in the European League of Legends community have some ideas. G2 Esports owner and CEO Carlos "Ocelote" Rodriguez says he believes that it has to do with the state of European teams. Simply put, G2 is too good, and that's boring to watch week in and week out.
"It doesn't help that G2 is winning all the time. I'm serious," he told theScore esports. "I'm G2, but even I myself, I watch every game and I see us playing a team that is perhaps the last place team, and the predictability is what makes the region a little more boring. If the same predictability would be in the NA LCS, I think things would be different.
"I do think though that the European teams are perhaps not ambitious enough when it comes to lineups. I do think that it doesn't do many any favors that some of the clubs, especially the ones at the bottom, simply don't give a shit about winning. That essentially f**ks up my business plan. I don't want to be the guy with two hairs in a bald world. In League of Legends in Europe, there are only three clubs, maybe four that I'm really concerned about putting on a show and beating. The rest are really dead weight. And I hate dead weight."
Ocelote also called the EU LCS Riot's "lab rat," but believes that time has passed. He says Europe is more stable right now, though the format switches may have confused casual fans who don't follow the league as closely.
It's not all doom and gloom though, as FC Schalke 04 coach Michael "Veteran" Archer notes that viewership could be stronger on the regional streams. However, he also says that he knows of players who have left Europe because they see the low views and want something better in North America. Even if viewership is a little low now though, Veteran says Europe is still thriving.
"I just think that naturally, the player base and the culture of Europe means we'll always be more relevant than North America on the international scale anyway," Veteran said. "So I don't put that much through into views even though that I know for a fact that there are European players in North America who are there because European viewership is down and they think they'll get more fame. I'm not that worried about a large-scale exodus, if only because most of the import slots are taken."
On the other hand, FC Schalke 04 and former H2k-Gaming support player Oskar "VandeR" Bogdan says that the format is partially the problem, just not in the way you'd expect. It's not about best-of-two formats or the group stage, but about the fact that the average game just doesn't matter.
"I like the two group system, it's just different so I mean it's more interesting to watch, at least for me," he said. "I'm a big fan of removing playoffs and just having one season with some tournaments in between.
"It would make the season more interesting, because then every match counts. When you have playoffs, not every match counts and the season is too long. Most of the games are not important, so you just chill in the game house and play another week of LCS with low viewership because it's boring."
VandeR pointed out that the space occupied by playoffs could be filled with more international events, something fans are always clamoring for. Otherwise, he feels it's difficult for fans to care about a Week 6 game that has no immediate impact on playoffs, which would explain why viewership tends to spike in the last week of a given split.
It's undeniable that, on average, Europe performs better on an international scale than North America, it's just that that success hasn't translated into a viewership spike across the past two splits. H2K made it to Top 4 at Worlds 2016, but their games didn't see a notable increase in viewership in 2017. It's hard to say why, but like Veteran, Ocelote isn't worried. This too shall pass.
"I think nowadays, Riot EU is treated according to the important of the European Market which, for the record, is a bigger market than the US market when it comes to user acquisition, when it comes to revenue generation, and about 25 percent bigger in terms of player base. And I'm not talking about League of Legends specifically, I'm talking in general. So the European market is super important for any company that strives to be big on a global level.
"As time goes by the European office becomes better and better, and at the end of the day these trends are easily broken by one European team doing really well at Worlds or getting some major talent that hypes the region up."
Daniel Rosen is a news editor for theScore esports. The first LCS game he watched was a Fnatic vs. Origen game. You can follow him on Twitter.Keelayjams's Vines are among some of the most daring out there. (He's the Viner who Tweeted his password and let strangers take over his account.) In this interview, Keelayjams shares his very (very!) strong opinions on street art, advertising, and why you shouldn't care about your follower count.
Keelayjams, or Kyle M. F. Williams, grew up in Massachusetts and currently lives in New York City with his wife Erin and their two cats. He went to college for painting and works for a clothing company designing men's accessories, yet on the web, he has created Vines that defy genre. Keelayjams talked to us about choosing to create what he wants without worrying about feedback or popularity, and his unusual decision to reject corporate money when it comes to his Vine account.
Tribeca: Your website reveals that you've made digital collages, sculptures, paintings and even music (with accompanying videos.) What advantages does Vine have as an artistic medium, and is it your preferred medium?
Kyle M. F. Williams: I like the immediacy of Vine. My workflow with Vine is usually pretty fast, I have a little visual idea in the morning, sit down for a while and conceptualize how to make it real, gather supplies and shoot the Vine that afternoon. I've always loved art and music that either looked or sounded half-finished, like artists' sketches and musicians' demos, and because of the time limit, interface restrictions, and low-resolution of Vine, I feel like I can just crank out these visual ideas in that "medium quality" look that I'm comfortable with and release it into the feed and then move onto the next idea. It's not my preferred medium but I think that it's influencing what I want to be doing in the future, like a long-form cinematic kinda thing.
Tribeca: Your latest Vines involve pasting graphics over real-time footage (ex: "Sneaking Lindsay Lohan into my apt with a very large rope", "Installed a new security system", "I'm in a fight with a skeleton"). Knowing that Vine doesn't allow for any editing, how are you able to accomplish this (or is it a secret?)
KW: I wanted to expand on creating surreal Vines that occur in a realistic space but I wanted to push the content towards something that would be almost impossible to produce. I've spent a good amount of money on supplies for Vines in the past and decided to chill out on the purchases and figure out a way to achieve some sort of bonkers scenario economically. I caved to stop-motion. I'm not a fan of cutesy, whimsical stop-motion. I thought I could make it a little creepier and less cartoony by grounding it in real life.
The public Vines take a lot of courage. I'm not super comfortable going outside in the city and making a scene.
The "I'm in a fight..." Vine was created by filming raw video with a DSLR, exporting 6-seconds of that footage to individual JPEGs, loading them into Photoshop and manipulating each one of the 60-or-so frames with superimposed elements like a horse head, a Shia LaBeouf head, a koala head, and a basketball all emerging from a human skeleton body. These individual collages were printed out on sheets of paper and shot stop-motion-style with the Vine app. Sound effects were looped in Garageband and played on an external speaker aimed at the phone doing the Vining. Pretty intense set-up, but much more cost-effective than actually buying a human skeleton, koala head, basketball, horse head, and creating a life-cast of Shia LaBeouf.
"Sneaking Lindsay Lohan..." and "Installed a new security system" were done in the same frame-by-frame Photoshop edit style but were shot using stop-motion off the screen of an iPad with a piece of frosted plexiglass over it to soften the pixels that often pop up on shitty Vines where people record their computer screens. The frosted plexi just blurs the pixels a touch so it doesn't look so obvious.
I think the words "Lindsay Lohan" floating in a lake is funny and cool to look at. That's all.
Tribeca: You've done some wonderful Vines in public spaces that combine pop culture icons with surreal imagery (drawing some parallels, I think, to Banksy). How were you able to make Vines such as "Amanda Bynes Graffiti" or "Shia LeBeouf hit me up" without interruption? And what's the significance of having the Vine orchestrated and filmed in public?
KW: The public Vines take a lot of courage. I'm not super comfortable going outside in the city and making a scene. I certainly don't want to interact with strangers or make them uncomfortable or leave a mess. For these larger-scale public pieces I try to shut off the world, focus on the shot, bang it out as efficiently as possible, upload the video, clean-up, and peace out. "Amanda Bynes Graffiti" was easy: I just had headphones in and listened to some tunes while I worked, muting the rest of the city. "Shia LeBeouf hit me up" was a little tougher and took an assistant and two takes.
It's cool here on the Upper East Side because it's not really an "artistic" kinda neighborhood like Williamsburg or Bushwick. Things are clean and people are too busy with their own business to give a shit if you're sticking white bread slices to a brick wall or placing letters on an abandoned movie theater marquee. I think I only do these public spaces Vines to give my feed a little bit of visual variety. I live in a tiny studio apartment and I'm pretty sure every inch of it has been featured in a Vine at some point during the last year. The outdoor stuff is almost an excuse for me to vary my feed or maybe to feel like I'm getting some exercise or something. The pieces are temporary and exist only for the Vine.
I don't like permanent street art. I like the process if the piece is interesting, but awful "social commentary" type street art that just sits on a wall until it's washed off is the worst. I guess I'm doing the anti-social-commentary street art by simply using the name of some high-paid celebrity with little to no biting commentary at all. I don't care to make a statement. I think the words "Lindsay Lohan" floating in a lake is funny and cool to look at. That's all. Plus, I clean up.
When a massive company is trying to be a your bud on the web and hashtagging themselves into your heart it's so obvious and embarrassing.
Tribeca: You've done some great work with Simply Sylvio and j_e__s___s. Are there any other Viners out there who inspire you and who you'd like to work with?
KW: I want to push Jake Fogelnest off a cliff while he's riding a Citi-Bike with training wheels, I want Matt Goold to do that pursed-lips-head-shake thing for as long as he physically can. I want to pants Bobby McKenna. I want to dog-sit for Marlo Meekins. I want Matt Swinsky to murder me until I'm dead.
Tribeca: Some of my favorite Vines of yours are the fake advertisements where you end up saying "fuck you" to all of them (literally.) Are you completely against Vine being used for advertising, even if the advertiser is attempting to take a more artistic route in promoting their product?
KW: I didn't think I was against Vine advertising until I started actually seeing it on Vine. Earlier this year I joined a Vine-centric ad agency. I thought it was no big deal: If a company wanted to work with you to make a Vine for them they'd give you a couple thousand bucks, you'd do the 6-second video pushing their product on your account, and who cares, onto the next thing. But when I actually saw what other people started doing for companies, it grossed me out. I never got any action from the ad agency and I was pretty sure I didn't want it, so I bowed out. Not that it was compromising my "art" but I had a feeling that if I looked back a year's worth of my Vines I'd be thoroughly embarrassed by the shitty ad for Triscuits or whatever that I was contractually prohibited from deleting from my feed. So I made a series of fake-ads utilizing the cute stop-motion technique that so many of these corporate Vines resorted to to make these goofy anti-corporate "fuck you" Vines for Garnier Fructis, Campbell's, Gatorade, Yamaha, and Monster Energy.
Corporate presence on any social media platform is a joke. When a massive company is trying to be a your bud on the web and hashtagging themselves into your heart it's so obvious and embarrassing. No one cares. People just want coupons.
Tribeca: According to this article a while back, you gave away your username and password via Twitter, allowing any user to do whatever they wanted to your profile because you were concerned about being too consumed with the internet. What were some of the most memorable changes that people made to your account? And would you do it again?
KW: I would never do this again unless I wanted to permanently abandon my account. It was a nightmare to regain access, delete all the videos my "guests" made, and revert my account to the way it was 12 hours before the stunt. I tweeted my Vine log-in info, my phone died, and I went to bed. I was asleep for the entire thing so I'm not completely sure what went on, but I think there were some pretty good puns on "Keelayjams" as my screen name.
Make things that you've always wanted to see but never have.
I got locked out of my account. I lost a bunch of followers who didn't get the joke, which |
('v'); var canvas = document.getElementById('c'); var context = canvas.getContext('2d'); var back = document.createElement('canvas'); var backcontext = back.getContext('2d'); var cw,ch; v.addEventListener('play', function(){ cw = v.clientWidth; ch = v.clientHeight; canvas.width = cw; canvas.height = ch; back.width = cw; back.height = ch; draw(v,context,backcontext,cw,ch); },false);
This is almost the same as I had before, with two real differences.
First, I’m creating a second canvas and pulling the context out of it as well. This is a “backing canvas”, which I’ll use to perform intermediate operations before painting the final result into the visible canvas in the markup. The backing canvas doesn’t even need to be added to the document. It can just hang out here in my script. This strategy will be used a lot in later examples, and it’s quite useful in general, so take note of it.
Second, I’m waiting to resize the canvases until the video is played, rather than just sizing them immediately. This is because the <video> element probably hasn’t loaded its video up when the DOMContentLoaded event fires, so it’s still using the default size for the element. By the time it’s ready to play, though, it knows the size of the video and has sized itself appropriately. At that point, we can set up the canvases to be the same size as the video.
function draw(v,c,bc,w,h) { if(v.paused || v.ended) return false; bc.drawImage(v,0,0,w,h);
Same as the first demo, the draw() function begins by checking if it should stop, then just draws the video onto a canvas. Note that I’m drawing it onto the backing canvas, which, again, is just sitting in my script and isn’t displayed in the document. The visible canvas is reserved for the displaying the grayscale version, so I use the backing canvas to load up the initial video data.
var idata = bc.getImageData(0,0,w,h); var data = idata.data;
Here’s the first new bit. You can draw something onto a canvas with either the normal canvas drawing functions or drawImage(), or you can just manipulate the pixels directly through the ImageData object. getImageData() returns the pixels from a rectangle of the canvas. In this case, I’m just getting the whole thing.
Warning! If you’re following along and trying to run these demos on your desktop, this is where you’ll probably run into trouble. The <canvas> element keeps track of where the data inside of it comes from, and if it knows that you got something from another website (for example, if the <video> element you painted into the canvas is pointing to a cross-origin file), it’ll “taint” the canvas. You’re not allowed to grab the pixel data from a tainted canvas. Unfortunately, file: urls count as “cross-origin” for this purpose, so you can’t run this on your desktop. Either fire up a web server on your computer and view the page from localhost, or upload it to some other server you control.
for(var i = 0; i < data.length; i+=4) { var r = data[i]; var g = data[i+1]; var b = data[i+2];
Now, a quick note about the ImageData object. It returns the pixels in a special way in order to make them easy to manipulate. If you have, say, a 100×100 pixel canvas, it contains a total of 10,000 pixels. The ImageData array for it will then have 40,000 elements, because the pixels are broken up by component and listed sequentially. Each group of four elements in the ImageData array represent the red, green, blue, and alpha channels for that pixel. To loop through the pixels, just increment your counter by 4 every time, like I do here. Each channel, then, is an integer between 0 and 255.
var brightness = (3*r+4*g+b)>>>3; data[i] = brightness; data[i+1] = brightness; data[i+2] = brightness;
Here, a quick bit of math converts the RGB value of the pixel into a single “brightness” value. As it turns out, our eyes respond most strongly to green light, slightly less so to red, and much less so to blue. So, I weight the channels appropriately before taking the average. Then, we just feed that single value back to all three channels. As we probably all know, when the red, green, and blue values of a color are equal, you get gray. (During this whole process, I’m completely ignoring the fourth member of each group, the alpha channel, because it’s always going to be 255.)
idata.data = data;
Shove the modified pixel array back into the ImageData object…
c.putImageData(idata,0,0);
…and then shove the whole thing into the visible canvas! We didn’t need to do any complicated drawing at all! Just grab the pixels, manipulate them, and shove them back in. So easy!
A final note: real-time full-video pixel manipulation is one of those rare places where micro-optimizations actually matter. You can see their effects in my code here. Originally, I didn’t pull the pixel data out of the ImageData object, and just wrote “var r = idata.data[i];” and so on each time, which meant several extra property lookups in every iteration of the loop. I also originally just divided the brightness by 8 and floored the value, which is slightly slower than bit-shifting by 3 places. In normal code, these sorts of things are completely insignificant, but when you’re doing them several million times per second (the video is 480×360, and thus contains nearly 200,000 pixels, each of which is individually handled roughly 100 times a second), those tiny delays add up into a noticeable lag.
More advanced pixel manipulation
You can operate on more than just a single pixel at a time, too, composing some fairly complex visual effects. As I noted at the end of the previous section, performance matters a lot here, but you’d be surprised what you can squeeze out with a little creativity. As you can see in the demo, I’ll be creating an emboss effect in this example, which requires you to use several input pixels together to compute the value of each output pixel.
Embossed video with canvas manipulation
Here’s the code. The HTML and most of the beginning code is identical to the previous example, so I’ve omitted everything but the draw() function:
function draw(v,c,bc,cw,ch) { if(v.paused || v.ended) return false; // First, draw it into the backing canvas bc.drawImage(v,0,0,cw,ch); // Grab the pixel data from the backing canvas var idata = bc.getImageData(0,0,cw,ch); var data = idata.data; var w = idata.width; var limit = data.length // Loop through the subpixels, convoluting each using an edge-detection matrix. for(var i = 0; i < limit; i++) { if( i%4 == 3 ) continue; data[i] = 127 + 2*data[i] - data[i + 4] - data[i + w*4]; } // Draw the pixels onto the visible canvas c.putImageData(idata,0,0); // Start over! setTimeout(draw,20,v,c,bc,cw,ch); }
Now let’s step through that.
function draw(v,c,bc,cw,ch) { if(v.paused || v.ended) return false; // First, draw it into the backing canvas bc.drawImage(v,0,0,cw,ch); // Grab the pixel data from the backing canvas var idata = bc.getImageData(0,0,cw,ch); var data = idata.data;
Same as the last example. Check to see if we should stop, then draw the video onto the backing canvas and grab the pixel data from it.
var w = idata.width;
The significance of this line needs some explanation. I’m already passing the canvas’s width into the function (as the cw variable), so why am I re-measuring its width here? Well, I was actually lying to you earlier when I explained how large the pixel array will be. The browser might have one pixel of canvas map to one pixel of ImageData, but browsers are allowed to use higher resolutions in the image data, representing each pixel of canvas as a 2×2 block of ImageData pixels, or maybe 3×3, or maybe even greater!
If they use a “high-resolution backing store”, as this is called, it means better display, as aliasing artifacts (jagged edges on diagonal lines) become much smaller and less noticeable. It also means that rather than a 100×100 pixel canvas giving you an ImageData.data object with 40,000 numbers, it might have 160,000 numbers instead. By asking the ImageData for its width and height, we ensure that we loop through the pixel data properly no matter whether the browser uses a low-res or high-res backing store for it.
It’s very important that you use this properly whenever you need the width or height of the data you pulled out as an ImageData object. If too many people screw it up and just use the canvas’s width and height instead, then browsers will be forced to always use a low-res backing store to be compatible with those broken scripts!
var limit = data.length; for(var i = 0; i < limit; i++) { if( i%4 == 3 ) continue; data[i] = 127 + 2*data[i] - data[i + 4] - data[i + w*4]; }
I’m grabbing the data’s length and stuffing it into a variable, so I don’t have to pay for a property access on every single iteration of the loop. (Remember, micro-optimizations matter when you’re doing real-time video manipulation!) Then I just loop through the pixels, like I did before. If the pixel happens to be for the alpha channel (every fourth number in the array), I can just skip it — I don’t want to change the transparency. Otherwise, I’ll do a little math to find the difference between the current pixel’s color channel and the similar channels of the pixels below and to the right, then just combine that difference with the “average” gray value of 127. This has the effect of making areas where the pixels are the same color a flat medium gray, but edges where the color suddenly changes will turn either bright or dark.
There’s another optimization here. Because I’m only comparing the current pixel with pixels “further ahead” in the data which I haven’t looked at yet, I can just store the changed value right back in the original data, because nothing will ever look at the current pixel’s data again after this point. This means I don’t have to allocate a big array to hold the results before turning it back into an ImageData object.
c.putImageData(idata,0,0); setTimeout(draw,20,v,c,bc,cw,ch);
Finally, draw the modified ImageData object into the visible canvas, and set up another call to the function in 20 milliseconds. This is the same as the previous example.
Wrapping up
So, we’ve explored the basics of combining HTML 5’s <canvas> and <video> elements today. The demos were very basic, but they illustrated all the essential techniques you’ll need to do something even cooler on your own:
You can draw a video directly onto a canvas. When you draw onto a canvas, the browser will automatically scale the image for you if necessary. When you display a canvas, the browser will again scale it automatically if the visible size is different from the size of the backing-store. You can do direct pixel-level manipulation of a canvas by just grabbing the ImageData, changing it, and drawing it back in.
In Part 2 of this article [Ed: coming soon!], I’ll explore some more interesting applications of video/canvas integration, including a real-time video-to-ASCII converter!Pro cyclocross racer Amy Dombroski of Boulder was killed Thursday when she was hit by a truck while training in Belgium.
Dombroski, 26, was riding behind a scooter when she was hit by a truck. The 52-year-old truck driver was not under the influence of alcohol when the accident occurred at 4 a.m. MDT, according to the Belgian newspaper, Het Nieusblad.
Dombroski won three under-23 cyclocross national titles and moved to Belgium last year to train with her team, Telenet-Fidea.
The accident sent shock waves through the Colorado cycling community.
“When I decided to come back to cycling, I came back specifically wanting to live as an athlete like Amy Dombroski did,” said Mara Abbott, a Boulder cyclist who returned in 2012 after a year’s absence and won her second prestigious Giro Rosa title. “She did stuff because she loved it and because it was good for her. So many of us waste time hemming and hawing and not doing what we should be doing and what our heart says.
“Amy didn’t do that.”
When Dombroski, a Jericho, Vt., native, was back in Boulder, she and Abbott sometimes trained together. Abbott left the sport for health reasons and returned last year better than ever.
“I told myself if I come back, I’d be proud to be an athlete like Amy,” Abbott said. “I’d be joyful and in tune with what made me happy and I’d take care of people I love the same way Amy did.
“Whether she knew it or not, she was my role model to come back to cycling.”
Georgia Gould, a Fort Collins mountain biker and cyclocross racer who won a bronze medal at the London Olympics mountain bike race, was Dombroski’s teammate for a year with LUNA Chix.
“Amy was a firecracker,” Gould said. “She had a really great sense of humor. She’d say what’s on her mind, which I appreciate. She was just a very dedicated racer.”
Dombroski’s accident came on a country road near the Belgian town of Sint-Katelijne-Waver.
“Any time anyone falls victim of that sort of dangerous training environment, it’s tough for all of us,” said Jonathan Vaughters, CEO of Boulder-based Garmin-Sharp. “We know the risks and live with that and hope nothing happens, but sometimes it does.”
According to Boulder-based VeloNews, Dombroski’s friends have set up a memorial fund to help her family. Donations can be left at Pro Peloton in Boulder or mailed to Memorial of Amy Dombroski; c/o Wells Fargo Deposits; 1242 Pearl St.; Boulder 80302.
John Henderson: jhenderson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnhendersondpI spent the morning of London’s Pride parade hand-stitching dildos onto a flag.
I’d been using the sex-toy motif in my work before I made a flag of Isis out of them and brought it to the march. Previously, I’ve attached dildos onto postcards from each country where homosexuality is still illegal to point out that the laws of these places regards its gay residents as mere sex objects.
The decision to make the flag was a simple one: a sense of outrage at Isis’s brutal advance across North Africa, Libya, Syria and Iraq. Medieval ideologies and barbarism were being spread and recorded through that most modern of expressions, social media, with that flag ever-present. It has become a potent symbol of brutality, fear and sexual oppression. If I wanted to try and stimulate a dialogue about the ridiculousness of this ideology, the flag was key.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Coombs dildosis flag Photograph: Paul Coombs
It was important that I didn’t try to replicate the writing on the flag, because the words and their subject – Islam – are not the target. But if I showed as little respect to this flag as Isis shows to the religion and people they claim to represent so that when people saw it they would think, “dildos”? Would that be a crazy idea?
The Pride festival is a pure celebration of the finest aspects of humanity: of tolerance, togetherness, acceptance and liberation, the polar opposite of what Isis stands for. If there was anywhere where my flag had a voice, it was there. And I had an invitation to march in the parade with a friend involved with “Alien Sex Club”, an art project exploring the HIV syndemic by John Walter.
We agreed we would gauge reaction to the flag from fellow marchers before we hit the main streets and the crowds, but the reaction was so good humored and understanding that any worries were dissipated in minutes. The tragedies in Tunisia, Kuwait and Lyon made the case for protesting against these murderers even stronger; defiance is the best form of remembrance. The flag was so clearly made of dildos that I never thought it could be mistaken for an actual Isis flag.
But 1.5 miles (2.4km) into the march, a gust of wind suddenly snapped the flagpole in two. I was wrestling with it when three or four police officers calmly appeared beside me.
Three policemen held out the flag and inspected it, grinning, acknowledging immediately that these were definitely dildos and butt plugs. They explained that they were getting reports that a man was carrying an Isis flag through the streets, a misconception that could easily put me in danger. They asked if I would keep the flag concealed. So I put it away.
Several hours passed before I noticed spreading news that CNN reported on the flag as though it was an actual Isis banner, not a piece of cloth covered in sex toys. #DildoIsis quickly started trending online. People made tribute dildo flags. But how could a report so hysterical and so clearly false possibly get onto the air, discussed by a terrorism expert? CNN correspondent Lucy Pawle described my flag as a “very bad mimicry” but the only bad mimicry I could see was CNN’s impression of a reputable news organization. What does this say about every other report that they broadcast? And why have they not mentioned it since? They seem to think that if nobody says anything about it then it can’t have really happened.
But oh, it did. On a message board someone posted: “Whenever I see the Isis flag anywhere, all I can see is dildos!” Mission accomplished.Jim Flaherty has clearly decided his budget doesn't need much selling to the Tim Hortons crowd at home. And the Finance Minister's annual pitch to markets is being done in Asia rather than New York.
Mr. Flaherty's post-budget journey across the Pacific has raised a few opposition gripes that he has left his post just after a federal budget, dodging questions in the Commons with a foreign junket the week after delivering his annual fiscal blueprint.
But his trip is perhaps more remarkable for what it says about this year's budget and Canada's future economic priorities. Mr. Flaherty isn't crisscrossing Canada to promote a budget that is short on major measures. And for the traditional post-budget junket to sell Canada's fiscal story to business, he chose Hong Kong and Thailand, not Wall Street or London.
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"I think it's noteworthy," said Peter Harder, president of the Canada China Business Council and a former deputy minister of foreign affairs. "Asia is the growth area. I suspect a significant amount of our debt is held in Asia. … It's part of a rebalancing we will see in the years ahead because of the important role Asia is playing economically."
The trip to sell Canada's story there is made possible by what many budget watchers view as the least consequential budget since Stephen Harper took office – a document unlikely to move markets or polls.
Governments usually plan multi-day campaigns to sell budgets, with the finance minister leading ministers and MPs in fanning out across the country for speeches and interviews. This year, that was mostly a one-day affair – last Friday.
For most of Mr. Flaherty's tenure, minority Parliaments made budgets, potentially putting at risk the survival of the government. Last year's included substantial cuts to departmental budgets and the civil service.
Bank of Montreal chief economist Doug Porter pointed out there's nothing in last week's federal budget that Mr. Flaherty needs to sell – to financial markets or Canadians. "The country's credit rating is not in doubt whatsoever," Mr. Porter said.
The lack of controversy at home provides more opportunity to get away to tout Canada abroad. Finance Ministers typically do that in New York, to Wall Street audiences, although there have been forays elsewhere, notably to London. Mr. Flaherty's spokesman, Dan Miles, said the Finance Minister often travels to promote the various budget initiatives, encourage investment in Canada and seek to increase trade.
But a post-budget trip to Hong Kong and Thailand is a milestone, not only as a symbol of Asia's rising importance to Canada but as part of Ottawa's deliberate efforts to court greater trade ties with those countries.
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"Asia's been growing immensely. Hong Kong makes good sense. They move markets now," said Gordon Houlden, the former Canadian diplomat who now heads the University of Alberta's China Institute.
The United States will always be a bigger trading partner for Canada, but Hong Kong is the financial capital where Mr. Flaherty can speak to players from China and Southeast Asia who now have large pools of "patient money" and are willing to make longer-term investments, Mr. Houlden said.
One measure in last week's budget did remove the lower-rate preferential tariff, created to aid developing countries, from 72 emerging nations, including China and Thailand. That's likely to be an irritant for those countries, whose exports will now have higher tariffs when entering Canada, although Mr. Houlden said it's by no means a "game-changer" for Asian trade. Mr. Flaherty may seek to smooth the hurt.
What's significant, Mr. Houlden said, is that Mr. Flaherty has gone out of his way to travel to Thailand, a major player in the ASEAN bloc in Southeast Asia – a symbol of the increasing time and attention Ottawa has recently begun paying to Asian nations beyond China.“Simpsons” Scenes and their Reference Movies [Updated]
Update: Some quick notes:
I didn’t compile or make these images; I found ’em, thought they were neat and posted them for everyone to see.
You can find more images like this at Actualidad Simpson.
. Yes, they’re stills and not scenes. Time was short when I posted the images and I used the wrong word. Anyone seriously incovenienced by that is eligible for a full refund.
Time was so short, that I posted a duplicate set of stills. There are only 66 in the set.
Time being short, I also didn’t post movie names. Feel free to identify them in the comments!
Here’s something for you film buffs who are also Simpsons buffs: 66 stills from various episodes of The Simpsons, each one beside the still from the movie scene to which they refer, courtesy of my friend Miss Fipi Lele:SVS is an American audio company known mainly for its subwoofers, one of which I recently had the pleasure of reviewing. What is not mentioned in my review is the fact that I was so enamored with the sub's performance that I ended up buying it. As you'll soon find out, I had a similar experience with SVS's Ultra Bookshelf speaker.
Additional Resources
• Read more bookshelf speaker reviews from HomeTheaterReview.com's writers.
• See pairing options in our Subwoofer Review section.
• Explore more reviews in our Amplifier Review section.
These speakers are actually part of a full line of SVS speakers, which includes the Ultra Towers, the Ultra Center and the Ultra Surrounds. The Ultra Bookshelf retails for $499 each; while my review sample featured a compelling high-gloss piano black finish, it's also available in a black oak veneer (real wood). It's a two-way monitor comprised of a one-inch aluminum dome tweeter with an FEA-optimized diffuser, which according to the SVS site is said to provide an "airy and unveiled presentation." FEA is a method of computer-modeling the design in order to produce a very specific type of performance. The key is that this happens prior to manufacturing. (That's an oversimplified explanation; you can certainly Google it if you want to learn more.) The woofer is a 6.5-inch composite glass-fiber cone and considering its performance, it was obviously a focal point for the SVS engineers. Frequency response is 45 Hz to 32 kHz; nominal impedance is eight ohms and sensitivity is rated at 87 dB. The Ultra Bookshelf measures 14.9 inches high by 8.5 inches wide by 10 inches deep, and each speaker weighs a stout 19 pounds.
The Hookup
The first thing I noticed, beyond the Ultra Bookshelf's exemplary finish, was the angular, wedge-shaped design of the cabinet. Beyond being aesthetically pleasing, the shape provides more accurate sound across the frequency spectrum. I began the hookup by stand-mounting each of the Ultras in place of my Epos ELS 3s. While the speakers come with jumpers attached for bi-wiring or bi-amping, I went the conventional route in hooking them up to my modest two-channel listening rig, which consists of an NAD C325BEE, an Oppo DV-980H and a MusicStreamer II DAC. For streaming from my music library, I used a MacBook Pro. As you make your way through this review, keep in mind that I paid $400 for the NAD, $170 for the Oppo and $150 for the DAC. Some of you might be asking if this gear is up to the task of reviewing a pair of bookshelf speakers that retail for about $1,000, and the answer is, unequivocally, yes. This is a compliment to the Ultras, as they're not the least bit power-hungry and played plenty loud with the rated 50 watts per channel that the NAD puts out. My USB cable came courtesy of WireWorld, and the analog interconnects for the DAC and OPPO were SVS's SoundPath cabling. For playback software, I used a combination of Amarra (for Apple Lossless files) and Decibel (for hi-res files). After about 14 hours of break-in time and some positioning experimentation, it was time to start the listening party.
Performance
To begin, I did a bit of A/B testing between my Epos ELS 3s and the Ultras. I noted that the Ultras exhibited much stronger bass and a marked advantage in terms of balance. While the Epos speakers were a bit thin in the lower frequencies and a bit etched in the upper, the Ultras were the polar opposite. Sure, one can argue that there's a significant difference in price point ($400 vs. $998), but the Epos speakers are highly regarded in their own right, winning Absolute Sound's Budget Component of the Year way back in 2003.
Read more about the performance of the SVS Ultra bookshelf speakers on Page 2.Burglars have broken into Steve Jobs’s family home in Northern California and stolen more than $60,000 worth of “computers and personal items.” 35-year-old Kariem McFarlin, of Alameda, has been arrested and charged with residential burglary and selling stolen property.
McFarlin remains in county jail on a $500,000 bail, and could face a prison sentence of seven years and eight months, including a one-year enhancement for “excessive taking of property” according to Silicon Valley Mercury News.
Police have given away little information about the burglary, and it’s unclear whether the property stolen belonged to Steve himself or a family member. Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Tom Flattery did reveal, however, that the burglary was supposedly a “totally random” one, and that McFarlin was unaware of the home’s owner.
Following Jobs’s passing in October last year, his Palo Alto home has been undergoing major renovations that have forced his family to vacate the property. It is believed that the entire roof will be replaced, and that changes will be made to the property’s roofline. It’s unclear whether Jobs’s family had moved back into the property before the burglary took place.
Source: Silicon Valley Mercury News
Via: Business InsiderLabor's Left faction confident motion binding members to vote in favour of same-sex marriage will pass
Updated
Left wing delegates to Labor's national conference are increasingly confident that a motion binding members to vote in favour of same-sex marriage will be passed later today.
Louise Pratt, from the party's Left, is expected to move an amendment to the ALP platform to force MPs and Senators to support gay marriage after the next election.
It is understood the motion will be seconded by Pat O'Neill from the right wing National Union of Workers.
One source from the Left, after attending a lunchtime caucus meeting, told the ABC "I am positive we'll get enough votes from elsewhere on the conference floor to pass this."
The view from the Right is increasingly pessimistic, with one delegate telling the ABC "we are having some real trouble on same-sex marriage".
At the moment Labor MPs have a conscience vote but there is a move from some in the Left faction, including Deputy Leader Tanya Plibersek, to ensure they would be "bound" to vote for marriage equality after the next election.
That would leave those MPs and senators who oppose gay marriage having to abstain or cross the floor, which could see them expelled from the party.
Opening the final day of the national conference today, Mr Shorten said Labor supported same-sex marriage and wanted it to be legalised in this term of Parliament.
"Let us ask of Mr Abbott that he gives a free vote to all members of his party and of course if we ask for him to give a free vote, we must extend that ourselves," he said.
Labor frontbencher, and member of the Left Anthony Albanese told Insiders that he strongly supports gay marriage but believes the party should retain a conscience vote.
"I'm of the view that you can have that strong position but be respectful towards people who, because of their faith, have a different point of view," he said.
"You can't call for tolerance and respect for diversity in my view whilst being intolerant."
Labor is also expected to change some of its rules today to give party members more say in the way it is run.
Mr Shorten called for the party to give its rank-and-file members more power.
But the details of how the so-called democratisation would work are still being figured out, with both issues expected to be discussed during the rules debate this afternoon.
The key issue of the conference was finalised yesterday when delegates accepted Mr Shorten's push for a future Labor government to have the option of turning back boats.
After a passionate and emotional debate the conference voted to reject a motion to ban turn-backs.
Topics: marriage, lgbt, community-and-society, federal-government, bill-shorten, alp, australia, melbourne-3000
First postedThe Pope is either a despicable liar or a complete ignoramus. Or possibly both. (How’s that for a gentle opening statement?) If you think that’s a tad harsh, read on.
Pope Francis has decided to publicly speak out against libertarianism, calling it “selfish” and “antisocial,” and saying that it “minimizes the common good.” Now, to give him as much of the benefit of the doubt as I can–because apparently the freaking POPE can’t be expected to actually become informed on things–if he was merely bashing certain individuals who wear the label “libertarian,” I might cut him some slack. But what he actually chose to bash, and warn the world about, is….
PEOPLE WHO OPPOSE THE INITIATION OF VIOLENCE.
Because that is the basis of libertarianism: the non-aggression principle. The Pope basically argued that it is “anti-social” to NOT advocate that your neighbors be forcibly robbed and controlled by “government,” and argued that it hurts the “common good” when the collective does NOT violently subjugate the individual. Bizarrely–but predictably–pretended concern for the little guy was the excuse for his position. Of course, as pretty much all libertarians know, the “greater good,” and putting the collective above the individual, has been the excuse for the mass violence committed by the most vicious tyrannies in history.
“To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.” – Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda)
Thanks for taking the side of Mao, Stalin and Hitler, Pope Francis.
But the icing on the poop cake was where he showed concern about a world in which “only the individual decides what is good and what is evil.” Because apparently he thinks that people deferring to an authoritarian power to make those decisions for them–instead of using their own consciences and moral judgment–has had a wonderful track record of creating peace and justice. Gack.A lender recently shared with me the true story of a struggling producer. Unfortunately, this producer made matters worse by passionately saying something of the like to his lender, “I do not want to hear about cutting family living expenses! This is my family and my business.” In reply, all I could say was, “Wow!” This producer needs to get serious and truly appreciate how much family living expenses can impact the profitability of a farm business.
Recently, I had the privilege of sharing two programs with the good folks of the Nebraska Farm Business, Inc. I enjoy a long-time relationship with this group and continue to utilize their valuable data in many of my schools and seminars. In light of this producer’s comment, I believe the Nebraska data on family living can be extremely helpful.
This Nebraska group presented some compelling numbers at recent educational conferences around the state. According to their data, the average family living cost for Nebraska farmers in their program was $96,000. An additional $48,000 was attributed to taxes, income and Social Security. Let’s take a closer look at these numbers. The average family living cost per bushel of corn was approximately 76¢. For those producers who grew soybeans, family living expense per bushel was $2.28. When the price of a bushel of corn was in the $6-8 range, these living expenses could be absorbed. However, with today’s commodity prices, living cost and taxes must be acknowledged as significant players in successfully reducing costs.
Granted, income taxes may be less today than in the past, but maybe not. Some producers utilized deferred tax strategies such as, prepaying expenses, as a way to minimize taxes. In years where cash flow and liquidity may be tight, strategies such a prepaying expenses are really not an option. Unfortunately, this type of approach may leave the business exposed and vulnerable to a higher tax bill at the worst possible time. Especially if this sounds familiar, prioritizing and pruning living cost is a good option.
In summary, this economic reset will dictate at least some amount of reduction in costs in order to remain sustainable. The numbers tell us that family living cost and taxes are two areas in which to capture significant savings. Stay open to change and be proactive!
Family living cost tips
Get a personal family living budget. I suggest utilizing the farm record-keeping systems in many states, as a good resource for sample budgets. A budget allows you to itemize expenses which is critical to reducing cost and covering obligations.
I suggest utilizing the farm record-keeping systems in many states, as a good resource for sample budgets. A budget allows you to itemize expenses which is critical to reducing cost and covering obligations. Develop a monthly budget. Monthly budgets are detailed and require more frequent monitoring than quarterly or annual budgets. When developing your budget, remember to add in an additional 25 percent for unexpected expenses such as repairs or emergencies.
Make family make it a family affair. In the budget process, it is important to include your spouse, children and even parents, if they are part of family cost. Communication is key and all those involved need to have some understanding of the urgency and importance in reducing family living cost.
P.S. From town hall meetings with farmers and small business owners, it seems increased health care costs are significant expense items in family living budgets. We will examine this and other impacting issues soon!We've been oohing and aahing over the Murder on the Orient Express movie trailer, set to hit theaters in early November, for the last two weeks. And now, with Belmond's real life Venice Simplon-Orient-Express getting an ultra-luxe makeover, we're finding it harder and harder not to book our own (murder-free) train ride through Europe. The luxury sleeper train and hotel connoisseurs at Belmond recently announced the addition of three new Grand Suites, designed in the train's original Art Deco style.
Themed after three iconic European cities—Paris, Venice, and Istanbul —the suites have a double or twin bedroom, a living area where you can request a private in-room breakfast, complimentary bathrobes that you don't have to steal to walk away with, and guaranteed seating in your preferred dining cart. Plus, guests have access to free transfers from the train to their arrival and departure accommodations and complimentary caviar on arrival. The ultimate luxury here: Guests in the Grand Suites get full private bathrooms, complete with shower, sink, and toilet, while the rest of the train's guests must use washrooms at the end of their train car. Oh, and if you book one of the suites, there's free champagne any time you want—honestly, that's incentive enough.
Courtesy Belmond
The Grand Suites won't hit the tracks until 2018, when they'll join the originally restored train cars from this 1920s icon of the Golden Age of travel on journeys of just one night (Vienna to London) to 10 nights (Paris to Istanbul to Venice). The luxury upgrade comes at a cost, of course. Regular double cabins cost $2,720 per person on a one-night London to Venice journey, while the Grand Suites are expected to cost $7,000 per person.
That's a lot of champagne to drink.The Bushco Torture Brigade is on a bad luck streak in dancing school. Four beatdowns by the Supreme Court on the legality/Constitutionality of their torture and trial program is beyond bad. Four drubbings of this type for a Presidential Administration, during a supposed time of war, is simply unheard of.
When Bushco got the ruling late last week that they could proceed with their first gulag trial against Salim Hamdan, they were ecstatic. Smug in the self satisfaction that the first show trial, of the many they have been pining for, would not be further delayed, Hamdan was |
its advertising was appearing, a Kia spokesman said: "As of now, programmatic advertising has been suspended until such time as we can meet with Google to further clarify the application of this advertising." A Holden spokesman said its YouTube ads would be put on hold temporarily while it works with Google to find a solution. "Holden in no way supports the content our advertising has been inadvertently associated with by Google. We're proud of our diversity credentials," a company spokesman said. "We value our good relationship with Google but in line with General Motor's global response and Holden's diversity stance we have instructed our media agency to temporarily suspend all advertising on YouTube until we are confident Google can protect our brand from inappropriate or offensive content. We'll work closely with our partners at Google to achieve this." A Bunnings spokeswoman declined to comment. A JB Hi-Fi spokesman noted they were aware of the issue and had a watching brief, but it was an immaterial portion of their advertising spend. The series of videos by one YouTube user centred around a men's rights movement known as MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) a group of straight men who will not date women and believe feminism has ruined society. One included an edited segment from Ten Network's Studio 10 that showed an interview with controversial author Peter Lloyd, who wrote the book Stand by Your Manhood. The video insults the Ten hosts, including calling former Australian of the Year Ita Buttrose a "hag". Another video is titled "'Feminism A Mental Disease MGTOW". Over the last week and a half a number of major brands across the globe have pulled advertising from Google's YouTube after their brands appeared before or next to videos promoting extremist material and hate speech. Brands to take action include two of America's biggest telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Starbucks and Pepsi. The Google boycott started in the United Kingdom when The Times revealed the UK government, and many major brands, had their ads next to extremist content, hate preachers and anti-Semitic material. The government subsequently pulled its advertising. The extent of the problem for Google is so large many have found examples of Google's own advertising being pre-rolled to racist videos. Last week, in response to an exodus of advertisers from YouTube, Google announced it would be revamping its ad policies to tackle the issue. A Google spokeswoman on Sunday said: "We don't comment on individual videos but as announced, we've begun an extensive review of our advertising policies and have made a public commitment to put in place changes that give brands more control over where their ads appear. "While we recognise that no system will be 100 per cent perfect, we believe these major steps will further safeguard our advertisers' brands and we are committed to being vigilant and continuing to improve over time." The saga underlines the perils that come with digital advertising where brands have little control over where and when their ads are served, because they often make a purchase across a wide variety of content, or across a network of websites. The issue doesn't pertain only to Google. In the past, brands have unwittingly appeared on piracy websites such as The Pirate Bay. Advertising is one of the major sources of revenue for Alphabet, Google's parent company. The boycott highlights a growing concern about brand safety, particularly in digital advertising, where having oversight over all content is difficult, especially on user-generated content sites such as YouTube. Google will be keen to fix the problem as soon as possible. The problem for the San Francisco-based technology giant is the ads are automatically served and keeping on top of the hundreds of hours per minute uploaded to YouTube is difficult. (The Australian Financial Review)I grew up with a constant reminder of the pre-antibiotic world. In the 1930s, my mother was riding her bicycle in the neighborhood when she was struck by a car. Her leg, badly injured, became infected. With no way of combatting the infection, her family was left with a stark choice: lose her leg or potentially lose her life. For the rest of her life, everything below one of her knees was prosthetic.
With the rise and rapid spread of antibiotic resistance, we run the risk of returning to this era. Earlier this week, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that "the problem is so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine. A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—is a very real possibility for the 21st century."
In response, the WHO plans on coordinating a global effort to limit the spread of antibiotic resistance. As it notes, though, "Determining the scope of the problem is the first step in formulating an effective response." So the WHO has polled all of its member states to get a sense of what they know about drug-resistant pathogens within their borders. The results were released this week.
The report makes clear that antibiotic resistance isn't our only problem. Malaria parasites have evolved drug resistance at a number of sites, drug-resistant flu viruses have been detected, and strains of HIV that resist various antiviral therapies exist. All of these things make health care more challenging.
But at the moment, none of them are as widespread as antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Even within the limitations of poor reporting in many locations, drug-resistant pneumonia is present in all six of the WHO's global regions. Two different types of drug-resistant E. coli show up in five out of the six.
Because these and other microbes are resistant to the most common antibiotics, doctors have been forced to prescribe more and more of what the report calls "last-resort" treatments. These antibiotics are more expensive, and less readily available, and they cause more side effects. And since they're generally used only when infections are serious, the costs of treating these cases are raising the price of healthcare. Finally, the WHO also notes that strains resistant to these last-resort antibiotics have been identified, so our treatment options may become even more limited.
With a better picture of the situation in hand, the WHO intends to start developing a global campaign to limit the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. But even before that's developed, there are obvious things we can do to limit the scope of the problem. Foremost on this list is simply to limit infections to start with. Public health campaigns to improve sanitary practices and improve access to clean water, along with vaccinations where appropriate, should all cut down on antibiotic use. When drugs are prescribed, the treatment needs to be followed to completion.
By limiting infections, we can hopefully begin limiting the use of antibiotics, which will gradually reduce the prevalence of drug-resistant strains. But it's likely to be a long and drawn out fight, one that will produce far too many casualties.
Listing image by CDCDescription:...
Steve has been speeding
He wants to find the lower bound of his speed
so he can get out of a ticket
To do this, use speed = distance/time
and find the lower bound of the distance and the upper bound of the time
Why doesn't he just pay his ticket, instead of all this effort?
My Fuhrer,
Steve...
Steve spent all of his money on £15 maths revision sessions
He had no money to pay it
Everyone in the room from Redlands, St Samuels or Francis Long School, leave.
£15 for a revision session?!
Who are these fucking people?
I hope all of the 77 people who went burn, their families too!
Maybe they would actually pass this fucking thing!
And Levi and his fucking cake
that asshole is getting diabetes from that thing.
The ribon wasn't even long enough for me to kill myself with!
Let alone cover a cake
My Fuhrer, I'm sure he was planning to share the cake
Fuck no he wasn't! Levi is a fat fuck's name.
Mr Fuhrer, I'm sure you will gain marks from the Histogram question.
No I won't. How do you even find the median of a histogram?
Fuck that exam!
My parents always tell me exams were harder for them, it's bullshit
they didn't need to put up with Hannah, Fred, Carl, Levi and Kirsty
Fuck those inbred assholes!
If Hannah were here I would blast her brains out right now.
Why can't she just eat her sweets and be done with it like a normal person
How fucked up do you have to be?
For years I have been revising for Maths exams, with Edexcel
I only needed maths to get into the College I wanted
Now that is fucked, it's fucked for me.
Those other fuckers will be on AQA or OCR.
They will get in.
They will get in because I got fucked over by Edexcel, my future is fucked
They don't care either way, they still get their wage.
If I ran Edexcel I would punish them
I'd fire whoever made these maths tests.
I'd poison Hannah's sweets and have my revenge
It's okay, I've hidden all x² - x - 90 = 0 of the sweets
What's the point,
The Nazi party don't need maths anyway
Doesn't matter.
Sociology, that matters.
Now go and put 6.0 x 10^6 people in St Samuels school, teach them maths
Not for fucking 15 pounds
Then burn the school.The introduction of new regulations for English language schools, aimed at tightening up entry to the industry, has been delayed. New regulations were due to be in place on October 1st. No new date has been set for their introduction.
They were aimed at tightening up the process for assessing English language course providers so rogue language schools could not operate in Ireland.
More than a dozen language schools have closed in the past year, some leaving students stranded in Ireland having paid more than €1,000 for English classes. David O’Grady, chief executive of Marketing English in Ireland (MEI), an umbrella organisation for 54 English language schools in Ireland, has called for the introduction of the promised regulations as soon as possible.
He said schools had been told the introduction had been pushed back “indefinitely”.
“Nobody knows what to tell their agents now, plus it still allows the rogue operators to continue operating because the new regime hasn’t been implemented,” he said.
Mr O’Grady made his comments at the MEI’s 19th international workshop for agents, which began in Dublin on Monday. When the UK clamped down, a lot of the rogue schools moved here, he said.
“They move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction exploiting any kind of loopholes or weaknesses in their law structure... If we clean up our act here, they will move on.”
Last year, almost 98,000 students from 80 countries came to study English in Ireland at the MEI schools, contributing over €330 million to the economy, according to data released by the organisation. Some 80 per cent of students were from EU or EEA countries.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice said the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service had to return submitted applications to “a large number of providers” for further clarification and detail.
As a result, the service anticipated “a short delay” in the next phase of regulation.The dictionary company Merriam-Webster announced that “surreal” was its word of the year for 2016. The adjective is defined by the company as something that has been “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream.”
In a statement, the company said “surreal” is “often looked up spontaneously in moments of both tragedy and surprise, whether or not it is used in speech or writing.”
There were three distinct events this past year that led to the word’s popularity in searches, according to Merriam-Webster: the Brussels terror attacks in March, the failed coup in Turkey in July, and the U.S. presidential election in November.
The company said the word of the year was not surprising to them.
“We often search for just the right word to help us bring order to abstract thoughts, emotions, or reactions,” Merriam-Webster said in a statement. “Surreal seems to be, for 2016, such a word.”
Other words that saw unusual spikes in interest this year with Merriam-Webster were: “Revenant,” “icon,” “In Omnia Paratus,” “bigly,” “deplorable,” “irregardless,” “assumpsit,” “Faute de Mieux,” and “feckless.”
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year selection joins the Oxford Dictionaries’ “post-truth,” and dictionary.com’s “xenophobia,” reflecting the uncertainty and divisiveness of the year all over the world.Will Purvis was a member of the White Caps, a group with foundations similar to the Ku Klux Klan. He was convicted of the murder of Will Buckley in 1894 and always maintained his innocence. He scornfully told the jury he would "live longer than the lot of them". He was sentenced to death by hanging, but survived because the noose untied around his neck. He was imprisoned, pardoned and eventually released. Nineteen years later another man confessed to the crime. Will Purvis died in 1938, three days after the last juror had died. Will Purvis was convicted of the murder of Will Buckley. Buckley was a member of the Whitecaps, a tight-knit organization similar to the Ku Klux Klan. Its members swore in blood never to reveal its secrets. In early 1892, the Whitecaps had unmercifully flogged a black servant of Buckley. Buckley had known nothing of the Whitecaps' intentions and was absent. Enraged at this uncalled-for violence and the secrecy with which it was carried out, Buckley decided to submit the whole affair and to expose the secrets of the Whitecaps to the next meeting of the Grand Jury. At the Grand Jury meeting, Buckley's evidence was presented, and indictments were brought against the three Whitecaps who were known to be most brutal in the attack. On his way home from the Grand Jury meeting, Buckley traveled through a forest path with his brother Jim and the flogged servant, all of them on horseback. While passing through a ravine a hidden gunmen shot Buckley dead. The gunman then jumped onto the path, reloaded his gun, and shot at Buckley's companions, but they escaped safely on horseback. Suspicion fell on 19-year-old Will Purvis, as bloodhounds indicated the killer escaped in the direction of the Purvis family home. Purvis admitted that three months previous he had joined the Whitecaps, but repeatedly professed his innocence of the crime. At trial Jim Buckley identified Purvis as the shooter. Purvis had alibi witnesses, but he was convicted and sentenced to death. Purvis's hanging attracted hundreds of spectators, as hangings in those days were still public events. On Feb. 7, 1894, the rope was adjusted around Purvis's neck and tested. A deputy sheriff, seeing an ungainly length of rope dangling from the knot, cut the rope flush with the knot. When everything was ready, the executioner used his hatchet to cut the stay rope holding the trap and Purvis dropped with a sharp jerk. The knot, instead of tightening around its victim, untwisted, and Purvis fell to the ground, unhurt. Dissension arose about whether Purvis should be hung a second time. It began with an individual, Dr. Ford, who despised the Whitecaps, but believed Purvis was innocent. Shouts from those nearby seemed to be evenly divided, but when a vote was taken by a show of hands, no one voted to resume the execution, and almost all voted for a stay. After consulting an attorney, officials were prepared to resume the execution. However, when Dr. Ford threatened to call 300 men from the crowd to stop the execution, officials relented and brought Purvis back to jail. The question of whether Purvis should be hanged again was brought to the state Supreme Court. The court ruled that the fact that officials had been careless in securing the knot was no reason that the law should be thwarted. It ordered Purvis be hanged again. In the town to which Purvis had been removed, indignation over the court ruling court ran high. On the evening before the scheduled July 1895 hanging, a group of friends abducted Purvis from the jail and hid him on a secluded farm. His friends intended to keep him until they could be assured that his life would be spared. In the following gubernatorial election, one of the issues was whether or not Purvis, if caught, should be hanged. The candidate in favor of modifying the sentence, A. J. McLaurin, won the election. When he assumed office, Purvis voluntarily surrendered himself, and McLaurin, in accordance with his promise to the people, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on March 12, 1896. Two years later the state's star witness, Jim Buckley, who had identified Purvis as the murderer, stated that he might have made a mistake, and that possibly it was not Purvis whom he had seen. Purvis was consequently given a full and unconditional pardon in Dec. 1898. In 1917, another man, Joe Beard, became seriously ill and confessed to participating in the murder of Will Buckley. He named his accomplice who shot Buckley. Beard was supposed to shoot Buckley's two companions, but lost his nerve, allowing them to escape. Beard's accomplice could not be prosecuted, because Beard died before he could sign a written confession. Buckley's killer lived alone in the woods and was never again seen in town. In 1920, the Mississippi legislature awarded Purvis $5000 as compensation for his 4 years of wrongful imprisonment, 3 of which were at hard labor. Victimsofthestate.org White Caps and Bull Doozers, or Will Purvis Numerous stories have been written on the life and experience of Will Purvis, known as the "Miracle Man", or the man who was hanged and still lives. His life on the gallows, in the convict camp, and as a fugitive was all brought about by his being a member of the "White Caps". In the year 1895, when he had just returned from school at the age of 19 years, there was a secret clan known as the White Caps which had overrun Mississippi. They had banded together to promote a better regime of law and order. Their meetings were held in secret and no one but a member knew of their meeting place or their plans. The order was much like the Ku Klux Klan and must have been an outcropping of the original clan. The White Caps were held responsible for many acts of violence and disorder, some of which they were innocent. The law was very much opposed to the White Capping and even the Governor of the State determined to destroy their power. Soon after Will Purvis became a member of their Clan some of the White Caps called on a Negro, Sam Waller, who was a farm hand on the Buckley Place nearby. Sam had been working for an aged widow in this community, who could pay only a very poor wage. The Buckleys knew Sam's ability as a worker and finally obtained his service on their farm at a higher wage. The White Caps determined this act an injustice to the poor widow and then and there marked the Negro for vengeance. They called at the Buckley farm that night and took Sam out and gave him a flogging. Will Purvis had nothing to do with the whipping, but was present when it took place. Now the Buckleys were members of the White Caps but denied this. They became very wrought up over the flogging of the Negro and declared that they would report this to the sheriff. All members of the White Caps were stirred up over this and became wary, lest Sam had recognized some of their members. The Grand Jury was in session in Marion County at the time. The White Caps called a meeting at Red Bluff on Pearl River and the death lot was cast for the murder of Will and Jim Buckley. So while the Buckleys were reporting the misdemeanors of the Clan to the Grand Jury their neighbors were planning their murder. They held their meetings after dark and planned for the murder. Will Purvis had only attended two meetings of the clan prior to this. He arose and stated that as long as the Clan stuck to the colored line that he was with them, but when it came to killing members of the white race they could count him out. He resigned that night and knew nothing more of the activities of the Clan. Late one afternoon as the Buckley brothers and Sam were returning from Columbia, where they reported the whipping of Sam, they were fired upon from an ambush and Will Buckley was killed from his saddle. Buckley's murder was soon reported in town and the Sheriff, Jim Buckley, the Coroner, and others returned and prepared Will's body for burial. Jim Buckley claimed that he saw Will Purvis near the scene of the murder and pinned the crime on him. The next day, June 22, 1893 Will Purvis was summoned to appear before the county Grand Jury. About midnight that same night Sheriff I. G. Magee and several deputies called at the home of Will Purvis' father to arrest Will and carry him to jail. The following day his father engaged two lawyers, Watkins and Travis of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to defend Will. In a short while he was taken to Meridian and placed in jail and remained there thirty days and then was returned to Columbia for trial. This was a special term of court. As public sentiment was running high at that time the Judge felt justified in calling a special term. Then came the strenuous siege of trial, and witness after witness was summoned and questioned. After hours and hours of debating the Grand Jury returned the verdict- "We, the Jury, find the defendant guilty as charged in the indictment and recommend him to the mercy of the court." Then the Judge's sentence- "I sentence you (Will Purvis) to hang by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead, on the 5th day of September, 1893, between the hours of 11 A. M. and 3 P. M. at the jail, Marion County. This was to be a lesson to the White Caps. It was September 6, 1893. The Reverend Sibley read a short passage of scripture. The sheriff asked Will if he had anything to say; Will stated that the only regret that he had was on account of his grief stricken mother, and shouted, "I didn't do this. There are men out there among you who could save me if they would." The black cap was placed over his face and the trap sprung, but the knot slipped, and he was escorted to the scaffold the second time. The Reverend Sibley cried out, "We have seen a miracle from God and the hand of Providence slipped the noose." Then the vote was cast and was unanimous to the effect that the act should not be repeated. He was taken back to jail and a new trial. The State Supreme Court confirmed the sentence and set the date for him to be hanged a second time on December 12, 1895. He was brought back to Purvis and stayed five months. One Sunday night friends broke jail and set him free. He hid out with friends until February, 1897; then he gave up. Upon his surrender Governor McLaurin sent him to Okley Farm between Natchez and Jackson and he remained there until on December 20, 1898 he was pardoned. After coming home he married and reared a large family. In 1920, Joe Beard, a resident of Marion County, went before Toxey Hall, then District Attorney and confessed to the murder of Will Buckley. After Purvis' innocence was established the Mississippi Legislature on March 15, 1920 appropriated $3,000 compensation for the services performed in the penitentiary through an erroneous conviction. Will Purvis Pardon The petition for the pardon of Will Purvis, the Marion County whitecapper who miraculously escaped the hangman's noose by the slip of the rope and is now serving a life sentence in the penitentiary has received over 100 signatures among the members of the legislature. This petition is signed by all officers in Marion County with some 1700 citizens of the county. Representative Hathorne of Marion County will present these petitions to the governor in a day or two. The Pearl River News, February 4., 1898 $10,000 for Will Purvis Representative John A. Yeager of Lamar County introduced a bill in the house this week for the relief of Will Purvis. The bill appropriates $10,000 and reads that it is given as a measure of recompense for the erroneous prosecution, conviction and punishment of the said Will Purvis of the state of Mississippi, relative to the assassination of Will Buckley in Marion County, Mississippi, in the year of 1893. A little over a year ago the real murderer of Buckley confessed on his deathbed the crime, finally clearing the name of Purvis, whom many have believed innocent. The Columbian was the first paper to announce to the world the confession and a day or two after its issue the leading Metropolitan Papers played the news up in big business. The Columbian, January 17, 1918 Rootsweb.ancestry.com50 Senior Military, Intelligence, & Govt. Critics of 9/11 Commission
Berg, Philip J. - Deputy Attorney General, Pennsylvania
Bowman, Col. Robert - Director of Advanced Space Programs Development under Presidents Ford and Carter
Burks, Fred - State Department Interpreter for Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton
Christison, William - Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis
Cleland, Senator Max - Member of the 9/11 Commission. Former U.S. Senator from Georgia
Cole, John M - Intelligence Operations Specialist, FBI
Conrad, David Mark - Agent in Charge, Internal Affairs, U.S. Customs
Costello, Edward J. - Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI
Dew, Rosemary N. - Supervisory Special Agent, Counterterrorism & Counterintelligence, FBI
Dzakovic, Bogdan - Counterterrorism expert, FAA
Edmonds, Sibel - Language Translation Specialist, FBI
Elson, Steve - Special Agent, FAA
Fitts, Catherine Austin - Assistant Secretary of Housing under George H.W. Bush
Freeh, Louis - Director of the FBI, 1993 - 2001
Goodman, Melvin - Division Chief and Senior Analyst of Soviet Affairs, CIA
Goulder, Morton - Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter
Graf, Mark - Security Supervisor, Department of Energy
Graham, Gilbert M. - Special Agent, Counterintelligence, FBI
Heikal, Mohamed Hassanein - Foreign Minister, Egypt
Hellyer, Paul - Minister of National Defense and Deputy Prime Minister, Canada
Honegger, Barbara - White House Policy Analyst Under Ronald Reagan
Ivashov, Gen. Leonid - Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces
Kleiman, Diane - Special Agent, U.S. Customs
Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col. Karen - Political Military Affairs Officer, Office of the Secretary of Defense
Larkin, Lynne A. - Operation Officer, CIA
MacMichael, David - Senior Estimates Officer, CIA
McGovern, Raymond L. - Chairman, National Intelligence Estimates, CIA
Meacher, Michael - Undersecretary for Industry, Minister for the Environment, UK
Nelson, Col. George - U.S. Air Force aircraft crash investigator
Pahle, Theodore J. - Senior Intelligence Officer, Defense Intelligence Agency
Peck, Edward L. - Deputy Director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism under Ronald Reagan
Ray, Col. Ronald D. - Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan
Reynolds, Morgan - Chief Economist, U.S. Department of Labor under George W. Bush
Ritter, Maj. Scott - Marine Corps Intelligence Officer and Chief UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq
Roberts, Paul Craig - Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Ronald Reagan
Rokke, Maj. Douglas - Director U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project
Sarshar, Behrooz - Language Translation Specialist, FBI
Shayler, David - Counterterrorism Agent, MI5 (UK)
Stubblebine, Maj. Gen. Albert - Commanding General, U.S. Army Intelligence
Sullivan, Brian F. - Special Agent and Risk Management Specialist, FAA
Tortorich, Larry J. - US Naval Officer and Dept. of Homeland Security
Turner, Jane A. - Special Agent, FBI
Vincent, John B. - Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI
von Buelow, Andreas - Minister of National Defense, West Germany
Weldon, Rep. Curt - Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee
Whitehurst, Dr. Fred - Supervisory Special Agent, Forensic Examiner, FBI
Wittenberg, Capt. Russ - Air Force Fighter Pilot and Commercial Jet Pilot
Wright, Col. Ann - U.S. Army and Former Diplomat
Zipoli, Matthew J. - Special Response Team Officer, Department of Energy
http://patriotsquestion911.com/
NYC: 5,000 in suit over WTC illness
World War 4 Report - Brooklyn,NY,USA
... have died as a result of the deadly mixture of chemicals they were exposed to as they searched for survivors in the ruins of the World Trade Center or aided in... full story >>
People are Dying Because the White House, EPA, and Giuliani Lied! :
In order to "reopen Wall Street" the Bush administration censored crucial EPA and New York City Health Department warnings that the air after 9/11 was highly poisonous. The White House forced the EPA to say "The air is safe to breathe" at the World Trade Center. This has seriously injured the health of Manhattan workers and residents, is even killing some of the heroes who worked at "Ground Zero"... full story >>
74% Want Investigation into Giuliani's lies about the deadly dust at the WTC. Giuliani, Christie Todd Whitman, the New York State and City Health Department all lied that the "Air is safe to breathe". See poll summary See full details
Watch Video Trailer: 911:Dust and Deceit at the WTC
Bloomberg withholds help for Dying Heroes!
Notables Claiming Government Lying:
Professor Steven E. Jones and sixty out of sixty academics think bombs, not the planes and fires caused the collapses of the WTC!
"Only professional demolition*... account for the... collapses", Bush Chief Economist for Labor, Morgan Reynolds.
Harper’s Magazine, Senator Mark Dayton, and others, call 9/11 Commission a “whitewash” full of errors, “lies”, and omissions.
"And then There Came a Day of Fire"
Presidential Pretender George Bush's Inaugural Speech is Straight From The Bible, Revelations! Bush invokes "God" 4 times and has 13 biblical references.
The Financial Times wrote, "the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum."
CBS Marketwatch news wrote, Bush has "lost his marbles".
Former editor of the Wall Street Journal and Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury: The US government has fallen into the hands of psychopaths...may be set to stage another terror attack in the US.
George Bush is feeling paranoid about by several of his most senior aides and advisors and has severely restricted access to the Oval Office. "The atmosphere in the Oval Office has become unbearable," a source said. "Even the family is split." Rarely sees his own father.
full story >>
"President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. 'God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan'." "And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq...' And I did.
"At Church one day [Tom DeLay, House Majority Leader] listened as the pastor declared that 'the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.' DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' he said, 'what has been spoken here tonight is the truth of God.'"
Click here for full storyA slew of ugly tweets and online rants could cost Wall Street horndog Benjamin Wey another $2.4 million.
The disgraced financier signed a contract agreeing to pay former intern Hanna Bouveng $10,000 for every tweet he writes bad-mouthing her and another $50,000 for each time he tries to communicate with her, court papers show.
Now Bouveng — who was awarded $5.6 million after suing the CEO for pressuring her into sex and firing her when she refused his advances — says Wey violated that pact with dozens of trash-talking postings.
In a memo filed in Manhattan federal court last week, lawyers for the pretty Swedish brunette said they want Wey to put his money where his potty mouth is and cough up the dough.
The lawyers didn’t say which postings they objected to, but Wey, a self-described “investigative journalist,” has blasted Bouveng on Twitter as a “homewrecker,” “cocaine user” and “failed extortionist.”
The specified tweets include 59 posts that violate the $10,000-a-pop rule, for a total of $590,000, according to her lawyers. Of those tweets, 26 also breach the $50,000 stipulation in the April 2014 agreement, for another $1.3 million fine, the documents charge.
The rest of the proposed fine — $510,000 — is based on other postings, the court papers state.
The contract came together shortly after Bouveng’s explosive lawsuit in July 2014.
In an effort to shame Bouveng, Wey posted pictures of her on Facebook “accompanied by stock photos containing explicit pornographic images and images of individuals doing drugs,” wrote her lawyers, Benedict Morelli and Perry Fallick.
Wey creeped out Bouveng by showing up at a cafe in her hometown in Sweden while she was there. He also attempted to question her 19-year-old cousin at a bar, according to her lawyers.
Bouveng initially sought a court-ordered injunction to stop Wey from harassing her. He agreed to stop, the contract shows.
Wey’s lawyer, Glenn Colton, did not return a request for comment. He is expected to file an objection to the $2.4 million lawsuit request Tuesday, court papers show.
Bouveng hasn’t been the only thorn in Wey’s side. He was arrested last year and charged with conspiracy, securities fraud and wire fraud tied to an alleged scheme to reap tens of millions of dollars through stock manipulation of Chinese companies.
Wey, his company and his wife, Michaela, were also accused of fraud and stock manipulation in a civil lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.So Robin Williams has died. Suicide. And that’s sad as any death is.
Facebook is full of posts with his picture sharing phone numbers and websites of helplines. Ones telling people that “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” And declarations that if you’re feeling down, if you have depression to make sure you tell someone. Friend’s saying that they hope their friends feel capable of telling them. And similar on twitter and other places.
Here’s the thing: I have a depression diagnosis and I have a lot of anxiety at times which has been recognised by medics although it’s never been given a label like GAD (generalised anxiety disorder). It’s more than 11 years since one of my friends finally convinced me to go and see a GP about the way I felt.
I’d told someone. I’d told her. But she couldn’t physically make me go to the doctors and get help. She kept telling me I needed to and encouraging me to for at least six months. I’d probably been depressed to a certain extent I had to do that myself (and unfortunately that meant things deteriorated because I didn’t go until I got scared about what might happen unless I did).
Then I went and told a GP. It wasn’t my GP because my mine was a male and I thought a female doctor would be easier. It was a first step but it wasn’t the solution facebook seems to be suggesting it was. Telling her wasn’t enough. I needed her support but I also needed meds and I needed time.
That first type of antidepressants made me ill so I ended up telling most of my carers although I’d not meant to. Several of them said “me too.” and I was shocked. Telling people might have been easier if I’d known how common it was. I felt less alone.
I went back a few weeks later for review and I did tell my then GP because really I loved my uni GP because he also had CP and he got a lot of what I went through. Over the years he’s been one of the few medics I’ve never had to convince that my depression isn’t caused by my CP. He’d seen me a lot in the months before for UTI and chest infections and I don’t know what else routine stuff. And he apologised to me for missing my mental health problems. It meant a lot to me but I wasn’t surprised and I didn’t blame him. I’d hidden it.
And since then over the last 11 years I’ve been on and off of antidepressants. I’ve told a lot of people about my mental health.
I’ve told friends. Family. Doctors, counsellors, social workers. Carers and some other people too.
Sometimes it helps a lot. Sometimes it helps a little. Sometimes it doesn’t help. And unfortunately sometimes it makes it worse.
I’ve had the response:
That I’m being silly
That I just need to stop taking antidepressants because they “are addictive and bad for you.”
That of course I’m depressed because I’ve got CP, what do I expect?
That things that have triggered bad times are in the past and I need to move on.
That I’m worrying about nothing
This too will pass
“you think you’ve got it bad I’ve blah blah blah” from a friend who kept telling me to tell her when things were bad. She still does that now and she gets annoyed if she ever finds out I’ve not told her stuff. But I’ve never, in more than 11 years since diagnosis been able to have a conversation with her about my mental health problems without it immediately being turned into something all about her.
Offering to listen and encouraging me to tell you about my problems is huge. But I need you to actually listen.
How could you help someone in a mental health crisis:
Don’t use cliches like this too shall pass or the one I keep seeing today “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem”. Robin Williams had been undergoing treatment for various mental health conditions for over twenty years. He had a real, serious illness not a temporary problem. Calling it that belittles his suffering.
If someone tells you don’t try and make them tell you exactly what it is they have to be depressed or anxious about. Mental |
3,000 miles, so to take only 15 hours would require an average of 200 miles per hour. Certainly other road trips are possible — but the particular one proposed here is not.
The parameters Romney has supplied were originally a 20 percent rate cut; certain other specific tax treatments; and revenue neutrality. What Gale and his colleagues showed was that the only way to make Romney’s plan work under those constraints was to raise taxes on middle-class taxpayers.
What we’ve seen since is a blizzard of misdirection, but nothing, as Gale says, has changed to make the math work. The only thing that has changed is that Romney now adds that taxes won’t go up on the middle class. But that only makes it worse; given that additional constraint, it’s even more clear than ever that something has to give. Either the rate cuts have to be lower, the other specific tax breaks have to be reduced or ignored, middle-class taxes have to go up – or, what I suspect is by far the most likely if Romney actually wins and has a Congress willing to do what he wants, revenue will just plummet and the deficit explode. But that’s just a guess based on past performance; all we do know is that, as a matter of addition and subtraction, Romney is not leveling with us about something.
The rest of it, again, is misdirection. Last week’s Romney float of a plan to cap deductions for the wealthy? Interesting as policy – but totally irrelevant to the question at hand, because the Tax Policy Center said there weren’t enough deductions to make back the revenue even if the deductions were all eliminated. The studies that Romney trots out to support him? They didn’t get to the core issue that the center raised.
The math is the math. There just aren’t enough tax expenditures that the wealthy use to allow Romney to cut tax rates by 20 percent without either reducing revenue or by making it up with tax increases on everyone else, at least not if he also retains the other specific provisions he supports. How to characterize that situation – Romney and Barack Obama clashed on whether it’s a “$5 trillion tax cut” – is a matter of semantics. But the basic situation is neither semantics nor opinion; it’s just arithmetic.Even revealing a so-called open secret outside the stadium only appears to be an unwritten rule, but this unspoken nugget is not explainable in two sentences or one paragraph, unless the receiver of them is familiar with this MLB necessity.
The Illusion:
On the surface, what you see is what you get only seems to encompass everything, but it also includes what your eyeballs miss.
On the way to the majors, a prospect moves from rookie ball to Double-A, and each promotion leads to stronger competition. Additionally, success at Double-A means the athlete has the ability to play in the big leagues, but does he have the mental toughness required for the Show?
IN OTHER WORDS: “I remember going from rookie ball to A, to double A, then to triple A. At every level it seemed like the game was faster. The bigger the situation, the more the game speeds up. That’s all mental. It messes people up.” – Derek Jeter
Before a fan takes a seat in the ballpark, meetings have occurred prior to each series, which includes film and scouting reports: Hitters and pitchers have powwows with their respective coaches. And all players, coaches and managers invest considerable thought into each game: both on an individual basis and in groups. For example, the starter and the catcher go through the signs and the opposition’s lineup, while a regular forms a plan for the other team’s hurler.
While every sport has its own personality, you have to go back to its beginning to understand it. Baseball is spending leisure time with friends and strangers alike, discussing earlier highlights during the contest, and not caring if you ever get back. If – on the other hand – you had nonstop action, you wouldn’t be able to savor an acrobatic defensive play, a majestic home run or the building tension in a hard-fought battle putting you on the edge of your seat. In other words, unless the situation is completely obvious, you don’t know when one swing will change things because baseball is a game of moments.Short Chat Server in Clojure
After seeing a neat little demo of a chat server in node.js, I wondered exactly what it’d look like to try and do something similar in my latest linguistic fling, Clojure. I was surprised at how quickly I could code it up (all in all, about 2 hours with numerous interruptions) and how simple it actually was.
First the code, then I’ll talk about it a bit:
So in 75 lines we have a chat server with rooms, and I think the code is short, clear and compartmentalized. The first segment is only about 16 lines, but it provides a robust framework for synchronized membership and asynchronous output to other connections. Really, that was the easiest part of the whole program.
I thought maybe the node.js server would have an advantage because of it’s (very cool) integrated event-based I/O system, which has a huge advantage for this sort of thing. But I was pleasantly surprised by how powerful and well-chosen Clojure’s built-in primitives are. Agents, in particular, are a clever way to model asynchronous objects that self-update their state based on outside input. It’s a very natural way to bring some erlang-ish goodness into the imperative world.
But what’s really cool about this is that I could easily drop into Java libraries at any time. If I wanted to bring in Netty or integrate Java’s SSL libraries, it’d be a relatively simple matter, all while still within clojure.
You can see the whole project at github.Throughout the last 100 years, the world has witnessed incredible advances in medicine that have dramatically improved the lives of the sick. But while there may be more drugs on the market than you could possibly fathom, many diseases can’t be treated by popping pills. That’s why DARPA is working towards a futuristic medical implant that not only continuously monitors the condition of your organs, but also helps your body heal itself when problems arise.
The program, known as Electrical Prescriptions (ElectRx), aims to develop technology that could “fundamentally change the manner in which doctors diagnose, monitor and treat injury and illness,” DARPA’s Doug Weber said in a news release. Moving away from conventional medicine, DARPA plans to develop an implantable device that works somewhat like an intelligent pacemaker, continually monitoring the body’s condition and providing feedback in the form of a stimulus that would help maintain healthy organs.
The idea behind the ElectRx implant is that it would act as a neuromodulatory device. Neuromodulation is the reversible alteration, or “modulation,” of the nervous system through stimulation of various nerves. These changes in neural activity can be achieved either through drugs or electrical stimulation, both of which are introduced by implants.
In the body, the peripheral nervous system (the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord) is constantly monitoring your organs and regulating responses to infection, injury or disease. Certain conditions can unfortunately cause this process to go haywire and rather than resolving the problem, peripheral nerve signals start to actually worsen the situation, triggering pain, inflammation and immune system problems.
That’s where ElectRx’s tiny little device would come in. After sensing problems, it would send out tailored electrical impulses to populations of nerves that help the body heal itself, keeping patients healthy using their own bodily systems rather than drugs.
There already exists a market for neuromodulatory devices, but current models are bulky, around the size of a deck of cards, and consequently require invasive surgery to fit them into patients. ElectRx devices, on the other hand, would be similar in size to individual nerves and could therefore be implanted with ease, perhaps with a needle.
Thanks to the recent identification of neural circuits involved in the regulation of immune system function, these devices could possibly be useful in the treatment of various inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. Furthermore, it could one day lead to better treatments for various brain and mental health problems, such as epilepsy, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
But ElectRx has got a long way to go before these ambitious devices can become a reality. Researchers need to first develop novel biosensors and also devise techniques that would allow the precise targeting of single nerves or small populations of nerve fibers that control relevant organs.
[Via DARPA and Live Science]Pa Modou Kah (born 30 July 1980) is a Norwegian international football coach and former footballer. He is currently working at FC Cincinnati as an assistant coach.
Career [ edit ]
Born in Banjul, The Gambia, Kah and his family emigrated to Norway in 1988, when he was eight years old. He began his football career with Vålerenga in 1998. With Vålerenga Kah appeared in 94 league matches and scored 9 goals. Kah won promotion with in 2001. The 2002 season he won the cup and was chosen young player of the season and the player's player of the year.In the summer of 2003, he moved to Swedish club AIK as a part of the club's efforts for winning the championship. Kah was appreciated for his fighting spirit and ability to win the ball. Although his natural position was as a central midfielder, he had to play in various positions; he played several games at right-back. After the club was relegated the following season, Kah transferred to Dutch club Roda JC, making nearly 200 league appearances. In the Netherlands Kah mainly played as central defender.
In 2011, after seven years in the Netherlands, Kah moved to Qatari club Al Khor. After a brief period in Saudi Arabia with Al-Wehda, Kah moved to the United States on 3 May 2013 when he signed with Major League Soccer club Portland Timbers.[1] On 8 December 2014, the Portland Timbers declined contract options on Kah.[2] He was unsigned in the waivers draft and later claimed by Vancouver Whitecaps FC on 21 January 2015.[3]
In August 2016, he agreed to mutually terminate his contract with Vancouver Whitecaps' first team in favour of joining their USL team as a player-coach.[4] On 21 February 2017 Kah announced his retirement and it was also confirmed, that he would continue working at the club as a Whitecaps FC staff coach.[5]
FC Cincinnati added Kah to its technical staff as a member of the scouting staff in August 2018.[6] In January 2019, the club announced that Kah's role would be changing, and he would now serve as an assistant coach.[7]
Personal life [ edit ]
In 2005, he was involved in a car accident in Peer, Belgium. He was accompanied by his girlfriend, his cousin, and a friend. His car was rear-ended while stopped at a routine road check, immediately killing his girlfriend but only inflicting minor injuries to Kah. In Roda JC's next match, Bjorn Kuipers held a minute of silence to commemorate the death of Kah's girlfriend. During the game, Arouna Koné took his shirt off to reveal a shirt which had the inscription "For Kah". Arouna was yellow carded by the referee, which was condemned by the commentators. Kuipers said afterwards that he had not seen the text on Kone's shirt.[8]
Kah speaks seven languages, including English, Norwegian, and some Spanish.[9]
Kah possesses a US green card which qualifies him as a domestic player for MLS roster purposes.[10]
Kah is the nephew of Djimon Hounsou.[11]Heavy Metal 282, our Sci-Fi Special, is on its way—coming soon to your local comic book retailer, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and the HeavyMetal.com Store! This is the one you’ve been hearing so much about, featuring covers by the winners of our Threadless Cover Contest. You can see the newsstand cover and three variants above.
Highlights of this issue include two stories by the team of Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes: the verbose and trippy “Industria,” and the wordless, mysterious “The Key.” Pahek‘s “Gavrilo C-914” takes us to Sarajevo in the year 3914, while the gallery of Jakub Rozalski‘s paintings takes us back to Poland in the year 1920 — but it’s not the 1920 you’d expect. Continuing in the parallel-universe, alternate-history vein, there’s “America Owns the Moon,” a tale by Craig Wilson that takes us beyond the feat of landing on the green-cheese orb. We’ve also got previews of two Heavy Metal standalone series, both writtern by Donny Cates: “Atomahawk,” a trippy, cyber-tribal chop-a-rama illustrated by Ian Bederman; and “Interceptor,” an already-acclaimed, already-underway series about space vampires, pictures by Dylan Burnett. You’ll also find the continuation of “Zentropa,” by John Mahoney, and “Salsa Invertebraxa” by Mozchops; as well as the conclusion of Enki Bilal‘s “Julia and Roem.” In the grand sci-fi tradition, Leonie O’Moore‘s “The Human Curse” seeks to better understand our own species through alien eyes; “Genres,” by Diego Agrimbau and Pietro starts from a similar perspective, but goes in a much different direction.
If all that weren’t enough, we’ve got a Bill Sienkiewicz classic from 1985, freshly remastered by the master himself. This is an issue not to be missed! Pick it up at your local comic book retailer, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million or the HeavyMetal.com Store!
NOTE: Subscribers and those who pre-order the issue from our online shop will receive the issue around August 31; it will hit shelves in terrestrial stores September 7.
Share this: on Twitter on Facebook on Google+FACTS ABOUT FIREFLIES
Interested in learning more about fireflies? Here are a few fascinating facts you may not know.
Fireflies talk to each other with light.
Fireflies emit light mostly to attract mates, although they also communicate for other reasons as well, such as to defend territory and warn predators away. In some firefly species, only one sex lights up. In most, however, both sexes glow; often the male will fly, while females will wait in trees, shrubs and grasses to spot an attractive male. If she finds one, she’ll signal it with a flash of her own.
Fireflies produce “cold light.”
Firefly lights are the most efficient lights in the world—100% of the energy is emitted as light. Compare that to an incandescent bulb, which emits 10% of its energy as light and the rest as heat, or a fluorescent bulb, which emits 90% of its energy as light. Because it produces no heat, scientists refer to firefly lights as “cold lights.”
In a firefly’s tail, you’ll find two chemicals: luciferase and luciferin. Luciferin is heat resistant, and it glows under the right conditions. Luciferase is an enzyme that triggers light emission. ATP, a chemical within the firefly’s body, converts to energy and initiates the glow. All living things, not just fireflies, contain ATP.
Firefly eggs glow.
Adult fireflies aren’t the only ones that glow. In some species, the larvae and even the eggs emit light. Firefly eggs have been observed to flash in response to stimulus such as gentle tapping or vibrations.
This is an image of a firefly larvae just emerging from the egg. Copyright © Terry Lynch
Fireflies eat other fireflies.
Fireflies are primarily carnivorous. Larvae usually eat snails and worms. Some species of fireflies feed on other fireflies—most notable is the genus photuris, which mimics female flashes of photinus, a closely related species, in order to attract and devour the males of that species. But adult fireflies have almost never been seen feeding on other species of bugs. Scientists aren’t sure what they eat. They may feed on plant pollen and nectar, or they may eat nothing.
Fireflies have short lifespans.
An adult firefly lives only long enough to mate and lay eggs—so they may not need to eat during their adult life stage. The larvae usually live for approximately one to two years, from mating season to mating season, before becoming adults and giving birth to the next generation.
Fireflies imitate each other.
Female photuris aren’t the only impostors among fireflies—the species is surprisingly devious when it comes to imitation. Sometimes male photuris imitate male photinus to attract females of their own species. She shows up looking for food, but instead he gets a mate.
Even more interesting, scientists believe some photinus males imitate photuris females giving off bad impressions of photinus male flashes, scaring off other photinus males and reducing competition.
Fireflies are found on almost every continent.
Fireflies love warm, humid areas. Because of this, they thrive in tropical regions as well as temperate zones—they come out in the summertime in these environments—on all continents except Antarctica. Fireflies thrive in forests, fields and marshes near lakes, rivers, ponds, streams and vernal pools. They need a moist environment to survive.
Some species of firefly larvae are generally aquatic—they even have gills—while others live almost entirely in trees.
Fireflies are medically and scientifically useful.
The two chemicals found in a firefly’s tail, luciferase and luciferin, light up in the presence of ATP. Every animal has ATP in its cells in amounts that are more or less constant—or should be. In diseased cells, the amount of ATP may be abnormal. If the chemicals from fireflies are injected into diseased cells, they can detect changes in cells that can be used to study many diseases, from cancer to muscular dystrophy.
But that’s not all they’re used for. Electronic detectors built with these chemicals have been fitted into spacecraft to detect life in outer space, as well as food spoilage and bacterial contamination on earth.
Fireflies don’t make tasty prey.
When attacked, fireflies shed drops of blood in a process known as “reflex bleeding.” The blood contains chemicals that taste bitter and can be poisonous to some animals. Because of this, many animals learn to avoid eating fireflies. Pet owners should never feed fireflies to lizards, snakes and other reptilian pets.Good design is as much about what you leave out as it is what you put in. Sometimes I think the problem with Starcraft 2 is that the races are just too well-rounded. Maybe a few holes would open up some interesting design space for new tactics or strategies.
The Rules:
One unit from each race
No units that wouldn’t be missed in competitive play (i.e. Carriers or Motherships
No Widow Mines, Swarm Hosts or Sentries. (Already discussed to death)
Obviously the game will have to be re-balanced around the units’ absences
My Answers:
The Marauder
“The less I see the Marauder the more I feel like switching back to Terran.” — Artosis, SOTG #42
I don’t know why Artosis doesn’t like the Marauder, but I know why I don’t. It removes the last possible downside for a Terran going bio. Giving a bio army a high health, armoured unit that can shrug off storms, absorb baneling hits, kite Ultralisks into uselessness, rush tanks and pick off retreating enemies with concussive shells just makes the composition that much too versatile.
The Hellbat, for all its flaws, at least doesn’t fall into the same trap: it’s a tank to hold off melee units, but with the downside of being useless against anything with decent range (and built from a Factory).
Without the Marauder, Terrans would have to go back to doing what they did in Brood War: supplementing their mobile but fragile bio army with slower, beefier metal.
The Roach
Is there any more boring unit in Starcraft 2 than the Roach?
The Roach is slow, barely micro-able and weirdly costed. It was too cheap at one supply and is too expensive at two. Roach battles consist of getting your units as close as possible to whatever you want them to fight, then leaving them there. Between two zerg players, Roach and Roach/Hydra engagements offer the worst spectacle Starcraft has to offer.
(Albeit slightly better than the “OK, now let’s throw our muta balls at each other and see who wins!” of early HotS)
Roaches were given to us with the promise of cool burrowing tricks, but that turned into a rare novelty pretty fast.
Of course the Zerg would still need something to stop their army being obliterated by AoE, but getting rid of the roach would open up more design space for alternative counters, without worrying that they would make the Zerg’s boring meat shield too powerful.
And then we could move Hydralisks back to being hatchery tech where they belong.
The Immortal
I was originally not sure what to pick for Protoss as they have so many one-dimensional units to pick from, but then I looked at my previous choices and saw the obvious pattern.
With the Marauder and especially the Roach gone, the role of the Immortal would be reduced to two things: the unit that defends against early stalkers in PvP, and one of the big “Fuck You”s against mech in PvT.
I know it’s not quite that simple, but surely we can find another way to stabilise PvP if removing the Immortal made mech just that tiny bit more viable?Step One before reading this blog: watch this video. Get turtle’d up.
Recently Activision, and developer Red Fly Studio released the latest offering to the Ninja Turtles gaming crowd: TMNT Out of Shadows. Unlike previous releases while Ubisoft had the licensing for the series, this game is not a remake, or port of the classic ninja turtle games – but an entirely new game. And seeming how I’ve been moving at a turtle’s pace as far as my posts here on TBOD go…this felt appropriate.
Still drawing heavily on the series’ roots as a co-op brawler, Out of Shadows still offers that hack and kick goodness we’re all used to, but adds a rather hefty spectrum of combos, counters, special weapons, and an upgrade and level system that rivals most RPG’s out there. Each turtle has his own level progression tree, and series of up-gradable abilities that encourage replay.
Now, being the TMNT fan that I am, I instantly gobbled this up as soon as it hit, and dove right in. As a kid I would read the original black and white comics by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, watched the cartoon(s), and had just about every action figure. At first glorious glance it was obvious that Red Fly had put some serious fan service into the look, and feel of this game.
The Turtle’s underground lair is essentially your in-game UI menu, and each selection will tour you to different areas such as the dojo, to throw-down against Donnie’s robot Foot Soldiers solo, or as a team. Learn combos, and get much needed practice to succeed at the rather difficult campaign. I’ll touch on combat later, but the game uses an attack/counter formula similar to the Batman: Arkham series, but one that is much faster-paced.
Other areas within the Turtle HQ include, A concept art gallery, The main campaign selection map, and the one that made me nerd-squeal: Donatello’s workshop, where you can purchase and upgrade cool weapon mods, and other inventions by the notorious tech-tinkering turtle.
The coolest addition to HQ which fans of the classic games will love, is an old-school arcade machine where you can play out mini versions of the campaign levels in side scrolling beat ’em up bliss. Each mission for the classic style game is unlocked via campaign.
The combat system for TMNT Out of Shadows, is to put it “lightly” a gong show. It’s fun, and rather challenging – but the games wonky camera (which you constantly fight with to prevent extreme close-up angles when it collides with walls.) makes for some rage-quit inducing moments sometimes.
In a nutshell the core combat function is rich, and offers some great animations, and the ability to call out team KO’s and other attacks that really show the brothers true calling, which is kicking the shit out of thugs and ninjas in tandem.
For the first time ever, the player is now able to take control of each turtle on the fly – using the D-Pad. This makes for some very cool opportunities to practice each turtles unique combat style, speed, as well as how to utilize team attacks to your advantage. Early on, you’ll learn that the Dojo I mentioned earlier is your best friend as training is important to get a feel for each character before braving the unforgiving campaign.
The health-system is a tad on the stagnant side, offering hidden, and sparse pizza boxes which serve as single use med-packs that you can keep in a mini-inventory along with throwing stars, and any power-weapon you might have purchased from the workshop. Pizza can be used to either replentish your health meter, or can be cashed in to revive a turtle if they are KO’d.
Due to the sparse nature of health, it creates a frustrating situation where it’s virtually impossible to keep each turtle “healthy” nor recall which of them has a pizza in their inventory. When you revive a turtle, they respawn with little to no health, thus wasting the precious pie entirely. I recommend taking the selfish route, especially when you are being swarmed with enemies. There is one particular moment I was stuck at for some time as a shit load of robots systematically killed each turtle that I was not controlling, leaving me alone against the raving horde of mechanical teeth and claws. Online co-op can help you get through a difficult situation however – so all is not lost.
The game’s story is based on the Nickelodeon series, which is not a far cry from the animated series I grew up with, so there’s plenty of familiarity with characters like Baxter Stockman & his robots, the foot, etc. All I can say, is that it’s a ninja turtle storyline, and it works pretty well and will give fans some real nostalgic nerdgasms, But don’t come here looking for a grandiose dramatic epic. It’s designed to reawaken your inner 8 year old…and it does it’s job well.
Well enough until the clunky camera shits on your parade when fighting in narrow spaces, or areas with lots of background geometry to literally trip-up and catch the mischievous camera, which seems on a quest to make you want to seriously kick a baby seal in the face. (Hey, I’m Canadian.) My best words of Splinter-esque wisdom would be:
“A warrior, will face many dangers, and enemies. But if his soul is pure. His presence a shadow, and his ability to rotate the camera quickly before being suckered by a Foot Soldier is true… He shall succeed.”
At first acquaintance TMNT Out Of Shadows is a fun and great offering to the series, that offers plenty of good ol’ gaming nostalgia, with a heaping helping of new school features.
After about an hour, you’ll likely light your XBOX on fire out of rage – but soon enough run out to get a new console so you can let this game give you heavy doses of joy and pure livid anguish again, and again in no time.
Uh….Cowabunga?
Advertisements“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
Opakeco Foundation Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 30, 2017
This quote of Mahatma Gandhi is one of the driving factors behind the efforts of our team. We are trying to change the world and we enjoy every second of it. What are you doing to make the world a better place?
As the Opakeco Foundation is moving towards its biggest milestone since its inception, we have some major announcements!
TL;DR
Partnership / Pilot Project : Village By Village
Partnership / Pilot Project : Slave Free Trade
Partnership with HSB Identification, aiming at ensuring end-to-end transparency for charity and relief aid programs.
aiming at ensuring end-to-end transparency for and. Featured at WebSummit 2017 in Lisbon. Will we meet you there?
in Lisbon. Will we meet you there? Evercoin listing and exchanging Karmo Tokens
listing and exchanging Renewed Opakeco website including contribution section, github updated with contracts.
Partnership with Charities
Let’s start with Village by Village and Slave Free Trade, two charities we have chosen to act as pilot projects on the Opakeco Platform.
Two completely different charities with one common denominator: They are not afraid of transparency and accountability. If you are part of a charity and would like to partner up with our foundation, reach out to me at akash@opakeco.org.
Partnership with HSB Identification
We are really excited to announce our partnership with HSB Identification. Together with HSB Identification, we are developing a platform for donors to send aid to verified charities, via a low-cost point-of-sale solution that can be used to transact in the field, leveraging on HSB’s Social Safety Net product. They are in a unique position to swiftly and safely deliver aid to any country, securing the entire chain from the donor until the beneficiary.
“We leverage cryptocurrencies and biometrics to give donors the guarantee that the money being sent out reaches individuals chosen carefully and transparently, based on standard targeting methodologies. For each new registered beneficiary, we carry out an accurate duplicate search — based on biometrics — before creating a personal wallet of cryptocurrency” says Jerome Buchler, Business Development VP at HSB.
Featured at WebSummit 2017
Websummit is the biggest tech conference in the world. We are one of the very few selected foundations that are being featured at the 2017 WebSummit in Lisbon. With attendees ranging from Al Gore to Wyclef Jean, we will certainly have some interesting conversations in Lisbon.
Evercoin to list Karmo Tokens
We have are in discussions with Miko Matsumura to list our Karmo tokens on Evercoin. We are making an agreement and we expect to have our tokens on this exchange shortly after our ICO ends.
Renewed Opakeco website and Github update
We gave our minimalistic website a major overhaul. Because we are moving closer to our ICO date (only 2 days left!), we feel this is a more appealing way of presenting information about the ICO.
Because of popular demand we have translated our website in Korean and the Hindi version is coming soon!
We have updated our Github to reflect changes we’ve made to the contracts and website. There still is a bounty program in place, so grab this opportunity to earn up to 33 ETH worth of tokens by auditing our contracts.
We ran a test on mainnet today and will deploy contracts later this evening. We have also added a contribution section to the website. Our ICO Address will be published on our website on 31th of September.
I am looking forward to a succesful ICO, let us teach the world that charity has a place within the crypto-ecosystem.
We are here to stay.
Akash Parmesar
Crypthusiast, Philanthropist and Co-Founder of Opakeco
NOTE: WE WILL ONLY PUBLISH THE OFFICIAL ICO ADDRESS ON THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE. WE WILL NEVER USE ANY OTHER CHANNEL.News
NASA’s Commercial Space Transportation Bi-Monthly Report Released
SpaceX Successfully Completes COTS Demonstration Mission
Partners Continue Meeting Commercial Crew Milestones
Commercial Space Transportation Enables Deep Space Exploration
Issue #7 – June 2012
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On May 31, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) completed its final Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration mission, clearing SpaceX to begin commercial resupply service missions to the International Space Station later this year. This mission was a huge step toward allowing regular cargo carrying missions to the ISS by the U.S. private sector.
SpaceX conducted the historic flight within 11 months of the final space shuttle flight, minimizing the gap in the U.S. space station cargo transportation capability. Additionally, this flight represents the first time a U.S. spacecraft has autonomously berthed to the orbiting outpost. “This was an incredibly challenging mission from a technical standpoint,” said Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial spaceflight. “To say that I am pleasantly surprised that the mission went so smoothly is an understatement.”
This demonstration mission accomplished all the objectives of what was originally planned to be two separate test flights. After the launch was successfully aborted on May 19 because of a faulty engine valve, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:44 a.m. EDT on May 22. The next couple of days were spent testing the Dragon spacecraft’s ability to perform specific tasks, including free drift and abort maneuvers, while maintaining a distance of about 1.5 miles below the space station. The Dragon’s navigation and communications systems also were verified, including the ability to accept commands directly from the station’s crew.
Given the success of these demonstrations, NASA authorized Dragon to approach the space station on May 25. After closing to about 32 feet, Expedition 31 flight engineer Don Pettit of NASA used the space station’s robotic arm to capture Dragon and berth it to the station’s Node 2. The station crew opened the hatch on May 26 and unloaded new supplies and packed return cargo over the four days Dragon remained attached The SpaceX Dragon commercial craft is berthed to the Earth-facing side of the International Space Station’s Harmony node. Photo credit: NASAto the orbital laboratory. The crew closed Dragon’s hatch on May 30 and released the capsule early on May 31. It splashed down off the coast of California, and SpaceX personnel immediately began post-landing operations. The program has confirmed that SpaceX successfully completed all COTS demonstration mission objectives.
As originally envisioned, the COTS project has two major goals: 1) demonstrate crew and cargo transportation services that NASA could potentially purchase in the future and 2) enable the U.S. to become more competitive in the global launch marketplace. Successful completion of this demonstration mission, along with SpaceX’s recent announcements of commercial launch agreements with other customers, indicate both goals are being accomplished.
This partnership between NASA and SpaceX demonstrates the ability of NASA and commercial partner teams to develop complicated space systems that help NASA meet its needs while strengthening U.S. industrial capability and competitiveness.
NASA’s commercial crew partners continue to achieve exciting milestones as the Commercial Crew Development Round 2 (CCDev2) Space Act Agreements enter their home stretch. Since the agreements were awarded in April 2011, the partners have achieved 48 of the 62 planned test, demonstration, and technical review milestone events. With the maturation of spacecraft and launch vehicle designs being accomplished under CCDev2, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is well positioned to move into the integrated capability design and testing phase. Awards for new Space Act Agreements are expected in July/August 2012.
An example of a recent significant CCDev2 accomplishment is the Boeing Company’s CST-100 parachute drop test.
Boeing’s CST-100 crew capsule floats to a landing above the Delmar Dry Lake Bed near Alamo, Nev, on May 2. – Image credit: Boeing
The company successfully completed the second of two tests that validated its parachute and latest landing airbag systems designs. During the test, a helicopter lifted the CST-100 crew capsule to 9,400 feet above the desert floor in Nevada, about a hundred miles north of Las Vegas. After the capsule was released, drogue parachutes immediately deployed to orient the capsule, followed by the three
main parachutes. Airbags on the bottom of the capsule then inflated, and the capsule settled to a soft landing. This demonstrated how the CST-100 will be able to return crews from the International Space Station safely with land-based landings, simplifying crew recovery relative to water-based landings.
Pusher Escape Flight Test Vehicle shipment. – Image credit: Blue Origin
Another example of a recent CCDev2 milestone is Blue Origin’s “pusher” escape system test vehicle, which has now been assembled and shipped to the company’s test range near Van Horn, Texas. This is a significant milestone in preparation for Blue
Origin’s pad escape flight test planned for later this summer. The pusher escape system protects crew in the event of a catastrophic failure of the launch vehicle, enabling the crew vehicle to carry the crew to safety. The upcoming test campaign will validate the system’s rocket motor and thrust vector control.
NASA’s commercial crew and cargo transportation programs will restore America’s access to low Earth orbit and ensure the agency’s ability to resupply the International Space Station and rotate its U.S. crews. In addition to this very tangible benefit to NASA’s immediate human spaceflight efforts, the commercial space programs are also enabling NASA’s longer term deep space human exploration goals. Transitioning low Earth orbit access safely and affordably to commercial industry frees up budget, personnel and facilities that NASA now can apply to developing the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the heavy lift Space Launch System (SLS), and other spacecraft and ground support infrastructure needed to send humans beyond Earth’s orbit.
Concept image of NASA’s Space Launch System. – Image credit: NASA
The space shuttle and old Constellation program’s Ares I and Orion were both overdesigned for simple taxi service for transporting NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. In contrast, the Commercial Crew Program is facilitating the development of systems specifically designed for transporting people to and from low Earth orbit and the International Space Station. This allows the crew transportation systems to be operated more efficiently, saving money and personnel that can be used for other missions.
Concept image of NASA’s Orion MultiPurpose Crew Vehicle. – Image credit: NASA
NASA already is making steady progress in the next great chapter of deep space exploration. Orion is on track for a high altitude orbital test flight in 2014, and SLS is moving swiftly toward a test flight in 2017 that will include a fly-by of the moon. In addition to making use of the resources now available for exploration systems development, NASA is using
existing hardware and capabilities to the extent feasible to accelerate progress on the spacecraft and launch vehicles that ultimately will have greater capability than ever before to carry humans and cargo into deep space.
Through commercial space transportation, together with the capabilities to explore deep space that Orion and the SLS will provide, NASA has a robust, complementary U.S. human spaceflight program.
This bi-monthly newsletter of accomplishments, progress, and happenings in NASA’s commercial crew and cargo programs is distributed by the Commercial Spaceflight Development Division at NASA Headquarters.
Tags: Blue Origin, Boeing, CCDev2, Commercial Crew Development Round 2, Commercial Crew program, Commercial Crew Program. Ares I, Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, commercial space, Commercial Spaceflight Development Division, Constellation program, COTS, CST-100 |
have regrouped in an effort to get the community part of the site back up. Since then they have launched Katcr.co, which hosts a forum where several staffers are present.
Speaking on behalf of the KAT-team that’s left, Mr.Black says that the criminal investigation won’t be the end of the community.
“We need to remember that Kickass Torrents is not simply about uploading, the heart and soul of KAT is our members, which are family and family is important as we all know. Nothing can ever take that away and no matter what happens we will not let our community down.”
“We guarantee that KAT will continue in one form or another and we will come back stronger than ever,” Mr.Black adds.
The forum, created by Mr.Prairi3DoG, has already gathered thousands of visitors over the past few days and continues to grow. While many of the original team members are present, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the original site will be restored as well.
KAT forum
TorrentFreak has learned that remaining “KAT team” doesn’t have access to the original code. They are mainly people who kept the site clean and in order, in the role of moderator or administrator, and who have no contact with the alleged site owner.
However, if the “owners” of the site would like to make a comeback, they will have the support of the KAT team that’s now trying to keep the community alive.
“Should the business owners choose to revive KAT then they will have our full support,” Mr.Black says.
He further notes that the site was taken down “under dubious circumstances” and calls the charges against the alleged operator “murky” at best. “No copyrighted material was ever stored on Kickass Torrents and the site was fully DMCA compliant,” Mr.Black says.
KAT spirit is still alive
For now, the forum will give estranged KAT users a place to get together once again. However, many are also still looking for alternatives, with various KAT mirrors growing in popularity.
The KAT team has noticed this as well, but warns that none of these are connected to the old team, urging people to proceed with caution.
“Please be aware that there is no legitimate fully-working KAT site available so be cautious and never attempt to login to any fake sites that may appear online,” Mr.Black warns.
Meanwhile, the alleged operator of KickassTorrents faces extradition to the United States. As far as we know he still remains in Poland, but the authorities haven’t announced any new information since last week, while the court case remains sealed.While Germany has declared itself open to refugees from wars in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere it has become a lot less welcoming to economic migrants from within Europe. Berlin has decided that Balkans countries are to be considred ‘safe’, and that anyone arriving in Germany from the region cannot claim asylum. It has already begun deporting thousands of people back to Albania and other countries in the region and is speeding up the process of assessment to repatriate even more.
I am 99 percent sure that I will try it again. I will go there again, because it's better to be in jail in Europe than to live in this place, here in Albania.
During the first half of this year, 40 percent of asylum seekers in Germany came from the Balkans.
Tens of thousands of economic migrants from Serbia, Bosnia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania joined the mass influx of war refugees from Syria and Iraq heading to Germany.
Migrant surge
They were joined by huge numbers of Albanians living in crisis-hit Greece and Italy, hoping for a better future to north.
In this edition of Reporter Hans von der Brelie hears the stories first hand of some of those who have been deported and others in still in Germany or who are expecting the same fate.
For some at least, going home is not a safe option.
In contrast, he meets Albania’s interior minister who agrees wholeheartedly with Germany’s tough stance.
Click on the video to see his report in full.
WEB-BONUS
Saimir Tahiri: ‘Albania is a safe country’
Euronews met the Albanian Minister of Interior Affairs in the capital Tirana. Why have so many Albanians left for Germany? Saimir Tahiri backs the German government’s efforts to tighten asylum legislation and to send economic migrants back to Albania. He believes Germany should speed up decision-making procedures on asylum seekers. The interview is in English.The most pro-European member of Theresa May’s cabinet has appealed to Remain voters to abandon hope that Brexit can be reversed – and instead back the prime minister to secure a “special partnership” with the EU.
The appeal to those who voted to stay in the EU, including Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National party supporters – by work and pensions secretary Damian Green – is the Tories’ latest attempt to widen their appeal for the 8 June general election.
Green, the closest ally and oldest friend of the prime minister in the cabinet, says in an interview with the Observer that it is time for Remain supporters, whose cause he championed during the referendum campaign, to stop playing games and deluding themselves that the UK can stay in the EU.
Instead, he says, they must recognise that the country faces a “huge historic task” and one of the “most momentous half decades” in its history as it tries to replace full EU membership with a workable alternative.
Tory strategists know that if they can win over a large number of non-Tory Remain supporters, as well as those hardline Leave voters deserting Ukip, then May could secure a huge “national mandate” that would bolster her hand in Brexit talks due to start next month.
“There are two things you can do as a Remainer, as I was,” Green says. “You can either say we argued the case and we lost, so now we have to think about what is best for the country, or you can continue trying to play games to say it didn’t really happen, and can we reverse it.
Play Video 0:51 PM: There is no Mayism, only good, solid Conservatism – video
“It seems overwhelmingly more sensible and more in the interests of this country to ensure the government gets the best deal here – to get a close and special partnership with the EU.”
He adds: “Given this huge historic task, you have got a pretty stark choice of leaders – Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn – and that is what we are pointing out to the country.”
As the Lib Dems, whose campaign centres on a call for a second referendum, struggle to make progress in the polls, and Labour lags behind the Conservatives, the Tories are stressing the potentially disastrous consequences of failure in the Brexit talks. Launching the Tory manifesto on Thursday, May said a bad deal would be “dire” for working people in the UK.
In an apparent rebuke to rightwing Conservatives who say the UK should be prepared to leave the EU with “no deal” rather than accept compromises over issues such as the divorce bill, Green says it is essential that an agreement is reached, and insists that this will require give and take. “No negotiation has ever succeeded without an element of compromise and similarly no compromise ever satisfies everyone 100%,” he says. “I am sure that all sensible people recognise that first of all there is a deal to be done that is mutually beneficial. That is the first thing you need.”
He refuses to draw comparisons with Margaret Thatcher’s ideology, but says the current prime minister is every bit as tough. “Mrs Thatcher saw dragons that needed to be slain in the 70s and was a tough-minded woman who succeeded. Theresa in 2017 is a tough-minded woman who succeeds – but there are different dragons to be slain.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Dragons Theresa May wants to slay are different to those Margaret Thatcher targeted as prime minister’ Photograph: PA
He adds: “Theresa is a very tough individual. She is a tough individual who when convinced that the path is right will pursue it.”
In last June’s EU referendum, 39% of Tories, 65% of Labour supporters and 68% of Lib Dems backed Remain. But recent analysis by YouGov suggests many Remainers now accept Brexit must happen. YouGov said there were now three identifiable groups: the “hard leavers” who make up 45% of voters; the “hard remainers” who still want to try to stop Brexit (22%); and a group of pragmatic leavers, 23% of the electorate, who voted Remain but believe the government has a duty now to deliver on the referendum vote.
The Tory advantage has plummeted since the party’s manifesto launch, according to a series of polls for Sunday newspapers. YouGov for the Sunday Times has the Tories’ lead down to nine points – the first time it has been in single figures in a mainstream poll since May called the snap election on 18 April.
An Opinium/Observer poll – conducted before the Tory manifesto launch – shows 47% of voters most trust the Tories to handle the Brexit process, against 13% who say Labour would do the best job. Conducted after the launch of Labour’s manifesto on Tuesday, but before the Tories’ on Thursday, it puts the Tories on 46% (down a point on a week ago), Labour on 33% (up one point), the Lib Dems on 8% and Ukip on 5% (both unchanged).The strongest sign of worry about the U.S. debt drama may be showing up in the dollar, which is on track for its third straight weekly decline.
If you don’t like what’s happening in America, one way to register that is to sell the buck.
The dollar fell to modern-era lows Tuesday against the Swiss franc, the New Zealand dollar and Singaporean dollar, and slid against a host of other currencies as well.
The DXY index (charted below), which tracks the U.S. currency’s value against six major rivals, including the yen and the euro, fell 0.7% to 73.52, nearing the 2011 closing low of 72.93 reached April 29.
The DXY is down 7% year to date.
Democrats and Republicans in Washington haven’t agreed on a plan to raise the $14.3-trillion federal debt ceiling ahead of the Aug. 2 deadline set by the U.S. Treasury. Without a higher ceiling by next week’s deadline, the Treasury says it risks defaulting on debt payments or other obligations.
Although many on Wall Street say they don’t believe Congress will allow default -- “I can’t believe they’re that dumb” is a common refrain from market players -- a greater concern is what will happen with the nation’s AAA credit rating.
Standard & Poor’s has warned that it may lower America’s rating if Congress and the White House don’t agree on at least $4 trillion in long-term budget cuts. Moody's Investors Service also has threatened a ratings cut.
Uncertain what a lower rating might mean for markets, “Global investors are preferring to reduce their exposure to the dollar temporarily,” said Michael Woolfolk, currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon. “For the time being, everything points to further dollar weakness,” he said.
As the U.S. currency sinks it’s eroding Americans’ purchasing power (good luck traveling overseas this summer), but it’s also helping U.S. businesses by making their exports cheaper.
Besides the debt drama, the greenback’s value is under pressure from concerns about the struggling U.S. economy, as the unemployment rate sits at 9.2% and job creation is abysmal.
Given slow growth, the Federal Reserve is expected to keep short-term interest rates near zero indefinitely.That also undermines the dollar, especially compared with currencies of developing nations that have been been tightening credit.
Case in point: Brazil. One dollar now buys just 1.54 Brazilian reals, down 7.3% since the start of the year and the fewest since the late-1990s.
The dollar also is slumping against its major rivals, including the euro and the yen. Although Europe's own debt crisis continues to fester, the euro rose to $1.451 on Tuesday, up from $1.437 on Monday and a three-week high.
The buck now buys just 0.801 Swiss francs, a record low and down 14.3% this year. Switzerland’s currency is considered a haven in times of geopolitical turmoil, not unlike gold, which hit a new high of $1,616.60 an ounce Tuesday.
In Japan, the falling dollar is bringing howls from manufacturers. As the yen rises, they face the choice of raising prices of their exports to the U.S. or slashing their profit margins.
One dollar now is worth 77.89 yen, down from 81.05 three weeks ago and the weakest since the yen briefly strengthened to a postwar record of 76.25 after Japan’s massive earthquake in March.
-- Tom Petruno
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The plan involves taking the 14 ships out of their normal deployment rotations and putting them into a maintenance and modernization effort, Navy officials said.
Cutting costs in a restricted budget environment is the main reason for the proposed plan. Laying up nine ships from 2013 through 2017 would save the Navy as much as $6 billion, according to an April Government Accountability Office report.
However, the House Armed Services Committee's mark-up of the fiscal year 2015 budget proposal is putting the brakes on the Navy's plan to lay up the ships and asking them to re-evaluate.
"The committee is concerned about the Navy's plan to reduce its battle force structure by 14 ships, especially in light of shortfalls in the force structure necessary to meet the requirements of the national military strategy," HASC writes.
Members of the committee expressed concern about taking cruisers and amphibs off line at a time when they are needed by the fleet. The Navy's plan would take one half of the service's 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers out of service.
A HASC amendment requires that the Navy upgrade only two cruisers in 2015. This language was developed to ensure that 11 cruisers were not taken out of the fleet, Congressional sources said. The amendment was proposed and sponsored by Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., chairman of the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee.
"The Navy's plan to prematurely remove 11 cruisers from service would significantly degrade the capabilities of the Navy and increases the operations and stress of the remaining force. Keeping these vessels in service, especially while the demand for their missile defense and air warfare capabilities grows, is essential for the health and versatility of our surface Fleet," Forbes told Military.com in a written statement.
The Navy's plan would include 11 Ticonderoga-class cruisers and three amphibious dock landing ships. Saving operational and manning expenses and extending the service life of the cruiser fleet from the 2020s to the 2040s are all parts of the calculus regarding the Navy's rationale, service officials said.
"The Navy's proposal delivers capabilities to ensure our cruiser fleet will continue service through the 2030s and into the 2040s. The last cruiser would decommission in the mid-2040s. Once cruisers are modernized the proposal would replace, on a hull-for-hull basis, the retiring [cruisers] as those ships reach the end of their service life in the 2020s," said Lt. Robert Myers, Navy spokesman.
The laid-up ships are slated to go through what's called hull, mechanical and electrical work before receiving weapons systems and electronics upgrades, Myers explained. The combat systems upgrades consist of work on the ships computers, radar and sonar systems along with the ship's guns and weapons.
The details and timetables regarding exactly which ships will be laid up, and the order in which they will be layed up, is still being determined, Myers added.
"Our proposal to Congress is still being discussed and it is too early to discuss timelines. The Navy's order of when certain cruisers will be modernized will be done in considering ship age, industrial workload, modernization requirements and procurement timelines, as well as material condition," Myers said.
Forbes' amendment plans to pay for upgrades to the two cruisers in 2015 with what's called the Ship Modernization and Sustainment Fund.
In addition, HASC's language asks for a report by March of 2015 detailing the costs, benefits and risks associated with the Navy's phased modernization plan. The committee also asks that the report include information on the costs, savings, benefits and risks of any alternate plans that were considered before the Navy adopted its current plan.
Myers said the Navy plans to work closely with Congress to address their concerns and articulate the merits of the plan.
One analyst said the Navy's plan makes sense given today's tight budget environment where shipbuilding dollars are increasingly scarce.
"This makes enormous sense as long as the nation fails to properly resource the Navy. The Navy is betting that the immediate future of the shipbuilding budget is not going to go up, so they are going to husband the force that they have," said Bryan McGrath, managing director at FerryBridge Group LLC, a defense consulting firm based in Easton, Md.
Having cruisers ready to emerge back into the fleet could prove useful in the future, McGrath added.
"This is a way to maintain an incredibly important force structure at a time of low risk so that it can be available later when there may be greater risk. As the fleet gets smaller and the ship building budget gets crowded out by the construction of the ballistic missile submarine, you will have these ships which you can bring out one at a time," he said.
The Ticonderoga-class of cruisers are engineered for Aegis ballistic missile defense, which uses a mix of computer, missile and radar technology to fire a Standard Missile-3 to knock an approaching enemy projectile out of the sky.
The 567-foot long warships are equipped with Tomahawk missiles, torpedoes, vertical launch tubes for SM-3s and other missiles, SH-60 Sea Hawk helicopters, 5-inch guns and Phalanx close-in-weapons-systems, among other features.
The Navy had planned to build a new class of cruisers called CGX – but that program was cancelled in 2010, paving the way for the upgrades of the existing Ticonderoga-class cruisers, Navy officials said.
-- Kris Osborn can be reached at Kris.Osborn@monster.com.Pinterest users were a target of an unusual attack on Friday when several users reported seeing butt pics pinned to their board.
According to Daily Mail, several users reported seeing pics of skimpy clad women and bare bottoms with weight loss captions on their boards. Many users also raised concerns on Twitter.
"Dear Pinterest my accounts been hacked with someone posting hundreds of butt pictures all over my boards," startup expert Hermione Way tweeted along with a snapshot of her Pinterest board.
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While Pinterest did not comment on what went wrong, Daily Mail said that the problem could be with third-party websites that allow users to pin posts.
"The problem appears to be on other websites that host 'Pin this' buttons, rather than Pinterest directly. Many websites feature the button, alongside other share options, on articles and images. Hackers are infiltrating these websites and inserting malicious codes into these third-party 'Pin this' buttons,"
ABC News indicated that phishers were at work. It said that users get an email saying that their friends have shared with them a pin. When they click the pin, they are led to a site which sells counterfeit products or some other fraud.
Better Business Bureau had earlier this month warned Pinterest users of spam attacks advising them to exercise caution when clicking pins, NDTV said.
Steve J. Bernas ofo Better Business Bureau was quoted by NDTV saying, "Pinterest is an easy outlet for scammers to access, just like any social media website."
"Our systems were alerted to some incidents of spam yesterday evening. These reports did not come in at a large scale. We began working on cleaning up and placing the accounts in safe mode immediately. The accounts have since been secured. As a precaution, Pinners should use unique and strong passwords, and can get more information in our Help Cente," a Pinterest representative told Tech Crunch.Battlelines drawn over child beauty pageants
Updated
A group of MPs and concerned parents are pushing for a ban on a child beauty pageant which American organisers are preparing to bring to Sydney.
The Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant, made famous in the reality TV show Toddlers And Tiaras, is travelling from Texas in June so Australian children can compete in formal wear, photogenic and congeniality contests.
Entrants must pay a minimum of $295 so their children, sprinkled in glitter and rhinestones, can strut their stuff on stage and sing to a panel of judges.
But if New South Wales Labor MP Jill Hall succeeds in her plan, she would put an end to child beauty pageants altogether.
Federal Labor MP Anna Burke is supporting the private members bill and calling for a national ban on the event.
"Dressing them up, fake tans, fake teeth known as flippers, even fake boobs and bums on three-year-olds is a bit of a ridiculous situation," she said.
"It's really calling into question, do we actually want to promote this in Australia?"
The City of Darebin hosted the Melbourne event last July and says it is now reviewing its venue hire policy because of the community uproar it provoked.
Council spokesman Daniel Freer says he is conducting community consultation.
"We certainly had a number of people that expressed their outrage and concern and a whole range of negative comment about the event," he said.
"Then we also experienced a number of people that were quite pleased that council allowed it to happen in one of council's facilities... saying they're right for their children to be involved in these sorts of activities and they're quite enthusiastic about their involvement in those activities."
'Supportive community'
Carmen Powell, a mother and a member of Pageants Australia, says her daughter Paige won the age-16 section at last year's Universal Royalty Pageant in Melbourne.
She says the pageants provide a fantastic supportive community for her daughter.
"It's an extension of a performing arts platform really. It's a stage opportunity," she said.
"It's also the opportunity depending on what the pageant offers, they have options of public speaking and also they just love the outfits, aspiring to wear certain garments, designing them and displaying them.
"It also helps in their modelling, their deportment, their stage presence, their confidence, which then travels over into everyday life - when they apply for a job or how they conduct themselves in their jobs."
Impact
Would you stand your two daughters side by side in the lounge room and tell one of them that she's more beautiful than the other? Pull The Pin organiser Catherine Manning
But those campaigning against the pageants, including Pull The Pin organiser Catherine Manning, are strengthening their efforts against the event coming to Sydney.
"I think the Sydney pageant will be a bit of a test for them," she said.
"Hopefully we'll have sent them packing and sent a very clear message to those other people who have sprung up on the coat-tails of Universal Royalty here in Australia that we really don't want this type of pageant culture for our kids.
"I always ask people, would you stand your two daughters side by side in the lounge room and tell one of them that she's more beautiful than the other?
"For most people that's a resounding no, and the reason is obviously not just because of the impact you have on the girl that you tell isn't the most beautiful, but you're also sending a really strange message to the girl that you tell is the most beautiful.
"I think that they get so many cultural messages about female beauty through advertising in the media, it's quite relentless."
Universal Royalty Pageant organiser Annette Hill did not respond to interview requests, but she did tell the ABC she was very excited about returning to Australia and had a few surprises prepared.
The pageant will be held in Sydney on June 16.
Topics: children, family-and-children, community-and-society, human-interest, australia, united-states
First postedAs part of the annual Document Freedom Day, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) have presented their Freedom Germany Award to the German newspaper die tageszeitung (TAZ). Subscribers to the newspaper can receive its issues in a range of DRM-free, open formats. Explaining the motivation behind choosing the winner, Stephan Uhlmann of the FFII said: "we congratulate TAZ for their firm stance on the usage of Open Standards".
TAZ subscribers can choose to receive issues in HTML, PDF, ePub, and plain text, all of them open formats without DRM. Asked about the paper's motivation for offering open formats, its head of IT Ralf Klever said that by not restricting its readers, TAZ was able to spread its content as widely as possible. TAZ is a daily newspaper with a circulation of approximately 56,000 copies according to the German audit bureau of circulations (IVW). Its web site lists its current number of subscribers at 12,540.
The Document Freedom Awards are given out every year on Document Freedom Day. Previous winners of the German edition include the internet service provider 1&1, the news web site of the German Public Broadcaster ARD, and Deutschland Radio.
(fab)Two white women from Mississippi have been sentenced to prison after admitting their involvement in a hate crime conspiracy in which they harassed African American residents and ultimately killed a Jackson, Miss. man in 2011.
Shelbie Brooke Richards, 21, and Sarah Adelia Graves, 22, were sentenced in Jackson on Thursday after pleading guilty to one count each of conspiracy, regarding the multi-person plot that culminated in the killing of James Craig Anderson in 2011.
United States District Court Judge Henry T. Wingate sentenced Graves to 60 months behind bars, while Richards ‒ who had also pleaded guilty to one count of misprision, or the deliberate concealment of knowledge of a felony ‒ was handed a 96-month sentence. The terms were the maximum allowed per the terms of the plea deals entered by the women, according to WAPT News, and six other defendants charged in related cases have already been sentenced to terms ranging from four to 50 years.
The two women admitted in court last December that they conspired with a small group starting in the spring of 2011 to harass and assault black residents in and around Jackson. Authorities say they attacked victims with beer bottles, slingshots and other weapons, then boasted about the incidents.
Women get maximum sentences in hate crime death http://t.co/iBS6JqhyKL — The Clarion-Ledger (@clarionledger) April 10, 2015
That campaign of violence turned deadly that June when Anderson, 49, was beaten by the group and then run over by a Ford F250 truck in which Graves and Richards were riding; the murder was captured by a hotel surveillance camera.
As part of the plea agreement, Richards and Graves admitted that they encouraged their co-conspirators to leave Brandon, Mississippi with them on June 26, 2011, to assault “n****rs” in Jackson.
“Richards further admitted that she encouraged her co-conspirator Deryl Paul Dedmon to hit Anderson with his truck,” the Justice Dept. said after the agreement was entered. “In addition, Richards admitted that she falsely told law enforcement officers that she did not remember a fight between Dedmon and Anderson, and that she did not encourage Dedmon to strike Anderson with his truck.”
“This prosecution sends a clear message that this office, in partnership with the DOJ Civil Rights Division, will prioritize and aggressively prosecute hate crimes and others civil rights violations in the Southern District of Mississippi,” US Attorney Gregory Davis of the Southern District of Mississippi said in a statement.
According to the Associated Press, Judge Wingate, the first African-American federal judge in Mississippi, pondered aloud during this week’s hearing: "I just wonder whether the hatred is just engrained for some particular reason."
"Then again, that's what race hatred is all about: whites who hate blacks and blacks who hate whites,” the judge said. “It's just automatic."
Graves and Richards both apologized to Anderson’s family at Thursday’s hearing, according to AP.
"If I had one chance to change everything, that would be to give Mr. Anderson's life back," Richards said. "The decision to go on this mortifying trip was the worst decision of my life."
"You sat, watched, encouraged and rallied around as my brother was beaten," Anderson's sister, Barbara Young, told the two women during the sentencing hearing, according to the Clarion-Ledger. "Your thirst for the blood of an innocent African American caused you to pour more fuel on the fire that has ignited the great Magnolia State of Mississippi."
The Justice Dept. had charged 10 white people ‒ all teenagers at the time of Mr. Anderson’s death ‒ with crimes related to the incident. Six of them have already been sentenced for their role in the conspiracy, and two others await their fate.People often dream of escaping to the “big city” to pursue their dreams of being actors/rock stars/writers/corporate raiders. The idea is alluring, after all: power lunches at fancy restaurants, memberships at country clubs, hobnobbing at big galas - they're all part of the fantasy.
But those who have gone before you in that journey to the big city may advise caution. Think of the traffic on that six-lane freeway, they’ll warn. The cost of living might be high, they’ll caution. The people will be unfriendly, or the jobs hard to get, they’ll say.
Sure, all that may be true. But, with some digging, we were able to find big cities that defy the stereotype and are filled with a higher proportion of happy workers. Here’s what we found when we looked at metropolitan statistical areas with at least a million people.
Study Methodology
From our perspective, five things make for happy workers:
The freedom to get another job if the current one sucks
A short commute
A decent wage
A lack of crappy office equipment
A non-nitwit boss
First, we looked at unemployment rates for metropolitan areas from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We figured that a low unemployment rate means it’s relatively easy to find another job.
Few things are worse than sitting in traffic for two hours every day, which is why we looked at the most recent U.S. Census data for daily commute time and gave it twice the weight in our scoring. As suspected, people in New York have it the worst with an average 34.9 minutes to work each way.
Once you get to work, you want to be happy, a feeling that comes pretty easy if you’re paid a decent wage. So we looked at the most recent U.S. Census data for per capita annual income and benefits.
We all have stories about hateful copiers and hellish computers that drove our productivity levels down the drain. The more employers keep these clunky things around, the more people they need to repair them. So we factored in the Bureau of Labor Statistics “Computer, Automated Teller, and Office Machine Repairers” occupation category, the more repairers per 10,000 residents, the higher the presence of poorly functioning office equipment. We gave this measure – our “Frustration Index” – half the weight, because a lame boss, bad pay, or a lousy commute usually outweighs constant paper jams or pleas for toner. From this we learned that Cleveland is one of the most frustrating places in America when it comes to office equipment.
Last, but not least, on the list of things that make work bearable is a nice boss. That’s hard to measure, but nothing raises the “nitwit” red flag like a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. This federal agency keeps track of all of the charges involving sexual harassment and retaliation, as well as racial, national origin, religious, age, and disability discrimination. Ironically, the home of the EEOC (Washington, D.C.) gets the top dishonor.
We crunched the numbers and came up with a solid list of big cities with the happiest workers.
10 Happiest Cities in the US
10. Boston, MA
Boston, Massachusetts
Unemployment rate: 5.9%
Average commute: 29.2 minutes
Average wages: $37,800
Frustration index: 4.7
EEOC claims per capita: 0.06
History, strong sports teams and a bustling waterfront converge to make Boston one of the world’s greatest cities. With a better than average unemployment rate and the lowest number of EEOC claims per capita on the list, it’s easy to see why it’s also an attractive place to work. Beware the commute, though - it’s a high 29.2 minutes each way (and that’s just the average).
9. San Jose, CA
San Jose, California
Unemployment rate: 5.8%
Average commute: 25 minutes
Average wages: $39,806
Frustration index: 8.22
EEOC claims per capita: 0.19
San Jose has two things really going for it: high wages and good bosses. That makes sense, given that so many Silicon Valley companies like having bragging rights about their work environments. However, San Jose has some of the most frustrating office equipment in the United States. Maybe all those tech geniuses will get around to upgrading their photocopiers.
Did you know?
Cisco Systems is the largest corporate employer in San Jose (13,600 employees there). IBM and eBay are the next largest at 4,700 and 4,200 employees, respectively.
8. Oklahoma City, OK
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Unemployment rate: 4.8%
Average commute: 21.8 minutes
Average wages: $25,782
Frustration index: 3.91
EEOC claims per capita: 0.36
At #8, Oklahoma City is OK. This city has the most well-mannered office equipment on the list, as evidenced by a low Frustration Index, but a high number of EEOC claims per capita suggests that the managers could be better. Having said that, low commute times and a low unemployment rate make it easier than most cities to get away from jerks.
7. Kansas City, MO
Unemployment rate: 5.4%
Average commute: 22.7 minutes
Average wages: $28,853
Frustration index: 5.21
EEOC claims per capita: 0.33
Coming in at #7 is Kansas City. This city has across-the-board satisfactory scores - nothing too high and nothing too low. At 5.4% unemployment, workers there have a lot of options, too. It’s an all-around solid choice for work happiness.
6. Milwaukee, WI
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Unemployment rate: 6.2%
Average commute: 22.8 minutes
Average wages: $28,593
Frustration index: 5.4
EEOC claims per capita: 0.17
Like Kansas City, Milwaukee is a case in moderation. There’s just not a lot to worry about if you work there compared to most other cities. The unemployment rate is relatively good, the commute isn’t terrible, the wages are about the same as Kansas City’s, and the bosses behave. Looks like the shredders shred and the faxes fax a little better there, too.
5. Salt Lake City, UT
Salt Lake City, Utah
Unemployment rate: 3.5%
Average commute: 22.8 minutes
Average wages: $25,549
Frustration index: 5.43
EEOC claims per capita: 0.10
Utah consistently gets praise for its outdoorsy quality of life, but there’s a lot to say about the indoor quality of life there, too. For one thing, it seems like everybody has a job in Salt Lake City - it’s got one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. The average wages are the lowest on our list, though, so you’ll need to believe that money doesn’t buy happiness.
Did you know?
In 2012, a 45-mile commuter rail line from Salt Lake City to Provo opened, and Utah’s ridership on commuter rail lines increased by 103%.
4. Minneapolis, MN
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Unemployment rate: 4.3%
Average commute: 24.8 minutes
Average wages: $33,262
Frustration index: 5.31
EEOC claims per capita: 0.19
Coming in at #4 is Minneapolis. With just a 4.3% unemployment rate, you’ll have more options than most folks in other cities if you’re still looking for the right job fit. The commute can be a bear, but the average wages run north of $33,000, which is pretty good for this part of the country. With people-friendly photocopiers and bosses, this place seems to be a good place for finding a non-soul-sucking job.
3. Hartford, CT
Hartford, Connecticut
Unemployment rate: 6.8%
Average commute: 23 minutes
Average wages: $34,490
Frustration index: 4.29
EEOC claims per capita: 0.08
Hartford comes in at #3 largely because the salaries and benefits are so high there - if you can find a job. The unemployment rate is the highest on the list, but we give the city credit for a more manageable commute and low-frustration offices. The managers there also seem to be low-frustration: the EEOC claim rate per capita is only 0.08.
Did You Know?
Insurance companies are three of the five largest employers in Hartford (the state and the local hospital are the other two).
2. Buffalo, NY
Buffalo, New York
Unemployment rate: 6.5%
Average commute: 20.9 minutes
Average wages: $26,946
Frustration index: 4.40
EEOC claims per capita: 0.18
Two of the greatest things about Buffalo are the chicken wings and the commute, which is only 20.9 minutes! That leaves plenty of wing-consumption time, though you’ll have to be sure to do it off the clock so you don’t get fired (with a 6.5% unemployment rate, it’s relatively hard to find another job there).
1. Rochester, NY
Rochester, New York
Unemployment rate: 6.1%
Average commute: 20.9 minutes
Average wages: $27,310
Frustration index: 6. |
policies”, the client rulers immediately “applied” for membership as subordinate members of the EU and NATO, trading sovereignty, markets and national ownership of the means of production for economic handouts and the ‘free’ movement of labor, an escape valve for the millions of newly unemployed workers. German and English capital got millions of skilled immigrant workers at below labor market wages, and unimpeded access to markets and resources. The US secured NATO military bases, and recruited military forces for its Middle East and South Asian imperial wars.
US-German military and economic dominance in Europe was premised on retaining Russia as a weak quasi vassal state, and on the continued economic growth of their economies beyond the initial pillage of the ex-communist economies.
For the US, uncontested military supremacy throughout Europe was the springboard for near-time imperial expansion in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America. NATO was ‘internationalized’ into an offensive global military alliance: first in Somalia, Afghanistan then Iraq, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine.
The Rise of Russia, The Islamic Resistance and the New Cold War
During the ‘decade of infamy’ (1991-2000) extreme privatization measures by the client rulers in Russia on behalf of EU and US investors and gangster oligarchs, added up to vast pillage of the entire economy, public treasury and national patrimony. The image and reality of a giant prostrate vassal state unable to pursue an independent foreign policy, and incapable of providing the minimum semblance of a modern functioning economy and maintaining the rule of law, became the defining view of Russia by the EU and the USA. Post-communist Russia, a failed state by any measure, was dubbed a “liberal democracy” by every western capitalist politician and so it was repeated by all their mass media acolytes.
The fortuitous rise of Vladimir Putin and the gradual replacement of some of the most egregious ‘sell-out’ neo-liberal officials, and most important, the reconstruction of the Russian state with a proper budget and functioning national institutions, was immediately perceived as a threat to US military supremacy and German economic expansion. Russia’s transition from Western vassalage to regaining its status as a sovereign independent state set in motion, an aggressive counter-offensive by the US-EU. They financed a neo-liberal-oligarchy backed political opposition in an attempt to restore Russia to vassalage via street demonstrations and elections.Their efforts to oust Putin and re-establish Western vassal state failed. What worked in 19991 with Yeltsin’s power grab against Gorbachev was ineffective against Putin. The vast majority of Russians did not want a return to the decade of infamy.
In the beginning of the new century, Putin and his team set new ground-rules, in which oligarchs could retain their illicit wealth and conglomerates, providing they didn’t use their economic levers to seize state power. Secondly, Putin revived and restored the scientific technical, military, industrial and cultural institutions and centralized trade and investment decisions within a wide circle of public and private decision makers not beholden to Western policymakers. Thirdly, he began to assess and rectify the breakdown of Russian security agencies particularly with regard to the threats emanating from Western sponsored ‘separatist’ movements in the Caucuses, especially, in Chechnya, and the onset of US backed ‘color revolutions’ in the Ukraine and Georgia.
At first, Putin optimistically assumed that, Russia being a capitalist state, and without any competing ideology, the normalization and stabilization of the Russian state would be welcomed by the US and the EU. He even envisioned that they would accept Russia as an economic, political, and even NATO partner. Putin even made overtures to join and co-operate with NATO and the EU. The West did not try to dissuade Putin of his illusions.In fact they encouraged him, even as they escalated their backing for Putin’s internal opposition and prepared a series of imperial wars and sanctions in the Middle East, targeting traditional Russian allies in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
As the ‘internal’ subversive strategy failed to dislodge President Putin, and the Russian state prevailed over the neo-vassals, the demonization of Putin became constant and shrill. The West moved decisively to an ‘outsider strategy’, to isolate, encircle and undermine the Russian state by undermining allies, and trading partners
US and Germany Confront Russia: Manufacturing the “Russian Threat”
Russia was enticed to support US and NATO wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya in exchange for the promise of deeper integration into Western markets. The US and EU accepted Russian co-operation, including military supply routes and bases, for their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The NATO powers secured Russian support of sanctions against Iran. They exploited Russia’s naïve support of a “no fly zone” over Libya to launch a full scale aerial war. The US financed so-called “color revolutions” in Georgia and the Ukraine overt, a dress rehearsal for the putsch in 2014 Each violent seizure of power allowed NATO to impose anti-Russian rulers eager and willing to serve as vassal states to Germany and the US.
Germany spearheaded the European imperial advance in the Balkans and Moldavia, countries with strong economic ties to Russia. High German officials “visited” the Balkans to bolster their ties with vassal regimes in Slovenia, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia. Under German direction, the European Union ordered the vassal Bulgarian regime of Boyko “the booby” Borisov to block the passage of Russian owned South Stream pipeline to Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia and beyond. The Bulgarian state lost $400 million in annual revenue... Germany and the US bankrolled pro-NATO and EU client politicians in Moldavia – securing the election of Iurie Leanca as Prime Minister. As a result of Leanca’s slavish pursuit of EU vassalage, Moldavia lost $150 million in exports to Russia. Leanca’s pro-EU policies go counter to the views of most Moldavians – 57% see Russia as the country’s most important economic partner. Nearly 40% of the Moldavian working age population works in Russia and 25% of the Moldavians’ $8 billion GDP is accounted for by overseas remittances.
German and the US empire-builders steamroll over dissenting voices in Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia, as well as Moldova and Bulgaria, who’s economy and population suffer from the impositions of the blockade of the Russian gas and oil pipeline. But Germany’s, all out economic warfare against Russia takes precedent over the interests of its vassal states: its theirs to sacrifice for the ‘Greater Good’ of the emerging German economic empire and the US – NATO military encirclement of Russia. The extremely crude dictates of German imperial interests articulated through the EU, and the willingness of Balkan and Baltic regimes to sacrifice fundamental economic interests, are the best indicators of the emerging German empire in Europe.
Parallel to Germany’s rabid anti-Russian economic campaign, the US via NATO is engaged in a vast military build-up along the length and breadth of Russia’s frontier. The US stooge, NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg, boasts that over the current year, NATO has increased 5-fold the warplanes and bombers patrolling Russian maritime and land frontiers, carried out military exercises every two days and vastly increased the number of war ships in the Baltic and Black Sea.
Conclusion
What is absolutely clear is that the US and Germany want to return Russia to the vassalage status of the 1990’s. They do not want ‘normal relations’. From the moment Putin moved to restore the Russian state and economy, the Western powers have engaged in a series of political and military interventions, eliminating Russian allies, trading partners and independent states.
The emergent of extremist, visceral anti-Russian regimes in Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania served as the forward shield for NATO advancement and German economic encroachment. Hitler’s ‘dream’ of realizing the conquest of the East via unilateral military conquest has now under Prime Minister Merkel taken the form of conquest by stealth in Northern and Central Europe, by economic blackmail in the Balkans,and by violent putsches in the Ukraine and Georgia.
The German economic ruling class is divided between the dominant pro-US sector that is willing to sacrifice lucrative trade with Russia today in hopes of dominating and pillaging the entire economy in a post-Putin Russia (dominated by ‘reborn Yeltsin clones’); and a minority industrial sector, which wants to end sanctions and return to normal economic relations with Russia.
Germany is fearful that its client rulers in the East, especially in the Balkans are vulnerable to a popular upheaval due to the economic sacrifices they impose on the population. Hence, Germany is wholly in favor of the new NATO rapid deployment force, ostensibly designed to counter a non-existent “Russian threat” but in reality to prop up faltering vassal regimes.
The ‘Russian Threat’, the ideology driving the US and German offensive throughout Europe and the Caucuses, is a replay of the same doctrine which Hitler used to secure support from domestic industrial bankers, conservatives and right wing overseas collaborators among extremists in Ukraine, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria.
The US-EU seizure of power via vassal political clients backed by corrupt oligarchs and Nazi street fighters in Ukraine detonated the current crisis. Ukraine power grab posed a top security threat to the very existence of Russia as an independent state. After the Kiev take-over, NATO moved its stooge regime in Kiev forward to militarily eliminate the independent regions in the Southeast and seize the Crimea.thus totally eliminating Russia’s strategic position in the Black Sea. Russia the victim of the NATO power grab was labelled the “aggressor”. The entire officialdom and mass media echoed the Big Lie. Two decades of US NATO military advances on Russia’s borders and German-EU economic expansion into Russian markets were obfuscated. Ukraine is the most important strategic military platform from which the US-NATO can launch an attack on the Russian heartland and the single largest market for Germany since the annexation of East Germany
The US and Germany see the Ukraine conquest as of extreme value in itself but also as the key to launching an all-out offensive to strangle Russia’s economy via sanctions and dumping oil and to militarily threaten Russia. The strategic goal is to reduce the Russian population to poverty and to re-activate the quasi-moribund opposition to overthrow the Putin government and return Russia to permanent vassalage. The US and German imperial elite, looking beyond Russia, believe that if they control Russia, they can encircle,isolate and attack China from the West as well as the East.
Wild-eyed fanatics they are not. But as rabid proponents of a permanent war to end Russia’s presence in Europe and to undermine China’s emergence as a world power, they are willing to go to the brink of a nuclear war.
The ideological centerpiece of US-German imperial expansion and conquest in Europe and the Caucuses is the “Russian Threat”. It is the touchstone defining adversaries and allies. Countries that do not uphold sanctions are targeted. The mass media repeat the lie. The “Russian Threat” has become the war cry for cringing vassals – the phony justification for imposing frightful sacrifices to serve their imperial ‘padrones’ in Berlin and Washington – fearing the rebellion of the ‘sacrificed’ population. No doubt, under siege, Russia will be forced to make sacrifices. The oligarchs will flee westward; the liberals will crawl under their beds. But just as the Soviets turned the tide of war in Stalingrad, the Russian people, past the first two years of a bootstrap operation will survive, thrive and become once again a beacon of hope to all people looking to get from under the tyranny of US-NATO militarism and German-EU economic dictates.UmeNow announced today that it supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) "Open Letter From Security Experts, Academics and Engineers to the U.S. Congress: Stop Bad Cybersecurity Bills."
"It's important for leaders and experts in technology and communication to stand up and be counted in recognizing that CISPA represents a false solution to a real problem. We should be highly concerned by reports that some companies are meeting behind closed doors with politicians to hammer through some version of CISPA and other laws like it that circumvent our privacy rights as Americans," stated Evelyn Castillo-Bach, CEO and founder of UmeNow, the super-private network that has banned all tracking, including tagging and face recognition technology -- and has also banned all third party apps and games because they are often used to extract private information without consent.
The open letter sponsored by EFF was signed by professionals, academics, and policy experts who have devoted their careers to building security technologies and to protecting networks, computers, and critical infrastructure against attacks. "All experts who have signed the anti-CISPA letter take security very seriously and fervently believe that strong computer and network security does not require Internet users to sacrifice their privacy and civil liberties," stated Castillo-Bach.
"Smart people want cyber security legislation but reject surveillance laws that violate the privacy rights of Americans," stated Castillo-Bach, who is also an outspoken privacy advocate.
Company Information:
UmeNow is a private "people's network" that has banned all tracking and all ads. UmeNow has a 2-tier membership structure. It promises the same privacy protection to its free members. Premium level members who subscribe for $6.00/ month have access to all site areas.
Evelyn Castillo-Bach is the founder of UmeNow and Collegiate Nation. UmeNow entered into its silent launch in July 2011. Collegiate Nation--also known as GoCNCN.com-- is the first and only private network exclusively for college students. Castillo-Bach was interviewed earlier this year by Miami television to address privacy issues impacting college students.
Both UmeNow and Collegiate Nation are known for fiercely protecting the privacy rights of its members. All ads, third party apps and games are banned because they are back doors to tracking and extracting private information. Castillo-Bach earned her M.S. in 1993 from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has traveled extensively in Ethiopia and in the Balkans, accompanying her Danish husband who is a lawyer.
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/4/prweb9440550.htmI got home from work and was SUPER EXCITED when I saw that this arrived! The boxes were taped really well and took me forever to get in, but first I had to look up what country this was from as I had no idea on the language. Turns out, Belgium :D
In the first box was some wool, beads and slippers. Everything is blue - which is awesome by the way - and in the second there was a TON of sweets and a card. The card is super cute, and I'm really surprised by how much is here! (and to answer your question, i LOVE sweets :D)
Thank you so much! This really brightened my day. I hope you have a very good Christmas my matchee! <3 (I have your real name, but not your reddit name. I'll happily add it in if you make youself known :) )Transistors will stop shrinking after 2021, but Moore's law will probably continue, according to the final International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS).
The ITRS—which has been produced almost annually by a collaboration of most of the world's major semiconductor companies since 1993—is about as authoritative as it gets when it comes to predicting the future of computing. The 2015 roadmap will however be its last.
The most interesting aspect of the ITRS is that it tries to predict what materials and processes we might be using in the next 15 years. The idea is that, by collaborating on such a roadmap, the companies involved can sink their R&D money into the "right" technologies.
For example, despite all the fuss surrounding graphene and carbon nanotubes a few years back, the 2011 ITRS predicted that it would still be at least 10 to 15 years before they were actually used in memory or logic devices. Germanium and III-V semiconductors, though, were predicted to be only five to 10 years away. Thus, if you were deciding where to invest your R&D money, you might opt for III-V rather than nanotubes (which appears to be what Intel and IBM are doing).
The latest and last ITRS focuses on two key areas: that it will no longer be economically viable to shrink transistors after 2021—and, pray tell, what might be done to keep Moore's law going despite transistors reaching their minimal limit. (Remember, Moore's law simply predicts a doubling of transistor density within a given integrated circuit, not the size or performance of those transistors.)
The first problem has been known about for a long while. Basically, starting at around the 65nm node in 2006, the economic gains from moving to smaller transistors have been slowly dribbling away. Previously, moving to a smaller node meant you could cram tons more chips onto a single silicon wafer, at a reasonably small price increase. With recent nodes like 22 or 14nm, though, there are so many additional steps required that it costs a lot more to manufacture a completed wafer—not to mention additional costs for things like package-on-package (PoP) and through-silicon vias (TSV) packaging.
This is the primary reason that the semiconductor industry has been whittled from around 20 leading-edge logic-manufacturing companies in 2000, down to just four today: Intel, TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung. (IBM recently left the business by selling its fabs to GloFo.)
The second problem—how to keep increasing transistor density—has a couple of likely solutions. First, ITRS expects that chip makers and designers will begin to move away from FinFET in 2019, towards gate-all-around transistor designs. Then, a few years later, these transistors will become vertical, with the channel fashioned out of some kind of nanowire. This will allow for a massive increase in transistor density, similar to recent advances in 3D V-NAND memory.
The gains won't last for long though, according to ITRS: by 2024 (so, just eight years from now), we will once again run up against a thermal ceiling. Basically, there is a hard limit on how much heat can be dissipated from a given surface area. So, as chips get smaller and/or denser, it eventually becomes impossible to keep the chip cool. The only real solution is to completely rethink chip packaging and cooling. To begin with, we'll probably see microfluidic channels that increase the effective surface area for heat transfer. But after that, as we stack circuits on top of each other, we'll need something even fancier. Electronic blood, perhaps?
The final ITRS is one of the most beastly reports I've ever seen, spanning seven different sections and hundreds of pages and diagrams. Suffice it to say I've only touched on a tiny portion of the roadmap here. There are large sections on heterogeneous integration, and also some important bits on connectivity (semiconductors play a key role in modulating optical and radio signals).
I'll leave you with one more important short-term nugget, though. We are fast approaching the cut-off date for choosing which lithography and patterning techs will be used for commercial 7nm and 5nm logic chips.
As you may know, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) has been waiting in the wings for years now, never quite reaching full readiness due to its extremely high power usage and some resolution concerns. In the mean time, chip makers have fallen back on increasing levels of multiple patterning—multiple lithographic exposures, which increase manufacturing time (and costs).
Now, however, directed self-assembly (DSA)—where the patterns assemble themselves—is also getting very close to readiness. If either technology wants to be used over multiple patterning for 7nm logic, the ITRS says they will need to prove their readiness in the next few months.Activists take steps to reduce male dominance – but critics say more is needed to stop women being 'patronised and policed'
At a gathering of Occupy Wall Street activists at a public space in New York on Monday, one young woman spoke of a bruising experience she had suffered the previous day. Angry and upset, she said she had been shouted down while attempting to facilitate a general assembly. There were nods of recognition and murmurs of sympathy from those seated in a circle around her.
But her battle was not with police officers or security guards. Instead, those who had treated her with disdain were fellow activists, every one of which was white and male.
"It was a really distressing experience having people policing and patronising me" she told the group.
In the aftermath of the eviction from their camp in lower Manhattan, the organisers of Occupy Wall Street are struggling to maintain order at the general assembly, the backbone of its decision-making.
At its heart was an "ongoing crisis for people of colour, women and the marginalised", according to Kanene Holder, a part-time teaching artist from Brooklyn who is active on several working groups.
Kanene Holder
"White males are used to speaking and running things," said Holder. "You can't expect them to abdicate the power they have just because they are in this movement."
One of the defining features of the leaderless Occupy movement – aside from the occupation itself – has been its horizontal decision-making in the form of its Arab spring-inspired general assembly. The simple idea behind it: that everyone has a voice.
But a quick glance through the paper, television and web coverage spawned since Occupy's first march on Wall Street in September reveals that some voices are louder than others. While images of women as victims have endured, those who speak about the ideas and actions have been predominantly male.
Yet women are everywhere in Occupy, of a ratio more in keeping with the 51% they represent in society at large than mainstream political parties or indeed Congress, where female representation is at a paltry 17%.
Those who spoke to the Guardian talked about a daily struggle to maintain their presence and ensure they were heard.
Various ideas designed to redress the balance – such as "progressive stacks", where minority voices are given priority to speak, and "caucuses", where decisions deemed inappropriate to women, people of colour and the LGBT community are blocked – were not enough, they said.
This week marked an important step. On Monday, after a number of women complained of "overly aggressive" men dominating events, OWS has, for the first time, instigated a series of female-led meetings where only women can speak. It was an opportunity for "males to listen and for female marginalised voices to be heard," Holder said.
The meeting at Wall Street, attended by around 20 women and 15 unusually silent men, was the first such gathering.
"There is a high level of awareness to include female voices" said Holder, who said the women-led meeting was voted on and agreed to by men.
At that point, as if to underline the issue, a commotion broke out as a white man burst into the centre of the female-led circle, demanding to speak, and angrily accusing all around him of sexism and racism.
"I'm allowed to speak," he shouted, as another man tried to usher him out of the circle. "You're allowed to be sexist? To get away with this crap?"
Holder insisted: "There is a learning curve. It exists because privilege is learned over a lifetime and cannot be erased overnight."
Many female activists who spoke to the Guardian said they were seeking to examine gender issues, not just within the movement but also within themselves.
Part of the reason for the dominance of male voices, they said, was because men tended to place more emphasis on speaking to the media at the expense of other projects. They too, had work to do to stop "giving away power", they said.
Linnea Palmer Paton
Linnea Palmer Paton, 23, from Connecticut, a volunteer with OWS's press team, said: "Sometimes there are interviews that I would really, really like to do, but when I put myself out there to do them I always say: 'I can do it, unless someone else wants to'. This doesn't come across as a definite answer. It sounds like I'm asking for others' permission."
Palmer Paton, a graduate at New York University studying urban planning, said she is learning to "step up more".
Jillian Buckley, a graduate from Brooklyn who is working part-time as a nanny, agreed. She said: "It's always tricky walking the line between doing that you feel like as an individual, and doing what's best for the collective."
Palmer Paton argued that the Occupy movement is already more democratic than the prevailing US political system.
"Congress is run by majority wins, so minority voices may not be heard and valued. Here we might not have got rid of all forms of oppression, but we are talking about it. We are aware of historical repression we don't want to do anything that would lead to further marginalisation."
Rebecca Traister, author of Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women" about the 2008 election, said: "This idea that, by its nature, left-wing activism is inclusive is a myth. The left is continually plagued by gender problems.
"It is not that women are invisible. There were the women who were pepper-sprayed by the cop in New York, the woman who miscarried after being pepper-sprayed … when I saw the image of the 84-year-old political activist, Dorli Rainey, who was also pepper-sprayed, I thought that was going in a female victim direction, too.
"But she turned it around. She gave an interview in which she cited the women's movement, which said: 'Screw us – we will multiply.' It was terrific and powerful and aggressive."
Traister referred to the controversial blog "Hot chicks of Occupy", which provoked discussion on whether it was sexist – or whether it could be seen as a tool to promote discussion.
"I mean, come on. Diminishing a serious social movement to a discussion over whether or not they're sexy?" said Traister.
She compared it to the second wave of feminism during the civil rights movement where women were often seen as "secretarial or sexual, yet they were fully participating." But she added: "I'm pleased that, just two and a half months in, women are talking about it."
Manissa McCleave Maharawal, 28, from Brooklyn, is at the forefront of fighting racism in the movement. In October, she was responsible for blocking OWS's first declaration as "alienating" to people of colour in a move that led to the caucuses, and has written movingly about it in a blog. She said that racism and sexism were ongoing challenges, but women within the movement had given her hope.
"I've come across so many amazing, strong activists, women organisers in this movement, more than I've seen in my life" said McCleave Maharawal, a facilitator and outreach worker with a PhD in anthropology graduate from the City University of New York.
"Historically, in activism women are doing the work at the photocopiers and putting the fires out, and men are the ones doing the theorising and politicking or being more radical than thou. I don't feel that is true here.
"This is a movement that takes its process seriously. In this movement the theorising is so much a part of the process, and women are so much a part of the process, that it is less divided than outside. I've felt more empowered to be politically theorising or to be commenting that I ever have before. That doesn't come easily and that comes because of women."About The Author Karthik Viswanathan is a high-school student who loves to program and create websites. You can view Karthik’s work on his blog, Lateral Code, and explore … More about Karthik…
Crucial Concepts Behind Advanced Regular Expressions
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advanced regular expressions. introduction to advanced regular expressions, with eight commonly used concepts and examples. Each example outlines a simple way to match patterns in complex strings. If you do not yet have experience with basic regular expressions, have a look at Regular expressions (or regex) are a powerful way to traverse large strings in order to find information. They rely on underlying patterns in a string’s structure to work their magic. Unfortunately, simple regular expressions are unable to cope with complex patterns and symbols. To deal with this dilemma, you can use Below, we present an, with eight commonly used concepts and examples. Each example outlines a simple way to match patterns in complex strings. If you do not yet have experience with basic regular expressions, have a look at this article to get started. The syntax used here matches PHP regular expressions.
Regular expressions (or regex) are a powerful way to traverse large strings in order to find information. They rely on underlying patterns in a string’s structure to work their magic. Unfortunately, simple regular expressions are unable to cope with complex patterns and symbols. To deal with this dilemma, you can use advanced regular expressions.
You may also be interested in the following related posts:
Below, we present an introduction to advanced regular expressions, with eight commonly used concepts and examples. Each example outlines a simple way to match patterns in complex strings. If you do not yet have experience with basic regular expressions, have a look at this article to get started. The syntax used here matches PHP’s Perl-compatible regular expressions.
1. Greediness/Laziness
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All regex repetition operators are greedy. They try to match as much as possible in a string. Unfortunately, this might not always be a desired effect. Thus, lazy operators are used to solve this problem. They only match the smallest possible pattern and are used by adding a ‘?’ after the respective greedy operator. Alternatively, the ‘U’ modifier may be used to make all repetiton operators lazy. Differentiating between greediness and laziness is key to fully understanding advanced regular expressions.
Greedy Operators
The * operator matches the previous expression 0 or more times. It is a greedy operator. Consider the following expression:
preg_match( '/<h1>.*</h1>/', '<h1>This is a heading.</h1> <h1>This is another one.</h1>', $matches );
Recall that a. means any character except a new line. The above regular expression is looking for an h1 tag and all of its contents. It uses the. and * operators to constantly match anything inside the tag. This pattern will match:
<h1>This is a heading.</h1><h1>This is another one.</h1>
It returns the whole string. The * operator will continuously match everything – even the middle closing h1 tag – because it is greedy. Matching the whole string is the best it can do.
Lazy Operators
Let’s change the above operator by adding a ‘?’ after it. This will make it lazy:
/<h1>.*?</h1>/
The regex now fulfills its duty and matches only the first h1 tag. Another greedy operator that uses this same property is {n,}. This matches the previous expression n or more times. If it is used without a question mark, it looks for the most repetitions possible. Otherwise, it starts from n repetitions:
# Set up a String $str = 'hihi'; # Match it using the greedy {n,} operator preg_match( '/(hi){1,}/', $str, $matches ); # matches[0] will be 'hihi' # Match it with the lazy {n,}? operator preg_match( '/(hi){1,}?/', $str, $matches ); # matches[0] will be 'hi'
2. Back Referencing
What it does
Back referencing is a way to refer to previously matched patterns inside a regular expression. For example, take a look at this simple regex that matches an expression in quotes:
# Set up an array of matches $matches = array(); # Create a String $str = ""This is a'string'""; # Traverse it with regular expressions preg_match( "/("|').*?("|')/", $str, $matches ); # Print the whole match echo $matches[0];
Unfortunately, this will not correctly match the string. Instead, it will print:
"This is a '
This regular expression matches the opening double quote but finds a different type of quote to close it. This is because it was given the option of picking a double or single quote at the end. In order to fix this, you can use back referencing. The expressions 1, 2, …., 9 hold references to previously captured subpatterns. The first matched quote, in this case, will be held by the variable 1.
How to Use It
In order to apply this concept to the aforementioned example, use 1 in place of the last quote:
preg_match( '/("|').*?1/', $str, $matches );
This will now correctly return:
"This is a'string'"
Remember that back referencing may also be used by preg_replace. Note that instead of 1 … 9, you should use $1 … $9 … $n (any number of these will work). For example, if you want to replace all paragraph tags with text that represents them, use:
$text = preg_replace( '/<p>(.*?)</p>/', "<p>$1</p>", $html );
The $1 back reference holds the text inside the paragraph and is being used in the replace pattern itself. This completely valid expression shows an easy way to access matched patterns even while replacing.
3. Named Groups
When using multiple back references, a regular expression can quickly become confusing and hard to understand. An alternative way to back reference is by using named groups. A named group is specified by using (?P<name>pattern), where name is the name of the group and pattern is the regular expression in the group itself. The group can then be referred to by (?P=name). For example, consider the following:
/(?P<quote>"|').*?(?P=quote)/
The above expression will create the same effect as the previous back reference example, but by instead using named groups. It is also significantly easier to read.
Named groups are also useful when sifting through the array of matches. The name given to a specific pattern is also the key of the corresponding matches array.
preg_match( '/(?P<quote>"|')/', "'String'", $matches ); # This will print "'" echo $matches[1]; # This will also print "'", as it is a named group echo $matches['quote'];
Thus, named groups not only make code easier to read but also organize it.
4. Word Boundaries
Word boundaries are places in a string that come between a word character and a non-word character. The specialty of these boundaries is the fact that they don’t actually match a character. Their length is zero. The b regular expression matches any word boundary.
Unfortunately, boundaries are so often skimmed over that many do not recognize their real significance. For example, let’s say you want to match the word “import”:
/import/
Watch out! Regular expressions can be tricky. The above expression will also match:
important
You may think it is as simple as adding a space before and after import to prevent these bogus matches:
/ import /
But what about this case?
The trader voted for the import
When import is at the beginning or the end of a string, the modified regex will fail. Thus, splitting this up into cases is required:
/(^import | import | import$)/i
Looking back at our regular expression, it does not take periods or other punctuation into account. Just to match this single word, a regular expressions may look like this:
/(^import(:|;|,)? | import(:|;|,)? | import(.|?|!)?$)/i
That’s a lot of code to match just a single word. This is why word boundaries are so significant. To accomplish the above statement and many other variations with word boundaries, all that is necessary is:
/bimportb/
This will match every case above and more. b ’s flexibility comes from the fact that it matches a zero-length string. All it matches is an imaginary space between two characters. It checks if one of the characters is a non-word character and the other is a word character. If so, it matches it. If the beginning or end of a string is encountered, b treats it as a non-word character. Because the i in import is still considered a word character, it will match import.
Note that the opposite of b is B. This operator will match the space in-between two word or two non-word characters. Thus, if you would like to match ‘hi’ inside another word, you could use:
BhiB
5. Atomic Groups
Atomic groups are special regex groups that are non-capturing. They are usually used to increase the efficiency of a regular expression, but may also be applied to eliminate certain matches. An atomic group is specified by using (?>pattern):
/(?>his|this)/
When the regex engine matches an atomic group, it will discard backtracting positions that came with all tokens inside it. Consider the word ‘smashing’. Using the above regular expression, the regex engine will first try to match the pattern ‘his’ in ‘smashing’. It will not find a match. At this point, the atomic group will kick in. The engine will discard all backtracking positions. This means that it will not search for ‘this’ inside ‘smashing’. Why? If ‘his’ did not return a match, then obviously ‘this’ (which includes ‘his’) will not return positive either.
The above example did not have many practical uses. We might as well have used /t?his?/ instead. Look at the following:
/b(engineer|engrave|end)b/
If the regex engine is given the word ‘engineering’, it will correctly match ‘engineer’. The next word boundary, b, will not match. Thus, it will move on to the next match: engrave. It realizes that the ‘eng’ matches, but the rest do not. Finally, ‘end’ is attempted and also failed. If you look carefully, you will realize that once the engine matches ‘engineer’ and fails the last word boundary, it can not possibly match ‘engrave’ or ‘end’. These two matches are smaller words than ‘engineer’, and thus the regex engine should not continue with the other trials.
/b(?>engineer|engrave|end)b/
The above is a much better alternative that will save the regex engine time and improve the code’s efficiency.
6. Recursion
Recursion in regular expressions can be used to match nested constructs, such as parentheses, (this (that)), and HTML tags, <div></div> |
range of noteworthy jump horses from a range of other yards in the Notebook Horse Section.I'm trying to get a handle on what advice to give people who are convinced AI is a problem worthy of their time, *probably* the most important problem, but are not sure if they have the talent necessary to contribute.
A trending school of thought is "AI Alignment needs careful, clever, agenty thinkers. 'Having the correct opinion' is not that useful. There is nobody who can tell you what exactly to do, because nobody knows. We need people who can figure out what to do, in a very messy, challenging problem."
This sort of makes sense to me, but it seems like only a few sorts of people can realistically contribute in this fashion (even given growth mindset considerations). It also seems like, even if most people could contribute, it doesn't provide very good next-actions to people who have reached the "okay, this is important" stage, but who aren't (yet?) ready to change their career direction.
Here is the advice I currently give, followed by the background assumptions that prompted it. I'm looking for people to challenge me on any of these:
Options for the non-or-minimally-technical-ish:
1) Donate. (1%, or more if you can do so without sacrificing the ability to take valuable financial risks to further your career. MIRI, FHI, 80k and CFAR seem like the most credible ways to turn money into more AI Alignment career capital)
2) Arrange your life such that you can easily identify volunteer opportunities for gruntwork, operations, or other nontechnical skills for AI safety orgs, and dedicate enough time and attention to helping with that gruntwork that you are more of an asset than a burden. (i.e. helping to run conferences and workshops). To help with AI specific things, it seems necessary to be in the Bay, Boston, Oxford, Cambridge or London.
3a) Embark on projects or career paths that will cause you to gain deep skills, and in particular, train the habit/skill of noticing things that need doing, and proactively developing solutions to accomplish them. (These projects/careers can be pretty arbitrary. To eventually tie them back into AI, you need to get good enough that you'll either be able help found a new org or provide rare skills to an existing org)
3b) Ideally, choose projects that involve working together in groups, that require you to resolve differences in opinion on how to use scarce resources, and which require you to interacting with other groups with subtly different goals. Practice coordination skills mindfully.
4) Provide a reading list of blogs and social-media feeds to stay up-to-date on the more accessible, less technically demanding thoughts relating to AI Safety. Practice thinking critically on your own about them. (this doesn't really come with an obvious "Part 2" that translates that into meaningful action on its own)
If technical-ish, and/or willing to learn a LOT
5) Look at the MIRI and 80k AI Safety syllabus, and see if how much of it looks like something you'd be excited to learn. If applicable to you, consider diving into that so you can contribute to the cutting edge of knowledge.
6) If you're a talented programmer, learn a lot about ML/Deep Learning and then stay up to date on the latest actual AI research, so you can position yourself at the top AI companies and potentially have influence with them on which direction they go.
An important question I'd like to answer is "how do can you tell if it makes sense to alter your career in pursuit of #5 and #6?"? This is very non-obvious to me.
I talk to a lot of people that seem roooooughly analagous to myself, ie. pretty smart but not extremely smart. In my case I think I have a credible claim on "community building" being my comparative advantage, but I notice a lot of people default to "be a community person or influencer", and I'm really wary of a decision tree that outputs a tower of meta-community-stuff for anyone who's not obviously expert at anything else. I'd like to have better, fleshed out, scalable suggestions for people fairly similar to me.
Background assumptions
Various things that fed into the above recommendations (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly). This is a living document that I'll update as people persuade me otherwise. Again, appreciate getting challenged on any of these.
AI Timelines and Goals
AI timelines are anywhere between 5 years (if DeepMind is more advanced than they're telling anyone), 20 years (if it turns out general AI is only a couple breakthroughs away from current Deep Learning trends, and we're (un)lucky on how soon those breakthroughs come), or much longer if General AI turns out to be harder. We should be prepared for each possibility.
Eventually, all of our efforts will need to translate into the ability into one of the following:
- the ability to develop insights about AI Alignment
- the ability to cause AI research to be safely aligned
- the ability to stop or slow down AI research until it can be safely aligned
Donation
- MIRI seems like the most shovel-ready instance of "actual AI Safety research". It's not obvious to me whether MIRI is doing the best work, but they seem to be at least doing good work, and they do seem underfunded, and funding them seems like the most straightforward way to turn money into more professional AI researchers.
- FHI is a contender for second-best funding-target for X-risk reduction, including some thought about AI alignment.
- 80k, CFAR and Leverage are the orgs I know of that seem to be concretely attempting to solve the "career capital gap", with different strategies. They each have elements that seem promising to me. I'm sure what their respective funding constraints are. (Note: I recently became a bit more interested in Leverage than I had been, but examining Leverage is a blogpost unto itself and I'm not going to try doing so here)
- The Far Future Fund (recently announced, run by Nick Beckstead) may be a good way to outsource your donation decision.
Career Capital, Agency and Self Improvement
- An important limiting reagent is "people able to be agents." More than any single skillset, we need people who are able to look at organizations and worldstates, figure out what's not being done yet, figure out if they currently have the skills to do it, and backchain from that to being able to become the sort of people who have the skills to do that.
- To self-improve the fastest, as a person and as an org, you need high quality feedback loops.
- In my experience, there is a critical threshold between an "agent" and a non-agent. People get activated as agents when they a) have a concrete project to work on that seems important to them that's above their current skill level, and b) have some high status mentor-figure who takes time out of their day to tell them in a serious voice "this project you are working on is important." (The latter step is not necessary but it seems to help a lot. Note: this is NOT a mentor figure who necessarily spends a lot of time training you. They are Gandalf, telling you your mission is important and they believe in you, and then mostly staying out of the way)
(Actual longterm mentorship is also super helpful but doesn't seem to be the limiting issue)
- Beyond "be an agent", we do need highly skilled people at a variety of specific skills - both because AI Safety orgs need them, and because high skill allows you to get a job at an AGI research institution.
- Despite attempting to achieve this for several years, it's not obvious that CFAR has developed the ability to produce agents, but it's succeeded (at least slightly) at attracting existing agents, training them in some skills, and focusing them on the right problems.
Thinking Critically
- We need people who can think critically, and who spend time/attention being able to think critically and deeply about the right things.
- Thinking usefully critically requires being up to speed on what other people are thinking, so you aren't duplicating work.
- It is currently very hard to keep up with ALL the different developments across the AI/EA/Career-Capital-Building spaces. Both because the updates come from all over the internet (and sometimes in person), and because people's writing is often verbose and inconcise.
- It is possible for the average EA to learn to think more critically, but it requires significant time investment
Coordination
- Coordination problems are extraordinarily hard. Humanity essentially failed the "Nuclear Weapons test" (i.e. we survived the Cold War, but we easily might not have. Squeaking by the with a C- is not acceptable).
- Some people have argued the AI problem is much harder than Nukes, which isn't clear to me, (in the longterm you do need to stop everyone ever from developing unsafe AI, but it seems like the critical period is the window wherein AGI is first possible, where it'll be something like 6-20 companies working on it at once)
- The Rationality and EA communities aren't obviously worse than the average community at coordination, but they are certainly not much better. And EAs are definitely not better than-average at inducing coordination/cooperation among disparate groups with different goals that aren't aligned with us.
- If your goal is to influence orgs or AGI researchers, you need to make sure you're actually following a path that leads to real influence. (i.e. "You can network your way into being Elon Musk's friend who he invites over for dinner, but that doesn't mean he'll listen to you about AI safety. The same goes for networking your way onto the GoogleBrain team or the Google AI Ethics board. Have a clear model of influence and how much of it you credibly have.")
-Mainstream politics is even harder than coordinating corporations, and to a first approximation is useless for purposes of AI alignment.
Open Questions
This is mostly a recap.
0) Is anything in my framework grossly wrong?
1) My primary question is "how do we filter for people who should consider dropping everything and focusing on the technical aspects of AI Safety, or seriously pursue careers that will position them to influence AGI research institutions?" These seem like the most important things to actually output, and it seems most important for those people to cultivate particular types of critical thinking, technical skill and ability-to-influence.
For people who are not well suited, or not yet ready to do 1), how can we either:
2) Make it easier for them to translate marginal effort into meaningful contribution, or creating a clearer path towards:
3) Level up to the point where they are able to take in the entire field, and generate useful things to do (without requiring much effort from other heavily involved people whose time is scarce).
Potential Further Reading
I have not read all of these, so cannot speak to which are most important, but I think it's useful to at least skim the contents of each of them so you have a rough idea of the ideas at play. I'm including them here mostly for easy reference.
(If someone wanted to generate a 1-3 sentence summary of each of these and indicate who the target audience is, I'd be happy to edit that in. I hopefully will eventually have time to do that myself but it may be a while)
MIRI's Research Guide
80,000 Hours AI Safety Syllabus
UC Berkeley Center for Human Compatible AI Bibliography
Case Study of CFAR's Effectiveness
AI Impacts Timelines and Strategies (examples of how to think strategically given different AI timelines)
Concrete Problems in AI Safety
OpenAI's Blog
AgentFoundations.org (this is sort of a stack-overflow / technical discussion forum for discussing concepts relevant to AI alignment)
Deliberate Grad School
https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/introductory-resources-on-ai-safety-research/During a series of town hall meetings hosted on Salt Spring, Galiano, Mayne and Pender Islands and in Sidney, I answered many questions about the political events of this past summer and the Confidence and Supply Agreement that I signed with the provincial government.
For the first time in decades we have a minority government in B.C. It has been called a “grand experiment” and while this arrangement may be new to B.C. politics, this “experiment” is little different than the countless number of personal interactions and business transactions that occur every day.
The Confidence and Supply Agreement provides stability for the provincial government and provides a framework for a strong working relationship between members in the Legislative Assembly. While a novel concept in B.C. politics, the Agreement is in fact very similar to a joint venture partnership used by businesses who want to bring their expertise together to deliver a product or service. The Confidence and Supply Agreement is founded on five words: “Good faith and no surprises.”
This is the minimum requirement of any healthy relationship. To give meaning to these words, all parties to the agreement are essentially agreeing to communicate with each other. In my opinion, that is necessary for good governance.
When we lack the collaboration and communication necessary to create policy that is a well-informed pursuit of effective solutions, we fail our constituents.
During the election, policy promises were made by every party. If one party had won a majority they would have been able to execute their plan with little to no collaboration or accountability. However, the election produced a minority government where collaboration is now required to ensure stability for British Columbians. As such, the Confidence and Supply Agreement provides new reference points for these campaign promises.
In the terms highlighted in the Agreement, the signatories agreed to commit to certain public policy directions. Where the Agreement is silent on a particular area or policy, then the reference point is the government’s platform and the B.C. Green Caucus will determine its support on an issue-by-issue basis.
With a working relationship founded on “good faith and no surprises,” disagreements and differences are open for discussion and broad consultation and the provincial government will be successful only if we are openly communicating with each other.
Just as our social and business interactions require negotiation and compromise, so does a minority government wishing to achieve positive public policy outcomes.
Relationships are work. They require trust and deep commitment to communicate with each other and respect differences. This opportunity is open to all 87 Member of the Legislature that embrace this approach.
Adam Olsen, MLA
Saanich North and the IslandsNational Defense Resources Preparedness
Obama Executive Order: Peacetime Martial Law!
Before It’s News
See: Government takeover of the Land of the Free?
This Executive Order was posted on the WhiteHouse.gov web site on Friday, March 16, 2012, under the name National Defense Resources Preparedness. In a nutshell, it’s the blueprint for Peacetime Martial Law and it gives the president the power to take just about anything deemed necessary for “National Defense”, whatever they decide that is. It’s peacetime, because as the title of the order says, it’s for “Preparedness”. A copy of the entire order follows the end of this story.
Under this order the heads of these cabinet level positions; Agriculture, Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Defense and Commerce can take food, livestock, fertilizer, farm equipment, all forms of energy, water resources, all forms of civil transporation (meaning any vehicles, boats, planes), and any other materials, including construction materials from wherever they are available. This is probably why the government has been visiting farms with GPS devices, so they know exactly where to go when they turn this one on. Specifically, the government is allowed to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate. They decide what necessary or appropriate means. UPDATE: BIN reader Kent Welton writes: This allows for the giving away of USA assets and subsidies to private companies: “(b) provide for the modification or expansion of privately owned facilities, including the modification or improvement of production processes, when taking actions under sections 301, 302, or 303 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2091, 2092, 2093; and (c) sell or otherwise transfer equipment owned by the Federal Government and installed under section 303(e) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093(e), to the owners of such plants, factories, or other industrial facilities.”
What happens if the government decides it needs all these things to be prepared, even if there is no war? You likely won’t be able to walk into a store to purchase virtually anything because it will all be requisitioned, “rationed” and controlled by the government. Construction materials, food like meat, butter and sugar, anything imported, parts, tires and fuel for vehicles, clothing, etc. will likely become unobtainable, or at least very scarce. How many things are even made here in the USA any more? A bit of history… During WWII, price stabilization didn’t begin until May of 1942, which froze prices on nearly all every day goods and rationing started in 1943. Why would the government want to control everything before a war? Here’s what some gas ration cards looked like during WWII. Will there be rationing under this kind of system? What better way to control the movement and actions of the populace… WWII era gas ration cards via Old Chester PA. You couldn’t go on vacation without a “vacation pass”. Under this new Executive Order, cabinet heads are authorized to loan money, offer loan guarantees and even subsidize payments at above market rates (no bid contracts?) for whatever they need. This could make Solyndra or Halliburton look like Junior Achievement. Nothing like a war will generate these kinds of huge profits for the corporate “partners” and you can bet the bankers and contractors are already lining up for this one—because under this order no war is even required! In a crisis situation, the government will be able to take whatever they need, print money to get whatever they want and distribute it as they see fit….for the benefit of a “war effort” or the politically connected corporations and individuals. All other contracts except those for employment are superseded by this executive order, it’s all here in black and white. Specifically, it orders: “to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense, is delegated to the following agency heads: the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer; the Secretary of Energy with respect to all forms of energy; the Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources; the Secretary of Transportation with respect to all forms of civil transportation; the Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and the Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials. About all I can say is “Have a nice day!” Link HERE
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Items of notes and interest from the web.
Please adhere to our commenting policy to avoid being banned. As a privately owned website, we reserve the right to remove any comment and ban any user at any time.Comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence and death, racism, anti-Semitism, or personal or abusive attacks on other users may be removed and result in a ban.-- Follow these instructions on registeringOn Valentine’s Day, pitchers and catchers reported to the San Diego Padres’ sprawling training camp in Peoria, Arizona. Pitchers and catchers from every level of the massive system that it takes to build a Major League Baseball team reported at once, from the 18-year-olds drafted last June to the grizzled 30-something-year-old veterans hoping for one last shot at the big time.
Joining pitchers and catchers by the end of the week were every player in the system, including most of the 2016 Pacific Coast League Champions—the El Paso Chihuahuas. Some of the players from that team have moved on to other systems and other training camps, some will be moving up to San Diego in all likelihood, and some may be coming back to El Paso to continue to prove their worth to the higher-ups in the Padres organization.
Championship-winning manager Rod Barajas will be returning to the Chihuahuas for the 2017 season, but until spring training is finished and the Padres’ roster is finalized—Barajas and Chihuahuas’ fans are left to guess who will comprise the roster for the team’s fourth season.
Catchers
At the Major League level, catcher Derek Norris was traded to make room for last season’s catcher Austin Hedges to permanently take his spot behind the plate for the Padres. Hedges has long been rated as one of the best defensive catching prospects in minor league baseball and in the last two seasons with the Chihuahuas, and his batting has clearly caught up.
In 2015, Hedges batted.324, with just two home runs, before being called up to San Diego and basically languishing on the bench. With a full season in El Paso in 2016, Hedges put it all together with a.326 average and 21 home runs.
This season, another familiar face could very well be behind the plate for the Chihuahuas yet again. Rocky Gale has played for the Chihuahuas during every season of their existence and looks like he may be starting opening day 2017 as well. Despite a career.255 average, Gale has never batted below.278 as a Chihuahua.
The second catcher spot should come down to two other non-roster invitees to spring training, either Hector Sanchez, who played 55 games as a Chihuahua last season, batting.324, with 13 home runs, or Tony Cruz, who spent almost all of last season with Omaha, batting.264.
Infield
Another familiar face should be back in El Paso in 2017 with infielder Brett Wallace. Wallace was with the Chihuahuas in 2015, batting.305 with eight home runs. After being called up in 2015, Wallace batted.302 with five home runs for the Padres and earned a one-year Major League contract for the 2016 season.
In 2016, Wallace came off the bench almost exclusively for the Padres and batted.189 with six home runs. Wallace was re-signed to a minor league contract this past offseason.
With first base, third base and most likely the bench spots locked up in San Diego, expect Wallace to man first base at Southwest University Park this season.
Another familiar face that could find himself back in El Paso is second baseman Carlos Asuaje. Despite a phenomenal season that saw him bat.321 and secure PCL all-star honors, Asuaje may end up as the loser in a three-way battle for the starting second baseman job in San Diego.
The consensus seems to be that former Chihuahuas Ryan Schimpf and Cory Spangenberg will secure the job as a platoon. Schimpf batted.217 with 20 home runs after his call-up to San Diego last season. Spangenberg batted just.229 during an injury-riddled 14-game season.
Although Asuaje’s numbers appear to be better than the two incumbents, minor league numbers can sometimes be deceiving. Using “major league equivalencies” invented by Bill James, the founder of Sabermetrics, we find that Asuaje’s stellar 2016 translates to a.257 average with 102 strikeouts and 33 walks in 535 at-bats in the Major Leagues.
The rest of the infield for the Chihuahuas could end up a little full, with shortstop Jose Pirela expected back for another season. Joining him could be new signees—with familiar names for frequent PCL watchers—second baseman Dusty Coleman, third baseman Jamie Romak and Christian Villanueva.
Outfield
If you want to see the 2016 Chihuahuas outfield again, simply turn on the TV and watch a Padres game. Starting in center field? Manny Margot. Starting in right field? Hunter Renfroe.
There will be some turnover in the Chihuahuas outfield, but El Paso fans can be proud of the prospects who have moved on. For as young as last season’s outfield was, 2017’s outfield could very well be the oldest in El Paso’s four seasons.
Three outfielders were signed to minor league contracts in the offseason and all have Major League experience. Nick Buss and Collin Cowgill spent time in the Major Leagues in 2016 with the Angels and Indians, respectively. Jamie Romak returns to the PCL, where he played with Reno in 2015, after playing in Japan with Yokohama in 2016.
Pitching
The Padres pitching situation is very fluid, with starting pitcher Jered Weaver signed as late as Feb. 19. With several spots in the bullpen still up for grabs, the Chihuahuas’ pitching situation is entirely dependent on which way Padres Manager Andy Green decides to go.
A few former Dodgers’ top prospects could be calling the Sun City home in 2017, as they look to find again the minor league dominance that once saw them seemingly destined for Major League stardom.
Zach Lee was rated as high as no. 45 by MLB.com prior to the 2012 season and still carries a 4.29 ERA with 614 strikeouts in 794.1 minor league innings. In 2015, the former first- round pick made his lone start in the Major Leagues, a loss to the New York Mets.
Hong-Chih Kuo was signed Feb. 18, after spending the last three seasons playing baseball in his home country of Taiwan. Kuo has battled injuries since he worked his way through the Dodgers’ system to earn an All-Star appearance in 2010. That season, Kuo set the Dodgers’ franchise record for lowest ERA in a season with a 1.20.
However, Kuo’s injuries worsened in 2011, he was unable to latch on with the Mariners, then the Cubs, and returned home on a three-year contract to play in the Chinese Professional Baseball League.
One of the only true prospects to potentially appear on the Chihuahuas’ roster to begin the season could be pitcher Dinelson Lamet, the Padres no. 9-ranked prospect according to Baseball America. The 24-year-old has moved through the season rapidly since moving over from the Dominican Republic.
Last season, an improved slider saw Lamet move to El Paso for the first time, where he found adversity for the first time in his young career. The future MLB set-up man should return to AAA this season to continue to hone his 93-95 mph fastball and still improving breaking ball.
With a new season and complete roster turnover comes another challenge for Barajas, who proved his worth last season by winning the PCL Championship. However, last season’s roster appears to have been laden with future MLB All-Stars. This season may just prove to need to be Barajas’ most impressive managing job yet. Chihuahuas fans will be hoping it is.I am a vegetarian. I do not eat beef, or for that matter, chicken, mutton, or pork. It is difficult in the best of circumstances for me to summon up a firm opinion on all things meat. (More so, perhaps, since my dietary preference has little to do with either ideology or faith). Watching the fervent debate rage online, in the media, and in political circles over the beef ban in the past month,I often felt as bemused as I did the first time I watching the Super Bowl at a US college dorm.
That said, there is no doubt, however, about which side I support in this controversy which is now unfolding with the combination of ardour and absurdity that one has come to associate with the religious right in this country. This is so for a number of reasons.
One, it is impossible for any right-thinking person (pun unintended) to side, or even sympathise, with idiocy. The sheer foolishness of the Hindutva campaign to save the cow is illustrated by two recent bits of news.
The Times of India reports today:
"The Malegaon police, who last week registered the first case under Maharashtra's new law banning beef, have now issued a diktat to all owners of cows and bullocks in the township: submit to the local police station the photograph of each and every cow and bullock, so that police can keep the pictures in their files for reference just in case a criminal case crops up."
Apparently, the cops plan to conduct "a census" in order to track and protect the cattle. Anyone who fails to "register" their cattle will likely end up like the Malegaon resident whose five cows were recently confiscated without an FIR or evidence of wrongdoing.
Given our Home Minister Rajnath Singh's support for the Maharashtra initiative, we can expect cows across the nation to soon enjoy the same privileges. A National ID for cattle. Quick, someone get Nandan Nilekani on it.
Two, dietary dictatorship is undemocratic. No democracy can or should impose the dietary beliefs of one group on all of its citizens.
The bottom-line is that a lot of Indians eat beef. And many of them are Hindu. As evidence, I could point to my various relatives and friends (a form of argumentation recently perfected by Jagdish Bhagwati in The Mint), but the religious identity or number of beef-eaters is incidental to the principle at stake. If even a small number of Indians eat beef (just because they like it) in a democracy, it should be legal. Anyone who mistakes freedom for the tyranny of the majority really needs to go back to school.
Besides, someone spare a thought for the rights of our caged tigers and lions who have been caught in the crossfire between an overzealous state government and angry traders. One side has deprived them of beef and the other of buffalo, reducing them to a diet of chicken.
And while we are on the subject of animals, villagers who live near the Kanha Tiger Reserve have long been forgiving of big cats who prey on their cattle (and livelihood). But their government shows no such compassion for humans who eat beef. A person can spend up to 7 years in jail in MP for eating the wrong kind of kebab, even as tigers maul gau mata at will. Such are the crimes against logic committed by this kind of cultural policing.
My third and last reason: The beef ban has little to do with compassion or even reverence for cows. Just look around you in any city, and you will see emaciated, half starved cattle wandering the streets, feeding on garbage. The reality is that raising cows is expensive, and most households who own cows cannot afford to do so. As Firstpost senior editor Pramod Kumar points out, the BJP governments -- in Maharashtra and elsewhere -- has no plans or funding allocated to the care of the cows'saved' by the beef ban.
And, oh, if the Hindu right thinks that driving beef trade underground is any kind of solution, they are dreadfully mistaken. A PETA investigation, confirmed by the Independent, showed that the black market in beef results in the worst kind of animal cruelty, as cattle are beaten, tortured and brutally killed outside the purview of the state.
Besides, if Rajnath Singh really cares about cows, he may want to take a closer look at the practices of the Indian dairy industry which routinely starves calves to death, keeps dairy animals in inhumane conditions, pumping them full of hormones.
Or we could ban milk, as well, and cheese, and dahi. No? In that case, let's not be picking on beef and see the ban for what it is: the Hindutva right seizing on an excuse to promote its spurious 'Hindu rashtra' agenda. If we truly care for animals, let's push instead for more stringent regulations requiring humane conditions for all animals, be they raised for dairy or slaughter. Surely that is one agenda that all of us -- vegetarians, eggitarians, pork, beef or chicken eaters -- can all get behind.
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.The discovery that Earth revolves around the Sun was revolutionary. It fundamentally changed how we viewed the cosmos, as well as ourselves.
But the Earth does not revolve around the Sun. At least, not exactly. Time to get pedantic.
"Technically, what is going on is that the Earth, Sun and all the planets are orbiting around the center of mass of the solar system," writes Cathy Jordan, a Cornell University Ask an Astronomer contributor.
"The center of mass of our solar system very close to the Sun itself, but not exactly at the Sun's center."
Every single object in the solar system, from the gargantuan sun to the tiniest speck, exerts a gravitational pull on everything else. The solar system is basically a massive game of tug of war, and all of the yanking balances out at a specific point: the center of mass, or "barycenter." Everything in the solar system orbits around that point. Sometimes, it's almost smack dab at the Sun's center. Right now, the barycenter is just outside the Sun's surface. But it's constantly changing depending upon where the planets are in their orbital paths.
Because the Sun holds 99.87% of all the mass in the solar system, it's always going to win the tug of war. Even if all the planets were perfectly lined up on one side of the Sun, the center of mass would be just 800,000 kilometers off the surface of the Sun. That sounds like a lot, but remember, our solar system is big! Such a barycenter would be roughly 70 times closer to the Sun than the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury.
An even better illustration for center of mass is the binary star system. When two stars of comparable mass cohabit the same corner of space, they orbit about a point between each other.
However, rather than play a billion-year game of cosmic tag, more often than not, binary stars will take an elliptical orbit!
The rest of the universe certainly doesn't revolve around the Earth, but, like so many topics in science, it's an oversimplification to say that everything orbits around the Sun.
(Images: Chandra Observatory, Wikimedia Commons, Lsmpascal, ESO, ZhattA Counterblaste to Tobacco is a treatise written by King James VI of Scotland and I of England in 1604, in which he expresses his distaste for tobacco, particularly tobacco smoking.[1] As such, it is one of the earliest anti-tobacco publications.
Style and content [ edit ]
It is written in Early Modern English and refers to medical theories of the time (e.g. the four humours).[2] In it, James blames Native Americans for bringing tobacco to Europe, complains about passive smoking, warns of dangers to the lungs, and decries tobacco's odour as "hatefull to the nose."[2]
Effects and legacy [ edit ]
James's dislike of tobacco led him in 1604[3] to authorize Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, to levy an excise tax and tariff of six shillings and eight pence per pound of tobacco imported,[4] or £1 per three pounds, a large sum of money for the time.
Because of continued high demand for tobacco in England and negative effects on the economies of the American colonies, the king in 1624 instead created a royal monopoly for the crop.[3] 150 years later, British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham would cite A Counterblaste to Tobacco as an example of antipathy run wild.[2]
Quotation [ edit ]
Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossely mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the markes and notes of vanitie upon you: by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse. James 1604[2][Physics FAQ] - [Copyright]
Updated 1997 by Sugihara Hiroshi.
Original by Phil Gibbs 1996.
What is Occam's Razor?
Occam's (or Ockham's) razor is a principle attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. Ockham was the village in the English county of Surrey where he was born.
The principle states that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." Sometimes it is quoted in one of its original Latin forms to give it an air of authenticity:
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"
"Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora"
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem"
In fact, only the first two of these forms appear in his surviving works and the third was written by a later scholar. William used the principle to justify many conclusions, including the statement that "God's existence cannot be deduced by reason alone." That one didn't make him very popular with the Pope.
Many scientists have adopted or reinvented Occam's Razor, as in Leibniz's "identity of observables" and Isaac Newton stated the rule: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
The most useful statement of the principle for scientists is
"when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."
In physics we use the razor to shave away metaphysical concepts. The canonical example is Einstein's theory of special relativity compared with Lorentz's theory that ruler's contract and clocks slow down when in motion through the ether. Einstein's equations for transforming spacetime are the same as Lorentz's equations for transforming rulers and clocks, but Einstein and Poincar� recognised that the ether could not be detected according to the equations of Lorentz and Maxwell. By Occam's razor it had to be eliminated.
The principle has also been used to justify uncertainty in quantum mechanics. Heisenberg deduced his uncertainty principle from the quantum nature of light and |
the price of the TV, but are already made in environmental costs, social exploitation, all those kind of things, but if we would count the data and compare definitely with this model it would be much more efficient. The first step toward that kind of economy in Europe, in my view, has been done by energy cooperatives. I don’t know if you have it here in the States, but what happened with the energy cooperatives, first because of the climate change all European countries wanted to invest in renewable energy of all size so it was heavily subsidized. It turned out that the initial beneficiaries were just the big companies that then said, “Okay, if the government is paying for me to have a solar panel or wind power, why wouldn’t I do that?”
And they invested in it, but very soon citizens, people realized, “Hmmm, why would I have a wind turbine in my backyard which is making this funny noise, and I don’t know, I cannot sleep. If I can collect money together with my neighbors and have another wind turbine down there, and actually the government is paying for it. I am giving guaranteed money back. I am saving electricity. I don’t have a risk of electricity price increase because it’s my own power. First I use it myself and what is the rest then it goes. Why wouldn’t we do that?” They started building cooperatives, which started investing in renewable energy of all kind.
Very quickly it turned out that this is actually an easier way to green the energy sector because when people are the owners, then they have the benefits, and it’s much easier to get all permits rights because nobody is complaining, nobody is protesting. Initially then the companies started sharing, giving part of the share of the renewable energy to citizens, but then citizens took it over.
Currently, about half of all investments in renewable energy in Germany is not done by investment funds, not by energy companies, not by any rich people, but by citizens themselves that collect money and build their own power. It has become so big that companies are now trying to create political pressure and trying to eliminate all those incentives for renewable energy. In the meantime, the prices of everything have dropped so sharply that now you don’t need incentive anymore. Now it’s commercially viable to building power through solar, and it’s unstoppable. Now there is the Federation of Energy Cooperatives of Europe which is investing with their own money, extra cash without financing or anything in the wind power plants.
Then when you have such control over it, it’s democratic energy, and then energy for your own purposes is for free, because it’s your own energy. Here in the US it’s probably not so attractive anymore, but in my view the fossil fuels and the renewable energy, this is a battle that fossil fuels cannot win, not because of the quality but because of economics.
Sarah McKinley: Because of the economic outlook.
Goran Jeras: On one side you have something very unique to dig out of the ground and the more you dig the farther that you need to get, and costs rise. [For green energy] you have the cost of equipment, but the sun is not sending a bill, so basically the price of renewables goes like this [gestures that they will get exponentially cheaper], and the price of non-renewables goes like this [gestures that they will get exponentially more expensive] and they will cross sooner or later. That’s something that nobody can do anything about it.
Adam Simpson: The final thing that I’d want people to know if they were to read parts of this conversation, if they wanted to learn more about your work and the work that you’re working on or other, is there a website they can go to? Are the sources you can-
Goran Jeras: If you go to www.ebanka.eu, there is some information but very limited. We are building a new website that will be just for the replication of our model.
Adam Simpson: Thanks, Goran.Perlin is a library with the aim to provide information retrieval functionality in a performant and understandable manner.
This blog post describes how query execution speed was improved after changes to the underlying data structures.
Recap
As discussed in the last blog post, to allow faster indexing, the data structures that store postings had to change.
Listings are not stored anymore in continuous space of memory, but rather in chunks with static sizes. This allows for much faster writing to the listings as they do not have to be moved inside memory. If a listing grows larger than the size chunk, a new chunk is allocated.
Additionally, we distinguish between hot chunks (chunks that represent the end of a listing and will be written to) and archived chunk (chunks that represent anything but the end of a listing). This enables continuous memory access during the indexing process.
The following chart illustrates the idea. Term 0 occurs often in this collection. It needs five chunks ( HotIndexingChunk #0, IndexingChunk #0, #1, #6 and #7) to store its listing. The chunks hold delta- and vbyte encoded postings in ascending order ( IndexingChunk #0 >= IndexingChunk #1 … >= HotIndexingChunk #0):
Note, that indexing chunks for this particular term_id are not adjacent to each other in memory. But, more importantly, HotIndexingChunk s, the ones that are frequently written to during the indexing process are close together in memory and will often be accessed in predictable manner.
Archive +--------------------------+ +------------------+ | HotIndexingChunk +--------------> IndexingChunk #0 | | for term_id 0 | | +------------------+ +--------------------------+ +------> IndexingChunk #1 | | HotIndexingChunk | | +------------------+ | for term_id 1 +--------------> IndexingChunk #2 | +--------------------------+ | +------------------+ | HotIndexingChunk +--------------> IndexingChunk #3 | | for term_id 2 | | +------------------+ +--------------------------+ | +----> IndexingChunk #4 | | HotIndexingChunk +---------+ +------------------+ | for term_id 3 | | +----> IndexingChunk #5 | +--------------------------+ | +------------------+ +------> IndexingChunk #6 | | +------------------+ +------> IndexingChunk #7 | +------------------+
Query Execution Performance
Comparing this data structure to the old implementation (just storing the postings in vectors (see Indexing Memory Access), this is far more complicated and takes time to decode.
Unsurprisingly, query execution performance has thus dropped quite a bit.
The first implementation after the rebuild of the indexing process just decoded the whole listing for every query term eagerly. This was far from optimal, especially because perlin allows lazy query execution.
Lazy Decoding
The first step for improvement was obvious. Instead of decoding the whole listing at once and storing it in a Vec, just hand the query execution machinery an Iterator for every query term that decodes the postings when necessary.
This iterator holds a reference to the corresponding HotIndexingChunk as well as one to the archive. While advancing the iterator, it reads as many bytes as needed to decode the next posting from an archived chunk or the HotIndexingChunk.
Changing the decoding from eager to lazy improved query execution performance for queries that are only interested in a small portion of results.
The question now arises, if we can also improve query execution performance for the general case.
Don’t look at everything
When asked why grep is so fast, Mike Haertel responded with a lengthy email. His key idea in this email is that “to make[..] programs fast is to make them practically do nothing.”
Can we apply this idea to our case?
Let’s assume following query:
("for" AND "science")
“for” is a common term. It’s listing will be spread over several IndexingChunk s. “science” on the other hand, will probably occur at least a magnitude less often than “for”.
Consider following collection:
doc_0: "For a long time, people have been studying the stars" doc_1: "The search for life on Mars is ongoing" doc_2: "Jupiter can be seen with the naked eye, for it is the largest of the planets" doc_3: "Venus seems uninhabitable for human beings" doc_4: "He exclaimed For Science! while lithobraking on Pluto"
For this very small collection, the listings for “for” and “science” look like this (positions left out for simplicity):
chunk 1 | chunk 2 +---+---+-------+---+ | | | | | | "for" | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | | | | | | | +---+---+---+---+---+ +---+ | | "science" | 4 | | | +---+
“for” occurs in document 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 while “science” only occurs in document 4.
Assume now further, that the listing of “for” is spread over two chunks.
When executing the query, the old way to do this is to look at every posting of every query term. In this case the process would executed as follows (pseudo-code for clarity):
let focus = "science".next() loop { if focus == "for".next() { return focus; } }
We call the next() method six times. Once for every stored posting.
If additionally to chunk ids HotIndexingChunk could store the doc_ids they start with, we could allow seeking access to the potentially interesting chunks and ignore irrelevant ones.
The process would be simpler, too:
let focus = "science".next(); if "for".next_seek(&focus) == focus { return focus; }
In total we only need to call next three times:
"science".next()
"for".next_seek() wich will call next() internally two times (first time yielding 3 and second time yielding 4)
Let’s try that.
Implementation Details
HotIndexingChunk now needs new capabilities. It needs a method that takes a DocId and it returns the relevant chunk, and the byte offset where the first posting of this chunk is encoded. This is needed because encoded positions can overflow a chunk.
Additionally it must give us the DocId of that first encoded posting, because postings are delta encoded and otherwise decoding would not be possible.
pub fn doc_id_offset(& self, doc_id: & u64 ) -> ( u64 /*doc_id*/, usize /*byte_offset*/ ) {
For that to be possible, HotIndexingChunk needs to know a bit more about its archived chunks:
//Before: archived_chunks: Vec < u32 /*chunk_id*/ > //Now: archived_chunks: Vec <( u64 /*doc_id*/, u16 /*offset*/, u32 /*chunk_id*/ )>
Also, we need capabilities to seek to a certain byte position while reading from a HotIndexingChunk:
pub struct ChunkRef< 'a > { read_ptr: usize, chunk: & 'a HotIndexingChunk, archive: & 'a Box <Storage<IndexingChunk>>, } impl < 'a > io::Seek for ChunkRef< 'a > { fn seek(& mut self, style: io::SeekFrom) -> io:: Result < u64 > { use std::io::SeekFrom; let pos = match style { SeekFrom::Start(n) => { self.read_ptr = n as usize ; return Ok (n) } SeekFrom::End(n) => self.bytes_len() as i64 + n, SeekFrom::Current(n) => self.read_ptr as i64 + n, }; if pos < 0 { Err (io::Error::new(io::ErrorKind::InvalidInput, "invalid seek to a negative position" )) } else { self.read_ptr = pos as usize ; Ok ( self.read_ptr as u64 ) } } }
We can now determine the byte-offset where it is sensible to look for a DocId and can seek to it. Now we need a way to express this throughout the query execution process:
pub trait SeekingIterator { type Item; /// Yields an Item that is >= the passed argument or None if no such element exists fn next_seek(& mut self, &Self::Item) -> Option <Self::Item>; }
And implement it for PostingDecoder :
fn next_seek(& mut self, other: &Self::Item) -> Option <Self::Item> { // Check if the iterator is already too far advanced. if self.last_doc_id >= *other.doc_id() { return self.next(); } // Get the doc_id and offset for the next sensible searching position let (doc_id, offset) = self.decoder.underlying().doc_id_offset(other.doc_id()); // Seek to the offset self.decoder.seek(SeekFrom::Start(offset as u64 )).unwrap(); // Decode the next posting let mut v = try_option!( self.next()); // DocId is corrupt, because delta encoding is obviously not compatible with seeking // So overwrite it with the doc_id given to us v. 0 = doc_id; // Store it for further decoding self.last_doc_id = doc_id; // If this seek already yielded the relevant result, return it if v >= *other { return Some (v); } // Otherwise continue to decode loop { let v = try_option!( self.next()); if v >= *other { return Some (v); } } }
Conclusion
This measure improves query execution performance especially for similar cases to the one showed above: (“seldom_term” AND “frequent_term”).
We now not only have capabilities to jump to certain postings, which is a huge help for implementing operators, but also do not access some IndexingChunk s in certain situations.
This will result in far better performance when IndexingChunk s are not in memory but on disk or stored somewhere on the network.
The next step will be to lazily decode positions. Positions are needed only for positional queries and then only if document ids match. So our current method, to decode them every time we look at a DocId is wrong.
These changes will be available in version 0.2 which will hopefully be released by the end of this year.THOUSANDS of intimate photos sent between iPhone users have been made public after an embarrassing security flaw.
The Quip app promised to let people send pictures to each other for free — like sending a multimedia message but without any fees.
What it didn't say was that anyone with a few web skills could see them as well.
Quip stored the private images on a publicly accessible web server without any encryption, making them easy prey for savvy internet users.
Now some of the most intimate moments of thousands of people are being circulated on web forums.
Many photos show people posing nude or having sex. Others show a day at the baseball or baby shots.
One image shows a man naked from the waist up and seemingly covered in cuts and blood. Another seems to have been taken inside the White House.
Some internet users have also allegedly matched up nude photos with real names and Facebook profiles.
On one web forum, a user identifying as one of the makers of the Quip app said the system had been shut down.
"Hello, this is Ish, the founder of Addy Mobile, makers of the Quip app," said "ish_addy" on Reddit.
"As soon as this post came to our attention, we immediately shut down our servers. We have also now disabled all S3 access and have started to systematically secure all files in the system.
"We will not bring the system back up until we have adequate security around all files shared over Quip."
However many of the photos, saved by people before the servers were shut down, are still being circulated.Opposition member Ilya Yashin has written an open letter to the head of the Chechen government, Ramzan Kadyrov, expressing his willingness to visit Kadyrov in Grozny, Chechnya's capital, to discuss the murder of Boris Nemtsov.
“I am ready to come to Grozny. I request you meet with me. I have a number of questions, which you will not like. State-sponsored media portray you as a man who is not afraid of a direct conversation and hard questions. I hope you live up to your reputation,” Yashin wrote.
Kadyrov's press office says it's unaware of Yashin's letter.
Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead in Moscow on February 27, 2015. Five people were arrested on suspicion of his murder. Among the five is a former member of the Chechen “Sever” battalion, Zaur Dadaev, who is considered the primary suspect. Investigators believe Ruslan Muhudinova ordered the killing, and he has been arrested in absentia.
In early October, Ramzan Kadyrov invited Zhanna Nemtsova, the daughter of the murdered politician, to Chechnya. She wants investigators to question Kadyrov, who promised to come in for questioning, if the Investigative Committee summons him.Last month, lawyers for Holder requested an extension of the Wednesday deadline. House seeks contempt for Holder
A House committee is asking a federal judge to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of court for failing to comply with a deadline a judge set to turn over documents related to the Justice Department’s response to Operation Fast and Furious.
In a motion filed Thursday afternoon, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to fine Holder personally if he doesn’t comply with an order Jackson issued in August requiring him to turn over non-privileged documents responsive to a committee subpoena by Oct. 1.
Story Continued Below
House lawyers even suggest it may be necessary to throw the attorney general in jail to get him to abide by the court order.
( Also on POLITICO: Who replaces Holder?)
“Should the Court determine that the Attorney General has violated that Order, the Court should impose on the Attorney General an appropriate penalty to coerce his compliance with the August 20 Order, including an escalating daily monetary fine against Eric H. Holder, Jr., to be paid by Mr. Holder out of his personal assets, converting to incarceration if the payment of daily monetary fines does not produce compliance within a reasonable period of time,” House Counsel Kerry Kircher and other lawyers wrote in the new motion (posted here).
Last month, lawyers for Holder requested an extension of the Wednesday deadline, arguing that it made more sense for Jackson to rule on all the disputed records and then take the case to the D.C. Circuit for an appeal rather than proceed piecemeal.
House lawyers said they want any documents they’re entitled to now, rather than waiting. The House committee did indicate earlier that it would not object to extending the deadline until Nov. 3.
However, the new House motion argues the extension Holder sought was not to apply to all the documents he was required to turn over. The Justice Department contends it does.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said Thursday evening: “We’re at a loss to understand this latest stunt since the committee itself did not object to November as an appropriate timeline for the production of any documents. The Department will respond to the motion in due course.”
Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) issued a statement Friday criticizing the Justice Department’s handling of the case.
“Attorney General Holder and his department have now failed to comply with a binding federal court order,” Issa said. “The attorney general and his department are acting as if the judge in the case has an obligation to modify her rulings with which they disagree, rather than they having the obligation to comply with those rulings. That is the arrogance that landed this case in court in the first place.”
Issa also disputed the relevance of his committee’s stated willingness to agree to an extension.
“Contrary to the counterfactual claims of the Justice Department, the House did not agree to any deadline extension absent a ruling from the judge and in fact has asked the judge to enforce her order,” the chairman said. “The American people can only continue to guess at what the attorney general and his department are hiding.”
After President Barack Obama asserted executive privilege over tens of thousands of pages of Justice Department documents relating to the response to the Fast and Furious “gunwalking” scandal, the House held a pair of votes in June 2012 finding Holder in contempt of Congress. One of those votes authorized a lawsuit against Holder to force disclosure of the documents.
That suit, filed in August 2012, has been mired in procedural motions and mediation for more than two years. Jackson rejected a Justice Department motion to dismiss the case. However, she also rejected the committee’s position that executive privilege cannot extend to records of executive branch agencies.
The judge recently set deadlines for Holder to turn over any documents that are not part of the government’s deliberative process and to make a log of all other relevant documents, explaining why they’re being withheld.
Last week, Holder announced that he plans to step down in the coming months, but will remain in office until his successor is confirmed.
Follow @politicoLED Costs Cut 75% with Silicon Breakthrough by California Startup Bridgelux
March 14th, 2011 by Susan Kraemer
While LEDs are by far the most energy-efficient (and thus, the cheapest) lighting over the long run, in the short term, they can be a hefty hit to the wallet. But a breakthrough in pricing may change that upfront expense.
Kim Eaton at Fast Company is reporting that the rapidly expanding Bay Area start-up Bridgelux has made a breakthrough in developing a way of making LEDs using silicon wafers instead of using wafers made with a layer of sapphire (yes, that priceless gem).
Even though the sapphire is artificially grown, it is still an extremely expensive procedure. Compared with the old way, using silicon instead of artificial sapphire is much cheaper, and getting cheaper still as solar panel production has skyrocketed over the last few years.
After it ramps up production, within just two to three years, costs for its LED could drop by at least 75%, the company says, while not impacting the incredible efficiency and longevity associated with LEDs.
By January 2012, lighting manufacturers selling in the US must increase the efficiency of any lightbulbs by 30% over that of traditional incandescent light bulbs (of 100 watts or more) to meet the Energy Independence and Security Act passed in 2007. By 2014, it includes bulbs of 40 watts and above. Most other nations have passed laws phasing out incandescents now, driving innovation globally.
The US law is not specific to incandescent lights, merely requiring that lights be efficient. But all lights except incandescents already meet that efficiency standard. CFLs are already 75% more efficient than the traditional bulbs, and LEDs are 90% more efficient.
Initially, GE initially attempted to develop a 30% more efficient incandescent, but a year later scrapped that and moved on to create a halogen substitute that is 30% more efficient, as it turned out to be easier to improve the efficiency of halogen lights to the point where they could meet the mandate.
When first developed, incandescent bulbs were an improvement over candle light, whale oil light, or gas lamps, and for a lower cost, so that the transition was naturally driven by market economics. But LEDs and CFLs are not such an easy switch. Even though they cost far less over time in energy costs, they cost more initially, so there is no market force forcing the switch.
Saving more over time is not an easy sell, as I found from my days in solar sales, (where the savings can easily add up to enough money to buy another house every 20 years) so I have a very visceral sense of how little the market responds to long term benefits. Most people are just unmotivated by the future, regardless. So the market would not have demanded increased efficiency, even though needlessly burning fossil fuels is already beginning to drive some catastrophic climate changes.
Because people are so easily lured into staying with what seems cheaper upfront – even if the long term costs are literally at the scale of destroying an entire 10,000 year old civilization within just a few more centuries – this law makes sense. In the four years since the enactment, lighting has vastly improved efficiency. This milestone from Bridgelux is an example.
Susan Kraemer@Twitter
Related articlesBradley Manning Hearing Shows Military Bosses More Concerned About Media Attention Than Manning's Conditions
from the but-of-course dept
Going through emails, it came out that Lt. Gen. George Flynn, superior officer, was concerned with media and not Bradley Manning’s conditions. For example, when David House and Firedoglake editor-in-chief Jane Hamsher were harassed at the gate of Quantico, Flynn was in on this incident. He was up on what the public affairs planned to say to any questions from media on the incident. But, he was not up on weekly updates coming from officers in the brig.
Lt. Gen. Flynn was upset that he read about Manning standing outside his cell naked in the New York Times. “It would be good to have leadership have heads up on these things before they’re read in the early bird!” Lt. Col Flynn wrote in an email. The “early bird” is a military synopsis of various news stories/press releases.
Also, a “forensic psychiatrist” that the Brig was consulting was a Dentist. She didn’t really have qualifications as a psychologist. She was a doctor on staff there and they went to her for assessments on Manning’s condition.
One Quantico Brig officer (female) sent email where he joked about the removal of Manning’s underwear after comments he made on March 2, 2011. Here’s a version the press pool currently believes we heard read in court:
“As Dr. Seuss would say I can wear them in a box, I can wear them with a fox, I can wear them with socks. I can wear them in the day so I say. I can’t wear them at night. My comments gave the staff a fright.”
It is Green Eggs & Ham.
Coombs asked Choike if he believed joking about the underwear was something that an officer should have done. Choike then said something to the effect that he realized this could be brought up by Manning with his attorney and it might become “another media issue.”
Kevin Gosztola has been providing detailed updates on the latest Bradley Manning hearings, focused mainly on the conditions associated with the treatment of Manning after his arrest, and whether or not it amounted to "unlawful pretrial punishment" or involved reasonable precautions by the military. Specifically, as we had discussed, Manning was held in conditions that amounted to torture under key definitions of torture -- held in "intensive solitary confinement" in total isolation, not allowed to have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Over 250 legal experts condemned his treatment and the State Department's spokesperson even lost his job for saying publicly that Manning was being mistreated, and that it wasn't productive.The legal issue is that if this treatment was seen as punitive then that's a problem. People can be held pre-trial, but they're not supposed to be "punished" as part of the process. The Defense Department has been trying to claim that the treatment of Manning had to do with fears that he would harm himself, and the latest hearings were to figure out which version of the story is really accurate. The details look pretty damning for the Defense Department. For example, it appears that officials were more concerned about the media, not about Manning's condition:Later, the same Lt. Gen. Flynn apparently got upset that the NYTimes had information on Manning's mistreatment and he hadn't been forewarned about the media situation:And then there's the fact that the "psychologist" relied on to assess Manning's mental state... wasn't actually a psychologist. Huh?!?On top of that, evidence was presented of guards joking about taking away Manning's underwear in response to comments Manning had made. It certainly raises significant questions about why they were treating Manning this way and if it actually had anything to do with his own safety... or if they just liked taunting him.Even if you think Manning violated the law, it seems pretty damning to see him treated this way pre-trial.Separately, prior to the discussion about Manning's conditions, the government officially opposed Manning's attempt to plead guilty to certain lesser charges (as discussed earlier ) in the hopes of speeding up the trial and getting potential leniency on some of the more serious charges. This issue more or less got tabled for procedural reasons, as Manning is still arguing that the government failed to provide a speedy trial and the court notes that if it excepts the plea, that would also waive the speedy trial issue. So, the court will handle the issue of whether or not the government failed to offer a speedy trial before taking on the plea issue.
Filed Under: bradley manning, media, solitary confinement, torture, treatmentTHANK YOU TO ALL WHO HAVE +1'D THIS DECK IN ORDER TO MAKE IT THE HIGHEST SCORING AFFINITY DECK ON TAPPEDOUT.NET! +1's are much appreciated if you like the deck, always open to suggestions too!
WIN CONDITIONS
Arcbound Ravager - If you know about affinity or robots then chances are you know about this guy. He is win condition number one in this deck, get him as big as you possibly can and swing in. Tips for using him would be to make sure you always have out one other creature to take advantage of modular and if one of your creatures is removed then, to get as much value as you can from it I would recommend sacrificing it to Arcy to pump him more. If someone straight up kills Arcy then in response I would suggest you sacrifice any useless artifacts (A 1/1 Memnite, a tapped Springleaf Drum this means you can now move more +1/+1s than before.)
Cranial Plating - The secondary win condition. Equip this to Etched Champion, Vault Skirge or even Ornithopter and you could be looking at a very lethal swing.
Inkmoth Nexus - The third win condition is actually my second favourite. I love transforming ol inky and slapping on a Cranial Plating in order to swing for 10 poison counters in one turn. Or go full glass cannon and sac all of your artifacts to Arcbound Ravager and then Ravager to itself throwing the counters onto Inkmoth Nexus
Master of Etherium - Although not always a win condition but he gives that extra +1/+1 that pushes you over the edge into lethal. He counts as an artifact so he helps Cranial Plating and slapping it onto him means insane amounts of damage!
LANDS ANDMANA PRODUCERS
Blinkmoth Nexus - To help pump up Inkmoth Nexus to save it from removal or to swing in for more.
Glimmervoid - A fantastic card that gets the job done
Springleaf Drum - The poor mans Mox Opal. This will help you out of a jam and raise your metalcraft or Cranial Plating up.
Mox Opal - A fantastic mana producer that is the heart and soul of the affinity build.
SORCERIES, INSTANTS AND ENCHANTMENTS
Galvanic Blast - Brilliant removal for a 1 drop. I chose it over Dispatch because it means you can finish off a player as well. I considered Shrapnel Blast but it being 2 mana put me off a bit.
Thoughtcast - Great card draw which is something this deck lacks. Its the closest thing to an Ancestral Recall in modern you can get.
Ensoul Artifact - Ensoul is a great card to help break out some early aggression. It puts a lot of pressure onto the board. The main targets for Ensoul would be Mox Opal, Darksteel Citedal and any other weaker artifact creatures ( Memnite, Ornithopter )
CREATURES
Steel Overseer - Pumps all of your creatures whilst theyre attacking. (You can pump them in response to blockers being declared or not).
Vault Skirge - Its rare that this will be a two drop, youre likely to be paying (1) and two life for it, its a great target for Cranial Plating as it has evasion and life gain built in.
Memnite - Hes a great little blocker and a good target for Ensoul Artifact
Etched Champion - This guy is very scary, its rare that Ill cast him and an opponent will remain silent. Hes a big threat and he draws a lot of heat.
Signal Pest - One of the unsung heroes of this deck, that one extra damage may not seem like much but without him youd be in trouble.
SIDE BOARD
Thoughtseize - Good against anything combo based or built around one card so basically most of modern
Ancient Grudge - Against the mirror-match
Blood Moon - Fantastic in this meta where everyone plays nonbasics
Dismember - If they're playing white they have Kataki, War's Wage put this in!
Spellskite - One of the best cards in the sideboard, if you know your playgroup well and find yourself side boarding him in a lot then you can just main board him. Hes a great spell sponge.
Spell Pierce - Bye bye Stony Silence, Fracturing Gust, Shatter Spree, Shatterstorm
Wear / Tear - Bye bye Stony Silence
Whipflare - Strong one sided removalThe San Francisco Giants have reached an agreement on a one-year major league deal with relief pitcher Clay Hensley, according to a baseball source. Hensley will make a base salary of $750,000 and can earn an additional $300,000 in incentives and awards, the source said. The deal is pending completion of a physical exam.
Hensley, 32, is a career 24-29 with a 3.94 ERA in six seasons with the Padres and Marlins. He became a free agent when the Marlins non-tendered him in December.
In August 2007, Hensley gave up Barry Bonds' 755th home run, which tied Bonds with Hank Aaron for first on baseball's career list.
Hensley joins Javier Lopez, Santiago Casilla, Sergio Romo, Jeremy Affeldt and closer Brian Wilson in manager Bruce Bochy's bullpen in San Francisco.
Jerry Crasnick is a senior baseball writer for ESPN.com.Vote in parliament followed debate in which Green was labelled a ‘billionaire spiv’ and ‘asset stripper’ and likened to Robert Maxwell and Napoleon
MPs have voted to strip Sir Philip Green of his knighthood in a symbolic move that adds to the pressure on the retail tycoon over the BHS scandal.
The businessman’s reputation was dealt a further blow following a debate in which he was labelled a “billionaire spiv” who should never have received his honour in the first place.
The approval of the parliamentary motion carries no official weight but it intensifies the pressure on Green, who has been criticised for foot-dragging in negotiations with the pensions regulator over the £571m hole in the BHS pension fund.
Green was pilloried during a more than two hour-long debate in which the once feted entrepreneur, who was knighted for services to the retail sector, was lambasted by MPs from across the political spectrum for his family’s role in the downfall of the high street chain. The fall of BHS triggered 11,000 job losses and left thousands of pensioners facing cuts to their benefits.
“[Green is a] billionaire spiv who should never have received a knighthood, a billionaire spiv who has shamed British capitalism,” said Labour MP David Winnick during a debate that, without a single Green sympathiser in the room, turned into a character assassination. MPs labelled Green an “asset stripper” and “corporate raider”, who was likened in the chamber to Napoleon and the former Mirror Group owner Robert Maxwell.
The Labour MP Frank Field, chair of the work and pensions committee, whose role in the MPs’ inquiry into the collapse of BHS has put him into the role of Green’s nemesis, said the businessman appeared willing to lose his reputation rather than “surrender a modest part of his mega-fortune” to aid BHS pensioners. Field said Green, who is worth an estimated £3.2bn, had promised to “sort” the pension issue back in June but that there was still no concrete proposal on the table.
Questioning whether Green had been a deserving recipient of a knighthood, Field said: “There was nothing the committee could find that shows Sir Philip Green is the king of the high street. He was a very, very, successful asset stripper.” Green was honoured by the Blair government in 2006.
Also speaking in parliament, Iain Wright, who co-chaired the select committee investigation with Field as chair of the business, innovation and skills select committee, told MPs that the failure of BHS was “one of the biggest corporate scandals of modern times”.
“Green took the rings from BHS’s fingers, beat it black and blue, starved it of food and water, put it on life support, and then wanted credit for keeping it alive,” said Wright, referring to the £400m in BHS dividends paid to the Green family in the early years of their stewardship.
Wright also questioned whether Green deserved acclaim for his skills as a retailer, suggesting his prowess lay in cutting costs and financial engineering with the bosses of rival chains such as John Lewis and Zara more deserving of plaudits. “Green can’t be described as a short-term corporate raider, but raid the company he did,” he said, adding that the Green family had sought to enrich itself at “the expense of long-term and sustainable growth for the company”.
“Certainly, profits were made, but they were more akin to a short-term sugar boost rather than a nutritious diet that aided the long-term health and strength of the business [BHS],” concluded Wright.
MPs voted in favour of the motion by acclamation, meaning that there was no opposition from parliamentarians on the chamber floor when the speaker put it to them. Despite the strong signal sent by the vote, the power to rescind a knighthood rests with the honours forfeiture committee, a group of civil servants and dignitaries chaired by Sir Jonathan Stephens, a permanent secretary.
Richard Fuller, the Tory MP who tabled the amendment calling for Green’s knighthood, said that although MPs could not remove the honour they were able to reflect the views of their constituents. “We do not make the final decision but it is worthy and honourable for this house to have a view about Sir Philip Green,” he said.
“Over the summer, he has had the opportunity to find his moral compass and do the right thing. In the absence of that, the house has no option but to support the amendment and the motion.”
The parliamentary inquiry into the collapse of BHS has strained relations between Green and MPs to breaking point, with a war of words between the tycoon and Field. The Labour MP for Birkenhead has riled the businessman by telling him to “stop messing around and write a big cheque”.
Green sold BHS for £1 in 2015 to investors led by Dominic Chappell, who had previously been declared bankrupt. The administrators were called in April this year but with no white knight willing to take on the loss |
keep the U's in League One.
City boss Tony Mowbray said: "I'm delighted to finally get this deal over the line as we've been tracking Jacob for some time and beat a number of clubs to his signature.
"I've continually stressed the importance of pace from both the wide and central positions, and Jacob is a player who has that attribute in abundance.
"He showed his ability last season by helping keep Colchester United in the league and we're hoping he can continue to progress this season with us.
"We're also delighted to get him for the entire season as it gives us a consistent option going forward and it's another crucial piece of the squad in place."
He will wear the No. 25 shirt during his time with the Sky Blues and the club are awaiting confirmation of his eligibility for tomorrow's game against Millwall.A few words on todays SPL games vs LNDC
First of all, really proud of the boys today and I'm glad we managed to pull out the wins.
So the tournament works like this, we get assigned to a server. Create a custom game lobby and start the game.
Myself,Qvofred and Trixtank had 100 ping on this server so we then tried remaking and was assigned to a different server.
We had the exact same ping on that one. So obviously we just have to accept the fact that we are going to play on 100 ping, as we only get 1 remake per game and I think that was the only 2 servers prepared for tourney play.
This is likely a routing issue where our ISP gets rerouted somewhere along their way to
Hirez' EU servers and results in high ping. At least from my understanding.
Now LC had no one with high ping, which isn't weird at all because its likely a routing issue, so obviously we are facing an immediate disadvantage.
Anyway we play game 1, and we get a good lead. Now we're at a staredown at FG, and we try to bait them in. They are not taking the bait and we start slapping FG. Then the second Qvofred disconnects they jump/engage us.
Now, we are all healthy and far ahead of them. We wanted them to engage us in the first place. That is why we have only 2 people placed directly near it.
The fact that they had no chance in winning that fight with all 5 off us connected is literally the only reason I called them out on it.
Anyway, most of you are with me anyway but I wanted to clear something up. We have no referees in game, there's no one there to blow the whistle when someone disconnects. We have to wait until all players are out of combat and then pause.
I made an extreme analogy earlier and ill make it again because its not entirely wrong. Imagine if there is no referees and a player passes out/dies in the middle of a soccer/football or any other relative team game. Are you just gonna grab your chance for the prize and snap the ball up and go for the goal? Is that considered just being good at taking advantages where you can or is that considered something else entirely. I mean I know my own opinion and I'm sure you all know my opinion as well.
Yes I'm an honest man, and brutally so. Can I be wrong?, absolutely. Am i wrong?, that's up to you for decide. Everyone is entitled to their opinion I'm only here to share my point of view.
Lastly don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be in the SPL and fight for the big bucks, but if I'm standing at a disadvantage before the games even begin because of routing issues I'm damn well going to speak up about it and try to make for an even playing ground in the next games.
Thanks for reading and more so thank you for supporting me and the rest of the paradigm squad. EVEN if I come across as a salty crab from time to time, make no mistake I'm only trying to get my boys to worlds.
Baba yetu was chiming as the janus ulti stole that fire giant in game one. And thus I end my essay.
<33 much love xoxo gossip lawb
Reply · Report PostBefore you step up to your weapons bench in Fallout 4, cram a hundred pounds of junk into it, and start tinkering with your favorite laser rifle, you might want to cast an eye on what modder LucasGod has been up to. Any Mod Any Weapon doesn't mince words, and could completely change the way you shoot monsters and robots. As you might have guessed from the name, it enables any weapon mod to be attached to any weapon, allowing you to lovingly craft the horrible and hilarious killing machine of your dreams.
Fallout 4 mod enthusiast Tyrannicon shows what's possible in the video above, with his wonderfully enjoyable deadpan manner. Watch as he builds and tests a scoped triple-barreled electrified minigun, an alien laser pistol that's half Fat Man, and several other devastating Frankensteinian weapons.
Clearly, anyone in Commonwealth who believes the saying "War never changes" has probably suddenly changed their mind, and if they haven't it's because their mind has been splattered into tiny chunks after stepping in front of the scoped triple-barreled electrified minigun.
The mod even works with melee weapons as well, so if you're looking for creative new ways to bludgeon someone's skeleton right out of their body, it should provide you with a ton of new options. Some things to keep in mind, from the mod page:
"Your custom weapon will inherit the base stats and attributes (Such as spread, bullet count and animation) from the base weapon you used, even if you change every piece into another kind of weapon. Attach a beam splitter to a shotgun and see the magic happens!"
"Some restrictions still apply, so you can't attach a muzzle to a barrel that doesn't support muzzles, but you can attach it to a barrel that supports, and then change the barrel. The muzzle will most likely disappear but the effects will carry on."
"Enemy weapon generation is kinda buggy with this mod, I recommend you use it only to craft your weapons, and disable it afterwards if you plan on looting genuine weapons from enemies until I manage to fix that."
Any Mod Any Weapon was created with FO4Edit, and is available at Nexus Mods.A new report from a South Korean think tank stated a unified Korea would become a new powerhouse in the global economy, and that trade volume with neighboring countries would subsequently rise. Photo by Artens/Shutterstock
SEOUL, Oct. 28 (UPI) -- Korean unification holds vast economic potential, and a unified Korea could create an $8.7 trillion economy by 2055, or 1.7 times the forecasted size of the South Korean economy.
The Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, a government think tank, released the numbers in a report on unification scenarios, South Korean newspaper Donga Ilbo reported Wednesday. The report stated a unified Korea is expected to become a new powerhouse in the global economy, and that trade volume with neighboring countries would subsequently rise.
The report proposed a two-step scenario of unification that could reduce steep costs, estimated to be between $50 billion and $6 trillion. In the first phase, which would take place anytime between 2016 and 2035, North and South Korea would maintain their mutual independence, but through reform the two sides would work to push up North Korea's economic growth.
In phase two of the proposal, which is to be carried out between 2036 and 2055, when the structural foundations of a unified system has been established, the free movement of people between North and South would complete the economic integration of the two countries, the report stated. The report did not include possible North Korea objections to increased exchange that could weaken the influence of the Pyongyang regime over the North Korean population.
The benefits of unification have previously been extolled by South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who once declared unification as the equivalent of hitting an economic "jackpot."
On Wednesday, South Korea's National Assembly Speaker Chung Ui-hwa said more than 90 percent of the country's problems would be solved through unification, Yonhap reported.
"There is only one country in the world where a people of a single ethnicity has been divided. Without unification, it is difficult to look forward to the future," Chung said to an audience at a campus of Yonsei University.
Chung also said the Sewol ferry sinking that killed 304 people in April 2014 was the result of the "selfishness and materialism prevalent in [South Korean] society," and that "altruism" should take their place.
South Korea is Asia's fourth-largest economy.Plane’s crew spotted two men waving in middle of icy tundra north of Arctic circle and rescued them in 15-minute window before darkness set in
A routine training session in Canada’s Arctic transformed into a real-life search and rescue mission after a Royal Canadian Air Force crew accidentally happened on two hunters who had been stranded for days.
The training mission had set out from Hall Beach, a hamlet of some 750 people that sits north of the Arctic circle in Nunavut. They were heading to an old mine site on the first day of a two-week annual sovereignty exercise in Canada’s north.
After locating the mine, the crew was surveying the vast tundra from their Twin Otter when one member spotted what seemed to be a man waving at the plane.
They passed over the area again. This time they could clearly make out two men standing on the sea ice, waving at the plane.
“You could probably go crazy trying to think of all the things that had to line up for us to see these guys out there,” Thom Doelman, a captain with the Royal Canadian Air Force told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
The men had set out from Hall Beach three days earlier on a hunting trip. About 40km (25 miles) south of the hamlet, their snowmobile broke down and their GPS locator device had failed to activate, leaving them stranded in the remote area, with temperatures of -45C (-49F) with windchill.
From high above, the crew assessed the situation. In about 30 minutes it would be too dark to attempt a landing. Furthermore, the plane was not equipped with the skis normally used to land on sea ice, leaving Doelman – who had never landed a plane with wheels on ice – worried about whether the frozen water could bear the weight of the plane.
Still, the crew was not willing to simply fly by two men who could be in distress, he said. “We didn’t know of any missing persons, but we felt that given that it’s the Arctic, given that it was about to get dark, that we couldn’t continue back to Hall Beach without checking on these guys.”
He carefully landed the plane, keeping its nose elevated to allow for a quick take off if the ice showed any sign of cracking. Once landed, Doelman immediately readied to leave, estimating that the crew had a 15-minute window before it would be too dark to take off.
The plane was back in the air when the two rescued hunters – Tyler Amarualik and 15-year-old Eugene Gibbons – asked whether their friend had been found: a third person, Lloyd Satuqsi, was still somewhere on the sea ice, having attempted to walk back to the hamlet.
The struggle in Iqaluit: north and south collide in Canada's Arctic capital Read more
“At this point my heart sank because to find out there was a third guy out there, it was unbelievable,” said Doelman. Darkness had now set in and the plane was running low on fuel.
The crew alerted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who paired with the hamlet to launch a ground search.
Satuqsi was found near the hamlet, some 12 hours later, andtaken to hospital to be treated for frostbite and hypothermia.
The two others are in good health, with just minor frostbite on their toes.
Doelman said he was astounded at the slim odds of stumbling across the pair as the crew looked down on the vast, open tundra: “They’re the luckiest two guys in the Arctic that I know.”Role: Anti-Tank/Brawler
I really want to see a TRUE brawler. Someone who gets into the middle of a fight and just starts punching people in the face, literally. i also wanted to create a champion whos dedicated role is to beat up Tanks/Tanky DPS. The only thing that i thought that could really stand up to a tanky dps/tank was in fact ANOTHER tanky dps with a kit built for doing just that.
from a "fun factor" stand point i really like the idea of a spammy brawler type champion that heralds to games such as "Streets Of Rage" or "Double Dragon".
PASSIVE - Punishing Blows
Each of Brauns abilities places a punishing blow on the target, increasing the damage of his normal attacks by 2% for 3 seconds. Stacks 3 times. Using an ability on an opponent who has 3 stacks grants that ability a bonus finishing effect.
Q - Steel Jab
A quick jab that does (AD*.5) physical damage plus 25% of Brauns armor and 50% of his targets armor.
3.5/3/2.5/2/1.5 CD
Finisher Bonus: Increases Damage done by 20% and increases Brauns movespeed by 10% for 2 seconds.
W - Mystic Cross
A heavy right cross that does (AP*.3) magic damage plus 30% of Brauns magic resist and 60% of his targets magic resist.
3.5/3/2.5/2/1.5 CD
Finisher Bonus: Increases damage done by 20% and increases Brauns Armor and Magic Resist by 10/20/30/40/50 for 4 seconds.
E - Hextech Haymaker
A short range AoE strike using both hands that does ( AD*1) physical damage plus 5% of Brauns health and 5% of his targets health in a cone.
10/9/8/7/6 CD
Finisher Bonus: Increases damage by 10% and stuns the target for 2 seconds.
R - Rampage - Braun does a short leap to a target area doing (AD*1) + 50% of his armor and magic resist in damage. If this damages a champion, Braun may leap again in the next 1.5 seconds. Maximum 3 leaps.
BASE STATS
HP - 460 HP AT LVL 1
ATK SPD - 0.712 AT LVL 1
ARMOR - 25 AT LVL 1
MR - 20 AT LVL 1
MOVE SPEED - 320 AT LVL 1NEW DELHI: The tax department has made it mandatory for central excise duty and service taxpayers to obtain a valid PAN number before they can be migrated to the new goods and services tax ( GST ) set-up.Despite the political impasse putting a question mark on the planned rollout of the new tax regime from April 1, the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) continues to do the groundwork with April 1 as the target date.GST will subsume central excise and service tax, and CBEC has initiated the process of migrating these taxpayers to the new regime through issuance of a provisional registration number."Every person registered under any of the earlier laws and having a valid PAN shall be issued a certificate of registration on a provisional basis," CBEC said in an order.For excise and service tax assessees without a valid PAN number, CBEC said "the assessee needs to obtain the PAN number and update the registration details on the ACES portal before the assessee can be migrated to GST".CBEC has also asked its field offices to launch awareness campaign and outreach programmes to facilitate migration of all excise and service taxpayers to the GST network by January-end.The provisional registration, which will be generated on the basis of PAN, will be called Goods and Services Tax Identification Number (GSTIN). Also, a provisional ID and password will be provided which the excise and service taxpayers must use to log in to the GST portal -- gst.gov.in -- and fill the required details and upload the supporting documents, it said.After providing the requisite details, an ARN (Application Reference Number) would be communicated to the assessee by GSTN (GST-Network). Once an ARN is communicated, the assessee "would migrate to GST on the scheduled GST rollout date with the issue of provisional certificate", it said, adding that CBEC is making all-out efforts for smooth implementation of GST by April 1, 2017.It further said that in the GST regime, one unique registration for a single PAN will be issued and the existing assessees will be given one provisional ID per state where the place of business is registered in the current excise or service tax regime. The remaining registrations in a state could be added as additional place of business on the GSTN portal.The government is looking to roll out GST by April 2017, but issues like jurisdiction over assessees and taxation rights over high seas have become sticking points at the GST Council deliberations. The Council will meet on January 16 to thrash out a consensus on the vexed issues.From now on, you can look through our exclusive photo archives, pick the photos and frames you love, and display your favourite motorsport moments for all to see.
Our collection includes selected images spanning generations of racing’s finest moments across Formula 1, MotoGP, WRC or the legendary Le Mans 24 Hours.
Featured photo – Bjorn Waldegard 1979 Monte Carlo Rally
Traditionally held in January, the Monte Carlo Rally puts drivers to the test in different conditions such as snowy, icy, wet or dry asphalt – often changing on the same stage!
It was no different back in 1979, an important milestone for the WRC, as the Drivers' Championship was first introduced. Remarkably, that year already offered one of the closest rivalries ever: Bjorn Waldegard (pictured above) and Hannu Mikkola were just one point apart in the end.
Waldegard, one of the finest rally drivers of the 70s, missed out on winning Rally Monte-Carlo by six seconds with his Ford Escort RS1800 MKII that year, but a further six podiums and two wins were enough to win the first, and his only, WRC title.
Waldegard – who was twice in winner of the Monte pre-World Championship – sadly passed away in 2014, at the age of 70.As we said before, VirtualDJ 8 is still under beta-testing, and we’ll keep it that way until we’re confident that we nailed every single one of the numerous small bugs that are the unavoidable byproducts of a complete rewrite.VirtualDJ 7 is a rock-solid piece of software, that is used daily by dozen of millions of DJs around the world without a glitch, and we strongly believe that VirtualDJ 8 should have the same stability. The new features in v8, no matter how groundbreaking, do not justify a loss in stability.So we’ll continue to whip the new development team until v8 is perfect.And as we promised, in the meantime, we’ll continue to release improvements on the v7.x series, and port back some of the new features that had been developed for v8.So here comes VirtualDJ version 7.3:The focus on this new update is mainly the sound quality.We’ve improved the audio engine, using 32-bit internal processing, we added an automatic Limiter, an optional new Parametric Equalizer with customizable frequencies, and in general ported back from v8 some new improvements that make VirtualDJ sound better.VirtualDJ 8 will sound even better, but 7.3 is already a noticeable improvement over the previous versions.We also ported back from v8 the multi-word search engine.If you search for “Guetta Love”, the search engine will now show all the results that contain both the word “Guetta” in one of the fields and the word “Love” in the same or any other field. (unlike v7.2 and previous, where it would have shown only files matching the exact string “Guetta{space}Love”).If you want to search for an exact string with spaces, just include it between double-quotes when you type it in the search field.And as usual we added native support for the latest and newest controllers that will hit the market soon, and we fixed a few small bugs that had been reported.As always, version 7.3 is free for all registered Broadcaster/Pro Basic/Pro Full users.You can download the new installer from your download Center Full change log is hereA teamspeak is nice to have, but even that can be centralized and advertised on the IRC. You would still be segregating the community if you 'just' provide a teamspeak. I've been setting up a teamspeak for everyone to join and advertised it on the IRC as well. I'm happy to join any other TS instead, but it would be nice to have all of this in one place so everyone is free to join whenever they want.
What I want to say is, I don't see how making the community split even more is helpful. We have the reddit community and the official starbound forum community already, I'd much rather look for a way to combine these two instead of adding a third community.
Click to expand...Sen. Rand Paul Announces 2016 Presidential Run
Updated at 12:30 p.m. ET
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced today that he will seek the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
"I have a message — a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words," he told supporters in Louisville, Ky. "We've come to take our country back."
Earlier, in a statement on his website, he said: "I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government."
Paul also released a video with the opening line: "On April 7, a different kind of Republican will take on Washington."
YouTube
Paul faces what is likely to be a crowded Republican field for 2016. Although Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, his colleague in the Senate, is the only other prominent Republican to have announced his intention to run for president, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, are expected to join the fray.
Polls show Paul in a three-way tie for third place in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Bush and Walker lead the most recent average of polls.
Paul, the son of longtime libertarian Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010 in the Tea Party wave. An ophthalmologist by training, Rand Paul is pitching himself as a "different kind of Republican." When he was first elected, he was seen as a candidate whose libertarian ideas, in the words of The Washington Post, "could make him the most unusual and intriguing voice among the major contenders in the 2016 field." It adds:
"But now, as he prepares to make his formal announcement Tuesday, Paul is a candidate who has turned fuzzy, having trimmed his positions and rhetoric so much that it's unclear what kind of Republican he will present himself as when he takes the stage."
As he prepared to announce his presidential ambitions, Paul adopted a more muscular defense policy and reached out to religious conservatives. (For more on the former, you can listen to Paul's interview with NPR's Robert Siegel last September.) Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV, told NPR's Scott Simon in a recent interview that Paul could be called "libertarian-ish."
Gillespie said:
"You know, I think he is talking what he believes. But I think he draws a lot of ideas from his father generally without some of the baggage, to be honest. "And people are more interested, I think, now than even a few years ago of being allowed to make more choices that are important in their lives. And you see that reflected in things like the growth in pot legalization and gay marriage. Then at the same time they're very skeptical of government, whether it's a conservative Republican government under Bush or a liberal Democratic government under Obama."
Following his rally today in Louisville, Ky., Rand travels to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada — the four states where the presidential nominating contests begin.
You can follow more detailed coverage of this story on our It's All Politics blog here.This hub will tell you how to get a sugar daddy of your own. What could be better than getting tuition paid and being spoiled? We also give advice on how to navigate the world of sugar daddies and sugar babies.
Men taking attractive women under their wing and financially supporting them is nothing new. Economic difficulties and rising college tuition prices have made this option even more popular for women.
When you have a sugar daddy, he will take you out to nice restaurants, buy you clothes and jewelry, give you an allowance, pay your tuition, or even give you a car and a place to live -- all fully paid.
How to Get a Sugar Daddy
Present yourself with class.
Be someone a man would be proud to carry on his arm. A man who is going to spend a lot of money on you wants you to be pleasant to be around and suitable to present to other people.One of the quintessential sci-fi inventions that exists in both the Star Trek and Star Wars canons is the laser weapon (okay, Star Trek calls it a “phaser,” but same diff for science purposes). Now, in real life, even as recently as three years ago, we were still lamenting the lack of availability of laser weapons that would allow us to poke holes in or evaporate one another. Well, the good(?) news is that the future is now!
Say hello to my little LaWS:
Yep, as of 2014, the US Navy has had a fully operational Laser Weapon System (LaWS) in active service. In what sounds like a straight-out-of-sci-fi endeavor, LaWS is a collaborative effort among a cornucopia of military and scientific bodies such as the ONR, NAVSEA, NRL, NSWC Dahlgren Division, and of course, commercial industry partners led by the not-at-all-evil-and-clandestine-sounding corporation Kratos Defense & Security. LaWS has already been demonstrated to detonate small rocket warheads mounted aboard oncoming boats, shoot a Scan Eagle UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) out of the sky, and destroy lots of other moving targets.
LaWS is a directed-energy weapon that can target both air and surface targets with either lethal or nonlethal force, depending on the power setting (like a phaser, one might say!). However, much to the chagrin of Industrial Light & Magic, the beam emitted by LaWS is invisible to the naked eye. All an observer would see is the target bursting into flames moments after the laser is activated.
As you might expect, DARPA is already toying with both airborne and ground-based LaWS variations.
I know, I know, so I can hear you thinking: Okay, great, so we’ve got “lasers,” but what about a Starkiller Base? That’s totally cray-fi, right? Wellllllll… while much has been written about the feasibility of the Starkiller Base featured in The Force Awakens, I don’t really know if it’s worthwhile waxing poetic about whether it’s feasible to suck the hydrogen fuel of stars to power such a big gun. Instead, let’s look at what the Starkiller accomplishes rather than how it accomplishes it. In other words, could we blow up another planet?
Well, while we’ll likely never have a Death Star, we are very close to having a DE-STAR, which stands for Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation. If you thought LaWS sounded like sci-fi, wait ‘til you get a load of this: the DE-STAR is an experimental system being developed by the University of California, Santa Barbara to deflect asteroids, comets, and other near-Earth objects using a massive array of laser beams. This laser array would generate a set of highly-focused energy beams that could raise the temperature of a spot on the target’s surface to around 4940 degrees (roughly half the temperature of the sun), allowing direct vaporization and ejection of surface material altering the asteroid’s or comet’s orbit. Get this: ideal DE-STAR systems should be able to simultaneously engage multiple extra planetary targets. In other words, who needs a Starkiller when you’ve got a DE-STAR?
Even if you’re not in the mood to play asteroids IRL, another use case of DE-STAR technology is photon propulsion, whereby thrust from said photons emitted from the DE-STAR laser array could be used to propel a spacecraft. This would allow for the possibility of flight speeds approaching the speed of light, which as we all know is a prerequisite for future interstellar missions.
So there you have it, the power to blow up the universe or explore it is within our grasp!
Going forward, I’ll be writing for Geek & Sundry about technologies that have up until very recently only existed in the realm of science fiction, but are now starting to enter our reality. Topics like artificial intelligence, teleportation, interstellar travel, and more.
What’s on your sci-fi wish list? Put it in a comment, and I’ll research it. Your dream tech may be closer to reality than you imagine!
Image Source: Qicheng Zhang/UCSB Experimental Cosmology GroupEvery year come 9/11 I see my “9/11: A Conspiracy Theory” video making the rounds again. But this year something marvelous happened. I was able to point people to my BitChute.com mirror of the video. And my Dtube mirror. And my minds.com mirror. And my vid.me mirror. The YouTube crackdown is coming (exactly as I warned you it would), but the YouTube exodus is also here (just as I predicted at the beginning of the year). The only problem is there are too many platforms to keep track of.
Here are the ones I mentioned, but I’m eager to hear from The Corbett Report about other platforms that are available and how they rate in terms of long-term viability, censorship resistance and free speech possibilities, user friendliness, etc. Please leave your comments and recommendations in the comment section below.
BitChute.com – From the FAQ: “Here we believe people should be able to express their opinions and choose their topics. If existing services cannot allow that, then let’s make some that will. The question is, how to disrupt a platform as well established as YouTube? It cannot be on their terms; we think we might have an answer, decentralization by torrents and tailored matchups for monetization.”
Dtube.video – From the introduction post on Steemit: “DTube is an application fully written in javascript, that runs in the browser, that allows you to upload and watch videos on top of the IPFS Network. Moreover, it uses STEEM as a database and enables earning rewards from your uploads.”
Minds.com – From the About page: “Minds (Minds, Inc.) is a free and open source social networking platform that rewards you for your activity online with revenue, digital currency and more views on your content. We are built on a foundation of freedom, privacy and democratization.”
vid.me – From the About page: “We’re a team of twelve humans and six dogs located in Downtown LA who are on a mission to build the world’s most creator-friendly video community. Over 25 million people use Vidme every month to upload and watch videos, and we’re just getting started.”
Filed in: VideosIf you’ve ever wanted to get up-close and personal with Mars, check out this incredible video recently released by NASA that shows the Red Planet’s surface in stunning detail. Entitled “A Fictive Flight Above Real Mars,” the video is a composite made from about 33,000 of the 50,000 high-resolution stereo images of the planet’s terrain made over the past 12 years by the powerful camera used in NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). These stereogram images depict the planet’s surface in incredible detail, which can only truly be appreciated in still images by using 3D glasses—or when merged together into an active, three dimensional, fly-over view, as was done by Finnish filmmaker Jan Fröjdman when creating this video.
As Wired notes, Mars’ dusty atmosphere obfuscates its surface with massive storms so regularly that the only way to get a decent look at the planet is through imaging technology. So that’s what NASA did. “The best way to see the planet’s surface would be to take a digital image and enhance it on your computer, said planetary geologist and principal investigator for HiRISE, Alfred McEwen.
Related: The UAE joins the race to build first city on Mars
Enter Fröjdman, who assembled the flyover shots piece by piece and colorized the monochrome images captured by the HiRISE camera. He was also responsible for identifying features like craters, canyons and mountains, then matching them between pairs of images. The 3D panning effect was the result of a painstaking process that involved stitching the images along reference points and then rendering them as frames in a video.
Fröjdman spent three months working on the project, during which time he picked and stitched by hand more than 33,000 images. The result of his work is worth the effort—a truly stunning video.
Via Wired
Video and image via Jan Fröjdman, VimeoSix hot contenders — also including Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Edie Falco and Emmy Rossum — talk candidly to THR about the "torture" of watching their performances, the horror of "pasties" and their industry crushes (Sam Rockwell!).
This story first appeared in the June 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
So, what is comedy these days?
A half-hour, single-cam cable show about a drug-addicted nurse? A one-hour women's-prison dramedy streaming on the Internet? A ratings smash with an old-school laugh track? A single-cam spin on the travails of a working woman and her messy dating life? An "adorkable" network series centered on a girl and her best guy friends? Or a grim hourlong series about a poor Chicago family whose toddler almost ODs on his sister's cocaine? For the six Emmy contenders who gathered on May 10 in Los Angeles to chat -- The Big Bang Theory's Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, 28; New Girl's Zooey Deschanel, 34; Nurse Jackie's Edie Falco, 50; The Mindy Project's Mindy Kaling, 34; Shameless' Emmy Rossum, 27; and Orange Is the New Black's Taylor Schilling, 29 -- the genre is all those things and then some. Between fake-peeing, showering with co-stars and the "torture" of watching their performances, there's little these women won't do for the sake of their craft.
What's the oddest thing you have been asked to do on your current series?
Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting My character was in an awful movie called Serial Apist, so I had full monkey makeup head to toe.
Taylor Schilling They put hair on you?
Cuoco-Sweeting Yes, they did.
Schilling Like, patchy hair?
Cuoco-Sweeting Yes. I Instagrammed it because I couldn't believe it was happening.
Zooey Deschanel I had to be Woody Allen as a zombie. I pasted sideburns and fake beard stuff to my eyebrows. That was the gift that I gave my show. They also made me be Elvis once.
Emmy Rossum My character had to pee on camera for a drug test this past season. I had to pull my pants down and use this squeezy contraption that made it look like I was really doing it. But it wasn't me peeing, just for the record!
PHOTOS: Inside THR's Actress Roundtable
Edie Falco For one scene on Nurse Jackie, I was lying on a bed of pills in this little miniature elevator thing, and it dropped like 10 feet quickly to show that I'd been overtaken by these pills. It felt like I was on the Cyclone at Coney Island.
Rossum They were like, "You don't need a stunt double. You're fine."
Falco They also wanted me to keep my eyes open.
Schilling That's terrible!
Falco My kids were visiting that day, too.
Deschanel They're like, "Why is Mommy falling?"
Cuoco-Sweeting They probably thought you were such a badass.
Mindy, what's the strangest thing you've written for yourself to do on your show?
Mindy Kaling My character is constantly getting very upset and running into the street to scream at somebody, so there are always cars about to hit me. Even though it's a stunt, you can't fake that a car is almost going to hit you.
PHOTOS: Inside THR's Comedy Actor Roundtable With Andy Samberg, Matt LeBlanc, Tony Hale
Deschanel You can't, actually.
Kaling The flip side is getting to make out a lot on TV, which I do. Sometimes we have to do a shower sex scene. And the first few times, it's kind of fun. Then after take eight, your makeup is streaming …
Schilling You're cold.
Cuoco-Sweeting It's not cute anymore.
Deschanel Fake nudity is not cute wet.
Kaling I'd rather show my breasts!
Schilling We're in jail on Orange, so there's real nudity.
Kaling Pasties are disgusting.
Deschanel I'd rather be naked!
PHOTOS: 'New Girl' -- Inside the Wardrobe Room of Zooey Deschanel's Hit Comedy
Taylor, when have you felt pushed to the limits on Orange?
Deschanel "What scene did you feel just terrible about and wanted to die?"
Rossum "And felt extremely vulnerable in front of a bunch of people?" (Laughter.)
Schilling There are a lot of clothes off and a lot of knives. Everyone has to do a lot of [unpleasant] stuff.
Falco It's equal opportunity.
Schilling Boobs for all and everybody's being shanked! I love naked bodies.
Deschanel Who doesn't?
Is there an audition in your history that was particularly mortifying?
Cuoco-Sweeting I don't think of those things.
Deschanel I used to have a tape of embarrassing moments that played in my head constantly, but I have shut it off.
Schilling I auditioned for commercials when I started out, which are awful. They make you do the weirdest stuff. There was one where there was a mannequin set up, and they're like, "Skip across this bench and plant a |
we want Salt to be full of secrets.
Secrets are a really fun aspect of video games. They keep players intrigued and sucked into the world in which they are playing. It is our goal to continuously implement new secrets and mysteries that will not only clue you into the backstory of Salt, but also keep you wondering, "What else is there?" Because of this intentional design mechanic, we have to keep a lot of what we implement, well, secret. We don't want players to always know what's ahead, as that would ruin the feeling of discovering it for yourself. Salt is about you creating your own adventure and secrets are a large part of that.
Not everything in the game is going to be a secret of course. There are a lot of things to look forward to as we push out updates and you'll be able to see that in our patch notes. Just keep in mind that not everything implemented will always show up in the patch notes. We are intentionally leaving things out, so that you can discover them for yourself.
One particular aspect of this that I've enjoyed is watching players come up with their own theories. It's fun to see players find items and not know what they do or what they are for. All kinds of theories begin to arise (I won't tell you which ones are true), and it shows that our design mechanic is working. I believe that deep down, this all comes back to hand holding. I don't think players really want to be handed everything, but rather they want to discover and overcome challenges on their own. This allows their adventure to become their story and not something designed by the game studio.
Be on the lookout for a new update within the next couple weeks! It just might contain a secret.
- Will Sterling (Audio and Game Designer)
I have. And I love that feeling. Thatis something we wanted to translate into the gameplay of Salt. We want Salt to be full of mystery, new places, and other things for you to discover.Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.
Barack Obama is bad for Israel, especially after the Iran nuclear deal. That is a given for many American Jews. The only American president they despise more, arguably, is Jimmy Carter, who at age 90 announced last week that he has metastasized cancer. When the 39th president leaves us, he will receive the usual glowing eulogies afforded ex-American presidents, yet many Jewish-Americans will listen through gritted teeth, recalling their strong suspicion that Carter was an anti-Semite. After all, during his long post-presidency Carter stood up for Palestinian rights with unseemly zeal, especially in his heretical 2006 book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid.
For many American Jews, it’s hard to recall that it was also Carter who—through vision, hard work and indomitable will—forged a singular agreement that allowed Israel to keep peace with its Arab neighbors for nearly four decades and, more importantly, to use that halcyon time to advance economically and transcend the Arab nations in military and technological strength, creating a world where today Israel no longer has to fear a traditional military attack by any Arab enemy. That agreement, Carter’s 1979 Camp David accord with Egypt—one of the great triumphs of American diplomacy in the 20th century—saved Israel from the main existential threat that had shadowed the Jewish state since its founding in 1948. Does that sound like the legacy of anti-Semite?
Story Continued Below
Barack Obama, whom some American Jews also suspect is anti-Semitic, may have just saved Israel’s existence again—and as profoundly as Carter did. However flawed, compromised and uncertain in its application, the Iran deal is the only thing in the past decade that has come close to stopping Tehran’s relentless march from a few hundred centrifuges to 20,000 and counting. That path would have led ultimately to Israel’s ultimate nightmare, a Mideast nuclear arms race that brings in not only Iran but rich Arab (and Israel-hating) countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Despite a lot of bluffing over recent years about an Israeli attack against Iran, Israeli security experts know a military solution would be a meager stopgap at best, setting Iran back by only a few years, and driving its nuclear program deeper underground. The evidence that many Israelis quietly realize this—despite the incessant caterwauling of Benjamin Netanyahu—is that key members of Israel’s security establishment, the ones who would know, have tentatively backed the Iran deal or at least conceded that Israel can live with it.
Among those experts, Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet, or Israel’s top domestic security agency, who told The Washington Post that the Vienna agreement was a useful way of curbing the Iranian threat. “When negotiations began, Iran was two months away from acquiring enough material for a [nuclear] bomb. Now it will be 12 months,” Ayalon said. That view was echoed by Gen. Yitzhak Ben-Israel, former head of the military’s weapons development and technology industry administration and current head of the Israeli Space Agency, who called it “a reasonable compromise” that “distances the Iranian nuclear threat for a very long time.”
But this is, however informed, a distinctly minority view among Israelis, as well as many American Jews. Though some polls appear to show many American Jews support the deal, the perception that it is very bad for Israel and that Jews in general oppose the deal has put it in jeopardy in Congress: Democratic senate minority-leader-in-waiting Charles Schumer of New York has announced that he would vote against the agreement, and so has another Jewish Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA). Both are precisely the sort of critical Democratic votes that Obama needs to avoid an override of his inevitable veto of congressional disapproval of the deal. Obama himself has raised the stakes, coming dangerously close to accusing AIPAC, the biggest and loudest Israel lobby, of funding the main opposition against the pact. But at American University last week the president was almost apologetic for upsetting the Israelis, saying it would “be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.”
The views of American Jewry are hardly monolithic; indeed despite the things being said about him by some conservative Jews Obama continues to have a higher approval rating among American Jews than he does among the public at large. Liberal Jewish groups like J Street have added to the debate, raising serious questions about Israel’s behavior. And yet many American Jews would concede there is a hard-line orthodoxy that prevails in Washington and demands total devotion to Israel. It is one that Netanyahu exploited in March when he spoke to thundering applause in Congress about Obama’s “very bad deal,” a deal that at that point didn’t even exist. It is this hard-line lobby that writer Peter Beinart found himself permanently at odds with after he dared to argue, in his essay “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” in The New York Review of Books in May 2010 and later in a book, that many young, liberal American Jews are disengaging from Zionism and the pro-Israel orthodoxy in this country because they cannot support much of what Israel does.
Obama is thus only sharing the fate of most modern U.S. presidents who have dared to cross official Israeli policy—and the American Jewish community. Somehow it seems that the ones who have worked hardest to preserve Israel have managed only to earn Israeli and Jewish mistrust and contempt.
After Carter there was George H.W. Bush, who with the 1991 Madrid conference set in motion what became the Oslo peace process—which during Bill Clinton’s subsequent presidency came within a hair’s breadth of achieving a necessary, internationally legal separation from the Palestinians. Most Israelis yearned passionately for this historic outcome. And yet for their troubles the elder Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, also earned the enmity of American Jewry, again for the heresy of defiance. Like Obama and Carter, Bush and Baker came down hard on Israel; like Obama (and Carter at Camp David), they sought to halt settlements in occupied lands and pushed and pushed for a Palestinian settlement, with Baker famously firing off a tough challenge to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir to call the White House at “1-202-456-1414 … when you’re serious about peace.” In the 1992 election, Bush received 15 percent of the Jewish vote, the worst showing by a Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964.
By contrast, an American president who remains popular among American Jews, George W. Bush, casually ditched the Oslo process and at the same time, by invading Iraq without cause—at a time when his attention was required in Afghanistan and Pakistan—virtually ensured the rise of Iran as a great, dangerous and nearly nuclearized power in the Mideast and an existential threat to Israel. What W. did do very effectively—earning the lasting gratitude of many American Jews—was to walk in lockstep with Israel on almost every issue.
***
Why do American presidents seem to get in such trouble for pressing Israel to solve its deepest problems? The tragedy of modern Israel is that economically and technologically the country is full of geniuses and visionaries, but strategically its political leaders sometimes can’t seem to see around the next bend. This is not for lack of brains, of course, but mainly because long-term strategic thought requires enormous political courage in a region of the world where wrenching political compromises must be made because Jews and Arabs live on top of each other. Tragically, two modern Israeli leaders who did seem to grasp a long-term strategic vision for their nation and at the same time possessed the courage and power to implement it—Yitzchak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, both of whom came around to the necessity of major compromises for a two-state solution with the Palestinians—were struck down before they could act, one by an assassin, the other by a stroke. Another, arguably, was Edud Barak, who made deeply painful compromises (at the second Camp David and at Taba, respectively) under tremendous pressure from Bill Clinton but was tripped up in the end by Yasser Arafat, who was fairly deficient in strategic vision himself.
And what of the current Israeli prime minister? Does he possess the strategic vision—and political courage—to match his very considerable acumen in Israeli politics, which has made him one of the longest-serving premiers in Israel’s history? Consider: At a time when the Arab world is overrun with anti-Western Islamist radicals or new militarist dictators (as in Egypt), Netanyahu has failed to seize this unique moment in history and illuminate Israel’s new role to the world as a pro-Western and democratic island in a sea of increasingly anti-Western and unstable enemies. At a time of intense anti-Arab phobia in the West, when a genuine Israeli gesture toward peace with the Palestinians would have won Israel endless admiration—and support—even among European nations that harbor more than their share of anti-Semites, Netanyahu ratcheted up settlements instead. After the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris in January, a vote of solidarity with France would have won Netanyahu admiration even in one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe. Netanyahu did the opposite, impudently calling on French Jews to retreat to Israel. And now, over Iran, Netanyahu has totally isolated his nation at a time when the known world powers have backed the historic Iran agreement.People should be able to say if they wish to die, Baroness Warnock says People with dementia should be able to end their lives if they feel they are a burden to others or to the NHS, according to a respected ethicist. Baroness Mary Warnock, who has made similar calls in recent years, first made her remarks in a Church of Scotland magazine. She told the BBC she believed there were many who "sank into dementia when they would very much prefer to die". But Alzheimer's charities called her remarks "insensitive and ignorant". Around 700,000 people in the UK have dementia and the number is expected to double within 30 years. 'Dread' Lady Warnock says there should be more research to establish when people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease can still be regarded as mentally competent, so that they can make a decision that they wish to be helped to die if they reach a certain point in their illness. The solution to our dementia crisis is not euthanasia
Rebecca Wood, Alzheimer's Research Trust "We need more research to find out at what point one can say people diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia are still mentally competent to make the decision that they would prefer to die, rather than be a burden on their families or the NHS." She praised the recently introduced Mental Capacity Act which gives people the right to appoint someone to act for them if cannot make decisions themselves. But she added: "I still think that there is a very huge number of people who sink into dementia and mental incapacity who would really very much prefer to die rather than continue in the state they are in. "I think that's something most of us dread more then we dread any other form of dying." Baroness Warnock said many people with dementia became unable to swallow - "that's one of the most horrible conditions to be in". "If one wants to avoid that, one should have the entitlement to make it clear what one wants to do, before that situation is reached." But Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, strongly criticised the peer's comments. "Lady Warnock demonstrates a shocking ignorance when espousing her highly insensitive view that people with dementia are 'wasting people's lives' and may have a 'duty to die. "People with dementia can live quite comfortably when cared for properly. "The solution to our dementia crisis is not euthanasia; the answer is more research so we can find new treatments, preventions and a cure.
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StumbleUpon What are these?Trivia apps for the iPhone are hardly a scarce resource, but Drivia is a new app that takes that simple quiz format and puts a different spin on it.
The idea is to keep drowsy drivers from falling asleep behind the wheel using a voice controlled app that doesn’t require them to look away from the road to use. Once the app’s fired up, it will ask you multiple choice questions and you simply shout out “One!”, “Two!” or “Three!” when prompted.
If you’re unresponsive for a period of time, the app gets persistently pesters you with questions and beeps with the aim of keeping you awake. The selection of questions that come with the app are a good introduction, but if you enjoy it you’ll find yourself purchasing additional question packs as in-app purchases pretty quickly.
It’s a simple twist on a staid format, but an interesting one nevertheless. Drivia is the product of three experienced Israeli entrepreneurs, and Eldad Ben Tora, who is described as the project’s Product Owner and Investor tells us the team has spent six months developing the idea of voice-controlled games for drivers.
“Our vision is to upgrade the life of the driver, saving him from hours of boring driving and maybe saving his life too,” he says. “We have some future features on our mind, like other voice based games and maybe even connecting ‘sleepy drivers’ to play and talk while driving- all for the sake of staying awake and alert.”
So, a simple trivia game to start, but some even more interesting ideas for the future.
Drivia is free in the App Store, with in-app purchases to add additional question packs at 69p (or local equivalent) per pack.
Read next: Take the Pain!Guns change the equation in so many ways. They make it harder for police to retreat, and more likely that a stand-off that might have been resolved peacefully will escalate. They make it harder for police to give suspects the benefit of the doubt, and more likely that a suspected criminal may not deserve it.
They make it easier for a mentally ill man to forever alter two families' lives in the name of "revenge."
After the killing of New York police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos over the weekend, it feels perhaps more satisfying to place blame elsewhere: on protesterswho've cried for better policing, on public officials who acknowledge that the protesters' grievances are valid. But both claims deflect attention toward a vague culprit — "anti-police rhetoric" — and away from a more concrete and systemic one: the ever-presence and easy availability of guns.
Ismaaiyl Brinsley killed Liu and Ramos with a semi-automatic pistol. NYPD Officials couldn't immediately determine how Brinsley had obtained the gun — only that it was purchased at a Georgia pawn shop by another man more than 15 years ago. We also know that Brinsley was previously convicted in Georgia and sentenced to two years in prison for illegal gun possession.
Today we should be talking about the guns not simply because one was used Saturday in the shooting deaths of two police officers, but because guns underlie the very tension between police and communities in America that voices saner than Brinsley have been trying to resolve.
In other countries, homicides, police shootings, shootings by police, and gun violence are much more rare. It's more rare that patrolmen even carry guns. It's more rare that the civilians they encounter will be carrying one, too. In this country, by contrast, the ubiquity of firearms — the possibility of a gun, legal or illegal, in any coat pocket or waist band — injects a level of tension into police encounters that may be hard to entirely disarm even with the most thoughtful community policing reforms.
In the United States, the ever-presence of guns makes it seem plausible that a 12-year-old boy handling a toy might actually possess one. And it makes it more likely that an officer responding to him would pull his own trigger. The ever-presence of guns also makes it plausible that an officer interacting with a teenager might fear for his life — and act in that fear. And it makes it plausible — even responsible — that communities who often encounter law enforcement feel they must teach their sons how to respond to policemen capable of killing them.
In comparing American police tactics and relations to other countries, it's hard to separate the role of guns here from all of the mistrust, defensiveness and aggression that arise around them.
"There’s not a big gun culture in Australia," Geoffrey Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied police use of force there, recently told me. "So the cops don’t have to worry the way our cops do. There’s not always a gun in every encounter. They don’t have to think about that."
They're freer to retreat, to reassess, to leave their own weapons holstered.
This doesn't mean that we can't ever improve police tactics in a county where guns are commonplace. Alpert believes policing reforms are possible and worth pursuing. But this does mean that we can't really address police-community relations without talking about the fear of guns tugging at both sides — andhow guns make the job of policing that much harder, how guns fatally narrow the margin of error for poor policework, how guns turn misunderstandings, mental illness and suspicion into something terribly deadly.MARTINEZ — A former Oakland Fire Department captain was sentenced to 150 days in jail Tuesday after pleading guilty before a Contra Costa Superior Court judge to one count of possession of child pornography.
Richard Chew, 58, of Lafayette was arrested Sept. 6. According to a search warrant affidavit, Chew allegedly had shared 195 computer files with an undercover sheriff’s deputy a few weeks earlier. At least three of those files, the affidavit said, contained images or video of young children performing sex acts.
Chew, who has been free on bail, is to turn himself in at a later date to serve his sentence. He also will have to serve three years’ probation, and register as a sex offender.
The Contra Costa Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force started investigating Chew in August; search warrants were soon served on Chew’s Lafayette home and at his Oakland Fire Department office. Images of child pornography were found on a laptop computer belonging personally to Chew, and on two flash drives seized by investigators.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Paul Graves would not say Wednesday who or what alerted law enforcement to investigate Chew in the first place.
He was placed on administrative leave by the fire department immediately after his arrest, and subsequently fired after more than 28 years with the department. Chew had been a departmental voice in reporting buildings that were unsafe in the event of fire. In March, just days before a blaze at a San Pablo Avenue halfway house apartment complex, he warned superiors of the dangerous conditions there.
Chew was charged with two counts of possession of child pornography, and ultimately pleaded guilty to one count.
The Contra Costa task force includes detectives and investigators from the Walnut Creek, Martinez, San Ramon, Concord and Moraga police departments, the Sheriff’s office, the county Probation Department and the District Attorney’s office.January 5, 2014 8 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The attack on capitalism in some intellectual circles has opened up a new front: entrepreneurship itself.
The latest talking point about how unfair capitalism is comes from Rolling Stone, where Occupy Wall Street organizer Jesse Myerson writes about The Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.
There are a lot of pieces pointing out the idiocy of these proposals, noting that it sounds more like satire than a Millennialist Manifesto. (It also seems horribly discriminatory to Millennials themselves, since it works under the assumption that this particular generation doesn't want to work - and shouldn't have to.) But the biggest flaw that business owners and entrepreneurs no doubt see is that it takes direct aim at entrepreneurship and free markets, and fails to see how taking your economic future into your own hands can lead to success.
Let's look at the five points from the viewpoint of entrepreneurship.
Guaranteed jobs. Myerson suggests the government guarantee jobs for all at a living wage. He doesn't suggest how this will be paid for. (Hint: That is because taxes will drive it, and no one likes to discuss taxes.) But here is the greatest misunderstanding: "Imagine a world where people could contribute the skills that inspire them - teaching, tutoring, urban farming, cleaning up the environment, painting murals - rather than telemarketing or whatever other stupid tasks bosses need done to supplement their millions."
Well, that world exists. Entrepreneurship allows people to take what drives them and make a business out of that. In some cases, it is urban farming or wall murals. In other cases, folks can set up one of those "stupid" businesses like telemarketing. Nothing stops a person in this country from pursuing their passion and turning it into a business.
Related: Preaching the Morality of Capitalism
Ironically, guaranteeing a job takes away opportunity. The outcome sought is simply a job, not a successful business. Sure, you are guaranteed the chance to farm beets in Brooklyn, but your ability to take that skill and make it into something where you can grow it, hire workers and sell those beets to a bigger crowd is diminished because the government is removing any barriers to other people getting into your business. It is subsidizing your competition, thus crushing your opportunities for growth. Supporting free-market entrepreneurship rewards your work by allowing you to prosper and grow. A guaranteed job doesn't create an equal opportunity (which entrepreneurship already provides), but rather an equal outcome, which is anathema to an entrepreneurial society.
Social Security for All. This is the biggest head-scratcher. It is a call for universal basic income, where the federal government writes you a check every month. As Myerson writes, it makes participation in our labor force "truly voluntary."
Ummm, why? Yes, we need to have more of a work-life balance. (Maybe.) But work is fulfilling. It helps define who we are. It helps us to support what lifestyle we want. For some, there are simple tastes. Others want the yacht or the country club (or both). These personal life goals help inform the business decisions we make.
Plus, one can argue that universal basic income won't change income inequality. Rather, it might make it worse. As people settle for the lowest income they are guaranteed, there is no cap on what someone can ultimately make (except, theoretically, for the tax burden these people will face to support those who are devoting their lives to their PlayStation 4's). That means the entrepreneurs will continue to make more, while the income is fixed for many.
Take Back the Land. Myerson has suggested a land-value tax before. In short, he promotes a tax for all landowners since they sit "idle" as landlords, making you pay rent (while, in theory, you are idle, too, with your universal basic income). But there is risk in landowning. Generally, we take loans to buy property - and not just personal property, but property for our businesses. We bear that risk because we seek reward. Sometimes that works; other times we fail. But the risk is there for us to take. Risk assessment leads to good decision-making.
Related: The Outrageously Silly Argument Against Uber's Surge Pricing
Also, ownership of property helps define our goals. I want property near enough to where I work to not put an undue burden on my life, so maybe I rent an apartment in New York City. But I also want to live on a golf course, with access to tennis and a pool in a warm climate, so I might buy a summer retreat in Boca. That might sound elitist to some, but I would never suggest I am somehow entitled to either, or, more importantly, that the people who achieved that need to have it taken away. Rather, I can incorporate these goals into my own plan, choosing professions and making lifestyle choices that help me reach that. That might mean starting my own business. That might mean striving to succeed within my enterprise. But the ownership of property is a reward for my labor. Letting anyone, irrespective of what they pay, have access to the same, cheapens that reward and diminishes productivity and drive. Squatters living in a tent on the golf course because they somehow feel, without evidence, that they have a right to live there runs counter to American entrepreneurship. (And, with my swing, is dangerous to the squatters' health.)
Myerson also suggests the government owning all the property, or simply holding land in common trust. But does he honestly think everyone won't assert their "right" to the ocean view? Also, in America, property is part of our dream. The pursuit of happiness sought by our founders was a pursuit of property. Just because rents are high in Hell's Kitchen doesn't mean you change that by destroying our economic system.
Make Everything Owned by Everybody. Rather than follow the Stalin model of turning an agrarian society of Russia into a state-owned industrial superpower like the USSR - killing millions of your own people in the process, incidentally - Myerson suggests that the government own all businesses by buying the stocks and bonds of all businesses as an "investment" in the private sector.
How would this work for entrepreneurs? (Spoiler alert: It can't. But read on anyway.) Someone invests his savings in her business, takes on appropriate risk based on her business plan, manages a business prudently and ethically, pays her employees well and then is told at the end that she doesn't actually own anything for her trouble? Actually, her fellow citizens, who did not lift a finger, own it and get dividends from it?
There would be a complete disincentive to actually create any business at all under that system. With the death of business creation comes a death of innovation. Again, our definition of an entrepreneur is someone who believes she can change the world with an idea scribbled on the back of a napkin. Our system allows for that innovation to happen. Rail all you want about Wal-Mart, but it started as a small business. Could Apple have been created if the government owned the company?
Plus, everyone can own a company. Through public stock, we can be shareholders in companies, and get dividends from those profits based on the risk we decide to take. As equity crowdfunding grows, we have the opportunity to invest in startups more. We can own what we choose. Best of all, we can choose to support which businesses reflect our values.
A Public Bank. Banking in this country is not without its flaws, but Myerson's suggestion that banking be run by the state forgets an important point: It was the government that encouraged some of the riskiest lending behaviors by banks, in the name of the same equality he is advocating.
Also, why can't entrepreneurs start banks or credit unions or manage new ways of lending? Take microlending. That whole area is driven by entrepreneurship - and it would be destroyed by Rolling Stone's Brave New World since the government would monopolize banking. The aforementioned crowdfunding model would never exist if everyone had a right to a loan. And, taking Myerson's plan to its conclusion, should any bank, public or private, offer loans to people who either don't work or have a guaranteed state job with caps on income?
In the end, entrepreneurship can and does offer the solutions to any or all the problems Myerson perceives. A freer market -- which already supports equal opportunity for all, provided you are willing to take a risk -- makes for economically free people. We should not be denied the opportunity to take a chance on ourselves, on our commitment to better our lives and share our passions. Any plan to deny those chances just seems cruel.
Related: Millennials Are Snubbing the Corporate World for EntrepreneurshipApple rises a little bit after earnings release. A preliminary behind the numbers.
As of this writing, Apple closed up 0.74%, but lost 0.84% in after hours trading, following the release of Q4 earnings.
Whether this release was good or bad seems to be in the eye of the beholder as Apple manages to:
It is truly everything to everyone.
Let’s take a look behind the numbers, as we’ll get into the rest of the release in a later post. They had net income of $7.5 billion on net sales of about $37.5 billion for the quarter. That’s a lot of dough, but is anything else going on?
After a seasonal dip in revenue in Q3, revenue increased about 7.1% from the previous quarter. For Q3 2012, revenues also dipped, but they only dipped 11% as we see here:
Q3 2012 Revenue Q4 2012 Revenue % Change Q3 2013 Revenue Q4 2013 Revenue % Change $35.0 $36.0 2.9% $35.3 $37.5 6.2%
Revenue grew fast from Q3 to Q4 from 2012 to 2013, driven by increases in iPhone sales. Which is good.
However, we also see continued declining performance in iPads, which is not good.
Well, for one thing, the average contribution per unit of the iPhone increased from $581 to $619 as Apple introduced an upgraded iPhone product line.
However, there is the iPad, which had a $947 million decline in revenue and a decline in per unit price to $440 from $508.
Here is the breakdown by product category:
Product Q4 2012 Units Q4 2012 Revenue per Product Q4 2012 % of Total Revenue Per Product Q4 2013 Units Q4 2013 Revenue per Product Q4 2013 % of Total Revenue Per Product iPhone 26,910 $16,645 46.3% 33,797 $19,510 52.1% iPad 14,036 $7,133 19.8% 14,079 $6,186 16.5% Mac 4,923 $6,617 18.4% 4,574 $5,624 15.0% iPod 5,344 $820 2.3% 3,498 $573 1.5%
Note: Units in thousands, dollars in millions.
The Christmas season should be an interesting and crucial one in Cupertino to see how Apple progresses as a growth company.Faye Base Convos (WIP?) kyleenim Apr 15th, 2017 ( edited ) 1,597 Never 1,597Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 1.69 KB ================ ===DISCLAIMER=== ================ All the Echoes stuff is just a fantranslation. All of these are the ones based on the ingame lines I found, but I might have missed some along the way. I'll be doing my best to be as accurate as possible without being too literal but I'm not 100% fluent so these will not be perfect. Please try to link the paste instead of just reposting since I might always go back and fix stuff. ================ ================ Faye Ch 1 Alm, are you getting used to all the fighting? Yeah...Alm was brave even back in the day...remember? You defeated those soldiers that were harrassing us. When you came to help...you were like a prince, Alm. Ufufufu, don't be embarraseed. It's the truth. Back then...even before back then you were always my prince. Ch 3 Hey Alm, I heard that you fought with Celica? It can't be helped. You two haven't seen each other in years. It makes sense Celica doesn't know how you feel. I think I know how you think, Alm. Hmmm...no, it's not about knowing. Alm's thoughts are my thoughts. I won't disobey you Alm. Just say one word (and I'll obey). So, is it okay if I continue to stay by your side, right? Ch 5 (can access this after Ch 5 also) Rigel is a cold place, isn't it? It's completely different from Zofia. I never thought I would come all the way here when I left Ram Village. I wonder if my mother, father, and grandmother are healthy and okay right now...I have been writing to them though. I just got a letter from them too. They keep saying all I write about is what Alm is doing and that I should write more about myself. It's really tough hearing that from them...but all I want to write about is about what you did Alm!
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================ ===DISCLAIMER=== ================ All the Echoes stuff is just a fantranslation. All of these are the ones based on the ingame lines I found, but I might have missed some along the way. I'll be doing my best to be as accurate as possible without being too literal but I'm not 100% fluent so these will not be perfect. Please try to link the paste instead of just reposting since I might always go back and fix stuff. ================ ================ Faye Ch 1 Alm, are you getting used to all the fighting? Yeah...Alm was brave even back in the day...remember? You defeated those soldiers that were harrassing us. When you came to help...you were like a prince, Alm. Ufufufu, don't be embarraseed. It's the truth. Back then...even before back then you were always my prince. Ch 3 Hey Alm, I heard that you fought with Celica? It can't be helped. You two haven't seen each other in years. It makes sense Celica doesn't know how you feel. I think I know how you think, Alm. Hmmm...no, it's not about knowing. Alm's thoughts are my thoughts. I won't disobey you Alm. Just say one word (and I'll obey). So, is it okay if I continue to stay by your side, right? Ch 5 (can access this after Ch 5 also) Rigel is a cold place, isn't it? It's completely different from Zofia. I never thought I would come all the way here when I left Ram Village. I wonder if my mother, father, and grandmother are healthy and okay right now...I have been writing to them though. I just got a letter from them too. They keep saying all I write about is what Alm is doing and that I should write more about myself. It's really tough hearing that from them...but all I want to write about is about what you did Alm!As Alabama continues to enforce the harshest immigration law in the land, faith, civil rights, and Hispanic group leaders came to Capitol Hill today to ask lawmakers to put an end to the “man-made humanitarian crisis” unfolding in the state.
Telling stories of racial profiling, harassment, violent thefts, assault, threat of murder, and worse, the panel of leaders explained how Alabama has made it so clear that undocumented immigrants are unwelcome, that the state has become a sponsor of hate against all immigrants and Hispanics.
As Mary Bauer, Legal Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center and one of the speakers today said:
This is a comprehensive law that was designed by its drafters to affect every aspect of an immigrant’s life, and it has done so. And the damage is extreme.
She and the other panelists spoke of undocumented immigrants in Alabama who have been refused all state services, and so could not obtain birth certificates for their American-born children; the husband of a nine-month pregnant woman who saw no choice but to drive her to Florida to give birth; a court judge who told a domestic abuse victim that he would report her to ICE; another court judge who said that anyone who asked for an interpreter would be suspected of being undocumented and reported; an American citizen from Ohio who was barred from making a purchase simply because he did not have an Alabama state ID; an immigrant outside his workplace who was threatened by armed white men in a pickup truck who told him they would kill him if he was still there tomorrow.
Marielena Hincapie, Executive Director of the National Immigration Law Center and the moderator of the event, described how one undocumented man had agreed to take back a car that he had previously sold to a woman some time ago. When he—with his wife and two-year old child—went to meet the woman at a gas station, she asked that they follow her to her home. She instead led them to an alley, where another car of armed individuals forced the family down to the ground and stole their car and all their possessions.The Drama of Chicago Cubs Baseball
What can even be said about a baseball game like the one we all endured last night?
Matt Paolelli Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 13, 2017
Anyone who lived through Game 7 of the 2016 World Series run probably assumed that they had suffered through the most insane, rollercoaster ride of a ballgame that could ever be concocted by the most gifted Hollywood screenwriters. And it probably was — until last night.
This whole NLDS was already earning a reputation for strangeness, as the Cubs and Nats — both formidable offensively productive teams during the regular season — were participating |
the princely states remained a major question. The partition resulted in the creation of Pakistan.
Republic of India (1950–present)
India has fought many wars and minor conflicts during its period as a republic.
See also
NotesIf you’ve ever had a cell phone, you know how frustrating it can be when your network fails. Areas with little to no signal can be absolutely infuriating, and overcrowded events can be just as bad. To sidestep this problem, the folks at GoTenna have developed their own ad-hoc network for sending messages. It’s an incredible concept, but with an asking price higher than most smartphones, there’s no way that this implementation is going to take off anytime soon.
The GoTenna is essentially a small, low-power (2 watts) radio transceiver. It’s powered by a lithium-ion battery, and it connects to your smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth. The company behind GoTenna is rather vague about the technical specifications of the device, but given the max claimed range (up to 50 miles), it probably transmits on a very low frequency (and probably has very low max bandwidth). GoTenna creates an ad-hoc, encrypted network between any other GoTennas in range. It’s kind of like a smartphone equivalent of a CB radio.
You can connect the GoTenna to any iOS or Android device via Bluetooth. After that, all you have to do is download the GoTenna app and fire off a message to anyone else who might be in range. Depending on your elevation and environment, the signal can travel upwards of 50 miles. By default, only your intended recipient will be able to read your message, but a “shout” feature allows messaging any GoTenna user within range. It doesn’t use cell towers or WiFi at all, so it’ll work even if all other forms of communication are unavailable.
In the video embedded above, the GoTenna team lays out a number of use cases for this device. People out in the boonies without cell signal and people at crowded events are the target demographic here, but it does require that everyone buys into the GoTenna platform. If you’re the only one with this radio in your pocket, it’s not going to do you a lick of good.
Currently, the GoTenna is being offered for pre-order at a cost of $150 per pair. Once enough units are sold to fund the initial production run, the price will jump up to $300 per pair. I’m sure that it’s quite expensive to get this handy gadget produced, but that price point just isn’t low enough for mainstream success. Only the most hardcore hikers and gadget enthusiasts will be willing to drop $300 on this device. It’s a clever idea, but its limited utility doesn’t justify that kind of expense for most people. [Read: How to build your own GPS receiver.]
Frankly, this kind of tech would probably be a lot better if it was built into smartphones. An ad-hoc or mesh network for messaging sounds incredibly useful, but it will take a company like Apple or Google to bring that concept to the mainstream. If this functionality was just baked into every iPhone or Galaxy S, it would make a lot more sense for consumers. As it stands, this expensive smartphone accessory seems to be little more than a novel curiosity.During his 12 seasons with the Stars, Richard Matvichuk became a fan favorite with the Dallas faithful for several reasons. One, he was a hard-nosed, gritty defenseman who was part of a Stars rearguard that was among the best in the National Hockey League.Two, besides delivering strong play in the back end he also contributed his share of points for some Dallas teams that didn’t really need any extra offense. On the ice, “Matty” was a bulldog and as tough as they come but off the pond, he was affable, approachable and yet another personality who embodied what those Stars teams were all about under Ken Hitchcock. So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he was one of many players fans took a liking to.In 2004, he made his way to New Jersey, following a similar path of ex-Dallas teammates Jamie Langenbrunner and Joe Nieuwendyk. He skated in 62 games for the Devils in 2005-06 but because of a back injury, only made the ice for one contest the following year. He gave it one last shot in Columbus in 2006 since Hitchcock was the Blue Jackets’ new head coach but while his will was strong, his back was not. So, he hung up his skates for good.“It was a tough go,” Matvichuk recalled. “I went in with [Ken] Hitchcock with open arms. It just didn’t work out. I thought I had a good chance but it just didn’t work out. It was one of those things at that point in my career and after back surgery, I knew I had to hang ‘em up.”Since retiring, he’s remained in the Dallas area, coaching his kids in baseball and hockey while also enjoying quality time with his family. They currently reside in Southlake.But like many former players, he’s now itching to re-immerse himself in the game, a way to give back considering hockey has given him so much over the years.“Yeah, I’m trying to get my name out there now and see what happens. I want to get back into the game and give the opportunity to some of these kids that all the coaches gave to me when I was playing,” Matvichuk said. “I’m only 38 now and they kind of say the magic number [to get back into the game] is 40. I’ll throw my name out a couple times and see what happens.”Some former players might prefer scouting over coaching or vice versa, but for this former Dallas standout, it really doesn’t matter what capacity he’s in just as long as he is involved with hockey once again.“No, it really wouldn’t matter. As long as I could get back into the organization, enjoy it and have fun. If it’s scouting or it’s coaching, whatever comes along [I’d be interested],” Matvichuk said.And since he remains in the area and also considering he had his most productive seasons in the NHL with the Stars, were the Dallas organization to offer him a way to get back in, he would jump at said chance in very short order.“Absolutely, 100 percent, this organization has been great to me. I still feel that I’m a part of the Dallas Stars and always will be,” Matvichuk said. “So, hopefully if there’s an opportunity my name will come up.”Should he land a coaching or scouting position, he knows he’d join several other members of that Stars 1999 Stanley Cup-winning team who are currently working in similar capacities around the league, guys like Derian Hatcher (Flyers) and Pat Verbeek (Lightning).“Hatcher’s in Philly and there are a bunch of guys out there. We’re all getting to that age now as players where we will start to get the coaching positions and the scouting positions to come along,” Matvichuk said. “When we were here in ’99, there were 11 or 12 of us who played together as players. I think four or five of the guys are getting back into it. It’s good to see.”Originally, he was the eighth overall pick in the 1991 NHL Entry Draft, taken by the Minnesota North Stars. Like several other members of that ’99 Cup team, he remembers, quite vividly being part of that inaugural Dallas Stars team in 1993. He looks at how much the game has grown in the Metroplex since and takes great pride in that.“It’s funny. When at his press conference, Mike [Modano] talked about when he first came down here in ’93, every time the whistle blew, the fans cheered,” Matvichuk recalled. “They didn’t know what they were cheering for but it was a great atmosphere. We knew that for us to compete in Dallas with the fans and with the Cowboys that we had to win. Luckily we did that.”And speaking of Modano, his longtime teammate here in Big D, he was somewhat sad to see Mo call it quits but also considers himself quite fortunate to have skated alongside a guy most consider the best American-born player ever to play in the NHL.For that fact alone, this former Star feels that Mo’s spot on hockey’s version of Mount Rushmore is all but assured.“It’s unbelievable. For me, you’ve got to put Mike in the upper echelon with the Leimieuxs and Gretzkys knowing that he is the best American player to ever play,” Matvichuk said. “For him to have the career that he did and for him to do what he did in Dallas is just awesome to see.”As a member of that magical ’99 team that brought Lord Stanley’s Bowl to DFW, he will be forever linked with that group. That’s just fine with him because that experience is one that will stick with him for the rest of his life.“It was fun. I remember the start of training camp, we went in knowing that anything less than the Stanley Cup would be a big failure for us. We went into every game thinking that we weren’t going to lose,” Matvichuk said. “We went through stretches of 10-game and 15-game winning streaks where if we lost a game, it was upsetting. I think we lost like 19 games that year and went into the playoffs pretty good. We dealt with a little adversity like when Mike [Modano] breaks his wrist and when Benoit Hogue and Brett Hull were out with knee injuries. But we all found a way just to dig in there and keep it going.”Since he’s remained in the area, he has continued to keep close tabs on how his former club has been faring in the NHL. He likes the recent hiring of Glen Gulutzan as the Stars’ new head coach as well as several personnel changes and admits this year’s group figures to be a fun product to see on the pond.“I played with Gully, the head coach in Saskatoon and I love his philosophy. I’ve talked to him a little bit,” Matvichuk said. “They’ve got a good team. They’re going to score some goals. The goaltending’s there. I think with the addition of Sheldon Souray, his leadership and experience and with Stephane Robidas back there, they’ll be OK.”It's eccentric and completely outrageous but it is gorgeous. This cape, on display in the exhibition "Golden Spider Silk" at London's Victoria & Albert Museum through June 5, is made out of the threads that a spider uses to make its web. The colour is completely natural: exactly what comes out of the spider.
Some statistics: It took four years and one million spiders to make the cape, completed in 2011. Each morning 80 people in Madagascar go out and collect the female Golden Orb (Nephilo madagascariensis) spiders which are common to the highlands. The spiders are 2" in size and fit in the palm of your hand.
They are brought to the silking facility, and the "silk" which is emitted from the underside of the spider's abdomen is collected. You can get 40 yards of it from one spider. Then they take the spiders back out into nature in the afternoon and set them free. They are not hurt during the process.
The silk strands are collected and put onto the bobbins. It takes 24 strands to make a single thread. However this may be too fine so usually they use 96 strand thread. The spider silk thread is then woven on a loom. Whew!
So how did this happen. Two men, Simon Peers, a textile designer and researcher and Nicholas Godley, an entrepreneur, initiated the project. Simon Peers spoke to a rapt audience at the Museum about the work. He has lived in Madagascar for over twenty years and was fascinated by the weaving and textiles of the land. Peers wanted to revive the local traditions of weaving and whilst doing research stumbled upon the story of this extracted silk. It was an irresistible draw; he was hooked.
He explained that the idea is at least three hundred years old. The Solomon Islanders grabbed the webs with bamboo poles from the trees; they made masks from it as ritualistic objects.
It has been written about in text books, and Rube-Goldberg-like contraptions have been created by a French colonial administrator to do it (see above). At the end of the nineteenth century there was even a college to train spider silk weavers and then because of the many difficulties and expense the industry died out.
The two men worked for eight years to develop this project. In 2004 they started "silking" spiders and by 2008 it became a reality.
The first thing that they made out of the silk was this magnificent shawl. It took four years to complete and is woven from threads twisted from 96 individual spider strands. The heavier brocaded part is made from 960 twisted strands.
Then they moved onto the cape. Why a cape format? It was conceived by the designer as a homage to the spider using both embroidery and brocade. It is decorated with lovely spider images, flowers and a clasp that looks like a web.
The cape is superman and it is liturgical as well. It summarizes our conflicted views of spiders: on the one hand they are the stuff of nightmares and horror films, and on the other there is the poetry and beauty of the spider's web.I recently posted a scatter plot (below) on Facebook/Twitter of preliminary metadata that we are accumulating as part of the American Gut project – which includes, among other things, a questionnaire of 50 + questions and a 7 day food journal. Plotting participants self-reported height, weight, and 7 days of dietary info (recorded using an online calorie counter), we can plot percentage of daily calories from fat (all sources) against body mass index (BMI) – which we calculate from the height and weight of the participant. While the data is of the dreaded self-reported kind, the lack of any significant correlation between % of daily calories from fat and BMI, is still very interesting (note even if you remove the various obvious outliers, the correlation – or lack of – is the same). In other words, as fat goes up in the diet, BMI does not per se. (Note we just started sequencing poo samples. Will be able to see how the metadata correlates with the microbial data in a few months – stay tuned).
As I look at the preliminary generic metadata (below) and follow the conversation around the benefits of a low carb diet, I continue to be concerned about the low-carbers gut microbiota (note I eat meat daily, so my diet is high in fat, animal protein – but also dietary fiber – as I eat a large diversity and qty of plants. Though I don’t consume many grains in any form). While there is no denying the wonderful results many people enjoy on a low (and even lower) carb diet – specifically weight loss, which is well-documented now in the peer-review research – the impact on the gut microbiota is not well understood. As we can see from our accumulating metadata (ultimate goal is 20,000 participants – we are at 6,000 now – with complete metadata on ~1,000 so far), we are likely to have a decent sample of low carb dieters (hopefully). This data will allow us to compare the gut microbial communities of this population against other dietary strategies. (But again, please note we have not completed sequencing of low, low carb eaters and so are not presenting any of that data [the plot is just metadata on fat and BMI – which tells us nothing about gut health of the various dots in the plot]. The following discussion is based on some general observations based on the existing literature about fermentation, pH, and its impact on the gut microbiome).
Please note the data in the plot above is self-reported and preliminary. As with all self-reported data, its not ideal. As data points are added over the coming months, will be interesting to see if the (lack) correlation holds. The average age of the persons in the plot is 46 – the youngest is 2, the oldest is 90. 55% are female, 45% male. ~99% are from the U.S. The point of showing this particular plot is that “these particular data” do not show any correlation with fat intake as a % of calories and BMI. Again, this has NOTHING to do with gut bacteria – at the moment – just an interesting “lack” of correlation (and should be interesting/useful for those following a HF diet).
Depending on whom you talk with, a low carb diet is many different things to many people. I think most misinterpret a Paleo or Primal lifestyle as somehow low carb. It can be, but most folks eat a diversity and quantity of whole plants that exceed that of the average American – often by a long shot. It can sometimes be a little low carb-like due the absence of high caloric foods made from grains. But I often find people who skip grains, sugar and the like as really paying attention to whole plants in their diet – which is, of course, a good thing. But a bona fide low, low carb eater is another animal all together. Whether you draw that line at 25, 50, or 75g a day of carbs, its low I’m afraid from the perspective of your gut bugs. Especially if those carbs contain a limited amount of resistant starch and other dietary fibers – food for gut bacteria.
That said, even though someone who eats as much as 200-500g of carbs a day can still be starving their guts bugs if those foods contain little to now indigestible substrates (fiber), a generic rule of thumb (albeit an ugly measure) is less overall carbohydrates – especially when you start dropping below 75-100g a day – translates into a dramatic drop in the amount of food reaching your colon where the vast majority of your intestinal microbial community resides. (There are exceptions to every rule, but follow my logic for a moment).
When it comes to the health and well being of your gut microbes, nothing matters more than fermentable substrates (You can read about here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here – you get the idea). As the rules/tenants of basic microbial ecology go, a reduction in fermentable substrates derived from carbohydrates means less energy sources for the microbes – who depend on host-derived substrates as well, as in the case of mucin-degraders like Akkermansia. As fermentation drops, so to does the byproducts of fermentation which include short chain fatty acids (primarily acetate, butyrate, propionate), organic acids, and gases like hydrogen. All of this can and will dramatically shift the pH of the colonic environment. As it stands in a healthy or normal gut, the pH of the colon changes from proximal to distal end, being more acidic in the proximal (front) end than the tail end – mainly as a function of more rapid fermentation as food items empty from the small intestine. As the pH shifts to being more alkaline from less fermentation, a number of shoes begin to drop (or can).
A less acidic environment means acid sensitive groups of bacteria, like those in the Phylum Proteobacteria, which includes a who’s who of bad guys like strains of E. Coli, Salmonella, Vibrio, Helicobacter, might bloom – not a good thing. You see the same blooms following antibiotic treatment. In addition, as pH shifts away from acidic, the genus Bacteroides can also bloom as well, gaining an ecological niche in this less acidic environment courtesy of a low carb diet. For those of you keeping score, many talk about the American gut in general being dominated by Bacteroides as a function of our high fat, high sugar diet. The reality is, it might have to do with what we are not eating – dietary fiber (of all kinds). The all-important butyrate producers Roseburia spp. and Eubacterium also drop in abundance as pH shifts away from acidic as well. A drop in fecal butyrate and butyrate producing bacteria was demonstrated in an elegant study comparing diets of varying amounts of carbs. Given the importance of butyrate in colonic health, any dietary strategy that potentially shifts pH away from acidity as a function of reduced fermentation, might contribute to various forms of IBD.
So, low carb equals a less acidic colonic environment due to the drop in fermentation (and I presume harder, and less frequent stools as a function of reduced biomass from bacteria – or maybe not). As pH shifts, prospects for opportunistic pathogens increase, as does opportunities for gram-negative bacteria like Bacteroides and Enterobacter. When you add this up – and a lot of more shifts in the microbial ecology of the low carb gut – you most certainly have a classic case of microbial dysbiosis – as the name implies, an imbalance. This dysbiosis can lead to issues associated with IBD, autoimmune disease, metabolic disorders and so on. But again, a large cohort of low, low carb dieters has never been looked at using 16S rRNA methods. So the jury is still out – but will be fascinating to see.
A bit of a paradox in all of this is the increased likelihood that a low carb microbial community will most certainly lead to increased gut permeability – a well-known phenomenon whereby microbial parts (lipopolysaccharides, which leads to metabolic endotoxemia) and whole microbes themselves (bacteremia) leak from the intestinal track into the blood, leading to low-grade inflammation that is at the root of metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and heart disease. So it is a paradox that a leaky gut that can be triggered from a low carb (high fat) diet – and a possible increase in gram-negative bacteria and a reduction in healthy bacteria like Bifidobacterium – doesn’t result in weight gain as demonstrated in study after study in mice and humans. Weird.
I hope people do not take this as some kind of attack on low carb diets – couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is NO AGENDA. Again, NO AGENDA. (It’s worth noting I consume a high fat, high protein, high fiber diet). Just wanted to point out some obvious concerns (maybe unfounded) and that if we get a large enough sample of low carb folks in American Gut, we might be able to provide some interesting insight – or not. Who knows, maybe low carb folks have super healthy gut microbiota (whatever that is).
So to my low carb brothers and sisters out there, try and eat a little more fibrous material if you can – diversity matters – and help your gut bugs help you. It’s what evolution intended.
**If you follow a low (or low, low) carb diet, would be great if you joined American Gut. The more people we have for each dietary group, the more we will hopefully learn.Jose Enrique is renowned for being one of the loudest characters within the Liverpool squad – but even he admits he's been a bit more sprightly than usual lately.
The Spaniard is in buoyant mood around Melwood having returned to Barclays Premier League action after a 10-month layoff due to injury after coming on as a late substitute against Tottenham Hotspur on August 31.
Enrique concedes that enforced absence has served to heighten his appreciation for the game and he's relishing every training session as if it were his first.
"I've always appreciated football, I've always loved training and I've always loved playing even more," he told Liverpoolfc.com. "But now, every time I go into training, I am like a child getting back with the team.
"Last year, I came to train alone all of the time while my teammates were outside. For a long time, I was alone and training in the gym because I was injured.
"Now I am training with my teammates again, I feel like the happiest guy in the world. I want to play - but I am so happy just to be back and training.
"It is true what they say in life, when something happens to you, you appreciate things more. That's what's happened to me."
Watch the video here »
Enrique took part in a behind-closed-doors friendly with Wolverhampton Wanderers at Melwood on Friday - a game he confesses he approached like a top-flight fixture.
"I am looking forward. We had a friendly at Melwood recently and I looked forward to it like it was a Premier League game," he smiled. "10 months without playing is a long, long time.
"I have been training every day, but games are completely different, so these types of friendlies are fantastic. I feel like a child right now, I am so happy.
"Even in my personal life, I am so happy right now - I'm really, really good. I feel really happy here."
As issue in his right knee that required surgery meant Enrique made just nine appearances last season.
The 28-year-old acknowledges it was one of the toughest periods he's faced in his career.
"It was difficult because I didn't know at which point I'd be back, so psychologically it was really hard for me," he explained.
"Luckily, this is all in the past - I am fit again, I've been good and I'm now hopefully injury-free again."
Now back in contention, Enrique is now aiming to stake his claim for a regular starting berth in the left-back position.
But it's not only fitness he's hoping to build up over the coming weeks and months - confidence will be key too, he believes.
Enrique said: "To get to your maximum level, it depends a lot on the confidence of the player. I think it's the most important thing.
"You see players have an amazing season and then have a bad season. People say, 'why is that?' but it's all about confidence. Players don't go from being the best to the worst in one year - it's about confidence. I am still trying to get to my best and I want to get that confidence.
"When I arrived here, for the first six months I felt I played well and I want to get to that level. And I will get there - I know that."Get the biggest Newcastle United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Mo Diame has revealed that his friend Hatem Ben Arfa was the inspiration for his move to Newcastle – and reckons the winger would love to come back to United one day.
Diame is beginning to really find his feet on Tyneside and scored the winner at Burton which ensured the Magpies will be Christmas number one in the Championship.
It comes after a slow start at St James’ Park, a club he moved down a division in the summer to join in order to play for Rafa Benitez.
Diame says he still keeps in touch with Ben Arfa, who moved to Paris-Saint Germain in the summer and is struggling to get regular game time. Diame feels that he will make a success of his move to the Ligue 1 giants, but says that he still thinks fondly of Newcastle – the club he left when Alan Pardew was manager.
Diame spoke to Ben Arfa, who he also played with at Hull, before moving to United and said his friend had no hesitation in recommending the club to him.
“Me and Hatem are friends. We had two seasons together at Clairefontaine. We still keep in touch now. He’s not playing a lot at Paris-Saint Germain, but everyone knows the player he is. He will be back,” he said.
(Image: The Chronicle)
“It’s true, Hatem told me to sign for Newcastle when I asked. He told me what a massive club Newcastle is. He was very happy here. He told me he had a good relationship with the fans – he loved it, he told me straight away to come to Newcastle.
“It would be nice for him to come back! He’s a player who could help the team and imagine him coming back and having happy fans who are behind him again. I think it would be good for him and I know he still loves the club.”
poll loading Would you take Hatem Ben Arfa back at United? 5000+ VOTES SO FAR YES NO
For Diame, Boxing Day will see him come up against the club whose hearts he broke at Wembley back in May.
He was part of the team that won the play-offs with Hull – and scored against Sheffield Wednesday. He is more than aware of the threat the Owls pose.
He said: “Sheffield Wednesday is a big club. Unfortunately for them they played against us (Hull) in the final last year but they are a good team. They manage the ball very well, they’re a good passing team who get a lot of possession and they’ve got players who are very good in possession.
“It will be a tough game, but it’s a game when we’re at home, we can show that we are a good side and we can win it.”
Diame says that he’s really enjoying his time at St James’ Park – and is learning every day from Benitez. “It’s great to work with him,” he says.
“In every single session you can feel his experience. He’s a great manager and you feel from what he achieves that he’s got a lot of experience and when he talks to you, you listen.
“I like working with him. I feel that he has taught me a lot already. You train every day and every week and you feel you can learn something every day: you’re more focused and you listen a lot.
“When you work with someone like this, you have to take everything you can from him.”Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, [download the Unity3D package]
If you are using Unity3D you may be familiar with image effects. They are scripts which, once attached to a camera, alter its rendering output. Despite being presented as standard C# scripts, the actual computation is done using shaders. So far, materials have been applied directly to geometry; they can also be used to render offscreen textures, making them ideal for postprocessing techniques. When shaders are used in this fashion, they are often referred as screen shaders.
Step 1: The shader
Let’s start with a simple example: a postprocessing effect which can be used to turn a coloured image to greyscale.
The way to approach this problem is assuming the shader is provided with a texture, and we want to output its grayscaled version.
Shader "Hidden/BWDiffuse" { Properties { _MainTex ("Base (RGB)", 2D) = "white" {} _bwBlend ("Black & White blend", Range (0, 1)) = 0 } SubShader { Pass { CGPROGRAM #pragma vertex vert_img #pragma fragment frag #include "UnityCG.cginc" uniform sampler2D _MainTex; uniform float _bwBlend; float4 frag(v2f_img i) : COLOR { float4 c = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv); float lum = c.r*.3 + c.g*.59 + c.b*.11; float3 bw = float3( lum, lum, lum ); float4 result = c; result.rgb = lerp(c.rgb, bw, _bwBlend); return result; } ENDCG } } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Shader "Hidden/BWDiffuse" { Properties { _MainTex ( "Base (RGB)", 2D ) = "white" { } _bwBlend ( "Black & White blend", Range ( 0, 1 ) ) = 0 } SubShader { Pass { CGPROGRAM #pragma vertex vert_img #pragma fragment frag #include "UnityCG.cginc" uniform sampler2D _MainTex ; uniform float _bwBlend ; float4 frag ( v2f _ img i ) : COLOR { float4 c = tex2D ( _MainTex, i. uv ) ; float lum = c. r *. 3 + c. g *. 59 + c. b *. 11 ; float3 bw = float3 ( lum, lum, lum ) ; float4 result = c ; result. rgb = lerp ( c. rgb, bw, _bwBlend ) ; return result ; } ENDCG } } }
This shader won’t alter the geometry, so there is no need for a vertex function; there’s a standard, “empty” vertex function is called vert_img. We also don’t define any input or output structure, using the standard one provided by Unity3D which is called v2f_img.
Line 20 takes the colour of the current pixel, sampled from _MainTex, and calculate its greyscaled version. As nicely explained by Brandon Cannaday in a post with a similar topic, the magic numbers.3,.59 and.11 used represent the sensitivity of the Human eye to the R, G and B components. Long story short: they’ll make a nicer greyscale image, based on the perceived luminosity. You can also just average the R, G and B channels, but you won’t get a result as nicer as this one.
Line 24 interpolates the original colour and the new one using _bwBlend as a blending coefficient.
This shader is not really intended to be used for 3D models; for this reason its name starts with Hidden/, which won’t make it appear in the drop-down menu of the material inspector.
Step 2: The C# script
The next step is to make this shader working as a postprocessing effect. MonoBehaviours have an event called OnRenderImage which is invoked every time a new frame has to be rendered on the camera they are attached to. We can use this event to intercept the current frame and edit it, before it’s rendered on the screen.
using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; [ExecuteInEditMode] public class BWEffect : MonoBehaviour { public float intensity; private Material material; // Creates a private material used to the effect void Awake () { material = new Material( Shader.Find("Hidden/BWDiffuse") ); } // Postprocess the image void OnRenderImage (RenderTexture source, RenderTexture destination) { if (intensity == 0) { Graphics.Blit (source, destination); return; } material.SetFloat("_bwBlend", intensity); Graphics.Blit (source, destination, material); } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 using UnityEngine ; using System. Collections ; [ ExecuteInEditMode ] public class BWEffect : MonoBehaviour { public float intensity ; private Material material ; // Creates a private material used to the effect void Awake ( ) { material = new Material ( Shader. Find ( "Hidden/BWDiffuse" ) ) ; } // Postprocess the image void OnRenderImage ( RenderTexture source, RenderTexture destination ) { if ( intensity == 0 ) { Graphics. Blit ( source, destination ) ; return ; } material. SetFloat ( "_bwBlend", intensity ) ; Graphics. Blit ( source, destination, material ) ; } }
Line 13 creates a private material. We could have provided a material directly from the inspector, but there’s the risk of that being shared between other instances of BWEffect. Perhaps a better option would be to provide the script with the shader itself, rather than using its name as a string.
Line 26 is where the magic happens. The function Blit takes a source RenderTexture, process it with the provided material and renders it onto the specified destination. Since Blit is typically used for postprocessing effects, it already initialises the property _MainTex of the shader with what the camera has rendered so far. The only parameters which has to be initialised manually is the blending coefficient. Line 19 skips the usage of the shader, if the effect has been disabled.
The CRT effect
One of the most used effects in games today is the CRT. Whether you grew up with old monitors or not, games are constantly using them to give that good vibe of old and retro. Games such as Alien Isolation and ROUTINE, for instance, owe lot of their charm to CRT monitors. This section will show how is possible to recreate a very simple CRT effect using screen shaders.
First of all, let’s look at what makes CRT monitors:
White noise Scanlines Distortion Fading
Rather then using a single shader, we’ll use four of them. This is not very efficient, but it shows how post processing effects can be stacked one on top of the other. For the white noise and the fading effect we will rely on Noise and Grain and Vignette and Chromatic Aberration filters.
Scanlines
The effect will have RGB lines, which will appear in screen space. As seen before, it has two components: a shader, and a script which is attached to the camera. This time, however, we also need an external material ( BWEffect creates its own material in Awake). This is because the scanline effect requires a texture which is easier to pass to a material, rather than to a script.
CRT.shader Shader "Hidden/CRTDiffuse" { Properties { _MainTex ("Base (RGB)", 2D) = "white" {} _MaskTex ("Mask texture", 2D) = "white" {} _maskBlend ("Mask blending", Float) = 0.5 _maskSize ("Mask Size", Float) = 1 } SubShader { Pass { CGPROGRAM #pragma vertex vert_img #pragma fragment frag #include "UnityCG.cginc" uniform sampler2D _MainTex; uniform sampler2D _MaskTex; fixed _maskBlend; fixed _maskSize; fixed4 frag (v2f_img i) : COLOR { fixed4 mask = tex2D(_MaskTex, i.uv * _maskSize); fixed4 base = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv); return lerp(base, mask, _maskBlend ); } ENDCG } } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Shader "Hidden/CRTDiffuse" { Properties { _MainTex ( "Base (RGB)", 2D ) = "white" { } _MaskTex ( "Mask texture", 2D ) = "white" { } _maskBlend ( "Mask |
in the world with his name - Cooler Master. But, now that is not important, this news is only about teams and their lineups! Below you can find seven teams, who confirmed to participate on good event with name -Here is just seven teams with their lineups, who confirmed to participate on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive European Championship! In next news we publish more teams, who also confirmed to participate on tournament, so stay tuned onfor more and more informations about this spectacle. Our Match Tickers will bring you full coverage of this championship, groups, matches, all results and more. If you are interested for more informations, check out this link - E-Frag.net/euchamp Source: E-FRAG.netPITTSBURGH (KDKA/AP) — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that Pittsburgh Police officers no longer have to live within the city limits.
The state’s highest court ruled unanimously Monday in favor of the police union, which argued that the option of living outside the city would give officers greater choice in schools and housing.
Officers had been required to live in the city since 1902. City voters made the mandate a permanent part of Pittsburgh’s home rule charter several years ago.
Union President Robert Swartzwelder called Monday’s decision a “great victory” for police.
MORE COURT RULING: After Supreme Court residency ruling, Mayor Peduto says he wants police to continue living in neighborhoods they serve. — Ralph Iannotti (@IannottiRalph) May 22, 2017
Mayor Bill Peduto said in a statement that residents “expressed overwhelming support for the residency requirement, and we want our police officers to continue to live in the neighborhoods and communities that they serve.”
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(© Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)@DADDYgoneCRAZY3
@upindat
Maka and I, we work "hard" to find all Collectibles for the User, We compare with each other and share our Information with each other. Currently we are "together" at Mission 10 and today (germany 11 clock in the morning atm) we / i try to reach 13-15 and compare (different time zones, germany <> Canada, i wake up, maka go sleeping, you know what i mean)
The "Problem" is, Alien Isolation is the first Game since Years which is really hard to search through and find Collectibles, the Alien you know, is so frustrating and demotivate when this fu*** part kill you over and over again when you searching a Mission and you have to replay the last 10-30min again...... and no one knows whether he has 100% until reach the End / Achievement plops.
The other Reason is what Maka say, the copycats.....
Maka brings out aka release M1 & M2, after that, the videos were tons of copied. Maka wait some days before M3 & M4 comes out, no one release a new Video with collectibles. Maka bring M3 & M4 out and the same Copycats Game begins....
Why call this Channels "Guide" channels when they searching etc nothing and wait until other Person like Maka and me release content? The better Name is Copycats Channels...
That is so frustrating too and sorry for awful english. I go search through Mission 11....
Regards Last edited by 360GameTV; 10-10-2014 at 09:07 AM."Thank goodness we still have Holliday."
So read the text message I received from a good friend and fellow Cardinals fan. Over a thirty-minute span I received several that formed what was essentially a stream-of-consciousness rationalization of Pujols leaving and assessment of the club's 2012 chances (as they stood at that moment, prior to any free agent signings). The sentiment in the above-quoted final text was somewhat surprising coming from him.
Like many St. Louis baseball diehards, my friend spit invective in the same medium when Matt Holliday dropped a fly ball at Chavez Ravine during the 2009 NLDS--a drop that started a Dodgers rally which was extended on three occasions by closer Ryan Franklin before allowing the coup de gråce off the bat of the.232-hitting Mark Loretta. Loney reaching on Holliday's error was not even a top five play in the game in terms of WPA. The walk to Casey Blake, Ronnie Belliard single, passed ball allowed by Yadier Molina with Russell Martin batting, walk to Martin, and Loretta single seem to have never happened in the collective consciousness of the Cardinals fandom; all that remains is the Holliday error.
That ninth-inning error also seems to have wiped clean any memory of Holliday's second-inning homer that put the Redbirds up 1-0 and provided the difference in what was a 2-1 game entering that fateful final frame. The amnesia induced by Holliday's dropped fliner also erased any remembrance of Chris Carpenter laboring through a mere five innings in Game 1 and posting a line that included nine hits allowed, four walks issued, and four earned runs allowed. Forgotten as well is the fact that the Cardinals as a lineup only managed to plate three of the 16 runners they put on base in that opening game of the NLDS. As for Game 3, well, that's best left in the amnesiatic haze of never was.
That Holliday's drop in left field of that game still dogs him this day is unfortunate. Since coming to the Cardinals via trade in 2009, Holliday has been an integral part of two postseason teams and a World Series champion. Whether one goes by more traditional stats or new advanced metrics, all Holliday has done as a Cardinal is hit and produce runs at a truly elite level. In addition to his numbers, Holliday is one of the grittiest players I've seen play the game and is a clubhouse leader.
Matt Holliday has a career batting average (BA) of.315. In 2011, his.296 BA was the lowest since his rookie season but still ranked thirty-third in the big leagues out of those who qualified for the batting title. More importantly, his.388 on-base percentage (OBP) tied for eleventh in all of baseball. Holliday's.525 slugging percentage (SLG) tied him with new teammate Carlos Beltran for twentieth. His combined OBP Plus SLG (OPS) of.912 ranked twelfth in the major leagues in 2011--ahead of former teammate Pujols (.906) and just ahead of Beltran (.910). Using Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA), the story is the same: Holliday's.393 wOBA ranks twelfth--behind the likes of Jose Bautista, Miguel Cabrera, Ryan Braun, and Adrian Gonzalez and ahead of players such as Josh Hamilton, Pujols, Carlos Gonzalez, Adrian Beltre, Mark Teixeira, Ryan Howard, Nelson Cruz, and Mike Stanton.
Holliday's excellent 2011 was no fluke. It is just another elite offensive season in a career striking in its consistently fantastic offensive production levels. Holliday has never had a below-average offensive season as a big leaguer and been head-and-shoulders above average from his third season through 2011. In his rookie season, he posted an OPS+ of 104. In subsequent seasons, his OPS+ levels have been 114, 137, 150, 138, 139, 139, 149, and 153. Despite being hindered by injuries in 2011, it was his best season relative to the rest of the league. The same is true using wOBA+. Even though Statcorner's wOBA+ only goes back to 2007, Holliday's 2010 and 2011 are career bests at 127 and 128 respectively. This despite Holliday having an unlucky 2011. Holliday's wOBAr was.426 when regressing for batted-ball levels despite it calculating out at.394 based on results.
Combined with Holliday's lumbering style of outfield patrol, the NLDS error has also unfairly fueled a persistent misconception amongst Cardinals fans that Holliday is not a good defender. Holliday ranks as perfectly average or above average in the big three fielding metrics. The following chart provides Holliday's Total Zone, UZR, and Fielding Bible +/- defensive ratings. A rating of zero is average, above zero is above-average (the higher, the better), and below zero is below-avearge (the lower, the worse).
HOLLIDAY'S DEFENSE BY THE BIG THREE DEFENSIVE METRICS
The metrics are in agreement that 2006 was a horrible year defensively for Holliday. For whatever reason, Holliday does not rank well in Total Zone, but UZR and The Fielding Bible +/- system have him as an above-average fielder for most of his career. His career ranking in Total Zone is a poor -16. This is due largely to his first three seasons; in the last five seasons, he has had Total Zone scores of -1, -2, 0, 0, and 0. Holliday has a career UZR of 10.7 and a career Fielding Bible +/- score of +27--both of which rate him as a very good left fielder for his career.
On top of his first-rate play, Holliday is also a clubhouse leader. Last week ESPN published a story on David Freese's unlikely rise from Mizzou dropout to World Series hero. The whole article is worth a read but it included an intriguing piece of reporting on Holliday taking Freese under his wing after Freese's second drunk-driving charge:
[Freese] credits Matt Holliday. After the DUI, the Cardinals outfielder told Freese, who is single and prefers living alone, to stick by him, that he wasn't going to let him screw up his gift. Last off-season, the two were always together, hitting, lifting and hanging out at Holliday's house. They talked about life, relationships, busting your ass and putting the bad behind you. "That was the greatest thing, because I had a role model to learn from daily," says Freese, who isn't drinking now. "He's a big brother to me -- a great teammate, person, everything. He's a big reason I'm still in this game."
In addition to his off-the-field leadership, Holliday also sets the tone on the field. His play-a-hard-nine style is in the vein of Scott Rolen and makes it crystal clear why manager Tony La Russa openly campaigned for the Cardinals to acquire Holliday via trade. There are many examples of this on the field but one sticks out in my memory.
Last season against the Chicago Cubs, the Cardinals were down 5-3 in the bottom of the fifth inning and had a rally brewing. The bases were loaded with one out. Freese was at the plate and Holliday was on first base. Freese grounded what should have been a double play ball to second that seemed likely to end the inning--but Holliday had other plans. In what I believe is one of the best base-running plays of 2011 by a Cardinal, Holliday went in hard to second base and took out shortstop Starlin Castro. Like an orca hitting a seal caught unawares, Holliday brutally broke up the double play, allowing the Cardinals to plate two runs that tied the game. The Redbirds would go on to open up a yawning lead over the Cubs and win handily. It was a play that would have made Enos Slaughter proud and one that has become a Holliday base-running calling card--he did the same thing to Elvis Andrus to break up a could-have-been double play in Game 6 of the World Series.
via bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com
After the 2009 season, the Cardinals signed Holliday to a seven-year, $120 million contract that pays him $15 million annually with $2 million deferred. It has turned out to be one of the best free agent signings in recent years with the Cardinals reaping a large surplus in production from the slugger. Holliday posted 6.7 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in 2010, the first of the contract, a WAR total that was worth $26.7 million on the open free agent market, according to the Fangraphs WAR valuation. In 2011, Holliday accrued 5.0 WAR in 124 games, which was worth $22.7 million. The Cardinals have paid Holliday $34 million through the first two years of the contract and have received approximately $49.4 million in WAR, or, $15.4 million in surplus value. There is still a lot of time left on the contract--five years--but it has been a superb signing by general manager John Mozeliak through its first two seasons.
My friend's text message was spot on. Holliday's performance with the bat is amongst the top ten-to-fifteen in all of the big leaguers year in and year out. Holliday also fields his position well. On top of that, he is a leader off the field and sets a hard-nosed tone in between the lines. With Pujols choosing to play in Anaheim for ten years and $254 million over returning to St. Louis, thank goodness the Cardinals still have Holliday.Meet Gertjie. Gertjie, or as his friends call him, Lil G, is an orphaned baby rhino whose mother was killed by poachers for her horn in May. Gertjie, who was then just 3 months old, was found refusing to leave his dead mom’s side.
But there’s a bright side to this story. Unable to survive in the wild, Gertjie was taken in by conservationists at the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre in South Africa. There, he got his own room (complete with webcam!), eight regular feedings a day, and best of all, a very special companion: Lammie the sheep.
Lammie was introduced to Gertjie as a companion in June, shortly after his arrival at the HESC. As you can see from this video, uploaded on Monday, the two hit it off well—so well, in fact, that Gertjie seems to want to hop, jump, and run like a sheep himself!
Gertjie is a white rhino, which puts him in much better shape, survival-wise, than his counterpart the black rhino. In 2011 a subspecies of black rhino, the western black rhino, was actually declared extinct due to the decimating impact of poaching on both white and black species. a subspecies of white rhino, the northern white rhino, is basically extinct in the wild, with just seven known members remaining in existence.
South Africa is home to the vast majority of the rhino population. Once Gertjie gets big enough, probably in another 12 to 15 months, he’ll be removed to a reserve and hopefully reintroduced back into the wild.
In the meantime, you can see lots more videos of Gertjie doing things like chasing ostriches and enjoying his first mud bath on the rescue center’s YouTube channel and website.
Screengrab via YouTubeOver the past few months, talk of a Gina Carano's debut in the UFC and return to professional fighting, have increased. Not long ago, most fans more or less considered the former Strikeforce champion in a state of permanent retirement. She has a budding film career, with several significant roles in the works, and in general she seems to have made a rather seemless transition out of professional fighting and into professional stunt fighting. Leaving at the peak of her abilities (albiet on a loss) and remembered quite fondly as the first major star of women's MMA.
But now, with a new kid on the block, in Ronda Rousey, and one badly in need of new name opponents, Gina Carano has been teased for a potential MMA return and UFC debut. What seemed to start as little more than publicity building for her latest film project has turned into a seemingly reasonable expectation that fans will soon be seeing Carano in the octagon, potentially in a major PPV headliner. The sport needs her and the interest is there. Unfortunately, her aforementioned film career may not allow it. Jeremy Botter reported the news on twitter, that Carano's movie deal has become a potential roadblock to her UFC signing.
Gina Carano to the UFC is not as much of a lock as I thought it was yesterday. Movie conflicts. Studio has to sign off. — Jeremy Botter (@jeremybotter) July 14, 2014
Studio worried that losing to Ronda will hurt Gina’s action hero allure. And yeah, it would. — Jeremy Botter (@jeremybotter) July 14, 2014
Not to say it won’t get done. Just that more forces are at play than just Dana negotiating with her agent. Not as simple. — Jeremy Botter (@jeremybotter) July 14, 2014
Keep in mind, this is directly on the heels of Dana White's comments that a deal with Carano was only a week away:
"One down, one to go," White said. "I'm going to meet with Gina next week and get that f---ing thing done. Next week, man. "It's just a matter of me and Lorenzo going to jump on a plane to Los Angeles, get in a room with her and her lawyer and get this thing done."
It sounds like the UFC is trying to make a heavy play to get Carano back in the cage, so I don't expect this is the last we've heard of a potential deal. Stay tuned to Bloody Elbow for all the news and updates.(photo by Lilli)
“Far from being a utopianist ideal, anarcho-primitivism worked for humans and our relationships with the earth since the dawn of our species. It is an easily observable fact that before technology, society, the work week, or the alienation of our current day malaise we knew how to live, we knew how to play, we knew how to eat and we knew how to thrive. Without police stations, churches, interstate commerce or monetary greed. Just like all other creatures we knew what to do and not to do because we were connected to the earth, instead of at war with her.” Back to the Primitive, Walter Bond
BUT WE CAN’T GO BACK!
When the topic of primitivism is discussed on internet messageboards, infoshops, and anarcholeftist bookfairs around the world, the term is met usually with a wave of reflexive eyeball-rolling, closefully followed by a chorus of disapproval. The organisationalists and urbanarchists, civilisation’s reformists and apologists, continually assert that they are living in the ‘real world’ and operating with ‘common sense’. They say they are challenging the system via the proper and correct channels, making a difference in their community, and fighting for social justice. All this wishful thinking and activist programming deliberately avoids the basic tenets of ecology, anthropology, and the geopolitical dimensions of industrialism, mass society and domestication. Furthermore, if one questions the premise and foundations of civilisation, some (who have an allegiance to cities, technology, and mass society) tend to take it personally and react defensively; discouraging, derailing, and sabotaging attempts further analysis.
PLASTIC SKIN, DIGITAL VEINS
The contemporary disconnection and estrangement from life’s natural processes is profound and all encompassing. Despite civilisation’s smokescreen, the fact remains that the things we need don’t simply materialise. It comes from somewhere specific. What we eat either comes from the earth, sea, forest, garden – or from a fluorescently lit building, wrapped in plastic. The ability to flick a switch and stay warm, the artificial lights and glowing screens, all arrive from somewhere. Usually a network of coal fired power stations pumping out electricity along power lines, as opposed to traditional methods; a campfire or the sun. For those who have not totally abandoned the idea of community, this phenomenon also doesn’t appear from thin air. It either forms from people living together, creating trust, helping eachother and resolving problems. Or – from a facilitating mechanism that sells an idea of community; such as a mall, internet messageboard, punk show, or workplace. Beyond just the basics of survival, all the trinkets and tawdry thrills of civilisation also arrive from somewhere else. In Australia, plastic niknaks usually come a factory in China, entertainment from America, building materials from the jungles of Indonesia, diamonds from Africa, and the list goes on. Failing to recognise the implications of all this globalised production and importation, the red anarchist hordes (herds?) dismiss out of hand the anarchoprimitivist assertion that civilisation itself is the problem and the enemy. There remains an acceptance of factories, cities, and technology, and a stark failure to delve deeper or imagine a radically different way for humans to live and function. The failure of the left is the inability to confront the reality that as domesticated humans, living within the confines of civilisation, we will never be in control of our own lives, communities, or fate. The liberal lemmings seem content to plod along, pleading for things to be slightly tweaked and adjusted until civilisation flows smoothly, efficiently, and with an ‘acceptable’ minimum of oppression.
LIFE WITHOUT LEVIATHAN
The difference between civilised and non-civilised life is deeper than we can probably imagine. Rather than systematically dominating and exploiting the earth and reaching as far as possible, band societies were seamlessly integrated with the natural elements and nonhuman animals, As Kirkpatrick Sale points out,
“The fossil record indicates little of the adversarial relationship with other creatures that existed at the core of Sapiens hunting society, and permits the conclusion that they must have lived in a deep, permeating bond with the natural world that the philosopher Owen Barfield has called “original participation, ” a “primal unity of mind and nature”.
Addiction to civilisation is understandable and nearly unavoidable. The civilising process took generations to take hold and will take generations to undo. But buried beneath he layers of psychosis, abstraction, and synthetic substitutions there is a lifeway and a source that has not been eliminated from humans. This has been explored deeply by the important work of anti-civilisation theorists, anarchoprimitivists and many prominent anthropologists. Our species has remained unchanged significantly for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, depending whose research you believe, but our habitat has changed greatly. The greatest threat to any species is habitat destruction and this is no more true than for humans. Humans genetic makeup has not changed and their needs have not changed. To paraphrase Marshall Sahlins, ‘rich’ peoples are the ones who have their needs met. By these standards, many of the most affluent are deeply impoverished. This is shown wherever we care to look; shown through civilised folks’ fractured minds, depleted and weak bodies, untrusting and hostile communities, and complete reliance and misplaced trust in the technosphere.
Most anarchists continue to ignore the obese, depressed, internet-fixated elephant in the room. They prefer to push aside important questions until after a mythical moment of ‘total collapse’, as if it isn’t unfolding before our eyes. This persistent, irritating, and presumably Hollywood-infused attitude contains a basic oversight – any ‘primitive skills’ take a lifetime of consistent practice and adjustment to even gain a low level of competency. Wouldn’t be better to attempt to break our addiction sooner, rather than later, while we have a chance? Are these folks waiting for total crisis and meltdown to try to learn fundamental ‘nuts and bolts’ life skills?
THOSE WACKY, ZANY, MADCAP, SUICIDAL, HOMICIDAL, GENOCIDAL ‘PRIMITIVISTS’ …
The term anarchoprimitivism, and the general abbreviation primitivism, was apparently not of the early writers’ own invention, but a peculiar label that after some time they couldn’t shake it. Nowadays it is often thrown around by the left in a dismissive or pejorative tone, a shorthand term of several pathetic and glib refutations. “We can’t go back”. “The train has left the station”. “That ship has sailed”. This echoes and reinforces assumptions of linear progress, and that ‘primitive societies’ are an evolutionarily inferior, infantile previous version of current-day civilised humans. A ‘work in progress’ that has culminated in modern day civilised human societies, the zenith, the pinnacle, the triumph. Between the lines is a hostile and condescending attitude toward noncivilised peoples, equating primitive societies as backwards and in the early stages of ‘development’. Never mind that these societies continually astound any social scientist that cares to study them, displaying a way of being in the world that seems almost magical to our dulled senses and skills.
When someone proclaims themselves an anti-capitalist, they encounter little resistance amongst anarchists. However, if they proclaim themselves anti-civilisation they encounter a barrage of scepticism and sneering. The typical shallow criticism revolves around their perceived ‘shortcomings’ as a primitivist or anti-civilisation anarchist. They may use cars or computers, live in an urban environment, and work a steady job for pay. The potshots will usually be focused on the fact that they need civilisation to survive, as if we have a choice at the moment. My response to this kind of cross-examination has been to ask, ‘Are you against capitalism and wage slavery?’ The reply has always been yes. When I ask, ‘Did you spend money this week?’ usually the answer is silence.
I make no apologies for advocating a primitive way of life and do not run away from the term primitivist, even though I do not live in a nomadic band society, and live as a civilised human being myself. I don’t care at all about what standards others hold me to, I define these for myself, set my own challenges, and expect others to do the same. However, I take the position that civilisation is the enemy, and nothing much will change until it is dismantled or nosedives by itself. Primitivism is a direct personal response to the onslaught of civilisation in my life and the world around me, and it describes generally the kind of world myself and other anarchoprimitivists would prefer to live in.
“When critics of anarcho-primitivism suggest we are “hypocrites,” they often make the hidden assumption that we are all autonomous individuals situated within a society that places no constraints on our ability to survive. The insinuation is that we can ‘love it or leave it’ and simply walk away. This is simply not the case. First, this ignores the fact that civilized institutions and the individuals who run them have been actively destroying alternative lifeways for thousands of years. Second, and related, if our choices are to work or die, many understandably choose the former. If our choices are to pay the rent or be homeless, many understandably choose the former. Wavering between two awful options is not unfettered choice. Rather, this choice is always mired in points of coercion.”
Cricket, For the Civilized to Leave Civilization
LIVE WILD OR DIE TRYING
This article argues for a return to the word primitivism as a description of a tendency in anarchism, without irony, disclaimers or asterisks. The Collins Dictionary defines primitive ‘as of or belonging to the first or beginning; original’. In world that has detoriorated into the abstract, a return to the primtive, the foundation, is the most appropriate response possible. In a society where all interactions are mediated and scripted, it signals a move toward immediacy and spontaneity. In a world where the division of labour of and specialisation has become unquestioned, it is an expression of a tendency toward self-reliance, and directly threatens ideas of the commodity. In the context of a ubiquitous mass society that worships increasing complexity, it reveals a hope for simplicity and a degree of reliability. As a response to the homogenisation of our world it proposes a unique sense of place and a path to become connected to it. Primitive skills inherently are against concepts of technology and domestication. A primitive tool, as opposed to an instrument of technology, is easily replicable, replaceable and available to all members of a community. I tend to think of primitive skills as the primary and fundamental skill set for our species, which we have lost as we have become dehumanised under civilisation’s stranglehold.
I argue for a redefinition of ‘primitive skills’ beyond the usual connotations. The clichéd, typical usage of this term refers to someone who maybe does some hunting or skinning, gathers roadkill or wild edibles, and can make fire with sticks. As useful and necessary as these skills are, and have been for humans for our entire time on the planet, they are barely scratching the surface of what I would define as a ‘primitive skill’. The immediate correlation between these type of skills and ‘primitivism’ is what limits it to a small subculture or novelty act rather than a more radical current with more potential. The avalanche of abysmal reality ‘survival’ shows have not helped at all – relegating this practice to just another hobby within ‘the spectacle’. The trend of hipster ‘professional rewilders’ who write books on the topics or run workshops claiming to be an authority on the subject are equally irritating. However, the kinds of skills that have been largely lost, abandoned or neglected were the day to day tools for our non-civilised ancestors and modern day tribal band societies. Without techno-industrial system supporting us like an iron lung, civilised humans will one day need them too.
These include
– The art of conversation and getting along with people
– Bird language and identification, stalking and observation of patterns
– Appreciation of sunrises, sunsets, storms, and general attention to the seasons
– Learning to keep a fire going/ relationship with fire
– Self defense and martial arts, making weapons
– Stealing and raiding from the enemy, setting traps
– Singing and dancing as a group (Rather than just by ‘professionals’ for entertainment as others watch. Nowadays this practice is considered embarrassing, daggy and lame. However rotting your brain and binge-watching 12 hours of your favourite TV show is totally acceptable. Go figure).
– Becoming mobile, resilient, mentally and physically strong.
– Practicing and refining concentration and focus.
– Hunting, fishing, diving, drying and preserving food.
– Cordage and container construction.
– Shelter construction/ improvisation.
– Guerilla attacks, going unnoticed, stealth.
• Foraging and scavenging. We can start treating certain products properly so they will not make us sick, but also not being squeamish.
– Working on awareness, attunement, concentration, focus, and balance outside of the urban habitat.
– Paying attention to the moon, stars and tide. Navigation without Google Earth or topographic maps. This is greatly discouraged by ‘outdoorsy’ types wearing North Face and Patagonia clothing!
– Breaking the sedentary existence and staying active. Eating wild foods and using non- chemical medicine.
– Fostering relationships with human and nonhuman animals.
– Conflict resolution. (Nowadays folks throw out friendships like yesterday’s trash (or recycling).. An unwillingness to forgive, and a propensity toward trash talking, gossip and simply being an asshole seems to be a trait of civilised people. Primitivists are not immune from this, quite the contrary they can be some of the biggest assholes imaginable, I should know! But I don’t think this should be encouraged. Without civilisation folks won’t have the luxury of hanging onto petty squabbles, and they would be sorted out in different ways, usually face to face, possibly with a respected mutual friend or elder assisting.
• Teaching is the original primitive skill but we have become inept at sharing and listening, distracted, unfocused, impatient and bored. No skill has been learned properly until one reaches the level where they can pass it along…
“One person’s choice to leave might involve reading a few pages of a plant-identification guide at night between a full time job and intense familial commitments. Another’s might look like attending primitive skills events and leveraging every possible chance to inhabit wild spaces. Another’s might look like writing books and treatises that catalyze further ‘momentum’ against civilization.”
Cricket – ‘For the civilized to leave civilization’
‘I DUNNO, THAT SOUNDS LIKE SOME KINDA LIKE IDEOLOGY….’
Nowadays it is impossible to advocate anything without being labelled an ideologue, dogmatic, prescriptive, or creating some kind of party line. All of the above diatribe may sound prescriptive, and of course to the ever-growing posse of nihilists it will surely sound as if I am espousing an ideology. I am willing to live with these accusations! At some point rebels need to establish a position and say what they are interested in, and stand their ground, or simply float around following the latest trend or current of analysis forever. Of course, anti-civilisation theory is critical; and is changing, adapting and open to critique. It should go without saying that these practices are simply some ideas and an incomplete suggestion of what one might classify as a primitive skill, and these ideas are very generalised and broad-brush attempt at creating this picture of skills useful for life without technology. Some skills will appeal more to some people than others. All of them can be practiced in an urban, rural, or bushland environment if one is to use their imagination. At some stage these were the everyday skills that everyone possessed. Apart from the logical rationale for retaining primitive skills for practical purposes and personal empowerment, fun, and entertainment, it also offers some remedy for the pathology of civilisation, counteracting the symptoms of frustration and anxiety that infiltrate our daily lives.
The question of what is a primitive skill do not need to be modelled on what we have seen on ‘Dual Survival’ or Ray Meares’ programs (as good as they are), but rather, ‘What are the broad skills we need to create a long term community outside of civilisation? How will we not only survive, but remain happy and healthy? How do we defend ourselves against the encroachment of civilisation’? Many have already started asking these questions, but there appears to be reluctance to embrace the term primitivism. Many others have advocated terminology such as anarchoprimitivism and primal war, and encouraged primitive skills, but it is certainly becoming a dirty word in contemporary anarchist circles. I would like to state for the record that anarchoprimitivists are here, and not going anywhere. We will be around, annoying you with our unassailable logic that civilisation sucks, and if some say we aren’t primitive enough for their liking, that’s just too bad.
“Domestication is a disease. Yet even in the poodle, wolf genes remain.
Given time enough and freedom, wildness returns”. (Laurel and Skunkly, Rewild, Resist)
I believe that the antidote to this disease of civilisation is to start to break the patterns instilled in us from birth and reinforced through all the institutions of civ. This process can be practiced anywhere, anytime, with a response appropriate to the situation. To resist domestication simply go outside. To escape the trap of wage slavery work less, share and scam whenever possible. To restore your health change to a diet with less processed foods. To practice your attunement to the natural world one can stalk or create a sit spot for themselves. To break the subservient docility enforced on us, some may choose to lash out at civilisation in a direct way, of dismantling the physical structures and apparatus’ as they exist. This could have a healing and cathartic effects, as well as benefits to their habitat.
“Get outside and break your dependence upon the civilized matrix as much as possible. Spend as much time as you can, & do whatever you can, to live your life outside of climate-controlled house-boxes, clock-time, work, industrial technology, the mass media & the cash economy. These all come together to create a false environment where the politics of domination make the psychology of alienation not only inevitable, but absolutely necessary on many levels. Learn the various arts of primitive self reliance— tracking, gathering, hunting, trapping, fishing, shelter, crafts, calling Fire, etc—and integrate the lessons into your whole life. Also, be open to having your encounter with these arts change you in fundamental ways—primitive survival is often a question of being, not of technique. Let your resistance to civilization spring naturally from this fundamental shift in being, and the revolution in which you take part will be Primal in both character and effect.”
RedWolfreturns from reclaim rewild
A prevalent criticism of anarchoprimitivists remains that they don’t ‘do anything’ or urbananarchists/activists do not see any concrete position taken by anti-civ anarchists. I have tried to open up the idea of primitivism and widened the parameters for myself, and I use the word without irony and with commitment. I hope that one day the competitiveness and the limits imposed mass society will wither away, and we can include any rebels that wish to strip away the technological and digital layers of repression and confinement. All of the things we don’t need, that are forced upon us by civilisation’s superstructure, we can begin to let go of and/or destroy. My project will be to steal what we need, and burn the rest, living one day as wild creatures in liberated habitat.
It takes years of socializing to subdue the power & beauty of a child’s primal instincts. This process is reversible. It is possible to become feral by overcoming the numbness of the civilized condition & become fully human. We can be wild again.
Griffin ‘Reclaim Rewild’
AdvertisementsA statement issued after the session by FIA F1 technical delegate Jo Bauer said the vertical deflection of the floor under a load of 4,000 Newtons had exceeded 5mm and thus breached the technical regulations.
However, after consulting with Toro Rosso, stewards accepted the team’s explanation that the failure was related to an impact suffered by Kvyat’s STR11 whilst on track.
“The team produced evidence that the car suffered an impact which reduced the downforce and resulted with a slower lap time than in Q2,” read the stewards’ statement.
“Therefore whilst technically the car failed to pass the deflection test, the stewards have decided not to impose any penalty. However the team is reminded that further tests will be conducted and that future failure of the test may not result in the same decision.”
Kvyat qualified ninth in Monte Carlo, two places behind team mate Carlos Sainz.At VOKRA we believe all cats deserve to have a safe and happy life |
my version of reality. Not allowing it to be altered on demand. Resistance. This anger protected me, because I knew what I knew. It couldn’t be erased. Being defiant does not make you difficult. It makes you resilient.
Recognize there will never be accountability
The person who is gaslighting you will never be able to see your point of view or take responsibility for their actions. They will never get it. They will never say, “Oh, you’re right – you have a point.”
Acknowledgement is not on the cards. And asserting yourself is not just useless but harmful. Because the person gaslighting will never be able to respond to logic and reason – and so you have to be the one to recognize that logic and reason can’t be applied.
Let go of the wish for things to be different
The wish for things to be different is very powerful and inoculates you to the tumult. It allows you to continue to believe logic and reason will prevail. You want to believe the person will change. You want things to make sense. But they won’t. You want to feel you are on safe ground. You have to let go of this wish. Because things will never make sense. You will never be heard.
Develop healthy detachment
I had to develop certain coping mechanisms, but there was a price. Behavior that was adaptive as a child becomes maladaptive as an adult: I was not trusting and always needing verification.
I became hyper-vigilant about clarity. There was no room for misunderstanding; no margin for error. I needed certainty in an uncertain world. But we live in an uncertain world, so there has to be a way to find balance.
Detaching from the gaslighting does not mean total detachment. It means distinguishing between the world of the gaslighter and the real world.
“Someone can try to gaslight you and once you can identify what’s going on, you can begin to turn off the gaslighting and heal,” Stern says. She points out that often people are willing to give up their reality in favor of hanging on to a relationship rather than rupturing it.
There are, she says, many different signs to recognize when you’re being gaslighted. “You feel confused and crazy. You’re always apologizing, wondering if you are good enough, can’t understand why you feel so bad all the time, or know something is wrong but can’t put your finger on it. You thought one thing, they say another; you can’t figure out which is right.”
A tip she offers for handling things is to write down what actually happened in the conversation. “Once you are not flooded with emotion, you can reflect rationally. Look at the conversation and see where it took a turn.”
When someone is so certain about what they believe and they keep on insisting and trying to convince you – over a period of time – it erodes your own perception. And having to verify reality is in itself destabilizing.
Stern poses an interesting question. “Are people upset because current leaders are telling them something they know isn’t true, or is it because they are upset other people might be believing it?”
With gaslighting, it feels as though the ground is always shifting beneath you. There is no center of gravity. And while we’re being told up is down and black is white, the only way to make sense of it is to remain resolute. Let people have their alternative facts. You’ll stick to reality.This year Bill Rapp has spent the early days of February holding meetings, writing reports, and making the rounds of Idaho’s Northwest Nazarene University, where he was hired as Athletic Director in 2012. But a little part of him was still back in the Bay Area. That’s where, over the course of three decades, he had watched Stefan Edberg and Andre Agassi grow up, brought John McEnroe out of retirement, helped launch the careers of Andy Murray and Milos Raonic, and failed to entice Rafael Nadal to try the world’s "best seafood pasta.”
That seafood pasta, believe it or not, happens to be in San Jose, Calif., which is where Rapp spent 12 years as the tournament director of the SAP Open. The ATP event, in various incarnations and under various names, was the second-longest ongoing tennis tournament in the United States after the U.S. Open. It was first staged in 1889 and, as the Pacific Coast Championships, became a fixture of the amateur and pro circuits at the Berkeley Tennis Club and San Francisco’s Cow Palace, before moving to San Jose in 1994. Legendary champions ranged from Little Bill Johnston and Don Budge to John McEnroe and Andre Agassi, each of whom won it five times. Johnny Mac also won the doubles nine times, the final one in 2006, at age 47, a moment that Rapp considers one of the highlights of his tenure.
“John got up to accept the trophy,” says Rapp, who convinced McEnroe to play his first tour event in more than a decade, with Jonas Bjorkman. “He said, ‘I want to thank Bill for letting me kick some a--. But if I’d lost, I would have kicked his a--.”
Last year was the end of the line for the SAP Open, which has been replaced on the 2014 tour calendar by a new 500-level, IMG-owned tournament in Rio de Janeiro. The shift south was part of a changing of the geographical guard in tennis, as the ATP has focused on its emerging Latin market. Two years ago, California also lost a long-running men’s tournament in Los Angeles. (Like the SAP Open, the L.A. event was the remnant of a once-prestigious West Coast tournament, Jack Kramer’s Pacific Southwest Championships.) That makes Indian Wells, and the ocean-deep pockets of its owner, Larry Ellison, the last place to watch ATP tennis in California, a state that has produced more Grand Slam champions than any other.
“It’s a bittersweet feeling,” says Rapp, who started working for the previous SAP tournament director, the late Barry MacKay, in 1983. “I had a lot of great relationships with the players and player agents. We had a profitable event for 14 years.”
That run of profitability, Rapp says, ended in the wake of the fiscal crisis of 2008. But there were factors working against the event that had more to do with trends in tennis than trends in the economy.
“It was tougher for us without a top American male player.” Rapp says. “In the Bay Area, people have money, and they want the best of the best. They have the 49ers, Lake Tahoe, the Pebble Beach [golf] event happened at the same time as ours. We used to be able to give them McEnroe, Sampras, Edberg, Agassi, Roddick when he was No. 1.”
That changed with the ATP’s continental drift to Europe, and the rise of the Big 4. In some ways, the SAP story illustrates the downside of today's top-player dominance. If you don't have Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Nadal, or Murray on your marquee, your gate will suffer. This week, Rotterdam tournament director Richard Krajicek had a solid draw in hand, with the Top 20 well-represented, but he still offered a last-second wild card to Murray. It once wasn’t so easy for Krajicek to nab a top name at the 11th hour.
“In the early 2000s,” Rapp says, “I introduced myself to Richard, and he said, ‘I know who you are, and you’re killing me.’ He had a new sponsor, ABN AMRO, who came in and said they wanted all the other signs in the building gone; they wanted to be the only sponsor. So Richard was under a lot of pressure to deliver for them, and he’s a competitive guy. But he still couldn’t get Sampras or Agassi, because we had them.”
With the best male players coming out of Europe, San Jose no longer made sense travel-wise. But that didn’t keep Rapp, who says “I don’t take no for an answer,” from trying to land them.
“I spent six months talking to Federer’s parents, Robby [Robert Federer] and Lynette,” Rapp says, “and then I finally sat down with Roger. He’s a great guy, but it was clear that it wasn’t going to happen.”
“I did the same thing with Rafa and Novak,” Rapp continues. “Rafa’s agent let me sit down with him one on one. I tried everything. I said we’d get him out on Pebble Beach, that we had the best seafood pasta he would ever have. But same thing, it became clear it wasn’t going to happen. And I understand, San Jose meant another trip to the States for those guys.”
Rapp’s one victory in the war for the Big 4 came with Murray back in 2006, before the Scot had established himself among the elite.
“I went out to the Aptos Challenger [in Northern California] and I saw this kid,” Rapp says. “I came back and said, ‘I don’t think he’s going to be a role model, with the way he talks, but he could be the future of tennis.’”
Rapp offered the 18-year-old Murray $3,000 to play San Jose in ’06. He won the tournament, his first ATP title, gave his then-new girlfriend, Kim Sears, a kiss. Murray defended his title in 2007, which was the last year he played the event.
“Now I look at the event in Rio,” Rapp says, “and there’s Rafa in the draw.”
Murray is also scheduled to make his way to South America later this month, for the tournament in Acapulco. And both men, along with Federer and Djokovic, will be in California a few weeks later to play Indian Wells. As Rapp knows, it’s tough to go head to head with Ellison’s full-service extravaganza in the desert.
“If someone in California has $2,000 to spend on tennis,” Rapp says, “they can get it all at Indian Wells. Men and women. You can’t fault anything Ellison has done there, with Hawk-Eye on every court. He wants to create the fifth Grand Slam, or California’s Grand Slam. It’s tough for anyone else in the state to compete. But that’s business.”
By the time he left the SAP Open in 2012, Rapp says, he “could see the writing on the wall.” By signing on at Northwest Nazarene, he has also left the professional ranks for the amateur arena.
“It’s refreshing,” he says, “to see kids playing for the love of it. Being in pro sports for any amount of time, you realize how much of it is dictated by money.”
As for the pro tennis game, Rapp says he thinks the sport is healthy, but he fears for the little guys.
“The concept of the 250 [event] is tough,” he says. “There’s not much a player can use ranking-wise there, so you have to pay an exorbitant amount to get a big name.”
But there’s one thing that the pro and college games share: The need to win.
“That’s what I’ve heard from the other ADs I’ve talked to," Rapp says, “if you want a program to thrive, you have to win. And it’s true for American tennis. We need the men to step up. Nothing replaces winning.”Labour have turned the Oldham West and Royton by-election nasty by calling Ukip 'evil', according to Nigel Farage. The Eurosceptic firebrand, speaking exclusively to IBTimes UK, made the remarks after shadow chancellor John McDonnell attacked the party at a fundraiser in the Greater Manchester seat.
"We can not allow what I think is an evil force within our society – that divides society often on the basis of race, often on the basis on some of the crudest policies that you can imagine any political party advocating," The Spectator reported the left-winger saying.
"We cannot allow them to get any form of a toehold within our political system and that's why it's about defeating them but more importantly, defeating them — a clear contrast in terms of a sincere, local committed socialist candidate."
Farage, who warned that by-elections could be "very rough and dirty businesses", said: "When John McDonnell describes Ukip as an evil force in society, that's quite nasty, yeah."
The Ukip leader's remarks come ahead of the 3 December vote, which was triggered after former Labour MP Michael Meacher passed away. Meacher beat Ukip into second place at the general election with his majority almost hitting 15,000.
Oldham Council leader Jim McMahon has been selected as Labour's candidate. But with Jeremy Corbyn's leadership issues in Westminster, some reports have claimed that his party's majority could be reduced to a few thousand at the by-election as Ukip hopeful John Bickley plans to take advantage of Labour's public split.
"It's going to be close, it could well be within a few hundred votes," Farage added. "The key factor on the day will be turnout – the weather forecast is dire, and have people got the energy to go down to the primary school and vote. My feeling is that the Ukip voters are very keen, they believe in what we are trying to do, and a lot of Labour voters, who have been Labour families for a hundred years, are they going to bother? I don't know, we will find out on Thursday night."
The Eurosceptics have launched their own personal attacks against the Labour leader by calling him a "security risk" and highlighting his previous comments on the UK's nuclear deterrent Trident, along with other defence polices.
"I would honestly say to you that 40% to 50% of people who come from traditional Labour families are deeply concerned by Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party," Farage said. "There are lots of reasons for it, but the key is when he was asked the question 'if there is a Kalashnikov-totting terrorist in a shopping centre shooting people, should the police shoot to kill?' and he hesitated and people are very concerned about that."HILLSBORO – Nathan Hale’s starting lineup was introduced, one by one, by the Les Schwab Invitational public address announcer prior to Tuesday night’s first-round game against Central Catholic, as is custom.
What was a little outside the box for the Raiders’ game at Liberty High School was the addition of a warm introduction to Nathan Hale’s coach, former Portland Trail Blazers star Brandon Roy.
“I wasn’t expecting that. It’s our sixth game and they usually just say, ‘Coach Brandon Roy.’ I thought it was cool. Nice of the fans, too,” Roy said. “There’s been some really good memories here. Just driving in, the memories started coming back. It was almost like I was still playing.”
Roy returned to the Portland spotlight for the first time since his knees gave out at the end of a seven-year NBA career, which included five years in Portland. Roy’s run in Portland was short, but nearly as prolific as any Blazer in history, as he was a three-time All-Star and a Rookie of the Year while playing for the franchise from 2006-11.
Now, after a few years on the sideline, Roy has recharged his basketball battery and appears ready for a second career in the sport. The Raiders will be in the spotlight a lot this season, as they’re ranked No. 6 in the country by MaxPreps, and they're one of the LSI favorites, particularly after a routine 95-65 first-round win over Central Catholic.
Roy was named Nathan Hale’s coach in June, taking over a program that had gone through five coaches in five years. The Raiders were 3-18 last season, but as soon as Roy was named coach, the team’s fortunes for the 2016-17 season soared.
During the summer, seven prominent players transferred to Nathan Hale, most notably Michael Porter Jr., the country’s most sought-after recruit for the Class of 2017. The 6-foot-9 Porter Jr., who scored 37 points and grabbed 22 rebounds against Central Catholic, signed with Washington in November.
Nathan Hale’s starting lineup against the Rams included five transfers.
Roy said “it’s an adjustment,” and not just because the team has many new faces. Roy is new to the high school game as a coach, too, in a role where he’s never had to do things such as order uniforms, check grades and make sure players' home lives are stable.
“It’s a total adjustment,” Roy said. “The things in the locker room are the same. Kids are goofy, joking around. They don’t know as much about the world as you do at the NBA level, but they’re still really smart kids.”
Roy says he’s rarely asked by the players about his NBA career. After all, most were in grade school when Roy’s career was nearing a close.
“They barely bring it up,” Roy said. “One time in the locker room, I think (Porter Jr.) was getting tape up, and he said, ‘Did you win a state championship?’ I said, ‘Uh, no.’ Why not? It kind of takes me back, little stuff like that.”
Roy said because of Nathan Hale’s national marquee status this season, the Raiders had multiple options for Christmas holiday tournaments, including Florida.
“I thought it would be good to come to Portland. My kids are down here. I told our guys it’s a great environment. I’ve been here before,” Roy said.
Roy is uncertain where his coaching career will go. He said he wanted to start with high school basketball, because “I feel like I have a chance to have an impact. I can work on myself and better myself to be a good coach.”
Could college or the NBA be next for Roy?
“I don’t know. The biggest thing is committing to being back on a team. I’ve been kind of out of anything consistently for four or five years. I’m ready to work this thing every day,” he said. “I don’t know where the destination is going to lead. I’m happy. My kids are settled, and that’s the biggest thing. They’re in schools that they like.
“I know when you go to the next level, the job is a little more demanding, so I’m happy where I’m at.”
Roy’s coaching style, at least Tuesday night, was subdued. He only got off the bench during timeouts, coaching during the action while seated. Roy says he’s not always like that; in the bigger games, he’ll be up pacing the sideline, but he doesn’t overdo it.
“I try to let the guys figure it out. I don’t want them to always look at me in situations. After the game, we try to teach a lot,” he said.
“Besides, people are here to see them, not me.”
Nathan Hale was never threatened by Central Catholic. Porter Jr. scored 22 points in the first half as the Raiders staked themselves to a 54-23 lead.
Porter Jr. led a third-quarter dunkfest, scoring 15 of the team’s 25 points as Nathan Hale extended its lead to 41 points.
The Rams had four players score in double figures, led by Malik Thirdgill with 15 points and Amari Hale with 14.
Nathan Hale advances to the LSI quarterfinals, facing Clackamas at 9 p.m. Wednesday. Central Catholic drops to the consolation bracket, where the Rams will play Beaverton at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday.
--Nick Daschel
ndaschel@oregonian.com
@nickdaschelCourtesy UM
CORAL GABLES, Fla. – University of Miami athletic teams continue to make the grade as the latest Academic Progress Rate statistics were released Wednesday by the NCAA. Last week, five Hurricanes teams were given APR Public Recognition Awards for being in the top 10 percent of their respective sports.
In the last NCAA APR report, based on scores from the 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years, every Miami program registered an APR score of at least 960 and no teams are subject to penalty.
Nine teams scored 990 or better out of a possible 1,000 points - men’s basketball (990), men’s XC (1000), men’s diving (1000), men’s tennis (992), women’s XC (1000), golf (991), soccer (991), women’s swimming (1000) and volleyball (995).
Miami is one of only 17 FBS schools (and one of four ACC schools) to score a 970 or higher in football, men’s basketball and baseball. Men’s basketball ranked 13th among FBS institutions, while football had the 25th-best score.
“Our continued APR success is credited to the academic commitment made by our student-athletes, coaches and our academic services staff,” Miami AD Blake James said. “We continue to be very proud of our student-athletes’ performance and dedication in the classroom.”
The Academic Progress Rate, a multi-year rate based on the most recent four years of data, is a real-time measure of eligibility and retention of student-athletes competing on every Division I sports team. The most recent APR scores are based on scores from the 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years. This year marks the 10th year of APR data for most teams.
In the fall of 2011, the Division I Board of Directors approved tougher academic standards, including setting a new standard that teams must meet to participate in postseason competition. The goal of the NCAA’s academic performance program is improvement, not punishment. Not only does the program ensure accountability for student-athletes, teams and institutions, but also it provides fairness by considering individual circumstances per team and school. Under the revised penalty structure, the Division I Board of Directors has set a cut score of 930 (out of 1,000) as a threshold for teams to meet or face possible sanctions. As was also the case a year ago, no sports from any ACC institutions are subject to penalties from this year’s APR release.
For the latest information on the Miami Hurricanes, follow us on Twitter (@MiamiHurricanes) and Facebook (facebook.com/miamihurricanes). For the most accurate and up to date information delivered to your phone, download the official Miami Hurricanes app for your Droid or iPhone.
UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI’S APR SCORES BY SPORT
SPORT SCORE
Baseball 973
Men’s Basketball 990
Men’s Cross Country 1000
Diving 1000
Football 972
Men’s Tennis 992
Men’s Indoor Track 975
Men’s Outdoor Track 976
Women’s Basketball 960
Women’s Cross Country 1000
Golf 991
Rowing 960
Soccer 991
Women’s Swimming 1000
Women’s Tennis 966
Women’s Indoor Track 979
Women’s Outdoor Track 979The National Zoo’s female giant panda gave birth to a cub Friday as hordes of people in this panda-obsessed realm halted work to watch the royal arrival in intimate high-definition on the zoo’s new public panda cams.
Across the area, thousands heeded the zoo’s summons to its cameras and sat at their computers, glued to the live black-and-white images as Mei Xiang gave birth to the scrawny cub at 5:32 p.m., the zoo said.
The birth sparked cautious jubilation at the zoo, salved the memory of the cub that died in September, and restored dreams of pandamania in a city that has longed for a cub since the days of the legendary Tai Shan.
As if anticipating a regal birth, the zoo sent out an alert on Twitter and Facebook after Mei Xiang’s water broke at 3:36 p.m., inviting people to watch what would ensue.
The zoo said the labor could last up to 10 hours. But the panda’s lasted less than two. The cameras captured her labor, the cub’s abrupt delivery, and Mei Xiang scooping it up and then cradling it against herself.
1 of 48 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Baby panda born at National Zoo View Photos The National Zoo's panda Mei Xiang gave birth to a cub, the zoo said Friday. Caption Mei Xiang has delivered two surviving cubs since 2005, Tai Shan in July 2005 and Bao Bao in August 2013. She gave birth to a stillborn cub about 26 hours after Bao Bao. In Septempter 2012, she gave birth to a cub with liver abnormalities that died days later. Sept. 5, 2013 It’s a girl! Scientists at the National Zoo used two tests that analyzed fragments of the zinc finger protein gene to confirm the gender of Mei Xiang’s new giant panda cub. A paternity analysis shows that her father is the zoo’s Tian Tian. The scientists also analyzed her second stillborn cub, which was a girl. The cubs were fraternal twins, the zoo said. National Zoo Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
“We feel incredible,” said Dennis Kelly, the zoo’s director. “The team is just ecstatic. But
we’re also very cautious at this point. We look like we have a healthy cub. It’s squawking appropriately.... It looks like it’s a good size. So all that is so far, so good.”
The zoo said it was watching to see whether a second cub might be born because giant pandas frequently bear twins. “There’s a window that runs from two to six hours after the first birth, where we are watching carefully for a twin,” Kelly said.
As of 8 p.m., Mei Xiang was still having contractions. But as of only a few minutes before midnight, no second birth was reported.
“In the next couple of hours, we’re looking for Mom to take care” of the newborn, Kelly said shortly after the birth. “If it were premature, we would see the lungs begin to shut down. So far, none of that’s indicated. What we’re looking for is continued squealing. We’re looking for evidence that it’s nursing.”
“It’s just a very anxious time for us,” he said. “But Mei’s a good mom.”
Kelly said he witnessed the birth on the panda cam, which faltered because so many people were tuning in, he said.
1 of 15 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × D.C.’s zoo babies View Photos Take a look back at some of the animals born at the National Zoo. Caption Take a look at some of the animals born at the National Zoo. Keepers are hand-raising this female sloth bear, seen March 18, 2014, cub at the National Zoo. The mother, Khali, gave birth to three cubs Dec. 29. She ate two of the cubs — it’s not uncommon for carnivores to ingest stillborn cubs or live cubs if they or the mother are compromised in some way. The keepers decided to hand-raise the surviving cub, which was sick. Linda Davidson/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
The zoo said it planned a quick physical examination of the cub Saturday. One keeper will distract the mother with food, while another, wearing Kevlar gloves, will take the cub to a nearby examination table.
The zoo has not done that before, to avoid interfering with the mother-cub bonding.
But panda experts in China do it regularly, and other zoos are starting to do it to make certain the cubs are in good health, zoo officials said. Two of the zoo’s panda keepers have been studying the procedure in China for the past two weeks.
Experts will check the cub’s size, weight and body temperature and go over the body for any abnormalities.
In September, Mei Xiang gave birth to a four-ounce girl, but it died six days later. The cub had underdeveloped lungs that led to liver problems.
The zoo’s new cameras were activated just several weeks ago. As word spread that Mei Xiang had gone into labor, zoo spokeswoman Pamela Baker-Masson said: “We’re thrilled!... Everybody’s watching!”
The zoo had gone on a round-the-clock pregnancy watch Aug. 7 and closed the panda house the next day after announcing that Mei Xiang was starting the closing phase of her gestation period.
It is difficult to determine if a giant panda is pregnant, because it goes through the same physiological stages whether it is bearing a cub or not.
The conclusive evidence is the arrival of a cub or the close of the period with no cub.
Mei Xiang gave birth to the much-loved Tai Shan in 2005, who was sent to a breeding program in China in 2010. After his birth, Mei Xiang had five false pregnancies between 2007 and 2012.
And before last year’s pregnancy, the zoo had been talking to Chinese officials about the possibility of replacing her. China owns all giant pandas in U.S. zoos.
But her pregnancy changed things.
On March 30, Mei Xiang was artificially inseminated twice after natural breeding attempts with the resident male panda, Tian Tian, were unsuccessful.
During the first procedure, she was inseminated with fresh sperm from Tian Tian and samples collected in 2003 that had been frozen.
In the second procedure, Mei Xiang was inseminated with Tian Tian’s frozen 2003 sperm as well as frozen sperm from the San Diego Zoo’s male giant panda, Gao Gao.
The zoo said it will conduct DNA testing later to determine paternity.About “Your Best American Girl”
“Your Best American Girl” is the lead single on Mitski’s 4th album, Puberty 2. The song represents the turmoil that one feels when they experience a relationship that brings them great joy, but also must come to terms with the fact that they are different from their new partner on a multitude of levels and they are likely committing to a fantasy.
In an interview with NPR, Mitski says that this song was inspired by “wanting so badly to fit into this very American person’s life, and simply not being able to, just fundamentally being from a different place and feeling like I would just get in the way of their progression in their life”.
In a second interview with NPR, she followed-up about the song,If you’re a lawyer seeking work, the first listing on the Web page for “Current Department of Justice Attorney Vacancies” looks good at first glance.
It’s an opening for a “special assistant United States Attorney” (SAUSA) in Southern Illinois.
Great experience, plus a lively music scene nearby.
But no pay.
“Uncompensated” is in parentheses for this listing and at least a dozen others. What makes these assistants so special is that they work for free.
That has the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys (NAAUSA) upset.
In a June 4 letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., previously reported on by ProPublica, the organization complained that using freebie lawyers “violates the general principle of appropriations law that the government cannot accept the voluntary services” for work that otherwise would have been done by paid employees.
Justice gets around that by claiming the unpaid lawyers are not volunteering but instead are providing “gratuitous services.”
With logic and language you have to be a government lawyer to appreciate, H. Marshall Jarrett, director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, said it is perfectly legal to appoint special attorneys “at a gratuitous rate of pay (i.e., $0)” in a May 23 letter to NAAUSA. “A gratuitous rate of pay distinguishes uncompensated [special attorneys] from mere providers of volunteer services. Uncompensated SAUSAs thus legally may provide gratuitous services to the Department.”
“Gratuitous” has two meanings. Done free of charge is one. Lacking good reason is another. Both seem to apply here.
“It is very, very bad for morale,” NAAUSA President Robert G. Guthrie said in an interview. “We think it’s bad public policy.”
But the Justice Department says it has good reason to use unpaid labor. Justice lawyers are subject to pay with “a specified maximum amount, but there is no mandatory minimum salary,” according to Jarrett.
Even the minimum wage does not apply. Wal-Mart must be salivating at the notion.
Paid assistant U.S. attorneys get $44,581 to $117,994 annually.
Although there is room for volunteers in the workplace — some internships, for example — free labor can undercut those who actually expect to be paid for their work. Uncle Sam has other reasons for his “prohibition on the acceptance of voluntary services,” Guthrie wrote in the letter to Holder.
The prohibition “forces agencies to operate within the amounts provided by Congress,” Guthrie said. Use of unpaid labor also “can draw into play the opportunity for self-dealing and abuse of governmental position that the federal conflict of interest laws are intended to prevent,” he added.
That’s not the way Keith Henneke sees it.
He was an uncompensated lawyer in the District’s U.S. attorney’s office in 2011.
“I thought the experience was amazing,” he said. “I’m very glad that I did it.”
His experiences included trying more than 20 misdemeanor cases during a six-month period. “The experiences I had with the U.S. attorney’s office were highly valued by the law firms I interviewed with,” added Henneke, who now works for a private firm in Los Angeles. “I looked at it as an opportunity to serve, not that I was taken advantage of.... You’re helping your government.”
In a November letter to Justice, Guthrie acknowledged that the pay system for assistant U.S. attorneys has greater flexibility than the General Schedule that applies to many federal employees. Yet “reasonable interpretations” of the law, he said, do not allow the department to devise a “pay rate as low as zero.”
There are other issues.
The Justice Department is the nation’s largest law firm, and “I think the Department of Justice should be setting the best example for the legal community,” said Carrie Cordero, director of national security studies at Georgetown University Law Center, in an interview. “In this case, they are setting a bad example.”
Cordero was a different type of special assistant U.S. attorney, one detailed from another Justice office, which paid her. Currently, there are 96 unpaid special assistant attorneys.
In a National Law Journal article, Cordero said: “The only students who have ever asked me about the unpaid SAUSA program are young women. This troubles me.... I am concerned about a young attorney starting her career, after having made the investments of money, time, effort and relationships to achieve a law degree, only to accept a reality that exercising its value is not worth getting paid for. This is a bad message.”
Justice says the unpaid program helps the agency deal with the impact of the budget cuts known as the sequester, although the program began before the sequester was imposed.
“This program, in which attorneys perform an important public service by representing the interests of our country, provides a valuable support to the Justice Department as we continue to address the staffing challenges imposed by sequestration and still fulfill our commitment to protect the American people,” said DOJ spokesman Brian Fallon. “Sequestration and other budget constraints have forced the Justice Department to impose a strict hiring freeze, which has caused the department to lose more than 2,500 staff department-wide since January 2011.”
Paying workers nothing certainly is a way to stay within budget.
Twitter: @JoeDavidsonWP
Previous columns by Joe Davidson are available at wapo.st/JoeDavidson.Chapter Text
Solace went around to us one by one, tapping her bird-skull wooden staff upon our heads. The tap produced dense mist, which fell down like a sheet to cover the body, and when it cleared, there was a bird standing there instead. I watched that happen to Grak and then Amaryllis, as Solace moved around the circle. Their bird forms looked almost identical, with her being a bit more sprightly and him a bit thicker. The color of the feathers was a dark black, with white on the belly and the lower half of the head.
“What kind of bird is that, if you know, or if that question isn’t indelicate to your, um, profession?” I asked, as Fenn was tapped on the head and shrouded in mist (or possibly, odorless smoke, if it had physical substance at all).
Solace gave a little laugh. “We’re not so fragile that we can’t withstand a little scrutiny,” she said. “They’re swallows.”
Yeah, thought so. African or European? “With an airspeed velocity of roughly twenty-five miles an hour?” It was a random fact stored away in my brain from long-ago discussions around the D&D table.
“I don’t really know,” said Solace with a raised eyebrow. “We don’t put much emphasis on measurements, and that aside, how fast or slow an animal goes -- even one of the mortal species in animal form -- is not something that can be reduced down to a simple number. People do it, but it’s pointless and, anyway, doesn’t ever truly match what we see in the world, where there are a million things that might affect a swallow’s flight.”
“Surely not actually a million,” I said, before stopping. “I really would make a bad druid, because now I’m trying to think about all the various factors that could influence swallow flight.” I was also thinking about relative levels of error and confidence intervals, but that was probably not something that the druid wanted to hear about.
Solace nodded happily, then tapped me on the head without another word. Mist poured down in front of my eyes, and when it cleared, I was a swallow, with no obvious transition between the two states, not even in terms of proprioception. Had my arms become wings? I lifted them, and it was as natural as if I’d been born into them, not like I had thrust my hands down into a bird suit and was controlling the wings from a distance. I ran forward a little bit on clawed feet, then flapped up into the air.
It took us two hours to get to within striking distance of the athenaeum as we followed the railroad tracks. It was visible almost from the first moment I took off though, as a beige smudge on the top of a singular purple mountain, one which sat a bit off from the rest of the range, at the end of a peninsula. Beyond that was ocean, wide and vast. That rock formation was something I didn’t think you’d ever see in nature, almost aggressively so. As we got closer I saw a city nestled at the mountain base among the trees there, and just barely, the thin line of lights that shone from the cable |
was investigating connections between Russia and the presidential campaign of the very man who fired him.
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“And it’s not normal that when you close your eyes and listen to the news, too often the political back and forth in America sounds too much like it does in the kinds of countries that the State Department warns Americans not to travel to,” he continued.
After serving as secretary of state during Barack Obama’s second term, the former longtime senator has made Massachusetts home again, changed vacation residences from Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard. He has also taken official roles at Yale University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Kerry described today’s political environment as not that different from the divided country during the anti-communist witch hunts of McCarthyism and Watergate. Though these are dark analogies, he said, he was hopeful because even in those times the nation’s institutions — whether it be media or even individual senators — worked to preserve the country.
In fact, Kerry noted that there was only one time when these institutions could not prevent a full crisis: the Civil War.
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“You know what, I don’t think even Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped that one,” joked Kerry in a reference to Trump’s quip weeks ago that Jackson, who owned slaves and died 16 years before the Civil War began, could have stopped the war if he had lived later.
Kerry expressed optimism about the nation’s institutions, but he also acknowledged there are real challenges and anxieties in the country, particularly for those people who may have voted for Trump.
Kerry argued that it isn’t free trade but breakneck technological changes that led to a massive job loss, particularly in the manufacturing sector.
“Sure – yes, technology is transformative, but if it was your job that disappeared and nothing replaced it – guess what,” Kerry asked. “You’ll find zero comfort in the fact that the same technology that eliminated your job also gave you a smartphone that lets you binge-watch a future that’s out of reach for you and everyone you grew up with.
“What concerns me is that if our institutions can’t build consensus and respond to the demand of Americans for jobs today — how are we ever going to do it in a time when artificial intelligence and robotics kick in and five times that number of jobs disappear twice as fast?” he said.
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He also talked at length about American political culture, climate change, and global terrorism.
This week the Harvard campus served as a reunion of sorts for several former Obama administration officials. Former vice president Joe Biden spoke to college graduates, and former deputy attorney general Sally Yates addressed the graduating class at Harvard Law school.
James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell or subscribe to his Ground Game newsletter on politics: http://pages.email.bostonglobe.com/GroundGameSignUpNEW DELHI/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. defense firm Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) wants to push ahead with plans to move production of its F-16 combat jets to India, but understands President Donald Trump’s administration may want to take a “fresh look” at the proposal.
A U.S. Lockheed Martin F-16 flies during an air display at the Farnborough International Air Show, Hampshire, July 19, 2004. REUTERS/Toby Melville
With no more orders for the F-16 from the Pentagon, Lockheed plans to use its Fort Worth, Texas plant instead to produce the fifth generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that the United States Air Force is transitioning to.
Lockheed would switch F-16 production to India, as long as the Indian government agrees to order hundreds of the planes that its air force desperately needs.
Trump has criticized U.S. companies that have moved manufacturing overseas and which then sell their products back to the U.S. In his first few weeks in office, he has pushed companies, from automakers to pharmaceutical firms, to produce more in the United States.
In Lockheed’s case, however, the plan is to build the F-16 to equip the Indian Air Force, and not sell them back into the United States.
Lockheed said it has been talking to Trump’s transition and governance teams as well as the U.S. Congress for several months on its plans, including the proposed sale of F-16 planes to India, a spokesman told Reuters in Washington.
“We’ve briefed the Administration on the current proposal, which was supported by the Obama Administration as part of a broader cooperative dialogue with the Government of India,” the spokesman said.
“We understand that the Trump Administration will want to take a fresh look at some of these programs, and we stand prepared to support that effort to ensure that any deal of this importance is properly aligned with U.S. policy priorities.”
India is expected to spend $250 billion on defense modernization over the next decade, analysts say, and there is concern that a veto on making the F-16 in India would not only hit Lockheed, but also threaten other military contracts to come up in India for Boeing (BA.N), Northrop (NOC.N) and Raytheon (RTN.N).
The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the plan to build the plane in India.
A person close to Lockheed said company officials did not know what the Trump administration planned to do about the proposal to shift F-16 production to India.
“They’re following it closely and talking with the White House. But if they don’t move production to India, there’s no way they’ll get the India contract,” the person said.
One argument to be made was that moving to India would preserve some component production in the United States. “Twenty-five percent of something is better than zero percent of nothing,” the person said.
NO THREAT TO U.S. JOBS
Lockheed has said that moving F-16 assembly to India would create 200 engineering jobs in the United States to help support the production line in India.
It has also said that about 800 workers in the United States making the non-Lockheed parts for the F-16 would keep their jobs if construction shifts to India.
“We are offering to make the F-16 Block-70 aircraft with a local partner in India. This is an offer exclusive to India,” Randall L. Howard, head of F-16 business development, told Reuters ahead of India’s biggest air show beginning in Bengaluru next week.
In India, the F-16 is up against SAAB’s (SAABb.ST) Gripen combat aircraft, which the Swedish firm has also offered to make locally, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi drives a Make-in-India campaign to build a domestic aerospace industry and reduce costly imports.
The Indian government is expected to decide this year on which company will build a single-engine fighter plane, in collaboration with a local partner. A defense official said the process was at a very early stage.
The Indian air force alone needs 200-250 fighters over the next 10 years, its former chief Arup Raha said before he left office in December.
Negotiating arms contracts with India can take years, and industry officials said there was no guarantee Lockheed would win the contract even if it moves production to India.
Defense ties between India and the United States have grown rapidly, with U.S. arms sales of more than $4 billion in 2012-15, mostly under government-to-government foreign military sales, upstaging long-term supplier Russia and even Israel.
Lockheed’s executive director for international business development, Abhay Paranjape, said his team has met with representatives from 40 defense and aviation firms in India to help build the ancillary network for the aircraft assembly program.
“We want to be prepared, that’s why we started the ground work,” he said, adding Lockheed has also scouted possible factory sites in India.
Lockheed has a joint venture with India’s Tata Advanced Systems Ltd to make airframe components for the C-130J Super Hercules transport plane and the S-92 helicopter.
“The capability for building components exists here, it’s been proven with the C-130s. The challenge now is to pick the right partners,” Paranjape said.On the fifth anniversary of the discovery of the Asian longhorned beetle in Worcester, state and local officials lauded the work to contain the pest, but said more work is needed.
On the fifth anniversary of the discovery of the Asian longhorned beetle in Worcester, state and local officials lauded the work to contain the pest, but said more work is needed.
The beetle, which bores into hardwood trees and eventually kills them by eating out the trees’ structure, was initially found in Worcester’s Burncoat neighborhood and spread to neighboring Shrewsbury, Holden, West Boylston and Boylston.
State and federal officials Monday declared August Forest Pest Awareness Month and encouraged the public to check trees in their yards and neighborhoods for signs of the pest.
"We need all the eyes on the ground we can have," said Rick Sullivan, secretary of the executive office of energy and environmental affairs. "It is very important that citizens do look at their trees."
Residents can spot signs of the beetle in hardwood trees, such as maple, elm and ash, by checking for exit holes and an orange discoloration to the bark, said Clint McFarland, of the US Department of Agriculture’s Asian Longhorned Beetle Eradication Program.
While the beetles are not currently threatening any MetroWest communities, McFarland cautioned that they could spread if people living in the beetle quarantine zone move infested trees or firewood.
"It’s still a concern and threat," said McFarland. "We still worry about it."
McFarland estimated full eradication is still about 10 years away, but said federal officials are encouraged by dwindling numbers of infested trees.
"If we’re counting infested trees on our fingers that’s a good thing," said McFarland.
Since the beetle was found in Worcester, federal officials have surveyed over 3.5 million trees and cut down, chipped up and incinerated more than 30,000 to control the spread.
While 33,000 trees have been cut down, the treeline of the region remains mostly unchanged as state and federal officials have partnered to replant over 25,000 trees with 2,000 more to be planted later this year.
"Never before has a region lost and replanted so many trees in this short of time,’ said U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-2nd.
State and federal officials are optimistic about their efforts.
"This is a critical milestone," said Jack Murray, commissioner of the Department of Conservation and Recreation. "There is more work to be done. This pest can be eradicated."
Jeff Malachowski can be reached at 508-490-7466 or jmalachowski@wickedlocal.com.Sharethrough serves millions of ad requests daily, all on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). At one time, sharing AWS credentials via a shared password vault worked OK. But as we grew, we needed a better, more secure way to manage AWS logins.
We use Terraform to maintain infrastructure and prevent unintentional version drift. Using it to maintain our AWS credentials seemed a logical choice. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) gives us the ability to create individual login (IAM user), assosicate users to a group (IAM group) and assign access control policy (IAM policy). Together, they offer a great solution for user, group and access management.
IAM in Action
In the example below, we are creating an iam_user mason who is a member of the stx iam_group. The stx iam_group is attached to the stx iam_policy with the access policy defined in stx.json. These files are checked into github to prevent drift, the same way we use Terraform to maintain other parts of our infrastructure.
Our Terraform directory structure looks like below. ( client, sam, sfp, and stx are teams within Engineering)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 # Directory Structure ├── policies │ ├── client.json │ ├── sam.json │ ├── sfp.json │ └── stx.json └── production ├── aws.tf ├── iam_group_membership.tf ├── iam_groups │ └── iam_groups.tf ├── iam_policies │ ├── client.tf │ ├── sam.tf │ ├── sfp.tf │ └── stx.tf ├── iam_policy_attachment.tf ├── iam_users │ ├── client.tf │ ├── sam.tf │ ├── sfp.tf │ └── stx.tf ├── modules.tf ├── production.tfstate ├── production.tfstate.backup ├── temp.tf └── variables.tf
Tree Structure and Explanation
The iam_users directory contains files that create individual users:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 # iam_users/stx.tf resource "aws_iam_user" "mason" { name = "mason" path = "/" } output "mason" { value = "${aws_iam_user.mason.name}" }
The iam_group directory contains a file that creates engineering groups:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 # iam_groups/iam_groups.tf resource "aws_iam_group" "stx" { name = "stx" path = "/" } output "stx" { value = "${aws_iam_group.stx.name}" }
The iam_policies directory files indicate the group policy to use. Actual policies are defined in the policies directory. In this case, the stx engineering group is using the stx.json policy file.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 # iam_policies/stx.tf resource "aws_iam_policy" "stx" { name = "stx" path = "/" description = "Team stx policy" policy = "${file(\"terraform/policies/stx.json\")}" } output "stx" { value = "${aws_iam_policy.stx.name}" } output "stx_arn" { value = "${aws_iam_policy.stx.arn}" }
Policies are defined as json blob inside the policies directory. This policy allows full access to EC2 and S3.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 # policy file: stx.json { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Action": [ "ec2:*", "s3:*", ], "Effect": "Allow", "Resource": "*" } ] }
The group membership file assigns an iam_user membership to an iam_group :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 # iam_group_membership.tf resource "aws_iam_group_membership" "stx" { name = "stx" users = [ "${module.iam_users.mason}" ] group = "${module.iam_groups.stx}" }
The policy attachment file attaches an iam_policy to an iam_group :
1 2 3 4 5 6 # iam_policy_attachment.tf resource "aws_iam_policy_attachment" "stx" { name = "stx" groups = ["${module.iam_groups.stx}"] policy_arn = "${module.iam_policies.stx_arn}" }
At last, the module file maps where the resources are located to better organize the IAM identities :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 # module.tf module "iam_users" { source = "./iam_users/" } module "iam_groups" { source = "./iam_groups/" } module "iam_policies" { source = "./iam_policies/" }
AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
We use two-factor authentication (2FA) as additonal security for AWS logins. The Amazon SDK provides information to enable 2FA for users, but associating an MFA device to a user requires entering two authentication codes from the device. Creating such devices is not within the scope of the SDK.
To associate a MFA device with a user, we wrote a tool that uses oath-tool (to create a virtual MFA for generating the authentication codes) and google charts api to create a qr_code.
Code snippet of the 2FA associator
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 # save the qr_code into a markdown file to display on browser def write_qr_code_file username data = @mfa [ username ] File. open ( "qr_codes/ #{ username }.md", "w" ) do | file | s = "<a href= \" #{ data [ :qr_code ] } \" rel= \" #{ username } \" ></a>" file. write ( s ) file. write ( "
" ) file. close end end # generate a vMFA and capture the next 10 codes for user association def create_auth_codes base_32_string_seed, serial_number, username @mfa [ username ] = { base_32_string_seed: base_32_string_seed, serial_number: serial_number, qr_code: "https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=200x200&chld=M%7C0&cht=qr&chl=otpauth://totp/ #{ username } @sharethrough?secret= #{ base_32_string_seed } " } codes, stderr, status = Open3. capture3 ( "oathtool --base32 #{ base_32_string_seed } -w 10 --totp" ) codes. split end
Conclusion
Balancing security with usability is tough. Terraform and IAM identities helped us make our systems more secure without hindering engineers. Engineers now have their own AWS access and secret keys saved in a credential file, and teams can focus on features, knowing that we have our bases covered.So first there were the fleas. They’ve lived in our house before. And in spite of the temporary presence of a dog, we concluded that my husband brought them home from his recent camping trip. He was infested. The dog was not.
So I stripped sheets from beds, powdered the house with borax, and sprayed the dog with a mild vinegar and water wash. Three of the beds weren’t made yet. But we could take care of all that after the family gathering. There would be plenty of time when we got back with some grandkids who were staying overnight so we could pick blueberries the next day.
The plan was simple. I’d make the beds. Paul could walk the dog. Bedtime would be later than usual but not unreasonable.
Then the plan changed.
“We have a problem,” Paul said when he returned from the walk. The dog had nosed his way into a bush and got a snout full of skunk spray.
The new plan meant the dog couldn’t come into the house yet. Paul headed to the store to buy tomato juice. I still had to finish making the beds. So I recruited two grandkids–cousins, the two oldest.
“You two watch the dog, but don’t touch him.” They sat on the creaky porch swing. The only light from stars and the corner street light.
I gathered old towels, a basin of soapy water, and a bucket for the tomato juice. And by the time I finished the beds, Paul was back.
The younger cousins were upstairs getting in some bonus video game time. Paul and the two older cousins were outside washing the dog.
I stood in between, near a window on a stairway, laughter arose from the driveway.
And I remembered another day that hadn’t gone quite right. We were at our church picnic. The dinner had been wonderful. But then one of the cousins convinced Grandpa Paul to go on the ride that went forward, backward, and sideways.
“Remember the time Grandpa threw up at the park?” I had told them they would always remember that day. “You’ll always remember this day too.”
It seemed as though nothing had gone right that day, yet all was right that could be.
After the dog dried off and settled down, the lone girl cousin was down the hall between pink sheets with a book and a light. Quiet there already. Later it was quiet upstairs. After the game was off, after a fight over who was hogging the covers, after cousin whispers of adventures and memories.
The next day we picked 22 pounds of blueberries. It took two vehicles to carry the cousins and the grandparents. We stopped for ice cream after our work. Grandpa played tag with them in the playground.
He did not throw up. But may we always remember anyway.
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PrintWashington (CNN) George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, said he is pulling himself out of consideration for a Justice Department job.
CNN had been told previously President Donald Trump was expected to nominate Conway to run the Justice Department's civil division, which handles legal challenges to major administration initiatives.
"I am profoundly grateful to the President and to the attorney general for selecting me to serve in the Department of Justice. I have reluctantly concluded, however, that, for me and my family, this is not the right time for me to leave the private sector and take on a new role in the federal government," he said in a statement.
"Kellyanne and I continue to support the President and his administration, and I look forward to doing so in whatever way I can from outside the government," he added.
One source close to the situation said the decision was made out of family considerations.
Read MoreA new approach to selling and recharging electric cars could overcome some of the basic issues that have kept them from being widely adopted. A startup called Project Better Place, which had the largest of any venture-funding round in 2007, raising $200 million, recently announced plans to install recharging infrastructure in Israel and Denmark and to sell electric cars using a business model much like that used today with cell phones.
Wind-powered cars: A startup is planning to build infrastructure in Denmark that will allow recharging of electric vehicles throughout the country. Electric vehicles are a good match for wind power, since they’re typically recharged at night, when the wind is the strongest and demand for electricity is ordinarily low.
The company aims to address two limitations of electric vehicles: their range is considerably less than gasoline-powered cars, and the batteries take hours to recharge from ordinary outlets. To solve the first problem, says CEO and founder Shai Agassi, Project Better Place is installing a vast grid of outlets at parking spaces throughout the country, which will allow drivers to keep batteries topped off during the day. In Israel, the company will install 500,000 outlets–one for every six parking spaces in the country–with a similar number slated for Denmark.
To address the time that it takes to recharge batteries, the company has arranged for the automaker Renault to manufacture electric cars with batteries that can easily be swapped out. The cars will have more than a hundred miles of range, which is more than enough for most daily driving. On long trips, once a battery is depleted, a driver will be able to pull into a station where a simple robotic system will remove the depleted battery and install a fully charged one. The process will only take a couple of minutes, Agassi says. The company will build 125 such stations in Israel and slightly more in Denmark.
To make this system work, Project Better Place will take an unusual approach to selling cars. The company will sell cars for a subsidized cost in return for drivers signing up for a service contract. Instead of signing up for a set number of calling minutes, as with cell phones, drivers will pay for a set number of miles. The subscription will cover the cost of renting the battery, swapping it out, and the electricity for charging it up. The number of miles driven will be tracked using a wireless network, Agassi says. The cost of the car will depend on the length of the service contract, he says. For example, the car could be free with a six-year agreement. In any case, the car will cost no more than a comparable gasoline car.
The model has a number of advantages, Agassi says. First, it lowers the up-front cost of the car. What’s more, it takes care of the issue of billing people for recharging from the network of outlets: it isn’t necessary to keep track of charging at each outlet. Instead, each car records the energy it has used, and it communicates wirelessly with Project Better Place. The model also addresses one of the main objections that have been raised regarding battery-swapping systems. In a battery swap, a driver can’t be sure the new battery is as good as the old one–it could have more wear and tear or less storage capacity. In the project’s system, the drivers don’t own the batteries, and the responsibility for maintaining them is transferred to the company.
The plan is particularly suited for small countries such as Israel and Denmark. All of the infrastructure needed in Israel can easily be paid for with the money that Project Better Place has already raised, Agassi says. The economics are attractive in other ways. Both countries have very high gas prices–more than $7 a gallon. The countries also have tax policies that heavily favor electric vehicles. In Israel, conventional cars have a sales tax of 72 percent, while electric cars are only taxed at 10 percent. In Denmark, the difference is even bigger. The government collects a tax of 150 percent on conventional cars, while electric cars are tax-free. As a result, Agassi says, a typical sedan in Denmark costs $60,000, while an electric car will cost just $20,000.
To work in the United States, Agassi says, the approach would need to be implemented at the city or state level, since the country is so much larger. It would be fairly easy, he says, to install recharging grids in cities and, particularly on the East Coast, to connect the cities with swapping stations. He says that higher gas prices will also make the economics more favorable.
Not everyone agrees that the company’s approach can work in the United States. Menahem Anderman, a highly regarded automotive-battery consultant and the founder of Advanced Automotive Batteries, says that the approach will be expensive, and that battery swapping can damage the batteries, reducing their life and reliability.
Regardless of the future of the technology in larger countries, Project Better Place is now getting its first project under way in Israel, working with utilities on a plan to build its recharging grid. Agassi predicts that results will be fast. He projects that in Israel, within 10 years, electric cars will outsell conventional vehicles.There has been much speculation that a Brexit could lead to a number of other countries following suit and leaving the EU. Top of that list is Denmark, with Nigel Farage claiming that the country would be the first to leave in a domino effect triggered by Brexit.
Now Denmark’s former Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt has waded into the discussion. When asked, at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women event in London, whether Denmark would leave the EU if Britain did, Thorning-Schmidt poured cold water on the suggestion. The former Social Democrat politician, who is the current chief exec of Save the Children, says the majority of Danes want to remain in the EU — even though they voted against closer ties in a referendum in December:
‘The Danish discussion is quite different from the British discussion. If you asked the Danes if they want to leave the EU or stay, you’ll get a majority that want to stay.’
Although Thorning-Schmidt, who is married to Labour’s Stephen Kinnock, concedes that a lot of Danes don’t like the EU, she argues that they understand deep down that the pros out-way the cons:
‘Everyone knows that the EU is not perfect, but deep down I think a lot of Danish know how much we gain economically, culturally in terms of our freedom by being part of the EU.’
While this is an indication that not everything may play out as Farage and his supporters expect in the event of Brexit, Thorning-Schmidt’s words ought to be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, since leaving office last year, she has been tipped for a plum role as an EU commissioner.On ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) addressed Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-OH) newfound support for same sex marriage, which the senator said was influenced by his son coming out as gay.
Boehner said he appreciates Portman’s change of heart, but “can’t imagine” that his own opposition to gay marriage would ever change, even if he had a child who was gay.
His exchange with host Martha Raddatz.
MARTHA RADDATZ: There was a surprise this week. Senator Rob Portman, who is a close friend of yours, a conservative from Ohio, said he has had a change of heart about gay marriage. He will now support gay marriage after learning his own 21-year-old son Will is gay. Has Portman shared this with you?
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: He has, in fact, called. Listen, Rob’s a great friend and a long-time ally. And I appreciate that he’s decided to change his views on this. But I believe that marriage is a union of a man and a woman.
MARTHA RADDATZ: Can you imagine yourself in a situation where you reversed your decision, as Portman has, on gay marriage if a child of yours or someone you love told you they were gay?
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Listen, I believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. All right. It’s what I grew up with. It’s what I believe. It’s what my church teaches me. And I can’t imagine that position would ever change.
MARTHA RADDATZ: Will Portman said it was not a choice. So, how do you justify denying him a right to marriage?
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Listen, I think that Rob can make up his own mind, take his own position. But I’ve made clear my position.Stockholm + FÖLJ
Explosion på nattklubb i centrala Stockholm
avKenan Habul, Niklas Svahn
NYHETER 23 december 2015 06:57
Polisen: ”Går inte att utesluta samband med skotten mot Sturecompagniet"
1 av 14
En okänd person har kastat in ett explosivt föremål på Berns salonger i Stockholm.
För två veckor sedan sköt någon mot nattklubben Sturecompagniet.
Berns och Sturecompagniet har samma ägare.
– Det går inte att utesluta samband. Rent historiskt är det endera någonting som en avvisad gäst gör i affekt eller så kan det vara grövre våldsbrottslighet i botten, säger inspektör Ulf Höglund, polisens förundersökningsledare.
Tipsa | Aftonbladet
Klockan 04.19 fick polisen larm om att en okänd person slängt in ett explosivt föremål i restaurangen Berns lokaler i centrala Stockholm. Föremålet detonerade samtidigt som personal befann sig inne på nattklubben.
– Det har smällt till ordentligt i restaurangen, säger Carina Skagerlind vid polisens kommunikationscentral i Stockholm.
Ett stort område kring Berns spärrades av och platsen undersöktes av polisens tekniker.
Personal inne i lokalen
– Jag håller på att sammanställa vad patrullerna som var på plats i morse har dokumenterat. Jag ska begära att få in de filmer från övervakningskameror som finns i området, säger inspektör Ulf Höglund.
Några ur personalen befann sig i lokalen, som annars var nedsläckt för natten, uppger polisen. Ingen person ska dock ha kommit till skada.
Polisen vet ännu inte om det var en eller flera gärningsmän.
Ingen person är gripen eller misstänkt.
Enligt Aftonbladets reporter Kristoffer Olofsson, som var på plats, hade polisen spärrat av nästan hela Berzelii park som ligger precis utanför Berns.
Utifrån syntes minst två rutor på fasaden som var krossade.
– Vi vet ännu inte vilken typ av sprängladdning det var, säger Ulf Höglund.
”Går inte att utesluta samband”
För två veckor sedan avlossade en man flera skott mot entrédörren till nattklubben Sturecompagniet på Stureplan i centrala Stockholm. Ägare till både Sturecompagniet och Berns är Stureplansgruppen. Flera vittnen uppgav för Aftonbladet att skytten var en mörkklädd man som kom till platsen i en mörk bil.
– Jag har inte pratat med någon från ledningsgruppen där, jag vet inte om de ser samband. Det går inte att utesluta, men det kan vara en enskild händelse också, säger Höglund.
Han lägger till att han ännu inte har en klar bild över det som har hänt. Men historiskt kan den här typen av attacker mot nattklubbar handla om utpressning eller avvisade gäster som vill hämnas.
– Det kan vara båda delarna. Endera är det någonting som en avvisad gäst gör i affekt eller så kan det vara grövre våldsbrottslighet i botten. Men vi vet ännu för lite i det här fallet, säger Ulf Höglund.
Berns håller öppet som vanligt
Nanna Waktel, vd för Berns, vill inte prata med Aftonbladet utan hänvisar till ett pressmeddelande på nattklubbens hemsida.
Verksamheten kommer inte att påverkas av nattens attack.
"Det är förvånande och beklagligt att något sådant här kan hända. Vi bistår polisen i deras arbete men av respekt för den förundersökningssekretess som råder kan vi i dagsläget inte lämna ytterligare kommentarer", skriver klubben på sin hemsida.
23 december 2015 06:57Antigay viewers were quick to take to social media last night to decry Sunday’s Super Bowl 50 Halftime show, which wrapped up with gutsy performances by Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, and Coldplay singing “Believe in Love.”
Apparently it was all the bright lights and rainbow colors… which equals gay? Who knows what they’re all so angry about?
Nothing against being gay, but can I please watch the Super Bowl half time show and not have to it be all about promoting homosexuality — isabelle schneider (@schneisa000) February 8, 2016
Forgot the halftime show was changed to a gay rights movement — Keegs (@Bryan_Keegs) February 8, 2016
@IngrahamAngle the homosexual promoting halftime show is over at my house. — S.Gatewood (@uspatriot72) February 8, 2016
Super bowl 50 halftime show is emitting homosexual tendencies@CloydRivers what has America come to? Football is being destroyed. — Tyler Solomon (@TylerSolomon30) February 8, 2016
I believe the message of that halftime show was "quickly, become a homosexual" — Real Trent Flubbs (@RealTrentFlubbs) February 8, 2016
Just because the super bowl is held near San Francisco doesn't mean we need to make it a homosexual congregation — Tyler Solomon (@TylerSolomon30) February 8, 2016
So sad that Super Bowl halftime shows the last couple of years has really pushed homosexual agenda. God please forgive our nation. — Mike Watts (@alabamawatts) February 8, 2016
Since when is the super bowl halftime show a gay pride festival — #HillaryForPrison (@Kovacina_Matt65) February 8, 2016
All the Halftime performance did was try to promote homosexuality. — #JetIsBad (@Jetisbad) February 8, 2016
Basically a homo pride celebration during halftime….. And that's one reason our country has gone down — CamVP(15-1)(2-0) (@Alpha_Dog_LM24) February 8, 2016
As The New Civil Rights Movement points out, the bright lights and swirling rainbow colors were simply promoting Coldplay’s new album:
Friendly Atheist’s Hemant Mehta noted that the anti-gay “complaints come from the same people who are watching a game in which dozens of men jump on top of each other for hours before dancing and patting each other on the butt.”
This Story Filed UnderThe coincidence could hardly be more unfortunate, but it could not have been foreseen. Back in March, on the second anniversary of his pontificate, Pope Francis announced a year to be dedicated to the major theme of his papacy, mercy.
The Year of Mercy, he announced, will begin on the day the church calls the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, December 8.
“I am convinced,” Francis said, “that the whole church will find in this jubilee the joy needed to rediscover and make fruitful the mercy of God, with which all of us are called |
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Image copyright Reuters Image caption Many Palestinians had refused to go through the metal detectors in protest
The site is hugely politically sensitive and has been subject to a delicate set of arrangements - commonly referred to as the "status quo" - governing access, security and administration, for the past 50 years.
Under the arrangement, Israel is responsible for security and a Jordanian-funded religious trust, or Waqf, looks after the day-to-day running of the site.
Palestinians said the placing of the metal detectors upset the status quo, which Israel has repeatedly pledged to maintain. Israel said Palestinians were using the issue as a pretext to spread hostility against the Jewish state.The idea of new "Arrested Development" episodes may have felt a little too good to be true, but producer Dean Lorey has helpfully provided those anxiously awaiting the show's return with an update.
On his blog, he assures fans that the project is in full swing - with creator Mitch Hurwitz and writer Jim Vallely joining him at the writers table to crank out a new season.
In November of last year, Netflix announced that the new episodes of "Arrested Development" would be available for U.S. Netflix subscribers to stream instantly at some point in 2013.
Better yet, "the original cast is back," Lorey revealed. "There are offices and parking spaces. We're shooting this year."
Although he couldn't give more details (including the show's shooting schedule), Lorey reassures that "it's happening, and it's great to be back with my pals from the show."
Hopefully the often-talked about potential movie isn't too far behind.Abstract
What is a good life and how it can be achieved is one of the fundamental issues. When considering a good life, there is a division between hedonic (pleasure attainment) and eudaimonic well-being (meaning pursuing and self-realization). However, an integrated approach that can compare the brain functional and structural differences of these two forms of well-being is lacking. Here, we investigated how the individual tendency to eudaimonic well-being relative to hedonic well-being, measured using eudaimonic and hedonic balance (EHB) index, is reflected in the functional and structural features of a key network of well-being—the default mode network (DMN). We found that EHB was positively correlated with functional connectivity of bilateral ventral medial prefrontal cortex within anterior DMN and bilateral precuneus within posterior DMN. Brain morphometric analysis showed that EHB was also positively correlated with gray matter volume in left precuneus. These results demonstrated that the relative dominance of one form of well-being to the other is reflected in the morphometric characteristics and intrinsic functions of DMN.
Introduction
What is a good life and how it can be achieved is one of the fundamental issues, which has a great impact on our practices to make human society better (Ryan and Deci, 2001; Huta and Waterman, 2013). Dating back to ancient Greece, significant strides have been made in distinguishing between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being when considering the nature of a good life (Ryan and Deci, 2001). The hedonic approach focuses on happiness and defines well-being as pleasure attainment. In contrast, the eudaimonic approach defines well-being in terms of meaning, purpose, self-potential and self-realization (Waterman, 1993; Ryan and Deci, 2001). As each form of well-being provides different answers to what a good life is, revealing the brain mechanisms of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being holds promise for enriching our comprehension of well-being.
Psychologically, hedonic well-being relates more strongly to excitement-seeking, extraversion and present-orientated, whereas eudaimonic well-being relates more strongly to self-connection, introversion and temporal integration (Huta and Ryan, 2010; Huta, 2012; Baumeister et al., 2013). For example, compared to individuals with hedonic well-being dominance, individuals with eudaimonic well-being dominance devoted more time to self-reflection to identify one’s true self (Huta, 2012) and thought more frequently about their past and future (Baumeister et al., 2013). These characteristics of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being are in line with functions of the default mode network (DMN), i.e. introspectively oriented mental activity at rest (e.g. self-reflection, theory of mind, mind wandering, episodic memory and future episodic thought) (Raichle et al., 2001; Buckner et al., 2008).
Recent neuroimaging studies on well-being have revealed neural correlates of hedonic or eudaimonic well-being within and outside of DMN (Heller et al., 2013; Lewis et al., 2014; Luo et al., 2014; Kong et al., 2015, 2016; Sato et al., 2015). For example, our previous study using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (R-fMRI) approach found that the hedonic well-being was associated with decreased resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) within core areas of DMN (Luo et al., 2016). Self-reported meaning in life was shown positively correlated with connectivity of medial temporal lobe, a subnetwork of the DMN (Waytz et al., 2015). As core regions of DMN, such as medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), not only involved in pleasure attachment, but also implicated in self-representation, introspective self-referential cognition and consciousness, DMN may play a fundamental role in connecting hedonic and eudaimonic well-being (Kringelbach and Berridge, 2009).
To date, few study have examined hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in a single study. The only pioneering study using resting-state electroecncephalography found that greater left than right superior frontal activation was positively associated with both forms of well-being, and left frontal activation predicted eudaimonic but not hedonic well-being when positive affect is statistically controlled (Urry et al., 2004). Thus, an integrated approach that can compare the functional and structural differences of these two forms of well-being with high spatial resolution is lacking.
Here, we filled this gap by using structural and functional MRI techniques and an eudaimonic and hedonic balance (EHB) index. Conceptually, EHB quantifies the balance between eudaimonic and hedonic well-being, or in other words, which form of well-being is more dominant. This could be an interesting trait that shows meaningful individual differences. Operationally, it is defined as the difference between Z-standardized scores of Psychological Well-being and the Positive Affect subscale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). This definition is based on the approach used in Cox et al. (2012), which measures the balance between affective empathy and cognitive empathy. EHB index has high ecological validity and reflects the fact that individuals live with both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in daily life, though some with greater tendency to pursue pleasure and others with greater tendency to self-realization. Using EHB index is necessary also because it allows us to investigate eudaimonic and hedonic well-being integrally, even when two measures were highly correlated.
Previous studies reported that eudaimonic well-being, relative to hedonic well-being, is correlated more strongly with self, and past or future thinking (Huta and Ryan, 2010; Huta, 2012; Baumeister et al., 2013). Thus, we predicted that EHB score will be positively correlated with functional connectivity of core DMN areas implicated in these functions, such as MPFC and precuneus (Raichle et al., 2001; Buckner et al., 2008; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010). That is, a eudaimonic dominance would exhibited enhanced functional connectivity within DMN and a hedonic dominance would exhibited decreased DMN functional connectivity. Furthermore, as eudaimonic or hedonic dominance is a relatively stable trait, EHB may also be associated with structural features within the DMN. Thus, we predicted that EHB would be related to DMN morphometry, such as gray matter volume.
Materials and Methods
Participants
Participants were 154 healthy undergraduate or postgraduate students, who volunteered as part of an ongoing study investigating the association between brain imaging, temporal cognition and well-being (Luo et al., 2014, 2016). Fourteen participants were excluded due to excessive head motion (see Functional MRI data preprocessing and analyses section for details), and another two were excluded due to missing self-report measures. Final sample includes 138 participants (males/females, 52/86; mean age = 21.10 ± 1.69). All participants were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, with no history of neurological conditions or psychiatric episodes. In accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, written informed consent was obtained from all participants. The study protocol was approved by the Southwest University Brain Imaging Center Institutional Review Board.
Eudaimonic and hedonic balance
We used EHB to quantify the tendency to eudaimonic or hedonic well-being. The EHB index, a relative measure, was defined as the difference between eudaimonic and hedonic well-being. A positive EHB score indicates a dominance of eudaimonic well-being, while a negative EHB score indicates a dominance of hedonic well-being. The trait level of hedonic well-being was measured using the Positive Affect subscales of the PANAS (Watson et al., 1988; Heller et al., 2013), a measure of hedonic well-being with high reliability (Cronbach's = 0.87).
The trait level of eudaimonic well-being was assessed using the Chinese version of the 42-item Psychological Well-being (Ryff, 1989), a reliable measure of eudaimonic well-being (Heller et al., 2013; Lewis et al., 2014; Kong et al., 2015). In our sample, a good reliability was also observed (Cronbach’s α = 0.92). The eudaimonic well-being can be further divided into two components: self- and other-focused eudaimonic well-being. The self-focused eudaimonic well-being index is composed of environmental mastery, personal growth, purpose in life and self-acceptance (Cronbach’s α = 0.90). Other-focused eudaimonic well-being index is composed of positive relations with others (Cronbach’s α = 0.79) (Barrett-Cheetham et al., 2016). The correlation between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being was shown in Figure 1.
Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Correlations between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.
Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Correlations between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.
Imaging data acquisition
Imaging data were acquired on a 3.0-T scanner (Magnetom Trio, Siemens, Erlangen, Germany). Eight minutes of functional images were acquired using a single-shot, gradient-recalled echo planar imaging sequence (TR = 2000 ms, TE = 30 ms, flip angle = 90°, 32 axial slices, FOV = 192 × 192 cm, acquisition matrix = 64 × 64, slice thickness = 3 mm, without gap, voxel size = 3 × 3 × 4 mm), when participants were instructed to rest with their eyes closed, not to think of anything in particular and not to fall asleep. To minimize head motion, participants’ head were restricted with foam cushions. High-resolution T1-weighted anatomical images were also acquired in sagittal orientation using a 3D magnetization prepared rapid gradient-echo sequence (176 slices, TR = 1900 ms, TE = 2.53 ms, flip angle = 9°, resolution = 256 × 256 and voxel size = 1 × 1 × 1 mm).
Functional MRI data preprocessing and analyses
Preprocessing
Functional images were preprocessed using data processing assistant and R-fMRI (version 2.2, http://www.restfmri.net/forum/DPARSF) (Chao-Gan and Yu-Feng, 2010). The preprocessing steps included slice timing, head motion correction, spatial normalization and smoothing (4 mm full-width at half maximum Gaussian kernel).
As head motion is a major concern for R-fMRI data analyses, we controlled head motion at different levels. First, we performed outlier analyses based on mean framewise displacement (FD), a summary measure of overall head motion (Power et al., 2012). Eight participants were excluded due to head motion outside of 1.5 s.d. of the group mean (0.122 ± 0.061 mm, threshold = 0.214 mm); second, we checked the number of volumes with an FD < 0.2 mm for each participant. Six participants were excluded due to having < 150 volumes with FD < 0.20 mm (Power et al., 2012); finally, we included mean FD in the group analysis as a nuisance regressor to account for the residual effect of motion.
DMN identification
After preprocessing, we concatenated the image data of 138 participants and performed group spatial independent component analysis (ICA) on the concatenated data to separate fMRI signal into spatially independent networks using Group ICA of fMRI Toolbox (GIFT) (icatb.sourceforge.net) (Calhoun et al., 2001). The optimal number of components was set to 32, according to the minimum description length criteria for source estimation (Li et al., 2007). To perform group ICA, dimensionality of the data was first reduced using principle component analysis. Then, the reduced data were concatenated over the time domain using the infomax algorithm. To ensure the reliability of the derived components, the infomax algorithm was repeated 20 times by running the ICASSO toolbox, using both ‘randinit’ and ‘bootstrap’ methods (Himberg et al., 2004). Individual maps and time courses for each participant were then back-reconstructed and calibrated using Z values to normalize the signal. As Z values represented the contribution of the voxels to the independent component, it is commonly thought that Z values can be indirectly used to measure the functional connectivity within the network (Beckmann et al., 2005; Liao et al., 2010).
Components corresponding to the DMN were identified in two steps: first, we performed a spatial template matching procedure using a DMN template delineated by Smith et al. (2009). Two components having the highest spatial overlap with the template were identified (r = 0.32 and 0.17). Then, these two components were further confirmed by visual inspection and guided by previously reported DMN (Buckner et al., 2008; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010). One component mainly includes MPFC, anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC/PCC) (anterior DMN: aDMN), and the other includes precuneus and PCC (posterior DMN: pDMN) (Figure 2). The stability of these two components were both above 0.97 assessed using ICASSO.
Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Spatial pattern of aDMN and pDMN. L, left; R, right.
Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Spatial pattern of aDMN and pDMN. L, left; R, right.
Association between DMN intrinsic functional connectivity and the balance of well-beings
Statistical analyses were performed using SPM8 (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/software/spm8/). To associate functional connectivity of DMN with EHB, multiple regression analyses were performed. First, for each DMN component, individual maps of all participants were entered into random effect one-sample t-tests (family-wise error, P < 0.05, k > 20) and create a sample-specific component map (Figure 2). Each component map was used as a mask in the group analysis to restrict the results within DMN areas. Second, we carried out multiple regression analysis with EHB as the covariate of interests, and gender, age and mean FD as nuisance covariates. Multiple comparisons were corrected using 10 000 Monte Carlo simulation (Ledberg et al., 1998), implemented in AlphaSim program within AFNI (http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/pub/dist/doc/program_help/AlphaSim.html) (P < 0.05, minimum cluster size are 30 voxels/810 mm3 and 27 voxels/729 mm3 for aDMN and pDMN, respectively).
Secondary analyses
In addition to EHB, we performed secondary analyses to examine the unique effect associated with hedonic after controlling for eudaimonic well-being and vice versa. Although two forms of well-beings are highly correlated, no multicollinearity among the regressors were found when both forms of well-beings were entered into the same general linear model (variance inflation factor was 1.52, below the cutoff criterion of 5) (Studenmund, 2000). Age, gender and head motion were included as nuisance covariates. Multiple comparison correction procedure was identic to the EHB analyses.
Specificity analyses
To confirm the specificity of our results, we performed additional two sets of analyses. First, we examined whether DMN connectivity was associated with measures other than EHB, such as anxious arousal. Anxious arousal is measured using the Anxious Arousal subscale of Mood and Anxiety symptom Questionnaire (Clark and Watson, 1991). This subscale is composed of 17 items and measures the level of somatic tension and hyperarousal (Cronbach’s α = 0.77). We chose this measure because it has no direct relationship with hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. Second, we examined whether EHB was associated with functional connectivity of networks other than DMN. We chose two visual networks (medial and lateral visual networks) for this purpose (see Supplementary Figure S1 for spatial map of medial and lateral visual networks). The regression analyses and multiple comparison correction were identical to the main EHB and DMN analyses.
Structural MRI data preprocessing and analyses: voxel-based morphometry
To examine the anatomical basis underlying the association between EHB and DMN functional connectivity, we performed voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis using FSL-VBM (Douaud et al., 2007, http://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fslwiki/FSLVBM), an optimized VBM protocol (Good et al., 2001; Smith et al., 2004). Preprocessing included brain extraction, gray matter segmentations and non-linear registration to Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) 152 standard space. Then, the gray matter segmented images were used to create a study-specific template. After that, all native gray matter images were non-linearly registered to this template and ‘modulated’ to correct for local expansion (or contraction) due to the non-linear component of the spatial transformation. The modulated gray matter images were then smoothed with an isotropic Gaussian kernel with a sigma of 3 mm.
The group analyses were restricted within three spherical region of interests (ROIs) (radius = 8 mm), defined based on the peak voxel coordinates in the RSFC analysis. Non-parametric voxel-wise statistical testing was performed using FSL randomize with 5000 permutations. Regressors include EHB, gender and age. Cluster significance was determined using the threshold-free cluster enhancement techniques (Smith and Nichols, 2009). The number of ROIs (n = 3) was also Bonferroni corrected (P < 0.05/3 = 0.017). Lastly, the VBM values of the ‘survived’ ROIs were correlated with its RSFC values to test for the structural and functional association.
Results
Behavioral measures of well-being
The sample demographics were showed in Table 1. There is no significant correlation between EHB and participant measures, including age, sex and head motion (P > 0.10). Hedonic (3.12 ± 0.61) and eudaimonic well-being (4.09 ± 0.46) scores were moderately correlated (r = 0.51, P < 0.001) (Figure 1). EHB scores range from −2.76 to 2.22. The percent of participants showing eudaimonic and hedonic dominance were close (50.7 vs 49.3%).
Table 1. Mean ± s.d. Range r/t (P value) Age (year) 21.10 ± 1.69 18–25 −0.14 (0.11) Female sex, % 62.3% −0.54 (0.59) Head motion (mm) 0.108 ± 0.038 0.04–0.22 0.07 (0.39) Eudaimonic well-being 4.09 ± 0.46 2.62–5.33 0.50 (<0.001) Hedonic well-being 3.12 ± 0.61 1.5–4.6 0.50 (<0.001) EHB 0.00 ± 1.00 −2.76–2.22 Mean ± s.d. Range r/t (P value) Age (year) 21.10 ± 1.69 18–25 −0.14 (0.11) Female sex, % 62.3% −0.54 (0.59) Head motion (mm) 0.108 ± 0.038 0.04–0.22 0.07 (0.39) Eudaimonic well-being 4.09 ± 0.46 2.62–5.33 0.50 (<0.001) Hedonic well-being 3.12 ± 0.61 1.5–4.6 0.50 (<0.001) EHB 0.00 ± 1.00 −2.76–2.22
Table 1. Mean ± s.d. Range r/t (P value) Age (year) 21.10 ± 1.69 18–25 −0.14 (0.11) Female sex, % 62.3% −0.54 (0.59) Head motion (mm) 0.108 ± 0.038 0.04–0.22 0.07 (0.39) Eudaimonic well-being 4.09 ± 0.46 2.62–5.33 0.50 (<0.001) Hedonic well-being 3.12 ± 0.61 1.5–4.6 0.50 (<0.001) EHB 0.00 ± 1.00 −2.76–2.22 Mean ± s.d. Range r/t (P value) Age (year) 21.10 ± 1.69 18–25 −0.14 (0.11) Female sex, % 62.3% −0.54 (0.59) Head motion (mm) 0.108 ± 0.038 0.04–0.22 0.07 (0.39) Eudaimonic well-being 4.09 ± 0.46 2.62–5.33 0.50 (<0.001) Hedonic well-being 3.12 ± 0.61 1.5–4.6 0.50 (<0.001) EHB 0.00 ± 1.00 −2.76–2.22
DMN intrinsic functional connectivity and the balance of well-beings
Spatial pattern of DMNs obtained from the group ICA analyses are shown in Figure 2 on surface map using BrainNet Viewer (Xia et al., 2013). Visual inspection indicated that the aDMN was mainly composed of the MPFC, ACC, a small portion of the PCC/precuneus, and bilateral inferior parietal gyrus. The pDMN mainly included the PCC and precuneus.
Multiple regression analysis indicated that the Z values of the bilateral vMPFC (portion of the aDMN) were positively correlated with EHB, and the Z values of the bilateral precuneus (portion of the pDMN) were also positively correlated with EHB (Figure 3A, Table 2). That is, individuals with greater eudaimonic dominance had greater DMN connectivity and individuals with greater hedonic dominance had smaller DMN connectivity.
Table 2. Anatomical region Side BAs MNI Voxel Peak x y z Size t-value EHB aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 54 12 40 3.75 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −63 21 67 4.08 Precuneus R 31 21 −54 27 36 4.51 Hedonic well-being aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 54 12 32 −4.08 Dorsal MPFC B 9 6 48 42 47 −4.28 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −66 21 48 −3.35 Precuneus R 31 18 −54 27 54 −4.28 Eudaimonic well-being aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 51 9 34 3.10 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −63 21 70 3.72 Anatomical region Side BAs MNI Voxel Peak x y z Size t-value EHB aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 54 12 40 3.75 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −63 21 67 4.08 Precuneus R 31 21 −54 27 36 4.51 Hedonic well-being aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 54 12 32 −4.08 Dorsal MPFC B 9 6 48 42 47 −4.28 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −66 21 48 −3.35 Precuneus R 31 18 −54 27 54 −4.28 Eudaimonic well-being aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 51 9 34 3.10 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −63 21 70 3.72
Table 2. Anatomical region Side BAs MNI Voxel Peak x y z Size t-value EHB aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 54 12 40 3.75 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −63 21 67 4.08 Precuneus R 31 21 −54 27 36 4.51 Hedonic well-being aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 54 12 32 −4.08 Dorsal MPFC B 9 6 48 42 47 −4.28 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −66 21 48 −3.35 Precuneus R 31 18 −54 27 54 −4.28 Eudaimonic well-being aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 51 9 34 3.10 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −63 21 70 3.72 Anatomical region Side BAs MNI Voxel Peak x y z Size t-value EHB aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 54 12 40 3.75 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −63 21 67 4.08 Precuneus R 31 21 −54 27 36 4.51 Hedonic well-being aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 54 12 32 −4.08 Dorsal MPFC B 9 6 48 42 47 −4.28 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −66 21 48 −3.35 Precuneus R 31 18 −54 27 54 −4.28 Eudaimonic well-being aDMN Ventral MPFC B 10 −6 51 9 34 3.10 pDMN Precuneus L 31 −15 −63 21 70 3.72
Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide aDMN and pDMN regions where functional connectivity is correlated with EHB (A), eudaimonic (B) or hedonic well-being (C). vMPFC, ventral MPFC; dMPFC, dorsal MPFC; PCU, precuneus.
Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide aDMN and pDMN regions where functional connectivity is correlated with EHB (A), eudaimonic (B) or hedonic well-being (C). vMPFC, ventral MPFC; dMPFC, dorsal MPFC; PCU, precuneus.
As a large body of literature showed that DMN hyperconnectivity was associated with rumination and depression (Greicius et al., 2007; Sheline et al., 2010; Berman et al., 2011; Whitfield-Gabrieli and Ford, 2012), we further disentangle the functional significance of DMN hyperconnectivity by correlating the DMN connectivity strength with two subcomponents of eudaimonic well-being. Specifically, we extracted the connectivity strength from regions showing significant associations with eudaimonic well-being (after controlling for hedonic well-being) and conducted Person’s correlation between their connectivity and the two subscales of eudaimonic well-being. We found that the Z values of the vMPFC were positively correlated with the self-focused eudaimonic well-being (r = 0.17, P = 0.046) but not other-focused eudaimonic well-being (r = 0.11, P > 0.05). The same pattern was observed for the left precuneus: correlation was significant for self-focused eudaimonic well-being (r = 0.19, P = 0.023) but not for other-focused eudaimonic well-being (r = 0.01, P > 0.05) (Figure 4).
Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Correlations between self- and other-focused eudaimonic well-being (EWB) and DMN functional connectivity: vMPFC (A) and precunues (B).
Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Correlations between self- and other-focused eudaimonic well-being (EWB) and DMN functional connectivity: vMPFC (A) and precunues (B).
Consistent with our primary analyses, secondary analyses showed that eudaimonic well-being was positively correlated with intrinsic functional connectivity of vMPFC and precuneus after controlling for hedonic well-being (Figure 3B, Table 2). In contrast, hedonic well-being was negatively correlated with functional connectivity of dMPFC, vMPFC and precuneus after controlling for eudaimonic well-being (Figure 3C, Table 2). Our specificity analyses indicated that DMN functional connectivity was not significantly associated with anxious arousal; Furthermore, the functional connectivity of visual networks were not correlated with EHB. These results provide additional evidence to support that the correlations between EHB and DMN functional connectivity are specific.
VBM and the balance of well-being
ROI-based analyses revealed a significant positive correlation between EHB and gray matter volume of the left precuneus (MNI coordinate: −14, −70, 20; cluster size = 100, P = 0.003, Bonferroni corrected) (Figure 5). No significant correlations were found between bilateral vMPFC or right precuneus and EHB. The gray matter volume value of left precuneus was marginally correlated with its RSFC values (r = 0.15, P = 0.075).
Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide VBM analyses. (A) DMN subregions where gray matter volume is significantly correlated with EHB. (B) Correlations between EHB and gray matter volume of the left precuneus (PCU_L).
Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide VBM analyses. (A) DMN subregions where gray matter volume is significantly correlated with EHB. (B) Correlations between EHB and gray matter volume of the left precuneus (PCU_L).
Discussion
In the present work, we used structural and R-fMRI to investigate how predominance of a certain form of well-being is reflected in the functional and structural characteristics of DMN. We demonstrated that EHB were positively correlated with the intrinsic functional connectivity of bilateral vMPFC within aDMN and bilateral precuneus within pDMN. Furthermore, our brain morphometry analysis highlighted the association between gray matter volume in the left precuneus and EHB. These results provided novel evidence to support the role of DMN in one’s inclination toward hedonic or eudaimonic well-being.
Our primary and secondary analyses highlighted the role of vMPFC and precuneous hyperconnectivity in eudaimonic well-being dominance and eudaimonic well-being alone. These results seem to contradict with previous work on hedonic well-being and the depression literature (Greicius et al., 2007; Sheline et al., 2010; Berman et al., 2011; Whitfield-Gabrieli and Ford, 2012) but are consistent with a recent eudaimonic well-being study (Waytz et al., 2015), which showed that meaning in life was positively correlated with a subnetwork of the DMN. When decomposing eudaimonic well-being into self-focus and other-focus well-being, we found that DMN hyperconnectivity was only correlated with self-focus but not other-focus well-being.
Self-focused attention can be adaptive (i.e. self-reflection) or maladaptive (i.e. self-rumination). Self-reflection is a form of positive self-focus that is motivated by curiosity or epistemic interest in the self and confers benefits to mental health; whereas, self-rumination is a form of negative, chronic self-focus is motivated by perceived threat, losses to the self and is associated with depression and neuroticism (Trapnell and Campbell, 1999; Takano and Tanno, 2009). As eudaimonic well-being is associated with higher level of adaptation and mental health, and more self-connected (Huta, 2012; Baumeister et al., 2013), it is possible that people with higher levels of eudaimonic well-being frequently engaged in self-reflection, rather than self-rumination. Thus, our results of EHB and eudaimonic well-being support the idea that the functional role of DMN is not limited to maladaptation and lower level of well-being but also to adaptation and higher level of well-being.
We found that eudaimonic dominance (a high positive EHB score) is not only associated with higher intrinsic functional connectivity but also with larger gray matter volume in precuneus. The convergence between structural and functional results in precuneus indicates that the observed association between intrinsic functional connectivity, and EHB could be partially explained by the gray matter volume. This convergence also highlights the critical role of precuneus in the stable trait of balance between eudaimonic and hedonic well-being. Precunues, the posterior core of DMN, subserves visuospatial imagery, episodic memory retrieval and episodic future thought (Cavanna and Trimble, 2006; Schacter et al., 2007; Fransson and Marrelec, 2008; Uddin et al., 2009). Functionally, the overall connectivity of pDMN was shown positively correlated with meaning in life, a core feature in eudaimonic well-being (Waytz et al., 2015). Structurally, gray matter volume of precuneus was shown positively correlated with the emotional intensity and purpose in life (Sato et al., 2015). In contrast, decreased functional connectivity of medial parietal cortex was associated with the inclination to hedonic well-being (Luo et al., 2016).
As thinking about past and future vs the present enhances the meaning of life or eudaimonic well-being (Routledge et al., 2011; Waytz et al., 2015; Sedikides et al., 2016), increased intrinsic functional connectivity of pDMN may indicate that people with eudaimonic dominance are more likely to beyond here and now and draw meaning from past or future events (Baumeister et al., 2013), which in turn enhances the feeling of purpose and meaningfulness (Waytz et al., 2015).
Our EHB-related results replicated and extended previous work examining either hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. Our work suggests that EHB is a sensitive index that can capture the neural characteristics of relative dominance of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. We recommend that this relative measure should be considered in future neuroimaging, clinical and psychopathological studies, given its capability of integrating two distinctive but related forms of well-being and its high ecological validity.
The present work has several limitations. First, we focused our investigation within DMN due to its fundamental role in EHB. It will be of merit for future work to extend to other networks using advanced analytics such as network analysis. Second, our study demonstrated the correlational relationship between EHB and DMN. Future studies using neural modulation technique to establish the causal relationship are needed. Third, we only compared the neural basis of people with eudaimonic and hedonic dominance. Logically, four categories are possible according to different levels of two forms of well-being: people with high eudaimonic and high hedonic well-being; people with low eudaimonic and high hedonic well-being; people with high eudaimonic and low hedonic well-being; people with low eudaimonic and low hedonic well-being. It will be interesting for future studies to characterize brain functional and structural features of these four |
local phenomenon," Domack says, adding that global changes are more likely due to human activity.
This question is obviously important because melting ice has historically raised and lowered sea levels dramatically. So knowing its fate matters a lot to the hundreds of millions of people who live near the coast.Posted on March 16, 2015 at 3:17 am by /
MBK Entertainment will collaborate with director Cha Euntaek to create a six episode web-drama with the T-ara members to broadcast online.
MBK Entertainment revealed to TV Daily this news today and said, “The production for the web-drama will begin in mid-April and we have distributed a high amount of funds to it. The six T-ara members will appear along six popular actors which is currently being finalized in secrecy. Additionally, there will be six OSTs produced for each episode.”
Cha Euntaek has worked extensively with MBK Entertainment in the past and was in charge of directing a variety of music videos for SG Wannabe, Lee Miyeon, Lee Hyori and T-ara – including “Cry Cry”, “Roly-Poly” and “Day by Day”. These music videos were commonly around 20-minutes around and included top stars like Cha Seungwon and Ji Changwook.
T-ara members have proven themselves outside of music in various drama and films so acting will be natural for them.
The production begins in April for the six T-ara members and six male actors web-drama and will also be available in China.
was last modified: byDonations to charity have fallen by up to half this Christmas, and some charities are receiving hate mail and phone calls, because of the “scandal” over salary top -ups at the Central Remedial Clinic.
That is according to Pete Ireton founder of one of Ireland’s most successful charities, the livestock aid organisation Bóthar.
While collecting money was getting more and more difficult over the last few years, Mr Ireton said Bóthar’s fundraising had in recent weeks fallen by half. He said he was aware other charities has suffered the same decline.
Mr Ireton said what had happened at the CRC, the use of funds raised for the charity to pay salary top ups to staff, was a “disgrace” and a “scandal”. He said since news of the payments to CRC staff had broken in the media, staff at Bóthar had suffered hate mail and phone calls from members of the public saying they were not going to pay salary top-ups.
Mr Ireton told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland Bóthar relied almost entirely on funding with “small” grants from State body Irish Aid going “one hundred per cent to the field”.
He urged regular donors to contact the charities they supported and ask for information on where the money goes.
“The CRC disgrace is tarring us all with the same brush” he said.Here we go:
The football game in Hartford is now 10:30 a.m., which will allow the Bulls to get back safely and early to Tampa.
Time change: Saturday's game between @USFFootball and @UConnFootball will be at 10:30 a.m. ESPNews will televise. — American Football (@American_FB) September 6, 2017
The game was going to be at noon anyway, so it’s not a big adjustment. Should be no BODY CLOCKS situation here.
As for all the other sports, they’re being shut down for the weekend:
TAMPA, Sept. 6, 2017 – Due to the potential risks of Hurricane Irma, USF Athletics has determined it is in the best interest of student-athletes, coaches, staff and fans to cancel previously scheduled events for later this week. Cancellations include the women's soccer home game against Mississippi State that was scheduled for Thursday and the volleyball program's USF Classic, which was set for Friday and Saturday on campus. Women's soccer's Sunday game against Florida in Gainesville also has been cancelled. Additionally, the USF Cross country team will no longer travel and compete in the UNF Invitational this weekend. The Bulls will make-up the meet by joining and participating in the Asics Embry-Riddle Classic on Saturday, Sept. 16. USF Athletics will keep everyone informed about plans on rescheduling these events for later in the season.
We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.Last week DNAInfo and Gothamist reporters voted to unionize in New York City.
They were very excited about their vote.
On Thursday the owner of DNAInfo and Gothamist shut them down.
It was a business decision.
The New York Times reported:
A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.
On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.
At 5 p.m., a post by Mr. Ricketts went up on the sites announcing the decision. He praised them for reporting “tens of thousands of stories that have informed, impacted and inspired millions of people.” But he added, “DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure.”
All other articles promptly vanished from the sites; an official at DNAinfo said they would be archived online.A Cambridge institution is closing down for a second time--though this time it is for good--and one of the region's best-known chefs and restaurateurs is opening a new spot within the space.Eater Boston is reporting that Cafe Algiers in Harvard Square will be shutting its doors in August, with Michael Scelfo opening an eatery called Longfellow in the Brattle Street space. The article mentions that Scelfo--who is behind Alden & Harlow just below Algiers along with Waypoint between Harvard Square and Central Square--will reportedly honor the landmark cafe with his new place, saying that "We're sad to see [owner] Emile and his team close their doors, but hope to pay homage to Algiers' 57-year legacy with this new venture."Cafe Algiers closed briefly in October of 2016, only to reopen under new ownership less than a month later; the place has been known for its Mediterranean fare along with coffee and tea.The address for Cafe Algiers (and the upcoming Longfellow) is 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138.[June 13, 2018 update: Boston Magazine mentions that Longfellow plans to feature finger foods along with a "geeky" cocktail program and lesser-known varietal wines.][January 17, 2019 update: A new Boston Magazine post indicates that Longfellow officially opens on Saturday, January 19.][Earlier Articles]Follow us on Twitter at @hiddenboston
Labels: cafes, Cambridge restaurants, Harvard Square restaurants, iconic restaurants, landmark restaurants, restaurant closings, restaurant openingsPredicting what the Canadian economy will look like in 25 years is no easy task.
Consider that a quarter-century ago, the World Wide Web was launched to little fanfare. The ensuing technological, social and political revolution, however, transformed the globe in less than a decade.
What will be the next big leap forward? It's anyone's guess – as is how such a development might transform the Canadian economy.
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A few trends that might signal a direction for the future are a tax on carbon and investment in renewable energies. Or the billions of dollars being poured into health care to help address the needs of an aging population. Those investments are being made as governments face headwinds of slow growth and increased foreign competition due to quickening globalization.
Even so, experts are optimistic about the potential for Canadian businesses to tap new opportunities at home and abroad. To predict how that could unfold, we asked five prominent business voices to predict how Canada's economy might function in 2041.
How we'll create
Much has been written about Canada's need to be more competitive and innovative to compete on the global stage.
Canada ranked 16th on the Global Innovation Index for 2015, a yearly list produced by Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Switzerland led the list, followed by Britain and Sweden.
It was an unremarkable showing for a country that hopes to spur innovation-driven growth in the decades ahead.
Improving innovation starts by building the right work force, says Gilles Patry, president and chief executive officer of the Ottawa-based Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). "[We need] to give young people the skills to be creative, innovative and adaptable to change."
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He predicts young Canadians will focus less on finding a job and more on creating one, perhaps in growth areas such as personalized medicine – fuelled by advancements in genomics and nanotechnology – or quantum computing or renewable energy.
Agencies such as CFI will continue to play a major role in funding that innovation, but Dr. Patry stresses that efforts must be made now if Canada is to remain competitive in 25 years. "You need to develop a sense of urgency, because if we don't sense the need to innovate, someone will do it in our place."
How we'll spend
It's clear that Canadians have become avid online shoppers. We spent $136-billion on goods and services online in 2014, an increase from $122-billion the year before, according to the latest figures from Statistics Canada.
That trend will only gain momentum in the next 25 years, predicts Mark Satov, founder of Toronto-based consumer research firm Satov Consultants Inc. Purchasing will become increasingly tech-enabled as retailers and service providers use ever-growing troves of client data to hone their customer service experience.
Customers used to rely on humans for all of their needs, Mr. Satov says. "Now you'll only need humans to deal with people on high-value transactions where there's some need to share advice or provide a great experience. You'll need fewer humans, but you'll invest more in them."
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That means greater transparency for consumers and businesses, as well as highly customized product and service experiences.
"What we've seen in service, and will continue to see, is the importance of people that are experts in collecting data," Mr. Satov notes.
How we'll invest
For Som Seif, president and CEO of Toronto's Purpose Investments Inc., the next 25 years will see a major shift in portfolio priorities.
He predicts that individual and institutional investors such as pension funds will invest in knowledge-based technology or service firms, likely over traditional blue-chip natural resource and manufacturing companies.
That will result in a continued flow of investment away from traditionally labour intensive, blue collar industries – a move that could ignite socio-economic tensions.
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"To stay relevant as a labour force, we need a smarter and more knowledgeable group of individuals," he says. "This is a massive issue because politically, a lot of our industries are very labour intensive and many voters are labourers.
"Everything that's happening, from the rise of Trump to Brexit, is because you have this knowledge-based society that's doing wonderful things, then a labour-based society that's falling behind."
Mr. Seif isn't writing off traditional industries – quite the contrary. Many of us will still invest in agriculture, he says, but we will focus more on companies in agricultural productivity or nutrition.
High-tech sectors such as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology will provide immense opportunities for Canadian investors as Western countries struggle to meet the needs of their aging populations.
Another growth opportunity that investors should keep on their radar is water, according to Mr. Seif. "I think we can increase investment opportunities in clean technology and supporting global access to clean water."
How we'll work
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Conference Board of Canada chief economist Glen Hodgson is even more direct with his predictions of a decline in Canadian manufacturing.
"We're already a 70-per-cent service economy and that's only going to grow," he says. "I can't see a compelling reason why we'd have manufacturing as a growth segment of our economy. We'll probably only make things in Canada that have a really high-tech component. But I can see a future in providing high-end services to people."
Indeed, in a recent Conference Board report, Mr. Hodgson predicted that in the coming decades most Canadians with postsecondary education will work in high-value service industries such as telecommunications, health care, professional and financial services, scientific research and IT.
He believes that our workplaces will also become more automated, and that the entire middle-management tier might become a thing of the past, thanks to the automation of administrative work.
"We'll have to find ways to deal with those affected by technological change," Mr. Hodgson warns.
How we'll grow
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For Ratana Stephens, the co-founder of Richmond, B.C.-based organic food maker Nature's Path Foods Inc., long-term success means looking beyond our borders and focusing on attracting and retaining top talent.
In Ms. Stephens' view, growth for small and medium-sized businesses over the next quarter-century will be propelled by economic diversification away from traditional industries such as manufacturing. Maintenance of a business-friendly tax environment will help catalyze innovation, she predicts.
Employers must also be able to attract highly qualified workers from overseas.
"We must nurture the ability to welcome skilled immigrants," she says. "Industry must embrace new Canadians in order to be successful and make a lasting and positive impact for years to come."VG.CyberZen will field EHOME's Tzu-Chi "Marek" Huang in WESG's APAC qualifier in place of Bin "Savage" Liu who was hospitalized Tuesday night following a slip and fall incident at an airport.
Statement regarding the Savage incident and Marek replacing him in WESGhttps://t.co/lV1SxXhpfQ pic.twitter.com/GrDYnltyev — ViCi Gaming (@ViCi_Gaming) November 9, 2016
Savage is a veteran CS player in the Chinese scene, playing since the mid-2000s. He has played with CyberZen since 2015, prior to its acquisition by Vici Gaming. Most recently, the squad have won WCA World Contest Championship 2016 and eXTREMESLAND Asia 2016.
Marek, a Taiwanese player, joined EHOME as its sixth member in October. He will compete with VG.CyberZen at WESG's APAC finals in Korea Nov. 10-13. APAC is the team's second chance to qualify for the main event after coming in second to TyLoo in WESG's Chinese finals where they lost 2-0.
Sasha Erfanian is a news editor for theScore esports. Follow him on Twitter, it'll be great for his self-esteem.San Diego Comic Con- The big event is finally here.
The San Diego Comic Con has become famous for its thousands of fanatics that travel far and wide to the five day show and support their favorite science fiction games, movie, TV shows, comics and more. In the Comic Con world, each attendee embraces their inner and outer geekness. This massive show is an experience like no other. The SDCC will feature an alliance of nerd nation and pop culture buzzing to be one of the largest conventions in the world! Here is a quick guide to a few of the highly anticipated, must-sees for this year's San Diego Comic Con.
Top five movies
Movies are a huge draw at SDCC. Stars, directors and screenwriters, including special guests, will attend exclusive panels to promote their films. Never before seen footage will unexpectedly appear along with Q&As regarding the new upcoming movies. This is something you do not want to miss. The top five movies to watch out for the 2013 San Diego Comic Con are as followed.
Thor: The Dark World
Marvel Comic films have a huge presence within the SDCC as Thor: The Dark World is the newest addition. Chris Hemsworth reappears in the sequel as Thor with a darker edge yet same action heavy, in your face, fly by the seat of your pants, kind of film.
Captain America: Winter Soldier
Chris Evans is back as Captain America, fighting against Bucky Barnes as his former sidekick who is now becoming the dangerous Russian agent, Winter Soldier. This unexpected twist leaves many unanswered questions that we all hope the Marvel panel will dish.
The LEGO Movie
Werner Brothers has finally begun the works to LEGO’s first ever, feature-length film starring Emmet, whom is key to saving the world. This animated film will consist of some big names as the voice talents including Chris Pratt, Will Farrel, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Nick Offerman. Alison Brie, Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman. Catch a quick preview of the LEGO fun in the Werner Brothers’ panel at the SDCC.
Godzilla
An all-new recreation of Godzilla has been introduced in the new movie of the iconic image destroying cities and causing havoc. Werner Brothers Pictures and Legendary Pictures have rebooted the 1954 classic and modernized it with stars like Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe and Elizabeth Olsen. In the panel’s presentation, attendees will have a sneak peek at the new monster film.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Sequel is finally here as it has been anticipated for quite some time. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire continues the same path as Katnis and Peeta soon find out they will be thrown back in the arena for a second time to fight for their lives. The featured panel will release never seen before footage of the upcoming sequel.
TV Panels
“Intelligence” is a new coming show to CBS which will release the pilot world premiere and panel discussion with Michael Seitzman, Rene Echevarria and Tripp Vinson will occur during SDCC, 2013.
“Star Crossed” is yet another new coming show to CW that will unveil a first look at the new series and panel featuring Matt Latner, Aimee Teegarden, Grey Damon, Adele Lim, Meredith Averill, Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec and Scott Rosenberg.
Other panels including “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “Pysch,” “Wilfred,” “Teen Wolf,” “Dexter,” “Sherlock,” “Bones,” “Nikita,” “Game of Thrones,” and many more will appear at this year’s San Diego Comic Con.
Anticipated Comic Panels
Let's not forget that the SDCC is essentially a comic convention! Here are some must sees for this year for those fans interested in the core of the convention. Panels will surprise viewers this year with the unexpected chatter.
Dark Horse
<Hellboy, Sin City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Yep, Dark Horse Comics has produced each of these comic book series and has more on the way. The #1 comic panel to see will be releasing information about their latest and greatest at their SDCC Panel.
Walking Dead
ZOOMMBBIIEESS! Yes, the dead will be stomping through San Diego’s 2013 Comic Con. The Walking Dead creator and writer, Robert Kirkman will be there to discuss the 10th anniversary during the Q&A.
Star Wars
The creators Carlos D’Anda, Corinna Bechko, Gabriel Hardman, Doug Wheatley, Gabe Eltaeb, Tom Taylor and Zack Giallongo will discuss the current progression of Star Wars comics during their panel. Also, get excited for the talk on what’s coming next from George Lucas’ four-color galaxy.
Masquerade
Costumes are a huge part of SDCC worn by attendees and displayed in showcases. The masquerade event will occur at the 2013 Comic Con which has brought in up to 4,000 audience members in previous years. The contestants will strut all types of costumes while portraying these characters in a creative way. It is a sight to see!
"Swag Bags"
The oversized and unnecessary bags Werner Brothers give out every year are finally done for! WB has produced wear ready “Swag Bags,” trendy backpacks that serve as a personal carrier and a cape. CAUTION: CAPES DO NOT COME WITH SUPER POWERS. Be sure to stop by the Project Triforce booth for their Swag Bag giveaway.
Marketing Genome Project is back!
The 2013 Comic Con could not be possible without all of the creative professionals who have helped to put together the entire show. Marketing Genome Project has designed multiple booths for the shows in the past and is at it again! Marketing Genome Project is hard at work to put together some of the most anticipated attractions! Keep a look out for our team while wondering through Dark Horse Comics and Project Triforce.
Leave a comment and let us know what your most excited about for the 2013 Comic Con! So far we've gotten some good feedback on this years booth.Well, this sounds like a real-life, rom-com nightmare. Two people decided to forgo the typical first date dinner and meet each other for the first time during a hike in the woods. They ventured into the Angeles National Forest in Arcadia, California with a map and a phone, but ended up getting lost in the trails with no cell phone service. Eventually, the two found a signal and were able to call for help.
A rescue crew sent by the Altadena Sheriff’s station found the uninjured couple and airlifted them out of the forest, reports ABC News. A hike may sound like a cool and unique way for two potential new lovers to get to know each other, but this sounds like some Lifetime Original Movie shit to me. The thought of going deep into the woods with a stranger and getting all dirty and disgusting (not in the sexy way) doesn’t sound very appealing. I’d rather do something boring like get a drink.
Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.A nurse accused of invading patients' privacy by snooping into their medical records has lost her bid to have her disciplinary hearing held in secret. A disciplinary panel of the College of Nurses of Ontario denied Mandy Edgerton-Reid’s request to exclude the public, including the media, from a hearing into allegations that she looked at records of 300 patients at the Peterborough Regional Health Centre, without consent or authorization.
Mandy Edgerton-Reid enters the College of Nurses in Toronto Friday on June, 19, 2015. Edgerton-Reid, accused of snooping into patient files, faces a public disciplinary hearing after the Star won a battle over the issue. ( Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star )
Her hearing will remain open to ensure public confidence in the administration of justice, the five-member disciplinary panel ruled in a written decision. Reid had sought a closed hearing to protect patient privacy and to protect herself against a $5.6-million class-action lawsuit that has been brought against her and others in relation to the alleged privacy breach. Through her lawyer, Robert Stephenson, she expressed concern that testimony given in an open hearing could create prejudice in the civil action. Contacted Monday, Stephenson said he had not yet read the decision so could not comment on it.
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Lawyer Iris Fischer, who represented the Star and argued against a private hearing, said: “A closed hearing would have meant deciding on the alleged breach of privacy in secret, with no public scrutiny of the evidence. It’s great to see the panel recognize that discipline hearings should and routinely do take place in public, and there was simply no reason to close this one. Patient privacy is protected in virtually every case through a ban on publishing identifying patient information, and the panel affirmed that a publication ban goes far enough.” The Star had also argued against a ban on the public disclosure of nonidentifying patient health information, which college counsel Megan Shortreed had sought. While publication bans on patient names and identifying information are commonplace in disciplinary hearings and are respected by the media, Shortreed acknowledged that a ban on patient health information is unusual. But she argued it is necessary in this case, particularly to protect the two patients who filed complaints about Edgerton-Reid. The identity of one has already been made public in local media reports, but her detailed health information, which the college plans to introduce as evidence, has not. As well, initials of both patients have been used in publicly available college documents. Even if their names were not publicly disclosed in media reports on the hearing, readers might be able to put two and two together and figure out who they are and learn about their confidential health information, Shortreed argued.
On this point, the disciplinary panel ruled that the media can report on general information about the type of treatment received by patients, but not on specific personal health records that could identify them when used in combination with other publicly available information. The Star had also sought access to exhibits. On this, the panel ruled that exhibits could be released only if they could be censored to exclude information covered by the publication ban it has ordered.
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Edgerton-Reid is one of seven employees fired from the hospital under allegations they violated patient privacy in 2011 and 2012. The Peterborough Examiner has reported that she was also fired from Fleming College where she worked as a part-time nursing instructor. The College of Nurses’ website says she is accused of professional misconduct for allegedly accessing health information of about 300 patients and/or disclosing it without consent. She is also accused of accessing the health information of one of her students and disclosing it to other nursing students. A former student has alleged Edgerton-Reid would search computer terminals at hospital nursing stations for medical records of people she knew and for cases she found interesting, according to the Examiner. Edgerton-Reid denies the allegations. Her disciplinary hearing resumes on March 21.This cigar was reviewed blind (no bands) by a panel of at least 4 reviewers. They did not know what they were smoking beforehand. The scores are an average of all the reviewers' scores with outliers removed.
Vital Stats:
Vitola: Corona Gorda
Length: 5.5″
Ring Gauge: 46
Country of Origin: Nicaragua
Wrapper: Nicaraguan Habano
Binder: Ecuadorian Sumatra
Filler: Nicaraguan and Peruvian
Factory: Unknown
Blender: Omar de Frias
Number of reviewers: 5 —– Ron (shuckins) Sandeep (Djangos) Robert (NavyPiper) Milton (mjohnsoniii) Cindy (Ms_CindyLynn)
Price: $7.00
Release Date: July 2013
Contributed by: Fratello Cigars
Cigar Info
From Manufacturer – “Fratello is a life-long dream for industry newcomer de Frias, a cigar aficionado for more than 15 years who grew up next to a cigar retail shop in his hometown of Santo Domingo D.R. “ I would come into the shop and the manager Don Rafael would always kick me out since I was not of age. One day he brought me in to watch a torcedor (Cigar Roller) perform his art, when he finished the cigar, he gave it to me and said, “Kid welcome to the true gentlemen’s club.” “Fratello, has been my nickname since college, means brother in Italian and embodies the true nature of this industry, camaraderie, family and friendship,” said de Frias.
de Frias, is an ex-professional basketball player with a love for cigars. Originally from the Dominican Republic, de Frias has worked for NASA, Baxter Healthcare Corp, and earned an MBA from the University of Puerto Rico. He spent two years defining The Fratello Cigars line and perfecting its blend. He resides in Northern Virginia with his wife and two kids.
Fratello will be available for retail customers after the IPCPR show and will be sold in a box of 20 cigars. Fratello will debut in four sizes Corona, Robusto, Toro and the 6 x 60. Prices will range from 7 and 8 dollars. Produced in Esteli, Nicaragua Fratello is a full-flavored cigar with a medium to full-body profile that is layered and complex. For more information about the cigars, visit http://www.fratellocigar.com
Initial Impressions
Appearance: 90
“This one has a nice uniform color throughout with a couple of noticeable veins. It appears to be rolled well and looks pretty good.” –Milton (mjohnsoniii)
Aroma: 91
“The cigar has a sweet smell of leather, light coffee and cedary tobacco.” –Ron (shuckins)
Construction: 90
“The cigar was medium firm throughout the length. No soft spots were felt. Triple capped and ready to go!” –Sandeep (Djangos)
First Third
Flavor: 88
Strength: Medium
Body/Complexity: Medium-Full
“It’s a little peppery with a dry, hot tasting cedar, light coffee, and just a trace of leather on light up. The dryness of the cedar faded towards the end of the first third taking the heat with it and letting more coffee and leather flavors through.” –Ron (shuckins)
“The cigar starts off with a veritable blast of pepper. The pepper is initially prominent in the front of the mouth and on the tongue but within a few puffs coats the entire mouth including the palate. There is definitely a lot of spices in the mix including nutmeg which is the most prominent of them as well as some cinnamon. A bit of coffee aroma is drifting in and out as the third is progressing. The pepper is definitely not letting up even at the one inch mark. Usually I would find this a little bit distracting but the flavors are keeping me intrigued as they blend into one another. Towards the end, a slight hay and grass flavor is creeping in. The ash is very flaky and is falling off at the half inch mark. The burn is slightly uneven but definitely not distracting. There are volumes of white creamy smoke which are kind of collecting over my head, so thick that it is not dissipating.” –Sandeep (Djangos)
“Holy Manzo! Had a blast of pepper that dominated most of this third! Towards the end of this third, began getting some flavors of pretty strong tobacco and leather along with the pepper, which had backed way down.” –Robert (NavyPiper)
Second Third
Flavor: 90
Strength: Medium-Strong
Body/Complexity: Medium-Full
“This cigar is still peppery with some cedar and coffee flavors. There is a taste of leather present, but not enough to produce the creaminess I usually get with leather. The tobacco has an earthy,woodsy after taste.” –Ron (shuckins)
“Leather was the main component throughout this third. The raisin flavors came in and out. The cigar had a strong earthy taste mixed with leather. It was quite nice.” –Cindy (Ms_CindyLynn)
Final Third
Flavor: 90
Strength: Medium-Strong
Body/Complexity: Medium
“The flavors entering the final third take a turn for more leather and tobacco. The pepper is beginning to ramp up once more and there is a mix of white and black pepper and is coating the entire mouth. The nutmeg and cinnamon flavors are still present but in the background. The strength is definitely increasing and I am confused whether this should be a full or medium full! Even though the flavors were mainly baking spices and pepper with some leather at the end, I am pleased with this cigar. The burn to the very end is a little crooked and the ash very flaky. There was no further issue with tar. The smoke is the star of this smoke, the amount and creaminess is incredible!” –Sandeep (Djangos)
“Throughout the last third, it consisted of leather and small hints of raisin at times. There was the earthy notes throughout the last third. The flavors seemed to be muted compared to the first third.” –Cindy (Ms_CindyLynn)
Overall Impressions
Draw: 88
“It had a pretty good draw with plenty of smoke, although it had a bit of heat at the beginning.” –Ron (shuckins)
Burn: 89
“While a little wavy at times, the burn was pretty good and consistent the whole time.” –Robert (NavyPiper)
Overall Strength: Medium-Strong
Overall Body/Complexity: Medium-Full
Overall Experience: 90
“This was an enjoyable cigar that I think given some time in the humidor, would have been even better.” –Ron (shuckins)
“The cigar was definitely something that I will go to again. It had great flavors mainly of baking spices, tobacco and leather. The pepper was very prominent in this stick and normally I would not like something like this however the flavors kept me intrigued. The only reason why this did not score beyond 90 was the fact that the flavors, even though great, did not change much throughout the cigar. The smoke on this one is worthy of special mention, it was so thick and voluminous that it seemed to just collect above my head and hang in the air without dissipation. The creamy character was just a bonus!” –Sandeep (Djangos)
“Overall, the cigar seemed to decrease in strength and complexity as time went by. I still rated it overall with a “very good” score, because there were many aspects of the cigar that I did enjoy.. the aroma was enjoyable, the burn/draw was great.. the flavors were great as well. I wish the strength and body would have followed throughout the entire smoke. I would recommend this cigar and would probably smoke it again if I get my hands on it.” –Cindy (Ms_CindyLynn)
Smoking Time (in minutes): 66
Total Score: 90 (Very Good)
To view the complete scores and notes, click here
Reviewer Appe-arance Aroma Const. 1/3 2/3 3/3 Draw Burn Overall Overall 90 91 90 88 90 90 88 89 90 Ron 90 90 93 88 88 90 90 92 89 Sandeep 90 91 90 91 92 90 91 87 90 Robert 90 90 89 87 90 89 84 89 88 Milton 91 92 89 86 82 82 81 84 82 Cindy 94 94 94 94 91 89 94 95 91
Blind Cigar Review: Fratello | Corona
Win a 4-pack of Fratello Cigars
How to enter:
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter Tweet or post to Facebook this review and include @blindmanspuff Comment in this post that you have done so (if you used facebook include a link to your post) Contest Ends on Saturday October 26th at 11:59PM Pacific Time We will then randomly choose an entry to win the 4-pack which will be sent to you by Omar de Frias himself!
CONTEST RULES
1. You must be 18 years of age or over AND the legal age to possess tobacco in your respective address.
2. Prizes have no cash value.
3. Blind Man’s Puff is not responsible for prizes damaged or lost in transit.
4. Occasionally cigars/prizes go missing, get damaged before we ship or other natural disasters occur, we reserve the right to replace a prize winning with something of equal or more value. In the event of replacement, winners will be notified before replacements are shipped.
5. In order to enter the contest you must post that you have tweeter/posted to facebook in the comment section of this post.
6. Winners must claim prize by emailing info@BlindMansPuff.com within 72 hours of a winner being announced. Winners will be announced via a comment at the designated date for when contests end, it is all participants responsibility to determine if they have won. Process must be completed by 11:59PM PST 10/26/13
7. Unless otherwise specified, you can only enter each contest a single time. Multiple entries will be disqualified.
8. All winners for random contests will be randomly. Contests where winners are not selected at random will be specifically noted.
9. Additional rules beyond what it is stated on this page will be explicitly stated on contests where additional rules apply.
10. By entering a contest, you accept the terms and conditions stated above.
11. Blind Man’s Puff will only ship winner’s cigars if they follow the above steps and email the appropriate e-mail address.
12. Blind Man’s Puff reserves the right to change these rules at anytime.It’s official, folks. Steve Jobs will grace the stage next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco where he will introduce OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud, Apple’s new cloud service. With Jobs till out on medical leave, it was questionable whether or not he would be spearheading this year’s WWDC announcements or if those responsibilities were going to be passed off to another executive like Phil Schiller. Also of note is that Apple in its press release officially acknowledged the impending arrival of its in-house cloud service.
We point that out because Apple doesn’t typically announce or even hint at upcoming products or services ahead of time. But at this point, Apple’s upcoming cloud initiative is partially out of the bag. Last we heard, Apple was busy trying to secure up licensing rights for a digital locker streaming service that would enable iTunes users to stream purchased content from the cloud down to any iOS device.
The keynote will kick off on June 6. The full press release is below:
CUPERTINO, California-May 31, 2011-Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.
WWDC will feature more than 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers. Mac® developers will see and learn how to develop world-class Mac OS X Lion applications using its latest technologies and capabilities. Mobile developers will be able to explore the latest innovations and capabilities of iOS and learn how to greatly enhance the functionality, performance and design of their apps. All developers can bring their code to the labs and work with Apple engineers.
For more details, visit the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2011 website at developer.apple.com/wwdc.
Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.The idea that violence is contagious doesn't appear in the Obama administration's gun control plan, nor in the National Rifle Association's arguments. But some scientists believe |
ologically pluralist. The movement suggests a dissolved dialectic in relation towards an advancement of one specific ideal against another and also exhibits a possible cultural pluralism that allows for new socio-political possibilities. Postmodernity’s cultural logic is articulated through globalization, the end of the Cold War and the rise of information technology. Lyotard uses an aphorism to define postmodernity as “skepticism towards all metanarratives,” while Baudrillard calls the period a theory, a negation, an end and a simulacrum.
Using the aforementioned definitions I believe western society has yet to experience a truly postmodern cultural event on the scale exhibited by the global banking crisis that has reached its apex during September 2008.
The Great Depression of 1929 must be seen as a modern counterpart to our current crisis because the dialectic was still very much in play. Had the United States government not intervened, the failure of capitalism could likely have led to totalitarian governments and communism under the semblance of the same modernist teleological progress. Today, the financial crisis of the banks in the United States comes during an era some of seen as the end of history, a time that has come to be defined by global free market capitalism as the closest thing to ideal and liberal democracy as the only eschatology. Fukuyama’s end of history doctrine interprets a postmodern landscape as one where the failure of Marxism can be seen as a historical synthesis that heralds liberal democracy as the supreme end of ideology. While this provocative argument held serious consideration in the early 1990s when his Fukuyama’s thesis was published, today we are seeing the last modern moment capitulating to postmodernity with the failure of the banks. What happens when the dominant western ideology fails in an era without an obvious ‘other’ to engage in a synthesis towards an ideal? When the power structures reveal themselves flaccid? Has the last remaining Grand Narrative of endless consumer consumption and late-capitalism finally revealed the fictions that constitute that every dominant ideology?
Never before have these questions been so pertinent. However, they have at least been broached in critical theory. This paper seeks to argue that upon examination, the crisis appears to be the ultimate consummation of the works of two postmodern theorists, Jean-Francoise Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard provides a strong starting point to position how we can understand the postmodern and offers a possibility for hope and change amid crisis. Baudrillard offers a bleaker outlook, but one with relevant and literal correlations to postmodern culture and the financial crisis. After influential postmodern arguments on the death of God (Nietzsche), the death of the dialectic (Fukuyama, Zizek, Baudrillard), and now the possible end game as the death of capital, we find ourselves at unique historical crossroad. Revealing itself slowly, the financial crisis gives most in society little choice but to take refuge in simulation and delusion: the first thoroughly postmodern event.
Lyotard and Legitimation
In many ways, the most logical place to begin understanding the financial crisis as ultimately one of postmodern significance is with Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition describes a shift in western knowledge that has realized itself during the last half of the 20th century. The shift is still very much in play, unraveling itself in myriad ways, but one area that comes to the fore in relation to the financial crisis is the postmodern theory of legitimation.
For Lyotard, postindustrial, computerized society brings with it a crisis of legitimation. The competing structuralist language games used in western culture are vastly different and incapable of legitimating rules, structures or truths when adhered to in relation to each other. Lyotard says in other words, scientific empirical knowledge structures can never be truly resolved with narrative qualitative knowledge structures and vice versa. They have different sources of legitimation and play by their own rules and compatibilities. So how does culture progress? Scientific and narrative tools are used hand-in-hand in economics, finance and government. The answer to this is that these different types of knowledge are all ultimately subservient to teleological and fundamental ideologies vis-à-vis institutions. Certain truths are accepted, while others ignored simply because they certain types of knowledge serve the institutional structure better than others. This is the modernist narrative. In Late-Capitalism, the only knowledge that matters as a means to an ends is capital itself.
So what happens when the ultimate knowledge in a modern society, capital, becomes challenged or deeply devalued? That is symptomatic of the postmodern break we are currently witnessing. Suddenly, the infallible worship of the almighty dollar is thrown into question and we are left with no answers. We retreat into the basic language based structuralist knowledge games that are insufficient as pointed out in Lyotard’s critique of Wittgenstein. In turn, we have economists, politicians, governments, CEOs, workers, lawyers, judges, tax payers, businessmen, academics, etc. arguing to determine the fate of global capitalism. The problem is they are not speaking the same language. This is a communication model predicated on unintelligible noise when taken in total, encoders with no decoders. As the institutions themselves face impotency, there is no ultimate arbiter of the language games that occur. The great irony of course comes to be seen when governments attempt to take over the free market, in effect a group of people trillions of dollars in debt attempting to regulate those with billions of dollars in debt. This is the only legitimation that can occur. It is at once completely illogical and also completely necessary if liberal democracy is to assert itself as the dominant ideology. Beneath this disquieting period, where languages inadvertently undermine fictions, the central postmodern questions arise: Is legitimation even possible? Is money legitimate? Is western hegemonic socio-political dominance predicated on grand narratives? And if the grand narratives are untrue, must we believe them anyway to maintain our place in the world?
Lyotard points out that the types of understanding institutions tend to strive for are ones of ideological purity and universalism, concepts at odds with the chaotic nature of man. Further Lyotard understands the appearance of the grand narrative as the development of a “truth” for a reason. And the reason at the heart of the lie can almost always be seen as one of wealth and more importantly, power. When a grand narrative proves to be neither purely rational nor universal it fails to exert its power. A history of ideology during the 20th century finds plenty of examples of the fall of modernist grand narratives: the rise and fall of Nazism, the fall of the Soviet Union, the detonation and aftermath of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and perhaps most telling, the People’s Republic of China’s rise as a global capital leader. Each of these events had profound impact on the ideological development of late capitalism. And now it is late capitalism that is in fear of failure with the financial crisis. But not necessarily because it is being posed as a diametrically opposed ideology to an Other, as seen in the modernist dialectic. Instead it is facing the worst kind of failure, an internal collapse under its own Lose Weight Exercise. A self-inflicted blow that reveals far more fictions than truths in a dominant system without an obvious dialectic challenge: a postmodern failure.
This is the fight Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke take up on a daily basis. It is the fight for grand narrative, for late capitalism, for western hegemonic dominance. The fight to reassert capitalism and the stock market as systems of exponential monetary growth is being questioned as economic imaginary. As Geithner and Bernanke testify in Congressional hearings, the stocks fluctuate as if to suggest if we all believe the lie we might be ok. This is a fight being made all the more difficult by technology. Lyotard might say that now more than ever the stakes of knowledge are in a vulnerable position. They are in a stable disequilibrium: the power still appears to remain in the hands of the institutions, but discourse and resources are more readily available and waiting to be moved like pawns in a chess game by anyone willing to challenge policy and the past. After all, only in a postmodern environment can a society exhibit enough pluralist attitudes, often through technology, to elect the other as president.
So what of Barack Obama? Is there hope for a transparency in a free market economic structure that allows for a truly egalitarian, democratic discourse? When the present is in flux and guidance is deeply desired, what will the new era look like? Is Obama doing the same work as Geithner and Bernanke or is something else at play? Have we truly moved past the modern with the election of Obama or will Grand Narratives be re-introduced?
On paper it appears Obama would side with Lyotard. Both seem to understand the monumental stakes at play for power, knowledge, capital and technology. However, it is also clear Obama is not an overt postmodernist. Obama attests to believing in Grand Narratives (God, the United States, Democracy) but in a way that might suggest he actually is the first postmodern president. Simon Critchley notes that while Obama subscribes to certain dominant ideologies, he does so in a way that he is personally able to reconcile them, so although they may guide his principles, he understands they are likely not teleological, universal truths. For Critchley, and in theory Lyotard, this is absolutely critical to Obama’s character and allows him to negotiate a postmodern political landscape with an open mind. It is not surprising that Obama is a proponent of net neutrality and free content systems, as is Lyotard. How will a president with such complex, seemingly contradictory fundamental ideologies handle a crisis of capital and finance?
Perhaps instead of perpetuating financial impossibility in a no-option, no-exit, endless economic crisis that we can escape only by believing a lie, perhaps Obama will live up to his credo of “change” and announce a return to modernist thinking and put cultural grand narratives back on the table. Just as Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard fought to reconsider the Grand Narrative philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Marx in an attempt to find meaning in the rapid gyre of history, Obama might find respite from a turbulent postmodernism by attempting to reinstitute the foundational democratic theories and liberal practices of Rousseau, Jefferson and FDR. The reappearance of romantic ideals is something missing in our daily lives and something that would likely lead back to modernism. The first truly postmodern event as evident in the financial crisis could likely also be the last, an impetus back towards the modern. The possibility of a complete transformation, one referenced by Lyotard that uses technology to move beyond even postmodernism, still seems too far distant and ahistorical at this point. For example, the idea of the Internet as a liberating and completely revolutionary concept seems to be rendered hopeful idealism today. Ideas like this might as well be considered romantic. That is to say, modern.
While Lyotard allows for an ambiguously possible liberation in and through postmodernism, this paper seeks to argue that this does not appear likely in the current historical situation. The other option for extrication from the financial crisis is one that simply moves farther down the road of postmodernism into deeper and deeper simulation and delusion. In the wake of bailouts and government interventions, simulations and strategies, the postmodern condition is revealing itself as never before. The postmodern theorist whose ideas exemplify this view most is Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard’s Simulations can be read as having disturbingly prophetic accuracy today. Using Simulations as a guide, this analysis explains how Baudrillard’s theories provide further evidence that the global financial crisis of 2008 is the postmodern apotheosis fully realized.
Baudrillard and Simulation
The procession of simulacra in Baudrillard provides an excellent model when we look at how modern capital has become distorted out of reality. In the successive phases of the image, Baudrillard identifies the first as a reflection of a basic reality. In this first stage the “image” is clearly an artificial placeholder for the “real” item. Although Baudrillard often associates this period with pre-history, we can think of it in terms of the monetary system as the point when money and tokens were first invented. Early tokens stood in place for actually commodities such as goats and grains. That is to say money was invented to more easily trade commodities in reality. It was a specific placeholder that had a specific referent. For example, one coin actually meant you actually had one goat in tactile reality.
In the second phase of the simulacra, the image masks and perverts a basic reality. This can be understood as the distinction between the “image” (the artificial placeholder) and the real beginning to break down. At this point the image’s ability to imitate the real threatens to replace the original referent altogether. Baudrillard often associates this period with the industrial revolution and the proliferation of mass production/copies. In terms of the monetary system, we can compare this with the rise of a modern financial system. Abstract numbers instead of goods become how wealth is accounted for, a credit system is put into place and the referent has begun to be replaced. For example, the ability to check bank statements online reduces the reality of physical legal tender to mere binary code of the data base. The power of the real becomes subsumed. This becomes a problem of power and legitimation when those who can bypass the language of the medium can easily manipulate the real. With the recent news suggesting the U.S. is not ready for cyber attacks, we see not only Baudrillard’s theory of the Simulacra having real world consequences, but also Lyotard’s worries of open source power struggles.
The third stage in the precession of the Simulacra occurs when the simulation masks the absence of a basic reality. That is to say the real no longer exists – only a simulation that attempts to uphold the real. This phase is associated with postmodernity and is found precisely in the financial markets leading up to the crisis. It is a system where people trade abstract numbers whether or not they actually exist in reality. Tokens without goats in the earlier example, credit without money in the housing and credit crisis. The loan practices in place by the financial institutions clearly had no real referent when the bubble burst. Banks had given out billions more than they actually had because the power of the copy (money in its image form) didn’t need a real referent to actual financial reality.
The global financial crisis now finds itself on the precipice of the fourth stage of the simulacra, as described by Baudrillard, where the market bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. It is its own pure simulacra. The danger at this phase is monumental for Late-Capitalism. Once society begins to understand the market as ultimately unreal, all institutions making up the world economy are put at risk of relevance and power. Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke are desperately trying to go back to Baudrillard’s third state of simulacra. The American public meanwhile is seriously beginning to question the work being done on Wall Street. It would appear that the stock market trades in a simulation that has totally preceded reality, a hyperreal that has displaced the real. The apotheosis of the Post-Modern age is at last here.
Baudrillard sees this sort of anti-scandal as endemic in postmodernism. Disneyland is a hyperreal imaginary, not unlike credit. While Disneyland works as a perfect model of America, it is also becomes the real not unlike the images of God or credit system. Baudrillard argues Disneyland is more real than Los Angeles just as the prison system is more real that the outside world because it is society that is carceral in its banality. This is the postmodern landscape, constantly at a third phase in its procession of Simulcra, where as far as the established order is concerned, all is real that is in simulation. This is the model predicated on Baudrillard’s famous saying that art has totally penetrated reality.
In the background, peeking through the whole time like an omniscient observer, have been notions of power. Baudrillard quotes Lyotard when he says that only capital takes pleasure, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Capital is a tool, a sorcery relation; it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such. Capitalism is in the process of proving itself through a crisis of capital, proving itself as unreal, through hyperreality. However, this will forever change the way we understand Capitalism critically. Only through a reinjection of the real will a Grand Narrative become wholly rational and re-establish itself as an unchallenged dominant ideology. The question that remains to be seen is how exactly it plans to go about this process. Is it even possible? Has it ever been possible?
The government and private sectors are going about an attempt to re-establish power and economic equilibrium not through a reinsertion of material reality and dialectical reasoning, but through more abstraction and simulation. This can be thought of as a thoroughly postmodern solution to a modernist narrative. It is in this fact we see the cure to the last modern crisis revealing itself and solving itself through postmodern practices. This is clearly evident in the financial bailout, auto bailout and stimulus packages. In fact, almost no debates have been considered regarding a complete overhaul of the financial and credit markets. The idea to dissolve and start anew seems absurd. The iconoclastors fight a notion that there is a possibility to live with mass Capital. We are too entrenched historically and ideologically to go back now. And furthermore, where would we go?
Conclusion
It appears that capital continues to be the ends, while simulation and delusion will continue to be the means. The financial crisis marks itself ultimately as the first postmodern crisis because we have moved into a pluralist, anti-telological landscape as the last remaining grand narrative, that of America and Late-Capitalism, threatens to reveal itself as a mere shadow of itself. It appears at this point the institutions believe a shadow to be sufficient. But what then of Lyotard’s potential for hope and epistemological emancipation? What of Obama? Perhaps someone will come along and try to save the modern in a different way. Perhaps through romanticism and idealism we can begin to see something new and reinvigorate the dialectic through a move back towards modernism. However, maybe technology has allowed reality to be penetrated irreparably and the future will forever be seen as a coalescence of simulation and delusion.
Notes
Matthew Ericson, et al. “Tracking The $700 Billion Bailout.” New York Times. 1 April 2009. <http://projects.nytimes.com/creditcrisis/recipients/table>
Priya David. “After Rescue, Bonuses Still Flow At AIG.” CBS News. 11 December 2008. <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/11/earlyshow/main4661900.shtml?source=mostpop_story>
“Ponzi Squared.” The Economist. 15 December 2008. <http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_12795543>
David Macy, editor. Dictionary of Critical Theory. (New York: Penguin, 2000). 259.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1979). xxiv-xxv.
Richard Appignanesi, Introducing Postmodernism. (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2007).
Lyotard, 39.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984).
Arthur Schlesinger Jr, The Coming of The New Deal, (New York: Mariner Books, 1988).
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992).
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (New York: Vintage, 1974).
Slavov Zizek, “Resistance Is Surrender” The London Review of Books, November 2007, <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_.html>.
Baudrillard.
Lyotard, 30-37.
Ibid, 67.
Ibid, 51.
Ibid, 67.
Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism Of The Other, (Palo Alto: Standford University Press, 1998).
Simon Critchley, “The American Void,” Harpers Magazine, November 2008.
Richard Appignanesi. Introducing Post-Modernism, (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2007) 54.
Baudrillard, 11.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “The Earliest Precursor of Writing,” Scientific American, June 1978, 50-59.
Reuters, “U.S. Not Ready For Cyber Attack,” New York Times, December 19, 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2008/12/19/technology/tech-us-security-usa-cyber.html?partner=rss&emc=rss>
Ibid, 23.
Ibid, 25.
Appignanesi, 54.
Baudrillard, 35.
Ibid, 30.
Works Cited
Appignanesi, Richard. Introducing Post-Modernism. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2007.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984.
Critchley, Simon. “The American Void.” Harper’s Magazine. November,
2008, <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/11/0082235>
David, Priya. “After Rescue, Bonuses Still Flow At AIG.” CBS News. 11 December 2008. <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/11/earlyshow/main4661900.shtml?source=mostpop_story
Derrida, Jacques. Monolinguism of the Other. Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1998.
Ericson, Matthew et al, “Tracking The $700 Billion Bailout.” New York Times. 1 April 2009. <http://projects.nytimes.com/creditcrisis/recipients/table>
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and The Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late-Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Lyotard, Jean-Francoise. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979.
Macy, David, editor. Dictionary Of Critical Theory. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, New York: Vintage, 1974.
Reuters. “U.S. Not Ready For Cyber Attack,” New York Times, December 19, 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2008/12/19/technology/tech-us-security-usa-cyber.html?partner=rss&emc=rss>
Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. “The Earliest Precursor of Writing,” Scientific American, June 1978.
Schlesinger, Arthur. The Coming Of The New Deal. New York: Mariner Books, 1988.
The Economist Web site. “Ponzi Squared.” The Economist.com 15 December 2008. <http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_12795543
Zizek, Slavov. “Resistance Is Surrender.” The London Review of Books, November 2007, <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_.html>.VANCOUVER, BC – The Canadian Soccer Association (CSA) revealed today the rosters for the four Canadian clubs competing in the upcoming 2013 Amway Canadian Championship (ACC), beginning on April 24.
Teams have until 48 hours prior to kickoff to make additions to their respective rosters, which can contain a maximum of 30 players. In order to be added to the 30-man rosters, players must be eligible to play first team matches, but exceptions have been made in the past.
2013 Amway Canadian Championship Rosters:
Vancouver Whitecaps FC
1 GK CANNON Joe 2 D HARVEY Jordan 3 D RUSIN Brad 4 D ROCHAT Alain 7 M/F SANVEZZO Camilo 8 M WATSON Matt 9 F MILLER Kenny 11 F MATTOCKS Darren 12 D LEE Y.P 13 D/M REO-COKER Nigel 14 M KOBAYASHI Daigo 16 D LEVERON Johnny 17 F SALGADO Omar 18 GK KNIGHTON Brad 19 F HURTADO Erik 23 F MANNEH Kekuta 26 F HERTZOG Corey 27 M DAVIDSON Jun 28 M KOFFIE Gershon 29 F HEINEMANN Tommy 31 M/F TEIBERT Russell 32 D KLAZURA Greg 34 F CLARKE Caleb 39 GK THOMAS Simon 40 D O'BRIEN Andy
Montreal Impact
1 GK PERKINS Troy Alan 5 D BROVSKY John Eli 6 D CAMARA Hassoum 7 M CAMPANHOLI MARTINS Felipe 8 M BERNIER Patrice 9 F DI VAIO Marco 11 M/F NYASSI Sanna 13 D FERRARI Matteo 14 D NESTA Alessandro 15 M ROMERO Andres Fabricio 16 M MALLACE Calum Stephen 17 D IAPICHINO Dennis 18 M WARNER Collen Najja Scott 19 M SMITH Blake Edward 21 M MAPP Justin Sanders 22 M ARNAUD JR. Davy Lee 30 GK BUSH Evan William 31 M PISANU Andrea 33 F WENGER James Andrew 34 D OUIMETTE Karl 40 GK CREPEAU Maxime 51 D TISSOT Maxim 55 D/M LEFEVRE Wandrille 98 M/F RODRIGUEZ Maximiliano Leonel
Toronto FC
2 D EMORY Logan 3 D CALIFF Daniel 4 D HENRY Doneil 5 D MORGAN Ashtone 6 D AGBOSSOUMONDE Gale 7 M BOSTOCK John 8 M BEKKER Kyle 9 M WELSHMANN Emery 10 F EARNSHAW Robert 11 F SILVA Luis 12 GK BENDIK Joseph 16 D/M RUSSELL Darel 17 F BRAUN Justin 19 M LAMBE Reginald 21 M OSORIO Jonathan 24 GK FREI Stefan 25 M HALL Jeremy 28 F MORGAN Taylor 31 M EPHRAIM Hogan 32 F WIEDEMAN Andrew 33 D RICHTER Ryan 40 GK ROBERTS Quillan 48 D O'DEA Darren
FC EdmontonIn the October 2016 general conference, Elder J. Devn Cornish shared an experience he had after graduating from medical school and was in a pediatric residency training in a high-powered, competitive program. He was faced with a challenging assignment and felt unqualified to meet it. In his despair, he alternated between sobbing and sleeping and had no idea how to proceed. Just at that moment, a senior resident in the program put his hand on Elder Cornish’s shoulder and asked how he was doing. After Elder Cornish poured out his frustrations, the senior resident responded in a way that Elder Cornish said changed his life. Elder Cornish described the senior resident’s response as follows: “He told me how proud he and all of the other senior residents were of me and how they felt like I was going to be an excellent doctor. In short, he believed in me at a time when I didn’t even believe in myself.” (“Am I Good Enough? Will I Make It?”)
Do we believe in our Scouts? Do we trust them enough to let go and let them lead? Do we believe in them when they do not believe in themselves? If the adults are dominating and controlling the meetings and activities of the troop, what does that tell our Scouts about our trust (or lack of trust) in them?
When Helaman was faced with a life-and-death situation for many of his people, he turned to a group of his young men and asked them for guidance. How old were they? The record does not tell us. But it does tell us that they were “very young.”
Helaman recounts the inspirational story to Captain Moroni as follows:
“And now, whether they were overtaken by Antipus we knew not, but I said unto my men: Behold, we know not but they have halted for the purpose that we should come against them, that they might catch us in their snare;
“Therefore what say ye, my sons, will ye go against them to battle?
“And now I say unto you, my beloved brother Moroni, that never had I seen so great courage, nay, not amongst all the Nephites.
“For as I had ever called them my sons (for they were all of them very young) even so they said unto me: Father, behold our God is with us, and he will not suffer that we should fall; then let us go forth; we would not slay our brethren if they would let us alone; therefore let us go, lest they should overpower the army of Antipus” (Alma 56: 43-46). (Emphasis added.)
Often, when telling this story, we rightly focus on the courage and bravery of these young men. However, there is another lesson to be learned if we focus on Helaman as a great young men’s leader, a great Scoutmaster we might say. Before this group of young men could exercise their great faith and courage, Helaman had to give them a chance to make a very difficult decision. He warned them of the dangers but he did not order them, he asked them what they should do. If he had ordered them into battle, he would have robbed them of the opportunity to grow. Helaman trusted these young men, his stripling warriors, and was richly rewarded. If we will trust our young men, we will be richly rewarded, as well.
Once, when I was in a priesthood leadership meeting, a great leader addressed the question of whether we should take a chance in giving so much responsibility to our young men. This great leader responded, “Why not? The Lord took a chance on you.”
-Bill Chapman lives in San Clemente, California, and loves to surf, trail run, backpack, camp, do anything in the outdoors, and watch young men achieve the purposes of the Aaronic Priesthood through the Scouting program. The views and opinions expressed in this message are solely those of the author.Nearly a decade ago, North Dakota and Colorado, poised for explosive growth in the drilling of energy resources, faced a decision: What to do with what appeared to be a never-ending geyser of new oil and gas riches?
Voters in Colorado opted for the status quo in 2008, rejecting competing efforts to use tax revenue from oil and gas production to pay for what backers called vital needs. They voted down one proposal to eliminate favorable energy industry tax deductions to pay for higher education scholarships and wildlife restoration and another plan to use existing revenues to build new highways.
Two years after the plans in Colorado collapsed at the polls, voters in North Dakota took the opposite approach and embraced radical change. They passed an initiative to set aside for future generations some of the tax revenue produced from the extraction of oil and gas. The Legacy Fund that North Dakota voters created in 2010 now has socked away more than $4 billion. This year, lawmakers in North Dakota will start debating how to spend the $300 million in interest earnings the fund is projected to generate annually.
In contrast, lawmakers in Colorado, on the heels of a recent court case that expanded even further energy industry tax exemptions, are scrambling again to tap diminished severance tax revenues collected from mining and energy exploration. Once again, the tax stash is getting carved up to pay for budgetary emergencies and parochial interests.
“We’ve frittered away every penny we’ve ever collected in severance taxes,” said former Sen. Pat Steadman, a Democrat in Denver who until early this year sat on the influential Joint Budget Committee, which sets budget priorities for Colorado. “There just isn’t a grand plan to do what some of the other states have done.”
While North Dakota and Colorado’s neighboring states have built multibillion-dollar trusts off energy taxes, the amount of money Colorado will have left in cash in its so-called permanent severance tax trust fund is projected to plunge to as low as $10 million by June even though Colorado has collected nearly $1.7 billion in the taxes over the past decade, an average of about $171 million annually.
Among nine Western states, Colorado’s effective severance tax rate, which includes deductions, ranked second to lowest at 1.7 percent, according to the nonpartisan Colorado Legislative Council. Only Utah had a lower rate. When other state and local taxes are added, Colorado’s total effective tax rate on energy producers and miners ranks fourth to lowest at 5.2 percent, compared with an average of 6.2 percent.
Funds stretched
Colorado governors and lawmakers repeatedly have raided severance tax collections to patch budget holes and pay for pet projects over the years. They also have left intact a system that in a typical year doles out tens of millions of dollars to counties and municipalities, fueling a massive public works spending spree. Critics say the disjointed spending leaves vital state functions and critical needs underfunded. And they fear that once the drillers in Colorado have finished extracting the finite oil, gas and minerals from the ground, the state will have nothing left over to help mitigate all the impacts from the drilling.
“There are a lot of legitimate, important functions that could use more revenue, but what bothered me about how we spent severance taxes is that we spent it like rain all over the place,” said former Republican Sen. Josh Penry, who represented Fruita as minority leader when he was in the legislature. “We just spread the loot around.”
About $360 million in the taxes have been diverted to shore up an unstable general fund since 2008. Gov. John Hickenlooper has asked the legislature for another $77.4 million this year to repay the fund for costs related to a lawsuit won by BP Production American Co., which expanded industry tax deductions. That court ruling allows oil and gas producers to amend their tax returns for the past four years to deduct capital costs for transportation, manufacturing and processing costs and continue claiming those deductions into the future.
During the past eight years, the state has sent $615 million in severance tax to municipalities and counties, 60 percent of which came in the form of special grants for new parks, recreational centers and other regional wishes, even going so far as to pay the salary of an administrative intern in the town of Nederland. Local projects the state has funded with the tax in the last five years include $300,000 to help renovate an opera house in Leadville, $2 million for a new sport shooting complex in Palisade, $332,000 to build a clubhouse at a shooting complex in Gypsum, $1.9 million to build a new recreation center in Montrose and stipends to allow municipal workers across the state to watch a conference headlined by a futurist.
Lawmakers and governors over the years have tapped the tax for special appropriations. Then-Gov. Bill Owens, in his last year of office in 2006, used it to provide an energy assistance program to low-income residents, an ongoing program that spent $11.8 million in severance tax funds last year. In 2007, then-Gov. Bill Ritter used the tax to give southeastern Colorado counties $650,000 for blizzard relief. Gov. John Hickenlooper reformed the Governor’s Energy Office in 2012 and that office has taken $1.5 million each year since in the tax revenue for operations.
Severance taxes covered a $35 million payment to settle a water dispute with Kansas in 2005. A little more than $28 million have helped finance operating expenses at the Colorado Department of Local Affairs since 2008.
Since 1995, the tax also has been used to fund the day-to-day operations of four agencies under the Department of Natural Resources, which last year amounted to almost $18 million.
Lawmakers also have approved more than 30 bills over the years that siphoned off severance tax revenues for additional needs including wildfire mitigation, studies to increase dam water holdings and efforts to combat pine bark beetle forest devastation. Those special appropriations added up to about $38 million last year.
Tax deductions cost state
In the midst of all the spending, lawmakers have left untouched tax deductions that the energy industry in Colorado enjoys far in excess of those offered by neighboring states. Those deductions cost Colorado an average of more than $270 million annually, according to a Colorado Legislative Council study this month.
Colorado and Wyoming energy companies took nearly identical amounts of oil and gas out of the ground two years ago, with Colorado firms extracting an amount worth $15.6 billion to the $15.1 billion extracted from Wyoming, that study found. Yet the firms in Colorado paid $811 million in state and local taxes, nearly half the $1.5 billion their peers in Wyoming paid, even though Wyoming does not have a corporate income tax. A big reason for the difference is the generous severance tax deductions allowed in Colorado, where drillers can exempt from taxation lower-producing wells and can claim tax credits for virtually all of their prior year’s local property tax.
Now, the cupboard in Colorado is nearly bare.
To pay off about $110 million in projected tax refunds to energy companies, caused in part by the BP court case, the state departments of local affairs and natural resources are slashing programs that usually rely on severance tax revenue, according to recent budget documents. Impacts range from water conservation plans to an effort to keep invasive species, such as the zebra mussel, from destroying lakes. New fees on boaters may have to be imposed so the lakes remain protected, state officials say.
“We prioritize funding out of the operational account, and higher priority needs are still getting met, but there are some pretty important needs that won’t get met,” said Bill Levine, budget director for the state’s natural resources department.
State loans financed by the tax to boost water production also are getting cut amidst warnings that the state needs to dramatically boost water supplies to keep |
would you make to your deck or sideboard?
Add an extra Garruk, Primal Hunter What was the strangest deck you played against this weekend?
Blue-White-Red agro with Wingcrafters and Knight of Glory. What are the best cards of these types in Standard: Land:
Kessig Wolf Run Creature
Thragtusk Instant:
Abrupt Decay Sorcery
Farseek
Top 8 – Decklists by Event Coverage Staff
Top 9-16 – Decklists by Event Coverage Staff
Quarterfinals – Maxime Cantin vs. Nico Christiansen by Josh Bennett
Nico Christiansen's Naya Humans helped him to his first Grand Prix Day 2, and now they've brought him to his first Top 8 and within reach of his first Championship. Standing in his way is Maxime Cantin, playing Day 2's most populous deck, Jund Midrange. It's the sort of deck Christiansen had been feasting on all weekend.
Unfortunately things did not go to play in game one. Christiansen mulliganed down to an unexciting five. Cantin was happy to match one-for-one against a hobbled opponent. He stopped Lightning Mauler with Dreadbore and Mayor of Avabruck with Mizzium Mortars. Christiansen played his fourth land and summoned a second Mauler and a Flinthoof Boar. Hit hit for five and passed, empty-handed.
Cantin calmly untapped and dropped his fourth land and Huntmaster of the Fells. Christiansen swung in. The wolf token blocked Lightning Mauler, and Giant Growth made the save. Next up from Cantin was Thragtusk, and the game was getting farther and farther out of Christiansen's reach. He drew and played Burning-Tree Emissary and passed.
Cantin hit back for five with the Thragtusk, and Christiansen took it. Cantin passed without playing a spell to flip his Huntmaster, killing off the Lightning Mauler. Christiansen had no play. Cantin attacked with both his creatures, trading the Ravager of the Fells for Christiansen's Flinthoof Boar, then showed Liliana of the Veil and a replacement Huntmaster. Christiansen had had enough.
Cantin 1 - Christiansen 0
Christiansen's deck let him stay on seven, and he opened with the perfect turn one - Cavern of Souls on Human and Champion of the Parish. Cantin was ready with Tragic Slip off an Overgrown Tomb. Christiansen replaced his Champion with the Mayor of Avabruck. Cantin played Farseek and passed. Christiansen added a second Mayor and Boros Elite to his baord, hit for two, and passed.
Cantin dropped Mizzium Mortars on one of the Mayors and passed his turn, revealing that he had no fourth land. Christiansen hit for three and played Champion of the Parish. Another Mortars cleared out the other Mayor. Christiansen just hit for two, dropping Cantin to eleven. He passed with no play on his four mana.
It looked like a much-needed respite for Cantin. He used it to cast Farseek for his fourth land. Christiansen untapped and played Lightning Mauler, soulbonding it to give it haste, then attacked with all three, triggering Battalion. Cantin was suddenly at four. When Cantin tapped out for Huntmaster, going up to six, Christiansen showed him a pair of Searing Spears.
Cantin 1 - Christiansen 1
Both players kept their openers. Cantin opened with Farseek opposite a turn-one Champion of the Parish. christiansen took two from Stomping Ground, then played out a second Champion and an Experiment One, hitting for three. Cantin played a land, and took care of the bigger Champion with Dreadbore. Christiansen played a land tapped, then summoned Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, hitting for five.
Cantin needed a roadblock, and summoned Thragtusk, vaulting back up to seventeen. Unfortunately for him Christiansen had Pacifism at the ready, and crashed through for seven damage. Cantin untapped and went over his option. Eventually, he chose to pay two life for Stomping Ground, going to just eight, but allowing him to summon Olivia Voldaren with activation mana up.
Christiansen played his fourth land, a Cavern of Souls, and summoned Mayor of Avabruck. In response, Cantin shot down Thalia. Christiansen tapped his last two mana for a second Mayor. Now he had a 7/7 Champion of the Parish and a 4/4 Experiment One. Cantin traded Olivia for the Experiment and dropped to one. He played out Huntmaster of the Fells and Strangleroot Geist, but as soon as he tapped out, Christiansen flipped over the Boros Charm in his hand, taking the match.
Nico Christiansen defeats Maxime Cantin 2-1
Quarterfinals Roundup by Nate Price
Wilson Wong vs. Reid Duke
This Jund Midrange mirror matchup isn't known for its speed, yet it was still the first of the quarterfinals to finish. Wong came out very slowly in the first game, not making a single play until a Thragtusk hit his side on turn 5. He was on the draw, and a Farseek from Duke put him even further behind. Duke's draw was a bit better, and he began adding Thragtusks to his board on turn 4. After adding two of the big Beast to his side, he followed with an Olivia Voldaren, backbreaking in the Jund Midrange mirror. The Vampire mistress proved her value as she grew and flew over the meager ground forces of Wong, carrying Duke to victory in Game 1.
Reid Duke 1 – Wilson Wong 0
In Game 2 of this match, it was Wong who had the Vampire advantage, with his Olivia Voldaren hitting the table before Duke's. Still, this was a Jund mirror match, and Duke had an easy answer in the form of Murder. This cleared the path for his Huntmaster of the Fells and accompanying Wolf token to begin to assault Wong's life total.
Eventually, however, Wong get back into the swing of things. A Garruk, Primal Hunter, gave him a neverending stream of Beasts. He also found a Huntmaster of the Fells to fill his board up. Duke had found a Staff of Nin to provide a clock and steady stream of cards his way, exactly what he needed to pull ahead. First came a Bonfire of the Damned, clearing away Wong's creatures and his Garruk. Wong had a Thragtusk to fill the void, but Duke followed with an even more impressive Olivia Voldaren. Unlike Wong's earlier copy, Duke's stuck, taking chunks of Wong's life. Wong slowed Duke's advantage with an Acidic Slime, killing the Staff, but Olivia just ate it and pushed even harder. With Duke's clock so large, Wong had very few outs, and when none of them came, he was once again done in by the massively important Vampire.
Reid Duke 2 – Wilson Wong 0
Tzu-Ching Kuo vs. Thomas Holzinger
For an aggressive deck, Holzinger's deck provided very little offense in the early stages of the game, very unfortunately against Kuo's Reanimator strategy. While he did have a turn 4 Falkenrath Aristocrat, it was quickly sealed away beneath a Fiend Hunter. Over the next two turns, Kuo began building his engine with two Undercity Informers. From there, he simply had to mill himself a couple of times before he found an Unburial Rites and an Angel of Glory's Rise in his graveyard, which he brought back to combo off on the following turn.
Tzu-Ching Kuo 1 – Thomas Holzinger 0
This game brought a faster start from Holzinger, with a slew of Humans enhancing a Champion of the Parish to 4/4. Kuo made a few of his deck's dorks, Burning-Tree Emissary and Undercity Informer, which he used to chump block and then mill himself, looking for the kill. Kuo used Fiend Hunters judiciously, trapping a Falkenrath Aristocrat as he had in the first game.
When Holzinger managed a Silverblade Paladin, Kuo's life total took a huge hit. He had cast a Huntmaster of the Fells on the previous turn, and he opted to double block the Paladin with both the Huntmaster and his Wolf, taking eight from the 4/4, double-striking Champion that snuck through. This dropped him to 9. When he cast a second Huntmaster, he managed to buy all the time he needed. His Wolf chumped, and Holzinger had no play. The Huntmaster transformed, killing one of Holzinger's creatures and giving Kuo a 4/4 attacker. A second Fiend Hunter got rid of the offensive Champion of the Paris, leaving Holzinger with a virtually empty board. Only a Doomed Traveler remained, and it was about to prove that it was not just a clever name.
Kuo was playing off of the top of his deck, but it didn't matter. He had a massive advantage on the board for the first time all game, and he pressed it. A third Huntmaster came down, one again transforming on his next turn. It killed the Traveler, leaving Holzinger with a single Spirit token left to guard the gates. He dropped to two. His draw provided nothing, and Kuo took his semifinal match in two games.
Tzu-Ching Kuo 2 – Thomas Holzinger 0
Wenzel Krautmann vs. Felipe Tapia Becerra
Krautmann had a blazing start, getting three Champions of the Parish into play over the early turns of the game. Combined with a Burning-Tree Emissary and a Wolfbitten Captive his little minions grew to as big as 5/5. Becerra had a couple of early ways to stem the tide, with a Lotleth Troll and a Geralf's Messenger, but he found himself quite far behind. Still, between those creatures and the addition of a couple more, he was able to slow the game down just enough to avoid death. Eventually, he was able to block and sacrifice enough creatures to his Lotleth Troll that its impressive size overmatched that of the Champions. Still, Becerra was at a much lower life total and was still facing down a more impressive army than his own.
Interestingly, because of a topdeck by Kratumann, Becerra was able to turn the game around. A Silverblade Paladin offered the chance for Krautmann to begin getting in for a great deal more damage than previously. When he went for the attack, Becerra let a creature die in combat to grow his Troll and then used Tragic Slip to kill off the giant Champion. This left Krautmann with an inferior force for the first time all game, and gave Becerra the slight edge. He was still behind, but he was rapidly pulling ahead. When he added a second Lotleth Troll to his side, it looked like things were going to go downhill for Krautmann from here.
Still, the top of Krautmanns deck came through in a pinch, providing him a Frontline Medic, a perfect way to give himself some reach. Life totals were 6-4 in favor of Krautmann as he pondered his attack. The appearance of the Medic had forced Becerra back into a defensive posture, so all of his creatures were back to block.
Becerra's Lotleth Trolls were more than up to the task of blocking, regenerating to stick around after combat. He ended up absorbing all of the damage and stayed relatively safe. Fortunately, this also left him an excellent window to finish things off. With Krautmann virtually defenseless, he sent his massive Trolls over to attack. Their trample damage was more than Kratumann's defenses could handle, and he scooped up his cards with lethal damage on the stack.
Felipe Tapia Becerra 1 – Wenzel Krautmann 0
The second game of the match featured an uncharacteristically slow start from Krautmann, with no creatures on turns 1, 2, or 3. Becerra, meanwhile, managed to drop two Lotleth Trolls onto the table within the first three turns. Krautman showed why he had kept his hand on the fourth turn, casting a Huntmaster of the Fells that was going to be unfortunately overmatched against Becerra's Trolls. When the Huntmaster transformed on Becerra's next turn, he fired off an Abrupt Decay to kill it. Krauttman had a Restoration Angel to keep it alive, but Becerra had a second copy to make sure the Ravager stayed dead.
Becerra attacked with a 3/2 Lotleth Troll. He only had one card left in hand, and Krautmann mused about whether or not it was a creature. Deciding that either it wasn't or that he didn't care, Krautmann shoved his Angel in front of it. When Becerra revealed that it was a Vampire Nighthawk that he could discard to his Troll, he seemed distraught. His Angel died and Becerra regenerated his Troll. Now things looked quite dire for Krautmann.
Kratumann took his turn. All he had left on his board was a 2/2 Wolf token, and he was facing down a trio of creatures. Krautmann made another Huntmaster on his turn, going up to three creatures himself, and putting him at a slightly safer six life. Still, the Troll's trample was what had done him in the first game, and he was facing a tough road in this one. Becerra's next attack cleared Krautmann's board, dropping him to 2 in the process. After one more draw step, Krautmann conceded defeat.
Felipe Tapia Becerra 2 – Wenzel Krautmann 0
Semifinals – Felipe Tapia Becerra vs. Tzu-Ching Kuo by Nate Price
Becerra's highly aggressive deck is one of the biggest nightmares for Kuo's Reanimator strategy. This matchup was going to come down to Becerra's start, and how Kuo countered it. Becerra started off with a fairly good first turn, making a Gravecrawler, but he didn't have the second-turn Lotleth Troll to follow it up, or another play for his third turn. This was exactly what Kuo needed to happen in order to steal Game 1 from Becerra's Jund Zombies deck.
Early in the game, Kuo's creatures serve as nothing more than sacrificial pawns used to extend the game, and his early Burning-Tree Emissary did exactly that. It came down, allowing Kuo to also cast Faithless Looting, before trading with the Gravecrawler in combat.
Becerra was able to find a third source of mana, a third Cavern of Souls, on his fourth turn, enabling a hasty Dreg Mangler. It crashed over, dropping Kuo to 11. Kuo once again made a sacrificial Emissary, this time using a green to cast a Grisly Salvage. It put two lands in his hand and a Fiend Hunter, Angel of Glory's Rise, and Undercity Informer into his graveyard. That was the whole combo, all in one fell swoop. Becerra attacked with his creature, but it was stopped by the Emissary, giving Kuo yet another turn. The turn was all he needed, as he had an Unburial Rites in his hand, casting it to take the first game off of a very slow start from Becerra.
Felipe Tapia Becerra 0 – Tzu-Ching Kuo 1
After sideboarding, Kuo's Humans Reanimator deck brings in a package very similar to that of the old Junk Reanimator decks. Thragtusks and other life-gaining creatures shore up his life total, giving him plenty of time to establish control. The only crack in this strategy comes in the Lotleth Trolls in Becerra's deck. Their trample and regeneration make them nightmares for Kuo's creatures to deal with in combat. Fortunately, Fiend Hunter is amazing against the Trolls, and they will likely be his saviors if Becerra gets off to a fast start.
Already down a game, Becerra couldn't feel too good about having to mulligan to six so close to the finals. His second hand was acceptable, though he did betray a bit of trepidation about it before drawing his last card. Once again, his draw was fairly slow, not adding to the board on the first two turns. He did manage a Geralf's Messenger on his third turn, but it was much slower against Kuo's ost-sideboarded strategy. Kuo padded his life total with a Centaur Healer before attacking with a Burning-Tree Emissary. Becerra chose not to run his Messenger into the Healer, instead passing the turn without a play.
Becerra's deck continued to deliver no threats, instead providing him a seemingly endless wave of lands. He looked exasperated as he was forced to pass turn after turn. Kuo, meanwhile, dug through his deck with Faithless Looting, finding yet another Healer to stymie Becerra.
Becerra did find a saving grace eventually, casting Slaughter Games naming Angel of Glory's Rise. Kuo shrugged and revealed his last card in hand: the Angel. He had enough mana to cast it, but had just gotten to that point after casting the Looting on his previous turn.
Still, Kuo was ahead. Becerra only had a Geralf's Messenger in play, and Kuo had made his deck less reliant on the Angel combo. While the Angel's ability was particularly potent in this Zombies matchup, he was going to more likely win with Thragtusks, Centaur Healers, and Huntmaster of the Fells.
Kuo attacked with his team. Before blockers, he cast an Abrupt Decay on the Messenger, actually turning on Becerra's Tragic Slip. This allowed him to kill a Healer, taking 5 to drop to 13. On his turn, he found another threat, this time a Gravecrawler, which he added to his team. As he was behind, the Gravecrawer not being able to block was a bit of an issue.
Kuo cast a Grisly Salvage on his turn, flipping over a trio of strong creatures. Rather than take a Centaur Healer or a Restoration Angel, Kuo decided on a Huntmaster of the Fells, immediately casting it. Becerra found his best creature on his draw step, making a Lotleth Troll and passing the turn. Kuo's Huntmaster transformed, getting the Lotleth Troll out of the way temporarily. When Kuo attacked with his team, Becerra tried to kill the Ravager of the Fells with an Abrupt Decay.
There was a collective gasp from the crowd when Kuo revealed a freshly-drawn Restoration Angel, resetting the Huntmaster and just absolutely giving the firm lead to Kuo. The turnabout was so strong that Becerra seemed unable to recover. His life had been decimated by the uncharacteristically aggressive Centaur Healer. All it took was one more attack with his swarm of 2/2s and 3/3s to make his way to the finals in style.
Tzu-Ching Kuo 2 – Felipe Tapia Becerra 0
Semifinals – Nico Christiansen vs. Reid Duke by Josh Bennett
This weekend nobody could stop Nico Christiansen and his Naya Humans deck. That is, until he ran into Reid Duke in round twelve. Duke's Jund Midrange served up the right cards at the right times to hand Christiansen his first loss. However, that was the exception. The rule had been that Christiansen crushed Jund. Now he had a chance for revenge, and when it mattered most. Better yet, Christiansen would be on the play for game one, casting a long shadow over Duke's chances.
Christiansen kicked things off with Boros Elite, and after Duke played Woodland Cemetery, added Burning-Tree Emissary and Mayor of Avabruck, hitting for two. Duke untapped and cast his one maindeck Tragic Slip, saying "Lucky" with a sheepish smile as he sent the Mayor to the graveyard. He played a second tapped Cemetery and passed. Christiansen hit for three and played Frontline Medic.
Duke was still on the back foot. He had to pay two life for Overgrown Tomb in order to Murder the Medic. Christiansen hit for three more and played Boros Elite. Duke played Rootbound Crag and summoned Huntmaster, hoping for profitable blocks. Christiansen played Lightning Mauler, bound it to the Emissary, and crashed in with all his creatures. Wolf token blocked the Emissary, and Huntmaster blocked the Mauler, letting the two 3/3 Elites through. Christiansen tapped one for Giant Growth, saving his Mauler.
Duke was down to just six life and no board. Blood Crypt put him to four, but it let him have Thragtusk to go back up to nine. Of course, Christiansen wasn't done yet. He summoned Flinthoof Boar and bound it to the Lightning Mauler, swinging again with four creatures. Thragtusk traded for the Boar, leaving a 3/3 beast behind. Duke was down to just one life.
Still, he wasn't dead. Christiansen had no burn. Duke summoned Olivia Voldaren and a lowly Arbor Elf, giving him three blockers to survive a turn. Christiansen turned his creatures sideways, and the blockers lined up: Elf on Boros Elite, Beast token on Boros Elite, and Olivia on the Lightning Mauler. Christiansen made no play. After the dust settled, it was just Boros Elite against Olivia. Christiansen played a tapped Temple Garden and passed. He was finally out of gas.
Duke had stabilised the board. He untapped, shot down the Elite, then cast Farseek for a third red source.
"So, one to sixteen?" asked Duke
He checked Christiansen's graveyard. He didn't risk an attack, keeping Flinthoof Boar from being an out.
Christiansen slid his card off the top, then turned over Searing Spear with a shrug.
Christiansen 1 - Duke 0
Duke kept his opening seven. Christiansen went to six. Duke led with Stomping Ground, and had the decency not to celebrate when Christiansen had no one-drop to go with his Cavern of Souls. Duke untapped, cast Farseek, and passed it back. Christiansen played a second Cavern and chained Burning-Tree Emissary into Mayor of Avabruck. Duke played his fourth land and a Huntmaster of the Fells.
Christiansen untapped, then sent his 3/3 Emissary into the red zone. Duke took three. Christiansen played a tapped Sunpetal Grove and summoned Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. It was no trouble for Duke. He just passed his turn and let the werewolves transform. Christiansen's trigger went on first, as he was active player, then Duke's. That meant that Ravager of the Fells could kill the Mayor.
It looked like there was no way out for Christiansen. He summoned Experiment one and Flinthoof Boar, and though he forgot the evolve trigger it didn't matter. Duke Murdered Thalia at ened of turn, flipped the Huntmaster back for a wolf and two life, then upped his defenses with Garruk, Primal Hunter and his good buddy, beast token.
Christiansen gamely played another turn like he was still in it, but the Bonfire of the Damned waiting on top of Duke's deck sent them to game three.
Christiansen 1 - Duke 1
Duke was focused as he shuffled up. "I knew this was going to come to game three," he said.
Both players kept, and what followed was sheer brutality.
Christiansen Turn One: Cavern of Souls, Champion of the Parish
Duke Turn One: Blood Crypt, tapped.
Christiansen Turn Two: Champion of the Parish, Stomping Ground, Experiment One, attack with 3/3 Champion.
Duke Turn Two: Stomping Ground, tapped.
Christiansen Turn Three: Burning-Tree Emissary, Mayor of Avabruck. Attack with 6/6 Champion of the Parish, 5/5 Champion of the Parish, and 3/3 Experiment One.
Duke counted the damage - fourteen on turn three. Someone in the audience made a disgusted sound, and it seemed like everyone present agreed. Duke smiled and extended the hand.
Nico Christiansen defeats Reid Duke 2-1
Finals – Nico Christiansen vs. Tzu-Ching Kuo by Nate Price
All weekend long, we had been following the improbable story of the Humans. Virtually ignored one week ago at Pro Tour Gatecrash, Humans-based decks seemed like a relic of the past. Still, as play progressed here in Quebec City, it became clear that there was something brewing. From virtual obscurity, both the Humans Reanimator deck and the Naya Humans deck began to become a larger and larger part of the top tables. Where other time-tested decks, like Esper Control, Bant, and UWR fell by the wayside, the two Humans decks thrived. Now, with one more match to determine the winner, they have reached the pinnacle, fated to dual each other to determine which Humans deck sits atop the Standard world.
Based on all we've heard this weekend, Kuo's Humans Reanimator deck did not appear to be favored in this matchup. His teammate Lee Shi Tian actually refused to play lands he had in his hand in a match against Kuo's finals opponent, Nico Christiansen, because Christiansen's draw was too fast. He didn't want to give away any additional information. Still, if Christiansen's opening draw were to stumble, Kuo's deck might get the window it needs to win.
Christinansen started off with a first-turn Chanpion of the Parish, his ideal opening. On the next turn, he followed that up with a Burning-Tree Emissary into an Experiment One. The Champion became a 3/3, and Kuo dropped to 17. On his turn, Kuo made a pair of Burning-Tree Emissaries, both doing their job to stem the tide. Still, Christiansen had a massively powerful draw. Before attacking, he made a Frontline Medic, turning his Champion into a 4/4 and his Experiment into a 2/2. He sent his team in to attack. Kuo chose to double block and kill the Champion, leaving Christiansen still able to trigger his Medic on his next turn. Kuo was up against the ropes, down to 7 life and no board presence. On Christiansen's next turn, he was able to attack for lethal damage, ending game one in very quick fashion.
Nico Christiansen 1 – Tzu-Ching Kuo 0
After sideboarding, Kuo is able to fill his deck with creatures aimed at keeping his life total high and putting bodies in front of Christiansen's creatures. Cards like Centaur Healer and Thragtusk do a wonderful job of both supplementing his early game, while giving him an alternative path to victory. Christiansen, on the other hand, has access to [].
While the matchup is admittedly abysmal for Kuo during Game 1, the package he gets to bring in for the second two is much better for him. Still, a blazing start from Christiansen is still one of the scariest things that can happen in Standard, and it can be difficult to beat, even with appropriate precautions.
Kuo and Christiansen kept their opening draws, and Kuo was on the draw. Christiansen made a quick Champion, just as he had in the first game, and his hand was chock full of ways to grow it. What he needed was a second land.
He didn't get it. Forced to simply attack for one with his Champion, Christiansen began to open the window Kuo needed. Grisly Salvage sent Mulch, Abrupt Decay, Thragtusk, and a Stomping Ground to Kuo's graveyard, and a Restoration Angel to his hand. Christiansen was still without a second land, and Kuo looked to be taking an extreme advantage. When he untapped and made a Thragtusk, it looked like the game might be his.
Christiansen did his best. He found that second land before the Thragtusk got active, using it to populate his board. Burning-Tree Emissary and Mayor of Avabruck made the Champion a 3/3, but he was still forced to stay back and defend. Kuo's second Thragtusk, in addition to the Angel in his hand, made things look quite grim for Christiansen. He was down 11-26, and wasn't going to be able to get aggressive anytime soon. He made a Frontline Medic, but it was more serviceable as a 3/3 body than an enabler for attack. When Kuo made a Fiend Hunter to steal away the Champion of the Parish, Christiansen's force was crushed. All it took was one more attack with his large force for Kuo to draw the concession from Christiansen, sending it to a decisive Game 3, where Christiansen would importantly be on the play.
Nico Christiansen 1 – Tzu-Ching Kuo 1
This was exactly what the Humans Reanimator deck wanted to do against the Naya Humans deck. With a stumble, as we saw in that game, it could overcome the aggressive advantage and draw things out until large, life-gaining beasts could take over the game. Still, with the final game starting on Christiansen's Naya Humans side, Kuo was once again put into a tight spot. Assuming Christiansen had a fair draw, Kuo was going to need early Centaur Healers or Fiend Hunters to stay ahead. Pulling a turn involving a Healer and a Burning-Tree Emissary might well result in exactly the momentum swing Kuo would need to turn the corner and take the lead. As for Christiansen, the onus is on him to do what his deck does: play creatures and attack. If he can do that, his pressure forces Kuo to have the exact right cards to survive, precisely where he wants to be. Naya Humans is a deck that wants to drive, and Christiansen has been doing that all weekend.
Kuo began with a mulligan to six, not at all what he wanted to do against this aggressive Naya deck. He would need all of his resources to stave off Christiansen's early rush, hopefully trading away creatures in the process. His second six were much better and he let Christiansen begin. The Naya deck began a bit slower than we'd seen from Christiansen so far, passing the first turn without a play. Kuo, meanwhile, began filling his graveyard and digging for the cards he needed, pitching a pair of Fiend Hunters to a Faithless Looting.
Christiansen's second turn was where the race began. He made a Burning-Tree Emissary and a Flinthoof Boar and passed the turn. He only had a Cavern of Souls and a Rootbound Crag, so his Boar remained a 2/2. Kuo built his mana on his turn, using Farseek to get closer and closer to Thragtusk mana. Christiansen sent his creatures in, dropping Kuo to 14. After combat, he made a Champion of the Parish and passed the turn.
Kuo hit four mana and passed the turn without a play, signaling a Restoration Angel. Christiansen made a second Cavern of Souls, using it to make a Lightning Mauler, which he paired and sent in alongside his other creatures. Kuo put the Angel in front of the Champion, dropping to 8. Christiansen held two copies of Searing Spear which represented close to lethal damage.
Kuo took his turn. Simply flashing back a Faithless Looting, Kuo passed it right back. At the end of his turn, Christiansen tossed one of his Spears at Kuo, dropping him to 5. He then untapped, made a Mayor of Avabruck, and attacked with his team. Kuo looked for a way out. He didn't know about the second Spear and set about trying to survive the attack. He had left himself Abrupt Decay mana available and intended to use it. His Angel lined up in front of the Lightning Mauler, and an Abrupt Decay took out the Emissary.
That left the Boar. The lone, non-Human in the deck. The little piggy that could. All he needed was the two damage the Boar was able to do to put Kuo in the Danger Zone. As soon as the Abrupt Decay came out, Christiansen flashed the Searing Spear, and his crowd of friends roared with approval.
"Seriously...Nico just won a Grand Prix," yelled a friend from the gallery.
Christiansen sat smiling, slowing down for the first time all weekend, letting his victory settle in.
Nico Christiansen 2 – Tzu-Ching Kuo 1
Top 5 Cards by Nate Price and Josh Bennett
5. Champion of the Parish How appropriate that the Grand Prix Champion's deck depends on the power of a Champion. We had seen the little 1/1 that could at Pro Tour Gatecrash, where Tom Martell gave a clinic on Champion openings with his winning deck, The Aristocrats. Aristocrats creator Sam Black went so far as to call the Champion one of the best creatures in the format, and you would be hard pressed to disagree given the results. And Nico Christiansen certainly didn't want to argue. Not only did he say that the Champion of the Parish was the most important card in his deck, and the card he most wanted to see in his opening hand, he agreed that it was one of the most powerful cards in the format, and that no deck could exploit that power like Naya Humans. Surrounded by a supporting cast of blitzkriegers, the Champion proved simply too big and too fast for most decks to handle. It was incredible to watch. Simply blink and you could miss the Champion growing from 1/1 to 5/5, all within the span of a turn or two. It's like a Weeping Angel, ready to pounce as soon as you look away. With two consecutive events under its belt, I doubt anyone will be closing their eyes once it hits the table anytime in the near future.
4. Burning-Tree Emissary There's an old Magic adage: A free spell is always better than it first appears. While it's true that sometimes you get a Commandeer, more often than not you're looking at a Bloodbraid Elf or a Gut Shot, a card that helps to define a format. It's telling that it shows up in both the finalists decks, despite their different plans of attack. In Nico Christiansen's Naya Humans, it's a turn-two engine that enables unbeatable aggro draws. In Tzu-Ching Kuo's Human Reanimator it serves a double function. On one side it's part of the instant-mill kill with Undercity Informant. However it also gives him powerful defensive openings against aggro, letting him get a blocker AND a Farseek on the second turn. Expect to see a lot of this creature in the coming weeks.
2. Farseek This is not the first time that Farseek has made the Top 5 Cards, and it will not be the last time. With the sheer power of the Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash dual lands enabling three- and four-color decks, Farseek is the method of choice to ensure the smoothness of draws. Considering the increase in speed that Jund and Naya Humans have contributed to the format, Farseek also plays an important role helping the slower midrange and control decks get to Thragtusk and Huntmaster of the Fells faster. In the end, the fact that Farseek exists is the reason that decks like Jund Midrange and Wolf Run Bant are even able to exist. The overwhelming presence of Jund Midrange here this weekend can be attributed directly to this precious little sorcery's power, recognized by some of the members of the Top 8 as the best sorcery in Standard.No organization, no matter how noble or important its goals, should be above scrutiny. Any organization that operates on a global scale, funding projects all over the world, is liable to make mistakes which have serious consequences.
When this happens, the best response is to take real steps to stop it from happening, and to acknowledge that something went wrong. It is not acceptable to close ranks, fudge the facts, and try and claim that your overall mission is too important for flaws to be publicly exposed.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is an enormous organization. In many ways it has come to symbolize conservation worldwide, its distinctive panda logo etched onto pamphlets, soft toys and fieldwork fleeces.
Despite WWF's iconic status, anyone who considers themselves an environmentalist should be troubled by their behavior in Cameroon, and support Survival International's complaint to the OECD.
From a legal, political, and moral perspective, WWF has made some serious errors of judgment, and needs to take real steps to address the situation as a matter of urgency. For this reason, Survival has lodged a complaint with the OECD, which publishes human rights guidelines for international enterprises, in the hope that this will lead to a change of policy.
This procedure is normally used as a corrective to gross abuses by multinational corporations - such as mining, logging and plantation companies. It seems strange to be using it against a conservation NGO, but we believe we are doing so with good reason. Allow me to explain...
A worthy cause, a dubious record
Cameroon's rainforest, home to many endangered species including forest elephants and western lowland gorillas, is threatened by loggers and miners keen to exploit its natural riches, and by networks of powerful people looking to line their pockets with profits from ivory and bushmeat.
WWF has been involved in creating a number of 'protected areas' for wildlife (a category that includes both national parks, and reserves for big game hunters to hunt for trophies) in the region.
These zones were created on the ancestral land of the Baka 'pygmies' and other neighboring rainforest tribes, without securing their agreement. A bare minimum of consultation was carried out, the project was not properly explained to the Baka, and before they knew it, they had lost |
ECC) including those granted to mines. That would come on top of the industry audit that led to the current mine suspensions.
But a mining industry group said Lopez “cannot unilaterally choose not to issue new permits” because she is required to process new applications under Philippine laws.
“We are still a government of laws, not of just one woman,” said lawyer Ronald Recidoro from the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines.
“It seems that the signal she’s sending to everybody (is) she’s out to slowly put this industry to sleep,” he said.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte warned miners in August to strictly follow tighter environmental rules or shut down, saying the country could survive without a mining industry.
NICKEL AT $15,000?
Manila’s mining crackdown sent nickel prices to a one-year high of $11,030 a tonne in August, though they have since retreated, trading at $10,465 on Friday.
But Goldman Sachs has said the potential for “larger and/or more permanent than expected Philippine mine suspensions” could drive nickel prices to $15,000 by year-end.
Lopez also confirmed the suspension of the ECC of a nickel mine run by private-owned Austral-Asia Link Mining Corp in the southern province of Davao Oriental.
Slideshow (3 Images)
An official at Asiaticus Management Corp, which runs Austral-Asia, declined to make immediate comment.
Lopez had told Reuters on Monday that the environmental permit would be canceled because the mine sits between a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a protected marine protected area.
“We’re now going to have an intense evaluation of all other ECCs. No more mining in any protected areas,” she said.That is all that would have been somewhat mitigated had I been given more in the way of direction on what to add or change upon delivery, but oh well, doesn't matter at this point.
I am interested in seeing what you have in mind for general classes and such, in hindsight I felt that some of the classes I added were a bit boring, my limited imagination quickly ran out of ideas when making them.
The military ponies and shared castes in general were a time consuming hell.
You should have seen how it looked early on when I began making one military caste per race of pony (because there were complications when overlapping pony main race stats and caste stats), I actually scrapped that idea and just gave all three races military castes same stats (military pegasi are identical to military unicorns and earth ponies if you didn't already know) so the list of castes and color descs you see there would actually have been 3 times longer.
Be careful and keep that in mind as you add and change castes.Planning Umrah with a Baby? Pick this Handy Bag to ease your Stress
Are You Planning for Umrah and you are Worried because you will be doing Umrah with your baby? The Concern is genuine. A day out with a small baby becomes a nightmare if you do not prepare well in advance.
Let me first tell you about my own experience. I did my Umrah (probably 4th or 5th) with a 41 days Old baby.Yes,She was hardly a month Old. Alhumdulillah! My Motherhood was New and the experience of Umrah with a baby was new too. There are Probably changing station inside Haram Toilets but I didn’t use them as the One I was shown was very dangerous.It was Just One hand space and there was a risk to the safety of the baby. I Remember,The Time of Diaper changing was Particularly a very stressful time for Me. And sometimes,When It is just you and your Husband doing Umrah,You need to ask Someone to hold your baby inside the ladies toilet. I always wished for some Magic stuff,Some Bag that has the potential of becoming a bassinet to your baby whenever you want it.Moreover you can place your baby in it safely without his/her chance to get stamped and it proves to be a lifesaver when you don’t get a place on the carpet and you have to sit on the cold floor. Needless to say that your baby will love the comfort.
I was unaware of this Product back then. But In my Last Umrah, A friend of Mine showed me this Product and asked me to Write about it. With the Intention that this Useful Baby Carrying Infant diaper Bag may ease the Worries of thousands of Mom who plan their Umrah with Kids,I am writing this Post for all sisters who drop their Plan of Umrah because of Small babies.
It is also Called Boxum 3 in 1 – Diaper Bag.Boxum’s easy to carry bag combines a traditional diaper bag with a portable bassinet and change table!
N.B :See Other Useful Hajj /Umrah Packing list
It is a travel bassinet that folds into the size of a regular diaper bag, giving you the freedom to carry your bassinet with ease while still retaining room for all your baby’s essentials. The waterproof wipe clean mattress and machine washable cloth top sheet making cleaning up leaks a breeze!
There are 5 zip compartments for storing diapers, creams, wipes and other baby necessities with 2 insulated bottle warmers included.It also has a sturdy construction with slim mattress base, so that baby can have a comfortable sleep.
It is Not Only meant for Umrah. You Can Use it anywhere,Anytime.
It is available in two Colours :Charcoal and Cream.Do You Like it?If you want one,Dec 15, 2013; Minneapolis, MN, USA; Minnesota Vikings fan Syd Davy cheers on his team as they play the Philadelphia Eagles at Mall of America Field at H.H.H. Metrodome. The Vikings win 48-30. Mandatory Credit: Bruce Kluckhohn-USA TODAY Sports
It has been a crazy couple days for those following the bids to host Super Bowl 52 in 2018. There was heavy competition coming from successful sites such as New Orleans, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis. The voting was done today and here are the results:
The members of the committee gathered and heard arguments from all sides of the issue. Each member of the committee got one vote. After several failed votes to achieve a Super Majority (24 of the 32 votes), an elimination vote was accomplished. Since Indianapolis received the fewest amount of votes among the contending sites, they were eliminated.
That left Minnesota and New Orleans as the potential home of Super Bowl 52.
After failing to reach a Super Majority vote again, a simple majority would win. It would take 17 of the 52 votes to win this election.
The final vote for to host the Super Bowl in 2018 came in around 2:43 pm central time and the decision was that Minnesota will play host to the biggest sporting event of the year.
Start saving your pennies for tickets to this event. While tickets will be expensive, I can’t wait to see what Superbowl 52 will look like in the new Vikings stadium. Don’t forget that the Super Bowl is much more than just a game. It will stimulate the Minesota economy and bring lots of money and interest to the Minneapolis area.
Congratulations to Minnesota: The future host of Super Bowl 52.About
http://scienstars.com
Scienstars is a space-based science fiction series, in the grand tradition of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, Farscape and others. But what sets Scienstars apart is that it also introduces ideas, practices, and principles from the new science education standards currently being evaluated and adopted across the US.
The pilot episode for this independent production was filmed during the last week of May, and is now in post-production. Your support will help us finish the pilot, and begin production of new episodes.
Galibria - what secrets does it hold?
ENTERTAINING
Scienstars follows two modern day teens, Gabe and Lily, as they secretly attend Scienstar Academy aboard the Galibria, a massive space station hidden on the far side of Earthʼs moon. The academy is part of the Scienstar Unity, a collection of alien species banded together to resist the Shadar, an ancient alien evil determined to wipe out all intelligence in the galaxy.
Cadets Liliana Malotte (Isabella Alberti) and Gabrael Brand (Andrew Wilson Williams)
Attending the academy with Gabe and Lily are Ferata of the Vetalans, and Grwys of the Canavar, two alien species closely resembling vampires and werewolves from Earth mythology. Overseeing the cadetsʼ education is Commandant Aeolen and Victoria Xen, an officer from a world that had reached the steam age before the Shadar destabilized their civilization and cast them into barbarism.
The story arc for the series will develop these characters and the universe they inhabit, and answer questions such as: why do the alien members of the Unity resemble mythological monsters? Does the Galibria, originally built by the legendary first sentients of the galaxy, hold the key to defeating the Shadar? Can the Unity hold together long enough to find out, or will its members fall back into the familiar horror of war? What will happen to Gabe and Lily - and Earth - when the Shadar come?
EDUCATIONAL
In addition to a compelling story, each Scienstars episode focuses on one or more of the core ideas, scientific practices, and crosscutting concepts from the Next Generation Science Standards*. The educational elements are woven seamlessly into the story. For example, in the pilot, the cadets use a gravity assist maneuver to escape a pursuing swarm of alien creatures. The gravity assist, or slingshot, is a great example of energy conversion and transfer, converting the gravitational potential energy of a planet into kinetic energy for a smaller object.
Escaping the Errg Swarm
Educational materials are being developed to supplement each episode, showing how the episode relates to the standards, and suggesting exercises, experiments and additional resources. The material will cover different grade levels, but will be concentrated on the middle school grades, the age range of our target audience, when interest in science is at its highest.
How do the Errg steal energy from the Earth?
* To learn more about the NGSS, visit http://www.nextgenscience.org/ or read the framework document at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165. Next Generation Science Standards and the associated logo are registered trademarks of Achieve, Inc. Neither Achieve nor the lead states and partners that developed the Next Generation Science Standards was involved in the production of, and does not endorse, this product.
INSPIRATIONAL
STEM. Anyone with a child in school likely knows this acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Careers in these fields are stable, lucrative, and growing fast. But of the one million high school freshmen who declare an interest in studying STEM subjects every year, six out of ten no longer feel that way at graduation.
Various education reforms have been proposed and implemented to address the STEM shortage. Experts are divided on their effectiveness, but it's probably safe to say that there is no "magic bullet", no single solution to the problem. True reform will likely incorporate a variety of methods.
Scienstars aims to be one of those methods. Our view is simple - students who are excited about a subject will learn it, so get them excited first. But how to help parents, teachers and mentors to do that? We can say from direct experience that science fiction is one very effective gateway to science, and many scientists agree.
So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination. - Michio Kaku
Science fiction [...] is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination. We may not yet be able to boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before, but at least we can do it in the mind.[…] There is a two-way trade between science fiction and science. Science fiction suggests ideas that scientists incorporate into their theories, but sometimes science turns up notions that are stranger than any science fiction - Stephen Hawking
Scienstars has the potential to be the gateway for the next generation of scientists. Our goal is to create stories as exciting as a blockbuster movie, a positive and inclusive view of scientists, and a call to action for fans to turn our science fiction into the next science fact. To quote a famous starship captain, make it so!
THE PILOT EPISODE
The pilot for Scienstars was filmed during the last week in May in a small town in central North Carolina. Our producing partners, Six Foot Kitten, erected an amazing green screen studio for our virtual sets in a former YMCA. And though the hours were long and there were many challenges, the entire cast and crew put their heart and soul into it. Because of their talent, and commitment to the vision of Scienstars, we made a Hollywood quality production at a fraction of the cost.
Cadets Ferata (Amaris Kirby) and Grwys (Christian Jimenez)
Commandant Aeolen (Tim Ross) piloting the shuttle
Lieutenant Xen (Lilly Nelson) witnesses an explosion near Jupiter
HOW THE DONATIONS WILL BE USED
Post-production for the pilot episode is partially funded. Donations from the fundraising campaign will be used to finish the process, including editing, ADR and pickups, CG modeling and animation, virtual set compositing and optical FX, score, etc.
Neptune Slingshot - CG Example
The completed pilot will be bundled with the educational materials and special features into a package for students, parents, educators, and mentors. The pilot will also be used to secure commitment and funding for a full series. However, if your donations exceed the goal, we can move directly into producing new episodes with the same creative control we applied to the pilot. The outlines are written, ready to go to script and pre-production. You can make it happen.The attorney general’s response did little to quell a political tempest in Washington, with some Republicans calling for her to recuse herself from the case — a step she said she was not going to take. Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, said the meeting had “opened up a Pandora’s box.” He cast doubt on whether it was entirely social, citing it as an example of how “the special interests are controlling your government.”
For Democrats, already anxious about the political impact of the email investigation, the incident revived fears that Mr. Clinton could become a rogue actor in a campaign that has so far operated more smoothly than Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid in 2008.
Mr. Clinton, who was on a seven-state fund-raising swing for his wife, strode across the tarmac at the airport in Phoenix to greet Ms. Lynch after her plane landed there on Monday night. The attorney general joked that she should have acted more swiftly to keep him from boarding. Asked by a journalist to name one thing she wished her predecessor, Eric H. Holder Jr., had told her about her job, she replied, “Where the lock on the plane door was.”
Still, Ms. Lynch said the episode was personally distressing because it stained the reputation of the Justice Department. “The fact that the meeting that I had is now casting a shadow over how people are going to view that work is something that I take seriously, and deeply and painfully,” she said.
Even Ms. Lynch’s explanation of how she planned to distance herself from the case — without recusing herself — required further clarification. “The case will be resolved by the team that’s been working on it from the beginning,” she said in Aspen. But a Justice Department spokeswoman, Melanie Newman, noted afterward that even if Ms. Lynch accepted the recommendation of her staff, she would be the one making the decision.Report cites ‘systemic failure’ to provide adequate medical care to detainees with health issues and warns Trump’s desire to expand capacity would make it worse
Raúl Ernesto Morales-Ramos, detained in California and ravaged by cancer, begged for treatment. He was given ibuprofen.
Tiombe Kimana Carlos, detained in New York with chronic schizophrenia, was held in solitary confinement. She made a noose from a sheet.
Manuel Cota-Domingo, detained in Arizona with untreated diabetes and pneumonia, began to have trouble breathing. Staff dithered over who should call 911.
All three died, victims – according to a report published on Monday – of dangerously inadequate medical care in immigrant detention facilities across the US.
Man's death hints at wretched medical care in private immigration prisons Read more
The joint study by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (Civic) details “systemic failure” which results in suffering and preventable deaths.
“The data reveals that people in immigration detention died needlessly under the Obama administration, even with its attempts at reform,” said Grace Meng, a senior HRW researcher. “The Trump administration has already announced its intent to roll back key reforms while detaining even more immigrants, which would likely mean more people will die needless and preventable deaths.”
The 104-page report, Systemic Indifference: Dangerous & Substandard Medical Care in Immigration Detention, details delays, mistakes and unaccountability in a network of facilities which detain about 40,000 people daily and 400,000 a year.
The Trump administration is seeking $1.2bn additional funding to expand detention capacity, raising alarm that inadequate medical care will worsen. More than two-thirds of detainees are held in facilities operated by private prison companies.
The report is based on independent medical experts’ analyses of records from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) own investigations into 18 deaths in detention from 2012 to 2015 and the medical records of 12 additional detainees, plus interviews with more than 90 other people, including relatives, attorneys and correctional health experts.
“The medical experts found numerous incidents of substandard and dangerous medical care, including failure to follow up on symptoms that required attention; medical personnel apparently practicing beyond the scope of their licenses and expertise; severely inadequate mental health care; the misuse of solitary confinement for people with mental health conditions; and sluggish emergency responses,” said the report.
The experts concluded that subpar care contributed to seven of the 18 deaths.
Among them was Morales Ramos, a Salvadorean held in Adelanto, California. He showed symptoms of cancer in 2013 but his appeals for treatment were largely ignored, according to the report.
In a grievance submitted in February 2015, he wrote: “To who receives this. I am letting you know that I am very sick and they don’t want to care for me. The nurse only gave me ibuprofen and that only alleviates me for a few hours. Let me know if you can help me.” He died two months later.
Kimana Carlos, originally from Antigua and Barbuda, was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager. Staff at the detention facility in York, New York, knew her condition but gave “woefully inadequate” mental health treatment, according to doctor cited in the report. She hanged herself in October 2013.
A restriction on which staff members can call 911 at the Eloy detention centre in Arizona contributed to an eight-hour delay in treatment for Cota-Domingo, a 34-year-old Guatemalan, who suffered breathing problems related to diabetes and pneumonia.
The report also alleged non-fatal delays and inadequacies in treatment for detainees with other conditions, including a torn ligament and vision problems.
Such a critique is not new. This is the third report HRW has released on medical care in immigrant detention since 2007. Last week, Penn State Law’s Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic and Project South published a study detailing complains and alleged abuses at two Georgia detention centres.
The Guardian last year reported on the case of Jose Jamarillo, who died after inadequate care at a facility in New Mexico. A facility in Pennsylvania allegedly left a five-year-old’s highly contagious disease untreated for weeks.
There is evidence that Ice knows about deficiencies in medical care but lacks procedures to take swift, appropriate action, said Christina Fialho, an attorney and the co-executive director of Civic.
At immigration detention center, every child has same Christmas wish: freedom Read more
“The sheer number and consistency of cases involving inadequate medical care point to a crisis that warrants immediate action. The medical experts’ analyses confirm what we have been hearing from detained immigrants for years. It’s past time to put an end to the substandard medical practices that harm many people in immigration detention each year,” she said.
Ice will review the HRW/Civic report to determine what changes, if any, should be made based on its recommendations, a spokesperson, Jennifer Elzea, said in a statement to the Guardian.
The agency was committed to ensuring the welfare of all those in its custody, she said.
“Staffing for detainees includes registered nurses and licensed practical nurses, licensed mental health providers, mid-level providers that include a physician’s assistant and nurse practitioner, a physician, dental care, and access to 24-hour emergency care.”
A detainee with a medical condition requiring follow-up treatment will be scheduled for as many appointments as needed, she added. “At no time during detention will a detainee be denied emergent care.” The agency said it spent more than $180m annually on detainee medical care.India, Hilbeck said, is a signatory to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international agreement on biosafety as a supplement to the Convention on Biological Diversity effective since 2003, which seeks to protect biological diversity from the potential risks posed by GM organisms resulting from modern biotechnology.
" Despite regulations, the implementation of the protocol remains weak", Hilbeck said, citing how insecticides on Bt cotton have almost doubled over the last few years. Data she released during her address showed, while insecticides on Bt cotton had been going down after it was introduced in early 2000s, in 2006 it was 4,623 metric tonnes, and reached 7,234 metric tonnes in 2013.
Pointing out that genetical engineering (GE) actually helps profiteer insecticide and fertilizer companies, she said, "Since the first commercial release of GE crops over 20 years ago, four commodity crops containing two types of GE traits produced in the same six countries -- USA, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India, China -- are making up over 90% of all commercial GE plants grown worldwide to this day".
She continued, "Bt cotton in India is the most prominent example with wildly differing claims of success and failure for small holders", even though "deeper analyses show that it benefited'small holders' at the upper end of the scale, meaning those with larger land holdings, irrigation systems and better education but failed the poorest of the poor and most vulnerable small scale producers on the lower end of the scale with very small holdings and rainfed cotton systems." Happy that India is refusing to bow down before Monsanto's plea for lower royalties the it should pay tongue government over its seeds, Hilbeck, who addressed media on the sidelines of her address, said, "This is largely because India is a democracy where bottom-up approach has been successful", insisting, however, the knowledge about organic farming without the use of chemical fertilizers remains low among the country's farmers.India, Hilbeck said, is a signatory to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international agreement on biosafety as a supplement to the Convention on Biological Diversity effective since 2003, which seeks to protect biological diversity from the potential risks posed by GM organisms resulting from modern biotechnology." Despite regulations, the implementation of the protocol remains weak", Hilbeck said, citing how insecticides on Bt cotton have almost doubled over the last few years. Data she released during her address showed, while insecticides on Bt cotton had been going down after it was introduced in early 2000s, in 2006 it was 4,623 metric tonnes, and reached 7,234 metric tonnes in 2013.Pointing out that genetical engineering (GE) actually helps profiteer insecticide and fertilizer companies, she said, "Since the first commercial release of GE crops over 20 years ago, four commodity crops containing two types of GE traits produced in the same six countries -- USA, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India, China -- are making up over 90% of all commercial GE plants grown worldwide to this day".She continued, "Bt cotton in India is the most prominent example with wildly differing claims of success and failure for small holders", even though "deeper analyses show that it benefited'small holders' at the upper end of the scale, meaning those with larger land holdings, irrigation systems and better education but failed the poorest of the poor and most vulnerable small scale producers on the lower end of the scale with very small holdings and rainfed cotton systems."
A top world expert has termed the world's biggest multinational seeds company, Monsanto, which is now being bought over by Bayer, and is involved in a dispute with the Government of India on how much of royalty it should take back to home on selling it's genetically modified (GM) seeds, as nothing more than a "marketing success." In Ahmedabad on Tuesday, where she addressed government officials, experts and activists, Angelika Hilbeck of the Institute of Integrative Biology, Agroecology & Environmental Biosafety Group, Zurich, Switzerland, said, the controversial US MNC functions just on one model, which is easy to predict -- share market.Calling it "essentially a licensing company", Hilbeck said, after working with GM seeds for several, and facing severe criticism over its failure of huge claims of their success world over, "it is withdrawing and is being bought over by Bayer,another MNC, as it isn't sure any more with its consumers. Hence it wants to get away from the business.""The yields from Monsanto seeds are tabling off. It is running against the wall. Things are running off", Hilbeck said, amidst reports that it's deal with Bayer is facing a major hurdle in the US: More than 1 million petition signatures were recently delivered by farming, consumer and environmental groups to the US Department of Justice calling on the department to block the proposed merger of Bayer and Monsanto.The signatures, said a report, were delivered as two new studies "revealed irreversible impacts from the merger on consumers and farmers", adding, the studies released by Friends of the Earth, SumOfUs and the Open Markets Institute released analysis exploring the implications of how Bayer-Monsanto merger would impact competition and farmer choice, even as "magnify their market power in the seed/agrochemical sector and squeeze farmers and consumers."A Michigan Republican's bill labels the Supreme Court's marriage decision "illegitimate" and "unconstitutional."
State Rep. Tom Hooker has introduced a resolution attacking same-sex marriage and the U.S. Supreme Court.
The bill, HCR0017, is already sponsored by 10 lawmakers, and a similar bill is being put forth in the state senate. The bill's purpose is to "express the sense of the Michigan Legislature that the United States Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges is illegitimate," and "urge the Governor and all executive officers in the state of Michigan to uphold their oaths of office and not recognize or enforce the decision."
It claims the Supreme Court effectively amended the U.S. Constitution and added "a new liberty: the fundamental right of 'personal identity.'"
It also chastises the Supreme Court, calling the Obergefell decision "an act of will, not judgment," and "a naked judicial claim to legislative...power" which "usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage."
And it warns that the decision in Obergefell was an "inversion of the original meaning of liberty," which "will likely cause collateral damage to other aspects of our constitutional order that protect liberty."
MLive reports that Hooker "read his pending resolution out loud Wednesday during a 'rally to protect religious people and stop persecution of religious people' outside the Michigan Capitol.
"The Supreme Court is not a Legislature," Hooker said. "Courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgement of legislative bodies or elected and passed laws." The rally, organized by a Christian non-profit called Salt & Light Global, drew a couple hundred people to Lansing.
The resolution in itself has no specific power and would not change marriage laws, but it sends a chilling and damaging message to every LGBT person, every family headed by a same-sex couple - including their children.
This is not Rep. Hooker's first attack on social issues. In September, the GOP State Representative submitted a bill that would ban Planned Parenthood from teaching sex-ed classes in public schools because, he claimed, it gives Planned Parenthood "a perverse incentive" to teach sex-education which, he believes, will lead to more sex and thus more abortions.
Image via Michigan House
Hat tip: Right Wing Watch
See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected]Developed by Roll7. Published by Roll7. Released January 21 2013. Available on PlayStation Vita.
There's nothing inherently wrong with OlliOlli, but I do have to question the wisdom of putting a game so prone to controller-tossing frustration on a system that is, itself, a particularly fragile $250 controller. While playing this sidescrolling skateboard game, I was tempted to crack the Vita over my knee on multiple occasions - and not always by OlliOlli's design.
On the surface, this is a fairly simple little title. You are a skateboard guy who has to do skateboard things, all for the pleasure of a miniscule crowd at the end of the level who couldn't possibly have seen most of what you've been doing from their ground-level, obscured vantage point. As well making it to the end of each stage, one must perform tricks, grind, and complete challenges to earn top scores and be the sickest of all bodacious dudes, bro!
OlliOlli uses a streamlined control scheme that is deceptively confusing in its minimalism. For the most part, you just need to use the X button and the left analog stick, with the button used to gain speed and land perfectly after a jump, and the stick performing jumps and tricks. By holding down the stick, moving it around, and letting go, Skateboard Guy can perform all manner of exciting moves, such as the Ollie, the Front Flip, the Major Cool Freak Out, the Gumble's All Original Sugar Treats, and the Skherme.
Although mechanically rudimentary, it's surprisingly easy to get confused when you have two buttons performing multiple tasks. The early stages can be quite frustrating due to one's brain and fingers attempting to deal with alternate stick flicks and button bashes at high speed, especially when grinding comes into effect, making the player hold down the stick for the length of a rail or wall, before flicking off, then potentially grinding some more or landing on the ground with a button tap.
The irritation is compounded by the fact that some levels seem designed with the clairvoyant in mind. Stages scroll by at a fairly swift pace, and ambushes lie in wait for those who cannot predict the future. Trial-and-error is the regular order of the day, and you can't just jump right back into the game. Each restart has you looking at the challenge list before watching Skateboard Guy perform a dull run-up.
It doesn't help that controls don't feel as responsive as they could be, either. In later stages, where momentum-killing obstacles appear in great frequency, failure can just as soon be down to the game not registering one's input in time as any failing of the player.
There's a lot standing in OlliOlli's way, but it's actually not a bad game. When it works, it can be an immensely gratifying little diversion, striking a great balance between speed and fluidity, while making the player feel pretty damn cool for navigating a series of rails and hindrances with skillful elegance. Each level is short enough to support a drop-in, drop-out portable experience, but a winning streak can prove addictive, spurring the player to stay glued to the screen. The addition of shoulder buttons to create more advanced tricks opens up an impressive amount of moves for such a basic input scheme, too.
With its nondescript music and fairly plain visual style (think Canabalt without the sleek color scheme and originality), OlliOlli is presented without much in the way of charm. It is at least very clear about what you can grind on, what you can land on, and what's an obstacle, so we can at least say the visuals are functional. That's about all we can say, too. At its very best, the game resembles a fairly bog standard mobile phone game.
In fact, that goes for more than the visuals. Though its controls are more nuanced than something you'd find on Android or iOS, the overall feel and quality is that of a $0.99 app. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but one tends to expect a little more than that on the Vita.
Bottom Line: A fun little game at times, a frustrating little nightmare at others, OlliOlli is a relatively decent, if fairly forgettable, mobile game.
Recommendation: Unless you're starving for a PS Vita game, you can wait until this becomes a freebie or a greatly reduced deal. Worth playing, but not necessarily worth paying much for.LaGuardia Airport is offering free bus service over the Presidents Day weekend, to alleviate road congestion.Last week, passengers were jumping out of cabs and sprinting across highways to make their flights, during the backup after the snowstorm.With nearly 300,000 passengers expected to use LaGuardia this Saturday, Sunday and Monday alone, the Port Authority says there will be six free days of the MTA's Q70 Select Bus Service, which provides non-stop service linking the main terminals of the airport (Terminals B, C and D) with New York City subway and Long Island Railroad transit hubs."We're going to need to reconfigure fundamentally how we do business there, because it's not going to all fit on high volume days," Governor Andrew Cuomo said.The LaGuardia Link Q-70 buses will also be free beginning Thursday at midnight, through next Tuesday night.The non-stop service links LaGuardia's main terminals with transit hubs in Jackson Heights and Woodside.The Port Authority is also encouraging travelers who arrive at the airport by car to park in the Long-Term Lot (P10) for $18 a day.Drivers should enter the lot via the LaGuardia Airport entrance at the 82nd Street Bridge; and not use the 94th Street Bridge.Daily and hourly lots adjacent to the terminals are expected to fill quickly, have limited availability and are $59 a day. Also, drivers seeking to meet arriving passengers can park for free for up to three hours in the Cell Phone Lot (Lot P5) near Terminal D.Alexander Higgins A BBC documentary on Al Qaeda admits the Bin Laden’s Organization never existed. Instead the US invented it out of thin air to fabricate criminal charges.
Al Qaeda = the base + i arabic word = the data base
http://alciaduh.blogspot.ca/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/unraveling-the-myth-of-al-qaida/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/the-al-qaeda-myth/244857/
See also:
CIA Bin Laden Chief: ‘US Fighting An Enemy That Doesn’t Exist’ Former CIA Bin Laden Chief exposes the lies behind government claims that terrorists are attacking the US because they hate our freedom. Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer, who was once in charge of hunting Bin Laden, debunks US government propaganda that “Al Qaeda” and “Islamist” terrorists are waging a ware against America because they hate our freedom and they hate our way of life. He explains how the US is fighting an enemy that does not exist. Read Entire Article
In reality, what the western media refers to as Al Qaeda is nothing more than a Salafi Jihadists.
Salafists Islam is the version of Islam pre-dominate in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the government of Saudi Arabia actually recruits Islamic extremists from their schools to wage Salafi Jihad against other Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
The United States doesn’t want you to know this because Saudi Arabia’s jihadists are used as a proxy mercenary army to conduct covert operations for the US Government.
For example, they were used to overthrow the Libya government and are actively working to overthrow the Syria government.
For a complete history of Saudi Arabia’s Salafi Jihadists see: Saudi Arabia Paying UK Trained Terrorists Up To $3,000/Mo To Jihad Against SyriaToday, 104 Democratic Members of Congress released a letter to President Barack Obama thanking him for his decision to instruct the Department of Homeland Security to offer “Deferred Action” deportation relief to young immigrants raised in the U.S. who would qualify for the DREAM Act.
The Members of Congress wrote:
We recognize that there are those who will want to take the power of discretion away from you and the Executive branch. Like you, we agree that you are on solid moral, legal, and political ground and we will do everything within our power to defend your actions and the authority that you, like past Presidents, can exercise to set enforcement priorities and better protect our neighborhoods and our nation.
The letter was largely to show support for the new policy ahead of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s testimony in front of a largely hostile House Homeland Security Oversight Committee.
Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee continue to believe that the President usurped Congressional authority with his announcement to not deport Dreamers and threatened to take DHS Sec. Napolitano to court over her June 15 memo.
Rep. Steve King was especially hostile:
Napolitano countered criticism regarding the deferred action program by noting that this was an evolution of a process that began in 2010 and reiterated that the announcement comes on the heels of various memos: the Meissner memo from Legacy INS, Julie Myers Memo, and the Morton Memo.
“I will not rescind it. It is right within the law.”
With regards to deferred action, Napolitano said that applications will be available on August 15 and added in her testimony that:
Individuals must also complete a biographic and biometric background check and not currently in removal proceedings or subject to a final order, must be 15 years or older to be considered for deferred action. Only those individuals who can prove through verifiable documentation that they meet these criteria will be considered for deferred action under this initiative. Individuals will not be eligible if they are not currently in the United States or cannot prove that they have continuously resided within the United States for at least five years.
Napolitano reiterated that the program will not cost American taxpayers because there will be a fee for the process (in addition to the $380 for work authorization and $80 for biometrics). It is important to note that DHS has not yet decided the cost of the application.
When Rep. Quayle (R-Arizona) pressed her on the issue, Sec. Napolitano stated there may be a hardship fee-waiver process in |
it may usually be), then there would seem to be no insuperable problem treating the matter of our bodies as either alive or conscious. Under the panpsychic or hylemorphic supposition, we can understand the relation of life and mind to matter in a way that does no violence to our most fundamental intuitions about things – that, indeed, harmonizes rather satisfactorily with our chthonic animism: the deep and universal hunch that the world and its denizens are all somehow, and essentially, alive and aware.
We can see that if you arrange lively seeds in just the right way, you’ll get animal awareness. But there’s still a problem: where does that arrangement come from? The particles of which a brain is constituted do not carry in themselves the specifications for that brain. They carry, they embody, only their own formal specifications. Just as a sodium atom can’t be an atom in a molecule of salt without the whole molecule of salt, so a neuron of a brain can’t be of that brain without the brain. The whole can specify its parts, but not vice versa. An arrangement of lively seeds can’t be actual in any one, or therefore any many, of the seeds themselves. The arrangement is different from its seedy constituents.
Complexity theorists cope with this difficulty by recourse to the concept of the strange attractor: a basin in configuration space that, because its surface specifies configurations that are mathematically more stable than those of the surrounding landscape, has the effect of accelerating actualities toward or about its central well. Aristotle’s term for it is entelechy, that nisus in all things toward their telos, their final end, their goal or resting place.
So far so good. The strange attractor or entelechy do not however solve the problem of the origin of form, but rather only name and limn it. To point out that strange attractors are built into the math of this world, so that it everywhere manifests an entelechy toward their (approximate) actualization, is to specify the explanandum, rather than its explanans.
Whence the math of this world? That math cannot explain itself, cannot specify itself. This is a fact of logic – and of metaphysics, too, for math cannot choose, cannot act or effect. Acts can and do all have mathematical character, but math cannot itself characterize acts. Math is not an agent.
The math of this world, then – its form and character – cannot originate from any mundane source, and cannot originate its own concrete instantiations. Thus the forms of our world cannot emerge from it. They must rather immerge to it, and from elsewhere.The idea, according to organizer Ingrid Burrington, isn’t necessarily to stiff the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). “I’m more excited about helping people who can’t afford to ride the train,” says Burrington, who describes herself as “just a person.” Any lost fares from the Swipe Back initiative, she says, will have little effect on a system that is already suffering huge financial problems – woes, she emphasizes, that are caused in large part by debt service and a lack of funding from the state government. “The MTA’s coffers are being undermined from all directions,” says Burrington. “Riders are the least equipped to fill them.” Farebox revenues currently account for 41 percent of the MTA’s yearly take.
So instead of boycotting, we find ways to express our protest, like this: If you use your unlimited card to swipe someone else in, then you’re effectively helping them boycott the fare hike, sort of like boycotting it forward.
We would boycott the subway, if we could. But since it’s an essential public service, we need it, to get to our jobs and live our lives.
A small group of activists in the city is planning to fight back against what they see as an unfair fare hike by using their unlimited cards to swipe in fellow New Yorkers for no charge. (You can reuse an unlimited card once 18 minutes has passed since your most recent swipe.) They’re calling their effort “ Swipe Back! ” It’s perfectly legal to do this, as the group points out on its website, as long as you don’t collect any money from the person you’re swiping in. From the group’s website:
The price of a ride on public transportation in New York City went up again over the weekend, from $2.25 to $2.50 – a full dollar higher than it was just 10 years ago. A weekly unlimited MetroCard now costs $30, up a dollar from the most recent rate, while a monthly unlimited pass will set you back $112 – an $8 increase. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) projects to increase revenue by $391 million this year with the move.
The MTA, unsurprisingly, is not pleased with the Swipe Back idea. A spokesman for the authority told Gothamist this:
The MTA is raising fares and tolls because our costs for employee healthcare, pension contributions, mandatory paratransit service, energy and other costs out of our control are rising far faster than the rate of inflation. We have cut our costs by more than $700 million, we have built a budget with net-zero wage increases for unionized employees, and we are implementing moderately higher fares and tolls. If anyone thinks the best way to balance the MTA's budget is to reduce the amount of money we collect from customers, then their math is as bad as their logic.
Burrington says she and her fellow organizers don't want to "hurt the MTA," but they do want to change what they see as an unresponsive system at the mercy of state legislators in Albany. The Swipe Back action, she says, is designed to educate the system’s users about the complicated financial and political issues behind rising fares, especially the arcane financial deals known as interest rate swaps, which have worked out to the agency’s distinct disadvantage over the past few years. The group is handing out buttons to people who want to get involved, and encouraging them to talk about what they’re doing when they give another straphanger a free ride.
Most people, Burrington says, don’t understand why the fares keep going up, just accepting it as one of the expenses of city life. “We’re trying to generate conversations about how transit is funded,” she says. “One of the reasons I think it’s hard to get people interested in transportation is that it’s not just one thing. It’s complicated. People are not necessarily seeing the big picture of what’s happening.”
This isn’t the first time the free swipes have been used to raise awareness among the harried riders of the city’s transit system, which carries seven million passengers every day. A group called the People’s Transportation Program offered free rides during a previous round of fare hikes in 2009, with very few people taking notice (except, of course, the lucky ones who benefited directly).
But Burrington says she and her fellow organizers aren’t daunted. “This is a very small part of a long-term endeavor,” she says. Most of all, she wants to see some of the city’s elected officials take a stand on the issue, especially during what is likely to be a blistering mayoral race. “I would like to see New York City politicians fight for this issue,” she says. “They need to fight for transit, fight for riders.”
Top image: People use Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) cards to enter the New York Subway system at the Times Square stop. (Andrew Burton/Reuters)Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told supporters in Toledo, Ohio that his campaign is about breaking up so-called "special interest" groups who he says influence politics in Washington, D.C. (Reuters)
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told supporters in Toledo, Ohio that his campaign is about breaking up so-called "special interest" groups who he says influence politics in Washington, D.C. (Reuters)
A group of 75 retired career Foreign Service officers, including ambassadors and senior State Department officials under Republican and Democratic presidents over nearly a half-century, has signed an open letter calling Donald Trump “entirely unqualified to serve as President and Commander-in-Chief.”
The diplomats said “none of us” will vote for Trump. While they said not all of them agreed with every decision made by Hillary Clinton, they said they all supported her candidacy.
“Because the stakes in this election are so high,” the letter said, “this is the first time many of us have publicly endorsed a candidate for President.”
[Read the diplomats’ letter on why they will not vote for Donald Trump]
The letter is the latest in an unprecedented number of joint public statements signed by retired high-level government officials and military officers this election cycle. Most have focused on national security, and most have been against Trump.
The most prominent exception was a letter early this month signed by 88 retired generals and other military officials who endorsed Trump as a “long overdue course correction in our national security posture.”
Last spring, more than 100 Republican national security experts signed a petition, even before Trump won the GOP nomination, saying they would never work for a Trump administration. Last month, 50 more Republicans, including former top aides and Cabinet members for the George W. Bush administration, signed a letter saying Trump would be “the most reckless president in American history” and that none of them would vote for him.
Most of the diplomats who signed the new letter have never been publicly associated with a political party. In their letter, they wrote that they “have proudly represented every President since Richard Nixon as ambassadors or senior State Department officials in Senate-confirmed positions. We have served Republican and Democratic Presidents with pride and enthusiasm.”
They had decided to speak out, the signers said, because “very simply, this election is different from any election we can recall.” Trump, they said, “is ignorant of the complex nature of the challenges facing our country, from Russia to China to ISIS to nuclear proliferation to refugees to drugs, but he has expressed no interest in being educated.”
The Trump campaign responded on Thursday that the country needs “an America First foreign policy.”
“How terribly weak and ineffective for a bunch of career overseas bureaucrats to send a letter or cable saying they want to keep things exactly as they are now and that they’re rallying around fellow insider Hillary Clinton,” the statement said. “The world has become a more dangerous place on their watch and they need to step up and own it.”
[Putin wants revenge and respect, and hacking the U.S. is his way of getting it]
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Although the idea for the letter was initiated by Nelson Cunningham, a former adviser to Democratic administrations, and James Keith, a former ambassador to Malaysia — both of whom now work for the international consulting firm McLarty Associates — many signers said they first saw it as it was widely distributed from friend to friend among the retired foreign policy community.
In interviews, several diplomats expressed broadly divergent reasons for signing. “As a normal issue,” former ambassador Ryan Crocker said, “generals or their civilian equivalent shouldn’t be making endorsements. I served six times as ambassador — three Republicans, three times for Democratic administrations — and I’m proud of that.”
“At the same time, looking at this campaign as I do through a national security optic, I am concerned enough to break my established position as nonpartisan,” said Crocker, whose ambassadorial posts included Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. “I know Hillary Clinton a bit from my time in Afghanistan. I thought she was a terrific boss. She’s smart, focused, she knows how to make decisions.” The next president, he said, “is going to be dealing with a world of hurt, quite literally.”
“I don’t know Donald Trump,” Crocker said. “I don’t know what he’d do. But based on what he’s said, I know I don’t want to find out. This is scary.”
John Maisto, former ambassador to the Organization of American States, Venezuela and Nicaragua, who also served on Bush’s National Security Council staff, said the letter was “the first time I’ve ever done anything like that. I’m a registered independent.” His reasons, Maisto said, “are pretty straightforward — what the letter says.”
“The Republican candidate, as so many of my Republican friends have said, does not have the qualifications to do the job, across the board. In any way. And the Democratic candidate does have the qualifications.... She’s not perfect, but nobody is,” Maisto said.
[Trump met his favorite Middle East strongman. What happened next will not surprise you.]
Some said they signed for specific policy reasons. Edward Marks, the Ronald Reagan administration’s ambassador to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, said, “I am very upset by the fact that Trump as a candidate has formally said he will use torture [and]... collective punishment as elements of U.S. policy. Those two pull him outside the normal U.S. political boundaries.”
Dan Kurtzer, former ambassador to Egypt and to Israel, said he objected to Republican support for a measure allowing U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments, which President Obama has said he would veto. He said he signed “not for the politics part, but literally for the protection that it [the measure] would strip away” from U.S. diplomats working overseas.”
Others have already publicly indicated a preference for Clinton, including Laura Kennedy, Bush’s ambassador to Turkmenistan, who has volunteered for the Clinton campaign. Nicolas Burns, undersecretary of state for Bush and a former ambassador to Greece, is rumored to be on a short list for Clinton’s secretary of state.
The letter’s signees also include Thomas Pickering, a veteran ambassador and senior diplomat who began his government work under President Harry Truman, and Marc Grossman, former ambassador to Turkey, who served as assistant secretary and undersecretary of state under Bush.
In statements about foreign countries, the diplomats wrote, “Mr. Trump has expressed the most ignorant stereotypes of those countries; has inflamed their people; and has insulted our allies and comforted our enemies.” And “shockingly, he has even offered praise and admiration for Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia whose international activities and reported intrusions into our democratic political process have been among the most damaging actions taken by any foreign leader since World War II.”
By contrast, they said, “Hillary Clinton’s handling of foreign affairs has consistently sought to advance fundamental U.S. interests with a deep grounding in the work of the many tens of thousands of career officers on whom our national security depends.”
Read more:
Former GOP national security officials: Trump would be ‘most reckless’ American president in history
He was one of the most respected intel officers of his generation. Now he’s leading ‘Lock her up’ chants.
One of Trump’s foreign policy advisers is a 2009 college grad who lists Model UN as a credential
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BBC radio presenter Nicky Campbell was ‘swung at’ by a fellow Metrolink passenger - for asking him to turn his music down.
The Five Live regular disclosed his tram ordeal on Twitter on Thursday afternoon, adding that he had received no support from fellow travellers.
He tweeted: “Man on Manchester tram had headphones so loud all could hear them. Politely asked him 2turn em down and he took a swing @me. Crap music too.”
And when asked by a follower if he’d called the police, he added: “I threatened to call and it turned into a stream of c words etc. Much shouting.”
He later described the culprit as a ‘young belligerent sweary lad’ and added: “Not pleasant. Still a bit shook.”
He was also asked if other passengers had supported him, to which he replied: “Silence.”
His Tweets garnered messages of support on social media.
@AndySoccer76 said: “Disgraceful. Manchester is usually a nice place too. Hope u reported and he doesn’t get away with such shameful behaviour.”
And @RABD103 added: “Should report him, will be on camera I’d think.”
Meanwhile, @MichaelDebenham took a more humorous stance, asking: “Was the swing for asking him to turn the headphones down, or the past 30 years of broadcasting?”
To which Nicky replied “both”.
A Metrolink spokeswoman recommended that Nicky reported the incident to the police.
She added: “Tackling anti-social behaviour on the tram network is a priority for us and we would ask anyone who witnesses an incident to report it directly to the driver through the call buttons on the tram, contact Metrolink staff through the call buttons on the platforms or report the incident to the police.
“We have CCTV on all tram stops that can be used in support of any required investigation.”Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (better known as MMORPG) is a combination of standard role-playing video game and MMO game. The main feature of good MMORPG is an interaction between a large number of players within a vast virtual world. As in every RPG, the players must create an avatar (from fantasy world or science-fiction world) and take control over that avatar's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single player RPGs (or even small multiplayer online RPGs) by two things. First one is the number of players able to interact within one game. The second one is the game's persistent world, which continues to exist and change even when players are offline and not playing Although modern MMORPGs are sometimes different from their predecessors, they still share the characteristics. These include character customization, level progression, social interaction within the game, persistent world, and sometimes even development of in-game culture. Top MMORPGs of all time are World of Warcraft, Star Wars The Old Republic, and Guild Wars. If you’re looking for the very best MMORPG games, Games Republic is definitely the place for you. Only top titles and best prices in the business! A real heaven for every PC gamer.
HideSCANDALOUS: IRS WILL NOT RETURN 60,000,000 Medical Records It Stole From California Company
They stole 60,000,000 medical records – And won’t give them back.
Last week news broke that the IRS was facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges. In a case involving solely a tax matter involving a former employee of the company, these agents stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans, including at least 1,000,000 Californians. The lawsuit by John Doe Company against 15 John Doe IRS agents is seeking punitive damages for constitutional violations, as well as $25,000 “per violation per individual” in compensatory damages.
But the story does not end there.
The IRS to this day is refusing to return the records including intimate medical records to the company.
Courthouse News reported:
Even though defendants knew that the records they were seizing were not included within the scope of the search warrant, the defendants nonetheless searched and seized the records without making any attempt to segregate the files from those that could possibly be related to the search warrant. In fact, no effort was made at all to even try maintaining the illusion of legitimacy and legality. After being put on notice of the illicit seizure, the IRS agents refused to return the records, continued to keep the records for the prying eyes of IRS peeping toms, and keep the records to this very day. The records may concern the intimate medical records of every state judge in California, every state court employee in California, leading and politically controversial members of the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild, and prominent citizens in the world of entertainment, business and government, from all walks of life… …”Adding insult to injury, after unlawfully seizing the records and searching their intimate parts, defendants decided to use John Doe Company’s media system to watch basketball, ordering pizza and Coca-Cola, to take in part of the NCAA tournament, illustrating their complete disregard of the court’s order and the Plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights.
Hat Tip Mara and Deb
Just wait til Obamacare.Combating parasitic DNA by methylation DNA methylation plays an important role in repressing the expression of “parasitic” DNAs, such as transposable elements, which have invaded our genomes. Mammals have three DNA methyltransferase enzymes. Barau et al. discovered a fourth DNA methyltransferase enzyme in mice. The enzyme DNMT3C is a duplication of DNMT3B and is found in male germ cells. There it targets evolutionarily young transposons, of which there is a heavy burden in the mouse genome. DNMT3C methylates and silences the young transposons, preserving male fertility. Science, this issue p. 909
Abstract DNA methylation is prevalent in mammalian genomes and plays a central role in the epigenetic control of development. The mammalian DNA methylation machinery is thought to be composed of three DNA methyltransferase enzymes (DNMT1, DNMT3A, and DNMT3B) and one cofactor (DNMT3L). Here, we describe the discovery of Dnmt3C, a de novo DNA methyltransferase gene that evolved via a duplication of Dnmt3B in rodent genomes and was previously annotated as a pseudogene. We show that DNMT3C is the enzyme responsible for methylating the promoters of evolutionarily young retrotransposons in the male germ line and that this specialized activity is required for mouse fertility. DNMT3C reveals the plasticity of the mammalian DNA methylation system and expands the scope of the mechanisms involved in the epigenetic control of retrotransposons.
Genome defense via transcriptional silencing of transposable elements has been proposed to be a driving force for the evolution of DNA methylation (1). Retrotransposons occupy half of mammalian genomic space, and their control is of paramount importance in the germ line: Their activity can damage the hereditary material with an impact on fertility and the fitness of subsequent generations (2). In mammals, after germline epigenetic reprogramming, small RNA-directed DNA methylation establishes life-long epigenetic silencing of retrotransposons during the perinatal period of spermatogenesis (3). Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are the cleavage products of retrotransposon transcripts and guide DNA methylation to the promoters of these elements through homology recognition (4, 5). Mammals have specifically evolved a catalytically inactive DNA methyltransferase (DNMT) cofactor, DNMT3L, which acts downstream of the piRNA pathway (6, 7). The inactivation of DNMT3L or PIWI-pathway proteins invariably results in hypomethylation and reactivation of retrotransposons, meiotic failure, azoospermia, and male sterility marked by small testis size (hypogonadism) (8).
To gain insights into the biology of retrotransposon silencing in the germ line, we screened a collection of hypogonadal male mice generated through N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU) mutagenesis for ectopic retrotransposon activity (fig. S1, A and B). Five independent positive lines were obtained, but all showed linkage to the same genomic interval on chromosome 2 (fig. S1C), suggesting that they shared a spontaneous, ENU-independent mutation. Whole-genome sequencing revealed a de novo insertion of an IAPEz element, a subclass of inracisternal A-particle (IAP) retrotransposon, in the last intron of the Gm14490 gene (Fig. 1A and fig. S1, D to F). Gm14490 maps 9 kilobases (kb) downstream of the Dnmt3B gene and was annotated as a nonfunctional tandem duplication of Dnmt3B, based on lack of transcription and recognizable open reading frames (ORFs) (9).
Fig. 1 Gm14490 encodes a male germ cell–specific de novo DNA methyltransferase, DNMT3C. (A) Structure of Gm14490 (Ensembl 2011) and position of the IAPEz insertion (antisense orientation). RACE and RNA-seq analysis of E16.5 and P10 testis identifies a long isoform with coding potential (ATG, green triangle). (B) Gm14490 is detected in testis by reverse transcription–quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR), but not in germ cell–depleted testis from Dnmt3LKO/KO animals. Tissues from 10-week-old mice, unless otherwise specified. (C) RT-qPCR of the two Gm14490 isoforms during testis development. Predominant germ cell populations are represented. Primordial germ cells (PGC), spermatogonial stem cells (SSC), and spermatogonia (Spg). (D) DNMT3C shows characteristics of DNMT3 proteins—conserved methyltransferase (MTase) motifs and an ADD domain, but no PWWP domain. (E) RNA-seq supporting wild-type and mutant Dnmt3C IAP splicing events in E16.5 testis. (F) LUminometric methylation assay (LUMA) of global CpG methylation in Dnmt-tKO ESCs that transiently express Dnmt3C- and Dnmt3B-3XFLAG alleles. Data are mean ± SD from three technical replicates in (B) and (C) and from three biological replicates in (F). nd, not detectable.
We found that Gm14490 was exclusively expressed in male germ cells (Fig. 1B and fig. S2A). Using RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) and rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE), we annotated two transcript isoforms, whose expression was tightly regulated during spermatogenesis (Fig. 1, A and C). The short, noncoding isoform was expressed in postnatal testes. However, the long isoform (2.8 kb) possessed a 709-codon ORF, and its expression sharply peaked around embryonic day 16.5 (E16.5), coinciding with male germline de novo DNA methylation (5, 10). In comparison, Dnmt3B is expressed in germ cells, early embryos, and somatic tissues of both sexes (11, 12). Using discriminating primers, we showed independent regulation of Dnmt3B and Gm14490 during spermatogenesis (fig. S2B). The coding potential and specific developmental regulation of Gm14490 led us to reconsider it as a functional paralog of Dnmt3B rather than a pseudogene, and thus we renamed it Dnmt3C.
The long Dnmt3C isoform encodes a protein with an organization characteristic of DNMT3 enzymes: six methyltransferase motifs (I, IV, VI, VIII, IX, and X) in C-terminal position and an N-terminal ATRX-DNMT3L-DNMT3A (ADD) domain, which binds unmethylated lysine 4 residues of histone H3 (H3K4) (Fig. 1D and fig. S2C) (13). However, DNMT3C lacks the Pro-Trp-Trp-Pro (PWWP) domain, which targets DNMT3 proteins to gene bodies through recognition of H3K36 trimethylation (H3K36me3) (14, 15). Overall, DNMT3C exhibits 70% identity with DNMT3B, while DNMT3A and DNMT3B are 46% identical. In hypogonadal mutants, the IAP insertion did not affect Dnmt3C transcript levels but provided an alternative splice acceptor site, which led to the exclusion of Dnmt3C last exon in favor of the retrotransposon sequence in a chimeric Dnmt3C-IAP mRNA (Fig. 1E and fig. S2, D and E). Its predicted translation product lacks motifs IX and X (fig. S2C), which are essential for the AdoMet-dependent methyltransferase fold and for the binding of the methyl donor S-adenosyl methionine, respectively (16).
To demonstrate that DNMT3C is catalytically active, we performed an in vivo DNA methylation assay. Dnmt3C is not expressed in mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) (Fig. 1B). By transfecting constructs driving Dnmt3C expression in DNA methylation-free ESCs (Dnmt1, Dnmt3A, and Dnmt3B triple-knockout; Dnmt-tKO) (17), we observed a gain of CpG methylation (10 to 20%), similar to that observed upon Dnmt3B transfection (Fig. 1F and fig. S2, F and G). The mutant Dnmt3CIAP allele failed to raise CpG methylation levels, as did Dnmt3C and Dnmt3B mutant alleles with a missense mutation in the catalytic site (DNMT3C C507A and DNMT3B C658A, in which cysteine at position 507 and 658 is replaced by alanine). An in vitro DNA methylation assay using the DNMT3C methyltransferase domain showed concordant results (fig. S2, H and I). These findings demonstrate that DNMT3C is an enzymatically active member of the DNMT3 family of de novo DNA methyltransferases.
Dnmt3CIAP/IAP animals were somatically normal, and only males were sterile (fig. S3A). Hypogonadism was linked to azoospermia with interruption of spermatogenesis at the pachytene stage of meiosis I, in the context of impaired chromosome synapsis (Fig. 2, A to C). The developmental phenotype of Dnmt3C mutant mice was similar to that observed in Dnmt3LKO/KO males (7, 18), suggesting that DNMT3C could be involved in transposon silencing during spermatogenesis. Indeed, the same set of retrotransposons were up-regulated in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP and Dnmt3LKO/KO testes at P20 (postnatal day 20) (Fig. 2D and fig. S3B) (18). Long interspersed nuclear elements (LINEs or L1s) showed the strongest reactivation, and more specifically evolutionarily young subfamilies: type A, T, and Gf transcripts were increased by 10-fold in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP testes, in association with accumulation of L1-encoded ORF1 proteins (Fig. 2E). Among endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), reactivation was specific to some ERVK families (MMERVK10C, IAPEz, and IAPEy). As in the case of the Dnmt3L mutation, L1 and IAPEz derepression was linked to a DNA methylation defect in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP testes (Fig. 2F), despite normal expression of piRNA/DNA methylation genes and piRNA production during fetal spermatogenesis (fig. S3, C to F). Finally, we confirmed DNMT3C function by generating a Dnmt3C knockout mouse through CRISPR-Cas9–mediated deletion (fig. S4A). The Dnmt3CKO allele recapitulated the Dnmt3CIAP/IAP developmental and molecular phenotypes in homozygous Dnmt3CKO/KO males and failed to complement the Dnmt3CIAP allele in Dnmt3CIAP/KO compound heterozygous males (fig. S4, B to E).
Fig. 2 Phenotype of Dnmt3CIAP/IAP males. (A) Hypogonadism (6-week-old mice). Scale bars, 5 mm. (B) Severe germ cell loss in testis sections (11-week-old mice). Scale bars, 100 μm. (C) Impaired chromosome synapsis at meiosis as detected by immunofluorescence against synaptonemal complex proteins (SYCP1 and SYCP3). Scale bars, 4 μm. (D) RNA-seq heatmap shows overexpression of young L1 and specific ERVK types in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP compared to Dnmt3CIAP/WT testis at P20. Annotations from RepeatMasker. (E) Aberrant expression of L1-ORF1 proteins in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP germ cells (TRA98-positive) at P20. Scale bars, 50 μm. (F) L1A-5′UTR and IAPEz-5′LTR are hypomethylated in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP testis DNA at P20, as in Dnmt3LKO/KO testis. Southern blot analysis after methyl-sensitive Hpa II digestion. Msp I is used as a digestion control.
To assess the contribution of DNMT3C to male germline methylation, we performed whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) in sorted germ cells from testes at P10, when de novo DNA methylation is completed. Overall CpG methylation levels of Dnmt3CIAP/IAP mutant cells were not markedly different from the Dnmt3CIAP/WT control (77.7 versus 78.5%). A slight decrease was only apparent when focusing on transposons (81.5 versus 84.2%), and more specifically on LINEs, ERVK, and ERV1 (Fig. 3, A and B). Accordingly, there was only a limited number (264) of differentially methylated regions (DMRs) in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP versus Dnmt3CIAP/WT germ cells (fig. S5A); all reflected hypomethylation in the mutant, and most overlapped with LINEs (34%) and ERVs (48%). RepeatMasker annotations further highlighted that the same families that were transcriptionally derepressed were hypomethylated in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP testes; namely, young L1s and specific ERVKs (Fig. 2D and Fig. 3C). By comparison, deletion of DNMT3L had a stronger and broader impact: Dnmt3LKO/KO germ cells exhibited only 39% of global CpG methylation, and all genomic compartments and retrotransposon classes were affected (Fig. 3, D and E, and fig. S5B).
Fig. 3 DNMT3C methylates evolutionarily young retrotransposon promoters. (A and B) Tukey box-plot representation of CpG methylation content as determined by WGBS over different (A) genomic compartments and (B) retrotransposon classes in control Dnmt3C IAP/WT (purple) and mutant Dnmt3C IAP/IAP (yellow) germ cells at P10. (C) Percentage of DNA methylation loss within individual retrotransposon families in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP samples. (D and E) As in (A) and (B) but for Dnmt3LKO/WT (green) and Dnmt3LKO/KO (red) germ cells. (F) Plotting of DNA methylation loss over individual copies of L1 families according to genetic distance from consensus sequences. (G and H) Metaplots of DNA methylation over full-length L1s (>5 kb) comparing (G) Dnmt3CIAP/IAP and (H) Dnmt3LKO/KO versus control samples. (I) Left: Heatmap of Dnmt3CIAP/IAP and control DNA methylation levels across paternally imprinted loci. Right: Methylation maps at the Rasgrf1 locus.
The DNA methylation defect in Dnmt3C mutants only reached 30% at the most for young L1s (Fig. 3C). We reasoned that DNMT3C selectively affects transcriptionally active retrotransposon copies, as these are targets of piRNA-dependent DNA methylation during fetal spermatogenesis (4, 5). Indeed, individual L1-A and -T elements with a 5′ promoter (length >5 kb) and the highest similarity toward the consensus sequence showed the greatest DNA methylation loss in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP cells (Fig. 3F and fig. S4C). Additionally, DNMT3C-dependent DNA methylation was not evenly distributed across the length of these transcriptionally competent elements, but rather focalized to their promoters [5′ untranslated region (UTR)] (Fig. 3G), in a pattern previously observed in piRNA-deficient MiliKO/KO males (fig. S5D) (4). Older L1-F elements did not show such trends (Fig. 3F and fig. S5C). By contrast, Dnmt3L deficiency caused demethylation of L1s independently of their age and throughout their sequence (Fig. 3H).
ERVKs exhibited milder methylation loss (10%) than LINEs in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP cells (Fig. 3C), and this was not related to the size or the sequence conservation of individual copies (fig. S5, C and E). ERVKs partially resist the genome-wide erasure of methylation that occurs in the fetal germ line (19, 20); this likely explains their limited dependency toward DNMT3C remethylation activity. Nevertheless, DNMT3C dependency was still greatest over regulatory long-terminal repeat (LTR) sequences of MMERVK10C (fig. S5F) and IAPEz elements when highly conserved copies were analyzed by bisulfite pyrosequencing (fig. S4E). Finally, among paternally methylated imprinted loci, only the Rasgfr1 imprinting control region (ICR) was hypomethylated in Dnmt3CIAP/IAP germ cells (Fig. 3I). This ICR includes an ERVK LTR fragment, which acquires DNA methylation in |
due to the recovering bald eagle population. The island is rarely visited but remains a source of mystery right off Tillamook Head.A Tunisian, a Palestinian and four Syrians are getting used to new homes in unfamiliar territory: Uruguay.
The six were all held at Guantanamo Bay for 12 years after they were captured by the US military in Pakistan and Afghanistan. All are suspected militants with ties to al-Qaeda, but they were never charged.
Now they're in Uruguay because the country's president, José Mujica, a former leftist guerrilla, spent time in prison when Uruguay was ruled by a military dictatorship.
"The president believes it's a humanitarian priority to close down the prison in Guantanamo," says Marta Rodriguez, a reporter in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo. "So it's something he needed to do. It's a commitment."
Mujica announced back in March that Uruguay would accept the inmates on "humanitarian grounds" in order to help US President Barack Obama fulfill his long-delayed promise to close the prison at Guantanamo.
Mujica has taken pains to treat the former inmates as free men. After their arrival in Uruguay, the six men were taken to a hospital for check-ups. Rodriguez says the government has pledged to support them, help them find jobs and possibly help bring their families to Uruguay. Mujica has even insisted they are free to travel or leave Uruguay if they choose.
That might seem like the natural choice: Uruguay is home to only 300 Muslims, and the Islamic Cultural Organization of Uruguay says it's the only country in South America without a mosque.
But a lawyer for one of the men told a local Uruguayan newspaper that the former inmates were very grateful and plan to integrate into Uruguay. One said he was looking forward to learning how to speak Spanish. Another refugee wrote a letter thanking President Mujica, saying he was happy to leave the "black hole" of the US military prison behind.
He was also looking forward to cheering on the local soccer team.Photo
As government regulators crack down on the financing of terrorists and drug traffickers, many big banks are abandoning the business of transferring money from the United States to other countries, moves that are expected to reverse years of declines in the cost of immigrants sending money home to their families.
While Mexico may be most affected — nearly half of the $51.1 billion in remittances sent from the United States in 2012 ended up in that country — the banks’ broad retreat over the last year is affecting other countries in Latin America and parts of Africa as well. The banks are being held accountable not only for the customers who directly use their money transfer services but also for their role in collecting remittances from money transmitting companies and wiring them abroad.
“This is transforming the business and may increase the costs of international money transfers,” said Manuel Orozco, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a research group in Washington.
JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have scrapped low-cost services that allowed Mexican immigrants to send money to their families across the border. The Spanish bank BBVA is reportedly exploring the sale of its unit that wires money to Mexico and across Latin America. And in perhaps the deepest retrenchment by a bank, Citigroup’s Banamex USA unit has now closed many of its branches in Texas, California and Arizona that catered to Mexicans living in the United States and stopped most remittances to Mexico as it faces a federal investigation related to money laundering controls.
Regulators say the banking system was being exploited by terrorists and drug lords seeking to launder money. While they have not banned banks from engaging in higher-risk businesses like money transfers to certain countries, they acknowledge that banks must now invest significantly more to monitor the money moving through their systems or face substantial penalties.
But the government’s efforts to root out illicit activity have effectively put the banks into a law enforcement role, industry experts say. And the result is undercutting another public policy goal — helping immigrants, who are primarily low income, move into mainstream banking. Even with the current relatively low remittance fees, the costs can still add up. Some Latin American immigrants say they regularly send three remittances a week to pay for last-minute school supplies or rent.
Manuel Santiago, a 48-year-old Mexican living in Queens, said he sometimes pays $4 to send as little as $20 at a time to his son and daughter in Mexico. “I am supporting my family and things come up irregularly,” he said.
The pendulum has swung so far, participants in the industry say, that regulators are pushing banks out of some activities considered beneficial to the broader economy.
“The money transfer business has become the whipping boy of regulators who want to show how tough they are,” said Paul S. Dwyer Jr., chief executive of Viamericas, a money transfer company based in Maryland with a large focus on Mexico.
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Shut out by many large banks, more of Mr. Dwyer’s customers are turning to large retailers in Mexico to pick up money sent from the United States, and some of those retailers charge money transfer companies as much as double the banks’ fees, he said. Mr. Dwyer’s company is recouping the additional costs by increasing the difference — or the spread — between what customers pay in dollars and what their family members receive in Mexican pesos.
A World Bank report on remittances found that the costs had been steadily falling over the last five years. But industry experts are expecting that trend to reverse.
A spokesman for Western Union, one of the largest remittance players, said the company was among those capturing business from the banks.
While immigrants say they have not noticed broad price increases from companies like Western Union, industry experts say higher costs are inevitable with fewer banks acting as middlemen for money transmitters.
“If you are the only game in town, you may be able to charge a premium,” said Daniel Ayala, head of global remittance services at Wells Fargo, adding that the bank has not passed increased regulatory costs to customers, leading to a decline in profits.
Many banks had considered remittances an attractive business because they generated steady fees and required little capital. In some cases, remittances could satisfy Community Reinvestment Act requirements to serve a certain percentage of low-income customers.
But the regulatory pressures and increased costs of compliance have started to outweigh the potential profits.
JPMorgan stopped its Rapid Cash program in November, partly because the bank grew concerned about some of the risks, a spokeswoman said. As part of its program, JPMorgan had teamed up with the large Mexican bank Banorte. Many people picking up remittances in Mexico sent from Chase branches in the United States were not customers of Banorte, making it more difficult to monitor them.
Last year, Bank of America canceled its SafeSend product, regarded as one of the least expensive ways for immigrants to send money to Mexico. A spokeswoman said the bank canceled the product because of “limited demand” and would not elaborate. A BBVA spokesman declined to comment on the possible sale of its Bancomer Transfer Services unit.
Some banks still make certain wire transfers to Mexico, but the costs of such services can be five times as high as a typical remittance, making it prohibitive for many immigrants.
Even if banks invested in new software to screen for worrisome transactions, they would still have to manually investigate many suspicious activities and report them to regulators. Banks fear that a single mistake could lead to costly penalties like the $1.9 billion settlement that the British bank HSBC agreed to pay over money laundering issues in 2012. HSBC has stopped paying out remittances at its Mexican branches.
And the heightened diligence can slow, or even stop, vital payments.
Domingo Garcia, a 36-year-old limousine driver in Los Angeles, said he grew frustrated with Wells Fargo when one of his family’s remittances totaling roughly $1,500 failed to clear. In the same week, he said, family members had tried to send another large remittance. His mother needed the money to pay for her chemotherapy treatment in Mexico. “The hospital was saying it would not give her the medicine until they were paid,” Mr. Garcia said.
Wells Fargo declined to comment on a specific customer’s transaction, but said there could be a number of causes for delays, including efforts to screen for fraud and the bank’s limits on the amount of transfers allowed each month. While the bank remains committed to Mexico, it has slowed the expansion of its money transfer network to other high-risk countries.
Citigroup’s Banamex USA, which has been ensnared in a criminal investigation related to money laundering, is an example of how compliance problems at an obscure affiliate can have serious consequences for a global bank like Citigroup. The New York parent has removed many of the veteran managers at Banamex USA and installed a “cleanup team” of executives to improve its compliance systems, according to a person briefed on the matter.
Citigroup inherited the small California bank when it acquired Banamex, Mexico’s second-largest bank after BBVA Bancomer, in 2001. Because Banamex USA was overseen by executives at Banamex’s headquarters in Mexico, it did not come under the same compliance systems as Citigroup’s units in the United States, this person said. It also wired cash on behalf of money transfer companies in the United States to Banamex accounts in Mexico, people in the remittance industry say.
In reality, it may be nearly impossible to fully monitor money flowing through some parts of the world. Regulators worry, in particular, about remittances to Somalia, a haven for terrorist groups with no formal banking system. Banks in the United States have had to wire money to banks in Dubai. Much of the money is then moved into Somalia through a network of traders.
One of the few banks willing to take that risk is Merchants Bank of California. But in the face of scrutiny from regulators, the bank has told some money transfer companies in cities with large Somali enclaves like Minneapolis that it may no longer be able to provide them with banking services.
Merchants Bank’s exit could be a big blow to Somalia, where remittances are a major source of income for a country that has suffered from recent famine, according to the antipoverty group Oxfam.
“We’re looking for alternatives,” said Abdulaziz Sugule, president of the Olympic Financial Group, a money transfer company in Minneapolis that Merchants Bank may drop, “but it’s going to be tough.”
Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting.Curious as to where your taxpayer dollars go? Ever wonder how feminism stimulate markets based on lies and corruption? Wonder what the future might hold for the mens' earning power in this misandric society? How much money will feminists demand in ten or twenty years if the status-quot does not change?
Tonight we will feature Captain Capitalism, an economist and MRA. Our discussion will center around the economics of feminism, its effects on the State, and how continued funding of this odious ideology affects your bottom line. We will also discuss methods to pull the teeth out of this money hungry beast.
We will want to take calls during this show. Our number is 310-388-9709.
Show time is at 9pm Eastern time, 6pm Pacific. Which is 2am July 10th London time and 2pm July 10th Brisbane.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Todd Akin said the words "legitimate" and "rape" should never be used together
US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has called on embattled congressman Todd Akin to withdraw from the race for a Senate seat in Missouri.
Mr Akin has sparked uproar by claiming women's bodies could prevent pregnancy in cases of "legitimate rape".
He is defying intense pressure from his own party to leave the race, accusing people of over-reacting.
Correspondents say Republicans fear the backlash could sink their bid to win control of the US Senate in November.
Mr Romney said on Monday Mr Akin's remarks were "offensive and wrong", but he had stopped short of urging him to drop out at that point.
But on Tuesday, Mr Romney said: "Today, his fellow Missourians urged him to step aside, and I think he should accept their counsel and exit the Senate race."
'Taking a stand'
Senator Roy Blunt and four former senators from Missouri said earlier in a joint statement that Mr Akin's candidacy did not serve the national interest.
If someone talked about 'legitimate murder' or 'legitimate burglary' we would be left scratching our heads as to what they meant
On conservative radio host Mike Huckabee's show, Mr Akin again refused to quit the race.
He described the response to his comments as a "little bit of an over-reaction", saying he had mistaken "one word in one sentence on one day".
"By taking this stand, this is going to strengthen our country," the sixth-term lawmaker said. "I hadn't done anything morally or ethically wrong, as sometimes people in politics do."
Last week Mr Akin had a comfortable lead in opinion polls over incumbent Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill in the Midwestern state of Missouri, which has leaned increasingly conservative in recent years.
Then on Sunday, he was asked by a local news station if he would support abortions for women who have been raped.
The 65-year-old lawmaker replied: "It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that is really rare.
"If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said Mr Akin's claim "contradicts basic biological truths".
'Gutless little twerp'
But even as top conservatives were lambasting the congressman, the Republican Party was reportedly ratifying a call for a constitutional ban on abortion, without any exception for rape or incest.
Pregnancy and rape There are more than 32,000 pregnancies from rape each year, the Centers for Disease Control says
A woman who has been raped "has no control over ovulation, fertilization or implantation of a fertilized egg (pregnancy)," says the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
The same group says that annually, between 10,000 and 15,000 abortions take place as a result of incest or rape
The position was to be the subject of a vote at the Republican national convention in Tampa, Florida, next week.
In a new campaign advertisement released early on Tuesday, Mr Akin said: "Rape is an evil act. I used the wrong words in the wrong way, and for that I apologise."
But the US Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell, said the apology was insufficient.
He said Mr Akin had "made a deeply offensive error at a time when his candidacy carries great consequence for the future of our country".
The National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee has reportedly told Mr Akin that $5m (£3.2m) in advertising set aside for Missouri would now be spent elsewhere.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Todd Akin on "legitimate rape" - Video courtesy FOX 2 KTVI
The Karl Rove-backed Crossroads organisation also pulled its ads from Missouri.
But Sen McCaskill, whose campaign appears reinvigorated by her Republican challenger's slip-up, wants Mr Akin to stay in the race.
She said Republicans were trying to "kick sand in the face" of their party's voters in Missouri who selected Mr Akin this month as their candidate.
On Monday evening, CNN television host Piers Morgan labelled Mr Akin a "gutless little twerp" for pulling out of an appearance on his show.
US media reacts
A New York Times editorial says that while Republicans are distancing themselves from Akin's comments, his views "expose a widely held belief among many fierce abortion opponents that a rape exception will be abused by women whose rapes were not 'legitimate'".
The Washington Post expands on that argument, saying: "Unfortunately, Mr Akin's remarks are not the first, nor are they likely to be the last, in a long-running effort to downplay the horror of rape as a way to restrict access to abortion. What they're really saying is that not all rape victims are victims, and so we shouldn't worry if they have to deal with unwanted pregnancy."
And the Atlantic says proponents of no-exception anti-abortion policies have tried to downplay or deny the occurrence of rape- or incest-related pregnancies: "The idea that trauma is a form of birth control continues to be promulgated by anti-abortion forces that seek to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest."
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle says Democrats are trying to link Mr Akin's comments to vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan's position on abortion: "This is the Democratic National Committee playbook: Delegitimize a respectable position - that abortion is the taking of innocent life - not by refuting it but by assessing guilt by association."WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A letter addressed to President Barack Obama contained a substance that preliminarily tested positive for the deadly poison ricin, authorities said on Wednesday.
President Barack Obama speaks about the bomb blast at the finish line of the Boston Marathon while in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, April 15, 2013. REUTERS/Larry Downing
News that the letter to Obama was being investigated came as a flurry of other reports of suspicious letters and a package caused the evacuation of parts of two Senate buildings and set nerves in Washington on edge.
The letter contained “a granular substance that preliminarily tested positive for ricin,” an FBI statement said. But the statement added: “There is no indication of a connection to the attack in Boston,” where three people were killed in bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday.
The Secret Service said the letter to Obama was received at a mail screening facility on Tuesday.
The mail facility that received the letter was not located near the White House itself, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan said in a statement.
“The Secret Service is working closely with the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI in this investigation,” Donovan said.
Parts of the Russell and Hart Senate office buildings were cleared while officials investigated suspicious letters and a package, a Capitol Police spokesman said.
CNN read a statement from a spokesman to Senator Richard Shelby, saying that Capitol Police were investigating a suspicious package that had been delivered to their office.
Senator Carl Levin said one of his Michigan regional offices had received a suspicious-looking letter, but it was not opened. Authorities are investigating, Levin said in a statement.
On Tuesday U.S. authorities intercepted a letter sent to Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker that preliminary tests showed contained the deadly poison ricin.Your author was actually going to issue Court proceedings today in the County Court for a Small Claim against James Billingham. I have no idea why he thinks I have dropped matters as I said the exact reverse. Before issuing the claim form I had contacted the police and offered the opportunity to object but they had not done so. In fact they have been very reasonable.
UPDATE – 11/04/2015 – So last night a DS from Hampshire phoned me. She said that Mr Billingham had never, in fact, made a statement – so his claims about an ongoing investigation and the police agreeing with him or whatever up until now are in fact factually incorrect. Mr Billingham has been invited to make a statement so the police can then investigate or alternatively, decide there is no case to answer.
But then … chasing the Information Commissioners Office … I discovered that the wheels of bureaucracy have been turning and the ICO have now allocated an officer to investigate 🙂. I was able to get hold of them for a brief chat and to provide some further information.
We also briefly discussed the various defences advanced by the Block Bot. Obviously, the officer is quite rightly still forming a view but I can say I am very happy with what I was told and that they have moved other things aside to ensure this is looked into properly. So I think now things are moving I can wait a few weeks more. This, I suspect, will be amusing …Apparently Facebook noticed the slap down that the FTC gave Twitter in June because it “failed to prevent unauthorized administrative control of its system.” Shortly afterwards one of the senior engineers at Facebook responsible for SRE (site reliability engineering) challenged Facebook employees to try to compromise him and gain access to Facebook’s administrative system via information obtained from him.
They succeeded.
It took a couple of weeks though. Employees supposedly got in via his home WiFi network, says our source. The details aren’t entirely clear, and Facebook isn’t talking. What I’ve heard is that they were able to intercept data from his home network after capturing his WPA password by luring him into logging into a rogue WiFi SSID that appeared to be his own router. See here for some details on how easy this is to do.
Once his home network fell, the Facebook employees were able to monitor all his Internet activity and obtain clear text passwords, etc.
The Twitter hacks last year began with compromised personal email accounts and unfolded from there.
It’s absolutely a smart thing for Facebook to do this, and other companies should too. But if a security engineer at Facebook was compromised, even though he knew it was coming, imagine how trivial it would be for other people to get hit, too.
Now excuse me while I go camp out in Mark Zuckerberg’s back yard for a week or two and try to set up a rogue WiFi SSID. Wish me luck.
Update: Facebook engineer Pedram Keyani, who was behind the challenge, has responded in the comments. He says that the challenge actually demonstrates how secure Facebook is — while the team could access his account, they were unable to compromise Facebook’s administrative/corporate systems.The State of Texas is preparing to remove their involvement in one state park.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has informed the Lavaca Navidad River Authority that they plan to terminate the lease of property that provides for Lake Texana State Park.
TPWD has operated the 575-acre area since 1977, and officially opened the state park to the public in 1981.
“Continued operation of Lake Texana State Park is no longer feasible for TPWD due to serious financial constraints to our state park system,” said Texas State Parks Director Brent Leisure. “We are proud to have served as the steward of this site for more than three decades.”
The park will continue to be operated by the Lavaca Navidad River Authority when the lease is terminated.
The park provides public access to 10,000-acre Lake Texana that provides fishing, boating, and other recreational opportunities for more than 40,000 visitors per year.Photo
Senator Bernie Sanders has repeatedly denounced campaigns that he says are built around their candidates attending fund-raisers. He has insisted he will not “go out hustling money from the wealthiest people in the country,” and declared at the first Democratic debate that he is “not raising money from millionaires and billionaires.”
Yet Mr. Sanders was cheered at a fancy campaign fund-raiser at the Hollywood home of Syd Leibovitch, a high-end real estate agent, and his wife, Linda, on Wednesday night.
Tickets for the event sold for a minimum of $250. Those who spent the maximum, $2,700, or who raised $10,000, were invited to a “pre-event reception,” according to the invitation.
The 14 co-hosts included Cindy Asner, the former wife of the actor Ed Asner, the actress Mimi Kennedy, and Benjamin W. Decker, whose website notes that he was once called the “legendary Hollywood P.R. maven” by Forbes magazine, and used to produce “celebrity-driven red-carpet movie premieres.”
Mr. Sanders has repeatedly talked on the campaign trail about how small-dollar donations are driving his campaign war chest — he raised $26 million in the third fund-raising quarter, primarily in small increments.
But the fund-raiser at the Leibovitch home was the type of event that most politicians typically hold. According to a pool report, guests dressed in blazers, jeans and cocktail dresses were treated to valet parking, and aides estimated about $150,000 would be raised from roughly 300 people there. It was the ninth such event of his campaign, his aides said, according to the pool report.
As Mr. Sanders began speaking to the guests, he joked that the Leibovitch house was a “proletariat” home, and told them, “The truth is there are many people in this country who have money but also believe in social justice.”
The nighttime event was part of a busy Wednesday for Mr. Sanders in California, including the taping of a fun appearance on the “Ellen DeGeneres Show” and another less-fancy fund-raiser at the Avalon Hollywood nightclub.
Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Mr. Sanders, insisted the Leibovitch event was “not particularly high-dollar,” and said there was no contradiction between such a fund-raiser and the candidate’s campaign-finance oratory about not “sitting around in small rooms talking to very wealthy people.”
“He still does not have a ‘super PAC,'” Mr. Briggs said, adding that he does not want one and that the words “‘lion’s share’ doesn’t begin to say how much his campaign relies on small contributions.”
Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.Image: Meizu
Chinese smartphone maker Meizu has shown off its new Super mCharge tech fully charging a 3,000mAh battery in 20 minutes.
Meizu unveiled the new battery tech on Tuesday at Mobile World Congress, offering a peek at the next generation of its mCharge quick-charging technology for lithium-ion batteries.
The company says Super mCharge is 5.5 times faster than its predecessor, delivering a 60 percent charge in 10 minutes and a full charge in 20 minutes.
That performance compares with Qualcomm's recently announced Quick Charge 4.0 tech in the new Snapdragon 835 processor, which in tests with a 2 750mAh battery delivered a 50 percent charge in 15 minutes, or an estimated five-hour charge in five minutes.
As reported by GSMArena, the Meizu's Super mCharge charger is a beast. Physically, it's almost as big as a smartphone and is also rated at 11V/5A, which is capable of transferring a massive 55W of power, or more than twice the output of Oppo's VOOC tech and Motorola's TurboCharger.
Meizu's first-generation mCharge was 18W, while the second generation delivered 24W.
Meizu says it created a 3,000mAh battery that can handle four times the current of existing lithium-ion batteries and claims it will sustain 80 percent capacity after 800 complete charge and discharge cycles, giving it a life span of over two years. It also created a new data cable that can transfer up to 160W of power.
According to Meizu, phones with its Super mCharge tech hit a maximum temperature of 38C-100.4F degrees compared with Qualcomm's Quick Charge 3.0's 44C-111.2F degrees. Key to keeping it cool is so-called "charge pump technology" that happens over two circuits, allowing it achieve a charging efficiency of 98 percent.
The downsides are that the cables cost three times as much as its current cables and that Super mCharge won't be in any devices for another one to two years.
Read more about battery techThe technological challenge of getting to Mars may seem like a huge hurdle but it may be biology that holds humanity back from venturing to the Red Planet.
Astronauts could develop irreversible dementia on their journey because their brains are being bombarded with destructive space radiation, scientists fear.
The University of California found that exposure to highly energetic charged particles - much like those found in the galactic cosmic rays – can cause significant damage to the central nervous system, resulting in brain impairments.
"This is not positive news for astronauts deployed on a two to three year round trip to Mars," said Charles Limoli, professor of radiation oncology in UCI's School of Medicine.
"Performance decrements, memory deficits, and loss of awareness and focus during spaceflight may affect mission-critical activities, and exposure to these particles may have long-term adverse consequences to cognition throughout life."
At its closest orbit Mars is around 34,000,000 miles from Earth and it takes between 150 and 300 days to reach the Red Planet depending on speed of launch. It means that simply travelling there and back could see astronauts being subjected to dangerous radiation levels for nearly two years.
• Life on Mars: Nasa finds first hint of alien life
• 50 years of photographing Mars
Female astronauts are known to be more susceptible to space radiation and generally spend 30 per cent less time in space.
To test the impact, rats were exposed to fully ionized oxygen and titanium to simulate space radiation, at Nasa's Space Radiation Laboratory.
The researchers found that exposure to these particles resulted in brain inflammation, which disrupted the transmission of signals among neurons.
Imaging revealed that the brain's communication had been damaged by reductions in the structure of nerve cells called dendrites and spines and alterations to synapses, which allow neurons to communicate with each other.
Nasa's Curiosity rover has been on Mars since 2012
The rats also performed less well in tasks designed to test learning and memory.
While cognitive deficits in astronauts would take months to manifest, Prof Limoli said, the time required for a mission to Mars is sufficient for such deficits to develop.
People working for extended periods on the International Space Station do not face the same level of bombardment with galactic cosmic rays, as they are still within the protective magnetosphere of the Earth, the Van Allen belt.
The irradiated particles that compose these galactic cosmic rays are mainly remnants of past supernova events.
• Space may make astronauts infertile, scientists fear
Prof Limoli's work is part of NASA's Human Research Program which is looking at the impact of extended periods in space and how the problems could be mitigated.
He recommends building a spacecraft which would have increased shielding at areas where astronauts rest and sleep.
However, these highly energetic particles will traverse the ship nonetheless, he said, "and there is really no escaping them."
"We are working on pharmacologic strategies involving compounds that scavenge free radicals and protect neurotransmission.
"But these remain to be optimized and are under development."
Astronauts face a series of health problems related to spending long periods in space. Microgravity causes the heart to pumping as strongly causing muscle mass loss. Often astronauts pass out when they return to Earth.
Most struggle to sleep in space, only getting an average of six hours a night, which is bad for long term health.
Hearing and sight loss is also common. Of the 300 US astronauts examined since 1989, vision problems developed in 29 percent of those on two-week missions and a 60 per cent of those who spent several months on the International Space Station.
Astronauts are also at greater risk of kidney stones because of microgravity and the difficulty in staying dehydrated.
Space flight may also make astronauts infertile. Animal experiments have shown that both male and female reproductive organs are affected by microgravity.
Although most astronauts have already had their families by the time they go into space, Nasa is so concerned that it now offers egg and sperm freezing.
The Mars One mission is currently scheduled to land its first crew on the planet in 2025, but it has warned volunteers that conception may not be possible in reduced gravity and that a fetus born on Mars may not develop properly.
The first spacecraft ever to make the journey from Earth to Mars was NASA’s Mariner 4, which launched on November 28, 1964 and arrived at Mars July 14, 1965. It took just 21 photographs.
The research was published in the journal Science Advances.State’s attorney general is suing employment agencies, alleging that they target vulnerable workers and place them with restaurant employers who exploit them
Javier and Daniel sit rigidly on a dirty mattress inside the makeshift hovel, peering out from behind a tattered comforter, their bodies shaking. Angel is on a broken, stained office chair just outside. In a slumping, mildewed tent next door, three men lie motionless side by side under a pile of blankets, staring up at the moist canvas. Two other lean-tos made of old mattresses, blue tarps and threadbare blankets complete the small community.
The ground is littered with crumpled beer cans, discarded clothes, food scraps and a monster mask.
Some days the encampment under a bridge just south of downtown and just north of Chicago’s Chinatown has the feeling of a bedraggled backyard barbecue. Men from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala cook frozen shrimp or crab over a fire, drink beers, joke and even sing. On this Saturday in February, however, the men are silent, and the fear and misery in the air are palpable. It is just too cold.
These men are homeless but they are not unemployed. They work at Chinese buffets, Japanese sushi bars and steakhouses, and other restaurants across the midwest, sent by Chinese employment agencies that are being investigated by the Illinois attorney general for alleged civil rights, human rights and labor law violations.
Attorney general Lisa Madigan’s complaint, filed on 12 November, names three nearby hiring agencies and two Illinois restaurants and refers to a larger network of eateries. One of the agencies closed its doors in October after the city issued building code violations; the other two agencies and the restaurants continue operating. In responses filed in federal court, the defendants have all denied the allegations or said such violations are not their responsibility. Talking with the Guardian, the agency owners and their lawyers denied wrongdoing or a connection with the homeless men.
“The people under the bridge are no good, lazy,” Ganglie Jiao, the owner of one of the three agencies sued by the attorney general, told the Guardian. “Maybe they worked at Chinese restaurants – but not through my office.” He later conceded: “maybe some go to my office”.
The agencies pay for bus or train tickets to send the men to restaurants in other states, where they live in housing controlled by the restaurant owners, as described by more than 30 men interviewed between October and March. The men owe the agency a “commission” of $120 to $250 for each job; they typically work four days to pay off the commission and transportation. After that, they typically make $400 to $600 for working six-day weeks, 12 hours a day, as dishwashers, cutters, friers or cooks.
That comes out to $5-8 an hour, significantly below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour plus time-and-a-half for overtime. The attorney general’s complaint cites wages as low as $3.50 an hour and commissions between $120 and $220.
“These employment agencies target vulnerable Latino workers and place them with restaurant employers who exploit them,” Madigan said.
The complaint, filed on behalf of the public and the Illinois department of labor, adds: “These unlicensed employment agencies have targeted Latino workers and actively marketed their ability to provide such Latino (or ‘Mexican’) workers to Chinese buffet restaurants that looked to fill low-paid kitchen positions.”
Cara Hendrickson, chief of the attorney general’s public interest division, said they are not trying to close the restaurants, but rather force them to comply with the law. The lawsuit demands the hiring agencies, meanwhile, be closed through a permanent injunction.
Most of the workers are undocumented. Their last names are not used here because of their undocumented status and because most still hope to get work in restaurants.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mario is often angry at the Chinese restaurant owners for the low pay and the way they treat Mexican workers. Photograph: Lloyd DeGrane
Mario, 44, has worked in countless Chinese restaurants around the country, many of them through the Chicago hiring agencies. He is often angry at the Chinese restaurant owners for the low pay and the way they treat Mexican workers. He described constant insults and work demands that are nearly impossible to meet. “I only have two hands, two eyes, two ears – what do they expect me to do?” he said after leaving a job he had for only a few days.
Mario came to the US from Guerrero after splitting from his wife and tiring of his grueling work hauling bags of cement “like a burro”. Around a fire under the bridge one January night, he reminisced about growing “squash as big as guitars” and other vegetables in the Mexican countryside. He broke into a romantic Chinese song along with Kent, a man who has lived under the bridge for 18 years.
“I speak more Chinese than English, I like my job,” Mario said. “But I never thought I would be living under a bridge. If I die here, I die alone.”
I like my job. But I never thought I would be living under a bridge. If I die here, I die alone Mario
He frequently talks of going back to Mexico. Instead, he ends up back on a Greyhound bus to another restaurant job.
When workers such as Mario are sent to restaurants outside Chicago, the men stay in apartments or houses controlled by the restaurant owners, living with other workers. They typically eat at the buffets, though they are often not allowed to eat the more expensive meat or shrimp. Chinese workers earn more and receive better treatment than the Latinos, who are regularly insulted, denied breaks and sometimes even beaten, according to the attorney general’s complaint and the men’s accounts.
The pay is cash and off the books, other than a “ticket” from the agency listing the commission and transportation cost and an agreed upon wage, as confirmed by the attorney for one agency. The men get no benefits, paid vacation days or compensation when they are burned, cut or otherwise injured on the job, the attorney general’s complaint notes.
The men typically do not stay at any one restaurant long, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or months, before the boss fires them or they quit in frustration. Then they head back to Chicago, back “under the bridge”, as they say in Spanish and English, to live outdoors while awaiting the chance to pay another commission for another job.
They come from Honduras, Guatemala and across Mexico, including Mexico City. Most of them crossed the border years ago and worked more lucrative jobs, including landscaping, roofing, painting, construction, factory work and picking fruit, before the economic crisis and their own health or life circumstances drove them to what many see as a last resort, these restaurant jobs.
Some said they are stuck in the restaurant jobs and homeless because of injuries that rule out other work, or because of drinking problems that make it hard to seek work or live with family members. Others said they don’t mind the situation, appreciating the freedom that the transient restaurant work gives them, and the chance to live in apartments or houses in other cities. A few had stopped working in the restaurants but still lived under the bridge.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angel. Photograph: Lloyd DeGrane
“Because of immigration, I can’t travel to my country, so I stay here, you know me,” said Antonio, 27, a man from Guatemala who went to school in Florida as a teenager and speaks English. “Take it easy. I’m under the bridge drinking beer, that’s all I have. I |
PI3K and subsequent activation of AKT. Although the glucose-lowering effect of insulin is mediated by the insulin-sensitive glucose transporter GLUT4 in the periphery, glucose transport into most neurons is GLUT3-dependent; transport into the glia and brain endothelial cells is GLUT1-dependent (30). Therefore, insulin is not needed for glucose transport into most brain cells. Instead, insulin in the brain is important for the central regulation of energy homeostasis and glucose homeostasis. Both leptin and insulin regulate POMC neurons and AgRP neurons at multiple levels. They regulate the transcription of Pomc and AgRP via their downstream target transcription factors STAT3 and FoxO1, respectively, and promote the expression of anorexigenic POMC while suppressing orexigenic AgRP (31, 32). FoxO1 also regulates the expression of carboxypeptidase E, which is necessary for processing POMC into α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (an agonist of melanocortin type 4 receptors) (33). Leptin and insulin also regulate the activities of POMC neurons and AgRP neurons (34). For example, both leptin and insulin act on POMC neurons to increase sympathetic activity to adipose tissues and to promote the browning of white fat (35). Therefore, these two hormonal signals of satiety regulate transcription, peptide processing, the activity of central melanocortin neurons, and energy and glucose homeostasis.
Three Layers of Leptin/Insulin Resistance in the Central Regulation of Body Weight The anorexigenic hormone leptin needs to enter the central nervous system and reach target neurons in order to suppress food intake and to stimulate energy expenditure. Leptin action encounters three barriers: the blood–CSF barrier, leptin uptake by the target neuron, and intracellular leptin-signaling resistance. First, leptin must exit the bloodstream and gain access to the CSF. The short isoform of the leptin receptor is highly expressed in cerebral microvessels and choroid plexuses, and is considered to be the main receptor by which leptin crosses the blood–brain barrier and the blood–CSF barrier (36). Megalin expressed by choroid plexuses can also act as a receptor to transport leptin from the blood to the CSF (37). The fenestrated endothelium of median eminence microvessels and the tight junctions between tanycytes together compose the blood–CSF barrier adjacent to the ARC (18). VEGF-A expression in tanycytes modulates the properties of this barrier, and ERK signaling in tanycytes promotes leptin transport across tanycytes to the CSF (38, 39). Once leptin enters the CSF/brain, it must find its target receptor (LepRb), but gliosis can interfere with the diffusion of leptin to LepRb on the target neurons (40). Finally, intracellular leptin signaling can be down-regulated by several molecules, such as PTP-1B, TC-PTP, SOCS3, and endospanin 1, which act on JAK2, STAT3, LepRb, and LepRb endocytosis, respectively (41, 42). Although the source of central insulin is debated, peripheral administration of insulin raises insulin concentrations within the CSF (43), indicating that peripheral insulin also serves as a satiety signal for the central nervous system by crossing the blood–brain barrier (44). Kinetic studies indicate that plasma-to-CSF transport of insulin involves a saturable mechanism (45, 46); this transport is decreased in several insulin-resistant states (47–49). Megalin is implicated in insulin transport, at least across renal tubular epithelial cells (50), which suggest that megalin may also work at the blood–CSF barrier as a carrier for insulin. Both PTP-1B and SOCS3 have been reported to cause insulin resistance at the level of the insulin receptor and IRS proteins, respectively (26). Therefore, common mechanisms are involved in central resistance to leptin and insulin (Figure ). Open in a separate window
Diet-Induced Obesity and Aging Cause Central Resistance to Leptin and Insulin Diet-induced obesity causes central leptin resistance first by affecting the central access of leptin and later by causing leptin resistance within the central nervous system (51). Obesity is associated with decreased leptin transport across the blood–brain barrier in rats (36) and in humans (52), which explains why obese humans have low CSF leptin levels despite having high-serum leptin levels. Within the central nervous system, diet-induced obesity does not uniformly cause leptin resistance. Diet-induced obesity caused by intake of a chronic high-fat diet mainly induces cellular leptin resistance in the ARC and the ventral tegmental area, but not in the lateral hypothalamus, ventromedial hypothalamus, and dorsomedial hypothalamus (53). Diet-induced obesity also induces astrogliosis (along with activation of microglia), which prevents circulating metabolic feedback factors, such as leptin from accessing neurons (54). Aging also impairs the central response to leptin (55–59) by impairing central leptin access and cellular leptin signaling (60). Aging is associated with down-regulation of megalin expression (37), decreased leptin uptake in the hypothalamus due to decreased expression of leptin receptor mRNA (61), decreased levels of leptin receptor protein in the hypothalamus (62), and increased PTP1B levels in the hypothalamus (63). The central insulin response is also attenuated by aging and diet-induced obesity (64–67). Insulin levels in the CSF are paradoxically low- compared to high-serum insulin levels in obese humans (68) and in genetically induced and diet-induced obese animals (49, 69). Consumption of a high-fat diet triggers hypothalamic angiopathy (70); endothelial cells of brain microvessels in obese fa/fa rats exhibit reduced insulin binding, leading to reduced internalization of the insulin–insulin receptor complex in rat brain endothelial cells (71). Expression of the insulin receptor decreases with aging in the central nervous system, especially in the hypothalamus, cerebral cortex, and hippocampus in rats (72). Central administration of insulin fails to reduce food intake under conditions of obesity (65, 67, 73), and intranasal application of insulin to the human brain improves peripheral insulin sensitivity in lean but not in obese men (74), indicating that obesity also causes central insulin resistance. Therefore, previous studies indicate that both central leptin resistance and central insulin resistance are induced by diet-induced obesity and aging at multiple levels. Does a common mechanism underlie these phenomena?
Hypothalamic Inflammation as a Culprit for Central Leptin/Insulin Resistance Hypothalamic inflammation is induced during diet-induced obesity both in rodents and in humans (75). Although intracellular fatty-acid sensing within the hypothalamus is important for the regulation of energy balance (76), excessive amounts of fatty acid in the diet cause hypothalamic inflammation and lead to obesity. Consumption of a diet rich in saturated fatty acids promotes inflammation, gliosis, and neuronal stresses in the mediobasal hypothalamus, along with inflammatory activation of microglia. Depleting microglia from the mediobasal hypothalamus of mice blocks the inflammation and neuronal stresses induced by dietary saturated fatty acids and improve leptin sensitivity (77). Saturated fatty acids can activate toll-like receptor 2- and 4-dependent signaling, leading to induction of the pro-inflammatory signaling mediated by JNK and NF-κB (78, 79). Excess amounts of free fatty acids, glucose, and amino acids due to over-nutrition induce endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and oxidative stress, which also promote the activation of pro-inflammatory signaling and defective autophagy (79). These metabolically induced pro-inflammatory changes in the hypothalamus cause defective intracellular leptin and insulin signaling, leading to central leptin/insulin resistance (80–84) (Figure ). Open in a separate window Pro-inflammatory signals in the hypothalamus are also involved in the aging of mice. Aging activates microglia and NF-κB signaling in the hypothalamus, inhibiting these reactions can improve age-dependent declines in body function in mice (85). Therefore, hypothalamic inflammation, specifically microglial activation and induction of NF-κB signaling, is involved in age-dependent and diet-induced obesity, which are accompanied by central leptin/insulin resistance.
Hypothalamic SIRT1 Ameliorates Central Leptin Resistance and Central Insulin Resistance SIRT1 is an NAD+-dependent protein deacetylase (86) and an energy-sensing molecule responsible for promoting healthy longevity through caloric restriction (87). Caloric restriction prevents aging-associated central leptin resistance in rats (88, 89). In peripheral tissues, SIRT1 has been demonstrated to promote fatty-acid oxidation and to improve insulin sensitivity (90). Single nucleotide polymorphisms in human SIRT1 are linked to both adult obesity (91–94) and childhood obesity (95), indicating that SIRT1 may regulate body weight. Several groups have reported genetic manipulation of SIRT1 in the hypothalamus and analyzed the effects of this manipulation on energy and glucose homeostasis. Genetic loss of Sirt1 in anorexigenic POMC neurons causes leptin resistance and decreases energy expenditure, whereas increasing SIRT1 levels in POMC neurons improves leptin sensitivity and ameliorates the decreased energy expenditure caused by an insulin-resistant form of FOXO1 in mice (96–98). Genetic loss of Sirt1 in orexigenic AgRP neurons causes weight loss due to decreased food intake via reductions in the firing ability of AgRP neurons in mice (99). Increasing SIRT1 levels in AgRP neurons also decreases food intake and body weight due to improved nutrient/hormone sensing in mice (97). Genetic manipulation of Sirt1 in steroidgenic factor 1 (SF1)-positive ventromedial hypothalamic neurons alters sensitivity to leptin and orexin-A, and modulates glucose uptake by skeletal muscle via the sympathetic nervous system (100). Therefore, SIRT1 stimulates energy expenditure, suppresses food intake, and regulates glucose homeostasis in POMC neurons, AgRP neurons, and ventromedial hypothalamic SF1-positive neurons, respectively, partly through improved nutrient/hormone sensing. How does SIRT1 improve central leptin/insulin sensitivity? SIRT1 can down-regulate proteins that promote leptin resistance, such as PTP1B, TC-PTP, and SOCS3 (97, 101). It also promotes insulin sensitivity by suppressing PTP1B [which also contributes to insulin resistance (101)], promoting IRS2 function (102), and down-regulating the transcription factor FOXO1 by promoting its degradation (98, 103). Down-regulation of NF-κB signaling may also improve central leptin/insulin sensitivity because SIRT1 suppresses inflammatory reactions by suppressing the p65RelA subunit of NF-κB (104). SIRT1 levels are reported to decrease as microglia age, and microglial SIRT1 deficiency plays a causative role in aging-mediated memory deficits in mice (105). However, the actions of microglial SIRT1 in the context of obesity, induced by aging or by diet, remain elusive. Other candidates for SIRT1’s downstream effects on central leptin/insulin sensitivity are autophagy and ER stress, since disruption of autophagy and increased ER stress are both linked to hypothalamic leptin resistance and perturbed energy homeostasis (80, 82, 83, 106, 107); SIRT1 regulates both autophagy and ER stress through substrates, such as LC3 (108), Atg5, Atg7, Atg8 (109), and XBP1s (110). However, these hypotheses need to be tested experimentally. SIRT1 can influence epigenetic regulation by directly modifying histones (86) and by affecting DNA methylation through DNMT1 (111) and MeCP2 (112). Thus, SIRT1 can modify the global transcriptional landscape through epigenetic regulation and the targeting of numerous transcription factors and co-factors (90). Therefore, unidentified molecules may also play roles in the improvement of central leptin/insulin sensitivity by SIRT1.
Potential Role of Hypothalamic SIRT1 in Weight Gain and Aging Overall, SIRT1 in the hypothalamus improves energy and glucose homeostasis and central leptin/insulin sensitivity. Because there is no single reliable marker for SIRT1 function in vivo, here I discuss changes in NAD+ content and SIRT1 protein levels during aging and diet-induced obesity in the hypothalamus. NAD+ content in the brain decreases with age in humans and in mice (113, 114). In mice, hypothalamic NAD+ content is significantly decreased in diet-induced obesity (after 4 weeks of a high-fat, high-sucrose diet) and in genetically induced obesity (with a homozygous db mutation) (97). Nicotinamide phosphoribosyltransferase (NAMPT), an essential enzyme in the NAD+ biosynthetic pathway that converts nicotinamide into nicotinamide mononucleotide, exists in two forms (intracellular and extracellular) in mammals (115). The brain expresses intracellular NAMPT at very low levels, and NAMPT levels decrease with aging in multiple organs (116, 117). The extracellular form of NAMPT is secreted from adipose tissue to affect NAD+ concentrations in the hypothalamus. Systemic injection of a NAMPT-neutralizing antibody decreases hypothalamic NAD+ content (118). Adipose tissue-specific Nampt knockout mice exhibit reduced plasma levels of extracellular NAMPT as well as reduced NAD+ concentrations in the hypothalamus; in contrast, adipose tissue-specific Nampt knock-in mice display increased plasma levels of extracellular NAMPT and increased hypothalamic NAD+ content (118). Therefore, although the brain relies on circulating extracellular NAMPT and nicotinamide mononucleotide for NAD+ biosynthesis, the supplies of these precursors decrease with age. Supplementation with these precursors effectively prevents diet-induced obesity and aging-induced diabetes in mice (116, 119), and therefore, this supplementation is currently under exploration as a strategy for counteracting aging and obesity in humans. Restoring SIRT1 protein levels is a less-explored approach to this goal. SIRT1 levels within the ARC decrease with age (97, 120) and after 4 weeks of consumption of a high-fat, high-sucrose diet in mice (97). Increasing SIRT1 protein levels specifically in POMC neurons or in AgRP neurons via genetic approaches was sufficient to prevent age-associated weight gain by stimulating energy expenditure and by suppressing food intake through improved leptin sensitivity (97). However, feeding mice a high-fat, high-sucrose diet reduced both endogenous SIRT1 protein and overexpressed SIRT1 protein in ARC, and eliminated the beneficial effects of genetic overexpression of SIRT1. Therefore, along with increasing SIRT1 activity by providing more NAD+ or a pharmacological activator, increasing the effective enzyme concentration per se also yields benefits. To enable such a SIRT1 “booster” approach, the mechanisms responsible for the decline in ARC SIRT1 levels during diet-induced obesity and/or aging must be identified. Diet similarly affected ARC SIRT1 protein levels when SIRT1 was expressed from the endogenous Sirt1 locus and when coding-sequence Sirt1 cDNA (without any 5′-UTR or 3′-UTR) was expressed from the endogenous Rosa26 promoter (97). These data indicate that the diet-induced reduction in ARC SIRT1 levels is unlikely to be driven by transcriptional or post-transcriptional regulation, but is likely mediated by post-translational regulation. SIRT1 degradation in vitro and in vivo could be regulated by the ubiquitin-proteasome system in the hypothalamus (121) and possibly in other tissues (122–124). Although exposure to a 4-week, high-fat, high-sucrose diet was sufficient to decrease ARC SIRT1 levels in mice, neither a high-fat diet nor a high-sucrose diet alone was as effective (unpublished observation). Furthermore, the effect was not as clearly evident after 2 weeks of a high-fat, high-sucrose diet (unpublished observation). Therefore, declines in ARC SIRT1 levels may not directly result from nutrients within the diet, but rather may be due to metabolic changes within the hypothalamus or in the periphery caused by chronic over-nutrition. Pro-inflammatory signaling could underlie the declines in ARC SIRT1 levels during aging and during diet-induced obesity because inflammatory changes occur during aging and during chronic over-nutrition.
Conclusion Central leptin and insulin resistance, hallmarks of disrupted nutrient/energy sensing by the hypothalamus, are common mechanisms for weight gain caused by aging and diet. Hypothalamic SIRT1 can improve these disruptions by acting on several targets that cause central leptin/insulin resistance. Meanwhile, aging and diets that promote weight gain suppress hypothalamic SIRT1 function by affecting the levels of both SIRT1 and NAD+, which is required for SIRT1 activity. Restoration of hypothalamic SIRT1 function can prevent age-associated weight gain in mice, indicating that improving hypothalamic SIRT1 function at multiple levels via supplementation with NAD+ intermediates, SIRT1 activators, and a SIRT1 “booster” may enable novel treatments of weight gain related to metabolic syndromes as well as weight gain caused by aging (Figure ). Open in a separate window
Conflict of Interest Statement The author declares that the research in this review was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.Join Our Members List For Exclusive Reports
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In an unprecedented move, the Director General of CERN, Fabiola Gianotti will be attending the 2017 Bilderberg Group meeting this July, when all of the planetary muckety-mucks get together a give talks to each other. off-the-record.
CERN is reputedly the largest machine ever built and it produces a magnetic field 100,000 times more powerful than that of the Earth, which is disturbing because the Earth’s EM affects everything on it, notably the pineal glands of vertebrates, which are involved in the innate ability of birds and fish to accurately navigate vast distances in their annual migrations. One wonders what the effects of these massive frequencies might be on humans.
Scientists rarely attend Bilderberg meetings, which are largely composed of bankers and technocrats but apparently, they’ve got something to talk about [unleashing on the planet] this year. There have been reports of CERN’s Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci’s references to interdimensional doorways at a recent press briefing, when he said, “Out of this door might come something, or we may send something through it.”CBS "Late Night" host Stephen Colbert on Monday mocked Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's praise of President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE, suggesting Abe "leave some of the strokes on the golf course."
Abe has golfed with Trump twice since the latter took office as the two leaders appear to have built an affinity for each other in a relatively short period of time.
"Abe really turned on the charm offensive, treating Trump to a round of golf then reminding Donald about it at that night’s reception," Colbert said before playing a clip of Abe.
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“When you play golf with someone not just once but for two times, the person must be your favorite guy," Abe said to laughter during the state banquet at Akasaka Palace in Tokyo on Monday.
“Alright, Shinzo, leave some of the ‘strokes’ on the golf course," Colbert joked.
The CBS host and staunch Trump critic has gotten in hot water before for making sexual references about Trump and other world leaders.
In May, Colbert said of Trump during his opening monologue, “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c--k holster.”
Criticism quickly came from all sides of media as the FCC weighed whether the former Comedy Central host should be fined for that remark.
"Stephen Colbert tried to insult Donald Trump. He made a homophobic comment instead," read a Vox headline. Colbert's Gay Trump Joke Went Too Far, Time Magazine wrote.
Many other outlets had similar headlines.
The FCC ultimately decided not to fine Colbert.
Trump continues his 13-day Asia tour in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday.Over the weekend, there were a flurry of stories about how Donald Trump and his family are already using the presidency to leverage his overseas businesses as well as his new DC hotel. Well, now there’s more. This time in Argentina.
Here’s the background.
For a number of years, Trump and his Argentine partners have been trying to build a major office building in Buenos Aires. The project has been held up by a series of complications tied to financing, importation of building materials and various permitting requirements.
According to a report out of Argentina, when Argentine President Mauricio Macri called President-Elect Trump to congratulate him on his election, Trump asked Macri to deal with the permitting issues that are currently holding up the project.
This comes from one of Argentina’s most prominent journalists, Jorge Lanata, in a recent TV appearance. Lanata is quoted here in La Nacion, one of Argentina’s most prestigious dailies. Said Lanata: “Macri called him. This still hasn’t emerged but Trump asked for them to authorize a building he’s constructing in Buenos Aires, it wasn’t just a geopolitical chat.”
(For Spanish speakers, here’s the original Spanish we’ve translated: “Macri llo llamó. Todavía no se contó pero Trump le pidió que autorizaran un edificio que él está construyendo en Buenos Aires, no fue solo una charla geo política.”)
Separately, Trump’s business partner on the project, Felipe Yaryura, was there on election night at the Trump celebration in New York City.
Why aren’t we hearing about this in the American press?
Well, remember, no one knew anything about the visit from Trump’s Indian business partners until it appeared in the Indian press either. It seems like this is likely happening on many fronts. It’s just being hidden from the American press. We only hear about it when it bubbles to the surface in the countries where Trump is pushing his business deals.
Late Update 2:32 PM: Both President Macri and President-Elect Trump have denied that they discussed Trump’s building project during their post-election phone conversation.
Later Update: 2:48 PM: We received this statement from the Trump campaign: “Any reports alleging a discussion about personal business interests between President-elect Trump and President Macri are completely untrue. The Argentine President and his office have also refuted these baseless claims.”
Even Later Update 2:53 PM: And now a full statement from the Embassy of Argentina: “That issue was not part of the conversation between president Mauricio Macri and president-elect Donald Trump. The subject both leaders talked about was the institutional relationship, and they briefly mentioned the personal relationship they have had for years”.Rent control policies implemented more than 20 years ago aimed at helping low-income Ontarians get affordable housing are having the opposite effect now, and making accommodation even harder to find, an economist with the CIBC argues in a new report Tuesday.
Amid calls for even stricter caps on how much landlords are allowed to hike rents in Toronto's competitive market, economist Benjamin Tal argues any such policy would do more harm than good — even to those it's ostensibly trying to protect.
"Rent control is the exact opposite of what the [Greater Toronto Area] market needs," he says. "If history is a guide, such policy will mostly hurt the people it's trying to protect."
Under current rules that were implemented in 1992 and subsequently left in place by every government that followed, buildings built after 1991 aren't subject to any caps on how much a landlord is allowed to raise the rent each year.
The turnover rate under rent control is lower as tenants stay in properties longer. - Benjamin Tal, CIBC
But older buildings have a cap on how much the rent can rise every year, regardless of what the costs are or whatever conditions in the free market are.
The plan was to encourage landlords and developers to build more apartment units by removing artificial caps on their potential profits. But more than two decades later, Tal says, the effect has been to fund a boom in condominiums that operate as rental units largely outside of regulation.
Others aren't so sure that less regulation is the answer. The Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario thinks the rules need to be updated to reflect the modern market.
"The theory is that with an increased supply of units, 'the market' will drive rents down," the group says in a factsheet on the topic on its website. "The reality is that rents have been increasing across Ontario whether the vacancy rate is high or low."
Most people expect their rent to go up each year, but two Toronto tenants saw their rent legally increased by 100 per cent 2:41
Tal argues that rent control on older units causes them to fall into disrepair since landlords have little incentive to maintain them. "The turnover rate under rent control is lower as tenants stay in properties longer," Tal said. "And naturally, landlords would spend the bare minimum to maintain their units, given that, in many cases, they do not need to attract other tenants."
Toronto City Councillor Josh Matlow agrees that rules need updating, but disagrees with Tal's view and thinks more rent control is what's needed — not less. The chair of the city's tenant issues committee says the "arbitrary" cut-off of 1991 needs to be removed so all buildings are treated the same way.
"The proof is in the pudding," he said in an interview. Rent increases have vastly outpaced inflation, which is why he wants the province to update the rules for a modern era.
Fall into disrepair
"There should be strict guidelines for all rentals before and after the arbitrary date of 1991, and a review and reform to ensure above-the-guideline rent increases" are subject to more scrutiny, Matlow said.
So-called "above-the-guideline" rent increases are when landlords make capital repairs and then pass the costs along to the tenant.
Unlike Matlow, Tal blames the problem of when older units fall into disrepair on rent control because there's no incentive to fix them. And people are less willing to move out of rent controlled buildings, which pushes others into the condo market, because few people are building so-called "purpose-built" rental units — the industry term for apartment buildings.
More "rent control will work to reduce the supply of rental units, and will inflate any segment of the market that is not under rent control," Tal says.
"More activity will be diverted toward condo construction, a segment of the market that is much more immune to rent control as condo owners have multiple avenues to require a tenant to leave," he says.
It's an issue that many at Toronto city hall are keenly aware of Coun. Ana Bailao says the rules on the books today certainly need updating, one way or another.
Different market
"It is a delicate balance," she told CBC News in an interview. "We understand this is a complex issue [but] something has to be done, because when people are getting slapped with rent increases of $600, $700, $800, it's not acceptable."
One way or another, Bailao says, rent control regulations need to find a "balance" and "respond to the new reality of what is today — and increasingly so — a different rental market."
Bailao, who chairs the city's affordable housing committee, has worked with Matlow on the issue and the two will soon present eight recommendations to help regulate Toronto's rental market to the mayor's office. Among the recommendations are a plan to expand rent control to buildings built after 1991.
For his part, Tal isn't advocating that a completely hands-off government approach would fix all of the city's housing problems. Rather, by coupling increased investment in affordable housing with less rent control, he says the market is more likely to fix itself by removing arbitrary limitations on competition.
Part of the problem with Toronto's housing market, Tal says, is people's willingness to buy in at all costs. And encouraging the current two-tiered rental market will do little to change that attitude.
"Any solution to the region's affordability crisis must include a significant increase in the propensity to rent, mainly among young families," Tal says.
Rather than making the rental market even more uncertain than it already is, the best thing government can do on the issue is fix a decades-old mistake by removing rent control entirely, Tal argues.
"Rent in the GTA is now rising much faster than inflation, and rent control is seen as a way to ensure that households on low and middle incomes are not squeezed out of the city," he said.
"While the intentions are pure, the suggested remedy is wrong."Advertisement
Illustration: iStockphoto
An explosion of domain names has reshaped the Internet by offering hundreds of new ways to end a Web address. Lawyers can now advertise websites with “.lawyer,” while toy companies can register with “.toys.” Jokers who want to build a site whose name ends with “.fail” or “.wtf” can do that, too.
But one highly sought-after domain remains stubbornly out of reach for a billion people. Africans still can’t register sites to “.africa” because the right to operate that domain is the subject of a tussle between rival registries that is now dragging through its fourth year. While the domain’s ultimate fate could remain the subject of legal battles for years, a California court could decide within weeks whether to finally permit.africa to go live.
The domain could prove quite lucrative for whichever registry wins it, although both competing registries pledge to spend profits on charitable activities. Registries act as domain-name wholesalers. They sell the right to resell a domain name to many registrars such as GoDaddy, which make their money by signing people up.
Wayne Diamond, who runs a registrar based in South Africa, says many of his clients want to list websites with.africa but are stuck waiting. “I think there’s growing impatience with what’s happening, now that it’s being held up in legal wranglings,” he says. “The delay has had a significant impact on the growth of the domain space in Africa.”
The two registries vying for control of.africa have also pitched the domain as an emerging economic engine and cultural exchange. DotConnectAfrica, a charitable trust that operates out of Kenya, promotes.africa as “your online African identity,” while the South African nonprofit ZA Central Registry says the new domain will enable “e-commerce, technology, and infrastructure to flourish.”
Those promises have so far gone unfulfilled. The tug-of-war began in 2011, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit that manages domain names, noticed that many of the shortest and most memorable addresses that end in “.com,” “.org,” and “.net” had been taken.
The organization invited registries to apply to add more options, and has since released 938 new domains. Most disputes were resolved amicably or by offering domains up for auction. For example, in January, GMO Registry beat seven competitors with its US $41.5 million bid for the “.shop” domain.
The.africa domain did not go up for sale, however, because of its geographic and cultural importance. In fact, ICANN requires applicants for a geographic domain to demonstrate support from 60 percent of national governments.
That requirement lies at the heart of the disagreement over which of the rival registries is better suited to manage.africa. Both candidates submitted their applications in 2012 and claimed that they had the support of the Commission of the African Union. DotConnectAfrica says it received the commission’s blessing in 2009, but the commission later formally withdrew that support and backed ZA Central Registry.
Sophia Bekele, head of DotConnectAfrica, says the process wasn’t “transparent and accountable” and that the commission failed to represent African governments. Neil Dundas, executive director of the organization that operates ZA Central Registry, points out that DotConnectAfrica has relatively few staff on the continent and would work with U.K.–based registry CentralNic to manage the domain. DotConnectAfrica will charge only $10 per year for website registrations, versus the $18 that ZA Central Registry plans to collect should it win the domain rights.
In 2014, ICANN agreed to issue.africa to ZA Central Registry. To fight back, DotConnectAfrica requested an internal review. After two more years, ICANN’s board passed a resolution in March reaffirming its decision and stating that DotConnectAfrica had not garnered enough government support.
That decision would have cleared the way for ZA Central Registry to begin registering Africa’s websites, but DotConnectAfrica filed a legal complaint against California-based ICANN, and asked a U.S. district court to block the organization from awarding.africa to ZA Central Registry while the case proceeds.
At press time, the court was poised to decide whether to grant DotConnectAfrica’s petition for a temporary stay that would prevent the transfer of the long-awaited.africa domain to ZA Central Registry while the suit against ICANN is adjudicated. If the court rules in its favor, ZA Central Registry estimates that it could have.africa sites up and running within four months. Dundas says he would love to see over a million sites signed up within three to five years.
But if not, the delay will drag on, and the promise of a new domain to jump-start economic growth and build a shared online identity among Africans will remain on hold or stalled.I don’t believe Captain Cook discovered Australia. How can I? People were standing on the shore as he weighed anchor!
I don’t believe Australia was settled – it was invaded. How else do we explain a foreign power planting a flag, taking land and extinguishing the rights of the nations of peoples living here? My Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi ancestors resisted and fought the invaders to their lands.
Discovery and settlement and invasion: these words frame the debate about our history. A debate that should be based on fact and logic and respectful cogent persuasion and argument.
I know what I believe. I am prepared to make my case but I don’t wish to force that on anyone else, in fact I welcome people who disagree and I absolutely reject any organisation, government, or institution instructing or guiding or forcing anyone how to think.
It's not 'politically correct' to say Australia was invaded, it's history | Paul Daley Read more
This is what is happening now at the University of New South Wales.
Students are being told it is offensive to use terms such as settlement, they are being instructed not to use words like Aborigine or Aboriginal.
It is suggested that students not refer to dates of Indigenous occupation of Australia. No more should they speak of 40,000 years of history, instead they should refer to the time of the dreaming.
This is wrong.
Education is about evidence and fact. It is about the freedom to disagree, to hold unpopular or sometimes offensive beliefs. Evolution was once considered offensive.
Education is about science, not belief or faith in the unseen or unknown.
I take great pride in the science of Indigenous antiquity of our land, the fossil evidence, the carbon dating of human made fire and art. This speaks to the great story of humankind.
There is a place for myth, and it enhances our understanding of the world. There is a place for our great religious traditions and the moral code and transformational power of faith. The dreaming and our oral traditions inform my identity and my sense of place.
Let’s learn of it all, all of it in its place without substituting one for the other; without forcing some orthodoxy or group think.
There are those who will argue for settlement over invasion. They can point to the legal basis for the establishment of the colony: the concept of Terra Nullius or empty land. It is enshrined in judgements like that of high court chief justice Gibbs in Coe v the commonwealth:
It is fundamental to our legal system that the Australian colonies became British possessions by settlement and not by conquest.
The 1992 high court ruling in the Mabo case overturned Terra Nullius but still upheld the basis for British assertion of sovereignty in 1788.
As the law may support an argument for settlement for many Indigenous people, this remains contentious and the fight for recognition of sovereignty continues.
This is as it should be – a battle of ideas in an open democracy founded on free speech. This isn’t helped by any university shaping how students should think.
I like irascible argumentative feisty people. I like those with strong ideas with the courage to challenge the status quo, those who reject intellectual or political correctness who can do so without resorting to rudeness, bigotry or hatred.
There are those who have spoken today criticising the University of New South Wales out of ignorance, or trying to fuel controversy, others opposed to anything that may dare to concede the humanity or dignity of Indigenous people. They seize on issues like this to wrap their bigotry in faux outrage.
I don’t need a university to protect me from these people or their views. I don’t want them silenced.
I want to be free to call them out in whatever language I choose.NEW YORK (Reuters) - A final hearing on proposals to lift a ban on drilling for natural gas in New York state drew a crowd of protesters on Wednesday opposing further energy development there.
Academy Award-nominated director Josh Fox speaks against hydraulic fracturing at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York November 30, 2011. REUTERS/Andrew Burton
New York City hosted the last of four hearings to discuss the Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) new rules that could open the state’s borders next year to a controversial drilling technique known as fracking.
New York has had a three-year moratorium on fracking, which involves blasting chemical-laced water and sand into gas-rich shale rock deep underground.
The technique would allow drillers to tap potentially huge reserves of gas in New York’s share of the giant Marcellus shale formation. But environmentalists say fracking could contaminate drinking water for millions of residents.
As at previous meetings across the state this month, protesters, including actors Debra Winger and Mark Ruffalo, gathered in downtown Manhattan to express concern about the safety of water supplies, holding signs saying |
er at UC Berkeley. Life on Earth consisted only of single-celled organisms; it would be another billion years before even the simplest multi-cellular life began to evolve.
As part of Breakthrough Listen’s program to observe nearby stars and galaxies for signatures of extraterrestrial technology, the project science team at UC Berkeley added FRB 121102 to its list of targets. In the early hours of Saturday, Aug. 26, Gajjar observed that area of the sky using the Breakthrough Listen backend instrument at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
The instrument accumulated 400 terabytes (a million million bytes) of data over a five-hour period, observing across the entire 4 to 8 GHz frequency band. This large dataset was searched for signatures of short pulses from the source over a broad range of frequencies, with a characteristic dispersion, or delay as a function of frequency, caused by the presence of gas in space between Earth and the source. The distinctive shape that the dispersion imposes on the initial pulse is an indicator of the amount of material between us and the source, and hence an indicator of the distance to the host galaxy.
Analysis by Gajjar and the Breakthrough Listen team revealed 15 new pulses from FRB 121102. The observations show for the first time that fast radio bursts emit at higher frequencies than previously observed, with the brightest emission occurring at around 7 GHz.
“The extraordinary capabilities of the backend receiver, which is able to record several gigahertz of bandwidth at a time, split into billions of individual channels, enable a new view of the frequency spectrum of FRBs, and should shed additional light on the processes giving rise to FRB emission.” Gajjar said.
“Whether or not fast radio bursts turn out to be signatures of extraterrestrial technology, Breakthrough Listen is helping to push the frontiers of a new and rapidly growing area of our understanding of the universe around us,” Siemion said.The International Space Station (ISS) flies in an orbit that keeps it about 400 kilometers (250 miles) above the surface of the Earth—roughly the distance between New York and Boston. Meanwhile, Landsat 8, an Earth-observing satellite, cruises at an average altitude of 705 kilometers (438 miles). That means Landsat 8’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) gets a unique view of the Space Station when the orbits of the two spacecraft occasionally align.
On June 19, 2016, they did just that. Landsat 8 acquired images of the ISS amidst a background of clouds over the state of Odisha in eastern India. The animation above is comprised of eight separate images collected just fractions of a second apart. Each image depicts OLI’s observations of electromagnetic radiation at slightly different wavelengths, or spectral bands. The first image in the sequence depicts OLI’s high-resolution observations of blue and green light (Landsat’s pan band); the second depicts blue light; the third is violet; the fourth is near infrared; the fifth is red light; the sixth is green; the seventh is shortwave infrared (2.107–2.294 micrometer wavelength); and the eighth is a different band of shortwave infrared (1.566–1.651 micrometers). The offsets, or motion, in each image is due to the relative speed of the two spacecraft, the altitude of Landsat 8, and the fact that the images were taken at slightly different times.
Space Station underflights of Landsat 8 are relatively rare. “On average ISS underflights seem to happen a few times a year,” explained Michael Gartley, a scientist at Rochester Institute of Technology. Other underpasses in the Landsat 8 archive have occurred on April 17, 2016; February 23, 2016; May 1, 2015; July 4, 2013; June 27, 2013; and May 3, 2013.
The OLI on Landsat 8 is not the only satellite sensor capable of capturing this type of image. The Landsat 7 and 5 satellites have caught glimpses of the ISS in the past. Likewise, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on the EO-1 satellite—as well as several high-resolution commercial satellites such as Geoeye, Quickbird, and IKONOS—have pushbroom designs that make it possible to image the underflights of orbiting spacecraft.
In fact, Gartley has developed an algorithm that systematically searches the archive of ALI imagery for underflights, and he is currently working on a similar algorithm for the Landsat 8 archive. As he detailed in a 2013 study, the ALI sensor serendipitously imaged “space objects” on 12 different occasions over the course of a decade. Those objects include a Meteor weather satellite, an Iridium 2 communications satellite, the Space Shuttle (STS-124), orbital debris from several types of rockets, and three Russian Kosmos satellites. In all, there are some 5,000 known objects that orbit at an altitude below that of many NASA Earth-observing satellites.
“[Earth-observing satellites] present an unlikely tool for aiding the space situational awareness community in their task of monitoring the growing population of low-Earth orbit space objects,” Gartley noted. “Although the frequency of underflights of space objects is low, the resulting signatures can provide well-calibrated location information.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Caption by Adam Voiland, with some information from Laura Rocchio.IN THE hot debate over the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, there are two competing versions of reality.
In one, increasingly massive communications firms gobble up ever-larger shares of various, increasingly interrelated markets, magnifying the power they wield against innovators who threaten the old business model and against customers already suffering from high bills and poor service. In that world, stopping the Comcast merger would prevent a bad situation from getting worse.
In the other, traditional cable television and wired broadband providers are in increasingly dire competition with online video services, wireless Internet providers and a cash-flush Google expanding its installation of high-speed fiber-optic cable across the country. Consolidation is the only way to ensure these companies have enough capital to invest in new and better technology that will keep their customers happy — or, at least, satisfied enough not to cancel their subscriptions.
In the real world, the outlook for the future of communications and entertainment is foggier than either scenario suggests. That uncertainty recommends a degree of regulatory caution. The government’s smartest move is not to block the merger, but to make clear that regulators will respond if big industry players begin to violate basic principles of market fairness.
Some criticism of the merger is misleading or speculative. Cable subscribers will not lose flexibility to get their television service from another company. The market is split geographically: Comcast and Time Warner Cable do not compete for customers. Will Comcast find ways to use its strengthened position to promote its own content (from NBC, for example) or services (such as its Netflix competitor, Streampix)? It may well gain more leverage in negotiations with content creators, some of which are in pretty strong positions at the moment. But it would take a much more drastic change in practice to start discriminating heavily against other players interacting with the company.
By the same token, some merger supporters overstate the extent of competition the cable industry faces. At the moment, there are few broadband services as attractive as the wired connections cable companies sell. That might change, but it is not clear how fast and in what way. Merger defenders also downplay the conflicts of interest that might encourage firms such as Comcast to promote their products on the wires they own, about which critics are speculating.
That is not grounds to take the severe step of blocking a proposed merger. But it is reason for federal regulators to keep a close eye on what cable companies, still huge players in how we communicate and consume culture, end up doing to competitors and upstarts — and to set clear conditions that allow a crackdown, if necessary.In a short span of two weeks, China’s most important people attending its biggest political ball of the year have been treated to two vastly different shades of Beijing’s skies.
When the annual plenary sessions began on March 3, the sky was a smoggy grey as the Chinese capital suffered light to medium pollution.
That cleared quickly, however – as if the gods knew the import of the event that had the country’s movers and shakers all gathered in one place at the same time.
Or maybe it was the government’s measures – closing polluting factories and rationing traffic – that had finally kicked in.
It was clear blue skies over the next few days. The air quality index as measured by the US embassy remained largely below 100 for those few precious days.
Smog returned to Beijing as China’s political gala ended
And though the air quality was categorised as only “moderate” – as opposed to “good” or “very good” – it was enough to get delighted residents and “two sessions” attendees clamouring over themselves to take photos and selfies as evidence to share with their friends on social media.
But as if to remind the people not to take it for granted, the sky turned a gloomy grey again after less than a week... only to return to blue when residents and politicians in the capital threw up sighs of disappointment, taking again to social media to document the change.
The blue skies held up for another few days all the way until the plenary sessions finally ended on Wednesday.
And as the parliamentary meetings drew to a close, as if on cue, the smog began descending on the capital once more.
Was it a response to Premier Li Keqiang’s declaration during his press conference that “I, too, hope that smog will be a thing of the past and blue skies will no longer be a luxury”?
On Wednesday, the AQI in Beijing climbed above 150 to “unhealthy” from a reading of around 50 the day before.
At the “unhealthy” level, people begin to experience the negative effects of exposure to air pollution, such as breathing difficulties.
Can China really win its “war against smog”? Li, at his press conference, said it would take time.
As polluting factories in the vicinity start production again now that the who’s who have left the capital, more choking smog can only be expected over the next few days.
It remains to be seen if blue skies can indeed become less of a luxury for Chinese residents, as the premier hopes.
This Teacher got 14 DAYS in CHINESE PRISON for Visa Violations
click READ MOREPaleo Pancakes Below are the Paleo Pancake recipes submitted for our 2 year anniversary Paleo Pancake-off! The winner’s recipe is listed first. Congrats Leigh – and all of the Paleo Pancake cooks! DAYWALKER’S (aka LEIGH’S) PALEO CAKES
*Adapted from Paleo Spirit Recipe Ingredients: 1 cup coconut milk
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup honey
4 eggs, beater with mixer
1/2 cup coconut flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 apple, chopped How to: Preheat pan or griddle over medium-low heat. Beat eggs in a stand mixer until frothy. Mix in milk, vanilla, and coconut nectar. Mix dry ingredients together (flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt) in a separate small bowl. Combine dry mixture with wet in the stand mixer and beat on medium speed for about 30 seconds. Scrape down sides of bowl then mix on medium to medium-high for another minute or two or until the coconut flour is completely mixed into the batter Fold in chopped apple. Grease pan with coconut oil. Pour batter to create pancakes that are about 3 inches in diameter. If the batter seems too thin you may need to add a small amout of coconut flour to achieve the desired consistency. Cook for approximately 3 minutes, flip and cook an additional 2-3 minutes. Sweet Pancake topping: strawberries, blueberries, honey and vanilla! LOU’S CHOCOLATE PANCAKES WITH COCONUT MILK WHIPPED CREAM Ingredients: 1/4 cup apple sauce
2 egg whites
1 whold egg
2 Tbsp coconut milk
2 Tbsp cocnut flour
2 Tbsp natural cocoa powder
2 Tbsp raw honey
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking soda
pinch of cinnamon
Coconut Whipped Cream How to: Preheat a griddle over medium-low heat with some coconut oil. In a blender, add liquid ingredients. Blend on low speed until mixed. Add dry ingredients and blend until just mixed. Spoon the better onto the skillet. Using the bottom of the spoon, spread it out a little bit so the batter remains thin. Flip once you see bubbles popping though the top Serve with Coconut Whipped Cream Coconut Whipped Cream Ingredients: 1 can unsweetened coconut milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 Tbsp agave nectar
1-4 Tbsp coconut flour How to: Chill a can of coconut milk in the fridge overnight. Drain off clear liquid. Beat in chilled bowl with hand mixer until fluffy. add vanilla and gradually add in agave nectar and coconut flour. Viola! Paleo Whipped Cream! JOE B’S BANANA / CHOCOLATE CHIP PANCAKES Ingredients: 2 bananas
5 Tbsp of almond flour
2 tsp of honey
4 eggs
Pinch of baking powder
1 cup of chops (I recommend Enjoy Life non-dairy mini-chips)
1 tsp of clarified butter How to Mix all ingredients in a blender except the butter and chips Heat a pan to medium/ low heat Add butter to pan Dollop pancake batter by the spoonful into skillet While the pancakes are cooking, add some chips to the uncooked side before flipping Flip pancakes when the sides get a little brown Serve with Maple syrup. BACONCAKES by Poop
(Hilarious, right!?) Ingredients: 6-12 pieces of uncured bacon
3 cups raw almond flour
3 eggs
1 can coconut milk (14 oz)
1 ripe banana
2 Tbsp vanilla extract
1/2 Tbsp salt
1 Tbsp baking soda
2 Tbsp cinnamon How to: Cook bacon until done to your liking. Turn grill down to low/medium heat In a blender, blend eggs, vanilla, banana and coconut milk. Blend until smooth. One by one, add in the dry ingredients. If batter becomes to too thick, add a Tbsp or 2 of water. Consistency sholudn’t be runny – it should pour out like cake batter). Add coconut oil to pan. Pour batter into 6 inch pancakes and add cooked bacon to the middle. When pancakes form tiny bubbles and begin to pop- flip and cook the other side. Eat with100% pure maple syrup and enjoy! GIGI’S (aka Trish’s) PALEO PANCAKES Ingredients: 3 EGGS
½ C. COCONUT MILK
½ C. SPARKLING WATER
2 TSP. VANILLA
1 T HONEY
½ TSP. BAKING SODA
½ TSP. SALT How to: BEAT EGGS WELL AND THEN SLOWLY ADD THE OTHER INGREDIENTS. WHEN EVERYTHING IS BLENDED, ADD 1 C. OF FRESH BLUBERRIES. DROP ONTO A HOT GRIDDLE COATED WITH COCONUT OIL. MAKE THEM SMALL AS THE BATTER IS DIFFICULT TO HANDLE WHEN THE PANCAKES ARE BIGGER. COOK THE PANCAKES UNTIL LIGHT GOLDEN BROWN ON BOTH SIDES. REMOVE AND SERVE WITH BLUBERRY SYRUP MADE WITH FROZEN BLUBERRIES COOKED DOWN IN ABOUT ¼ C. OF COCONUT OIL. SPRINKLE WITH UNSWEETENED COCONUT AND WALNUTS IF PREFERRED. MK’S Paleo Pancakes Ingredients: 1 cup almond flour
1 cup shrdded coconut
1/4 cup coconut milk
3 whold eggs
1 tsp almond butter
1 tsp coconut oil
1/2 tsp aking powder
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp agave nectar
Add diced bananas to taste How to: Mix all together Spoon onto medium heat griddle and cook, flipping once, until both sides are cooked through Top with agave and bananas! Subscribe to the comments on this post
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Nick Blackwell's family expect the boxer to wake from his induced coma in the next 48 to 72 hours, reports BBC boxing correspondent Mike Costello.
Blackwell, 25, was taken to hospital after Saturday's British middleweight title fight with Chris Eubank Jr was stopped in round 10.
He suffered a small bleed on the brain but has not required surgery.
"I'm told the vital signs are good and doctors are cautiously optimistic," Costello told BBC Radio 5 live.
Blackwell is heavily sedated, but doctors are gradually reducing the amount of drugs over the next two to three days.
"There are no major issues within the context of his condition," added Costello.
Towards the end of the fight, Eubank's father - former world champion Chris Eubank Sr - told his son to punch Blackwell's body rather than his face.
The ringside doctor then halted the fight in round 10 because Blackwell's left eye was swollen shut.
He was taken from the ring on a stretcher while being given oxygen.
Eubank Sr later told BBC Sport he would have stopped the fight had his son been in the same situation, while Eubank Jr said he eased off in the final round and that referee Victor Loughlin should have ended the bout sooner.
However, Eubank Jr's trainer Ronnie Davies disagreed and said both Loughlin and Blackwell's corner were right not to pull him out of a "title fight".
The British Boxing Board of Control said it is satisfied with the way the fight was handled and respected trainer Adam Booth told BBC Radio 5 live that Loughlin had "acted immaculately".
Meanwhile, boxing promoter and former world champion Barry McGuigan said it was an "isolated incident" and "nobody was to blame".US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook called Mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio "a terrorist" over his tweet expressing support for Clinton's rival in the Democratic Party presidential nomination Bernie Sanders, according to the emails released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The information was revealed in a batch of emails of Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta published by the whistleblowing website.
An email with de Blasio's tweet saying "I’ve always liked what i heard from Bernie Sanders [on income inequality]" was sent out by Battleground state communications person Ian Sams on June 10, 2015 to other Clinton's campaign members, including Podesta. Mook replied to the email sending a message, "Wow. What a terrorist."
De Blasio endorsed Clinton in late October 2015.
WikiLeaks published the first batch of Podesta's emails on October 8.Everyone is watching Paris today to see if the FIA decides to take any further action against Sebastian Vettel, but more important things are happening elsewhere. Sources at Silverstone have tipped off Britain’s biggest vaguely-serious newspaper that Silverstone is going to action the break clause in its British GP contract and bring the race to an end after 2019. Well, that’s the theory. The reality is that this is a negotiating ploy to bring the Formula One group to the table. Given that there are three years before a new British GP promoter is needed, I doubt this will have much impact, indeed it gives the Formula One group the option to shop around. The folks at Silverstone think that they are the only game in town and, to some extent this is true. The Circuit of Wales has blown up in the last few days and I doubt it will ever happen. There is no interest from Donington Park, but there are some possibilities in the London Docklands and I see this being the most likely route for Chase Carey and his gang, with Silverstone as a back-up plan for 2020. That might upset the traditionalists, but imagine a Singapore-style event in stodgy old London. Silverstone is a great event and attracts a big crowd, but it cannot compete with F1 fees as they now are, unless the government helps. Does it make sense for Carey to lower the fees? It is an interesting question. But it will not come to this for a while yet as the British GP remains until at least July (or late June) 2019.
Elsewhere, as expected, there is still no new team principal for Sauber, evidence that F1 is not as easy as some financial types might think.
And there is the question of Jolyon Palmer. For some time there have been rumours that Britain’s other F1 driver may be in danger of losing his seat at Renault, having failed to get close to Nico Hulkenberg on most occasions this year. The implication has long been that the team would stick with Jolyon until the British GP at least, and that still seems to be the case. However the race in Baku was a big setback for the Enstone team, with all its rivals scoring and its goal of being fifth in the Constructors’ Championship beginning to fade. Williams now has twice as many points as Renault and while there are still a lot of races to go, it is clear that the team needs two drivers both capable of scoring points at all races if it is going to beat Team Willy. Chucking out Palmer makes no sense unless there is a clear improvement, so there is little logic to have a Sergey Sirotkin, for example. There’s no time to teach new boys how to do things. The team says Robert Kubica is not a possibility and it is hard to get excited about any of the other options with suitable F1 experience.
So the best option would seem to be to go after a driver from a rival team. There are a few who are unhappy and would like to move on, but who could actually move? McLaren wants to hold on to Fernando Alonso and are not about to give him away, but if offered money might they part with Stoffel Vandoorne? It all seems pretty unlikely. Romain Grosjean could be of interest, but does Haas want to release him? Why would they?
The best option would probably be Carlos Sainz, for a number of reasons. Toro Rosso can always use money (or a reduction in its engine bills). Carlos has been there for three seasons and he has done well, but Red Bull has nowhere to take him, unless Max Verstappen or Daniel Ricciardo departs – and neither is showing any sign of being able to do that. Red Bull has a hungry replacement for Sainz in Pierre Gasly, who is waiting for his F1 chance. Gasly might be an option for Renault, except he has no F1 racing experience and so the only really sensible conclusion is for Renault to go after Sainz. A Renault deal offers him a solid future (which Red Bull cannot) and Toro Rosso/Red Bull has things to gain from letting him go… That, surely, offers the basis for a negotiation.
The option is to leave things as they are and hope they improve, but in this age of team principals as football managers, it might not be wise for Renault’s folk to do that…
We will see.Hipster or hepcat, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jazz, in particular bebop, which became popular in the early 1940s. The hipster adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following: dress, slang, use of cannabis and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty, and relaxed sexual codes.
Charlie Parker (known as Bird) at Three Deuces in New York
The words hep and hip are of uncertain origin, with numerous competing theories being proposed. In the early days of jazz, musicians were using the hep variant to describe anybody who was "in the know" about an emerging culture, mostly black, which revolved around jazz. They and their fans were known as hepcats. By the late 1930s, with the rise of swing, hip rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace hep. Clarinetist Artie Shaw described singer Bing Crosby as "the first hip white person born in the United States."[1]
In 1939, the word hepster was used by Cab Calloway in the title of his Hepster's Dictionary, which defines hep cat as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive". In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified this to hipster[2] in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk", published in 1944 with the album Boogie Woogie In Blue, featuring the self-titled hit "Handsome Harry the Hipster".[3] The entry for hipsters defined them as "characters who like hot jazz."
Hipsters were more interested in bebop and "hot" jazz than they were in swing, which by the late 1940s was becoming old-fashioned and watered down by "squares" like Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo and Robert Coates. In the 1940s, white youth began to frequent African-American communities for their music and dance. These first youths diverged from the mainstream due to their new philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits. The drug of choice was marijuana, many hipster slang terms were dedicated to the substance.
In his book Jazz: A History (1977), Frank Tirro defines the 1940s hipster:
To the hipster, Bird was a living justification of their philosophy. The hipster is an underground man. He is to the Second World War what the dadaist was to the first. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and overcivilized to the point of decadence. He is always ten steps ahead of the game because of his awareness, an example of which might be meeting a girl and rejecting her, because he knows they will date, hold hands, kiss, neck, pet, fornicate, perhaps marry, divorce—so why start the whole thing? He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions—so what values are left for him?—except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that, "be cool," and look for kicks. He is looking for something that transcends all this bullshit and finds it in jazz.
Marty Jezer, in The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945–1960 (1999), provides another definition:World Cup-winning goalkeeper Fabian Barthez will face one of the biggest challenges of his career this weekend when he swaps his goalkeeping gloves for driving gloves to compete in his first Le Mans 24 Hours.
World Cup-winning goalkeeper Fabian Barthez will face one of the biggest challenges of his career this weekend when he swaps his goalkeeping gloves for driving gloves to compete in his first Le Mans 24 Hours.
The former Manchester United star is part of the driver line-up for the No 58 Team Sofrev Asp Ferrari 458 that will compete in the GTE-Am class alongside Anthony Pons and Soheil Ayari in an all-French trio.
Having won the French GT championship last season after turning his commitments to morot racing, the 42-year-old will step-up to tackle one of the most challenging races in the world, as teams compete 24 hours round the clock to conquer the Circuit de la Sarthe.
Barthez won the Prmeier League twice with United in 2000-01 and 2002-03, as well as winning the Champions League in 1992-93 with Marseille and Ligue 1 twice with Monaco in 1996-97 and 1999-2000.
But his career defining moments – on the pitch at least – was featuring in both the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championship successes for France.
The dangers that Barthez faces became all too clear in the build-up to Saturday’s race, with no fewer than seven red flags hindering practice and qualifying. The biggest accident was that suffered by the No 1 Audi, when Loic Duval mysteriously hit the wall as high speed in the Porsche Curves.
Duval was lucky to escape with his life, let alone without serious injury, but medics decided that he would not be allowed to compete in the car of the reigning champions. Former GP2 driver James Calado has also been ruled out of competing after his Ferrari 458 went off in the same section of the track. The Briton suffered a suspected concussion, but has tweeted that he is alright and will be back behind the wheel as soon as he can.
Win One of Five Pairs of Tickets to Ireland v France - Click here
Online EditorsST. PAUL, Minn. -- The St. Paul Saints split a Sunday doubleheader with the Gary Southshore Railcats on Sunday afternoon as the Saints took game one 4-0, but dropped game two 10-3. The doubleheader was necessary due to Saturday’s rainout.
Saints take game one 4-0
The Saints got the scoring started right away in the bottom of the first when Tim Colwell led off with a solo homerun to right field to put the Saints up 1-0. After two flyouts, Brady Shoemaker doubled to left-center field and ended up scoring when Tony Thomas jacked a home run to the bullpen in left field to make it a 3-0 lead. Anthony Gallas ended up flying out to end the inning.
The Railcats almost had a chance in the fourth inning when Wilfredo Gimenez led off with an infield single. He stole second and advanced to third when Ryan Fitzgerald grounded out to first. Saints pitcher John Straka was able to wiggle out of the inning without giving up any runs thanks to a weak groundout and a strikeout to keep it a 3-0 Saints lead.
In the bottom of the fourth inning, Thomas stepped up to the plate for his second at-bat of the game and ripped a double to left field to put a runner on second with nobody out. He scored when Anthony Gallas singled to center field to boost the lead to 4-0. Gallas ended up advancing to second when pitcher Jeff McKenzie balked. He advanced to third when Jon Kristoffersen grounded out to shortstop but was stranded as Tanner Vavra grounded out to second to end the inning.
Again the Railcats had a scoring chance in the fifth inning, as they got the bases loaded with two outs thanks to an error by Nate Hanson, but Straka was again able to wiggle out of the jam to keep the lead. Straka finished that inning with 95 pitches, leading manager George Tsamis to remove him from the game in the sixth inning in favor of left-hander Corey Williams.
Williams was on the mound in the top of the seventh when Colin Willis led off with a double to left-center field. He was forced to remain there when Frank Martinez hit a sharp line drive to Hanson, who knocked it down but was unable to get an out. That was the point where Williams was removed from the game in favor of closer Seth Rosin.
He got Crosby to hit a fielder’s choice, that was strange, as it was a soft pop-up to second that wasn’t enough for the infield fly rule to be called. Vavra fielded it on a hop, threw to second for one out, then Jon Kristoffersen threw it to third for the second out. Gimenez followed with a groundout to shortstop to end the game.
Tim Colwell steps out of the box during the second game. (Stevie Larson/VAVEL USA)
Railcats break out big bats for game two
The Railcats and the Saints were scoreless through two innings in the second game, but in the top of the third, the Railcats piled on five runs after Fitzgerald led off with a triple to right-center field. He scored when John Holland grounded out. Kris Goodman followed it up with a walk and scored when Chase Harris doubled. Harris advanced to third on a wild pitch, and after Anthony Cheky Jr. drew a walk, Willis hit a single to left-center field to score Harris. Martinez got in on the act, as he singled to right field to score Cheky Jr. and Willis to make it a 5-0 game.
Jaime Del Valle followed with a single of his own, which spelled the end of the night for Jason Creasy, who was removed in favor of Connor Little. Little was able to get out of the inning without giving up any more runs, keeping it a 5-0 game.
The Saints picked up three runs in the bottom of the inning, as Brady Burzynski led off with a walk. He advanced to second when Thomas hit a two-out single and scored when Gallas doubled to right field that scored Burzynski. Thomas would score on a wild pitch, while Gallas scored when Danny Oh singled to right field to make it a 5-3 lead.
That was where the Saints ended their good luck, as the Railcats tacked on five more runs over the next three innings, while the Saints were unable to get any more runs across the plate. The game ended with a 10-3 final score in favor of the Railcats, their first win of the young season.
Quick Hits
- The Saints ended the first series of the season with a 3-1 record, with all of their wins coming against the Railcats. Last season, the Saints swept the Railcats in the season-opening series, albeit with a completely different roster.
- The Saints will now travel to Sioux Falls, S.D. to face the Canaries in a three-game series before returning to CHS Field to face the Kansas City T-Bones. The Railcats, meanwhile, will head to Kansas City to face the T-Bones before returning home next weekend for their home opener against the Texas Airhogs.
GAME SUMMARIES
Game One
Win - John Straka (1-0)
Loss- Jeff McKenzie (0-1)
Save- Seth Rosin (1)
Player of the game - Tony Thomas (2-3, double, home run, 2 runs scored)
Game Two
Win - Conrad Wozniak (1-0)
Loss - Jason Creasy (0-1)
Save - None
Player of the game - Frank Martinez (3-5, 3 runs batted in)Image:Matthew Straubmuller/Flickr
A surveillance system sold by the infamous surveillance software developer Hacking Team went "missing" after presidential elections in Panama at the end of 2014.
Hacking Team, a tech company that sells spyware to government customers from Ethiopia to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, was hacked on Sunday. The massive breach exposed more than 400GB of secrets, and sent the company in "full on emergency mode," as one source put it to Motherboard.
Leaked emails also suggest Hacking Team was not always in control of the products it sold, and that its clients might have abused them in Panama.
"I just got word from Robotec that the system we installed in Panama had gone missing," Hacking Team's then-salesperson Alex Velasco wrote in an email to the company's higher ups, who seemed taken aback by the incident.
"The system we installed in Panama had gone missing."
"Would you please better explain to us what 'gone missing' really means?" asked Hacking Team's CEO and co-founder David Vincenzetti in reply. "A robbery? An insider crime? Is there any newspaper article reporting this accident?"
Velasco wrote back that an individual named Hugo, presumably a local liaison, told him that Hacking Team's equipment "disappeared from the office after the presidential election, and before the new president moved in."
"All Hugo told me is that they are looking for it and can not find it," Velasco said, according to the emails. "This happened with the presidential change."
Former President Ricardo Martinelli was not running, but he had hand-picked a successor to extend his grip on power. Surprisingly, however, outsider candidate Juan Carlos Varela won.
Velasco did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment.
"Our best hope is that no report develops regarding this."
Eric Rabe, the company's head of marketing and spokesperson, didn't seem too worried about the loss of powerful surveillance technology—but was more preoccupied about the press finding out about it.
"Our best hope is that no report develops regarding this," Rabe wrote. "Should we get a call anywhere from a member of the press, elected official, regulator, etc. regarding the Panama system, we should say as little as possible but try to determine what the caller knows, then promise to look into it and call back. Then we can decided [sic] whether or not to offer any comment and, if so, what."
Rabe, too, did not respond to a request for comment.
It's unclear from the leaked data whether the missing system ever resurfaced, or what exactly happened to cause its disappearance in the first place. A source with knowledge of the incident said that the lost Remote Control System installation was never found, but it's likely not operational anymore. As Motherboard reported yesterday, Hacking Team has the ability to shut down its customers systems, if the need to.
After the elections in Panama, the the former president Martinelli has been accused of illegally wiretapping dozens of public figures, politicians and business people, according to local reports. In his defense, Martinelli said the investigations were nothing more than an attempt of "political vengeance" by Varela, the current president of Panama—who has also been accused of spying on political enemies. A witness told Panama America that Varela has likely engaged in surveillance without judicial oversight, according to the report.
Regardless of who's doing it, it seems there's been a lot of spying going on in Panama, perhaps thanks to Hacking Team's technology.The Toronto Parking Authority (TPA) has chosen a new supplier for the city's public bike-sharing system, a move that will see the TPA buy 1,000 new bikes and 120 new stations this year.
PBSC Urban Solutions is the new supplier, an international company that already provides cities like Montreal, New York, Washington, San Francisco and London with bike-sharing systems.
The purchase more than doubles the number of bikes in Bike Share Toronto, according to the TPA.
On top |
one of the most effective ways of reducing misconceptions.
As part of the college class MET103 - Global Climate Change, students pick a climate myth from the Skeptical Science list of myths. Our refutations are often written at multiple levels: Basic, Intermediate and Advanced. Students are required to carefully study all the versions of a specific myth, then summarise all the information in their own words. Students are marked on how well they describe the myth, why it persists and how well they refute the misinformation. They're encouraged to read the Debunking Handbook for techniques on effective debunking.
In 2013, three students scored 100%, well above the class average of 72% or 77% in the Spring classes. All three students used an alternative explanation to fill the gap created by the debunking. They also used simple explanations to avoid the Overkill Backfire Effect.
Countering the “It's the Sun” Argument
Robert Necci began his paper by providing an explicit warning mentioning the myth, useful in avoiding the Familiarity Backfire Effect:
This argument is deliberately misleading; intended to shift public opinion by instilling doubt over the validity of climate science in the United States. The objective of this action is to create controversy and debate, allowing for any regulations on greenhouse gas emissions to be delayed for as long as possible.
Necci explains concepts such as radiative imbalance, total solar irradiance and the greenhouse effect. He reveals that TSI has decreased in the past few decades while global air temperatures have been increasing. The increased greenhouse effect is the only physical explanation for the modern day warming.
Read Robert Necci's full paper...
Hurricanes Aren’t Linked to Global Warming
Mike Santalucia describes how the planet is being warmed due to greenhouse gas emissions, leading to increased ocean temperatures and higher sea levels. These two factors are leading to more powerful and damaging hurricanes. The author challenges the myth of no trend in hurricanes by citing research finding “increasing cyclone numbers has lead (sic) to a distinct trend in the number of major hurricanes and one that is clearly associated with greenhouse warming”. Even if the number or intensity of hurricanes were not changing, rising sea levels due to global warming will make every hurricane more damaging via increased storm surges.
Read Mike Santalucia's full paper...
Ice Age Predicted in the 70s? Not So Fast
Anthony Buonasera refutes the myth that scientists were predicting a coming ice age in the 1970s by explaining that the origin of the myth comes from two stories in the popular press (TIME and Newsweek) and not from peer-reviewed scientific journals. From 1965 to 1979, there were a total of seven peer reviewed studies that predicted global cooling while 42 studies that predicted global warming.
Scott Mandia's classes are demonstrating that agnotology-based learning is a powerful way of engaging students, teaching climate science and equipping students with the critical thinking skills to detect misinformation.
Read Anthony Buonasera's paper...‘Anti-Muslim reporting’ has led to an increase in hate crimes against Muslims a report says.
Journalists and media experts have submitted recommendations to Leveson Inquiry to address racist media portrayal of Muslims and it’s wider social impact.
The report ‘Race and Reform: Islam and Muslims in the British Media’ draws on first-hand interviews with 16 journalists, media experts, community representatives and politicians and aims to address inaccurate anti-Muslim narratives in British media and their social impact, from the 1990s to 2011.
It also examined a large range of significant academic studies, policy reports, opinion polls, and surveys.
Submitted by Unitas Communications, the report found a disturbing correlation between the rise of anti-Muslim narratives in the media over the last decade, a rise in Islamophobic sentiment in wider British society and a rise in hate crimes against members of Muslim communities over this period.
Findings in specific studies found the Muslim world was associated with the words ‘extremism and terrorism’, ‘despotism’ and ‘sexism’.
It also found that in a study of 351 articles over a random selected one week period in 2007 - 91% of articles proved to be negative. And 12 of 19 publications had no positive associations at all.
Ninety-six percent of tabloid articles were negative compared with 89% of broadsheet articles.
References to ‘radical Muslims’ outnumbered references to ‘moderate Muslims’ by 17 to one. Imagery associated with articles depicting Muslims generally depicted Muslims as a homogenous mass.
Report author Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Chief Research Officer at Unitas Communications, said: “Although there are mixed views about the term ‘Islamophobia’, our analysis of existing research to date on how the British media has reported on Islam and Muslims over the last two decades shows that this reporting has been overwhelmingly negative, stereotypical and inaccurate.
“This is due largely to poor journalistic standards in the tabloid press, which sets the wider news agenda in print and broadcasting.
“Within the last decade in particular, spikes in anti-Muslim reporting have correlated with an increase in negative perceptions of British Muslims in wider society.
“This in turn has correlated with a dramatic rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes, which now appear to be at record levels.”
The report states: ‘Contrary to conventional wisdom anti-Muslim discourses did not originate after the 9/11 attacks, but predated those attacks by some decades.’ ‘After 9/11 the scrutiny on Islam and Muslims led to an escalation of inaccurate anti-Muslim reporting in the British Media. The primary driver of this kind of reporting was the populist tabloid press.’ Among the report’s eight key recommendations to the Leveson Inquiry for media reform were.
• More robust enforcement powers for the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) to deal with third-party complaints, with a more equal right of reply and harsher penalties for violations of the press code of conduct including fines.
• A better press code of conduct revised with assistance from the Equality & Human Rights Commission to ensure media compliance with existing equalities legislation.
• Establish a PCC advisory panel on issues relating to Islam and Muslims.
• Greater engagement between media agencies and minority groups, including measures to improve diversity in employment.
• Protection for journalists from editorial pressure to generate inaccurate stories.
• There was also an under-representation of minorities and Muslims in the media. And there was a call for more to be done to increase representation.
Contributors included Political Editor of the Daily Mirror Jason Beattie, Director of POLIS and former Channel 4/ITN Programme Editor Charlie Beckett, Executive Director of the Daily Telegraph Group The Rt. Hon. Lord Guy Black, former Mail on Sunday and Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiat, former Independent on Sunday Deputy Editor and Journalism Professor Brian Cathcart, Chair of Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom Professor Julian Petley, former Asia Editor at BBC World TV Rita Payne, Head of Diversity at The Guardian Yasir Mirza, and former Deputy Features Editor at The Times Burhan Wazir.Today we launch our very own radio station in cooperation with Radio Bandit Sweden.
Its something we worked on for quite a while, and we feel really proud of it.
It is a digital radio station which mainly will play Sabaton songs, but also bands who have played or will play at our festival Sabaton Open Air – Rockstad: Falun can be heard there, which ensures that the mix will be just great.
Here you can hear your favourite Sabaton songs 24/7, and also hear us talk about the songs in a way
you never heard before. Both historical and fun facts combined with unknown stories from our tours.
We talk Swedish, but you can listen from anywhere in the world.
Tune in and rock!
Update: This radio station is no longer live.Photo by Nina Corcoran
In the 2014 documentary No Cameras Allowed, we watched one guy crash more than 50 festivals around the globe, including Bonnaroo, Coachella, Glastonbury, and Austin City Limits. An upcoming film is looking to take that idea to the next level by following seven different people as they journey through a three-day festival.
Simply titled FESTIVAL, the documentary examines these individuals’ various experiences, as well as festival culture as a whole, aiming to be “an honest and detailed look at why our generation attends massive events, what is sacrificed, what is gained, and why it matters.”
Says the film’s director and executive producer Michael Raspatello: “This isn’t a concert film or a behind-the-scenes look at any one festival. It neither vilifies nor glorifies the festival industry. This is a collection of stories from real individuals, a snapshot of what happens when 100,000 people descend on a festival weekend.”
Alongside footage of the FESTIVAL’s protagonists — a group of men and women whose ages range from 20 to 40 — the documentary promises never-before-seen clips of HAIM, Duke Dumont, and Benny Benassi. There will also be cameos from industry veterans, journalists, historic segments about Newport Folk and Monterrey Jazz, and archival video of festivals past, such as Lollapalooza 1.0 and Woodstock ’99.
The folks behind FESTIVAL have launched an IndieGoGo campaign to help offset some of the film’s costs. Check it out here.
Watch the official trailer below.Share. Actor on playing the part: "Give me a call." Actor on playing the part: "Give me a call."
So remember that rumor going around last week about Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston potentially being on the short list to play Lex Luthor in the next Superman movie? Well, over the weekend Cranston responded to the rumor, and it sounds like he's interested.
"Give me a call," the actor told Metro with a grin. "I like Lex Luthor. I think he's misunderstood. He's a loveable, sweet man."
Exit Theatre Mode
Cranston, of course, is no stranger to the DC Universe. The actor also voiced Commissioner Gordon in 2011's Batman: Year One. Perhaps if things don't pan out in Metropolis, Cranston could return to the GCPD in the Batman vs. Superman film?
What do you think? Would you like to see Cranston in the role of Lex Luthor, or even James Gordon? Let us know in the Comments!
Exit Theatre Mode
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson on Twitter, or MaxNicholson on IGN.KPCC's education team — Annie Gilbertson, Deepa Fernandes, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez and Mary Plummer — covers education. These stories are part of a developing, ongoing conversation that is continually updated. Email suggestions or tips to soshiro@kpcc.org.
Teachers in the 7,000-student Centinela Valley Union High School District are angered by a Daily Breeze report that Superintendent Jose Fernandez received a pay package last year worth a reported $633,000.
Jack Foreman, president of the Centinela Valley Secondary Teachers Association, told KPCC: "We're just appalled that he would take this excess compensation."
Foreman said he plans to meet with many of the union's 310 members this week to decide what, if any action, they might take. The district in southwest L.A. County operates Leuzinger, Hawthorne and Lawndale high schools, an adult school and a continuation high school.
The Daily Breeze story notes that Fernandez's total compensation "even eclipsed that of John Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system. Deasy’s base salary is $330,000 this school year and his gross compensation is just shy of $390,000, according to the LAUSD. But the district enrolls more than 650,000 students while Centinela Valley serves about 6,600."
Assistant Superintendent Bob Cox said the information in the Daily Breeze report came from public documents requested of the Los Angeles County Office of Education. However, he said the district would not respond questions about the superintendent's pay.
"We've chosen not to do anything in response," said Cox.
Nor will the public have a venue to question board members anytime soon in an official setting. The school board cancelled February's regular monthly meeting because not enough members planned to attend.
Foreman said the County Office of Education stepped in to stabilize the district's finances in 2007-08. A spokesman for the county Office of Education was unable to confirm its role at Centinela Valley, and the school district's Cox also declined to discuss the district's current or past finances.
The school board hired Fernandez in 2009 and renewed his contract in 2012. Under the new contract, he was given $200,000 per year in base salary, plus a nine percent increase for every year he had stayed since 2009, plus $1,000 per month for out-of-pocket expenses.
The school district also loaned Fernandez $910,000 to buy a house in Ladera Heights. According to his employment contract, the loan was at two percent interest, repayable over 40 years.
The nine percent annual raise rankles Foreman, who said teachers in his union have received a combined 2.75 percent increase since Fernandez took charge.
According to the contract, the superintendent's work year was set at 215 days. His 30 days of annual paid vacation and 24 annual sick days could be traded for cash if unused, the contract said. The Daily Breeze calculated the value of the contract at $633,000 per year.
Foreman admitted Fernandez had done a good job getting the district back on a stable financial footing. Fernandez, a former Inglewood councilman, had previously run the district's adult school and served briefly as business administrator, Foreman said.
The school district levies a parcel tax to raise more than $3 million annually to supplement state and other sources of funding. The election to approve the tax was in 2012.
"The people of this community voted for the parcel tax to support education, not so one person at the top could bring in a windfall of perks," Foreman said.
PDF: Superintendent's contract with Centinela Valley Union High School DistrictBuzzFeed’s terror response: ‘Ban cars from big cities, seriously’
The stupid. It hurts. Less than a week after a jihadi drove a rented truck through a crowd of people in a terrorist attack, the lefties at BuzzFeed have come up with a solution. No, it’s not extreme vetting, or ferreting out radical Islamists hell-bent on jihad. No … Buzz Feed wants to ban cars from big cities.
Here’s a tweet from BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith.
We Should Ban Cars From Big Cities. Seriously. https://t.co/jWzNLiXIbi — Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) November 3, 2017
Seriously? This notion is anything and everything BUT serious.
Here’s what BuzzFeed contributor Jessie Singer wrote:
In the coming days, politicians will try to convince you that what happened on the West Side Highway in Manhattan this week was an issue of terrorism, immigration, or religion. But just like the plague of mass shootings is a gun problem, the thousands of people killed by cars as they walk our streets every year is a car problem. A gun lobbyist would typically step in right about now to ask whether those who demand gun control after mass shootings also want to ban cars after events like this week. To which I say: Hell yes. Cars don’t belong on the streets of big cities, and we should do everything in our power to get rid of them. You can’t stop crazy. But you can reduce the number of people allowed to drive their 4,000 pound bumachines into city parks, along city beaches, past playgrounds, and alongside the sidewalks of the most pedestrian-packed places in the nation. If we banned cars from every city in the US tomorrow, we would stop vehicular terrorism overnight — and save thousands of lives.
“… Politicians will try to convince you what happened … was an issue of terrorism.” What? Is that really in question? The jihadi screamed “Allahu akbar” while carrying out his religiously motivated jihad attack. Mainstream outlets are reporting that the jihadi is smiling in his hospital room, and asking for ISIS flags.
A plaintiff in a lawsuit surrounding the Trump Russian dossier earlier this week argued that “BuzzFeed isn’t a real news organization.” It seems that Ben Smith and his team are trying to do everything possible to prove that plaintiff’s point.
Let’s FIGHT BACK together …
… against the mainstream media’s biased reporting, selective facts, and outright propaganda. Sign up now for the daily dose of sunlight you need to disinfect the media’s lies. It’s free!Roger Goodell is an idiot.
Who in their right mind would schedule the 48th Super Bowl on the same day as the 10th annual Puppy Bowl? Only a foolish person, especially when considering what Animal Planet has in store this year.
The NFL and Fox don’t stand a chance. It’s almost as if the organizers of the Puppy Bowl have a mole within the NFL and developed a counter for every thing the Super Bowl could possibly throw its way. And then some.
The NFL playoffs haven’t even begun, so we don’t know who will be in the Super Bowl, but let’s just assume it’s the Eagles and the Broncos. You know, names like Peyton Manning and Nick Foles and LeSean McCoy and Wes Welker and DeSean Jackson and Champ Bailey. Exciting, right? It’s almost too much to handle, right? Can barely stay in your seat, right?
That was biting sarcasm, as a way of setting up the real stars of February 2, 2014. Just look at these sassy, eclectic dogs.
Aurora, dalmatian, “Has read all the Harry Potter books”
Bach, bernedoodle, “Thinks Mozart is overrated”
Brody, American Eskimo, “One day wants his own dog house”
Cici, German shepherd mix, “Wants to be on Dancing With the Stars“
Danny, papillion mix, “Aspires to have hair like One Direction’s Harry Styles”
Ginger, Old English sheepdog, “Counting sheep automatically puts her to sleep”
Laney, Brittany spaniel mix, “Wants to catch a ride on one of those NASA Mars rovers”
Lily, basset hound, “Tries not to step on her own ears”
Loren, Brittany spaniel mix, “Prefers NCAA 14 to Madden 25”
Mandy, dachshund hound mix, “Thinks long legs are overrated”
Pong, Havanese shih tzu mix, “Has been to Disney World 12 times”
Shyla, Great Pyrenees, “Loves to snowboard”
Suri, Siberian husky, “Thinks they should cut Miley Cyrus some slack”
Ullie, Chihuahua dachshund mix, “Hates all those Rocky sports clichés about Philadelphia”
Have you ever heard Manning talk about being an astronaut? Does Foles know how to snowboard? RILEY COOPER CAN’T READ.
Advantage: PUPPY BOWL X
But what of the entertainment? The whole “halftime show” thing? How does that stack up? The Super Bowl has Bruno Mars. I’m sure it will be electrifying. What about Puppy Bowl X?
KEYBOARD CAT PERFORMING BRUNO MARS:
Just unreal. And, according to Entertainment Weekly, it doesn’t stop there.
“During the feline’s performance, 30 kittens will perform a domino topple and one little daredevil will make a grand entrance by parachuting onto the field.”
Advantage: PUPPY BOWL X
What about other guest stars? Or cameos? Any confirmed celebrities?
Super Bowl: Because it is an event, one has to assume Kevin Hart will be there. Other than that, who knows. But this is the “New York” Super Bowl (in New Jersey) so there’s bound to be no shortage of star power.
PUPPY BOWL X: LIL BUB
Again, according to Entertainment Weekly, the leading source of Puppy Bowl X exclusives, Lil Bub will “check in throughout the game from her Chicago studio, as furry first responders representing police dogs across the New York region take to the field for the National Anthem.”
And if that isn’t enough, the cheerleaders are penguins.
PUPPY BOWL FEATURING FAMOUS CATS AND SCANTILY CLAD PENGUINS
Advantage: PUPPY BOWL X
This has turned into a landslide victory for Puppy Bowl X. And it isn’t even close to finishing pouring it on, because for the first time in the event’s history, there will be fantasy.
FANTASY PUPPY BOWL.
Titled “Fantasy Puppy League,” in the weeks leading up to the big day, humans will be able to create fantasy teams based on the competitors. And on February 2, you will be able to track the stats of your puppy team, in real time, just like a fantasy league for the once-important National Football League.
There’s also MVP voting online and a variety of social media things in which to participate, but the reality of puppy fantasy is the biggest takeaway from this puppy skunk of professional American football’s most esteemed event.
The real losers in all this are the players who have to play in the actual Super Bowl, since they won’t be able to monitor their fantasy Puppy Bowl teams in real time. I know it may seem like a stretch, but don’t be surprised when the NFL playoffs become suddenly marred by Puppy Bowl–related tanking, with the biggest losers being forced to play in freezing Super Bowl XLVIII instead of lounging in the comfort of their own homes, watching the cuddly-yet-ferocious Puppy Bowl X.
A final comparison between the two events. The Super Bowl airs once, at 6:30 p.m. ET. But Puppy Bowl X has its two-hour premiere at 3 p.m. ET, and then it repeats five more times.
TWELVE HOURS OF PUPPY BOWL X.
Advantage Landslide Victory Maximum Fatality Finish Him: PUPPY BOWL XA pioneering new treatment developed in the United Kingdom is allowing paralyzed dogs to walk again.
A new experiment from the University of Cambridge took cells from dogs' noses and then injected them into the injured part of their back, helping regenerate their spines, reported the Daily Mail.
The cells, known as olfactory ensheathing cells (OEC), are specialized for the repair of nerve fibres in the nose. But by transplanting them to the spinal cord, they can do the same repair work there.
After the treatment, the animals were able to move previously paralyzed limbs.
Professor Robin Franklin, co-author of the study from the Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, told the Daily Mail, "Our findings are extremely exciting because they show for the first time that transplanting these types of cell into a severely damaged spinal cord can bring about significant improvement."
In the study, published in the journal Brain, scientists looked at 34 dogs who had suffered severe spinal injuries. None of the dogs could use their back legs to walk.
Of the 34, 23 had the cells transplanted into the injury site -- the rest were injected with a neutral fluid, reported the BBC.
All of the dogs who were injected with the cells showed significant improvement in mobility. Some also regained bowel and bladder control after the treatment.
May Hay, whose dog Jasper took part in the trial, told the Telegraph: "Before the trial, Jasper was unable to walk at all."
"When we took him out we used a sling for his back legs so that he could exercise the front ones. It was heartbreaking," she added. "But now we can't stop him whizzing round the house and he can even keep up with the two other dogs we own. It's utterly magic."
While earlier tests on paralyzed rats enabled them to move their hind legs six weeks after being injected with OEC, this was the first study performed on animals that suffered accidental injury. The treatment took place at least 12 months after the spine was damaged.
Scientists say that this more closely resembles a scenario that could involve a human patient.
Franklin told the Daily Mail that while he was confident that while the technique could restore "at least a small amount of movement in human patients with spinal cord injury," it is more likely that the procedure would be used as part of a combination of treatments.If you like seasoning your Asian dishes such as bánh xèo and bì cuốn chay (fresh spring rolls) with the typical Vietnamese condiment called nước mắm but find it too strong to your taste or simply if you're a vegetarian, this recipe is for you. The vegetarian equivalent is called nước chấm.
I use lemon-flavored soy sauce as a main ingredient but there is a new product called nước mắm chay available in Asian stores. It gets a "sea" flavor from the addition of seaweed to the product.
It is also a nice addition to Asian soups like my sweet and sour pineapple soup. Just serve it on the side and let your guests add as much (or as little) as they like. In Vietnam, this sauce, or its fish-based equivalent, is as common on the dinner table as a salt shaker is in the West.This article is over 2 years old
Case against Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama seen as test of Indonesia’s commitment to religious tolerance and pluralism
The Christian governor of Jakarta, the capital of the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, has been named a suspect in a case of alleged blasphemy, Indonesian police announced on Wednesday.
The case involving Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama has caused uproar across the country in recent weeks and is being seen by some as a test of Indonesia’s commitment to religious tolerance and pluralism.
Indonesian president blames 'political actors' for stoking Jakarta blasphemy protests Read more
The police announcement follows mounting pressure by religious hardliners who earlier this month initiated mass protests across the country to demand the popular figure be arrested and charged with insulting Islam. Some analysts believe the protests to be politically motivated.
“Police have decided to declare Basuki Tjahaja Purnama a suspect and bar him from travelling abroad,” national police chief detective Ari Dono Sukmanto said on Wednesday morning.
“After long discussions, we reached a decision that the case should be tried in an open court,” he added.
If found guilty under Indonesia’s 1965 blasphemy law Ahok will face a maximum of five years in jail.
Ahok provoked the ire of hardliners after he cited the Al Maidah 51 verse from the Qur’an during a campaign visit to the Thousand Islands in September. He said the verse had been used to deceive voters and justify the assertion that Muslims should not be led by non-Muslims.
The governor later apologised, saying it was not his intention to cause any offence.
However, an edited version of those comments was subsequently circulated online, changed in a way to make the governor’s comments appear more offensive, angering hardliners further.
As a Christian, and the first ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta, Ahok is somewhat of an anomaly in Indonesia’s political scene.
The capital’s willingness to be led by a man who represents a double minority has in the past been hailed a symbol of progress and pluralism, the latter a virtue enshrined in the Indonesian constitution.
In a country where 90% of its more than 240 million people follow Islam, the national motto is, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, or unity in diversity.
But following the police announcement that Ahok is likely to now face trial, Andreas Harsono from Human Rights Watch fears he will be found guilty.
“I have studied more than 200 blasphemy cases in Indonesia since it was written by President Sukarno in 1965. Over this 50-year period I think there was only one case where the suspect was acquitted,” he said. “I don’t think Ahok can survive this prosecution, he is very likely to end up in jail.”
The last acquittal on charges of blasphemy happened to a newspaper editor in 1968, said Harsono.
In 2012, Alexander Aan, a 30-year-old civil servant from Sumatra, was sentenced under the same blasphemy law to two-and-a-half years in prison after he declared on his Facebook page he was an atheist.
The declaration of atheism was deemed offensive to Islam – one of Indonesia’s six official religions, together with Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism.
“I think it is going to be difficult for Ahok to defend himself. Why? This is a law, in Bahasa Indonesia, we call it pasal karet, a rubber article. It is always political,” Harsono said.
The Chinese Christian governor is campaigning for re-election this February and while drawing criticism – including for evictions and a controversial reclamation project – he has been seen as the frontrunner.
The political stakes for the gubernatorial race are high, with big political players backing the three pairs of candidates, which include former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose son Agus is running.
The Gerindra party, headed by former military general Prabowo Subianto, is backing the third pair headed by former education minister Anies Baswedan.
Ahok, who succeeded President Joko Widodo as governor of Jakarta in 2014, has vowed that he would continue his campaign regardless of the investigation.
The hashtag #kamiAhok, or “we are Ahok” was trending countrywide on Wednesday morning, with support flowing in for the beleaguered governor.
Noted Indonesian filmmaker Joko Anwar, who has more than 1 million followers on Twitter praised the governor as a good man.Get ready to travel through time, delving deep into the mystery surrounding Masteria as you visit its past in new content to be released in multiple Acts over the coming weeks. Then, visit the new town of Shanghai and the Shaolin Temple, and embark on the next saga of Beasts of Fury as you journey into the mountains to realize your untapped power! Springtime means new events, and there are several you can participate in to earn Spring Bunny Coins, exchangeable in a special shop. Finally, collect Easter Eggs to earn a Moon Bunny Costume! The Cash Inventory Transfer Event and other events will also be returning. All this and more, in the Masteria Through Time update!
V.171 – Masteria Through Time is live on March 10!
Table of Contents
That’s not all, Maplers! More upcoming content and events will be announced in the future, so stay tuned!
MASTERIA THROUGH TIME
Part 1
Requirement: Lv. 33 and above
Prepare to delve deeper into the story of Masteria—the continent that once sank beneath the ocean waves, only to suddenly re-emerge 1,000 years later!
Travel through time, visiting Masteria’s past to learn about the rise and fall of Masteria, including the truth of Christopher Crimsonheart and his children, and the real reason Crimsonwood Keep was established.
The content is split into multiple Acts, which will be unlocked as you progress through them.
Act 1: Forgotten Battles and Act 2: 1000 Years and Counting will both be available starting March 10.
Acts 3 and 4 will be released later this spring.
This content is best viewed at a resolution of 1366 x 768.
Monsters in Masteria Through Time will scale to your characters level.
Accept the quest 'Lost Hero's Call' from the Masteria Through Time icon on the left side of the screen to begin your journey.
Act 1 Rewards:
1000 Honor EXP will be given after completing Act 1.
EXP will also be rewarded based on your character's level.
Act 2 Rewards:
1500 Honor EXP will be given after completing Act 2.
EXP will also be rewarded based on your character's level.
Part 2
Opening April 7
Requirement: Lv. 33 and above
Continue your adventure in Masteria!
Act 3: The Man from Versal and Act 4: The Fall of Crimsonwood will be available on April 7.
This content is best viewed at a resolution of 1366 x 768.
Monsters in Masteria Through Time will scale to your character’s level.
Accept the quest 'Lost Hero's Call' from the Masteria Through Time icon on the left side of the screen to continue your journey.
Act 3 Rewards:
2000 Honor EXP will be given after completing Act 3.
EXP will also be rewarded based on your character's level.
Act 4 Rewards:
2500 Honor EXP will be given after completing Act 4.
EXP will also be rewarded based on your character's level.
Subani's Pendant : Req. Lv: 125. STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +16, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +2, Trade disabled when equipped.
A ntellion Guardian : Req. Lv: 33, STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +15, MaxHP/MaxMP: +500, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +8, Untradeable
Crimsonwood Warrior Chair : Untradeable. This item is given depending on the choices made in Act 3.
Dark Follower Chair : Untradeable. This item is given depending on the choices made in Act 3.
Subani-Roid : Can be traded once within the account. This item is given depending on the choices made in Act 4.
Dr. Jang-Roid: Can be traded once within the account. This item is given depending on the choices made in Act 4.
New Masteria Equipment
Requirements: Lv. 90 and above. Must have completed the 'Welcome to New Leaf City' quizzes from NPC Icebyrd Slimm.
Speak to NPC Icebyrd Slimm in New Leaf City and accept the quest 'Masteria Traveler's Gift'.
Complete the different quests around New Leaf City to obtain the following new equipment items.
Rewards:
Complete all of NPC Elpam's quests to receive the quest 'Elpam's Belt' at Lv. 102. Elpam's Belt : Req. Lv: 125. STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +8, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +2, Weapon DEF/Magic DEF: +100, Trade disabled when equipped
Complete all of NPC Professor Foxwit's quests to receive the quest 'Professor Foxwit's Glasses' at Lv. 106. Professor Foxwit's Glasses : Req. Lv: 125. STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +3, MaxHP/MaxMP: +200, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +2, Trade disabled when equipped
Complete all of NPC Hunter Jack's quests to receive the quest 'Treasure Hunter Jack's Scar' at Lv. 112. Treasure Hunter Jack's Scar : Req. Lv: 125. STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +3, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +3, Trade disabled when equipped
Complete all of the NPC Nameless Warrior's quests to receive the quest 'Lukan's Pauldron' at Lv. 116. Lukan's Pauldron : Req. Lv: 125. STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +8, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +4, Weapon DEF/Magic DEF: +42, Trade disabled when equipped
Complete all of NPC Hunter John's quests to receive the quest 'Treasure Hunter John's Ring' at Lv. 120. Treasure Hunter John's Ring : Req. Lv: 125. STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +3, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +3, Trade disabled when equipped
Complete all of NPC Sheriff Lita's quests to receive the quest 'Sheriff Lita's Earrings' at Lv. 124. Sheriff Lita's Earrings : Req. Lv: 125. STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +4, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +2, Trade disabled when equipped
Masteria Equipment Set Effects:
3 items : STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +5, MaxHP/MaxMP: 2%, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +4, Weapon DEF/Magic DEF: +100
5 items : STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +10, MaxHP/MaxMP: 3%, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +8, Weapon DEF/Magic DEF: +150
7 items: STR/DEX/INT/LUK: +20, MaxHP/MaxMP: 5%, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT: +12, Weapon DEF/Magic DEF: +200
Masteria Revamp
Several areas of Masteria have been revamped, including:
Requirement levels for the following quests and others have been modified: The Mayor of Disaster Subani's Legacy Lost! Featherweights Urban Jungle
Requirements for quest completion for the following quests and others have been modified: Cleaning Up The Streets Urban Jungle Supplies for T-1337 Rags to Riches The Brewing Storm
The levels for the following monsters and others have been modified:
Street Slime Urban Fungus Killa Bee Fire Tusk Gryphon
The world map has been modified to show all of Masteria including New Leaf City's Bigger Ben.
The following maps and others have been modified: Upper Ascent The Path of Strength The Path of Peril Cavern of Pain Lower Ascent
Crimsonwood Keep Party Quest has been blocked temporarily.
The Tao of Shadows, Tao of Sight, and Tao of Harmony monster drops found in the Crimsonwood Keep Party Quest will now drop from the following monsters in the Crimsonwood Forest: Bigfoot Headless Horseman Crimson Guardian Typhon Baby Typhon Firebrand Windraider Nightshadow Stormbreaker Elderwraith Leprechaun
NEW DUNGEONS
Beasts of Fury 2
Requirements: Lv. 140 and above. Must have completed 'The Dragon and the Tiger' quest line.
The Gold Dragon and Red Tiger clans have been living together peacefully, giving you an itch for adventure!
Your Master realizes this and asks you to visit the Wu Tien Mountains, where a powerful mentor lives.
Go back to the Gold Dragons or Red Tigers and continue your quest to becoming one of Mu Gong's mighty pupils.
You can begin this new theme dungeon by accepting the quest 'The Master's Summons' from your available quest log.
This update adds story quests and a repeatable time attack mini-game dungeon. There are 10 stages in the mini-game dungeon.
Rewards:
EXP based on your level
Gold Dragons' Soul Weapons : Beefy Gold Dragon Soul : Untradeable. Grants the Gold Dragon skill and bonus Potential to weapons under the effects of a Soul Enchanter. Bonus Potential: STR +12. Success: 100%. Swift Gold Dragon Soul : Untradeable. Grants the Gold Dragon skill and bonus Potential to weapons under the effects of a Soul Enchanter. Bonus Potential: DEX +12. Success: 100%. Clever Gold Dragon Soul : Untradeable. Grants the Gold Dragon skill and bonus Potential to weapons under the effects of a Soul En |
Carl Sandburg, with whom Martha had had an affair.
After the archives comes real-world research. Interview the people involved in the scenes — not just the primary characters, but the bystanders, as well, who may provide different perspectives. Visit the places where the action occurred and seek telling details, like the locks of Sandburg’s hair, that will surprise readers. This is the stuff that stands out and makes your work unique, memorable and three-dimensional.
More often than not, the responsible writer combines both methods of research not just to make scenes enticing, but also to assure accuracy. Nailing down the facts and maintaining dramatic impact is a process that requires patience, persistence and a commitment to not cut corners. Examples of how to do it right can be found in Rebecca Skloot’s excellent book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” In one scene, Stanley Gartler, a relatively unknown geneticist, speaks at a conference of more than 700 academics and industry leaders in Bedford, Penn., in 1966. He steps up to the podium, leans into the microphone and begins a talk that disrupts the entire field of study related to the culturing of cells. When Gartler finished, “the room sat silent, dumbfounded,” Ms. Skloot writes, until T.C. Hsu, the chairman of the conference session, spoke: “So I am happy about the paper by Dr. Gartler and am also sure he has made many people unhappy.”
Ms. Skloot then recounts the ensuing dialogue in the meeting, as well as the heated debate that flows into other sessions and continues through informal lunches — and six pages of the book.
Ms. Skloot was able to describe and document the debate so thoroughly because she unearthed a detailed transcript of the proceedings, which included the discussions that followed presentations. But what about the narrative details: how Dr. Gartler stood at the podium and leaned into the microphone — and then the deafening silence following his talk? Ms. Skloot tracked down and interviewed people who were there, she explained in an e-mail to me. She located letters about the conference written by participants who’d since died. She also examined photographs from the sessions.
As a final step, a writer must conduct a fact-checking review, the final ‘R’ in this equation. This is important, even when the story is based on archival material and reinforced through personal conversations.
In an ideal situation, research, real world and review all come together perfectly. But of course, this isn’t always the case. When I was reconstructing Mr. Williams’s nervous night and his embarrassing phone call to Mr. Feeney, no written documentation existed. In piecing together the story, I interviewed both Mr. Williams and Mr. Feeney, as well as two of the umpires that Mr. Williams had been working with who had heard the story from both men. I confirmed it all with Mr. Williams before the book went to press.
In the end, thorough research and real world exploration followed by fact-checking review shapes and sharpens the story, ensures writer credibility and allows for fair and equitable treatment of the characters involved. And by carefully following the three R process, writers of nonfiction will be prepared to answer the inevitable question: “How do you know?”
Lee Gutkind is founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction Magazine. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University and a professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication. His new book is “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction from Memoir to Literary Journalism to Everything in Between.”Atlanta's most lovably ragged music venue, the Masquerade, will soon be closed and redeveloped into a residential-anchored mixed-use development.
A longtime holdout in a neighborhood changed dramatically by the Beltline and projects like Ponce City Market, the venue and the land it sits on is just too valuable to remain as is, developers have decided. While plans have been rumored for years, Atlanta magazine reported Friday that work will now begin on the project. As in, today.
Billed as North + Line, the $60-million project will bring a five-story residential building to the southern end of the site (nearest the Eastside Trail Gateway) and three stories of parking, while preserving the historic stone building which currently houses the music venue. The building, which started life as the Excelsior Mill in the late-1800s or early 1900s, will be repurposed into the "Mill Marketplace," featuring restaurants and shops, the magazine reports.
Work will commence in the next few weeks with the demolition of non-historic structures on the site, officials said. From there, stabilization, site work, and construction of the new parking deck will carry the project into summer 2017. The timeline should allow the Masquerade to find a new space to accommodate shows.
Developer SWH Residential Partners purchased the 3.3-acre site last year for $5.3 million. Designed by Smith Dalia, the project will echo the modern lines of many recently completed projects in the city. Rent in the expected 228 units is anticipated to be comparable to the Flats at Ponce City Market, developers told the magazine.
The Masquerade team, which has been reticent to discuss the situation, doesn't exactly sound bitter.(UPDATED) Was it a terror attack or not? Did the gunman kill himself, or did police shoot him to death? Questions hound the deadly attack at a Manila casino.
Published 9:10 AM, June 03, 2017
MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED) – Official sources contradicted each other Friday, June 2, after a gunman opened fire and burned part of the posh Resorts World Manila casino, leaving at least 37 dead and 54 injured.
The gunman – described by the Philippine police chief as a "foreign-looking" 6-footer with a moustache – reportedly killed himself after the shooting incident, fueling speculations about his motives. (READ: TIMELINE: Resorts World Manila attack)
Contradicting statements came from officials of both the Philippine government and Resorts World Manila on Friday. Information released so far also indicate a number of loopholes.
1. Terror attack or not?
First, Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Director General Ronald dela Rosa downplayed a report that linked the terrorist group Islamic State (ISIS) to the Resorts World Manila attack.
It was the terrorism monitoring group SITE that first said an ISIS "Filipino operative" was behind the incident. Eventually, ISIS claimed that its "fighters" carried out the attack. But Dela Rosa claimed it was the handiwork of one man, a "lone wolf".
The PNP chief said of the gunman's act: "We're looking at robbery as an angle because he stole, he barged into the storage room for casino chips. He took the chips, put them inside his backpack but eventually left it. We have recovered the backpack."
National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) chief Director Oscar Albayalde later echoed Dela Rosa's statement.
Albayalde said the gunman had tried to steal P113 million ($2.3 million) worth of gambling chips, although he left the backpack on the ground near the stock room.
Referring to the gunman's act, Albayalde said, "We cannot relate it to terrorism because he did not shoot anybody."
Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, however, said on Friday: "We are not yet ruling out that this is an ISIS act. It is so easy for ISIS to claim responsibility. Whether true or ISIS is just riding onto a done act, we still do not know." (READ: Terrorism and ISIS at Resorts World Attack?)
On Saturday, June 3, House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, a key Duterte ally, said he disagrees that the Resorts World Manila attack "was not a terrorist act but rather a criminal case of armed robbery and arson."
"This is a clear example of a 'lone wolf' terrorist attack targeting civilians to inflict maximum loss of life and damage to property, as what has happened in other countries," Alvarez said.
2. Definition of terror
The other loophole in Albayalde's statement is the way he ruled out terrorism because the gunman "did not shoot anybody."
"Kung ISIS siya, namaril na siya doon (If he was from ISIS, he would have shot the people there)," Dela Rosa also said, explaining that a terrorist would have carried out a suicide bombing to inflict maximum casualties.
An act of terror, however, is not defined by the use of gunfire or by a huge number of deaths.
In a lecture uploaded by the International Crisis Group, terror analyst Sidney Jones said in 2013 that "there is no single definition of terrorism. But she said "there is wide consensus that it is a tactic, not an end in itself, involving a deliberate effort to create a sense of fear in a particular target population to achieve a political objective."
Paraphrasing scholar Martha Crenshaw, Jones said: "Terrorism is a form of violence that is primarily intended to influence an audience. It depends on concealment, surprise, stealth, conspiracy, and deception. Terrorism is not spontaneous and does not involve mass participation; it is carried out by a handful of people claiming to act on behalf of a larger group."
Still paraphrasing Crenshaw, Jones said of terrorism: "The act itself communicates a future threat to people who identify with the victims – it conveys the sense of 'You will be next.' The choice of time, place, and victim is meant to create shock, fear, or anger. Psychological impact is key. It involves maximum impact with minimum effort."
Terrorists achieve this goal through various means, not merely the use of gunfire.
For instance, an independent analysis by IHS Conflict Monitor, quoted by the New York Times in 2016, said ISIS "has used chemical weapons, including chlorine and sulfur mustard agents, at least 52 times on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq."
Jones also pointed out, "Not all terrorism involves large numbers of deaths: in 2011 in Indonesia, for example, we had 8 separate terrorist incidents and a total death toll of 5, including two bombers who killed only themselves."
"Not all crimes are instantly recognizable as terrorism. Suicide bombings have become the classic terrorist crime, but what about the robbery of an ATM or the shooting of a policeman? They might be terrorism, but they can also be acts of rebellion or ordinary crimes, depending on the circumstances and who was involved. Drawing those lines is not always easy," Jones said. (Rappler's Maria Ressa interviewed Jones in January 2016. Watch this Rappler Talk interview about ISIS here.)
In a Rappler Talk interview with Maria Ressa on Friday, former interior secretary Rafael Alunan III said a "hallmark" of a terrorist attack is having a venue that has "high human traffic" and is "frequented by foreigners."
Alunan knows this topic well as he used to chair the National Peace and Order Council, and the National Action Committee on Anti-Hijacking and Terrorism under then president Fidel V. Ramos.
On the sites of terror attacks in general, Alunan said that "casinos are not a surprise, like malls, schools, airports, et cetera."
3. How the gunman died
Dela Rosa claimed before 8 am on Friday, "The lone gunman is already neutralized; he's dead. He burned himself inside a hotel room."
The PNP chief said the gunman eventually went inside hotel room 510, where he doused gasoline on the bed, slipped himself under the covers, then set the bed on fire. When the police got into the room, the man was already dead.
In an earlier media interview, Dela Rosa said the gunman was "killed by our troops."
Later, Albayalde and Presidential Spokesman Ernesto Abella said in separate statements that the gunman shot himself in the head after setting himself on fire.
A photo of the gunman's dead and charred body showed him embracing his baby armalite when he died. This was supposedly after he shot himself in the head, based on Albayalde and Abella's statements.
On his Facebook account, Alunan also called attention to reports that before the gunman died, a security guard managed to inflict on him a gunshot wound.
Alunan wrote: "Nagpakamatay ang gunman o pinatay? Kung binaril siya ng security guard at nasugatan, paano niya sinunog at binaril ang kanyang sarili? Sunog na sunog ang bangkay beyond recognition. Deliberate para hindi siya ma-trace?" (Did the gunman commit suicide, or was he killed? If he was shot and wounded by a security guard, how did he burn and shoot himself? The corpse was burned beyond recognition. Was it deliberate so that he cannot be traced?)
4. Security guard 'accidentally' shot self?
Police said a security guard sustained a gunshot wound after he accidentally shot himself during Friday's incident.
Resorts World Manila chief operating officer Stephen Reilly said, however, that the security guard sustained the gunshot wound when he exchanged gunfire with the gunman.
He said the guard shot the gunman, which "significantly slowed down the assailant" and forced him to retreat to a hotel room.
In his earlier interview, however, Reilly denied security lapses, saying that it is part of their protocol for security personnel inside to not have firearms. He was quoted as telling the media, "They did not engage because that would escalate the situation."
Chief Superintendent Tomas Apolinario, Southern Police District chief, confirmed Reilly's statement in a media interview outside the hotel late Friday afternoon.
Apolinario said the security guard shot the gunman in the thigh.
5. Doubts on robbery angle
Earlier on Friday, Albayalde told reporters, "There is no indication that this is a terror attack. It is a simple robbery and most likely it was done by a demented person."
Later, however, the Metro Manila police chief said authorities had some doubts about the robbery angle since the chips cannot be exchanged just anywhere, and the gunman dumped his stash as he fled police.
Alunan told Rappler on Friday, "I was shocked this morning to hear that it wasn't a terrorist attack but the handiwork of a deranged man who probably had lost a lot of money in the casino and wanted to steal money.
"But then when I heard that, I felt that somehow it didn't compute, because if I were a thief, I'd be going there stealthily. I wanna make sure that I don't get detected. And I'd like to leave the place, I'd like to have an exit plan, I'd like to leave the place undetected as well," he said.
"But this fellow was dressed to kill," Alunan continued. "He was making a mess of himself, shooting at the ceiling, shooting at the floor, burning the place down. Those are not the footprints of a thief. Those are the footprints of either a nut, a nutcase, or somebody who was tasked to do that."
6. Suspect a long-time guest?
Apolinario said he heard from officials that this was the first time they saw the gunman, so he couldn’t have been a frequent guest.
The Bureau of Fire Protection told Rappler, however, that the suspect had been a "long-time guest" of the casino hotel.
Abella on Friday further described the gunman as an "emotionally disturbed individual."
He said most of the casualties in the incident, aside from the gunman, died "due to suffocation at the second floor gaming area," which the gunman set on fire.
Rappler asked Alunan on Friday about his reaction to the contradicting statements issued so far on the Resorts World Manila attack.
Alunan said: "First of all, I think it has to do with the way crisis management is being handled. Normally in situations like this, there's an official spokesman who speaks to the reporters. There's a formal press conference, and details, as the facts are unearthed, are reported. And usually we avoid speculating as to what happened."
"Normally detectives will not rule out anything. They put everything on the table, and then let the facts eliminate one theory from another, et cetera," Alunan added.
"But then that takes time. You can't have instant answers. So people have to be patient." – with reports from Bea Cupin, Rambo Talabong, and Agence France-Presse/Rappler.com
*$1 = P49.71As Mitchell returns to the New York stage to play Hedwig, 17 years after creating the role, I now see a warning in the show about how outsiders can hurt one other
Great art changes and expands each time you experience it – but that’s not always a comforting feeling. Walking into the Belasco Theatre in New York this past Saturday night to see writer-director-actor John Cameron Mitchell make his triumphant return to the stage in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 17 years after he originated the role off-Broadway, I didn’t know what my reaction would be. Here was a show I, and thousands of other LGBTQ people and other outsider folks, hold near and dear. I wondered whether Hedwig would still feel as urgent and exciting as the first time I saw it. Swept up in the crowd’s enthusiasm and joy, I found one obvious answer – Mitchell and the show are sensational. But the deeper truth I found was that Hedwig’s story – co-created by Stephen Trask, who wrote the music and lyrics – has become more resonant and relevant to queer and trans audiences than ever, yet in a darker way than in previous incarnations.
Like the majority of fans, my first encounter with Hedwig came via Mitchell’s 2001 film adaptation. I was going through a hard time when I first stepped into the cinema on the film’s opening weekend. I had come out of the closet 10 months previously and had been desperately trying to figure out who I was and where I fitted in. Was I a gender-bending club kid? A Chelsea twink? An art fag? I’d also experienced a crushing rejection from my gay best friend, a feminine guy who wore makeup and women’s blouses, but told me that I was “too gay” to hang out with him.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest An image from Mark Tusk’s New York show called It’s Pronounced HedVIG. Photograph: Mark Tusk/http://flaneurphoto.tumblr.com
This pain and confusion swirled around me as I took in the story of Hedwig, an East German boy forced into a botched sex change, who, now living as a woman, emigrates to America, where the love of her life rejects her sexually and steals all her music. Filled with rage, Hedwig pulls the wig down from the shelf and goes on the warpath, following her superstar ex’s tour bus around the country, performing her pain and heartbreak in a series of truly incredible songs in tacky buffet palaces. In Hedwig’s story, I found a message of resilience and self-expression. Keep going, the film screamed at me. Let your freak flag fly, no matter how much shit people throw at you.
This experience was shared by millions of queer and trans kids around the world, for whom the movie and stage show became a kind of modern Rocky Horror Picture Show – a positive statement of queer and gender-fluid expression, and a meeting place where queer and trans kids could come, dress up in drag, let their hair down, find friends and lovers. After Saturday’s performance, Mitchell described testimonies from queer and trans people over the years who described the show’s impact on their lives. “For example,” he said, “I just met a mom at the show yesterday who said her daughter was suicidal and the show helped her move past that period, which is pretty moving.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Site of transformation: Hedwig’s wig. Photograph: Mark Tusk/http://flaneurphoto.tumblr.com
Two months after my first viewing, I went to see Hedwig again, days after the Twin Towers fell. This time I ignored the film’s message of resilience and persistence. Instead, I mourned the loss of the grungier New York depicted in the film, uncertain of what the future held for the city, which had allowed Mitchell, an out Broadway actor, to travel downtown to the famed Squeezebox party and workshop his character before turning her into a cult phenomenon.
Fourteen years later, Mitchell tore up the stage at the Belasco as if no time had passed, but I saw a whole new side of Hedwig. In this production, violence was everywhere – from the physical (sexual abuse, mutilation) to the emotional (neglect, rejection, betrayal). Violence also runs through the music in songs like Tear Me Down, Angry Inch, The Origin of Love and Exquisite Corpse.
The violence is at its most extreme is in the relationship between Hedwig and her husband Yitzhak, a former drag queen (played by Tony winner Lena Hall) who Hedwig forbids to perform in drag for fear Yitzhak may eclipse her own talent. They spit in each other’s faces, torment and try to upstage each other, before Hedwig tries to heal the damage she’s inflicted on him. Mitchell confirmed that one of his main goals with this production was to to emphasise the dark side of this relationship: “I wanted it to be believable that we’re in a relationship,” he explained. “A fucked-up one, a kind of Petra von Kant one, but a real one, a sexual one and an abusive one.”
This new Hedwig is a profound exploration of violence – how we endure it, how we cope with it, and how abused people can perpetuate the cycle. For queer and trans people, even today, this message is incredibly resonant, especially as both groups move into the mainstream. All one has to do is to recall last year’s vitriolic RuPaul-inspired debate between drag queens and the trans community over the usage of words like “tranny” to realise our continued capacity for inflicting trauma upon each other in abundance.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hedwig as portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris, John Cameron Mitchell’s predecessor before the originator of the role took over. Photograph: Joan Marcus/AP
“I don’t think that it’s reductive to use Hedwig as a kind of trauma treatment,” Mitchell says. “I like making art that’s useful to people who have a harder road. Art is a tool to get through it, it’s a tool to prepare for the worst. By envisioning it in an artistic context you can make sense of it before and after it happens. I always think that in some way art is the best tool we have to prepare for death. It’s like a sculpture that you can interpret differently every time you look at it. I love that people come back to Hedwig and tell me, ‘I went that time and it brought so many things and I saw it in a different way.’”
When Hedwig hands her wig to Yitzhak, in that final moment of contrition and apology during Midnight Radio she – and Mitchell – encourages us to try not to transfer the pain and abuse we experienced on to others, but to find ways to enable more forms of self-expression, to listen to each other and to consider our words and our actions.
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The links are powered by Skimlinks. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that Skimlinks cookies will be set. More information.With the Battle for Zendikar officially under way, I got a chance to pick the brain of Mark Rosewater, lead designer of the set (and head designer for all of Magic), on some of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs behind its design. Check out the interview below!
The Basics
Name: Mark Rosewater
Job at Wizards: Head Designer for Magic: The Gathering
Role on Battle for Zendikar: Lead Designer
Favorite Magic card: Maro
If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Telekinesis
Yichao: You mentioned in a recent article that one of the big challenges of working on Battle for Zendikar was the initial need to keep complexity down while solving very complex challenges. Would you say this need to minimize complexity was the biggest challenge in the BFZ process? What lessons did you draw from the difficulties?
Mark: The biggest challenge was indeed the complexity, but it stemmed from a larger issue. Battle for Zendikar is mechanically more like revisiting two worlds, as Zendikar and Worldwake had a completely different suite of mechanics and feel than Rise of the Eldrazi. Finding the correct way to elegantly mix them together was the biggest challenge.
BFZ is one of the first sets after the transition to a heavier emphasis on storytelling. What challenges and happy surprises came from this shift? How does design approach creating cards around key story moments?
Battle for Zendikar is the introduction of what we are calling "pivotal events." These are five cards each set that show off key, pivotal moments of the story. We're working with the creative team to design cards that properly capture mechanically what the pivotal event is showing flavor-wise. When we design from a vantage point we don't normally start from, we get interesting designs.
Did you have any pet cards or favorites that made it into the set?
Desolation Twin started as a green sorcery called Double Trouble that made two 10/10 Eldrazi creature tokens. Development changed it to a 10/10 Eldrazi that brings along a 10/10 Eldrazi token creature when cast. I love doubling things, so I was happy to make a card that doubled an Eldrazi.
What cards changed the most/least from their initial designs?
A lot of things changed substantially from their original design. Early in design of the Eldrazi, for example, we had a mechanic called "hedronize" where every time it triggered you rolled an eight-sided hedron die to see what effect it produced. We also went through a period where the Eldrazi mechanically loved odd-numbered things but hated even things. Void Winnower is the one card left from that swath of cards.
Void Winnower | Art by Chase Stone
Can you share any cards you really liked that didn't make it through design?
Back when we had the "odd matters" theme, we had a card that said "All your even numbers are considered odd." Whenever a new person read the card in play testing, they'd say "what?!" I like occasionally making a card that actually shocks people in its strangeness.
Which aspects of leading a design team were the most fun? The most challenging?
Probably the most fun for me was getting to go back to Zendikar. I had fought very hard to make original Zendikar even happen, so having a chance to return was a real treat. The biggest challenge was we had left Zendikar with a big cliffhanger, and I felt we needed to finish off the story. That meant we needed to create a world with a dominant Eldrazi that we could capture mechanically, and that was tricky.
How was it decided that Eldrazi wouldn't be in white?
All five colors originally had devoid cards. I believe it was the creative team who asked if we could pull back the Eldrazi from white because they make the least sense in that color.
What are timelines like for creating a set? Do you always feel the time crunch and pressure of deadlines, or are there ever periods of phases of design where you feel like you have more room and space?
One of the luxuries on working on a game as successful as Magic is that we have a lot of time to work. We get six months of exploratory design and then a full year of main design. And that's all before development starts working on it. Having this much time allows us to really give the design room to breathe and lets us figure out the best execution of each mechanic and card.
What is the process for deciding which legendary creatures return? It's fun to see Omnath and Drana come back; are they chosen for story reasons then designed top-down, or are they designed by your team and then fitted to the legends that creative wants to see come back?
The characters are chosen almost exclusively by the creative team. The design team (and later the development team) then works to create designs that match the flavor of the characters. If it's a returning character, we will look at the older version(s) to make sure there is a mechanical through-line.
Finally, the most important question: What is a Gnarlid? We've only seen them on Zendikar so far—will we see more Gnarlids? And what makes them so cute?
Every world has its beasts, and the Gnarlid is one of the beasts of Zendikar. I don't know if Gnarlids exist on other planes, but if I'm told they do, we'll design more. I'm not sure who originally designed them, but they are cute... from a distance.
Thanks to Mark for taking time to answer these burning questions. Be sure to check out the Battle for Zendikar homepage to browse the full card list, catch up on the story, and more!Here is a verbatim statement just issued by the University of Mississippi:
At the request of Chancellor Dan Jones, the university’s Alumni Association has offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of two individuals involved in an early morning incident on The University of Mississippi campus.
The University Police Department (UPD) is looking for two men who were seen early Sunday morning near the James Meredith statue, which commemorates the 1962 integration of the university. One of the men was reported to have been wearing camouflage pants. The statue had been draped with a noose and an old Georgia state flag, and the men were heard shouting racial slurs.
Jones condemned the action as contrary to the beliefs and values of the university community. “These individuals chose our university’s most visible symbol of unity and educational accessibility to express their disagreement with our values. Their ideas have no place here, and our response will be an even greater commitment to promoting the values that are engraved on the statue – Courage, Knowledge, Opportunity, and Perseverance.”
Assistant to the Chancellor for Multicultural Affairs Don Cole reiterated the creed that the university stands by. “This is particularly painful because the James Meredith statue has become a gathering place for students to discuss many things, including the tenets of our creed, which calls for dignity and respect for all people.”
UPD has initiated a rigorous investigation and alerted Oxford Police. Anyone with information concerning the investigation is urged to contact UPD at 662-915-7234.
Contact: PR Director Danny Blanton, 662-915-1678, dblanton@olemiss.edu
For more information about the University of Mississippi, visit http://news.olemiss.edu">http://news.olemiss.edu or sign up for our RSS feed at http://rebs.ms/umnewsrss">http://rebs.ms/umnewsrss. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter at http://rebs.ms/UMsocial">http://rebs.ms/UMsocial.Not the New TV or iPad 3,Then What? Apple To Hold a Mysterious Event Later This Month
Apple is planning to hold a press event in New York later this month for a media-related declaration,according to a report of All Things D.
But it is sure that this event will not be related to the next version of iPad 3, the next iteration of the famous gadget that is expected to be available in 2012.
Also unlikely, the launch of Apple’s interactive television initiative that it has been working on. While Apple is likely to roll out its new Apple TV in the end of 2012, such an event would almost likely to be held at least in Silicon Valley or in the heart of the industry in Hollywood.
Since Apple’s senior vice president of Online Software and Services Eddy Cue is reportedly involved, so there is a possibility of some kind of publishing or even advertising announcement will be there, but we all know that Apple is very well known for moving around their public show-and-tells, so the announcement could surely change at any moment. It’s worth noting that Apple does have an iAd office in NYC, which Cue is also in charge of.The scheduling of the Socceroos' Asian Cup semi-final clash against United Arab Emirates on Tuesday in Newcastle instead of Melbourne is at best regretful and in reality an embarrassment.
It is regretful and embarrassing for the Asian Cup's local organising committee that they could not persuade the Victorian government to bid to stage a semi-final three years ago, and for the Bailieu/Napthine government that they did not give the tournament the respect it has proved to deserve.
Imagine what a great place Melbourne would be on Tuesday with Nick Kyrgios competing in the Australian Open quarter-finals on the same night the Socceroos were playing for a spot in the Asian Cup final. Credit:Getty Images
Instead, Newcastle's Hunter Stadium hosts the game, 10,000 under capacity because tickets cannot be sold for the grass banks behind the goals, and NSW has a free run at the biggest games at the business end of the tournament, with Sydney hosting the other semi-final and final.
When the scheduling was being determined for the matches and venues a few years ago, the local organisers and Football Federation Australia looked to governments to support the event by underwriting the bulk of the staging, marketing and promotional costs. The budget for staging the competition was $75 million, with state and federal governments contributing $61 million in a 50-50 split.Speaking during Report stage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, Baroness Knight compared those opposed to equal marriage to conscientious objectors during the First World War.
The Baroness made the comments during the debate around the bill on Monday, which lasted over nine hours, and was the first of two days of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill’s Report Stage.
She began by noting her previous argument that Catholic adoption agencies had closed because they had refused to place children with same-sex couples.
She said: “I agree completely with what was said in the earlier debate about the monstrous way that we in this country and, I am afraid, other countries have treated homosexuals in the past.
“But it’s only wrong up to a point. We can demand that other rules are made that aren’t fair. More and more I come to the conclusion is that one person’s human rights are the denial of another person’s human rights.”
She went on to draw a comparison between those opposed to equal marriage, and conscientious objectors, who chose not to fight during the First World War.
“We agreed years ago—I think the first well known example occurred during the First World War—that people were able to have a conscientious objection to fighting. They were given other jobs, which were extremely important in the war effort, and that happened in the last war, too. We must guard and guide that trend. It is woefully and obviously wrong to say today that it is right that conscientious objections shall, in certain circumstances, be smothered. It has to be wrong. We must stand and defend those conscientious objections.”
She the noted Lady Williams’ observation that becoming a registrar was the “first step to a whole career”, but expressed concern that some people would not be able to become registrars if they were opposed equal marriage.
“I urge noble Lords to recognise that it is very dangerous for a free country to deny a person’s right to live by their conscience. We may not agree—it is not important at all—but everybody has a right to their conscience and to live by what it tells them. It is only fair to say that we must try to give the same human rights to everyone,” she said.
The Conservative peer voted against the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill in the previous House of Lords vote. She hit the headlines when she said a higher authority” than any peer, had “already decided that people are not equal”, because “some people can see, others are blind”.
She dismissed suggestions of homophobia on BBC Radio 5 Live by saying: “We’ve all got friends who are homosexuals. They are often extremely, very, very good at artistic things, very good at things like antiques, knowledgeable. No reason at all to say that they’re not loving.”
The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill will resume Report stage on Wednesday 10 July.The final season of HBO’s The Leftovers is brilliant. As a disciple of the Church of Lost, an apostle of apocalypse narratives, an end-of-days evangelist, I feel fairly confident in preaching the perfection of the series’ latter days. Or so far, anyway. Critics were given the seven penultimate episodes and perhaps the denouement destroys the epic beauty in the communion of narrative and aesthetic that personifies the first seven-eighths of the season.
But I doubt it. The Leftovers is a rare breed of series, getting stronger as it goes on. From the mysterious disappearance of 2 percent of the global population in the first season to the brink of Armageddon in this one, and throughout all the flights of magical realism in between, the audience has been confronted by discussions of love, loss, faith, forgiveness, and futility in a post-truth era where on the small screen and main street, all we really want is answers, closure, and verity. Season three of The Leftovers aspires to complete its pilgrimage and ours. It’s a wandering populated by stunning performances from Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Amy Brenneman, Scott Glenn, Kevin Carroll, Christopher Eccleston, and the rest of the cast—an ensemble that has arced and swayed with skill and grace like few others.
Tom Perrotta, upon whose 2011 novel the series is based, has had his work interpreted by some of the industry’s most interesting and dynamic auteurs: Alexander Payne with Election, Peyton Reed with Bad Haircut, and Todd Field with Little Children. But his collaboration with Damon Lindelof (co-creator of both The Leftovers and Lost) goes beyond artistic adoption, as the series departs the page and expands into a vibrant and beautiful new universe that reimagines the possibilities of adaptation and storytelling. The Leftovers and Perrotta use the series’ final season to confront their characters’ pasts, their faiths, and whether beards mean the end of the world.
[This interview contains light spoilers.]
Season three is more geopolitical. The narrative expands to Australia and includes more of the “real world.” What role does that shift in setting play in completing the series?
I think that there’s been a steady expansion of the sphere of the show. The first season we were focused on an idea in the book, which was the way to handle this global event in the storytelling fashion, to have a microcosm, to stick with this one family in this one town. I would argue that season two was trying to look at a larger American context. I think it really helped |
an explanation of what Allâh Almighty intended, including all the implications involved and the details needed. These details are also received by the Holy Prophet through the unrecited revelation. As discussed earlier, the Holy Qur'ân has clearly said, Then, it is on Us to explain it. (75:19) This verse is self-explanatory on the subject. Allâh Almighty has Himself assured the Holy Prophet that He shall explain the Book to him. So, whatever explanation the Holy Prophet gives to the Book is based on the explanation of Allâh Himself. So, his interpretation of the Holy Qur'ân overrides all the possible interpretations. Hence, he is the final authority in the exegesis and interpretation of the Holy Qur'ân. His word is the last word in this behalf. Examples of Prophetic Explanations of the Qur'ân To be more specific, I would give a few concrete instances of the explanations of the Holy Book given to us by the Holy Prophet. These examples will also show the drastic amount of what we lose if we ignore the sunnah of the Holy Prophet: 1. The salaah (prayer) is the well-known way of worship which is undisputedly held as the first pillar of Islâm after having faith. The Holy Qur'ân has ordered more than 73 times to observe it. Despite this large number of verses giving direct command to observe the salaah, there is no verse in the entire Book to explain how to perform and observe it. Some components of the salaah, like ruku' (bowing down) or sujud (prostration) or qiyaam (standing) are, no doubt, mentioned in the Holy Qur'ân. But the complete way to perform salaah as a composite whole has never been explained. It is only through the sunnah of the Holy Prophet ( ) that we learn the exact way to perform it. If the sunnah is ignored, all these details about the correct way of observing salaah are totally lost. Not only this, nobody can bring forth an alternate way to perform salaah on the basis of the Holy Qur'ân alone. It is significant that the Holy Qur'ân has repeated the comand of observing salaah as many as 73 times, yet, it has elected not to describe the way it had to be performed. This is not without some wisdom behind it. The point that seems to have been made deliberately is one of the significance of the sunnah. By avoiding the details about no less a pillar of Islâm than salaah, it is pointed out that the Holy Qur'ân is meant for giving the fundamental principles only. The details are left to the explanations of the Holy Prophet ( ). 2. Moreover, it is mentioned in the Holy Qur'ân that the salaah is tied up with some prescribed times. Allâh Almighty says: Surely, the salaah is a timed obligation for the believers. (4:104) It is clear from this verse that there are some particular times in which the salaah should be performed. But what are those times is nowhere mentioned in the Holy Qur'ân. Even that the daily obligatory prayers are five in number is never disclosed in the Holy Book. It is only through the sunnah of the Holy Prophet that we have learnt the exact number and specific times of the obligatory prayers. 3. The same is the position of the number of rak'aat to be performed in each prayer. It is not mentioned anywhere in the Holy Qur'ân that the number of rak'aat is two in Fajr, four in Zuhr, 'Asr and 'Isha; it is only in the sunnah that these matters are mentioned. If the sunnah is not believed, all these necessary details even about the first pillar of Islâm remain totally unknown, so as to render the salaah too vague an obligation to be carried out in practice. 4. The same is the case if zakaah (alms-giving), the second pillar of Islâm, which is in most cases combined with the salaah in the Holy Qur'ân. The order to "pay zakaah" is found in the Holy Book in more than thirty places. But who is liable to pay it? On what rate it should be paid? What assets are liable to the obligation of zakaah? What assets are exempted from it? All these questions remain unanswered if the sunnah of the Holy Qur'ân is ignored. It is the Holy Prophet who explained all these details about zakaah. 5. Fasts of Ramadan are held to be the third pillar of Islâm. Here again only the fundamental principles are found in the Holy Qur'ân. Most of the necessary details have been left to the explanation of the Holy Prophet which he disclosed through his sayings and acts. What acts, other than eating, drinking and having sex, are prohibited or permitted during the fast? Under what conditions can one break the fast during the day? What kind of treatment can be undertaken in the state of fasting? All these and similar other details are mentioned by the Holy Prophet. 6. The Holy Qur'ân has said after mentioning how to perform wudu', (ablution): And if you are junub (defiled) well-purify yourself. (5:6) It is also clarified in the Holy Qur'ân that while being junub (defiled) one should not perform prayers (4:43). But the definition of junub (defiled) is nowhere given in the Holy Qur'ân nor is it mentioned how should a defiled person "well-purify" himself. It is the Holy Prophet who has explained all these questions and laid down the detailed injunctions on the subject. 7. The command of the Holy Qur'ân concerning Hajj, the fourth pillar of Islâm, is in the following words: And as a right of Allâh, it is obligatory on people to perform the Hajj of the House- whoever has the ability to manage his way to it. (3:97) It is just not disclosed here as to how many times the Hajj (pilgrimage to Makkah) is obligatory? The Holy Prophet explained that the obligation is discharged by performing Hajj only once in a life-time. 8. The Holy Qur'ân says: Those who accumulate gold and silver and do not spend them in the way of Allâh, give them the news of a painful punishment. (9:34) Here, "accumulation" is prohibited and "spending" is enjoined. But the quantum of none of the two is explained. Upto what limit can one save his money, and how much spending is obligatory? Both the questions are left to the explanation of the Holy Prophet who has laid down the detailed rules in this respect. 9. The Holy Qur'ân, while describing the list of the women of prohibited degree, with whom one cannot marry, has extended the prohibition to marrying two sisters in one time: And (it is also prohibited) to combine two sisters together. (4:23) The Holy Prophet while explaining this verse, clarified that the prohibition is not restricted to two sisters only. The verse has, instead, laid down a principle which includes the prohibition of combining an aunt and her niece, paternal or maternal, as well. 10. The Holy Qur'ân says: Today the good things have been permitted to you. (5:5) Here, the "good things" are not explained. The detailed list of the lawful "good things" has only been given by the Holy Prophet who has described the different kinds of food being not lawful for the Muslims and not falling in the category of "good things." Had there been no such explanation given by the Holy Prophet everybody could interpret the "good things" according to his own personal desires, and the very purpose of the revelation, namely, to draw a clear distinction between good and bad, could have been disturbed. If everybody was free to determine what is good and what is bad, neither any revelation nor a messenger was called for. It was through both the Holy Book and the Messenger that the need was fulfilled. Numerous other examples of this nature may be cited. But the few examples given above are, perhaps, quite sufficient to show the nature of the explanations given by the Holy Prophet as well as to establish their necessity in the framework of an Islâmic life ordained by the Holy Qur'ân for its followers.............. The Time Limit of the Prophetic Authority We have so far studied the two types of the Prophetic authority, first being the authority to make new laws in addition to those contained in the Holy Qur'ân, and the second being the authority to explain, interpret and expound the Qur'ânic injunctions. But before proceeding to other aspects of the Prophetic authority, another issue should be resolved just here. It is sometimes argued by those who hesitate to accept the full authority of the Sunnah, that whenever the Holy Qur'ân has conferred on the Holy Prophet an authority to make laws or to explain and interpret the Book, it meant this authority to be binding on the people of the Prophet's time only. They were under the direct control and the instant supervision of the Holy Prophet and were addressed by him face to face. Therefore, the Prophetic authority was limited to them only. It cannot be extended to all the generations for all times to come. This contention leads us to the discovery of the time limits of the Prophetic authority. The question is whether the authority of the Holy Prophet was confined to his own time, or it is an everlasting authority which holds good for all times to come. The basic question underlying this issue has already been answered in detail; and that is the question of the nature of this authority. It has been established through a number of arguments that the obedience of the Holy Prophet was not enjoined upon the Muslims in his capacity of a ruler. It has been enjoined in his capacity of a prophet. Had it been the authority of a ruler only which the Holy Prophet exercised, it would logically be inferred that the authority is tied up with his rule, and as soon as his administrative rule is over, his authority simultaneously ceases to have effect. But if the authority is a "Prophetic" authority, and not merely a "ruling authority," then it is obvious that it shall continue with the continuance of the prophethood, and shall not disappear until the Holy Prophet no longer remains a prophet. Now, the only question is whether the Holy Prophet was a prophet of a particular nation or a particular time, or his prophethood extended to the whole mankind for all times. Let us seek the answer from the Holy Qur'ân itself. The Holy Qur'ân says: Say: O mankind! I am the Messenger of Allâh to you all. (7:158) And We did not send you (O Prophet) except to the entire mankind, bearing good news and warning. (34:28) And We did not send you save as a mercy unto all the worlds. (21:107) Blessed be He Who has sent down the Qur'ân on His servant so that he may be a warner to all the worlds. (25:1) And We have sent you (O Prophet) for mankind as a messenger. And Allâh suffices to be a witness. (4:79) And the whole mankind is addressed when it is said: O mankind! The Messenger has come to you with the truth from your Lord, so believe: it is better for you. And if you disbelieve, to Allâh belongs what is in the heavens and in the earth. And Allâh is All-Knowing, All-Wise. (4:170) The first five verses need no elaboration. They are self-explanatory on the point that the Holy Prophet was sent to the whole mankind and not to a particular people; his prophethood was not limited either in time or in place. The fifth verse addresses the whole mankind and enjoins upon all of them to believe in the Holy Prophet. Nobody can say that the belief of the Holy Prophet was restricted to his own time. It is, according to this verse, incumbent upon all the peoples, of whatever age, to believe in his Prophethood. It is also mentioned in the Holy Qur'ân that the Holy Prophet is the last Messenger after whom no Prophet is to come: Muhammad is not the father of any one of your men, but the Messenger of Allâh and the last of the prophets. And Allâh is All-Knowing in respect of everything. (33:40) This verse made it clear that the Holy Prophet is the last one in the chain of prophets. The earlier prophets were often sent to a particular nation for a particular time, because they were succeeded by other prophets. But no prophet is to come after Muhammad. Hence, his prophethood extends to all the nations and all the times. This is what the Holy Prophet himself explained in the following words: The Israelites were led by the prophets. Whenever a prophet would pass away, another prophet would succeed him. But there is no prophet after me. However, there shall be successors, and shall be in large numbers. (Sahih al-Bukhari Ch. 50 Hadîth 3455) If the realm of his prophethood would not reach out to the next generations, the people of those generations would be left devoid of the prophetic guidance, while Allâh does not leave any people without prophetic guidance. In the light of the verses quoted above, there remains no doubt in the fact that the Holy Prophet is a messenger to all the nations for all times to come. If his prophethood extends to all times, there remains no room for the suggestion that his prophetic authority does no longer hold good and the present day Muslims are not bound to obey and follow him. There is another point in the subject worth attention: It is established through a large number of arguments in the first chapter that Allâh Almighty sent no divine book without a messenger. It is also clarified by Allâh that the messengers are sent to teach the Book and to explain it. It is also proved earlier that but for the detailed explanations of the Holy Prophet, nobody might know even the way of obligatory prayers. The question now is whether all these Prophetic explanations were needed only by the Arabs of the Prophetic age. The Arabs of Makkah were more aware of the Arabic language than we are. They were more familiar with the Qur'ânic style. They were physically present at the time of revelation and observed personally all the surrounding circumstances in which the Holy Book was revealed. They received the verses of the Holy Qur'ân from the mouth of the Holy Prophet and were fully aware of all the factors which help in the correct understanding of the text. Still, they needed the explanations of the Holy Prophet which were binding on them. Then, how can a man of ordinary perception presume that the people of this age, who lack all these advantages, do not need the explanations of a prophet? We have neither that command on the Arabic language as they had, nor are we so familiar with the Qur'ânic style as they were, nor have we seen the circumstances in which the Holy Qur'ân was revealed, as they have seen. If they needed the guidance of the Holy Prophet in interpreting the Holy Qur'ân, we should certainly need it all the more. If the authority of the Holy Qur'ân has no time-limit, if the text of the Qur'ân is binding on all generations for all times to come, then the authority of the Messenger, which is included in the very Qur'ân without being limited to any time bond, shall remain as effective as the Holy Qur'ân itself. While ordaining for the "obedience of the messenger," the Holy Qur'ân addressed not only the Arabs of Makkah or Madînah. It has addressed all the believers when it was said: O those who believe, obey Allâh and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. (4:59) If the "obedience of Allâh" has always been combined with the "obedience of the Messenger" as we have seen earlier, there is no room for separating any one from the other. If one is meant for all times, the other cannot be meant for a particular period. The Holy Qur'ân at another place has also warned against such separation between Allâh and His Messenger: Those who disbelieve in Allâh and His Messengers, and desire to make separation between Allâh and His Messengers and say, "We believe in some and disbelieve in some," desiring to adopt a way in between this and that? those are the unbelievers in truth; and We have prepared for the disbelievers a humiliating punishment. (4:150-151) Therefore, the submission to the authority of the Holy Prophet is a basic ingredient of having belief in his prophethood, which can never be separated from him. Thus, to accept the prophetic authority in the early days of Islâm, and to deny it in the later days, is so fallacious a proposition that cannot find support from any source of Islâmic learning, nor can it be accepted on any touchstone of logic and reason. The Prophetic Authority in Worldly Affairs Another point of view often presented by some westernised circles is that the authority of the Holy Prophet ( ) is, no doubt, established by the Holy Qur'ân even for all the generations for all times to come; But, the scope of this authority is limited only to the doctrinal affairs and the matters of worship. The function of a prophet, according to them, is restricted to correct the doctrinal beliefs of the ummah and to teach them how to worship Allâh. As far as the worldly affairs are concerned, they are not governed by the prophetic authority. These worldly affairs include, in their view, all the economic, social and political affairs which should be settled according to the expediency at each relevant time, and the Prophetic authority has no concern with them. Even if the Holy Prophet gives some directions in these fields, he does so in his private capacity, and not as a Messenger. So, it is not necessary for the ummah to comply with such directions. To substantiate this proposition, a particular tradition of the Holy Prophet is often quoted, though out of context, in which he said to his companions: You know more about your worldly affairs. Before I quote this tradition in its full context, the very concept upon which this proposition is based needs examination. In fact, this view is based on a serious misconception about the whole structure of the Islâmic order. The misconception is that Islâm, like some other religions, is restricted only to some doctrines and some rituals. It has no concern with the day-to-day affairs of the human life. After observing the prescribed doctrines and rituals, everybody is free to run his life in whatever way he likes, not hindered in any manner by the divine imperatives. That is why the advocates of this view confine the Prophetic authority to some doctrines and rituals only. But, the misconception, however fashionable it may seem to be, is a misconception. It is an established fact that Islâm, unlike some other religions which can coincide and co-exist with the secular concept of life, is not merely a set of doctrines and rituals. It is a complete way of life which deals with the political, economic and social problems as well as with theological issues. The Holy Qur'ân says, O those who believe, respond to the call of Allâh and His Messenger when he calls you for what gives you life. (8:24) It means that Allâh and His Messenger call people towards life. How is it imagined that the affairs of life are totally out of the jurisdiction of Allâh and His Messenger? Nobody who has studied the Holy Qur'ân can endorse that its teachings are limited to worship and rituals. There are specific injunctions in the Holy Qur'ân about sale, purchase loans, mortgage, partnership, penal laws, inheritance, matrimonial relations, political affairs, problems of war and peace and other aspects of international relations. If the Islâmic teachings were limited to the doctrinal and ritual matters, there is no reason why such injunctions are mentioned in the Holy Qur'ân. Likewise the sunnah of the Holy Prophet deals with the economic, social, political and legal problems in such detail that voluminous books have been written to compile them. How can it be envisaged that the Holy Prophet entered this field in such detailed manner without having any authority or jurisdiction? The injunctions of the Holy Qur'ân and sunnah in this field are so absolute, imperative and of mandatory nature that they cannot be imagined to be personal advices lacking any legal force. We have already quoted a large number of verses from the Holy Qur'ân which enjoin the obedience of Allâh and the Messenger upon the believers. This "obedience" has nowhere been limited to some particular field. It is an all-embracing obedience which requires total submission from the believers, having no exception whatsoever. It is true that in this field, which is termed in the Islâmic law as "mu'âmalât," the Holy Qur'ân and sunnah have mostly given some broad principles and left most of the details open to be settled according to ever-changing needs, but in strict conformity with the principles laid down by them. Thus the field not occupied by the Qur'ân and sunnah is a wider field where the requirements of expediency can well play their role. But it does not mean that the Qur'ân and sunnah have no concern with this vital branch of human life which has always been the basic cause of unrest in the history of humanity, and in which the so-called "rational views" mostly conflicting with each other, have always fallen prey to satanic desires leading the world to disaster. Anyhow, the fallacy of this narrow viewpoint about Islâm which excludes all the practical spheres of life from its pale, rather, to be more correct, makes them devoid of its guidance, cannot sustain before the overwhelming arguments which stand to rule it out totally. The Event of Fecundation of the Palm-Trees Let me now turn to the tradition which is often quoted to support this fallacious view. The details of the tradition are as follows: The Arabs of Madînah used to fecundate their palm-trees in order to make them more fruitful. This operation was called ta'bîr which is explained by E. W. Lane (Arabic English Lexicon) as below: "He fecundated a palm-tree by means of the spadix of the male tree, which is bruised or brayed, and sprinkled upon the spadix of the female; or by inserting a stalk of a raceme of the male tree into the spathe of the female, after shaking off the pollen of the former upon the spadix of the female." Keeping this in view, read the following tradition, as mentioned by Imâm Muslim in his Sahîh: The blessed companion Talhâ says:"I passed along with the Holy Prophet across some people who were on the tops of the palm-trees. The Holy Prophet asked, 'What are they doing?' Some people said, 'They are fecundating the tree. They insert the male into the female and the tree stands fecundated.' The Holy Prophet said, I do not think it will be of any use.' The people (who were fecundating the trees) were informed about what the Holy Prophet said. So, they stopped this operation. Then the Holy Prophet was informed about their withdrawal. On this, the Holy Prophet said, 'If it is in fact useful for them, let them do it, because I had only made a guess. So, do not cling to me in my guess. But when I tell you something on behalf of Allâh, take it firm, because I shall never tell a lie on behalf of Allâh." According to the blessed companion Anas, the Holy Prophet has also said on this occasion: You know more about your worldly affairs. The words of this tradition, when looked at in its full context, would clearly reveal that the Holy Prophet in this case did not deliver an absolute prohibition against the fecundation of the palm trees. There was no question of its being lawful or unlawful. What the Holy Prophet did was neither a command, nor a legal or religious prohibition, nor a moral condemnation. It was not even a serious observation. It was only a remark passed by him by the way in the form of an instant and general guess, as he himself clarified later. "I do not think it will be of any use." Nobody can take this sentence as a legal or religious observation. That is why the Holy Prophet did not address with it the persons involved in the operation, nor did he order to convey his message to them. It was through some other persons that they learned about the remark of the Holy Prophet. Although the remark was not in the form of an imperative, but the blessed companions of the Holy Prophet used to obey and follow him in everything, not only on the basis of his legal or religious authority, but also out of their profound love towards him. They, therefore, gave up the operation altogether. When the Holy Prophet came to know about their having abstained from the operation on the basis of what he remarked, he clarified the position to avoid any misunderstanding. The substance of his clarification is that only the absolute statements of the Holy Prophet are binding, because they are given in his capacity of a prophet on behalf of Allâh Almighty. As for a word spoken by him as a personal guess, and not as an absolute statement, it should be duly honoured, but it should not be taken as part of Sharî'ah. As I have mentioned earlier, there is a vast field in the day-to-day worldly affairs which is not occupied by the Sharî'ah, where the people have been allowed to proceed according to their needs and expedience and on the basis of their knowledge and experience. What instruments should be used to fertilise a barren land? How the plants should be nourished? What weapons are more useful for the purpose of defence? What kind of horses are more suitable to ride? What medicine is useful in a certain disease? The questions of this type relate to the field where the Sharî'ah has not supplied any particular answer. All these and similar other matters are left to the human curiosity which can solve these problems through its efforts. It is this unoccupied field of mubâhat about which the Holy Prophet observed: You know more about your worldly affairs. But it does not include those worldly affairs in which the Holy Qur'ân or the sunnah have laid down some specific rules or given a positive command. That is why the Holy Prophet, while declaring the matter of the palm-trees to be in the unoccupied field, has simultaneously observed, "But when I tell you something on behalf of Allâh, take it firm." The upshot of the foregoing discussion is that the sunnah of the Holy Prophet is the second source of Islâmic law. Whatever the Holy Prophet said or did in his capacity of a Messenger is binding on the ummah. This authority of the sunnah is based on the revelation he received from Allâh. Hence, the obedience of the Holy Prophet is another form of the obedience of Allâh. This prophetic authority which is established through a large number of Qur'ânic verses, cannot be curtailed, neither by limiting its tenure, nor by exempting the worldly affairs from its scope. (Taqi Usmani, The Authority of Sunnah, Chapter 2: The Scope of the Prophetic Authority, Source ) Return to Hadeeth Rejecters Return to HomepageMONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Late on the night of August 4, 2010, a badly beaten young man arrived at the trauma ward of Jackson Hospital here. Although the patient was hardly a flight risk, security was tight and prison guards crowded into the emergency room as doctors began treatment.
The patient's limp body spoke to the savagery of an assault that had left deep contusions on his legs and torso, and inflamed knots bulging from his head and face. He was unresponsive, with fixed and dilated pupils, and doctors quickly diagnosed a traumatic brain injury. Only a ventilator kept him alive. He never regained consciousness and died the next day.
His name was Rocrast Mack. An Alabama prison inmate, his death at age 24 came at the hands of six corrections officers, who took turns battering him with their fists, feet and batons in retribution for a minor altercation with a female guard earlier that night, according to witness accounts and prison records.
Civil rights advocates call Mack's death an avoidable tragedy, the inevitable product of a profoundly dysfunctional state corrections system in Alabama that ranks among the very worst America has to offer.
It is a system flooded with low-level drug offenders like Mack, who was sentenced to 20 years behind bars after pleading guilty to selling $10 worth of crack cocaine to an undercover cop in 2009.
Alabama is also emblematic of a broader problem facing America's prison system: In many states, there simply isn't enough room to hold all of the people who are incarcerated. Against that tableau, inmates often born and bred in hard luck circumstances now find themselves mired in a loop of violence that extends from the street and into prisons themselves.
Yet even in a nation that has little to boast about in terms of prison efficiency and quality, Alabama stands out for what appears to be the sheer brutality and freewheeling nature of its corrections system.
Starved of funds, the state's aging prisons suffer from the worst overcrowding in the nation, operating at an average of 190 percent of their design capacity. Ventress Correctional Facility, where Mack died, is an outlier even by this standard. Built in 1990 and designed to accommodate just 650 men, the facility now holds 1,665 prisoners -- more than 255 percent of its capacity.
Alabama has not ignored Mack's death. Last month, more than a year after it occurred, the Alabama attorney general charged the ranking officer at the scene, Lt. Michael A. Smith, with intentional murder for the beating.
The charge, which could put Smith behind bars for life, is unusual. Even when excessive force is alleged after an inmate death, prosecutors rarely bring charges above manslaughter or negligent homicide, according to Gene Atherton, a former prison administrator and consultant on use of force in prisons and jails.
Federal prosecutors have also taken action. On Nov. 18, the Justice Department said a junior officer involved in the assault, Scottie T. Glenn, had pleaded guilty to two felonies: violating Mack's civil rights and conspiring with fellow officers to cover up the assault.
Civil rights advocates welcome the charges, but say they don't go nearly far enough. What is truly needed, they say, is widescale reform to alleviate brutally harsh conditions that foster violence by inmates and guards.
"What happened with Mr. Mack is almost predictable," said Charlotte Morrison, a senior staff attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, a prisoner legal assistance group based in Montgomery.
It is not just independent groups calling for reform. Conditions are so dire that senior Alabama lawmakers recently warned fellow legislators that the prison system risks seizure by the federal courts and a mandatory mass release of inmates. In California, when the Supreme Court recently ordered the release of 30,000 inmates on constitutional grounds, the state's prisons had an overcrowding rate of about 170 percent.
"Alabama is facing a crisis with its prisons -- too many inmates and not enough beds," Cam Ward, the Republican chairman of the state senate's judiciary committee, wrote in an editorial in the Birmingham News earlier this month.
Severely overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed, the state's prisons have become incubators of disturbing levels of inmate-on-inmate violence, according to prisoner advocacy and civil rights groups that work in the state. Equally troubling is a sharp rise in allegations of brutality by Alabama corrections officers, these groups say.
"We've seen a dramatic increase in the number of complaints coming into our office concerning guard-on-inmate assaults," said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of EJI. "Physical assaults of inmates by guards have become an accepted part of the culture in a lot of Alabama prisons."
Facilitating the abuse are outdated standards for monitoring guard and inmate interactions -- video cameras, common in most state and federal prison systems, are rare in Alabama, for instance -- and follow-up investigations after assaults that are haphazard at best, critics say.
Such shortcomings in oversight allow problem officers to operate without consequences until they inflict a catastrophic injury on a prisoner, as in the case of Mack, according to Sarah Geraghty, senior staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta civil liberties group that works extensively in Alabama's prisons.
"The department has been on notice a long time that they have a serious problem with how they investigate reports of brutality," she said. "Their approach has been to bury their heads in the sand."
State officials readily acknowledge problems with staffing and overcrowding, but adamantly reject charges that Alabama's prisons are rife with violence and abuse.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, Richard Allen, the prison commissioner at the time of Mack's death and now Alabama's chief deputy attorney general, described the prison system as "very well-run."
"I don't think our prisons are different from any other system in the country," Allen said. "Alabama is maybe less violent than other facilities."
Allegations of widespread inmate abuse are simply not believable, he added. "Prisoners have been known to exaggerate," he said.
Allen described the fatal assault on Mack as "a tragedy," but said an internal investigation by the department of corrections had found no evidence of other wrongdoing by officers at Ventress Correctional Facility.
The review was conducted by James DeLoach, the department's senior official for operations, who personally briefed Allen on the findings, Allen said. DeLoach refused repeated requests for an interview and declined to answer questions by email or provide a written statement.
"In Mr. DeLoach's judgment, it was an isolated incident and was not part of a broader problem," Allen said. "He looked into it."
'PLEASE HELP ME'
An examination of the records and documents surrounding Mack's murder sharply contradicted the apparent conclusion by the Alabama Department of Corrections that it was an isolated event.
To the contrary, court records and other documents demonstrate that both agencies overlooked clear signs of escalating violence by guards at Ventress in the period before Mack was killed.
In particular, documents reveal numerous excessive force allegations against Lt. Michael Smith, now charged with murder, and other guards at Ventress. It is a pattern that prison officials and the Alabama attorney general's office either did not recognize at all or failed to take any serious steps to address.
Court records show that Smith became a familiar face to the Alabama attorney general's office between 2009 and 2010, a period when the state vigorously defended him in three separate federal brutality lawsuits filed against him by Ventress prisoners.
All three complaints contain documentation of serious unexplained injuries to the prisoners and were deemed credible enough by a federal judge to withstand repeated attempts by the state to have them dismissed without trial. (One suit was recently dismissed on technical grounds; the other two remain pending.)
Smith had been investigated by the Alabama Department of Corrections for brutality in a fourth case, according to a deposition in a federal lawsuit, before being promoted to his supervisory role at the prison. The corrections department declined to share details of the allegations or the investigation into them.
After the multiple brutality complaints were described to Allen, the former commissioner, he revised his statement. "At some point I was informed that Smith was the subject of other allegations," he said. "I was not aware of that at the time of the alleged murder."
But charges of abuse at Ventress go well beyond a single rogue officer.
Lawsuits, interviews, sworn affidavits and inmate letters all describe a poisonous atmosphere at the prison, where guards -- several under Smith's command -- allegedly beat and abused inmates who crossed them with little apparent concern for the consequences.
Some brutality claims are supported by records of injuries and sworn statements by inmate witnesses. Others are simple handwritten cries for help. In their totality, they paint a disturbing picture of lawlessness at the facility in the time preceding Mack's death.
"The environment is very scary at the moment," Lavaris Evans, then 21 and serving three years at Ventress for an $1,800 credit card theft, wrote to a prisoner assistance group in April 2010.
"Today they beat a real close friend of mine until he was knocked out," Evans continued. "He's beat very badly to the point that he can't open his eyes."
"If there's any way you can get me far away from here," he wrote. "Please help me."
Allegations of widespread inmate abuse at the prison are further bolstered by a sworn statement made by Paul T. Costello, a Ventress guard, filed in late October in U.S. District Court in Montgomery in response to an inmate lawsuit.
The document indicates that in July 2009, a group of Ventress guards, including two senior officers, witnessed Smith's violent assault on an inmate, then falsified internal reports and perjured themselves in federal court by denying their involvement in the incident.
Bryan Stevenson of EJI said the officer's statement "clearly establishes" a history of abusive behavior by officers at Ventress before Mack's death. "It makes a statement that the violence against Mr. Mack was an isolated incident not credible."
"Many officers clearly thought they could act violently toward prisoners with impunity," he added. "That develops when repeated acts of unauthorized use of force go unpunished."
Reached by phone, J.C. Giles, the Ventress warden, refused to answer any questions about violence at the facility.
'A TICKING TIME BOMB'
Brian Corbett, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections, declined to respond to allegations of systemic abuse at Ventress, citing an ongoing investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice.
"We, therefore, are unable to comment or release any additional information regarding this incident due to continued criminal and civil investigations," he said.
Allen, the former commissioner and current chief deputy attorney general, also declined to comment on the allegations of broader violence at the facility. "There is nothing I want to say," he said.
But the state's overall policies regarding violence and inmate abuse in its prisons were made amply clear over the past two years, during litigation of a federal class-action suit filed on behalf of inmates at Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison east of Birmingham.
The prisoners were represented by the Southern Center for Human Rights, which hired Steve J. Martin, a nationally-recognized corrections expert and the former general counsel for the Texas Department of Corrections, to review practices at the prison.
Martin, who has worked as an expert for the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and served as federal court monitor in seven prisons and large metropolitan jail systems, found extreme levels of violence and use of force practices at Donaldson that were "far out of the mainstream," he said in an interview.
Beatings with batons were common, and even incidents that left inmates seriously injured were poorly documented and investigated, he said.
"There is a disturbing level of staff-on-inmate violence at Donaldson, much of which is not investigated or questioned," he wrote in a report submitted to U.S. District Court in Montgomery.
In at least once instance, he found, the violence had had fatal consequences. In |
actually format the system and clean it out, the way we did in Judea and Samaria during Operation Defensive Shield."
As Abunimah explains:
Israel credits these [Operation Defensive Shield massacres in 2002] with turning the Palestinian Authority (PA) into an even more obedient partner of the Israeli army in suppressing Palestinian resistance. In the 2000s, under the supervision of U.S. general Keith Dayton, PA forces were re-made into a more effective Israeli proxy force to suppress any resistance, particularly from Hamas.
Ever since Hamas won Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006, Israel has largely been able to count on the PA as collaborators in its war on Gaza. So even as Israel trumpets the "surgical precision" of its military--a claim which a compliant mainstream media promotes--the PA has remained silent in the face of Israel's war crimes.
For years, Israel has alternatively deployed open warfare on the one hand and siege and strangulation on the other in its war to devastate the Palestinian population. In the words of Noam Chomsky, recently returned to the U.S. after making his first trip to Gaza:
It's amazing and inspiring to see people managing somehow to survive as essentially caged animals and subject to constant, random, sadistic punishment only to humiliate them. Israel and the United States keep them alive, basically. They don't want them to starve to death. But it's set up so that you can't have a dignified, decent life. In fact, one of the words you hear most often is "dignity." They would like to have dignified lives. And the standard Israeli position is they shouldn't raise their heads. And it's a pressure cooker that could blow up. People can't live like that forever...It's an open-air prison...It's constant subjugation to an external force, which has no purpose except to humiliate you. Of course, they have pretexts--everybody has pretexts--but they don't make any sense.
But with the Middle East already on a knife's edge, the stakes are even higher this time around. Around the world, everyone who is concerned about the cause of justice must mobilize to prevent Israel from attempting to repeat the destruction of Gaza's civilian infrastructure and the targeting of Palestinian children that it unleashed during Operation Cast Lead.Bryce Harper reacts after striking out looking to end an inning against the Mets. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
One day in mid-August, when Trea Turner was hitting.338 and slugging.546, the 23-year-old was scrolling through his Twitter account when he came upon a rather unpleasant tweet. In it, a man Turner did not know, who does not follow him on the site, generously offered his unsolicited thoughts about the rookie’s season in 140 grammatically suspect characters that included such phrases as “your a” and “U’ll.”
Turner replied with one word: “you’re.”
“I had 100 retweets and hundreds of favorites, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” Turner said. “Then people just started tweeting at him left and right, trash-talking him. I felt kind of bad because I didn’t mean for all that to happen.”
Turner, like many public figures, receives a barrage of messages like those on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes, the feedback is positive. Often, particularly when things are not going well on the field, it is not.
Players such as Turner must balance standing up for themselves with the risks of embarrassing themselves, brushing it off with being ticked off.
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As the Washington Nationals make the third playoff appearance in team history beginning Friday, heightened emotions almost certainly will inspire further participation in the social-media conversation that is becoming an increasingly complex part of life for big leaguers who choose to take part.
[Max Scherzer reached 20 wins, but his Cy Young case goes beyond that]
Some Nationals see everything sent their way on social media. Some ignore it, or choose not to have social-media profiles at all. All of them weigh the pros of interacting with supportive fans against the cons of hearing from critics who aren’t subject to the same levels of accountability.
“I have written out full tweets and figured out how to get everything I want to say in 140 characters, spend five minutes on it, then think, this probably isn’t a good idea,” first baseman Clint Robinson said. “They say if you have to say ‘should I?’ you probably shouldn’t. So I’ve hit delete quite a bit.”
Robinson reads everything. Others, such as shortstop Danny Espinosa, do not have a Twitter account. Espinosa said he mostly hears about things from his wife, who does have one, if he hears them at all.
“I used to have it when I was young, then quickly realized the negatives of it,” Espinosa said. “It just doesn’t matter who you are or what you do or what you’ve done, because the second you do something that somebody doesn’t agree with, people bash you.”
Outfielder Jayson Werth does not have a Twitter account, and he said “absolutely not” when asked if he ever seeks out what people are saying. However, when a reporter tweeted video of Werth’s first throw of spring training sailing a few feet over Bryce Harper’s head, Werth mentioned the tweet just a few minutes afterward.
General Manager Mike Rizzo does not have an account, either. He said he mostly relies on his public relations staff to show him things he needs to know — rumors of injuries, trades, free agent interest, etc. — which he then addresses with those responsible if he sees fit.
“I would say on a 20 to 80 scale, I’m about a 30 social-media person,” said Rizzo, who also has been known to bring up a tweet or two now and then.
Max Scherzer laughed out loud when asked how much he pays attention to social-media criticism. Joe Ross seemed amused and said he mostly enjoys reading the positive feedback, but as for the other stuff?
“Not at all bothered,” he said. “Not in the slightest bit.”
“I’ll get like one random person say, ‘Way to blow the game,’ and I’m just like, ‘Okay, what am I going to say to that?’ ” left-handed reliever Sammy Solis said. “I can’t imagine being like Bryce.”
[Boswell: After 95 wins, these Nationals are not to be taken for granted]
Such was the sentiment of most of the Nationals, who see Harper bear the brunt of most online outrage. Harper said he is used to it, having been the center of attention and a powerful magnet for criticism since age 15.
He said he does not run his Twitter account, which sends out his Instagram pictures along with obligatory messages for sponsors to 736,000 followers. He tries not to read what people post on his Instagram, either, though he does see comments now and then. So does his family.
“My brother, of course, has it,” said Harper, of brother Bryan, who finished this season with the Class AAA Syracuse Chiefs. “He sent me this one: ‘Your brother Bryce is worse than Hitler.’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh — Hitler!?’ ”
Occasionally the Nationals will share mean tweets with one another, on the bus rides to and from the stadium or just in the clubhouse. Backup catcher Jose Lobaton had one of the consensus winners when someone tweeted that he should die of cancer.
“It’s not something that’s going to bother me like, ‘You know what? I’m going to die of cancer.’ It’s like, ‘What an idiot. Who is this guy doing that?’ Just say, ‘You suck,’ ” Lobaton said. “... I just feel bad for them. How can you say that to somebody?”
Lobaton said he knows comments such as those are meant to incite a reaction — but when players react, far more people see it than see the initial tweet, so the consequences are more substantial for players than their critics.
“It’s hard sometimes to see that. Sometimes I just want to get on Twitter or Instagram just to check,” Lobaton said. “Then you see that, and you’re just like, ‘That’s not what I need.’ ”
Robinson, on the other hand, feeds off it.
“Sometimes I do it to fire myself up and say, ‘Get your head out of your butt.’ Sometimes I like my ego stroked a little bit,” Robinson said. “It is a hard game. It’s a game of failure. So when you do something good, it’s great to hear that people appreciate what you did.”
Players agreed that the most absurd tweets, while disturbing in their own way, are easier to dismiss because of their irrationality. They also understand that, to the extent that any substantial negative energy is warranted for those who play a game all summer, they probably deserve a little criticism at times.
Early last June, a few months into his rookie year, Robinson was picked off first base to end a potential game-tying rally against the Chicago Cubs. He immediately told reporters he had made a mistake — Robinson is not particularly speedy, and therefore likely wasn’t headed anywhere anyway. But he avoided social media for a few days all the same.
“I knew I screwed up. I didn’t want to hear it,” Robinson said. “... Pretty much every time something bad happens, somebody’s going to pop off because it’s a forum you can have where you’re not going to get confronted about it.”
Therein lies the ultimate tension for players who want to interact with fans but must face negativity warranted and unwarranted to do so.
“If I was 0 for 4 with three [strikeouts] and somebody was talking crap to me, I’d probably be like, ‘I mean, you’re right. I was bad tonight,’ ” Turner said. “... You have one bad game here, it’s like you’re the worst player ever. And you have one good game, you’re the best and everything is just so extreme. It’s funny how it works.”The Phantom 4 Pro improves on the Phantom 4’s imaging and video capture capabilities with an upgraded camera that shoots 4K/60fps at a bitrate of 100Mbps and stills up to 20-megapixels. The Phantom 4 Pro also comes with added improvements to its obstacle avoidance system and flight time. The FlightAutonomy system adds dual rear vision sensors and two imaging cameras for a total of 5 directions of obstacle sensing. The Intelligent Flight Battery has also increased capacity by 520 mah for an extended flight time of 30 minutes. There are even brand new ActiveTrack and TapFly functions to capture new and exciting shots.
As an extension of the Phantom 4 but with huge improvements in features and camera quality, the Phantom 4 Pro is the perfect drone for pilots looking to shoot cinema-quality imagery from the skies.
GIMBAL AND CAMERA
Visually the Phantom 4 Pro’s camera looks similar to the one on the Phantom 4, but it has received some major upgrades that separate it from the pack. The Phantom 4 Pro uses a 1-inch CMOS 20-megapixel sensor and has a manually adjustable aperture from F2.8 to F11.
The camera also includes a mechanical shutter and has a focus range from 1m to infinity, which reduces distortion and allows users to take much higher resolution photos. The combination of a larger, better sensor and a mechanical shutter gives the Phantom 4 Pro’s camera the ability to shoot much higher quality photos than any of its predecessors.Since both candidates in Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate have a record when it comes to religious liberty, you can bet the topic will come up—giving you the opportunity to talk with the people in your life about a deeply important issue.
Unsurprisingly, religious liberty is a tricky topic to navigate because it’s personal. People feel strongly about the ability to live life as they want, but some betray the concept of tolerance by crying “intolerant!” if others want to live life through the lens of their faith.
So, how do you talk about religious liberty with someone who thinks the government can force people to violate their beliefs? Here are some guidelines that allow you to tread lightly and expertly discuss the issue without fear and trembling.
Common Ground
We’ve talked in the past about how common ground is disarming, and we’re going to make that case again.
Liberals frequently cry “intolerant!” when conservatives start to talk about religious liberty. Don’t let them.
Though it’s become a dirty word, tolerance is important—we should be able to disagree with each other and then live side-by-side in peace. Tolerance doesn’t mean defeat, but it does require kindness and respect from both parties.
Acknowledging the common ground of tolerance creates a safe space to examine, discuss, and disagree. And addressing the elephant in the room—“we disagree on this issue, but it’s ok. I’ll maybe kinda sorta still like you when this is over. Now let’s talk about it”—frees you up to make your case and rightly frames your motivation.
The liberal on the other side of the conversation can’t claim you’re intolerant if you just said you believe we should be able to disagree, discuss, and then live in peace side-by-side.
Goodbye, argument of intolerance. Hello, civil discussion.
Examples
Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of folks trying to run businesses, practice medicine, or simply move up the corporate ladder but have been punished for not wanting to violate their beliefs.
Here is the latest from The Daily Signal on the Oregon bakers who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony in January 2013. Nearly four years later, the bakery is closed and the case is still moving through the court system (think of those hefty legal bills).
This article explains why a 70-year-old florist is facing seven figures in legal fees for refusing to make flower arrangements for a same-sex wedding.
Illinois signed into law a bill that forces doctors to tell their patients about the benefits of abortion and refer them to abortion providers, even if the doctor is pro-life.
These are powerful examples to use when arguing for religious liberty. Not only do you have plenty to choose from, but the person you’re talking to will more quickly recognize the person you’re defending.
Words
Be inclusive. Don’t point fingers. Go on offense, not defense.
When you talk about religious liberty, you’re not only making a case for your beliefs, but also for the beliefs of those you disagree with. If you’re going to argue for tolerance, that means both sides are able to live and let live. So come at this conversation with an attitude of “I care deeply about my beliefs, but also about yours.”
Words and phrases like “tolerance,” “live and let live,” and “no one should be forced by government” go a long way in illustrating what we have in common despite party affiliation—that this country was founded so that people could live free from burdensome government interference.
Here’s hoping you’re able to make a case for religious liberty that emphasizes its importance for both sides. Religious liberty doesn’t just protect those who identify as “religious,” it also benefits those that don’t. It’s an argument for all, and that’s an easy argument to make.Hi Developers!
Recently we released a new constraint: the CylindricalConstraint. You can find the API documentation at:
http://wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=API:Class/CylindricalConstraint
The cylindrical constraint combines properties of both prismatic and hinge constraint, allowing translation along a line and rotation around an axis. It is equivalent to a prismatic constraint and a hinge constraint with an intermediate part between the two.
In the cylindrical constraint, the axes of rotation and translation don’t have to have the same direction. They can be same, opposite or any angle in between.
An application of the constraint is in building vehicle suspension where the two axes are perpendicular. The cylindrical constraint simplifies this process: it removes the need for a knuckle - the intermediate part between the wheel and the suspension that often causes instabilities - and the wheel is attached directly to the chassis.State lawmakers are drafting at least two bills for the coming General Assembly session aimed at cleaning up Maryland’s renewable energy supply, which includes polluting fuels such as household garbage and a paper-making byproduct known as black liquor.
Proponents who have backed similar legislation in previous years hope concerns about climate change improve their chances. They say recent hurricanes, President Donald J. Trump’s support for fossil fuel industries and a recent series of articles in The Baltimore Sun could motivate politicians to act. The Sun reported that a state program sends millions of dollars from electricity ratepayers to paper mills and trash incinerators, one of which is Baltimore’s largest single source of air pollution.
But environmentalists nonetheless expect an uphill battle.
The same politics and economics that helped classify the paper and waste-to-energy industries as green energy producers — making them eligible for the subsidies — will be at work when the assembly convenes in January, they said. And there will be a simultaneous push to increase the total amount of money available in renewable energy subsidies, potentially complicating the issue, they said.
The 2018 elections, however, could change political dynamics.
“We hope that this is something that people want to run on,” said Kristen Harbeson, political director for the Maryland League of Conservation Voters. “We want to be incentivizing the energy of the future.”
Del. Dereck E. Davis, chairman of the House of Delegates committee that will consider the legislation, said he expects a complex debate over what the state should consider renewable energy.
“It’s getting tougher to predict overall where the committee will land on that,” the Prince George’s County Democrat said.
Maryland has allowed generators of renewable energy to collect a slice of ratepayers’ electricity bills since 2004. The program was intended to give clean energy a boost, reducing dependence on fossil fuels and emission of climate-change-inducing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
State lawmakers decide what is deemed renewable energy, and the list of green sources includes not just solar and wind power but combustion of carbon-emitting fuels like black liquor, trash and landfill gas.
Those fuels have collected about $100 million in subsidies over the past dozen years. In 2015, they accounted for about half of Maryland’s renewable energy.
There are at least two factions of lawmakers and advocates who plan to push legislation during the 90-day session that begins Jan. 10 to address what they see as a contradiction. They argue that including energy sources besides solar, wind and a few other exceptions amounts to subsidizing pollution.
A coalition of hundreds of environmental and community groups that calls itself the Maryland Clean Energy Jobs Initiative is already campaigning for legislation that would mandate that half of the state’s energy supply come from renewable sources by 2030. Under law adopted earlier this year, the goal is 25 percent.
The legislation would also stop sending subsidies to trash incinerators, including the Wheelabrator Baltimore facility along Interstate 95. The Baltimore City Council recently passed a resolution pressing state regulators to reduce the incinerator’s pollution, and lawmakers in Montgomery County, where the state’s other large trash incinerator is located, recently called for an end to trash incineration subsidies.
“We’re not out to shut trash incinerators down, at least my organization’s not,” said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “We want to stop the improper subsidizing of trash incineration from ratepayer money and calling it renewable energy.”
Del. A. Shane Robinson is pushing a more aggressive approach that would set the renewable energy mandate at 100 percent of the state’s power supply — that is, subsidizing enough renewable energy to supply all of the state’s needs, even if other sources are still used. His bill would also deny the ratepayer subsidies to anything but wind and solar power and other clean technologies that are still being developed.
The Montgomery County Democrat said he does not see any good in less sweeping legislation if environmentalists all agree their ultimate goal is full reliance on renewable energy.
“Why ask for something that is less than what you want?” he said.
Discussions on both bills are expected to start in the House of Delegates. While lawmakers are awaiting the results of a study of the state’s renewable energy supply and subsidies, which was ordered this year and is due at the end of 2018, they said they are open to hearing the proposals.
Del. Sally Y. Jameson, a Charles County Democrat who sponsored the bill ordering the study, said she is wary of making major changes without a holistic look at a program that has been updated nearly three dozen times, by her count. Davis said most of the members of his committee, House Economic Matters, were not in office or on the panel when many of those changes were considered, so that could also make it harder to pass legislation.
Much of the discussion is expected to center on the level of the renewable energy mandate and what it could mean for the economics of renewable energy investment and the cost to ratepayers. But advocates say the types of energy characterized as renewable, under what is known as the Renewable Portfolio Standard, are an important element of that debate.
“We can’t expand the RPS as it stands with all of the dirty energy,” Harbeson said.
There is sure to be some reluctance to change the policy because of concerns about jobs and economic development. The paper industry, including a mill in the Allegany County town of Luke, has for years fought to keep its subsidies — and won those battles. The debate over subsidies to black liquor has repeatedly ended in a stalemate between labor unions and environmentalists, both key constituencies for the Democrats who lead the General Assembly.
Lawmakers said they don’t expect that conflict to resolve easily in 2018.
Del. John F. Mautz IV, an Eastern Shore Republican, questioned why environmentalists keep targeting the paper mill subsidies when they seem to get no closer to cutting them off.
David Friend has been working for 16 years to build a wind farm on Dan’s Mountain in Allegany County, but has met opposition from worried neighbors every step of the way. Similar battles are brewing across the state. (Jerry Jackson, Kim Hairston) (Jerry Jackson, Kim Hairston)
“Are they really serious about improving the environment, or are they just pushing a political issue?”
But supporters of the legislation say they think the time is right, given increasing fears about climate change and election-year politics.Jay Clayton, a prolific Wall Street attorney, has been tapped by US president-elect Donald Trump to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is charged with protecting investors from fraud.
Clayton, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, boasts a career encompassing some of the largest capital-markets transactions in recent years, from the $25 billion US public stock offering of the Chinese internet firm Alibaba to British Airways’ acquisition of Iberia Air. He was also a player in the emergency response to the 2008 financial crisis, working on the fire-sale of investment bank Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase, on Barclays’ purchase of a failing Lehman Brothers, and on a last-second capital raise for Goldman Sachs.
No one should be surprised that ostensibly populist Donald Trump has put a top Wall Street lawyer in charge of policing financial sector behavior—it fits the pattern of financial industry veterans being tapped for key roles. What’s noteworthy is that Clayton is the first high-powered Wall Street attorney to lead the SEC since 2002.
Other presidents, even Wall Street-friendly ones, have balked at appointing attorneys who have represented or done business with major investment firms, instead tapping government officials, industry regulators, or even accountants.
Barack Obama, who has appointed two SEC chairs since taking office amidst the crisis, first tapped Mary Schapiro, a long-time financial industry regulator, and then Mary Jo White, a former federal prosecutor. Neither earned major plaudits for her work, but both guided the SEC through its post-financial crisis transformation as more bank supervision powers were transferred to the Federal Reserve.
George W. Bush’s final appointee, Chris Cox, was a long-time congressman who had authored securities law legislation; before him, Bush tapped William Donaldson, then the CEO of insurer Aetna, with a long career behind him as a corporate executive.
The most instructive comparison for Clayton may be Harvey Pitt, Bush’s first SEC chair. Pitt was considered a superlative securities lawyer who represented banks and individuals facing SEC enforcement action. He resigned in disgrace, though, after clashing with the White House and with his fellow SEC commissioners over plans for a new accounting industry oversight board. In the wake of major accounting frauds at Enron and WorldCom, Pitt’s choice to lead the new oversight board was the former head of the audit committee at US Technologies, which itself had been accused of fraud and was under criminal investigation. Pitt was roundly criticized for being too close to the accounting industry, which he represented while in private practice.
Clayton appears to be more of a deal-maker than a securities lawyer, though his official biography notes some work on behalf of clients facing inquiries from government regulators, including the SEC.
Debates over the appropriate personnel to regulate financial markets have raged since the 2008 crash. Many on the left argue that regulators should not have close ties to the industries they supervise. But the need for expertise to understand capital markets and their participants has made it difficult to find qualified appointees without any background in the sector.
The SEC was created in the 1930s, in the wake of the Great Depression. Its first chairman was Joseph P. Kennedy, himself an avid stock speculator. Is a “fox to guard the henhouse” still what’s needed? Or is a remove from the industry essential to do the job right?
These questions, underlined by the financial crisis and Clayton’s direct experience with the Wall Street mega-deals that followed, will animate what is sure to be a contentious confirmation hearing.Time to be Gorgeous, fellow players!
Posted by Hugh 6 years ago
We have built Extractors together, run through Phase Gates together, fought against against the darkness, scampered through ventilation shafts, and ambushed marines together. We play this game together. You have submitted code improvements, bug fixes, maps, game modes and argued for gameplay changes. We develop this game together. Now, Gorgeous is coming, and it’s time to stand together again.
Gorgeous will go live at 1500US-PST. Wondering what time that is in your local time zone? Consult the handy graphic above. At that time, around the world, we at Unknown Worlds will do a few things.
Press the big red Steam button to launch Gorgeous Release the trailer and changelog videos on YouTube Post the trailer to all our social media feeds Cross our fingers
Social media. Ugh. Surely the most overused two words in the English language. Is your business social? Is your game social? Is your social life social? But what does it really mean? It in the best cases, it means that there is no communication barrier between a game developer and players. What we want to share with you, we can, and vice-versa. Best of all, it allows you to tell other people if you think our game is good.
When the Exosuit trailer went live on August 28th, your shares and retweets took it to a quarter of a million views. On October 31st, you took the NS2 Launch trailer to almost half a million views. The success or failure of the Gorgeous trailer is in your hands – If you like it, there is no limit to how far you can spread it. And if you spread it far enough, countless new NS2 players could be joining us.
We hope you’ll stand with us tomorrow and tell the whole world Gorgeous has arrived.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Vanilla.Seven teenage students in North Carolina were arrested on Thursday and charged with a misdemeanor for throwing water balloons during a school prank. A parent was also arrested during the incident.
The seven boys, all between the ages of 16 and 17, threw balloons filled with tap water as an end-of-year prank at Enloe High School in Raleigh. The balloons were rumored to be filled with “other substances,” but Wake County Public School System spokeswoman Renee McCoy said “all indications” were that only water was used.
Six of the teens were charged with disorderly conduct. The seventh was charged with assault and battery for hitting a school security officer with a balloon.
The parent who was arrested, Kevin Hines, told WBT News 13 he saw officers acting aggressively as he drove up to the school. Hines said he tried to enter the school to talk to the principle about the situation occurring outside, but police stopped him and threatened him with a stun gun. He was charged with second-degree trespassing.
The parent of another student has filed a complaint with the Raleigh Police Department. The student, who was not arrested, was allegedly slammed into a concrete sidewalk by the officers.
“How he was taken down was the most disturbing because they took him down by his neck and slammed him,” Hines told WRAL.com.
Watch video, courtesy of WRAL, below:
[H/T: Reason]Membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes 30 of the world’s most developed countries, does not provide money or any special economic benefits. Yet it is easy to see why the Israeli government attributes great importance to Israel becoming one of its members. For Israel, membership in the OECD would mean a victory of legitimacy, and a major setback for the worldwide movement calling on Israel to be held accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people. Only democratic countries are allowed to join the OECD. With 35 percent of the population under Israel’s control and sovereignty disenfranchised, denied their basic human and civil rights and repeatedly attacked by the Israeli army, Israel is finding it increasingly difficult to portray itself as a democracy.
What appears less obvious is why the member countries would want to include Israel in the OECD. Israel’s membership would be a confirmation of Israeli policies, thus eroding the organization’s prestige while undermining the efforts of these very same countries to achieve peace in the Middle East. The OECD would be inviting the world to see how it prefers to ignore the crimes committed by Israel, and reward it instead. This would do no less than feed into the argument of extremists who claim that only violence can safeguard the rights of occupied Palestinians.
Ironically, however, the OECD seems to be working harder than Israel to facilitate the latter’s acceptance, which is expected to occur in May. Israel has refused to comply with the OECD demand to provide statistical data which applies only to the internationally-recognized parts of Israel, excluding the illegal settlements in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Yet despite Israel’s refusal, the OECD’s Committee on Statistics is acting to find ways to accept Israel anyway.
According to a leaked report, “Ascension of Israel to the Organization: Draft Formal Opinions of the Committee on Statistics” (download the PDF), the committee proposes to accept Israel based on the statistics currently available, which includes Israeli citizens in the OPT. However, it requests that Israel provide more detailed statistical data which will allow the OECD to conduct its own calculation in order to separate the OPT data from that of Israel. However, Israel will only commit to provide this data after it becomes a member of the organization. Yet as soon as Israel becomes a member, it will have the right to veto this decision, rendering the commitment an empty statement.
It should be noted that in this way the OECD is adopting the Israeli approach — an approach that eliminates the Palestinians and Israel’s effective sovereignty over the OPT, and focuses solely on Israeli citizens. This approach is tantamount to recognizing Israel’s illegal occupation, which stands in direct contradiction to international law and the foreign policies of virtually all OECD countries.
It should also be noted that the OECD takes decisions by consensus. It only takes one OECD country to oppose the integration of Israel into the organization in order to block the process. So far, not a single OECD country has voiced its intention to vote against including Israel in the organization.
The reason for that is twofold. First, there is the usual fear that any country (especially a European country), that voices its objection to Israel’s joining the OECD will be accused of anti-Semitism. Israel enjoys the unflinching support of the United States, and few European politicians have the courage to take a moral stand against either Washington or Israel.
Second, right-wing parties around the world see Israel as the Mecca of anti-immigration policies, Islamophobia and the “war on terror.” With every new line that Israel crosses in abusing the human and national rights of Palestinians, right-wing parties are emboldened to deepen their own politics of hatred toward immigrants. If Israel conducts extra-judicial assassinations, why won’t other countries be allowed to do the same? If Israel installs surveillance mechanisms that invade the privacy of its citizens, what would stop other countries from doing so also? Legitimizing Israel by inviting and facilitating its ascension to the OECD is thus a tool to legitimize the extreme measures promoted by far-right parties in Europe, which are eager to do away with democratic mechanisms and human rights of minorities in the name of nationalism and “security.”
European law clearly forbids European countries from recognizing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, as has been affirmed by the Russell Tribunal. Yet by granting Israel membership in the OECD, they will be doing exactly that. OECD members will knowingly accept Israel to the organization based on deceptive statistics provided by the latter, statistics which conceal the occupation while simultaneously treating it as a permanent fact.
Israel’s acceptance into the OECD would be a grave mistake. It will reward violations of international law, feed the extreme right wing which is growing in developed countries and render all OECD countries as accomplices in Israel’s illegal occupation.
Shir Hever is an economist at the Alternative Information Center.Questions about the fate of CNN have loomed for months over the Trump administration’s review of the merger, especially given the president’s frequent Twitter attacks on the network and his denunciation of its coverage. | Getty Sources: AT&T, Time Warner under pressure to dump CNN
AT&T and Time Warner are under pressure from the Justice Department to offload CNN to win the Trump administration's approval of their $85 billion merger, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
DOJ presented the companies with an ultimatum at a meeting Monday: Sell off Time Warner-owned Turner Broadcasting, which includes CNN as well as networks like TBS and TNT, or jettison DirecTV, which AT&T acquired two years ago, one source said — adding that it's clear the real sticking point for the government is CNN, a frequent target of President Donald Trump's anger.
Story Continued Below
"The only reason you would divest CNN would be to kowtow to the president because he doesn't like the coverage," the source said. "It would send a chilling message to every news organization in the country."
Justice Department officials later said that the companies themselves offered to sell CNN but that DOJ's antitrust division rejected that option. DOJ told the companies that divesting CNN wouldn't necessarily solve the harm to the public caused by the mega-merger, the officials said.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson pushed back against that narrative.
"Throughout this process, I have never offered to sell CNN and have no intention of doing so," he said in a statement.
Morning Tech Technology news from Washington and Silicon Valley — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
AT&T and Time Warner see no legal basis for selling any media properties at stake in the deal, and their lawyers are preparing for a court battle should the Justice Department ultimately reject the merger, sources said. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that DOJ is preparing a lawsuit in the event it can't reach a settlement with the companies.
Questions about the fate of CNN have loomed for months over the Trump administration’s review of the merger, especially given the president’s frequent Twitter attacks on the network and his denunciation of its coverage as “fake news.” The New York Times reported in July that White House advisers had discussed using the merger as “a potential point of leverage over their adversary” — i.e., CNN — prompting Democratic senators to warn the White House against exerting any “political interference” in the deal.
Trump directed his populist ire at the merger itself during the final weeks of the presidential campaign, saying it would create “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”
Despite the campaign rhetoric, the companies were confident the merger review was moving toward approval until Makan Delrahim, Trump's newly installed DOJ antitrust chief, entered the picture in late September.
Before his nomination by Trump, Delrahim — a former tech and telecom industry lobbyist — said in an October 2016 television interview that that he didn't see the merger as a "major antitrust problem." But the source said Delrahim had been critical of the deal since taking the helm of the DOJ's antitrust division.
AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said at a conference Wednesday that the timing of the Time Warner merger is "now uncertain" as it continues making its case to the Justice Department. The companies agreed late last month to delay their self-imposed Oct. 22 deadline for closing the deal, which they announced more than a year ago.
Trump's longtime associate Roger Stone suggested in a tweet last month that a “house cleaning” of CNN personalities like Don Lemon, Jake Tapper and Ana Navarro will take place once AT&T completes its acquisition of Time Warner. But White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday on CNN that the administration is not interfering with the Justice Department's review of the deal.
The merger would allow AT&T, one of the nation’s largest wireless and pay-TV providers, to bulk up its media holdings with brand names including HBO and Warner Bros. in addition to CNN.
Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.Punters heading off to Makuhari Messe this weekend for SonicMania — the all-night event preceding the annual Summer Sonic music festival — should try to arrive at the venue early to secure a prime spot for the evening’s first act: pop trio Perfume.
Once Perfume steps off the Mountain Stage, rush over to the Sonic Stage to catch the tail end of French electronic act Madeon (real name: Hugo Leclercq) followed by American electro-popper Porter Robinson.
If you hear similarities in the sounds of all three acts then you’ve got one man to thank: Yasutaka Nakata. The maximalist sound producer has helped Perfume win thousands of fans over the past decade, and Leclercq and Robinson are among the growing number of overseas artists who cite Nakata as a big influence.
“I think that he is a master of doing much of what I want to do. He writes stuff in a poppy format with hooks |
Sysdig tracers let you track and measure spans of execution in a distributed software system. You can instrument almost anything with a sysdig tracer – a method in your software, a service call, a network request, a shell command execution, a script, and any other thing that can happen in a computer system.
Once you instrument something with sysdig tracers, you can monitor how long it takes to complete, you can observe the system activity taking place within a span, or you can trace how it progresses through your system.
Tracers were designed to be efficient, extremely easy to use, leverageable from everywhere (inside and outside your source code) and container friendly.
Tracers are a feature on top of sysdig, the open source linux system visibility tool. If you’re not familiar with sysdig, read this quick overview when you get a chance.*
A Simple Example
Tracers are easy and so language independent that you can even trace what happens in a shell script, with just two additional lines:
<span style="color: #993300;">#!/bin/bash # # A simple shell script that measures the time to download the sysdig home page #</span> <span style="color: #000080;">while : do</span> <span style="color: #993300;"># Start a trace named 'website-latency'</span> echo <span style="color: #008000;">">::website-latency::"</span> > /dev/null <span style="color: #993300;"># Download the sysdig home page</span> curl -s http://sysdig.org > /dev/null <span style="color: #993300;"># End the the trace</span> echo <span style="color: #008000;">"<::website-latency::"</span> > /dev/null <span style="color: #000080;">done </span>
Run the script and, in a separate shell, this command line:
sudo csysdig -v spectro_tracers
And you will get a nice visualization of the trace latency:
This is, of course, just one example of the many things that sysdig tracers let you do, but I hope it whets your appetite. Let’s keep going.
How Sysdig Trace Collection Works
A tracer is a marker for a point in time in execution. Tracers always come in pairs: an entry tracer, which delimits the beginning of a span, and a corresponding exit tracer, which closes the span. A span, therefore, is the interval of execution delimited by two corresponding tracers. Spans can be nested, which means that a span can contain layers of other spans. The root of a span tree is called a trace.
Now here’s the cool part: tracers are created by writing specially formatted text strings to /dev/null. If you can write to /dev/null, you can emit a tracer! No library to link. No application framework to instrument. Sysdig automatically captures these strings before they are discarded, then parses them and converts them into special tracer events that become part of the sysdig events stream.
This means that it’s easy to do typical sysdig things like: save them to a capture file, search them using filters, manipulate them using chisels, and visualize them in csysdig (the curses-based command line UI for sysdig).
It’s worth noting, emitting tracers is reasonably efficient: on an average machine, you can expect the overhead to be under one microsecond.
Tracers, and therefore spans, also carry additional state that makes them useful for tracing: they have properties like an ID, one or more tags, and an arbitrary number of arguments. You can get the full details in the tracers manual in the wiki. First, however, let’s talk about the motivation behind this…
Why Sysdig tracers? A manifesto
The more powerful and sophisticated our software becomes, the more important it is to measure its performance.
At the present day, people interested in measuring things have access to two main categories of tools:
Some great, established standards for basic metrics collection (e.g. SNMP, StatsD, CollectD)
Application Performance Management (APM) tools that help identify bottlenecks in distributed application. This includes a bunch of expensive commercial tools and a handful nascent community efforts (e.g. opentracing, zipkin, X-Trace)
StatsD and CollectD are absolutely great, but we often need to export more than just “numbers”. For example, it’s often helpful to understand bottlenecks, component interactions and delays without having to worry about the collection complexities. APM solutions address this problem, but are either expensive, or very hard to deploy, or tied to specific languages/frameworks, or all of the above. For this reason, APM is often relegated to a small slice of an environment, where the cost is justified.
Sysdig tracers are a compromise between these two approaches: think about them as a simplified APM that is always available, lightweight and free. Tracers are nestable and based on absolute IDs, so they work well both in single machine and distributed setups, and this makes them effective not only in production, but during development too, especially when using containers.
Application transaction time, by the way, is a very important thing to track, but there are so many more things that are useful to measure:
system-level latencies
batch jobs duration
deployments interruption times
autoscaling latencies
container startup times.
Sysdig tracers make it possible to easily trace all these things, and many more.
But what I find really exciting is how many new cool things we can do when tracing meets sysdig.
Let me give you some examples.
Some Useful Things You Can Do With Sysdig Tracers
Treat tracers as sysdig events
As mentioned, the tracers that you emit simply become events in the sysdig event stream. As a consequence, the whole sysdig goodness is at your disposal when working with tracers. For example, you can store your tracers in sysdig capture files with the -w sysdig option, and then filter and analyze them later. For example, this command line will print duration, ID and tags of any trace that lasts more than 100ms.
sysdig -r capture.scap -p "%span.duration.human %span.id %span.tags" "tracer.duration>100000000"
Analyze traces with Csysdig
Csysdig, the htop-inspired sysdig command line interactive interface, offers three new views to analyze tracers. Two of them, Traces Summary and Traces List allow interactive drill down-based span exploration (more info in the manual), while the third one, Traces Spectrogram, is a tracer-specific version of the award-winning sysdig spectrogram and is a pretty awesome way to display and investigate latencies in your apps or scripts. Take a look at this video.
Inspect system activity inside traces
Tracing latencies is useful, but why stop there? Sysdig lets you get deep system visibility into selected portions of your app by leveraging tracers.
This is accomplished through the evtin class of filters. A couple of examples. This command line lists the file opens generated inside spans with ‘query’ as tag:
sudo sysdig evt.type=open and evtin.span.tag=query
While this one prints all the data sent or received on the network by spans with tag ‘srvc_node7’:
sudo sysdig -c echo_fds evtin.span.tag=srvc_node7
Trace-Aware Log Monitoring
A powerful application of the just described filtering technique is the ability to capture and visualize logs on a per span basis. This is accomplished by using sysdig’s spy_logs chisel in conjunction with evtin* filters. For example, this command line prints the log entries written by any span in the trace with ID 123:
sudo sysdig -c echo_fds evtin.span.id=123
Export trace latencies using statsd
Want to pipe span latency information to your monitoring backend of choice? There’s a chisel for that! Just run:
sudo sysdig -c tracers_2_statsd "<ip> <port>”
Where *ip* and *port* are the statsd server endpoint information.
Conclusions
A good way to think about sysdig tracers is that they are a mix between Zipkin-style transaction tracing, strace-like data collection and an htop-inspired interface. We put a lot of effort in making them lightweight and simple to use, so they should help you in both development and production environments.
This is just an initial release. We plan to extend the feature set quite a bit, for example with integrations for the most common languages, so stay tuned and feel free to give us feedback. Happy tracing!Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses a Trump for President campaign rally in Macon, Georgia November 30, 2015. REUTERS/Christopher Aluka Berry
Update: A new Quinnipiac poll, released Wednesday morning, shows Trump getting a little bump and now leading the national race at 27 percent. Bush takes 5 percent. Last month, Trump was at 24 percent and Bush at 4 percent. The original post follows.
Donald Trump has spent less than 1 percent as much money as Jeb Bush on ads so far in the 2016 election, according to calculations made by NBC News, even as the real estate mogul continues to lap the former Florida governor in both key early state and national polls.
Jeb and his aligned Right to Rise super PAC have dropped $28.9 million on TV ads to Trump's $217,000 on a flight of radio ads. That spending chasm is almost the inverse of where each man stands in the race -- with Trump alone at the top and Jeb mired in the murky middle.
(Philip Bump / The Washington Post)
I'm not sure what number is more remarkable: Jeb's or Trump's.
That Jeb has spent nearly $30 million on ads trying to move his numbers in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and watched as those numbers either stayed where they were or, in some cases, dropped is absolutely eye-popping. It's also yet another data point that suggests Jeb's massive fundraising edge may mean far less than we at first assumed due, in large part, to the fact that Republican voters are just not buying what he is selling.
But, I actually think the fact that Trump has spent just over $200,000 on paid media is even more amazing -- and speaks to Trump's true political gift: Getting lots and lots of free publicity.
Trump has repeatedly insisted he will spend whatever it takes out of his multibillion-dollar personal fortune to win the Republican nomination. But, as of October, Trump had only put $2 million of his own cash into his campaign largely, by his own admission, because he is getting so much free media attention. "I’ve gotten so much free advertising, it’s like nothing I’d have expected,” he told the New York Times in September. “When you look at cable television, a lot of the programs are 100 percent Trump, so why would you need more Trump during the commercial breaks?”
For those who believe that the media is to blame for Trump, his remarkably low spending on TV ads coupled with his remarkably high standing in the polls will be a key piece of evidence to make that case. I would argue -- as I have before -- that simply blaming the media for Trump's rise underestimates both Trump and the Republican primary voter. Sure, Trump's celebrity meant that when he announced his candidacy he got lots and lots of attention. But, what explains not just his surge to the front of the field but also the durability of his lead over his rivals?
At this point, Trump is being covered for what he is -- the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. You don't have to like him or his policies to grasp that he gets the most coverage because he's (way) ahead.
One person who absolutely understands his relationship with the media and voters is Donald Trump. No one in this field -- and maybe ever -- has gotten such a high return on his investment as The Donald.There is no recession evident at the downtown Calgary MEC on a weekday afternoon in July.
The parking lot is full, two cyclists on their way from Vancouver to South America have stopped by to stock up, parents are buying their children supplies for camp, and there is a sign at the rental area that says there are no sleeping bags left to rent for the coming weekend.
Research has shown that Canadians are not as prone to going into the pure wild anymore. - David Ian Gray, DIG360 Consulting
All this helps to explain why MEC is opening two new stores in Calgary over the next three years, despite a recession in the province that economists are calling the worst in decades.
One location will open on Calgary's western edge, on the way to the mountains, the other in Seton, in the city's deep southern suburbs.
"We've been hearing for years that people really love MEC, but that it's not really accessible," said Jerry McGillivray, western regional manager for the chain.
MEC has more than 350,000 members in the Calgary area, about half the total in Alberta. The retailer works as a co-operative, in which customers buy a $5 lifetime membership and are entitled to annual profit sharing. That also means the company is able to track every purchase its members make, from climbing chalk, to paddle boards to road bikes.
'We have the advantage in that we know where all of our members live," said McGillivray. "So by having that information, we can really speak to what areas of the country and what areas of specific markets we should be in."
An artist's rendering of MEC's new location in South Calgary. (MEC)
Stores coming in Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton
MEC has been going through a significant expansion in recent years. In 2016, it has already opened a location in Kelowna, B.C., and is opening new stores in Edmonton, Laval, Que., and the Toronto suburb of North York later this year, as well as one in Kitchener, Ont., in 2017.
But Alberta is a retailing risk these days.
"We are very aware of the economic situation, said McGillivray. "If you look at the Alberta retail market, both our MEC locations both in Edmonton and Calgary are faring much better than your typical retailer."
MEC has broadened its offerings in recent years to appeal to a broader customer base than the hard-core backcountry enthusiasts who built the brand. At times, that has ruffled feathers, but is expected to be an engine for growth. In 2012, before the branding change, MEC generated $302 million in sales from 16 stores. Last year, sales came in at $366 million from 18 stores. By the end of 2016, there will be 22 stores in Canada.
"For the brand to rejuvenate, sustain and rebuild, it requires reaching out to new people," said David Ian Gray, a retail analyst with DIG360 Consulting in Vancouver.
'We can really speak to what areas of the country and what areas of specific markets we should be in,' says Jerry McGillivray, MEC's western regional manager.
Not as many Canadians heading to back-country
"Research has shown that Canadians aren't as prone to going into the pure wild anymore, the backcountry. That's the reality and MEC isn't able to change that on their own, so they need to adapt to what people are doing and what activities they're participating in."
Starting in 2012, MEC began holding running clinics and bike races, and offering paddling lessons to draw in less-outdoorsy customers, which has become a key part of its strategy.
The stores physically become community hubs, said Meriko Kubota, director of community investment with MEC.
"Where members come to the stores, they're not only purchasing to get outside and recreate. but we connect them with the clinics, so they know how to get outside."
If MEC doesn't want to show people how to get outside, other stores are probably willing to, according to Gray.
"One of the reasons for the expansion is probably to get ahead of competitors who could come into Canada, or come at them from Canada. It's still an underserved market."Image copyright AFP/Getty
The UK's rail franchising model is "no longer fit for purpose" and is failing passengers, MPs have warned.
The Transport Committee said there were "serious deficiencies" in the way the Department for Transport awarded contracts, leading to higher fares and poor performance.
The MPs urged ministers to launch an independent review of the system.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said the committee had made some "sensible recommendations".
He said the main problem was that the rail network was "bursting at the seams".
The MPs' report said the current model of awarding franchises to companies to run services in different parts of the country had enabled the rise in passenger numbers.
But they said it had not increased competition in the way the government had hoped in the 1990s.
"Many metrics of performance are plateauing and the passenger is not receiving value for money," the report said.
How the system works
Image copyright Getty Images
There are 15 franchises in England and Wales which each give companies the right to run passenger services in a particular area for a specified period
They are awarded following a tendering process that involves the Department for Transport asking for expressions of interest before it consults with the public and ultimately selects an operator from a shortlist of companies bidding for the contract
The railway network was privatised under John Major's Conservative government in 1993
Labour has promised to renationalise the railways as each contract expires
The train operating companies are not responsible for track maintenance, which falls to publicly-owned Network Rail
The committee said while there could be no "single template" for franchises, there was "merit" in obtaining longer agreements covering smaller areas.
The opportunity of smaller franchises with less financial risk could lead to new companies appearing on the market, the MPs said.
Their report comes after the Association of British Commuters applied for a judicial review into the government's handling of the Southern rail crisis, which has seen months of delays and cancellations with packed services hit by a wave of industrial action.
The group says ministers have acted unlawfully by failing to determine whether managers have breached franchise obligations.
The Transport Committee also called on the government to set out how much the problems with the Southern, Thameslink and Great Northern franchise had cost taxpayers.
"Given the exposure of the taxpayer to the failings of this franchise, it is unacceptable for the department to maintain its current 'arms-length' approach," the report said.
"We recommend the department intervene to ensure that all possible steps are being taken to stop the haemorrhaging of income."
It said the government should consider "restructuring" the franchise if operator Govia Thameslink was officially found to be in breach of its franchise.
Transport Committee chairman Louise Ellman said: "While franchising enabled passenger growth and service improvements when it was first rolled out, passenger satisfaction with the railways is falling.
"Its core objectives are no longer being met, potential benefits are being lost and the passenger is suffering through higher fares and continued underperformance."
In January the cost of a rail ticket rose on average by 2.3%, prompting protests at railway stations across the UK.
Ms Ellman told BBC Breakfast the DfT was too soft on train companies that broke promises on performance.
"And if the department can't do that, perhaps somebody else should be looking at it to enforce the promises that the train companies make when they take over running the service," she said.
'Better collaboration'
The MPs suggested that a complete restructuring of the system would be "prohibitively impractical", but it recommended that as contracts expired the DfT might consider whether they be modified to "align better with the specific market they serve".
Labour, which wants to bring the railways back under public ownership, said the network was "fragmented and inefficient".
Shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald said: "A railway works best as an integrated network but privatisation and franchising have meant breaking it up."
Speaking on BBC's The Andrew Marr Show, Mr Grayling said the government was already taking steps to ensure Network Rail worked more closely with rail operators, as recommended by the committee.
The DfT said £40bn was being invested to upgrade the railways and that the franchising system had helped to create one of the safest and fastest growing networks in Europe.
A spokesman said: "We can make improvements and the transport secretary has been clear that it will take new ways of working, more investment and better collaboration across the industry to tackle the challenges ahead."CouchDB IRC Meeting
The next CouchDB IRC Meeting will take place on February 18th, 8pm GMT (you can check your local time e.g. here). Everyone is welcome to attend this meeting. If you have anything to put on the agenda, please reply to this email or mention it at the start of the meeting. The meeting will take place in irc://irc.freenode.net/couchdb-meeting, you can also access it online by following this link.
Major Discussions
Mango working on CouchDB Master (see thread)
Mango has just been enabled in CouchDB Master, so you can now play with it. You should be able to follow this example.
Release of CouchDB 2.0? (SEE THREAD)
Question: A user asked about the expected release date or time frame for CouchDB 2.0
Answer: There is no official release date yet, especially since there is still some work to be done – e.g. the setup topics and also documentation are not yet finished (in parts not even started). You can of course already test CouchDB 2.0 in the Developer Preview.
CouchDB-Scala – a new purely functional Scala client for CouchDB (see thread)
The first public release of CouchDB-Scala has been announced – a purely functional Scala client for CouchDB. You can find the project on GitHub, a few details and notes about it are in the Wiki.
Releases in the CouchDB Universe
hapi-couchdb 0.2.0 – a Hapi plugin providing a CouchDB connection
simplicate 1.1.3 – Minimal syntax for triggering CouchDB replication from the command line. Also useful for generating curl commands that you can share with others
hoodie-plugins-api 0.4.0 – Hoodie interface to CouchDB
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Get involved!
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on CouchDB. Submit a pull request and join the project! CouchDB has a new wiki. Help us move content from the old to the new one!
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Do you want to help moving the CouchDB docs translation forward? We’d love to have you in our L10n team! See our current status and languages we’d like to provide CouchDB docs in on this page. If you’d like to help, don’t hesitate to contact the L10n mailing list on l10n@couchdb.apache.org or ping Andy Wenk (awenkhh on IRC).
We’d be happy to have you on board!
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Time to relax!
“Everyone is obsessed with how successful people start their day. And if you’ve decided to do something about the quality of your life, you’ll start working on developing a morning routine and trying different versions of it. But we seem to forget that what productive people – those who work each day to achieve what they want and have hacked so many areas of their life – do before they go to bed is as important.” – 10 Things to do before you go to Bed
“Many Americans spend a minimum of eight hours per day sitting in an office, but we observed significant physical and mental health benefits in subjects after just one instance of standing up, walking out the door, and never coming back to their place of work again, ….” – Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back
… and also in the NewsKardin Ulysse, 14, has undergone two surgeries on his right eye since the June 5 beatdown at Roy H. Mann Junior High School in Bergen Beach. It is unclear whether the bullies’ multiple punches or the broken shards of lens from his eyeglasses caused the damage to his cornea. “The doctor says he needs a transplant,” Pierre Ulysse said. “For me to send him to school with two eyes and come back with one eye is really absurd. “I want the world to know about this,” he added. Kardin, an eighth-grader, was set upon by a pair of seventh-graders who were calling him a “fucking faggot” a “pussy,” a “transvestite” and “gay,” according to a Department of Education occurrence report. While one schoolmate pinned the victim’s arms, the other rained punches on Kardin’s face, head and neck. Kardin broke away and the fight continued in the cafeteria until school safety officers and school aides finally intervened.San Antonio’s manufacturing direct employment rose only slightly in the five-year period ending in 2016 but the sector’s overall economic impact grew 28 percent, mostly due to technology advances and higher skills, a new report stated Tuesday.
The “San Antonio’s Manufacturing Industry: Economic Impact in 2016” report was presented Tuesday during a luncheon event of the San Antonio Manufacturers Association attended by more than 200 people.
The 2016 impact in 2016 was $40.5 billion, making manufacturing “one of the largest sectors of the San Antonio economy,” according to the report compiled by Trinity University professor Mary Stefl and retired Trinity professor Richard Butler for the association and the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation.
The report updates Butler and Stefl’s previous manufacturing-sector report last released in 2012, which said manufacturing companies contributed $22.5 billion into the local economy in 2011.
The economic impact includes so-called “multiplier effects” for products produced in the San Antonio metropolitan area and sold to customers outside the state.
The area’s workforce at 1,544 manufacturing companies rose only to 51,904 in 2016 from 51,026 in 2011, but the total payroll increased to $2.99 billion in 2016 from $2.42 billion in 2011, a 24 percent increase.
Manufacturing employees in 2016 made an average of $57,507, including benefits, compared to the $46,891 for all workers in the San Antonio area last year, according to the report.
The gap between manufacturing compensation and average wages in the San Antonio area is 23 percent. In 2001, the gap was smaller, 13 percent.
The difference is not new. “The average salary in manufacturing has been consistently higher than the regional average over the past two decades,” the report stated.
Wage gains stem from manufacturing’s shift to high-technology, high-skilled job categories, according to the report.
The best-paying manufacturing jobs are in the transportation sector, including aerospace companies and the Toyota assembly plant. Average annual transportation wages in 2016 were $68,175.
The transportation sector also was the fastest-growing in employment. The sector shedding the most jobs was the “diversified products” category, 80 percent of which is food and beverage manufacturing, Butler and Stefl said.
Butler and Stefl said it is difficult to determine San Antonio’s largest economic sector because they study the sectors in different years. For 2015, the health care and biosciences sector’s economic impact was reported at $37 billion, but it now might be about the same as manufacturing as the area’s two largest sectors.
“Health care has twice as many employees, but the salaries are not as high,” Stefl said. Butler added: “The military is pretty big, too, but no one has measured it recently.”
San Antonio Manufacturing Association CEO and President Rey Chavez said the report’s main message to area manufacturers is “they are being noticed, and how much manufacturing is here. It’s not just Toyota. This study will be a recruitment and retention tool.”
The future of manufacturing, Chavez said, will be increased production and increased skills required to operate more complex machinery.
“My personal goal to see a $10 billion increase in economic impact, to $50 billion” in the area over the next five years, Chavez said.
“Manufacturing is the fabric of our nation. There’s nothing we use that isn’t manufactured,” he said.
Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said that exporting manufacturing goods is critical to the area’s economic health.
“We know that if we don’t export goods and services more than we bring in goods and services, we will be a poor city,” Wolff said.
dhendricks@express-news.netSlit-planting is the easiest way to plant a bare root tree. It needs to be done in winter, when both the tree and the soil are dormant. We planted ours in February, and it was hard work: harder than I realised at the time. I am writing this in June, and my body still hasn’t recovered. My left arm is partly crippled by tendonitis, and my lower back is bad on some days and not so bad on others. My fingers and wrists begin to ache and tingle if I demand too much from them. This means that the acres of grass I have to scythe on my land are going uncut, and the place is running wild. I think I’m going to need to ask our neighbour to graze his horses in our field again, because I can’t do much else with it this year. My hands and my arms are currently not suited to serious physical work, as a direct result of my winter toils with the trees. That, and over twenty years of typing words like this into computers, which has frazzled the tendons and the nerves in my forearms possibly beyond repair. The spade and the keyboard are very different tools, but one thing they have in common is their ability to break the human body.
We planted around five hundred small trees here on our couple of acres in the west of Ireland. Most of them will end up in our woodstove: the idea is to be self-sufficient in heating as soon as possible. For this purpose, we’ve planted several blocks of birch, poplar and willow, which should have a coppice cycle of six or seven years. On top of that, we’ve put in about a hundred sticks of basket willow, in differing colours. We’ve also planted three hedges of native trees – rowan, more birch, spindle, holly, wild cherry, hazel, oak – to create windbreaks, shield us from the lane in front of the house and make some kind of offering for the birds around here. Perhaps it will distract their attention from our vegetable garden, which they are currently digging up daily.
The real work was in clearing the ground, most of which was covered thickly with a deep tangle of brambles and suckering blackthorns. When we moved to this little patch of land, we came with ideals, and one of them was to do our work by hand, with as little impact as possible. So we laid into the thorns and brambles, which must have been growing for decades, with scythes and mattocks and spades and machetes. It took weeks and weeks. The scratches were deep. The industrial-strength gloves we bought were torn to shreds. More than one mattock handle was broken. I have never seen suckers so thick or long, nor root balls so deep and woody. Even after weeks of clearing the ground by hand, we still had to hire a digger for a day to tear out the deepest of the roots and make the ground fit for planting.
After that, the planting itself was a doddle. To slit-plant a tree, you just push your spade into the ground up to the end of the blade, wiggle it back and forth until you have a wide enough slit and then drop the tree root into it. You cover the ground around the tree with newspaper, and then pile wet straw on top of that to mulch it. Finally, if your land attracts both rabbits and hares, which ours does, you wind a plastic spiral tree guard around the tiny trunk, and fortify it with a garden cane against the Atlantic winds.
Do that five hundred times, and you have a little forest. Better, you have a forest planted in a low-impact and ecological way. You have an endless supply of sustainable fuel for your sustainable household, and you have used minimal dirty fossil fuels in order to create it. You have taken some wasteland and made it into a diverse ecosystem. You have created a closed-loop system, and a mini carbon sink. You have also crippled yourself. But it was worth it.
At least, that’s what I thought I would be telling myself at this stage. But I’m not so sure any more.
I don’t mean that it wasn’t worth it. I would have liked to have done it without the consequent pain, but I don’t regret putting the trees in. This is the kind of thing we came here to do, and compared to a lot of what is done to agricultural land, it is a good thing. Maybe I can grow alongside these trees, and learn a little patience from them. Maybe we can leave this place better than we found it.
But I’m kidding myself if I think this was a “low-impact” enterprise, and I’m not just talking about the impact on my musculoskeletal system. It was a two-hour journey in my diesel-powered camper van to collect the trees in the first place. A heavy-duty mini-digger used up a day’s worth of fossil fuel to heave the root balls out of our land. And those are just the most obvious examples of our reliance on not-very-sustainable industrial technologies to put our little forest in. Consider the simple tools: the spade, the mattock, the machete, the scythe. All of them made of steel whose ore was dragged up from some mountain somewhere and smelted, shaped and tempered in a factory, then fixed to a machine-tooled handle made of wood from who-knows-where. All of them, like my gardening gloves and my wellies and my raincoat, and the plastic tree spirals and the newspaper and even the straw, products of a globe-spanning industrial economy which helped us to plant our low-impact trees in our low-impact garden.
Then, of course, there is the awkward fact that in order to plant these trees we had to cut down a lot of... trees. The trees that we chopped down were suckering blackthorn and bramble, mainly. They were not useful or attractive to us, whereas the ones we planted were. I give this an ecological gloss by talking up the fact that we have planted a diversity of native species, but whichever way I cut it, we have cleared a wilderness in order to plant crops. The product of those crops might be firewood or basket willow or natural beauty or human contentment or protection against the elements, but they are crops nevertheless, and the things they replaced were wild plants growing without any human intervention.
It turns out that living a simpler life can be quite complicated.
***
I was about a quarter of the way in to What Technology Wants before I realised I was reading a religious text. What Technology Wants is a book published a few years back by Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and a significant spokesman for what we might call the Silicon Valley Mindset. It takes the reader through the historical development of technology and into a future in which, Kelly believes, technology will be a living force which controls our destiny.
Kelly starts by leading us on a journey through the development of technology, or perhaps more accurately, the idea of technology. The idea, he suggests, is a fairly new one. Though human beings have been using tools since they first dug holes with sticks, and though the Greeks and Romans invented everything from iron welding and the bellows through to blown glass and watermills, there was no sense that this collection of useful artefacts was anything more than the sum of its parts. “Technology could be found everywhere in the ancient world except in the minds of humans,” writes Kelly. That changed in 1802, when, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the German professor Johann Beckmann coined the word “technology” to refer to the “systemic order” of tools and machines that were beginning to take over many of the functions previously assumed by humans.
That was just over two hundred years ago. Before that, a spade and mattock were just a spade and a mattock: useful additions to life which made work easier. After that, they were part of something bigger, at least in Kelly’s telling. Kelly is a techno-utopian, and to him, this thing called “technology” is not just a collection of tools and machines but “a living force”. He calls this force “the technium”, and he describes it as a “global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us”, which is now on the verge of taking on its own life and its own mind.
It is this last claim that makes his book so interesting. You can find plenty of people who will argue, as Kelly does, that technology will save us from pretty much every problem on Earth, if only we would trust it. Techno-utopianism is a subset of the contemporary religion of Progress, into which we are all baptised at birth. In this reading, the benefits of modern technology – fewer deaths in childbirth, dental hygiene, the ability to tweet a picture of what you had for breakfast to someone on the other side of the planet – are talked up, while its drawbacks – nuclear bombs, mass extinction, climate change, viral videos of Korean pop hits – are glossed over. This is the standard narrative of modernity, and arguing against it is likely to see you labelled a “Romantic Luddite” at best and a reactionary hater of “the poor” at worst.
This line, though, usually comes with a denial that our increasingly complex technologies could ever be anything other than inanimate servants. You will hear from its proponents that “technology is neutral”, or that “technologies are neither good nor bad: it depends what we do with them”. This is where Kelly stands out, because he is having none of this. He shares with technology’s sternest critics a controversial but, I think, correct perspective: that the huge web of advanced technologies we have built around us is now so central to our lives, so complex and interconnected and fast-evolving, that it is becoming an autonomous thing, separate from humanity, though currently still dependent on it. This thing is the technium.
Kelly claims that the technium is “as great a force in our world as nature”; indeed, it is itself a force of evolution. Technological life, like biological life, tends towards more complexity, interdependence and intelligence, because “technology and life share some fundamental essence”. |
'My mother,' - her voice dripping with contempt - 'all my mother wants is to meet someone and get laid! She's so liberated! When I was 11 she told me to get a diaphragm. Couldn't wait to tell me everything. If you ever get pregnant, Sally, she said, come to me; WE'LL get an abortion. Don't you think that's sickening?'
'You talk so much about sex,' Foucault reflected.
'It isn't me,' Sally said. And then she's off again: 'Every time you touch someone they expect you to end up in bed with some kind of orgasm. It's a serious thing to let someone inside your body. I don't enjoy it. So far it's been rotten. And it's not, you know, the size of someone's penis or the way they put it in. It's a mental thing.'
'Oh yes?'
'When I go down on a man,' Sally told Foucault, 'I hate it, God they stick everything in your mouth, it's like a garbage truck parking, you know? Fucking the dead. It doesn't feel natural and the inner voice says no.'
'I see,' Foucault replied, remembering the Jesuits. 'You have many things to confess.'
Sally jumped at this. In acting class she excelled at improv. You catch the ball, and then you run with it. A good improviser thinks on her feet, can transform even the lamest conversational lulls into… opportunity. 'Yes, Father,' she drawled, feeling her way. 'I've sinned. I've sinned. I've sinned… but, it's all in my head. I can't be blamed, you see, because,' - she changed gears artfully - 'You have such a nice body.'
Foucault was really taken aback.
'I can't help it, Father, you're so attractive. Would you mind if I sit on your lap?'
Foucault stiffened and tried to get rid of his legs. 'I suppose,' he said, taking a theological detour, 'you believe in the Immaculate Conception?'
'I do, Father, yes I do. I don't approve of sex, bodily orifices and things, out of the bond of matrimony. And unless you're with someone who's a missionary or a religious person, to know, to know absolutely for sure that they're not going to sleep with everyone else…'
'Father,' she said, I just want to ask you one thing. You can say whatever you want. I promise I won't mind.' She whispered in his ear and he suddenly woke up.
'No! That is ridiculous. You jump on me with the rant about marriage and Christianity. I sit here listening out of curiosity or pity and then you throw yourself at me as if I could respond? I don't! Is that clear? I can't have a girlfriend, ever.'
Sally was concentrating very hard, but her eyes kept moving around. Some fifty yards away she noticed a couple standing under a tree. They were having a fight, she could tell.
'I understand,' Sally said. 'I think I do. But it's not pleasure I want… I mean, oh I don't know.' And she threw a glance at the couple, fighting.
The woman was shrieking. The man was trying to get away but she was hanging on to his jacket. Finally he pushed her and walked away. It was all over between them. Sally felt so sad she could've cried. Anyone could divorce or die, anyone could stop loving you - except Jesus. Sally sighed with relief. No, Jesus would never leave me for another woman… And then it dawned on her: what if Jesus was a fag? She gasped. What if he didn't care for women at all? The thought went through her like a knife.
'If you don't like women,' Sally finally said, regaining her composure, 'that's okay. At least, I know you're not going to… In a sense, I trust you more. I'd be your ONLY girlfriend. 'Cause all I want,' she finished, 'is to be your friend.'
'I don't know about that,' Foucault said, frowning.
Sally looked at him intently, as if for the first time. Now it was all up to him.
Foucault grabbed his bag.
For a moment everything was suspended.
The woman now was crying against the tree, her frail shoulders going up and down, up and down. He was gone, she was alone. My father, Sally thought, never cared much for women. He didn't care for my mother. They didn't love each other. They slept in separate rooms. But what if it had been a mistake? If he didn't want to live with a woman? And now she was sobbing, all these years piled up on the bench like so much junk.
Finally Foucault said: 'Once I had a woman friend…'
Sally stopped sniffling and smiled. Maybe they could still be friends.“I am Grandpa Wen Jiabao,” the prime minister said as he watched two children being pulled from the rubble, according to Xinhua, the official state news agency. “Hold on, kids! You’ll definitely be rescued.”
But enraged parents interviewed at the morgue on Wednesday afternoon and early Thursday morning say local officials lied to the prime minister to hide the true toll at Xinjian, which they estimate at more than 400 dead children. Several parents blamed local officials for a slow initial rescue response and questioned the structural safety of the school building. They were also furious that officials forbade them to search for their children for two days and then allowed access to the bodies only after the parents formed an ad hoc committee to complain.
“Before Wen Jiabao came, the whole school was filled with children’s bodies,” said one mother who sat outdoors at the morgue with her husband in the early morning darkness beside the covered body of their 8-year-old daughter. “Her father and I had stood outside the school since the earthquake. We pleaded with the government: ‘If she is dead, I want to see the body. If she is alive, I want to see her.’ ”
Her husband, a thin man, leaned forward into the yellow light of two candles. “We’re telling you the truth,” he said. “Get the truth out.”
The morgue is an hour outside Dujiangyan on an isolated rural road, yet the parking lot was filled at 1:50 a.m. on Thursday. Parents and other family members clustered around the bodies of their children. Some burned fake money to bring their lost child good fortune in the afterlife. In one room, 25 small bodies were scattered on the floor. Some children had already been taken away; an empty white body bag lay near a sneaker and a filthy pair of boy’s trousers. Some families had placed flowers or incense inside empty water bottles as makeshift memorials.
“There are more in there,” said a man, pointing to a rear door. He walked outside to a walkway and paused. Scores of bodies, covered with sheets, were lined in two long rows on the concrete floor. Others were placed in an adjacent room. Parents sobbed or sat silently beside bodies.
“They are all students,” said the man in the blue shirt. “Look,” he said pointing to a red and white jacket folded beside one body. “That is the school uniform.” He pointed to a Mickey Mouse backpack. “There is a book bag.”
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The two rows of bodies came to an open door that led to the large steel furnaces used for cremation. In China, the dead are almost always cremated fairly soon after death. Usually, there is enough time for funeral ceremonies and rituals, but parents said that officials were worried about cremating so many bodies before they started to decompose. So some parents have been asked if their children can be cremated with dead friends to save time.
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Parents say they were only allowed to begin identifying their children on Wednesday. The bodies had remained inside the gated grounds of Xinjian Primary School for two days until officials began transporting them to the morgue on Wednesday.
The earthquake struck at 2:28 p.m. on Monday, and many parents rushed to the school. Xinjian had about 600 pupils, ages from roughly 7 to 12. When parents arrived most of the building had collapsed. They frantically pulled away bricks and chunks of concrete with their bare hands.
“We pleaded with the administrators to help us,” said one mother, Chen Li, 39, who came to the morgue on Wednesday to identify her son, a sixth grader. “We yelled, ‘Where are the soldiers? Send them to help us!’ ”
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Parents say neighbors and students from a nearby college arrived by 4 p.m. to help with the digging. Local officials and school administrators also came but then left after inspecting the site. Two more hours passed before a large group of paramilitary police officers arrived and told the parents to leave because the area was too dangerous. Parents were relocated outside the school gate, unable to watch as the officers began digging.
Ms. Chen said her son, Zhang Yuanxin, was discovered the same day as the earthquake but then left uncovered in the rain with other bodies on the playground. She said two trucks arrived Wednesday and carried away bodies shortly before Mr. Wen arrived for his inspection.
“I think there were 50 bodies in two trucks that were carried away,” Ms. Chen said. “I asked those people, ‘Are you taking the bodies away?’ ”
But she said local officials lied to her and said they were only taking away tents.
Parents say they became so angry over the situation at the school by Tuesday that they formed the committee and complained to local officials. Officials in Dujiangyan could not be reached for comment, but parents say the officials relented on Wednesday by moving the children’s bodies to the morgue and providing shuttle buses for people waiting outside the school.
At the morgue on Wednesday, parents walked through rooms lined with bodies on the floor, lifting sheets in the unwanted search to identify a lost child. Cai Changrong, 37, held an urn containing the ashes of his cremated 9-year-old daughter. His wife, Hu Xiu, could not stop wailing.
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“We didn’t find any bruises or injuries on her body,” said Ms. Hu, the mother. “But she lost all her nails. She was trying to scratch her way out. I think my daughter suffocated to death.”
Several parents wanted an investigation into the construction quality of school buildings in Dujiangyan. They say six schoolhouses collapsed in the city, even as other government buildings remain standing. One man said officials built two additional stories on the Xinjian school even though it had failed a safety inspection two years ago — allegations that could not be verified.
Mr. Li, the father dressing his dead daughter, also said he believed that the school was poorly built. He arrived at the school minutes after the quake and spent the next four hours searching for his daughter. His forearms were bruised and his fingernails were split and bloodied from digging.
He proudly handed over his cellphone and showed a picture of his daughter, Ke, taken last week. But Thursday morning, he and his wife were preparing for her cremation. They struggled to slip her into the pink pajamas and then dressed her in a gray sweatshirt and pants. Her mother placed a white silk mourning cloth under her clotted black hair.
Mr. Li said he lost his job in 1997 and had been living on a meager welfare payment. He said the school was filled with children from poor families. “My daughter was a very good student,” he said. “She was a quiet girl, and she liked to paint. We’re putting her in these clothes because she loved them.”
He said he was angry and sad. He said his daughter’s body was still warm when he found her at the morgue on Wednesday. He wondered how long she lived beneath the rubble. And then he turned away, leaning down slightly, and whispered in her ear.
“My little daughter,” he said quietly. “You used to dress yourself. Now I have to do it for you.”From...
InfoGear upgrades phone of the future
June 10, 1999
Web posted at: 11:36 a.m. EDT (1536 GMT)
by David Needle
(IDG) -- Last year, InfoGear Technology got plenty of oohs and ahs for its iPhone, a telephone that could let you surf the Web.
But the device's slow modem, hard-to-read screen, and high price didn't attract many buyers -- only about 15,000 active users, according to InfoGear Chief Executive Officer Ed Cluss.
Enter the new iPhone, which addresses the most common complaints about the first model. "This is the phone they should have built the first time out," says analyst David Coursey, editor of the Coursey.com e-mail newsletter.
The iPhone features an integrated Web browser, tiltable 7.4-inch gray scale touchscreen, an e-mail client, a 56-kilobits-per-second modem, two phone jacks, a full duplex speaker phone, and a keyboard that slides under the phone to save space. Hardware for a digital answering machine is also built in, although that functionality won't be available until later this summer via a software upgrade, available over the Internet.
The iPhone's current fifth-generation software is much easier to install than PC software -- in fact, InfoGear says, there's no real installation. When a new application is available, an icon appears on the iPhone's screen. Press the icon and the new software is transferred to the system, a process that takes a minute and a half at most, according to Cluss.
InfoGear doesn't set the price for the iPhone, but defers to its resellers. For Internet service, InfoGear refers customers to Big Planet, but you can also go with your own service provider. Big Planet is also InfoGear's preferred online retailer; it lists the iPhone for $299, plus service plans.
Competition from cheap PCs?
Even though the low end of the PC market is in the same price range as the iPhone, and threatening to drop further, Cluss says he isn't worried. "The reason low-cost PCs aren't in more homes than they are already is ease of use and support issues," says Cluss. "People are worried about having to upgrade and breaking the PC. We're very focused on these issues and we've tried to create a simple, reliable device."
The market for information appliances like iPhone is set to explode, by some analysts' reckoning. "Consumers are looking to obtain the benefits of the Internet without the bulk, the complexity, and cost of the PC," says Sean Kaldor, a vice president with research firm International Data Corporation. "1999 will be a formative year for Internet screen phones as numerous companies such as InfoGear come to market in response to consumers' needs for fast, easy, and convenient access to the Internet."
Not a WebTV wannabe
While some of the iPhone's advantages sound a lot like a marketing pitch for WebTV -- it provides convenient, low-cost access to the Internet and e-mail -- Cluss says the iPhone addresses a different set of needs.
"PCs and TVs are things that people tend to sit down and watch for hours at a time," says Cluss. "The idea for the iPhone is that it sits in a heavily trafficked area of the house, like an entry way or the kitchen, and you typically will spend three to seven minutes on it, checking or sending off an e-mail, getting a weather report and so on."
While WebTV tries to appeal to newbies, Cluss says most iPhone users already own a PC. "The iPhone is for people who have an oven," says Cluss, "and now they want a microwave."
Cluss also argues the iPhone is a more private device because it lets you can dash off a short e-mail or read a message in private, whereas a desktop PC or a WebTV device uses a display that's viewable by anyone in the room.
The iPhone can't handle streaming media or multimedia games. "You can go anywhere you want to on the Internet using the iPhone, but you can't play Quake or run multimedia applications. It wasn't designed for that," says Cluss.In an election year, after announcing a 100 per cent hike in the remuneration of Imams associated with the Delhi Wakf Board and increasing salaries of Urdu medium teachers, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Wednesday hiked monthly emoluments of Urdu teachers by Rs 11,000 each.
The chief minister also announced that henceforth Urdu educators would get honorarium of Rs 2,000 a month instead of Rs 1,500 and the topper student from Urdu schools would get a cash reward of Rs 1,000 instead of Rs 500.
Addressing the annual convention of Urdu educators at Talkatora Stadium, Dikshit said Urdu language is a "symbol of our composite culture" and that her government has been rendering all possible help in promoting Urdu in the capital.
The announcement was made in the presence of Delhi Education Minister Kiran Walia, secretary (Languages) S S Yadav, and vice-chairperson of Urdu Academy professor Akhtar-ul-Wasey.
Dikshit presented a cash reward of Rs 1,500 each to 46 Urdu educators and prizes to 90 topper students at the convention.
Welcoming the CM's decision Wasey said the increase in emoluments was much needed as through its 136 Urdu literacy centres, the academy was trying to reach out to the most deprived sections of society. "We are taking Urdu to the slums and JJ colonies of Delhi where there are barely any avenues of study," he said.
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Five felony charges of sexual assault by a corrections officer of an inmate were dismissed against a former guard at the Milwaukee County Jail after he pleaded no contest to one felony count of misconduct in public office as part of a plea agreement.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Daniel Konkol sentenced the former guard, Xavier Thicklen, 26, to three days in the House of Correction, which he already has served, and a fine of $200. The original charges carried a maximum penalty of 200 years in prison.
Thicklen has consistently denied having ongoing sexual contact with the inmate while she was in jail last year. The misconduct charge involves him giving candy and gum to the woman and letting her make an unauthorized phone call, according to Thicklen's lawyer, Lew Wasserman.
"All he was guilty of was probably being too sympathetic to inmates," Wasserman said. "She was an agitator and he was trying to mollify her. He gave her Jolly Ranchers out of his lunch and Doublemint gum."
The woman, who was 20 at the time, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier this year that Thicklen assaulted her five times, including once when she was more than seven months pregnant and once within days of her return to the jail after giving birth.
Prosecutors believed her and filed the sexual assault charges against Thicklen in January.
Thicklen, who had been a corrections officer for a little more than a year, resigned a month earlier, as soon as the Milwaukee County sheriff's office began investigating.
The woman, who already was pregnant at the time of her arrest, gave birth to a healthy girl while in custody.
She has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that sexual assaults, improper nutrition and shackling during delivery were violations of her civil rights. Thicklen, Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. and the county are named as defendants.
A federal judge suspended the civil case in July, pending the outcome of the criminal case against Thicklen.
Last month, Wasserman said Thicklen offered in June to plead no contest to the single misconduct count, but negotiations were held up because Assistant District Attorney Paul Tiffin had been barred from speaking to the woman by her civil attorneys and he felt he needed to speak with her before making a plea deal.
Konkol ruled that the prosecutor was not required to engage in plea negotiations, according to online court records. Because Tiffin was not representing anyone in the civil suit, he was not required to recuse himself, Konkol found.
The civil suit is pending.
Attorney Robin Shellow, among a team of lawyers representing the woman in the civil case, said surveillance video from the jail corroborates the woman's allegations.
"The plea bargain struck by the state and the defendant is between the two of them," Shellow said. "When the evidence is aired before a civil jury, Thicklen will be made to eat more than Jolly Ranchers. He will have to eat his words."While searching for a recording of “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana I came across this video which brings together scenes from across the various six Star Wars films to that musical accompaniment, connecting the early and later in a pretty effective way.
The look on Obi Wan Kenobi’s face in the first Star Wars film ever made, A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker asks him about his father, shows an incredible amount of forethought was already at work. The fact that one can splice in “flashbacks” to Episode III and have it work so well is impressive. Anyone who watched LOST and found themselves frustrated when things didn’t match up should appreciate what George Lucas accomplished in Star Wars rather than complaining about it.
Some have chosen to “reboot” classic shows and films rather than try to offer sequels that seek to maintain continuity. The spoof comic Gutters recently explored the idea of the New Testament as a “reboot” of the Jewish Scriptures (HT Hemant Mehta):
Do you think that the New Testament is better viewed as a sequel or a reboot in relation to the Jewish Scriptures? And when it comes to continuity (and continuity errors) is it more like Star Wars, LOST, or Doctor Who?There is no precise match in the Russian language for the English expression, “I hate to say, ‘I told you so.’” But something similar will likely be on the mind of Russian President Vladimir Putin when he meets with his American counterpart, Barack Obama, on Monday during the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
Their last formal sit-down was more than two years ago, at the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland in June 2013, when the two leaders clashed over how to resolve the civil war in Syria. This time in New York, their main topic of discussion will be much the same, only Putin will be far better equipped to get his point across.
Since the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011, Putin has repeatedly warned the West over the folly of supporting Syria’s rebels against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad, and the past two years of chaos and violence have borne those warnings out. The world has watched the failed attempts of the U.S. and its allies to arm and train a moderate faction of rebels that might be capable of ousting Assad’s regime. At the same time, the terrorist group most commonly known as the Islamic State has declared a caliphate that spans vast sections of Syrian territory, and many countries in Europe and the Middle East have been inundated with refugees fleeing the savagery of Syria’s conflict.
On Monday, when he will address the U.N. General Assembly for the first time in 10 years, Putin is set to propose a way out of the Syrian crisis that would run along two parallel tracks. First, he wants the U.N. to support a military intervention in Syria, one that would allow what Putin calls an “international coalition” of powers — likely including Russia, the U.S. and Iran, among others — to work together in defeating the Islamic State. Second, and perhaps even more controversially for America and its allies, Putin wants the Assad regime to play a role in this effort — and thus to remain in power at least until Syria is stable enough to handle a negotiated change of leadership.
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For several weeks, and well before he set a date for his talks with Obama, Putin has been busy putting the early stages of his plan into motion. The Russian military has deployed a formidable group of tanks, warplanes and troops around Assad’s strongholds in the west of Syria, all of which will help Putin put forward his proposal on Monday as a fait accompli: with or without the approval of the U.S. or the U.N., Russia is already mounting a military intervention in Syria to prop up Assad and help him fight off the rebel factions.
Obama will now have to decide whether the U.S. is willing to go along, and if so, on what terms. The hardest prospect for Obama to stomach will likely be aiding Assad, whose forces have committed gruesome and widespread atrocities against civilians. But in the past few weeks, even some of Obama’s former aides and closest allies have come around to the notion that Assad’s forces would be essential to any resolution of the Syrian conflict.
Putin has been working hard to sell that point of view to Assad’s most dedicated regional opponents. On Sept. 24, after a meeting with Putin in Moscow, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said for the first time that Assad could play a role in the “transition process” in Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also paid Putin a visit three days earlier, and Israel’s military later said that it would coordinate with Russian forces operating in Syria. Faced with an influx of Syrian refugees, leaders in Europe have meanwhile grown more desperate in recent months for any workable plan to end the conflict that lies at the source of the mass migration.
Now, if Putin can get Obama to go along with his proposal as well, it would mark one of the greatest diplomatic triumphs of his 15 years in power. Russia’s role as a decider in the affairs of the Middle East would then be more pronounced than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the country’s diplomatic isolation over its military incursions in Crimea last year would be substantially eased. If the Russian military takes part in a coalition with the West in Syria, Putin would also have a lot more political leverage in getting the West to lift the sanctions it has imposed against Russia over Ukraine.
With so much to gain, it is little wonder that Putin has offered the West a string of conciliatory gestures in order to set a friendly tone for these talks in New York. There has, for instance, been a clear lull in the fighting in eastern Ukraine, patches of which are still under the control of Russia’s proxy militias. On Friday, officials from Russia, Ukraine and the European Union reached a deal to ensure supplies of natural gas for this winter, settling another sore point in their mutual relations. The following day, Russia sent home an Estonian security officer, Eston Kohver, whose arrest and trial for espionage last year in Moscow had further soured relations between Russia and the West. In this context, it’s also worth noting Putin’s surprise phone call last week to the performer and gay-rights activist Elton John, who has been seeking an audience with the Russian leader to discuss the touchy issue of Moscow’s homophobic policies.
All of these little olive branches, though clearly meant to signal a friendlier mood in Moscow, will not be enough for Putin to reverse the last two years of antagonism between the U.S. and Russia. But they might make it harder for Obama to dismiss Putin’s proposal on Syria outright. In order to do that, the U.S. President may first need to come up with an alternative plan of his own. But with Russia’s forces already in place, any such plan would still have to deal with Putin — either as a partner or an adversary.
Contact us at editors@time.com.Lessons from the Sony Hack
Earlier this month, a mysterious group that calls itself Guardians of Peace hacked into Sony Pictures Entertainment's computer systems and began revealing many of the Hollywood studio's best-kept secrets, from details about unreleased movies to embarrassing emails (notably some racist notes from Sony bigwigs about President Barack Obama's presumed movie-watching preferences) to the personnel data of employees, including salaries and performance reviews. The Federal Bureau of Investigation now says it has evidence that North Korea was behind the attack, and Sony Pictures pulled its planned release of "The Interview," a satire targeting that country's dictator, after the hackers made some ridiculous threats about terrorist violence.
Your reaction to the massive hacking of such a prominent company will depend on whether you're fluent in information-technology security. If you're not, you're probably wondering how in the world this could happen. If you are, you're aware that this could happen to any company (though it is still amazing that Sony made it so easy).
To understand any given episode of hacking, you need to understand who your adversary is. I've spent decades dealing with Internet hackers (as I do now at my current firm), and I've learned to separate opportunistic attacks from targeted ones.
You can characterize attackers along two axes: skill and focus. Most attacks are low-skill and low-focus -- people using common hacking tools against thousands of networks world-wide. These low-end attacks include sending spam out to millions of email addresses, hoping that someone will fall for it and click on a poisoned link. I think of them as the background radiation of the Internet.
High-skill, low-focus attacks are more serious. These include the more sophisticated attacks using newly discovered "zero-day" vulnerabilities in software, systems and networks. This is the sort of attack that affected Target, J.P. Morgan Chase and most of the other commercial networks that you've heard about in the past year or so.
But even scarier are the high-skill, high-focus attacks -- the type that hit Sony. This includes sophisticated attacks seemingly run by national intelligence agencies, using such spying tools as Regin and Flame, which many in the IT world suspect were created by the U.S.; Turla, a piece of malware that many blame on the Russian government; and a huge snooping effort called GhostNet, which spied on the Dalai Lama and Asian governments, leading many of my colleagues to blame China. (We're mostly guessing about the origins of these attacks; governments refuse to comment on such issues.) China has also been accused of trying to hack into the New York Times in 2010, and in May, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the indictment of five Chinese military officials for cyberattacks against U.S. corporations.
This category also includes private actors, including the hacker group known as Anonymous, which mounted a Sony-style attack against the Internet-security firm HBGary Federal, and the unknown hackers who stole racy celebrity photos from Apple's iCloud and posted them. If you've heard the IT-security buzz phrase "advanced persistent threat," this is it.
There is a key difference among these kinds of hacking. In the first two categories, the attacker is an opportunist. The hackers who penetrated Home Depot's networks didn't seem to care much about Home Depot; they just wanted a large database of credit-card numbers. Any large retailer would do.
But a skilled, determined attacker wants to attack a specific victim. The reasons may be political: to hurt a government or leader enmeshed in a geopolitical battle. Or ethical: to punish an industry that the hacker abhors, like big oil or big pharma. Or maybe the victim is just a company that hackers love to hate. (Sony falls into this category: It has been infuriating hackers since 2005, when the company put malicious software on its CDs in a failed attempt to prevent copying.)
Low-focus attacks are easier to defend against: If Home Depot's systems had been better protected, the hackers would have just moved on to an easier target. With attackers who are highly skilled and highly focused, however, what matters is whether a targeted company's security is superior to the attacker's skills, not just to the security measures of other companies. Often, it isn't. We're much better at such relative security than we are at absolute security.
That is why security experts aren't surprised by the Sony story. We know people who do penetration testing for a living -- real, no-holds-barred attacks that mimic a full-on assault by a dogged, expert attacker -- and we know that the expert always gets in. Against a sufficiently skilled, funded and motivated attacker, all networks are vulnerable. But good security makes many kinds of attack harder, costlier and riskier. Against attackers who aren't sufficiently skilled, good security may protect you completely.
It is hard to put a dollar value on security that is strong enough to assure you that your embarrassing emails and personnel information won't end up posted online somewhere, but Sony clearly failed here. Its security turned out to be subpar. They didn't have to leave so much information exposed. And they didn't have to be so slow detecting the breach, giving the attackers free rein to wander about and take so much stuff.
For those worried that what happened to Sony could happen to you, I have two pieces of advice. The first is for organizations: take this stuff seriously. Security is a combination of protection, detection and response. You need prevention to defend against low-focus attacks and to make targeted attacks harder. You need detection to spot the attackers who inevitably get through. And you need response to minimize the damage, restore security and manage the fallout.
The time to start is before the attack hits: Sony would have fared much better if its executives simply hadn't made racist jokes about Mr. Obama or insulted its stars -- or if their response systems had been agile enough to kick the hackers out before they grabbed everything.
My second piece of advice is for individuals. The worst invasion of privacy from the Sony hack didn't happen to the executives or the stars; it happened to the blameless random employees who were just using their company's email system. Because of that, they've had their most personal conversations -- gossip, medical conditions, love lives -- exposed. The press may not have divulged this information, but their friends and relatives peeked at it. Hundreds of personal tragedies must be unfolding right now.
This could be any of us. We have no choice but to entrust companies with our intimate conversations: on email, on Facebook, by text and so on. We have no choice but to entrust the retailers that we use with our financial details. And we have little choice but to use cloud services such as iCloud and Google Docs.
So be smart: Understand the risks. Know that your data are vulnerable. Opt out when you can. And agitate for government intervention to ensure that organizations protect your data as well as you would. Like many areas of our hyper-technical world, this isn't something markets can fix.
This essay previously appeared on the Wall Street Journal CIO Journal.
EDITED TO ADD (12/21): Slashdot thread.
EDITED TO ADD (1/14): Sony has had more than 50 security breaches in the past fifteen years.
Posted on December 19, 2014 at 12:44 PM • 86 CommentsThe old sign still looms over Beach Boulevard, a 20th century landmark that, like the museum it once trumpeted, held out past the dawn of multiplexes and YouTube.
The Movieland Wax Museum, which closed in 2005 after 43 years in business, continues to beckon motorists who drive the main thoroughfare of Buena Park's entertainment district. The tall sign in front, featuring the museum's name surrounded by white diamonds atop a spindly blue base, has stayed in place even as wax sculptures were auctioned off and new tenants moved in.
On a recent warm afternoon, Mario Orozco, a retired Buena Park resident, sat at the Starbucks below the sign and recalled his days visiting the museum as a child. Back then, he said, the opportunity to see celebrity likenesses up close was a rare treat. And that massive sign broadcast the message that something special resided beneath it.
"To me, it's like the big A at Angel Stadium," Orozco said at an outdoor table, looking up. "It's one of those things that's an icon. In Buena Park, it is."
As R.E.M. once sang, though, the 20th century has gone to sleep. Many of the stars once portrayed in the museum's cool confines are likely to have small audiences on Netflix, at least among millennials. And as Buena Park officials look to sweep out relics along Beach Boulevard, from former tourist spots to shuttered motels, the future of that curving blue sign has become a question mark.
For two years, Premier Exhibitions has installed two temporary shows in the facility — one focused on the Titanic, the other on the human body. Now, a new permanent tenant is set to move onto the property: Los Angeles-based Butterfly Pavillion plans to open an elaborate complex featuring an atrium full of butterflies, a movie theater and more next year.
As that time approaches, the city, which bought the Movieland Wax Museum property in 2007, will have to reach an agreement regarding a staple of the Buena Park skyline.
"They're probably going to change the face of the sign," said Ruben Lopez, the city's economic development administrator. "We're going to see if we can negotiate to keep 'Movieland' in there somewhere."
::
"Where they wax eloquently."
So the Los Angeles Times proclaimed the museum when it opened in 1962, offering about 60 sculpted figures that represented the first half-century of cinema.
Actress Mary Pickford, one of the biggest stars of the silent era, showed up to dedicate the grounds on opening night. Entrepreneur Allen Parkinson treated the museum's debut like an actual movie premiere, complete with searchlights, bleachers and stars arriving in limousines.
The museum drew as many as 1.2 million visitors a year during its peak of popularity, in the 1960s, and it remained a prestigious spot for celebrities for decades after. The cement handprints still preserved in front of the building include those of Carol Burnett, Marcel Marceau, Ray Charles, Ed Asner and the leads of the "Batman" TV series.
The museum kept current with celebrities over time, as Kate Winslet and Britney Spears took their places along the likes of Mae West and W.C. Fields, but attendance and interest diminished nonetheless.
With the museum now long closed, that sign over Beach Boulevard sometimes poses a problem.
Sara Copping, the executive director of the Visit Buena Park tourist bureau, often gets calls asking if the museum is open or what its hours are. The sign may represent a treasured part of history for locals, but those from outside the neighborhood are often confused about the lack of |
its generally more productive.The reason we are looking at this k number and not kh/s is it shows results from changes faster. kh/s seems to be some sort of average while k seems to be right now speed. So its easier to see in real-time the changes from one xi to the next. Make sure you let it run for at least a few seconds on each increase or decrease to be sure of the speed change.For even more tweaking there is now a feature in the kalroth release called rawintensity. This is quite literally just the intensity threadcount. This is a much more fine tune and will take a ton of time to tweak. but if you want to spend some more time getting every little bit you can then use rawintensity to take it another step!The last thing I usually mess with is thread-concurrency. Assuming the setting from wiki worked ok (they generally do). You should attempt multiples of your shaders aswell as multiples of 1024. Go up and down from your original wiki setting and see what works best for your gpu. Theres likely going to be a large range that performs similar. You will want to end up somewhere in the middle of too high tc (generally choppy) and too low tc (hw errors). If the wiki setting falls in the middle its probably where you should keep it.Many people have reported that thread concurrency is best found by shaders*n+1. So Take your shaders multiply by a number usually 3-10 add 1 and test. I ended up on 8193 personally with my 270x and 7870 and it seems to run best on MANY different gpu.Theres no one specific setting for any of these, some just perform better at different settings then others. Even the exact same 2 gpu from the same company same model may have 2 completely different optimal settings.Just dont forget to keep an eye on HW: This will tell you if you have any hw errors. Also wu/m again is the most important of all as it represents the actual work submitted (what your pool pays you for). Also dont forget wu/m takes a LONG time to even out even 24 hours before its steady sometimes (you will get used to watching it and understand kinda how it works). Wu/m is about luck (Difficulty of each submitted work) but luck over time will always even out.Lastly you may want to do some clean-up in your cgminer folder before starting overclocking. Everytime you changed thread-concurrency, worksize OR gpu threads it created another bin file. This bin file is used everytime you start cgminer and keeps your settings stored. Once your at your optimal settings you can just delete all of the bins. It will create a new one with the same previous settings and you wont have 20 bin files anymore. Also I am sure you noticed everytime you start cgminer with one of those settings changed it takes a much longer time to start because it creates the bin file. Once you have your settings locked in and a bin file made cgminer will start much quicker.Overclocking can be very frustrating. Many cards can respond differently. You will need to tinker with both core and memory clocks at the same time in order to optimize your settings. You can even end up at different clocks for different cgminer settings.Use a program like MSI afterburner or Sapphire trixx or something. You need on the fly controls to really optimize each gpu.Sometimes you will see the same results from 1340 mem as you will from 1500. Sometimes not. Depends on memory, brand and card. Core clock can also be the same way. My 7870 likes a much lower clock between 975-1010 is optimal but it still runs almost the exact same kh/s at 1300-1340. So when you think your going up sometimes its better to go down! Try everything!My current clock settings:7870: core clock 980, mem-clock 1358 runs at 425kh/s. Can push around 435 at 1010,1360270x: core clock 1160, mem-clock 1498 runs at 500kh/s. Can push up to 505ish with minor tweaking (reports show these settings work on multiple 270x)This can be HEAVILY effected by the bin file created by the miner from different driver versions. I do NOT suggest using the new 14.1 drivers for pitcairn cards. For both my 7870 and 270x there was a MAJOR loss in kh/s. Have also seen alot of bad reports from others aswell. 13.11 or 13.12 are recommended.Your overall goal is to attempt to undervolt aswell as increase kh/s by possibly underclocking. You will want to start as low as possible and hope that your core responds well to low clocks. For example if you get 420kh/s at 980 clock but you get 425 at 1250 clock then its likely better to go with the 980 as your power bill will show it. Memory clocks are likely to end up higher but do not draw as much power.Do your best to find your optimal core and memory clocks. adjusting each by 20mhz at a time at first then when you get to the "sweet spots" adjust up and down slightly until you find the magic numbers. You will see the results in cgminer. You can adjust while running cgminer it will take a few moments to regain speed (unless you hit a bad spot). Once you find the highest possible generally best to back off just a tad.Lastly after finding those optimal settings you will want to try to undervolt your gpu. This is done by lowering the vcore which on some gpu can be locked. In MSI afterburner you can try going into settings and selecting unlock voltage aswell as extend overclock limits (you may not even have these options). If it works you may get voltage unlocked. Otherwise there is other methods like flashing the bios if you really want to undervolt. The goal is to turn down the voltage as far as you can to save power. if you lose some serious wu/m after undervolting you may have to go back up a bit. I did myself it seemed to work fine but then i realized it was not submitting nearly as much work. So keep an eye on it before and after undervolting to assure its working properly.Once all is said and done you can use a program like VBE7 to edit, save and flash your bios to permanently have these clocked miner settings. Its better to do this if you plan on using for mining only as using msi ab or another program everytime can be a pain and can cause conflicts with some other programs like cgmonitor. Even though afterburner runs everytime your start your pc its better to always be clocked properly. Flashing bios is the optimal way to do this but in most casesAfter overclocking your completely done! you should have the highest hash possible out of your gpu. Hope I helped you squeeze out some more hash! Feel free to PM me with any questions or reply hereThe search for Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster is world famous. Far less well-known is the hunt for a similar creature, Mokele-mbembe, which is reputed to live in the remote north of Congo-Brazzaville. But how strong is the evidence?
“I checked maps, and the data on the maps was white. It said, ‘insufficient data to delineate terrain’. Well that got me!” says Dr Roy Mackal, a retired biologist from the University of Chicago.
“It’s the end of the world. It gives you a feeling of a surviving prehistoric time.”
In the 1980s, Dr Mackal led two expedition teams to the vast Likouala swamp and rainforest area of the Congo which is inhabited by pygmies, on the hunt for this mystery creature – Africa’s version of Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster.
The Mokele-mbembe is reputed to be a large reptile-like creature, with a long neck, and long tail.
Despite being a herbivore, it is said to roar aggressively if approached by humans. Some say it has a single horn, which it uses to kill elephants.
Many a Western explorer over the years has been gripped by the tantalising possibility that they could discover a creature – a formidable one at that – that has remained, as yet, unknown to science.
To date, there have been more than 50 expeditions to the region, but no scientific evidence, unless you include the large claw-shaped footprint recorded by a French missionary in 1776, and by a number of others since.
The only photographic images have been so fuzzy, they prove nothing.
But there is no shortage of eyewitness reports.
“I was in a boat on the river when I saw Mokele-mbembe. He began to chase us. Mokele-mbembe rose out of the water,” one man told the BBC. “We ran, or he would have killed us.”
Lake Tele, 5km across, is a hotspot for Mokele-mbembe sightings
Paul Ohlin, a community development worker who spent more than 10 years living with the Bayaka in Congo and the Central African Republic, just to the north, says the people who live in the area are in no doubt about the creature’s existence.
“When people are sitting around the campfire talking, they talk about the Mokele-mbembe – it’s something that’s a reality in everyday life,” he says.
At the same time he emphasises their “spiritual connection” and “mystical relationship” with it.
But their eyewitness reports still need to be taken seriously, in his view.
“Certainly mythology surrounds it,” says Adam Davies, a British man who spends his spare time and money travelling the world in search of undocumented species, and has twice gone to Africa on the trail of the Mokele-mbembe.
“But when you put it to people, ‘Is this a real creature?’ they become quite affronted… and they consistently came out with physical descriptions.”
“Never dismiss tribal accounts on the basis that they must be talking tosh because they are tribal – that’s not right and it’s actually disrespectful,” he says.
The field of cryptozoology – the search for large, unproven species – extends well beyond the realms of mainstream science.
Dr Mackal was scientific director at Loch Ness before turning his attention to Congo But those who believe Mokele-mbembe exists point out that some animals once dismissed by science have turned out to be real.
The most often cited example is the okapi – a cloven-hoofed mammal with zebra-like stripes on its legs, which lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, just to the east of Congo-Brazzaville.
In the 19th Century, there was talk among Westerners in Africa of the existence of an “African unicorn” and the explorer Henry Morton Stanley – who had earlier tracked down the missing missionary, Dr David Livingstone – reported seeing a mysterious donkey-like animal on a journey through the Congo in the late 1880s.
It was only in 1901 that the okapi was properly documented and identified as a relative of the giraffe.
“I’d put Mokele-mbembe in the same category as the Loch Ness Monster,” says Bill Laurance, professor at James Cook University in Australia, a conservation biologist and an expert in tropical rainforests.
“My gut sense is that the likelihood of the creature actually existing today is small.
“However, one thing you learn early on in science is never say never. We are still discovering new species all the time.”
The Likouala region in the north-east of Congo Brazzaville is the kind of place that it is easy to imagine containing hidden mysteries. Congolese government officials say 80% of its 66,000 sq km is uncharted. Much of it is dense, often flooded forest, forming part of the second largest rainforest in the world.
“The idea of a creature which is very rare, living in a very remote area with a vast size to it, is not remotely implausible,” argues Adam Davies.
But some wonder about the motivations of the Congolese who promote the existence of the creature.
US writer Rory Nugent who went to Congo in search of the Mokele-mbembe and wrote a book about his experience, Drums Along the Congo, says he saw “an elegant French curve moving through the water”.
He believes it might have been the head of the famed creature, but he is also deeply sceptical.
“The guides were screaming about a god beast. Whether it was part of the show, whether there was somebody swimming under the water with flippers pushing a cardboard piece across the lake, I couldn’t tell you.”
Taking foreigners on expeditions to try to find the Mokele-mbembe is a good “money making operation” for those involved, he adds.
Mr Nugent fears that one day a kind of “Disneyland Congo” could be created in the area – similar to the tourist trap around Loch Ness – with scientists and tourists from the world flying in and out.
New species?
Those who believe the Mokele-mbembe exists argue that with further dedication of time and resources, one will eventually be tracked down.
Mokele-mbembe are still reproducing, reckons Roy Mackal… possibly near Lake Tele But might the discovery of the creature be an anti-climax? Perhaps the mystery is what we enjoy most.
“I think there is a basic need or drive to entertain possibilities just outside of our reach,” says psychology professor Jacqueline Woolley of the University of Texas.
“There is the excitement in believing that what seems impossible or improbable could potentially exist.”
She says that for belief in creatures like the Mokele-mbembe to take hold, they “can’t be too wacky and far out – they must be similar to real entities,” but vary in just one or two ways.
“I realise my bias,” admits Dr Mackal, who is now in his 80s. “I’m interested in discovering unknown species of animals.”
“But I think that Mokele-mbembe still exist, and there isn’t just one – they are reproducing,” he contends.
“At 86 years old, I would dearly love to be alive if and when the animals are discovered.”
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16306902To ensure the safety of our customers and employees, Delta no longer accepts hoverboards or any lithium battery powered self-balancing personal transportation devices on board its aircraft. These items are prohibited as both carry-on and checked baggage.
Spare batteries for other devices, fuel cells, and e-cigarettes are permitted in carry-on baggage only. If your carry-on bag contains these items and is gate checked, they must be removed and carried in the cabin. For more information, please visit restricted items.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has issued an emergency order that bans all Samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices from commercial air transport. Delta customers should comply by not traveling with this device in any form, whether on their person, in a carry-on bag, in a checked bag or shipped as cargo. The U.S. DOT has provided additional information about the ban on their website.
Effective immediately, customers traveling on any airline to the U.S. from select airports in Europe, the Middle East and Africa should expect additional security measures relative to carry-on items. All battery-operated electronic devices intended for carry-on must be operational; any device that cannot be powered on upon screening will not be permitted onboard. Customers are encouraged to allow extra time at airports to account for additional screening requirements and to charge their electronic devices prior to arrival at security checkpoints. For the most up-to-date information on this and all security directives, visit TSA.gov.Reichsautobahn Car plaque for members of the Reichsautobahnen System information Maintained by Reich Ministry of Transport Length 3,819.7 km (2,373.5 mi) Formed 23 September 1933 ( ) Highway names
Berlin - Munich Reichsautobahn, today's A9, southeast of Dessau, photographed in 1939. The oaks were intentionally retained in the median.
The Reichsautobahn system was the beginning of the German autobahns under the Third Reich. There had been previous plans for controlled-access highways in Germany under the Weimar Republic, and two had been constructed, but work had yet to start on long-distance highways. After previously opposing plans for a highway network, the Nazis embraced them after coming to power and presented the project as Hitler's own idea. They were termed "Adolf Hitler's roads" (German: die Straßen Adolf Hitlers) and presented as a major contribution to the reduction of unemployment. Other reasons for the project included: enabling Germans to explore and appreciate their country, and there was a strong aesthetic element to the execution of the project under the Third Reich; military applications, although to a lesser extent than has often been thought; a permanent monument to the Third Reich, often compared to the pyramids; and general promotion of motoring as a modernization.
Hitler performed the first ceremonial shoveling of dirt on September 23, 1933, at Frankfurt, and work officially began simultaneously at multiple sites throughout the Reich the following spring. The first finished stretch, between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, opened on May 19, 1935, and the first 1,000 km (620 mi) were completed on September 23, 1936. After the annexation of Austria, the planned network was expanded to include the Ostmark, and a second sod-breaking ceremony for the first Reichsautobahn on formerly Austrian territory took place near Salzburg on April 7, 1938. When work ceased in 1941 because of World War II, 3,819.7 km (2,373.5 mi) had been completed.
History [ edit ]
Background [ edit ]
Two controlled-access highways had been built prior to the Nazi era. The 10 km (6.2 mi) long Avus (short for Automobil-Verkehrs- und Übungsstraße - automobile traffic and practice road) was built in Berlin starting in 1913. The corporation to build it was organized in 1909, and construction continued during World War I using prisoners of war, but it was not completed and officially opened until 1921. This was originally intended as a race track, and was used for testing vehicles and road surfaces, but it had many of the characteristics of the later Reichsautobahn and served as a model for Piero Puricelli's 1924 autostrada between Milan and the Northern Italian lakes, the first true motorway in the world.[1][2] In 1929–32, a highway some 20 km (12 mi) long that also resembled the Reichsautobahn except for the lack of a median strip was built between Cologne and Bonn using unemployed labour; on the basis of this, the then Lord Mayor of Cologne and Chairman of the Provincial committee for autostraßen, Konrad Adenauer, could be credited as having built an autobahn before Hitler.[3] The "Opladen bypass" between Cologne and Düsseldorf was also built in 1931–33.[4][5] Adenauer also began construction of a ring road encircling Cologne, which was more in accord with demand at the time. According to a 1936–37 traffic survey, the highest road traffic was still around the major cities.[6]
Corporations were also formed and plans drawn up for motorized highways between Mannheim and Heidelberg, between Munich and Berlin via Leipzig, between Munich and Lake Starnberg, between Leipzig and Halle, and between Cologne and Aachen, in addition to plans for networks totaling 15,000 km (9,300 mi) or 22,500 km (14,000 mi) in length. In 1930 the Ministry of Transportation became involved in trying to establish guidelines for the building of a highway network.[7] Most notably, the organization acronymed as HaFraBa (Verein zur Vorbereitung der Autostraße Hamburg–Frankfurt–Basel - Association for the preparation of the motorway Hamburg [later Hansestädte, Hanseatic cities, after Lübeck and Bremen were added] – Frankfurt – Basel), was founded in 1926 at the instigation of Willy Hof, who had been inspired by the Italian highways, and projected a north-south highway to be expanded into a network. Detailed engineering specifications were prepared, bound in 70 volumes, and this planning would form the basis of the Reichsautobahn network.[8][9]
However, HAFRABA was never able to surmount the logistical problems of building a highway through many different jurisdictions,[3][10] or the funding problems of such a large undertaking.[11] Moreover, legislators condemned it as a luxury project that would benefit only the few wealthy enough to own cars; the Nazi Party was against public spending on highways for this reason,[12] as were the Communists and the Reichsbahn, the German national railroad, which feared highways would take some of its freight business.[11] Even the association of German car manufacturers did not support highway projects; they were concerned that long-distance driving would overtax their vehicles.[10]
Planning and construction [ edit ]
Hitler shoveling dirt at the ceremonial inauguration of Reichsautobahn construction; behind him on the right Fritz Todt, on the left two workers helping him
After the Nazis came to power at the end of January 1933, their position changed rapidly. Fritz Todt produced a report arguing for the building of highways, Straßenbau und Straßenverwaltung, known as the "Brown Report" (Braune Denkschrift or Brauner Bericht),[13] and in a speech at the Berlin Motor Show on February 11, Hitler presented it as a necessity and as the future measure of a people, as railroads had been in the past.[14] A law establishing the Reichsautobahn project under that name was passed on June 27, 1933, and the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen (Reichsautobahns Association) was founded on August 25 as a subsidiary of the Reichsbahn, thereby removing its objections.[15] Todt was named Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straßenwesen (Inspector-General for the German Road System) on June 30. HAFRABA and other organizations were folded into the planning arm, known as GEZUVOR (Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung der Reichsautobahn, Society for the Preparation of the Reichsautobahn).[16][17] The Chairman of the Board of HAFRABA, Dr. Ludwig Landmann, the Mayor of Frankfurt, was Jewish, which provided the Nazis with a reason to take it over.[18] The autobahn was presented to the German public as Hitler's idea: he was represented as having sketched out the future network of highways while in Landsberg Prison in 1924.[19] They were to be "the Führer's roads", a myth promoted by Todt himself, who coined the phrase and warned close associates not to "in any way [let] the impression arise that I built the autobahns. They are to be reckoned as simply and solely the Führer's roads."[20] Hof, an enthusiastic party member, resigned on December 22, 1934; the editor of the HAFRABA magazine, Kurt Kaftan, had caused a political problem by presenting Hof as the originator of the idea, or jointly responsible for it with Hitler.[17] The overlapping responsibilities of the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen (in charge of construction) and of Todt's office (in charge of planning but also of all roads in the Reich) exemplified the growth of central authorities in the Third Reich and inevitably led to conflicts, but only on January 1, 1941 was the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen removed from the Reichsbahn and placed directly under Todt.[21]
On August 5, 1933, a radio play by Peter Hagen and Hans Jürgen Nierenz, Wir bauen eine Straße ("We are Building a Road"), was broadcast throughout the Reich.[22] On September 23, 1933, the first 720 unemployed marched to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, where they were ceremonially invested with shovels as Reichsautobahn workers, then from there accompanied by SA men, marched behind Todt and Jakob Sprenger, the Reichsstatthalter of Hesse, to the bank of the Main. There after further speeches, Hitler was to inaugurate work on the autobahn system with the first ceremonial shoveling of dirt to form the base of an embankment. However, as Todt described the scene in an illustrated album published in 1935, "again and again his shovel plunged into the mound [of dirt]. This was no symbolic shoveling; this was real construction work!" Two of the workers "sprang... to help him", and they worked "until the mound had been dealt with in an orderly fashion and... the first drops of sweat were dripping from his brow onto the earth."[23] The image of Hitler shoveling was used many times in propaganda, including superimposed on the workers' march in Heinrich Hoffmann's poster urging Germans to ratify the Nazi government in the November 1933 Reichstag election.[24] The location was marked with a park and a commemorative stone.[25]
Layout of the Drackensteiner Hang project: to negotiate the steep terrain with minimum disturbance, the two directions were routed on different sides of the mountain
Preparatory work at several sites was done over the following winter, but full-scale construction officially began on March 21, 1934, as the showpiece of the opening of the Arbeitsschlacht ("work battle"), which also included construction of dams and residences and agricultural work. Autobahn work sites had been established at 22 locations, governed by 9 regional work divisions (which became 15 by mid-1934), distributed throughout the Reich for maximum public visibility, and work was ceremonially initiated at 15 of the sites. At Unterhaching, Hitler made a short speech ending with the command, "Fanget an!" ("Begin!") This was broadcast nationwide on the radio, after which his representatives opened work with the first shoveling of dirt at the other 14 locations: Hermann Göring at Finowfurth near Berlin, for example.[26] A monument in the highway median at Unterhaching later commemorated the event: it took the form of a cylinder inscribed with Hitler's command and the date and surmounted by shovels in the manner of weapons on a military monument.[27][28] 15,000 workers were now engaged; however, at several of the work sites, the men were immediately sent home because mechanized excavations and other preparation had to be done first. According to a Sopade report in April–May 1934, only 6,000 workers on a 67 km (42 mi) stretch between Frankfurt and Heidelberg and 700 on a 7 km (4.3 mi) stretch between Munich and the border were actually active. GEZUVOR presented its 788 volumes of plans to Todt on June 1, 1934.[30]
Despite initial promises that the first segment would open in September 1934, to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the ground-breaking and with the 7th International Road Congress, this did not happen until May 19, 1935, when the 22 km (14 mi) stretch between Frankfurt and Darmstadt was opened.[31] Hitler rewarded Todt with a three-axle Mercedes-Benz touring car. Two further segments opened that year, a total of 108 km (67 mi).[30] The celebration of the first 1,000 km (620 mi) took place on September 27, 1936 at Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), five segments being opened to traffic that day.[32] 2,000 km (1,200 mi) were completed by the end of 1937, and 3,000 km (1,900 mi) by the end of 1938,[33] when the planned network was also extended from 7,000 km (4,300 mi) to 12,000 km (7,500 mi) after the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland.[34] A second inaugural ceremony for the first autobahn construction on formerly Austrian soil took place on April 7, 1938, with Hitler shoveling dirt into a decorated dumpster near Salzburg, and on December 1, 1938, Rudolf Hess broke ground at Eger for a projected "transit autobahn" from Breslau to Vienna via Brünn (Brno).[35] However, the emphasis on east-west connections and on attracting foreign tourists and promoting automobile touring meant that the completed sections did not constitute a useful network for freight transportation until 1937.[34] In 1938, construction priorities shifted with the preparation for war. Todt was given responsibility for building the Westwall, and in 1939 only 237 km (147 mi) were added to the Reichsautobahn.[36] In addition, Hitler ordered important sections of the autobahns to be widened, from 24 m (79 ft) to 26.5 m (87 ft) and ultimately to 28.5 m (94 ft), which further diverted resources from building new sections.[37]
Working conditions were hard and the pay very low, because it was based on the lowest local wage and unlike unemployment payments did not include an allowance for living expenses. There was also no payment until winter 1938 for bad weather days when work could not take place. Workers were initially housed in barracks, barns, industrial buildings, and tents, and complained about the work, the conditions, and the pay. On October 18, 1934, the workers on the Hamburg-Bremen segment of the autobahn at Gyhum went on strike; the 141 who could not be talked into resuming work were transported to Berlin for interrogation by the Gestapo.[38] To avoid a recurrence of such problems, a policy was put in place of investigating men for political reliability before they were hired for work on the autobahn, access to the workers' camps was restricted, a surveillance network was instituted in which the Gestapo participated increasingly, and the few SA members among the workers were organized into Baustürme ("construction storms") that provided both example and intimidation at work sites. There were nonetheless several further strikes in 1935, and increasing numbers of fires were ascribed to sabotage by disgruntled workers.[39][40] Todt attempted to make worker housing into "worthy lodgings", and had camps specially built, beginning with a model camp at Werbellin on the Berlin-Stettin autobahn that was opened in December 1934.[41] Kraft durch Freude entertainment, books, and propaganda movies were also provided from that point on.[42] One worker wrote in 1975 of the camp where he had lived in 1937 that he would still describe the living conditions as "absolutely model".[43] However, conditions remained very poor. Work sites were often remote, as far as two hours' march from the camp, and had no access to food or water.[44] The pressure on the workers was considerable, especially after Hitler publicly alluded in 1937 to the objective of completing 1,000 km (620 mi) a year.[45][46] After mid-1936, workdays lasting 11 to 12 hours were the norm.[47] There was a high incidence of back injuries to men who were unaccustomed to physical work after long unemployment and in many cases undernourished.[48] Numerous accidents occurred, some fatal, due to the rapid pace of work, exhaustion, and unfamiliarity with heavy machinery; after the first five years, one worker died per 6 km (3.7 mi) completed.[49]
As the economy improved and the rearmament effort accelerated, it became impossible to find enough workers; they were for a while brought in from the big cities where unemployment remained highest, primarily Hamburg and Berlin, but in 1937 full employment was achieved, and armaments factories offered far superior pay and working conditions. The policy of minimizing the use of machinery was reversed and pay was increased, those unemployed who refused assignment to the autobahn were punished by suspension of benefits for up to 12 weeks, and after the annexation of Austria and of the Sudetenland, workers from there were almost immediately put to work on the autobahn, but increasingly the project used forced labor of various kinds. Several times, up to 1,400 youths fulfilling their obligation to work through the Reichsarbeitdienst were used as autobahn workers, mostly doing simple hard labor, in November 1937, women and school-age children were put to work at a site in Silesia, and soon after, 17 and 18-year-olds in Hanover.[50] Eventually, the inmates of re-education camps—the "work-shy", Social Democrats and Communists—constituted the majority of Reichsautobahn workers, and during the war increasing numbers of prisoners of war were used.[45] The war also removed the main obstacle to using prison inmates and Jews from the concentration camps, that foreign visitors would see the necessary armed guards and form a bad impression; previously they had been used only at remote locations such as quarries. In October 1939 an SS re-education camp was built at Hinzert that housed recalcitrant workers on the autobahn as well as the Westwall; in all, 50 forced labor camps were established for Reichsautobahn workers, and transferred to regular SS use when construction stopped.[51] In fall 1940, an internal report counted approximately 62,600 workers engaged on the autobahn, of whom approximately 21,900 were contract workers, 300 women, 28,600 prisoners including prisoners of war, 1,100 Poles, 5,700 Czechs, and 4,700 other foreigners.[52]
The Reichsautobahn network as it was ultimately conceived was to extend into most of the planned Lebensraum in the conquered territories;[53] along with a trio of eastward and southward extensions of the extreme broad-gauge Breitspurbahn rail system, the highways were intended to provide the main connections for the "settlement strings" of German immigrant Wehrbauer communities to be located in conquered Soviet territory.[54] The addition of Austria to the Reich in 1938 resulted in an extension of the previously Vienna-centered road system and major planning and construction efforts in the Alpine regions. The West Autobahn between Vienna and Salzburg was started within weeks with much publicity, but only a few kilometers around Salzburg were finished by 1942.[6]
Reichsautobahn work site near Berlin, April 1936
A workers' barrack
Bunk room in workers' camp, 1934
World War II [ edit ]
German Ju 88 warplanes concealed along the autobahn in 1945
After the war began in September 1939, a further 560 km (350 mi) of autobahn were completed, bringing the total to 3,870 km (2,400 mi), before work ceased almost entirely in late 1941 with the worsening of the war situation in Russia.[36][55] This included the connection of the Avus to the ring road around Berlin, celebrated on September 23, 1940, the seventh anniversary of Hitler's opening of the project. Work on approximately 3,000 km (1,900 mi) had begun but remained unfinished; of this, work had stopped on approximately 1,000 km (620 mi) in October 1940.[36] Completion of the 4,000th kilometer was foreseen and a medallion designed to celebrate it, but that milestone was never reached.[57] The engineers were put to work restoring bridges in the occupied territories[36] and later, converting rail tracks in the USSR to standard gauge. In 1942 Albert Speer, who succeeded Todt after his death, folded the Reichsautobahn completely into the war-oriented Organisation Todt.[58]
A speed limit of 100 km/h (62 mph) had been imposed in May 1939 to save fuel;[59] during the war this was lowered to 80 km/h (50 mph), and private cars were allowed on the autobahns only in exceptional circumstances. (By 1943, traffic was so low that bicycles were permitted.[6]) Other than official traffic, which picked up toward the end of the war, the autobahns were used for some deliveries of tank parts and finished U-boats and motor-boats, and as runways for fighter planes, including in one case for final assembly and test flights of Messerschmitt Me 262s after the factories in Augsburg and Regensburg were bombed.[60] As the war progressed, vehicles were at risk of strafing by Allied aircraft.[61] However, most damage to the autobahns was caused late in the war by the retreating Wehrmacht, which blew up numerous bridges in an effort to slow the Allied advance;[36] on March 19, 1945, Hitler ordered the destruction in retreat of "all military, transportation, news, industrial, and provisions facilities".[6][62]
After the war, the Reichsautobahns were declared national property of the various post-war states (for example Bundesvermögen, federal property, under Article 90 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949) and became the foundation of the modern autobahn networks in Germany and Austria. Several stretches were no longer within the redrawn German borders, notably the unfinished highway between Berlin and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), now known unofficially as the Berlinka. Others were no longer useful because of the altered borders, including the occupation zone boundary that became the inner German border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. A stretch of highway near Kaiserslautern became the access road to the U.S. Ramstein Air Base.[63] Most of the destroyed bridges were either reconstructed or rebuilt in a different style, although the Saale River Bridge at Rudolphstein, on the inner German border, was not replaced until the 1960s.[64] The debris of the destroyed bridges still lies below the rebuilt series of viaducts at the Drackensteiner Hang in the Swabian Alps.[65] Elsewhere, unfinished autobahn construction was left abandoned; the Wommen Viaduct, also on the inner German border, was completed in 1993, after German reunification.[66][67]
Technical specifications and financing [ edit ]
The specifications for the autobahns were based on those developed by HAFRABA. They were |
, tuktuks and people lined 3 rows deep waiting for the bus to arrive competed for space. There were no signs. A concrete wall covered in barbed wire ran along the exterior. It was just another alleyway in a city of 23 million people.
I didn’t really know very much about the place when I first arrived. The rumor was that some local magicians lived there. Maybe some musicians too. Admittedly, I had done very little research. I never expected to find an entire slum full of performing artists. Everyone I met there was a juggler or a magician or a dancer or puppeteer. Their fathers and grandfathers had taught them and their kids were learning from them. There isn’t a single person in the place that can not play a drum.
When I first arrived, my taxi was surrounded by swarthy men with moustaches and silk shirts aggressively trying to sell me an imported dalmatian that looked malnutritioned. My driver said something in Hindi. The only thing I understood was his disapproving look and the word “thief.” It was a fairly intimidating introduction.
That first day I met Krishan the Juggler. He was holding his baby and smoking hash with his friends on the main thoroughfare. I have no idea why I agreed to visit his house and have chai tea with him. He was probably the 20th person that offered. But his demeanor was innocent and generous so I went with it. I followed him through a maze into the heart of the slum. The extremely narrow alleyways had an open sewer running through the middle which required us to hop from side to side to navigate. His home was just a room. His wife immediately went outside to make the tea while his daughter dragged a charpoy (rope and wood bed frame) into the room so we’d have something to sit on.
Krishan is a juggler. And a sword swallower. 50 years earlier, his father moved from the Rajasthani Desert to Delhi in order to make a living as a performing artist. He had also been a juggler and a sword swallower. As was his father before him. The techniques (one way to put it) of sword swallowing had been handed down through the generations. When Krishan was 7, his father and brother held him down and forced a plastic sword down his throat. He spent the next three days in the hospital. He’s been a sword swallower ever since.
There is a sense of tradition in India that no westerner could possibly understand. You are juggler, because your father was a juggler and his father before him and so on. It is dharma. Breaking the cycle is extremely rare. On one trip, I passed a house where a father and son were practicing simple illusions. The father bent a trick spoon. Then the son did the same. They made flowers appear out of their shirt sleeves. They worked on pulling a white pigeon out of a hat.
The son was already a working magician, taking jobs at parties and cultural events but he sat there nonetheless as his father watched and commented on his technique. The tricks were very basic but the son just kept repeating them as his father watched. I sat with them for an hour and just watched. If I hadn’t been there, the white foreigner with a large camera, no one would have even noticed. It was just another quiet moment in Kathputli.
The reasons I kept going back to the colony were obvious. First, it was as colorful a place as any I had seen. Most of the families had originated in Rajasthan and they had managed to bring the hyper colors of that area with them. Blue houses and red shops and yellow saris were a fantastic contrast to Delhi’s smog brown template. Second, it was as filthy a place I had ever seen. After a few years in India I had seen some unhygienic places but Kathputli was nasty. Goat feces and garbage and nasty tobacco juice was everywhere and most people barely noticed as they strolled through it barefoot. Herds of street children ran through the crowds with snot and dirt caked on their faces. It made for an extremely visceral experience. Third, everyone had flair. Everyone was a performer. And they performed all the time. Men had long shiny hair and big moustaches. Gold chains and big hoops earrings dangled and swung when they danced and sang into my camera. Fourth and finally, there was always someone singing, dancing or banging a drum. If you closed your eyes and drowned out the white noise, a song would always emerge. Women danced behind closed doors. Men would stroll by in costume with a tabla hanging over their shoulder. Children would reenact Bollywood numbers without any prompting whatsoever. Simply put, Kathputli was never dull.
Children run, shouting and screaming down the main street in the Kathputli Colony. Located in northwest Delhi, Kathputli is inhabited by approximately 2,000 performing artists, practicing traditional art forms such as marionette puppetry, juggling, magic, acrobatics, dance and music. Many have travelled all over the world showcasing their abilities, but they still choose to remain living in this slum, which is one of the most impoverished in the city.
Rahul, the Fire Eater, practices his art in the Kathputli Colony.
A drummer in the Kathputli Colony plays a traditional Punjabi Bhangra song.
Outside the Kathputli Colony, underneath the New Delhi Metro, a young musician boards a local bus en route to a paid performance.
A young girl walks through the narrow alleyways of the Kathputli Colony.
A girl holds a white pigeon in the Kathputli Colony.
Ravi Bhatt is a Horse-Dancer in the Kathputli Colony.
Many of the women in the Kathputli Colony perform as dancers, singers and acrobats.
A woman in the Kathputli Colony practices the traditional Rajasthani dance of Bhawai which can include dancing on broken pieces of glass while balancing five to seven pots on your head.
A young woman in the Kathputli Colony.
The Tall-Man of the Kathputli Colony.
Krishan the Juggler shows his sword swallowing trick in the Kathputli Colony. He says that he first learned the trick when he was nine years old from his father, also a performer. According to Krishan, his brother held him down while his father forced the sword down his throat. Krishan then spent the next three days in hospital.
Nine year old Tarveena the Magician wears her performance dress on a rooftop overlooking the Kathputli Colony.
I met and worked with a lot of people in Kathputli but I never did see the Indian Rope Trick. One guy said he could perform it but when he said it he was drinking whiskey and he said it would cost me about $10,000 to see it. Every other time I asked people looked at me like I had said something in Arabic. I guess that was a myth. But the City of Illusions is not.
Bio:
Zackary Canepari (b.1979, USA) is an independent photographer and filmmaker specializing in documentary and editorial projects. His career began in 2003 shooting portraiture for American culture magazines such as XLR8R, RIDES and the SF Guardian. Before that he studied photography in Paris at the SPEOS Photographic Institute and later entered the Masters Program at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. From 2007-2009 he lived in New Delhi, India working as a photojournalist in the region. As a photographer, his work has taken him to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mexico, China, Eastern Europe, and Nigeria for a number of clients including The New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, TIME Magazine and The Chicago Tribune. In 2009, Zack and filmmaker Drea Cooper created California is a place, a series of short documentaries about California. The series was featured as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontiers section and was nominated for the IDFA DocLab award for Digital Storytelling. As a director, his clients include K-Swiss, RayBans, Chevy, Adidas, Toyota and NPR. He is currently based in Los Angeles.
http://www.canepariphoto.comFrench police officers patrol on the Champs Elysees in Paris Sunday. | AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu Paris attacks shows danger of cell phone encryption, says Bratton
The attackers who killed more than 100 people in coordinated attacks Friday in Paris were equipped with assault rifles, suicide belts, and, of particular concern to New York City’s top police official, phones that may have prevented surveillance from law enforcement officials.
“ISIS, taking advantage of the technology that the head of the FBI has been complaining about, I’ve been complaining about, going dark, the ability to go dark, I think you’re going to see that playing a significant factor in this event,” New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said in an interview Sunday on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos. Bratton — who has complained about cell phone makers selling devices with no ability to break their encryption — said he is “very interested to see what types of phones they were equipped with, what types of apps they had on those phones. Were they, in fact, even in communication with each other at all?”
Story Continued Below
In another interview on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday, Bratton went further, saying the deadly events in Paris show why the issue of cell phone encryption needed to be debated immediately.
Bratton complained about “These apps, these devices that now allow these terrorists to operate without fear of penetration by intelligence services. This is the first example of this.”
He added, “We, in many respects, have gone blind as a result of the commercialization and the selling of these devices that cannot be accessed either by the manufacturer or, more importantly, by us in law enforcement, even equipped with search warrants and judicial authority. This is something that is going to need to be debated very quickly because we cannot continue operating where we are blind.”
The need to gather intelligence was underscored by Bratton’s predecessor, Ray Kelly, who spoke to ABC on Saturday. Since there are so many potential targets where terrorists may strike, law enforcement needs to be able to penetrate the chatter before it turns into action, he said.
“Soft targets, of course, are everywhere,” Kelly said. “That’s why intelligence is key. You need some information we can hang our hat on … some indication as to who’s talking about it, who’s thinking about it.” Kelly, who built the NYPD’s counterterrorism operation from scratch shortly after the terrorist attacks in 2001, said, “You have to get them before they’re in the position to act.”
Last year, Bratton complained about encryption technology on iPhones and other devices. “It does a terrible disservice to the public, ultimately, and to law enforcement, initially,” and “it really does impede our investigation of crimes,” he said then.
Law enforcement officials said there is no known, credible threat to New York City following the attacks in Paris. But the attacks there were “game-changing,” Bratton told CBS on Sunday, since they showed ISIS — who claimed credit for the attack — using technology, suicide attackers and a sophisticated ability to plan and execute a deadly assault.
Bratton said the NYPD has 400 officers prepared to respond to the kind of attack seen in Paris — multiple gunmen, heavily armed, trained and coordinated assailants who are willing to kill themselves and as many civilians as possible. In addition to preparing for an ISIS-style attack on the streets, Bratton said the terrorist organization needs to be confronted online.
“What we are also doing, as part of our efforts, is trying to deal with the social media skills of … ISIS,” Bratton said on NBC. ISIS “mastered social media,” he said, echoing comments made earlier by NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller.
Like 9/11, Bratton said, the attacks in Paris had a "game-changing aspect."Last year, a half billion eggs were recalled. The industry mantra remained: stop whining, completely cooked is completely safe. Notice, though, that they never tell you what “completely cooked” means. Research funded by the egg industry itself found that Salmonella can survive scrambled, over-easy, and sunny-side-up cooking methods. Sunny side-up was the worst. The paper ends bluntly: “The sunny-side-up method should be considered unsafe.” May be the best-kept secret within the egg industry. They know it’s unsafe, but are they out there warning customers? Of course not. And this wasn’t funded by some consumer group, some anti-egg group, but by the American Egg Board itself.
Earlier research shows Salmonella can survive in omelets and French toast as well. Even boiling eggs up to eight minutes straight may be insufficient to eradicate the threat. Bottom line? If there are high enough titers of Salmonella, no standard cooking method provides complete Salmonella destruction.
Fine, but what if you do boil all your eggs for ten minutes? Even if you incinerate them, buying eggs is not completely safe, and this is why. Before you reduce your eggs safely to ash, Salmonella can get on your fingers, your kitchen utensils, and sometimes stays there even after washing.
No one in their right mind would eat raw eggs these days, but you whip up a cake batter, and Salmonella can end up on your counter 40 centimeters away from the mixing bowl. And then it just sits there, and could still potentially infect someone touching that kitchen surface a day later. So the day after you bake a cake all the way through—heck, you could burn the cake, and still, someone in our family could end up in the hospital, grabbing an apple sitting on the counter.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Peter Mellor.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.TUALATIN -- Damian Lillard on Tuesday took a step of progress in his rehabilitation from left foot plantar fasciitis, participating in extended portions of the Trail Blazers' morning practice in Tualatin.
The All-Star point guard said his foot was pain-free after the workout, but stopped short of declaring himself ready to return when the team hosts the Denver Nuggets Wednesday night at the Moda Center.
"I want to make sure I'm 100 percent ready to go," Lillard said. "I don't want to be out there feeling restricted or uncomfortable. When I feel that I'm ready to go, I'll play."
Lillard said he went through an individual workout before Tuesday's practice, then jumped into various parts of practice, including full-court shooting drills, live action defensive exercises and "a couple possessions" of full-court scrimmages. Lillard and the Blazers' medical staff closely monitored his involvement during the practice, deciding what exercises he could participate in and how often he could do so.
Lillard, who has been dealing with discomfort in his left heel for roughly four weeks, aggravated the injury Dec. 20 during a game at Miami and has missed the last four games. He said he would evaluate his foot Wednesday morning when he awakes -- to see how it responds to Tuesday's workout -- then test it again during the Blazers' morning shootaround and pregame workout.
The team on Tuesday night upgraded his status against the Nuggets to questionable. But, considering coach Terry Stotts said Lillard would likely have been held out of a game if the team played Tuesday, it seems unlikely the Blazers' leading scorer will play. Either way, he shouldn't be sidelined too much longer.
"The pain is gone," Lillard said. "It's just a little bit stiff. I've been so busy trying to take care of it and do the right stuff. I want to do as much (live action practice) as I can and be comfortable with it before I say, 'All right, I'm going to go play in a game.' Then I can't get out there and be myself. When I get out there, I want to be able to do what I do. Until that point, I won't be out there."
Lillard played in the first 275 games of his NBA career, so sitting out four games has been an adjustment. But it hasn't been all bad. Lillard has used the time on the sidelines to scout his teammates from a different perspective and he says he's gained valuable insight, taking particular note of where some teammates like the ball in certain sets and -- conversely -- picking up tendencies about what defenses have done to frustrate teammates. Lillard, who has been engaged and hands on during his absence, has not been bashful about offering tips and critiquing teammates during games.
He's been so involved, Lillard has earned a new nickname.
"Coach Lillard -- that's what they call me now," he said, laughing.
And how would one describe Coach Lillard?
"Coach Lillard is competitive, he's aggressive, he's a guy who understands the game," CJ McCollum said. "I know it's tough for him, being out, not being physically able to play. I think he's handled it well. He's done a great job of being engaged, overly engaged in terms of breaking down the film. And when I come out the game, I'm like, 'What did you see Dame, what did you see?' I think he's helping me a lot."
Added Stotts: "A lot of players find it difficult to be a leader when they're in street clothes. It's just not the same. But I think Damian is really comfortable in helping the guys on the team even though he's not out there with them. That's a credit to him. I've been around a lot of very good players that led while they were suited up, but when they weren't, they took a step back."
But Lillard is much more of an asset in uniform and Stotts and the Blazers are eager for him to step back on the court. At the very least, his increased activity on Tuesday indicates he's inching closer to a return
"I'll see how it feels when I get up in the morning, see how it feels when I go through shootaround and my pregame workout," Lillard said. "After all that stuff, I'll have a better feel for it."
--Joe Freeman | jfreeman@oregonian.com | 503-294-5183 | @BlazerFreemanPosted 02 April 2015 - 07:58 AM
THIS IS A PS3 AND 360 INT EVENT
Description
Armored Core: Verdict Day contest where participants use the in-game emblem maker to create an emblem that depicts the parts they like to use in ACVD either in an abstract, stylistic, or realistic manner. After all entries have been collected, it will be up to community members to vote, and the winner will receive a fantastic prize!
Examples
Spoiler
Dates
Submission Deadline: April 18th 11:59 PM EDT
Voting Period: April 22nd - 29th 11:59 PM EDT
Winners Announced: May 1st
Submission Process
-If you don't already have one, create an account on the Armored Core Legacy forums
-Using Private Message, send FromCheng a picture of your emblem, your PSNID/Gamertag, and also what parts are in the emblem.
-Be sure to read all rules before submitting.
General Rules
-Only 1 entry per person
-You may only use the ACVD in-game emblem maker to create your emblem.[/size]
-Submit 1 picture of your emblem, your PSNID/Gamertag, and a list of parts in the emblem.
-Entrants name will be not be revealed until the contest is over.
-Any entries without clear indications of what parts are in it may be disqualified.
-No sexual imagery, racial slurs, or derogatory terms allowed in your emblem.
-Your emblem MUST include frame or weapons parts from ACVD in it, as shown in the examples. Beyond that, you are free to add anything else unless noted otherwise.
EXAMPLE: If your emblem has the HF-227 KE head, be sure to explicitly state that. If we cannot definitively identify the part and you provide no list, we will not accept your emblem.
-There is no limit as to the number of parts you are allowed to feature in your emblem, although 1 or 2 is recommended to avoid cluttering it up.
-Any entries which do not meet the above mentioned guidelines will be disqualified and not included during voting.
-Any entries with duplicate emblems (aka 2 people sending in the same thing) will be automatically disqualified
-No votes or entries will be accepted after the stated due date.
-Voting rules will be announced after all entries have been collected.
Prize
The emblem with the highest number of votes will receive this!
SpoilerShare. Rumors suggest the franchise is headed to The Commonwealth. Rumors suggest the franchise is headed to The Commonwealth.
Rumors suggest that Bethesda’s next Fallout game will take place in Boston. According to a thread posted by an anonymous Reddit user, scouting is currently underway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The rumors are true, Fallout 4 will take place in Boston,” the user writes. “In case you haven't heard, Bethesda has recently been scoping out and researching Boston. They also have a strong connection to MIT.” The user notes that he “may or may not be an MIT employee” but “that's really all I can say for fear of losing my job.”
The rumor makes sense considering the lore behind The Commonwealth, the Fallout universe’s version of Massachusetts that’s been referenced in prior games. In Fallout 3 side quest The Replicated Man, players encounter a scientist named Dr. Zimmer who comes from The Commonwealth, a “war-ravaged quagmire of violence and despair” where he notes he and his colleagues created androids that have escaped and are running wild. Zimmer also references The Institute, which is presumably a future version of MIT.
As noted by our friends over at Gamespy, The Commonwealth also contains the Railroad, which runs in direct opposition to the Institute and aims to rescue the androids that have been created. A branch of the Commonwealth Police known as the Synth Retention Bureau is in charge of capturing androids that have escaped from the Institute.
Bethesda has declined to comment on the rumor of a Boston setting for now, but considering the impressive amount of mythology already revolving around The Commonwealth, it certainly seems like a plausible theory.
Bethesda’s Fallout 3 was released in 2008 and took place in a war-ravaged version of Washington DC, with expansions adding Pittsburgh and Maryland. Follow-up Fallout: New Vegas was developed by Obsidian in 2010 and was set in a future version of Nevada.
Exit Theatre Mode
Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.[Note: This article appears in the new issue of Game Informer. Molasses Flood's Kickstarter page is here.]
[Photography: Dan Perez de la Garza, all photos subject to copyright]
In the Boston suburb of Cambridge, six people sit in a cramped room in the basement of a nondescript office building, working on a dream. In many ways, they are no different than hundreds of small indie developers; putting in long hours, pinching pennies, and subsisting on takeout pizza and ramen noodles. Unlike most of those small teams, the Molasses Flood (as they’ve named themselves) is made up of people who have worked on some of the most critically acclaimed games in history, including BioShock, Guitar Hero, Halo 2, and Rock Band.
Frustrated with the constraints of large-scale console development and worried by increasing instability in the industry, the team united around an ethos of creativity, collaboration, and friendship. Instead of pursuing lucrative jobs at major game studios, Molasses Flood – like so many former triple-A developers – is forging its own way with the promise of independence, ownership of its own creations, and the chance to build a company from the ground up. This treacherous path is filled with both possibility and uncertainty. This is their story.
Before The Flood
As modern game development becomes increasingly complex and expensive, the old studio model is beginning to break. By the time a major triple-A game is released, the development team has often swelled to several hundred highly paid professionals. This immense overhead is proving hard to maintain, especially as the studio regroups to another cycle of prototyping and pre-production for a new project, where smaller, more agile groups are needed instead of the massive production staff. The result of this is a new reality in which a job well done is rewarded by a round of layoffs. We’ve seen this story repeated dozens of times in the last few years with studios like Sucker Punch, Sony Santa Monica, and Eidos Montreal. Molasses Flood’s tale begins on February 18, the day when BioShock creator Ken Levine announced he was shuttering Irrational Games. Around the video game industry, this news was met with a mix of shock and disbelief. It seems unthinkable that a studio at the peak of its creative powers would be shut down so quickly. BioShock Infinite had earned rave reviews, a 94 Metacritic rating, and won over 42 game of the year awards. The game debuted at the top of the monthly NPD sales charts, and has gone on to sell over six million copies. If Irrational wasn’t safe from layoffs, what studio was?
Forrest Dowling, who served as lead level designer on BioShock Infinite, recalls feeling unsure about the future in the weeks leading up to the closure. “I knew there had been questions about the viability of the type of projects that Irrational had done up to that point,” Dowling says. “Games are a super tough market, and making a big, expensive single-player narrative game is a difficult and risky proposition. There was a sense that [Irrational] was going to want to try something different. It ended up taking the form of something very small that didn’t need that team size.”
By coincidence, the news came down on a day when Dowling had planned to reconnect with a former colleague, Scott “Sinc” Sinclair, Irrational’s former art director who had left prior to the layoffs. “I wanted to get back to my own art,” Sinclair says. “Before games, I’d been doing art prints and album covers for bands. My hope was that I still had a foot in that door.”
Dowling had contacted Sinclair through his art website, and purchased a couple of prints from his online store. “There was a form where you put in your shipping information. My shipping information was, ‘Let’s get lunch and catch up,’” Dowling recalls.
This casual lunch between old friends became more momentous than either could have anticipated. That morning, Dowling received word there would be an all-company meeting at Irrational. The message was clear: Nearly all of the staff was being let go. “We had the meeting and got our paperwork, and I thought, ‘Well, I guess I don’t have to go back after lunch,’” Dowling says.
Naturally, the conversation over lunch turned to the future, with Dowling and Sinclair talking about the challenges and possibilities of the changing industry. As they both bounced ideas off each other, the pair left the restaurant with vows to keep in touch, but no concrete plans.
Despite the fact that Irrational had held a job fair, with companies like Riot Games and 343 Industries flying representatives down to court the studio’s former talent, the prospect of starting an independent game studio was in the forefront of Dowling’s mind. Soon, he decided. He was going indie and wanted Sinclair, one of the most respected leaders on the BioShock Infinite team, to come with him.
“I thought we could get a team of people willing to take a risk with us,” Dowling says. “All of us that were let go were given a severance, so that would give us some time to help get our feet underneath us. It snowballed from there.”
For his part, Sinclair was eager for a new opportunity in games, and felt Boston was a perfect place to start.
“I wanted to get back to a place where it’s a small team and I actually have to make the art, not just manage the art team,” Sinclair says. “At the time it happened, it wasn’t just Irrational; it was Turbine and Harmonix. I went to a game industry drink night, a layoff drink night, and it was this sea of programmers, artists, and designers – all laid off, all around the same time. You can see, even that night, groups of people splitting off and saying, ‘What if we did something?’”
Dowling and Sinclair began to piece together a team, which grew organically based on the pair’s long list of contacts and former colleagues in the Boston game community. Two members of the team that would become Molasses Flood had worked closely with Dowling and Sinclair on BioShock Infinite, animator Gwen Frey and artist Chad LaClair. Both welcomed the chance to work with their former comrades. Frey had been planning to go independent for years, quietly squirreling away savings. LaClair took a little more convincing, and even interviewed at other more established studios. However, he kept coming back to the idea of working with Dowling and Sinclair again.
“Scott called me up and asked me if I was interested,” LaClair says. “All the other interviews I had were colored by that. I had amazing studios I could have gone to, but I would have been missing out on this opportunity to work with guys that I really respect.”
Dowling rounded out the team by recruiting two expert programmers with decidedly different personalities. Bryn Bennett, who had worked with Sinclair in the early days of Irrational, had spent the last few years working at Harmonix in between tours with his hard rock band Bang Camaro.
Damian Isla, who is more buttoned-down, was one of the chief engineers on Halo 2 and 3, and he also helped Irrational toward the end of BioShock Infinite. Isla had already made the plunge into indie development, forming Moonshot Games in 2009, which had recently released the noir-themed iPad game Third Eye Crime. “The day that I heard Irrational went down, I got on the phone with one of my friends there and said, ‘I know some startups are going to come out of this so let me know,’” Isla says. “A couple days later, Forrest called and said, ‘I heard you are interested.’ I was opportunistic. It was like your crush just broke up with her boyfriend.”
For all involved, this was a rare chance to have the artistic freedom of an indie studio with the experience of a veteran team. More importantly, starting with Dowling and Sinclair, the group had the inherent trust that comes from having been through “crunch time” on major projects together – the camaraderie of the foxhole. Dowling and Sinclair were voted president and creative director by the group, but each member of Molasses Flood is an equal partner. Any future profits will be equally split six ways.
“There’s not many times when you get to jump to a company with all really good people,” Bennett says. “It seemed like an opportunity that I didn’t want to let pass by.
What’s In A Name? The Molasses Flood is an odd name for a game studio, but the true story behind it is stranger still. The Great Molasses Flood (also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster) occurred in 1919 when a molasses storage tank exploded in the North End neighborhood of Boston. Molasses flooded the streets at a terrifying rate; reports say the flood advanced at speeds up to 35 miles an hour. Over 21 people were killed and 150 were injured in the accident. Cleanup of the incident took weeks. “We were looking for something local,” says creative director Scott Sinclair. “We wanted a name that was memorable and wasn’t a tech-company name. We wanted something that spoke to where we’re located in Boston.” “We want to do something that’s fun and light but also dark,” says Molasses Flood president Forrest Dowling. “The Molasses Flood is very much like that. It’s weird that this molasses covered the northside, it’s weird and funny. But people died and it actually led to a lot of new regulations for industry. That’s the dark side. That speaks to the creative decisions I want to make, that contrast.”
The New Frontier
The story of the Molasses Flood is one of dozens of similar tales in the game industry in recent years. With each passing month, more artists, programmers, and designers are leaving the triple-A games space for a more creative and uncertain future in the independent development. Increasingly frustrated by the inertia inherent in teams of hundreds of people (Dowling described making large-scale changes in a triple-A game as “trying to turn a battleship”) and eager to make games of a smaller, more personal scale, high-profile developers like ex-People Can Fly head Adrian Chmielarz (now working on The Vanishing of Ethan Carter) to Capcom’s legendary Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune (Mighty No. 9) have struck out on their own.
This movement has been made possible by an explosion of alternative avenues of game distribution. Services like Steam, as well as new home consoles that have viable self-publishing programs, have created an environment where games like Limbo, DayZ, and Minecraft can reach large audiences while remaining independent. You no longer need the endorsement of a major publisher like EA or Activision to reach the audience.
“It seemed approachable now a way it didn’t a few years ago,” Dowling says. “I feel like I can take a shot now. Four years ago, it would have seemed like a much crazier risk. I have a huge respect for the indies that forged this path, the first people who were getting stuff out on Xbox Live. [Jonathan Blow] or Supergiant – they’ve done a great service for people like myself. I can see a way to form my own company and make my own games. There’s a path to customers without the backing of major publisher.”
Like many experienced developers, Molasses Flood is attempting one of the most potentially lucrative – and riskiest – new forms of funding: Kickstarter. Since Tim Schafer’s Double Fine raised over $3.5 million in 2012 for an adventure game project that would become the still-unfinished Broken Age, scores of aspiring game studios have used the crowdfunding service to go directly to the fans.
If successful, Kickstarter is an ideal situation for a developer. The spoils include funding for a project, a good bit of pre-release publicity, and total creative freedom.
“Kickstarter removes all conflicts of interests and lets us work directly for the fans,” Frey says. “We get to make the game we want to make from the fans. All money comes with strings. If we accepted money from the publisher, they would have a say in when it ships, what systems it comes out on. In some cases, they would own the IP and be able to make sequels without us. Some people thrive on that pressure of ‘Ship on this date or we will cut your funding.’ We have an experienced team and don’t need that pressure; we put pressure on ourselves. Everybody here has shipped games.”
However, with any potential Kickstarter money still months away, the team had to make both personal and professional sacrifices to stay afloat financially.
“For me, it was all savings,” Sinclair says. “For these guys, it was severance. Our [Kickstarter] date has to do with our internal funding flatlining. It’s been good pressure, but we’ve done a lot fast to try to stay ahead of that. And we are in Boston, a city where overhead is high. We were lucky to find this place. Collaborating face to face was something that we deemed important... I’m used to ramen noodles anyway.”
Other members of the team have all had to make adjustments to keep the small company afloat. Frey relocated from downtown Boston to a small studio apartment in the suburbs. She also credits “Obamacare” for giving her affordable health care after losing the coverage she had at Irrational. Most of the team is quickly burning through either severance or savings. When asked about the financial pressure inherent in going indie, Chad LaClair, whose wife is currently unemployed, admits that he’s “starting to feel it.”
Despite these hard realities, the atmosphere in the office is far from tense. If anything, they seem to share an infectious sense of excitement about their new undertaking, an enigmatic, charming take on the survival genre called The Flame in the Flood.
Kickstarter Winners & Losers
Kickstarter is a powerful funding tool, but often unpredictable. For every breakout success, there seems to be a “sure thing” game project that doesn’t reach its funding goal. Here are some of the most notable video game Kickstarter successes and failures. WINNERS: STAR CITIZEN – No bigger Kickstarter success story exists than Chris Robert’s epic online space sim Star Citizen. Its original Kickstarter campaign blew through its $500,000 goal, earning over $2.1 million. However, the game kept taking donations through its own website and other avenues, and is currently closing in on a mind-boggling $54 million raised through crowdfunding. LOSERS: WILDMAN – Gas Powered Games had a strong track record in the industry, with games like Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander under its belt. After Microsoft shut down the studio’s Age of Empires Online, the company conducted layoffs and tried to save itself with a Kickstarter for Wildman, a caveman-themed action/RPG in the Diablo vein. Despite its track record, it did not make its $1.1 million goal. BROKEN AGE – This Kickstarter is effectively the “shot heard ‘round the world” of video game crowdfunding. As the first high-profile video game crowdfunding effort, Tim Schafer’s large cult following and the underserved adventure game audience let Double Fine Adventure, which was later renamed Broken Age, rake in $3.3 million on a $400,000 goal. It also showed the game development community that crowdfunding was a viable way to get a game off the ground. Now, if they’d only finish the damn thing. THE ADVENTURES OF DASH – This project was the brainchild of Robert Bowling, one of the public facing figures at Infinity Ward during the heyday of Call of Duty. Bowling was well known in the game community, but his 2D action/platformer The Adventures of Dash failed to strike a chord, earning a paltry $33,121 of its $400,000 goal. TORMENT: TIDES OF NUMENERA – InXile Entertainment struck Kickstarter gold with this ambitious (and still unreleased) RPG based on the Torment table-top universe. PC-oriented, hardcore RPGs have proven to be one of the most successful genres on Kickstarter, and Torment racked up an impressive $4.2 million from its Kickstarter campaign. MUTANT FOOTBALL LEAGUE |
comb through these fields."They've cordoned off some of the areas a little more effectively and recovered some of more of the body parts in some of the more difficult areas, but in terms of an international operation here, it's wholly inadequate."It really does look, I'm afraid to say, as though there has been some sort of looting here because virtually every bag we've seen has been opened."It looks like it's been rummaged through, and if that's true that's a very distressing element to this whole disaster."
A Sky News spokesperson has since issued an apology.
"Today whilst presenting from the site of the MH17 air crash Colin Brazier reflected on the human tragedy of the event and showed audiences the content of one of the victims' bags," the spokesperson said.
"Colin immediately recognised that this was inappropriate and said so on air. Both Colin and Sky News apologise profusely for any offence caused."
The incident came as Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop called for respect for the bodies of the 298 who perished in the disaster, amid reports the crash site was being trampled and interfered with while investigators' access to the site was restricted by conflict.
"It is an utter outrage that that site has been contaminated and that evidence has been removed," she said.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described the site as "chaotic", expressing concern about how the management of the crash site may impact the integrity of investigations into the cause of the crash.
"The last footage that I've seen, which I presume is the most up-to-date footage that's available, the site is being treated more like a garden clean-up than a forensic investigation and this is completely unacceptable," he said.
Journalist David Ferris has described "hellish scenes" at the MH17 crash site after visiting on Saturday morning (local time).
"It's still very grim... [There are] a lot of personal effects scattered about," he said.
"There is a large area of charred aeroplane parts and charred earth... [and] another area, which is a hellish scene – just body parts and mangled corpses and cadavers twisted in unnatural ways."
AFP/ABC
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, air-and-space, accidents, disasters-and-accidents, world-politics, government-and-politics, ukraine, russian-federation, australia, united-kingdom
First postedWindows developers are confirming the results of a survey released yesterday that found fewer than 1 in 12 programmers currently writing applications targeting Windows Vista.
"None of our customers are saying, 'G******it, we need those WPF controls now!'" said Julian Bucknall, CTO for Windows programming tools maker Developer Express Inc., referring to one of Vista's most highly-touted features, its new graphical subsystem, Windows Presentation Foundation. Rather, "we find most are still sticking with ASP.Net and Windows Forms applications."
True to Microsoft's form, ASP.Net and Windows Forms and most of Windows XP's other legacy technologies still work fine in Vista. (The converse is also true: many Vista features can be installed as add-ons to XP.)
But as in every upgrade cycle, Microsoft runs the risk that developers may bypass the latest technologies -- in Vista's case, WPF, the XPS printing format that Microsoft is touting as a rival to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF); Windows Sidebar 'gadgets,' and others -- in favor of those further down the road, such as those expected in Vista's successor, Windows '7'.
"Microsoft tends to dump ten new technologies on us, but only 2 or 3 really stick," said Michael Krasowski, vice-president of PDSA Inc., a Microsoft-focused 20-developer firm in Tustin Calif., citing the Windows DNA Architecture as an example.
Microsoft Corp. undoubtedly wanted to avoid its current predicament. It has been publicly talking up features in Vista since 2003 -- half a decade.
But such "overmarketing," as Krasowski calls it, can rebound. Experienced developers have become jaded towards the third-party apps Microsoft trots out as exemplars of Redmond's latest technology -- "demoware," he calls them -- that sparkle with flashy animation and video.
"You can't write an enterprise app like a demo. It'd be all soft and weak under the hood," he said. "We'd never put all that stuff in because it couldn't support 100 concurrent users."
Some say it's premature to declare Vista a flop with developers. For one thing, despite the 140 million copies Microsoft claims to have shipped, the market hasn't reached a tipping point yet.
"I can???t see targeting something only to Vista when you have XP and Windows 2003 out there in huge numbers," said Dave Noderer, a Microsoft MVP who runs the Florida.Net User Group as well as his own software development firm, Computer Ways Inc. in Deerfield Beach, Fla.
Others point out the symbiotic relationship between most Windows developers and the large enterprises that hire and pay them. Enterprises are proving even slower than the rest of the market at moving off XP, say analysts such as Forrester Research Inc.
"Large enterprise don't transition overnight to the newest platforms," said Shannon Braun, a Microsoft MVP and Minneapolis-area-based programming consultant. "To me the adoption pace [of Vista by developers] seems pretty normal."
"Vista is too bleeding-edge -- not for us, but for our clients," Krasowski said. PDSA's clients include large, blue-chip customers such as Kaiser Permanente and Boeing Inc. "They're all leery of Vista."
And why shouldn't they be? According to data released this spring by migration software vendor AppDNA Ltd., about a fifth of enterprise applications running on XP break when moved straight to Vista, mostly due to pre-XP-era code still lingering in the app. That increases to nearly half for apps migrated from 32-bit XP straight to 64-bit Vista.
Another reason is that Microsoft, in an attempt to catch up to the Mac, emphasized consumer-y aesthetic features with Vista, with WPF, Aero and the DirectX 10 3-D graphics rendering engine all aimed at making Vista or its apps more pleasing to the eye.
More attractive apps are more user-friendly apps, says Microsoft, and that translates into increased user productivity. But that message remains a hard sell to enterprises, who demand their apps stay "lean and mean," said Krasowski, not get "confused and cluttered."
Others say learning how to take advantage of Vista's new visual features remains daunting. Improving data presentation is "a good thing to do, but there is a lot of hacking through the undergrowth first," Bucknall said. "I don't think a lot of developers know how to get to that stage."
Noderer is optimistic. While XP-era technologies such as Windows Forms "will be around for many years to come," he said, Vista-era ones such as WPF "will slowly rise as the way to do Windows applications."
But others think that the rise in popularity of server-delivered business apps -- coupled with Microsoft's recent moves to make its Internet Explorer 8 browser behave more like other Web browsers -- could make Vista's client-side graphics-enhancing features irrelevant.
"98% of the apps we write are for the Web," Krasowski said. "They're more flexible and easier to maintain. Many of our clients are migrating from apps written in VB6 or.Net."
Heather Havenstein contributed to this story.
This story, "Coders Tell Why They're Avoiding Vista" was originally published by Computerworld.Rogelio V. Solis, AP
BRANDON, Miss. — Mary Jane Kennedy considers herself a conservative Christian Republican, and she’s led Bible studies in her native Mississippi for decades. She’s also the mother of two gay sons and one of the faces in a new advertising campaign aimed at softening religious opposition in the Deep South to equal rights for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
The Washington-based Human Rights Campaign is taking on the region’s longstanding church-based opposition to homosexuality in a series of groundbreaking television commercials, direct-mail messages and phone-bank operations designed to promote equality and legal protections for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people in Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi.
TV commercials will begin airing Monday in Jackson, the state’s largest city and prime media market, with Kennedy featured as a mom who struggled to understand her own sons’ sexuality and believes God loves them, just like everyone else. The commercials also will be available online, as will banner ads on websites.
Other commercials may follow in Alabama and Arkansas depending on the reception and results of the Mississippi campaign. The Mississippi effort – which will cost $310,000 – is part of an $8.5 million, three-year effort launched six months ago in the three states.
Brad Clark, director of Project One America for Human Rights Campaign, said the commercials are the group’s most direct effort yet to confront religious attitudes involving sexual orientation and non-traditional gender identification.
Polls have shown that Mississippi is among the most religious states, with more than half of its 3 million residents belonging to Southern Baptist churches. At the same time, Mississippians are far less likely than the average American to say they know someone who is gay, according to Human Rights Campaign.
“It’s the first time we’ve led with this message, and it’s historic for the South,” said Clark.
The commercials will begin airing two days before a federal court hearing in Jackson on a Mississippi law that bans same-sex marriage. Opponents of the ban are seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the ban from being enforced while a lawsuit seeking to overturn it is pending. In November 2004, Mississippi voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Watch:
After a series of recent court decisions, gay couples have the right to marry in 30 states. However, earlier this month a panel of federal judges from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld anti-gay marriage laws in Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.
Kennedy, 61, was initially apprehensive about speaking out so publicly about such a private topic, but she said her faith led her to the belief that spreading kindness, love and caring was more important than her own fears.
Justin Kelly of Jackson says the spots could help build acceptance in his home state. The 25-year-old Iraq war veteran is openly gay and will be featured in his Army Reserve uniform in another TV spot during the campaign, called “All God’s Children.”
“The values that are already in place in Mississippi are what we’re looking for: To be friendly, to be open, to have conversations,” said Kelly.
Article continues below
The president of the conservative American Family Association, Tim Wildmon, said he doubts advertising will have much of an effect on the attitudes of Mississippi residents in the pews.
“If you’re trying to change peoples’ fundamental religious views that’s a pretty daunting task,” said Wildmon, whose Tupelo-based organization owns and operates 194 radio stations in 38 states, including 12 in Mississippi. “For those who take the Bible literally there are some pretty clear scriptural references … that show homosexuality is unnatural.”
The Human Rights Campaign has said it wants to change the “hearts and minds” of people through the campaign, but Wildmon is dubious.
“What’s wrong with the hearts and minds of Southerners?” he said.
© 2014, Associated Press, All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
This Story Filed UnderDavid Cameron likened Russia’s actions in Ukraine to those of Nazi Germany yesterday, as he prepared for a tense showdown with Vladimir Putin.
The Prime Minister will use talks with the Russian president in Australia today to warn him he faces more sanctions and isolation from the West unless he stops trying to destabilise Ukraine.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Australian prime minister Tony Abbott in Canberra yesterday, Mr Cameron drew a direct comparison between Russia’s actions and the Nazi aggression that sparked the Second World War.
Prime Minister David Cameron, left, accused Vladimir Putin of acting like Nazi Germany over its aggression in Ukraine in a joint press conference in Canberra with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, right
‘Russia’s action in Ukraine is unacceptable,’ he said. ‘We have to be clear what we are dealing with. It is a large state bullying a smaller state in Europe.
‘We have seen the consequences in the past and we should learn the lessons.’
Mr Cameron said there was no ‘military solution’ to the Ukraine conflict. But he said Western sanctions were beginning to bite on Russia’s crippled economy – and warned they would be stepped up unless Mr Putin backed down.
He added: ‘I would still hope that Russia will see sense and allow Ukraine to develop as a free country.
‘If they do not then the relationship that Britain and the EU have with Russia will be very different. Russia needs to know that this can’t be like what happened in the past with other frozen conflicts where the world moved on. I don’t think the world can move on from what’s happened in Ukraine.’
Mr Cameron, pictured, said he hoped that Russia was prepared to allow Ukraine develop as a 'free country'
Vladimir Putin, left, arriving at the G20 conference in Brisbane, where he is under intense diplomatic pressure
His comments echo those made by Prince Charles on his tour of Canada this year. Mr Cameron also mocked Mr Putin for sending warships to Australia where world leaders are at the G20 summit.
It has caused consternation in Australia, with the Navy sending three warships of its own to the region in response.US 'has no better friend' than Australia
Updated
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has praised Australia's efforts to maintain stability in the Asia-Pacific region as part of a forum in Melbourne.
Ms Clinton is speaking to a group of young Australians at a town-hall style event at Melbourne University, hosted by ABC1 Lateline's Leigh Sales and broadcast on the ABC.
She says she has been impressed with the way Australia has helped out its neighbours when problems have arisen.
"Australia has always understood and accepted this responsibility," she said.
"It has increased military cooperation with Malaysia and Singapore, provided crucial assistance in Timor Leste's transition to independence, and led stabilisation forces in the Solomon Islands."
Ms Clinton has also thanked Australia for its support in the aftermath of September 11 terrorist attacks.
She says the United States has no better friend than Australia.
"Americans will never forget that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Australia invoked our treaty alliance," she said.
"That meant a great deal to us. And we grieved with you, after terrorist murdered 88 Australians in Bali. So the United States has no better friend than Australia."
Ms Clinton says she is seeing signs of progress in Afghanistan and has reaffirmed plans to draw down US troops next year.
She says people on the ground are telling her that international forces are having an impact despite the death toll.
After making her opening remarks, the secretary of state faced questions from the audience, who were chosen by the US state department.
She also responded to questions posted on the ABC News Facebook page and on Twitter with the hashtag #hillaryoz.
Asked about gay marriage, Ms Clinton stopped short of endorsing it, but said she supports civil partnerships for gay and lesbian Americans.
She says the issue of same sex marriage is best left to individual states.
"I have not supported same sex marriage," she said.
"I have supported civil partnerships and contractual relationships, yet I am supportive of our states taking actions that they believe reflects the evolution of attitudes about this."
Tomorrow Ms Clinton will take part in the annual Australia-US ministerial talks, where the war in Afghanistan and the rise of China will be prominent topics.
Topics: foreign-affairs, federal-government, world-politics, melbourne-3000, australia, vic, united-states
First postedIntel’s drones will be taking to the skies to perform a five minute light show as part of the fifth act in the upcoming Singapore’s National Day Parade (NDP).
This will be the first time a drone light show will be performed during a NDP and with over 300 drones in the air simultaneously, this will make it the largest drone event in SE Asia.
The various shapes that the drones will display during the fifth act of NDP will include those such as: an outline of Singapore Island, A heart with a crescent and five stars, NDP 2017 logo, a hashtag, The Merlion, Children and an arrow.
Developed and manufactured by Intel, The Shooting Star drones were specifically designed for light show performances by manoeuvring into complex aerial formations consisting of hundreds of illuminated drones flying together.
How it works
The drones will perform the light show by hovering over the waters of Marina Bay instead of hovering over the public. Each drone comes equipped with built-in LED lighting capable of producing over four billion colour combinations. The Shooting star drones are capable of staying airborne for up to twenty minutes before their batteries are depleted.
All 300 drones are operated using a single computer, utilising customised software that lets the light show team create and edit the drone formations ahead of the show. Once the formation layout is designed, the software then automatically calculates the number of drones that will be required to complete the formation and how each drone would be positioned among other drones, as well as calculating the quickest route from ground to sky required for the formation.
To ensure the safety of audiences, Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) has set temporary restrictions on all aerial activities over the Marina Bay Floating Platform as well as its immediate surrounding areas.
Last year, Intel performed a light show using 500 Shooting Star drones flying in various formations. The performance also led to Intel setting a new world record for most UAVs airborne simultaneously.
Other events where Shooting Star drones were extensively used include Lady Gaga’s 51 Halftime Superbowl 51 show and Disney World.Orlando is one of the first Black Belts teaching Seminars over Europe since 2001, he opened his first school in Germany but for more than 5 years living in Austria where he is Leading the fusion of AkxeBJJ and “Roger Gracie Vienna” Located at Backyard Vienna. One of his latest achievement is the Gold Medal at the London Open 2014, where he won against the leader of Gracie Barra LA, World Champion and UFC Fighter Alberto Crane, but according to him the biggest victory is watching his students improve. After getting his black belt he had a big surgery on his back and he could barely walk for the next six months. The doctors told him to forget about tournaments but he decided to take a different route and took on a few tournamenst despite all the pains and difficulties with keeping the weight. And the reason? He felt that the students will be proud.
Orlando Machado Neto on the past, his experiences, Gi vs NoGi and his opinion on the direction sport bjj took.
ellenfelem.hu: – Hello Orlando! Thanks for sitting down with us. So, you started with bjj at age 4 at the Copacabana when times were very different. Can you tell us about how was it like?
Orlando Neto: – Yeah, my stepfather was the 6th student of the Carlson Gracie school and I was there regularly, watching the guys train. I grew up with them but despite the big rivalry between these schools my stepfather had friends both at Gracie Barra and at Carlson’s School. I was really lucky because I had the opportunity to know both sides and train at both which wasn’t really common. The Gracie Barra guys trained in one district and Carlson’s guys in another one. I had friends on both sides.
e: – Now that you look back how do you remember or see the Wallid Ismail conflict?
ON: – Ultimately I think it helped the sport to grow. I don’t think there really was hate. The hormones were involved for sure and the sport was growing rapidly. Also these guys were all really competitive.
e: – Probably you have a few wild and funny stories but can you tell us one?
ON: – Definitely. There are a lot of fun and crazy guys and they travel a lot so we are no short on stories. There was a fight once between Renzo Gracie and Eugenio Tadeu. I was very young and watching it close to the ring. My father was calling the fights, announced the names and such. Suddenly a huge fight broke out between the Luta Livre guys and the Jiu Jitsu guys. They’ve switched off the lights, chairs were flying. I was worried about my father as he was still talking into the microphone, trying to calm people and make them stop. I thought I had to rescue him otherwise someone will seriously hurt him and beat him up. I made it to the ring somehow, partially on all fours but when I got there I realized he left already. He was in the locker rooms somewhere and his voice was coming from the speakers. Now I had to make my way back! It’s funny now but back then actually I didn’t really enjoy it.
e: – You moved to the US for a year when you were 16. How do you remember those times?
ON: – I was an exchange student but unfortunately there was no bjj in the US at that time. I was already a blue belt and I couldn’t train so it was a bit frustrating. I tried wrestling but when a guy took me down I slapped a triangle on him and he almost passed out yet they still said I lost because my back hit the ground. I couldn’t understand this. After two days I stopped wrestling. Nowadays I really like it but back than I just didn’t get it. I switched to American Football and after a while I started to teach bjj to my teammates. It was my first time teaching. I never had such plans as I was just a blue belt but my friends were asking me. It was a good opportunity as I could then train a little bit at least.
e: – Was it a conscious decision that you’ve ended up in Europe? Almost everyone relocated and competes, lives, trains in the US.
ON: – I like the US but it’s really different to live here. There’s something here that I felt the very first time I came here. Just a few hours drive and people speak a different language, live in a completely different culture with different ways of thinking and different foods. I fell in love with Europe and especially with this part of it. In a few hours I can go to Croatia, Slovenia or up to Germany. I just find this amazing.
e: – Why is it that Jiu-Jitsu becomes a lifestlye, a way of living and thinking really fast in your opinion?
ON: – I think it’s a combination of many things. For me it’s part of brazilian culture. So it’s a cultural thing but also there’s respect that plays a big part and the way it promotes a healthy lifestyle. There’s jiu-jitsu and lots of other things around it like the Gracie Diet, the history around it and so on.
e: – We’ve asked Roger the same question but we’d like to hear your take as well on Gi vs NoGi. How do you see this topic?
ON: – I was very patient for a long time with people coming to my academy telling me they don’t want to train in the Gi. Many teachers had this problem a few years ago when they came here that people have seen MMA and came to train but didn’t understand the importance of it. Probably the Gracies had this less because of the name, their reputation. We had to explain to people a lot why they had to train in the Gi. All the champions, all the best fighters train with the Gi. I don’t try to convince people anymore. We have NoGi days at my school but those who want to participate have to take part in the Gi classes as well.
e: – There’s this new debate that sport bjj took a really different direction where they focus way more on sport-specific techniques, small advantages and such and left the self defense path and the effectiveness behind. How do you see this topic?
ON: – I think that both are valid and I love them. I enjoy the IBJJF tournaments but I also love when Metamoris is on. It’s all jiu-jitsu. There’s always something new, some new challenge and that makes jiu-jitsu amazing.
We wanted to hear Roger’s take as well so we asked the same question:
Roger Gracie: – There’s always something like this. For example many years ago it was the spider guard everyone said you cannot use in real life. In the sport bjj world they’re looking for ways to win the match and not do defend themselves. They’re focused on that and therefore it’s natural that techniques, things will emerge.
It’s the berimbolo now, it was the spider guard before. There’s always something that people will try to use while others won’t like it. It will always stay jiu jitsu however. No matter what techniques they’ll come up with as others will figure out a way to defend and counter it and a lot of times you have to get back to the basics.
And if you’re not good with that you won’t be successful.
e: – Do you guys prefer submission only tournaments?
RG: – I think it’s impossible to do big tournaments like that. You can watch 6-7 fights like Metamoris but as fights can be 20-30 minutes it’s hard to go beyond. Imagine you have a huge tournament and the first fight is 1 hour. You won’t be too excited by the end and after that. You can set time limits and use different restrictions but still these are sepcial cases. Look at the number of guys learning jiu jitsu. They all need to compete.
e: – An easy one for the last: what’s your favorite sub if any?
ON: – I like the Omoplata.
RG: – I don’t have a favorite submission. Every submission is exactly the same to me. Whichever you able to win a fight with that’s the best one. But I prefer chokes over locks. With a lock they can carry on fighting. Even if you break someone’s arm they’ll might continue. With a choke it’s not possible. They’ll pass out.Eugene School District students soon will receive training in what to do if an active shooter enters a school, district officials announced to the Eugene School Board on Wednesday.
Elementary school students will be trained first, beginning in May. The district has dedicated the month of April to hosting parent information nights and introducing the curriculum to parents and community members for discussion.
How public schools should deal with the threat of a shooter long has been a topic of national debate. Some educators believe that teachers should be armed with guns at school. Others think that installing bulletproof glass and keeping schools locked would help to keep students safe from an armed intruder.
But several local school districts are confronting the matter head on by training students in the more aggressive ALICE method. ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate.
All students and staff in the Springfield and Bethel School districts � including cooks, custodians, secretaries and teachers � already have completed the training. Eugene district staff also have been trained; students in the Eugene district have not.
The training system, developed by the for-profit Ohio-based ALICE Training Institute, tries to help people respond to and survive an attack, according to the program�s website. The training is an attempt to help people learn how to react to an armed intruder and move away from outdated safety procedures that for decades instructed teachers to lock all doors, turn off lights and hide until law enforcement arrived to deal with the intruder.
During one of the first staff trainings in January 2015, police officers roamed Kennedy Middle School hallways armed with Nerf guns and attempted to get into classrooms, pretending to shoot the gun through open spaces in the barricade of chairs and desks that teachers set up.
Staff also learned how to distract a gunman using classroom items � such as fire extinguishers, globes or chairs � should a shooter enter a classroom.
Now the district is ready to train its students, but not all at once, and with a slightly different approach.
At a Eugene school board meeting Wednesday, Randi Bowers-Payne, a human resources administrator with the Eugene district; Brooke Wagner, the district�s director of elementary education; and Cheryl Linder, the director of educational support services within the district, presented board members with information about how the student training will be approached and implemented. The staff said the training will be progressive, age-appropriate and will �not include any surprises.�
Elementary-age students
The information that elementary-age students will receive will be vastly different from that of the high school-age training, district officials said Wednesday.
Students in grades K-5 will be taught that the class will �practice drills to keep us safe� and to �listen to your teacher.� Other key messages presented to elementary school students will include �make it even harder for danger to get us,� �get away from danger� and �in the face of danger, we must do something.�
Wagner said at the Wednesday meeting that elementary-age training would not include any re-enactments, reference to guns or shootings and would be somewhat vague about having students protect themselves against dangerous people.
�All of the conversations taking place at the elementary level will be just that: conversations,� Wagner said. �Conversations about how to listen to teachers or trusted adults who they know in the building.�
Wagner also said that elementary-age students will practice evacuating the building, just as they would during a fire or earthquake drill.
�We�ll have teachers establish a meeting point for the kids to go to,� she said. �That�s the piece about ALICE � the �I� for information � that helps to empower a teacher to what�s best for their kids with the information they�ve received.�
Middle-school students
Wagner said the conversation at the middle and high school level will be a bit more specific with reference to an armed intruder and options for dealing with that situation.
�Older students will be talking about more specific steps they could be able to take if that situation arises,� Wagner said. �Conversations at the secondary level may be more descriptive than they would at the elementary level.�
District documents show that when students practice the training, an announcement of a �lockdown� drill will be made over the school intercom. The location of the pretend danger also will be announced via intercom. Based on the information presented in the announcement, students respond by either evacuating, barricading or sheltering. A debriefing session will take place after the practice drill.
Neither elementary nor older children will take part in any active-shooter response simulations, however.
Exact language and information to be presented to middle and high school students has not yet been finalized, according to Wagner, who said parents can review the curriculum at an April 17 parent information night at the district office. Parents also can get more information from their students� school administrators.
Student board representative Dylan Troyer of South Eugene High School told district officials at the Wednesday meeting that he was thankful for the district�s efforts to address the active shooter issue.
�I know that ever since I was young, having routine fire drills has helped me to stay calm,� he said. �Whether it�s a drill or an actual fire, it helps to lower stress, and having that training in a school shooting situation would be very beneficial.�
Troyer also said ALICE training could have benefited South Eugene High School students during a 2015 lockdown prompted by a Eugene police SWAT team sniper who was dropping off his child at the Eugene Family YMCA in SWAT gear.
A Eugene School District delivery driver saw the police officer walking on Patterson Street at the southeast corner of South Eugene High School just after 10 a.m. dressed in camouflage, with a handgun in a holster and carrying a black bag. The SWAT member later was identified by a Eugene police who was on a break from a SWAT training in Goshen.
The driver reported the SWAT member to police, causing a 45-minute lockdown at South Eugene High School and Roosevelt Middle School on students� last day before summer break.
�It turned out to just be a SWAT officer dropping his child off at the YMCA, but we were under the desks in our classrooms, and a lot of us were very afraid,� he said. �I think that if we would have had this sort of training, it would have been a lot better, so thank you.�
The district soon plans to announce its ALICE curriculum to district parents.
John Stapleton, 39, is the father of a sixth-grader at Spencer Butte Middle School in south Eugene. He said Thursday that he thinks the ALICE curriculum is what needs to be taught to students in this day and age.
�This sort of stuff does occur, and pretending like it doesn�t exist is not a plan,� Stapleton said. �This is the kind of world our kids are coming up in. You have to have plan if you want to have any hope of dealing with this adequately, otherwise it will take you completely by surprise.�
Stapleton said he has complete faith in district teachers to roll out the curriculum without scaring anyone.
�If it�s done in an age-appropriate and culturally sensitive way, I think this will be a huge improvement from the current policy,� he said. �You don�t ever want to think about your 8-year-old kid in a confrontation with an active shooter, but telling teachers to shelter just isn�t going to work.�
Follow Alisha on Twitter @alisharoemeling. Email alisha.roemeling@registerguard.com.Renault development driver Oliver Rowland will drive one of the team's F1 cars for the first time on track at Assen next month.
The 24-year-old will take a step closer to realising his dream of becoming a Formula 1 driver when he drives Renault's 2012 V8-powered Lotus E20 car at Gamma Racing Day on August 5.
Rowland, who currently sits third in the Formula 2 championship standings, will take to the track on Saturday, with Nico Hulkenberg on driving duties the following day.
The event, held in the Netherlands, is expected to see crowds of around 100,000 fans.
Rowland, who drives for DAMS in Formula 2, said: 'It's a really exciting time for me to drive Renault's F1 car in front of 100,000 people in Holland.
"I see this as a step in the right direction to achieving my dream of driving in Formula 1."
If you are using skysports.com you can comment below to get involved in the debate, but please adhere to our House Rules. If you wish to report any comment, simply click on the down arrow next to the offending comment and click 'Report'.20 March 2015 | user-246-794809
9 | Inspired
The movie fails to touch upon the racial dynamics, which is actually a quite important dimension of the topic. For some issues, such as fraternity, it was simply mentioned like a little bit, without going any further or deeper.
It's not perfect, but it's trying. Some people say that Fight Club is a movie that every man must watch, but I think this one might be more important for every man and woman to see. And it's not just men that live in a mask. Everyone is forced to put on a mask by all the pressure from the society, family, friends. Take off your mask. Help others take off theirs. The world would be a happier place.
I will definitely watch it again.PGL has revealed the last four players who will compete at the HTC 1vs1 CS:GO Invitational.
This weekend, PGL's studios, in Bucharest, will play host to a 1vs1 invitational tournament sponsored by telecommunications company HTC, with $25,000 at stake.
Sixteen top players, hailing from the male and the female professional scenes, will face each other in aim duels in the tournament, which will kick off with a GSL group stage, followed by the single-elimination playoffs.
ShahZaM and desi to represent NA in Bucharest
Rounding out the list of participants for the event are Preparation's Casper "cadiaN" Møller, CSGL's Michał "MICHU" Müller and North American duo Derek "desi" Branchen and Shahzeb "ShahZaM" Khan, both of whom are free agents after recently leaving Winterfox and OpTic Gaming, respectively.
The following 16 players will be taking part in the HTC 1v1 CS:GO Invitational by PGL:
Taking viewers through all the action on PGL's Twitch channel will be a talent panel featuring Henry "HenryG" Greer, Joona "natu" Leppänen, Pala "Mantrousse" Gilroy Sen, Matthew "Sadokist" Trivett and a special guest, who will be revealed closer to the event.Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of 'The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity'.
It turns out that Donald Trump, he of the non-released tax filings, claimed a 1995 income loss so large — $916 million — that the tax software back then couldn’t handle it; it didn’t have enough space for all the numbers. His lawyer had to separately type in -91 on front of 5,729,293 to report the loss.
Source: New York Times
Such losses can be claimed against taxes owed for three prior years and 15 future years, leading the New York Times, which broke the story, to conclude that “it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.”
To the extent that the story made a splash, it’s certainly not because it disabused anyone of the notion that Trump has been sending big checks to the IRS. The conventional wisdom, as purveyed by Hillary Clinton in their first debate, is that he pays little to no taxes, which is why he won’t release the returns to the public. The leaked returns just confirm our priors.
Trump even went as far as to claim, in response to Clinton’s allegations, that not paying taxes just means he’s “smart.”
So, is this a big deal or not?
Politically, I’d guess not. Perhaps some undecideds might be turned off by the exposure of an alleged billionaire allegedly paying no taxes, while they pony up year in and out. Also, these losses were generated by a number of very big-ticket business failures by Trump in the (economically booming) mid-1990s, which one might guess would undermine his claim that he’s such a great businessman. But if you’re still undecided at this point, I have no idea what makes you tick, and thus no idea how this plays out.
Here’s what’s important about this, though, again, I’m not at all claiming this as breaking news: When people like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren say “the system is rigged,” this is what they mean. There’s nothing illegal in this story. Industries — real estate, in particular — have successfully lobbied the politicians whose careers they bankroll to give them precisely |
put himself in a tricky situation, is unable to get Peña Nieto to agree to his suggestion that he stop pushing back against Trump on who funds the wall, and ends by kicking the crucial issue of who will actually fund the wall down the road.
And as far as their back and forth on trade is concerned, Peña Nieto makes no meaningful concessions or promises and criticizes Trump for deviating from the plans discussed by their teams in the runup to the call.
Trump, though, does seem rather elated by the end of the call. “It is you and I against the world, Enrique, do not forget,” he says, wrapping up what he evidently perceives as a successful exchange.
But after the call, even the modest agreement that Trump and Peña Nieto had settled on about avoiding public discussion about which country would pay for the wall quickly fell apart. Washington and Mexico City’s joint statements on the matter took different paths: The Mexican release announced their agreement not to speak publicly about funding the wall, but the US statement made no mention of it.
That was five months ago. It should probably come as no surprise that the two countries continue to trade blows over the wall — and to fight about who will ultimately pay for it.On some remotes, you may also have home control buttons that you can use with devices like Philips Hue lights, a Nest thermostat, or a Belkin WeMo smart outlet. (You can see Logitech’s full list of supported smarthome devices here.)
Unlike home theater devices, you cant fully program your remote using the MyHarmony desktop software–you hae to use the Harmony app for iOS or Android to perform some of the setup. So, that’s what we’ll use in this guide.
This assumes you already have a Logitech Harmony universal remote set up for your home theater–so if you haven’t done so already, check out our Harmony guide for the initial setup process. Then, come back here to add smarthome control to your remote.
NOTE: If you can, try to follow these instructions as closely as possible. While Logitech makes some great hardware, their software is not very good, and things can go wonky and get confusing very easily (especially when it comes to remotes with the Harmony Hub). The closer you follow these instructions to the letter, and in the proper order, the less chance you have of running into a problem.
How to Add Your Smarthome Devices
To add new smarthome devices to your Logitech Harmony remote, open the Harmony app on your phone or tablet and expand the right sidebar. Tap “Edit Devices” along the bottom.
Click the “+ Device” button that appears along the bottom to add a new device.
Select “Home Control” from the list, and choose the smarthome device you want to add. In this case, we’ll add our Philips Hue lights.
You may need to put your smart device into pairing mode–for us, this meant pressing the button on the Hue Bridge so our Harmony Hub could detect it.
From there, follow the on-screen instructions to import anything else you want (such as Philips Hue’s lighting scenes). When you’re done, click the Next arrow in the upper right corner.
Your new device will appear in the right sidebar of the Harmony app. Repeat this with any other smarthome devices you want to add.
How to Create Groups of Devices for Easier Control
Next, you may want to group certain devices together so you can control them easier. For example, we’ll add a few of our Hue bulbs to a group called “Living Room” so we can control all the living room lights at once with our Harmony remote.
Expand the right sidebar and tap “Edit Devices”.
Tap the “+ Group” button that appears along the bottom.
Give the group a name, and select the devices you want to belong to that group. Click the Next arrow to continue.
Now, in the right sidebar, those lights will be grouped together so you can more easily control them.
How to Control Your Smarthome with Your Remote’s Buttons
Smarthome-enabled Harmony remotes have a set of buttons designed to control up to four smarthome devices–they’ll look like light bulbs and power outlets:
To assign functions to these buttons open up the Harmony app and tap the menu button in the top left-hand corner. Then head to Harmony Setup > Add/Edit Devices & Activities.
From there, tap the “Remote & Hub” category.
Select your remote from the list–in our case, “Harmony Elite”.
Tap the “Home Control Buttons” option to customize those buttons.
Select one of the buttons and tap the “Assign” button.
Select the device(s) you want to control with that button. In our case, we’re going to control the “Living Room” group of lights we created earlier.
When you do, it’ll return you to the Home Control Buttons page. Unfortunately, you can’t customize what the buttons do–they are strangely limited–but you can see the button assignments below. In our case, a short press turns the lights on, a long press turns the lights off, and the rocker switch in the middle adjusts the brightness of those bulbs.
We really, really, wish you could customize these functions, but Logitech apparently decided to leave this feature half-finished instead.
Repeat this process for the other buttons. When you’re done, tap the Next button to save your changes.
How to Create Activities to Control Your Devices
If you want true customization of your smarthome devices, touch screen-enabled remotes allow you to create activities for your smarthome devices, from the very simple (“Dim Lights”) to the more complex (“Dim the lights, roll up the blinds, and start my home theater”). This is much, much more useful than the hardware buttons, which are surprisingly uncustomizable.
To add activities, expand the left sidebar of the Harmony app and tap “Edit Activites”.
Tap the “Add Activity” button that appears along the bottom.
On the next screen, choose “Add Your Own Activity”.
Give your activity a name and choose an icon for it. This is the icon that will appear on your remote. In our example, we’re creating an activity called “Lights Dim” that will dim our living room lights to 30%, perfect for watching a movie. Then click the Next arrow.
Next, select the devices involved in the activity. For this example, it’ll just be our three Living Room lights.
It will ask you what you want to do with the entertainment devices for this activity. In our case, we’re going to leave them alone, so we’ll choose “Leave everything as is”.
Next, you’ll adjust what happens when the activity starts, and what happens when the activity ends. Tap the Next arrow.
In our case, we want each light bulb to turn on at 30% dimming when the activity starts. So we’ll set up our lights on this screen…
…and tap the Next arrow when finished.
Repeat this process for when the activity ends. In our case, the activity will just be a one-time button press, so we won’t do anything here–we’ll press the Skip button.
And now we’re finished. This is a very simple example, but this can be very powerful. For example, you could create an activity called “Movie Night” That turns on your home theater, sets it to your Blu-Ray player, rolls down your smart blinds, and dims your smart light bulbs all at once. You can even set it to un-dim the lights when you switch to a different activity (by changing their state for the activity’s end). You’re only limited by your imagination…and how many smart devices you have in your house.
Your home theater is more than just a TV and some speakers. The lights, the blinds, and even your thermostat are crucial to the ultimate home theater experience–so it only makes sense you’d be able to control them from your remote. Now you can go from basketball-watching mode to movie-watching mode with just a few button presses, all without getting up from your couch.An ancient Chinese text dating back over 2,000 years tells the legend of King Mu, Son of Heaven. It is said that in 964 B.C., King Mu of the Zhou dynasty sent a massive band across the Gansu Corridor deep into the heart of Central Asia. There, he hosted a grand three-day musical performance for the locals. This musical diplomacy led them to revere China’s might.
In a similar way, globalizing Chinese culture has been at the heart of the nation’s soft-power push over the past decade. However, a clear dilemma arises when it comes to promoting Chinese opera overseas. First, folk opera’s appeal is much stronger at home than abroad. Second, new opera lacks outstanding, globally minded works.
Chinese opera can be categorized as either old or new. “Old opera” refers to the traditional forms, such as Peking opera, kunqu opera native to eastern China’s present-day Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, and other regional operas based on local instruments and singing styles. “New opera,” meanwhile, emerged in 1945 with “The White-Haired Girl.” The style largely combines Western compositional structures with Chinese singing and is also known as “revolutionary opera.”
The sharp contrast between old and new opera has much to do with the legacy of the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and ’20s. The left-wing core of the movement, represented by writer Lu Xun and future co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party Chen Duxiu, strongly opposed so-called old opera for the way it celebrated the baseness of feudal ethics. At the same time, as more and more Chinese people were exposed to Western opera, they were left impressed by the powerful and majestic vocals that ran through works by composers like Richard Wagner.
In the 1980s and ’90s, as China’s living standards rose, opera became more accessible and diverse. At that time, it developed along two distinct paths: one that stayed faithful to revolutionary opera and another that attempted to incorporate more innovative forms and techniques. The former includes works like “The Daughter of the Party” and “The Long March,” while the latter includes “The Savage Land” and “Rickshaw Boy.”
The first hurdle to overcome when trying to popularize revolutionary opera is the cultural gap between China and other countries. For instance, in “The White-Haired Girl,” an exploitative landlord wants tenant Yang Bailao, a poor farmer, to repay his debt by giving his daughter to the landlord, to which Yang sings heartrendingly that “the skies had turned a sheet of white from the wind and snow.” However, foreign audiences unfamiliar with themes of socialist revolutionary struggle in China may find it difficult to empathize with Yang’s plight.
Meanwhile, a larger obstacle to building global appeal lies within the musical form itself. China’s new operatic style utilizes folk singing and folk musicians, but Western opera primarily features the bel canto style, made famous by Italian opera singers. Besides this, present-day Chinese works that try to directly emulate Western opera still lack technical ability, making their value experimental at best. As long as audience members remain unfamiliar with Chinese history and unable to connect with the music, Chinese opera will have trouble gaining popularity abroad.
If we want others to appreciate our art, then we must first acknowledge that it may be more effective to use art forms that originated abroad as a way of portraying China. - Jiang Yimin, professor
To date, Chinese opera has been promoted abroad in three main ways. First, to spread familiarity with Chinese language and culture, the government has sponsored traditional Chinese artists to perform abroad. Since 2004, these initiatives have regularly been backed by a global network of Confucius Institutes. The government also successfully fought to gain recognition for the privileged status of Chinese opera. In 2001, kunqu was listed by UNESCO as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
The second method is to use foreign works as reference points for new operas. For example, China’s National Centre for the Performing Arts has introduced a large number of operatic works from other countries, to which they hoped that greater exposure would inform and enhance Chinese opera. One successful result from this strategy is “Rickshaw Boy,” an opera based on the novel by Lao She, whose innovative staging and content earned rave reviews during its Italy tour in fall 2015.
The third method involves showcasing Chinese artists through performances of international works abroad. Prior to enacting the policy of reform and opening up, China was largely unfamiliar with Western music and lacked the technical ability to perform it. At the outset, Chinese singers had trouble mastering the bel canto style, while the strong personalities of the musicians in symphony orchestras made harmonizing difficult. Following the nation’s economic reforms, though, Chinese performers gradually learned the correct vocal methods and even nativized them into a form known as “China bel canto.” Now, for example, the China Philharmonic Orchestra and the China National Opera House often perform non-Chinese pieces when they tour abroad.
Our team at the Peking University Academy of Opera has tried this method before. Because pronunciation in the Western bel canto style differs from that of Chinese language, Chinese audiences may not warm to it immediately. But by incorporating Chinese pronunciation into the singing style to create China bel canto, we have had more success. In July, the troupe traveled to the Chinese embassy in London to perform this mixed genre, singing Chinese folk songs and even Western-style bel canto as part of a revolutionary opera. The performance was a resounding success, primarily because the audience understood the story and found it engaging.
Art must be understood before it can be appreciated. If we want others to appreciate our art, then we must first acknowledge that it may be more effective to use art forms that originated abroad as a way of portraying China, rather than insisting on pushing traditional Chinese arts overseas. If we want our work to resonate with international audiences, then we must find a way to express Chinese feelings using a singing style familiar to foreigners.
For Chinese opera singers, the ultimate goal is to create pieces that tell the story of China, resonate with global audiences, and showcase our musical abilities. However, while we have witnessed ever-greater technical accomplishment in the field, we are still restricted by the number of works available.
In the 1980s, the Chinese art community mostly went along with the idea that for a local or regional art form to be globally successful, it had to preserve the exoticism of its own characteristics. Now, however, there has been a shift toward couching certain unique cultural traits within a mainstream art form to give them broader appeal. In September, for example, an English-language operatic version of the classic novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” was performed at the San Francisco Opera, which abridged many of the more culturally specific scenes from the sprawling love story in order to make it understandable to foreign audiences. The performance was universally praised by Chinese and non-Chinese spectators alike.
Chinese opera still strives to become a key player on the global stage rather than remaining a side act for small audiences. The prerequisite for this, however, is erasing regional or ethnic barriers to understanding. We need to encourage greater cross-cultural exchange, in part by letting go of the desire to faithfully adhere to impenetrable original pieces. Only by broadening our appeal in this way will Chinese opera take its place alongside existing Western forms.
(Header image: A performer stands at a bus stop before taking part in Chinese New Year celebrations in central London, February 22, 2015. Anadolu Agency/Getty Images/VCG)Math 55 is a two-semester long first-year undergraduate mathematics course at Harvard University, founded by Lynn Loomis and Shlomo Sternberg. The official titles of the course are Honors Abstract Algebra (Math 55a) and Honors Real and Complex Analysis (Math 55b). Previously, the official title was Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra.
Description [ edit ]
The Harvard University Department of Mathematics describes Math 55 as "probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country". [1] Formerly, students would begin the year in Math 25 (which was created in 1983 as a lower-level Math 55) and, after three weeks of point-set topology and special topics (for instance, in 1994, p-adic analysis was taught by Wilfried Schmid), students would take a quiz. As of 2012, students may choose to enroll in either Math 25 or Math 55 but are advised to "shop" both courses and have five weeks to decide on one.[2] Depending on the professor teaching the class, the diagnostic exam may still be given after three weeks to help students with their decision.
In 1994, 89 students took the test given after three weeks: students scoring more than 50% on the quiz could enroll in Wilfried Schmid's Math 55 (15 students), students scoring between 10 and 50% could stay in Benedict Gross's Math 25 (55 students), and students scoring less than 10% were advised to enroll in a course such as Math 21, multivariate calculus (19 students).[3] A take-home final ends the class.[4]
Historical retention rate [ edit ]
In 1970, Math 55 covered almost four years worth of department coursework in two semesters, and subsequently, it drew only the most diligent of undergraduates. Of the 75 students who enrolled in the 1970 offering, by course end, only 20 remained due to the advanced nature of the material and time-constraints under which students were given to work.[5] David Harbater, a University of Pennsylvania mathematics professor/researcher, and survivor of the 1974 Math 55 section at Cambridge, recalled of his experience, "Seventy [students] started it, 20 finished it, and only 10 understood it." Scott D. Kominers, familiar with the stated attrition rates for the course, decided to keep an informal log of his journey through the 2009 section: "...we had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester after the fifth Monday." (The beginning of the fifth week being the drop-deadline for students to decide whether to remain in Math 55, or transfer to Math 25 (Linear Algebra and Real Analysis I & II)).[6]
Course content [ edit ]
Through 2006,[7] the instructor had broad latitude in choosing the content of the course. Though Math 55 bore the official title "Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra", advanced topics in complex analysis, point set topology, group theory, and/or differential geometry could be covered in depth at the discretion of the instructor, in addition to single and multivariable real analysis and abstract linear algebra. In 1970, for example, students studied the differential geometry of Banach manifolds in the second semester of Math 55.[5] In contrast, Math 25, entitled "Honors Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra", tended to be more narrowly focused, usually covering real analysis, together with the relevant theory of metric spaces and (multi)linear maps. These topics typically culminated in the proof of the generalized Stokes' theorem, though, time permitting, other relevant topics (e.g., category theory, de Rham cohomology) might also be covered.[8] Although both courses presented calculus from a rigorous point of view and emphasized theory and proof writing, Math 55 was generally faster paced, more abstract, and demanded a higher level of mathematical sophistication.
Loomis and Sternberg's textbook Advanced Calculus,[9] an abstract treatment of calculus in the setting of normed vector spaces and on differentiable manifolds, was tailored to the authors' Math 55 syllabus and served for many years as an assigned textbook. Over the years, instructors for Math 55[10] and Math 25[8] have also selected Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis,[11] Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds,[12] Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right,[13] and Halmos's Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces[14] as textbooks or references.
From 2007 onwards, the scope of the course (along with that of Math 25) was changed to more strictly cover the contents of four semester-long courses in two semesters: Math 25a (linear algebra) and Math 122 (group theory) in Math 55a; and Math 25b (calculus, real analysis) and Math 113 (complex analysis) in Math 55b. The name was also changed to "Honors Abstract Algebra" (Math 55a) and "Honors Real and Complex Analysis" (Math 55b). Fluency in formulating and writing mathematical proofs is listed as a course prerequisite for Math 55, while such experience is considered "helpful" but not required for Math 25.[1] In practice, students of Math 55 have usually had extensive experience in proof writing and abstract mathematics, and many are winners of prestigious national or international mathematical olympiads (e.g., USAMO or IMO), while typical students of Math 25 have also had previous exposure to proof writing through mathematical contests or university level proof-based courses.
Notable alumni [ edit ]
Problem sets are expected to take from 24 to 60 hours per week to complete,[1] although some claim that it is closer to 20 hours.[15] Of those students who could handle the workload, some became math or physics professors,[5] including members of the Harvard Math Department such as Benedict Gross and Joe Harris; also, Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall '84[16] and Harvard economics professor Andrei Shleifer '82.[17] Although a 2006 Harvard Crimson article alleged that only 17 women completed the class between 1990 and 2006,[6] in fact 39 women completed 55a (the first of the two semesters), and 26 completed 55b.[18] Math 25 has more women: in 1994–95, Math 55 had no women, while Math 25 had about 10 women in the 55 person course.[3]
There are also Math 55 alumni who went on to be professors in other universities. These include Fields-medalist Manjul Bhargava, who is now a professor at Princeton University, as well as Kiran Kedlaya, now at the University of California, San Diego.
In addition to these professors, past students of Math 55 include Bill Gates[19], Richard Stallman.[5] and Simpsons executive producer Al Jean.[20]
Demographics of students taking this course over the years has been used to study causes of gender and race differences in the fields of mathematics and technology.[21]
Historical instances of Math 55 [ edit ]
Fictional references [ edit ]
Math 55, along with several other high-level mathematics courses, were brought up by Dr. Spencer Reid in a 2015 episode of Criminal Minds entitled "Mr. Scratch."[33]16th August 2014
Swarm of 1,000 robots able to self-organise
A huge, self-organising robot swarm consisting of 1,024 individual machines has been demonstrated by Harvard.
Swarm robotics is a new and emerging field of technology involving the coordination of multiple robots to perform a group task. By combining a large number of machines, it is possible to create a hive intelligence – capable of much greater achievements than a lone individual. In the same way that insects such as ants, bees and termites cooperate, researchers can build wireless networks of machines able to sense, navigate and communicate information about their surroundings.
Recent efforts have included a formation of 20 "droplets" created by the University of Colorado, a group of 40 robots developed at the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, and drones using augmented reality to produce "spatially targeted communication and self-assembly". Although impressive, those projects – and others since – have lacked the raw numbers to be considered a genuine "swarm" like the creatures mentioned earlier. This week, however, scientists at Harvard took research in the field to a whole new level, by demonstrating a network of more than 1,000 machines working simultaneously.
Known as "Kilobots", these devices are just a few centimetres across, roughly the size of a U.S. quarter. Each is equipped with tiny vibrating motors allowing them to slide across a surface, using an infrared transmitter and receiver to alert their neighbours and measure their proximity. From just a simple command, they can arrange themselves into a variety of complex shapes and patterns.
In 2011, open-source hardware and software was developed and licensed by Harvard to improve the algorithms used in machine networks. A report showed how groups of 25 Kilobots – demonstrating behaviours such as foraging, formation control and synchronisation – had the potential for much bigger numbers. Following three years of further testing and experimentation, the university has now succeeded in coordinating a swarm of 1,024 units.
The new, smarter algorithm enables the Kilobots to correct their own mistakes, avoiding traffic jams and errors that would otherwise become more likely in larger-scale groups. If an individual deviates off-course, nearby robots can sense the problem and cooperate to fix it. As robots become cheaper and more numerous, with a continued trend in miniaturisation, this form of social behaviour could lead to revolutionary applications in the future.
As Professor Radhika Nagpal explains in a press release: “Increasingly, we’re going to see large numbers of robots working together – whether it's hundreds of robots cooperating to achieve environmental cleanup or a quick disaster response, or millions of self-driving cars on our highways. Understanding how to design ‘good’ systems at that scale will be critical. We can simulate the behaviour of large swarms of robots, but a simulation can only go so far. The real-world dynamics – the physical interactions and variability – make a difference, and having the Kilobots to test the algorithm on real robots has helped us better understand how to recognise and prevent the failures that occur at these large scales.”
These latest developments are reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
Comments »Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Harriet Harman: "That is an unfair inference and a smear"
Harriet Harman has accused the Daily Mail of running a "politically-motivated smear campaign" against her.
The newspaper has reported that a civil liberties group she used to work for had links to paedophile rights campaigners in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Labour deputy leader told the BBC she had never been an "apologist for paedophilia" and had sought to protect children from abuse during her career.
But the newspaper said she had failed to answer its questions.
From 1978 to 1982 Ms Harman was legal officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties, which was the predecessor to campaign group Liberty.
'Not apologising'
The Daily Mail has questioned the politician, her MP husband Jack Dromey, and former health secretary Patricia Hewitt over their actions while officials at the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) in the 1970s and 1980s and its ties with the Paedophile Information Exchange - a group which spoke positively about adults who were attracted to children.
My work has always been, when I was at NCCL and when I have been in politics and ministerial office, to protect children, especially from child abuse Harriet Harman
Although the body granted "affiliate" status to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) prior to her appointment, Ms Harman said the NCCL was "an organisation which anyone could apply to join and indeed any organisation could apply to be 'an affiliate' on payment of a fee".
There is no evidence to suggest that Ms Harman, Mr Dromey or Ms Hewitt personally supported the views of PIE.
Ms Harman told BBC Two's Newsnight. "It is not the case that my work, when I was at NCCL, was influenced by PIE, was apologising for paedophilia or colluding with paedophilia. That is an unfair inference and a smear.
"My work has always been, when I was at NCCL and when I have been in politics and ministerial office, to protect children, especially from child abuse."
'Contrition'
Earlier, she released a statement that the newspaper's allegations were "horrific" and she denied all of them.
"The editor and proprietor of the Daily Mail are entitled to their political views and they are of course entitled to oppose what I stand for but they are not entitled to use their newspaper to smear me with innuendo because they disagree with me politically and hate my values.
The belated statements today of Ms Harman and her husband - full of pedantry and obfuscation - failed to answer the Mail's central points Daily Mail spokesman
"I sincerely hope people won't believe these smears... but given the seriousness and the aggression with which the Daily Mail are pursuing me, I feel that I need to put the facts in the public domain."
But the Daily Mail claimed the shadow culture secretary had failed to answer the main charges it had made against her in a series of articles and instead denied allegations it had not made.
"For ten weeks now the Mail has repeatedly asked three leading Labour figures to answer questions about the involvement of the NCCL, a body in which they played leading roles, with a vile paedophile group," a spokesman said.
"The belated statements today of Ms Harman and her husband - full of pedantry and obfuscation - failed to answer the Mail's central points."
'Decency'
Labour leader Ed Miliband had earlier said his deputy was "somebody of huge decency and integrity - I don't set any store by these allegations".
A statement released by Mr Dromey said: "Sexual abuse of children is evil and I have always viewed paedophiles and any group associated with them as evil.
"During my time on the NCCL Executive, I was at the forefront of repeated public condemnations of PIE and their despicable views. Then, when I was elected chairman, I took them on.
"I personally chaired the NCCL conference that, on my recommendation, refused to back by a massive majority a loathsome motion from a leading light in PIE calling on NCCL to support the so-called 'rights' of paedophiles. Indeed, my stand was denounced in a leaflet distributed by PIE to the delegates to the Conference.
"Like many organisations in the 1970s, NCCL had been infiltrated but that was the moment the tide was turned. I closed the conference saying that we had to stand up for the rights of children not to be sexually abused and that adults guilty of abuse were the lowest of the low.
"I was then the first to argue that paedophiles could have no place in NCCL.
"As a lifelong opponent of evil men who abuse children, the accusations of the Daily Mail are untrue and beneath contempt."
Ms Hewitt, who stood down as an MP in 2010, has yet to comment on the story.Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said his side didn't need to sign a new striker despite Oliver Giroud being ruled out for three months.
Sporting Lisbon's William Carvalho is hoping for a last-minute move to Arsenal, sources have told ESPN FC.
- Wenger coy over Falcao loan
- Wenger: Ozil is a 'perfect' player
- Cross: Arsenal must add to attack
The highly-rated midfielder has been the subject of plenty of interest this summer, most notably from Manchester United and the north London club.
While tempted by a move to Old Trafford, Carvalho himself is said to favour a side currently in the Champions League, and there is anticipation that Arsenal may move for him before the transfer window closes on Monday.
William Carvalho has won six international caps for Portugal.
Any move must make financial sense for Arsene Wenger, however, and the deal could now be done for around 24 million pounds.
Carvalho, 22, would certainly solve a long-term issue in the Arsenal midfield given the paucity of options in defensive midfield, particularly with the fitness concerns surrounding Mikel Arteta.
Sporting have already sold Marcos Rojo to United this summer, despite the player's work permit issues, though they have managed to retain Algeria international striker Islam Slimani, who impressed at the World Cup.2016 MVFC Preseason Poll and Team
ST. LOUIS - Five-time defending national champion North Dakota State was tabbed to win the Missouri Valley Football Conference crown in 2016. The Bison have two outright and three shared league titles with an overall record of 71-5 the past five seasons.
This year, NDSU earned 37 of a possible 39 first-place votes and 388 total points in a poll conducted by league coaches, media and sports information directors.
North Dakota State had five players picked to the preseason all-conference team: running back King Frazier, offensive guard Zack Johnson, defensive end Greg Menard, linebacker Nick DeLuca, and free safety Tre Dempsey.
NDSU long snapper James Fisher, defensive tackle Nate Tanguay and strong safety Robbie Grimsley earned honorable mention.
The league is coming off a season in which five teams represented the conference in the playoffs for a second straight year. Northern Iowa, picked second in this year's poll, was one of those five, and the Panthers received the remaining two first-place tallies and 343 total points.
ST. LOUIS - Five-time defending national champion North Dakota State was tabbed to win the Missouri Valley Football Conference crown in 2016. The Bison have two outright and three shared league titles with an overall record of 71-5 the past five seasons.This year, NDSU earned 37 of a possible 39 first-place votes and 388 total points in a poll conducted by league coaches, media and sports information directors.North Dakota State had five players picked to the preseason all-conference team: running back, offensive guard, defensive end, linebacker, and free safetyNDSU long snapper, defensive tackleand strong safetyearned honorable mention.The league is coming off a season in which five teams represented the conference in the playoffs for a second straight year. Northern Iowa, picked second in this year's poll, was one of those five, and the Panthers received the remaining two first-place tallies and 343 total points.
South Dakota State was picked third in this year's preseason poll. The Jackrabbits, who have earned a postseason bid for four straight years, are picked third with 284 total points. SDSU narrowly edged two-time defending co-champion Illinois State in the rankings; ISU received 274 total points.
Youngstown State was picked fifth with 254 total points. The Penguins are seeking their first playoff bid since 2006 under second-year head coach Bo Pelini.
A preseason favorite has claimed the league crown 18 times (in 30 previous polls). North Dakota State was picked to win the league last season.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A maniac holds his fiancee hostage with a meat cleaver after her family refused to agree to their marriage.
The bare-chested boyfriend appeared to prove his potential in-laws right to oppose the wedlock as he forced his love to strip while he got down to his underpants in the terrifying roof-top siege.
Grabbing the cowering girl by her hair and holding the cleaver to her throat, the topless man – known only as Lin – held police at bay for over five hours.
Snipers surrounded the quiet residential block in the Chinese city of Sanya, as negotiators begged him to let her go.
As he climbed down and dragged the girl towards a getaway car laid on for him, armed officers pounced.
The man was later hauled away in cuffs, and is now facing a long prison sentence.
It turned out even his own parents had opposed the marriage.Fartun Osman is in a tight spot. She, her husband and their four children, aged seven, five, three and one, live in a private one-bedroom flat in Harrow. Her eldest daughter suffers from asthma and eczema. “She has a lot of allergies,” says Osman. “Sometimes she can’t sleep. Sometimes she can’t do anything.”
They want to move. But her husband works on zero-hours contracts when he can and he hasn’t been employed since Christmas. Lettings agencies won’t register them; the council has downgraded them to a lower priority. So while her daughter wheezes, they wait and worry.
“My religion teaches me to believe that one day things will be better,” says Osman, 34, a Muslim refugee from Somalia who is now a British citizen. She has a degree in accounting; her husband has a master’s in business studies. They never imagined a life like this. “I don’t want my children to live their life like I lived my childhood, because it wasn’t safe in Somalia. But if it was safe I would go home. But so long as we are here and so long as I am healthy, I have to say Alhamdulillah [all praise be to Allah] and never give up.”
Pamela Fitzpatrick, who runs the law centre where Osman has come for help, says such cases are all too common. “I have friends who went to see I, Daniel Blake and cried,” says Fitzpatrick, referring to the Ken Loach film about a widower in his late 50s who is failed by the benefits system. “I thought it was a very powerful film. But when you work in this sector you don’t cry because you see it every day.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pamela Fitzpatrick. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
Spend a day in the Harrow Law Centre speaking to clients, or a morning at the local Citizens Advice getting a sense of the kinds of cases coming through the door, and you can see how the confluence of austerity, scarce housing and low pay has created a general sense of anxiety and large pockets of desperation. The Tories, and Theresa May in particular, are associated here with a lack of fairness that may stand them in good stead when contemplating Brexit negotiations but not when dealing with vulnerable people.
“We need to show people we care about them,” says Debbie, who is leaning towards voting Labour. When people speak of Harrow feeling “unloved”, you sense they mean Harovians too.
Along with west Somerset, Harrow ranks as the worst place in Britain when it comes to low pay, according to the Office for National Statistics, with 37% of employees in the borough working in low-paid jobs and 42% of jobs here paying less than the London living wage.
House prices in the borough have risen steeply. According to Zoopla, the average price paid for a property in Harrow over the last three months was £461,066 – 25% higher than the average over the last five years. According to the estate agents Foxtons, the average rent for a two-bedroom house in the borough is £1,560 a month. On average, Harrow tenants spend 61% of their earnings on rent.
Harrow’s food bank gave out three-day emergency food supplies to children in the borough at a rate of roughly twice a day last year. After benefit cuts, a growing number |
, road grade, revolutions per minute, and calories burned.
On a more physical level, the bike can be adjusted both vertically and horizontally to accommodate all types of riders.
“Our mission is to make indoor cycling accessible and enjoyable to the masses. For years, we have worked to create an advanced AI product that will deliver this mission through a reasonable price, a safe and simple design and engaging features,” Younghyun Jo, VirchyBike’s marketing director, said in a statement.
VirchyBike LITE can be pre-ordered on Kickstarter for $399, a mere fraction of the price of other, similar indoor bikes. According to the announcement, the $399 price is available throughout the Kickstarter campaign, which runs until Nov. 2. The campaign has so far raised $36,595, far surpassing its $15,000 goal.
The bike is expected for delivery in February 2018.Play Facebook
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CLEVELAND — Vice President Joe Biden put his working class folksiness to work for presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in northeastern Ohio on Thursday, delivering blow after blow to Republican nominee Donald Trump.
"This is a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth that now he's choking on because his foot's in his mouth along with his spoon!" Biden began the day in Warren, Ohio, arguing that Trump simply “doesn't understand” the realities of working and middle class people.
"My biggest problem with Donald Trump," the vice president continued, "is not his cockamamie policies, it's the way he treats people."
Biden repeatedly hammered Trump on issues of national security — as he did in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania during his first joint campaign event with Clinton in August.
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"The man is totally irresponsible," said Biden. He described how Trump naming President Barack Obama the “founder of [the terror group] ISIS” potentially jeopardized the safety of American lives abroad.
"Donald Trump is simply not qualified to be commander in chief," Biden asserted at his final stop of the day in Parma, Ohio.
But Biden’s pitch was as much fear-Trump based as it was don’t-fear-Clinton based.
"I know some of you are mad at Hillary, I know some of you look at her and say — let me tell you something man, she gets it," said Biden in Warren’s United Automobile Workers Local 1714 hall.
This message was perhaps specifically tailored to one of Hillary Clinton’s demographic weak spots: white working class men. Both official Clinton campaign events were held in union halls in majority white areas of Ohio.
Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2016, in Cleveland. David Dermer / AP
Biden repeated “She gets it” throughout the day, making the case that Clinton understands the needs of the working and middle class better than Trump.
In addition to his scheduled campaign stops, Biden stopped by Canfield, Ohio’s county fair to greet voters and lend his hand to other candidates.
"Hi, I’m Joe Strickland, I work for Ted Strickland!” Biden told fair goers jokingly as he shook hands alongside Democratic Senate candidate and former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland.
Later he visited a Hillary Clinton field office in Parma and gave an abridged stump speech to volunteers.
"I’m Joe Biden, I work for Hillary," he said as he entered to giggles.RIO DE JANEIRO – The 32 fighters competing in the fourth edition of “The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil” have been revealed.
“TUF: Brazil 4,” which features UFC light heavyweights Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Mauricio Rua as coaches, debuts April 5 in Brazil on Globo and on UFC Fight Pass in the rest of the world
Bantamweight and lightweight fighters will be part of the show, which was taped primarily in Las Vegas between early February and early March. There will be 12 regular-season episodes with the 13th and final episode being the live finale. No date or location has been announced for that event yet.
The new edition of the series begins with an elimination round of fights over two episodes. All winners of the those fights become official cast members. They then compete in a single-elimination tournament, which is the focus of the reality show’s regular-season run. The winners of the two weight classes will receive UFC contracts.
Nogueira was a replacement for Anderson Silva, who was removed from his coaching post by the UFC after two positive drug tests related to his win over Nick Diaz at UFC 183 in January. UFC officials said in a statement that he took over a team that already had been chosen by Silva before he was removed from the show.
“The beginning was difficult because we didn’t know the guys – we hadn’t studied their styles,” Nogueira stated. “But we accepted the challenge, we worked with Anderson’s coaches and everything went well. It was an amazing experience to be able to work with young fighters who have the dream of fighting in the UFC and share those moments with them.”
“I always dreamed of being one of ‘The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil’ coaches,” Rua stated. “And to have this dream come true this season was awesome. This is the first time the show is going to Vegas, which is the heart of the UFC, and the bantamweight and lightweight divisions are great for the Brazilians’ body types, and those divisions are full of talent. The technical level was really high and I can guarantee this season will be exciting.”
The full list of “TUF: Brazil 4” fighters includes:
BANTAMWEIGHTS
Franklyn Arrocha (4-0)
Eduardo Diez (4-0)
Bruno Gustavo (8-2)
Leandro Higo (13-2)
Bruno Korea (4-0
Dileno Lopes (17-1)
Marcos Maju (9-2)
Matheus Mattos (8-0)
Renato Monaco (10-1)
Peter Montibeller (7-0)
Matheus Nicolau (10-1)
Gustavo Sedorio (4-0)
Maycon Silvan (7-2)
Giovanni Soldado (15-1)
Mateus Vasco (12-1)
Reginaldo Vieira (12-3)
LIGHTWEIGHTSWritten By
When a narcissist comes into your life it is like being hit by a freight train.
One day you were going about your everyday life, and within a very short amount of time, before you could even catch your breath you were swept up into an entirely differently reality.
Gary Zukav makes reference to a Hindu poem “Destruction never appears weapon in hand. It comes slyly on tiptoe, making you see bad in good, and good in bad”.
Narcissists come in hard, they come in fast, and once a narcissist has decided that you are a target, he or she doesn’t waste time.
The process almost all narcissists know how to use very well is known as ‘love-bombing’. It is a powerful tool.
Wikipedia describes ‘love bombing’ as this:
Love bombing is an attempt to influence a person by lavish demonstrations of attention and affection. The phrase can be used in different ways. Members of the Unification Church (who reportedly coined the expression) use or have used it themselves to mean a genuine expression of friendship, fellowship, interest, or concern. Critics of cults use the phrase with the implication that the “love” is feigned and the practice is manipulative. It has also been used to refer to abusers in romantic relationships showering their victims with praise, gifts, and affection in the early stages of a relationship.
In this article I will explain how narcissists use love bombing throughout a relationship (especially in the early stages) in order to hook you, as well as how to CLEARLY identify the signs of love bombing and RUN AWAY before it’s too late.
The Narcissist’s Reality Before You Came Into the Picture
Let’s start with the background of where the narcissist has come from before he or she begins to plot how to get you into their world.
The narcissist is likely to have had narcissistic supply dry up, or is in the process of devaluing and discarding a former source of narcissistic supply. This means that the narcissist is looking to build new sources of supply.
Narcissists have no True Self – their inner self has been completely engulfed by the False Self. Therefore any reverence for life – love, compassion, empathy, integrity and genuine connection is null and void.
Because of the narcissist’s barren and internal emptiness he or she needs mirroring to survive. His or her flagging and erratic self-worth and self-value is precariously balanced on the need for outside attention.
To be without narcissistic supply (attention) is the difference between emotional life and death for a narcissist. The narcissist’s internalised wounds often resulting from the unhealed wounds sustained from the mother (or sometimes the father or other authority figures) are relentless. These are the ‘voices’ that continually tell the narcissist ‘you are no good’, ‘you are worthless’, ‘you are a total failure in life’, ‘you don’t deserve to exist’.
The narcissist does not have the resources to deal with, process or heal this inner terminal self-degradation, because he or she dismissed the True Self and created a False Self in its place.
This False Self is pathological – it is false. And through this faux self which requires constant stimulation and reinforcement of the narcissist’s grandiose version of himself (to escape inner constant torment) people are needed to feed this fake construction.
Normal life disappointments can be processed by people who are non-narcissists with relative ease. A narcissist does not have the inner mechanics to deal with ‘disappointments’ ‘set backs’ or the confronting of his or her ‘reality’ – that he or she is in fact imperfect and not the grandiose false version that is presented to the world.
Constant narcissistic supply is necessary to avoid him or herself, as a bottomless and never-ending quest to escape dealing with the emotional annihilation of what the narcissist really feels about him or herself.
A narcissist low on narcissistic supply needs to secure narcissistic supply as soon as possible. This will be his or her all-consuming focus.
And this is where love bombing comes into play…
The Difference Between Neediness and Pathological Narcissism
You must understand that the narcissistic emotional ‘love’ model is not the normal human one we know. Narcissists are insatiably needy. We know there are ‘needy’ people in the world – but the normal human version of ‘needy’ bares very little resemblance to a narcissist’s neediness.
Needy people are needy people, and have low self-esteem and deficient self-emotional resources, but they are not the pathological, relentless and lethal version of ‘neediness’ that the narcissist is.
Needy people are often very unskilled at the art of persuasion and romance, and may be very off-putting in their advances. It has often been said neediness is the worst cologne – and this is very true. ‘Normal’ needy people often don’t secure love relationships quickly because people are repelled by their shaky advances.
The narcissist is a completely different ball game. He or she is the most needy of all the needy people (requiring narcissistic supply like a heroin addict requires heroin), and his or her literal emotional survival has depended on acquiring narcissistic supply.
Therefore the narcissist has been able to intricately learn and perfect the craft of how to secure narcissistic supply – quickly, flawlessly and expertly. Narcissists appear to be very confident, and very much ‘in their power’ when romancing and wooing you.
Intense Idealisation
Those who understand narcissistic behaviour realise the intense cycle of idealisation (adoring) and devaluing (abhorring).
The start of a love bombing episode with a narcissist is TOTAL idealisation. Valuable and consistent sources of narcissistic supply are necessary for the narcissist to escape into his or her magical world again of being adored, special, unique and ‘wonderful’.
When a narcissist decides a love partner is a valuable source of narcissistic supply – he or she will completely overrate, idealise this person and put them on a pedestal.
In the narcissist’s pathological landscape this offers the ‘greatest bang for buck’, that he or she has secured the most intelligent, creative, good looking, amazing, wealthy, resourceful or incredible source of supply possible.
The narcissist convinces him or herself (narcissist’s have incredible child-like imaginations) how INCREDIBLE this source of supply is.
This is how the narcissist highly values the narcissistic supply he or she has just ‘won’.
Inevitably the initial adoring comes at a very high price for the person who has been secured for narcissistic supply, and the fall, the devaluing is imminent – when the False Self is not being fed exactly what it requires – and the previously adored partner will be devalued and discarded.
This will always happen, because any critique, ‘slight’ real or imagined, or differing opinion undermines the narcissist’s grandiose version of self and is interpreted as the narcissist as a complete attack and possible annihilation on his or her precarious emotional foundation.
Once narcissistic supply has dried up, or the narcissist is confronted too often with his tormented inner self, without ‘the right’ narcissistic supply from you as relief, the narcissist has the ability to switch relationships quickly, just as he or she can completely change jobs, lifestyle and communities. All source of narcissistic supply which are not cutting the grade are dispensable.
Unhealthy Romantic Behaviour
Unfortunately there have been too many romantic movies, books and songs written about undying instant love, and couples getting together quickly, romantically and living happily ever after.
I am not saying this isn’t possible – but it certainly is not probable, and if you have ever been narcissistically abused then it is TOTALLY not worth the risk of EVER falling into an instant relationship in the future.
The truth is if what has presented to you is a real relationship, then absolutely it will stand the test of time, and you are narc-proofing yourself by taking your time.
This is not about being paranoid; it is about being a mature, sensible and healthy adult.
Someone who moves very quickly to secure you into a relationship and / or a sexual connection is not someone who is sensible or mature themself and is not being mindful about the long term implications of a relationship.
It is obvious they are also not concerned with empathy for you – in regard to the long term consequences of a relationship.
Such as ‘I don’t want to rush things before I am really sure, and play with this person’s heart and emotions. I want to be really sure, so I don’t unnecessary hurt this person or myself.’
Rushing, which of course includes love bombing are all the signs of instant gratification which narcissists are famous for (I need energy / attention / drama / stuff now and quickly to avoid my inner demons and tortured true self.)
Anyone who puts their heart on their sleeve immediately, or asks you for a committed relationship after one date (or even a few), or starts showering you with intense and incredible compliments straight away is VERY suspect.
This is NOT what normal healthy adults do.
When a narcissist is in the courting phase of securing narcissistic supply, he or she thrusts all available energy at the target of new narcissistic supply. The narcissist is full of energy, excited, and very forthcoming with future dreams and plans (which of course are everything you want to hear). Energy, gifts, compliments, effort, charms, talents and emotions are lavished on the new target.
The narcissist is a chameleon. He or she is able to mould, shape-shift and become anything that you want him or her to be. The narcissist has no real dreams, passions, preferences and certainly no real human values. Everything that the narcissist has crafted in his or her life has been for one reason only which is to secure narcissistic supply.
This is why so many people report that the narcissist seemed to have the exact same viewpoints, goals, future dreams, values and aspirations as themselves. All of this was false, the narcissist actually has no identity for him or herself, the narcissist steals identities to know he or she exists.
You need to know the narcissist is a pathological liar. If he or she is speaking, or writing an email or text you have absolutely no way to know whether or not the information is a lie. The narcissist is engulfed by an all pervasive False Self – which means this person is a phony – through and through.
What you can be sure of is every statement the narcissist makes – true or false (which is totally irrelevant to the narcissist) – is driven by the all-consuming need to acquire and contain narcissistic supply.
You need to GET REAL, this person showering you with compliments and attention does not even know you.
He or she has no idea until getting to know you whether or not you would make a good partner (which is exactly what you should be thinking as well) and this due-diligence takes time. It necessitates getting to know someone first (as a friendship first) to ascertain and build a healthy synopsis from.
The truth is narcissists aren’t worried about all the details of a long-term relationship. A narcissist is simply concerned with securing narcissistic supply as quickly as possible.
For some reason you fit this bill. You have great positive energy – which the narcissist can drain, you are attractive and intelligent – which is a good fit for the narcissist’s ego to show off, you fall for the narcissist’s charms – which means you will easily provide the narcissist with sex, you are successful and have resources – which the narcissist can start extracting from you…and the list goes on and on.
These are the things that make the narcissist exert his or her pathological laser like focus to do whatever it takes to secure you into a relationship – and as quickly as this can take place.
Being a narcissist and securing reliable and steady sources of narcissistic supply is exhausting, and his or her energies must secure a payoff and quickly.
For the narcissist it is about filling the need now, and making you as dependent as possible of him or her, so that he or she can extract narcissistic supply for as long as the narcissist chooses to.
Subconsciously (at least) narcissists know their relationships fall apart and are doomed to fail. Therefore the long view is not important.
Healthy Courting Behaviour
People who date healthily and who do have a True Self are not playing the game of needing instant gratification and needing to secure narcissistic supply.
They are mature and sensible enough to realise that a potential life long relationship takes time to ascertain, it takes time to get to know a person, and time to see if a love relationship could work healthily.
Mature, ‘normal’ adults do not start using excessive charm, target quickly and start professing all the reasons why you are so incredible, their soul mate, how much they love you and ‘where have you been all my life’, and all the reasons why ‘you are so different from all the others’.
They do not try to get in to an instant relationship with you – they take their time to get to know you.
They do not start sending incredible long romantic texts (that resemble something out of a movie or book), they do not write you exquisite love notes and letters, and they do not act out ‘over-the-top’ romantic statements and surprises.
Healthy mature adults may feel intense feelings of connection, but they will keep their cards to their chest for a while, they will see if these feelings are reciprocated by you, and they will play it gently and respectfully – and take their time.
In stark contrast narcissists will forge ahead, put it all on the line with love bombing and even when you tell them you are not ‘where they are at yet’ (if you aren’t) will carry on love bombing, telling you they have a right to declare their undying love, and don’t respect or hear that you may need some time to catch up to their feelings of ‘love’ (which appears to be ‘real’ but of course isn’t).
This is one of the surest ways you know you are with a narcissist. He or she will not back off on the love bombing if you don’t feel the same way.
The ‘romantic’ gestures, statements, text messages still continue and may even intensify.
Then if you don’t cave in to it, they may try to bully you, guilt you, confuse you, appeal to your compassion, frighten you (with threats of abandonment) or use another manipulative tactic to force you into succumbing.
You see a narcissist likes to win. He or she does not want to exert the force of love-bombing without securing the prize. To not win constitutes an enormous narcissistic injury. If it can’t be achieved by love-bombing, then cruel manipulation may ensue.
A non-narcissistic person, if they really wanted to develop a healthy relationship with you, would willingly back off, give you some time and respect ‘where you are at’.
A narcissist certainly won’t.
How to Flush Out a Narcissist When You Meet One
It is so important to not get caught up with love bombing, because being intensely idealised is one of the surest signs that further down the track you will be horrifically devalued and abused.
When you are the new source of narcissistic supply – the narcissist is high on his or her drug, and appears to be madly in love, incredibly attentive, adores you, worships you – and will tell you just how much you are adored and worshipped.
I know this can be incredibly difficult to accept at first, but you must be very clear, this love is not about ‘you’ as a person – it is about you being a supplier of the drug – narcissistic supply. It was never about you, it was always point blank about the narcissist ONLY.
You were simply an object dispensing narcissistic supply, and in the early days you supplied it in great measure. Partially due to the fact that you felt so loved and adored by the perfect partner that you had wanted all your life, and because the narcissist is so ‘high’ on ‘what a fantastic source of supply you are’.
Non-narcissistic people know this as ‘feelings of obsession’ (even if we don’t want to admit it). To the narcissist it is TOTALLY about getting the DRUG – narcissistic supply.
Beware of someone asking you intense inner and personal questions.
Beware of the words “I want to know everything there is to know about you”.
This is a definite red flag especially when coupled with love bombing.
Narcissists enmesh, they ensnare, engulf and bond intensely and quickly. Any information derived from you is to know how best to control you as a source of narcissistic supply. And the narcissist will use this information mercilessly in the future to exact punishment on you when you are not maintaining his or her False Self sufficiently.
What you will find out down the track is just how important narcissistic supply is, and how unimportant you are in comparison.
You will discover the narcissist will lie, cheat and use any pathological method to get it and secure it. You will discover that when the narcissist is no longer having his or her ego stroked by you, that the brand of narcissistic supply will now become how much the narcissist can affect you, create fear, paranoia and pain within you, (negative attention serves the narcissist the same as positive attention) – this is when the narcissist will use projection to label you as all the things that he or she does not take responsibility for (lying, adultery, abuse, selfishness, manipulation, etc).
Where does ‘love’ come in to it now?
It doesn’t – the fact is it never did.
You will also discover that the narcissist will not hesitate to replace you with other sources of narcissistic supply, or seek ones out on the side if the drug you are providing is not up to scratch. (And it never can be consistently because the pathological False Self is never sufficiently appeased for any durable length of time).
So this is the awful eventuality if you end up with a narcissist – and the chances are if someone is love bombing you – this is EXACTLY what you are signing up for.
I believe in love – absolutely and so should you. But ONLY with mature, real people who actually do have a True Self and are capable of being real love.
So how do you know that someone is the real deal?
Watch and listen. Have you heart open, but be very sensible. Don’t fall for gushing and love bombing statements, or ostentatious favours, offering of gifts, assistance and over-the-top romantic compliments.
Make the remark and be firm about it “It’s far too soon to be saying / offering that, you don’t even know me, and I don’t know you”.
Make it clear that you are in no hurry to enter a relationship and you would like to get to know someone first. Do not allow someone to sweep you off your feet, and force their way in to your life, bed and heart.
If the person attempting to do this does NOT HEAR YOU and pull up, and refrain from doing it – GET AWAY and STAY AWAY.
A few weeks (or even months) of spending time with someone – without having sex – and without making a commitment to be in a relationship is one of the healthiest moves you could ever do. If this person is keen and a genuine love connection with this person is possible – they will ABSOLUTELY respect your decision – and they will NOT continue to love bomb you with attention and adulation.
If this person is real and mature they will wish to walk this sensible line anyway.
If you meet someone who agrees to take their time with you – and you know they are present, able to be by themself, and don’t show signs of being in side relationships with others (which narcissists usually do) then this is a great sign that you are engaging with someone who is a True Self.
Obviously you need to have done enough work on yourself to not be needy (partners of narcissists are notoriously prone to ‘dependencies’), and to not be so empty or lonely that you want to rush things, and to not fear that this person will run off with someone who they can hook up with much quicker.
Anyone who has been narcissistically abused knows the gamble of letting someone enmesh with them quickly – and how in reflection the narcissist preyed on your vulnerabilities to make you dependent on him or her so that you could be targeted and snared for narcissistic supply, which of course set you up for soul-shattering abuse.
I know exactly how hard it is to get out – despite suffering the horrific devaluing and discarding episodes. Especially when dealing with an altruistic narcissist, I remember saying “If only this could change it would be perfect!”
Please understand a love relationship with a narcissist is merely an illusion, it was never real, and it is never going to be.
I hope this article has helped you get clear, and realise what was really taking place when you met the narcissist, and how to be very clear about people who use love bombing on you in the future.
I would love to hear your comments about this article, and I would also appreciate it very much if you pass this information on to help people avoid narcissists in the future.
(Visited 89,266 times, 4 visits today)David Cameron is finalising plans for a cabinet reshuffle that is expected to affect all ranks from senior cabinet members to junior ministers.
The new cabinet lineup could be revealed on Tuesday and would be in place for the second half of the parliament and the runup to the 2015 general election.
According to reports, George Osborne, William Hague and Theresa May are expected to stay in their posts, but high-ranking figures such as Kenneth Clarke and Jeremy Hunt could be moved.
How are the current ministers doing? Tell us who you think should stay where they are and who should depart in our poll and share your thoughts on your selection in the comments below.
We've included some other minister who also attend cabinet meetings, such as David Willetts and Dominic Grieve in the list below.The Heritage Foundation chartered a bus in late January and sent 40 Members and a handful of staffers from the House Republican Study Committee to the Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia for a three-day retreat.
If the nonprofit, ideological think tank employed lobbyists to influence the Members it sent on the trip, as it has in the past, House ethics rules would have barred Heritage from picking up the tab.
But because Heritage alumni opened an affiliated — but separate — lobbying shop and “membership organization” in 2010, Heritage was able to pay for the trip without running afoul of Congressional travel restrictions. It cost more than $50,000, according to records maintained by LegiStorm.
Just five years ago, Congress amended its ethics rules to prohibit private groups that retain lobbyists from arranging, organizing and financing most Congressional trips that last longer than one day. But, as Roll Call has reported, Members of Congress and their staffers continue to take trips sponsored by groups that don’t lobby themselves but maintain formal affiliations with lobbyists and advocacy organizations and do so with the blessing of the House Ethics Committee.
“It gives a patina of respectability to the travel that it probably doesn’t deserve,” Campaign Legal Center’s Meredith McGehee said.
January was an illustrative month for how organizations with strong ties to lobbying interests continue to sponsor Congressional travel, even quasi-official membership retreats.
Just days before the excursion to Philadelphia, the Congressional Institute, a nonprofit with a board consisting almost entirely of registered lobbyists, spent more than $60,000 to send more than five dozen staffers to meet their bosses in Baltimore for the annual House Republican Conference retreat, LegiStorm records show.
Though lawmakers pay their own way to the meetings, the institute pays hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to send staffers to the January retreat, as well as another it hosts in the spring for chiefs of staff.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) approved 13 staffers to make the trip to Baltimore; Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) approved travel for 11 others, according to LegiStorm records.
Every member of the Congressional Institute’s board is a current or former registered lobbyist — for organizations that include Verizon, American Express, UPS, Altria and Boston Scientific, according to OpenSecrets.org.
President Mark Strand, who last registered as a lobbyist in 2002, said lobbyists on the board “don’t have anything to do with any aspect of planning the trip. They are not involved whatsoever, they don’t speak, they don’t have a role in the events or plan the agenda.”
Lobbyists were given the opportunity to hobnob with the lawmakers and staffers at an opening reception and dinner at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel before holding their own separate meetings the next day, Strand said.
A similar retreat for House Democrats was financed by official and campaign funds, a spokesman confirmed.
The Heritage trip to Philadelphia also is an annual event. A Republican Study Committee spokesman said Heritage reaches out to the Congressional group to get suggestions and advice before planning and underwriting the conference each year.
Last year, Heritage spent almost $125,000 to fly about 50 Members and a few staffers — along with spouses and other family members — to Simi Valley in January 2011 so they could be near the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library for a retreat titled “In the Steps of Reagan.”
The trip was just months after foundation employees left to open an affiliated advocacy organization called Heritage Action for America, which spent more than $150,000 lobbying Congress last year.
Michael Franc, as vice president of governmental studies at the Heritage Foundation and supervisor of Congressional outreach, submits the travel pre-authorization forms to the House Ethics Committee. Franc is also a director at Heritage Action.
Heritage Action is an “organization that maintains one class of membership and its sole member is the Heritage Foundation,” according to its most recent tax filing, though a spokesman said there are 35,000 individuals who contributed financially to the organization last year.
Franc said that despite the links between the two groups, Heritage’s advocacy arm has no role in the trips the foundation plans for lawmakers.
“The retreat was a 50,000-foot extended dissertation on our founding principles” and should be distinguished from a trip pushing particular legislation, Franc said.
Heritage Action is “very targeted in terms of policy advocacy,” he added.
Critics say underwriting an advocacy arm is no different than hiring a lobbying shop, but the technical distinction allows an entity to certify that it does not “retain or employ a federally registered lobbyist” when it asks for approval from the House Ethics Committee.
“Looking just a few years back, the so-called charity Heritage Foundation itself was [a Lobbying Disclosure Act] registrant in 2006, employing the lobbying services of Foley & Lardner. Today, the foundation employs the lobbying services of Heritage Action. These are not distinct entities,” said Public Citizen’s Craig Holman, who took an active role in helping draft the 2007 reforms.Two Champions League hopefuls faced off at White Hart Lane in a bid to keep pace with the clubs above them. Both sides knew, given the competitiveness of the league this season, dropping points against a fellow contender could be disastrous. AVB had steadied the Spurs ship after a run of poor games, but the lack of goals and a poor home form still persisted. Rodgers’ side had been free scoring and winning at home, but a not so impressive away form (last away win coming in September) left many questioning their true ability. It was a chance for both to stamp their authority on the league and a top 4 place.
Tottenham were on the back of a victory over Anzhi in midweek in the Europa League, a match in which Soldado scored his first hat-trick for the London club. Liverpool on the other hand, came in to the game after a 4-1 victory over West Ham, but were without their injured captain Steven Gerrard (in addition to the injured Daniel Sturridge). It meant Luis Suarez was given the captain’s armband for the first time.
Tottenham Hotspur 0-5 Liverpool
Line Ups
Tottenham Hotspur: Lloris, Walker, Naughton (Fryers 45′), Capoue, Dawson, Sandro (Holtby 30′), Dembele (Townsend 61′), Paulinho, Chadli, Lennon, Soldado
Liverpool: Mignolet, Johnson, Flanagan, Skrtel, Sakho, Lucas (Alberto 79′), Allen, Henderson, Coutinho (Moses 90′), Sterling, Suarez
A solid Liverpool midfield, led by Lucas
In the absence of Steven Gerrard, Liverpool lacked a creative spark from midfield. It was upto the more attackingly positioned Coutinho and Suarez to add that creativity into the side. Lucas, Allen and Henderson though, still had a duty perform, which they did so with impeccable quality.
Lucas was fantastic at defending against the Spurs attack, proving to be more than just adept at covering the back four. He constantly cut out the Spurs attack from creating key chances. While he got some crucial blocks in and around the box, it was right in the centre of midfield where he proved to be most effective, putting an end to Spurs attacks before they even reached the final third.
As seen above here, Lucas was always quick to to defend against an approaching Spurs’ attack, he was assisted by a solid defensive shape from the back-four and tireless fellow midfielders. Henderson, Allen and Coutinho, all of whom were regulars in Liverpool’s attacking runs were also able to adequately discharge their defensive duties. The Liverpool midfielders were thus successful in crowding out Spurs’ attacking zones and preventing them from playing their football, or completing passes to build up their play.
The 3 Liverpool midfielders (and Coutinho) combined well to win back possession for their side and quickly recycle it to play it out of their own half. A quick one-two passing game amongst the midfielders was sufficient to easily and calmly get the ball away and start an attack. It’s the sort of football Rodgers’ has been trying to implement in his Liverpool side, those nifty little triangles arising out of good understanding between the players.
The above is a perfect example at the midfield’s hardwork. After Liverpool lost possession, Allen chased Dembele down, making a clean tackle from behind, the lose ball came Lucas’ way and before a Spurs’ player could put excessive pressure on the side, he played a first touch short pass onto Henderson’s path who shifted his zone (from defense to attack) upon Allen winning the ball back. Coutinho (at the bottom of the picture) quickly made a run into attack along with Henderson, who had possession. It was in this way that Liverpool successfully countered Spurs’ attack even before it started.
Joe Allen made an incredible 7 tackles, 6 of which were right in the centre of midfield, helping his side regaining possession (illustrated above) on a number of occasions. Lucas made 4 interceptions in the centre of midfield, further preventing Spurs’ attacks. The Liverpool midfield completed 166 passes between them at impressive completion rates- Allen (90%), Henderson (92%) and Lucas (94%).
Henderson and Allen’s forward runs
While the Liverpool midfielders were exceptional in their defensive play and distribution, they were also particularly impressive in their attacking display. Gerrard, besides creating opportunities, was vital in making runs into the box. Henderson and Allen were able to replicate this against Spurs. Henderson, who has vastly improved, made regular bursts forward, contributing to the two first half goals. He pressed the Spurs defence for the first goal, winning back possession and seeing the ball roll onto Suarez’ path.
The second goal, though coming after a series of rebounds, was made possible by Henderson’s forward run. The ex-Sunderland man made a darting run towards the box as soon as a long ball was played towards Coutinho, who managed to find his run with a deft first touch.
Joe Allen too was regularly making bursts forward as Lucas was more than adequately protecting the back four and the midfield area. More importantly, the Welshman was composed in the opponents half and was able to pull off quick passes in attacking zones. Something which he desperately lacked earlier on in the season.
Luis Suarez drops deep
Liverpool’s captain for the night scored his 16th and 17th goals of the season as he continues to be the league’s stand out performer. The Uruguayan has led by example throughout the campaign and finds himself at the top of his game. Often it is just a spark of brilliance that separates Suarez from the rest of the players. He did well |
economic output, gross domestic product (GDP).
Yet deep inequalities, which became a hot-button political issue in the wake of a deep recession and financial crisis that highlighted those disparities, paint a different picture of how well off most Americans really are.
Research from Berkeley economists has found incomes at the top 0.001% of the income strata surged a whopping 636% between 1980 and 2014, while wages for the bottom half of the population were basically stuck in place.
Critics of that body of work say its use of pre-tax data masks some of the equalizing effects of the tax code, and thus overstates inequality. If that were indeed the case, a look at the distribution of wealth as opposed to just income, while harder to measure, could be a better barometer as to the true state of America's social divide.
This chart courtesy of Deutsche Bank economist Torsten Slok shows the picture with regards to wealth is even bleaker. The richest 10% of families are worth a combined $51 trillion, equal to 75% of total household wealth. To put that figure in perspective, US GDP totaled $18.5 trillion in 2016.Image caption Cockroach brains contain powerful antimicrobial compounds which can kill MRSA
Cockroaches, far from being a health hazard, could be a rich source of antibiotics.
A study of locust and cockroach brains has found a number of chemicals which can kill bugs like MRSA.
Scientists hope these could become a powerful new weapon to boost the dwindling arsenal of antibiotics used to treat severe bacterial infections.
The research was announced at a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology.
The researchers discovered nine different chemicals in the brains of locusts and cockroaches, which all had anti microbrial properties strong enough to kill 90% of MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) while not harming human cells.
Cockroaches have a reputation for tenacity and for thriving in dirty environments.
Simon Lee from Nottingham University is the author of the study. He said that it is this capacity to live in dirty, infectious conditions that mean insect brains contain these kinds of compounds.
"They must have some sort of defense against micro organisms. We think their nervous system needs to be continuously protected because if the nervous system goes down the insect dies. But they can suffer damage to their peripheral structures without dying," he told BB News.
He hopes the compounds could go on to be used to treat multi drug resistant infections like E. Coli and MRSA which are becoming increasingly difficult to treat using some of the most powerful antibiotics available to medicine.
"A kill rate of 90% is very very high, and I diluted the substance down so there was only a minute amount there. Conventional antbiotics reduce the number of the bacteria and let your immune system cope with the rest. So to get something with such a high kill rate that is so potent at such a low dose is very promising," he told BBC News.
The compound would need years of testing for safety and efficacy before any drugs developed from them could go on the market.Story highlights There are reports of more legal cases involving war veterans suffering from PTSD
Using PTSD as a defense for serious crimes isn't easy, one legal expert says
In 2009, a jury found an Iraq war veteran legally insane but guilty of murder
He could have served 25 years in prison; instead, he got treatment
Raymond Williams had just retired and was looking forward to traveling out west with his wife and spending time with his three grandchildren. But all those plans were shattered on April 6, 2009. As Williams, 64, went to get the mail on that spring day, he was gunned down by a man he'd never met.
His wife found his body.
"She said, you know 'Matt! Matt! Somebody shot Dad,'" recalled Williams' son, Matt. "It didn't register. I'm thinking, 'OK where is he now? Did they take him to the hospital? What hospital is he in?' And before I could even get another word out, she goes 'And he's dead.'"
A short time earlier, the same gunman had killed a teenager and wounded a woman at a store in the same working-class town of Altoona in central Pennsylvania.
The gunman, Nicholas Horner, was a husband, a father, and a veteran soldier who had been awarded multiple medals for his service in Iraq, including a combat action badge. Less than a year after returning from combat, Horner faced two first degree murder charges and the possibility of the death penalty.
"Not in a million years could I believe this was true because Nick would never, he could never hurt anyone," said Horner's mother, Karen. "I know Nick. Nick pulled the trigger, but that wasn't Nick."
After he returned from Iraq, Horner was a different person, his mother said. He barely left his home and, oftentimes, his wife would find him crying in the corner of the basement.
Less than a year after returning from combat in Iraq, Nick Horner was charged with two murders.
"He wasn't my little boy anymore," said Karen Horner. "You could see in his eyes, he had seen things and done things that probably none of us should ever see."
There was no question that Horner had committed the crime, and his attorney would not argue otherwise. The question was whether Horner was to blame.
"I argued to the jury in my opening (statement), I said I believe that the Iraq war came home that day," said defense attorney Tom Dickey.
Horner was one of the thousands of soldiers and veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. In total the military says 90,000 currently serving troops who fought in those wars were diagnosed with PTSD. The number from the Veterans Administration is well over 200,000.
After a decade of combat, PTSD is being used as a criminal defense in the courtroom. Horner's case would test whether this combat-related illness could be accepted as a defense for murder.
The crime
The morning of the shootings, Horner dropped his kids off at school and went shopping with his wife. An argument ensued and he stormed away, armed with his.45-caliber handgun.
"He left Walmart and went to a bowling alley, where he sat all afternoon and drank several... at least two pitchers of beer," said prosecutor Jackie Bernard.
Horner ordered food, talked to people and then walked over to the Subway sandwich shop intending to rob it, the prosecutor said.
Scott Garlick was months away from his high school graduation when he was fatally gunned down by Horner.
Witnesses said Horner pounded on the shop's back door trying to get in. Evidence showed that Horner cut the electrical wires to the restaurant and even tried to shoot out the utility box.
Horner's lawyer argues he was in the middle of a PTSD episode and, to him, the Subway looked like a building in Iraq.
"Why do you in broad daylight enter from the rear and announce yourself by firing, you know, five or six shots?" Dickey said.
Once inside, Horner shot and killed Subway worker Scott Garlick, a teenager two months shy of graduating high school. He then shot and injured another worker, Michelle Petty, and stole about $130.
"And when he left, he walked over to Scott's body as he lay bleeding there and said to him: 'Sorry, I didn't wanna have to do that to you,'" said Bernard.
Several blocks away, Horner spotted Raymond Williams. Prosecutors argue he killed Williams for his car keys to try to get away.
During the trial Horner pleaded "diminished capacity" in an effort to persuade the jury to find him not guilty because of PTSD.
PTSD on trial
The same year as the Altoona shootings, an Oregon jury found Iraq war veteran Jessie Bratcher guilty of murder but legally insane. So, instead of serving 25 years in a maximum security prison, Bratcher was provided treatment at the Oregon State Hospital.. A medical review board keeps track of his progress, and his attorney says he could be released as early as this month.
"I can honestly tell you that I would have never shot anybody if it hadn't been from PTSD," Bratcher said.
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The ex-soldier got into a shoving match with a man who he believed raped his girlfriend. The argument ended with Bratcher unloading six hollow-point bullets into victim Jose Medina, killing him.
"I remember him threatening and pushing me, then having flashbacks of Iraq... like seeing my buddy get killed in Iraq," Bratcher said.
From the moment he set foot in Iraq, Bratcher said he was bombarded by rockets and mortars. When he returned, he had trouble sleeping, couldn't hold a job, and was behaving unusually.
"I remember his sister said that once she looked out the window, and he was in the backyard working in the garden and he had his AK-47 slung over his shoulder," said Markku Sario, Bratcher's attorney. Bratcher would live out in the woods for weeks at a time and set up perimeters that he could defend, Sario said.
Like the Horner case, there was no question that Bratcher killed the victim. Bratcher had turned himself in to authorities after the shooting.
"There was no defense to the action," said Sario. "The only defense that was possible was either good negotiation -- but we had a district attorney who wasn't interested in negotiating -- or some sort of mental defense."
A PTSD diagnosis has helped Iraq and Afghanistan veterans win acquittals of lesser crimes like robbery, and has reduced prison terms for others. But Bratcher's attorney said this case represents the first major criminal exoneration linked to PTSD since the Vietnam war. The defense had been used with some degree of success in the years following that war.
"It's not a defense that has been written up a lot. It hasn't been used a lot," said Sario.
But that's changing. Now defense attorneys are advertising their expertise to troops facing charges, with hooks like "Criminal Defense Lawyers for Veterans with PTSD."
One veterans' group, the National Veterans Foundation, is creating a manual on how to defend veterans with PTSD -- detailing tips like finding witnesses from the defendant's squad. Such a witness "can testify as to the horrific events that the defendant has gone through, because those are the things that sell to a jury," said Sario, who also is helping compile NVF's manual.
Not an easy defense
Currently, the crime rates associated with Iraq or Afghanistan veterans diagnosed with PTSD are not tracked. But a 1988 study of Vietnam veterans could provide a glimpse into what is to come as more veterans return from these wars.
About 480,000, or just over 15%, of all Vietnam veterans included in a National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey done about a decade after the war were diagnosed with PTSD. Of those diagnosed, about half had been arrested or jailed at least once (34% more than once) and 11.5% had been convicted of a felony, according to the survey.
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Today, many in the criminal justice system are reporting an increase in cases involving war veterans suffering from PTSD.
"Presently I'm swamped with cases, and they've been increasing," said William Brown, a criminal justice professor at Western Oregon University who testifies as an expert witness. "We haven't begun to see the wave of all this."
With no concrete statistics available, Brown bases his forecast off of his own caseload and studies he's done at the Marion County jail system in Oregon. Marion County is one of the few places where those in jail are asked their veteran status.
"There's no structure available right now to even quantify it," he said.
But if a PTSD defense is used inappropriately, a judge and jury might see it as making an excuse and the defense may backfire.
"If you try to shoehorn it inappropriately, it is not received well," said Dr. Landy Sparr, director of the forensic psychiatry training program at Oregon Health & Science University.
Sparr, who has expertise in mental incapacity defenses, said PTSD is not an easy defense to use and cautions against the idea that there will be an epidemic of these cases.
"PTSD as an insanity defense in a murder case is hard to use because the person knows the difference between right and wrong," said Sparr. "They are not delusional or psychotic. For example, they do not believe they have killed a Martian instead of a human."
And Sparr adds that, depending on the state's law, the other issue may be whether or not the defendant could have controlled his or her behavior.
"In either case, you usually have to prove that the defendant was in the throes of a flashback when committing the crime," said Sparr.
The issue of PTSD as a defense for murder could come up when U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales faces court martial for 17 counts of murder stemming from a a bloody massacre in Afghanistan. The March 11 rampage strained already tense U.S.-Afghan relations. Bales' attorney has indicated he intends to raise the issue of his client's mental state during the upcoming trial.
The verdict
Nick Horner's mother says that after he returned from Iraq, her talkative son didn't mumble more than a few words.
"Everything started to change... the phone calls got less and less, the conversations got shorter," said Karen Horner. "He would have to have a weapon with him constantly to feel safe and secure. The doors were always locked in his home. He couldn't go into public without having panic attacks."
Nick Horner's lawyer argued he was confused by a mix of prescription drugs used to treat PTSD.
"That's what I've been trying to argue throughout, is that Nick is sick and not evil," said Dickey
The prosecutor, however, told jurors those drugs did not impair Horner's judgment.
"He had the ability to form the specific intent to kill. And he did have the intent to kill when he shot Scott and Mr. Williams," said Bernard.
In the end, three medical experts agreed with the prosecution and so did the jury. PTSD was not a sufficient excuse for murder in this case.
"I understand that Mr. Horner saw things in Iraq that were probably horrifying, but you know, so did we. One thing I know that he didn't see was the image of his father, you know, laying on the asphalt in a pool of blood like my mother saw," Matt Williams said.
Nick Horner was convicted of first-degree murder. The jury couldn't agree on the death penalty so he got life in prison.
"We all feel like we're doing a life sentence with Nick right now," said Karen Horner. "It's still a nightmare we can't wake up from."After nearly a decade of land purchases and years of speculation and false starts, the massive NorthSide Regeneration project is set to break ground on its first retail development. A Dollar General retail location is planned for the northeast corner of North Grand and Cass Avenue. All four corners of the intersection are vacant. A $1.4M building permit has been requested for 1500 North Grand with an additional $45,000 permit for additional parking on an adjacent lot along Cass. No site plan has yet been made available.
While many of the more than 2,000 lots comprising NorthSide are scattered across 1,500 acres of the city, the effort has aggregated lots at several high profile locations. The intersection of Grand and Cass was one. NorthSide owns the southeast corner, the city's Land Reutilization Authority (LRA), the northwest corner and a private owner the southwest. Dollar General reached 10,000 stores nationwide in 2012, including 379 in Missouri.
Developer Paul McKee's NorthSide has received nearly $40M from the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage tax credit program (DALACT), which was purposely written for NorthSide. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has recently detailed, NorthSide has ramped up lobbying efforts, signing a small army to push for extending and expanding DALACT and arming them with a series of white papers supporting NorthSide. The only accomplishment to-date has been the assembly of small city lots. Critics of the plan cite the lack of construction and failure to fulfill promises, such as renovating the historic Clemens Mansion.
{NorthSide property on northeast corner of Grand and Cass in red, 1500 N. Grand in orange}
{NorthSide, outlined in red, has marketed the numbered properties for commercial development – the planned Dollar General is 25}
NorthSide Retail Marketing Map by nextSTLWelcome to the annual GosuAwards for Dota 2, where we celebrate the top teams, stories, and players in their individual roles.
Please feel free to read all of our nominations here. This year, you can find some similar categories from last year's with a bit of freshness added in such as the new categories: "Biggest Upset", "Best Roster Transfer", "Best Drama" and "Best Dota 2 Meme".
We will be splitting the awards into three parts. First, the teams will be awarded, followed by the players and then miscellaneous awards for all the other stuff worth mentioning.
But enough of that, let's check out the awards!
Category: Best team
Winner: Alliance
Photo: Valve
Alliance dominated most of 2013 through a mix of innovative strategies and hard work, bringing together what in every sense of the word was a team of talented players, to create one of the most dominating presences in Dota 2 to date. They carved out their place as the kings of the Western scene, and they also made history by going to China and becoming the first non-Chinese team to defeat the locals on their home turf. Their efforts culminated in the taking of the greatest single prize pool in e-Sports history when they defeated Na`Vi on the grand finals of the International 2013. Alliance did deteriorate towards the end of the year, but their string of first place finishes throughout the year should be able to cover their recent short slump.
Runner-up: Na`Vi, for a consistent great showing for most of the year and for taking top billing in the West heading into 2014.
Community poll results Winner: Na`Vi (38%) Runner-up: Alliance (34%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Most improved team
Winner: Fnatic
Photo: GosuGamers
At the start of 2013, there were still quite a lot of doubters when it came to Fnatic being able to earn themselves a spot at The International. Yet 12 months later, it seems impossible to tell the story of Dota 2 without them. They’ve established themselves as the third European powerhouse, forever present on the scene, fighting through tough times in order to time and again give the world's best a run for their money. There is no doubt that heading into the new year, they’ve silenced all doubts regarding whether they will become a mainstay of the scene, and a household name as Dota 2 continues it’s growth in 2014.
Runner-up: Speed Gaming, for a strong second half including first place at MLG Columbus.
Community poll results Winner: Speed (45%) Runner-up: Fnatic (26%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Most disappointing
Winner : LGD.Int
Photo: LGD
At the tail end of last year, we lived in a world where China was still the undeniable superpower of Dota and the sole custodians of our future. At this time, the prospect of a team of Western players heading off on this journey to the promised land was not only sensational but hopeful, and that hope was rewarded through their strong showing during the G-League group stages. But as the new year rolled in, things went sour and the LGD.Int experiment turned to dust; losing their own flair and causing many to lose all faith in the prospects of Western Dota. This malaise lasted for several months, until Alliance came in and showed that the answer was not in the LGD.Int model, but that by working hard at home, Western teams could find a new path to success. Their decision to return to China after The International 3 was nothing but further disappointment for their fans. The team more or less disbanded a few days before their WPC-ACE League playoffs match.
Runner-up: Virtus.Pro, for their post-TI3 roster disaster.
Community poll results Winner : Virtus.Pro (39%) Runner-up: LGD.Int (28%) Results
Photos: Virtus.Pro, LGD
Category: Best carry
Winner: Loda
Photo: GosuGamers
Internally, this was cause for a huge debate as Loda and XBOCT are as close as it could get this year, both performing to the very limits of their capabilities. In the end, our pick was the Swedish “living legend”, who impressed the Chinese with his wide array of carry heroes at the G-1 League and became the flexible backbone for his team. This enabled their style of drafting which could lead the opponents to simply throw up their hands and admit that while they knew what was coming, they could never prevent it from happening. Loda has been the bedrock upon which Alliance built a year of dominance.
Runner-up: XBOCT, for epitomizing the aggressive carry player who takes things to the edge, and then pushes the boundaries of the possible.
Community poll results Winner: XBOCT (39%) Runner-up: BurNing (30%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Best solo mid
Winner: Mushi
Photo: GosuGamers
Mushi has for a long time been one of the very best players in the world and was widely considered the epitome of a great laner, yet for whatever reason true success has seemed to elude him in the past. However in 2013, not only did Mushi lead Orange to become a constant competitor in Chinese competitions, his versatility allowed the Malaysian sensation to storm The International. Playing an unmatched array of heroes, he thus allowed his team to counter their opponents styles of play by constantly adapting. Mushi's efforts were rewarded with a third place at The International 3, the best finish for an Eastern team, and ultimately leading him into being picked up by DK. Becoming the dynamo of action for the new super team, Mushi has helped DK make their bid for being the best team in China, and possibly the world, clear.
Runner-up: s4, for his great teamfight awareness as well as impeccable and consistent execution.
Community poll results Winner: Mushi (44%) Runner-up: Dendi (36%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Best secondary solo
Winner: Admiralbulldog
Photo: GosuGamers
There’s little doubt that the Bulldog shot to stardom this year, with his Lone Druid and Nature’s Prophet being perhaps the most defining heroes of the whole year; an ever present thorn in their opponents sides. Bulldog has taken up the mantle left behind by LighTofHeaveN as the great split-pushing semi-carry, having the capability of taking his team on his back, and carrying them to victory when called upon to do so. He may not have been the most versatile this year, but don’t knock what works! Runner-up: iceiceice, for being the most YOLO player. He will more or less decide his team's victory. He also plays a wide range of heroes.
Community poll results Winner: iceiceice (35%) Runner-up: AdmiralBulldog (29%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Best supports
Winner: Puppey and Akke
Photo: GosuGamers
Both Alliance and Na`Vi were the hallmarks of great support play this year, and above all else these two players proved instrumental in creating the positions for their teams to win games, in particular with their shared signature heroes of Chen and Enchantress. Akke pioneered the usage of the Harpy Stormcrafter to help win the middle lane, while Puppey continues being the spearhead of Na`Vi’s efforts to ensure that Dendi gets every rune and every advantage. Great players in their own right, they exemplify what a support is through the sacrifices that they make.
Community poll results Winner: Puppey (25%) Runner-up: Akke (18%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Most improved player
Winner: Meracle
Photo: Armaggeddon Before this year, you’d be excused if you did not know who Meracle was. Even as he lead First Departure to become a mainstay of the SEA scene, his talents were being paid little attention to until he was given a chance to join the ailing Chinese team, RisingStars. Whilst everything was crumbling around him, Meracle showed that not only could he play with the big boys, he could bring something more to the table - something which few will ever hope to achieve: a kind of vitality and presence that has had even the seasoned professionals singing this young superstar praises. Runner-up: XBOCT and fy. We settled with a tie for the runner-up of this category because both players have shown tremendous improvement over the year.
Community poll results Winner: XBOCT (30%) Runner-up: Meracle (21%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers (XBOCT), Armaggeddon (Meracle)
Category: Best tournament
Winner: MLG Columbus
Photo: GosuGamers
A combination of a great prize pool, great teams, great community management, and overall fulfilling the expectations that had been brewing for a long time, MLG entered Dota 2 with a splash this year. Much of the credit for the great way this event was conceived has to go to Adam Apicella for going out of his way to listen to the community, which was in turn rewarded with not only our viewership, but our affections. Runner-up: DreamLeague, for kicking it up a notch in Europe, a promise of great things to come.
Community poll results Winner: MLG Columbus (51%) Runner-up: DreamLeague (19%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Best English caster
Winner: Draskyl
Photo: GosuGamers
Draskyl made a name for himself last year as the sidekick to Ayesee, but it wasn’t until he was picked up to be the headliner for The GD Studio that he truly came into his own as a caster. During the past twelve months, Draskyl has established himself as the best analytical caster in Dota as well as a very capable play-by-play person, having a very distinct personality. What he brings to a cast is undeniable, and whilst he has had great competition from last year's winner LD and the much improved crowd favourite TobiWan, we feel that this is the year to highlight the finest Dota 2 has to offer in terms of analysis, for which we give the honours to him. Runner-up: TobiWan for his incomparable ability to hype up a LAN crowd.
Community poll results Winner: TobiWan (47%) Runner-up: LD (19%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Best personality
Winner: Cyborgmatt
Our beloved prophet, Matt has grown to become not just the embodiment of Valve in the community this year but also an ever expanding presence on camera. His is a take on the game which we love to listen to, and he commands the respect of everyone on the scene. We could not imagine the scene without him, nor would we ever want to. Runner-up: Bruno for continuing to provide some of the funniest moments caught on stream in 2013.
Community poll results Winner: Bruno (49%) Runner-up: 2GD (17%) Results
Photos: GosuGamers
Category: Best roster transfer
Winner: DK
Photo: Eric Brinkley
While DK gave up much when they let go of rOtk, Super, and QQQ, it is undeniable that the three names they picked up is as good as good as an addition can get for any team. Chinese talent LaNm as well as SEA super-stars iceiceice and Mushi have all received vast amounts of personal praise throughout their careers, but all of them want to further their career by winning. The new roster is a dream come true for the organization and the players, both in terms of PR and potential. Coming out on top of the Fengyun Championship along with earning their spots in the finals of both G-League and WPC ACE League, the current DK roster seems stronger than ever.
Runner-up: EGM to Alliance, a new star support and was a key player in their TI3 win.
Community poll results Winner: DK (57%) Runner-up: Na`Vi (23%) ResultsHamilton equalled Vettel's tally of four world titles on a day when they collided in an opening lap clash that delayed both.
Vettel needed to finish second in Mexico to keep the championship race open, but could only manage fourth, while Hamilton recovered to ninth.
Speaking to NBC after the race, Vettel said: "I'm down, obviously. It's tough to cross the line and realise that you're not in the fight anymore. That sums it up.
"The rest isn't that important, whatever happened today, the most important thing is it's Lewis's day – he was crowned world champion and he deserves that.
"Overall he was the better man and did the better job, simple as that."
On the subject of Hamilton drawing level on four titles, he said: "I would have loved to go up on him, but it's his day, it's his year and he deserves that.
"For us, obviously we're left with whatever is left. Right now, it's disappointing. Next year will be a different story, as we all start again, but right now, in these moments, you need to give credit to the best man and that is him this year."
When asked by Sky Sports to rate Hamilton as a competitor, Vettel replied: "I don't fear him. I like racing with him, obviously I would have liked a little bit more of that this year. But overall, you know, they were just the better bunch."In anticipation of Baselworld 2016, we see the re-release of the Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman, a purpose-built diver that was the choice of the U.S. Navy in the first half of the 20th century for its tactical dive teams. It was also an important model in the history of Hamilton on the silver screen, being the first watch from the brand to appear in a motion picture. The movie was, fittingly enough, The Frogman, a 1951 release about the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Team.
The flagship version of the Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman re-release has a 46mm titanium case with a red, unidirectional rotating bezel marking out 60 minutes and ten-minute integers in a clear, retro-militaristic font, with a triangular indicator replacing the zero/sixty marker. The Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman has a black dial with applied indexes with Super-LumiNova luminescence. The hour and minute hands are sizeable and feature the same luminescence as the dial, and there is a small date window between four and five o’clock. The crystal is sapphire with an antireflective coating. Immediately noticeable is the locking crown guard which, in addition to the black rubber strap, hints at serious diving abilities.
With water-resistance to 1,000 meters, the Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman watch lives up to the promises its design makes for it. It also features a helium escape valve for regulating internal/external pressures experienced while diving. The Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman watch is powered by the H-10 automatic caliber movement and has an 80-hour power reserve.
Obviously, the market for dive watches is incredibly dense and Hamilton is going head-to-head with a number of different capable manufacturers with this watch. The Tag Heuer Aquaracer, while only water-resistant to 300 meters and priced higher, has a more subdued design which could allow it to be worn more casually in environments where the Frogman would stand out. It is a similar story with the Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman and the Tudor Pelagos or one of the Tudor Heritage Black Bay watches. These could potentially be unfair comparisons because of the price differences, but since this is the territory Hamilton is entering with their dive watches, it will require a hands-on to see how the build and design compares to the Swiss rivals. The Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman can also be compared to dive watches from Oris and Squale priced at or below the Frogman with similar technical features and attractive designs.
The Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman is also being re-released in a 42mm stainless steel version and will be available with either a black or blue dial with matching bezels on each. The 42mm version doesn’t have the same diving capabilities, being water resistant to only 300 meters and excluding the helium escape valve, but the additional case designs, lower price, and option of a rubber strap (the same color as the dial) or stainless steel triple-row bracelet make it attractive as well. With a good history, both in terms of within the brand and in the context of dive watches, the Hamilton Khaki Navy Frogman is worth a look at its suggested retail prices of $1,445 for the 46mm version and $1,095 for the 42mm version. It will be interesting to see this model in person and get a better sense of how it compares to the competition. Maybe I’ll fill the wait by seeing if I can find a copy of The Frogman. hamiltonwatch.comAn AAP Minister has demanded a law for “public” killing of rapists saying they should be treated as “terrorists” while also advocating the need to give arms training to women.
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Delhi Culture Minister Kapil Mishra made the comments in his blog in the wake of the Bulandshahar gangrape incident, which he said “can happen to anyone, anytime”.
In last one year, “450 minor girls” have been raped in the national capital, Mishra claimed. “I have been against death penalty for a long time, but I want to say that rapists are terrorists and they should be treated like one.”
“…give arms and arms training to all girls and women. Let them kill those who try to rape them, let them kill their rapists. Give exemplary punishment. Parliament should pass a special law following the Bulandshahar incident and rapists should be killed publicly,” Mishra wrote.
Mishra, AAP’s Karawal Nagar MLA and one of its most vocal leaders, said age bar for trying should be done away with while dealing with sexual offenders as “if one is old enough to rape, he is old enough to be punished like adults”.
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He demanded that identity of criminals who have raped or sexually harassed a female should be made public. “The burden of the crime should fall on the criminal and not the victim.”The Curators of Sweden project has been closed down, after nearly seven years. During the course of this project, every week has offered a new person the chance to tweet through the Twitter account @sweden. The aim of this approach has been to present the country of Sweden through the mix of skills, experiences and opinions it actually consists of. Through the stories of the various curators, not one Sweden has been conveyed, but several.
In 2011, Sweden was the first country in the world to hand over its official Twitter account to its citizens. The project Curators of Sweden was initiated by the Swedish Institute together with VisitSweden, and has been administered by the Swedish Institute since 2013.
What’s the thought behind Curators of Sweden?
The Curators of Sweden project has given the curators the chance to share both their own and others’ thoughts, stories, information and other content that is somehow linked to Sweden. Through their tweets, the curators have created interest and aroused curiosity for Sweden and everything the country has to offer. One aim has been to let the curators paint a picture of Sweden that is different to that usually obtained through traditional media.
The curators on @sweden have been free to write whatever they want. Tweets would only have been deleted if:
they violated Swedish law;
they promoted a commercial brand;
they were a security threat.
Code of conduct
The @sweden account on Twitter has served as a platform that supports the idea of free speech and democracy, inviting opinions and debates.
In an attempt to minimise hate and trolling, the curators and anyone interacting with @sweden have been asked to follow the 5 guidelines below:
1. Refrain from personal attacks (against the curators or others), hateful posts and persistent trolling.
2. Please respect other people’s views and beliefs and consider your impact on others when interacting with @sweden.
3. Beware that this is not a space for racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate speech.
4. Try to maintain a reasonable tone, even in unreasonable circumstances.
5. Please mind your language – foul language tends to get in the way of the message you’re trying to convey.
Blocking policy
Each curator on @sweden has had the right to block twitterers who interacted with the account, if she or he has deemed this necessary. Those accounts were then unblocked before a new curator took over the account the following week.
How can I nominate a future Curator of Sweden?
You can’t anymore. But for the duration of the project, anyone has been free to suggest a suitable candidate via a web form (now deactivated). The candidate had to be an active Twitter user and either located in Sweden (citizenship irrelevant) or a Swedish citizen abroad. Around 1,500 Twitterers have been nominated over the years, and 356 have been selected to be curators.
Why has the project come to an end?
Curators of Sweden has been a very successful and appreciated communications initiative, but every project has a finish date and after nearly seven years the Swedish Institute (SI) has decided that this project has come to an end. Curators of Sweden is just one of many channels |
data security. It’s also about privacy.
Arguably, Aadhaar could be patched and the gaps in the security could be plugged, though this looks increasingly unlikely to be even theoretically possible. Arguably, the government could impose a death penalty on the misuse of Aadhaar data and arguably, it might even be efficient enough to stop a few of the leaks. (Sarcasm alert!)
But that still leaves the issue of privacy. Until privacy is acknowledged as a fundamental right, you cannot legislate effectively for data security: the concept of data security starts with the definition of sensitive data and sensitive metadata. That definition depends on an understanding that privacy is a fundamental right.
So, India lacks the two essential legislative elements that are foundational to creating a secure, or semi-secure digital infrastructure. It doesn’t have a Privacy Law and a Data Protection law. And it does have a government that argues that privacy is not a fundamental right.
What could go wrong?
Here are a few possible use cases.
A) A government agency wiretaps and records over 50,000 hours of conversations involving hundreds of individuals, many of whom are extremely well-known. Those conversations are then leaked into public domain and gleefully used by multiple people to smear multiple other people. Many reputations are damaged or destroyed. Mind you, there are no guarantees that the recordings as released were not forged.
Technically those hypothetical recordings are evidence gathered held in police custody. That means there is a chain of responsibility for securely holding onto those recordings: There is a policeman in charge of the archive, that policeman has a boss, the boss reports to the home secretary who reports to the Home Minister. Has anybody ever been hauled up or punished? No.
B) Somebody goes to a medical lab and takes a medical test for HIV. That test is held in an insecure database and downloaded by a random hacker. That person loses his job and suffers social ostracism. Can he sue the medical lab in question? Apparently not.
C) The government is being embarrassed by a human rights activist who has accused certain senior politicians of being involved in communal violence and murder. In retaliation, the activist has faced inquiries into her financial transactions. Apparently that activist has used her credit card to buy liquor, which is in itself, a perfectly legal transaction. Well, you can gleefully tell everybody that this activist is an alcoholic and in fact, release her entire credit card transaction record. Can the activist sue the government for violation of privacy? Of course not. Privacy is not a fundamental right.
Similarly, somebody who eats beef legally in Kolkata and pays for it by card could be lynched if that information is strategically released while the beefeater is travelling in UP.
D) Millions of debit cards are hacked. Cards are blocked by banks and randomly replaced, causing great inconvenience, including inconvenience to people whose cards were not hacked. In other nations, the banking system would have its collective butt sued off. Class action suits would have been brought by users who were inconvenienced. The security gaps would have been plugged. Here, nothing of the sort happens.
E) Take it further. Your mobile company knows your whereabouts 24×7, using simple triangulation to track your mobile. It has a pretty good idea of what you watch and who you contact. If you happen to have GPS switched on, it can narrow down your location to a couple of metres.
That means your mobile service provider can pretty much lay down a daily report on where you go and what you do, minute by minute. Tie this to your financial transactions by card, or mobile wallet, and another layer of data about your life is wide open.
Then start making intelligent guesses. Say, X went onto the Internet and searched for DIY enema kits. Then he bought condoms and enema kits online and checked into a massage parlour where he was in close proximity to Y. Hmm – what conclusions can you draw?
Answer: IT IS NOBODY ELSE’S BUSINESS if you live in a country which considers privacy a fundamental right.
But you see, location is not considered private or sensitive data in India. And, in the absence of a privacy law, anybody who gathers these data and metadata is free to try and monetise it, or do whatever they like. It could be used to send location-specific advertising (“check into this massage parlour”; “watch this movie which fits with your surfing habits”). It could be used to blackmail X and Y (“IPC 377”).
There’s a pending DNA Bill, which, among other things, proposes that anybody who makes a police complaint needs to submit DNA. The logic: the complainant’s DNA may be important to ascertain if a crime is committed. Fair enough. Now tell me: How long would that DNA be stored? What else could the police do with it? Can the complainant ask for the DNA record to be deleted? There are no answers.
There’s been a Privacy Bill pending since 2012 when Justice AP Shah analysed the state of the art of privacy. The state-of-the-art has changed considerably along with the technology in the next five years.
The need for a privacy bill has become stronger. Successive governments have tried to evade their responsibility in this regard. Obviously, most governments would prefer not to have to bother with laws that might cramp surveillance. The chances are that this evasion will continue until some sort of extremely embarrassing data leak involving politicians happens.The PIRATE Act is back, and this time it means business.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) yesterday introduced the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act (PDF), with Leahy saying, "The PIRATE Act has passed the Senate on three separate occasions; this should be the Congress in which it becomes law."
Like previous incarnations of the PIRATE Act, this one tries to force the Department of Justice to bring suits against individual file-swappers, something that could save the recording industry plenty of money and could also displace some of the "bad guy" stigma that the labels have acquired after suing people like Jammie Thomas.
The bill would give the Department of Justice authority to bring civil (not just criminal) cases against infringers, though it does limit penalties to those that could be imposed in criminal proceedings. The Attorney General can also bring such civil suits only when the act in question constitutes a crime (such civil suits can be easier to win).
Leahy and Cornyn want Justice to start prosecuting file-sharers, which sounded like a bad idea the first time we heard it and hasn't gotten any better since. Since the No Electronic Theft Act passed in the late 1990s, the DoJ has actually had the authority to bring criminal cases against file-swappers under certain situations; to date, it has not filed a single one.
The Department would no doubt rather be busting gangsters, child molesters, and even actual counterfeiting rings, but it seems like some members of Congress are intent on pressing Justice to get involved in the P2P lawsuit game—something that Big Content would dearly love to see happen.
The bill also provides more funding to counter intellectual-property crimes involving both computers and Internet, along with more FBI agents to investigate such crimes.
"Copyright infringement silently drains America's economy and undermines the talent, creativity and initiative that are a great source of strength to our nation," said Leahy. "When we protect intellectual property from copyright infringement, we protect our economy and our ideas."Dwight Gayle is a "big doubt" for tomorrow's game against Preston North End.
Rafa Benitez today revealed that the Newcastle United striker is battling to be fit to play at Deepdale.
Gayle is the club's leading scorer with 11 goals.
Benitez said: "Gayle is a big doubt."
READ MORE Christian Atsu on Rafa Benitez, his Newcastle future and his charity work
Aleksandar Mitrovic – who scored twice in Tuesday night's 6-0 EFL Cup win over Preston – could deputise.
Defender Chancel Mbemba also has a "little problem", according to United manager Benitez.
Midfielder Jack Colback – who had stitches in a head wound suffered in the cup win – will not be involved.
Meanwhile, Achraf Lazaar, Jesus Gamez, Massadio Haidara and Rob Elliot are close to a return from their respective injuries.
Visit our NUFC Facebook page hereWhat is this country coming to?
While it is perfectly legal to kill unborn babies for any reason or no reason at all, soon it will be strictly against federal law to buy, sell or traffic in incandescent light bulbs.
I have a problem with this.
The deaths of tens of millions of American children since 1973 have been justified on the basis of “choice.” Activists for abortion on demand say they don’t necessarily justify the moral decision to kill unwanted, pre-born children, but they believe every mother has a right to make that “choice” for herself. They’re not pro-abortion, they say. They are “pro-choice.”
Of course, I’m pro-choice, too. I think women who don’t want children should do everything in their power to avoid pregnancy – up to and including becoming abstinent. That is the proper way to exercise “choice” about children.
Choice ends, however, when the life of another human being enters the picture. Just as I don’t have the right to choose to kill another human being who inconveniences me, no mother has the right to kill her unborn child because he or she inconveniences her.
Except in the extremely rare instance when a rape results in a pregnancy, women make their choices when they have sex. But even in those extremely rare instances when rape is involved, the crime hardly justifies the murder of another innocent human being.
But enough about abortion. I don’t want to talk about abortion today. I want to talk about light bulbs.
Because my right to choose is being taken away from me – and so is yours.
Did you know the congressional busybodies in Washington have actually passed a law that will ban the sale and possession of incandescent light bulbs a few years from now?
It’s still hard for me to believe.
I’ve written extensively about this – probably more than anyone else in the media.
And I’m not done.
This issue is bigger than light bulbs.
It’s about freedom. It’s about liberty. It’s about choice. It’s about the Constitution. It’s about America and free enterprise and everything that makes this country unique and special in the world.
I’ve been on something of a campaign on this issue. And the campaign will continue until someone finally turns out all the incandescent lights in America.
I hope others see the importance of this issue. If the federal government can take away your incandescent light bulbs, is there anything the federal government can’t take away from you?
So, beginning today, I’d like to enlist you in this personal cause.
If you agree with me that banning the incandescent light bulb is one of the most idiotic and unconstitutional ideas yet, here’s the way we begin fighting back.
Join my campaign for choice in light bulbs.
Here’s how it works: There’s no organization. There’s no leadership. There are no dues. There’s no mailing list. All you have to do to make a difference is buy this new magnetic bumper sticker and put it on your car(s) and truck(s). They’re inexpensive and they won’t mess up your auto. Magnetic bumper stickers can be taken off easily for washing – or when we win our victory!
Is that simple enough?
I believe this campaign can raise consciousness across this country about the federal government’s insidious plans to seize our beloved incandescent light bulbs.
I don’t want CFLs. And I sure don’t want to be told by Washington that I have to use them – that I have no choice.
Let me say, I’ve taken most of the risk here. I’ve manufactured the bumper stickers. I’ve done the heavy lifting, as they say. All you have to do to join this freedom campaign is invest $6.
Are you with me?
Related special offers:
“I’m pro-choice on light bulbs” bumper sticker
Check out WND’s full line of bumper stickersSpy Shots: Exposed 2019 RAM 1500 Interior Shows Vertical Touchscreen
The interior of the upcoming 2019 Ram 1500 pickup is going high-tech.
New images show that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has designed a full-length digital touchscreen for its top-selling full-size truck. Spy photographers recently captured the prototype during testing.
The 2019 Ram 1500 will debut at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this January to compete against Ford’s F-150 and the Chevrolet Silverado, which also is expected to unveil a next-gen model at the show.
In recent months spy shots have shown a quick glimpse of the Ram 1500 interior as well as a full view of its exterior design.
Now we know how the full interior controls will look.
Ram has adopted a large vertical screen that is reminiscent of those in the Tesla Model S sedan and Model X SUV.
Unlike the Teslas, however, the Ram 1500 will retain physical buttons along the sides of the screen for climate control and menu options. There are buttons at the top of the screen for safety features like lane-keep assist and parking assist. There also are switches on the bottom of the screen for traction control, parking sensors and other functions.
The screen itself is operated by the latest fourth-generation version of the UConnect 8.4 system in other FCA products such as the Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger and Dodge Challenger. It is compatible with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
The key fob for the new vehicle was also spotted in the vehicle’s center console. It reveals buttons for a power-activated tailgate and remote control of the truck’s air suspension system – potentially making it possible to load items into the pickup bed without turning the vehicle on.
The current Ram 1500 is the only full-size pickup truck that offers air suspension.
Read Next: Spy Shots: 2019 Ram 1500 Full Design Exposed
Learn more about Specs & Pricing
ResearchIntroduction
dlib is a C++ machine learning library that is used to create powerful real world application. It is used in many computer vision and machine learning applications, it can be used to detect facial landmarks such as eyes, nose, lips etc which is how snapchat lenses work. Since its a C++ library it might seem a little hard to get it working with you iOS project. This post aims to explain how to add dlib to an existing iOS project. The process involves a bit of work so its important that one follows all the steps in order.
Building dlib
Assuming we already have an iOS project setup we will begin by downloading and building dlib from the dlib website. Start by downloading dlib from here and save it in a directory you can work from. We will need to have X11, and CMake installed on our system. If you do not have cmake you can istall it via homebrew.
brew install cmake
Navigate to the examples folder inside the dlib folder via your terminal.
Create a new folder called ‘build’
mkdir build && cd build
Run the following commands
cmake -G Xcode..
cmake --build. --config Release
An Xcode project will be created under build/dlib_build
Now that we have dlib built and setup lets start adding it to our Xcode project.
Adding dlib to your xcode project
In the root of your Xcode project create a folder called ‘lib’. Copy the ‘libdlib.a’ file from the dlib xcode project and paste it into the ‘lib’ folder. Copy the ‘dlib’ folder from the ‘dlib-19.2’ folder and paste it into the ‘lib’ folder.
Drag the libdlib.a file from the ‘lib’ folder and drop it into ur Xcode project. Once that is done it should show up in your linked libraries and frameworks section of ur Xcode project. This is all the files thats required to add dlib to your Xcode project but if you try to compile, it will not work because we need to set up some compile time flags and add library search paths for xcode to be able to compile the dlib library along with your app.
Configuration
In your Xcode project open ‘Build Settings’ tab and add the following under ‘Library Search Paths’ and ‘Header Search Paths’
$ ( PROJECT_DIR ) /lib
This will let Xcode know where the dlib files are.
Next we need to add some preprocessor macros to help Xcode xompile the dlib files properly.
DLIB_NO_GUI_SUPPORT
DLIB_JPEG_SUPPORT
NDEBUG
DLIB_USE_BLAS
DLIB_USE_LAPACK
That is all you need to do to add dlib to your project. In some cases you might get ‘BITCODE Error’ in that case just set enable Bitcode to ‘NO’ in the Build Settings.
Conclusion
This post assumes that the reader is using XCode 8+ and Swift 3+ results may vary for older versions of xcode. To use dlib in your swift projects you would need to write a wrapper class. A great example is this github project. It uses dlibs facial feature detection. The author has created a ObjectiveC++ wrapper that he is then able to use with swift. I’ll probably do another post later on how to go about writing a wrapper class.All-In-One Messenger App for Windows 10. Use Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, WhatsApp Web and many more with this App. Get Notification when someone messaged you*! Set your own Personal password or use Windows Hello so that no one can access your app without your permission.
All-In-One App for Most Famous Social websites. With an Exclusive Dark Mode for Facebook Messenger, Skype. you can enjoy it even more!
Sometimes it’s hard to connect with everyone to see their messages on different apps or websites. One Messenger solve this problem, you can chat with your friends on Skype, FB Messenger, WhatsApp without having to switch to different app or websites on PC.
Well you can say it is a web wrapper but it will give you more personalized web experience than just opening websites in your Browser! You can try it yourself and I am sure you’ll like it! You will also get Notifications* when you get messages from facebook messenger, skype, Group me… We also have bunch to settings to personalize your experience, all you want!
Gallery
Beautifully Designed for Windows 10. It also gives you better privacy protection than your browser because you are using it sandboxed(safer) mode which is secure than most browser. We assure you that we don’t save any kind of information about you. We store nothing about you. All are saved in your own machine if it is needed to be saved!
One Messenger let you view sites side by side without having to switch!
One Messenger Helps you to Connect to everyone easily and efficiently. You will never have to go to different apps to use them! You don’t have to sign-in every time you open One Messenger too.
Give it a try, Maybe you will love it!
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One Messenger Developer: Define Studio Price: Free+
*Due to limitations, this app does not have all the capabilities you might expect from a native app. The app must be running to receive notifications.
As said above We do not save Any information about you, You can See our Privacy Policy Below. if you are still concerned about the privacy policy Mail us and we will do our best to explain you!
Thank You!The once extraordinary rate of Chinese economic growth is slowing. In 2014, China’s GDP grew at an official rate of 7.4 percent, slightly less than the stated goal of 7.5 percent. Although more recently monthly data have been more robust, the trend towards slowing growth seems inexorable.
A decelerating Chinese economy, coming at a time of global economic uncertainty (especially in the eurozone), could have dramatic economic implications throughout the world. However, the repercussions of a Chinese economic slowdown would not be limited to the economic sphere. Given the incredible importance of economic growth to political stability – both within China itself and East Asia in general – adapting to a dampened Chinese economy will be a pivotal challenge in the Asia-Pacific.
While an official GDP growth rate of 7.4 percent would be the envy of most major economies, this figure represents China’s lowest economic growth since 1991. And of course, economic data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics is not completely trusted by all observers. Local officials (and the central government itself) have a vested interest in exaggerating their economic performance. Capital Economics, a London-based research group, monitors the Chinese economy by looking at the five factors of electricity output, freight shipmen, construction, passenger travel, and cargo volume. According to this China Activity Proxy, recent annual growth is closer to 5.7 percent.
Regardless of the statistical specifics of the Chinese slowdown, this development poses some degree of political risk for the Chinese state. For more than two decades economic growth has been the major factor in ensuring political stability in China. Many Westerners forget that the massive protests that rocked Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989 coincided with the biggest economic crisis of the post-Mao era, with annual inflation of 30 percent leading to panic buying throughout the country.
Since 1990, China has been governed by a social contract in which the material lives of ordinary citizens improve dramatically while the Party keeps a monopoly on political power. Rising wages and standards of living helped ensure political stability. Historically most revolutions, including the recent upheavals in the Middle East, only reached critical mass when a majority of a country’s people lost hope in the economic capabilities of the governing political structure.
Recent initiatives by the Chinese state can be understood in light of these economic concerns. Since coming in to power in 2013, the administration of President Xi Jinping has launched several populist measures. Posters throughout the country combine traditional Chinese themes with Communist Party slogans to promote the “Chinese Dream.” Xi’s campaigns against lavish banquets and other government waste led to a significant drop in the price of high-end liquor soon after his rise to power. Perhaps most important has been a massive anti-corruption campaign, which has netted thousands of corrupt officials, from minor bureaucrats to the massively powerful former head of internal security.
The anti-corruption campaign in China has been so far-reaching that it is now having negative effects on the Chinese economy. These effects create something of a contradiction in the Chinese polity, because although the anti-corruption campaign enjoys widespread support, it appears to be having some detrimental effects on the main economic pillar of Chinese political stability. Besides dampening the high-end liquor market, the anti-graft and ant-waste campaigns have had deleterious effects on industries from tourism and gambling to real estate. Mao Daqing, deputy chief executive officer of the largest property developer in China, openly warned of the economic impacts of the political campaign: “For us developers, the impact of the anti-corruption campaign on the sales of high-end property is very serious.”
China’s once-booming housing market is now deflating, with prices falling in a majority of cities. Prices appear to be dropping because the rapid increase in housing supply in recent years has outstripped demand. Problems in the real estate market are mirrored by other macroeconomic troubles. Much of the low-hanging economic fruit in China has been plucked. Rising wages in China have led many manufacturers to relocate to countries such as Vietnam or the Philippines. China’s historically strong international trade is also taking a hit, with exports down 3.3 percent from a year ago and imports dropping nearly 20 percent.
In June 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged to maintain a robust growth rate: “China’s economy needs to grow at a proper rate, expected to be around 7.5 per cent this year… Despite considerable downward pressure, China’s economy is moving on a steady course. We will continue to make anticipatory and moderate adjustments when necessary. We are well prepared to defuse various risks.”
Indeed, since this pledge and the subsequent slowdown, the central government has used macroeconomic tools to boost growth. The People’s Bank of China cut interest rates in November, and more recently lowered the reserve requirement ratio, freeing up $100 billion for lending. China has weathered previous economic predicaments, for example the 2008 global financial crisis, and emerged stronger. A hard landing is by no means a foregone conclusion, and China still has many macroeconomic advantages.
However, for all the policy tools at Beijing’s disposal, China’s leaders cannot guarantee rapid economic growth forever. It may be necessary to lower economic expectations, while shoring up the state’s popular legitimacy through non-economic means. Back in 2013, Xi criticized the myopic focus on economic growth, saying “We should never judge a cadre simply by the growth of gross domestic product.” More recently an article in China’s NetEase quoted Fudan University Department of Finance professor Kong Aiguo as saying, “Since we are entering what is called the ‘new normal’, we should not worry about the speed of GDP, bur rather we should focus on livelihood issues, public welfare issues, entrepreneurship issues, and financial transparency issues.”
Adapting to China’s “new normal” of lowered GDP growth will be an important challenge for leaders in China and around the world. China does more international trade than any other country on earth. Besides issues of trade, any problems in the Chinese financial system could have serious global impacts, especially coming at a time of relative global economic uncertainty.
If China does face a prolonged period of economic difficulty, the political repercussions could be volatile. The Chinese state might be forced to look for alternative sources of popular support. China’s leaders could implement additional populist measures. It is also possible that increased nationalism could come in to play, especially in the unresolved territorial disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Regional and global powers would be wise to monitor China’s economic situation closely.
Brendan P. O’Reilly is China-based writer and educator. His specialty is Chinese foreign policy.A New Zealand firm says it successfully trialled technology to separate hemp fiber and cellulose fresh in the field during its harvest this year. The machine, the Clarke D8 decorticator, was invented by its late namesake, Australian Adrian Clarke, who developed the D8 through two decades of research and trials at TCI Australia, based in Victoria.
Waikato-based Hemp Farm NZ Ltd, said tests this harvest season in its fields included stressing the machine to the breaking point. A team of engineers identified points of weakness which were then re-engineered to further improve performance, the company said.
Hemp Farm said the D8 is a cost-effective alternative to traditional hammer mills used in the decortication process — often multi-million dollar machines that separate the fiber by forcefully pounding the hemp stalks.
The Clarke D8 costs a fraction of the price of a hammer mill, and farmers can use their land immediately after harvest, the company noted.
Hemp Farm works with farmers, researchers and environmentalists developing programs for health, ecological housing and environmental restoration.About Capitol Desk Capitol Desk delivers the latest in health care policy and politics from Sacramento and around the state. Have an idea? Let us know.
The Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles last week ruled that the Department of Managed Health Care cannot use licensure as a basis for denial of a type of autism treatment to state employees.
The ruling means better access for patients to applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy, according to Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, the consumer advocacy group that brought the lawsuit.
“This case was a landmark … and a big victory for public employees, who will be able to get ABA therapy,” Court said.
Court said the state previously had a policy of allowing denial of ABA therapy because of a lack of licensing — though health plans, he said, weren’t actually denying it. And at one point, he added, the state worked on the assumption that ABA therapy was educational, not medicinal.
The bigger issue, Court said, involves the central principle of whether or not ABA therapy is a medically necessary treatment, and that part of the ruling came across clearly, he said.
“This was a resounding affirmation that ABA therapy is the right medicine for the job,” Court said.
The next big issue is to challenge the lack of access to ABA therapy services among Medi-Cal beneficiaries — particularly those who previously were in the Healthy Families program, Court said. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program, and Healthy Families is the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Many children lost access to ABA during this year’s transition to Medi-Cal managed care, Court said, though some of those kids could be eligible for help in the regional centers.
“This lawsuit could never reach that far, but the next question is, since Healthy Families [families] had access to ABA therapy, should that entitlement go with them?” Court said.
“The real takeaway is that Medi-Cal recipients have been left out [of ABA therapy coverage],” he said. That’s the last remaining question that needs to be answered, and that would be resolved with another lawsuit or new legislation.”SINGAPORE - Suburban mall Compass Point has picked "1 Sengkang Mall" to be its new name after a naming contest, but netizens do not seem to welcome it.
On Tuesday (Dec 22), the shopping mall announced in a Facebook post: "We are proud to share that '1 Sengkang Mall' has been chosen and approved by Government Authorities.
"Congratulations to Ms Lee Sook Fong who will be walking away with $1,000 cash prize!!"
Many who responded to the post were unimpressed.
"So, just in Sengkang itself,we have Seletar Mall, Rivervale Mall and now Sengkang Mall, so boring," said Facebook user Disapora Ooi.
Netizen Thomas Toh called it "a lousy name", and Jacqualine Chan made a sarcastic comment: "Wow! Lots of creativity in that name!"
"Compass Point was such a nice name what is wrong with you authorities," wrote Anubhav Khanna.
The "Give us our new name" contest was held from Oct 15 to Oct 30.
The mall has been temporarily closed since October for upgrading works and is expected to re-open in a year with the new name.
In an earlier Facebook post, the mall announced: "We're transforming! Our new sleek contemporary mall will feature sensational fresh elements including different concepts. And we need a great name to go with this new exciting look."
On Nov 12, the top eight names submitted were announced.
They were:
- Sengkang Central Mall
- Sengkang Mall
- One Sengkang
- SengKang Square
- One Sengkang Square
- Sengkang One
- #1 Sengkang Square
- 1SM
The winning name - 1 Sengkang Mall - was announced on the mall's Facebook page on Dec 22.
Correction note: An earlier version of this story reported the mall's new name as Sengkang Mall. The information was taken from the mall's Facebook page. A spokesman has since clarified that the mall's Facebook post was wrong and that the correct winning name is "1 Sengkang Mall".The 2016 elections have seen a surge in contributions from “ghost corporations,” so-called because they are not functioning businesses or non-profits, and hence seem to exist solely to shield their owners’ identities.
Ghost corporations are a particularly dangerous and alarming new twist in campaign financing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. They make a mockery of one of the central claims of that decision: that “prompt disclosure” and “transparency” would allow U.S. democracy to survive the unlimited flood of money into elections from individuals, corporations and unions.
So exposing the real donors hiding behind ghost corporations is essential. And The Intercept has now determined the identity of the donor behind this cycle’s second-most generous ghost corporation, Children of Israel LLC. He is Saul Fox, a California private equity CEO.
Children of Israel LLC contributed $150,000 in 2015 to Pursuing America’s Greatness, a Super PAC supporting Mike Huckabee’s presidential run; $400,000 in 2016 to Stand for Truth, a Super PAC supporting Ted Cruz; and $334,000 to the Republican National Committee.
Fox’s motive in masking his identity is unknown. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Fox’s funding of Children of Israel LLC can be pieced together via a close examination of corporate and FEC filings, specifically a twice-amended Republican National Committee year-end filing for 2015.
According to the Republican National Committee’s initial Jan. 31, 2016, filing with the FEC, Saul Fox personally gave the RNC the annual legal maximum of $334,000 on Dec. 10, 2015. (Congress recently crafted new rules that allow individuals to give $33,400 to national parties’ general accounts, and then $100,200 each to accounts for their headquarters, conventions and legal funds. There are therefore technically four separate donations.)
In that original filing, Fox’s address is listed as being on a street in Cupertino in Silicon Valley. This address is the same as the home address of Shaofen Gao — a realtor in Silicon Valley who, in filings with the state of California, is listed as the registered agent for Children of Israel LLC.
The RNC then amended that filing twice, most recently in May. The May filing has new information: it says for the first time that when the RNC received $334,000 on Dec. 10, 2015, the money came from Children of Israel. And the amended filing lists Fox, immediately after the Children of Israel entries — with the same transaction ID as the Children of Israel donations, with an “M” added at the end.
The “M” stands for “memo,” and signifies that the entry is not a separate donation but exists to provide additional information about the Children of Israel contribution. In this case, the entry’s additional information is that the contribution from Children of Israel is attributable in full to Saul Fox.
If limited liability companies like Children of Israel make political donations, and the LLC is treated as a partnership for tax purposes, federal regulations require the LLC to inform the recipients who the actual humans behind the company are. Then the recipients of the donations must disclose this in their filings with the Federal Election Commission. By May of this year, Fox and the RNC were doing that.
But Children of Israel either failed to do so with its contributions to Pursuing American’s Greatness and Stand for Truth, or the two Super PACs simply chose to ignore it. According to Brendan Fisher, associate counsel of the political money watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, Fox and/or Children of Israel therefore violated prohibitions on “straw donor” contributions made in someone else’s name. (The CLC filed a complaint with the FEC against Children of Israel in March before Fox’s identity became known.)
Pursuing America’s Greatness did not respond to questions. Stand for Truth’s treasurer stated that the Super PAC is “confident that its filings are accurate and comply with FEC regulations,” but would not say anything further because of “the complaint pending before the FEC.”
The RNC’s amended, legally compliant filing came after the Campaign Legal Center filed its Children of Israel complaint. After a similar Campaign Legal Center complaint in 2011 about several corporate donations to Restore Our Future, the main Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, a former Bain Capital official revealed that he had funded one of them. The RNC did not respond to requests for comment.
This is not the first time Fox has been connected to donations whose true sources were obscured. During the 2012 campaign, a company called Mercury Trust gave $1 million to American Crossroads, a Super PAC co-founded by Karl Rove, and made a donation of $425,000 to Restore Our Future. Mercury Trust was later discovered to be affiliated with Fox Paine.
Fox is also a prolific, longtime GOP donor under his own name. He most recently gave $100,000 to Team Ryan, a joint fundraising committee set up by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and $25,000 to Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee.
In addition to his Children of Israel contributions to their Super PACs, Fox personally gave $2,700 to Huckabee’s presidential campaign and $5,400 to Cruz’s.
Fox also gave $5,400 to Marco Rubio’s campaign, as well as — surprisingly — $5,400 to campaign-finance reformer Lawrence Lessig’s abortive presidential run.
The FEC took over four years to vote on whether to open an investigation into the similar Restore Our Future donations during the 2012 election cycle, and then deadlocked without taking any action. So imminent action at this point seems unlikely.
The donor or donors behind Freedom Frontier, the most generous ghost corporation, remain unknown. Freedom Frontier is a Dallas 501(c)(4) nonprofit — a type of organization that can engage in political activity as long as that is not its primary focus. Freedom Frontier does not appear to have ever done anything except give $2,575,000 to various conservative Super PACs this election cycle.The Padres agreed to terms with compensation choice Eric Lauer, Baseball America’s John Manuel reports on Twitter. He’ll earn $2MM, just $159,900 shy of the full allotment for the 25th overall pick.
San Diego chose Lauer, a lefty out of Kent State, as part of a critical haul of draft prospects. He was taken just after shortstop Hudson Potts — who recently changed his last name from Sanchez, per MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell. The signing means that the club has inked six of its eight selections from the first five rounds, including top selection Cal Quantrill, with a net savings from that group. Still yet to sign are Buddy Reed (48th overall) and Reggie Lawson (71st).
Lauer drew top-thirty grades from MLB.com and Baseball America, which cited his improving showing over the last year. His calling card is a fairly polished, four-pitch mix that gives him a fairly strong floor. With good athleticism and an easy motion, Lauer looks like a solid bet to crack the majors. Of course, it’s less clear that he has the upside of some higher-octane arms, and that viewpoint led Keith Law of ESPN.com to rate him 50th among draft-eligible prospects.© Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images A 1950's telephone
PASCAGOULA, Miss. — Hundreds of southeastern Mississippi citizens received jury summons that incorrectly instructed them to call a sex hotline.
Multiple news outlets report that at least 350 jury summons with the incorrect phone number were sent out in Jackson County to potential jurors.
Circuit Clerk Randy Carney says people started calling the circuit clerk's office Monday morning to report the problem. Others stopped by in person to address the issue.
Carney says he doesn't know what caused the mix-up. He has drafted an apology letter that will go out those who received the erroneous summons. He says he doesn't know if his office will be liable for costs associated with any potential jurors billed for using the hotline.
Carney added |
She's gotten pulled offstage for jokes being too off-color and Goddamn I love that. So I'd say Bun Bun and Belushi. Maybe I'm kind of a combination of the two. And I like putting stuff up my butt, that's one of my favorite things. So maybe a little bit of Gallagher in there, too. In my last show at the Cutting Room I butt-chugged onstage. And for "Es Una Pasiva," the Spanish song, I put a maraca up my butt. And now I'm graduating to fisting, finally.
So you're really going to do that?
Yes. I definitely am. There's no reason not to, right?
I suppose not!
It's performance art, Goddamn it! Think how warm it will be inside there.
So you're going to be doing the fisting?
Girl! I'm not getting fisted onstage. That'll fuck up my tuck for a week. I'm gonna be the fistee! Or the fister? I don't know which it is. You're gonna have to come to the show to see!Jake Locker was able to practice again on Thursday. That is a good sign that his hand responded well after practicing on Wednesday. However, reports are that Charlie Whitehurst got the bulk of the snaps in the open period of practice.
What does that mean? It is hard to say. The media is only allowed to see part of practice. Could Ken Whisenhunt be giving Whitehurst the bulk in that period to keep the Redskins guessing? That is certainly possible. We also don't know how the snaps are being divided up in the closed portion of practice. It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.
Shonn Greene, Coty Sensabaugh, Ropati Pitoitua, George Wilson and Taylor Thompson all missed the open portion of practice according to Jim Wyatt.‘The Mummy’ Reboot Finds Its Mummy In ‘Kingsman’ Star Sofia Boutella
The first movie to be rebooted in Universal Pictures’ Classic Monsters shared universe, The Mummy, has found its mummy.
It’s being reported that Sofia Boutella, who had a breakout role in the surprise hit Kingsman: The Secret Service and has a role in the upcoming Star Trek Beyond, is in talks to take on the tile role of the reboot. If deals get worked out, she would co-star alongside Tom Cruise, who was reported to be in talks for a role in the movie at the end of last month.
Cruise’s potential role in the movie has not yet been revealed, but one might assume that he would be playing something similar to the Brendan Fraser role seen in the most recent Mummy movies…if that’s even a role that will be in the movie. If not, Van Helsing is also a character that could be involved in this shared universe that could also include new movies revolving around Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and more all existing in the same interconnected world, and it would make plenty of sense if Universal made him a character that showed up in all of these movies and locked up someone like Cruise to play him. But that’s all speculation.
The Universal Classic Monsters shared universe is being developed by Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, with Kurtzman stepping behind the camera to direct as well.
Kurtzman’s last directorial effort was 2012’s People Like Us. He wrote entries in big Hollywood franchises like Star Trek, The Amazing Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible, and Transformers and also is credited as one of the creators and writers of TV shows Fringe, Sleepy Hollow, and Hawaii Five-O, all along with longtime partner Roberto Orci.
Morgan has been a writer on the Fast and the Furious franchise since 2006’s Tokyo Drift, and also worked on the screenplays for Cellular, Wanted, and 47 Ronin.
Prometheus and Doctor Strange writer Jon Spaihts penned the script for The Mummy.Yes, yes, there’s a giant monster movie opening this weekend. The new GODZILLA is, of course, a new American version of Ishir? Honda’s seminal kaiju film, one that’s being (justifiably) re-released to theaters and written about again all over the fan media. But I’m not here to talk about the new GODZILLA like everyone else is. Nor am I here to talk about the old GOJIRA, because plenty of folks are doing that as well. I’m not even here to talk all of the other GODZILLA films, as our own Jon Abrams did that expertly last week.
No, I’m here to talk a bit about COZZILLA.
The work of director Luigi Cozzi is well-known to oddball film fans, as the likes of CONTAMINATION, STAR CRASH and the pair of Lou Ferrigno HERCULES films are well-regarded as… well, entertaining, certainly. And he directed a version of GODZILLA of his own, sort of, one that is as legendary in its unavailability as it is in its batshit craziness. A psychedelic kaleidoscope of distortedly wrongheaded ideas using the original GOJIRA as its base, “COZZILLA,” as the edit is referred to, is something amazing, a piece of work that stands alone among every other GODZILLA film ever made. Not even GODZILLA’S REVENGE wants to hang out with it.
The year was 1976. Dino DeLaurentiis’s KING KONG was a big box office draw. The enterprising Cozzi, sensing a buck to be made in giant monster rage, decided to re-release the U.S. version of GOJIRA, GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS, to theaters. The problem was that by that point, the film was two decades old and in black and white – not exactly the alluring draw that would get the butts in the seats.
Cozzi had a plan. First, he took the Italian version of GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS and re-edited the film again, adding footage from films like THE TRAIN and THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE. He revised the soundtrack a bit, adding new music from “Magnetic System,” in fact Italian composer Vince Tempera. For the post-attack scenes in Tokyo, he made the amazingly tacky decision to add newsreel footage of actual death, including some charred bodies. And he colorized using a process called “Spectrorama 70” that made everything look as though it was in a particularly trippy dream sequence.
COZZILLA never reached U.S. shores, relegated only to screenings inside Italy, but its impact was made well beyond its home country. The poster art ended up being utilized on the cover for the first issue of Fangoria, a cover so iconic that the magazine has made reference to it in its most recent issue. The movie itself, however, has never received proper distribution (for obvious legal reasons) outside of the grey market circuit.
Watching COZZILLA now is a bizarre exercise, especially if you’re not on any mind-altering substances. The bootleg version that’s in circulation (thankfully, with fan-made English subtitles) is a shorter, television cut of the film, meaning that Ishir? Honda’s classic has been re-edited three times – first by American distributors, then by Cozzi, and finally by television editors – to the point where it’s amazing it’s coherent at all.
The resulting film feels less like a giant monster movie than a surreal art school project that’s attempting to make some statement about war or diplomacy or Raymond Burr or something by utilizing footage from a variety of different sources. The fact that the bootleg version is of such poor quality adds to the idea, even if it makes the film seem several decades older than the original GOJIRA, as it sometimes comes off like an early “talkie” in which they’ve been playing with color by having a child smear water colors across the film!
COZZILLA is genuine enigma in the roster of GODZILLA films – it feels more like a Damon Packard project than anything that would have been released with the intent of a mainstream audience in mind. It’s a shame that this isn’t being released to theaters along with the original GOJIRA, especially with the theatrical gimmicks that involved trembling seats. In this excellent interview, Cozzi mentions that film’s rights are in the hands of Yamato Video and that a 35mm print of the film is still around, so who the hell knows? It would be great to see this make its way into a legal format, if only to expose a truly hallucinatory, ridiculously bizarre version of the film that truly becomes an entity of its own.Microsoft is bringing one of its impressive Windows Phone apps to iOS and Android today. Office Lens is effectively a portable scanner in your pocket, allowing you to capture pictures of whiteboards, documents, and receipts to save and edit them digitally. While many apps like Scanner Pro, Scanbot, and even Evernote already exist, Microsoft’s unique offering here is Office integration.
Office Lens will covert images into Word and PowerPoint files, and even PDF documents. If you take a picture of a document then Word will preserve the layout of the paper document and use optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the image into text. You can also do the same with business cards to generate contacts on a phone. If you’ve taken a photo of a whiteboard then there’s some truly powerful things Office Lens will do. Images can be automatically cropped and rotated, and PowerPoint will even convert hand-drawn whiteboard images into objects that can be moved, resized, colored, and edited fully.
If you’re taking pictures of receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards, or even sticky notes then Office Lens will automatically crop, enhance, and clean up the image and export it to OneNote or OneDrive as a JPEG image, or Word, PowerPoint, and PDF document. Microsoft is launching an iPhone version of Office Lens today and a preview of the Android app until it's ready to roll out broadly to the Google Play Store. It’s the latest example of Microsoft’s focus on iOS and Android apps, or as the company calls it: mobile-first.
Verge Video: Project Spartan, the successor to Internet ExplorerGetty Images
The Saints have ridden a seven-game winning streak to the top of the NFC South and the NFL is responding to that by putting a couple of their upcoming games into the preferred television window on Sunday afternoon.
The league announced changes to the kickoff times of the Saints’ games in both Week 12 and Week 13. Their Week 12 game against the Rams in Los Angeles was set to get underway at 4:05 p.m. ET, but the matchup between the two 7-2 teams will now get going at 4:25 p.m. ET.
The game will be on CBS while the Titans-Colts game earlier that day will now be on FOX.
New Orleans was set to face the Panthers at home at 1 p.m. ET the next Sunday, but that game between the two top teams in the division will also be moved to a 4:25 p.m. ET start. The game will remain on FOX and the Broncos-Dolphins game will be moving to the same network.
There will not be any changes to the Sunday night schedule in either week. Week 12 will feature the Packers in Pittsburgh to face the Steelers while Week 13 will find the Eagles and Seahawks squaring off in Seattle.Dean Norris (left), Anna Gunn, Betsy Brandt, Bryan Cranston and RJ Mitte in meth drama 'Breaking Bad.' (Photo11: AMC)
Two of Breaking Bad's breakout characters, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), found a home on AMC's prequel/spinoff Better Call Saul, which dials up a second season Feb 15 (10 p.m. ET/PT). USA TODAY looks at where other Bad alums have landed since the hit meth drama signed off in 2013:
Bryan Cranston is up for a best actor Academy Award playing blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in biopic 'Trumbo.' (Photo11: Hilary Bronwyn Gail, Bleecker Street)
Bryan Cranston (Walter White)
To Bad fans, he'll always be the one who knocks, but Cranston has carved out a remarkable stage and screen résumé since hanging up the hazmat suit. He has balanced blockbusters (Godzilla, Kung Fu Panda 3) with artier fare, earning his first Academy Award nomination this year for Trumbo. In May, he'll reprise his Tony Award-winning performance as President Lyndon B. Johnson in All the Way, an HBO film adaptation of the 2014 Broadway play.
'Equity' puts a woman's perspective (Anna Gunn) on Wall Street. (Photo11: Via Sundance Institute)
Anna Gunn (Skyler White)
Walt's wary wife was much-maligned by viewers during Bad's run, but that didn't stop Gunn from earning two Emmy Awards for her potent performance. Since then, she has made comic cameos on The Mindy Project and Portlandia, played a detective in Fox's murder mystery Gracepoint and starred in female-driven Wall Street movie Equity, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival last month.
RJ Mitte has enjoyed success as a model and actor in his post-'Bad' career. (Photo11: Larry Busacca, Getty Images)
RJ Mitte (Walt Jr., aka "Flynn")
The Whites' breakfast-starved son has an appetite for another side of entertainment: modeling. Since Bad went off the air, Mitte shot spreads for Dark Beauty magazine and Gap, and he made his runway debut during Vivienne Westwood's Milan show last summer. He has done some acting, too, with roles in Switched at Birth, Dixieland and the upcoming Who's Driving Doug.
Eddie (Aaron Paul), a convert to the Meyerism movement, has a crisis of faith in 'The Path.' (Photo11: Hulu/Greg Lewis)
Aaron Paul (Jesse Pinkman)
Yeah, science! Walt's most quotable protege has been keeping busy since he was freed from meth-dealing white supremacists in Bad's series finale. Starring in video-game adaptation Need for Speed and the upcoming Triple 9, Paul has also made his mark on streaming shows. In the animated BoJack Horseman, he voices lovable slacker roommate Todd; and in Hulu's The Path (premiering March 30), he plays a doubting cult member.
'Big Jim' (Dean Norris) was a two-faced councilman trapped in Chester's Mill for three seasons of 'Under the Dome.' (Photo11: Brownie Harris, CBS)
Dean Norris (Hank Schrader)
Norris' righteous DEA agent was the antithesis of his next TV role: corruptible councilman "Big Jim" Rennie on Stephen King adaptation Under the Dome. Although the critically hammered series lasted three seasons on CBS, Norris has popped up in other series such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Sons of Liberty, and has two movies due this year: The Book of Henry and Fist Fight.
Betsy Brandt is a mother of three in CBS' new 'Life in Pieces.' (Photo11: Monty Brinton/CBS)
Betsy Brandt (Marie Schrader)
Skyler's snooping, supportive sister has perhaps had the most flourishing small-screen career of any Bad alum. Although The Michael J. Fox Show was canceled after one season, Brandt has since checked into Children's Hospital, Parenthood, Masters of Sex and Axe Cop. Now, she's a regular on CBS's freshman family comedy Life in Pieces.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1T6J87ZHighSchoolStarleague Profile Joined June 2012 9 Posts Last Edited: 2013-08-17 18:03:58 #1
The HSL DotA 2 2013 Summer Tournament is a short and sweet pre-season event to help us smooth into and prepare for the official launch of a full season for the newly added DotA 2 division of HSL. If your school is interested in participating in this monumental cage match between Heroes from around the NA continent, then you can register your team
Registration deadline is extended to Aug 9th, Friday.
The first round will be delayed also to Aug 10th, Saturday.
These dates may be subject to change, so be sure to check your e-mail for updates if you've signed up or check this thread now and then!
Schedule
The default match time is Saturdays, 9 pm EST. Both coordinators must agree if you wish to play at a different time.
Registration & Eligibility
Only the team coordinator needs to sign up. He/she will represent the team.
Participants must be currently enrolled in a high school or be an incoming high school student. If you’re not sure whether your school counts as a “high school”, please check with us so we can avoid future problems.
Participants must be living in North America.
Your team can have more than 5 students.
Your team can field your players any way it chooses to each set.
Gameplay
Matches will be Bo3 and played in Captain’s Mode. The team listed on top of the other in the bracket will spawn as Radiant for the first set.
The loser of the previous set picks what side (Radiant/Dire) to spawn on for the next set.
The Rules can be updated or changed at any time.
FAQ
What about people from other schools?
In the event that you are unable to find 5 people from your school to join, please contact us at dota2.hsstarleague@gmail.com to state your case and request an exception.
What if I can’t make a match day?
If your team wants to play a match on a different day, both teams must agree upon a time, and the notify an administrator. Administrators have the final say on all reschedules.
I’m not sure I can commit to HSL.
Your team can have more than 5 players. Therefore, you can have many back up players. This allows for greater flexibility with your schedules as students and other extracurricular obligations.
Are there going to be prizes?
Unfortunately not, but we will almost certainly have prizes for Season 1, which is set to begin in Fall 2013.
Is EU eligible?
Unfortunately at this time, HSL is a purely NA organization, however EU may be eligible in future events.
Multiple teams from a school?
For this summer tournament we will only allow one team per school. We are however aiming to allow multiple teams per school for the fall season.
How do the schools determine their coordinator?
It is the responsibility of the DotA 2 community at your school to designate a coordinator.
How can I help?
HSL DotA 2 is always looking for help! If you are interested in joining staff or helping with casting, you can e-mail us with questions, applications, or auditions at dota2.hsstarleague@gmail.com!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All the above information is subject to change. In the event of a change HSL will make its best effort to notify affected parties about any changes, but cannot guarantee notification.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the HSL
The High School Starleague (HSL), formerly known as the HSSTL, has been operating since 2011. The HSL strives towards providing high schoolers with as team-orientated, competitive, fun, and rewarding of an experience that playing traditional sports for a high school does. Our dream is the day when eSports are respected and appreciated as much as traditional sports, and where high schools can officially field, fund, and support their own eSports teams.
Find us at:
Our Website
Our Facebook
Our Twitch Channel
Our Twitter
Our Youtube
Contact us:
Please do not send any PMs, as we do not use this account often!
Email: dota2@hsstarleague.com
Anonymous Complaint/Suggestion Box
The HSL DotA 2 2013 Summer Tournament is a short and sweet pre-season event to help us smooth into and prepare for the official launch of a full season for the newly added DotA 2 division of HSL. If your school is interested in participating in this monumental cage match between Heroes from around the NA continent, then you can register your team here Registration deadline is extended to Aug 9th, Friday.The first round will be delayed also to Aug 10th, Saturday.These dates may be subject to change, so be sure to check your e-mail for updates if you've signed up or check this thread now and then!The default match time is Saturdays, 9 pm EST. Both coordinators must agree if you wish to play at a different time.Only the team coordinator needs to sign up. He/she will represent the team.Participants must be currently enrolled in a high school or be an incoming high school student. If you’re not sure whether your school counts as a “high school”, please check with us so we can avoid future problems.Participants must be living in North America.Your team can have more than 5 students.Your team can field your players any way it chooses to each set.Matches will be Bo3 and played in Captain’s Mode. The team listed on top of the other in the bracket will spawn as Radiant for the first set.The loser of the previous set picks what side (Radiant/Dire) to spawn on for the next set.The Rules can be updated or changed at any time.In the event that you are unable to find 5 people from your school to join, please contact us at dota2.hsstarleague@gmail.com to state your case and request an exception.If your team wants to play a match on a different day, both teams must agree upon a time, and the notify an administrator. Administrators have the final say on all reschedules.Your team can have more than 5 players. Therefore, you can have many back up players. This allows for greater flexibility with your schedules as students and other extracurricular obligations.Unfortunately not, but we will almost certainly have prizes for Season 1, which is set to begin in Fall 2013.Unfortunately at this time, HSL is a purely NA organization, however EU may be eligible in future events.For this summer tournament we will only allow one team per school. We are however aiming to allow multiple teams per school for the fall season.It is the responsibility of the DotA 2 community at your school to designate a coordinator.HSL DotA 2 is always looking for help! If you are interested in joining staff or helping with casting, you can e-mail us with questions, applications, or auditions at dota2.hsstarleague@gmail.com!----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------All the above information is subject to change. In the event of a change HSL will make its best effort to notify affected parties about any changes, but cannot guarantee notification.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The High School Starleague (HSL), formerly known as the HSSTL, has been operating since 2011. The HSL strives towards providing high schoolers with as team-orientated, competitive, fun, and rewarding of an experience that playing traditional sports for a high school does. Our dream is the day when eSports are respected and appreciated as much as traditional sports, and where high schools can officially field, fund, and support their own eSports teams.Please do not send any PMs, as we do not use this account often!Email: dota2@hsstarleague.com Follow HSL at: hsstarleague.com, facebook.com/hsstarleague, twitter.com/hsstarleague, youtube.com/highschoolstarleague, & twitch.tv/hsstarleague.The books we see for sale at a local chain bookstore or purchase new online are a small fraction of the entirety of human print culture. In fact, 98 to 99% of all books ever published are now out of print. These are the books featured in the BookFinder.com Report.
The BookFinder.com Report is issued every fall, and the 2012 edition marks the 10th anniversary of our tracking the most sought after out-of-print books in America.
Topping our anniversary list are the "big three" of out-of-print books which perennially find their way onto the BookFinder.com Report: Sex by Madonna, Rage by Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King), and Promise Me Tomorrow by Nora Roberts. This year's list also marks the graduation of Marilyn by Norman Mailer, which after appearing in four straight Reports was finally reprinted by Taschen last December.
Some of the out-of-print titles new to the BookFinder.com Report include:
Pure, White and Deadly ; the Problem of Sugar by John Yudkin
First published in 1972, Professor Yudkin’s book outlines his research showing that sugar and refined sweeteners are closely associated with heart disease and type 2 diabetes. The book has shot back into demand after being highly praised in Robert Lustig’s lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” which enjoyed YouTube viral success. Yudkin’s book was reprinted in the UK in 2012 but remains out-of-print in the U.S.
Phoebe and the Hot Water Bottles by Linda Dawson
This juvenile fiction work has been out-of-print in America since 1979. It features a young girl who has millions of hot-water bottles and uses them to douse a blaze when her house catches fire. She receives a puppy for her efforts.
Big League Sales Closing Techniques by Les Dane
Les Dane has published several guides to sales techniques, including this now out-of-print 1971 title. The guide reviews common scenarios found in sales, teaching would-be salesmen fundamental techniques for closing a deal.
Country Landscapes in Watercolor by John Blockley
Blockley demonstrates techniques of landscape and watercolor in this book which has been out-of-print since 1982.The 1984 NBA draft was the 37th annual draft of the National Basketball Association (NBA). It was held at the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York, on June 19, 1984, before the 1984–85 season.[1] The draft was broadcast in the United States on the USA Network.[2] In this draft, 23 NBA teams took turns selecting amateur U.S. college basketball players and other eligible players, including international players. The Houston Rockets won the coin flip and were awarded the first overall pick, while the Portland Trail Blazers, who obtained the Indiana Pacers' first-round pick in a trade, were awarded the second pick.[3] The remaining first-round picks and the subsequent rounds were assigned to teams in reverse order of their win–loss record in the previous season. The Cleveland Cavaliers were awarded an extra first-round draft pick as compensation for the draft picks traded away by their previous owner, Ted Stepien.[4] A player who had finished his four-year college eligibility was automatically eligible for selection. Before the draft, five college underclassmen announced that they would leave college early and would be eligible for selection.[5] Prior to the draft, the San Diego Clippers relocated to Los Angeles and became the Los Angeles Clippers.[6] The draft consisted of 10 rounds comprising the selection of 228 players. This draft was the last to be held before the creation of the draft lottery in 1985.[7] It was also the first NBA draft to be overseen by David Stern, who would continue as the commissioner of the league for the following 30 years.
The draft is generally considered to be one of the greatest in NBA history,[8][9] with four Hall of Famers being drafted in the first sixteen picks and five overall.
Selection [ edit ]
The Houston Rockets used their first pick to draft Hakeem Olajuwon,[10] a junior center from the University of Houston. The Nigerian-born Olajuwon became the second foreign-born player to be drafted first overall, after Mychal Thompson from the Bahamas in 1978.[11] The Portland Trail Blazers used the second overall pick to draft Sam Bowie from the University of Kentucky. The Chicago Bulls used the third pick to draft Naismith and Wooden College Player of the Year Michael Jordan from the University of North Carolina.[1][12] Jordan went on to win the Rookie of the Year Award and was also selected to the All-NBA Second Team in his rookie season.[13] Jordan's teammate at North Carolina, Sam Perkins, was drafted fourth by the Dallas Mavericks. Charles Barkley, a junior forward from Auburn University, was drafted fifth by the Philadelphia 76ers.
Olajuwon, Jordan and Barkley, along with the 16th pick John Stockton and the 131st pick Oscar Schmidt, have been inducted to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.[14] The first four mentioned players were also named in the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History list announced at the league's 50th anniversary in 1996.[15] Olajuwon's achievements include two NBA championships, two Finals Most Valuable Player Awards, one Most Valuable Player Award, two Defensive Player of the Year Awards, twelve All-NBA Team selections, twelve All-Star Game selections and nine All-Defensive Team selections. Olajuwon retired as the all–time league leader in total blocked shots with 3,830 blocks.[16] The third pick, Jordan, achieved even greater success than Olajuwon. He won six NBA championships, six Finals Most Valuable Player Awards, five Most Valuable Player Awards, one Defensive Player of the Year Award, eleven All-NBA Team selections, fourteen All-Star Game selections, three NBA All Star Game MVP Awards, and nine All-Defensive Team selections.[13] Barkley and Stockton never won an NBA championship, but both players received numerous awards and honors. Barkley won the Most Valuable Player in 1993 and was selected to eleven All-NBA Teams, eleven All-Star Games, and was the MVP of the 1991 All Star Game.[17] Stockton was selected to eleven All-NBA Teams, ten All-Star Games and five All-Defensive Teams before retiring as the all–time league leader in assists and steals and was co-MVP of the 1993 All Star Game along with his Utah Jazz teammate Karl Malone.[18] Jordan, Barkley and Stockton would later play as teammates for the 1992 "Dream Team". Alvin Robertson, the seventh pick, is the only other player from this draft who has won annual NBA awards as a player; he won both the Defensive Player of the Year Award and the Most Improved Player Award in 1986. He was also selected to one All-NBA Team, four All-Star Games, six consecutive All-Defensive Teams,[19] Two other players from this draft, ninth pick Otis Thorpe and eleventh pick Kevin Willis, were also selected to one All-Star Game each.[20] Willis also had one selection to the All-NBA Team.[21] Rick Carlisle, the 70th pick, became a coach after ending his playing career and won the Coach of the Year Award in 2002 while coaching the Detroit Pistons. In 2011, he coached the Dallas Mavericks to an NBA Championship.[22]
The Trail Blazers selection of Sam Bowie (left) over future Hall of Famer Michael Jordan (right) would become a noteworthy moment in NBA draft history.
The 1984 draft class is considered to be one of the best in NBA history as it produced five Hall of Famers and seven All-Stars.[23][24][25][26] However, it was also marked by the Blazers' selection of Sam Bowie, considered one of the biggest draft busts in NBA history.[27][28][29][30][31] It is believed that the Blazers picked Bowie over Michael Jordan because they already had an All Star shooting guard in Jim Paxson and a young shooting guard in Clyde Drexler, whom they drafted in the 1983 draft.[13][32] Although Drexler went on to have a successful career, Bowie's career was cut short by injuries; he had missed two of the past three seasons in his college career as well.[12] Despite having a 10-year career in the NBA and averaging 10.9 points and 7.5 rebounds per game, Bowie's career was interrupted by five leg surgeries, which limited him to 139 games in five years with the Blazers.[33][34]
Notable selections [ edit ]
Brazilian Oscar Schmidt was drafted with the 131st pick in the sixth round by the New Jersey Nets. However, Schmidt turned down the offers to play in the NBA and stayed to play in Italy and later in Brazil. He played in five Olympics and was the top scorer in three of them. He finished his career with 49,703 points with various clubs and the Brazilian national team, more than the NBA's career scoring leader, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who scored 38,387 points in his NBA career.[35] In 2010, International Basketball Federation (FIBA) honored Schmidt with an induction to the FIBA Hall of Fame,[36] and Schmidt was inducted by the Naismith Hall in 2013.[37]
University of Houston track and field Olympic Champion Carl Lewis, who had never played college basketball, was drafted by the Chicago Bulls with the 208th pick in the 10th round. Lewis would dominate the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in the summer of 1984.[1][38] Lewis, who had also been drafted in NFL draft of the same year by the Dallas Cowboys, stayed with his athletics career and went on to win nine Olympic gold medals and eight World Championships gold medals.[39]
In the fifth round, the Portland Trail Blazers drafted Mike Whitmarsh, who starred for the University of San Diego in both basketball and volleyball, with the 111th pick. Whitmarsh played professional basketball in Germany for three years, but never played in the NBA. He then left basketball to play beach volleyball, where he achieved greater success, including a silver medal in the Olympics.[40]
The final pick in the 1984 Draft, number 228 by the Boston Celtics, was Dan Trant of Clark University. Trant never played in a regular season game for the Celtics. Trant was working in his office at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and was killed in the terrorist attacks that day.[41]
This draft would be the last of the NBA that would be without any undrafted players entering the NBA. Starting from 1985 onward, multiple undrafted players from each year would enter the NBA, with more of them coming after the league decreased the number of rounds from the draft from 10 to the more current two.
Key [ edit ]
Pos. G F C Position Guard Forward Center
Draft selections [ edit ]
Notable post-second round picks [ edit ]
The following list includes other draft picks who have appeared in at least one NBA game.
^ Nationality indicates the player's national team or representative nationality. If a player has not competed at the international level, then the nationality indicates the national team which the player is eligible to represent according to FIBA rules.
Trades involving draft picks [ edit ]
Draft-day trades [ edit ]
The following trades involving drafted players were made on the day of the draft.[1]
Pre-draft trades [ edit ]
Prior to the day of the draft, the following trades were made and resulted in exchanges of picks between the teams.
Notes [ edit ]
^ 1: When Hakeem Olajuwon first arrived in the United States in 1981, his first name was incorrectly spelled as "Akeem". He used that spelling until March 9, 1991, when he announced that he would add an H and changed it to "Hakeem", the original Arabic spelling of his name.[10]
^ 2: Hakeem Olajuwon was born in Nigeria, but became a naturalized United States citizen in 1993. He has represented the United States national team.[16]
^ 3: As compensation for the first-round draft picks traded away by the previous owner, Ted Stepien, the Cleveland Cavaliers were awarded extra first-round draft picks in the 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1986 drafts in exchange for cash.[4][79]
^ 4: Even though Tim McCormick was a senior, he had one year of college eligibility remaining and thus had to apply for early entry.[5]
^ 5: Stuart Gray was born in the Panama Canal Zone which was controlled by the United States. He has represented Panama national team.[80]
References [ edit ]
GeneralI have had enough.
I gasp for breath.
Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest—
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.
I have had enough—
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.
O for some sharp swish of a branch—
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent—
only border on border of scented pinks.
Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light—
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?
Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit—
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
with a russet coat.
Or the melon—
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste—
it is better to taste of frost—
the exquisite frost—
than of wadding and of dead grass.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves—
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince—
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.EMPLOYMENT California's jobless rate hits high of 12.6% in March
The state adds 4,200 jobs, but more people were seeking work than in February. L.A. County's rate holds at 12.4%; Orange County's rises to 10.1%. Meanwhile, unemployment benefits are running out.
California payrolls increased by 4,200 nonfarm jobs in March, primarily in the sectors of manufacturing, educational and health services, and leisure and hospitality. Still, the unemployment rate rose as many who had been discouraged by the job hunt resumed their search.
"Jobs have not been quickly multiplying, so there's a lot of people who are still in need of assistance," said Loree Levy, a spokeswoman with the Employment Development Department.
The Employment Development Department estimates that about 100,000 Californ |
This much we know: Dolphins football czar Mike Tannenbaum is tied deeply to Ryan Tannehill after signing the quarterback last May to a six-year, $95 million contract.
That fate-filled relationship sits at the heart of Miami's decision on Saturday to hire Adam Gase.
After watching Tannehill shift from one tutor to the next in South Beach -- from Mike Sherman to Bill Lazor to Zac Taylor -- the talented but inconsistent signal-caller now has a teacher revered around the league as one of the NFL's premier quarterback whisperers.
After watching the offense implode in 2015, the Dolphins went out of their way to gather Gase and Tannehill during the coach's first interview in Miami, with NFL Media's Jeff Darlington reporting that the two "hit it off," only strengthening what team brass already felt about Gase.
That cheery first impression now serves as the start of a committed working relationship between a young passer tied to $45 million in guarantees and a coach in Gase who was flexible enough to work with both Peyton Manning and Jay Cutler.
"I think it's going to start with me," Gase said of helping Tannehill during Saturday's introductory press conference. "I think he needs a guy that's going to have his back. That he feels comfortable with right out of the gate. And I'm going to be working directly with him and I'm going to hire guys on the offensive staff to also help him develop. I feel like when we do put a staff together, we're all going to help him get better."
Gase's time with Manning was laced with anecdotes of the two late-night texting and dual-obsessing over the smallest details. The creative play-caller showed equal command and versatility in milking a career-high passer rating out of Cutler, a quarterback most had written off before last season.
It's unfair to expect Denver-level fireworks from this Miami attack. The talent isn't there -- not yet -- and the book is still out on Tannehill, who threw just 24 touchdowns in a season that saw young passers Blake Bortles (35), Derek Carr (32) and Kirk Cousins (29) all make strides.
Of course, Tannehill was asked to operate under comprehensive chaos, with firings left and right, and a midseason scheme change during a campaign that should have seen him settling into familiar territory.
The transitions, changes and in-fighting are over now. The Dolphins have their man, one they believe will turn their young arm into a franchise gem. We'll find out soon enough if Gase is up to the task.In an effort to stop the desertification in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China the government has adopted measures to encourage tree-planting and to resettle the nomadic population. However the forced removal of tribes from their traditional pastures remain controversial and those who refuse to leave are often arrested, detained or assaulted.
Below is an article published by The Star:
As a child growing up in Inner Mongolia, Han Yu was surrounded by breathtaking nature. “The scenery was beautiful. There were lots of trees. Even though you can see sand dunes, there were still different trees fronting the dunes,” says the farmer, now 54.
Today, the landscape could not be more different. The views of galloping horses and moving herds in rolling grass meadows are long gone, replaced by barren sandy plains. Yu bears witness to the sea of sand washing over his farm, and those of his neighbours: “In the 1960s and 70s, we had to increase food production to feed the population so trees were felled and the grassland slowly diminished. By the mid-80s, we began to see the desert expanding.”
The sand dunes of central Asia are marching outwards unrelentingly. In Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a third of the land now lay wasted. China’s third largest province, it is fighting severe desertification, much like the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, Shaanxi, Heilongjiang and Hebei. Over-grazing, expanding farms and population pressure, coupled with drought and the freezing and thawing of iced soil, have steadily turned once fertile grasslands into sandy plains.
In a 2006 report to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, China declared that 2.63 million sqkm – 27% of its land – is covered by desert, compared with 18% in 1994. Its grasslands have shrunk by 15,000sqkm annually since the early 1980s. The loss of land and ensuing economic activities is costing the country US$6.5bil (RM22.7bil) annually. As farmers abandon parched lands, rural poverty has worsened.
And each spring, dust and sand are whipped up by the winds to form the “Yellow Dragon”, a choking cloud that engulfs China’s northern cities, causing respiratory and eye infections among millions. As the sandstorm drifts along, it binds with pollutants from factories and coal plants, creating a toxic plume that spreads as far as North and South Korea, Japan and even North America.
Aware of the ramifications of failing to act, China has adopted measures – such as reforestation, resettling nomadic Mongolians from their traditional grasslands to towns and restricting grazing areas – to stop the land degradation.
To enable the denuded land to heal, the government has zoned farming areas and introduced seasonal grazing: cattle and sheep from March to mid-June and only cattle in the other months. Farmers are also taught more efficient farming methods, and this has raised corn yields from 300 to 400kg per mu to between 500 and 1,000kg. (One mu is 675sqm)
“If they can enjoy the benefit of better yields, they will not open up land illegally. The farmers obey the rules on grazing and farming areas as they can get government assistance such as free fertiliser. Those who contravene the rules face fines,” explains Batole, head of the forestry division of Tongliao province in Inner Mongolia.
Meanwhile, a reward scheme encourages tree-planting. A farmer who keeps the forest on his land intact will receive Y10 (RM5) per mu. He also gets saplings for replanting. If he clears the forest, he gets a fine.
Batole, who like most Mongolians go by one name, says the efforts have shown result as tree cover in Horqin was 18% in 2008 (the latest available figures) compared with 12% in 2001. He believes that the barrier of trees has somewhat curbed sandstorms, with only one hitting the region this year and none last year. But as the areas affected by sandstorms are widespread, he says other areas still suffer from it.
But not all the steps to combat desertification have found support. The forced removal of nomadic tribes from their traditional pastures to reduce over-grazing, remains controversial. Opponents of the government’s plan say herders who have grazed the grasslands for centuries are key to solving the problem, and should not be blamed for spreading deserts.
They say much of the desertification is a result of over-grazing by new farmers from the Han Chinese ethnic majority, who poured into Inner Mongolia to raise goats when the cashmere industry became lucrative in the 1980s. This had allowed China to export millions of cheap cashmere sweaters to Western consumers.
The US-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre group said the resettlement of herders has endangered the very existence of the Mongolians. Those who resisted the relocation had been arrested, detained or assaulted.
Tree-planting, being easy to do and non-controversial, has become the most ambitious effort to halt the spread of the desert. The state television CCTV reported that by the end of 2009, China had reached its goal of a 20% tree cover. And late last year, President Hu Jintao committed to add 40 million hectares of trees by 2020.
Supporting the government’s reforestation efforts are numerous non-governmental groups. One group working hard at stemming the advancing sand is Japan-based Green Network. Over the past decade, with funding from universities, volunteer groups and companies such as Timberland, it has been greening Inner Mongolia’s Horqin desert that is tucked away in the north-east region of China, the area once known as Manchuria.
“Up until 30 years ago, fertile grassland spread out from here and the area was called the Horqin field,” explains its executive director, Yoshio Kitaura.
“However, due to excessive grazing and cultivation, the soil became impoverished and the area is now known as Horqin desert. In the 60 years after the establishment of the Republic of China, the population increased four-fold and livestock such as goats and sheep amazingly, increased about 300 times. So the people are forced to live while depending on disorganised grazing and cultivation which is the cause of the desertification even now.”
Kitaura says Horqin desert is one of the fastest expanding deserts in China, growing by six million hectares annually. It now sprawls over 42,300sqkm – as big as Switzerland. With its eight permanent staff and 15 part-timers – all locals – the group has greened 1,850ha so far. The tree-planting endeavour has proven infectious: even locals do it on their own accord, supported with seedlings from Green Network.
“This land was once open forest, so it is not impossible to return it to its original state by changing the way the people lived which was what caused the desertification, such as the excessive grazing and cultivation, together with adequate efforts of greening,” says Kitaura.
He is all too aware that tree-planting merely addresses a symptom, not the root cause of the expanding desert, which is overpopulation and unsustainable agriculture. Thus his team also advises locals on wiser landuse and farming methods. In the works is a scheme that encourages villagers to grow corn for food rather than animal feed, as the more lucrative prices will mean less land needs to be cultivated.
Of course, farms still encroach into restricted zones as the vast spread of the land hampers governmental policing but Kitaura is hopeful of a transformation as villagers have grown mindful of their harmful activities.
As attests by the farmer, Yu: “As more companies and groups come here to plant trees, we have become more aware. We now realise the seriousness of the problem. We didn’t know better before. If we knew, we wouldn’t have over-grazed or cut trees for fuel.”
With proper guidance, there is hope yet for the land to flourish again.JACKSON, MI – Michael Hamilton purchased a gun Aug. 8, 2012, his former girlfriend, Shannon Arquette, testified Thursday, Oct. 10.
"He bought it for protection in general," Arquette said during the fourth day of Hamilton's jury trial.
Hamilton, 34, is charged with open and attempted murder for allegedly shooting and killing Robert Marcyan, 49, and firing at Marcyan's twin brother, Richard, on Sept. 8, 2012, outside Hamilton's father's cottage on Wamplers Lake. Richard Marcyan was not hurt.
Michael Hamilton looks on with attorney George Lyons during opening arguments in his trial in front of Jackson County Circuit Judge John McBain on Monday, Oct. 7, 2013. Michael Hamilton is charged with open murder, assault with intent to murder and two counts of both using a firearm to commit a felony and automobile theft. If convicted of first-degree murder, he would go to prison for life.(J. Scott Park | MLIve.com)
George Lyons, Hamilton’s lawyer, is arguing Hamilton was involuntarily intoxicated by Adderall, prescribed to him to treat his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the side effects of the drug rendered him insane at the time.
Arquette said Hamilton was hearing voices and acting paranoid. He would not let her open the windows and he was afraid “someone was going to get” Arquette and her 8-year-old son.
He could not sit and watch a movie, she said, answering questions posed by Lyons. “He would just be pacing all over the house, checking the doors, checking the windows.”
When Chief Assistant Prosecutor Kati Rezmierski cross-examined Arquette, she focused much on Hamilton’s drug use.
Intoxication from illegal drugs or alcohol is not a valid defense. Lyons has to show the intoxication was involuntary, meaning as a result of a prescribed, properly ingested medication.
Arquette said she and Hamilton smoked marijuana, and Hamilton had a problem with Vicodin, a prescription pain medication.
Answering further questions from Rezmierski, Arquette said she knew Hamilton had a friend with a heroin addiction. This was not a concern, she said. “Because they had been friends since childhood.”
Hamilton did not use heroin, she said, and when Lyons asked her more about the friend, she said he was on methadone, which treats narcotic addiction, and in therapy.
She said Hamilton had not taken Vicodin since he had some dental work done in May 2012. He smoked marijuana to help him eat and sleep, she said. She did not know if he had a medical marijuana card.
Before the shooting, Arquette last saw Hamilton on Sept. 5, 2012. The two lived together and she was cutting the grass. He told her to go inside and not to return to the yard.
She talked to him the Friday before Robert Marcyan died. He said he was at a cousin’s house. One of his cousins lives in a “dope house,” Arquette conceded.
“Michael had run out of money. He wanted me to bring him money,” she said.
He wanted her to take it to the cottage on Wamplers Heights Drive in Norvell Township.
It was late. She would have to drive a long distance, and she told him she would not. Hamilton was aggravated and hung up on her, Arquette said.
When with Hamilton, her boyfriend since December 2010, she said she never felt she was in any danger. He was "warm-hearted" and kind, she said.
It did not occur to her to have him “committed” when he started acting suspicious in the spring of 2012, she said, but she suggested he see his doctor. She thought he might have schizophrenia.
She had helped him find a doctor and he had begun seeing a psychiatrist in November 2011. The doctor then prescribed him Adderall.The nominations for this year’s Emmy awards — which were announced this morning — may surprise some viewers, and not just because Orphan Black got snubbed. In the guest actor/actress categories, there are a few people who seem pretty much the opposite of “guests” on their shows. For example: Orange Is the New Black‘s crucial Laverne Cox (as Sophia Burset), Natasha Lyonne (as Nicky Nichols) and Uzo Aduba (as Crazy Eyes), and Masters of Sex‘s Allison Janney and Beau Bridges (as Margaret and Barton Scully).
How are those actors in the same category as guests who show up in one or two episodes (like Paul Giamatti, who briefly appeared as Harold Levinson on Downton Abbey) or stop by to host for a night (like SNL‘s Jimmy Fallon, Louis C.K., Tina Fey and Melissa McCarthy)? After all, unlike those more obvious guests, the actors in question appear throughout the show’s run and interact regularly with the main characters, determining the way the plot will play out. Shouldn’t they be in the “supporting” category instead?
The reasons are invisible to many TV viewers.
First, there’s a contractual issue. According to the Emmy rules and procedures, the distinction between “supporting” and “lead” is one of character and the distinction between “guest” and “supporting” is one of contract. When signing on for a show, one of the questions an actor must consider is whether the role is officially regular or recurring, which can determine things like whether your name is mentioned in the credits. A guest or recurring role might be just as important as a regular role, but there are differences behind the scenes. In other words, the producers get to decide based on an actor’s role whether a regular character is supporting, but a guest is a guest is a guest. The rules specify that if the performer’s contract is a guest-star contract, he or she must enter the guest category “without regard to the number of episodes he/she appeared in.” No matter how much of a star someone may seem within the show’s context, “star” has a legal definition too and they don’t fit in.
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And then there the Emmy eligibility dates. This year’s Emmys are looking at June 1, 2013 – May 21, 2014. In the case of Orange, that means we’re talking about the long-ago first season, during which a mere half dozen of the actors and actresses from the show were series regulars.
So there you go. Calling Crazy Eyes a guest on Orange Is the New Black isn’t an insult to her importance to the show, but rather a necessity that was set in motion as soon as Aduba signed her contract with Netflix. However, in the case of Orange, that also means next year’s nominations might look a bit different: Uzo Aduba and Natasha Lyonne were both already promoted to series regulars for season two, and this summer has seen several more actresses promoted in advance of season three.
Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com.Today marks the end of 2012 and the perfect opportunity to re-energize an otherwise stagnate room.
When a room becomes cluttered or, conversely, too barren, the feeling created by the space affects everything – specifically your mood. With the help of a few quick tips, any room – bedroom, kitchen, or bathroom – can be transformed from someone’s house into your home.
1. Air it out.
One of the easiest ways to promote the flow of energy in a room is by simply opening all the windows and doors. Allowing the wind and fresh air to sweep through your house or apartment does something to not only stir the dust but also your perception. This is integral to re-imagining the space as it will soon be.
2. Shed some light.
Light is a great mood-enhancer, especially to small or cramped spaces. If the room you are re-energizing doesn’t have any windows, instead use a warm light. Try to get at least a 5,000 Kelvin bulb, which is closest to simulating natural daylight.
3. “Flip.”
The KGA signature “flip” is essential to breathing new life into any space. To do this, simply remove everything from the room. This includes all furniture (even the heavier pieces), paintings, posters, and any plants. When you take everything out of a room, it allows you to see the space in its true form, which then provides a certain creative clarity.
4. Mirror, mirror on the wall.
Hanging mirrors not only gives the illusion of a much larger space but it also promotes visual interest. In Feng Shui, the Chinese system of geomancy, mirrors are believed to reflect positive energy. According to these principles, avoid hanging mirrors directly facing windows or the front door, as it reflects positive energy back out of the house.
5. Plants, flowers, and fruit.
Fresh flowers, fruit, and living plants will revitalize almost any space and lends the feelings of vitality and health. Remove any signs of death, such as dying plants, dead flowers, or turned fruit.news, latest-news
Source: The Coastal Leader The community and council in the tiny town of Kingston have begun counting the cost of a tornado which unexpectedly ripped through homes and businesses and tossed bricks, tiles and fences through the air on Saturday. Rooves were lost on at least 25 properties, including two businesses and a two-story house which SES volunteers spent four hours trying to secure with tarpaulin that night. "Today we'll spend revisiting each property to sure the tarps are properly secured, that everything is safe," said the SES's Craig Brassington. "It was amazing. Only about four streets were affected, between the lighthouse and the water tower." Not so, according to David Rasheed, who has property 32 kilometres north-east of Kingston. "A 10 metre by forty metre shed was completely blown to pieces – iron was strewn all across the place, wrapped around trees and up the hill. Trees were uprooted and torn in half and limbs were everywhere," he said. A community meeting will be held at the school at 1pm. Police, council, relief agencies and SES will attend. Kingston deputy mayor Chris England visited the affected area. "People a few streets away didn't even know it had happened. It was very narrow where it hit. We've had a good response from emergency services," he said. Councillor England said hard rubbish debris could be left behind the council depot. Kelly Mules didn't know something big was about to happen at lunch time on Saturday but her dog certainly did. It was around 12.30pm when the pooch started whining at the back door and, on hearing the rain, Ms Mules went to investigate. "So I was standing at my back door and I was like, what the hell," Ms Mules recalled to Fairfax Regional Media. "There were roof tiles up in the air, big sheets of iron, debris, all flying through the air. It looked like I was watching tv. "I've never seen anything so eerie and scary in all my life... I was just worried about that debris, there was so much and it was going so fast, it would've killed someone had it hit them." Homes, businesses and infrastructure in the path of the 'Kingston tornado' as it is being called by locals, were severely damaged and left in shambles. The State Emergency Service sent support crews to Kingston, 300 kilometres south-east of Adelaide, from as far away as southern Adelaide and Murray Bridge More than a dozen roofs were lost, powerlines down and electricity poles bent. It is impossible to know exactly how fast the wind was spinning because Kingston does not have a local weather station. However, Weatherzone meteorologist Kim Westcott said it was likely gusting up to nearly 90kmh. "To cause structural damage as has happened, sustained wind speed of between 76 to 87 kilometres per hour would be necessary," she said. A cold front with a jet stream wind high above were the culprits, according to Ms Westcott. "This type of wind event is usually quite narrow, while a tropical cyclone can be kilometres wide," she said. Kelly Mules described the damaged as narrow. "It was so quick. If you were in its direct path, you were in trouble. You can have one house is damaged while next door is fine," she said. "The damage – it's pretty drastic." Craig Brassington from the SES said reports of damage were received shortly after 12.30pm. "Some are calling it a mini tornado but the weather bureau is calling it a wind shear," Mr Brassington said. To share this article on Facebook, click the 'like' icon below.
https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/resize/frm/storypad-38aa7Z4QzDgQR8kRzdxXWY3/71a3257d-269c-4103-a3c5-8c652fd2e096.jpg/w1200_h678_fcrop.jpgDiego Costa: Expected to join Chelsea early next week
The Spain striker has already passed a medical and Chelsea have met the £32m buyout clause in his contract.
Costa has also directed Atletico to accept the offer and Sky sources understand that Chelsea are determined to get the deal done before the start of the World Cup, so that he can concentrate on the tournament.
"Chelsea have made an offer to Atletico Madrid in compliance with the buyout terms in Diego Costa's contract, and have been advised that the player has provided notice to Atletico Madrid invoking the buyout clause and directing the club to accept Chelsea's offer," said a club source.
"Chelsea look forward to entering into formal transfer documentation with Atletico Madrid as soon as possible so that the player can concentrate on the World Cup."
The Brazil-born forward scored 36 goals in 52 games last season as he helped Atletico win the La Liga title for the first time since 1996 and reach the final of the Champions League.
Costa limped off after just nine minutes of the final in Lisbon which was won by city rivals Real but the 25-year old is fit again and training with Spain ahead of the tournament in Brazil.Polish brewer Tomek Porowski knew he was taking a gamble when he opened his business in 2011. In a country obsessed with pure, strong vodka, he decided to produce, a light, sweet, low-alcohol beverage — apple cider.
“I couldn’t afford to start a winery, so I decided instead to start [making] cider,” Porowski tells TIME. With his friend Marcin Hermanowicz, who lives in Grojec, the orchard capital of Poland, they launched Cydr Ignacow with the intention of selling it to a small city-slicker niche.
Their business was a success, and as their cider started appearing in more bars and restaurants with each passing year, so other brewers were inspired to start their own craft cider operations. Porowski feels like he has sparked a trend much larger than what he initially intended — and he has Russia to thank for it.
After Warsaw criticized Moscow’s actions in Ukraine in 2014, Russia banned some Polish exports, including apples. Surplus fruit piled up, and the consumption of apples became something of a nationalist duty, spurred by its own Twitter hashtag, #eatapples. Poland’s newfound love of cider was born in this climate. Sales of the beverage have almost quadrupled in the past year alone, according to Malgorzata Przybylowicz-Nowak, the editor in chief of the website Kraina Cydru, or Land of Cider.
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“Cider producers took definite advantage of the national outcry against the embargo,” Iwona Chromiak, a spokesperson for Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture, told TIME in an email interview. “The embargo directly led to the popularity of cider.”
To some, it’s no surprise that Poland would eventually become a good market for cider. After all, Poland produces more apples than Italy does grapes, explains Agnieszka Wozniak of Ambra, one of Poland’s biggest distributors of wines and alcoholic beverages.
The beverage had to overcome an image problem first. To Poles who grew up under communist rule, fizzy alcoholic beverages made from apples, known as jabolami, were the epitome of socialist shabbiness, drunk only by misty-eyed seniors lamenting the days of Gomulka and Gierek.
Even a few years ago, this reluctance to accept cider was marked. According to a 2013 KPMG study done on the Polish alcohol market, Poles consumed over 4 billion liters of alcohol a year, with beer and vodka constituting almost 80% of that total. Only 11% of the population drank cider with anything approaching regularity.
In the past two years, this number has shot up. The cider market increased from $6.63 million to $21 million, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. Ambra started mass-producing ciders like Cydr Lubelski in the summer of 2013, selling them in stores throughout the country. Przybylowicz-Nowak says she is expecting Poles to drink over 80 million liters of the beverage in the coming years — although that number still only represents about 2% of Poland’s total beer market, Wozniak says.
To gain greater market share, cider makers like Kamil Mazuruk, the owner of Dzik Cider, are counting on the drink’s appeal to young people, for whom the drink doesn’t have cheap connotations. “Hipsters are a good channel of communications — they brag about the brands they like,” says Mazuruk, who has been selling his product to trendy bars and restaurants in Poland’s bigger cities, like Warsaw and Krakow.
“We see big potential here, because more young people born in 1991 don’t know what was there before,” he adds, making a reference to the year when Poland threw off Soviet rule. It seems that apples, nationalism and antipathy toward the Russians make for a distinctly Polish cocktail, however you decide to brew it.
Contact us at editors@time.com.Untitled a guest Aug 5th, 2017 1,742 Never a guest1,742Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 2.43 KB def percentageBar(number):## Can be done more efficently but more editable and visual ## if number < 5: print('Loading [------------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 5 and number < 10: print('Loading [+-----------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 10 and number < 15: print('Loading [++----------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 15 and number < 20: print('Loading [+++---------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 20 and number < 25: print('Loading [++++--------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 25 and number < 30: print('Loading [+++++-------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 30 and number < 35: print('Loading [++++++------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 35 and number < 40: print('Loading [+++++++-----------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 40 and number < 45: print('Loading [++++++++----------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 45 and number < 50: print('Loading [+++++++++---------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 50 and number < 55: print('Loading [++++++++++--------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 55 and number < 60: print('Loading [+++++++++++-------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 60 and number < 65: print('Loading [+++++++++++-------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 65 and number < 70: print('Loading [++++++++++++------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 70 and number < 75: print('Loading [+++++++++++++-----]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 75 and number < 80: print('Loading [++++++++++++++----]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 80 and number < 85: print('Loading [+++++++++++++++---]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 85 and number < 90: print('Loading [++++++++++++++++--]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 90 and number < 95: print('Loading [+++++++++++++++++-]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 95 and number < 100: print('Loading [++++++++++++++++++]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 100: print('...............Complete...............')
RAW Paste Data
def percentageBar(number):## Can be done more efficently but more editable and visual ## if number < 5: print('Loading [------------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 5 and number < 10: print('Loading [+-----------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 10 and number < 15: print('Loading [++----------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 15 and number < 20: print('Loading [+++---------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 20 and number < 25: print('Loading [++++--------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 25 and number < 30: print('Loading [+++++-------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 30 and number < 35: print('Loading [++++++------------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 35 and number < 40: print('Loading [+++++++-----------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 40 and number < 45: print('Loading [++++++++----------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 45 and number < 50: print('Loading [+++++++++---------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 50 and number < 55: print('Loading [++++++++++--------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 55 and number < 60: print('Loading [+++++++++++-------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 60 and number < 65: print('Loading [+++++++++++-------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 65 and number < 70: print('Loading [++++++++++++------]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 70 and number < 75: print('Loading [+++++++++++++-----]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 75 and number < 80: print('Loading [++++++++++++++----]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 80 and number < 85: print('Loading [+++++++++++++++---]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 85 and number < 90: print('Loading [++++++++++++++++--]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 90 and number < 95: print('Loading [+++++++++++++++++-]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 95 and number < 100: print('Loading [++++++++++++++++++]'+ str(number) + '%',end='\r') elif number >= 100: print('...............Complete...............')SIG, AR, and TYR are the names of three letters of the old North European runic alphabet. These runic symbols represent the forces of chaos, balance, and order. SIG:AR:TYR began in 2003 as a one-man project from London, Ontario, Canada dedicated to the mythology of Northern Europe. Northen is its first album in over 5 years years, and also the first to feature additional musicians besides mastermind, Daemonskald. On the concept behind the album:
"Near the end of the Viking age, the Norse set out from Greenland to explore new lands to the West, now understood as the east coast of Canada, including Baffin Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, and possibly even further inland to New Brunswick and the northeastern United States. Unlike the permanent settlements in Greenland, their stay here was short-lived, and we are still discovering the extent of their travels, the artifacts from their small settlements, and unfolding the tales of their interaction with the native cultures here at the time. This is a tale of tribute to this small group of adventurers, who with a dynamic and individualistic spirit, were willing to throw stability and comfort aside to explore mysterious new places like Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, and be their own master in a changing world. A world where their old ways and traditions were fading, a world where sons turned away from their father’s faith, and where some rediscovered the path of the Northen…”
The story-telling qualities are definitely front and center when it comes to this album. The band is not afraid to take their time with lengthy compositions dragging the full runtime out to over an hour. Thankfully, they are also adept at making those minutes count musically as well. Songs go through a number of stylistic shifts within the folk metal genre, from Amon Amarth to Bathory to Opeth to early Borknagar. Acoustic guitars give way to blastbeats and back again. Morning minstrels trade favors with galloping hordes. And while the pace is often slow to mid-range, there is no less urgency in the sound. The title track in particular shows the group's ability to creak some really banging hooks and shredding solos.
I do have somewhat of a complaint in the vocal department. They are what I can't describe any better than a "blackened whisper." These screams are harsh, yes, and certainly fit into the early BM camp. But they come through a bit quiet and wispy for my taste. In comparison to the powerful guitar harmonies and otherwise full production, it leaves me wanting more. The delivery is not bad; just distracting enough at times to make me consider how more presence could have elevated songs to another level.
Even so, Northen is still an album worth your time. The instrumentation is very evocative of times long past. It takes you on journeys over vast oceans with nothing but a dream on the horizon, unforgiving open landscapes, and fireswept battlefields. Less of a warcry than the output of many genre peers, SIG:AR:TYR seem more focused on the tragic elements of the history. Mind you this is from someone who was more focused on the music than the lyrics, but I fail to see how songs that sound so sorrowful could be about anything else.
If you are thirsty for a draught of more folk metal this year, I would encourage you to check out Northen. It may not have the intensity of some of the other offerings this year, but you won't leave feeling dissapointed either. Not everything about the vikings was women and ale, after all.savedroid ICO announcement: Why the world needs a crypto simplifier
savedroid Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 13, 2017
Cryptocurrencies for everyone — Germany´s savedroid AG enters the ICO arena with its pledge to democratize the market.
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demolition.
"It was like a shock to us and that's it. We had to leave in quite a hurry, so you grab what you can, like clothes or just leave," Marcotte said.
"Of course we have insurance, but you can never replace what you have. Furniture you can replace, but I'm sorry -- there are things that you can't," she said.
‘An act of God’
The co-op building’s insurance broker has deemed the sinkhole “an act of God” and said it won’t cover the costs of the destruction.
Borough Mayor Benoit Dorais said that while the demolition was unfortunate, it was the only way to ensure residents’ safety.
"The building is actually dangerous and possibility of danger is why the building was evacuated," he said.
The Red Cross has stepped in to assist displaced residents, some of whom were paying less than $400 per month in rent.
But a heritage advocate says that more could have been done to prevent such a loss.
"There's a disconnect between the discourse on heritage and the action on heritage," said Dinu Bumbaru of Heritage Montreal.
With a report from CTV MontrealClive Brunskill/Getty Images
Rafael Nadal is ready to take the ATP World No. 1 ranking at the China Open in Beijing on October 7. Currently, Nadal (10,860) trails Novak Djokovic (11,120) by 260 points.
With both players slated to play Beijing, Djokovic can only defend his 500 points by winning the tournament. He can still hold the No. 1 ranking if he drops 200 points as a finalist and Nadal is quickly eliminated. If he does not make the final, he will fall behind Nadal
Nadal can clinch the No. 1 ranking by making it to at least the finals regardless of Djokovic. He would add 300 for this achievement because he did not play in Beijing last year and has no points to defend. If he wins the tournament, he will gain the full 500 points. Barring a major upset, Nadal will be No. 1.
Djokovic’s reign as the No. 1 player will have lasted 101 weeks, including all but 17 weeks since assuming the top position on July 4, 2011, with his Wimbledon title.
Nadal, who currently has 102 career weeks as No. 1, looks to reign at the top for a long time, perhaps a very long time.
The Road Ahead
Nadal and Djokovic are scheduled to play Shanghai two weeks after Beijing. Shanghai is a Masters 1000 tournament and another title Djokovic must defend in order to avoid dropping more points. Nadal is likely to keep increasing his gap, all the way to the year-end World Tour Finals in London.
Currently, Nadal (11,015) is almost 3,000 points ahead of Djokovic (8,110) in the race to winning the year-end No. 1 ranking. If both players perform equally into mid-November, Nadal will be able to maintain this huge advantage.
The 2014 Australian Open will be another huge opportunity for Nadal. If Djokovic does not defend his title at Melbourne, he will drop a minimum of 800 points. Meanwhile, Nadal could add 720 points for a semifinal appearance and either 1,200 or 2,000 points if he were to win one or two more matches. This could conceivably add another 2,000-point gain for Nadal and put him about 5,000 points ahead.
As spring comes, Nadal will then have many points to defend, including Indian Wells, Madrid, Rome and Paris, totaling 5,000 points, not including the South American clay-court swing in February and a finals appearance at Monte Carlo. But barring injury or an inexplicable collapse on clay, Nadal will still retain his No. 1 ranking and have another opportunity to grab big points at Wimbledon.
He will need a strong lead for next summer to give him a margin of error to defend his perfect 2013 North American Triple Crown.
All of this adds up to a very likely stay at No. 1 for the next year and possibly beyond.
Historical Clout
Nadal has been one of the greatest players of all time the past eight years, yet he can continue to bolster his legacy with more time at No. 1. Historically, he is ranked seventh in the Open era with weeks at No. 1.
For nearly half of Nadal’s career, he has been chasing Roger Federer. This was a tough task because of Federer’s greater consistency on hard courts and grass through 2008. Many tennis fans who look at Federer as the standard for the best tennis career of all time, point to his consistency at the top, including his record 302 weeks.
Nadal will likely not get to 300 weeks, but another year at No. 1 would get him halfway there. Two more years would crack the 200-week level and give him the kind of long-term dominance people more often associate with Federer, Pete Sampras, Ivan Lendl and Jimmy Connors.
Being No. 1 a long time is not the all-important measurement for a great player’s career, but it is an indicator of how long a player’s greatness lasted. For instance, many tennis fans would choose Bjorn Borg to be a greater player than Connors, Lendl or John McEnroe, but he spent fewer weeks (107) at No. 1.
Federer fans and defenders often point to the Swiss Maestro’s 17 Grand Slam titles, 302 weeks at No. 1 and more balance with winning on three of four Grand Slam venues. He has had five multi-Slam seasons. They point out that his records prove more longevity of greatness than Nadal.
Nadal fans often point out that Nadal’s greatness on clay is more dominant than anything Federer did on grass or hard courts. He has won more Masters 1000 tournaments and has won 21 of 31 head-to-head matches. They point out that at his best, he is the superior player and that given time, he will add to his greatness.
There are countless other arguments of course, but comparing apples and oranges is a fruitless discussion. It will be decided by individual tastes and preferences.
How Much More?
Nadal’s greatness has now hit a third peak with 2013 being the third time he has had a multi-Slam season. It seems that he could have more dominant seasons before entering his 30s, but he has also had a history of obstacles that have curtailed his time spent at No. 1.
His knees and injury patterns are always a concern. Will he be healthy and able to play at or near his current form into his 30s?
There is also the added factor of having to chase down a legendary dominator like Federer, only to have Djokovic come along from behind and add a greater degree of competition and rivalry. Nadal has been at the center of these rivalries in an increasingly deeper and more competitive ATP.
Will Djokovic or Andy Murray be able to turn in a monster 2014? It can be easier to be the hunter rather than the hunted.
Still, Nadal’s title as King of Clay has often overshadowed his stellar play on the other surfaces. He continues to evolve his game with more variety and cerebral adjustments. Above all, his heart and competitiveness have driven him like no other player. He is a fighter, and only age or injuries will one day cause him to step aside.
Just how much further will this talented Spanish champion travel? How much more hardware will he collect? Does he have more or less than another 100 weeks at No. 1?
He might already be the best player tennis has ever seen, but he’s clearly not finished yet.There are over 16 million immigrants in Germany today.
The Halloween attacks were reminiscent of the New Year’s attacks in 2016 where hundreds of women were groped and raped in Cologne.
Russia Today reported:
Disturbances broke out in several German cities, including Hamburg and Berlin, where groups of youths attacked passers-by and police as hundreds of young people celebrated Halloween across the country.
Eggs and fireworks were hurled at law-enforcement officers in Hamburg, where several hundred youths rioted in three districts, Zeit Online reported. Six young people were detained, with two criminal cases initiated.
🇩🇪 #Koln Groups of aggressive Arab and North African men cause trouble, sexually harass women on #Halloween https://t.co/ip61vtgOTM — Leonard Bennett (@LennyBenn7) November 1, 2017
Police had to reinforce their presence outside Cologne Cathedral over reports of “heavily intoxicated and aggressive groups of men,” in the city center, who were mostly of North African or Arab origin, according to Zeit.Astronomers are using data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission to provide new insights into the huge impacts that dominated the early history of Earth’s moon and other solid worlds, like Earth, Mars, and the satellites of the outer solar system.
In two papers, published this week in the journal Science, researchers examine the origins of the moon’s giant Orientale impact basin. The research helps clarify how the formation of Orientale, approximately 3.8 billion years ago, affected the moon’s geology.
Located along the moon’s southwestern limb — the left-hand edge as seen from Earth — Orientale is the largest and best-preserved example of what’s known as a “multi-ring basin.” Impact craters larger than about 180 miles (300 kilometers) in diameter are referred to as basins. With increasing size, craters tend to have increasingly complex structures, often with multiple concentric, raised rings. Orientale is about 580 miles (930 kilometers) wide and has three distinct rings, which form a bullseye-like pattern.
Multi-ring basins are observed on many of the rocky and icy worlds in our solar system, but until now scientists had not been able to agree on how their rings form. What they needed was more information about the crater’s structure beneath the surface, which is precisely the sort of information contained in gravity science data collected during the GRAIL mission.
The powerful impacts that created basins like Orientale played an important role in the early geologic history of our moon. They were extremely disruptive, world-altering events that caused substantial fracturing, melting and shaking of the young moon’s crust. They also blasted out material that fell back to the surface, coating older features that were already there; scientists use this layering of ejected material to help determine the age of lunar features as they work to unravel the moon’s complex history.
The Importance of Orientale
Because scientists realized that Orientale could be quite useful in understanding giant impacts, they gave special importance to observing its structure near the end of the GRAIL mission. The orbit of the mission’s two probes was lowered so they passed less than 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) above the crater’s mountainous rings.
“No other planetary exploration mission has made gravity science observations this close to the moon. You could have waved to the twin spacecraft as they flew overhead if you stood at the ring’s edge,” said Sami Asmar, GRAIL project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Of particular interest to researchers has been the size of the initial crater that formed during the Orientale impact. With smaller impacts, the initial crater is left behind, and many characteristics of the event can be inferred from the crater’s size. Various past studies have suggested each of Orientale’s three rings might be the remnant of the initial crater.
In the first of the two new studies, scientists teased out the size of the transient crater from GRAIL’s gravity field data. Their analysis shows that the initial crater was somewhere between the size of the basin’s two innermost rings.
“We’ve been able to show that none of the rings in Orientale basin represent the initial, transient crater,” said GRAIL Principal Investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, lead author of the first paper. “Instead, it appears that, in large impacts like the one that formed Orientale, the surface violently rebounds, obliterating signs of the initial impact.”
The analysis also shows that the impact excavated at least 816,000 cubic miles (3.4 million cubic kilometers) of material — 153 times the combined volume of the Great Lakes.
“Orientale has been an enigma since the first gravity observations of the moon, decades ago,” said Greg Neumann, a co-author of the paper at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We are now able to resolve the individual crustal components of the bullseye gravity signature and correlate them with computer simulations of the formation of Orientale.”
Reproducing the Rings
The second study describes how scientists successfully simulated the formation of Orientale to reproduce the crater’s structure as observed by GRAIL. These simulations show, for the first time, how the rings of Orientale formed, which is likely similar for multi-ring basins in general.
“Because our models show how the subsurface structure is formed, matching what GRAIL has observed, we’re confident we’ve gained understanding of the formation of the basin close to 4 billion years ago,” said Brandon Johnson of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, lead author of the second paper.
The results also shed light on another moon mystery: Giant impacts like Orientale should have dredged up deep material from the moon’s mantle, but instead, the composition of the crater’s surface is the same as that of the lunar crust. So, scientists have wondered, where did the mantle material go?
The simulation shows that the deep, initial crater quickly collapses, causing material around the outside to flow inward, and covering up the exposed mantle rock.
The new GRAIL insights about Orientale suggest that other ringed basins, invisible in images, could be discovered by their gravity signature. This may include ringed basins hidden beneath lunar maria — the large, dark areas of solidified lava that include the Sea of Tranquility and the Sea of Serenity.
“The data set we obtained with GRAIL is incredibly rich,” said Zuber. “There are many hidden wonders on the moon that we’ll be uncovering for years to come.”
The twin GRAIL probes were launched in 2011. The mission concluded in 2012.
Publications:"The men who lead it have put themselves on a collision course with the victims of child sexual abuse by expressing their unfailing support for George Pell." Last week, the program interviewed Peter Saunders, a member of the commission that advises the Pope on the protection of children, who made a number of allegations about Cardinal Pell relating to whether he had knowledge of the actions of paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale. Various senior members of the Church publicly pledged their support for Cardinal Pell after the allegations aired, including the Archbishops of Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Hobart and Canberra-Goulburn. The Vatican press office also released a statement that distanced the Church from claims made during the program. Additionally, a statement by the Cardinal's spokesperson branded the claims "false and misleading" and "outrageous". "From his earliest actions as an archbishop, Cardinal Pell has taken a strong stand against child sexual abuse... there is no excuse for broadcasting incorrect and prejudicial material... The Cardinal is left no alternative but to consult with his legal advisers," the statement said.
On Sunday, Brown hit back. "There was nothing factually incorrect with our story," she said. "There was nothing prejudicial about our story. Indeed all of the allegations we broadcast have been raised inside the Royal Commission. Even the chief executive of the Church's own Truth, Justice and Healing Council, Francis Sullivan, says George Pell needs to be cross-examined." The program again aired a snippet of an interview with George Pell from 2002, where he told Richard Carleton he had not seen a photograph that featured the self-harm of one of the daughters of Anthony and Chrissie Foster. The daughter, who had been sexually abused by a priest, later took her own life. Eleven years later, Cardinal Pell told the Victorian Inquiry into institutional child sexual abuse that he had seen the photograph - suddenly and without warning.
"We'd like to know if Cardinal Pell was telling the truth to Richard Carleton in 2002, or was he telling the truth when he changed his story at the Victorian Inquiry in 2013," Brown said. "But regardless of the answer to that question, the Bishops have now pledged their support for George Pell. These leaders of the Catholic Church in Australia have hitched their wagon to George Pell and put themselves on a collision course with victims of child sexual abuse." These comments of support for Cardinal Pell, which said he was a man who respected the truth and had empathy for victims of sexual abuse, were referenced in a legal letter sent to Mr Saunders that then asked him to withdraw his allegations. "It makes the whole week seem like a co-ordinated campaign to defend Cardinal Pell," Brown said. "Once again the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is out of touch and closing ranks. Despite all their rhetoric, they've forgotten what matters most here: the victims. The victims want to be heard, they want to be listened to, and most importantly, they want to be believed.
"But the Bishops, Archbishops and Cardinal Pell have given every indication that's unlikely to happen." Cardinal Pell has been asked to appear as a witness at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse when it returns to Ballarat later this year. He has maintained he would be willing to appear at a hearing and answer questions posed to him.Did Fr. Raphael provoke them in some way? Did he draw Muhammad? Did he opine that Islam was not a religion of peace? Or could his murder simply have been provoked by who he was, as an Infidel, a Christian priest?
Why are Church leaders in the West so uniformly silent about the Muslim persecution of Christians? Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, gave an interview to a French reporter in which he was highly critical of the mainstream media and even of his fellow bishops for ignoring the Muslim persecution of Middle Eastern Christians. “The European media,” he charged, “have not ceased to suppress the daily news of those who are suffering in Syria and they have even justified what is happening in our country by using information without taking the trouble to verify it.” And as for his brother bishops in France, “the conference of French bishops should have trusted us, it would have been better informed. Why are your bishops silent on a threat that is yours today as well? Because the bishops are like you, raised in political correctness. But Jesus was never politically correct, he was politically just!”
Archbishop Jeanbart was not the first to say this. “Why, we ask the western world, why not raise one’s voice over so much ferocity and injustice?” asked Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the head of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI). Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Ephrem Joseph III Younan appealed to the West “not to forget the Christians in the Middle East.” The Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III has also said: “I do not understand why the world does not raise its voice against such acts of brutality.”
But the Patriarch should have understood, since he is a major part of the problem. After all, he recently said: “No one defends Islam like Arab Christians.” It is to defend Islam that Western clerics do not raise their voice against such acts of brutality. It is to pursue a fruitless and chimerical “dialogue” that bishops in the U.S. and Europe keep silent about Muslim persecution of Christians, and enforce that silence upon others. Robert McManus, Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, said it on February 8, 2013 as he was suppressing a planned talk at a Catholic conference on that persecution: “Talk about extreme, militant Islamists and the atrocities that they have perpetrated globally might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims.”
Remember that Mohamed Atta, about the plane he had hijacked on September 11, 2001, told passengers over the intercom: “Stay quiet and you’ll be OK.” The Catholic Church appears to have adopted that statement as its policy regarding Muslim persecution of Christians. When will Pope Francis canonize Atta?
“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)
“Egypt: Coptic Christian priest killed in ‘hail of bullets’ outside church,” by Florence Taylor, Christian Today, June 30, 2016:Comments from former Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos Tuesday helped kick off the selling as traders took a report quoting him just before the market close, to mean that Greece's exit from the euro was a strong possibility.
After Tuesday's market close, Papademos spoke with CNBC and said there are no preparations underway in Greece for possibly exiting the euro. He added that he is not aware of any specific preparations in European institutions or other European countries.
But news reports and market players speculated Greece would choose to exit when its citizens go to the polls June 17 to elect a new government.
Reuters quoted sources saying that euro zone countries will have to prepare contingency plans for the eventuality of Greece leaving the currency. But many investors believe those plans are already in place.
European leaders were gathering for a dinner in Brussels, and markets were also watching comments from Spain's finance minister. He said the government would cover needs of at least 9 billion euros in Bankia, the failing bank Spain is nationalizing.
“They may not have the large bullet people are talking about, but we are going to see if they discuss any measures to help growth or maintain that austerity pledge. Germany doesn’t want to be seen financing any budget deficits,” said Brian Kim, currency strategist at RBS.
There had been some expectations that the group could discuss a new euro bond, after French President Francois Hollande said he would raise the idea over the weekend. But even if discussed, it does not seem likely to gain much traction. A senior German official, quoted by the AP, said euro bonds are not the right path and can’t be part of a growth strategy.
Chandler said the French, Italian and Spanish bloc that favors joint bonds will not be able to force them on Germany.
"Germany has the treaty on its side. The current treaties bar joint bonds," he wrote in a morning note.
Chandler said there is room for compromise, such as allowing countries extra time to reach fiscal targets and creating project bonds for infrastructure and public projects. He also said the EMU could guarantee savings deposits, but that is not likely.
Investors are also watching the Treasury's auction of $32 billion in 5-year notes at 1 p.m. Earlier Wednesday, Germany auctioned $5.8 billion in 2-year notes with a zero percent coupon.
Oil markets were paying careful attention to the talks in Baghdad between Iran and six nations on Iran’s nuclear program. Diplomats from the six countries offered Iran new proposals but rejected Iran's request to ease sanctions.
Follow Patti Domm on Twitter: @pattidomm
Questions? Comments? Email us at marketinsider@cnbc.comTHE TRANSFORMERS THE MOVIE Written by Ron Friedman Story Consultant Flint Dille (C) 1986 Sunbow Productions, Inc. Sunbow Productions, Inc. 380 Lexington Ave. Suite 1105 New York, N.Y. 10168 (212) 687-2500 For a bound, printed copy, contact: Script City, 8033 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1500, Hollywood, CA 90046 Tel. 213-871-0707 or 1-800-676-2522, Fax 213-871-9260 Transcriber's note: This is a mostly faithful copy of the original script for TF:TM, with many errors (like grammar errors) from the original text left in, though some (like spacing errors and obvious spelling errors) have been corrected. Note that many of the scenes and lines here did not make it to the final release of the movie, and some scenes were later added. For images, sounds, movie clips, trivia, and more information about the coolest movie ever, check out: http://iocon.com/cj/tf/movie ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- FADE IN EXT. SPACE A small planet glows in the light of its sun. Suddenly, we hear a loud rumble, and see a thick, electronic mist behind the planet... Then, the electronic mist begins to engulf the planet, and we hear the horrible sounds of destruction. Almost like somebody, or something, is eating it. PUSH DOWN TO: EXT. THE NEAR SIDE OF THE PLANET'S SURFACE Strange robotic creatures scramble around the planet in a wild panic. It looks like Pompeii must have looked as Vesuvius erupted. ANGLE ON ONE OF THE CREATURES - TRACKING The creature is KRANIX. We will meet him later on in a very different context, but for now, he is running from the ever-growing mist that threatens to engulf him. ANOTHER ANGLE - THE PANIC As Kranix runs, another creature, ARBLUS, calls to him. ARBLUS Transform and flee, Kranix! You must warn all you meet of the horror of Unicron! Suddenly, the pitiful creature is surrounded by the strange energy cloud and it looks like his body has simultaneously caught fire and been doused with acid. KRANIX Arblus! No! ANGLE ON KRANIX The mist threatens to engulf him too. He transforms into a small rocket ship and... TRACK WITH KRANIX AS... He takes off. As we rise higher and higher in the atmosphere, we see the horror wrought by the hideous and still mysterious Unicron. The planet cracks like an egg and rivers of lava leak out. The energy cloud surrounds it and... Dissolves everything...... And when the smoke clears, we get our first look at Unicron. It is horrifying. A massive, metal orb with a gaping maw and a field of electricity. PAN FORWARD to SHOW that this hideous planet is on a direct collision course with... MOONS ORBITING CYBERTRON IN DEEP SPACE There are TWO MECHANISTIC MOONS orbiting the huge planet Cybertron. But we are most concerned with a small, greenish metal one. NARRATOR It is the year 2005. The treacherous Decepticons have conquered the Autobots' home planet of Cybertron. But from secret staging grounds on two of Cybertron's moons the valiant Autobots prepare to retake their homeland. CLOSER ON GREEN MOON At first, we see nothing unusual or suspicious. Then, pulling closer, we see that the top of the moon is covered with moon camouflage "netting" and underneath it is a huge cache of futuristic weapons. This is the Autobot staging ground for an assault on Cybertron. DOLLY THROUGH THE COMPLEX until we arrive at a Command Center where several Autobots peer into monitors, running constant surveillance on Cybertron. ANGLE ON IRONHIDE He peers into a monitor. As he speaks, we see the monitor PAN to an area where a huge Decepticon Symbol is emblazoned on Cybertron. IRONHIDE Every time I look into this thing, my circuits sizzle. I'm tired of this waiting game, Prime. When are we gonna start bustin' Deceptichops? ANGLE ON OPTIMUS PRIME He stands over a holographic map which shows various invasion plans for Cybertron. OPTIMUS PRIME We still don't have enough Energon cubes to power a full scale assault, Ironhide. IRONHIDE Then let me make another run to Autobot City on Earth. I'll bring you back more cubes than you'll know what to do with. ANGLE ON PRIME He solemnly hands down an order PRIME Alright, ready the shuttle for launch. ANGLE ON IRONHIDE He raises a fist in a warwhoop! IRONHIDE YAHOO! (looking into monitor) Your days are numbered now Decepticreeps. A SMALL MOON "MOUNTAIN" Ironhide transforms and Races toward a mountain, which stands about a half mile from the secret Autobot facility. OPTIMUS PRIME (V.O.) Jazz, report security status. COMMAND CENTER - ANGLE ON THE CONSOLES JAZZ No sign of Decepticons in this sector, Prime. PRIME What about Moon Base 2? JAZZ Jazz to Moon Base 2. PAN UP and through the sky to - ANOTHER MOON This is the second moon. It is much closer to Cybertron than the first one. This is where Bumblebee and Spike are stationed. JAZZ (V.O.) Jazz to Moon Base 2. ANGLE ON BUMBLEBEE AND SPIKE They stand together a communication console. Spike is now 35 years old. Bumblebee looks as he has always looked, save for a couple of funny bumper stickers on his tail: I (heart) Cybertron. I (club) Decepticons. BUMBLEBEE Bumblebee and Spike here. JAZZ (V.O.) We're about to send up the bird. Any Decepticon shenanigans in your sector? BUMBLEBEE All clear, Jazz. (pause) SPIKE Hey, Ironhide, tell my son, Daniel, I miss him, and tell him I'll be coming home as soon as we've kicked Megatron's tail across the galaxy. CUT TO: INT. THE SHUTTLE Ironhide and Prowl sit at the controls, running a series of pre-launch tests. IRONHIDE Will do, Spike. ANGLE ON PRIME, CLIFFJUMPER, AND THE OTHERS Standing at the Command Center, watching: PRIME Commence countdown, Cliffjumper. CLIFFJUMPER Five...Four...Three...Two... THE LUNAR "MOUNTAIN" Suddenly, smoke starts pouring out of the mountain. CLIFFJUMPER One.... Then, the "mountain" which must be made of paper mache or something blows away revealing -- The shuttle! CLIFFJUMPER (V.O.) Liftoff. Suddenly, the shuttle rips out of the ground in a ball of fire. As it takes off, we realize this isn't any dinky shuttle, but a massive ship, capable of carrying all the energon needed to fight a war and an army to boot. The screen is bathed in smoke and fire which slowly clears. ANGLE ON PRIME As he watches the shuttle shoot into the distance. PRIME Now, all we need is a little Energon and a lot of luck. ANGLE BEHIND PRIME We see a bank of computers. Suddenly, a small tape deck pops open... a cassette pops out and transforms into......Laserbeak who flies away unseen. DISSOLVE TO: EXT. SPACE - LATER The shuttle hurtles though a massive asteroid field. PROWL (V.O.) Slow down, Ironhide. We want to get to Autobot city in one piece. CUT TO: INT. THE SHUTTLE Ironhide is at the controls. IRONHIDE If I can dodge Dececpticon rays, I can sure as shootin' dodge a couple of asteroids. Suddenly, there is a terrible BANG! on the side of the ship, and the two Autobots are thrown from their seats. PROWL You were saying? IRONHIDE (irked) That wasn't an asteroid. There is a blast of light and they turn to see... ANGLE ON THE SHIP The most powerful laser light anybody has ever seen cuts a gaping hole in the side of the ship... Then, when the light clears, a panel of the ship falls in and we see - MEGATRON! In all his glory. MEGATRON Die Autobots! Then, he transforms to Gun Mode, spins into STARSCREAM'S arms and Starscream fires. BRAWN is cut in half by Megatron's blast. ON PROWL as SCAVENGER MELTS HIM DOWN. THE INSECTICONS...eat away at the hole in the shuttle to make way for......an ARMY of other Decepticons including Laserbeak who enter, firing. IRONHIDE AND RATCHET While FIRING back are FUSED TOGETHER...... then blasted apart and fall in smoking, glowing fragments. ON STARSCREAM AND MEGATRON As they enter the now empty ship, a number of Decepticons flood past them, taking positions and searching for other living Autobots. MEGATRON This was almost too easy, Starscream. STARSCREAM Much easier, oh mighty Megatron, than attacking the real threat: the Autobots moon base. MEGATRON You're an idiot, Starscream. Were we simply to wipe out that minuscule base, they could build another one. But when we slip by their security systems in their own ship and destroy Autobot city, the Autobots will be vanquished forever! IRONHIDE Fat chance, Megatron! Ironhide pulls himself up and grabs onto Megatron who flings him against the wall. MEGATRON Such heroic nonsense! DISSOLVE TO: EXT. EARTH - CLOSE SHOT- MINIATURE RADAR SCREEN A child's hands hold a scanner device which tracks a TRAVELING BLIP across a star map towards a pulsing dot which represents the Earth. DANIEL (V.O.) The Shuttle just zipped past checkpoint zeta. ON DANIEL Daniel, a classic twelve year old American boy watches the portable viewer which is like an over-sized Boy Scout compass. WIDEN SHOT to show he is at an old fashioned "fishin' hole" on Earth - surrounded by weeping willows, assorted trees and shrubs, and that his fishing pole is stuck in the dirt, the line floating lazily out on the water. DANIEL Let's watch Ironhide land it, Hot Rod! As Daniel runs to small skateboard-like device, hits a button, and watches, it transforms into a hoverboard and rides it, like a surfer up a steep, grassy hillside we change angle to feature... HOT ROD an "adolescent" Autobot. He is in robot mode, sitting with his fishing rod held between two fingers, looking bored with it all. HOT ROD Talk about dull......! Then, he tosses the rod into the water. ON DANIEL RIDING HIS HOVERBOARD UP THE HILL DANIEL (calling excitedly) Hurry or we'll miss it! HOT ROD lopes up hill after Daniel. HOT ROD If you're gonna ride, Dan-O...ride in style! Hot Rod catches up with Daniel, scoops him off his hoverboard, TRANSFORMS to automotive mode and RIDES OVER CREST OF HILL with Daniel in the front seat. ANOTHER ANGLE - ON AUTOBOT CITY FOLLOW Hot Rod up and over a roadway leading around the perimeter of Autobot City which becomes visible the instant Hot Rod clears the rim of a hill. As they travel, we SHOULD also be getting a sense of what Autobot City is all about. (DESIGN NOTE: Autobot City looks like a federal energy project gone mad. Here, the Autobots are trying to exploit every known means of getting energy. The mountain is covered with solar panels, windmills spin in the valley, oil derricks pump, and not far away a hydroelectric dam catches millions of volts. Near all of these various things are energon compressors, which turn the raw energy into energon cubes. IN THE BACKGROUND of these scenes, we should see various panel truck-type Autobots cruise up in auto mode to stacks of this energon, convert to humanoid mode, load up their vans, then convert to Auto mode again and drive the Energon into Autobot City. In short, it should be clear that the purpose of Autobot City is to harvest energy. All the while, Hot Rod and Daniel are riding recklessly out from the Autobot City and up into neighboring hills for an overview of the - CIRCULAR LANDING AREA which resides within the "bowl" created by the City structure and natural surroundings. DANIEL Hey! Let me out. HOT ROD Why settle for a peek when you can see everything from Lookout Mountain? DANIEL But we're not supposed to go beyond City limits! HOT ROD Chromo-Chicken! ON KUP AND OTHER AUTOBOTS KUP - a grizzled, "old Soldier" of an Autobot - is directing the positioning of a large metal road barricade. Hot Rod barrels through a sign which reads: "STOP -THIS AREA OFF LIMITS", almost knocking Kup over in dust and wind KUP disgustedly watches Hot Rod drive up the mountain. KUP (to sound like swearing) Cam bustin', turbo revvin' young punk. CUT TO: MOUNTAIN ABOVE AUTOBOT CITY- LOOKOUT POINT Hot Rod arrives at a viewing platform carved in mountainside and TRANSFORMS back to humanoid mode. Daniel rushes to a set of PUBLIC VIEWING BINOCULARS and peers into them. HOT ROD This is it! Now take a squint through those babies. DANIEL Hot Rod, look! There's a hole in the shuttle! HOT ROD What!? DANIEL'S P.O.V - BINOCULAR MATTE - THE SHUTTLE The hole Megatron blasted in order to get into the shuttle mars the otherwise perfect exterior of the ship. ANGLE ON DANIEL AND HOT ROD Hot Rod looks up and a pair of futuristic binoculars pop out of his eyes. HOT ROD'S POV - THE SHUTTLE Hot Rod's vision, now, infinitely better than human vision, spots something truly disturbing -- -- Starscream, and several Constructicons inside the ship! HOT ROD (O.S.) Decepticons! ANGLE ON HOT ROD Drawing his gun, he starts FIRING on the shuttle. HOT ROD This is for Ironhide. As so's this! ANGLE ON THE SHUTTLE Rays streak through the hole searing... STARSCREAM He ducks away from the door. STARSCREAM I'm hit! ANGLE ON MEGATRON Standing behind a pair of Decepticons who pilot the shuttle, he turns to see... THE CONSTRUCTICONS Firing out of the hole. MEGATRON He's furious. MEGATRON You imbecile, our cover is blown! STARSCREAM It was your stupid strategy! CUT TO: ANGLE ON KUP, CONSTRUCTION CREW Kup and the Autobot Construction Crew watch Hot Rod shooting at the shuttle. KUP What's that darn fool doing? Hound looks up and points. HOUND Decepticons! ANGLE ON THE SHUTTLE Suddenly it cracks open, and Decepticons shoot out of the wreckage like toys from a pinata. CLOSE - MEGATRON In |
, really?
Honestly, I'm not a believer in "better" when it comes to different devices, from different manufacturers running different operating systems. Even so, the Note has some features that clearly make it more attractive for some than Apple's latest iPhone. For example, the screen resolution is higher and there's built in monitoring for blood saturation, heart rate and even UV light.
Also, an important part of the Note range has always been the S Pen. This device allows you to interact with the phone in a way that is unique to Samsung. It's actually very good and when used right a really handy tool, especially for business users. I use it for handwriting recognition, and with every new device this gets better and better. Many of the early problems have been fixed now, and the recognition is very usable. With practice, it could even be faster than typing if you invest some time into learning how to use it.
Also, there's a really important thing to remember when it comes to storage. The Samsung Galaxy Note has just 32GB of storage, which sounds weak next to the iPhone which can go up to 128GB. However, the Note can accept MicroSD cards that offer as much as 128GB of additional storage for about $100 - generic cards can be had for a fraction of that price, but I'd advise avoiding them for intensive video capture, though they would be fine for just music.
And, of course, the replaceable battery in the Note 4 means you can carry a spare for when your power runs out, or you can just replace the cell when it reaches the point where it no longer lasts as long as it did when new.
The screen
There is just no denying that the 1440x2560 resolution screen on the Note 4 is amazing, it's one of the highest resolutions of any phone, and really does look amazing. Because it's an AMOLED, it's very bright and very colourful. Does it trade accuracy a bit for that, yes, possibly, but for a phone it's a great choice. Sometimes I found it too bright inside, and the problems with Samsung's slow-to-respond ambient light sensor persist. I do also have some reservations, because a higher resolution screen has a huge impact on two areas of a smartphone: it puts a strain on the processor and it increases battery drain.
To be fair, processor usage isn't an issue on the Note, there's loads of power here, and I didn't notice any lag at all when using the device. In fact, it feels a lot snappier than my Note 3, and Samsung seems to have tweaked its TouchWiz UI to make it less laggy too - this is well overdue.
Battery life is a problem still. I didn't find the Note 4 to be disastrous though. What I noticed mirrors the Note 3, and that's using the display for long periods will destroy your battery life at a rate of 10-20 per cent per hour in daylight conditions. The Note 4 has a larger power pack than the previous phone, but this is really just to keep pace with the screen. I'd quite like to see Samsung expand the battery in these devices. As it stands, I never leave the house without a backup charger now anyway.
Samsung does, however, do one very useful thing with the Note 4. That's the Ultra Power Saver mode it has brought over from the Galaxy S5. Here power is saved by shutting down Wi-Fi, stopping most background apps and turning the screen black and white. This allows you to get about 24 hours out of 10 per cent charge. So, when I turned it on at 21 per cent, the phone suggested I would get 3.5 days out of the phone.
And, it has to be said that the Ultra Power Saver isn't as limiting as I expected. You can still use data, and a few select apps. You're allowed to pick and chose, so I asked it to let me use Facebook and Twitter, and the choice is fairly limited. What you do get are the Samsung web browser - Chrome, though installed, is not an option. You can also add WhatsApp and the phone and text messaging services remain in place.
There's also a lot of value in the fast charging mode, which puts 50 per cent charge into the battery in as little as 30 minutes. One missing feature though is wireless charging out of the box. The phone is capable of doing it, but Samsung opts not to send the right back out with the phone. This is stupid as LG, Nokia and others all have their phones shipping, ready to be wirelessly charged.
Security
Samsung deserves credit for taking security on its devices seriously. Perhaps it's the desire to beat Apple at corporate sales, where the iPhone has taken a large chunk of Blackberry's market.
To help keep your data secure, there are several features that you can use. Samsung's own Knox allows you to keep work and personal apps apart. This means that if, by some chance, there is malware on your personal handset, it should be kept away from your work files.
In addition to that, there's also the standard Android feature of device encryption, which means that if your phone gets stolen, the files on it will be unreadable by a third party. For those of us that have enormous amounts of personal data stored on our phones, that's a reassuring move.
Sadly, the attempt at using biometrics for security, namely the fingerprint scanner, are as dismal now as they have been on every other Samsung device I've tested. The problem here is that the fingerprint reader on the iPhone is more sensitive, doesn't need you to "swipe" across its surface to scan an image, and it works - for me at least - pretty much every time. Samsung's scanner is so bad that on every device I've used, I've needed to disable it, because it's just too frustrating. Some people have told me that you need to enroll your fingerprint sideways, so you can unlock the phone as you hold it, but for me that never worked.
If Samsung can't get fingerprint scanning as accurately as Apple, then honestly I think it should just stop it all together.
Camera
As with the Note 3, 4K video recording is present and correct here. As with the previous model, it's a nice thing to have but it eats a lot of space up if you use it for much more than short clips. Now though, the recorded video more closely matches the display resolution, which kind of makes sense if you're showing people clips on the screen. While 4K isn't essential on a phone, it is yet another thing that separates the Note 4 from the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
The stills camera is improved too. I've grown to love the camera on the Note 3, it's capable of some great quality results. The Note 4 improves things again by tweaking the resolution from 13- to 16-megapixels. The front-facing camera gets a boost too, with a new resolution of 3.7-megapixels, it's still awful though and while I'm sure it's fine for "selfies" it looks awful for anything actually photographic in nature. Still, its main purpose is for video calls, and for that it is fine.
Health and fitness
Samsung has now added a heart rate monitor, blood oxygen saturation monitor and even a way to see how much UV radiation there is outside. All of this is built into the newly revised S Health, and I have to admit I sort of like it.
As a hub, it works well. The pedometer now counts steps without any wearable like the Gear needed. This means that you get to see some rough numbers about how far you've walked, and how many calories you've burnt. You can add in foods, track your heart rate over time and generally keep an eye on your health.
While I don't think these measurement tools are accurate enough to be much use to medical professionals, they do give you a comparative way to track your stats at home. The design is great too, and the whole thing feels like a nice piece of software.
I have some problems with the heart rate monitor though. These are much less severe than for the fingerprint scanner, but there are still times when it just refuses to measure properly. On the whole though, I still feel like it's a good feature and these measurements are becoming more useful with each year as more and more of our lives are folded into our phones.
Data and voice
LTE on the Qualcomm version of the Note 4 can download at speeds as high as 300mbps where supported by your phone company. Along with 802.11ac wireless, this is a phone that should offer some impressive internet connectivity.
Samsung also employs some nice tricks, like smarter Wi-Fi switching to get the best possible connection and speeds to the internet. There's also its download booster, which allows you to speed up transfers by using both 4G and Wi-Fi at the same time.
Happily though, there's no problem with voice either. I have spoken with people on both standard and HD calls and both are crisp and clear. HD calling, where supported, is just amazing and I'm always thrilled to have conversations with people on the same network as me.
Conclusion
There isn't really any doubt here, but the Note 4 is one of the best phones on the market.
This is an area that Samsung can claim to be the leader of. Many, many people laughed at the Note when it launched, and a lot of them - including some of my friends - were still laughing when I used my Note 3 to make calls - it still looks ridiculous. But Apple entering the market will shut a lot of those people up quite nicely. The larger phablets have become a real segment, and a lot of that - most of it - is thanks to Samsung's Note.
The Note 4 improves significantly on the last generation, there are some great features here and the screen, in particular, is stunning. LTE users should find this phone to be blazing fast, if their service provider supports Cat 6 4G and I really like the call quality - where supported, HD calling is just amazing.
If I had to pick a phone right now, the Note 4 would be top of the list. That's impressive, given that it is a great time for phones right now with the new Nexus 6 from Motorola and devices like the iPhone, Nokia Lumia 830, and the LG G3.
It is, however, worth noting that we're only weeks away from Android 5.0 being launched, and Samsung has launched this device with KitKat. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that version of the OS, but with Android Lollipop so close, I wonder if it wouldn't have made more sense to wait.
NOTE: As always with my reviews, there's plenty left to explore beyond the first week. Is there something that the Note 4 does that you're interested to know about? Put a comment below, and I'll do my best to test and get an update on the page.Microsoft promises a lot with the new Surface Book 2. The 13.5-inch convertible is a really good device in some respects, but we are sometimes wondering why the manufacturer ignores known issues or waives modern standards.
Let us begin with the good things. Microsoft says the new device is twice as powerful as before. This is true as long as you focus on the CPU performance. The new ULV quad-core from Intel is much faster compared to the previous dual-core models. We can only praise Microsoft for the performance utilization, which is very decent, despite the passive cooling. Some laptops with actively cooled CPUs perform worse. However, not much has changed in terms of the graphics card. Yes, the GTX 1050 performs well, but it is not much faster than the previous GTX 965M. The new Surface Book 2 also lasts longer on battery, still uses an excellent display, and has a nice chassis with comfortable input devices.
The Surface Book 2 13.5" is once again almost unrivaled thanks to the good performance. However, there are some compromises (no Thunderbolt 3!), which are hard to swallow considering the high price.
The biggest problem is revealed when you stress the dedicated GeForce GPU, because the fan is really loud. We showed how you can easily bypass this issue with the new performance settings of Windows without sacrificing much performance.
A bigger issue, which seems to be acceptable for Microsoft, is the power delivery. The power adapter is not always sufficient during gaming, so the batteries are slightly discharged and charged again. This cannot be good for the battery health. It might be related to a limitation of the Surface Connector since the power adapter of our test model should be sufficient. This brings us to the next problem, the ports. Microsoft probably sticks to the Surface Connector to ensure compatibility with the old Surface Dock. This is unfortunately a big limitation. A modern Thunderbolt 3 port would be more practical and future-proof. An additional USB Type-C port on the tablet would have been nice as well.
The battery situation is not perfect either. There is a connector for the power adapter on the tablet, but it still takes almost 2.5 hours to charge the small battery. This can probably be fixed via a software update. An "empty" tablet can unfortunately not be charged by the battery in the keyboard unit either.
You can easily avoid the loud fan in this case and the power delivery should not be a big deal in practice as long as you avoid the Best Performance setting. The missing Thunderbolt 3 support is a bigger issue for a price tag of more than 2200 Euros ($1999) though. The Surface Pen is not included anymore and has to be purchased separately. The 13.5-inch convertible is still almost unrivaled on the market thanks to the high performance and leaves a positive overall impression.Story highlights The White House is expected to send Congress a request for $5.95 billion
It's described as a "down payment" on federal aid
Washington (CNN) — The Trump administration on Friday is expected to ask Congress for nearly $6 billion in disaster relief funding as part of an initial request for funds in response to Hurricane Harvey, two administration officials said.
The White House is expected to send Congress a request for $5.95 billion in funding, a senior administration official and White House official each said. About $5.5 billion will go to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is rapidly burning through cash as the primary agency handling disaster relief. The remainder of the emergency funding request will go to the Small Business Administration, which is doling out disaster recovery loans to homes and businesses damaged by the storm.
House GOP leaders have signaled the House will take "quick action" and a vote could come as early as next week but nothing firmly scheduled yet.
The nearly $6 billion request will be described as a "down payment" on federal aid in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan from White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, the senior administration official said. The Trump administration is expected to make subsequent funding requests to help in the multi-billion dollar rebuilding effort that will need to take place in Texas and Louisiana, where tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes due to hurricane damage and flooding brought on by record-breaking rainfall.
Separately, the administration is expected in the upcoming debate over a bill to avoid a government shutdown by the end of month to ask for authority to spend $6.7 billion in disaster relief for FEMA more quickly, the administration officials and a senior House GOP leadership aide said.
Read MoreA while ago I started using Socks and Caps as shorthand for social anarchists and anarcho-capitalists respectively. But then I drifted away from it, mainly because there seemed to be no useful article-of-clothing shorthand for us lefty individualist types in the middle.
But there is! Mack (or Mac, but Id prefer to avoid the association with either computers or hamburgers) is an abbreviation for an article of clothing a Mac(k)intosh raincoat and also works as an abbreviation for FMAC, itself an acronym for Kevin Carsons phrase free-market anti-capitalist.
Okay, its a bit less intuitive than Sock or Cap but on the other hand it has the advantage that macks are generally worn between socks and caps, which is just where we Macks generally find ourselves because, yknow, were the vital center, while Socks and Caps are bewildered deviationists.
Also, its more embarrassing to be caught wearing only socks, or only a cap, than to be caught wearing only a mack thus reinforcing our dialectical superiority. Plus Zerzanites can denounce all three groups, since Zerzanites dont approve of clothing of any kind.Atheist regimes dominated much of Central and Eastern Europe until the fall of the Iron Curtain and collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. Today, however, many of the governments in the region have an official state religion or an unofficial preferred faith.
In such countries, people are more likely to see religion and national identity as entwined, compared with citizens of neighboring Central and Eastern European states that lack official or favored faiths, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.
Residents of states with official or favored religions also are more likely to support government subsidies and a public policy role for their country’s predominant church.
Of the 18 countries the Center recently surveyed in the region, two (Armenia and Greece) have an official state religion. Nine others, including Russia and Poland, unofficially “prefer” a religion, bestowing disproportionate benefits on a particular religious group, although they do not officially recognize it.
Across these countries, a median of 66% say being a member of the official or favored faith is very or somewhat important to national identity (e.g. “being truly Armenian”). In most countries without an official or preferred religion, substantially smaller shares (median of 43%) say this about the dominant religious group in their country.
In Greece, for instance, where Greek Orthodoxy is the country’s official religion, 76% of adults say being Orthodox is important to being Greek. In Poland, where the Roman Catholic Church is preferred by the government, 64% say being Catholic is important to being truly Polish.
By comparison, in countries where there is no officially recognized or preferred religion, generally smaller shares tend to agree that religion and national belonging go hand in hand, including in Ukraine (51%), Hungary (43%) and Latvia (11%).
There are, however, some outliers to this general trend. For instance, in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia, a religiously diverse country without an official or preferred religion, 59% say belonging to the faith group with which they personally identify (be it Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox) is important to being truly Bosnian. And, in neighboring Croatia, which also does not have a favored church, 58% say being Catholic is important to being Croatian.
Despite perceived ties between faith and national belonging, majorities in four of 11 Central and Eastern European countries with an official or preferred religion actually favor separation of church and state. This includes seven-in-ten Poles, 62% of Greeks and roughly the same proportion of Moldovans and Serbs (59% each). The public is relatively more split on the issue in Belarus, Bulgaria and Russia, where 50% favor keeping religion separate from government policy, while 42% in each country say governments should promote the spread of religious values and beliefs in their country.
Only in Armenia and Georgia do more (59% and 52%, respectively) say the state should promote religious values and beliefs in the country.
In all seven Central and Eastern European countries surveyed where there is no official or preferred religion, solid majorities favor keeping religion and the government separate. For instance, in Bosnia – which experienced ethnic and religious violence in the 1990s – 76% of the public favors separation between religion and government. And, in Croatia, another former Yugoslav republic that experienced ethnic and religious violence, roughly seven-in-ten (69%) say the same.
People in countries with an official or preferred religion also are somewhat more likely (median of 53% vs. 40%) than those living elsewhere to support government funding of the dominant church in the country. For example, eight-in-ten Georgians (82%) think the Georgian Orthodox Church – the nation’s preferred religion – should receive financial support from the government. By contrast, in Latvia, which has no official or preferred church, fewer than a third (30%) of adults say that their country’s largest church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia, should receive funding.
Two countries – Greece and Poland – buck this trend. In Greece, only 18% of people favor government funding for the country’s official Greek Orthodox Church. And in Poland, only 28% say the government should provide money to the country’s preferred Catholic Church.
Topics: Eastern Europe, Religious Affiliation, Religious Beliefs and Practices, Europe, National and Cultural IdentityA man who repeatedly contacted the U.S. Secret Service to threaten President Donald Trump’s life was charged in federal court Tuesday.
James Jackson, a truck driver, was arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, after it was determined he made phone calls to the Secret Service field office in Chicago, Illinois, from Oct. 12 through Oct. 13 using a masked phone number, saying he was going to kill the president, The Detroit News reported.
“Better watch Donald Trump a--, ya b---h. Ya’ll think someone playing with yo dumba--es, I am going to blow white brains out … his [expletive] head,” Jackson reportedly said.
On Oct. 18, Jackson called the Secret Service field office in Detroit, Michigan, saying: “Why ya’ll messing with my wires? I’m going to blow Trump’s brains out.”
A woman who Jackson frequently called in an unrelated incident told investigators that after she met a man named “Jamie” online, he threatened to “cut off her head and parade it in front of the White House for Trump.”
Jackson, who was arraigned in Spokane, Wash., and remains in custody, denied the allegations against him through his federal defender.One of the four main techniques of Russian disinformation is distortion, misreporting the facts on the ground in order to confirm a chosen narrative. As @DFRLab has reported, earlier distortions used grossly inflated figures, doctored images, and fake social media posts to achieve their effect.
The present case involves what appears to be the deliberate mistranslation of a quote in a Western tabloid to create the impression that NATO has aggressive intentions towards Russia — a key theme of Kremlin propaganda.
The original story
The case in question began on April 2, when British tabloid the Daily Express ran an article by correspondent Marco Giannangeli on the deployment of British forces to the Baltic States as part of NATO’s enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) in the region.
The original article. (Source: Daily Express)
The article quoted a number of officers from the British and US armies, including US Lt. Col. Steve Gventer, who was quoted as saying:
Once we’re set up, we’ll be spending time sizing up the terrain, with all its lakes and waterways, and finding the defensive positions in case the enemy attacks. (…) But I don’t expect to see Kaliningrad or the Belarusian border. Our intent is to work out how we’d be able to defend sovereign Nato territory.
The article was picked up by thirteen Russian language media outlets. Seven of them significantly misquoted Lt. Col. Gventer’s comment, rendering “I don’t expect” as “It’s possible that we will”:
Left: Gventer’s quote, from the Daily Express. Right: A translation of the quote as it appeared in Russian outlets
This, in turn, was used to imply that NATO is planning an assault on Kaliningrad and Belarus:
“NATO announced its readiness to take Kaliningrad and Minsk by force.” (Source: warfiles.ru).
The false quote was first used in WarFiles — a platform that publishes user-generated content on military, geopolitics, defense, and security. It was shared over 500 times on Facebook.
(Source: via buzzsummo.com)
Fake or mistake?
It is important to assess whether the error is likely to have been an innocent translator’s mistake, or deliberate. The Russian phrase used was, “Возможно, мы увидим Калининград или белорусскую границу, но наша цель — выяснить, как защитить суверенитет территории НАТО.” Literally translated, this means, “It’s possible that we will see Kaliningrad or the Belarusian border, but our goal is to work out how to defend the sovereignty of NATO territory.”
The second half of the warfiles.ru quote, from “but,” is broadly accurate; it certainly does not pervert the overall meaning. The problem lies in the translation of Gventer’s phrase, “I don’t expect to see Kaliningrad or the Belarusian border,” as “It’s possible that we will see Kaliningrad or the Belarusian border.” This converts a negative statement (“I don’t expect”) into a positive one (“It’s possible we will”), and builds a narrative of aggression on the result.
The warfiles.ru article contained a large number of other quotes from the Express article, which appear to have been translated accurately; this shows the translator had at least a baseline of competence.
Moreover, it is worth noting the translation of the quote used by other Russian outlets at the same time, notably state broadcaster RT Russian and daily Pravda: “Я не жду, что мы увидим Калининград или белорусскую границу.” This is a much more literal translation, correctly portraying the statement as negative, and the phrase used to translate “I don’t expect,” “ Я не жду,” is extremely common.
The likelihood is therefore that the warfiles.ru mistranslation was deliberate, and chosen to reinforce the narrative of NATO aggression.
Spreading the fake
The warfiles.ru article was reproduced the same day by rusmi.su, a self-styled “information agency” whose stated goal is to “support the national leader and head of state — Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” and whose values include:
We are for strengthening the image of man in society as the father of children, the head of the family and clan, the noble warrior-defender, the creator and laborer. We are for strengthening the image of woman in society as the mother, protector of the home and hearth, and keeper of the house!
The spread of the Express article. Logos with a red lozenge mark the use of the false quote.
No other outlet picked up the fake story in April. However, in June it was re-launched by a site called fdnews.ru, which specializes in pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian stories. The site appears to be a political clickbait website generating over 95% of its traffic from social media, primarily Facebook and Russian social media networks Vkontakte and OK.ru, according to similarweb.com.
Its pickup of the warfiles.ru story was shared over a thousand times on Facebook and spread to Russian-language Latvian media outlet Vesti.lv, Russia’s Gosnovosti, a blog on mirtesen.ru, and a Russian-language outlet in Lithuania, obzor.lt. Of note, Vesti.lv also amplified a fake story on the number of U.S. tanks deploying to Europe at the beginning of 2017, showing a track record of disinformation which has been underlined by investigative group Re:Baltica.
Together, these articles generated close to 2,000 Facebook shares and an unknown number of shares on Russian social media platforms.
Conclusion
This is not the first time that the pro-Kremlin media have distorted quotes in the foreign-language media to create a propaganda effect. In August 2016, for example, Sputnik’s English service misquoted a Norwegian article as accusing German Chancellor Angela Merkel of behaving like an “autocrat,” when the original said that she “reigned almost supreme” in German politics.
The Sputnik version, sourcing itself to an article by Christina Pletten of Aftenposten. Note the use of the word “autocrat” in quotes. (Source: Sputnik. Archived on June 27, 2017.)
The Aftenposten original. Note the byline of Christina Pletten and the lead paragraph in bold, which reads, “A series of brutal attacks in public places have given Angela Merkel a heavy fall in the polls. Nevertheless, she reigns almost supreme in German politics.” The word “autocrat” did not feature in the article. (Source: Aftenposten)
The twisting of a positive story into a negative one fits into the Kremlin’s broader pattern of attacking and undermining Merkel ahead of German elections in September.
The perversion of the Daily Express story is significant for two reasons. First, it shows the extent to which such fake stories can spread and endure. The warfiles.ru article did not have a massive impact, but it reached hundreds of social media users and was still being circulated almost three months after its initial launch.
Second, it shows the ease with which fake news can be created. The article in question built on a mistranslation of just three words — “I don’t expect” — to validate an entire narrative of NATO aggression and perfidy. It is a cheap trick, in the literal sense as well as metaphorical: such mistranslations, which give falsehood a veneer of authority, can be produced at next to no cost. It is likely that many more remain to be uncovered.The conversation on the doorstep in Bents Green began so promisingly for Nick Clegg. The economy was going well, noted his Sheffield Hallam constituent, a 53-year-old quantity surveyor. Business at the man’s engineering firm was booming and they were taking on new staff. The deputy prime minister nodded enthusiastically. Then he heard the n-word.
“I must admit, I normally vote for you,” said the man. “But this time I’m going for Ukip, purely because of Europe and immigration. I don’t trust Farage, but I will probably vote for them.”
Things didn’t really improve from there. “I think he [Farage] will be in coalition instead of you next time,” said the man, who declined to be named. Well, Clegg wasn’t going to let that one pass. “I doubt that very much,” he began, as two bodyguards waited patiently at the gatepost, muttering to each other via their earpieces. “But here, in your neck of the woods, the choice really is between myself and the Labour party. Ukip aren’t going to win here.”
Though Clegg didn’t mention it, Farage’s party hasn’t even selected a candidate yet to try to eat into his 53.4% majority this May.
“I do like you,” said Clegg’s lost voter. “We’ve been to hear you talk and we really appreciate having a national politician taking the time to come local.” Clegg spluttered good-naturedly: “Then the least I deserve is a cross on your ballot paper!” The conversation ended with Clegg noting that both he and his interlocutor were wearing North Face fleeces. “Look at that, we’re both wearing North Face and still you won’t vote for me. What does it take?”
Nick Clegg canvassing in Sheffield Hallam. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Guardian
Despite such dispiriting encounters, Clegg insists he is “confident but not complacent” about retaining the seat he has held since 2005. In the leafier parts of the semi-rural constituency in south-west Sheffield it is easy to find voters, particularly older people, who are keeping the Lib Dem faith, insisting Clegg is a hard-working local MP who has been unfairly scapegoated by the media.
Many will tell you they have not forgotten the “socialist republic of South Yorkshire” of the 80s, which they feel led to poorer (Labour-voting) parts of Sheffield getting preferential treatment – a divide some say continues today.
It is therefore quite remarkable that Clegg now sees Ed Miliband’s party as his main challenger. Labour has never won the seat in its 120-year history, or even come close. Yet a recent poll by the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft gave Clegg a lead of just three points over his young Labour rival, Oliver Coppard. Ever optimistic, Lib Dems hope the 23.5% of the electorate who voted Tory in Sheffield Hallam in 2010 will hold their noses and vote for Clegg in May if it will keep Miliband out.
The Labour surge cannot be attributed merely to vengeful students bitter about Clegg’s broken promise on tuition fees. Despite sharing a name with one of Sheffield’s universities, only 15% of the electorate are students. Students live mainly in the Crookes and Ecclesall wards, where Clegg’s name was greeted last week with responses ranging from “tosser” (a locksmith on Crookes Road), and “Cameron’s pet” (a taekwondo instructor from Crosspool who said he was switching from the Lib Dems to Ukip in May), to “lying bastard” (a barman, a Lib Dem to Labour defector, at the Ball pub in Crookes) and “unprincipled, power-grabbing charlatan” (the owner of Books on the Park at Hunter’s Bar).
The only South Yorkshire seat that is not a Labour stronghold, Sheffield Hallam is often described as the most affluent constituency outside the south-east. Labour came third in 2010, when Clegg upped his majority to 15,284 with the Tories a distant second. Yet just before Christmas the Times suggested on its front page that Labour was mounting a secret operation to “decapitate” Clegg. After a visit to the constituency, the Labour MP Tom Watson stirred the pot by saying: “I have never encountered such animosity on the doorstep against an incumbent MP – particularly one as high-profile.”
Despite the rhetoric, Labour is not putting any money into fighting the seat. It is not on the party’s target list, and Coppard has not been given the services of a paid organiser, nor “mobilisation assistants”. Clegg, meanwhile, has registered donations to his local party worth £43,500 this year, cash that helps to pay for two full-time campaign staff, not to mention an avalanche of leaflets that pensioners were busy stuffing in envelopes in a church hall in Bents Green on Saturday morning.
Labour’s Oliver Coppard. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Guardian
Coppard has had to pay for his own propaganda, raising money via a “donate” function on his website. His campaign is run by Harry, who works in a bicycle co-operative by day and often turns up to canvassing sessions on his bike wearing a head-torch and no coat. He has co-opted an army of students, who will trek up Sheffield’s hills in foul weather in the hope of kicking out the man they blame for their £9,000 tuition fees.
On the doorstep, Coppard paints a picture of Clegg as an absent MP more concerned with cosying up to Cameron than fighting for his constituents. Clegg has made Coppard’s job easier, not just by reneging on his pledge not to increase tuition fees but by being in the highest echelons of a government that, shortly after its formation in 2010, cancelled a £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters, which the steel company had hoped to use to buy a new forging press for producing nuclear plant components, creating jobs.
Coppard, the amiable son of a former chief executive of Barnsley council, was once an office junior for another Sheffield MP, Meg Munn, and like many of the new Labour generation he loves American politics, having interned in Congress and worked on Obama’s second presidential campaign. After a spell at a London-based thinktank, he now works for the South Yorkshire local enterprise partnership trying to make the county’s former coalmining communities carbon-neutral.
A first-time general election candidate who went to school in Sheffield Hallam, he is green enough to believe he can topple Clegg, but says: “This is not a decapitation strategy. This is a local campaign, about us doing our best to win a seat we can win.”Volunteer Activities
Bambelela is a great opportunity for wildlife enthusiasts to get involved in true wildlife conservation, rehabilitation and release. Volunteers work directly alongside the experienced wildlife staff and will be trained in all aspects of primate care, including acting as "surrogate parents" to orphaned baby monkeys, introducing juvenile monkeys to existing troops at the sanctuary, and preparing established troops for release. Long-term volunteers may even get to experience living at the release site and monitoring the progress of the newly released troop.
In addition to the many projects which are constantly running, volunteers also assist with the day-to-day running of the sanctuary. The volunteers’ daily tasks may include:
-Feeding of animals in the wildlife care (with food prep / cleaning)
-Making baby bottles and feeding orphaned baby monkeys
-Caring for and playing with baby monkeys, as surrogate parent and/or in Bambelela "kindergarten"
-Caring for injured or sick animals
-Assisting with basic medical practices, administering medications
-Cleaning of cages, camps, clinic, kitchen, bomas and enclosures
-Creating natural environments in enclosures
-Developing behavior enrichment programs for the animals
-Going out on calls to collect monkeys and/or food supplies
-Assisting with introduction of new monkeys
-Monitoring monkeys requiring daily attention
-Building of new camps and quarantine facility
-Writing up reports and keeping data lists
-Assisting with fundraising and social media efforts
-24 hour emergency stand-by (once a week)
Caring for animals requires patience, compassion, and a calm demeanor. A positive attitude, willingness to help and learn, and a sense of humour are essential - volunteers should expect to be dirty and exhausted by the end of the day!
Although the focus is on vervet monkeys, you may also get to experience other sanctuary wildlife at Bambelela including zebra, kudu, giraffe, warthog, porcupine, mongoose, meerkat and capuchin, as well as the many wild animals who are attracted to the Groot Nylsoog River and its marsh passing through Bambelela.
Community Outreach and Education
Apart from caring for, rehabilitating and releasing wildlife, Bambelela also runs outreach programs - educating farmers, land owners and settlements and giving talks at schools, clubs, organizations, conservancies and the sanctuary itself.
Vervet monkeys are classified as “old world monkeys,” meaning that they have been around for over 65 million years - long before apes and humans. Vervet monkeys are one of South Africa’s five indigenous primates. The other four are the lesser bushbaby, the thick-tailed bushbaby, the samango monkey and the chacma baboon.
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was just too much for many people here.
They contended that it was better to risk turning Mr. McVeigh into a dead martyr than risk his becoming a Charles Manson-like figure who could gather even larger numbers of disturbed people to him.
''It stops -- it stops here,'' said Mike Lenz, whose wife, Carrie, who was pregnant at the time, was killed in the attack.
Jannie Coverdale, whose two grandsons were killed in the bombing, agreed.
''That is the only reason for asking for his death,'' Mrs. Coverdale said by telephone from Denver. ''We don't need him in prison recruiting people to go out and hurt other people. We have enough people like Timothy McVeigh walking around out there already.''
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Several people here said Mr. McVeigh's execution was worth the risk of losing any information that he might take to his grave.
For weeks now, they have heard witness accounts of Mr. McVeigh's actions and attitudes in the courtroom. Never did he show any remorse for the pain they suffered.
Why would he be forthcoming in prison? people here ask.
Ms. Coverdale said that she felt ''so sorry'' for his parents in the Denver courtroom but that the enormity of the crime justified the death sentence.
To try and get at more answers in the case, and to backstop the Federal death warrant with a state one, the district attorney here plans to try Mr. McVeigh in state court. Today's verdict did nothing to change that, said the district attorney, Bob Macy.
Some people here have questioned the wisdom of that, afraid that it would only prolong the pain of what happened here. But others here want to be very, very sure that he pays.
Mr. Welch, though he opposes the death penalty, did not question the decision by the jurors because they acted on the evidence, within the law.
''I just hope someday we can deal with murderers in some other manner,'' he said.
Ms. Coverdale said that she, too, was sick of the killing but that the death sentence ''was necessary'' for Mr. McVeigh.By: Taito Genre: Shooting Players: 1 Difficulty: Easy-Medium
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: 259,300 (one credit)
Also Available For: MegaDrive, NES
The differences between the gaming cultures in Japan and the ‘West’ really are quite amazing sometimes. Obviously certain genres are more popular in certain parts of the world but even some that are universally popular, such as shoot ’em ups, can be quite different. The Japanese like bright, cute, and often very weird games while us Western gamers apparently have darker, more realistic, and often more violent tastes. A great example of this peculiar trend is Insector X by frequent purveyors of cuteness, Taito. Accordingly, this original is colourful and full of cute characters. Most Western gamers know it as a MegaDrive release, however, and this version features much more realistic graphics devoid of cuteness. When I recently decided to reacquaint myself with the game, this time by sampling the arcade version, it was this kind of game that I was expecting, but as you’ve probably already determined, it’s not the type of game I found.
No versions of the game seem big on story, not even the ones that have instruction manuals as far as I can tell, but it seems the premise involves some sort of insect infestation, but they’re not just ordinary insects – these ones are cybernetic terrors! Rather than using a combination of insect repellent and the odd hydraulic press, however, the fate of the world (whichever world it is) is instead left up to a hero who rivals the insects in terms of his diminutive stature as well as his hardened resolve. He goes by the name of Yanmer and only with your help can he rid the world of the Dark Ruler Queen, etc. Five side-scrolling stages stand between the two adversaries as well as a large number of exoskeletal goons who, I’m happy to say, do not exclusively possess the luxury of flight – Yanmer is not only equipped with wings himself which enable free and unlimited movement around the stages but he also wears a hat topped by a propeller for good measure.
The freedom of flight would be useless without something a bit more aggressive to back it up with though, as a single hit from one of the spindly critters is enough to put him down. To this end, Yanmer is also equipped with the standard weedy gun which initially fires a single small shot. It can be powered-up fairly quickly by collecting ‘P’ icons though, while the similar ‘S’ icons put a bit more wind in his wings, the ‘A’ icon equips an autofire option, Lightning icons are smart bombs, there are acorns to collect for bonus points, and there’s also the odd 1up to look out for. Then there’s the special attacks. There are ten of these altogether which are obtained by collecting insecticide cans carried by some enemies (which is a bit like Ripley carrying an angry Alien around, but nevermind) which alternate between ground and air attacks – coloured brown or blue respectively – of which there are five apiece. They are seemingly awarded randomly but generally consist of either bomb-like things to hammer the numerous floor-dwelling enemies, and various types of missiles for taking out the more numerous airborne nincompoops.
These special attacks can also be powered-up by collecting successive icons and before long our heroic fairy is hurling an almost-unbreachable wall of death! That doesn’t make it the easiest arcade shmup of all-time but it’s far from the hardest either. Least that means you should get to see all the stages though, but are they worth seeing? Graphically, it uses a mixture of styles. As mentioned, the sprites are mostly cute creatures such as flies, bees, dragonflies, moths, and ladybirds in the air while the ground forces are made up of fish, snails, flowers, and even mushrooms. The stages themselves, on the other hand, are made to look a bit more realistic for the most part. They’re named Desert, Plateau, City, Jungle, and Their Empire, and feature a decent mixture of man-made as well as natural environments, both indoor and outdoor.
Each stage, or ‘area’, is guarded by a giant creepy-crawly too, such as wasps or spiders. These things reminded me of the bosses in Fantasy Zone – they have limited movement and seem to content merely flinging a load of bullets your way. They’re not nearly as tough as the infernal guardians in Sega’s older cute ’em up but they do look half-decent, as do many of the backgrounds and some of the amusing enemies too, but I can’t help thinking this looks like a game designed a few years earlier – things were generally quite a bit flashier than this by 1989. The flashiest thing here is probably Yanmer’s weapons, with the screen often brimming with his multi-coloured bullets and missiles, but most effects, such as the explosions or enemies taking damage are quite poor. Still, it’s pleasant and cheerful enough, and sounds the part too. The music is rather on the loud side but most tunes are catchy and suit the cutesy action pretty well.
For all its decent-though-unspectacular aesthetics, though, I’m struggling to think of any one moment or section of the game that really stands out. Control of Yanmer is good, although it’s possible to speed him up too much, but there isn’t really much in the way of foreground scenery or obstacles to manoeuvre around which was disappointing and made progress a bit… well, boring at times, especially as there isn’t really any super-tough, nerve-fraying parts either. A balanced difficulty level is rare in a shmup, admittedly, but sometimes you need a crazy, hectic section to keep you on your toes! It’s not a very long game either – a player of moderate skill should be able to play it through in less then twenty minutes with a bit of practise. Insector X is far from a terrible game and is well worthy of a blast if the chance arises – what else gives you the opportunity blow the crap out of confused-looking snails, frowning moths, and evil mushrooms? – but when the most noteworthy thing about a game, and an arcade game no less, is curiosity over its graphical style compared to a more popular version, it can’t really be wonderful news either.
RKS Score: 6/10
Hits: 40Severed head of genital disease saint for sale in Ireland BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A decapitated head, said to be that of St Vitalis of Assisi, the patron saint of genital diseases, will be sold at an auction in Co Meath next Sunday. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/republic-of-ireland/severed-head-of-genital-disease-saint-for-sale-in-ireland-28619687.html
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A decapitated head, said to be that of St Vitalis of Assisi, the patron saint of genital diseases, will be sold at an auction in Co Meath next Sunday.
The macabre object, which is housed in a Queen Anne case, is being sold by an Anglo-Irish family based in Co Louth and has a guide price of between €800 and €1,200.
Saint Vitalis of Assisi (there are a number of saints with the name Vitalis) was an Italian hermit and monk who died in 1370.
He became a saint despite an early life marked by licentiousness and immorality.
However, in an attempt to atone he went on pilgrimages to various sanctuaries.
On his return to Umbria, he became a Benedictine monk at Subiaco and later lived as a hermit. He spent the rest of his life in the hermitage of Santa Maria di Viole, near Assisi, in utter poverty.
His reputation for holiness soon spread after his death. He was known as a patron against sicknesses and diseases affecting the genitals.
How what is believed to be the saint's decapitated head came to Ireland is unclear.
Auctioneer Damien Matthews, who will sell the saint's severed head at auction at Annesbrook House in Duleek, Co Meath, says the current owners believed it was brought here by an Anglo-Irish couple who had acquired it on the 'grand tour' of Europe which was a ritual for ascendancy types during the 19th century.
For many years the ornate case with the skull housed inside it behind glass, had pride of place in the entrance hall of the current owner's home but when children arrived was stored in an old outhouse for many years.
"That's where I came across it. It is strange and it is macabre but it is very interesting object," said Mr Matthews.
The auction is on in the house next Sunday, May 29, at 3pm -- but items will be on view on Friday and Saturday from 11am-6pm.
"It's a fine country estate about seven miles from Slane, off the N2 motorway from Dublin (R152). There are over 400 lots with estimates ranging in value from €100 up to €30,000," he said.
Belfast TelegraphRory Gaffney scored two goals in seven games for Cambridge before joining Bristol Rovers on loan
Bristol Rovers have completed the permanent signing of Cambridge United forward Rory Gaffney.
Gaffney, 26, has been on loan at Rovers for part of this season, scoring five goals in seven games.
He began his career at Limerick and moved to Cambridge in January 2015, but has only played seven times for United.
"I'm just very happy and relieved it's all sorted," Gaffney told BBC Radio Bristol. "I didn't want to leave and go back to Cambridge United."
Gaffney has signed an 18-month deal at Rovers and chairman Nick Higgs hailed the signing.
"It's a very important signing for us as we bid to achieve a second successive promotion," Higgs told the club website.
Find all the latest football transfers on our dedicated page.DUBLIN (RNS) For years, many Irish parents sought to school their children outside the Roman Catholic Church, which dominates the country’s education system. Now a ruling could force the Irish government to do just that.
On Tuesday (Jan. 28), the European Court of Human Rights found the government was liable in a case in which a principal sexually abused a student, then 9 years old, when she attended a state-funded Catholic school in the 1970s. An Irish court had rejected her claims on the grounds that the school wasn’t public, but the European court decided the government had failed in its duty to protect children.
The ruling touched on an issue that has taken on greater urgency in recent years as sexual abuse scandals have rocked the church and more nonreligious people have immigrated to the staunchly Catholic country: Who should run Ireland’s schools?
The Catholic Church runs 90 percent of primary schools in Ireland. The rest are mainly Protestant, and about 4 percent are managed by the nonprofit Educate Together, which is nonsectarian.
The arrangement is unsettling to some parents who have little choice in where to send their children.
“They integrated religion into every subject in the school,” said Martijn Leenheer, an atheist who moved from the Netherlands to a small village in west Ireland eight years ago. “For instance, in biology, they would say ‘God created these flowers.’ Even in math they do it. They basically make religion part of everything in the school.”
Although he requested that his son opt out of religious classes, Leenheer later found that his son was learning how to recite prayers and said the school’s principal was unsympathetic to his concerns.
Eventually Leenheer moved his family so his son could attend an Educate Together school.
Jane Donnelly of Atheist Ireland said the European court’s decision may help parents like Leenheer.
“If you’ve got nowhere else but to send your child to the local school and the local school is Catholic and the state is funding that education for your child, then the state should be responsible for the protection of your human rights in that school and for religious discrimination in that school,” said Donnelly.
Ireland’s system of school patronage provides for public funding of schools but allows private groups to establish schools as long as there is sufficient demand.
Long the most powerful institution in Ireland, the Catholic Church has established more than 2,500 schools under the system. Educate Together has 68 schools, mainly in urban areas.
Responsible for their own admission policies, many Irish schools often favor baptized Catholics when enrollment exceeds available seats. As a result, parents sometimes baptize their children in the Catholic faith so they can receive an education.
“There should be freedom of religion and at the moment that is impossible,” said Jones Irwin, a lecturer at St. Patrick’s College in Dublin.
Prayers at the beginning and end of the day as well as Catholic or Protestant icons are common in Irish schools, said Irwin.
But Irish society is changing.
The number of people describing themselves as “not religious” jumped by 44 percent between the 2006 census and the most recent count in 2011. A 2010 Irish Times poll found that 61 percent of respondents believed the Catholic Church should give up control of schools. Meanwhile, attendance at Mass in Ireland has plummeted.
Even the Catholic Schools Partnership, an association representing Catholic schools in Ireland, agreed there is a problem.
“The system allows for opt out but a school must provide that opt out,” said the Rev. Michael Drumm, partnership chairman.
But Drumm said it would be unfair to say parents are forced to baptize their children. “The vast majority of Catholic schools are not oversubscribed at the moment and are open to everybody,” he said.
Teacher training programs have broadened the curriculum to instruct teachers on other faiths. Ireland’s national curriculum authority is currently writing a new, broader curriculum for schools.
As part of a study on the church’s role in schools, Ireland’s Department of Education found that around 8 percent of parents in some areas said they might move their children to nondenominational schools if given a chance.
“Everyone accepts that there’s probably an oversupply of Catholic schools at primary level,” said Drumm, though he added that a “blanket divesting” from church-run schools would only harm the education system.
Atheists like Donnelly remain skeptical.
“They might hand over a few schools here and there to try to give the impression that something is happening on the ground, but in reality they have no intention of handing over enough schools to radically change the system,” she said.
But the mere fact that Ireland is having the debate, albeit with the help of the European court, shows that the country is growing more diverse even as it retains its strong Catholic identity.
“For the first time that I’ve seen in Ireland, people are really interested in these questions now,” said Irwin. “Maybe people will say, ‘Actually, you know, we quite like what we have and we want to hold onto it.’ But we need to have that discussion.”
YS/MG END COLLINSLocation:
New Farm, BrisbaneGeneral location: Australia
The Setup:
The fireworks show to kick off Brisbane's River Festival is always a winner. I was going to set up in my normal secret* location along the north bank of the river, but I had no-one to go with this year. Erin, my old m9 from uni and IRC days said there was plenty of room at their perch at New Farm. I had Evelyn for the day as well (Lui had a day off). Dave (Erin's husband) loaned me his Sigma 10-20mm lens (I was going to use my poor man's super-wide-angle but the Sigma is far superior).The shot I had imagined I would take was of Evelyn's face as the fireworks washed over them. In reality, that would have been far too difficult to do with just me and a tripod so I have deferred that until next year (when Lui can be there to hold Evelyn). For this shot, instead, I lined up the shot so the bridge and fireworks would be in, and then marked up a spot where I would stand with Evelyn and be in the shot, triggering the shutter with the cable release.* Not especially secret, but there are no toilets there (so not good for mummies and daddies) and no fences (so not good for babies).
The camera & lens:
Camera: Canon EOS 400D DIGITALLens: Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX-DG @ 10mmExposure: 2" @ f/16, ISO 1600 (M + cable release. f/16 for attempted hyperfocal focusing)
Post processing:
Lightroom - I used a curve to highlight fireworks, but darken the sky without darkening myself and Evelyn too much (lights +20, darks +100, shadows -60). I then used recovery bar (100) to bring the highlights under control in the fireworks (this left the centres of the lights at white, but meant the light dropped off earlier, leading to a somewhat more pleasing shape). After all the overall image adjustments, I couldn't get myself and Evelyn to be light enough so I used an adjustment filter to lighten the bottom left corner Above is the end result of the colour processing. On a whim, I thought I'd try B&W processing and loved it straight away. The only further adjustment I made was to make a panoramic crop. I did have to use a fair bit of noise reduction (combination of ISO 1600, a lot of dark area in the photo, and lots of processing). I normally only use luminescence noise reduction (this time at 65), but for this photo I also used contrast noise reduction (100). It helped a lot on the edges of the fireworks.
The wash-up:
What would you do?
You are welcome to have a go at editing this photo yourself. When editing in browser, maximum size is 1600x1200px and edits can be saved as a comment if you want to share your work. Go crazy!
If you'd rather, you can download the original/raw image to play with in your own image editor:
I didn't realise until too late that my shot included a palm tree, but I think it is neutralised in the end result. Pedants will pick it up.
Related Images:This post was originally written by Raj Kumar Gujar and has been republished with permission.
Ever wondered what it would be like to be part of the minority community in a supposedly religious nation, more specifically for a Hindu in Pakistan? Well, turns out it is a pretty regular affair, no Bollywood melodrama there. social entrepreneur with the PEAD foundation in Islamabad - paints a colourful picture of his home town in Umerkot, Sindh.
"We are a happy family with different identities. As a nation, we share the same food, clothes, buildings, laws, and events. All these elements are what bring us together under the same umbrella, then why do we look for reasons to hate each other?" Raj wrote in his blog post.
Raj visited India last month for a conference in Chandigarh. He says he was "bombarded with questions regarding the status of Hindus in Pakistan."
To which he replied: " I have always felt like a star of my country and I feel safe, which is why I am as loyal as any Muslim in the country. Pakistan doesn’t just belong to Muslims; it belongs to all the residents of its soil."
Raj argues with the common widespread notion that minorities in Pakistan are treated differently or pitied. He claims to be as much a part of the soil as the friends and families he has grown up with, and considers it a blessing to have been born to his homeland.
At least, all the ladies here reminded him that his name was easy to remember. " I believe I have Shahrukh Khan to thank for that," he says.
Read Raj Kumar Gujar's complete blog post here.
All photos courtesy: Raj Kumar GujarBharatiya Janata Party leader Yogi Adityanath, center, is greeted after his election as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh during the party lawmakers’ meeting Saturday in Lucknow, India. (Reuters)
NEW DELHI — Yogi Adityanath is a saffron-robed Hindu priest, a five-term member of India’s Parliament and has more than a dozen criminal cases pending against him, including an attempted murder charge. In incendiary speeches across the sprawling and impoverished Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, he has long advocated for Hindu ideals and even exhorted his followers to kill Muslims.
On Saturday, in a surprise move, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party tapped him to lead Uttar Pradesh, which analysts see as a clear signal that Modi is building on his party’s recent win in the state’s elections and moving to consolidate his Hindu base in a run-up to the 2019 general election.
In a front-page story Sunday, the Times of India called the selection of the “saffron hardliner” a “defiant assertion” of the party’s Hindu nationalist credentials.
“By picking him to govern India’s largest state, Modi and Shah have sent a clear message that they will be bound by neither the norms of ‘politics as usual’ nor the requirements of political correctness,” the Times wrote.
Adityanath, 44, has held sway in eastern Uttar Pradesh since he was first elected to Parliament at age 26, as a “sanyasi,” or devotee, of the Gorakhnath temple religious community.
Known as a controversial and fiery orator, he has vowed to cleanse India of other religions and in 2014 suggested that mosques feature Hindu deities.
“This is the century of Hindutva, not just in India but in the entire world,” he said.
He once accused Mother Teresa of being part of a conspiracy to Christianize India and likened a well-known Bollywood star, Shah Rukh Khan, to a terrorist. At one rally, Adityanath vowed, “If one Hindu girl marries a Muslim man, then we will take 100 Muslim girls in return.” He went on, “If they [Muslims] kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.”
He was arrested in 2007 and spent 11 days in prison for violating prohibitory orders in what was deemed a “communally sensitive area,” with tensions between the Muslim and Hindu communities. He had 18 criminal cases registered against him, according to one tally during the 2014 parliamentary elections, including attempted murder, criminal intimidation and rioting.
During rallies for state elections this winter, Adityanath’s supporters often chanted for Hindu-centric rule and demanded that Muslims leave the country. Adityanath also praised President Trump for his first travel ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries and added that similar action is needed in India.
Adityanath was credited with helping the BJP and its allies win 325 of Uttar Pradesh’s 403 assembly seats during the state’s recent elections.
Uttar Pradesh, with a population of more than 220 million people, has a history of Hindu-Muslim riots. In 2013, riots between the two groups resulted in the death of more than 60 people, with thousands displaced.
Analysts said the state’s electorate will now look to Adityanath to deliver on the party’s campaign promises, including the banning of cow slaughterhouses and the building of a temple on a mosque site that has been the subject of a decades-long controversy.
The BJP's announcement about Adityanath caught even some of the party’s most staunch supporters by surprise. “I am thankful to the party and PM Modi for considering me worthy of the post,” Adityanath said. “I will take UP forward with ka saath sabka vikas,” meaning "development for all.”
Read more:
India’s biggest state, home to 220 million, is readying a report card for Narendra Modi
In India, Muslim men can end a marriage by saying ‘divorce’ three times. One woman wants to stop that.
How one Indian student tried to challenge right-wing nationalist groups on campusFor other places with similar names, see Araba
Ruins of the capital Hatra
The Kingdom of Araba (or simply Araba) was a 2nd-century CE Arab kingdom located between the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire, mostly under Parthian influence, located in modern-day northern Iraq.[1]
The city of Hatra was probably founded in the 3rd or 2nd century BCE, under the Seleucid kingdom.[1] Arabs were common in Mesopotamia at the time of the Seleucids (3rd century BC).[2] In the 1st and 2nd century, Hatra was ruled by a dynasty of Arabian princes.[1] It rose to prominence as the capital of Araba and became an important religious center as a result of its strategic position along caravan trade routes.[1]
Araba is one of the first Arab states to be established outside of Arabia, preceded by the Kingdom of Osroene (132 BC–216 AD) and the Kingdom of Emesa (64 BCE–300s CE), and followed by the Ghassanids (220–638) and the Lakhmids (300–602), buffer states of the Roman and Sassanid Empires, respectively.[2]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]“HIGH ENERGY BASED Japan approved blanked [sic] surveillance over ALL” Muslims!
So reads the celebratory title of a Reddit post linking to an old news article about Japan’s highest court approving surveillance of Muslims. The post is from the The_Donald community on Reddit, the major online gathering place for U.S. President Donald Trump’s supporters. For them, it is a welcoming, “high energy” subculture dense with memes, conspiracy theories, alternative news sources, and celebration of Trump’s intellect and leadership — a never-ending online Trump rally. I have been lurking in the community since the time when a Trump presidency was no more than a wacky thought experiment, but for the uninitiated, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin from the New York Times provides a great introduction.
Since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visits to the United States, I have been struck by the community’s admiration for Japan and belief in Trump’s widespread popularity there. Abe and Trump’s bromance was warmly received by the The_Donald community, where it was celebrated with posts such as “70% of japanese approved of pm shinzo abe’s trump visit! winning!” Indeed, the community has found many reasons to admire Japan. A 2015 Fox News headline, “Japan not taking in refugees; says it must look after its citizens first” was posted several times in February, with numerous other discussion threads praising Japan’s strict immigration policy. Back in December a post sharing a piece by the far-right news site Infowars, analyzing how Japan’s policies are a model for resisting Islamic terrorism, was one of the most popular topics in the community. In one of the highest rated comments, user bottomlines explains his admiration for Japan:
“Even this aside, Japan is a nice example of a country which prioritized itself: Third largest economy in the world. One of the highest living standards. One of the safest countries. And they have a very close-knit, friendly, and mostly well-functioning society. We are all using Japanese products, which are designed, created and made IN Japan using their own brains and manufacturing. So many enormous companies are Japanese.
“They don’t thrust themselves head-first into every foreign endeavor. They are fiercely defensive of their culture, and unaccepting of people coming in and trying to change it. If you go there, you’d better learn their language and follow their customs.
“I might even say they are a bit too insular, but I honestly admire their balls for absolutely refusing to buy into the globalism open-borders bullshit.”
This admiration for Japanese society also complicates the characterization of the The_Donald community as a racist, misogynistic, homophobic hub for white supremacists. In fact, the community is frustrated by such accusations and frequently celebrates black, LGBT, and female Trump supporters. At the height of the community’s interest in Japan, a Japanese-American Trump supporter created a thread to answer Japan-related questions, where her identity as a mixed race immigrant in a homosexual relationship was picked up on by the community as yet another example of how the mainstream media unfairly mischaracterizes The_Donald posters.
Although the nationalist wave that made Trump president no doubt re-energized many old-school racists and white supremacists, The_Donald is a younger community, with many members quite accepting of other cultures and identities — when framed in their own terms, not those of the liberal left. They are not simple xenophobes, but hold that all nations (the U.S., Japan, and Mexico alike) have a right to protect their people and culture without a carte blanche obligation to accept outside people and values. They ridicule college feminism and its obsession with safe spaces, trigger warnings, and limitless gender identities, but celebrate Kurdish and Israeli warrior women and condemn the misogyny of Islam. Many describe themselves as having previously been uncritical of mainstream liberal values, until they were “red pilled,” a metaphor from the movie “The Matrix” to describe waking up to the truth.
Communities like The_Donald will continue to carve out in our political discourses a growing space for a younger, less crusty body of nationalist values to do battle with college liberalism for the hearts and minds of coming generations. Adherence to values of tolerance, multiculturalism and social progressiveness as envisioned in the prevailing mainstream of liberal thinking will no longer be the unchallenged measure of Western civilization.
This new contested space will suit Japan well. Ever since Meiji Japan sought to join the club of European empires, Japan has been playing catch-up with the values of developed Western nations that set the standard for what civilized society should look like. In Japan, ideas such as internationalization or women’s empowerment often feel like they are being introduced top down and from the outside, without being driven locally by powerful social movements or vigorous public discussion. Even university campuses, hotbeds for activism on social issues in the United States and Europe, are as politically apathetic as any part of Japanese society.
The real values that most of Japan holds on issues such as multiculturalism and women’s empowerment are in fact much closer to the values of The_Donald than of elite liberals. Although poor performance in gender equality rankings is embarrassing, Japan’s pursuit of women’s empowerment is a pragmatic response to an aging and shrinking population and is accompanied by little critical discussion on the nature or politics of gender identities, much less any feminist anger at a volume we are used to in the West.
Meanwhile, various aspects of internationalization in Japan often feel like a layer of surface gimmicks, precariously built on an underlying anxiety about protecting a Japanese culture and society often reluctant or unable to substantially engage with foreign cultures. Ready as Japan may be to “attract international talent” in the specific form of university educated white people, it would much prefer to build robots than throw open its doors to workers from countries elsewhere in Asia or, more unlikely still, refugees from the Middle East.
Should the Millennial nationalism represented by The_Donald eventually make its way to mainstream legitimacy in Western societies, it could set the scene for Japan to assert a less awkward (inter)national identity that is unashamed, perhaps even celebratory, of its cultural and social homogeneity and lack of multiculturalism. There may be a tipping point where Japan’s defensive approach to globalization and reluctance to open its arms to multiculturalism will be held as a model for how a civilized developed nation might position itself in the Trump era. For members of The_Donald, Japan is already such a model.
Sakari Mesimäki is a Finnish public affairs consultant based at APCO Worldwide in Tokyo. © 2017, The Diplomat; distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLCWilliamsburg-Jamestown Airport in Virginia Wikipedia Updated 9:33 PM EDT: Two people died when a single-engine Cessna plane crashed in Williamsburg, Virginia, FOX43 TV is reporting.
The plane went down in a wooded area around 50 yards from the Williamsburg Landing subdivision near the Williamsburg/Jamestown Airport, according to FOX43.
Investigators initially confirmed one fatality due to the impact, and said there was no fire when the crash happened shortly before 5 p.m., FOX43 reported.
A second passenger, a woman, was confirmed dead later in the evening.
The family pet also died in the crash, FOX43 reported.
The names of the victims have not been released.
According to WUSA9, the Federal Aviation Administration said the plane was a Cessna 210, and that as the plane lined up for a final approach, the pilot flew across the airport and landed on a field for unexplained reasons.This week, we’re pleased to announce that one of our partners, TOPOP, is featuring three fantastic Guild Wars 2 statues in their December sale! Enjoy savings now on statues of Rytlock, the Shatterer, and Zojja with a golem.
Guild Wars 2 Rytlock Brimstone: Hero of Charr Figure Statue
This Blood Legion charr was stationed in the Black Citadel as part of its vanguard. Now, he’s available for reassignment to your home or office. This 11” PVC statue comes with 10 interchangeable accessories, including a right hand that wields the legendary sword Sohothin.
Guild Wars 2 the Shatterer Dragon Statue
The Shatterer patrols the Dragonbrand within Blazeridge Steppes, overseeing the Branded within. Now, this 8” PVC-and-resin replica is ready to stand guard for you. The statue features the Guild Wars 2 logo emblazoned on its platform.
Guild Wars 2 Zojja with Golem USB Flash Drive and USB Hub Figure Statue Set
Zojja is a highly respected asuran elementalist, golemancer, and member of the College of Synergetics. This beautiful replica features fully articulated arms, including one equipped with a light-up function. The Zojja figure also doubles as a 16 GB flash drive for storing your own knowledge. Accompanying Zojja is a golem with fully articulated arms, four USB ports, and a light-up function on its eye and chest.Everybody Always Thinks Inflation Is Higher Than It Really Is
The world is going to hell, and prices are going through the roof. This, more or less, seems to be the perpetual conventional wisdom.
The first half of the statement is debatable. But the second half is clearly wrong at the moment: Prices are not going through the roof.
Prices for U.S. consumers rose by just 1.4 percent over the past year, according to the consumer price index numbers released this morning. In other words, inflation is very low.
Enlarge this image St. Louis Fed St. Louis Fed
If this comes as a surprise, don't be surprised. In study after study, in country after country, economists have found that consumers overestimate inflation.
It's not clear why this is the case.
Maybe it's because when consumers think about inflation, they think about stuff they buy all the time — stuff like groceries and gasoline. But gas accounts for only 5 percent of the average household's budget, while groceries make up 9 percent.
And over the past few decades, prices for more expensive things that people buy less often — stuff like cars, furniture and electronics — have risen more slowly than prices for stuff people buy all the time. As a result, consumers have tended to over-estimate inflation. (For more on this hypothesis, see this study.)
There's also this: Everybody talks about food and gas prices when they're rising. Think of gas prices in the past few weeks, and earlier this year. But, somehow, we don't hear so much about gas prices falling, as they did for much of the spring.
"People focus on bad news more than they focus on good news," Paul J. Healy, an Ohio State University economist who has studied how people perceive inflation, told me. "When prices go up, they notice it. When prices go down, they don't care."Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro has announced the creation of a new popular assembly with the ability to rewrite the constitution, a move that opponents labelled a power grab aimed at defusing anti-government protests.
The opposition has been demanding general elections to try and end the socialists' 18-year rule.
"I don't want a civil war," Maduro told a large May Day rally of supporters in Caracas business hub, while elsewhere across the city security forces fired tear gas at youth hurling stones and petrol bombs after opposition marches were blocked.
Maduro has triggered an article of the constitution that creates a super-body known as a "constituent assembly".
It can dissolve public powers and call general elections, echoing a previous assembly created by his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, in 1999 soon after he won office.
"I convoke the original constituent power to achieve the peace needed by |
will also go to Save the Children, which is formally involved in the effort.
Typical of the more obscure nonprofit appeals springing up in the wake of the earthquake is the newly formed Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children’s Fund announced on Tuesday by Kids in Distressed Situations.
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KIDS, as the group calls itself, supplies clothing, toys, books and other basic necessities for underprivileged children and children affected by disasters. In the case of Japan, the organization said it was soliciting corporations and donors for products like new children’s underwear, blankets and toys.
Asked how money raised for the fund would be used, Dr. Janice Weinman, president of KIDS, wrote in an e-mail that it would pay for “shipping of the product and for warehousing it until the Japanese ports open.”
Holden Karnofsky, a founder of GiveWell, a Web site that researches charities, said he was struck by how quickly many nonprofit groups had moved to create ads using keywords like “Japan,” “earthquake,” “disaster,” and “help” to improve the chances of their ads showing up on Google when the words were used in search queries.
“Charities are aggressively soliciting donations around this disaster, and I don’t believe these donations necessarily are going to be used for relief or recovery in Japan because they aren’t needed for that,” Mr. Karnofsky said. “The Japanese government has made it clear it has the resources it needs for this disaster.”
Robert Ottenhoff, president and chief executive of GuideStar, a Web site that provides charity tax forms and other resources for donors, said donors themselves were to blame for the fund-raising frenzy.
People who really want to support charitable organizations and good works, Mr. Ottenhoff said, should base it on a desire to support something they already understand and believe in.
Since this article was originally published, the Japanese Red Cross has begun taking donations to support relief work in the earthquake-stricken region of Japan. You can also find another list of organizations raising money that will go directly to Japanese non-governmental organizations here.Although we are unlikely to hear the Presidential candidates discuss this issue, a decision issued last week by the D.C. Circuit highlights the ongoing need for labor law reform. The case, Ozburn-Hessey Logistics, LLC v. NLRB, demonstrates how employers can flout the law with impunity, frustrating the efforts of workers who want to organize and bargain collectively.
All of the following facts come from the court’s decision: In 2009, workers began an organizing campaign at the employer’s warehouse facilities in Memphis, Tennessee. The employer responded to the organizing campaign with a series of unlawful acts, including threatening employees, confiscating union materials, and disciplining union supporters. A representation election took place in March 2010; the workers voted against unionization, but that the election was tainted by the employer’s unfair labor practices. The workers regrouped and voted to unionize on July 27, 2011, even though the employer continued to commit illegal acts, including firing a union supporter and issuing a final warning to another.
When the election was over, the employer refused to bargain, forcing the union to file charges with the NLRB. The refusal to bargain case was combined with the case involving the illegal firing and discipline, and, now five years later, the D.C. Circuit ruled against the employer on every issue. In other words, for the last five years, the employer has unjustifiably deprived its workers of their federally protected right to engage in collective bargaining. What are the consequences for the employer? Exactly nothing – the only remedy is a prospective bargaining order. What compensation will the workers receive for this deprivation of their rights? Again, nothing!
As we approach the Presidential election, think about the outrage if the incumbent were allowed to stay in office while we spend five years litigating the legitimacy of the election (and to further the outrage, consider if, as was the case with Ozburn-Hessey, the arguments raised to challenge the election were so frivolous that the circuit court summarily rejected them without discussion). If an employer refuses to honor the results of a union representation election, there should either be an expedited proceeding to resolve the dispute, or workers should be entitled to compensation for interference with their rights. Republicans often proclaim fealty to “the rule of law,” but the current system where an employer can make workers wait five years to vindicate their right to collective bargaining makes a mockery of the rule of law.
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In this day of polarized politics, it’s incumbent on good citizens to be vigorously truthful. Even in the heat of battle, partisans should own up to their mistakes. Rectifying errors builds credibility. Honest self-criticism ensures a healthy debate and a healthier democracy.
OK, fine. I messed up.
Late last month, my wife, Susie, and I took a day trip to Shutters, an elegant, white-veneered hotel along the ritzy Santa Monica shoreline. It’s a special-occasion place, and we went there to take in a rare parental reprieve.
We went to the hotel’s second-floor veranda overlooking the Pacific and ordered spinach-and-artichoke dip and two margaritas. Except for a mild wind, the day was perfect for checking out seagulls and passers-by on the boardwalk below.
Santa Monica is an upscale part of Los Angeles, and Shutters is a pricey joint. But the nearby pier-cum-amusement-park and its spacious public beach is a multifaceted, people-watching experience.
Soon after our drinks arrived, a group of mostly-college-age kids began walking by in large bunches, many in tandem holding large rope segments in groups of 20 or so. They clearly were marching for something they considered important.
As they passed, the protesters stared sourly at the second story where we sat. Fellow patrons wondered aloud what this now massive conga line was all about. About 300 people into the procession, I spotted a sign that had “war” written in it. One T-shirt read, “Stop forcing our children to be your soldiers.”
It’s a voluntary army, you stupid kids!
A thousand marchers into the protest, the sour looks aimed at the hotel’s clientele began to wear on us. The marchers’ defiant smugness started to make an enemy of me.
“Oh, no,” I thought. The antiwar movement that I saw growing only days after Sept. 11, 2001, was at it again. I thought: Even with a new president - and one who mostly shares their point of view - the I-love-a-protest-parade political left couldn’t help itself. It likes ruining nice sunny days. Protesting is what these people do. Sneering at their fellow citizens is their chief skill. Projecting arrogance is their birthright.
So with the antiwar sign, the T-shirt and the thousand-strong parade right under our noses, I began to seethe. These anti-warriors were trying to destroy the peaceful seaside vibe and our pleasant Jose Cuervo buzz.
Knowing that Susie considers a true escape a day when politics isn’t on the menu, I kept my observations to myself. I even restrained my natural impulse to run down to the sand to go mano a mano with the rabble-rousers.
But when one dude raised his fist like runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, I could not hold myself back. I jumped from my seat and bolted to the center of the balcony, where the American flag waved furiously in a now-harsh wind. Positioned next to Old Glory, I countered the young punk and reached out my right arm directing my middle finger in his direction.
As soon as my finger was raised, a phalanx of photographers began snapping away at the white middle-aged man wearing a white LaCoste shirt next to the old red, white and blue. Cognizant of the power of imagery, I owned the moment and refused to back down. The fist wielder immediately dropped his arm. I clearly had won and envisioned photos of the anti-antiwar protester making the front pages of the Los Angeles Times.
Satisfied by the small victory, I sat down to finish my cocktail. With my wife pretending not to be embarrassed, we went back to enjoying our midday excursion. But instead of waking up Sunday or Monday morning to see my face in the paper, I instead received an e-mail from a journalism student at a local university who recognized me from a recent debate on campus.
The e-mail began like this:
“On 4/25/09 an event hosted by the Invisible Children called ‘The Rescue’ took place in Santa Monica. I shot the event. 4,000 youth marched in solidarity for the children abducted and forced to fight for the LRA in Northern Uganda and more recently in the Congo. I had felt a sense of hope in my generation’s methods of activism at the event.”
Oh, no. It only got worse.
“I believe most people in America are in agreement that human slavery, genocide and child soldiers are a terrible thing. This event was hardly controversial. The protest marched by ‘Shutters on the Beach.’ After reviewing the photographs I was taking for the event and confirming the facts (you were in Santa Monica at the date and time) I realized you were flipping the protesters off. I am curious to why this is the case.”
In order to prevent my eternal damnation, and to end what has been three weeks of difficult REM sleep, please visit: www.invisiblechildren.com.
Andrew Breitbart is the founder of the news Web site www.breitbart.com and is co-author of “Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon - the Case Against Celebrity.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.The British government is following a trail from Cairo to a flat above a disused kebab shop in Cricklewood, north-west London, as it carries out an “urgent investigation” into whether one of the largest organisations of political Islam in the world, the Muslim Brotherhood, is plotting extremism from this country.
The “thorough probe” has been personally ordered by the Prime Minister. It is being conducted by elite diplomatic and intelligence officials, including Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, Sir Kim Darroch, the National Security Adviser, and Sir John Jenkins, one of the foremost Arabists in the Foreign Office and ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Information about what is unfolding is coming from Downing Street. The inquiry is a review of the Brotherhood’s philosophy, politics, modus operandi and alleged links to radical militancy, especially if it is being organised from the UK. Hence the interest in the premises above the Flame House Takeaway in Cricklewood Broadway. Some of the most senior members of the organisation fled to London from Egypt after the coup by the country’s military “to coordinate an international response”, it is claimed.
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Today, David Cameron expanded on the investigation at a press conference: “We want to challenge the extremist narrative that some Islamist organisations have put out. What I think is important about the Muslim Brotherhood is that we understand what this organisation is, what it stands for, what its beliefs are in terms of the path of extremism and violent extremism, what its connections are with other groups, what its presence is here in the UK.” Security analysts are puzzled by the way the matter is being handled. If the Government really has received credible information that the Brotherhood is carrying out violent acts abroad from a British base, then normal practice would be to have an operation conducted by MI5, MI6, GCHQ, Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command and foreign intelligence services. It would, they point out, be done secretly and not through No 10 briefings.
One should, perhaps, be grateful that the Prime Minister has called in such eminent and capable people as the two Sir Johns and Sir Kim; a far cry from the Iraq dossier produced by Tony Blair’s government, which was largely plagiarised from the 10-year-old thesis of an undergraduate.
But the exact nature of the charges against the Brothers has remained unclear. An attack on a tourist bus in Sinai, in which two South Korean nationals and the Egyptian driver was killed in February last year, is supposedly being looked at. However an Islamist militant group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, linked to al-Qa’ida, with a lucrative smuggling trade, had claimed responsibility and no proof has been produced of Brotherhood involvement.
Above the Cricklewood kebab shop today, a group of men denied they were members of the Brotherhood. They belonged instead, they said, to World Media Services, a supplier of printed material. Mohamed Ghamen, a British citizen of Egyptian origin, who said he was a director of the concern, insisted: “We are affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood only through sharing ideas, but we are not part of the Muslim Brotherhood. Anyway, the Muslim Brotherhood has said many times it is against violence; it is a legal organisation.”
Those working in neighbouring shops on the busy thoroughfare stated that they had not been interviewed by the police, or any other government officials.
Most of the victims of the crackdown which followed the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi by the military last year were supporters of the Brotherhood. Their opponents, however, had accused the organisation of meting out violence and I found members of the Brotherhood carrying out targeted killings in Alexandria.
Egypt’s army-backed government has accused the Brotherhood of terrorism, and last month a court in Cairo sentenced 529 members to death. However, the evidence has been disputed, and the prosecutions have followed a punitive pattern in which journalists and activists have also ended up in the dock.
By making public the pursuit of the Brotherhood, Mr Cameron was stepping into a deepening schism on the issue. The movement has been funded by Qatar; but it has faced the virulent opposition of Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, Kuwait. Some officials in the Foreign Office are uneasy at talk from some that the Brotherhood should be proscribed; such a step, they say, could drive supporters towards far more radical groups.
The Prime Minister’s seeming lack of knowledge about the Brotherhood is also viewed as odd. Diplomats and intelligence officials had kept in touch with the movement during its years in opposition and members of Mr Morsi’s government would quite often drop in for informal talks at the home of the British ambassador in Cairo. A number of papers have also been produced on the Morsi government and the Brotherhood leadership.
In fact, Britain has been the first Western power to try and forge links with the Brotherhood in Egypt; the first contacts taking place in 1941. These grew during the 1950s in tandem with London’s alarm over the “virus of Arab nationalism” being espoused by Gamal Abdel Nassar, and fears that he would nationalise the Suez Canal. After the Conservative prime minister, Anthony Eden, told his foreign secretary, Anthony Nutting, that he wanted the Egyptian leader “murdered”, clandestine talks were held with the Brotherhood, who had their own plot to assassinate Nasser, by MI6 and some of the ‘Suez Group’ of Tory MPs. In the event the UK colluded with France and Israel to invade Egypt instead.
The investigation: Key players
He has been Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia since June 2012. Having joined the Foreign Office in 1980, working mainly in the Middle East and South-east Asia, he has served as ambassador to four countries, including Libya, Iraq and Syria. This is in addition to a stint as the Foreign Office’s director for the Middle East and North Africa from 2007 to 2009. He has also held posts in Rangoon, Kuala Lumpur and Jerusalem.
Sir Kim Darroch
Since January 2012, Sir Kim has been the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser, also responsible for running the National Security Council, on which a number of cabinet ministers sit. Sir Kim joined the diplomatic service in 1976 and his previous roles have included being head of the Eastern Adriatic Department, dealing with the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Bosnia conflict as well as EU adviser to the Prime Minister and UK permanent representative to the EU.
Sir John Sawers
He was appointed chief of MI6 in June 2009. The government spoke at the time of the career diplomat “rejoining” the service, but there were no details of his role as a spy. Between 1999 and 2001 he was foreign policy adviser to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and became ambassador to Egypt, leaving the post in 2003. He will play an important role, having reportedly had contacts with former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. (Picture: Getty)
Prince Charles
In February, Prince Charles visited Saudi Arabia as part of a tour that included Qatar, his second visit to the two nations in under a year – and his 10th overall to Saudi. The day after the Prince donned traditional robes and joined Saudi princes in a sword dance in Riyadh, BAE concluded a deal with the Saudi government over the sale of 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets, which was first agreed in 2007. The Prince’s aides said the deal had not been discussed on the trip. (Picture: Getty)
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Subscribe now.Suda 51 and Grasshopper have teased one of their future titles, coming out sometime after Killer is Dead, with a piece of art showing off a very familiar character.
As any No More Heroes fan will tell you, the character bears a striking resemblance to Shinobu from the same franchise. The way the lips and hair are drawn are too similar to be more than a coincidence, not to mention that like the girl in the artwork, Shinobu uses a Katana for battle.
While the flower isn't too similar to the one Shinobu wears it's speculated to be another hint towards the character being Shinobu. Suda51 was waiting for the next Nintendo console to work with for No More Heroes 3 and confirmed Travis's story was done with NMH2 so it makes sense that Shinobu would stae as the main character for NMH3. We'll just have to wait and see.It has been an American tradition since Jacqueline Kennedy took on the modernization of the White House during John F. Kennedy’s presidency for the spouse of the president to adopt a flagship project to champion during the family's time in Washington. After all, Americans like to stay busy and value productive work — and yes, official advocacy, even when unpaid, is work — above all. While I suspect I’m not alone in not caring whether or not any first lady or gentleman decides to take a Bartleby, Bess Truman-style, and decline to perform a high-profile public service project, it is, for now, the custom. And it’s a custom that Melania Trump seemed to embrace when she announced that she would focus on fighting cyber bullying if her husband was elected.
The White House website still states, after an exhaustive list of her modeling achievements and honorary designations, that "Mrs. Trump cares deeply about issues impacting women and children, and she has focused her platform as First Lady on the problem of cyber bullying among our youth." But after months of silence on the matter, Politico reported earlier this month that a White House official said her initiative against cyber bullying had been “cast aside":
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Her spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, claimed Melania Trump is still passionate about the issue, even though she has yet to highlight it in any public appearance. “While cyber-bullying is something she speaks out against, that is but one subset of her focus around the overall wellness of children,” Grisham said in an email.
That’s a shame, because "the overall wellness of children" appears to be intrinsically tied to social media use now. According to the Journal of Adolescent Health, social media use among young people is associated with mental health problems including depression, sleep disturbance and “eating concerns,” with 92 percent of kids ages 12 to 17 reporting that they went online every day in 2015 and 71 percent using at least one social networking site. Kids live online and on social networks; to be concerned about the overall wellness of children is to be concerned about their digital lives and how they affect their physical selves.
A heartbreaking story out of New Jersey this week puts a face on the importance of not separating kids’ online lives from their “real” lives. The community of Rockaway Township is mourning the death of Mallory Rose Grossman, 12, who was laid to rest Tuesday. While officials say her death is still under investigation, friends told NBC reporters that Mallory, a gymnast and cheerleader, committed suicide after being bullied online.
Twelve years old.
Social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat don’t technically allow users under the age of 13, in order to comply with digital privacy laws. That doesn't mean kids 12 and under are safe from the darker sides and potential mental health impact of social media. Age restrictions do nothing to stop a motivated tween from creating an account — my own niece tried it last year and got caught and grounded, but many kids apparently don’t even hide it from their parents — and so it's possible for an entire second layer of a child’s social life to be carried out silently, right alongside the events parents and teachers can observe, with just as much potential for harm as face-to-face interactions. Kids carry their social lives around in their backpacks and pockets on the very phones they use to stay connected to their parents, schools and caregivers. Cyber bullying isn’t a “virtual” concern anymore, if it ever was to begin with.
Nobody is so naive as to think Melania Trump could have made a direct difference in one child's life this spring. But first ladies don't only help set cultural agendas, they can directly influence policy to support those priorities, too. This October cover story by Time highlights exactly why the mental health of our kids deserves high-priority status:
In 2015, about 3 million teens ages 12 to 17 had had at least one major depressive episode in the past year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. More than 2 million report experiencing depression that impairs their daily function. About 30% of girls and 20% of boys – totaling 6.3 million teens – have had an anxiety disorder, according to data from the National Institute of Mental Health.
Laws like Colorado's Kiana's Law, named for a teen who attempted suicide after being cyber bullied, can expand harassment statutes to include the digital realm. But laws are designed to punish perpetrators, and by the time that happens, damage to a child's health can already be done. There's much that could be designed and promoted by an influential force like the first lady's office to help educate parents, teachers and caregivers on how to spot and understand the signs of kids' distress related to their digital lives.
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Will that happen in a political landscape where "snowflake" students are routinely derided for expressing their hurt and anger? It remains to be seen. We are a country so spitefully divided that Michelle Obama's belief that American kids deserve to be fed the most nutritious options available in their government-subsidized school meals is viewed as culture-war cannon fodder instead of plain common sense. Given the Trump administration's obsession with destroying as much of Obama's legacy as possible, it's safe to say that Melania won't be focusing on nutrition or physical fitness as part of her "overall wellness of children" agenda.
But we haven't heard much from Melania yet. She's only just moved to Washington and still has time to set a tone for her time in the White House beyond "impeccably dressed," if she so chooses. She should follow her instincts and follow through on the pledge she made on the campaign trail — and if she does, everyone concerned about children's mental health should embrace her work sincerely. The first lady might not have the power to target individual kids for relief from suffering, but she does have the opportunity to make a difference with a concerted effort against cyber bullying — an opportunity that grows in painful relevance every day.Share
Update 2/24/2016: Added rumors about the name of OS X 10.12 and the inclusion of Siri.
With OS X 10.11 El Capitan embracing all Apple users with its operating system arms, Apple users have quickly found out that it’s…well, it’s a whole lot like Yosemite. That’s the whole point of this latest system improvement update, but it has left some people feeling a little let down by the lack of new things. So there’s never a better time to turn hopeful eyes toward OS X 10.12 and discuss some of the latest rumors of new features.
The name
Apple has not officially announced a name OS X 10.12, but the rumors leaked so far have cited the code-name “Fuji.” While that doesn’t seem to fit with the California theme at a glance, it turns out that Fuji apples are frequently grown in California.
Siri, finally!
Support for Siri has been a rumor for years, but it will finally happen in OS X 10.12, according to 9to5Mac. The website, citing an anonymous source, says Apple plans it as an OX 10.12 launch feature.
According to the source, Siri will reside in a menubar icon in the upper-right hand corner of the user’s Mac, next to the Spotlight and Notification Center icons. When active, it will be represented by a dark, transparent interface, much like those found in iOS 9 and tvOS. Users can activate it the digital assistant by clicking, or through a user-defined keyboard shortcut.
It’s not clearly exactly how Siri will call up information. The Search function in OS X is a bit different from the iOS implementation, and that presumably will have an impact on what users can access, and how they access what they can. For example, the file search features in OS X are obviously a lot more involved than iOS, since the latter doesn’t have an exposed file system.
Interestingly, the rumor suggests that Siri will only respond to voice commands when on power. That seems a bit odd, since Cortana can respond when plugged into power, or not.
More Swift
There’s a good chance that Apple’s apps will be converted to Swift in 2016 with the OS X 10.12 update. If that doesn’t mean anything to you at all, then it’s time to go back in time and talk about the Swift programming language.
Apple created Swift as a way to develop apps more easily, in ways more suited to the modern world of app use and development. It was originally designed for iOS, OS X, and watchOS – basically all Apple platforms. After some in-house work Apple introduced Swift in 2014, made it open source, and encouraged developers to use it. In general, Swift got great reviews from the pros. It combines several useful qualities of older languages like Objective-C, adds some extra-handy programming shortcuts, and generally just helps new and experienced alike when entering the app world.
The problem with introducing a new programming language is that people need to switch over to it. For a few years now Apple has been struck a balance between old apps written with other languages and new apps written with the evolving Swift code. OS X 10.12 is expected to provide a new update for Swift that includes pre-installed code binaries to save data, as well as convert older Apple apps fully into Swift.
New filesystem
These next few rumors are all intertwined, but let’s start with potential (and hopeful) changes to the Apple file-system, or the method used to store data and retrieve them again when necessary. Apple has been using its own file-system, HFS+, for many years now. In fact, HFS+ is pretty long in the tooth these days and no professional really likes working with it anymore. Over the past several updates to OS X, it has been theorized that a file system update might be inbound.
Perhaps Apple will switch to a new option like BFS or ZFS. Perhaps they are working on a new in-house file-system. Concrete details are sparse, but at this point any announced change to the file-system would not be a surprise. The big question is if Apple will wait until OS X 11, or make the changes in OS X 10 – the sooner the better, as far as die-hard Apple fans and developers are concerned.
Better backup
Do remember Time Machine? A lot of Apple users do…but today’s Time Machine hasn’t evolved well. Its usefulness as a backup system is minimal when it comes to saving and protecting data. And let’s face, we’ve got a lot of data to work with these days. Not all of our movies, music and projects can be effortlessly zoomed up to the iCloud without major expenses. It’s no surprise, then, that a frequently requested update for OS X is a new Time Machine, or a better backup option altogether, especially for media.
iCloud updates
Apple has been unrolling steady iCloud updates, and OS X 10.12 probably won’t be an exception – the question is just what Apple will do. The trend has been toward greater reliance on iCloud for storing long-term data. Apple could increase those capabilities with new features, or (fingers crossed) lower the prices on upgrading iCloud so that it could become a more feasible way to backup your computer.
More integration with other Apple systems
The Apple Watch, the revamped version of Apple TV, iOS – Apple will have plenty of opportunities to include new integration between Macs and its other various devices, and it would be very strange if 10.12 didn’t capitalize on that.
For example, Apple may add the ability to unlock or lock a Mac through the Apple Watch. This could be done through an app on the Watch, but it also could be done through some form of proximity detection using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
Such capability might also be rolled out to iPhone. For example, it’s easy to imagine unlocking a Mac with a swipe of the iPhone’s fingerprint reader.
As for Apple TV, it would be nice to see better integration between the two, allowing more seamless streaming from computer to the Apple TV, or full-fledged remote control.Ford CEO Mark Fields said Wednesday that he sees the potential for fully autonomous cars to be available for use on U.S. streets in four years’ time.
Speaking to reporters in San Francisco, Fields said that Ford should be able to have vehicles that can be fully autonomous on roads where high-definition maps are available. The key, he said, is making sure that the regulatory and legal issues get worked out.
“Technology tends to lead all that,” Fields said.
Fields’s time frame is even more aggressive than others in the field, including Google. Google has said it hopes self-driving cars will be in the mass market in five years, although the Internet giant has yet to reveal a business plan for its own fleet. Other automakers have offered much longer timelines for self-driving vehicles.
“I describe our strategy as having one foot in today and one foot in tomorrow,” Fields said. “We are becoming a mobility company and an auto company.”
Fields said that part of the company is focused on selling traditional cars, trucks and SUVs, while the other is looking at where transportation will be 20 years from now. He said he wants his company to bring as much change to the future of transportation as Henry Ford brought 100 years ago.
“What are the decisions that we need to make today to allow us to be successful [in that world]?” Fields said. At the same time, he touted the fact that Ford has been the best-selling U.S. carmaker for six years running.
Fields apologized to the crowd of tech reporters for showing up in a suit and tie, but said that it wasn’t because he doesn’t get the tech dress code. Fields said he had come from an economic event with Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and other executives and leaders.
Ford announced last week that it has begun testing autonomous vehicles at Mcity, a 32-acre test layout run by the University of Michigan. That gives Ford a full-scale urban environment in which new technologies can be tried out safely.
“You don’t want to do that on the streets of Ann Arbor, especially after a U of M game,” he said.
There is a definite shift, Fields said, toward vehicles that aren’t owned solely by individuals. That is especially pronounced among millennials, many of whom, he said, fear other drivers more than public speaking or death.
Some cities are also trying to remove privately owned vehicles from city centers, Fields said, pointing to Oslo, Norway, which aimed to be free of such cars by 2019.
That said, he isn’t convinced the world is headed to a future with just on-demand autonomous vehicles. He noted that parents with kids probably won’t want to schlep car seats from one shared vehicle to another.
On the mobile app front, the carmaker just announced an extension to its Ford Sync entertainment system that allows people to use their smartphone to remotely locate or even start their car. Fields said the company plans to extend that feature, known as Ford Sync Connect, to its complete line of vehicles.
Data collection and analytics is another area of focus, Fields said. Asked just what kind of data Ford wanted to collect and use, Fields said the first step is just unifying the company’s existing databases, such as those kept by its sales, credit and customer service arms. Down the road, Fields said, Ford needs the ability to make sense of all that data — provided customers give their okay for that.
Fields has emphasized Ford’s desire to work with Silicon Valley companies while not handing the keys to the kingdom over to Apple and Google. Ford has said it plans to include Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto to some vehicles, but has not given a timetable. Fields declined Wednesday to say when support for those systems would come.
“As you can imagine, we are working on it,” Fields said.
Asked about the company’s stock price, Fields said he learned to stop trying to predict that a long time ago.
“I think we are working on the right things,” Fields said.
Additional reporting by Mark Bergen.BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. – July 25, 2016 - Netflix and 20th Century Fox Television Distribution today announced their first global SVOD licensing agreement. Netflix will be the exclusive global streaming home for FX’s hit, American Crime Story. The first season of the franchise will be available globally on Netflix, excluding Canada, in 2017 with all seasons made available after their respective broadcast windows. The 22-time Emmy® nominated first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story concluded its 10-episode run as cable’s most-watched new series of 2016.
From executive producers Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski and Brad Falchuk, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story stars John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sarah Paulson, David Schwimmer, Courtney B. Vance, Sterling K. Brown, Nathan Lane, Kenneth Choi, Christian Clemenson and Bruce Greenwood. The limited series is produced by Fox 21 Television Studios and FX Productions.
The first season of this limited series goes inside the O.J. Simpson trial and explores the chaotic, behind-the-scenes dealings and maneuvering on both sides of the court, and how a combination of prosecution overconfidence, defense shrewdness and the LAPD’s history with the city’s African-American community gave a jury what it needed: reasonable doubt. The second season of American Crime Story focusing on Hurricane Katrina will debut on FX next year.
“We’re excited to evolve our relationship with FOX and to bring their lauded content to our members around the world,” said Sean Carey, Vice President of Global Television. “Given the popularity of the first season of American Crime Story, we are thrilled to offer this acclaimed drama series to our members.”
“We’re extremely pleased to continue our relationship with Netflix on this groundbreaking deal,” said Gina Brogi, EVP Worldwide Pay TV and SVOD, Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution. “We are very proud of the first installment of this franchise, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, which has received extraordinary critical acclaim and perfectly captured the cultural Zeitgeist.”
About Netflix:
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About Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution:
A unit of 21st Century Fox, Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution is a global leader in the distribution of award-winning motion pictures, television programming and entertainment content across Pay TV, broadcast television and SVOD. Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution connects audiences around the world with premium content from the production divisions of Twentieth Century Fox Films, Twentieth Century Fox Television, FX and FBC as well as other 21st Century Fox companies.I’ll say this much for the climate commies who are squawking so loudly about the end of the world. At least they aren’t dumb enough to believe their own lies. If they were, they would live very differently. Matt Walsh will start believing that they believe what they insist we believe when they start living like the Amish:
I can only imagine how I would react if I actually believed that the extinction of all mankind was imminent, and my lifestyle was directly contributing to it. At a minimum, I would not drive a car anymore. Ever. At all. I would ditch electricity. I wouldn’t eat any kind of meat. I wouldn’t buy mass made consumer products. I wouldn’t give my money to any company that sells items made in factories with giant smokestacks. Those smokestacks are literally killing people. How could you continue shopping like everything is normal?
Climate commies manage.
Strangely, only the Amish can be seen riding horses and buggies down the street in this country, but even they don’t believe that automobiles are going to annihilate life on Earth. You do believe that, yet you still drive them. You know how much CO2 was emitted in order to produce your iPhone, yet you still buy a new one every 18 months. You know that hurricanes and tornadoes are popping up everywhere because of the factories that make your trendy shoes and clothing, yet you still stock your closet full of them. You know that your air conditioning unit is slowly poisoning the atmosphere and leading us rapidly to certain death, yet you turn it on the moment the temperature rises above 70 degrees outside. You know that your refrigerator is a cancerous tumor metastasizing on Mother Earth, yet you still won’t preserve your food by drying or pickling it. You know how |
-three.” Which was my way of asking why he wanted me to go.
“It’s three years in space.” He looked up now, not needing to explain why they wanted an old pilot.
That long in space? It doesn’t matter how much shielding you have against radiation, it’s going to affect you. The chances of developing cancer within the next fifteen years were huge. You can’t ask a young astronaut to do that. “I see.”
“We have the resources to send a small craft there. It can’t be unmanned because the programming is too complicated. I need an astronaut who can fit in the capsule.”
“And you need someone who has a reason to not care about surviving the trip.”
“No.” He grimaced. “PR tells me that I need an astronaut that the public will adore so that when we finally tell them that we’ve sent you, they will forgive us for hiding the mission from them.” Sheldon cleared his throat and started briefing me on the Longevity Mission.
Should I pause here and explain what the Longevity mission is? It’s possible that you don’t know.
There’s a habitable planet. An extrasolar one and it’s only few light years away. They’ve got a slingshot that can launch a ship up to near light speed. A small ship. Big enough for one person.
But that isn’t what makes the Longevity mission possible. That is the tesseract field. We can’t go faster than light, but we can cut corners through the universe. The physicists described it to me like a subway tunnel. The tessaract will bend space and allow a ship to go to the next subway station. The only trick is that you need to get far enough away from a planet before you can bend space and… this is the harder part… you need a tesseract field at the other end. Once that’s up, you just need to get into orbit and the trip from Mars to LS-579 can be as short as three weeks.
But you have to get someone to the planet to set up the other end of the tesseract.
And they wanted to hide the plan from the public, in case it failed.
So different from when the First Mars Expedition had happened. An asteroid had slammed into Washington D.C. and obliterated the capitol. It made the entire world realize how fragile our hold on Earth was. Nations banded together and when the Secretary of Agriculture, who found himself president through the line of succession, said that we needed to get off the planet, people listened. We rose to the stars. The potential loss of an astronaut was just part of the risk. Now? Now it has been long enough that people are starting to forget that the danger is still there. That the need to explore is necessary.
Sheldon finished talking and just watched me processing it.
“I need to think about this.”
“I know.”
Then I closed my eyes and realized that I had to say no. It didn’t matter how I felt about the trip or the chance to get back into space. The launch date he was talking about meant I’d have to go into training now. “I can’t.” I opened my eyes and stared at the wall where the publicity still of me and Nathaniel hung. “I have to turn it down.”
“Talk to Nathaniel.”
I grimaced. He would tell me to take it. “I can’t.”
I left Sheldon feeling more unsettled than I wanted to admit at the time. I stared out the window of the light rail, at the sepia sky. Rose tones were deepening near the horizon with sunset. It was dimmer and ruddier here, but with the dust, sunset could be just as glorious as on Earth.
It’s a hard thing to look at something you want and to know that the right choice is to turn it down. Understand me: I wanted to go. Another opportunity like this would never come up for me. I was too old for normal missions. I knew it. Sheldon knew it. And Nathaniel would know it, too. I wish he had been in some other industry so I could lie and talk about “later.” He knew the space program too well to be fooled.
And he wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t want to go. He knew how much I missed the stars.
That’s the thing that I think none of us were prepared for in coming to Mars. The natural night sky on Mars is spectacular, because the atmosphere is so thin. But where humans live, under the dome, all you can see are the lights of the town reflecting against the dark curve. You can almost believe that they’re stars. Almost. If you don’t know what you are missing or don’t remember the way the sky looked at night on Earth before the asteroid hit.
I wonder if Dorothy remembers the stars. She’s young enough that she might not. Children on Earth still look at clouds of dust and stars are just a myth. God. What a bleak sky.
When I got home, Genevieve greeted me with her usual friendly chatter. Nathaniel looked like he wanted to push her out of the house so he could quiz me. I know Genevieve said good bye, and that we chatted, but the details have vanished now.
What I remember next is the rattle and thump of Nathaniel’s walker as he pushed it into the kitchen. It slid forward. Stopped. He took two steps, steadied himself, and slid it forward again. Two steps. Steady. Slide.
I pushed away from the counter and straightened. “Do you want to be in the kitchen or the living room?”
“Sit down, Elma.” He clenched the walker till the tendons stood out on the back of his hands, but they still trembled. “Tell me about the mission.”
“What?” I froze.
“The mission.” He stared at the ceiling, not at me. “That’s why Sheldon called, right? So, tell me.”
“I… All right.” I pulled the tall stool out for him and waited until he eased onto it. Then I told him. He stared at the ceiling the whole time I talked. I spent the time watching him and memorizing the line of his cheek, and the shape of the small mole by the corner of his mouth.
When I finished, he nodded. “You should take it.”
“What makes you think I want to?”
He lowered his head then, eyes just as piercing as they had always been. “How long have we been married?”
“I can’t.”
Nathaniel snorted. “I called Dr. Williams while you were out, figuring it would be something like this. I asked for a date when we could get hospice.” He held up his hand to stop the words forming on my lips. “She’s not willing to tell me that. She did give me the date when the paralysis is likely to become total. Three months. Give or take a week.”
We’d known this was coming, since he was diagnosed, but I still had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from sobbing. He didn’t need to see me break down.
“So… I think you should tell them yes.”
“Three months is not a lot of time, they can—”
“They can what? Wait for me to die? Jesus Christ, Elma. We know that’s coming.” He scowled at the floor. “Go. For the love of God, just take the mission.”
I wanted to. I wanted to get off the planet and back into space and not have to watch him die. Not have to watch him lose control of his body piece by piece.
And I wanted to stay here and be with him and steal every moment left that he had breath in his body.
One of my favorite restaurants in Landing was Elmore’s. The New Orleans style cafe sat tucked back behind Thompson’s Grocers on a little rise that lifted the dining room just high enough to see out to the edge of town and the dome’s wall. They had a crawfish étouffée that would make you think you were back on Earth. The crawfish were raised in a tank and a little bigger than the ones I’d grown up with, but the spices came all the way from Louisiana on the mail runs twice a year.
Sheldon Spender knew it was my favorite and was taking ruthless advantage of that. And yet I came anyway. He sat across the table from me, with his back to the picture window that framed the view. His thinning hair was almost invisible against the sky. He didn’t say a word. Just watched me, as the fellow to my right talked.
Garrett Biggs. I’d seen him at the Bradbury Space Center, but we’d exchanged maybe five words before today. My work was mostly done before his time. They just trotted me out for the occasional holiday. Now, the man would not stop talking. He gestured with his fork as he spoke, punctuating the phrases he thought I needed to hear most. “Need some photos of you so we can exploit—I know it sounds ugly but we’re all friends here, right? We can be honest, right? So, we can exploit your sacrifice to get the public really behind the Longevity mission.”
I watched the lettuce tremble on the end of his fork. It was pallid compared to my memory of lettuce on Earth. “I thought the public didn’t know about the mission.”
“They will. That’s the key. Someone will leak it and we need to be ready.” He waved the lettuce at me. “And that’s why you are a brilliant choice for pilot. Octogenarian Grandmother Paves Way for Humanity.”
“You can’t pave the stars. I’m not a grandmother. And I’m sixty-three not eighty.”
“It’s a figure of speech. The point is that you’re a PR goldmine.”
I had known that they asked me to helm this mission because of my age—it would be a lot to ask of someone who had a full life ahead of them. Maybe I was naive to think that my experience in establishing the Mars colony was considered valuable.
How can I explain the degree to which I resented being used for publicity? This wasn’t a new thing by a long shot. My entire career has been about exploitation for publicity. I had known it, and exploited it too, once I’d realized the power of having my uniform tailored to show my shape a little more clearly. You think they would have sent me to Mars if it weren’t intended to be a colony? I was there to show all the lady housewives that they could go to space too. Posing in my flight suit, with my lips painted red, I had smiled at more cameras than my colleagues.
I stared Garrett Biggs and his fork. “For someone in PR, you are awfully blunt.”
“I’m honest. To you. If you were the public, I’d have you spinning so fast you’d generate your own gravity.”
Sheldon cleared his throat. “Elma, the fact is that we’re getting some pressure from a group of senators. They want to cut the budget for the project and we need to take steps or it won’t happen.”
I looked down and separated the tail from one of my crawfish. “Why?”
“The usual nonsense. People arguing that if we just wait, then ships will become fast enough to render the mission pointless. That includes a couple of serious misunderstandings of physics, but, be that as it may…” Sheldon paused and tilted his head, looking at me. He changed what he was about to say and leaned forward. “Is Nathaniel worse?”
“He’s not better.”
He winced at the edge in my voice. “I’m sorry. I know I strong-armed you into it, but I can find someone else.”
“He thinks I should go.” My chest hurt even considering it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the mission. “He knows it’s the only way I’ll get back into space.”
Garrett Biggs frowned like I’d said the sky was green, instead of the pale Martian amber. “You’re in space.”
“I’m on Mars. It’s still a planet.”
I woke out of half-sleep, aware that I must have heard Nathaniel’s bell, without being able to actually recall it. I pulled myself to my feet, putting a hand against the nightstand until I was steady. My right hip had stiffened again in the night. Arthritis is not something I approve of.
Turning on the hall light, I made my way down the stairs. The door at the bottom stood open so I could hear Nathaniel if he called. I couldn’t sleep with him anymore, for fear of breaking him.
I went through into his room. It was full of grey shadows and the dark rectangle of his bed. In one corner, the silver arm of his walker caught the light.
“I’m sorry.” His voice cracked with sleep.
“It’s all right. I was awake anyway.”
“Liar.”
“Now, is that a nice thing to say?” I put my hand on the light switch. “Watch your eyes.”
Every night we followed the same ritual and even though I knew the light would be painfully bright, I still winced as it came on. Squinting against the glare, I threw the covers back for him. The weight of them trapped him sometimes. He held his hands up, waiting for me to take them. I braced myself and let Nathaniel pull himself into a sitting position. On Earth, he’d have been bed-ridden long since. Of course, on Earth, his bone density would probably not have deteriorated so fast.
As gently as I could, I swung his legs to the side of the bed. Even allowing for the gravity, I was appalled anew by how light he was. His legs were like kindling wrapped in tissue. Where his pajamas had ridden up, purple bruises mottled his calf.
As soon as he was sitting up on the edge of the bed, I gave him the walker. He wrapped his shaking hands around the bars and tried to stand. He rose only a little before dropping back to the bed. I stayed where I was, though I ached to help. He sometimes took more than one try to stand at night, and didn’t want help. Not until it became absolutely necessary. Even then, he wouldn’t want it. I just hoped he’d let me help him when we got to that point.
On the second try, he got his feet under him and stood, shaking. With a nod, he pushed forward. “Let’s go.”
I followed him to the bathroom in case he lost his balance in there, which he did sometimes. The first time, I hadn’t been home. We had hired Genevieve not long after that to sit with him when I needed to be out.
He stopped in the kitchen and bent a little at the waist with a sort of grunt.
“Are you all right?”
He shook his head and started again, moving faster. “I’m not—” He leaned forward, clenching his jaw. “I can’t—”
The bathroom was so close.
“Oh, God. Elma…” A dark, fetid smell filled the kitchen. Nathaniel groaned. “I couldn’t—”
I put my hand on his back. “Hush. We’re almost there. We’ll get you cleaned up.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He pushed the walker forward, head hanging. A trail of damp footsteps followed him. The ammonia stink of urine joined the scent of his bowels.
I helped him lower his pajamas. The weight of them had made them sag on his hips. Dark streaks ran down his legs and dripped onto the bathmat. I eased him onto the toilet.
My husband bent his head forward, and he wept.
I remember wetting a washcloth and running it over his legs. I know that I must have tossed his soiled pajamas into the cleaner, and that I wiped up the floor, but those details have mercifully vanished. But what I can’t forget, and I wish to God that I could, is Nathaniel sitting there crying.
I asked Genevieve to bring adult diapers to us the next day. The strange thing was how familiar the package felt. I’d used them on launches when we had to sit in the capsule for hours and there was no option to get out of our space suit. It’s one of the many glamorous details of being an astronaut that the publicity department does not share with the public.
There is a difference, however, from being required to wear one for work and what Nathaniel faced. He could not put them on by himself without losing his balance. Every time I had to change the diaper, he stared at the wall with his face slack and hopeless.
Nathaniel and I’d made the decision not to have children. They aren’t conducive to a life in space, you know? I mean there’s the radiation, and the weightlessness, but more it was that I was gone all the time. I couldn’t give up the stars… but I found myself wishing that we hadn’t made that decision. Part of it was wishing that I had some connection to the next generation. More of it was wanting someone to share the burden of decision with me.
What happens after Nathaniel dies? What do I have left here? More specifically, how much will I regret not going on the Mission?
And if I’m in space, how much will I regret abandoning my husband to die alone?
You see why I was starting to wish that we had children?
In the afternoon, we were sitting in the living room, pretending to work. Nathaniel sat with his pencil poised over the paper and stared out the window as though he were working. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t but I gave him what privacy I could and started on one of my eagles.
The phone rang and gave us both something of a relief, I think, to have a distraction. The phone sat on a table by Nathaniel’s chair so he could reach it easily if I weren’t in the room. With my eyes averted, his voice sounded as strong as ever as he answered.
“Hang on, Sheldon. Let me get Elma for—Oh. Oh, I see.”
I snipped another feather but it was more as a way to avoid making eye contact than because I really wanted to keep working.
“Of course I’ve got a few minutes. I have nothing but time these days.” He ran his hand through his hair and let it rest at the back of his neck. “I find it hard to believe that you don’t have programmers on staff who can’t handle this.”
He was quiet then as Sheldon spoke, I could hear only the distorted tinny sound of his voice rising and falling. At a certain point, Nathaniel picked up his pencil again and started making notes. Whatever Sheldon was asking him to do, that was the moment when Nathaniel decided to say “yes.”
I set my eagle aside and went into the kitchen. My first reaction—God. It shames me but my first reaction was anger. How dare he? How dare he take a job without consulting with me when I was turning down this thing I so desperately wanted because of him. I had the urge to snatch up the phone and tell Sheldon that I would go.
I pushed that down carefully and looked at it.
Nathaniel had been urging me to go. No deliberate action of his was keeping me from accepting. Only my own upbringing and loyalty and… and I loved him. If I did not want to be alone after he passed, how could I leave him to face the end alone?
The decision would be easier if I knew when he would die.
I still hate myself for thinking that.
I heard the conversation end and Nathaniel hung up the phone. I filled a glass with water to give myself an excuse for lingering in the kitchen. I carried it back into the living room and sat down on the couch.
Nathaniel had his lower lip between his teeth and was scowling at the page on top of his notepad. He jotted a number in the margin with a pencil before he looked up.
“That was Sheldon.” He glanced back at the page.
I settled in my chair and fidgeted with the wedding band on my finger. It had gotten loose in the last year. “I’m going to turn them down.”
“What—But, Elma.” His gaze flattened and he gave me a small frown. “Are you… are you sure it’s not depression? That’s making you want to stay, I mean.”
I gave an unladylike snort. “Now what do I have to be depressed about?”
“Please.” He ran his hands through his hair and knit them together at the back of his neck. “I want you to go so you won’t be here when… It’s just going to get worse from here.”
The devil of it was that he wasn’t wrong. That didn’t mean he was right, either, but I couldn’t flat out tell him he was wrong. I set down my scissors and pushed the magnifier out of the way. “It’s not just depression.”
“I don’t understand. There’s a chance to go back into space.” He dropped his hands and sat forward. “I mean… If I die before the mission leaves and you’re grounded here. How would you feel?”
I looked away. My gaze was pointed to the window and the view of the house across the lane. But I did not see the windows or the red brick walls. All I saw was a black and grey cloth made of despair. “I had a life that I enjoyed before this opportunity came up. There’s no reason I shouldn’t keep on enjoying it. I enjoy teaching. There are a hundred reasons to enjoy life here.”
He pointed his pencil at me the way he used to do when he spotted a flaw in reasoning at a meeting, but the pencil quivered in his grip now. “If that’s true, then why haven’t you told them no, yet?”
The answer to that was not easy. Because I wanted to be in the sky, weightless, and watching the impossibly bright stars. Because I didn’t want to watch Nathaniel die. “What did Sheldon ask you to do?”
“NASA wants more information about LS-579.”
“I imagine they do.” I twisted that wedding band around as if it were a control that I could use. “I would… I would hate… As much as I miss being in space, I would hate myself if I left you here. To have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Till death do us part and all that. I just can’t.”
“Well… just don’t tell him no. Not yet. Let me talk to Dr. Williams and see if she can give us a clearer date. Maybe there won’t be a schedule conflict after al—”
“Stop it! Just stop. This is my decision. I’m the one who has to live with the consequences. Not you. So, stop trying to put your guilt off onto me because the devil of it is, one of us is going to feel guilty here, but I’m the one who will have to live with it.”
I stormed out of the room before he could answer me or I could say anything worse. And yes—I knew that he couldn’t follow me and for once I was glad.
Dorothy came not long after that. To say that I was flummoxed when I opened the door wouldn’t do justice to my surprise. She had her medical bag with her and I think that’s the only thing that gave me the power of speech. “Since when do you make house calls?”
She paused, mouth partially open, and frowned. “Weren’t you told I was coming?”
“No.” I remembered my manners and stepped back so she could enter. “Sorry. You just surprised me is all.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Spender asked me to come out. He thought you’d be more comfortable if I stayed with Mr. York while you were gone.” She shucked off her shoes in the dust room.
I looked back through the kitchen to the living room, where Nathaniel sat just out of sight. “That’s right kind and all, but I don’t have any appointments today.”
“Do I have the date wrong?”
The rattle and thump of Nathaniel’s walker started. I abandoned Dorothy and ran through the kitchen. He shouldn’t be getting up without me. If he lost his balance again—What? It might kill him if he fell? Or it might not kill him fast enough so that his last days were in even more pain.
He met me at the door and looked past me. “Nice to see you, Doc.”
Dorothy had trailed after me into the kitchen. “Sir.”
“You bring that eagle to show me?”
She nodded and I could see the little girl she had been in the shyness of it. She lifted her medical bag to the kitchen table and pulled out a battered shoe box of the sort that we don’t see up here much. No sense sending up packaging when it just takes up room on the rocket. She lifted the lid off and pulled out tissue that had once been pink and had faded to almost white. Unwrapping it, she pulled out my eagle.
It’s strange seeing something that you made that long ago. This one was in flight, but had its head turned to the side as though it were looking back over its shoulder. It had an egg clutched in its talons.
Symbolism a little blunt, but clear. Seeing it I remembered when I had made it. I remembered the conversation that I had had with Dorothy when she was a little girl.
I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. The edges of the paper had become soft with handling over the years so it felt more like corduroy than cardstock. Some of the smaller feathers were torn loose showing that this had been much-loved. The fact that so few were missing said more, about the place it had held for Dorothy.
She had asked me, standing outside the fence in the shadow of the rocket gantry, if I were still going to Mars. I had said yes.
Then she had said, “You going to have kids on Mars?”
What she could not have known—what she likely still did not know, was that I had just come from a conversation with Nathaniel when we decided that we would not have children. It had been a long discussion over the course of two years and it did not rest easy on me. I was still grieving for the choice, even though I knew it was the right one.
The radiation, the travel… the stars were always going to call me and I could ask him to be patient with that, but it was not fair to a child. We had talked and talked and I had built that eagle while I tried to grapple with the conflicts between my desires. I made the eagle looking back, holding an egg, at the choices behind it.
And when Dorothy had asked me if I would have kids on Mars, I put the regulation smile on, the one you learn to give while wearing 160 pounds of space suit in Earth gravity while a photographer takes just one more photo. I’ve learned to smile through pain, thank you. “Yes, honey. Every child born on Mars will be there because of me.”
“What about the ones born here?”
The child of tragedy, the double-orphan. I had knelt in front of her and pulled the eagle out of my bag. “Those most of all.”
Standing in my kitchen, I lifted my head to look at Nathaniel. His eyes were bright. It took a try or two before I could find my voice again. “Did you know? Did you know which one she had?”
“I guessed.” He pushed into the kitchen, the walker sliding and rattling until he stood next to me. “The thing is, Elma, I’m going to be gone in a year either way. We decided not to have children because of your career.”
“We made that decision together.”
“I know.” He raised a hand off the walker and put it on my arm. “I’m not saying we didn’t. What I’m asking is that you make this career decision for me. I want you to go.”
I set the eagle back in its nest of tissue and wiped my eyes. “So you tricked her into coming out just to show me that?”
Nathaniel laughed sounding a little embarrassed. “Nope. Talked to Sheldon. There’s a training session this afternoon that I want you to go to.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“You won’t. Not completely.” He gave a sideways grin and I could see the young man he’d been. “My program will be flying with you.”
“That’s not the same.”
“It’s the best I can offer.”
I looked away and caught Dorothy staring at us with a look of both wonder and horror on her face. She blushed when I met her gaze. “I’ll stay with him.”
“I know and it was kind of Sheldon to ask but—”
“No, I mean. If you go… I’ll make sure he’s not alone.”
Dorothy lived in the middle of the great Mars plains in the home of Elma, who was an astronaut, and Nathaniel, who was an astronaut’s husband. I live in the middle of space in a tiny capsule filled with punchcards and magnetic tape. I am not alone, though someone who doesn’t know me might think I appear to be.
I have the stars.
I have my memories.
And I have Nathaniel’s last program. After it runs, I will make an eagle and let my husband fly.A North Korean border patrol guard escaped to China on July
20, putting Chinese patrol units and public security forces near the Sino-North Korean border area on high alert, Daily NK has learned.
“The border patrol soldier, based in Onsong County, North
Hamgyong Province, escaped across the Tumen River on Wednesday (July 20) at
approximately 4 p.m.,” a source close to North Korean affairs in China told
Daily NK on July 22.
“The soldier is an unarmed male believed to be around 20
years old. He was spotted in Kaishantun, China–a town across the Tumen River
from Onsong County, North Korea. China’s border patrol units were
dispatched to the area after receiving a tip from a resident, but the soldier slipped
away and his whereabouts are unknown.”
A Chinese resident who spotted the young guard near a well in
Kaishantun reported the information to Chinese public security forces. China’s
Ministry of Public Security offers financial rewards to Chinese citizens,
particularly those residing in locales straddling the North Korean border, who
report North Korean defectors to the government.
More recently, remuneration for such reports has increased. “Public announcements instructing the public to report
illegal border entry are especially pervasive near the Longjing City area,” a
separate source in the region, also aware of the situation surrounding the soldier in question, explained. “Because the [Chinese] public security
forces are offering up to 20,000 RMB (3,000 USD) [to informants], vulnerable parties are fraught with anxiety, expecting Chinese residents to become more proactive about
reporting [them].”
She added that while the soldier’s location remains unknown,
the issue of the special alert increases the likelihood of his imminent
apprehension, and expressed grave concerns for his fate thereafter.
On July 22, Seoul’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Daily NK “nothing
was yet known” about the soldier’s defection.You work with Python for a while and you'll become familiar with printing a method and getting
<bound method Foo.function of <__main__.Foo instance at 0xb736960c>>
I think there is room for one more explanation on the internet, since I've never seen it diagrammed out (maybe for good reason!).
In the above diagram on the left, we have the fairly simple conceptual model of a class with a function. One naturally tends to think of the function as a part of the class and your instance calls into that function. This is conceptually correct, but a little abstracted from what's actually happening.
The right attempts to illustrate the underlying process in some more depth. The first step, on the top right, is building something like the following:
class Foo (): def function ( self ): print "hi!"
As this illustrates, the above code results in two things happening; firstly a function object for function is created and secondly the __dict__ attribute of the class is given a key function that points to this function object.
Now the thing about this function object is that it implements the descriptor protocol. In short, if an object implements a __get__ function; then when that object is accessed as an attribute of an object the __get__ function is called. You can read up on the descriptor protocol, but the important part to remember is that it passes in the context from which it is called; that is the object that is calling the function.
So, for example, when we then do the following:
f = Foo () f. function ()
what happens is that we get the attribute function of f and then call it. f above doesn't actually know anything about function as such — what it does know is its class inheritance and so Python goes searching the parent's class __dict__ to try and find the function attribute. It finds this, and as per the descriptor protocol when the attribute is accessed it calls the __get__ function of the underlying function object.
What happens now is that the function's __get__ method returns essentially a wrapper object that stores the information to bind the function to the object. This wrapper object is of type types.MethodType and you can see it stores some important attributes in the object — im_func which is the function to call, and im_self which is the object who called it. Passing the object through to im_self is how function gets it's first self argument (the calling object).
So when you print the value of f.function() you see it report itself as a bound method. So hopefully this illustrates that a bound method is a just a special object that knows how to call an underlying function with context about the object that's calling it.
To try and make this a little more concrete, consider the following program:
import types class Foo (): def function ( self ): print "hi!" f = Foo () # this is a function object print Foo. __dict__ [ 'function' ] # this is a method as returned by # Foo.__dict__['function'].__get__() print f. function # we can check that this is an instance of MethodType print type ( f. function ) == types. MethodType # the im_func field of the MethodType is the underlying function print f. function. im_func print Foo. __dict__ [ 'function' ] # these are the same object print f. function. im_self print f
Running this gives output something like
$ python./foo.py <function function at 0xb73540d4> <bound method Foo.function of <__main__.Foo instance at 0xb736960c>> True <function function at 0xb73540d4> <function function at 0xb73540d4> <__main__.Foo instance at 0xb72c060c> <__main__.Foo instance at 0xb72c060c>
To pull it apart; we can see that Foo.__dict__['function'] is a function object, but then f.function is a bound method. The bound method's im_func is the underlying function object, and the im_self is the object f : thus im_func(im_self) is calling function with the correct object as the first argument self.
So the main point is to kind of shift thinking about a function as some particular intrinsic part of a class, but rather as a separate object abstracted from the class that gets bound into an instance as required. The class is in some ways a template and namespacing tool to allow you to find the right function objects; it doesn't actually implement the functions as such.
There is plenty more information if you search for "descriptor protocol" and Python binding rules and lots of advanced tricks you can play. But hopefully this is a useful introduction to get an initial handle on what's going on!GUEST:
This was purchased about 40 years ago by my husband's aunt and it was given to me. And she had lived in Richmond at the time and then had gone to Williamsburg for the day and was shopping. And evidently, this was on a center table that was highlighted and stuff, and she fell in love with it. And it took her a while to convince her husband to purchase it, but they did buy it and she's had it for the 40 years. But there's no receipt or information about it, so we'd love to learn more.
APPRAISER:
What more have you discovered about it? Everybody gets out on the Internet these days and does a little research. What have you found?
GUEST:
Well, the name is on here. And I found that the gentleman is no longer living, but his sons have carried on the tradition. And from what I understand, they would do a room and that would not be duplicated.
APPRAISER:
Well, these are really interesting. You look at this and it's a relatively modern construction box. We know it's not terribly old. And we see on the lower left corner a signature, E.J. Kupjack, for Eugene Kupjack. This fascinates a lot of us in the trade. Now, if you look at the craftsmanship, it's absolutely amazing.
GUEST:
Well, she fell in love with it, yeah.
APPRAISER:
The table, the fireplace. So, Eugene Kupjack operated in the late 1930s. He was hired by the Thorne family, which were the heirs to the original Montgomery Ward. And the wife had designed some rooms for Mr. Kupjack and he created those. And those are on display at the Art Institute of Chicago today. And you're right, his sons do still make them. So Eugene Kupjack was born in 1912 and as you found on the Internet, he died in 1991. He was actively working as of the late '30s, where he did those rooms for the Thorne family. And everything was produced, really, after that. So I think it's reasonable to expect it was completed in the 1950s.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
We see the package and at first glance, some of us thought it was a microwave. But really, it's a miniature meant to sit on a bookshelf, and it would have blended in. You can see the artist has actually put the book on the end. Now, the other thing that's absolutely fascinating is, we see this new stuff, we don't think it's going to be valuable. It doesn't make sense to us. Yet when these come up at auction, they're selling for a good bit of money. So if I were to estimate this at auction today-- and I think we're conservative-- we would say between $5,000 and $7,000.
GUEST:
That's amazing.
APPRAISER:
To have one made, a new one, can cost over $100,000.
GUEST:
Oh, my Lord.From special reports
U.S. Senators Thad Cochran |
featured a mythical giant Kalewi-Poeg who was an obvious analogue to the Finnish Kalevi.36 Between Lithuania and Estonia, the Latvian area around Riga was hit by these two mythological waves from a Polish-Lithuanian south and a Finnish-Estonian north. In contrast to these South Slavic and Russian trends, a mythological-folkloric interest in the Polish lands was triggered primarily by historians seeking to fill the early, prehistorical chapters of their books. Their frame of research was biethnic: they focused on the ancient Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its prehistory. This Polish-Lithuanian prehistory then triggered a cascade of mythologies across language borders and across cultural media whose very complexity is fascinating to trace:Nor is this Polish-Lithuanian cascade of influences across cultural media and between ethnicities the end of the story. At the same time, the Baltic region was hit from the north by a mythological cascade originating in Finland.Between Lithuania and Estonia, the Latvian area around Riga was hit by these two mythological waves from a Polish-Lithuanian south and a Finnish-Estonian north. • Here, early modern German chronicles documenting subsisting traces of local paganism had been picked up by the Baltic German Garlieb Merkel ( Die Vorzeit Lieflands, 1798–99, and the historical romance Wannem Ymanta: Eine lettische Sage, 1802).
• A scholarly elaboration was undertaken by the previously mentioned folklorist/mythologist Wilhelm Mannhardt in his Letto-Preussische Götterlehre of 1870 and in an article series “Die lettischen Sonnenmythen” (in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1875).
• By this time the appropriation of a vernacular mythology by Latvian cultural nationalists had got under way here as much as in the neighbouring lands; both in Latvian and Lithuanian culture (which are linguistically related), an extensive corpus of oral balladry provided the type of ethnographical material that the Finnish ballads had given to Ganander and Lönnrot. Juris Alunāns wrote on the nation’s mythology in the 1850s with a good deal of creative imagination as well as reliance on Narbutt’s Polish-Lithuanian work.
• In turn, these materials were poetically used, and popularly disseminated, in the legendary poems of Mikus Krogzemis (his pseudonym, Auseklis, was taken from mythology). The culmination point was Jēkabs Lautenbahs-Jūsmiņš’s Latviešu mitologija of 1882.
• At the same time, a national epic on mythical themes was constructed by Andrejs Pumpurs. Lāčplēsis (The bear slayer; 1888), now considered Latvia’s national epic, has many scenes set among gods and supernatural or magic-working beings and brings figures from various Baltic pantheons together.37The Bluewater school district near Toronto, Ontario has a decades-old tradition of handing out Gideon Bibles to 5th graders. Why this was allowed for so long, I don’t know, but the school board recently decided to put a stop to it, banning “distribution of all non-instructional religious materials.”
As you might expect, many of the Christians in the community were very understanding:
“When are you ‘politically correct’ idiots, with your heads buried in the sand, going to realize that every action you take to destroy Canadian heritage…?” one email began. “Allowing newcomers to Canada the ability to walk all over our heritage has got to stop before they carry us into the realm of a warring nation like the one they often left behind,” another writer said. … Trustee Fran Morgan called the “onslaught” of messages “really disturbing,” and said it has made her uneasy about driving the 30 kilometres to board meetings at night by herself. … Board chairwoman, Jan Johnstone, admits the vitriolic responses — some urging trustees to “watch your back” — are unnerving. “People do crazy things,” Johnstone said. “They see Christianity as a fundamental part of their Canadian identity.” Another wrote one trustee: “How is that you agree with God’s 10 Commandments and yet you have broken them countless times, you hypocrite!” … Although one trustee received a phone call he thought was tantamount to a death threat, the board has so far not referred the matter to police, but a spokesman said the situation was being monitored.
The alternative is to allow *all* non-education religious material, but you know these same Christians would complain about that, too, the moment a Koran or Wiccan text was handed out to students.
The ban is set to become finalized on April 17th.
(Thanks to Dorothy for the link!)The Manitoba government has stopped tracking the controversial use of hotel rooms to house kids seized by child-welfare workers.
The former NDP government promised to stop putting up kids in hotels, except in exceptional circumstances, after repeated criticism from the province's children's advocate that hotels do not provide adequate security or supports for children taken from their families.
The NDP collected data from child-welfare agencies and regional authorities and posted monthly statistics to demonstrate its progress on eliminating the practice.
The Progressive Conservative government, elected a year ago, no longer collects or posts the data and says it believes the problem has been solved.
"The Department of Families has regular meetings with … authorities and agencies. Since the 2015 directive [not to use hotel rooms], they have checked on this issue and each time partners have stated that the directive has been successfully met," Andrea Slobodian, press secretary to Families Minister Scott Fielding, wrote in an email this week.
"Hotel use is not tracked as it is not permitted."
The province has also disbanded the Hotel Reduction Team — a group that was tasked with tracking and eliminating the use of hotel rooms — instead focusing its attention on emergency placement use and discharge planning.
In 2014, dozens of children each month were being housed in hotel rooms due to a lack of space in foster and group homes.
One of them was Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old girl who ran away from her hotel room in downtown Winnipeg shortly before her body was pulled from the Red River.
The following year, a 15-year-old girl being housed in a hotel was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted. A boy who was also being kept in the same hotel by child-welfare officials was charged in the attack.
The NDP government at the time expanded the number of emergency shelters and group-home spaces. In the fall of 2015, the province said hotel rooms were no longer being used except in exceptional circumstances — when kids are travelling for family visits, for example, or when siblings are seized in the middle of the night and there is no immediate placement available without splitting them up.
But Cora Morgan, the children's advocate for First Nations in Manitoba, said she believes hotel rooms are still being used. She said she saw evidence last New Year's Eve when her family took a mini-vacation at a Winnipeg hotel.
"We were in the pool and there were four First Nations kids there with a support worker," she said.
The Office of the Children's Advocate, an arm's-length provincial watchdog, said hotel use should still be tabulated.
"We should be tracking every way that we're interacting with children who are in care of the system," spokesperson Ainsley Krone said.
"The types of placements that they're staying in — whether those are group homes or whether those are foster homes or whether they're hotels — all of that information should be known."
The last statistics posted on the government's website dates from December 2015. A request for updated numbers, filed by The Canadian Press under Manitoba's freedom-of-information law, was rejected because the data are no longer collected centrally from child-welfare agencies across the province.
"The information you requested does not exist in a single record and would require a large number of records to be searched and compiled, interfering unreasonably with the operation of the agencies," stated a letter from Jay Rodgers, deputy minister of the Department of Families.
"As a result, the department is unable to provide information that is responsive to this request."New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore faced off in a much-heralded debate over economic policy at FreedomFest on Thursday. They discussed the 2008 stimulus, Obamacare, the minimum wage, and the reasons for economic growth in the 50 states—vehemently disagreeing with each other on most topics, though occasionally finding common ground.
Krugman was at his most persuasive when talking about Obamacare, which he called a “remarkably successful public policy” that brings the United States more in line with the cost-effective healthcare policies of European nations.
“Obamacare is working quite well,” he said.
Moore admitted that he wasn’t a healthcare expert, but proposed Lasik eye surgery as an example of a medical service that continues to become cheaper because government doesn’t mandate insurance for the procedure and true competition is permitted.
On the subject of the minimum wage, Krugman admitted that he had changed his mind over the years—he once accepted the idea that the minimum wage caused unemployment, but the evidence no longer supports that conclusion, he said. Moore fared better here, insisting that minimum wage laws were particularly destructive to teenage employment levels. He asked whether Krugman would consider supporting a separate minimum wage for teenagers.
“What my research shows is [with the minimum wage] you get a reduction in the labor force participation rate of teenagers,” said Moore. “This is a very sinister trend. Would you, Paul Krugman, support a teenage minimum wage?”
Krugman said he was willing to think about it.
Moore claimed that “red states,” which have adopted more free-market policies, are performing better, economically speaking, than “blue states.” Krugman disputed this characterization, claiming that land use policies and climate were more important factors, to which Moore replied, “You tell me people moving from San Diego to Houston are doing it because of the weather?”
Krugman also repeatedly rejected the notion that he is a big-government liberal, or a socialist.
“There are only certain times where you really need government intervention,” he said.
Before today, I had only ever experienced Krugman via his acerbic, blithely partisan NYT columns. He was much more reasonable—and ultimately, persuasive—in person. Ultimately, the Krugman/Moore debate served as a good reminder that the important intellectual fight is between advocates of limited government intervention and advocates of moderate government intervention, not between advocates of limited government and advocates of all-encompassing government. Even Krugman, the left’s most influential economics expert, is not a socialist.You Sherwood Not Want To Make A Mochrie Out Of These Two
You’ve witnessed their shenanigans on VH1, TV commercials, movies and the long-running improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? But have you seen them live? For the last six years, Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood have toured with their show An Evening With Colin Mochrie And Brad Sherwood (check their site for upcoming tour dates), where the dynamic duo takes their experience with comedy improv and encourages audience participation, including the sound effects game that was so popular on their long-running BBC/ABC hit show. But the best part of the night is the mousetrap game, where the duo alternate singing lines of an opera — the theme determined by the audience, each line beginning with a letter of the alphabet picked by said fans, then going in backwards order — while also walking the stage blindfolded through a minefield of mousetraps. You can imagine how absurd and painful it gets. And how funny.
Given their pedigree with improv, Mochrie and Sherwood have made a career out of throwing themselves to the wolves. Despite the unpredictability of a show or audience on any given night, they thrive on performing live without a net. Luckily, ADD was not as tough an audience when we sat this humorous twosome down in their hotel to discuss their long-running act, chemistry and love for spontaneous comedy. I also chatted with them for a new Stage Directions cover story entitled “MacGyvers Of Improv,” the extended online version of which can be found here.
Of all the people you’ve worked with, how did you two develop this chemistry, decide to work together and take this show on the road?
Brad: We’ve done different [improv] incarnations with bigger groups, but some of the guys were busy or don’t like to fly, and we’ll go anywhere. We’ve worked together for so many years…
Colin: We don’t like sharing stage time.
Brad: The bigger the group the less we’re on stage, so we thought, if there are only two of us we’re on stage the whole time.
Have you been doing a lot of press while you’re here in New York?
Brad: We just did the Fox News show and walked back here.
Colin: All we really wanted was you.
Excellent. How was Fox News?
Brad: It’s weird. I think it was [for] their weird online news outlet. So who’s actually watching an online live Fox TV show other than shut-in conservatives?
Did you perform at a White House gala in 2007?
Brad: It was the Congressional Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner. It wasn’t the White House one, it was the one being sponsored by Congress. So technically we were being hired by Democrats. I just want to put that out there. We were performing for the President, but we were hired by Democrats.
I’m assuming you weren’t quite in line with the last administration at that point?
Brad: I have never been in line with that administration.
So how do you get up and perform in front of people like Karl Rove, whom you might not like, and manage to make it work without politicizing it or creating any tension?
Colin: It’s pretty easy for us just because we never do political humor. I think when you improvise political humor it just becomes pretty much black and white, like, “Oh, they’re stupid.” That kind of thing. You can’t really satirize it like Saturday Night Live or other people who can spend time writing the sketch and fine-tuning it. Ours would be broad strokes. It’s really not our strength. We just tend to go for the silly.
Brad: Our show is goofy and very apolitical. We came in the year after Stephen Colbert did his skewering of Bush, so I think everybody on both sides of the aisle were interested in having a fun, light, apolitical comedy act, which is what we are. We went in there to make people laugh and didn’t have a political agenda. We weren’t sermonizing in any way, and we just did really goofy, silly stuff. We got great feedback. Everyone said it was the funniest thing that they had at one of those things. Usually it’s standups who generally don’t do political humor but feel compelled to write a complete political set for that event, so they’re doing stuff that’s way out of their comfort zone and doing stuff that’s making half the audience feel uncomfortable at any given moment, depending upon what their political bent is.
The show has such a wide demographic, and we have a lot of kids and families in our audiences.We have the widest demographic for any comedy show: 7 to 70.
You may not have raunchy humor, but there is racy humor. Even some of the improv stuff on Whose Line, Just For Laughs and various TV appearances you have made is not all G-rated. Some of it is PG content that almost pushes R-rated material.
Colin: It hits that spot where it kind of goes over the younger people’s heads but the parents get it.
Brad: Most of our stuff is [double] entendre. If it’s racy it’s vague enough that it’s not specifically filth. It walks that line where the adults know what we’re talking about, but the kids have no idea that there’s even a dirty reference going on.
Like when you spilled red wine during the “lie down” sketch at the Just For Laughs festival and made a porn reference with the spillage.
Colin: Yeah, those kinds of things. Good, clean family humor!
Modern comedy has become more adversarial, which mirrors the way we are as a society. We have become more confrontational with each other. It’s been said that a lot of standup comedians have issues. Do you guys fit into that stereotype of trying to work something out on stage?
Colin: There is nothing going on with us.
Brad: I think improvisers as a breed tend to be more social because everything we do is interactive and requires more than one person, whereas standups tend to be a bit more misanthropic and asocial. They comment on and have an angry perspective on the world and talk about how everything is stupid, whereas what we’re doing is creating right there on the spot, and it’s a communal event between us and the audience. It’s a totally different mindset. Improv is for people that play well with others, whereas the social outcasts tend to be the standups, where they have their bitter take on the world and comment on what is wrong with it.
I get crankier as I get older.
Brad: I think the reason people get angrier as they get older is that as you get older you get wiser. But as you get older the world becomes full of more people that are less wise than you, so the population of people that is dumber than you continues to grow. As you become more enlightened the world continues to fill with less enlightened people. Your perspective is just so frustrating when you have these morons who are text messaging while they’re making your café mocha. It’s this new techno age of bonehead children who are completely asocial and think the world owes them something. I think that’s what frustrates you as you get older.
That’s your rant!
Brad: I was doing standup.
Are there any roles that you guys would like to do, either comedic or dramatic, that would be different from what you’ve done and that would allow people to perceive you differently?
Colin: I don’t know if people would accept us as anything else at this point.
Brad: I’d like to play one of those villains in those Jason Statham type movies, like The Transporter. I think because I’m tall and look a little bit dour that I’d be good as the big guy that walks around with a trenchcoat and a gun.
Colin: I would love to do an action movie just because action heroes look like they could beat up a terrorist with their bare hands. Look at them. But with me it would be a surprise.
Or you could be the ringleader of a big bank heist.
Brad: I wouldn’t want to be the hero. I’d want to be the bad guy. The henchman to the little, evil, weaselly guy or the aloof, I’ll-kill-you-if you-look-at-me-wrong guy. Cowboy movies – I would like to be in violent, Clint Eastwood style spaghetti westerns.
There are so many entertainment choices now that everything seems to have been done, so it seems harder to capture an audience’s attention.
Colin: It’s been hard to be original. Every idea has been done. If you look at comedy, Saturday Night Live is doing what Sid Caesar did – a 90-minute show every week with live sketches. It’s just finding that different point of view, and after awhile everything becomes new again. I’m hoping that people forget some really good ideas so I can use them in the future.
Bryan, I was looking on your site, and you are a serious metalhead.
[Throws the horns] What about you?
Brad: I’m a total metalhead.
What groups did you see when you were younger?
Brad: I saw the Scorpions, Black Sabbath, Twisted Sister, Def Leppard, Triumph, Iron Maiden, all the good ones. But I never saw Judas Priest or AC/DC.
I saw Judas Priest in ‘84.
Brad: Those are two embarrassing admissions. I didn’t get to see them, but I saw pretty much anybody else.
Colin: I’m kind of shocked that you haven’t seen AC/DC.PROBE 233.23.A CONNECTION ESTABLISHED INCOMING TRANSMISSION: Blog "Use of Weapons"
- posted on Thu 30th July 2015 12.00AM
This update introduces a host of new features including guns, colonist emotions, social interactions, and console commands. There's also been an overhaul of balance and the colonists priorities which will improve game play dramatically.
Emotions and Sanity
Colonists now experience emotions. Emotions will develop as they perform tasks, communicate with other colonists, and encounter the environment. You'll notice that colonists exhibit emotional outbursts such as breaking down in tears and cheering. Head over to the Maia wiki to see the ways in which you can influence their moods.
Social
Colonists now crave social interaction. These interactions may involve hugging, chatting, waving.....[Read Blog] No Comments.
Minecon 2015!
- posted on Thu 9th July 2015 12.00AM
Hey everyone!
This weekend we were invited to showcase Maia at Minecon in London! Simon, Nick Dymond (Maia''s sound designer) and I headed over to London to demonstrate the game to the energetic Minecrafters and their not always so energetic parents.
We had a fantastic time and got great feedback from some very enthusiastic players. A lot of young players stuck around our booth for hours, playing and replaying the game and helping other new players to learn.
Getting to meet a lot of other indie developers was also a highlight of the event. Since it''s only my second event with Maia there was still a lot of people for me to meet. The sense of community among the group was very apparent and I found everyone very welcoming.
;
Photo by Ian Bui
Thanks to Mojang for inviting us, John Polson for organising and Multiplay for supplying the equipment.
We''ve got an interesting update coming up soon...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Development Log 30.03.15
- posted on Mon 30th March 2015 6.27PM
Hey!
It was great meeting so many of you at EGX Rezzed 2015. The Machine Studios team had an amazing time showing off the game and seeing how players reacted to the latest build. We were really happy to see so many people playing for long periods of time. One person ran in at 11am on the Friday and played for over 2.5 hours! The glowsticks were also a hit, all the players looked like they were heading off to a rave.
The venue was really nice. There was a lot of light and fresh air which made a refreshing change from being in a dingy convention hall.
I think the rest of the team agree, it would have been great to have a chance to look around the other games on show, but we were extremely busy. We also got to meet a lot of YouTube content creators and streamers who were really interested in the game. (If you are also interested in creating online video content of Maia let us know!)
We had a great time after the event each night too. On the Friday we went out for sushi. I had never had sushi before so it was interesting, even so, I don't think I'll be rushing to have it again. Ruairi ended up getting super late night ice cream, which he now advises against. After Rezzed was over we went to Loading Bar where the extra glowsticks came in handy...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Daily Development Log 04.03.2015
- posted on Wed 4th March 2015 12.00AM
Leanne has finished up her work from last week and has working on another animation sequence used for colonists banging on doors and other vertical surfaces. We're going to use this to allow the colonists to show their frustration at locked doors or being trapped in rooms without doors.
In the office today, we have been doing a fair amount of preparation for Rezzed. We ordered several shirts to make ourselves easy to find at the booth and some more promotional trinkets for the team to give out. We've also been discussing other inventive ways we could promote the game.
Aside from a mandatory trip to the barbers, sorting out payments, tax and organising promotional material for Rezzed, Simon has been busy looking into acquiring a space suit [For research!]. This evening he's going to be working on some code to begin to rework the tutorial.
I'm still looking through and cataloguing articles, currently I'm on 130! The more articles I collect the more the list is starting to represent a time line of events. As someone new to the company I've found this really beneficial.
-Caroline
[Thanks for all the feedback on the daily posts, we're glad you've enjoyed them...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Daily Development Log 03.03.2015
- posted on Tue 3rd March 2015 12.00AM
As you might have read over the last week, the team has been working consolidating the known issues and bugs in the game. When Ruairi finds a bug he carefully creates replication steps and posts them in our bug tracker. Working with Simon, a severity is picked and then each issue is then assigned to him to work on.
Here's the list of bugs currently assigned to Simon, starting with the most severe:
Colonists are Walled in by bad base generation.
Lander crew get stuck if impassible object is in front of lander
Tasking IMP to Dig inaccessible wall causes slowdown
IMP stops collecting Material (even with Hopper)
Loading Multiple times can cause AI shutdown.
Right clicking on an object in blueprint phase causes crashes
IMP placing fossil breaks.
Stills Deposit water barrels in inaccessible spots.
Dead IMPs not removed from list, unable to build additional IMPs
Colonist Spawning at corner of Map
Object blueprints are sometimes ignored...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Daily Development Log 02.03.2015
- posted on Mon 2nd March 2015 12.00AM
It's the start of a new week at Machine Studios!
Over in Germany, Ruairi has been creating a priority list of known potential bugs and critical issues for Simon to fix before Rezzed and 0.48. Especially focusing on issues that hamper early and mid game interactions and game play, as we want to make sure you have the best experience possible with the game, even in alpha.
He's also been cleaning and updating the issue database so we can post it to the forums and update everyone on specific issues. It's important to us that we are open and honest with our development process and access to raw up to date information is a critical part of that.
Simon has also been accessing the bug list to find the biggest issues we can fix to dramatically improve the game for the next release.
He's also completed the new timer for when you can call down colonists from orbit. Allowing the player to know when they can request more colonists instead of waiting blindly. The "Call Capsule" button will now be greyed out until it is usable rather than hidden, as many people thought it disappearing was a bug.
He is now tidying up the games UI to reduce the amount of visual clutter, and to increase the amount of information offered to the player...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Daily Development Log 27.02.2015
- posted on Fri 27th February 2015 12.00AM
Time for another update!
Today, apart from being stuck on a bus for two hours, Simon has been working on releasing a build for Linux which should fix some AI related issues. He also fixed a bug for the 0.48 release, regarding the capsule landing sequence, which could cause empty landers and other strange bugs.
Ruairi has been doing his morning forum sweep. He then tracked down some in game bugs and preformed his daily smoke test. He's also been working on replicating a bug which makes colonists walk though walls. Spooky!
As mentioned yesturday, Leanne, has been very busy working on the new pistol animations. Here's a quick peek.
To prepare for her next animation task, she has been filming herself performing the action she is about to animate. This way she will be able to use it as reference material. We hand animate the characters in Maia as it allows for greater expression and precision over motion captured data.
Separate from writing these updates, I've been looking for ways we can start organising our tasks a bit better, writing risk assessments and sorting out online company profiles...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Daily Development Log 26.02.2015
- posted on Thu 26th February 2015 12.00AM
Good evening!
Our animator Leanne has finished the animations that she was working on yesterday for the male and female rigs of the colonists patrolling the base with pistols drawn. She also been fixing up the transitions that allow the colonists to move between the stances of them drawing, carrying and firing the weapons.
Ruairi has been doing his daily scan of the forums and looking for bugs the community have been reporting, whist also completing the daily smoke test of game. He attempted to recreate a few of the bugs on the forums, mostly these related to the AI not building specific objects and interaction issues with the work bench in the game.
Today I've been emailing T-shirt printing companies, researching health and safety procedures for the studio, writing risk assessments, looking into the companies customer outreach and branding, and looking at possible future events we could attend to meet fans of the game.
As for Simon, he's been hunting down a bug that causes black squares on the side of the screen for ATI users and working on some of the UI improvements going in to 0.48...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Daily Development Log 25.02.2015
- posted on Wed 25th February 2015 12.00AM
We've decided to start doing daily update logs so people can see what the team is up to and how the game is progressing. Our new hire Caroline has spent some time catching up with the team.
Today Simon has been working on bugs regarding the airlocks. The issues with colonists refusing to take off their surface suits in the airlock should now be solved. He's also been fixing the workshop table bugs caused by quick saving and loading often. This means the game should work better for those of you who like to save a lot.
Ruairi has been hard at work checking out the bugs that have been reported on the Steam and Maia forums. He's managed to recreate some of the bugs you have pointed out and has been working with Simon to fix these.
Leanne is currently finishing up the first set of handgun animations for the colonists. Colonists firing weapons and defending the base will be a big feature in 0.48. For today she's been polishing the animations created for the colonists drawing their weapons and firing them from a standing position. Things like adding small head tilts and subtly shifting body weight to give impact and life to the animations. Shes' also working on animations for having them patrol the base.
I'm new to the company this week...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Burn Rate.
- posted on Sun 21st September 2014 8.25PM
There's been a lot of talk about alpha funded games getting into deep water recently so I thought it would be interesting to post a blog discussing the future of Maia and of Machine Studios LTD, the business I have now formed to develop it and future games.
First some context. On Steam alone, over it's lifetime and including sales, Maia has averaged $1,515 a day. That number is massively skewed by the release sale and subsequent coverage, but a good base point to work from. A month with no big releases or coverage sits closer to half that amount. These numbers are currently increasing as the game matures and could increase by a lot more. I, perhaps optimistically, hope to see a day where we stay in the charts without being on sale.
In short, things are very healthy.
At our current burn rate, running off cash reserves, with no further sales of the game, development can easily continue for about five years. That said, current development has a few bottlenecks I would like to hammer out of the pipeline, which will push up costs by a few thousand.
So at the rate I would like to be developing at, it is closer to three years...[Read Blog] No Comments.
In Defence of Open Development.
- posted on Thu 23rd January 2014 10.40PM
Today I read a piece by John Walker, where he asserts that having an open development process is a bad thing. I responded on Twitter, but I feel I need a few more characters to explain myself. While Johns argument seems sound, in a superficial manner, he fails to understand the role of a games designer, how games production in general works and the reasons why a developer might turn their ear to their customers.
The foundation of Johns complaint is that a democratic development process cannot work, because the input from ill-informed people will lead the developer astray. Here's the thing: Open development is not democratic, only the developer is holding the wheel.
Open development is about providing the users with the information they need and communication channels required to allow them to critique your work. It is not about compromising the design process in an effort to pander and please.
By talking openly about features I am forced to defend my ideas. I have to provide a reason as to why I feel an idea works and justify my thought processes...[Read Blog] No Comments.
The Steam launch.
- posted on Wed 11th December 2013 5.05PM
Seven days ago we launched on Steam early access. It has been a frantic hundred hour week and finally the dust is starting to settle. Eight hundred emails answered, many more waiting, forty patches distributed, two hundred gigabytes of content uploaded and ten thousand lines of code hammered out. Phew!
We chose to release a public alpha at a very early stage in development. Effectively, we put out a work-in-progress, a detailed proof-of-concept that would give people a unique insight into how we're building the game. Releasing such an early build was a risk, but I still strongly believe in community driven development and the launch has definitely vindicated my thinking. We've completely transformed the game since release and it's entirely thanks to you guys! I really want to thank everyone who took to the forums, and email, and who submitted their problems, their feedback and their ideas.
The launch exceeded all our expectations, in fact it blew them away. We certainly didn't expect to be featured on the front page of Steam for so long. We spent several days outselling games like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty at one point we even became the #2 seller...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Maia 0.38 live on Steam
- posted on Tue 3rd December 2013 5.00PM
Maia 0.38 is ready and is minutes away from launching on Steam Early access!
It's a pretty huge milestone for me and the team.
Steam keys will be going out to people who have already preordered some time in the next few days.
Cheers!
-Simon
...[Read Blog] No Comments.
3578600m
- posted on Fri 4th October 2013 9.49PM
This blog has been a little neglected, but none the less, things have moved on at great speed!
Maia has been Greenlit!
We are aiming to release to early-access in December.
If you can't wait, you can preorder for immediate access to alpha builds!
Preorder now!
...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Greenlight
- posted on Wed 10th July 2013 1.55PM
Maia has launched on Steam Greenlight!
Please give us your vote!
We are currently just about to enter the top 100 games on the service. A few more votes will help push us over!
Cheers
-Simon...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Maia Alpha 0.28 released
- posted on Wed 19th June 2013 6.56PM
The 0.28 alpha is now ready for download in the members area.
This release is a patch for 0.27. It brings performance increases, a lot of bug fixes and even some new content.
AI is currently idle and won't build things, although there is already lots of content to check out. Let us know on the forums if you have any issues!...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Deorbit disposal
- posted on Thu 16th May 2013 12.00AM
Alpha keys have now gone out to all backers. Check your junk mail if you missed it.
The upcoming alpha 0.27 will be released in a week or so, however there is already a tech demo up on members.maiagame.com to check out.
Have fun!
-Simon
...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Elucidation
- posted on Sun 10th March 2013 9.15PM
Apologies for the lack of blog updates. As you can imagine things have been hectic around here!
So what's the status of the game?
With funding through Kickstarter and Indiegogo secured, we are now in full development. The plan is to release a new trailer on April 15th to launch a Greenlight page and public alpha sales.
We are in the position of having a large amount of our static assets done and in the game. With more complex things like character animation also starting to work their way in. Here's a video of the day/night system along with some of our new assets and rendering engine.
This week the website will be going live, which will allow users to start downloading alpha builds and other goodies. Check out the forums for regular updates and sneak peaks of what we are working on.
-Si
...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Kick-starting
- posted on Sat 3rd November 2012 2.27PM
Maia has launched on Kickstarter. Please support us in creating the most ambitious indie game ever made and help us to resurrect the god-game genre.
In just three days we have raised 25% of our budget, but there is still a long way to go. Please share the project where ever you can.
-Thanks
Simon...[Read Blog] No Comments.
Volume
- posted on Sat 20th October 2012 9.21PM
After a few sleepless nights, I have the games particle effects system in and working!
This will be used to create steam, smoke, fire, explosions, dust and other volumetric phenomena.
The steam picks up lighting from the surrounding lights. (currently only one or two at the moment, so if you're |
132.0504 15.16949143 08 1 70005U 15159.12706861.08636904 00000-0 20491 0 0 64 2 70005 55.0125 260.0406 0230147 228.0123 130.1929 15.18087828 08 1 70006U 15159.19334589.09012408 00000-0 20962 0 0 89 2 70006 55.0102 259.7502 0226383 228.3817 132.2958 15.19232689 09 1 70007U 15159.25915494.09660876 00000-0 21997 0 0 62 2 70007 55.0077 259.4608 0222568 228.7128 132.1507 15.20418885 00 1 70008U 15159.32397867.09708942 00000-0 21612 0 0 37 2 70008 55.0080 259.1752 0218535 229.0014 126.9342 15.21671393 03 1 70009U 15159.38996897.10032923 00000-0 21810 0 0 88 2 70009 55.0094 258.8851 0214471 229.4062 128.2943 15.22952785 07 1 70010U 15159.45527671.10400000 00000-0 22077 0 0 89 2 70010 55.0104 258.5983 0210198 229.8433 126.1871 15.24263240 02
To cope with the uncertainty in the rate of decay, I recommend comparing predictions against the pre-sail deployment TLE, and taking 50% of the difference in prediction time as the uncertainty, e.g. if a 700XX TLE predicts a pass 5 min. earlier than the 90726 TLE, then allow 2.5 min. prediction time uncertainty.
I estimated the TLEs using the following procedure. I used SGP4 to propagate the 90726 TLE to the time of deployment, which I took to be Jun 07 at 19:55 UTC. TLE Analyzer 2.12 converted the result to a state vector type compatible with GMAT 2014a (General Mission Analysis Tool).
I used GMAT to numerically propagate the orbit, based on the mass of the spacecraft (4.5 kg), the dimensions of its sail (~5.66 x 5.66 m2), my guess that it will be tumbling, and the current space weather.
GMAT produced Cartesian state vectors at close time intervals. I selected state vectors near successive ascending nodes and converted them to TLEs. I computed the mean ndot/2 and corresponding B* decay terms between successive TLEs, and inserted them into the TLEs.
I intend to revise in the event I receive visual, optical or radio tracking data that reveals a significantly different rate of decay, in time to be to useful to observers on the night of Jun 7/8 UTC. Updates will be posted on this page, so please check back from time to time.
I also intend to produce TLEs for the night of Jun 8/9, if I have sufficient data.
Link to the VSO Home Page.A National Rifle Association attack ad targeting Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Jason Kander features a narrator who falsely claims Kander “voted against letting me defend myself at my apartment with a gun if I choose.” But the bill in question had nothing to do with whether people are allowed to defend themselves in the home with a gun.
The NRA has spent nearly $3 million on the Senate race in Missouri, including almost $2.5 million in spending against Kander, and nearly $500,000 in spending supporting Republican incumbent Sen. Roy Blunt. Gun policy has played a significant role in the campaign since the release of a viral ad where Kander assembles a gun blindfolded while describing his experiences as a combat veteran in Afghanistan and explaining the need for background checks to keep guns away from terrorists.
In an October 31 NRA ad, a woman identified as Jessica from Ballwin, MO, claims that “Jason Kander voted against letting me defend myself at my apartment with a gun if I choose.” The NRA ad cites a vote Kander made on House Bill 668 in 2009 while serving in the Missouri House of Representatives as evidence of this claim:
JESSICA: If you’re like most people, you just want this election to end. So how do we decide? For me, it’s about respect. Jason Kander does not respect my right to self-defense. Jason Kander voted against letting me defend myself at my apartment with a gun if I choose. It should be my choice, because it’s my right. Don’t let Jason Kander take your rights away.
H.B. 668 wasn’t about self-defense inside the home. Instead, it was legislation that expanded the scope of permissible self-defense outside the home in a way similar to controversial “Stand Your Ground” self-defense laws. This fact is explained in a since-deleted 2009 notice on the NRA’s website urging NRA supporters to advocate for the bill’s passage, where the NRA explained H.B. 668 “would expand Missouri’s Castle Doctrine to now include your private property boundaries” -- meaning it would have expanded the self-defense protections already available in the home to outdoor property.
Both before and after the passage of H.B. 668, Missouri has been considered a “Castle Doctrine” state, meaning that people do not have a duty to retreat when employing deadly force in defense of the home. Voting for or against H.B. 668 has no bearing on this fact.
It is unlikely even that the kind legislation described by the ad -- a bill that would allow or disallow people to use a gun in the home for self-defense -- would be proposed or voted on by anyone. Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion in the landmark 2008 decision District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects the right of law-abiding people to keep a gun in the home for self-defense -- meaning that the type of legislation imagined by the NRA in their anti-Kander ad would be a non-starter.Photos by Felipe Hernandez and Gatnau Fornell Ramon
On Wednesday, the Spanish government announced a draft proposal to introduce anti-protest measures that would make Russia’s handling of activists look magnanimous in comparison. If passed, the bill will penalize many accepted forms of peaceful protest with fines and prison sentences, which isn't a great look for a country with a fascist past.
Aside from the contents of the bill, what’s most worrying is how many of the proposed changes to the law seem to have been thought up as a direct response to specific groups and actions, mainly from the left, and mainly emerging out of Spain’s Occupy movement—15M.
Reading between the lines, the proposed bill reads uncannily like a timeline of the last four years, with each law dreamed up as a direct response to any action that has upset the government or caught it with its pants down by exposing corrupt behavior. It takes on online activist groups like Anonymous, as well as a political pressure groups such as the PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages—Spain’s anti-foreclosure activists) and, perhaps most controversially, makes a villain out of those who use social networks for political ends. In short, it’s trying to kill social activism in a country that’s been utterly failed by the state.
OK, so here's the breakdown:
Anyone organizing an protest through Facebook that is not officially sanctioned would receive a prison sentence of up to three years, or a huge fine of $45,000. Spain has been much vaunted as the birthplace of Occupy, and it was the spontaneous protests organized through Facebook and Twitter that led to the formation of the first campsites in the center of Madrid. Without 15,000 people marching under an apolitical banner, it’s unlikely that much of what followed, would have, um, followed.
Passive resistance at large gatherings would also get you three years in the slammer. In the context of Spain, where riot cops tend to be more baton happy than they are in the US, this can be read as a legitimization of the kind of brute force the police used to dislodge Barcelona’s Occupy camp back in 2011.
In April 2012, protesters brought Madrid’s entire metro system to a halt for ten minutes by pulling the emergency cords on nine trains at the same time. The action, by the Toma el Metro group, was in protest at a 40 percent rise in the price of a metro ticket over three years. So, naturally, any attempt to disrupt communications or public transport would now be labeled "sabotage" and could land you in prison for one to five years. This law also seems to target Anonymous, who in March released the full accounts of the governing Popular Party from the years between 1991 and 2012, when senior members were accused of receiving cash payments from private companies. It would also give the Spanish security forces greater measures to respond to cyber attacks.
See a pattern here? Protesters do something, so the government tailors a piece of legislation specifically to criminalize it.
As well as the above, the draft bill also seeks to penalize protesting in front of public institutions, and the criminalization of the current strategy of "escraches" (spontaneous protests where people target specific bankers or politicians in their place of work or residence to publicly humiliate them). So now you can protest so long as it's nowhere near anybody in a position of power.
So far, the government has insisted that this is only a draft bill and that it will be revised before being put to parliament. But given their absolute majority—and the fact that previous revisions have included taking out legislation that referred to the criminalization of the display of fascist symbols—it’s likely that many of these changes will make it through. Right now, the only positive thing I can think of is that the same inventiveness that Spain’s social activists have showed in the past, will be used again to think up other ways to protest.
Follow Paul on Twitter: @pauldotsimon
More stuff from Spain:
Els Masturbadors Mongòlics Brought Punk to Fascist Spain
Watch – Teenage Riot: Spain's Neo-Revolutionaries
Watch – Skate SpainRussia's SWIFT Settlement Alternative The SWIFT System is an integral part of a communication process that assists payment and clearing of financial transactions. The Corporate-to-Bank site defines it in the following manner and provides several examples of Payment, Clearing and Settlement Systems. “The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, Societe Cooperative a Responsabilite Limitee (limited co-operative society) (“SWIFT”) is a member-owned co-operative. SWIFT provides a telecommunication platform for the exchange of standardized financial messages between financial institutions and corporations. SWIFT is neither a payment system nor a settlement system though the SWIFT messaging standard is used in many payment and settlement systems. SWIFT’s customers include banks, market infrastructures, broker-dealers, corporates, custodians, and investment managers. SWIFT is subject to oversight by the central banks of the Group of Ten countries.” Now that Western Central Banks are coordinating with their puppet governments in a desperate struggle to preserve their financial preeminence, the push back is heating up. The article, Moscow’s Response To Economic Warfare: Central Bank Of Russia Launches SWIFT Alternative For Domestic Payments, states: “The calls to disconnect Russian banks from the global interbank SWIFT system came amid the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West and the introduction of sanctions. However, SWIFT itself does not intend to switch Russia off from the system, saying a number of countries put pressure on it, and insists it is not joining the anti-Russian sanctions.” Well, if the SWIFT members of their co-operative are not part of the effort to isolate un-cooperative regimes, why would Russia take the effort to organize an alternative? Russia Girds for Financial Nuclear War answers accordingly. “It will be tested with eight large banks, including VTB bank (#2 in the country), and SMP and Rossiya banks (both sanctioned by the west). Komlev said the new system should be up and running by May 2015.” The natural response to sanctions has accelerated the need to circumvent a blackball threat that has Russia launches own SWIFT-style service. “There has been talk of blocking Russian banks from using SWIFT among some EU members as well.” However, the latest pressure did not originate the planning for an alternative system. As reported in TASS, Russia, China in talks to make alternative to SWIFT, “Russia and China are discussing setting up a system of interbank transactions which will become an analogue to International banking transaction system SWIFT, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov” announced back in September of this year. “According to Shuvalov, Russia has been also discussing establishment of an independent ratings agency with China. Concrete proposals will be made by the end of 2014, he said.” Just how far will, such new-found collaboration union develop? The implications go far beyond the establishment of an alternative settlement system. Examine the trade implications from the initiative that has China to Start Payments With Russia in National Currencies. “The China Foreign Exchange Trade System has announced that since December 29, China, Russia, Malaysia and New Zealand will start the usage of national currencies in mutual transactions. Beijing hopes to make the yuan an alternative to the US dollar in global trade.” Now this development becomes far more interesting as the global financial tug of war plays itself out. From the flagship publication of the City of London, the Economist tells a very different tale. The pros and cons of a SWIFT response, “The impact of a reprise on Russia’s already fragile economy would be huge. Its banks are more connected to international trade and capital markets than Iran’s were. They are heavy users not only of SWIFT itself but also of other payment systems to which it connects them, such as America’s Fedwire and the European Central Bank’s Target2. Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, has reported that more than 90% of transactions involving Russian banks cross borders. Foreign firms that do business in Russia would suffer, too. Countries that trade heavily with Russia, such as Germany and Italy, are therefore none too keen. Nor are many in the financial sector. SWIFT is less insulated from such pressure than its counterparts in other sectors, such as the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency which is governed by an international convention. But it is a crucial part of the world’s financial plumbing system.” The tone of this analysis implies that it is in the interest of Russia to keep their current SWIFT relationship intact. Oh, how nice it would be if only international disputes could just exempt the banking system and continue functioning in its normal imperialist manner. In a perceptive article, What Petrodollar: Russia, China To Create SWIFT Alternative, points out the irony in the viewpoint reflected in the Economist. “But wait: wasn't it the UK's desire to force Russia out of SWIFT just two weeks ago? Why yes, and the fact that Russia is happy to do so, and on its own terms, once again shows just who has all the leverage, and who really needs, or rather doesn't, the US Dollar.” And here lies the significance of this latest campaign to isolate any country that operates in their self-interest and bucks the commands of the almighty US Dollar reserve currency. These developments that fragment the globalist model of financial primacy should be viewed negatively. A SWIFT conclusion to an international Paradyne that purports to be the ultimate state of financial being entry into central banking heavens, which guides the path to global enlightenment, is a much needed remedy. Mixing oppressive foreign compliance demands with intimidation of isolating uncongenial regimes from conducting foreign trade seems to be a violation of the basic tenet of globalism. Of course the underpinnings that threatens one world economic rule, requires any unreceptive country to be brought back in line. The fundamental defect in operating any financial system is that political disputes usually override pure economic expediency. Russia, China, Iran and any other country that differs with the Rothschild banking model of debt credit money will always be under pressure to capitulate or expire. Such a paradigm is anything but swift. James Hall – December 31, 2014 Subscribe to the BATR Realpolitik Newsletter Discuss or comment about this essay on the BATR ForumInterim Liberal Leader Bob Rae says this is the wrong time to raise employment insurance premiums.
Premiums are to go up starting Jan. 1, and the average increase will cost employees and employers $306 a year.
Rae accuses the government of breaking an election promise by raising taxes and said ordinary Canadians will pay more while big corporations get a cut. The government is going through with a planned corporate tax cut to bring the rate down to 15 per cent from 16.5 per cent.
Although the government is raising EI premiums, Rae says, it has laid off some workers who handle EI claims, meaning processing takes longer. He says the delays are causing people to go to food banks or miss rent payments.
Rae wants the tax system reviewed and restructured.
"It's crazy to make payroll taxes the basis for employment insurance," Rae said Friday. "I think that we have to get ourselves back into a situation where we recognize that people need support when they're out of work. That hasn't changed."
Rae says the system has to be reviewed "to make sure that we're getting the balance right and to make sure that we're designing a tax system that’s going to be the most innovative and the most likely to create jobs."
Tax structure doesn't encourage hiring, Rae says
The way it's structured now makes it least likely to encourage employers to hire, he says.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's spokesman defended the increase in EI premiums, saying the government is raising them by less than it said they would.
"To protect the economy and jobs, we cut any potential increases in half for 2012 — keeping EI premiums near their lowest level since 1982," Chisholm Pothier said in a statement. "This change is expected to save employers and employees $600 million in 2012."
Pothier says the average family of four now receives almost $3,100 in extra tax savings due to measures introduced by the Conservative government.
The EI fund is in deficit and has been since the government froze premiums during the recession, he said.
"Because recovery is fragile, we keep overruling the EI board’s maximum increases to continue giving employers and employees a break," Pothier said, referring to an advisory board that recommends where to set EI premiums.
"We also introduced the Small Business Hiring Tax Credit in budget 2011, to give employers a break on EI premiums and encourage them to hire new employees."
Pothier says a recent Department of Finance study linked low corporate taxes to investment.ISO 14688 grades sands as fine, medium and coarse with ranges 0.063 mm to 0.2 mm to 0.63 mm to 2.0 mm. In the United States, sand is commonly divided into five sub-categories based on size: very fine sand (1?16 - 1/8 mm diameter), fine sand (1/8 mm - ¼ mm), medium sand (¼ mm - ½ mm), coarse sand (½ mm - 1 mm), and very coarse sand (1 mm - 2 mm). These sizes are based on the Krumbein phi scale, where size in? = -log base 2 of size in mm. On this scale, for sand the value of? varies from -1 to +4, with the divisions between sub-categories at whole numbers.
Constituents
The composition of sand is highly variable, depending on the local rock sources and conditions. The bright white sands found in tropical and subtropical coastal settings are eroded limestone and may contain coral and shell fragments in addition to other organic or organically derived fragmental material.
Arkose is a sand or sandstone with considerable feldspar content, derived from the weathering and erosion of a (usually nearby) granitic rock outcrop.
Some sands contain magnetite, chlorite, glauconite or gypsum. Sands rich in magnetite are dark to black in colour, as are sands derived from volcanic basalts and obsidian. Chlorite-glauconite bearing sands are typically green in color, as are sands derived from basaltic (lava) with a high olivine content.
Environments
Sand is transported by wind and water and deposited in the form of beaches, dunes, sand spits, sand bars and related features. In environments such as gravel-bed rivers and glacial moraines it often occurs as one of the many grain sizes that are represented.
Study
Oriental Bay - Wellington.
Introduction
The study of individual grains can reveal much historical information as to the origin and kind of transport of the grain. Quartz sand that is recently weathered from granite or gneiss quartz crystals will be angular. It is called grus in geology or sharp sand in the building trade where it is preferred for concrete, and in gardening where it is used as a soil amendment to loosen clay soils.Sand that is transported long distances by water or wind will be rounded, with characteristic abrasion patterns on the grain surface.People who collect sand as a hobby are known as arenophiles. Organisms that thrive in sandy environments are psammophilesWellington City Council upgraded the Oriental Bay foreshore by enlarging and enhancing the existing Freyberg and Oriental Bay beaches, and creating a new beach east of the Band Rotunda.
There is now more sandy space for Wellingtonians and visitors to the city to enjoy walking, playing or relaxing. More than 27,000 tonnes of sand, from a site inland of Golden Bay in the northern region of the South Island, was placed on the beaches.
The entire project was funded by approximately $4 million from the Wellington City Council and approximately $3.5 million from the Plimmer Bequest. The existing sand is not a natural product of the Wellington harbour.
Concept Development
The sea wall around Oriental Bay stops any normal degradation of the coastline by wind and water and the coastline is not shaped in a way to capture sand. This area of the harbour is extremely vulnerable to the batterings of northerly storms which tend to move the sand away from the Bay.Over the last 50 years, Oriental Bay's foreshore has evolved in a very unplanned way especially around the Freyberg area. Sand, which came from overseas, was dumped there during World War 2. From then on there have been several different haphazard changes and additions.
The Wellington City Council had to make a decision, either to let Oriental Bay degrade and in time have the sand shift away from the shore due to the severity of the storms that Wellington experiences, or given the Bay's popularity, do something to improve the area. The “Wellington Waterfront Development" project focused on the nearby waterfront which extends along Taranaki Wharf and in front of Te Papa, Museum of New Zealand.
The development project was the “Waterfront Park" which will transform the Chaffers area between Te Papa and Oriental Parade. The Oriental Bay foreshore development project is technically not part of the “Wellington Waterfront" project but is a geographic extension of it. The very strong link between the two and the popularity of Oriental Bay were good reasons to improve the standard of the area. No matter what time of the day or night, workdays, weekends, public holidays people can be seen walking, boating, relaxing, or exercising around the foreshore of central Wellington and Oriental Bay.
The catalyst for the project was a proposal put forward in 1996 to construct a small new beach east of the Band Rotunda. This proposal expanded into one to redesign Oriental Bay's entire foreshore area spanning 800 metres of coastline.
The sand as reclamation and its retention
The existing sand is not a natural product of the Wellington harbour. The sea wall around Oriental Bay stops any normal degradation of the coastline by wind and water and the coastline is not shaped in a way to capture sand. This area of the harbour is extremely vulnerable to the batterings of northerly storms which tend to move the sand away from the Bay.
A barge measuring 100 metres in length and 25 metres in width was used to bring sand, from a hillside near Takaka, to its new home at Oriental Bay. By the end of May 2003, nearly two thirds of the new sand was deposited on the main Oriental Bay beach and the new beach east of the Band Rotunda, where it is being filtered and shaped by the waves and tide.
The new sand appeared to be “washing away" off the beaches, but this is all part of the process of building the beach. The new sand, because it came from a hillside hadn't been naturally sorted by sea or river water. It has been intentionally placed with a steep edge so the waves will wash over it and filter out finer, almost silt-like materials – leaving on the beach the heavier grains of sand. The sand will also change colour as the finer grains are filtered out, leaving a lighter coloured sand behind.
Silt from sand was also dumped further out in the bay and sand from the mouth of the Hutt River is being used to fill in a natural depression on the harbour bed near Freyberg Beach – when the sand was dumped into the depression, a plume of silt discolours the water, making it look like sand is being washed out to sea.
One very important aspect in relation to the sand was the relationship with Iwi as a stakeholder. Wellington City Council managed this issue right from the outset before any decisions were made and continued to be in constant contact and communication with local Iwi throughout planning. Both Iwi from the north and south were comfortable with the transporting of sand from Golden Bay to Wellington.
Golden Bay - Takaka.
Location
This location is made up of Separation Point Granite (Top layer) and Rameka Intrusive from Mid Devonian to Carboniferous which about 300 - 280 MYBP
Rameka Intrusive
Diorite, gabbro, norite and amphibolite are the main rock types in a large intrusive body at Rameka Creek on the Pikiruna Range. The intrusion is in the form of a folded silt or laccolith below the Mount Arthur Marble and has given rise to a variety of skarn rocks at marble contacts.
The sills show strong segregation of dark and light minerals suggestive of primary laying. Minor sepintines and gabbro's intrusive's into Ordovican rock elsewhere, and the Rameka Metavolcanics are probably related to the Rameka Intrusive. A Devonian age is likely.
Separation Point Granite
The Eastern highlands are formed of the Separation Point Granite, light coloured sodic to calc-alkali biotite granites, hornblende granites, syenite's and quartz diorite's.
For over 50 miles along the eastern highlands, granite concordantly underlies the Mount Arthur Marble. Contacts show inter-lamination of marble and granite and no contact alteration or chilling, thus indicating that marble and granite were isogradic at the time of metamorphism. A possible explanation is that the granite was formed in a place from granitised Ordovician sediments underlaying the marble.
The age of the Separation Point Granite is post Devonian and probably Carboniferous, as pebbles or similar granite appear in early Permian sediments of East Nelson.
Earthcache Tasks
There is four waypoint's that you must go to, to complete the task required to claim this Earthcache, you will also need to make and gather some extra equipment to be able to complete some of these task. All "TASKS" must be completed before you are able to claim this Earthcache.
Extra equipment
The following is a list of equipment that you will need to help you complete the following experiments. You will also be required to make you own hourglass to be able to complete all the required task.
Questions
More info can be found at the following Web page or you can google your own search. Link to making you own hourglass Plastic cupElectronic ScaleA Stopwatch or an accurate timekeeping device.film canistersCalipers or a very accurate ruler
All the results of each experiment and the answers for the following questions "MUST" be emailed to the owner before you can claim this Earthcache unless otherwise specified. Please "DO NOT" spoil it for other cachers that follow by posting spoilers.
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Experiments
Locations
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Q 1: What is the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal settings called?Q 2: What is the logarithmic scale for measuring sand called?Q 3: Named 4 types of minerals that are found in the composition of sand?Q 4: What is the geological term for Quartz sand called?Q 5: Organisms that thrive in sandy environments are called what?Q 6: Name 6 major industrial uses that sand will be required for?Q 7: At the following waypointyou will find 3 objects, a Chondrichthyes and two molluscs. What is their general name of these 3 sea creatures?Q 8:According to the Wellington City Council, how many tonnes of sand was moved?Q 9: Identify the two main formation which contribute to the sand in Golden BayQ10: What is the estimated MYPBQ11: What does MYPB stand for?Q11: What minerals forms this graniteQ12: At the following waypointplease describe in you own words standing facing the sea what the deference between the east and west of where you stand.At these two co-ordinates you can to take your samples of sand that you need for this experiments. You may need to take up to 100 grams. If the sand is wet you will need to dry it out.
Once you have your samples you will need to complete the following experiments: Once finished return the sand back to where you got it from.
1: Tip your sample into a plastic cup, then rotate your cup in a circular motion (creating a centrifuge effect) for 20 - 30 rotations. Tap cup gently on a flat surface once or twice to level out the sample.2: Describe the layers of grain sizes from top to bottom.3: Sieve your sample though a kitchen sieve to separate the coarse and fine grains, once done describe the sample and colours you observe.4: Weigh the coarse and fine grain separately and record the weights.5: Using the Wentworth scale classified your sample.6: Now make your hourglass with a 1.0 - 4.0 mm hole (Whatever is required for the size of the sand.)7: Tip your fine sand into the hourglass after taking the weight (Weight = X), tip the container with the sand on top and measure the time it takes for the sand to empty from the top to the bottom container (Time = Y) and calculate the flow speed amount of grams / second (Z). Email the answers for X and Y, and Z.8: Create a "Sand Mandella", be creative and post a picture of your Sand Mandella with your online log.
At S41 17.454 E174 47.752 (Optional) you will need to take a photo of the predominant man made object that is in the water and the surrounding background and the view beyond with you or your GPSr in the photo please place this with you online log.
At S40 48.587 E172 56.758 (Optional)you will need to take a photo of the escarpment that is across the water and the surrounding background and the view beyond with you or your GPSr in the photo please place this with you online log.Prioritization is a top concern for most Product Managers. It’s by far one of the most popular topics on PM blogs, Q&A sites and other online communities.
Although it’s not what we are hired to do, it’s something that we have to do to achieve our real goal: creating successful products that bring value to our customers and to the business.
The need to prioritize comes from a very simple fact: we just don’t have enough resources to work on everything we can come up with.
Thus, we need a process to determine the sets (and sequence) of things that should be done on the product to deliver the most value at each point in time, given our constraints.
If we break this statement down, a core group of questions then need to be answered:
How can we know what’s valuable? How valuable is it? Valuable to whom?
How can we define the set of things that should go together in a product release? How should we sequence those releases?
How can we get the necessary buy-in to follow through and get these things to the market?
How can we know if our assumptions are right? Are we on the right track? Are we really delivering value? Could we do any better?
What this guide is all about
If you search around, you’ll find countless articles with recommendations, techniques and approaches to this very hard problem. However, each method’s usefulness will depend on the specific product or project where it’s applied. Your prioritization needs may vary vastly.
Here’s what you will get from this guide covering 20 popular product prioritization techniques:
A map, in the form of a Periodic Table to help you make sense of what each technique has to offer;
to help you make sense of what each technique has to offer; An overview of each method, with graphics and links to more in-depth resources ;
, with graphics and ; 5 commonalities and takeaways from all these methods.
The Periodic Table of Product Prioritization Techniques
When I started working on this guide, I immediately felt the need to visually organize all of these techniques in a way that made sense and showed the context in which each of them is valuable.
With this mind, I found two dimensions that fulfilled these requirements and the result was the sort of Periodic Table you see below.
The horizontal axis tracks how oriented a method is towards getting input from the inside or the outside world. In other words, how much it depends on data and opinions from people external to the core product development team.
This dimension reflects the fact that sometimes you need involvement from the outside (e.g. end customers or stakeholders within the company) to help you prioritize. However, in other cases you might want to follow a simpler process with the development team or by yourself.
The vertical axis shows how quantitative is the method prescribed by each technique. That is, how much of it is based on expert (personal) opinions instead of some kind of metric, classification, voting or ranking.
Some people feel more comfortable around quantitative approaches and being supported by numbers (either for themselves or for people “higher-up”.) In other instances, you need to work on the qualitative side if what you’re trying to achieve is not quantifiable or if it doesn’t make sense in your context.
Every technique was placed in the table taking into consideration what I believe to be their relative positions along these two dimensions. Individual locations might be debatable, but I think this is a good starting point to navigate them.
The next section presents an overview of each technique, including pointers to other relevant and in-depth resources.
This is an extensive read, so if you don’t have the time right now, get it as a PDF eBook sent to your email.
You will also get the Kano package and more Product Management resources.
An Overview of Product Prioritization Techniques
External & Quantitative Techniques
The Kano Model
Noriaki Kano, a Japanese researcher and consultant, published a paper in 1984 with a set of ideas and techniques that help us determine our customers’ (and prospects’) satisfaction with product features. These ideas are commonly called the Kano Model and are based upon the following premises:
Customers’ Satisfaction with our product’s features depends on the level of Functionality that is provided (how much or how well they’re implemented);
with our product’s features depends on the that is provided (how much or how well they’re implemented); Features can be classified into four categories ;
; You can determine how customers feel about a feature through a questionnaire.
Satisfaction vs. Functionality
Kano proposes two dimensions to represent how customers feel about our products:|
– one that goes from total satisfaction (also called Delight and Excitement) to total dissatisfaction (or Frustration);
– and another called Investment, Sophistication or Implementation, which represents how much of a given feature the customer gets, how well we’ve implemented it, or how much we’ve invested in its development. The Four Categories of Features
Features can fall into four categories, depending on how customers react to the provided level of Functionality. Performance
Some product features behave as what we might intuitively think that Satisfaction works: the more we provide, the more satisfied our customers become.
Some product features behave as what we might intuitively think that Satisfaction works: the more we provide, the more satisfied our customers become. Must-be
Other product features are simply expected by customers. If the product doesn’t have them, it will be considered to be incomplete or just plain bad. This type of features is usually called Must-be or Basic Expectations.
Other product features are simply by customers. If the product doesn’t have them, it will be considered to be incomplete or just plain bad. This type of features is usually called Must-be or Basic Expectations. Attractive
There are unexpected features which, when presented, cause a positive reaction. These are usually called Attractive, Exciters or Delighters.
There are unexpected features which, when presented, cause a positive reaction. These are usually called Attractive, Exciters or Delighters. Indifferent
Naturally, there are also features towards which we feel indifferent. Those which their presence (or absence) doesn’t make a real difference in our reaction towards the product. Determining how customers feel through a questionnaire
In order to uncover our customer’s perceptions towards the product’s attributes, we need to use the Kano questionnaire. It consists of a pair of questions for each feature we want to evaluate: One asks our customers how they feel if they have the feature ;
; The other asks how they feel if they did not have the feature. The first and second questions are respectively called the functional and dysfunctional forms. To each “how do you feel if you had / did not have this feature”, the possible answers are: I like it
I |
article. Also, "being published" means just that - you've told other people about something you did, and a few people agreed with you that it was neato keen. It's not the end all be all.)
Oh, right, and Vizidi's awesome article? "New Methodologies for Osteometric Analysis in Human Remains." (Because what we need is another article to tell us how to measure the length of a bone?) His follow-up? The hilariously non-specific, "Advances in Forensic Odontology."
Dialogue and Plot Comments
"Krishna has been depicted as having blue skin, but he died in 3012 BCE, so decomposition would be a little more advanced." - Brennan's attempt at a joke.
Brennan's attempt at a joke. "See what else you missed in your quest for notoriety." - Brennan, putting Vizidi in his place. (I laughed at this, but only because I could totally imagine my advisor saying it to me...)
"Tanga. That's a sea port in northern Tanzania." - Brennan, on lingerie. (It worries me that this is exactly the same thing I thought when tanga became popular as a style of underwear.)
What has Brennan been wearing that she's just now realizing she doesn't have the same body she did before she got pregnant? At least Angela finally told her to just buy some damn clothes and quit whining already.
The writers are clearly checking off some sort of post-partum list, never to return to the issues again. Episode 1 post-baby - nursing. Check, dealt with that. Episode 2 post-baby - body dysmorphism. Check, dealt with that. I know, I know, it's a procedural. But I had hoped for more, especially since Emily Deschanel is clearly still post-partum in these episodes. It's nice to see an actress with a real post-baby body and not a cover-of-People-in-a-swimsuit-post-baby-crash-diet body.
Why does Brennan still call the father of her child and domestic partner by his last name? Please make the move to first names, people.
And finally... screw you, Toyota. I don't want to buy one of your randomly accelerating cars.
Ratings
- D. I hate episodes when the facial reconstruction that we've never seen gets a "hit" in a magical database and IDs the victim. Makes for boring television.- D. Really, the sacrum told you age, sex, and stature, Brennan? Why not race? Hair color? Favorite death metal band? I was most interested in Vizidi's program to remove scavenging marks, but it didn't help find cause of death. And I'm not convinced that a teeny nick to the hyoid could be seen, let alone that a cause of death could hang on it.- D-. There was no drama in this episode. Like, really, none. Did you care about the victim at all? About the killer? About Sweets' car? Booth's cliched confusion about lingerie? Brennan's trumped-up body issues? I didn't think so.What a fun episode to hate on. Next week: fishing puns!Envision a new Progressive supermajority party rising, already enormous, flying from the ashes of a shriveled old Democratic Party. Struggling to rise, it could form overnight if Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent, would quit working against the rising young generations who won him power.
Those with Progressive views, 66% of registered U.S. voters, are against endless war, corporate subsidy and corruption, are protective of the environment, and champion safety nets, science and social justice. If unified they could walk away with every election. Many are therefore working to build a new major party. That is not a minority view: 60% of U.S. voters overall, 78% of Independents, want a new party.
Sanders himself has said, “The overwhelming majority of the American people know that we have got to stand together, that we're going to grow together, that we're going to survive together, and that if we start splintering, we're not going to succeed.”
Yet four times in the last year, the self-organizing new Progressive party has had at clear shot at takeoff, only to be four times blocked by Bernie.
Sanders is instead working to “unify” the deeply-divided, deeply corrupt Democratic party --- to which he himself does not belong and which is at best 28% of the registered voters — and is urging supporters to register Democratic, thus dividing Progressives, 66% of U.S. voters. He meanwhile ducks public debate on the subject, discussing it only with TV anchors who don’t grill him.
Somebody should. Perfidy stinks. Sanders owes these people.
Where The Real Power Is
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016 because young Democratic Progressives drafted him to do it. Determined to clean up U.S. politics, get us out of the wars, restore the safety nets, fight climate change, they had been unable to find anyone at the federal level of the Democratic or Republican parties who wasn’t taking global corporate money!
Bernie, an Independent (which is a nonpartisan stance not a party), had won local and federal office without party backing or corporate bucks for 42 years. Compelling, knowledgeable, passionate, but nationally unknown, Bernie was swept into the limelight and toward victory by 18-50-year-olds, the Gen-X/Millennials, intent on cultural and political change, on withdrawing from empire and rebuilding social democracy. Their mean age was 37.
Though an Independent, Bernie ran as a Democrat because the Democratic and Republican parties, two private political clubs, had shut off access to the U.S. presidency except through them. The Democrats welcomed Bernie as a candidate because as the DNC emails show, he provided an illusion of competition for their already chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton. The Democratic National Committee [DNC] figured that the man with the circlet of white hair would be easy for her to beat. In fact, thanks to the young Progressives, Bernie from the first month could land in a town one night and the next day have a crowd of 10,000-30,000, with a big chunk ready to work. When Clinton/DNC engineered an eight-month-long media blackout on Sanders news, young Progressives carved trustworthy news channels online. Clinton had mountains of corporate money. Millions of Progressives giving an average of $27 apiece outraised her three months in a row.
Neither Sanders nor his supporters knew that the Democratic primaries, which engage millions of citizens in a mummery at public expense, are fraudulent, their outcome predetermined behind closed doors. As the DNC’s attorney admits, the party views this as its right.
What the Democratic leadership in its turn had not realized was that younger people have the mathematical and technical ability to understand not only that they are being cheated but how. Far from being disheartened, they were furious. The blatantly rigged Democratic primaries between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton ended in June 2017, with the November election still four months away. Polls meanwhile showed that Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump were neck and neck, with most U.S. voters despising them both.
Independent voters, not allowed by the private Democratic Party to vote in the tax-funded primaries of most states, were 40% of the electorate, climbing swiftly toward half. Overwhelmingly pro-Sanders, these Independents would be voting in the November 2016 general election, could sweep it....
The First Missed Opportunity with the Clinton Time Bomb Ticking
Ready to charge all the way to victory with Bernie on their shoulders, Gen-X/Millennials immediately after the rigged 2016 primaries pressed Bernie, an Independent, to run as an Independent, to give U.S. voters a real choice. Since Sanders had a 60% approval rating and his supporters were already organized nationwide, that would have kickstarted a new party right then.
Sanders refused.
Instead the old Independent warhorse gave his loyalty to the Democratic Party that had just cheated him and them. As the runner-up, Sanders was by tradition owed a night of the Democratic Convention in July, to have his name placed in nomination. He explained to his supporters that instead of running as an Independent, he was going to contest the outcome of the Democratic primaries on the floor of the Convention.
He didn’t. That night of the Convention in Philadelphia in July, Nina Turner, his key surrogate, was poised to nominate Sanders when the DNC forbade her to take the stage. Tulsi Gabbard an ex-military Hawaiian Congresswoman who had left the DNC in protest against its election fraud and had endorsed Bernie, was handed the job of nominating him, a chance to speak before billions — without preparation. Sanders’ delegates, many of them young and new to the process, had traveled to the Convention at their own expense. He gathered them together not to thank them or to organize the promised floor fight but to order them not to oppose Clinton. His delegates were treated dishonestly and brutally by Clinton forces, who hounded them out of the Convention.
Sanders did not stand up for any of them and did not contest the primaries.
Theories abounded. Had Bernie’s wife Jane been threatened? Had Bernie been beaten up? Had Bernie been cloned? Had Bernie who could not be bought off with money been bought off instead with promises of power? The Neoliberal Democrats had made Sanders, still registered as an Independent, the Democratic Party’s head of outreach, of which more later....
The Second Missed Opportunity, This Time With The Trump Clock Ticking
During that July Convention, thousands more Progressives who were Sanders’ supporters were outside the Convention Hall, marching in the scorching heat and violent thunderstorms of mid-summer Philadelphia. Wet and bedraggled, surrounded by Darth Vader cops with helicopters overhead, people from every aspect of the Progressive movement were in those Philly streets.
Gen-X/Millennials vastly outnumber the Boomers, and are adept at networking. By the time that the three-day Convention was over, the seeds of a supermajority party were sprouting. Sanders had a 60% approval rating and the November election was still three months away. Supporters again pressed Sanders for an independent run.
Bernie refused a second time.
Refusing however was not all that Bernie did that second time.
He stumped for Hillary Clinton, a pro-TransPacific Partnrship [TPP], pro-fracking, pro-war, pro-corporate subsidy, corporately-funded, anti-universal healthcare Neoliberal, everything that Sanders had stood against all his working life.
The story was that Bernie had to back her, that otherwise Trump would win. Yet polls showed that Hillary probably could not beat Trump in swing states, that she would therefore lose in the Electoral College — as in fact she did. Polls also showed to the last minute in November 2016 that Sanders himself would have swept the election against Trump including the swing states that Hillary lost, taking the Electoral College. One poll on the last day before the November election, commissioned by Rep. Alan Grayson [FL-D], suggested that the Sanders’’ win would have been with 56% of the vote, a landslide.
Many under 50 therefore felt that they had been cheated by the Democratic Party — and that they had invested a year of time, money and round the clock effort in Sanders who had just betrayed them three times. They began pulling away from both Sanders and the Democratic Party.
The effect was stark.
With Progressives, Sanders had been able to rely on seeing 10,000-30,000 people at each rally. Making speeches for Clinton, Sanders could not fill what Darryl Thomas describes as ”a bathroom at Burger King.”
Third Major Chance With Clock Ticking
The Neoliberal Clinton block has a chokehold on power within the Democratic Party and fights in vicious and grade-school ways, rigging leadership elections and kneecapping any Democratic candidates who are Progressives. When Nina Turner took over the helm at Sanders’ group within the Democratic Party, Our Revolution, and tried to present a suggested Progressive platform to the DNC, the staff under Tom Perez barricaded themselves in the DNC office!
Judging from Sanders’ approval ratings in the Democratic Party, Progressives are 80% of it. Yet they have no formal power within it. Sanders, as the new Democratic Party director of outreach, remains adored, activating Progressives wherever he goes, helping young Progressives take over some local and state levels of the party, below the corrupt leadership. He insists that he can restore the Democratic Party to its former workers-party glory. Yet can even he resist what it’s become?
Cozying up to the Democratic Party’s ruling Neolibs, Sanders began adopting Neolib policies that he had campaigned against, like “regime change” (imperial overthrow of other countries’ governments), with his call for regime change in Syria scarring his bipartisan reputation for rockhard integrity. Was he also abandoning allies when they needed him? When Congresswoman, ex-military Tulsi Gabbard, who had left the DNC in protest against fraud, and had then endorsed and later nominated Bernie, stood up against the Syrian invasion, the Democratic Party turned on her. Far from defending his much tested supporter, Bernie turned his back.
The corrosive effect of Dem-Rep politics on even the initially most honorable people is evident to all who watch. Many Democratic Progressives in late 2016 therefore became intent on linking up with Independent Progressives, Green Progressives, etc. and starting a new supermajority party that would refuse corporate money, thus breaking the bonds of corporate control of our government.
If even half the remaining Progressives leave the Democratic Party, it will be down to 17%. So when Sanders re-registered as an Independent, Progressives were ecstatic, expecting that he was about to lead the ongoing exodus from the Democratic Party into a new clean one. Sanders instead actively blocked that from happening. Although Sanders is himself is registered Independent, he told his followers to register or stay registered Democratic....
The Once-in-a-century Chance
Granted, new major parties are rare. Usually, a small party takes over the lumbering machinery of one of the old major parties, as Sanders is obviously attempting to do in the Democratic Party.
There is however a realistic alternative, because these are rare times. Sanders is in a once-in-a-century position to be a key force in forming a new major party. Progressives are on their feet, effective. His own approval numbers are off the charts, with for example 73% approval among African Americans whom the media pretend he “cannot reach”. Nick Brana, one of those Sanders staff members who left in protest against the bucks from billionaires idea, sees the current situation as analogous to immediately before the Civil War when the old Whig Party refused to move on the question of slavery. Under the pressure of abolitionists headed by a charismatic speaker, Abraham Lincoln, the Whig party split, with the largest chunk flying off as the new Republican Party., born big.
If Sanders were no longer holding Progressives in the Democratic Party, but helping to found a clean new Progressive party, Progressives in their overwhelming numbers could stand together. A new party could be up and running by the end of 2017, ready for the Congressional elections in 2018, the presidential election in 2020. So Sanders got yet another chance to come through for t and 90% of voters under 40 who demand a new clean party.
Infuriating many other Progressives who had by then had it with Sanders, in March 2017 Braña with six Sanders staff members and delegates and a supervolunteer, founded Draft Bernie for a People’s Party, determined to shift Sanders’ weight on the political seesaw. Braña pulled key online talk show hosts on board, and Lee Camp, Jimmy Dore, Tim Black and Steve Grumbine also began stumping to Draft Bernie. Six months later, the group had state organizers in 43 states and all big metro areas, staying in touch through social media “slacks” and weekly organizing conference phone calls.
Meanwhile, following a Progressive Independent Party [PIP] Progressive summit on the West Coast, Draft Bernie linked with PIP and Socialist Alternative [SA] for a Convergence on the East Coast, the three issuing a call to all Progressives to meet in DC on September 8-10, with streaming video available in sister parties and through Facebook. The Justice Party got on board both times. Activists from throughout the Progressive movement, from a founder of Occupy Wall Street to the 2016 Green Party presidential nominee, spoke at the Convergence.
Dr. Cornel West, the first prominent African American to support Sanders back when Sanders had desperately needed that support has insisted, “We must admit the Democratic Party has failed us and move on….”
Senator Sanders was asked to debate that point in a town hall meeting with Dr. West at the Convergence. People were willing to listen, open to inside/outside coordination strategies.
Instead Sanders stiff-armed those not obediently following him into the Democratic Party. There was no note of apology or explanation in response to a personal invitation from Braña. Also not acknowledging an invitation signed by 50,000 of his supporters, with, according to his schedulers, no schedule conflicts, Sanders simply didn’t show up to debate. So, sure. Progressives will put their shoulders to the wheel on Medicare for All. Twenty-four groups are actively working on it. They know that it will never pass a solidly Republican House, but it’s changing the conversation, creating a litmus test for 2018 candidates. Sanders’ leadership on the issue is profoundly appreciated.
However, that power behind Sanders’ Medicare bill is more a vivid demonstration that the young in this country can move mountains than a promise that the prodigiously corrupt Democratic Party is the mountain that they intend to move.
Leaving the Old, Making Way For the New
Since the rigged 2016 primaries, Progressives have in fact poured out of the Democratic Party by the millions. Fourteen million people flooded out just in the three months between the November 2016 elections and February, 2017. The Democratic Party as of September 2017 is still hemorrhaging not only members but potential voters; 67% of the nation says that the party is out of touch with the people. Those numbers are worse than for Republicans and Trump. Approval ratings have tanked.
As the DNC/Clinton/Podesta emails show, the DNC was instrumental not only in the election rigging, but also in money laundering, sluicing money from state Democratic parties and Sanders supporters to Clinton. So the DNC is still asking for money but Progressives are no longer giving it. Donations to the Democratic National Committee [DNC] have long since dried up.
Both the Democrats and Sanders are steadily losing Progressives, their base.
Granted, replacing the Democratic Party with a coalition Progressive party will be no walk in the park. After 40 years without representation, the vast Progressive supermajority has devolved into small groups, each defending some aspect of the community from the ravages of global corporate government — arguing for a living wage, against mass incarceration, for water protection, infrastructure repair, meals at school or healthcare for all. Some won’t cooperate unless Property is denounced in the first sentence. With or without Bernie, though, they’re coming together, a new consensus is welling up, a new party without global corporate “donors” is forming....Collingwood are playing without confidence or effective system or structure. If the structure is wrong or been worked out within three games, then it is a coaching issue. If it is the right structure but played the wrong way, then players and coaches share blame. Collingwood players leave the field after their loss to St Kilda on Saturday. Credit:Getty Images Damningly, St Kilda cautioned each other after the win not to be overly excited by victory for the quality of the opposition was so poor. They spent the game waiting for Collingwood to come at them to harass and pressure them but at every turn Collingwood instead folded back and ushered them forward. In years past there have been explanations for form lapses but in years past the explanations only needed telling in the second half of the season. The first half went swimmingly before the Magpies drowned. Buckley has just been reappointed for next year and is in no danger of his employment being challenged but this start to the season has turned focus now to him as much as the highly paid players who are underperforming.
The statistical evidence reinforces what the eye has seen: the Magpies give the opposition too much space, their ball movement is stagnant and they do not mark the ball near their goal. The combination of factors has meant their ball movement is treacle slow with the Magpies playing on far less than any of their opponents. It is not helped by the fact their ball use is atrocious, with their total disposal efficiency ranked the second worst in the league compared to their opposition. Injuries and suspensions to Dane Swan, Travis Varcoe, Steele Sidebottom and Jamie Elliott have doubtless hurt, but Collingwood's absences have been no worse than other clubs. In the midfield Jack Crisp was a revelation last year but terrible this year, Taylor Adams out of form. Levi Greenwood has kicked balloons up in the air and hit the target by foot just 43 per cent of the time. Even recruit Adam Treloar, a good player in the first two games, is only kicking the ball at 46 percent. They have too few elite ball users behind the ball. Ben Sinclair has been given ample time but remains a poor kick who would be playing at few other teams. Brayden Maynard is young and a good kick but is lost playing a zone. Ben Reid's return last week has helped restore some class and Scott Pendlebury is still needed there … and everywhere else.
Meantime, they are allowing the opposition a ludicrous amount of time and space for uncontested possessions. This makes them easy to score against, as reflected in the fact the opposition score more than half the time they take the ball forward which ranks them among the league's worst. Buckley correctly asserted on Saturday his side was horrible at trapping the ball in the forward zone. This might be because of the haphazard and slow way they moved it forward and the fact his forwards seemed incapable of taking a mark inside 50. Darcy Moore is in his second year and looked to be sore. Travis Cloke was not as bad on Saturday as he has been, which is a long way from saying he was good. He continues to have no influence on games, which is inexcusable for a player in the top band of earners in the competition. He was rightly used as second ruck to protect Moore and to get him into the game. Putting that aside, Buckley's fundamental point was right, the players in the forward 50 were incapable of slowing players let alone sticking tackles and that meant the ball bounced down the field. But it was only one of the problems. They continue to have problems in the ruck. Jarrod Witts was poor then injured in round one and Brodie Grundy – despite booting the winning goal against Richmond – has had little influence around the ground. He has taken five marks in two games this year and none of them were contested. Last year he averaged one contested mark every two games and only 3.5 marks a game. While he is good at ground level, big men are there to be big men and he does not take enough marks.
At the bounce his tap work has been mid-table for the league but the players at his feet are not getting it and clearing it. He takes some responsibility for that. They take more. When Collingwood looked good in the pre-season they moved the ball with pace, purpose and direction. They looked drilled and sharp, but that has not been seen since football that matters has been played. That suggests that either, once the real football began and opposition teams seriously worried themselves with Collingwood, the system collapsed, or once the real football began, the players stopped playing the game they were trained to play. Either reason is unsatisfactory. After Saturday's game Buckley conceded that players alone were not at fault. "Parts of our method are falling over and our players are not able to execute it often enough at the moment and that is something we will need to look at as a coaching staff and as a playing group," he said.Arsène Wenger has suggested that Arsenal's injury problems might be related to his players taking legal supplements to enhance aspects of their lifestyle and performance without the knowledge of the club.
The manager revealed last month that he had ordered an investigation into the club's training methods and medical procedures in an effort to establish whether they could have avoided their latest injury crisis. The absence of the attacking midfielders Aaron Ramsey, Theo Walcott, Mesut Özil and Jack Wilshere has hit them hard while the defender Laurent Koscielny has also been out with a muscle strain.
Arsenal's Premier League title challenge appears to have been overtaken by the more familiar battle to finish in the top-four and trip to fifth-placed Everton has assumed tremendous importance. The good news for Arsenal is that Ramsey will return to the squad after more than three months out with thigh trouble, although he will feature as a substitute at best while the full-back Nacho Monreal is also back in contention after a foot injury.
Wenger said that the internal review had yet to yield any hard and fast conclusions but he advanced a personal theory. "Some of them [muscle injuries] are down to the medication that the players take that you don't even know about. Then you realise afterwards that they took this medication but that's not prudent."
He added that certain medication could affect the liver and then it "doesn't work as well... the toxins don't go as quickly out of the body as they should and they [the players] get tired". Injuries are sometimes the result of lower levels of stamina; if a player is, to borrow a phrase from Wenger "in the red".
He was asked to give examples of the kind of medication he was referring to. "If you lose your hair and you've taken something to make your hair grow, it might not be good, especially for the rest of your body," he said. "Medication always pushes a part of your body and is sometimes detrimental to other parts of your body.
"At the moment, we have not come to any conclusion … every case can be very different and you need to analyse very deeply why things happen. I'm surrounded by people who want to enhance their performances because they have another problem in their life and it's not always necessarily a good thing to do."
Arsenal's doctors do not believe that there is a link between supplements, tablets or medication and injuries while no one in the squad is on long-term medication. The doctors strive to provide and oversee the use of any supplements that may be required.
Ramsey was in the red before he played at West Ham United on Boxing Day, the league fixture in which he suffered his thigh injury but Wenger admitted that because the player was in the form of his life, he had struggled to give him a rest. "When Ramsey got his injury we saw he was tired at West Ham, so maybe sometimes when the player is very important as well, you are tempted to play him even when he is tired," he said.
Ramsey's performances over the first-half of the season had advertised him as a potential player of the year and although that chance has gone, there remains plenty for him and the team to play for, not least the FA Cup, in which they face Wigan Athletic in the semi-finals next Saturday. "The number of goals Ramsey has scored is tremendous for a midfielder," Wenger said. "He turns up in the box. He is a bit Lampard-ish. There is a lot more to come from him."US President Donald Trump looks certain to visit Wrocław next month according to a White House press release that was published yesterday.
Yesterday's press release reads as follows:
"President Donald J. Trump accepted the invitation of the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, to visit Poland in advance of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. The visit will reaffirm America’s steadfast commitment to one of our closest European allies and emphasize the Administration’s priority of strengthening NATO’s collective defense. The leaders will discuss a range of bilateral and regional issues, deepening an alliance based on shared values and common interests. While in Poland, President Trump will deliver a major speech, and he will attend the Three Seas Initiative Summit to demonstrate our strong ties to Central Europe."
As you will have seen, there is no mention of any Polish city in the press release. However, the "Three Seas Initiative Summit" is taking place at Wrocław's Hala Stulecia on the 6th and 7th of July. Therefore if Donald Trump is to take part, he will almost certainly have to come here. It is thought that the US President will make a key speech on the opening day of the summit.
The Three Seas Initiative traditionally involves the participation of the 12 leaders of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe; Poland, Czechia, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary.
According to Michał Kobosko, the director of Wrocław Global Forum, the possibility of Donald Trump visiting Wrocław was increased by the fact that this year's G20 meeting is being held in Hamburg just two days after the Three Seas Initiative.
Back in January Wrocław President Rafal Dutkiewicz had the following to say about the possibility of a Donald Trump visit: "Donald Trump, whether we like it or not, won the election in the United States. The visit, if it were to happen, would always be a great event."Many news outlets are reporting that former-senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut is rather likely to be Donald Trump’s choice to be the new FBI director. With all due respect to Lieberman, who is a fine man and one of my favorite public servants of the past 30 years, this is a bad idea.
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It is bad for numerous reasons. First, at exactly a moment when the political atmosphere is toxic and when the prior director was widely criticized for appearing to tip the political scales in the midst of a national election, this is precisely not the time to hire for the very first time an FBI director whose background is largely elective/political. For all of Lieberman’s vaunted bipartisanship, he still built a career as a politician and has a habit of thinking like one. This is not good.
Second, the nature of the job itself is not that of a mere CEO type in the way that some of the lesser cabinet posts are. This is a job for a person not just broadly familiar with, but extremely well versed in, the tools of law-enforcement investigations, the technical interplay of various federal agencies, and the granular details of patient inquiry. Lieberman, despite his long government résumé, has not a single day of federal law-enforcement experience. If he were named director, he would be the first person ever to hold that post without prior Justice Department experience. He just does not have the requisite base of knowledge that the Bureau’s chief should have.
Third, Lieberman is, sorry to say, too old. He may be fit and energetic and sharp as a tack, but he’s 75. The directorship is, at least nominally, a ten-year term. A 75-year-old, especially one with a need for on-the-job-training, is not a proper choice for the position.
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Fourth, Lieberman clearly is being considered as an answer for immediate crisis of sorts, with thoughts of who can inspire widespread political acceptance for the current circumstances — but what is needed is for somebody to be chosen without regard to the Russia-related investigation or for today’s headlines, but instead chosen for aptitude with the broad range of FBI responsibilities over the long haul. Appointment of Lieberman may achieve short-term political reassurance, but only at the expense of a more explicitly qualified leader intent on institutional-operational competence, stability, and progress.
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As I wrote last week, the FBI needs not a face-man but a professional technician: “a low-key, high-energy, uber-competent, well-experienced director... [with] ample experience as a federal prosecutor, thorough understanding of the workings of both the FBI and the Justice Department as a whole, considerable knowledge of counterterrorism issues, and, preferably, a grasp of federal inter-agency dynamics.”
Current senators who served with Lieberman will be loathe to push back hard against his appointment, because he was deservedly well liked and widely respected in that body. But all senators should nonetheless push back, and hard, before Trump makes the pick. Lieberman is a good man for the wrong job at the wrong time. He absolutely should not be director of the FBI.At the same time, scientists who have worked to survey and counteract the damage from spills say the picture in the gulf is far from hopeless.
“Thoughts that this is going to kill the Gulf of Mexico are just wild overreactions,” said Jeffrey W. Short, a scientist who led some of the most important research after the Exxon Valdez spill and now works for an environmental advocacy group called Oceana. “It’s going to go away, the oil is. It’s not going to last forever.”
But how long will it last?
Only 20 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that oil spills did almost all their damage in the first weeks, as fresh oil loaded with toxic substances hit wildlife and marsh grasses, washed onto beaches and killed fish and turtles in the deep sea.
But disasters like the Valdez in 1989, the Ixtoc 1 in Mexico in 1979, the Amoco Cadiz in France in 1978 and two Cape Cod spills, including the Bouchard 65 barge in 1974 — all studied over decades with the improved techniques of modern chemistry and biology — have allowed scientists to paint a more complex portrait of what happens after a spill.
It is still clear that the bulk of the damage happens quickly, and that nature then begins to recuperate. After a few years, a casual observer visiting a hard-hit location might see nothing amiss. Birds and fish are likely to have rebounded, and the oil will seem to be gone.
But often, as Dr. Short and his team found in Alaska, some of it has merely gone underground, hiding in pockets where it can still do low-level damage to wildlife over many years. And the human response to a spill can mitigate — or intensify — its long-term effects. Oddly enough, some of the worst damage to occur from spills in recent decades has come from people trying too hard to clean them up.
It is hard for scientists to offer predictions about the present spill, for two reasons.
The ecology of the Gulf of Mexico is specially adapted to break down oil, more so than any other body of water in the world — though how rapidly and completely it can break down an amount this size is essentially unknown.
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And because this spill is emerging a mile under the surface and many of the toxic components of the oil are dissolving into deep water and spreading far and wide, scientists simply do not know what the effects in the deep ocean are likely to be.
Still, many aspects of the spill resemble spills past, especially at the shoreline, and that gives researchers some confidence in predicting how events will unfold.
Remarkable Persistence
In 1969, a barge hit the rocks off the coast of West Falmouth, Mass., spilling 189,000 gallons of fuel oil into Buzzards Bay. Today, the fiddler crabs at nearby Wild Harbor still act drunk, moving erratically and reacting slowly to predators.
The odd behavior is consistent with a growing body of research showing how oil spills of many types have remarkably persistent effects, often at levels low enough to escape routine notice.
Jennifer Culbertson was a graduate student at Boston University in 2005 when she made plaster casts of crab burrows. She discovered that instead of drilling straight down, like normal crabs, the ones at Wild Harbor were going only a few inches deep and then turning sideways, repelled by an oily layer still lingering below the surface.
Other researchers established that the crabs were suffering from a kind of narcosis induced by hydrocarbon poisoning. Their troubles had serious implications for the marsh.
“Fiddler crabs normally play a crucial role in tilling the salt marsh, which helps provide oxygen to the roots of salt marsh grasses,” Dr. Culbertson said about her study.
In Alaska, the Exxon Valdez spill dumped nearly 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound, and it spread down the Alaska coast, ultimately oiling 1,200 miles of shoreline. By the late 1990s, the oil seemed to be largely gone, but liver tests on ducks and sea otters showed that they were still being exposed to hydrocarbons, chemical compounds contained in crude.
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Dr. Short, then working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, mounted a series of excavations to figure out what had happened, with his team ultimately digging thousands of holes in Alaska’s beaches. Oil was found in about 8 percent of them, usually in places with too little oxygen for microbes to break it down.
Exactly how much damage continues from the oil is a matter of dispute, with Exxon commissioning its own studies that challenge the government’s findings on the extent of the impact. But it is clear that otters dig for food in areas containing oil, and that they, like nearly a dozen other species of animals, have still not entirely recovered from the 1989 spill.
At the rate the oil is breaking down, Dr. Short estimates that some of it could still be there a century from now.
Increasing the Stress
Perhaps the greatest single hazard from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the gulf is the long-term erosion of delicate coastal wetlands it could cause. At another spill site on the Massachusetts coast, not far from the West Falmouth spill, the legacy of oil contamination is evident in the difference between two marshes on either side of a pebbly shoreline road.
On one side, where the marshes were suffused in 1974 when the grounded Bouchard 65 barge dumped 11,000 to 37,000 gallons of fuel oil into the sea, the grasses are stunted and sparse. They cling tentatively to the edge of the sandy beach. But the grasses on the other side, untouched by oil, rise tall and thick.
Louisiana ’s coastline contains some of the most productive marshes in the world, delivering an abundance of shrimp and oysters and providing critical habitat and breeding ground for birds and fish.
But even before the spill, the land was under enormous environmental stress, largely due to human activity. Dams on the Mississippi River and its tributaries have slowed the flow of sediment to the marshes, and global warming has caused sea level to rise.
The Louisiana marshes are eroding at an extraordinary rate — a football field’s worth sinks into the Gulf of Mexico every 38 minutes, according to the Louisiana Office of Coastal Management — and the worry now is that the oil spill will accelerate that erosion.
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The Bouchard shows how that could happen. When the barge ran aground, thousands |
reduced to the survival of certain economic structures which the Revolution was unable to destroy with its first decrees: for example, the small-scale production (primarily peasant production in Russia) which so preoccupied Lenin? Or does it refer as much to other structures, political. ideological structures etc- customs, habits, even ‘traditions’ such as the ‘national tradition’ with its specific traits? The term ‘survival’ is constantly invoked, but it is still virtually uninvestigated, not in its name (it has one!), but in its concept. The concept it deserves (and has fairly won) must be more than a vague Hegelianism such as ‘supersession’ – the maintenance-of-what-has-been-negated-in-its-very-negation (that is, the negation of the negation). If we return to Hegel for a second we see that the survival of the past as the ‘superseded’ (aufgehoben) is simply reduced to the modality of a memory, which, furthermore, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation. Just as at the dawn of Human History the first stammerings of the Oriental Spirit – joyous captive of the giants of the sky, the sea and the desert, and then of its own stone bestiary – already betrayed the unconscious presage of the future achievements of the Absolute Spirit, so in each instant of Time the past survives in the form of a memory of what it has been; that is, as the whispered promise of its present. That is why the past is never opaque on an obstacle. It must always be digestible as it has been pre-digested. Rome lived happily in a world impregnated by Greece: Greece ‘superseded’ survived as objective memories: its reproduced temples, its assimilated religion, its rethought philosophy. Without knowing it, as at last it died to bring forth its Roman future, it was already Rome, so it never shackled Rome in Rome. That is why the present can feed on the shades of its past, or even project them before it, just as the great effigies of Roman Virtue opened up the road to Revolution and Terror for the Jacobins. Its past is never anything more than itself and only recalls to it that law of interiority which is the destiny of the whole Future of Humanity.
I think this is enough to show that, though the word is still meaningful (in fact, not rigorously meaningful), Marx’s conception of ‘supersession’ has nothing to do with this dialectic of historical comfort; his past was no shade, not even an ‘objective’ shade – it is a terribly positive and active structured reality, just as cold, hunger and the night are for his poor worker. How, then, are we to think these survivals? Surely, with a number of realities, which are precisely realities for Marx, whether superstructures, ideologies ‘national traditions’ or the customs and ‘spirit’ of a people, etc? Surely, with the overdetermination of any contradiction and of any constitutive element of a society, which means: (1) that a revolution in the structure does not ipso facto modify the existing superstructures and particularly the ideologies at one blow (as it would if the economic was the sole determinant factor), for they have sufficient of their own consistency to survive beyond their immediate life context, even to recreate, to ‘secrete’ substitute conditions of existence temporarily; (2) that the new society produced by the Revolution may itself ensure the survival, that is, the reactivation of older elements through both the forms of its new superstructures and specific (national and international) ‘circumstances’. Such a reactivation would be totally inconceivable for a dialectic deprived of overdetermination. I shall not evade the most burning issue: it seems to me that either the whole logic of ‘supersession’ must be rejected, or we must give up any attempt to explain how the proud and generous Russian people bore Stalin’s crimes and repression with such resignation; how the Bolshevik Party could tolerate them; not to speak of the final question – how a Communist leader could have ordered them. But there is obviously much theoretical work needed here as well. By this I mean more than the historical work which has priority – precisely because of this priority, priority is given to one essential of any Marxist historical study: rigour; a rigorous conception of Marxist concepts, their implications and their development; a rigorous conception and investigation of what appertains to them in particular, that is, what distinguishes them once and for all from their phantoms.
One phantom is more especially crucial than any other today: the shade of Hegel. To drive this phantom back into the night we need a little more light on Marx, or what is the same thing, a little more Marxist light on Hegel himself. We can then escape from the ambiguities and confusions of the ‘inversion’.
June-July, 1962
Further reading: On Contradiction, Mao Zedong | Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks | Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Stalin | German Ideology, Marx & Engels | Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels | Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General, Marx 1844 | Jean-Paul Sartre | Concepts of Capital, Geoff PillingPeter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality is not exactly pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear appeals on several marriage equality cases, warning in a statement today that as a result of the court’s non-decision “we live not in freedom but under tyranny.”
“Now is the time for civil disobedience on a massive scale: we hope that statesmen and citizens alike -— in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Indiana, Utah and Virginia — indeed, any state where the people’s will has been robbed by elitist judges — will reassert their state sovereignty against escalating judicial supremacy,” LaBarbera writes. “God is not mocked: the Scriptures are clear that homosexual practice is an offense against both God and the very bodies of those who practice it (as is all sexual immorality).”
We are witnessing a “gradual Roe v. Wade” by which unelected judges impose homosexual ‘marriage’ on the nation. Hubris rules the day as millions of Americans’ votes defending actual marriage (one man, one woman) are negated by one court ruling after another. Each decision bastardizes America’s noble quest for racial justice by invoking “equality” for unions based on disordered sexual behavior that can never be “equal” to God-ordained sex within marriage. Now the nation’s highest court is content to let the ongoing disenfranchisement become law.
Yesterday’s action by the Supreme Court only solidifies the idea that the powerful elites who dominate politics, media and culture do not care what the people think, expressed through the ballot box or their elected state legislators. And if “We the People’s” votes do not count, then We live not in freedom but under tyranny.
The notion that nine men and women in black robes know more about what constitutes marriage than 76 percent of Oklahoma’s voters is insulting and preposterous. Now is the time for civil disobedience on a massive scale: we hope that statesmen and citizens alike–in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Indiana, Utah and Virginia—indeed, any state where the people’s will has been robbed by elitist judges—will reassert their state sovereignty against escalating judicial supremacy.
From a moral and spiritual perspective, no court or government action can—to quote from the ill-informed ruling of Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner–“confer respectability on a sexual relationship” between two people of the same sex. Homosexual activists yearn to be told that their defining sin is not a sin at all—and legalizing genderless “marriage” is their holy grail to achieve that end. “Love is love,” we are told, or rather scolded. But God is not mocked: the Scriptures are clear that homosexual practice is an offense against both God and the very bodies of those who practice it (as is all sexual immorality).
The truly loving thing for Christians to do is not to “bless” same-sex relationships but to guide men and women caught up in false homosexual identities to the One, Jesus, who will forgive them and guide them to a life pleasing to God.An Oklahoma federal judge ruled that a former middle school teacher convicted of raping a student must pay the victim $1 million for intentionally inflicting emotional distress.
Judge Robin Cauthron’s ruling came two years after the victim and his father filed a civil lawsuit against Jennifer Caswell, 31, and the Oklahoma school district where she used to be employed, the Daily Mail reported.
The lawsuit came around the same time in 2015 when Caswell was sentenced to 15 years in prison, with five of those years suspended, for having sex with a 15-year-old Hollis Middle School student multiple times.
Judge Cauthron wrote in her opinion that the boy “reported feelings of depression, isolation, and self-blame” as well as feelings of humiliation once the news of his sexual relationship with Caswell spread.
“In this case, a teacher abused her position of trust and authority to sexually violate a young man, who will face the emotional effects of the encounter for the rest of his life,” Cauthron wrote.
Bob Wyatt, the attorney for the victim and his father, told the Oklahoman that his clients were satisfied with the results of the lawsuit and hoped it would send a message to teachers and school districts that educator-facilitated sexual abuse will not be condoned.
Caswell’s defense attorney argued that his client will not be able to afford to pay the $1 million judgment to the victim, given that she still has to spend the next few years in prison, but Caswell is unlikely to appeal the judge’s decision.
Hollis Public Schools settled a separate lawsuit with the victim and his family in July that accused the school district of covering up the crime. The district agreed to pay $125,000 to the family.by Brett Stevens on June 29, 2017
In the realization that the best defense is a good offense, a group of non-Leftists got together and christened today Heterosexual Pride Day. Good provocation brings out the issues that lurk under the surface, and this was top-notch trolling.
Naturally the Left responded with outrage. In their view, homosexuals are a persecuted minority, and therefore homosexual pride is good, but heterosexual pride affirms the oppression that they infer is going on because of the delta in power between the two groups.
On the Alt Lite and mainstream parts of the Right, this provokes confusion. How is it, they ask, that if it is good for one group to have pride, it is bad for another group to do the same? Try that with the “White Panthers” or “Christian Holocaust” in conversation and you will see why not.
As they are about to learn, the hardest cuck to beat is the cuck within. In each of us, there is a beaten, derided and humiliated little boy hiding in his room after his parents said something cruel or his social group at school made fun of him for not being enough “with it” in emulating whatever trend everyone else was chasing.
To uncuck yourself, realize that there are two views of human social organization:
Do what allows everyone to just get along. Do what is right and realize there will be conflict.
Egalitarianism arises from a desire to avoid conflict. Properly speaking, it is a variety of pacifism, or the idea that refusing to fight is more efficient or more moral than getting in there and fighting. The tearful child hiding behind his pillow wants, at first, for the conflict to end so that he is just accepted and can go further down the path of maturation without the horror of social censure confronting him.
If you want to know why most people tend toward egalitarianism, and from that to the range of opinions derived from it known as “Leftism,” the reason can be found in this desire to avoid conflict. If we tolerate everyone, stop fighting, and each of us just does whatever he or she needs to, they think, then society can function and the individual will not be bullied anymore.
To someone in the grips of this mentality, “equality” seems like a savior. In this view, every person and group gets an equal chance to have pride in what they do. But that is not how equality works in practice. In practice, pacifism always penalizes those who know and care enough to fight for what is right instead of what is convenient (that which allows us to “just get along”).
They do not understand egalitarianism. Equality will always and forever mean taking from the thriving and giving to the failing. It will always mean supporting the underdog against the strong. It will inevitably and necessarily oppose those who start conflict, even if the conflict is fair and reasonable, because the goal of equality is keeping everyone together in lieu of finding out what is right because the latter inexorably involves conflict, and egalitarians fear conflict in which they can appear to be in the wrong.
Scratch a bully, find someone who is terrified of not being included. Every bully that I knew had a terrible home life. Divorce, drunk dads who loved the belt more than a single word of praise, dysfunctional parents and siblings in jail. Feeling no place that belonged to them, and thus no value or purpose to their lives, they came to school and did unto others as life did unto them.
The kids who were really sad were the ones who had outwardly functional homes, but parents who belittled them or ignored them. To these parents, children were possessions that were designed to make the parent look good, and if that did not happen — the little screwups of childhood — they treated the children like non-functioning gadgets, and this mentality of “take it back to the store” or “throw it out” imprinted deeply on those children. These are at first inclined to go along with the True Believers in equality, but over time come to realize that what they have always wanted is to know what is right, and to do that, so when people criticize the belittled child can comfort himself with the knowledge that he did what was good and that the others are simply wrong.
One does not need equality in a group that is naturally equal, which means a group where everyone knows roughly what is right and each person is working toward that unequally, or according to their skills and abilities without the expectation of being identical. But in a group organized around control, or forcing everyone to just-get-along so that authority can stop worrying about what is right and focus on increasing its power, inequality is a problem because authority needs everyone to do exactly the same thing in order to avoid internal conflict. They demonize that internal conflict because some of it will consist of accurate and realistic criticism of that authority.
Authority gets a huge boost here. The dividend achieving by not trying to address real problems, and instead using that energy and resource load to further the goals of authority itself, makes authority massively powerful. Despite its promises to citizens, it serves only itself, and power that serves its own goals instead of those that it rules is by nature tyranny, or another form of bullying. It comes full circle.
This creates a match made in some infernal place. The underconfident herd demands an end to being bullied because its individual members fear losing social status if they are found to be wrong, and so authority steps in and promises to abolish all standards except obedience to authority, which makes everyone safe. At that point, society anathematizes realistic thinking and solutions in the external world, and goes down a path of navel-gazing which rewards only lies, since it is based on an assumption (equality) that is a lie.
This is why “Heterosexual Pride Day” or “white pride” will always be viewed as different than their equivalents among minority groups, and will be demonized and treated as an attack. You cannot get to doing what is right through equality; in fact, egalitarianism opposes the very idea of doing right or being realistic, which is required to know how to do right, in the first place. Equality replaces good as the goal of society. As the old saying goes, “Quality or equality; pick one.”
Tags: control, egalitarianism, equality, heterosexual pride day, social control
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.This latest offering from Superformance, a Southern California company that distributes 1960s-era racecar replicas and continuation models, is a re-creation of a road racer that Corvette patriarch Zora Arkus-Duntov designed in 1962. He planned on a production run of 125 examples, for homologation purposes; his ultimate goal for the car was to win the GT class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. However, General Motors brass canceled the project after only five cars were completed. Superformance, which is licensed by GM, obtained the original blueprints and molds for chassis number 2 and used them to design its Grand Sport. The company sells the car as a rolling chassis with a coupe body, and the buyer then has an engine and transmission installed.
Engine options range from the iron 350 hp ZZ4 small block to the all-aluminum supercharged and fuel-injected LS9.
You can order the Grand Sport with magnesium wheels like those of the original cars.
Optional amenities include a touring interior, power steering, and air-conditioning.
After canceling plans to produce the Grand Sport, GM ordered that the five prototypes be destroyed. Instead, they were stashed away and survive today.
Superformance, superformance.com (starting at $99,900, not including the engine and transmission)For the Atlanta Falcons, the amount of attention being paid to the defensive side of the ball, by pundits and fans alike, diminishes the fact that some of the NFL's most talented players reside along the offense. While the defense remains a work in progress -- especially in the established talent department -- the offense only needs a few tweaks here and there to be considered among the upper echelon of the league.
That's not to say that the offensive depth chart is laced with supreme talent throughout. It's merely shedding light on how superb the great players are. The trio of Matt Ryan, Julio Jones and Roddy White can be measured against any in the league -- when healthy, of course.
Ryan may be one of the most underrated players in the NFL. He's excelled in both a vertical-stretch offense and a rhythm-and-timing offense. The latter of which he could be considered the league's premier general of. His short-to-intermediate accuracy may only be superseded by his ability to improvise. He has a strong command of his offense and team in general.
Last season, with Jones missing 11 games and White hobbled for the majority of the season (and missing three games of his own), we saw that Ryan had a plethora intangibles that hadn't been brought up a lot: Toughness and resiliency. Running a vertical offense when your coordinator calls pass plays 70 percent of the time takes pure guts.
Doing so while being plastered all over NFL fields by just about every defense on the schedule takes even more pure guts. But through it all he never wavered one iota. Now with his career safety net, in retired (I use that term loosely) tight end Tony Gonzalez, no longer available Ryan may be in for his toughest season yet.
But you know the old adage: When the going gets tough...
Offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter can make the transition from a Gonzalez-less offense much easier; moving White to the S-receiver, permanently, could enhance the Falcons' explosiveness while still providing Ryan the short-to-intermediate outlet he's accustomed to having.
Superior Route-Running Ability
From the time Gonzalez showed up in a Falcons' uniform, he enhanced the offense with his ability to generate first downs. It was pretty much clockwork: Gonzalez would run a "stick-nod", create separation at the stem, make the slowest juke move ever and get an extra four-to-five yards for a first down.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Defenses knew it was coming, broadcasters had the same general idea and all of us in the stands -- or watching at home -- were privy to the same information.
Nobody in the league could consistently stop the Ryan-to-Gonzalez connection!
Case in point: Gonzalez, lined up at the "S", runs an out to perfection. Despite the fact that he's running at complete turtle speed, against possibly the fastest linebacker in the league in New York Jets' future star Demario Davis, he shows why it's proper route-running ability that gets the job done on the inside of a formation.
Gonzalez sells the 9-route, stems extremely hard to create vast separation, secures the catch and gets a few extra yards for his troubles. Defensive coordinators tried putting safeties on him for speed purposes; linebackers for size purposes; corners for technique purposes.
It virtually never worked.
The only time coordinators had success was in the "money zone" using the double-vice technique.
White may find even more success than Gonzalez if permanently lined up at the S-receiver. He, too, is a master at the finer points of route-running. Although never possessing the wheels of an Andre Johnson (Houston Texans), nor the size of a Larry Fitzgerald (Arizona Cardinals), White has managed to be their equal behind being a complete route-runner -- among other things.
This is what White has been doing to corners ever since the light turned on for him in his third season. He makes sure that every route looks the same at the bottom. Some receivers telegraph their routes by eying their target point or not running hard enough if they have a hard-breaking route.
As a former defensive back/linebacker, at the semi-pro level, I keyed in on receivers' tendencies in their route-running. Someone like White would've frustrated me as he takes care of the minutia of his craft.
Here he sells the 9-route causing the corner, talented Buffalo Bills' defensive back Stephon Gilmore, to open his hips to defend deep. Gilmore is unable to match the transfer and has to make a complete turn. This allows for the necessary separation White needed.
When you have the best short-game QB throwing you the ball, it doesn't take much. And when you have the best short-to-intermediate receiver in the game, it's simply a match made in heaven.
Before Koetter took over the reins, former OC Mike Mularkey eased Ryan's transition into the league by bringing a multiple offense with West Coast principles. The combination of Ryan's quick-decision making, a nasty offensive line and White's ability to destroy both man and zone coverage made Atlanta one of the best offenses in the league.
What it lacked was a certified deep-threat to take advantage of the vertical concepts of Mularkey's playbook. After the acquisition of Jones, the corps was complete. In fact, Mularkey's final season in the Peach State produced the seventh-ranked offense in the NFL.
Somehow Mularkey was ousted, after multiple playoff failures, for the true vertical stylings of Koetter -- who has yet to surpass Mularkey's final offensive ranking.
But this may finally be the year as it seems the move tight end position, or "F", will no longer be a major emphasis like it was when Gonzalez was in tow.
"There'll be a change in the type of tight end we'll have on our roster," coach Mike Smith said, via D. Orlando Ledbetter of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We'll have a 'Y' tight end, where he'll be an in-line player. They won't be moving around nearly as much as what we call a 'F.' Tony Gonzalez was more of a 'F' tight end than a 'Y' tight end."
This means Falcons fans can expect a ton of "11" and "10 personnel." Koetter loves to go to both spread and tight sets out of "11 personnel." By putting White in Gonzalez's spot in these sets you essentially force the defenses hand.
When you see a spread formation like this with a move tight end, it's better to just think of said player as a receiver. Often times defenses go to its dime package as a counter, but they run the risk of being gashed by a draw play as this formation still has a running back present.
If White were linchpin on the inside, he could be matched against linebackers out of this set. And there's not a linebacker in the league savvy enough to defend White. And unlike Gonzalez he could turn a short catch into a much more explosive play.
My personal favorite is the tight set. It takes great route-running to excel in this set, but the results can be tremendous. A great blocker like White would do wonders in the run game, which Gonzalez was rarely lauded for.
But either set can find White in a mismatch.
Lined up against Bills' linebacker Manny Lawson, White shows why he would be deadly as an S-receiver. Running a simple slant, White puts the offense way ahead in the down-and-distance game -- and never even gets touched by Lawson.
When White encounters the average nickel corner, there will be plays to be made. White is one of the most powerful receivers in the league who rarely goes down with the initial tackle. His ability to separate from a well-run route, coupled with his ability to separate defensive backs from their respective souls with physicality is a tough proposition for any coordinator
Speed on the Edges/Julio Occupying the Primary
As much as Falcons fans don't care to come to grips with it, much-maligned receiver Harry Douglas proved his worth with a 1,000-yard performance in last season's 4-12 debacle. While Douglas has normally operated out of the slot in recent memory, Jones' absence allowed him to oscillate between the "Z" and "Y" spots in the formation.
While Douglas may not have the talent of a White, he's undoubtedly a faster player. His presence, along with the promising Darius Johnson, on the edges could mean more explosive plays in the vertical attack.
But putting White in the slot would also allow Jones to occupy the primary in his stead -- a scenario we witnessed when White has hampered by injury at the beginning of last season. And the results were astounding.
Jones looked to be the most dominant force in the league (41 catches for 580 yards in five games) when allowed to run the full route tree as White's position in the offense calls for. Normally Jones occupies the vertical part of the offense predominately, but he showed himself to be quite the force in the short-to-intermediate game as well.
Let's face it: Jones should no longer play second fiddle to anyone in the league as he is virtually unmatched from a size-speed-talent perspective. With White turning 33 years old this season, and Jones getting close to re-upping for a zillion-dollar contract, the time to pass the torch is now.
But by putting White in the slot on a permanent basis, it not only allows for a smooth transition, it fills a major void in the offense that Gonzalez is leaving behind. It may also extend White's career as he will face lesser competition in the role.
It's pretty much a win-win scenario for all parties involved...except the opposition.
So we should expect explosive plays like this from him playing on the inside of the formation. White once said that the "big boys play outside," but once he racks up video game numbers in the slot he'll most certainly change his tune.
Make it happen, Koetter!
Murf Baldwin covers the Alabama Crimson Tide for Roll 'Bama Roll in addition to being a staff writer for The Falcoholic. He previously covered the Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints for Bleacher Report. Accept no imitations; follow me on Twitter.
Follow @MurfBaldwinMost people are clueless as to the legality of what they are doing when they vote. You think you are voting for a candidate, but you are actually voting for delegates to represent you. The delegates will represent you on the first vote at the convention and then they are free to vote for whoever they choose. Even in the national election, you technically and legally do not vote for candidates. You vote for delegates to represent you in the Electoral College process. You never actually vote for a candidate.
The audacity of Mitt Romney to come out and bash Trump, yet not endorse anyone else, was a blatant play to be drafted by the Republican elites whom are looking to rob the people of any Democratic process. Romney is deeply entrenched within the elite. In July 2012, Cheney used his Wyoming home to host a private fundraiser for Romney, which netted over $4 million in contributions from attendees. If Romney were to be president, Cheney would be hiding in the shadows.
Politicians are becoming the same worldwide. In Europe, the Troika never stands for election, yet they rule over the people with an iron fist with one hand, and the other hand is used to pick the pockets of the great unwashed. They regard the vote of the people as routine and easily manipulated. A Republican questionnaire that was sent out didn’t ask what the most important issues were, it only asked the social bombshells. There is nothing addressing the economics.
Then there is the dark pool of “superdelegates” who are not involved in the Republican Party nomination process and are thus a check against any democratic system. These superdelegates in the Republican National Convention are actually seated automatically, but they are limited to three per state, and in theory compose more than 10% of the required number to be elected as the candidate at the national convention. These superdelegates consist of the state chairperson and two district-level committee members. Republican Party superdelegates are therefore obliged to vote for their state’s popular vote winner under the rules of the party branch to which they belong, but this rule can be changed.
The “superdelegate” actually began in the Democratic National Convention. They were the means for the elite to control the convention. Distinguished from other delegates, the superdelegates were seated automatically and could choose to vote for whoever they wanted to vote for. Democratic superdelegates are free to support any candidate for the nomination. This contrasts with the delegates “pledge” to vote for who won the popular vote. This entire process is very anti-democratic and is designed for the elite to control the election.
Then there is the Electoral College process, which the Founding Fathers established in the Constitution as a compromise between the election of the president by a vote in Congress and the election of the president by a popular vote of qualified citizens. The Electoral College process, therefore, consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the president. Your state’s entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your Senators. There is ample opportunity for the elites to try to steal the election from the people. The question becomes, what will erupt in the aftermath if they play for such high stakes?
When we look at the delegates amassed so far, Trump is well ahead, but look at Jeb Bush. He was lower than Carson. Bush was the elite choice, as he was the traditional pick based upon his last name. I have told the story before of how I used to visit people who wanted to run for president. They were told I was there to advise them on the world economy, yet I was there to also vet them and relay my opinion if they had what it took to do the job. I was asked in 1999 to fly to Texas to meet with George Bush Jr. I was told this was “different” and they admittedly told me he was “stupid.” They never used such demeaning words before. I asked why they would choose someone stupid to be president. I was told he had the “name” that would carry the day. I was then asked if I would accept the position of chief economic adviser. I laughed and said there was no possible way. They said they had to surround Bush Jr. with good people. Hence, Dick Cheney really ran everything. Bush actually disliked Cheney and came to distrust him immensely. Bush and Cheney were never quite friends and they never socialized outside of the office. In that respect, one must feel sorry for Bush. He truly got the raw end of the deal. Nevertheless, the elite saw Jeb with the name, but this time that name made a cycle inversion thanks to Cheney.
The elite actually think they can somehow rob the people of any right to vote. It is the same attitude emerging in Brussels. They think the people are too stupid to know what is best for them.The horror genre is a wide and beautiful landscape of subgenres that let us face our fears, be they in the form of demons, monsters, slashers, mutants, ghosts, viruses, nature, or our own minds, not to mention the wide plethora of other assailants that I haven’t mentioned. I’m constantly reminded of the merchant in the beginning of Hellraiser, who asks Frank Cotton, “What’s your pleasure?” When it comes to horror, I can choose from a wide variety of delights with which to sully and corrupt my mind.
But like any other fan of the genre, horror is not the only thing I imbibe. I enjoy watching comedies, action/adventure, and even the occasional romance film (Amelie is one of my favorite movies of all time). And something I noticed in several of my favorite non-horror films is that many of them share many themes with horror!
So I decided to whip up a list of six non-horror movies that I thought of off the top of my head that I feel would be right up the alley of any horror fan. Check out the list below and let me know some recommendations YOU have in the comments below!
eXistenZ
A game designer on the run from assassins must play her latest virtual reality creation with a marketing trainee to determine if the game has been damaged.
Directed by the legendary David Cronenberg, this movie falls far more under the umbrella of “sci-fi mind fuckery” than horror. But if you think Cronenberg doesn’t add in some really horrific moments, you’re very much mistaken. Packed with phenomenal performances and featuring some typical Cronenberg grossness, eXistenZ is a wildly entertaining and absolutely bizarre journey.
Children of Men
In 2027, in a chaotic world in which women have become somehow infertile, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea.
Don’t watch this movie unless you make plans for afterwards. I made that mistake and just sat on my couch for two hours after the credits stopped rolling trying to absorb everything I’d just witnessed.
The reason why I feel horror fans will love this movie is because it has a bleak, almost hopeless feel throughout nearly the entire film. Furthermore, there are scenes of graphic violence and brutality AND it’s essentially a post-apocalyptic film, although the apocalypse here isn’t caused by a virus, zombies, or anything like that. Instead, it’s simply a biological shift whereby women can’t get pregnant, so humanity loses all hope.
It’s a really stunning film and I wholeheartedly recommend watching it.
The City of Lost Children
A scientist in a surrealist society kidnaps children to steal their dreams, hoping that they slow his aging process.
This is one of my favorite movies ever. Essentially a dark and twisted fairy tale, The City of Lost Children is playful in its surreal approach, crafting a charming and delightful film that circles the terrifying concept of child abduction.
Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet would go on to make Alien: Resurrection, which would see him reunite with The City of Lost Children stars Ron Perlman and Dominique Pinon. Additionally, it has music from “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Badalamenti.
The Running Man
A wrongly convicted man must try to survive a public execution gauntlet staged as a game show.
Based on a story by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), The Running Man essentially set the stage for movies and ideas like Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, The Purge, and more.
The horror elements here are basically the constant threat of the hunt. Arnold Schwarzenegger is constantly on the move to not only survive but to also find a way to expose and take down the very people who framed him. Facing one “gladiator” after another, each equally vicious and despicable, Schwarzenegger and crew are fighting for their very lives every moment of this sadistic TV show.
Dark City
A man struggles with memories of his past, including a wife he cannot remember, in a nightmarish world with no sun.
It’s hard to describe Dark City because the movie is so unique and out there. But I don’t think anyone can deny that through its sci-fi noir veneer, there is an underbelly strongly influenced by horror. I mean, remember that little child Stranger? That’s something out of a nightmare.
Filled with an incredible cast (Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Richard O’Brien, Ian Richardson, and more) and directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow), this movie was under-appreciated upon release but has since grown a strong cult following.
The 13th Warrior
A man, having fallen in love with the wrong woman, is sent by the sultan himself on a diplomatic mission to a distant land as an ambassador. Stopping at a Viking village port to restock on supplies, he finds himself unwittingly embroiled on a quest to banish a mysterious threat in a distant Viking land.
Okay, the below trailer is absolutely godawful, so just ignore that it even exists, okay?
Directed by John McTiernan and based on Michael Crichton’s book “Eaters of the Dead” (which itself was inspired by the epic poem “Beowulf”), The 13th Warrior went through its fair share of production woes. The budget reportedly hit over $160 million, which, if adjusted for inflation, is nearly $230 million today, and the movie only took in $61 million in global box office, making it a catastrophe.
However, I was always puzzled by the distaste for the film. It’s a snappy film that doesn’t waste time and it knows how to introduce new elements in clever ways, such as the scene where Antonio Banderas learns how to speak Norse by listening during their journey.
But where horror fans can latch onto the movie is the villains. The book wasn’t called “Eaters of the Dead” because it sounded cool, it’s because that’s exactly what was happening! So, you’ve got vikings against the cannibalistic “Wendol”, who wear bear skins in order to make themselves appear more ferocious and aggressive. Plus, they have no problem ripping the heads off of their victims with their bare hands.
This really was another criminally under-appreciated film upon release. I wish it got more credit as it’s thoroughly entertaining with wonderful sets and fantastic music. Plus, I guarantee you’ll start saying the “Lo, there do I see my father…” mantra at the most random times and feel like a total badass while doing it.I'm Cheryl, and I'm a food slut. I love food |
, down-home, old-world persona. Some might find his nuanced views on social media as surprising as his cursing about the president's Twitter prowess. His comment has been gaining attention on social media, though of course, the reaction is divided.
Neither the University of North Carolina nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment.
It's instructive, though, that even in answering a purely sports media question, the president's tweeting becomes a reference point.
A few weeks ago, another legendary college hoops coach, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, offered this view on Trump and Twitter to ESPN: "We're in such a line-item society, a Twitter world, so when one thing happens, that's the story. It's a good thing leaders don't lead that way. I hope they don't -- I know one uses Twitter a lot."
Previously, NBA coaches such as San Antonio's Greg Popovich, the Golden State Warriors' Steve Kerr and the Detroit Pistons' Stan Van Gundy have been openly hostile to the president. Van Gundy, for example, called him "brazenly racist."
As Williams intimated, there's no escaping Twitter and there's no escaping politics these days. And the president has ensured that there's no escaping politics on Twitter.
Technically Incorrect: Bringing you a fresh and irreverent take on tech.
Virtual reality 101: CNET tells you everything you need to know about VR.At the start of football season, the Freedom From Religion Foundation is renewing its objection to Georgia Tech's football chaplaincy.
FFRF initially contacted the university in August of last year to complain about its chaplaincy program, enclosing a broader national report. FFRF received an emailed acknowledgment after a week. However, there still has been no response to date about any actions to remedy the situation.
Derrick Moore continues to serve as Georgia Tech's football chaplain and receives compensation from Georgia Tech for his religious services. Moore regularly prays with the team before games, while wielding a sledgehammer. Maintaining such a chaplaincy program violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
The idea that such religious activities are truly optional is questionable, at best. FFRF's report concluded that "athletes do not view coaches' suggestions as optional." Moreover, "coaches add to this pressure by sending chaplains to talk with players going through difficult times, instead of allowing players to seek out their own religious or professional counseling."
"Even if the chaplaincy were strictly voluntary, that fact does not alter the unconstitutionality of the practice," FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor write in a letter to Georgia Tech President G.P. Peterson. "Courts have summarily rejected arguments that voluntariness excuses a constitutional violation."
Additionally, Georgia Tech has only a Christian chaplain, showing an unconstitutional preference for Christianity. This is in spite of the fact that 44 percent of college-aged Americans are non-Christian and fully a third of millennials identify as nonreligious, according to the Pew Research Center.
In order to aid the university in protecting its students from religious discrimination, FFRF is also recommending the adoption of a model policy, which includes the maintenance of complete official neutrality in matters of religion. If adopted, this model policy would not only bring the university into compliance with the law but it would send the message that Georgia Tech values the rights of every student athlete to hold his or her own religious or nonreligious views, free from direct or indirect coercion or contrary endorsement.
"Apparently, we need to sledgehammer Georgia Tech officials in order to get any meaningful response," Barker adds.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a nationwide nonprofit organization dedicated to the separation of state and church, with almost 24,000 nonreligious members across the country, including more than 400 in Georgia and an Atlanta-area chapter.Software Development and Community Growth Continues for Hyperledger Hyperledger Announcements Six New Members, including State Farm Insurance & Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Now Support Leading Enterprise Blockchain Project SAN FRANCISCO – (October 30, 2018) – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort…
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Six people were lynched to death by villagers in three places in Jharkhand on Thursday, news agency PTI reported.
The incidents took place on Thursday and the the victims were beaten to death over suspicion that they were child lifters.
Local police also became a target of the violence, with two police vehicles being burnt by agitating villagers.
In the first incident, two people were beaten to death in Sosomoli village, DIG (Kolhan region) Prabhat Kumar told PTI. Another person was beaten to death in the Shobhapur village by local residents, Kumar added.
The third lynching, in which three people died, took place in Nagadih, Superintendent of Police (City) Prasant Anand told PTI.
Anand added that when a police team reached the spot, agitated villagers started pelting stones at the cops, causing injuries among some police personnel. Two vehicles were damaged in the violence.
Villagers responsible for the first two lynchings have been identified and action will be after a probe into the violence is completed, DIG Prabhat Kumar said.
Thursday's incidents come a week after two people were beaten to death and as many were injured by a mob on suspicion that they were child lifters in Uranium township of Jadugora in East Singhbhum district.
Following the incident, the police had asked the villagers not to pay heed to rumours.
(With PTI inputs)
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ALSO WATCH | Rajasthan: Couple beaten stripped, paraded for marrying against familyThe summer vacations have just ended for most people. So, you might wonder how long you benefit from the effects of your holiday? Ought we go on holidays to relieve work-related stress and to stay well?
Research shows that not going on holidays is associated with a higher risk of morbidity (disease) and mortality (Gump & Matthews, 2000; Eaker, Pinsky & Catelli, 1992).
Holidays are brilliant and the positive effects are obvious to us, but the effects on health and well-being are not as long-lived as we like to believe. Positive holiday memories stay with us for a long time, but the direct effects of a holiday decline quickly.
A new longitudinal study by Jessica de Bloom, Mirjam Radstaak & Sabine Geurts (2014), in press at Stress and Health, demonstrates the effects of vacation on work-related rumination and emotional well-being in obsessive-compulsive workers.
The authors assessed work hours, rumination, and affective well-being in 54 employees two weeks before (baseline), during and in the first, second and fourth week after a summer vacation. For the assessment, a digital diary was used before and after vacation, and a telephone interview was used during vacation.
The degree of rumination was assessed on a 10-point scale, and the participants were asked two questions: “I worry about things that have to be done at work”, and “I ruminate about things that have happened at work”.
Affective well-being was assessed in the same way but with three questions: “How happy did you feel today?”, “How satisfied do you feel about this day?”, and “How was your mood today?
The study reveals that (1) vacations decrease work-related rumination until two weeks after a holiday; (2) vacations improve affective well-being, especially in obsessive workers; (3) obsessive workers experience a quick relapse to their initially low level of affective well-being and high level of rumination, meaning that:
“… Obsessive workers seem to benefit more from a vacation [compared to their non-obsessive counterparts] … Their vacation relief is greater, but so is their relapse.” (p. 25).
The authors sum up the findings for us:
“Vacations seem to constitute a powerful recovery opportunity for all workers and even more for workers who find it difficult to recover during free evenings after work or during normal weekends due to their strong inner drive to continue working.” (p. 25).
These findings shed light on the importance of a good work-life balance. It seems like obsessive workers (often referred to as workaholics) find it difficult to distract themselves from work-related thoughts after finished work. This tendency may lead to negative consequences for the well-being of the workers, and their social relationships as a result.
The present study shows that a longer summer holiday makes obsessive workers prioritize other things than their work for a while, which is related to improved well-being. Shorter breaks from work like regular evening hours after work, or a weekend, is just not enough for this positive effect to happen.
It also shows that obsessive workers “catch up” with their non-obsessive counterparts with respect to affective well-being during a holiday, which we may consider a major benefit.
The study also shows that obsessive workers tend to “relapse” quickly after work resumption. For this reason, it is highly recommended that obsessive workers try to find and seek a healthy work-life balance when they return to work so that their well-being do not drop so dramatically.
Considering the importance of vacations on well-being, all people should have an opportunity for regular, longer holidays (not just weekends). Workers who are not stressed-out are more satisfied with their jobs, and work satisfaction leads to increased motivation, and productivity as a result. So vacations are worthwhile.BETHEL — A state subsidy that supports fast Internet in rural Alaska public libraries has been zeroed out by both the Alaska House and Senate as legislators struggle to address a budget gap approaching $4 billion.
Librarians are organizing to save the Online With Libraries, or OWL, program, which they say has dramatically changed who comes to libraries and how libraries are used.
The cut isn't final until the Legislature passes its budget. The money could be added back in, according to Rep. Lynn Gattis, R-Wasilla. Or maybe, she said, the local match can be generated by fundraisers or donations.
In Anchorage and Fairbanks, anyone with a laptop can stop at a coffee shop for free Wi-Fi and a spendy latte. But in the Bush, there are no Starbucks and public libraries are often the only place in town with free Internet.
Rural Alaskans without home Internet often rely on computers in public libraries for essentials, said Katie Baxter, director of the Kodiak Public Library and chair of the advocacy committee of the Alaska Library Association.
They do their taxes, find health insurance and pay bills, the same as people with home Internet. They look for jobs, apply for Permanent Fund dividends and buy hunting and fishing licenses. They check Facebook and email. But generally, they aren't streaming videos — the subsidized broadband is fast but not fast enough for that, librarians said.
The program costs the state about $760,000 and draws down four times that from the federal government. As of Wednesday afternoon, 880 people had signed an online petition in support of OWL.
Cutting a cord
Twenty-four libraries have reported they will "go dark" without the state and federal support, according to a state survey. There's tiny Lake Minchumina, population 11, which is counting on $5,600 next year through the state subsidy to support the only public broadband in a large remote area near Denali. Kodiak, with thousands of residents, expects $6,700 from OWL. Sitka in Southeast is counting on $5,000, and Dillingham in the Bristol Bay region, more than $18,000. Each library would get much bigger federal matches.
"Basically we're cutting the cord between urban Alaska and rural Alaska," said Rep. Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks, who tried to reinsert the funds in the House Finance Committee and on the House floor but didn't succeed.
Other communities with libraries that report they can't afford broadband on their own are Aniak, Chiniak, Coffman Cove, Cold Bay, Cooper Landing, Craig, Eagle, Haines, Hyder, Kasilof, Koyuk, McGrath, Moose Pass, Nome, Ouzinkie, Port Lions, Thorne Bay, Togiak, Tok and Whale Pass.
In all, 40 communities currently receive funding for the Internet through the program. Some say they would pick up the difference of what the state would have spent. Another 45 libraries use the OWL program's videoconferencing network for trainings, meetings and classes.
"Without public Wi-Fi, in a lot of places people live on subsistence and can't afford to have their own devices," said Linda Thibodeau, a retiring official who oversees the state library.
The state looked into whether public libraries could revert to dial-up Internet but were told no one offers that anymore.
"If local communities cannot afford the local share without OWL help, then they don't have broadband. They don't have Internet," Thibodeau said.
The OWL program covers on average 19 percent of the broadband cost at the small, rural Alaska libraries that participate in the program, and the federal government picks up 79 percent through its e-rate subsidy, which is funded through surcharges on telecommunications bills, according to the library association. Just 2 percent of the costs are paid by local communities.
Libraries are banding together to save a program that even the Legislature's chief budget-cutters say is valued.
Budget not done deal
"It matters to Anchorage if Kodiak or Togiak or Moose Pass or Nome or Sitka — if they don't have Internet connectivity," Baxter said. "That diminishes the quality of life for Alaskans."
Librarians, she said, are trying to show legislators that "public libraries serve the underserved of Alaska."
That's understood, said Gattis, who chairs the House budget subcommittee on education.
"I'm a big believer in technology and how it connects the Bush to the rest of Alaska and the rest of the world," she said. "Cutting that particular piece of broadband was difficult for me."
Yet the funding was eliminated by both the full House and Senate. The Legislature is still working on a final version of the budget.
"I don't necessarily believe that cutting broadband in the Bush is the right thing to do, but at the same time when we are cutting the budget we are looking at everything," Gattis said.
Gov. Bill Walker had proposed $761,800 in the coming budget year for OWL and broadband library support, which generates a federal match of more than $3 million. Without money from Alaska, the federal match goes away.
About $275,000 of the state portion is for bringing Internet to rural libraries, and that's the essential piece, said Patience Frederiksen, the state's incoming director of the Division of Libraries, Archives & Museums. The program also covers the costs of equipping, running and maintaining a videoconference network, a consultant who helps libraries and schools get the federal match, and a state coordinator.
The program started in 2010 with support from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and became state-subsidized in 2013.
Before that, the small libraries typically had dial-up access to the Internet.
One of GCI's lobbyists has jokingly hooted in Gattis' office to urge support for OWL, though GCI says it is not officially lobbying to save it. Several Internet service providers participate and must compete for library customers, said Pam Lloyd, GCI vice president for education.For years, police in Newark, N.J. regularly handed out citations to residents for minor offenses.
Known as “blue summonses,” the citations were intended to curb crime in a city rife with violence. Officers who racked up high tallies were rewarded with better assignments and overtime, according to police and federal officials.
Ultimately, police and residents said, the practice damaged the Newark PD’s relationship with the minority community and did little to reduce crime. It also helped lead to federal intervention in the police department last year.
Newark’s blue summonses were rooted in the 1980s-era theory known as “Broken Windows,” which argues that maintaining order by policing low-level offenses can prevent more serious crimes.
But in cities where Broken Windows has taken root, there’s little evidence that it’s worked as intended. The theory has instead resulted in what critics say is aggressive over-policing of minority communities, which often creates more problems than it solves. Such practices can strain criminal justice systems, burden impoverished people with fines for minor offenses, and fracture the relationship between police and minorities. It can also lead to tragedy: In New York in 2014, Eric Garner died from a police chokehold after officers approached him for selling loose cigarettes on a street corner.
Today, Newark and other cities have been compelled to re-think their approach to policing. But there are few easy solutions, and no quick way to repair years of distrust between police and the communities they serve.
How Broken Windows Began
Although it was first practiced in New York City, the idea of Broken Windows originated across the river in Newark, during a study by criminologist George Kelling. He found that introducing foot patrols in the city improved the relationship between police and black residents, and reduced their fear of crime. Together with colleague James Wilson, he wrote an influential 1982 article in The Atlantic, where the pair used the analogy that a broken window, left unattended, would signal that no one cared and ultimately lead to more disorder and even crime.
Kelling has since said that the theory has often been misapplied. He said that he envisioned Broken Windows as a tactic in a broader effort in community policing. Officers should use their discretion to enforce public order laws much as police do during traffic stops, he said. So an officer might issue a warning to someone drinking in public, or talk to kids skateboarding in a park about finding another place to play. Summons and arrests are only one tool, he said.
Kelling told FRONTLINE that over the years, as he began to hear about chiefs around the country adopting Broken Windows as a broad policy, he thought two words: “Oh s–t.”
“You’re just asking for a whole lot of trouble,” Kelling said. “You don’t just say one day, ‘Go out and restore order.’ You train officers, you develop guidelines. Any officer who really wants to do order maintenance has to be able to answer satisfactorily the question, ‘Why do you decide to arrest one person who’s urinating in public and not arrest [another]?’ … And if you can’t answer that question, if you just say ‘Well, it’s common sense,’ you get very, very worried.”
“So yeah,” he said. “There’s been a lot of things done in the name of Broken Windows that I regret.”
The Crime Debate
In practice, Broken Windows has come to be synonymous with misdemeanor arrests and summonses. In New York, the largest city to implement the practice, between 2010 and 2015, police issued 1.8 million quality of life summonses for offenses like disorderly conduct, public urination, and drinking or possessing small amounts of marijuana. Felony crime rates, meanwhile, declined.
But a report released last week by the New York Police Department’s inspector general’s office found “no evidence” that the drop in felony crime during those six years was linked to the quality of life summonses or misdemeanor arrests, which also declined during that time.
“That’s basically what we’ve been finding for years — a lack of any evidence of an effect,” said Bernard Harcourt, a Columbia Law School professor who has conducted two major studies on the impact of Broken Windows in New York and other cities.
The NYPD, led by Police Commissioner William Bratton, an early supporter of Broken Windows, said in a statement that the inspector general’s study was “deeply flawed” because it only examined arrests and summonses, not the agency’s broader quality-of-life efforts. Kelling, who has used misdemeanor arrests to evaluate the theory, wouldn’t comment on the study, saying he’s still a consultant to the department.
Defining Disorder
Some policing experts say that Broken Windows is a flawed theory, in part because of the focus on disorder. Kelling argues that in order to determine how to police a community, residents should identify their top concerns, and police should — assuming those issues are legitimate — patrol accordingly.
But disorder doesn’t look the same to everyone, Harcourt said. “Definitions about what is orderly or disorderly or needs to be ticketed, etc., are often loaded — racially loaded, culturally loaded, politically loaded,” he said. He cited New York’s recent decision to crack down on subway performers, who are often young black men, as an example.
Giving police discretion to enforce public order laws, he added, “becomes extraordinarily problematic because of racial, ethnic and class-based biases, and including implicit biases” that can come into play.
Linking disorder and crime can also change the way officers perceive residents, by creating the assumption that those committing minor offenses may do something worse if they’re not sanctioned, said David Thacher, a criminologist and professor at the University of Michigan.
“Broken Windows frames trivial misbehavior as the beginning of something much more serious,” Thacher said. “And I worry that that encourages the police to see a broader and broader swath of the people they’re policing as bad guys.”
It can also lead police to use minor offenses inappropriately as a pretext to search for more serious contraband, like guns or drugs, he said.
Newark’s Blue Summonses
In Newark, police saw the effect of blue summonses on their community first-hand. James Stewart, president of Newark’s Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union, told FRONTLINE that the frequent stops and citations made people mistrust the police, and much less likely to cooperate when officers were investigating serious crimes.
But, he added, because officers who racked up summonses were chosen for plum assignments, many felt they didn’t have much of a choice.
To boost their summonses numbers, residents said, officers often chose “convenient targets,” including the elderly, or those with mental illnesses or disabilities, according to a civil rights investigation by the Justice Department. Those cited also appeared to be disproportionately black or Latino.
“[I]f you were to look at the blue summonses… the vast majority of them are issued to people in their 50s or 60s or maybe even older,” Stewart said. “Are they really the group of people that are committing the violent crimes here in Newark? You know, I would think not. But in order to get more numbers, the cops go after these people.”
Ryan Haygood, an attorney and longtime Newark resident, argued that officers shouldn’t have to overstep the law to maintain order.
“I don’t see an inconsistency with respecting people’s constitutional rights and protecting public safety,” he told FRONTLINE. “In our area we do have neighbors who have been victimized in violent ways by crime. But it doesn’t mean that police officers can, in three out of four of the stops, violate people’s constitutional rights.”
Meanwhile, he added, the department’s efforts have done little to make the community safer. In its investigation, the Justice Department also questioned the practice’s impact on crime reduction.
What Comes Next
Is there a way to conduct order-focused policing in black and Latino communities — asking officers to deal with the kid skateboarding recklessly in the park, the guys loitering on the corner — without criminalizing the people who live there?
Activists with the Black Lives Matter movement say no. They’ve called for an end to enforcing — or at least criminalizing — minor offenses.
Policing experts don’t go that far. But most today, as well as the Justice Department and President Barack Obama’s task force on policing, recommend that police embrace a broader notion of community policing, which requires officers to get to know the people they serve and respond more directly to their needs. While it didn’t specifically address Broken Windows policing, the task force noted that police should adopt policies that emphasize community engagement and trust.
That’s already happening in a few places.
In New York this month, the city council passed a bill requiring police to establish written guidance on how officers should use their discretion to enforce certain quality-of-life offenses, such as littering and unreasonable noise. It also allows officers to issue civil summonses to avoid routing people through the criminal justice system for minor offenses.
Cities like Milwaukee, Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn. have introduced foot patrols, which can allow officers to engage more closely with residents.
Portland, Ore. and Seattle — both cities under a reform agreement with the Justice Department — have placed a renewed emphasis on community policing, including encouraging officers to conduct foot patrols. In Seattle, overall approval ratings for the police have risen, although they remain stagnant with African-Americans. Last year, an independent assessment in Portland found that overall, 70 percent of residents said they would be treated fairly by police, but that African-Americans in particular remained concerned about discrimination and excessive force.
In Newark, Mayor Ras Baraka told FRONTLINE that the police department will return to what he called “neighborhood policing.” As part of the mandated reform process, officers are being re-trained, and given more accountability.
The goal is to have officers “who know people’s grandmothers, who know the institutions of the community, who look at people as human beings, right?” Baraka said. “And so that’s the beginning of it. If you don’t look at the people you are policing as human, then you begin to treat them inhumanely.”
Additional reporting by Anya Bourg and James Jacoby of FRONTLINE’s Enterprise Journalism Group.
Funding for the Enterprise Journalism Group is provided by the Ford Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Douglas Drane Family Fund.WASHINGTON -- There's one measure that quietly passed in the House along with Friday's massive defense bill that libertarians may like: a ban on drone strikes against U.S. citizens.
The idea that the United States military could target citizens with Hellfire missiles from an unmanned aerial vehicle caught prominence when Sen. Rand Paul held an epic 13-hour filibuster demanding to know whether the Obama administration thought it had the authority to carry out such a strike.
Attorney General Eric Holder eventually answered "no," the administration does not, as long as the person is not actively engaged in combat against the United States.
Still, many members of Congress did not want to take Holder at his word, and a ban, authored by Georgia GOP Rep. Paul Broun, was slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act among a block of amendments approved only on a voice vote.
The amendment says the "Department of Defense may not use a drone to kill a citizen of the United States," except in the same case Holder noted.
"The prohibition... shall not apply to an individual who is actively engaged in combat against the United States."
“I reluctantly supported the NDAA because it is critical that we provide for our national defense and give our men and women in uniform the resources they need," said Broun. "However, I am deeply concerned that the bill doesn’t go far enough to protect U.S. citizens from government overreach, and I plan to continue to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to ensure that Americans’ rights are protected."
The Senate is now working on its own version of the bill.
Broun and many others |
letes' Village and getting feedback on what works and what doesn't.
"The endeavor of the Olympics starts as soon as the last game ends," he said. "At the end of Beijing we started discussions about what we were going to do for London, and now we're knee-deep in Sochi and starting to think about Rio, as well."
Incidentally, IOC sponsor Adidas has not renewed its deal for 2016, leading some to speculate whether Nike will step in, leaving behind its role as strategic ambush marketer.
Mr. Lotti was mum on the point. But would it be easier if Nike were an official sponsor?
"It would definitely make life easier, but this makes it more interesting," he said. "I love challenges. I live by them."I love St. John’s College (full disclosure: I received my Masters from the school in 2002). As a lover, it fits my needs perfectly: a deep listener, a keen learner, respectful, patient, tolerant, seeking out the greatest works and biggest questions, and, yes, ironic. You need irony to be my lover and to be "the great books school."
The tenor and direction of most academic institutions, like the tenor and direction of our mass culture, like the tenor and direction of most lovers, is away from big questions towards smaller, niche, ephemera. Swimming against that tide seems peculiar, even absurd, not to mention “impractical.” But, like St. John’s, I embrace that strangeness (like an Irish monk studiously copying the great works of western civilization as the barbarians knocked at the gate, except I am lousy at Latin and Greek).
Fortunately, there are a few other anomalous souls left in America, who, like the rebel readers in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” seek out difficult works for their own betterment and for the improvement of their families, communities, and country. I strongly believe that the two campuses of St. John’s College (Santa Fe and Annapolis) are the civilized answer to the uncivil sophistry that Bradbury foresaw.
With that optimistic backdrop, and my yearly pilgrimage to St John’s Summer Classics firmly in mind, I sat down for a Johnny-to-Johnny dialogue with St. John’s College Santa Fe president, Michael Peters. “Mike” was one of my two tutors during a recent weeklong seminar on Joseph Conrad’s dense, rewarding spy novel, “The Secret Agent.” As a former U.S. Army Colonel, Chief of Staff at the United States Military Academy at West Point, attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Council on Foreign Relations, he seemed like the perfect person to discuss the relationship between St. John’s unique pedagogy and my broader concerns about education and public policy.
JAMES CROTTY (JC): Mike, there’s an objective and comprehensive international test now, the Program for International Student Assessment (or PISA), that 15-year-olds around the world take every three years. On the 2009 test, China came out number one and the U.S. was way down. We ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math. We spend so much as a country on education, but we are falling further and further behind other nations. Is there something intrinsic to our current democracy that is failing us in the education realm? Why are we continually failing at these educational benchmarks?
MICHAEL PETERS (MP): I guess there are a couple of things that strike me. First, I think the Chinese have demonstrated they are effective test-takers. Their educational system is directed towards that kind of evaluation. It’s funny because I was just having a conversation with a woman who works for UNESCO in China. She was complaining that the Chinese that she works with, you can’t give them an open-ended task. You have to lay out absolutely everything for them. Tell them exactly how they need to do the business and then they can do it exactly that way. But when it comes to creativity, to flexibility, to critical thinking, their skills are really lacking. As for the United States, I think it’s obviously very, very complicated, but one of the things that has made it more of a challenge is that increasingly over the last generation we have put more and more obligations on schools that are not necessarily directly connected to the classroom. Schools have become the social center of students’ lives. They feed them in the morning for breakfast and they take care of them during the day, and then they have after-school activities, and then, we’ve done things in the abstract and in the particular that are probably the right thing to do -- dealing with students with disabilities and those kinds of things – but that put a great demand on school systems. And I think that makes it harder for our schools to focus completely on the education part in the classroom.
JC: In Europe, at least in Germany when I visited, they do not understand this. They get a kick out of, for example, how American sports culture is tied up with one’s school. Because they do their sports in clubs. They do not do sports through the schools. Because schools are where you learn and then you leave. We have a very strong emotional attachment to our schools, built through sports, other extracurriculars, cultural attractions, fundraising, reunions, and so on.
MP: Oh, absolutely.
JC: And maybe that is a positive thing. Yet despite that strong emotional attachment, I have this continual experience that “American students are not as smart” as they were even in my era. I am aware that this is a curmudgeonly tendency in me as I get older, but the PISA results verify that American students are not keeping up with our competitors. Of course, Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffet and others are generously investing a lot of money trying to solve this problem on the primary and secondary school levels. And I was involved in this movement myself in the South Bronx of New York City in terms of mentoring inner city young men; I am completing postproduction on a documentary about that experience called “Crotty’s Kids.” But it seems to me that the focus of Gates, Buffett and others is in researching how to be a better teacher, teaching teachers how to teach, better principals, all that stuff. But the St. John’s pedagogy is not focused on these things that seem to be at the center of the greater education debate. We are doing something different here. What is that thing that is different?
MP: At St. John’s we have one undergraduate program which is distinctly interdisciplinary, and based on the fundamental liberal arts. We are the epitome of the liberal arts college. And because we only have that one program, that one major, we’re laser focused. We’re not trying to create a business major. We’re not trying to create fine arts major. We’re not trying to create a sociology major. We’re focused on this interdisciplinary approach, and we’re also focused on reading the original text, and bringing those texts into the classroom, and asking students to read them deeply, to think about them, and then be willing to talk about them and write about them, and under the guidance and mentoring of a tutor, but not to be professed to by the tutor. And the reason we call them tutors and not professors is that we don’t want them to profess. We want the students to, in a sense, be their own teachers. So, that’s the nature of our pedagogy. And we start out, we do it unashamedly, on Western texts. Not because there isn’t value in Eastern texts or Middle Eastern texts -- we have a graduate program that looks at Eastern and Middle Eastern texts – but because, in four years, you can only do so much. What’s undermined the quality of education in general is we’ve gotten into the Chinese menu view of course selection. You take one from column A, one from column B, one from column C, and they may or may not be connected with each other. There’s no synergy there. But at St. John’s College we start out with the Greeks. We start out with the Greeks in math by studying Euclid. We start out with the Greeks in laboratory science by looking at Aristotle. We start out with the Greeks in seminar. We study Greek language. And then we progress through, so that all of those classes are connected to one another and build on one another and show the connectivity, the very nature of all these things. And rather than distinguishing and demonstrating how they're different from one another, we’re trying to show how they really are related to one another.
JC : Exactly. Now, I drank the Kool-Aid. I graduated from the St. John’s College Santa Fe Graduate Institute. I attend St. John’s College Santa Fe’s Summer Classics every July. I host and lead Great Books discussions in the St. John’s shared inquiry manner. I am about as converted as you can get. And I believe St. John’s is the answer to the dogmatic Know-Nothingism sweeping this country. In your parting remarks today at the Summer Classics Week One closing luncheon, you said the same thing, but with an interesting fillip. You talked of St. John’s as the antidote to the opinion-based nature of our current national discourse, where people “have answers when they don’t even know the questions.” Why is St. John’s the antidote to our noisy polarized discourse?
MP: It’s an antidote because it provides an opportunity to ask questions and to question answers, and to think in terms of knowledge as opposed to accumulation of information. I think one of the things, again, that is unfortunate -- and we’re being driven to it more and more by the nature of the internet and other kinds of things -- is that you can find almost anything you want that’s a piece of information. All you have to do is Google it. But accumulating a bunch of information doesn’t translate into knowledge. It just means you know how to Google. And there’s some value in that, but it’s not enough, and you have to really translate that. And so the example of St. John’s and the opportunity at St. John’s is one of the things that we need to raise the visibility of.
JC: I know you’d love to have the problem of too many students and you need fifty campuses. But there is a Zen koan built into the St. John’s pedagogical model. That is, you must want to learn this way. It is a self-selecting marketing strategy. You could drive a lot of horses to the well of St. John’s College, but it wouldn’t work for them unless they had the hunger for what you have to offer. To get people to come to St. John’s, you almost have to miraculously develop the hunger for St. John’s in the culture at large. Is that a fair statement or is it too strong?
MP: It’s a bit strong. There are plenty of people out there who would, who are, searching for a St. John’s education. They just don’t know it’s available. And so our big task is to make folks aware of our existence and what it is we do. And I’m persuaded that despite the overwhelming counterculture, if you will, or the lack of appreciation of what St. John’s is, there are more than enough people out there who would benefit from, and would contribute to, a St. John’s education, that we can fill our seats.
JC: How do you go about doing that?
MP: It’s actually one of the things that we struggle with most. At the retail level, if you will, we have a pretty aggressive admissions program. We do a lot of the things that other colleges and universities do to get in front of prospective students. But in today’s world and in today’s economy, it’s an even bigger challenge because the overwhelming sense of the culture is that, “Why do you go to college? You go to college to get a job.”
JC: Correct. And then there’s the 90/10 rule that just came out in June from the Department of Education. It has to do with loan repayment, but more broadly it is the idea that a student, when he or she is done, must get a job in their field of study, whatever that is. St. John’s, as you said, is a liberal arts college, so it’s not a trade school, where, with the degree, you can go out and, say, cut hair. It’s training in how to think, how to listen. So how does that model of education square with the gainful employment mantra that seems to be gaining steam?
MP: I think that education is, at its root, learning. And at St. John’s we want to attract, we want to foster, and we want to move into the rest of society people who love to learn. And learning, first and foremost, for its own sake, but also because of how that learning can be put into action in society. But the way you put your learning into action is not just in your vocation, you put it into action in your family, you put it into action in your community, you put it into action in your church or your synagogue or your mosque, and so education and higher education is not just about preparing you for the workforce. Although I would argue that the St. John’s education is an excellent preparation for the workforce. Not for a particular thing, but to give you the kinds of skills that it takes to operate in a modern economy.
JC: Could you name three or four of those skills that a Johnny will have that the average kid graduating from Northwestern or the University of Chicago or somewhere else might not have?
MP: Well, I wouldn’t say that people who are graduating from Northwestern or some other very fine college wouldn’t necessarily have, but the skills that I think our students demonstrate are, first of all, the ability to read intensely and deeply, to think critically, to write coherently and cogently, and to be intellectually courageous. Because one of the things that we demand – because of the nature of our program – is that you’ve got to take the whole program. You can’t just focus on the things that you think you're good at or that you're comfortable with. If you don’t like math, you still must take math at St. John’s College. If you don’t like language, you still must take language at St. John’s College. And what that builds and what that requires is an intellectual courage to be willing to put yourself out there into areas where you're fundamentally uncomfortable and be willing to take that on. That courage then translates into your ability to do just about anything you want because you feel confident enough to say, “I can get into this. I can learn this, whatever it is I have to learn, whatever skill I have to learn, and I can then practice it.” And so when somebody says, “What do you do with a St. John’s education?” It sounds kind of trite, but I say, “Anything you want!” Because you’ve built those kind of skills that gives you the capacity to take on almost any intellectual challenge.
JC: That’s why I keep coming back here every summer because I start to fall into the mental trap that I’m not trained as a “specialist.” This occurs a lot, in weaker moments: “Well, I’m not a good enough writer because I was never trained in writing. I never got a degree in writing. I’ve only taken one writing course.” This is the courage-sapping doubt that the culture in a way feeds us. “You need to be a specialist, you need to get a Ph.D. or some higher credential.” And when I come back to St. John’s every summer, when I get back into the flow of things, it builds back that intellectual confidence.
MP: I completely agree with that. Nevertheless, we had this issue: not all Johnnies are able to get into the work force. There seems to be a disconnect with employers.
JC: Yes. The graduates I’ve talked to say employers don’t fully get the person that’s sitting there, who’s gone through the St. John’s process. This is a critical thinker. This is a person who’s actually more useful than you realize, even though he or she doesn’t have a Ph.D. in math. That does seem to be an issue.
MP: It certainly is. And I think that one of the things that we have been paying a lot of attention to over the time that I’ve been here is to help our students make that transition from “the college” to the rest of their lives, and, in particular, into their work lives. And to help them develop the skills to translate what they’ve done here into something that an employer would recognize. It is a matter of translation.
JC: What are the things you would teach a new graduate on how to go about making that transition?
MP: The biggest thing is to help them recognize how they can explain what they’ve done to someone who hasn’t had a St. John’s education, to help an employer understand the amount of writing they’ve done, the amount of reading they’ve done, the breadth of what they’ve studied. And the fact that -- and this is a common misunderstanding of what a St. John’s education is – it isn’t all just sittin’ around in a classroom talking. You’re doing hands-on stuff. You’re doing experiments. You're going to the board and demonstrating, so you’re learning briefing skills by going to the board and demonstrating a proposition in Euclid. And you're learning to operate in different languages. You're learning to operate in French and Greek. You're also learning to operate in a mathematical language. And you're learning to operate in a musical language. And I think that we have to help our graduates be able to do that translation of what we do here. The other part is fundamental practical skills. How do you write a resume? How do you conduct yourself in an interview? How do you perform in an interview? A lot more of that nuts and bolts stuff because it’s true for any young person going into the workforce for the first time, but especially because of the intensity of our program, because of the commitment that our students make to it, they keep their eye on that ball, they're not spending as much time thinking, “Okay, well what am I going to do with this? How am I going to translate this?” And I think we have an obligation to help them do that.
JC: We talked a lot about time in our discussion of Conrad’s The Secret Agent. So, let’s loop back. Now you're a tutor at St. John’s and you are the president of the Santa Fe campus. You are very aware of the pedagogy, the methodology. If you put yourself back into the organizations you’ve worked for, at West Point, in the special operations division of the Army, at the Council on Foreign Relations, how would that have made you a different boss or employee?
MP: That’s a really interesting question. I think that, at its root, I would have been more concerned with the question than the answer. In hierarchical organizations like the military, you're always looking for the solution, but often times you're looking for the solution to the wrong question. One of the things that I really learned from St. John’s is that the most important thing is the question. And getting the question right is the most important exercise.
JC: Can an argument be made that the military does not want to ask certain fundamental questions because it would threaten its current level of funding?
MP: It’s hard to generalize about a big institution like the military. I suspect that the reason for not asking fundamental questions is the pace of the activity that you're engaged in. It’s not that military officers aren’t capable of reflection, but they’re engaged in an activity that is so overwhelming, so time-sensitive, so urgent that you don’t have a lot of time for reflection. And one of the things that the army does, probably as well, and maybe better than any of the services, is it really tries, especially with its career officers, to provide time for them to take a year off, go to school. It gives them time to reflect and to think about what they've been engaged in. But in the day-to-day, it’s just very very difficult.
JC: Would the St. John’s method of shared inquiry be a bad fit in the military culture?
MP: Not all of life is seminar. At the end of the day in almost any activity that you're engaged in, you’ve gotta make a decision, and you’re always gonna make that decision with limited information.
JC: To paraphrase Vladimir in “The Secret Agent,” action has to be taken.
MP: Yeah. And so the St. John’s method is not something that you would impose on an organization as the way to operate because it wouldn’t be effective in that sense. Nevertheless, part of making the best decisions is asking the right questions. Focus more on making sure that you're asking the right question, rather than answering the wrong question and coming up with a solution to the wrong question.
JC: Since 9/11, what are the questions we’re not asking? What’s the question Americans aren’t asking, or the Department of Defense is not asking, or the government in general is not asking about our foreign policy threats?
MP: I think the question we always have to be asking ourselves as Americans is, “What is the balance between protecting our self physically and protecting our values and our principles?” That is what makes us different from another country. From my own personal understanding in the wake of 9/11, we probably erred a little too much on the side of physical protection, and we made some compromises.
JC: Guantanamo Bay and things like that?
MP: That kinda thing. I mean broadly speaking.
JC: The Patriot Act.
MP: Yeah, I mean aspects of it. Obviously, we needed to do some things. 9/11 clearly demonstrated that our physical security needed to be improved. And we had to do some things to do that, and we had to take some actions. And some of those things were obviously going to push up against individual rights and other kinds of things, and probably appropriately so. But there wasn’t much of a debate about that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. At least not broadly.
JC I guess that is what I am saying in a way. Hurry and indecision is something I try to avoid in life now. Even in a genuine crisis like 9/11, the hysterical rhetoric of, “We must act now,” often has bad consequences.
MP: The urgent always tends to crowd out the important.
JC: Let’s talk strategically a little bit. Put your Council on Foreign Relations hat on. You were a Colonel. You worked with Army Special Forces, Special Ops. And America now has a good idea of what Special Forces can do with the killing of Bin Laden. When George W. Bush said after 9/11, “We’re going to have a quiet war,” I liked that term, “quiet war,” because I have always believed that if you are going to solve a world problem, do it with a minimal footprint. And I was shocked when the footprint became so large. Looking back at the policy, would a policy based predominantly on Special Forces, more of a “quiet war,” have better solved the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan?
MP: The invasion of Iraq was a huge strategic blunder in my personal view. The jury is obviously still out, but the positive from our experience in Iraq at this point seems to pale in comparison with the negative. So, yeah, if we were going to do something in Iraq, we would have been far better off to do it quietly, covertly, not with a massive infusion of military force. And I think that Afghanistan is probably the same. And I think that because in the case of Afghanistan we have a fundamental mismatch between what our objectives seem to be and what our resources are to be able to achieve those objectives. I think the idea of building a modern national state in Afghanistan is folly, and if that’s what we’re going to try to do, you can’t set an end date on doing it. And it would take a lot more forces and a lot more money to be able to accomplish that. So, yeah, I think that our strategy there ought to be more focused on the counterterrorism aspect and less on the nation-building.
JC: But the problem is there is this view on both sides of the aisle that if you have a huge military, you have to use it. There is something self-perpetuating about large organizations like the military. Is that tendency operative within the armed forces?
MP: If that’s the case, I don’t think it comes from the military. I think it comes from the political side. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Allbright, when she was talking about Bosnia and Kosovo, said, “What have we got this big military for, if we don’t use it?” And I think that kind of capacity is the reason that George W. Bush could invade Iraq because he thought he had the capability to do it. The other thing is that (and this is part of the challenge in Afghanistan), by virtue of its organization, by virtue of the nature of what the military does, and by nature of the people who are in it, they have this can-do attitude -- “Yes sir, yes sir, if you ask me to do it, I’ll get it done one way or the other” -- you end up asking the military to do things that aren’t appropriate for the military to do.
JC: So, it is a political problem in the sense that it’s rooted very deeply in the fact that a lot of defense money flows into the districts of elected officials. Let’s be honest …
MP: Well, in the procurement of weapons for sure.
JC: Yeah, and that’s a big deal because it brings jobs and other benefits. So, how are we ever going to get out of that cycle?
MP: Well, I suspect the budget crisis that we’re facing now is going to put increasing pressure on the defense budget, and frankly, appropriately so from my point of view. And I think that it’s going to be increasingly difficult to protect the defense budget if you're going to cut Medicare and Social Security.
JC: When you look at America right now --- as a Johnnie, you've read Montesquieu on the fall of the Roman empire -- are we at a point where we are falling right into the imperial overreach trap that the great scholars of Rome talked about?
PM: There’s certainly elements of that and I think again that we have, for a whole variety of reasons, pretty much reached the limits of our resources to be able to do these things. We’re going to have to retrench. We don’t have any other choice. But I don’t think we’re beyond recovery. We’re a large society and population. We are still very, very creative. We’re not where we were in comparison to other countries, but I think part of what we have to recognize is that it’s not so much that we’re falling behind, it’s that others are catching up with us. In the post-World-War-II period, we were the richest, we were the largest, and we dominated.
JC: We killed off our economic competitors.
PM: Right. And everybody was so far behind us that we could kind of coast along, but we can’t continue to coast along, because others, the Chinese, the Europeans, they’re catching up. The world is global and talent flows to where the rewards are the greatest and where the opportunities are the greatest. And I think still for the most part that’s the United States. But there are other pockets in the world where talent is interested in flowing, too. Some places in India. Obviously some in China and Europe and others, and so it’s becoming a more equal world from that point of view.
JC: Would you say that we’re moving into a world where what will separate us from our competitors is not so much our military might but what Joseph Nye called our “soft power.” Things like education. Will education be the arbiter?
PM: Yeah, I think education is one of them, but I think, at its root, it’s really about the economy. And that’s why the big question is how do you build the economy of the future? By having educated people. Again, this is why I think a St. John’s education is so appropriate because jobs are going to be increasingly mobile. Increasingly, folks change jobs five, six times in the course of their working lives. How do you make those kinds of transitions? What are the skills that give you the ability to do that? Well, they're the kind of skills that you learn at St. John’s College.
Let me know what you think in the Comments area below. Moreover, feel free to track me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, and follow me on Forbes to receive regular dispatches from the front lines of global education. I am also launching email newsletters on Education, Politics, Culture, and Travel. In addition to summaries and article links, Crotty Newsletter subscribers will receive breaking and market-making news before anyone else. My "Crotty on Education" newsletter, in particular, will include links to videos and podcasts by experts in the field, high-level research reports, plus the invaluable Crotty on Education Stock Index. You can subscribe to Crotty Newsletters here: www.jamescrotty.com/newsletter.htmlWhen I first accepted Islam as a teenager, I became friends with an elderly American man named Curtis Shabbaz. He was ill. Having worked in an asbestos factory in his younger years way before regulation or even knowledge of its dangers, he was later diagnosed with cancer. His wife would drive him to the Masjid on Sundays when he felt well. Only when they arrived he would be so weak that he was unable to exit the car. She would park the car in the direction of the Qibla, and he would pray in the passenger seat all by himself. I would often go out and sit in the car with him, keep him company, and have a pleasant conversation.
One day, while I was asking him about how he grew up and how he found Islam, he asked me what it was I was going to do now that I had become Muslim. He told me “The Imams and teachers of my generation took us as far as they could and they did a good job. But you will need to go and study. You will need pick up where they left off, to go learn Islam from the source,” he said. This was the first time anyone told me about studying Islam. The first I had heard anything about “seeking knowledge” as it were. He continued, “You need to go overseas. Go get this deen and bring it back to the people. And when you’re over there, you’ll find people that will help you, they’ll support you, they’ll equip you with the knowledge you need to bring back to us.” While I was in Medina, I found people that were willing to give us the shirts off their backs, all because we had come to study in the City of the Beloved Prophet. If I told you stories of people’s generosity, you may not believe me.
Abu Harun said: We used to visit Abu Sa’id al-Khudri, and when we would enter upon him he would exclaim “Welcome to the bequest of the Messenger of God! The Messenger of God informed us saying: People will come to you from distant lands to gain understanding [in faith] so welcome them and treat them well.” In another narration he added “…and teach them.”(1)
Br. Curtis was right, we found exactly that. Curtis continued, “When you get back, look for me. I will be there to support you, and so will the Muslims.”
Sadly, Curtis’ Janaza was the first I ever prayed over. I remember crying uncontrollably. Crying inexplicably. I was unable to understand why, but I never forgot the lessons that he taught me in the front seat of his car.
———————-
(1) Narrated by al-Baghawi in Sharh al-Sunnah, with supporting narrations found in Sunan Ibn Majah. The aggregate of these narrations seems Hasan.THE US has carried out new air strikes and aid drops, as Barack Obama vowed to help rescue thousands of civilians besieged by jihadists on an Iraqi mountain.
The US President gave no timetable for the first US operation in Iraq since the last American troops withdrew three years ago and put the onus on Iraqi politicians to form an inclusive government and turn the tide on jihadist expansion.
US forces hit out on the campaign’s second day to protect members of the Yazidi minority, many of whom have been stranded on Mount Sinjar since they fled Islamic State attacks on their homes a week ago.
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US forces “successfully (conducted) four air strikes to defend Yazidi civilians being indiscriminately attacked” near Sinjar, the United States Central Command, which covers the Middle East, said in a statement.
In the first strike, “a mix of US fighters and remotely piloted aircraft struck one of two ISIL armoured personnel carriers firing on Yazidi civilians near Sinjar,” the statement said.
After following the remaining vehicle, a second pair of strikes, around 20 minutes later, hit two more armoured personnel carriers and an armed truck.
The fourth struck another armoured personnel carrier also in the Sinjar area.
US and Iraqi aircraft have also sent planes to deliver food and water to the thousands of people, many of them Yazidi civilians, stranded on the mountain.
The third US airdrop, announced by Centcom late yesterday, sent water and more than 16,000 packaged meals to the besieged civilians.
“The United States can’t just look away. That’s not who we are. We’re Americans. We act. We lead. And that’s what we’re going to do on that mountain,” Obama said.
France and Britain announced that aid consignments of their own were imminent and Australia has been talking to the US about possible participation in humanitarian airdrops.
Two Royal Air Force (RAF) C-130 transport planes took off from Britain carrying reusable filtration containers filled with clean water, tents, tarpaulins and solar lights that can also recharge mobile phones.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was expected in Baghdad and the Iraqi Kurdish city of Arbil later today for talks with his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari and Iraqi Kurdish president Massud Barzani.
He will also oversee the delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians who have fled the advance of the Islamist fighters.
Yazidi MP Vian Dakhil, whose poignant appeal in parliament this week made her the public voice of her community, said time was running out.
“We have one or two days left to help these people. After that they will start dying en masse,” she said.
The Yazidis, who worship a figure associated with the devil by many Muslims, are a small and closed community, one of Iraq’s most vulnerable minorities.
After a first day of US air raids on fighters who had moved within striking distance of Kurdistan, a top official in the autonomous region said the time had come for a fightback but there was no immediate sign that was happening.
Obama said he had authorised the strikes in Iraq to protect US personnel serving there.
“And, if necessary, that’s what we will continue to do,” he said.
Federal and Kurdish officials, who had been at loggerheads since IS fighters launched their an offensive exactly two months ago that has brought Iraq to the brink of partition, have said they were now working together and with US advisers.
But it remained unclear how much longer and how much deeper inside Iraq US warplanes would intervene and Obama stressed the real game-changer would be the much-delayed formation of an inclusive government.
Until then, he said, “it is very hard to get a unified effort by Iraqis against” IS.
Many Iraqis see Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as partly responsible for the conflict by institutionalising sectarianism.
Washington, Tehran, the Shiite religious leadership and much of his own party have pulled their support but he has dug his heels in and apparently not yet given up on seeking a third term.
Up to 100,000 Christians were forced to flee from their homes in a matter of hours on Thursday, completely emptying the country’s largest Christian city Qaraqosh of its population.
Among the hundreds of thousands of people who fled their homes in northern Iraq were several other minorities such as the Shabak and Turkmen Shiites.
UNESCO chief Irina Bokova called it an “emerging cultural cleansing”.
“The US should strike Sinjar, even if there are civilian casualties. It’s better than letting everyone die,” Vian Dakhil said.
Obama said he was confident the US could prevent IS fighters “from going up the mountain and slaughtering the people who are there” but added the next step of creating a safe passage was “logistically complicated”.
The International Rescue Committee is providing emergency care to around 4000 people who crossed safely into neighbouring Syria.Dylan Buell/Getty Images
The Cleveland Browns have talent, and real, honest potential.
I know that might be a little difficult to absorb after they just made the worst kind of history by losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers 28-24, becoming only the second team to post an 0-16 record.
Entertaining any positive Browns thoughts requires even more mental gymnastics when looking beyond 2017. After all, we're talking about a team that flirted with a winless year in 2016 and finished the job in the most depressingly Browns-ian way possible in 2017. Wide receiver Corey Coleman dropped what should have been a routine fourth-down catch, ending a potential game-winning drive late in the fourth quarter Sunday.
There are two images now forever etched into Browns history, and they should be plastered all over the factory of sadness. The first is of Coleman's slippery fingers:
And the second is Coleman being consoled shortly after, when he looked like a little leaguer who just dropped a fly ball that cost his team a championship:
But it's more than just New Year's Eve cheer or the lingering festive spirit of the holiday season making me urge you to still embrace happy Browns thoughts in this dark time. It's also the tiniest victory.
Even though they were terrible, even though they've gone 1-31 during the Hue Jackson era, and even though they're about to have the first overall pick in two straight drafts, the Browns still didn't field the worst team in league history.
Hooray?
The Browns and 2008 Detroit Lions are now tied together forever as the only teams to go through the soul-shattering misery of a winless 16-game season.
The 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were taunted by a zero in their win column all year too. But the Bucs' bumbling came during an expansion year, a time when putrid play is expected and excused more easily. And more importantly for any comparison to modern times, in 1976 the schedule was only 14 games. The Lions and Browns, meanwhile, had to be extra terrible while losing two more games in their historically awful seasons.
It really isn't close in |
major club side, but he stuck with it because he was sure his team was on the cusp of winning something big.
Germany’s long wait for a title was really supposed to end two years ago, in the European Championships in Poland and Ukraine. Germany beat Portugal, the Netherlands, and Denmark in the group stage and crushed Greece in the quarterfinal. Their eyes were on the final against Spain, the team that had beaten them in the final of Euro 2008 and in the semifinal of the 2010 World Cup. This time it was going to be different.
Except Germany ran straight into an Italian sucker punch in the semifinal. Italy had the craft and cunning of Antonio Cassano and Andrea Pirlo, the stubbly ruthlessness of Giorgio Chiellini and Gianluigi Buffon, the explosive speed and power of Mario Balotelli. They made Germany look like a bunch of college kids.
A nation struggled to come to terms with defeat. How could this have happened? Where was the guile? Where was the power? And a familiar theme began to emerge: Where were the leaders? Where were the Real Men?
* * *
The question of why Germany no longer wins has many answers. The simplest explanation is that other teams, such as Spain and Italy, have been better. (Particularly Spain. Germany might have dodged a bullet or four by losing that 2012 semifinal. Spain had been saving its best for the final. It was Italy’s worst defeat in 55 years.)
As an answer, “Spain is just better” might be correct, but it’s too simple to be satisfying. So a debate has developed around the personal qualities of this generation of German players as compared with the serial winners of the past. As Lothar Matthäus recently told World Soccer magazine: “[T]he only thing we lack is the nasty characters.”
When Matthäus talks about nasty characters, he means guys like him. Someone who is prepared to do what it takes. Most of all, someone who is prepared to lead. There is a special vocabulary for this. The usual German word for “leader,” Führer, isn’t used much in this context. Instead, people complain about the lack of a Führungsspieler (leader-player), Führungsfigur (leader-figure), and sometimes even Leitwolf—literally “lead wolf.”
Germany once drew on an apparently inexhaustible supply of Leitwolfs. The 1982 squad alone had men like Matthäus, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Felix Magath, Uli Stielike, and Paul Breitner, any one of whom would probably have been the captain and undisputed alpha male in any other squad. The center-forward was Horst Hrubesch, whose mere name sounded like it would probably beat you in an arm-wrestling contest. Hrubesch’s nickname was “the Header Monster.”
Mesut Özil runs with the ball during a friendly against Cameroon on June 1, 2014, in Moenchengladbach, Germany. Photo by Boris Streubel/Getty Images
The difference between the old-school German teams and the team of today is best summed up by the contrast between someone like Hrubesch and Mesut Özil, the skillful Turkish-German playmaker who would have been prevented from representing the sides Hrubesch played in by the old German nationality laws.
Özil is so gifted that everything he does on the field looks absolutely effortless. This is both his blessing and his curse. When things are going against his team, some fans have a tendency to become irritated by the fact that Özil, with his drooping eyelids and slouching shoulders, looks like he doesn’t care enough. Özil’s Körpersprache—his body language—has become the focus of national debate.
In May, Löw told Kicker magazine that Özil needed to work on that body language. Then the former national team captain Michael Ballack chimed in, repeating that Özil needed to massively improve his body language.
Nobody had ever questioned Ballack’s body language. But then Ballack is more in the traditional Leitwolf mold: 6 feet, 2 inches with a highlight reel full of 30-yard shots and massive leaping headers. His shoulders were probably physically incapable of slouching at an Özil-ian angle.
The current German captain, Philipp Lahm, has taken issue with the principle that every good team needs a Leitwolf. The German team that failed at Euro 2004 had two: Michael Ballack and Oliver Kahn (a Kinski-like figure who can easily be imagined in a steel helmet, tossing a monkey into a river).
Analyzing Germany’s 2004 group stage exit, Lahm wrote in his 2011 autobiography that their failure had demonstrated the bankruptcy of the principle of the “so-called Führungsspieler.” The problem, according to Lahm, was that if all the authority was bound up with the coach and the on-field Leitwolf, the other players were not encouraged to step up and take responsibility. “It’s becoming apparent that a new way of thinking, a commitment to collective responsibility, to flatter hierarchies, is necessary in order to be successful in modern football.”
The problem is that so far, flatter hierarchies haven’t won any trophies for Germany. Annoying as it is for Lahm to have to listen to the old-timers grumbling that he and his teammates aren’t mean enough (meaning man enough) to do it, the only way to shut them up is to win the World Cup.
Löw is also a flat-hierarchies man. Asked by those great chroniclers of the German World Cup adventure, Nivea Men, whether he assessed candidates for his squad purely on footballing ability, he gave a thoughtful response:
Of course, that’s very important. Can the player implement what the coach is looking for? But when you’re at a tournament like the World Cup, you also ask: Which players can give us energy? Which players are tolerant of frustration, if they sometimes don’t play? Which players can promote competition, which players can withstand it? And: Which players are perhaps a little too egotistical? We are away with a big group for several weeks. … For this team, there are certain values to be considered: respect, tolerance, discipline, reliability, integrity, humility, ability to concentrate. If a player has flaws in these areas, the group suffers.
You wonder whether Löw is quite sure what he’s looking for. On the one hand, Özil has been criticized for not strutting about the field like a Leitwolf. On the other hand, the coach says he’s looking for sociable, well-adjusted types who won’t kick up any trouble during five weeks on the road.
If Werner Herzog had cast his movies according to the Löw rulebook, Klaus Kinski would plainly have been the last man on earth he’d have hired. And quite possibly nobody outside the German-speaking world would ever have watched Aguirre.
It’s not as though there’s an actual footballing Kinski out there who’s been excluded by Löw for being unable to get on with his teammates. It’s more the romantic ideal of what Kinski represents—the ungovernable passion, the untrammeled egotism, the demonic energy—that feels like it’s been forgotten about.
All these qualities were evident in the Germanies of Breitner, Rummenigge, Matthäus, even Klinsmann. They have not yet shone through in the Germany of Lahm, Özil, Schweinsteiger, and Mertesacker.
The ongoing preoccupation with the Führungsspieler and the Leitwolf reflects a widespread suspicion among Germans that their team is simply too nice. Can Löw solve the problem by getting them to be even nicer?
Read all of Slate’s World Cup 2014 coverage.Ohio voters will decide this fall whether to legalize marijuana in the Buckeye State for recreational and medical use.
ResponsibleOhio's marijuana legalization constitutional amendment was certified Wednesday by the Ohio secretary of state. It will appear as Issue 3 on the statewide ballot for the general election on Nov. 3.
If approved by voters, Ohio would be the fifth state to legalize marijuana for recreational use and the first to do so without first having a medical marijuana program.
"It's time for marijuana legalization in Ohio, and voters will have the opportunity to make it happen this November — we couldn't be more excited," ResponsibleOhio Executive Director Ian James said in a statement. "Drug dealers don't care about doing what's best for our state and its citizens. By reforming marijuana laws in November, we'll provide compassionate care to sick Ohioans, bring money back to our local communities and establish a new industry with limitless economic development opportunities." – Cleveland.com, Aug. 12, 2015
On the surface, Ohio looks like a strong candidate to join the list of states allowing legal recreational marijuana. Look deeper and you will find a more complicated story.
"ResponsibleOhio" is a noble-sounding name for a group of investors who seek a state-enforced monopoly on growing marijuana in Ohio. They wrote the proposed constitutional amendment and collected the signatures to get it on the ballot because they believe it will make them rich.
If the amendment passes, ten specific companies will have their sites written in Ohio's constitution as the state's only legal marijuana growers. They see enough profit potential to have invested $20 million just in the campaign to pass the amendment.
Profit seeking is not wrong per se, but it becomes so when it relies on state power to restrict competition. That is what ResponsibleOhio's amendment will do.
Who will own these monopolies? Ten companies whose ownership hides behind corporate veils. So not only is the group asking Ohio residents to grant it a monopoly, it asks them to grant a monopoly to unknown parties. This seems like a recipe for trouble.
The Ohio legislature, displeased by this, will have its own amendment on the same ballot to prohibit constitutionally guaranteed monopolies. If both proposals pass, the Ohio Constitution will then contain mutually exclusive amendments. Months of court drama will then follow.
Of course, none of this would be happening if the Ohio legislature would respect its voters enough to legalize marijuana without granting monopolies. That is apparently too hard.
There is one positive bit of news in all this, though. The fact that statist groups like ResponsibleOhio want to coopt the legal marijuana movement is evidence it is on the road to success. Pro-legalization should move forward confidently and not let powerful corporate interests take over the process.Well, Wikileaks has done it again. Not being content with having shown video of a turkey shooting in Baghdad–oh, wait a moment–those weren’t turkeys, those were REUTERS NEWS MEN!–they now have had the effrontery to publish 92,000 documents concerning our wartime activities in Afghanistan. 92,000! This makes the 4100 pages of the Pentagon Papers look like small potatoes. You couldn’t do this before the Interwebs! Let’s hear it for technology!
As for what’s in those documents, God only knows. WhoTF has even read them yet? I mean, this makes the last couple of Harry Potter books look like Victoria’s Secret flyers! Wikileaks founder Julian Assange tells us that there is evidence of war crimes there. The Guardian–the British newspaper given advance looks at the stuff–says there no such thing. But one thing, they and the NYTimes and Der Spiegel agree on–it’s worse than we were told.
The White House is making sure that everyone knows that the bulk of these documents deal with things that happened B.O.–Before Obama! But if this was the situation B.O., WTF are we still doing there now? The Pentagon, sharp as ever, wants to remind everyone that no one vetted these documents. Hell, back in the good ol’ days when Stan McChrystal was in charge, the Army vetted all leaks!
As for the reaction of the American public, who knows? The loudest shouters are so far, and have always been, the people who think we’re at war in Afghanistan because THEY ATTACKED US! Wait a minute, that war was over seven years ago–and WE WON! But perhaps these documents may convince more people that the reason for being in Afghanistan vanished a long time ago and–like the guy at last call who hasn’t left yet–the reason we’re still there is because we’re too drunk to see where the door is.
But I doubt it–the size of the leak is too vast for anyone to get a handle on it and its sheer weight will dull its own impact. As for war crimes–hey, there’s only a couple of them in there and they’re just little ones anyway! Besides, it’s war! You can’t make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs!
I’m afraid we’ll be eating that Afghan Omelet for some time. And it will be about as appetizing as eating my Aunt Margie’s Afghan.
No cartoon next week–I’m taking time off and going to Otakon! Have fun y’all and try to stay out of the heat!
CommentsA House Republican this week introduced legislation to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The Wasteful EPA Programs Elimination Act of 2017, declared Rep. Sam Johnson (Texas), is a "commonsense bill does right by the hardworking Americans." According to a press statement from Johnson, the legislation "would terminate or eliminate federal funding for 13 wasteful EPA programs, would close all EPA field offices, and require the EPA to lease or sell all underutilized properties."
Among the programs it would kill are environmental justice programs and all EPA grant programs. It would strip funding for the greenhouse gas reporting program, regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, regulating greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants; and climate research at the EPA's Office of Research and Development.
The Hill writes that it "is modeled after a report from the Heritage Foundation," a conservative think tank. It also regurgitates a failed bill Johnson introduced in 2015, which Bloomberg BNA described at the time as "the anti-EPA bill to end all anti-EPA bills."
The Center for Responsive Politics, using data from the Federal Election Commission, reveals that Johnson has received $586,600 from the oil and gas industries from 1991-2016.
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His, however, is far from the only recent threat to the agency.
Last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) introduced legislation to kill the EPA entirely. Beyond that, Trump's pick to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has been described as a "fossil fuel industry puppet" and climate change denialist who fought EPA regulations.
And Myron Ebell, the former head of Trump's transition team at the EPA, said to the Associated Press two weeks ago that the administration may pursue slashing the agency's workforce by half—or perhaps more. Further, AP writes: "Ebell suggested it was reasonable to expect the president to seek a cut of about $1 billion from the EPA's roughly $8 billion annual budget."
While Rep. Johnson argued that gutting the EPA was in the public's interest, BillMoyers.com reporter John Light explores how doing so is anything but, as it threatens public health and people's lives.Three months following the ratification of a new collective bargaining agreement, two key members of the MLS Players Union’s front office, including U.S. National Soccer Hall of Fame defender Eddie Pope, are leaving to join sports marketing powerhouse Octagon. The division established next month by Pope and MLSPU staff counsel Mike Senkowski may shake up the North American player representation landscape, which is dominated by Wasserman Media Group and James Grant Sports.
Pope and Senkowski will work out of Octagon’s headquarters in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., as directors of the firm’s new North American soccer practice. According to Octagon’s website, it currently represents around 900 athletes and sports and media personalities around the world, manages more than 13,000 events annually from 68 offices and is responsible for approximately $3 billion in sponsorship spending. NBA MVP Stephen Curry, swimmer Michael Phelps and six-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson are among the athletes in Octagon’s portfolio.
The company hasn’t done much with soccer, however. It managed World Cup sponsorships for MasterCard, Budweiser and Johnson & Johnson, among others. Octagon also represents Liverpool and England forward Daniel Sturridge and NBC pundit Graeme Le Saux, a former Chelsea, Blackburn Rovers and England defender.
Pope and Senkowski hope to bring Octagon’s size and influence to bear in North America, and eventually beyond.
“An opportunity was presented to us, a really good opportunity, and it was just too good to pass up,” Pope told SI.com. “The ability to run a soccer division, essentially build my own business at a large company, it was just really hard to pass up.”
A three-time World Cup veteran and three-time MLS champion, Pope retired following the 2007 season and has spent some eight years as a liaison between the MLS player pool and MLSPU office. As Director of Player Relations, the North Carolina graduate visits every club every year and is available to players who have questions about their contracts or career. He’s played a role in two CBA negotiations.
“The phone calls that you get in my position, any problem that any player could ever come up with, I’ve probably had to deal with it and counsel that player and tried to help them get through that issue,” Pope said. “If a player were to retire and come to me and say, ‘I want to become an agent,’ my advice would be to go work at the Union for five years and get that experience. You’re forced to deal with everything … You’re touching almost every aspect of the business from both sides of the business—from the league side of the fence and player side of the fence.”
Senkowski earned his law degree from American University and spent time at Creative Artists Agency and the NFL Players Association before joining the MLSPU, where he monitors CBA compliance, reviews contracts, represents players with grievances and helps them prepare for upcoming contract negotiations.
Asked for comment, MLSPU executive director Bob Foose said the departure of Pope and Senkowski was amicable. Pope said the MLSPU’s main priority over the next year would be to help players adjust to the new CBA—to “really dig into the weeds of everything and educate everyone”—while preparing for the league’s first foray into free agency this winter.
“I am grateful for all of the great work Eddie and Mike did on behalf of players in their years at the Union,” Foose said. “It was a pleasure working with them both and I wish them the best of luck in their new venture."MOUNT CARMEL TOWNSHIP — A woman was found dead after getting her arm caught in a clothing drop-off bin, leaving her dangling for more than six hours.
Judith Permar, 56, died from a combination of trauma and possible hypothermia, according to Northumberland County Coroner James Kelley.
Permar used a step stool to reach the bin when her arm became stuck and the stool collapsed — her feet dangling just above the ground, PennLive reported. She broke her left arm and wrist, which prevented her from escaping, authorities said.
Investigators believe the woman went to the bin around 2 a.m. Sunday. The bin is located on Route 54 in Natalie.
She was found around 8:30 a.m. and pronounced dead at the scene.
The coroner ruled the cause of her death accidental.
Permar’s son said she always wanted to help the less fortunate and constantly donated to those clothing bins.
Her son says in honor of his mother’s giving heart, the family welcomes anyone who would like to attend her funeral service this Friday at the Stutz Funeral Home in Mount Carmel.
Her daughter, Angela Minnig, posted a message about her mother to Facebook following the news of her death:
“To the friends and family of Judy Permar: “I know it’s in the paper and it’s beginning to spread on social media, but for those who do not know; On Sunday morning my Mother passed away. It was very sudden and our family will learn to coupe with the loss of such an amazing Wife, Mother, Sister, and Friend. We will be updating everyone on her viewing and wish all who knew her to visit and pay her respects. She was such a fun loving person and we know it would mean the world to her to say ‘See you Again.'”
Services for Permar will start with a viewing at 10 a.m. with her funeral to follow after.
The Stutz Funeral Home is located at 40 South Market Street in Mount Carmel.
In lieu of flowers, her family asks people make donations to their local SPCA or animal shelter as Judith was an animal lover.KIEV –
Several dozen Ukrainian nationalists stormed a tent encampment of ultra-Orthodox visitors in Uman over the weekend, destroying equipment and dismantling parts of the fence surrounding it. A police force was dispatched to the area, but according to witnesses, the officers failed to intervene.
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"On Shabbat, when they knew we wouldn’t be able to respond or activate the communication device, they simply knocked down the fence, pushed the light poles and security cameras and caused damage estimated at half a million dollars," Eliezer Kirshboim, chairman and director of the Jewish association in Uman told Yedioth Ahronoth. "We are approaching the High Holidays, and this disrupts all our work arrangements."
Brutal Beating Dutch Holocaust survivors assaulted Itamar Eichner The Jewish community in Amsterdam is in an uproar after an elderly Jewish couple who survived the Holocaust was severely beaten in their home while being called ‘dirty Jews.' Dutch Holocaust survivors assaulted
Although the information about the incident was transferred to the highest diplomatic ranks, no suspects have been arrested yet.
Kirshboim added that anti-Semitic right-wing activists were seeking to "harass the Jewish Hasidim" in order to gain political points among the local public. "Whoever harasses the Hasidim more has a better chance of winning the elections in October," he said.
Jewish pilgrims in Uman. 'Their goal is that the Hasidim won't come to Ukraine at all (Archive photo: AFP)
According to Kirshboim, the current mayor was "appointed" by members of the nationalist Svoboda party following the revolution in Ukraine. "There is crazy state of anarchy here," he said. "All they want is a bribe and to prove that they are harassing Hasidim."
The Hasidim say that although they recently invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the city's development, the authorities are still hostile towards them. "We are under the impression that their goal is that the Hasidim won't come to Ukraine at all," Kirshboim said.
Attorney Genadi Beloritski, who represents the Hasidim, explained that although they have made a great contribution to the city's development, the nationalistic groups have a lot of influence on the local authorities and continue to disrupt their activity in the area.
As an example, he pointed to the fact that the authorities have failed to grant the Hasidic tent encampment license, although the Hasidim own 70 percent of its area.The Central Board of Film Certification’s website does not have any information about the films it has certified for the last one and a half years. No censorship data for films released after mid-2015 is indexed on the Board’s website. Before then, the Board had been uploading the “cut-list” for films that it had been certifying on its website.
In response to an RTI application filed, the CBFC denied this, and said that “Information is being uploaded on [the] website,” and the fact that this information is not available for titles released after mid-2015 is “not true”. Interestingly, the Board also declined to give the censorship data it is claiming to be uploading, saying that the “data [is] not available”. Right before this story went live, the censor board’s website announced that all data will be uploaded next month, in February.
When Pahlaj Nihalani took office as CBFC chairman in early 2015, he placed an embargo on censor certificates being made available online for two weeks after certification, according to a report by the Hindustan Times. In the same report, which came out on October 2016, he is quoted as saying that the embargo was later lifted, and that all certification data was now being uploaded online immediately.
As of 8th January 2017, no information on titles certified after July 2015 is available on the CBFC website. This is contrary to the CBFC’s response to the RTI application and the chairman’s claim. Just days after the Board replied to the RTI application falsely claiming that information was being uploaded on the website, it seems to have backtracked.
Since March last year, the censor board has been discussing the revamp and redesign of their website going live next month, according to minutes of a meeting published by the Board last year. Other digitisation efforts that they are undertaking include getting encrypted versions of all films they certify to prevent piracy from their end.
***
Here are the questions asked the RTI application:
Please provide the following information. Concerned authority is Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).
i) Whether a digital database of all certification records exists.
ii) If not, whether CBFC has any plans to create such a database.
iii) Reason for non-availability of any certification records after beginning of 2015 on CBFC website.
iv) Whether there are any plans by CBFC to upload the information of these records on the website.
v) Whether CBFC has any IT officer to manage digital records of CBFC, including certificate details.
vi) Physical location of certificate data on the website–whether it is in NIC server or CBFC server.
vii) Please provide full copy of all available digital certificate records that are available on the website in the form of a CD.
The responses from the CBFC are provided below:Mumbai: Ramraje Nimbalkar, senior Nationalist Congress Party leader, was declared elected unopposed as the new chairman of the Maharashtra Legislative Council here on Friday.
The development followed a surprise decision by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena to "boycott" the election earlier today.
BJP's Eknath Khadse and Sena's Ramdas Kadam, both senior ministers in Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis's cabinet, jointly made the announcement of their party's decision, paving the way for Nimbalkar's unopposed election to the august post.
"We stand united on this... there is no question of supporting either the Congress of Nationalist Congress Party... hence we have decided to boycott the election," Khadse told media persons near the state legislature.
The chairman's election was necessitated after council chairman Shivajirao Deshmukh in an unprecedented no-confidence motion was voted out of the office. The veteran Congress leader held the august post in the upper house for 11 years.
The decision smoothened the way for Ramraje Nimbalkar, given the arithmetic in the 78-member house.
The NCP enjoys a brute strength of 28, followed by the Congress (21), BJP (12), Shiv Sena (seven), and the rest belonging to other parties.
On March 19, the Shiv Sena had attempted to corner ally BJP by fielding Neelam Gorhe for the post in what would have become a four-cornered contest comprising Gorhe, NCP's Nimbalkar, Congress' Sharad Ranpise and an Independent from Amravati teachers' constituency, Shrikant Deshpande.
In the March 16 voting on the no-confidence motion against Deshmukh, the opposition NCP was virtually "helped" by the BJP to defeat the Congress amidst charges that the BJP and NCP had already arrived at an "understanding" over the issue.
Nimbalkar, hailing from the erstwhile royal family of Phaltan in Satara district that had close relations with the Chhatrapati Shivaji clan, is considered a protege of NCP supremo Sharad Pawar.
Chief Minister Fadnavis and other leaders hailed Nimbalkar's election and paid glowing tributes to his long experience as a legislator and minister.Final Fantasy: Memory of Heroes is a book consisting of three short stories written by Umemura Takashi, each a retelling of one of the three first Final Fantasy games. It was released on 31st October 2012.[1]
The four Warriors of Light from the original Final Fantasy game are named in the novelization:
Zest, the Fighter
Sauber, the Thief
Floe, the White Mage
Daewoo, the Black Mage
Contents show]
Story Edit
The four Warriors of Light awaken in a field not knowing who they are, where they're from and what they're doing there. Each bears a crystal shard, and they know they can rely on each other. The group decides to head for the nearest human habitation, which turns out to be the city of Cornelia, where they are identified as the Warriors of Light and take on the task to defeat the rogue knight Garland and save Princess Sarah.
After doing so the four are advised to head where the earth is dying. They eventually take control of a ship and reach Melmond. They defeat the Vampire, and discover that more must be done to heal the land. They find Lich by the Earth Crystal who is defeated and the Earth Crystal regains its light. It tells the Warriors that they must bring back the light of the three other crystals as well.
The next destination is Crescent Lake, where the Warriors of Light receive advice from the Circle of Sages. They head to Mount Gulg, take down Marilith, and return the light of the Fire Crystal. Discouraged by the task ahead, they nevertheless unearth an ancient airship with a stone found by the Fire Crystal, and on their way north encounter a huge dragon in the skies.
The dragon presents them a task: to bring proof of their courage from the Citadel of Trials in exchange for more strength to complete their journey. The Warriors succeed, and emboldened by their success, reach Onrac. The city at first offers them nothing, but a strange girl asks if they are going to save the mermaids. After some hesitation, the Warriors agree to follow her, and the girl guides them to a huge barrel they can use to travel to the temple where the Water Crystal lies, the oxyale needed to breathe underwater, and instructions to save the crystal so that the mermaids may live.
Despite their doubts the Warriors soon discover that mermaids do in fact live in the temple, and that in its deepest parts lives Kraken, guarding the crystal. The Warriors head on, chop Kraken to pieces and return the light of the Water Crystal.
Onwards on their journey, the Warriors end up in the town of Lufenia whose people used to rule the skies where the Wind Crystal lies. The Lufenians guide them to the Mirage Tower that was used in ancient times to reach the Flying Fortress they used to live in. The Warriors climb the tower and encounter its guardian robots who have been waiting for a challenger for Tiamat ever since the Lufenians left the fortress.
The robots show the Warriors recorded events of the day the fortress was evacuated by Cid, and activate the teleporter so they can head for the fortress themselves. The Warriors use it, and soon encounter Tiamat. The many-headed dragon is not an easy opponent but it eventually goes down, and the Wind Crystal regains its light. Instead of telling them that their job is done, the crystal urges the Warriors of Light to vanquish darkness from the world.
Stumped, the Warriors exit the fortress and end up at Crescent Lake whose sages guide them to the Chaos Shrine where they find a portal that takes them through time to the shrine 2,000 years in the past. The past world is bright and almost hurts their eyes. At the entrance, the Warriors find the four Chaoses they defeated. Both sides are confused, with the Chaoses accusing the Warriors of Light of having come to destroy the era of light, while the Warriors accuse the Chaoses of plotting to destroy the world.
Garland enters and reveals himself to be the mastermind behind everything, and absorbs the four Chaoses, becoming monster-shaped himself. His powers are unimaginable, and the Warriors are soon defeated. Zest, the warrior, refuses to lose. He rises up and calls for power. The crystal shards respond to his call and form a multi-elemental sword of light, and he defeats Chaos with it.
The Warriors slumber in the light. Before losing consciousness, Zest wishes the four of them the best in their new adventures together.
Destiny must never be left to chance, no one knows what the future holds except the Wild Rose.
A world of light, and a world of darkness, joining forces to stop the Cloud destroying the land.
This article or section is a stub in Final Fantasy: Memory of Heroes. You can help the Final Fantasy Wiki by expanding it
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This is the only time the original Four Warriors of Light are given names.
Each Fiend has a unique, and in some cases, even graphic death.Microsoft has been on a roll lately. Its massive Windows 10 update ‘Threshold 2’ has far more good features than bad ones, the ‘free upgrade’ rules have been improved and even Microsoft’s Black Friday 2015 deals are surprisingly great. But a new discovery has been made which isn’t good news - at all…
Earlier this month Microsoft finally went on record admitting that automatic spying within Windows 10 cannot be stopped. This sparked a lot of outrage and with ‘Threshold 2’ it appeared Microsoft had done a sharp U-turn because the background service at the heart tracking (the ‘Diagnostics Tracking Service’ aka ‘DiagTrack’) appeared to have been removed. Critics celebrated and it was another well deserved pat on the back for Microsoft.
Except it turns out Microsoft had just been very sneaky. What Tweakhound discovered and was subsequently confirmed by BetaNews, is Microsoft simply renamed DiagTrack. It is now called the ‘Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service’ - which is both a) deliberately vague, and b) misleading (don’t ‘Connected User Experiences’ sound great).
Even sneakier is, in being renamed, Microsoft also reset users preferences. Those who dug deep into the Windows 10 registry to disable DiagTrack will find it has been re-enabled now it is called the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service. Yes, tracking is back and without any warning and your preferences were irrelevant.
The good news is you can disable the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service the same way as DiagTrack:
Hold down the Windows key and tap the R key In the box that opens type ‘services.msc’ and press the Enter key In the ‘Services (Local)’ section locate ‘Connected User Experiences and Telemetry’ and double-click it In the ‘Service status’ section click ‘Stop’ Under the ‘Startup type’ drop down menu select ‘Disabled’ and then confirm this and close the window by clicking ‘OK’
Note: it is advisable to disable Not delete the service. Deleting it can cause problems
So what is Microsoft thinking here? I've reached out to the company but, despite recognising my enquiry, it has yet to issue a statement. I'll update this post when it does.
While Microsoft thinks about what to say, I'd say the problem with the DiagTrack rebrand is the company wasn’t thinking. Subtle under the hood changes will always be picked up for such a high profile product. That said such a move is consistent with the negatives in Threshold 2 namely: it resets many user preferences (including basics like your preferred web browser) if they weren’t Microsoft product/services as well as silently deleting third party system monitoring apps like: CPU-Z, speccy, 8gadgetpack, SpyBot, HWMonitor and more.
In my opinion it is this kind of overriding desire for control and a disregard for user choices which is harming Windows 10. At its core Windows 10 is a modern and highly capable platform, but it has been buried under ludicrous layers of control. Worst still it has created a two tier customer base where consumers are forced to take updates which businesses can delay, effectively turning everyday users into bug testers for corporations.
It all feels unsavoury and unnecessary and (while it could be coincidence) there has been a dramatic slowdown in Windows 10 growth after an explosive beginning. For the first ever Free version of Windows, that’s not great.
How can Microsoft reignite the love for Windows 10? I’d say a good start would be to stop doing daft things like this…
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More On Forbes
Microsoft ‘Black Friday’ 2015 Deals Are Surprisingly Great
Microsoft Makes Windows 10 ‘Free Upgrade’ Rule Changes
Microsoft Makes Windows 10 Upgrades Automatic For Windows 7 And Windows 8
Microsoft Admits Windows 10 Automatic Spying Cannot Be StoppedSEVRAN, France — The last will and testament of Quentin Roy, a good-looking 23-year-old from the Paris suburb of Sevran, was written in neat blue biro on a piece of paper torn from a notebook. He gave instructions for his Samsung tablet to be given to fellow fighters, and listed mobile phone numbers for “Maman” and “Papa” so that his parents could be informed of his death via Whatsapp.
Véronique Roy, who sells advertising for health magazines, received a photograph of her son’s will on January 14. The Islamic State member who sent it added that Quentin had blown himself up in Iraq, “martyred on the soil of the caliphate.”
Sevran, an unloved town a 20-minute train ride from Gare du Nord, has seen 15 of its young men depart for Iraq or Syria since 2014. Nine are now believed dead, according to Véronique and Thierry Roy, who are in touch with families in the same situation.
When Quentin left Sevran in September 2014, his parents recalled that many young men from the local housing estates had sounded impressed.
“So he’s gone to look for a life,” was a common refrain. “Respect, man. He’s got balls.”
Sevran lies in the banlieues, the French word for “suburb” that has come to serve as shorthand for the poverty, crime and failed integration that have blighted the edges of French cities for decades.
Cities minister Patrick Kanner estimates there are “a hundred” French neighborhoods that bear a resemblance to Molenbeek, the Brussels district now globally infamous as a jihadist breeding ground. Sevran is high on the list.
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going to involve VAT in some shape or form. There are specific exceptions of course, education and training are, for example, VAT exempt in the UK. Most goods have VAT included in the price you pay at the checkout and that’s as true for fiat as it is for bitcoin.
In almost all cases then, what you buy online in the EU will have VAT charged at the rate of the country it is being consumed in. Businesses who wish to recoup business-to-business VAT expenditures at a later date will indeed have to provide full disclosure, but for the average consumer the only real question remains, which country are they purchasing from? And whilst that’s a little bit more tricky, establishing a person’s country of residence is hardly a definitive way of establishing their actual identity. According to the explanatory notes:
“When services are supplied to a customer via his fixed land line, the customer is presumed to be actually located there and the supplier will be able to rely on that (regardless of whether the fixed land line belongs to that supplier or to a third party). A definition of ‘over the top’ services can be found in point 1.6. Explanatory Notes – published 3 April 2014 unless he can rebut this presumption on the basis of three items of evidence.”
In other words, in all likelihood the company will look at the IP of the customer and assume that they are living in that particular country unless some effort is made on the part of the consumer to offer a rebuttal. That such a rebuttal requires “the billing address, bank details and other commercially relevant information indicating another Member State than that of the fixed land line,” is besides the point.
The bottom line
VAT rates in the EU range from 17% at their lowest in Luxembourg to 27% in countries such as Hungary, but the addition of sample reduced rates, wherein certain goods such as children’s clothes are charged at a lower rate complicates things; generally the SRR ranges from 0% in Denmark to 15% in Norway, averaging out at 8% across all 23 member states.
Added into this mix is the fact that some states allow for different exemptions than others. It’s a mess really and highlights the need to move towards true federalism. So ordering $100 worth of e-books whilst enjoying a weekend in your Luxembourg summer house will be exactly $3 cheaper than if you ordered them in your London home. It all adds up I suppose, but for the private consumer — especially the ones who can afford a summer house in Luxembourg — the new rules are largely irrelevant. For now, bitcoin transactions across Europe for electronic goods simply require a point of origin marker.
With the online marketplace dominated by companies like Amazon, who do not as of yet accept bitcoin, this ruling should barely raise the hackles of even the most ardent bitcoin enthusiast. In truth, this legislation is directed at such companies who up until now have processed their purchases in countries of low VAT. For the rest of us, it amounts to little more than an inconvenience — and at times, barely even that.
Ian Jackson is an Inside Bitcoins correspondent based in the U.K.
Photo credit:”EU Stars” via eu-academia.org"Hey, Hanky Panky. It’s nice to see you back on the scoresheet."
"Yeah, well. I was just saving myself for the REAL playoffs, ya know?"
(Photo by Jeff Vinnick/NHLI via Getty Images)
Game Day Recon: Western Conference Final Game 1 – Sharks @ Canucks
After getting only one day off between rounds 1 and 2, the Vancouver Canucks got 5 full days between closing out their series agains the Predators, then starting today against the Sharks in the Western Conference Final. The Canucks certainly needed the rest to heal a few bruised bodies.
But will the time off hurt the Canucks game rhythm, or will the rest give them what they need to get everyone healthy again?
Broadcast Info
Game Time: 5:00 PM PT
TV: CBC Radio: Team1040
The Intel
The Vancouver Canucks were nursing a few injuries after knocking off the Predators in six games. Chris Higgins was bothered by a sore foot after blocking a shot in game 5. Mikael Samuelsson is hurt and still out of the lineup. And Henrik Sedin was clearly nursing a sore hamstring or groin. All three were noticeably absent from several practices, obviously resting up as much as possible.
The biggest surprise the Canucks got during their time off was the appearance of Manny Malhotra on-ice, skating with his teammates. Malhotra was wearing a full clear cage, and wasn’t wearing any pads, but his presence was clearly a massive lift for the Canucks. While it is extremely doubtful, if not impossible, that Malhotra would return to the lineup this spring, speculation began to mount as to the possibilty of Malhotra coming back. It might be a little smoke and mirrors from the Canucks, it might be a little trickery. In fact, we KNOW it is. But this time of year, anything is possible.
The Canucks now face a team with plenty of offense depth, much like they saw when they played the Blackhawks, when Chicago had three full lines with the potential to score. Just like Chicago, these Sharks have that same potential, and are very deep at the center position. It will be an interesting matchup all series long to see how the Canucks defensive depth matches up against the Sharks offensive depth, as the Canucks are able to send out three very competent pairings against the Sharks forwards.
One player who could make a difference for the Sharks is Ryan Clowe, who is having a terrific post-season so far, but was injured in Game 5 against the Red Wings, missed Game 6, then came back for Game 7, but was a noticeable step behind his normal pace. Clowe is a big presence on the ice, so if he is hurt, this could be a big advantage for the Canucks.
Will this be the series where we see the Canucks offense break out? The Sharks defense is the weakest of the three teams that they have faced in the playoffs so far. And Antti Niemi is not playing spectacularly in the post-season, merely playing good enough. With a thinner defense than they have seen against Nashville or Chicago, and a goaltender not playing at the top of his game, the Canucks have an opportunity to showcase their offensive form that got them to the top of the league standings. This series, and tonight, may very well come down to the Sedins’ ability to break through. While the Canucks have won two series without having Daniel and Henrik playing to their Art Ross trophy-winning potential, this series against the Sharks could be an old-fashioned gun fight and the Sharks have plenty of weapons. The Canucks had better not show up to a gun fight with only a couple of knives.
Based on the line rushes and speculation from Vancouver media, it looks like Victor Oreskovich may replace Jeff Tambellini on the fourth line. While I like Oreskovich’s game, taking Tambellini’s speed out of this game is a tactical error, in my opinion. Tamby’s speed could go to town on the Sharks slower D, especially when forechecking. Sure the Sharks lineup is more physical, but the one that the Sharks are not is fast. Also expected to miss the game tonight is Mikael Samuelsson, still injured with no timetable yet to return. No word yet on when the Canucks are planning to parachute Manny Malhotra into Rogers Arena while strains of "The Ride of the Valkyries" blare through the crowd as he lands on the ice riding a magical Nordic steed. I suspect that will happen midway through the second period.
The Three Keys
Here are the three keys for the Vancouver Canucks tonight:
1. Get into the game early. With 6 days off, the Canucks need to get engaged early. Hit early, skate early, forecheck early, shoot early and often. Shake off any rust that may have formed from five full days off. The Sharks are coming off an emotional series victory over the Red Wings and may have left a little of their game back in San Jose to close out that series. Take advantage of that early.
2. Use your speed. The Canucks are BY FAR the speedier team of the two. It is imperative that the Canucks forecheck as much as possible on a slower defense and negate any backchecking by the slower Sharks forwards. If the Canucks can outskate the Sharks, they will easily control the puck more often, this keeping it away from the Sharks strong forwards.
3. Smart, safe defense. The Sharks offense is deep and likes to control the puck and set up, much like the Canucks do. The way to counter that is with smart, safe plays. Don’t play high-risk in your own zone (save the higher-risk moves when you are on the offense). Keep the Sharks to the outside, and when you get the puck, play it north-south and get the puck out in 1 to 2 passes. There cannot be ANY passes going east-west in your own zone. The Sharks will prey on those types of plays.
The Links
Here are your top 5 links for today’s game:
1. Tale of the Tape: Sharks @ Canucks (Canucks.com)
2. San Jose focus on Kesler could help Sedins line (The Province)
3. Canucks blueliners poised to repel Shark attack (Vancouver Sun)
4. Canucks/Sharks Preview (Yahoo! Sports)
5. Sharks Gameday: Power vs. Power (Fear The Fin) << SEE WHAT THE ENEMY HAS TO SAY!When we talk about flow in the NHL, we're not talking about rhymes and verses, we're talking hair.
Who has the smoothest locks? Who best rocks the grizzly beard? Who has the sweetest combo job?
Here is the best flow in the NHL today, broken into three categories with three players apiece, along with three honorary categories featuring men in a class of their own.
Top Dog
Henrik Lundqvist
Lundqvist isn't just 'The King' between the pipes for the New York Rangers; he's also one handsome man. The netminder has appeared in GQ and usually accompanies his beautiful waves and beard combo with a stylish suit and tie. Lundqvist exudes class on and off the ice. He's also fabulous in this shampoo commercial.
Honorable mention: Henrik Zetterberg, Erik Karlsson
Young Stud
William Nylander
Nylander has only played pre-season hockey in the NHL, but his flow just can't be stopped. The son of former NHLer Michael sports hair for days and should be featured in a shampoo commercial with Manfred Mann's "Blinded by the Light" playing in the background.
Honorable mention: Calle Jarnkrok, David Pastrnak
The Hair & Beard Combo
Brent Burns
Burns is the grizzliest of the grizzly. Men dream of growing a beard like his and he rocks it well in combination with a huge mound of flow. How does he even fit that under his helmet? Add in the missing teeth and you've got every man's dream: Grizzly Adams in NHL form.
Honorable mention: Drew Doughty, Ryan O'Reilly
Between the posts
Jonas Hiller and Braden Holtby
This was a tough one to judge with Lundqvist already out of the running taking top dog, so we'll call this a tie.
Hiller's mop may not stand out to some, but he's rocked the damp goalie locks for most of his career and he wears it well. Is that sweat? Or does he shower during each intermission? Either way, his mane is sweet.
Holtby is quickly moving away from being a baby-faced young netminder and moving into the ranks of manly man with a nice combo of lengthy waves and a bountiful beard. The 25-year-old is a well-groomed beast in the Washington Capitals net.
What's in your hair award
Roberto Luongo
The Florida Panthers goaltender is not only known for being an outstanding netminder and a comical character, he also has a rep for sporting a lengthy and greasy hairstyle under his goalie's mask. What does Luongo use to give his flow that glossy texture? Whatever it is, his waves are dope.
Gingerbread Man
Cody Eakin
Gingers need love too. Eakin rocks the red-headed locks like nobody's business for the Dallas Stars. The 23-year-old is on pace for the finest season of his career and his mane is taking the ride with him.As of Friday the 10th of October, 2014, thecreatureblog is stopping all activity. No more posts will be made/reblogged onto this blog anymore, so feel free to unfollow it. Nevertheless, the blog page will stay up to keep this message out, and old posts will probably be slowly deleted throughout the coming weeks/months.
The five admins have no longer any interest in being linked with this blog or The Creatures and therefore will not be dedicating any more of their time on running this blog that was for years linked to thecreaturehub youtube and twitch channels.
It’s with great sadness that we came to this conclusion, but we all are 100% sure this is what we want. Under the Read More, personal messages from each of us will be attached (it’s a long read, but a good one if you’re interested) with our experiences and more specific reasons as to why this happened.
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you all of this time and thank you Creatures for the laughs, but this is the end of the line.
- Julio, Claudia, Kaitlyn, Chloe and Arthur
JULIO:
I’d like to start of by saying thank you for all the support from our followers and friends in the community for all this time, and I’d like to write all of my experiences with the blog since I created it back in May, 2011, but I feel like Claudia, Kaitlyn, Chloe and Arthur summed it up pretty good. We’re all done, we don’t find any joy in being part of this community or many entertainment in watching the group, anymore. Sadly, we all grew up and our eyes opened, our minds and hearts changed, and it all came to this. I knew that this wasn’t forever, and I was right; we feel it’s time to move on with our lives, we don’t have the time to spend watching many YouTube videos, nor the desire to stomach the growing toxicity of the community on YouTube, Twitter and Tumblr. We’re just done. If you feel like you need a new “creature blog” to follow as this one is going away, follow my friends at the creaturegroup, they’re extremely talented and are very friendly. Have fun, and enjoy life.
CLAUDIA:
I started watching the Creatures years ago when James had under 75k subscribers and I knew I was in this for the long haul. Through him I found Kootra, Gassy, and Sp00n and eventually started watching every Creature video that was being uploaded. I’d tell all of my friends about how cool these guys were and how funny I thought their content was, and was desperately trying to call into Creature Talk each week. I loved machinima and for years my favourite combo was Sp00n and Nova. Whenever I was feeling kind of down, I’d just watch their videos and it would be like life was on pause for a bit. I met Julio by posting on tumblr back when this blog was still called ‘little-creature-things’. After we evolved a bit and the blog grew we had a great group of people consisting of the two of us and Kailtyn and Chloe. I met a lot of other great people through the blog including some people I’ve ended up meeting in real life and I’m really grateful for having been able to meet all of these great people who I feel like I can call friends. I think the biggest moment for me in my Creature fan career was when James did his first face cam video. My poor teenage heart was literally about to explode and if anything it only got me more involved with the Creature fan base online, including the old Creature Hub website (which is where I spent a lot of my free time). My favourite Creature Talk was and always will be the Lyle’s Hard Hitting Questions episode. I still listen to it once in a while when I need to have a bit of a laugh. I almost got called into the Creature Talk episode that aired either before or after that one—I forgot— but that was pretty great and it was really cool for me at the time to be able to listen to Creature Talk live since I lived in a country where it would air at the worst time ever and I could only really listen to it live when in the US. I remember once I actually left my friends house early to go listen to Creature Talk. I was like that at the time. When the Creatures all moved in together…that was, like, a huge deal and it was all really exciting. I knew I’d get to see more of the Creatures in real life instead of simply hearing their voices, which was so awesome at the time. I loved the idea up until I heard from the other mods that Junkyard and Chilled were no longer going to be considered Creatures. I think that, for me, that’s where I really started to lose my enthusiasm for the Creatures. Of course, I still watched all of their videos because I wanted to see them interact together and whatever, but it was weird without Chilled and Junkyard for a while. Then when they announced that Gassy was no longer going to be a part of the Creatures, that’s when I really stopped feeling excited. To me it felt like such a betrayal. Such a fucking nasty decision. Like, I’m not Gassy, I’m not a Creature, I have no say in their decisions, but this one really angered me. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why they were splitting up the group like this. So I stopped watching videos that weren’t necessary for me to keep helping out with the blog. I watched most Creature Hub ones and kept watching some of James’, but that was it. I’d check the tags on tumblr but I knew the Creatures weren’t my thing anymore. Which is okay, right. I mean, we all move on or whatever. Didn’t mean that I stopped caring about them as people, just wasn’t into the content and didn’t always respect all of their decisions. Whatever. Things change. I mean, I got super into machinima respawn thanks to the Creatures. Stopped watching that after it changed as well. The difference was that with respawn, I understood why it was changing. It was from that point until now that I pretty much decided that there are very few fandoms on the internet that are worse than the Creature fandom. If you guys could see our ask box, you’d agree. If you guys checked the tags everyday, I’m sure you understand. There were moments when we’d get an ask that was so fucking awful and nasty that I just couldn’t believe it. I would answer an ask as honestly as I could and get backlash for it from some dickhead anon. All of the mods would. There were constantly messages in our inbox with people criticising us and talking shit about the Creatures and being so downright stupid at times that I literally wouldn’t bother with the blog for days after. I haven’t brought a great amount to the Creature fandom but I’ve seen it evolve from where it barely existed on tumblr to what it is now and frankly I’m done with it. It’s been great to have been a part of running this blog for over three years now, but it’s over. The Creatures have changed and I’m no longer a fan. I wish I were sorry but I’m not. I lost respect for some members a long time ago and have learnt some nasty shit about the others. I don’t support them as a group anymore and I certainly don’t respect the fans. Yes, of course there are exceptions but as a whole I don’t see this fandom as anything but toxic. I don’t want to look at it or be involved with it anymore. I wanna thank my friends Julio, Kaitlyn, Chloe, Arthur, Felix, Hayley, Nic, Janine, Jason, and anyone else I’ve met through the Creatures. I wanna thank people for supporting our blog and finding joy in its existence. Sorry it’s over but change isn’t always a good thing for everyone. I wanna thank the original Creatures for everything they did back when I was a fan. It was really important to me and I loved it a lot at the time. Thanks James for being my teenage crush. That was a tough one to explain to mom. I hope y’all and your families stay safe and healthy. Peace out forever. x Claudia
KAITLYN:
I remember when this blog was little-creature-things and my url was the original whatthebrown. That was about four (five?) years ago, and it was then that I joined Julio, Claudia, and Chloe in managing what we transformed into the Creature Blog.It was the four of us, and we always partook in little games. It was really awesome and amazing to meet these people and be a part of their lives, and have something to collectively work together on. We always had little Skype chats or got together, played games, and enjoyed each other’s company. It was a group of people brought together by just a couple of dudes making videos on the internet. In high school, the Creatures were my main source of entertainment. Every night after class, I would come home, lie in bed, and watch their videos. It was kind of a cathartic ritual for me. But time passes and interests change, and after a few personal matters, my interest in the Creatures had diminished. With the rise of the blog, it was difficult to keep up with these people who were passionate about the group of YouTubers. They showed to me what I was like in the previous years - which, y’know, had its ups and downs. The bad fans know who they are. In a fandom that started as everyone helping each other out, there’s always some idiots to ruin it. My internet diminished during my last year of high school and even though I helped run the blog time to time, I hardly watched a single video in my first year of university. This is no personal dig to anyone who is affiliated to the Creatures, or enjoys their comments, but some of the immaturity levels were off the charts. Like Claudia mentioned, some of the messages we received were just downright ridiculous. I’m glad I enjoyed their content when I did, and I wouldn’t take back the time we had. I remember the Creature Calls, and the first time we got into a huge Skype call with all the creatures. I remember being a nervous caller during the time the Creatures played Monopoly back in what- 2010? Something like that. All in all, it’s been a fun journey. Life’s all about growing up and making decisions that are best for you in the long run - and after some of the situations that have happened recently, this is for the best for the group and us as individuals. And so now, a toast to the Creature Blog and those who ran it because shit, we grew up fast, didn’t we? Cheers. xo kat
CHLOE:
So we’re officially calling it quits after almost 3 years of being “creature approved.” I started to move away from their content and the community around July following the recent changes to the group and honestly because running the blog didn’t give me the satisfaction it used to, there have been times in the past I should have stopped due to certain circumstances but I just couldn’t and it’s stupid to even think this but I thought I’d just let others down and be throwing away such a unique opportunity. I think it’s important to be a critical fan, blindly following youtubers because you think they are “famous” is a terrible state of mind and it’s easy to get caught up in it all. I have been guilty of it, I remember when we first got in a call with the creatures shortly after they found the blog, (I felt like I was dying of a heart attack but) it was so great, it made me so motivated and dedicated and if anyone dared talk shit about them I’d wanna rip them apart, but after time I realised they’re just people, doing their jobs, who happen to have a large audience. It’s this type of blind dedication that’s caused certain youtubers to feel so popular that they can just do what they want, which has caused a LOT of issues for the youtube community as a whole lately. This is another reason why I felt I needed to just stop watching. There has been an increase of “offensive” comments/behaviour from by creatures (one in particular ya know damn well who I’m talking about) and it’s one thing to not realise you were being offensive and apologising for it, but when someone you directly associate with is completely unapologetic and can’t take criticism at all without calling people fat and ugly and blames people for being offended, it just comes across insincere. And with amount of hatred for each other within the community, I didn’t want to be spouting my opinion on here and causing more shit, so we stayed impartial, but it hasn’t stopped how hateful this community has become.. But yea, basically I don’t support this type of behaviour, so I stepped back, which I do honestly believe is the best solution. Anyway thank you to everyone who submitted to this blog, asked questions, replied to posts, and generally kept this blog being as hilarious and annoying as it was over the years. I’m especially proud to have been able to give extremely talented artists the attention they deserve, and I’m so happy I got to make all the friends I did. And obviously thanks to the creatures, you guys got me through some difficult times in my life, I’ll ~never forget you~ I hope this made sense it’s 6am and I gotta get ready for work, if you wanna ask me anythin or discuss something over PMs my personal is here. cheap plug xxxxxxxxxxx
ARTHUR:
I wasn’t a mod here for all that long compared to the rest, but I’ve been a fan of the creatures for about 4 years now and during this time they became a huge part of my life. Like some of you I was there for the earliest creature talks, the ustream days, the first time faces were revealed, the rise of lets plays, the end of machinimas, the original move into the creature house, etc etc. I was there for the highs and the lows. This group of friends quickly became my favorite form of entertainment and escapism. They became my heroes. Thanks to this interest I made many new friends myself, friends who I’ve come to appreciate greatly and who have helped me through some of the shittest times of my life so far.
So for this group of friends that I made within the community, for all the laughter the guys have given me, and the relief they offered whenever things got especially bad, I am grateful. Thank you Creatures. However, being a part of this community for so long I have come to realise that what I enjoyed out of all this has changed. It’s only natural for a group like the creatures to change throughout the years, maybe even unavoidable. But that also means it’s unavoidable for people like me to be put off by such changes. I no longer feel the same way about this community, nor some of the content, as I used to. I can no longer be a mod for the #1 creature related blog if I do not stand behind exactly all of the creatures or can’t objectively share their content. It’s that simple. I will continue to follow and support certain members and hope they do well, but being so close to the action and representing a fandom is more of a burden I’m willing to carry. So goodbye guys and here’s hoping the good times will stick with me for a long time to come.
~Arthur
Goodbye.Nevada's Hasaan Henderson is one of seven senior starters on the projected 2016 Wolf Pack. (Photo: Jason Bean/RGJ file)
College football season officially ended last month with the national championship game, but it’s only a matter of time until spring football begins (Nevada usually starts in late March or early April). The Wolf Pack will return 10 starters on offense and five on defense, with several positions up for grabs, especially on defense. Here’s my best guess on the depth chart as Nevada enters spring camp and the 2016 season. (* indicates returning starter)
Offense
QB: Tyler Stewart*, Sr.: Stewart had a solid 2015, completing 57.1 percent of his passes for 2,139 yards with 15 touchdowns and seven picks. He’ll be pushed, but this is his job. Backup: Hunter Fralick, So.
RB: James Butler, So.: As a backup in 2015, Butler had the 11th most rushing yards in a single season in Nevada history (1,342). Imagine what he’ll do with a starter’s carries. Backup: Blake Wright, So.
WR: Hasaan Henderson*, Sr.: The 6-5 Henderson led Nevada with 14.2 yards per catch. He hauled in 52 balls for 741 yards and four touchdowns and will be a three-year starter. Backup: Dominic Christian, Fr.
WR: Jerico Richardson*, Sr.: Richardson was fourth in the MW in catches (68) and led Nevada in receiving yards (750) and touchdowns (five). He’s a three-year starter, too. Backup: Andrew Celis, So.
WR: Brayden Sanchez, Jr.: Sanchez tore his ACL in the season opener, a huge (and overlooked) loss. He’s a gamer who was due for a breakout in 2015. He’ll be back next season. Backup: Wyatt Demps*, Jr.
TE: Jarred Gipson*, Sr.: Gipson has the most career starts (32) of any Wolf Pack returner. He’s a top red zone target who could be used more in the passing game next season. Backup: Evan Faunce, Jr.
LT: Austin Corbett*, Jr.: A starter since his freshman year, Corbett had started 25 of Nevada’s 26 games the last two years. He’s the most steady, dependable player on the line. Backup: Humberto Lopez, Sr.
LG: Ziad Damanhoury*, Jr.: Damanhoury started the final eight games in 2015 but will have to fend off Adam Khouri (future questionable with concussion) and transfer Sean Krepsz. Backup: Adam Khouri, Jr.
C: Nathan Goltry*, Sr.: Goltry won the center job last fall and held the position the entire season. He was a pleasant surprise and should be improved in his second year as a starter. Backup: Thomas Newton, Jr.
RG: Jeremy Macauley*, Sr.: The emotional leader of the line, the Reed High graduate has overcome some serious knee injuries to start 23 games over the last three seasons. Backup: Daren Echeveria, So.
RT: Jake Henry*, Sr.: Henry was a big surprise in fall camp and started every game last year. He is one of seven projected senior starters on a veteran offensive group for Nevada in 2016. Backup: Illya Lopez, So.
K: Brent Zuzo*, Sr.: Zuzo is one of the most accurate kickers in college. He was fourth in the nation in field-goal percentage in 2015 (89.5 percent) and is automatic inside of 50. Backup: Spencer Pettit, Fr.
Defense
DE: Patrick Choudja, Jr.: Choudja has shown flashes during his first two years as a backup, but Nevada will need him to consistently get into the backfield as a starter in 2016. Backup: Jarid Joseph, So.
NT: Salesa Faraimo*, Sr.: Faraimo is a solid nose guard who will split time with Nakita Lealao, a 6-1, 305-pound JC transfer who is a veteran (he’s five years removed from high school). Backup: Nakita Lealao, Jr.
DT: Korey Rush, So.: Rush, Hausia Sekona and Kalei Meyer (three youngsters) will battle for this starting position. Rush, who is a little undersized, brings a nastiness to the front. Backup: Hausia Sekona, Fr.
DE: Malik Reed, So.: Like Choudja, Reed has shown flashes of his potential and will get a chance to show that in 50-plus snaps per game in 2016. He has a great speed/strength blend. Backup: Jordan Silva, So.
WLB: Jake Lacaden, So.: This position is wide open. Lacaden, Travis Wilson and others will have a chance to win the gig with good spring and fall camps. This is a production position. Backup: Travis Wilson, Jr.
MLB: Alex Bertrando, Sr.: Bertrando is a vet who is coming back from a torn MCL. He’s had the edge in experience, but will have to hold off talented youngster Gabe Sewell. Backup: Gabe Sewell, Fr.
SLB: L.J. Jackson, Sr.: Jackson started two games for the injured Bryan Lane Jr. in 2015 and got extensive playing time. This is a hybrid position that drops into coverage quite a bit. Backup: Riley Brand, Fr.
CB: Kendall Johnson*, Jr.: Johnson began his career at cornerback, moved to free safety and then moved back to cornerback midway through last year. Cornerback is his best position. Backup: Elijah Moody, So.
CB: Elijah Mitchell*, Sr.: Mitchell’s speed is his top asset. His 16 starts are the most of any returning player in the secondary. He also serves as the Wolf Pack’s kick returner. Backup: Ahki Muhhamad, So.
SS: Asauni Rufus*, So.: Rufus had 105 tackles, a touchdown-saving forced fumble and an interception as a freshman. He has this positon locked down for three more years. Backup: Jaden Sawyer, Jr.
FS: Dameon Baber*, So.: It’s going to be hard for Baber to replicate his 2015 when he had six interceptions in 10 games. But he’s a ball-hawk and sure-handed tackler. Backup: Cal Kee, Fr.
P: Alex Boy*, Sr.: Boy has been an above-average punter for Nevada the last two seasons and averaged 42 yards per punt in 2015, drawing fair catches on 28 of 65 attempts. Backup: Brayden Sanchez, Jr.
Columnist Chris Murray provides insight on Northern Nevada sports. Contact him at cmurray@rgj.com or follow him on Twitter @MurrayRGJ.Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's rhetoric on the issue, too, has changed. Last year, as Treasury began to increase its predictions about our future size, he branded himself a big-Australia man. ''I think it's good for us, it's good for our national security long-term, it's good in terms of what we can sustain as a nation,'' he said. Then came Treasury's Intergenerational Report this month and its prediction that Australia would swell from about 22 million people to 35.9 million people in 2050. Rudd was no longer so sure a large population was a good thing, so he instead sat on the fence as the opposition increased a get-tough-on-asylum-seekers theme. Despite changing rhetoric, the reality is our leaders remain hopelessly addicted to population growth. It is a drug they are unlikely to kick any time soon. Size, for some misguided reason, has long been equated with importance. But there is another, more intrinsic reason for the addiction. Population growth is one of the simplest ways for a government to boost economic growth, which is in turn regarded as a key measure of political success. More people means more houses, more cars, more food consumed and more petrol burnt. All this is dutifully recorded by the Bureau of Statistics as an increase in Australia's gross domestic product, which is in turn associated with prosperity. An apparently circular need to feed economic growth with population growth represents a significant flaw in our political system.
First, economic growth for its own sake is not necessarily a good thing. Rebuild a town flattened by bushfires and it's recorded as economic growth. Yet can you really argue that the town's population, or society as a whole, is better off? Second, even if you assume GDP is a good measure of progress, the focus should not be on GDP growth per se, but GDP growth per person. The economic pie may be expanding, but if the number of people sharing it is growing at an even greater rate, then everyone gets a smaller slice. This is exactly what has happened in Australia. We may have been one of the few economies in the developed world to have grown over the past year (just ask Treasurer Wayne Swan). But because the population grew faster, GDP per person slipped by about 1.7 per cent over the year to September 2009. But don't expect to hear Swan talking about that. Labor backbencher Kelvin Thomson, who is arguing for a cut to Australia's skilled migration intake, says there are many costs of population growth not factored into economic growth measures, including environmental degradation, loss of urban amenity, and congestion. ''I believe very strongly that if we add another million, or 2 million, or 3 million people to Melbourne over the course of the next few decades, that will be a poorer city than the one that I have had the privilege to live in,'' Thomson says.
There are other issues, too. About 64 per cent of Australia's recent population growth has been due to migration. As opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison points out, the states have little influence over migration levels, despite being responsible for many areas that are affected, including planning, infrastructure and environment. ''Growth is good only if it is managed well,'' Morrison says. ''If it is not managed well it can be very counterproductive.'' The prediction that the population will hit 36 million by 2050 may even be too conservative. The Intergenerational Report assumes an annual net overseas migration for the next 40 years of 180,000. The intake last financial year was about 285,000. As Morrison says, it would be intriguing to know when the government intends to cut the intake to bring about this average figure of 180,000. None of this is to say that immigration is a bad thing. What we do need is to have a sensible debate about how big we want to get. Once we decide this, our politicians will need to make some brave decisions, including acknowledging that economic growth isn't always worth pursing for the sake of it. After all, as former treasurer Peter Costello liked to say, demography is destiny.
Josh Gordon is The Sunday Age national political reporter.Users of Windows will recognise one app as being a constant throughout the many iterations of the world's most popular desktop operating system and that's Microsoft's free image editing software, Paint. The legacy Paint app has remained more or less the same for many, many years now but it seems that the company is finally ready to give |
increasing the competition between drivers in McLaren on the following races.[49]
After the Bahrain Grand Prix, Jenson Button was quoted with the following on Pérez's driving style:
I've raced with many team-mates over the years and with quite an aggressive team-mate in Lewis, but I'm not used to driving down the straight and then my team-mate coming along and wiggling his wheels at me and banging wheels with me at 300km/h. I've had some tough fights in F1 but not quite as dirty as that. That's something you do in karting and normally you grow out of it but that's obviously not the case with Checo [Pérez]. Soon something serious will happen so he has to calm down. He's extremely quick and he did a great job today but some of it is unnecessary and an issue when you are doing those speeds. Jenson Button speaking to ESPN about Pérez after the 2013 Bahrain Grand Prix[50]
At the 2013 Monaco Grand Prix Pérez performed several aggressive overtaking moves, before retiring after colliding with Kimi Räikkönen. Following the incident Räikkönen said that Pérez should be "punched in the face".[51] Pérez recorded a season-best fifth-place finish in India, finishing four seconds shy of the podium, a result that left him "extremely satisfied".[52]
Pérez confirmed on 13 November 2013 that he would be leaving McLaren at the end of the season to be replaced by Kevin Magnussen.[53] On 12 December 2013 (exactly a month after it was announced he would leave McLaren), Force India confirmed Pérez would join Nico Hülkenberg in their driver line-up for 2014 in a 15 million Euro deal.
Force India (2014–present) [ edit ]
On 12 December 2013, Pérez had his drive for Force India in 2014 confirmed.[8]
2014 [ edit ]
In the Australian Grand Prix, he finished 11th but was moved up to 10th to get his first point for Force India due to Daniel Ricciardo being disqualified for breaching fuel limits. He failed to start the Malaysian Grand Prix, after his car encountered gearbox issues prior to the start of the race. Nevertheless, a week later in the Bahrain Grand Prix, he was able to score Force India's first podium since 2009,[54] holding off Ricciardo's Red Bull for a third-place finish.[55] At the Chinese Grand Prix, Pérez started 16th and after gaining four places at the start, was able to overtake both McLarens and Daniil Kvyat's Toro Rosso to finish 9th. Outqualifying his teammate for a second time, Pérez started in tenth position for the Monaco Grand Prix however a first lap collision with Jenson Button meant an early retirement for the first time in the season. At the Canadian Grand Prix, Pérez was again fighting for another podium finish until the car suffered braking issues, later resulting in losing the third-place position to both Red Bulls. On the last lap he was involved in a collision with Felipe Massa, who crashed into the back of his Force India sending both cars heavily into the barriers. Pérez was subsequently given a five-place grid penalty for the next race, as the stewards decided he changed his racing line, causing Massa to crash into him.[56] At the Austrian Grand Prix, Pérez set his third fastest lap of his career whilst also giving Force India their third fastest lap in their history.
On 7 November 2014, before the Brazilian Grand Prix, Force India announced that Pérez would remain with the team for the 2015 season.[57] Pérez stated that contract negotiations were "ongoing", in regards to a further contract extension. The deal was officially confirmed at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, with Pérez signing a new two-year contract, until the end of the 2016 season.[58]
2015 [ edit ]
The 2015 season started with a 10th place for Pérez in Australia, followed by a 13th in Malaysia, an 11th in China and an eighth in Bahrain. He came fifth in Belgium and sixth in Italy. His best race of the season was in Russia, where he scored his first podium of 2015 and Force India's third ever.[59] Pérez finished the 2015 championship in ninth, his highest championship position to date, with 78 points. He outscored teammate Hülkenberg by 20 points. Besides the podium finish in Russia, Pérez managed three further top five finishes in Belgium, USA and Abu Dhabi; he scored 63 of his 78 points in the final nine rounds. In the second half of the season he out qualified his teammate in six of the last nine races, and eight times throughout the season.
2016 [ edit ]
Pérez experienced a difficult start to the season for the first four races due to an uncompetitive VJM09 - even though he broke into the points with a ninth place in Russia.
Upgrades were introduced in Barcelona with a seventh-place finish confirming the team's change in form.
A stellar drive in Monaco in wet and changing conditions saw him score his sixth (and Force India's fourth) podium finish and he moved to ninth in the Drivers' Championship standings. As usual with his podiums, tyre management played a big role but in contrast to previous occasions he pitted as many times as Ferrari and Red Bull, at times catching up with the front runners and managing to hold Sebastian Vettel in fourth at a comfortable distance.[60]
In the European Grand Prix in Baku Pérez once again finished third, recovering from a gearbox change penalty as a result of a crash during free practice, having been fast enough to qualify on the front row. Despite having to start from seventh on the grid he made his way up to fourth before passing Kimi Räikkönen on the last lap of the race for third, making it his second podium in three races.[61][62]
2017 [ edit ]
After the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix, Pérez confirmed he has committed to Force India for the 2017 season. Pérez remained with the Indian team for a fourth consecutive season alongside new teammate Esteban Ocon, ending speculation of a possible move to Williams, Renault or Haas.[63][64] He was very consistent with his highest finish in 2017 a fourth place in Spain after two rivals collided at the start, and a third retired mid-race with a power unit failure.[65] He ended his streak of 17 points finishes as he ended up colliding with Daniil Kvyat in Monaco. He had a moment with his teammate in Canada when he would not allow his teammate through, who thought he could challenge Daniel Ricciardo for 3rd. He was again knocked out in Baku where he thought he could challenge for the win before colliding with Ocon. He finished 7th in Austria and moved up to 6th in the standings after Max Verstappen was out of the race on the first lap. He dropped to 7th in the championship after finishing 9th in Britain, behind his teammate and Verstappen finished 4th. He remained 7th in the standings for the rest of the season.
2018 [ edit ]
At the season opening Grand Prix in Australia, Pérez finished 11th after starting 12th on the grid. He finished third at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix after an incident-strewn race. He passed the then championship leader Sebastian Vettel for third with a few laps to go, making him the first driver to finish on the podium twice at the Baku City Circuit (in 2016 and 2018).
Racing record [ edit ]
Career summary [ edit ]
† Includes points scored by other drivers.
Complete A1 Grand Prix results [ edit ]
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete GP2 Series results [ edit ]
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete GP2 Asia Series results [ edit ]
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
Complete Formula One results [ edit ]
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Driver failed to finish the race, but was classified as they had completed >90% of the race distance.“You can’t let a few election trolls ruin your city and ruin your home,” Abukar says. “There’s no room for hate of any kind in Canada”
This was not the first time Abukar has faced xenophobia on the campaign trail. Earlier this month, the Star reported that a campaign sign featuring Abukar wearing a hijab was defaced with the words “B----” and “Go Back Home.”
On Friday, a Purolator spokesperson issued a prepared statement that said the company is “deeply troubled about this report” and is “taking this matter seriously.” The spokesperson said Purolator President and CEO Patrick Nangle contacted Abukar on Friday morning “to apologize and express concern.”
TDSB Ward 10 trustee candidate Ausma Malik appears to be the target of an anonymous co-ordinated attack. In addition to being heckled at a candidates’ debate, her campaign office says that thousands of flyers were distributed throughout the ward this week which, among other things, accuse Malik of being a supporter of the Toronto 18 terrorist cell and a proponent of Sharia law. One flyer even has a photo of Malik superimposed over a yellow and green Hezbollah flag.
“The accusations are incredibly mean-spirited and they’re lies,” Malik says. “I’m doing this because I believe in public education, I believe in our community, and I believe that an inclusive, equitable and progressive public education system is possible — and especially in light of this, absolutely necessary.”
In Ward 18, council candidate Mohammad Uddin claims he has been the target of a steady stream of Islamophobic insults. On Thursday, he tweeted a photo of one of his campaign signs defaced with the words “F--- Islam.” Uddin claims racist graffiti has been discovered outside his campaign office as recently as Friday, and earlier this month, he says his car windows were smashed and his campaign signs were stolen as the vehicle sat in his driveway.
“Canada is a country of peace, love and brotherhood,” Uddin says. “In 20 years, I’ve never had problems like this.”
Abukar, Malik and Uddin have reported these incidents to police. On social media, Twitter users have shown their support with the hashtags “#IStandWithAusma” and “#IStandWithMunira.”On March 3, 1991, taxi driver Rodney King was beaten by four police officers in Los Angeles following a high speed car chase. George Holliday, a witness on scene, videotaped the incident from his balcony and sent the footage to local news station KTLA, drawing outrage amongst the African American community.
All four officers were acquitted of charges of assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force. Within hours of the acquittals, the 1992 Los Angeles riots started, stemming from frustration and outrage on how Blacks were treated by police.
Thousands rioted and looted areas throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Among the neighborhoods, Koreatown was heavily impacted by looting and buildings set on fire. There’s speculation that the Korean-American community received minimal aid from police due to their low social status and language barrier. The riots lasted for six days before dissipating after military intervention.
Korean-American actor Justin Chon was only 11 years old when the riots happened. Back then, his father owned a wholesale shoe warehouse in Paramount, right across the bridge on the 710 Freeway from East Compton. Their whole store was looted on the last day of the riots.
“It was like a hurricane went through the store. Everything was knocked over. There was empty shoe boxes everywhere. It was completely trashed,” Chon recalled. “Everything was mostly gone.”
“At the time my immediate concerns as an 11-year-old was what does it mean for our family? Does it mean we have to move? Is my dad in trouble? I was watching TV footage of the riots and remembering my dad not coming home,” he said.
Throughout history, there has been an unspoken animosity between the Korean American and Black community, mostly stemming from tensions built up over the years.
“I think it was mostly built up resentment from [Koreans] being in their neighborhoods… and treating [African Americans] like criminals,” Chon said “But at the same time, Koreans come from a war torn country. It’s about survival. They’re trying to make a living and the only way they know how is to set up a business. In their defense, they didn’t know any better.”
“A lot of Koreans at that time just weren’t assimilated — I’m not making excuses for them,” Chon said. “They didn’t know that if you’re gonna make money from a community, you can’t just make money and leave. You gotta give back and be a part of the community, and I don’t think they understood that. So during the riots, their businesses were targeted. And they were very shocked at how much hatred there was for them.”
However, what probably drove the biggest wedge between the two communities was the death of Latasha Harlins, a 15 year old Black girl who was shot in the head by Soon Ja Du, a 51 year old female convenience store owner from South Korea.
Du allegedly caught Harlins trying to steal a bottle of orange juice in her backpack and confronted her by grabbing her sweater and backpack. Harlins retaliated by punching Du three times. When Harlins turned to leave the store, Du took out a handgun and shot her from behind in the head, killing her instantly.
On November 15, 1991, Du was sentenced to five years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine. Naturally, such a light sentence struck a chord amongst the Black community. Some argue that the incident was one of the catalysts for the L.A. Riots as well.
“I don’t know any time you can shoot someone in the back and not go to jail,” Chon said.
While the L.A. Riots have been covered from many different angles in the media over the years, very few have been presented from the Korean-American angle. Chon seeks to tell that story through his new film “Gook”.
“I’ve poured through tons of LA riots films over the years, but I didn’t feel any of them adequately or authentically portrayed the Korean experience,” Chon said. “I think the Korean experience was shock. Cause I don’t think a lot of people knew how severe the tension was — how much they were not wanted in the communities.”
“Gook” is set during the 1992 L.A. Riots and follows Eli (played by Justin Chon) and Daniel (played by David So), two Korean-American brothers who run a struggling women’s shoe store, and their unlikely friend Kamilla, an 11-year-old Black girl. The trio end up teaming up to defend their store on the first day of the riots while “contemplating the meaning of family and thinking about personal dreams and the future.”
As many may know, the term “gook” was a derogatory term used against Koreans during the Korean war, then it got taken over to Vietnam. When asked why he decided to name his film “Gook”, Chon said:
“‘Gook’ actually means ‘country’. And it’s explained in the film. I don’t just do it for shock value, I don’t just do it because it’s a race thing. When you watch the film, at a pivotal moment, Kamilla asks Eli what ‘gook’ means. He has a choice to reinforce the racial slur and hate, or he can choose to tell her the literal meaning. And he chooses to tell her the literal meaning. So it’s like a big, huge point. Why wouldn’t I call the film ‘Gook’?”
Chon did a lot of research for the film from researching material about the riots and talking to people who were personally there during.
“They told me that it wasn’t just Blacks looting. It was everybody — Hispanics, Whites, even Asians,” Chon said.
His father, Sang Chon, experienced the riots first hand when his shop was looted. Coincidentally, he was also an actor back in his home country of South Korea before retiring at 25. Chon thought it was fitting to write a part for him in the film, but it took some convincing. He plays Mr. Kim, the convenience store owner.
“I wrote a part for him, but it took me forever to convince him. My dad’s a super f*cking grumpy dude. I grew up watching his black and white films, so I knew he could do it. But, I knew it wasn’t gonna be an easy sell to get him to do it.”
“He’s like ‘I left that back in Korea. Why would I want to revisit acting?’ He was also confused as to why I wanted to make a film about a very traumatic time.”
Eventually, Chon succeed in convincing his dad. He plays Mr. Kim, a convenience store owner who plays a pivotal role towards the end of the film.
After working on the film for over a year, Chon needed more funding to complete his project. Facing challenges of finding investors for a film featuring Asian leads, he turned to crowdfunding. He started a Kickstarter campaign and raised over $55,000 to complete post production for the film.
During the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, “Gook” became the winner of the Next Audience Award and Samuel Goldwyn Films acquired the North American rights to the movie. It currently has a Tomatometer rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Despite the clear statements about racism, kinship, and solidarity in the film, “Gook” as a whole makes a huge statement about Asians in film.
“Asian Americans are represented in a non-traditional way in the film,” Chon said. “We’re either seen as triads running a Fortune 500 company, or we’re really great at math, or we’re going to Harvard or Stanford. These are just two blue collar trade Americans that are just trying to make it through the day. They both have dreams, desires and needs that are three dimensional.”
When asked what he wants viewers to take away from his film, Justin Chon sai:
“Let’s look at where we’ve come in the last 25 years with the Rodney King verdict and everything. And just kind of evaluate where we’re at. In some ways we’ve progressed, but some ways we’ve really not progressed whatsoever. And to me, it’s a good benchmark. It’s a good sort of milestone for us to just have an introspective moment.”
In many cases, Justin Chon has succeeded on many fronts for his film. Not only was he able to make a statement about racism and animosity during that time, he was able to create an award winning film on a limited budget with two Asians playing the lead role. This is possibly one of the biggest wins for Asians in film.
Gook is set to be released in Theaters on Friday, August 18.The woman who died Saturday in her home as the Valley fire roared through had advanced multiple sclerosis and had no way to get out, her caretaker said.
Authorities have not released her name, but her caretaker identified her to The Times as Barbara McWilliams, 72, of Lake County.
McWilliams was the first reported fatality of the fast-moving fire, and her death has raised questions about the evacuation efforts.
On Monday, the Lake County Sheriff's Department issued a statement saying that deputies responded to the area 22 minutes after receiving a 7:12 p.m. call asking rescuers to help her. By that time, sheriff's officials said, the subdivision "had already been engulfed by flames."
The caretaker, Jennifer Hittson, 30, had worked for McWilliams for the past five months, said she had tried for hours to get officials to retrieve the woman, but was told by both deputies and Cal Fire officials that they did not have the time to assist.
"More should have been done," Hittson, of Kelseyville, told The Times on Monday.
McWilliams lived on Cobb Mountain, and though her health was failing, Hittson said, enjoyed feeding birds near her well-kept home. In the midst of the attempts to reach McWilliams, a neighbor confirmed her home had burned to the ground, Hittson said.
Lake County Sheriff Brian Martin said in a brief interview at a mobile command post Monday that "the fire spread too violently and too quickly for us to be able to get to her on time."
Hittson says she has been torn by grief and regret. "I could have made her get in my car," she said.Construction Continues on DAPL Despite Protests
Law enforcement officials say construction has resumed on the four-state Dakota Access pipeline on private land in southern North Dakota.
Crews dug trenches and laid pipe in the St. Anthony area.
A federal appeals court ruling Sunday cleared the way for work to resume on that land.
The work on federal land is still on hold.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe opposes the pipeline over concerns about drinking water and cultural sites.
Thousands of people have protested and 123 people have been arrested since mid-August, including actress Shailene Woodley and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.
Woodley livestreamed her arrest Monday on social media and the video of what appeared to be a peaceful protest has been viewed three million times.
Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney, who was assisting law enforcement at the protest, called it a riot."I am a true believer, Anthony Spencer will have seven or more sacks in 2011." This was the statement I made during the offseason and much to the delight of one BTB member, I was wrong. Almost Anthony, as many Cowboys fans have come to call him, managed only six sacks this season. Now, does that mean he is a terrible strong side linebacker?
I still believe Anthony Spencer is better than many other left outside linebackers in the league. Yes, I still have issues with his consistency. In some games he seems downright dominant, yet in others he makes mistakes and seems average. Yes, there were better first round picks the Cowboys could have made when they drafted Spencer, but was that his fault?
Believe it or not, after Sean Lee, Spencer is our best linebacker in coverage and Ryan often used him in that capacity. He is also one of the best Cowboys linebackers at stopping the run. Sure, that may be more of an indictment on how poor the Cowboys inside linebacker depth truly is, but it does reveal the true versatility of Anthony Spencer.
And yet, you will still see many Cowboys fans excited at the proposition of the Cowboys losing Spencer as he tests the free agent market this year. Some outright calling him terrible. And yet, whenever I ask a simple question it seems no one wishes to respond.
If Anthony Spencer is so terrible, how many LOLB in the league are better?
Well, seeing no one has ever answered that question for me I decided to do the leg work so we can compare.
It seems many fans are still confused about Spencer's role on this defense. Everyone would love to have two DeMarcus Wares rushing the passer, but too often forget that Spencer does not rush the passer as often as Ware. In fact, this season he rushed the passer less than in other years and still managed to tie his career best in sacks. Spencer is often tasked with containment duties, making sure that if the play is a run that he does not allow the back to get around the edge. You will also often see him covering backs and tight ends in the flat. In fact, in Ryan's defense you would even find Spencer standing up in front of the slot receiver. In most 3-4 defenses the left outside linebacker does not get to tee off as a pass rusher as often as the right outside linebacker or a 4-3 defensive end.
Let's first begin with taking a look at how Anthony Spencer did compared to other Cowboys defenders. He was fourth on the team in total tackles, second in sacks, and led the team in forced fumbles. Not too shabby. Only Sean Lee and the two safeties had more total tackles than Spencer, but if the Cowboys secondary wasn't so putrid, it would likely mean that Spencer would be second in total tackles and likely would have accrued a few more sacks. But let's get on to the comparison with other LOLB around the league.
All stats from NFL.com except QB Hits and TFL which are from Advanced NFL stats
Player Team Total Tkls Sacks Fum Frd QB Hit TFL A. Spencer DAL 66 6 4 15 12 R. Kerrigan WAS 63 7.5 4 12 9 J. Houston KC 56 5.5 1 9 10 C. Matthews GB 50 6 3 22 8 A. Brooks SF 49 7 1 13 12 C. Haggans ARI 46 3 1 9 5 B. Reed HOU 45 6 0 11 7 S. Phillips SD 42 3.5 0 6 8 C. Kelsay BUF 41 5 2 6 3 L. Woodley PIT 39 9 0 13 10 J. Westerman NYJ 32 3.5 1 7 6 J. Taylor MIA 18 7 1 15 5
So, how many LOLB in 3-4 defenses around the league are better than Anthony Spencer? The answer is not many. Clay Matthews is actually the best OLB on his team and plays more like a ROLB though they play him on the strong side. Perhaps we should be comparing Ware and Matthews, and if that is the case Anthony Spencer is far better than anyone else the Packers line up at OLB. Even so, Spencer had as many sacks as Clay Matthews, more tackles, and forced more fumbles.
The only player that seem he could become far better, and should likely be considered one of the best LOLB in the league, is Ryan Kerrigan. The Redskins seem to have gotten great value with that draft pick. While Lamaar Woodley had quite a few sacks more than Spencer, it is clear he is primarily used as a pass rusher since he has almost half as many tackles as Spencer, and no forced fumbles.
So I ask again, is Anthony Spencer really as bad as people think? How many LOLB in the league are better?
Anthony Spencer led all LOLB in tackles, forced fumbles, and tackles for a loss. He was Top 5 in sacks and tied for second in QB hits.
Perhaps Cowboys fans should not be so quick to cheer the loss of Anthony Spencer from this defense. This team needs to upgrade other positions far more than LOLB if Spencer is re-signed. And yes, I am still a true believer.THERE’S PLENTY GAA action in store this weekend with key games down for decision in the battle to go up and avoid the drop in the Allianz football league.
Schools action in Gaelic football in the Hogan Cup and hurling showdowns in the Croke Cup are also on the agenda.
Here’s what’s in store.
Wednesday
Masita All-Ireland PP SAFC (Hogan Cup) semi-final
Summerhill College (Sligo) v St Pat’s Maghera (Derry), Brewster Park, Enniskillen, 2pm
Saturday
Allianz Football League
Division 1
Dublin v Donegal, Croke Park, 7pm
Division 2
Tyrone v Armagh, Healy Park, Omagh, 7pm
Division 3
Tipperary v Kildare, Sean Treacy Park, Tipperary Town, 2pm
Division 4
Leitrim v Carlow, Carrick-on-Shannon, 2pm
Allianz Hurling League
Division 2A final
Carlow v Westmeath, O’Connor Park, Tullamore, 4pm
Division 2B final
Down v Armagh, Dowdallshill, Dundalk, 2pm
Division 3A final
Roscommon v Monaghan, Ballyshannon, 4pm
Division 3B final
Fermanagh v Longford, Markievicz Park, 2pm
Sunday
Allianz Football League
Division 1
Cork v Down, Páirc Uí Rinn, 2pm
Monaghan v Kerry, Clones, 3pm
Roscommon v Mayo, Dr Hyde Park, 3.30pm
Division 2
Derry v Meath, Owenbeg, 2pm
Cavan v Laois, Kingspan Breffni Park, 3pm
Galway v Fermanagh, Tuam Stadium, 3pm
Division 3
Clare v Longford, Cusack Park, Ennis, 3pm
Sligo v Limerick, Markievicz Park, 3pm
Westmeath v Offaly, Cusack Park, Mullingar, 3pm
Division 4
Waterford v London, Fraher Field, Dungarvan, 1pm
Louth v Wexford, Gaelic Grounds, Drogheda, 3pm
Wicklow v Antrim, Aughrim, 3pm
Camogie National League
Division 1
Group 1
Clare v Galway, Venue TBC
Offaly v Wexford, Venue TBC
Tipperary v Dublin, The Ragg, 2pm
Group 2
Limerick v Kilkenny, Bruff
Derry v Waterford, Celtic Park, 2pm
Monday
Masita All-Ireland PP
SAHC (Croke Cup) final
St Kieran’s (Kilkenny) v Ardscoil Rís (Limerick), Semple Stadium, Thurles, 4pm
SBHC (Paddy Buggy Cup) final
St Louis Grammer School Ballymena v Abbey CBS (Tipperary), Semple Stadium, Thurles, 2.15pm
The42 is on Snapchat! Tap the button below on your phone to add!There is a serious crisis stalking America’s black community right now, one that gets relatively little attention. That crisis is one of credibility.
This reality has been highlighted by, among other things, the recent prevalence of the knockout game, which has gained much mainstream media attention as of late. What exactly is “the knockout game”, you ask?
Pennsylvania schoolteacher Jim Addlespurger was walking home, minding his own business, when a group of teenagers knocked him out in broad daylight with no warning at all. He dropped face-down to the curb. It’s called the “knockout game”: teenagers knocking people out for the fun of it. They even target women and children. Cases are piling up, and police are on high alert. “It appears these are just random acts of violence,” said former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt. “There’s no robbery, there’s no rhyme or reason; it’s just simply youths making a decision they’re going to punch somebody out — sometimes as simple as $5 bet between themselves.” Seventeen-year-old Marvel Weaver admits he played a version of the knockout game using a stun gun. He was caught and is now in jail. “It was a lesson learned,” Weaver told TODAY. “Someone throws it out there: ‘Want to play this?’ And people go along with it and one thing leads to another, and it just goes all downhill.”
Who are the perpetrators of this knockout game? They’re almost unanimously young urban teens of African-American heritage, bored youths with little to do who figure that random assaults are a fine way to burn some time.
There isn’t anything funny about this, as the consequences can be quite serious:
After 17 months of waiting, a family finally learned how much time the man who killed their son will be in prison, reports CBS Minnesota. A Stearns County judge sentenced 18-year-old Jesse Smithers to 10 years on Thursday. Smithers admitted to delivering a deadly punch in a St. Cloud alley almost a year and a half ago, when on Sept. 21, 2012, Colton Gleason was walking with friends when a car pulled up, and Smithers got out and punched him. John says his son was the victim of a deadly “knockout game.” “This group was out there and their intentions were very clear. This is unprovoked. They stopped and they saw someone they thought they could victimize,” he said. “Colton didn’t have a chance to even turn and defend himself when somebody blind-sided punched him.” Jesse Smithers was sentenced to 10 years behind bars for delivering the fatal punch. He originally entered a plea of not guilty, but changed it to 2nd-degree murder in Nov. 2013.
This phenomenon clearly illustrates the growing crisis of credibility black America is coming to face.
Racism is definitely a problem in the United States, as it always has been. Discrimination in hiring still occurs on the basis of one’s name and the color of one’s skin. Lending discrimination still occurs frequently. The criminal justice system in the United States is still known to discriminate when it comes to sentencing, and blacks have paid a heavy price for that. Black America has legitimate concerns in the USA, and these concerns should be heard and addressed as best they can be. I fear, however, that they never will. Why? Because there are too many incidents like this:
A 17-year-old has been charged in the beating of a man who was attacked while trying to help a boy struck by his pickup truck in Detroit. Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy said Bruce Edward Wimbush Jr. is facing charges of assault with intent to murder and assault with intent to do great bodily harm for the attack on 54-year-old Steve Utash. He will be arraigned on Wednesday. The Roseville man was driving his truck on Morang Street near Balfour Street on April 2 when he hit 10-year-old David Harris. Police have said Harris stepped into traffic and Utash is not at fault. When Utash got out of his truck at the scene, police said at least a half-dozen people attacked him. He remains in critical condition. The boy was not seriously hurt.
That is just one of many examples I can point to involving incidents of undeserved violence on the part of blacks against non-blacks in the United States. This is becoming a trend, and people are noticing. More importantly, they’re also seeing the reaction to this trend.
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Had Steve Utash been a black man and his attackers been young white teens, this story would have been a national (perhaps international) sensation. Rallies would have been held all over the country, with civil rights organizers hearkening back to the days of lynchings and foretelling a “return of the old Jim Crow” to the USA. The reaction would be loud and substantive.
Yet when black teens are the culprits, things are quiet. All of the concerns I mentioned earlier with regard to blacks and the discrimination they face in the USA are quite serious, but these largely black on non-black crimes are no less of a concern. If black America fails to become as vocal and animated in a bid to eradicate the likes of “the knockout game” from its community as it is in its defense of youths like Trayvon Martin, then I fear that hostility directed at the black community from the outside will only continue to grow. This hostility will, in turn, fuel more discrimination and hamper current efforts to eliminate it.
This is only logical when you consider some of the concerns the black community maintains. One of these is the persistent fear black males sense in the non-blacks they associate with in public. Many a black male has lamented the fact that non-blacks they pass on the street often feel the need to lock their car doors, cross the street, clutch their purses more tightly, and engage in a host of other pre-emptive actions that mark the presence of the black male as inherently threatening. I understand this concern—I’m sure it hurts to be viewed as a threat everywhere you go if you don’t actually intend to threaten anyone. Not everyone shares the Machiavellian preference for fear over love.
That being said, can we really blame those people for erring on the side of caution in a society where large numbers of young men of African-American descent have been known to randomly assault completely innocent people in public simply for shits and giggles? A society where violent black-on-white crimes are substantially more common than the reverse, and yet don’t receive anywhere near the media attention their less common white-on-black counterparts would receive?
These are the realities that help to fuel discrimination. They are the realities that give credence to those harping on and on about inherent black violence, white supremacy, black inferiority, etc, making such individuals seem more legitimate than they are. These are the realities that feed far right-wing media pundits and political actors with the fuel they need to campaign for the roll-back of the progress blacks have made in the last 50 years, and the slow-down of anti-discrimination efforts that are already under way.
These are the reasons why it remains very much in the self-interest of black America to treat these acts of senselessly violent black-on-non-black conduct as seriously as they would the reverse. Blacks have spent decades trying to fight the notion that young black males are inherently violent threats to innocent people. Phenomena like the knockout game threaten to roll back any progress made in that time, while giving more ammunition to those who wish to promote that regression.
Excuses will not suffice because, frankly, there are no good excuses for this kind of behavior. No amount of discussion about poverty, slavery and other instances of historic black disenfranchisement in the USA will illicit sympathy for those who threaten the lives of innocent people just for fun. The families of Steve Utash and Colton Gleason (along with the tens of millions of ordinary Americans who look like them and/or have friends and relatives like them) are not going to be moved to “understanding” by these excuses. In fact, I think it could be reasonably expected that such individuals would only be further angered by such discussions, which seek to treat the violence inflicted upon them and their loved ones as just punishment for historical crimes they’ve not been involved in. They may try to be politically correct and bite their tongues in public, but the seeds of truly disruptive discontent and interracial distrust will have already been firmly planted. The maturation of these seedlings is something the black American community should be very interested in preventing.
If there is to be any chance of killing those seeds and getting non-blacks to take the |
passed, seven out of nine at Barra and 38 out of 52 in Brodick.
Gordon Rae, who lives near the Isle of Mull test centre, has been an instructor for 12 years. He said the DVSA told him a few years ago tests on the islands were likely to be discontinued because they were not challenging enough.
He said there are no traffic lights, roundabouts or dual carriageways.
"When you work in this business you are aware of it," he said.
"I have requests from people who live on the mainland but want to go over to Mull because the pass rate is so much better. But I refuse to do it because I believe in the ethos that when a candidate has a test, they should be ready for it.
"They might pass in Mull but when they go into one of the big cities, they would be like a fish out of a pond. It's an accident waiting to happen."
In England, the Kendal test centre in the Lake District yielded the highest number of passes with a 70.8% success rate.
Image copyright Google Image caption More than 70% of candidates who took their test in Kendal, Cumbria, passed
Jan Walker, who runs Jan's Driving School in Cumbria, said many people asked if they could take their test at Kendal because they believe it is easier.
"Kendal has a lot of visitors so you get quite a few hold-ups," she said.
"It has a one-way system and you get stuck in traffic quite a bit.
"When you are queuing in traffic you do not have to think that much. The cars in front of you are slowing down.
"When you are on a fast road you have to think that bit more quickly."
A DVSA spokesperson said pass rates could be influenced by various factors but refused to say if it was easier to pass at some test centres than others.
"Some people take more lessons and are better prepared for the test," a spokeswoman said.
"Statistical factors can also play a part as the number of tests conducted at different test centres varies significantly.
"We train examiners to a high standard and closely monitor their work to ensure that all tests are assessed consistently across the country."The OnePlus 5 looks set to get a new limited edition design
The OnePlus 5 was revealed earlier this year and offers Android fans the chance to own a premium device at a much more reasonable price.
Although it costs less that £500, this device is packed with flagship specs including the latest Snapdragon 835 processor, a dual-lens camera and 5.5-inch AMOLED display.
Express.co.uk recently reviewed the OnePlus 5 saying "Make no mistake, OnePlus 5 is a brilliant smartphone."
However, if you are thinking of spending your money on this device it might be worth holding off for a couple of weeks.
OnePlus will hold an invite-only event on September 19, the company has confirmed to Express.co.uk.
The event will showcase the fruits of a new partnership between OnePlus and iconic French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.
The collaboration has been dubbed, “Callection”.We've written extensively about CISPA over the last year, but since the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is set to mark the bill up next week, and the full House to vote on it the week after that, we're dissecting its shortcomings. Information sharing isn't offensive per se; it's really a question of what can be shared, with whom, and what corporations and government agencies can do with it. Yesterday we told you what could be shared (read: your personally identifiable information) and today we discuss where that information ends up.
With whom can companies share information?
Short answer: anyone the Googles, AT&Ts, Microsofts, and Facebooks of the world want to share it with.
Yes, for all the talk of getting critical information where it needs to go, into the hands of the people who need it--CISPA doesn't say "where" where is, or whose hands will receive it. Instead, CISPA lets the companies decide whether they will share it with other companies or with the government. In the latter scenario, companies even get to decide whether your information can be delivered to civilian agencies like the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Treasury, or Energy, or whether it can go to military ones like the National Security Agency (NSA). Under CISPA, the same companies holding records on what we read, where we go, and what we're thinking about get to decide who else can see those records.
When it comes to where the data should go in the government, it should go to civilian agencies. As we've written about before, and as we testified before Congress, maintaining civilian control of domestic cyber programs is one of the most important decisions Congress can make.
Under longstanding American legal requirements and policy traditions, the military is restricted from targeting Americans on American soil. Yet, CISPA would empower military agencies like the NSA to collect more information about internet users in order to respond to online threats. Doing so would create a significant new threat to Americans' privacy, and must be avoided. The NSA has developed extraordinary powers and has been granted broad legal leeway, all under the premise that its spying would be focused outside the confines of the territorial United States. Setting it free to begin collecting American information for cybersecurity purposes would be unprecedented, and incredibly dangerous because of the NSA's immunization from transparency.
In addition to being a bad deal for privacy, shifting cyber programs away from DHS isn't even necessary from a security perspective. The highest ranks of the intelligence community agree that DHS should retain authority over civilian cyber programs. NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander, has stated that his agency should not be the public face of cybersecurity, and while his agency has a major part to play in our national cyber defense, DHS should be the entity to deal directly with civilians, the private sector, and domestic internet information.
Last year when it threatened to veto CISPA, the administration said that it opposed this bill precisely because it "…effectively treats domestic cybersecurity as an intelligence activity and thus, significantly departs from longstanding efforts to treat the Internet and cyberspace as civilian spheres." The calendar may have changed, but this year's CISPA remains the same as the one presented to the last Congress.
Have no doubt: this is a straight up fight for civilian control over our domestic internet. All members of Congress should oppose CISPA unless the bill is corrected to make sure DHS or other civilian agencies are empowered to act as a gatekeeper for our information. Sign this petition to tell the president to veto CISPA because it lets the NSA collect our very sensitive records.
Next up: What can be done with your sensitive personal information after it is shared? Check back tomorrow for CISPA Explainer #3 and click here to sign a petition to the president asking him to veto CISPA.
Other blogs in this series:
CISPA Explainer #1
CISPA Explainer #3
CISPA Explainer #4
Learn more about cybersecurity and other civil liberty issues: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.In the world of PC cooling few names carry as much weight as Noctua; an Austria based cooling technology company, which specializes in high-end air coolers and fans. You may even consider them the BMW of PC cooling.
Their former flagship air cooler: the NH-D14 holds high regard with PC enthusiasts and overclockers everywhere. So naturally when they approached us to do a review of the cooler replacing that highly successful model: the Noctua NH-D15, we jumped at the opportunity!
PACKING, PRICING AND SPECIFICATIONS
The packaging features a mostly white and brown/black color scheme with a shadowy image of the cooler itself on the front. It is a very elegantly designed packaging, however we do wish they would have opted to place a more detailed view of the actual cooler on it.
We also get a look at some of the basic specifications for the cooler. The NH-D15 is based on the same award-winning design as the NH-D14, with some alterations. It features a dual-tower heat-sink with dual 140mm Noctua NF-A15 premium fans.
A quick search on Amazon we’ll give us a current pricing of $99.99, putting it in line with other premium cooling solutions.
Opening up the box we’ll find three smaller boxes on the top which hold the coolers mounting kits and accessories. Underneath we’ll find two more boxes surrounded by closed-cell foam packaging. The larger box carries the cooler itself along with the first cooler pre-installed, while the smaller box stores the second of the two 140mm fans included.
Opening up the first three boxes we’ll find both AMD and Intel installation kits compete with instructions for installing the cooler on AMD’s socket AM3/AM3+ and Intel’s LGA 115x and 2011/-3.
We’ll also find a very nice metal Noctua case badge, a pair of mounting clips for the second fan, two low-noise fan adapters and a 4-pin Y-splitter cable. As well as a tube of Noctua NT-H1 thermal compound and a long Phillips head screwdriver to help with installation, which is a very thoughtful addition.
We really appreciate all the extras Noctua throws in the box, especially at this price point. We really hope other manufacturers follow-suit, but for now we’re happy Noctua is leading the way.20 Terrifying Two-Sentence Horror Stories. I Didn't Think It Was Possible Until #5... When The Hair On My Neck Stood Up
Ever since I was a little kid I've loved sharing ghost stories around a campfire which is probably why I love watching horror movies. And every single time I finish watching one, well, a good one... I kick myself for not picking out a comedy instead.
Someone on Reddit asked the question, "What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?" I honestly didn't think it was possible to give me chills from such a limited amount of words...
Photo Credit: BHF Photography
1. I woke up to hear knocking on glass. At first, I thought it was the window until I heard it come from the mirror again.
Therealhatman
2. The last thing I saw was my alarm clock flashing 12:07 before she pushed her long rotting nails through my chest, her other hand muffling my screams. I sat bolt upright, relieved it was only a dream, but as I saw my alarm clock read 12:06, I heard my closet door creak open.
Jmperson
3.Growing up with cats and dogs, I got used to the sounds of scratching at my door while I slept. Now that I live alone, it is much more unsettling.
Miami_Metro
4. In all of the time that I've lived alone in this house, I swear to God I've closed more doors than I've opened.
EvilSteveDave
5. A girl heard her mom yell her name from downstairs, so she got up and started to head down. As she got to the stairs, her mom pulled her into her room and said "I heard that, too."
Drrd777
6. She asked why I was breathing so heavily. I wasn't.
Calamitosity
7. My wife woke me up last night to tell me there was an intruder in our house. She was murdered by an intruder 2 years ago.
The_D_String
8. I awoke to the sound of the baby monitor crackling with a voice comforting my firstborn child. As I adjusted to a new position, my arm brushed against my wife, sleeping next to me.
Doctordevice
9. I always thought my cat had a staring problem - she always seemed fixated on my face. Until one day, when I realized that she was always looking just behind me.
Hangukbrian
10. There's nothing like the laughter of a baby. Unless it's 1 a.m. and you're home alone.
Wartortlesthebestest
11. I was having a pleasant dream when what sounded like hammering woke me. After that, I could barely hear the muffled sound of dirt covering the coffin over my own screams.
Vigridarena
12. "I can't sleep," she whispered, crawling into bed with me. I woke up cold, clutching the dress she was buried in.
Vaultkid321
13. I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, "Daddy, check for monsters under my bed." I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, "Daddy, there's somebody on my bed."
JustAnotherMuffledVo
14. You get home, tired after a long day's work and ready for a relaxing night alone. You reach for the light switch, but another hand is already there.
madamimadamimadam
15. I can't move, breathe, speak or hear and it's so dark all the time. If I knew it would be this lonely, I would have been cremated instead.
Graboid27
16. She went upstairs to check on her sleeping toddler. The window was open and the bed was empty.
Aerron
17. Don't be scared of the monsters, just look for them. Look to your left, to your right, under your bed, behind your dresser, in your closet but never look up, she hates being seen.
AnarchistWaffles
18. My daughter won't stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but it doesn't help.
Skuppy
19. After working a hard day, I came home to see my girlfriend cradling our child. I didn't know which was more frightening, seeing my dead girlfriend and stillborn child, or knowing that someone broke into my apartment to place them there.
Cobaltcollapse
20. There was a picture in my phone of me sleeping. I live alone.
Guztaluz
Enjoy sleeping with the lights on tonight...The White House is preparing an emergency request to Congress for additional powers to enable the fast-track deportation of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America who are crossing the US border illegally, a move that could bypass protections introduced by the the Bush administration.
President Barack Obama has called the surge of minors pouring across Mexico border and into the Rio Grande Valley a “humanitarian crisis” and has ordered officials to open emergency shelters on military bases and increase the number of border agents.
But in a significant toughening of the president's stance, to be announced formally on Monday, the administration will request the authority to immediately repatriate children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – the Central American countries from which most of the child migrants are travelling
A White House official told the Guardian the administration is planning to ask Congress to provide the department of homeland security with “additional authority to exercise discretion” in dealing with children from those countries. The request has been drafted in a letter to Congress that will be sent on Monday, the official said.
More than 52,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended on the border since October. Administration officials have been particularly alarmed by the increase in children, many of them girls, under the age of 13. Border officials have reported finding some children as young as four or five or travelling alone.
However, the the administration has been hampered by anti-trafficking laws passed under George W Bush, which set out strict protocols for handling unaccompanied minors, which in turn delay the deportation process.
Unlike migrants from Mexico and Canada, children from countries that do not have a direct border with the US, such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, must first be screened by a US border control agent, who cannot hold them for more than 72 hours before they are transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
The White House will also ask Congress on Monday to increase penalties for people smugglers who target children. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP
The DHHS is required to “act in the best interest of the child”, which often means transferring the child into foster care or, more commonly, the custody of a family member or relative in the US. Estimates for the percentage of Central American unaccompanied migrants (not including Mexicans) who are united with US-based sponsors range from 65% to 90%.
Even then, such migrants are still in the removal process, and need to have their case heard by a judge, who has the discretion to deport them. The Obama administration is desperately trying to counter the perception that unaccompanied children who arrive in the US are guaranteed the opportunity to remain in the country.
The White House official said the letter to Congress would request “added flexibility” to deal with child migrants who, under current laws, cannot be immediately returned across the border. The change of rules the administration is seeking would effectively allow the secretary for homeland security, Jeh Johnson, to order that children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador be treated the same as Mexicans, who are often sent back across the border soon after being detained.
The Guardian understands the children would still be screened for humanitarian claims. The administration also hopes to invest in repatriation centres in the children's countries of origin, in order to smooth the process.
The White House will also ask Congress on Monday to increase penalties for people smugglers who target children and for additional resources to cope with the cost of sheltering thousands of children – as well as single-mothers with children, who have also been streaming across the border.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sacred Heart Catholic Church temporary migrant shelter in McAllen, Texas. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters
The additional funds being requested will be used to pay for more immigration judges, expanded detention facilities, where the children are housed and fed, and for an “aggressive deterrence strategy” in the Central American countries from which the migrants come. The White House official said the total sum being requested was “likely to be more than $2bn”, a figure first reported in the New York Times.
The child migrant crisis has become a major priority over the last month for the White House, not least because it has significant political repercussions for a president whose second-term ambition – passing comprehensive immigration reform – appears doomed.
Even prior to the current crisis, Republicans opponents of immigration reform in the House of Representatives argued Obama’s failure to robustly enforce immigration rules had served as a magnet for illegal immigrants and broken the trust required for bipartisan legislation. Immigrant rights groups, on the other hand, have labeled the president "deporter in chief”, for forcefully removing two million immigrants since coming to office in 2008 – more than any other president to date.
Republicans have been demanding tougher action against illegal immigrants before undertaking any reform and have seized on the child migrant crisis as evidence of a systemic failure in border control.
The chairman of the House judiciary committee, Bob Goodlatte, said on Thursday that if the Obama administration was serious about immigration enforcement, “they would not simply call the matter at the border today a humanitarian crisis, but would acknowledge that this is a serious national security issue, law enforcement issue, respect-for-the-rule of law issue.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ana Garcia de Hernandez, first lady of Honduras, speaks to the media about the immigration influx in the Rio Grande Valley along with US representative Henry Cuellar. Photograph: Joel Martinez/AP
There has been an increase in child migrants fleeing Central America for the US since at least 2009, but in recent months the numbers being detained at the border has spiked dramatically.
The US border patrol was used to detaining around 7,000 child migrants on the south-west border each year. Since October, at least 52,100 have been caught crossing the border; that number is expected to surpass 60,000 before the end of September. Most have come through the Rio Grande area, on the southernmost tip of Texas, which has seen a 178% increase on last year’s tally of children migrants.
This month, the Obama administration has begun focusing efforts in Central America to dissuade more families from sending their children on such perilous journeys. Earlier this month the White House announced a $250m package directed at the region, including funds for reintegrating returned migrants and tackling gang violence, an endemic problem considered to be behind many families' deciding that their children should leave.
Vice-president Joe Biden traveled to Guatemala to convene an urgent meeting attended by leaders from El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico. Secretary of state John Kerry will meet with representatives of all four countries on Tuesday, in Panama.Hamilton police aren't offering any explanation for why two journalists were arrested at the scene of a fatal crash in suburban Hamilton yesterday.
Freelancer Dave Ritchie and Global News's Jeremy Cohn were arrested in Waterdown, where a 10-year-old girl was struck and killed by a van on Tuesday evening.
The arrests were condemned by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, which demanded an inquiry into the police actions. And Hamilton Centre MP Dave Christopherson, asked about the matter in Ottawa, and said he expected police to offer a full account of happened.
Police Chief Eric Girt said he is reviewing the incident, but in a statement he offered no explanation about what occurred other than to say there were "interactions" between an officer and the journalists.
"During the scene management of this fatal motor vehicle collision investigation, there were interactions between a member of the Hamilton Police Service and members of the media responding to the scene," Girt said. "As a result of these interactions, two individuals were arrested."
Cohn was "released unconditionally," while Ritchie was charged with obstructing a peace officer and resisting arrest. Police said Ritchie will appear in court on June 15.
"As the matter is now before the courts, no further comment will be made in order to respect the court proceedings." Girt's statement reads.
"As chief of police, I take the arrest of any member of the media seriously. As a result, I am reviewing this incident in the context of what transpired yesterday."
CHCH News reported that Ritchie was arrested after he left his camera unattended momentarily while he went to change his batteries. He told CHCH News he arrived at the scene before police had put up yellow tape marking a boundary.
"When he came back, his camera was gone and a police officer admitted to taking it," CHCH reported.
Ritchie told the news agency that the officer used the term "scumbags" to refer to media, and Ritchie and the officer got into an argument before Ritchie was tackled and arrested.
'A cornerstone of our democracy'
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression president Alice Klein issued a statement about the arrests, which was addressed both to Mayor Fred Eisenberger and Girt.
"We call on Hamilton Police Services to drop the charges against Ritchie and demand an immediate public inquiry into the circumstances which led to the forceful detention and arrest of members of the media," she said.
Canadian Journalists For Free Expression called for an 'immediate inquiry' into the arrests of two journalists in Hamilton Tuesday. Freelancer Dave Ritchie is seen here in the back of a police vehicle. (Andrew Collins/CBC)
"It remains unclear what led Hamilton Police Service (HPS) officers to believe that forcefully detaining two working journalists was a necessary or correct course of action."
The MP Christopherson, a onetime Ontario solicitor general, said he didn't know the details or circumstances of the arrest, and so was hesitant to comment on the situation specifically.
But he said even the appearance of preventing media from exercising press freedom requires government to "be looking at that in a very serious way."
"I would assume that the police will be releasing all the details as soon as possible given the importance of freedom of the press," Christopherson said.
"This is a major issue. It's a cornerstone of our democracy, and any time that looks like — even looks like it might have been infringed on, then we need to be looking at that in a very serious way."
Coun. Terry Whitehead, who sits on the local police board, told CBC News that he plans to bring up the issue with the police chief before the next police board meeting.
"Clearly I'm not going to pre-judge anything. Police do what they do, and they do a good job at it," he said. "But I will expect some clarity at the next board meeting."
Thanks for the support, I have great relationships with many first responders. This was an isolated issue and I will be seeking resolution. —@Media371
Neither Ritchie nor Cohn was available for comment Wednesday afternoon.
Global News spokesperson Rishma Govani told CBC News that they are "very concerned" about the circumstances surrounding Cohn's arrest.
"While we are satisfied he was quickly released without charge, the incident merits further investigation and we will be following up directly with Hamilton Police Service," she said.
CJFE also called for Hamilton police to,"consider instituting a force-wide media relations policy and train front-line staff on how to interact constructively with members of the press, and hope such an administrative process will give clarity about the crucial role journalists have in a democratic society."
.<a href="https://twitter.com/Media371">@Media371</a> is a huge supporter of paramedics and all Emergency Services. This is strange. <a href="https://t.co/9urihnOv9a">https://t.co/9urihnOv9a</a> —@OPSEU277
People who have worked with Ritchie offered their support on Twitter.
"[Ritchie] is a huge supporter of paramedics and all Emergency Services," wrote the Peel Paramedic Union. "This is strange."
The Niagara Paramedic Association also weighed in:As any Doom player knows, a good chunk of the visceral joy and laser-like focus that arise while ripping and tearing your way through demons is due to the game's heavy soundtrack. Through some dark alchemy, it thumps and chugs and chings at all the right moments, making every weighty punch feel like a cannon shot.
The end result is amazing, but seeing how the music was made is truly something else. Two weeks ago, in a talk at the 2017 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, game composer Mick Gordon walked us mere mortals through his process. I have never seen anything like the silly business on display.
The most interesting revelation, to me, is that the game's signature sound—pulsing, distorted synth lines that roar and squeal like the devil—is really nothing more than a simple sine wave. This is the most basic form of synthesis, and it kind of sounds like nothing; it's just a boring, smooth, rounded bass tone. Gordon took sine wave patterns and turned them into the diesel-choked riffs we all know and love by running them through a massive array of effects that he thinks of as an instrument on its own.
The way it works is this: A single sine wave is split into four signals and sent down four effects chains. Two of these contain no fewer than four distortion and phaser pedals, to create harmonics. The third chain is pretty much for echo and reverb, and the final chain overloaded a tiny amp mic'd up for feedback. Put it all together and compress the ever-loving shit out of it—this basically makes louder sounds quieter and brings smaller sounds up in the overall mix, key for the music's swelling screeches—and you've got Doom, baby.
A diagram of the setup from Mick Gordon's GDC talk. Screengrab: GDC Vault/Mick Gordon
Goddamn, right?
Algorithms were also involved in creating the game's memorable guitar tones, which sound more like roaring chainsaws than any third-rate metal band. Well, as it turns out, this is because guitar riffs were "morphed" together with the sound of the chainsaw from the original 90s Doom. This was accomplished with a plug-in called MORPH. How MORPH works is a bit of a mystery, but it was originally designed by the now-defunct Prosoniq, which made a name for itself by using neural networks in music production.
One possibility, floated by machine learning expert Alex Champandard on Twitter, is that MORPH uses a neural network technique called "style transfer," which is currently a darling of the field and is finding use in everything from apps that make selfies look like works of art to projects that re-imagine famous movies as impressionistic animations.
Now, go forth and slay some demons with a new appreciation for how metal—nay, more metal than metal—the Doom soundtrack really is.
Subscribe to pluspluspodcast, Motherboard's new show about the people and machines that are building our future.Metaphors can be useful, unless they are allowed to override reality. In recent weeks, advocates for "reproductive freedom" have said that part of the Republican "war on women" is the proposal to let religious employers refuse to buy contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans.
But who is the enemy? Most women, a New York Times/CBS News poll finds, agree that religious hospitals and universities should be free to opt out. Nearly half think any employer should have that prerogative.
If the effort to limit the contraceptive mandate were truly a frontal assault on women, a majority of them would not be endorsing the offensive. But the ideology of groups like Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women (NOW) sometimes ignores inconvenient gender realities.
Those advocates have been distracted from a different and far less figurative war on women—which, as it happens, is helped rather than hindered by one of the "reproductive rights" they champion. Legal abortion may empower women, but it has also become a powerful method for the mass elimination of females.
Modern technology allows prospective parents to learn the sex of a fetus, and many of them use that knowledge to exercise a preference for sons. Absent such intervention, about 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But as Mara Hvistendahl reports in her 2011 book "Unnatural Selection," the number for boys per 100 girls has risen to 112 in India and 121 in China.
It was once assumed that the general preference for male offspring would subside as countries became richer and women became more educated. But in country after country, that has proved false.
Nor is the phenomenon limited to the eastern hemisphere. Rajendra Kale, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, writes that "female feticide" is so common in Canada that he believes "doctors should be allowed to disclose this information only after about 30 weeks of pregnancy -- in other words, when an unquestioned abortion is all but impossible."
French demographer Christophe Guilmoto, reports Hvistendahl, regards gender imbalance as "an epidemic. In the number of lives it has touched, he says, sex selection merits comparison with AIDS." Worldwide, experts say, the number of "missing girls" amounts to a stunning 163 million -- more than the entire female population of the United States.
The gender imbalance is particularly outsized in China partly because of the government's compulsory one-child policy. Yet that policy has sometimes been excused by supporters of women's rights. In 1989, as president of NOW, Molly Yard praised the Chinese population policy as "among the most intelligent in the world."
Selective abortion, however, does not target only girls. Recent screening advances now make it easier and safer to detect Down syndrome in the womb. Universal screening will have a predictable impact, because 92 percent of fetuses diagnosed with the abnormality are aborted.
Paul Root Wolpe, director of Emory University's Center for Ethics, told the New York Post, "What you end up having is a world without people with Down syndrome."
No one would object if that were achieved by curing the condition. But eradicating it through abortion doesn't sound so benign. A survey reported in the American Journal of Medical Genetics found that only 4 percent of parents with Down syndrome children regret having them—and nearly 99 percent of the people with the disorder said they are happy with their lives.
The practice of eliminating people who are regarded as unacceptable because of their sex or significant defects was probably an inevitable result of the proliferation of abortion. There may be others even more ominous.
A recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics argues that abortion should not be limited to fetuses that have not yet been born. The authors propose instead to allow "after-birth abortion," which is "ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be"—which means, really, for any reason at all.
That policy may not be so improbable. Ann Furedi, head of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, has said, "There is nothing magical about passing through the birth canal that transforms it from a fetus into a person." The Netherlands now allows physicians to euthanize newborns with a "hopeless prognosis" and "unbearable suffering" if the parents authorize it.
Abortion-rights advocates think the right to choose has conferred great benefits. Maybe so, but not on everyone.
Steve Chapman blogs daily at newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/steve_chapman.It’s every parent’s nightmare: sending their child off to school or daycare or sports practice and learning that they’re being bullied. That for some reason or another, they’re being targeted and made to feel badly about themselves by other kids. There are lots of resources for helping kids once the bullying has started, but you don’t often see resources on how to prevent these situations in the first place. Here are our top tips for helping your child avoid a horrible situation from the get-go:
Teach Your Kids to Look Inward for Validation
Children who depend on validation from friends and other outside sources are more vulnerable to a bully’s insults. But children who derive joy and meaning from their own pursuits (their favorite activities, time spent with family) are better able to resist taunts and jeers.
Observe kids in their environment
Make time to watch your children on the school playground or at pick up from practice. Observe whom they’re talking with and what the interaction is like. “If they seem isolated from their peers or if you notice that their behavior is different (e.g. less confident) than when they’re with you, ask them about it,” suggests 19-year-old Aija Mayrock, author of The Survival Guide to Bullying—Written by a Kid, For a Kid. If they purposefully separate themselves from the group or clam up around others, there could be a reason that needs to be uncovered.
Remember, however, not all conflict between children is bona fide bullying. As Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, points out: Bullying is a particular form of harmful aggression that results in psychological damage. Sometimes intervention is necessary, argues Bazelon, but sometimes kids need to work things out on their own, so it’s important to know exactly what’s going on before acting.
Ask specific questions
In many situations, asking open-ended questions allows children the choice to share as much or as little information as they’d like. But when it comes to helping kids avoid bullying, more precise is preferable. “Ask them who they sit with at lunch,” says Mayrock, “but also ask them what it’s like when they all sit together. Try to find out what they talk about and if people are nice to each other.” That will give you a better feeling for how your child is faring in social situations. If she reports that kids are being mean to one another or sitting together just so they can tease someone, then you’ll know that involvement might be required.
Get Active Early
If you suspect that your child is in danger of being bullied, create a two-tiered plan of action. Parents’ best bet is to get the school’s administration or the head coach involved and observing what’s going on—and to not let nothing happen. But kids need a strategy, too, especially since bringing both parties together for a talk often backfires and results in escalating the bullying. “Kids need to be their own superheroes,” says Mayrock. “They should take charge where they can by making sure they’re safe in school and not putting themselves in situations they know will trigger the bullying.”
Ultimately, the best way to (try to!) bully-proof your child is to teach them empathy and good behavior from the start. If you model respectful interaction with people, that’s what your children will pick up. And if they see you respectfully standing up for yourself when necessary, they’ll most likely acquire that skill as well. Most importantly, kids need to realize that it’s “never their fault if they’re bullied—and that they don’t have to live with it,” says Mayrock. “It isn’t easy to leave bullying in the past once it’s become part of your normal life, but it is possible.”
Check out our book review on One, a book that will definitely help your child understand bullying.
RELATED QUESTIONS
For the past two years my daughters have been getting bullied by the same kids. I finally talked to some administrators, do you think I’m doing the right thing?
My 7 month old acts like a bully…Is she old enough to have time outs?
My 8 year old stepdaughter is bullying my younger children. Advice please on how to handle this?
My niece was pushing my daughter and I stepped in to stop it. Was this the right thing to do?
My 6 year old is calling mme a bully for asking her to do household chores. How can I explain that this isn’t bullying?
I was bullied in middle school and now in high school I am friends with the person who bullied me. Things can change.
How do I confront, and what do I say to a mom who is being a bully to my child?
I have a 10 year old who is being bullied at school and it is now affecting his behavior at home. What should I do?
What if your child is the bully?
What are your thoughts on bullying? Why do you think kids do that to each other?
Get more great advice and meet other moms. Download the SmartMom app today.Soon under surveillance. (Photo by flickr user @tomsaint, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license)
For his entire career in truck driving, Bryan Spoon has tried to move toward being his own boss.
A third-generation trucker, he started driving in the military, which lasted ten years. After leaving the service, he bought his own truck in 2004, and leased it to one company for a while. Then he became independent, picking up jobs on the spot market, hauling loads from as far south as Georgia all the way up to New England and out to Kansas City.
But now, a new federal regulation is making him feel as if that freedom is being taken away. Under final rules published this month, he and more than three million other drivers have until the end of 2017 to buy and install an “electronic logging device” that connects to his engine and broadcasts his speed and location to the shipper, replacing the log sheet that truckers have kept for decades.
“I run a safe, compliant business. I never had any issues with hours of service. So what does the government get out of monitoring me?” Spoon says. The government won’t actually be looking over his shoulder day-to-day, but could ask for the records if it suspects he’s violated rules that govern the hours he can |
Bacon just moved to a space six times its original size — Sheahan, 43, adds another task. As the logistics coordinator for the expanding operation, she’s the efficiency whip for a staff full of teenagers and the supervisor of bacon skewering — lots of it.
She’s also in a wheelchair, without the use of her arms and legs, although those who know her would be forgiven if they forgot that once in a while.
“One word: She’s formidable,” said her father, Larry Abdo, who owns Abdo Market House real estate, the Nicollet Island Inn in Minneapolis and other businesses. “When she’s around, she commands the room.”
Her presence, along with her success in building Big Fat Bacon and Saguaro, were cited by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal when it honored her with a Women in Business award this year. But when you ask Sheahan about what she’s achieved, she only shrugs.
At that, cousin and business partner Tina Jordan shakes her head.
“You probably blacked out a lot of this,” Jordan said, “but we were there, at the hospital. We watched what you overcame. And to see you come from that to where you are now, you absolutely deserve this.”
In the spring of 1994, it seemed like everything was blooming all at once on the University of Notre Dame’s ivy-decked campus.
Bill Sheahan had finally struck up a friendship with Mandy Abdo, a fellow performer in the Shakespeare theater, whom he’d long admired from afar. And that friendship was developing into something more.
“I like to say I met her a year before she met me,” Bill joked.
Long walks through the lush grounds led to lunch dates and dorm visits. The budding romance simmered over the summer, through a series of letters. When they returned for his senior and her junior year, they were a couple.
After Bill graduated, he went to law school in his home state of Colorado. They stayed close despite the distance.
But on Nov. 11, 1995, everything changed.
‘Still Mandy’
When Bill called to say good night, Mandy’s roommate answered. There had been a terrible accident. Mandy was in the hospital.
She and some friends were driving to a movie when the rain turned to sleet. The car’s brakes locked up on the ice, sliding into oncoming traffic. One person sustained a concussion. Another broke an arm. Mandy snapped her neck.
Mandy Abdo Sheahan has long been a force in the Twin Cities restaurant scene.
As soon as Bill heard the news, he raced to the airport, where he slept under the ticketing counter until an agent showed up in the morning. He caught the first flight.
When he got to the hospital in South Bend, Ind., he breathed a sigh of relief. A tangle of tubes led to and from her body. But beyond the ventilator, he saw the same smile.
“It was still Mandy,” he said. “It was still the girl I fell in love with before she knew who I was.”
In the days and months that followed, she would begin to breathe on her own and regain the ability to talk. She would, however, be permanently paralyzed from the chest down.
It was gut-wrenchingly difficult for her to learn to navigate her new world. But she was determined. And her family was by her side. So was Bill.
Even when Mandy was unable to speak, he would call her from Colorado, sometimes talking to her, sometimes quietly holding the line just so she would know he was there. He visited on the weekends after she moved back to Minnesota, and they would play Trivial Pursuit, with Mandy mouthing the words. Bill became apt at reading her lips.
Then, one day, she mouthed the words, “You didn’t sign up for this. You can leave.”
He snapped.
“I got angry,” he said. “I hated the suggestion that what we had was something frivolous and that I was the kind of guy who would walk away.”
Mandy nodded at the thought. “I had to give you an out,” she said.
“I had to know if you stayed it was because you wanted to, not because you thought it was your obligation.”
In 1999, Bill proposed. And in 2000, eight years after Bill fell for Mandy from afar, they said, “I do.”
Juggling it all
After her accident, Mandy fought her way back, graduating from college within a year.
“I’m 21,” she told cousin Tina. “I’ve got a lot of life ahead. What am I going to do, be miserable for the rest of it?”
Instead, she started working as the marketing director of the Nicollet Island Inn. She wrote the first business plan for MyBurger, a chain for which Larry is chairman of the board and her brother John is president and CEO.
Working with food had been a part of Mandy’s life since before she could crawl.
While she was growing up in St. Paul, parents Larry and Caryl ran a pita stand at the State Fair and at the Renaissance Festival. As a toddler, Mandy would sit on the counter. By age 5, she was pouring the pop. Eventually, she graduated into making the garlic sauce, cooking the meat, cutting the bread.
But business was not booming for Pocket Pies.
“They were so ahead of their time with health food, ethnic food,” Mandy said of her parents. “But no one goes to the fair to eat healthy food. So we decided to make some money.”
That was Big Fat Bacon, a concept dreamed up in 2008 by Larry, and named and run by Mandy. The idea was simple: a quarter-pound of bacon, sprinkled with a pepper blend and splashed with maple syrup. The novelty took off.
As her three younger brothers got older and more involved in the family’s projects, Mandy wanted something of her own. So in 2014, she opened Saguaro, a restaurant inspired by the cooking of her “Sito” (Lebanese for grandmother), who lived in Arizona.
“I can’t be hands-on,” she told her parents. “But I can be brains-on.”
These days, she juggles Big Fat Bacon and Saguaro. Mandy’s family, whom she describes as “unbelievably supportive,” is almost always around. They often work together and go out together for Sunday dinners.
And then there’s Bill. Mandy’s full-time aide recently had a second child, so Bill has been filling the role since March. (He’s also vice president of operations for the Abdo family businesses, “which means I do whatever needs to be done for whoever needs it,” he said.)
In the mornings, he gets up and gets ready before doing the same with his wife. For Mandy, there’s a half-hour of stretching, then getting in her chair, then contacts, hair and makeup.
“Hairstyles are limited, based on [his] talent,” Mandy said. “He’s good at ponytails, not so good at braids.”
Then there’s the outfit.
“The whole standing in front of the closet thing, he doesn’t get that,” Mandy said. “He’s like, ‘Just pick something out!’ ”
“It’s the classic 1950s movie scene where the woman is taking forever and getting ready and the man is downstairs, tapping his foot,” Bill said.
“Except we’re together,” Mandy added.
In fact, they’re together all the time, from work projects to yoga lessons to reruns of “Law & Order” at night.
They have the same struggles as most couples — and then some. But when Bill looks at Mandy, it’s obvious he still feels like everything’s blooming, all at once.
“I never fell in love with Mandy because I saw her gracefully gliding across a ballroom floor,” he said. “It was all mental, all personality.”
“This definitely has changed the way I do things,” Mandy said of her wheelchair. “But it doesn’t change what I do. It doesn’t change who I am.”I have a magic pill to sell you. It will help you make more money, be happier, look thinner, and have better relationships. It’s a revolutionary new pharmaceutical product called Late-No-More. Just one dose every day will allow you to show up on time, greatly enhancing your life and the lives of those around you.
All joking aside, being late is unacceptable. While that sounds harsh, it’s the truth and something that should be said more often. I don’t care if you’re attending a dinner party, a conference call, or a coffee meeting - your punctuality says a lot about you.
Being late bothers me so much that just thinking about it makes me queasy. My being late, which does occasionally happen, usually causes me to break out into a nervous sweat. The later I am, the more it looks like I’ve sprung a leak. Catch me more than 15 minutes late and it looks like I went swimming.
On this issue, I find myself a member of a tiny minority. It seems like most people consider a meeting time or deadline to be merely a mild advisory of something that might happen. I’ve been called uptight and unreasonable, or variations prefaced with expletives. In a world that feels perpetually late, raising the issue of punctuality isn’t a way to win popularity contests and I’m ok with that.
There’s a reason we set meeting times and deadlines. It allows for a coordination of efforts, minimizes time/effort waste, and helps set expectations. Think of how much would get done if everyone just “chilled out” and “went with the flow?” It would be the definition of inefficiency. It’s probably not that hard to imagine, considering just last week I had 13 (yes, I counted) different people blow meeting times, or miss deadlines. It feels like a raging epidemic, seemingly smoothed over by a barrage of “my bads,” “sorry, mans,” and “you know how it goes.” The desired response is “it’s all good,” but the reality is that it’s not okay. Here’s what it is.
Disrespectful: Being on time is about respect. It signals that you value and appreciate the other person. If you don’t respect the meeting’s participants, why are you meeting with them in the first place?
Being on time is about respect. It signals that you value and appreciate the other person. If you don’t respect the meeting’s participants, why are you meeting with them in the first place? Inconsiderate: Unintentionally being late demonstrates an overall lack of consideration for the lives of others. You just don’t care.
Unintentionally being late demonstrates an overall lack of consideration for the lives of others. You just don’t care. Big-Timing: Intentionally being late is about power. It’s showing the other person, or people that you’re a “big deal” and have the upper-hand in the relationship. It’s also called being a dick.
Intentionally being late is about power. It’s showing the other person, or people that you’re a “big deal” and have the upper-hand in the relationship. It’s also called being a dick. Incredible: No, not in the good way. When you miss meeting times or deadlines, your credibility takes the trajectory of a lead balloon. If you can’t be counted on to be on time, how could you possibly have credibility around far tougher tasks?
No, not in the good way. When you miss meeting times or deadlines, your credibility takes the trajectory of a lead balloon. If you can’t be counted on to be on time, how could you possibly have credibility around far tougher tasks? Unprofitable: Let’s consider a scenario where five people are holding a meeting at 2 p.m. Your sauntering in ten minutes late just wasted 40 minutes of other peoples’ time. Let’s say the organization bills $200/hour. Are you paying the $133 bill? Someone certainly is.
Let’s consider a scenario where five people are holding a meeting at 2 p.m. Your sauntering in ten minutes late just wasted 40 minutes of other peoples’ time. Let’s say the organization bills $200/hour. Are you paying the $133 bill? Someone certainly is. Disorganized: If you can’t keep your calendar, what other parts of your life are teetering on the edge of complete disaster? Being late signals at best that you’re barely hanging on and probably not someone I want to associate with.
If you can’t keep your calendar, what other parts of your life are teetering on the edge of complete disaster? Being late signals at best that you’re barely hanging on and probably not someone I want to associate with. Overly-Busy: Everyone likes to equate busyness with importance, but the truly successful know that’s BS. Having a perpetually hectic schedule just signals that you can’t prioritize, or say “no,” neither of which is an endearing trait.
Everyone likes to equate busyness with importance, but the truly successful know that’s BS. Having a perpetually hectic schedule just signals that you can’t prioritize, or say “no,” neither of which is an endearing trait. Flaky: Apparently some people just “flake out,” which seems to mean that they arbitrarily decided not to do the thing they committed to at the very last minute. Seriously? That’s ridiculous.
Apparently some people just “flake out,” which seems to mean that they arbitrarily decided not to do the thing they committed to at the very last minute. Seriously? That’s ridiculous. Megalomaniacal: While most grow out of this by the age of eight, some genuinely believe they are the center of the universe. It’s not attractive. Note, this is also called Donald Trump Syndrome. Do you want to be compared to Donald Trump?
As I said earlier, I’m occasionally late. Sometimes a true emergency happens, or an outlier event transpires. When it happens, I try to give a very detailed account of why I was late, apologize profusely, make sure the other person knows that I take it very seriously, and assure them it won’t happen again.
Paying attention to punctuality is not about being “judgy,” or stressed. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It makes room for the caring, considerate, thoughtful people I want in my life, whether that’s friends or colleagues. Think of how relaxing your life would be if everyone just did what they said they’d do, when they said they’d do it? A good place to start is with yourself and a great motto is something I was taught as a child:
“5 minutes early is on time. On time is late. Late is unacceptable.”
Brent Beshore is the founder and CEO of adventur.es. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.What's The NSA Doing Now? Training More Cyberwarriors
Enlarge this image toggle caption David Welna/NPR David Welna/NPR
The U.S. needs more cyberwarriors, and it needs them fast, according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. He plans to more than triple the size of the Pentagon's Cyber Command over the next two years.
But where will they come from? These are not the kind of skills you can teach in basic training.
Enter the embattled National Security Agency. Its new director, Adm. Michael Rogers, also directs the Cyber Command. Ten miles down the road from the NSA, at a defense contractor's office in Columbia, Md., the NSA recently held a live-fire cyberwarfare exercise aimed at developing more cyberwarriors.
In a long room at the facility, big speakers pump electro house music. Several dozen people, many in military uniforms, cluster around computer stations. Hovering above them is the image of a skull and bones — a big Jolly Roger pirate flag.
This is a roomful of break-in artists — people who are experts at hacking into other people's computers.
Enlarge this image toggle caption David Welna/NPR David Welna/NPR
Marine Capt. Robert Johnston leads what he calls a reconnaissance and initial access team.
"So we're the guys kinda pounding at the front door," Johnston explains, "finding all the open holes that we can, and beatin' down the door."
A Three-Day Competition
For three days, nonstop and around the clock, Johnston and his team launch cyberattacks on networks designed and defended by teams at the nation's top military academies, including one from the Naval Academy at Annapolis and one from the Military Academy at West Point. It's all part of CDX, an annual cyberdefense exercise run by the NSA.
The red-cell team hacking the academies' networks is made up of a mix of NSA and military cyber experts like Johnston. He did this last year, too, and thinks the military academies have gotten a lot better since then.
"I've been nothing but impressed, actually, from last year to this year," says Johnston. "I've felt like there's been some exponential growth in capabilities."
But the academies are still no match for the attack team the NSA has assembled. As four men in camouflage crowd around a computer screen, up pops the grinning face of Justin Bieber. It's evidence they've managed to deface a network defended by the Naval Academy.
The trophy for the best defense of a network goes to West Point this year, but practical considerations drive this exercise.
"We want to make this clear: This is not a game," says Shawn Turskey, leader of the NSA's red-cell team. "We're training our future leaders to fight through network adversity to conduct their mission and keep our nation safe."
The Shadow Of Edward Snowden
The CDX exercise has been going on for 14 years. This year's, though, is the first since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden hacked the spy agency itself and made off with thousands of top-secret documents. The episode only underscored how much damage can be done when networks do get breached.
But the NSA has another reason for holding this exercise: the possibility that some of these students at the military academies will take jobs there.
"Some have ended up working a tour here, maybe for three years, then on to another tour; it definitely happens," says the NSA's Dan Finnerty, the coordinator of this annual cyberbattle.
The U.S. armed forces provide around half of the spy agency's 35,000-member workforce, according to Finnerty.
Industry insiders say competition for top cyber experts in both the private and public sectors has never been so fierce.
"We're all fighting for the same talent — it's tough out there," says NSA recruitment marketing manager Lori Weltmann. But she insists the NSA is holding its own, especially when prospective employees get to know the agency's operations.
"Once you try NSA, you buy NSA," Weltmann says. "The work is exciting, and you can do things here that you can't do anywhere else."
That's the selling point, but it may also be the problem. Because of public indignation over the sweeping agency activities leaked by Snowden, "the last 12 months were extremely difficult for NSA," says Victor Piotrowski.
He directs a program called CyberCorps at the National Science Foundation that's focused on attracting students to cybersecurity careers. While CyberCorps' biggest customer is the NSA, Piotrowski says it's hard to know just how much the agency was hurt by Snowden's revelations.
"From the leaked documents, the public perception is really creating a very negative image of a lot of government programs," Piotrowski notes, "and that might be working, you know, somehow against our recruitment efforts."
Training At The Service Academies
Enlarge this image toggle caption David Welna/NPR David Welna/NPR
The next generation of talent is being trained now at the nation's military academies. They happen to be at the incoming end of the CDX computer hacking exercise.
At the Naval Academy in Annapolis, midshipmen in a large classroom cluster around a computer whose network is being bombarded by the NSA's red-cell team. It's this academy's network where the NSA's red-cell team posted the face of Justin Bieber.
Second-year midshipman Bill Young sits at the keyboard trying to fend off attacks and keep the network up and operating. He'll be in the academy's first graduating class of cyber operations majors. Young says for him, the CDX exercise has been time well-spent.
"I've probably learned more in four days of working CDX than I have in two-plus semesters of taking information security classes," Young says. "Simply because you're doing it, you're seeing other people work with it."
This is the only military academy where every student is required to complete at least two courses in cybersecurity.
Capt. Paul Tortora, who directs the Naval Academy's Center of Cyber Security Studies, says the academy needs to be ready for a whole new theater of warfare.
"Cybersecurity, cyber awareness, cyber operations, so that we create an officer corps that has an understanding," Tortora says. "Then they go to the fleet, or the Marine Corps, and they can take the understanding of cybersecurity, cyber awareness to all their daily operations."
The NSA sees training exercises like CDX as an investment in future returns.
"We're in this for the long haul," says the NSA's Turskey. "We'll get immediate return, but down the road is what we're looking for to have that bigger payoff."
For the spy agency, that payoff could come with the new generation of cyberwarriors being bred at the nation's service academies — those who choose not just to try NSA, but to buy NSA.Virtual pay TV service YouTube TV will launch apps for Roku, Apple TV, Xbox One and several other devices. But thanks to a long-running dispute between YouTube parent Google and Amazon, the service will continue to shun Amazon OTT devices.
YouTube’s cold shoulder toward Amazon dates back more than two years. In October 2015, Amazon notified its customers that it wouldn’t be selling Apple TV and Google Chromecast devices. “It's important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion,” Amazon said at the time.
As Re/code noted, the e-commerce giant eventually patched things over with Apple but still doesn't sell Chromecast.
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RELATED: Amazon tells its sellers to nix Apple TV and Chromecast
According to Parks Associates, Amazon’s “Fire”-branded devices are the second-best-selling OTT boxes in the U.S., accounting for 24% of OTT boxes in U.S. TV homes in the first quarter. Roku ranked first at 37%.
YouTube has not commented on its decision not to support Amazon devices.
YouTube TV launched with a self-proclaimed “mobile-first” agenda, targeting iOS and Android devices. The only living room option initially was Google’s Chromecast dongle, which lets users port whatever is playing on their mobile device to the TV screen.
Other devices now supported by YouTube TV include Nvidia Shield TV and Sony smart TVs’ equipped with Android TV. Samsung and LG smart TVs are also now supported.
YouTube has not disclosed subscriber numbers for the virtual MVPD service it launched over the spring. The service is now deployed in more than 50 markets, covering 68% of the U.S. population.
“When we launched the service, we positioned it as a mobile-first product,” Christian Oestlien, product management director at YouTube TV, told TheVerge. “A lot of that was about breaking the association with the DVR and set-top box, this hardware in the living room you have to rent that gets outdated really quickly. We were trying to get people to grok that this is TV that lives on your phone, a cloud DVR, all of the above. What we saw in practice was that the majority of our watch time was in the living room, through Cast. And the number one request we get from consumers is more options, native options, for the living room.”Update: Climate Skeptics In Rome Warn Pope Francis of ‘Unholy Alliance’ With UN Climate Agenda Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano will join scientific delegation in Rome to Present Skeptics' Case to the Vatican. Morano: 'Instead of entering into an invalid Marriage with climate fear promoters -- a marriage that is destined for an annulment – Pope Francis should administer last rites to the promotion of man-made climate fears and their so-called solutions. This unholy alliance must be prevented.' 'The Pope has been misled on climate science and his promotion of the UN agenda will only mean the poor will be the biggest victims of Climate Change policies -- just as the global warming narrative has weakened.'
Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano will be part of a high level skeptical delegation with the Heartland Institute, traveling to Rome to offer alternative voices to the Vatican and Pope Francis on global warming. The skeptical delegation will hold counter events during Pope Francis’ climate summit on April 28 at the Vatican. (See: Pope Francis to Host Major Summit on Climate Change)
Morano will join skeptical scientists from NASA and elsewhere, to lay out a detailed case explaining why climate science does not justify the Vatican putting its faith in the work of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the UN climate agenda.
Skeptic Events In Rome – Morano & Heartland Institute – Who, Where & When:
Will also feature former NASA scientist Hal Doiron, Physicist Dr. Tom Sheahan, and Dr. Richard Keen, Christopher Monckton, Cal Beisner and others.
Monday, April 27, 1:00 p.m. GMT +2 (7:00 a.m. ET)
Hotel Columbus
Via della Conciliazione
33 – 00193
Rome, Italy
A slate of independent scientists and policy experts offer a “prebuttal” to the Vatican’s April 28“Climate Summit.”
Tuesday, April 28, 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. GMT +2 (7:00 a.m. ET)
Palazzo Cardinal Cesi
Via della Conciliazione n. 51 (Piazza S.Pietro)
00193
Rome, Italy
Morano’s key points to Pope Francis and Vatican officials will be as follows:
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Watch: Morano on Fox News on Pope Francis & Climate: ‘On every metric from polar bears on down, the global warming narrative has weakened’
Background info on Morano’s trip to Rome
Heartland Institute Heads to Rome
to Advise Pope Francis on Climate Policy
World’s Leading Scientific ‘Skeptics’ of Man-Caused Global Warming
Invite Public and Press to Open Events April 27 and 28 Just Outside the Vatican
The Heartland Institute is sending a team of climate scientists to Rome next week to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science: There is no global warming crisis!
Monday, April 27, 1:00 p.m. GMT +2 (7:00 a.m. ET)
Hotel Columbus
Via della Conciliazione
33 – 00193
Rome, Italy
A slate of independent scientists and policy experts offer a “prebuttal” to the Vatican’s April 28“Climate Summit.”
Tuesday, April 28, 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. GMT +2 (7:00 a.m. ET)
Palazzo Cardinal Cesi
Via della Conciliazione n. 51 (Piazza S.Pietro)
00193
Rome, Italy
Climate scientists and policy experts lay out a detailed case explaining why climate science does not justify the Holy See putting its faith in the work of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Both events are open to all press and the general public. Go to Heartland’s Vatican Environment Workshop page for real-time updates, presentations, and podcasts.
For more information, please contact Jim Lakely at [email protected] (preferred) or 312/731-9364(in Rome beginning Monday, April 27) or Gene Koprowski at [email protected] or (office)312/377-4000 or (cell) 312/852-2517 (in Chicago).
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, April 28 is hosting a workshop titled “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity” to “raise awareness and build a consensus” among people of faith that human activity is causing catastrophic global warming. The Heartland Institute – the world’s leading think tank promoting scientific skepticism about man-caused global warming – is bringing real scientists to Rome next week to dissuade Pope Francis from lending his moral authority to the politicized and unscientific climate agenda of the United Nations.
The Vatican’s summit features two men – Ban Ki-Moon, secretary-general of the United Nations, and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs – who refuse to acknowledge the abundant data showing human greenhouse gas emissions are not causing a climate crisis and there is no need for a radical reordering of global economies that will cause massive reductions in human freedom and prosperity.
Heartland’s experts will send this message to Pope Francis: Please do not put the enormous weight of your moral authority behind the discredited and scandal-prone United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Instead, speak out for the poor and disadvantaged of the world who need affordable and reliable energy to escape grinding poverty.
“The Holy Father is being misled by ‘experts’ at the United Nations who have proven unworthy of his trust,” said Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast. “Humans are not causing a climate crisis on God’s Green Earth – in fact, they are fulfilling their Biblical duty to protect and use it for the benefit of humanity. Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate.
“People of all faiths have a moral calling to continually seek the truth,” Bast said. “That is why Heartland is sending a contingent of real scientists to Rome next week. We are bringing the Vatican a message of truth for all with open ears: The science is not settled, and global warming is not a crisis. The world’s poor will suffer horribly if reliable energy – the engine of prosperity and a better life – is made more expensive and less reliable by the decree of global planners.”
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Related Links:
Pope Francis to Host Major Summit on Climate Change
Pope Francis Urges Quick Action on Climate Change, Set to Unveil Official Church Position
Report: Pope Francis nominated for Nobel Peace Prize ‘for stressing social justice and care for the environment’
Der Spiegel: Pontifical Academy Of Sciences Pushing For Climate Treaty…Finds Fossil Fuels Akin To ‘Modern Slavery’!
Pope Francis Apparently Doesn’t Know UN IPCC Climate Objective Contradicts Catholic Doctrine
Pope’s visit to U.S. stoke climate fight – Francis’s visit, which he told reporters this week will almost certainly include visits to both D.C. and United Nations headquarters in New York, will come only a few months after he is scheduled to issue an encyclical urging Catholics to fight climate change. He’ll also use the encyclical — a decree of sorts — to push United Nations leaders to be tough in December when they work to write an international agreement to reduce emissions and help poorer countries adapt.’
#Georgaphically, monthly marijuana use seems to be increasing more in regions of the country without medical marijuana laws. The Midwest (IL, IN, MI, OH, WI, IA, KS, MN, MO, NE, ND, & SD) has seen the greatest monthly use increase 6.6% or 210,000 more monthly tokers, despite having only one active medical marijuana state (Michigan). Increases of 4.6% were found in the Northeast (CT, ME, MA, NH, RI, VT, NJ, NY, PA) with only 2 active state programs and monthly use is up 2.9% in the South (DE, DC, FL, GA, MD, MS, NC, SC, VA, WV, AL, KY, MI, TN, AR, LA, OK, TX) with no active programs. Yet in the West (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, WY, AK, CA, HI, OR, WA), the birthplace of medical marijuana, where 10 of the 13 states have active medical marijuana programs, seven of them for over a decade, monthly use has held statistically steady (+0.2%), which may actually be a decline when population increase is factored in.Universal’s The Secret Life of Pets held onto the top spot for the second weekend in a row, fighting off tough competition from the highly anticipated Ghostbusters reboot. Pets made an estimated $50.56 million, down 51.5 percent from its massive opening last weekend. It’s now earned $203.14 million through 10 days, placing it 9.7 percent ahead of Inside Out, 2.6 percent ahead of Despicable Me 2, and 5.8 percent behind Minions through the same points.
Sony’s much-discussed Ghostbusters remake rode the buzz surrounding its all-female lead cast to an estimated $46.0 million opening weekend. The science-fiction action comedy starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and Chris Hemsworth rebooted the 1984 classic and notched the highest opening for a live-action comedy in more than a year.
Among comparable films, Ghostbusters starts 58.1 percent ahead of the opening weekend for Spy, 17.6 percent ahead of the opening for The Heat, 19.3 percent behind the opening of 22 Jump Street, and 33.5 percent behind the opening for Pitch Perfect 2. It also bested both the inflation-adjusted opening weekend and improved second weekend for the original 1984 film by about 32.6 percent and 19.3 percent respectively, and came about 27.7 percent below the $63.69 million inflation-adjusted opening weekend for Ghostbusters II in 1989.
The new Ghostbusters started with $17.2 million on Friday (including $3.4 million from Thursday night shows), declined a mild 4.9 percent to $16.35 million on Saturday, and dropped a further 23.8 percent to $12.45 million on Sunday. This places its opening weekend to Friday ratio at an estimated 2.67 to 1. With an overall B+ CinemaScore and mixed reviews, not to mention the high anticipation likely leading to a high opening weekend relative to its overall gross, expect this to drop pretty significantly next weekend. Reviews were highly segregated by gender, with 56.2 percent of female IMDB users rating the film a perfect 10, but only 13.1 percent of male users doing the same.
Warner Bros.’ The Legend of Tarzan slipped 47.1 percent to an estimated $11.12 million and third place. With $103.05 million through its third weekend, it’s running 7.2 percent behind the gross of 1999’s animated Tarzan through the same point, even without adjusting the original’s gross for inflation.
Disney’s Finding Dory sank 47.0 percent to fourth place with an estimated $11.04 million, just a hair behind Legend of Tarzan and close enough that the two titles could swap positions when weekend actuals come out on Monday. Dory extends his lead as the highest grossing film of 2016 and is running 81.0 percent ahead of predecessor Finding Nemo through the same point, or about 23.2 percent ahead when adjusting Nemo for inflation.
With $445.50 million to date through five weekends, Dory overtakes 2004’s Shrek 2 $441.22 million to become the highest grossing animated film domestically of all time. (Adjusting for ticket price inflation, Dory is currently the sixth-highest animated film, behind The Lion King, Shrek 2, Finding Nemo, Aladdin, and Toy Story 3, though it’s poised to eclipse the latter two films within the next few days.)
Fox’s Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates dropped 54.9 percent to fifth place with an estimated $7.50 million, for $31.23 million through two weekends. Universal’s The Purge: Election Year declined 50.9 percent to sixth place and an estimated $6.08 million, for $71.00 million through three weekends. It’s running 12.2 percent ahead of second installment The Purge: Anarchy and 19.1 percent ahead of the original The Purge through the same points. Warner Bros.’ Central Intelligence dropped a mild 34.0 percent — the lowest drop of any of the top films this weekend — to an estimated $5.30 million and seventh place, for $117.50 million through five weekends.
Broad Green Pictures’ The Infiltrator started with a lackluster estimated $5.28 million, although its relatively low theater count may have hampered its potential. The drama thriller starring Bryan Cranston got an early jump on the weekend by opening last Wednesday and has earned $6.74 million to date. With mixed reviews and a crowded summer schedule, this movie looks to fade fast and seems a poor follow-up to Cranston’s Oscar nomination last year.
Rounding out the top 10, Disney’s The BFG tumbled 52.0 percent to an estimated $3.74 million and ninth place, for $47.33 million through three weekends. Fox’s Independence Day: Resurgence tanked 55.7 percent to an estimated $3.45 million and tenth place, for $98.51 million through four weekends.
The top 12 films this weekend made an estimated cumulative $154.06 million, which is 26.3 percent behind last weekend (due largely to the huge splash from the Secret Life of Pets opening) and 15.9 percent behind the same weekend last year when Ant-Man and Trainwreck opened.
Overseas Update:
Ice Age: Collision Course crushed the competition overseas with $53.4 million, up 72.0 percent, in 51 markets ahead of its domestic release this Friday. The film has earned $127.0 million overseas so far, led by $19.6 million in Mexico, $13.2 million in Germany, and $11.4 million in Brazil. The film looks to do significantly better internationally than domestically, as current U.S. projections for this upcoming weekend are lower than for previous installments in the franchise.
Finding Dory continues its overseas dominance with $36.5 million, up 22.8 percent, as it expanded into 45 markets. It’s now earned $276.2 million overseas and $721.7 million globally, led by $38.3 million in China, $33. |
Never an elite scorer, no player impacted the game in more ways or made more winning plays than Russell. -- Adams
He stepped up when it mattered most. By my metrics, no all-time great contributed a higher percentage of his overall value in the postseason than Russell. -- Pelton
Russell's career is impossible to refute at the most fundamental level of sports: winning. -- Doolittle
4. Shaquille O'Neal
Robert Mora/NBAE/Getty Images
Teams
Orlando Magic (1992-96), Los Angeles Lakers (1996-2004), Miami Heat (2004-08), Phoenix Suns (2008-09), Cleveland Cavaliers (2009-10), Boston Celtics (2010-11)
Honors
MVP (1999-2000), three-time Finals MVP, 15-time All-Star, 14-time All-NBA selection, three-time All-D selection, Rookie of the Year (1992-1993)
Championships
4 (2000, 2001, 2002, 2006)
Career stats
23.7 PPG, 10.9 RPG, 2.3 BPG,.582 FG%
The player
The best center of his generation and possibly the last great center in NBA history. His sheer size and strength overwhelmed opponents, but he also had a deft touch around the rim and carried the Lakers to three straight NBA titles. -- Peterson
Surprisingly nimble and athletic, he is the biggest, most powerful force the game has ever known. He won four titles and some think he still underachieved; that's how good he was. -- Broussard
When basketball analytics were in their infancy, the "Shaq test" was a good way to evaluate player metrics: if O'Neal wasn't best on a per-minute basis, something was wrong with your system. -- Pelton
An immense force down low and perhaps an even bigger character in the locker room. He was the Wilt Chamberlain of the modern game. -- Marc Stein, ESPN.com
5. Hakeem Olajuwon
Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty Images
Teams
Houston Rockets (1984-01), Toronto Raptors (2001-02)
Honors
MVP (1993-94), two-time Finals MVP, two-time Defensive Player of the Year, 12-time All-Star, 12-time All-NBA selection, nine-time All-D selection, Hall of Fame
Championships
2 (1994, 1995)
Career stats
21.8 PPG, 11.1 RPG, 3.1 BPG,.512 FG%
The player
A groundbreaker in terms of bringing footwork and agility to post play. The first of Houston's two back-to-back championships was particularly memorable, because Hakeem was essentially the Rockets' lone star, surrounded by a clutch of quality role players. There haven't been many NBA champions over the years featuring this sort of one-star construction. -- Stein
Created and mastered moves that have never been seen by a big man before or since. On top of that, he was the greatest defensive center ever not named Bill Russell. -- Broussard
Olajuwon's path is truly amazing. He arrived in Houston for college with one developed skill: The ability to play volleyball with opponents' shots. Three decades later, All-Star-caliber players go to Hakeem to learn the fundamentals of post play. -- Doolittle
It's a testament to his athletic abilities that Olajuwon himself declared that "The Dream Shake" was actually something he came up with while playing soccer, not basketball. -- Adams
6. Moses Malone
Jim Cummins/NBAE/Getty Images
Teams
Utah Stars (1974-75), Spirits of St. Louis (1975-76), Buffalo Braves (1976), Houston Rockets (1976-82), Philadelphia 76ers (1982-86, 1993-94), Washington Bullets (1986-88), Atlanta Hawks (1988-91), Milwaukee Bucks (1991-93), San Antonio Spurs (1994-95)
Honors
Three-time MVP (1978-79, 1981-82, 1982-83), Finals MVP (1983), 12-time All-Star, eight-time All-NBA selection, two-time All-D selection, Hall of Fame
Championships
1 (1983)
Career stats
20.3 PPG, 12.3 RPG, 1.3 BPG,.495 FG%
The player
You know you're good when you become synonymous with an adjective, which for Malone was "relentless." He outworked opponents on his way to the Hall of Fame and was the best player in the NBA for a good two to three years. -- Doolittle
The king of lunch-bucket basketball, he was an incomparable force on the offensive glass and teamed with Dr. J to make the '83 Sixers one of the greatest teams of all time. -- Broussard
Malone might be the only superstar player who identifies as an NBA vagabond of sorts. Including his time in the ABA, Malone played for nine different franchises, making him the most traveled Hall of Famer. -- Adams
Of the eight players to win three MVP awards, Malone is probably the least appreciated. -- Peterson
7. David Robinson
Rocky Widner/NBAE/Getty Images
Teams
San Antonio Spurs (1989-2003)
Honors
MVP (1994-95), 10-time All-Star, 10-time All-NBA selection, 8-time All-D selection, Defensive Player of the Year (1991-92), Rookie of the Year (1989-90), Hall of Fame
Championships
2 (1999, 2003)
Career stats
21.1 PPG, 10.6 RPG, 3.0 BPG,.518 FG%
The player
A lefty who excelled at both ends and could run the floor like a small forward. The Admiral was the centerpiece for a small-market team that badly needed one and later a sidekick to Tim Duncan who willingly bequeathed his role as face of the franchise with uncommon grace. -- Stein
Skilled enough to lead the league in scoring and one of the best defenders in the league, Robinson was a consummate team player and leader. -- Doolittle
While he wasn't as productive in the playoffs, Robinson consistently outrated Hakeem Olajuwon in the regular season thanks to his efficient style of play. -- Pelton
The foundation of a Spurs dynasty that continues to this day. -- Broussard
8. Patrick Ewing
Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty Images
Teams
New York Knicks (1985-2000) Seattle SuperSonics (2000-01), Orlando Magic (2001-02)
Honors
11-time All-Star, 7-time All-NBA selection, 3-time All-D selection, Rookie of the Year (1985-86), Hall of Fame
Championships
None
Career stats
21.0 PPG, 9.8 RPG, 2.4 BPG,.504 FG%
The player
A force on both ends of the floor. Ewing is often slighted and underrated because he never delivered New York a title, but he never had a healthy perennial All-Star teammate during his prime. -- Broussard
His toughness and defensive presence were the foundation of everything New York accomplished in the '90s. -- Doolittle
Ewing had the misfortune of being stuck in the same conference as Michael Jordan and playing at the same time as David Robinson and Hakeem Olajuwon. -- Adams
Had he come along 10 years later, Ewing might have been the league's best center. -- Pelton
9. George Mikan
AP Photo
Teams
Minneapolis Lakers (1947-56), also played in the NBL and the BAA
Honors
4-time All-Star, 6-time All-NBA selection, Hall of Fame
Championships
7 (1947-NBL, 1948-NBL, 1949-BAA, 1950, 1952, 1953, 1954)
Career stats
23.1 PPG, 13.4 RPG, 2.8 APG,.404 FG%
The player
The first great center, Mikan brought glory to the Lakers franchise long before Wilt, Kareem and Shaq ever put on purple and gold. -- Adams
Editor's Picks 5-on-5: Dwight Howard top-10 all-time center? Our team debates which centers are ranked too high or too low in the all-time #NBARank, and where Dwight Howard will be ranked at the end of his career.
Photos: Top 10 NBA centers of all time Who are the greatest centers in NBA history? We're counting down the top 10 on all-time #NBArank. 1 Related
The single most difficult player to rank in NBA history. Dominant in his era, but because of physical advantages that quickly dissipated as the league became more athletic. -- Pelton
We don't have the tools to truly measure Mikan's on-court impact, but it's visible more than a half-century after he quit playing: the 24-second clock came into being because of him. -- Doolittle
He has a shooting drill named after him. The league widened the lane because of him. Teams stalled to blunt his effectiveness on offense. No man had a greater impact on the early NBA than George Mikan. -- Peterson
10. Bill Walton
Dick Raphael/NBAE/Getty Images
Teams
Portland Trail Blazers (1974-79), San Diego/Los Angeles Clippers (1979-84), Boston Celtics (1985-87)
Honors
MVP (1977-78), Finals MVP (1977), Sixth Man of the Year (1985-86), 2-time All-Star, 2-time All-NBA selection, 2-time All-D selection, Hall of Fame
Championships
2 (1977, 1986)
Career stats
13.3 PPG, 10.5 RPG, 3.4 APG, 2.2 BPG
The player
A passer without peer at the center position. No player ever stopped him, only injuries. Had he been healthy, he probably would have built a dynasty in Portland. -- Broussard
One of the best team players ever; the prototypical John Wooden player. -- Doolittle
Few, if any, centers threw the outlet pass as well as Walton. When he was healthy in the '70s, he challenged Kareem as the best center. -- Peterson
MVP, Finals MVP, Sixth Man of the Year and two-time champion. Not bad for someone who essentially never had a prime due to lingering foot injuries. -- AdamsThe protest that sparked the recent string of demonstrations in Saudi Arabia began March 7 at an all-female campus of King Khalid University in Asir province. Hundreds of students reportedly protested against discrimination and mismanagement at the university before security forces dispersed the crowd with batons, injuring dozens. The incident reportedly spurred similar gatherings by both men and women in solidarity with the King Khalid University students — as well as in demand for better facilities — at several other universities across Saudi Arabia, including in Riyadh. According to social media and news reports, additional demonstrations are planned for the coming weeks.
Protests are banned in Saudi Arabia, making the recent events quite anomalous. Thus far, the demonstrations outside Eastern Province have not called for political reform or involved slogans expressing grievances against the government. The demonstrations could cease to gain traction, or be satisfied with minor concessions and die out. However, small human rights protests often lead to larger demands for political change.
There are several key differences between the protests in Eastern Province and those in other parts of the country. Since February 2011, eastern Shiite demonstrators have demanded political reforms, the release of political prisoners and increased recognition of human rights. In contrast, the recent protests outside Eastern Province are Sunni-led and have called primarily for better university facilities. The demonstrators have not yet called for political reforms, which could threaten the Saudi government.
Suppression and Stability Strategies
The Saudi royals fear that a nascent reformist faction will gain traction due to the rise of political Islamists elsewhere in the Arab world. These concerns are growing at a time when the Saudi rulers are also facing upcoming challenges in the royal family succession. At this point, the demonstrations do not pose a serious threat to the stability of the monarchy, and the royals still have a number of well-established mechanisms to contain the dissent.
The monarchy maintains a tight security apparatus, which can be quickly dispatched to break up demonstrations. However, unlike other regimes, Saudi authorities avoid using brute force against protesters. Instead, to maintain their hegemony and social stability, the Saudi authorities isolate instigators from wider society (often through a series of arrests) and seek to use their entrenched influence among the Saudi tribal and religious networks to quell public dissent before it spreads.
To keep the population and local leaders happy, the monarchy provides a combination of cash handouts, subsidies and benefits. It also regularly marries into and develops relationships with nearly every tribe and province. And it cultivates varying degrees of influence in the country's ulema, or religious networks, by instilling fear of religious condemnation and arrests into both religious leaders and the general population. This nexus between local and religious leadership and the al-Saud family provides the monarchy networks that can be wielded to exert influence among a wide array of Saudi citizens. The networks also help perpetuate a norm among Saudis that public dissent, especially protests, is a taboo Western tactic and is fundamentally un-Islamic.
Cultural Shifts and Challenges
It is important to watch for signs of erosion of this norm, which is a possibility considering that the demonstrations have occurred primarily among Saudi youth, who might not be as influenced by the hierarchies of Saudi tribes and families. In addition, the youth have access to previously unavailable tools, such as the Internet, which is used by some to discuss current circumstances and continue to explore ideas even when demonstrations are shut down. The frequency and growing geographical diversity of the protests suggests the monarchy cannot rely on Saudi norms and networks to pacify dissent.
If demonstrations strengthen and become more political, authorities might decide that stronger suppression tactics, similar to those employed to manage the simmering unrest in the Eastern Province, are necessary. Indeed, tactics such as arrests, a heavier security presence, the use of rubber bullets and tear gas, and controlling the clerics through ulema networks have allowed authorities to largely contain the demonstrations and prevent them from undermining governance and the economy in the Eastern Province. If the new protests escalate, how the demonstrators respond to the government's tactics — and whether the spirit of protest endure — will be increasingly important to observe.Operation Lam Son 719 or 9th Route - Southern Laos Campaign (Vietnamese: Chiến dịch Lam Sơn 719 or Chiến dịch đường 9 – Nam Lào) was a limited-objective offensive campaign conducted in the southeastern portion of the Kingdom of Laos. The campaign was carried out by the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) between 8 February and 25 March 1971, during the Vietnam War. The United States provided logistical, aerial, and artillery support to the operation, but its ground forces were prohibited by law from entering Laotian territory. The objective of the campaign was the disruption of a possible future offensive by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), whose logistical system within Laos was known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail (the Truong Son Road to North Vietnam).
By launching such a spoiling attack against PAVN's long-established logistical system, the American and South Vietnamese high commands hoped to resolve several pressing issues. A quick victory in Laos would bolster the morale and confidence of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), which was already high in the wake of the successful Cambodian Campaign of 1970. It would also serve as proof positive that South Vietnamese forces could defend their nation in the face of the continuing withdrawal of U.S. ground combat forces from the theater. The operation would be, therefore, a test of that policy and ARVN's capability to operate effectively by itself.
Because of the South Vietnamese need for security which precluded thorough planning, an inability by the political and military leaders of the U.S. and South Vietnam to face military realities, and poor execution, Operation Lam Son 719 collapsed when faced by the determined resistance of a skillful foe. The campaign was a disaster[2] for the ARVN, demonstrating deficiencies in ARVN military leaders and that the best units of the ARVN could be defeated by PAVN[13] and destroying the confidence that had been built up over the previous three years.
Background [ edit ]
Between 1959 and 1970, the Ho Chi Minh Trail had become the key logistical artery for PAVN and the Viet Cong (VC), in their effort to conduct military operations to topple the U.S.-supported government of South Vietnam and create a unified nation. Running from the southwestern corner of North Vietnam through southeastern Laos and into the western portions of South Vietnam, the trail system had been the target of continuous U.S. aerial interdiction efforts that had begun in 1966. Only small-scale covert operations in support of the air campaigns had, however, been conducted on the ground inside Laos to halt the flow of men and supplies on the trail.[14][8][15]
Since 1966, over 630,000 men, 100,000 tons of foodstuffs, 400,000 weapons, and 50,000 tons of ammunition had traveled through the maze of gravel and dirt roads, paths, and river transportation systems that crisscrossed southeastern Laos. The trail also linked up with a similar logistical system in neighboring Cambodia known as the Sihanouk Trail.[4]:65 However, following the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970, the pro-American Lon Nol regime had denied the use of the port of Sihanoukville to communist shipping. Strategically, this was an enormous blow to the North Vietnamese effort, since 70 percent of all military supplies that supported its effort in the far south had moved through the port.[16] A further blow to the logistical system in Cambodia had come in the spring and summer of 1970, when U.S. and ARVN forces had crossed the border and attacked PAVN/VC Base Areas during the Cambodian Campaign.
With the partial destruction of the North Vietnamese logistical system in Cambodia, the U.S. headquarters in Saigon determined that the time was propitious for a similar campaign in Laos. If such an operation were to be carried out, the U.S. command believed, it would be best to do it quickly, while American military assets were still available in South Vietnam. Such an operation would create supply shortages that would be felt by PAVN/VC forces 12–18 months later, as the last U.S. troops were leaving South Vietnam and thereby give the U.S. and its ally a respite from a possible communist offensive in the northern provinces for one year, possibly even two.[17]
There were increasing signs of heavy communist logistical activity in southeastern Laos, activity which heralded just such a North Vietnamese offensive.[18] Communist offensives usually took place near the conclusion of the Laotian dry season (from October through March) and, for PAVN logistical forces, the push to move supplies through the system came during the height of the season. One U.S. intelligence report estimated that 90 percent of PAVN materiel coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail was being funneled into the three northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, indicating forward stockpiling in preparation for offensive action.[3]:14 This build-up was alarming to both Washington and the American command, and prompted the perceived necessity for a spoiling attack to derail future communist objectives.[3]:15
Planning [ edit ]
Map showing the Ho Chi Minh Trail
On 8 December 1970, in response to a request from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a highly secret meeting was held at the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam's (MACV) Saigon headquarters to discuss the possibility of an ARVN cross-border attack into southeastern Laos.[19] According to General Creighton W. Abrams, the American commander in Vietnam, the main impetus for the offensive came from Colonel Alexander M. Haig, an aide to National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger.[20][19]:317 MACV had been disturbed by intelligence of a PAVN logistical build-up in southeastern Laos but was reluctant to let the ARVN go it alone against the North Vietnamese.[20]:230–1 The group's findings were then sent on to the Joint Chiefs in Washington, D.C. By mid-December, President Richard M. Nixon had also become intrigued by possible offensive actions in Laos and had begun efforts to convince both General Abrams and the members of his cabinet of the efficacy of a cross-border attack.[4]:66
Abrams felt that undue pressure was being exerted on Nixon by Haig, but Haig later wrote that the military was lacking in enthusiasm for such an operation and that "prodded remorselessly by Nixon and Kissinger, the Pentagon finally devised a plan" for the Laotian operation.[21] Other possible benefits which might accrue from such an operation were also being discussed. Admiral John S. McCain Jr (CINCPAC) communicated with Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that an offensive against the Ho Chi Minh Trail might compel Prince Souvanna Phouma, prime minister of Laos, "to abandon the guise of neutrality and enter the war openly." Although technically neutral, the Laotian government had allowed the CIA and U.S. Air Force to conduct a covert war against an indigenous guerrilla insurgency (the Pathet Lao), that was, in turn, heavily supported by regular North Vietnamese forces.[8]:247
On 7 January 1971 MACV was authorized to begin detailed planning for an attack against PAVN Base Areas 604 and 611. The task was given to the commander of XXIV Corps, Lieutenant General James W. Sutherland, Jr., who had only nine days to submit it to MACV for approval.[3]:30 The operation would consist of four phases. During the first phase U.S. forces inside South Vietnam would seize the border approaches and conduct diversionary operations. Next would come an ARVN armored/infantry attack along Route 9 toward the Laotian town of Tchepone, the perceived nexus of Base Area 604. The village was estimated to have had about 1,500 inhabitants in 1960; five years later, half of the residents had fled due to war; Operation Lam Son 719 then destroyed the village and left it deserted.[22][23] This advance would be protected by a series of leap-frogging aerial infantry assaults to cover the northern and southern flanks of the main column. During the third phase, search and destroy operations within Base Area 604 would be carried out and finally, the South Vietnamese force would retire either back along Route 9 or through Base Area 611 and exit through the A Shau Valley.[18]:304 It was hoped that the force could remain in Laos until the rainy season was underway at the beginning of May. U.S. planners had previously estimated that such an operation would require the commitment of four U.S. divisions (60,000 men), while Saigon would only commit a force half that size.[24]
Because of the notorious laxity of the South Vietnamese military when it came to security precautions and the uncanny ability of communist agents to uncover operational information, the planning phase lasted only a few weeks and was divided between the American and Vietnamese high commands.[19]:322–4 At the lower levels, it was limited to the intelligence and operational staffs of ARVN's I Corps, under Lieutenant General Hoàng Xuân Lãm, who was to command the operation, and the XXIV Corps, headed by General Sutherland. When Lãm was finally briefed by MACV and the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff in Saigon, his chief of operations was forbidden to attend the meeting, even though he had helped to write the very plan under discussion.[8]:252 At this meeting, Lãm's operational area was restricted to a corridor no wider than 15 miles on either side of Route 9 and a penetration no deeper than Tchepone.[18]
Command, control, and coordination of the operation was going to be problematic, especially in the highly politicized South Vietnamese command structure, where the support of key political figures was of paramount importance in promotion to and retention of command positions.[4]:57–8[24]:630 Lieutenant General Lê Nguyên Khang, the Vietnamese Marine Corps commander and protege of Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, whose troops were scheduled to participate in the operation, actually outranked General Lãm, who had the support of President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. The same situation applied to Lieutenant General Dư Quốc Đống, commander of ARVN Airborne forces also scheduled to participate in the operation. After the incursion began, both men remained in Saigon and delegated their command authority to junior officers rather than take orders from Lãm.[3]:104–5 This did not bode well for the success of the operation.
Individual units did not learn about their planned participation until 17 January. The Airborne Division that was to lead the operation received no detailed plans until 2 February, less than a week before the campaign was to begin.[4]:70 This was of crucial importance, since many of the units, particularly the Airborne and the Marines, had worked as separate battalions and brigades and had no experience maneuvering or cooperating in adjoining areas. According to the assistant commander of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, "Planning was rushed, handicapped by security restrictions, and conducted separately and in isolation by the Vietnamese and the Americans."[4]:72
The U.S. portion of the operation was to bear the title Dewey Canyon II, named for Operation Dewey Canyon conducted by U.S. Marines in the northwestern South Vietnam in 1969. It was hoped that the reference to the previous operation would confuse Hanoi as to the actual target of the proposed incursion. The ARVN's portion was given the title Lam Son 719, after the village of Lam Son, birthplace of the legendary Vietnamese patriot Lê Lợi, who had defeated an invading Chinese army in 1427. The numerical designation came from the year, 1971, and the main axis of the attack, Route 9.
The decisions had been made at the highest levels and planning had been completed, but valuable time had been lost. The South Vietnamese were about to begin their largest, most complex, and most important operation of the war. The lack of time for adequate planning and preparation, as well as the absence of any real questioning about military realities and the capabilities of the ARVN were going to prove decisive.[4]:66 On 29 January President Nixon gave his final approval for the operation. On the following day, Operation Dewey Canyon II was under way.
Operations [ edit ]
Dewey Canyon II [ edit ]
Any offensive planning by the U.S. was, however, limited by the passage on 29 December 1970 of the Cooper-Church Amendment, which prohibited U.S. ground forces and advisors from entering Laos. Dewey Canyon II would, therefore, be conducted within territorial South Vietnam in order to reopen Route 9 all the way to the old Khe Sanh Combat Base, which had been abandoned by U.S. forces in 1968. The base would be reopened and would then serve as the logistical hub and airhead of the ARVN incursion. U.S. combat engineers were tasked with clearing Route 9 and rehabilitating Khe Sanh while infantry and mechanized units secured a line of communications along the length of the road. American artillery units would support the ARVN effort within Laos from the South Vietnamese side of the border while Army logisticians coordinated the entire supply effort for the South Vietnamese. Air support for the incursion would be provided by the aircraft of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, and U.S. Army aviation units were tasked with providing complete helicopter support for the ARVN operation.[3]:31
U.S. forces earmarked for these missions included: four battalions of the 108th Artillery Group; two battalions of the 45th Engineer Group; the 101st Airborne Division; six battalions of the 101st Aviation Group; the 1st Brigade of the 5th (Mechanized) Infantry Division (reinforced by two mechanized, one cavalry, one tank, and one airmobile infantry battalions; and the two battalions of the 11th Infantry Brigade of the 23rd Infantry Division.[17]:334
On the morning of 30 January, armor/engineer elements of the 1st Brigade, 5th Infantry Division headed west on Route 9 while the brigade's infantry elements were helilifted directly into the Khe Sanh area. By 5 February, Route 9 had been secured up to the Laotian frontier.[19]:330–1 Simultaneously, the 101st Airborne Division began a feint into the A Shau Valley in order to draw PAVN attention away from Khe Sanh. At the combat base, poor weather, obstacles, land mines, and unexploded ordnance pushed the rehabilitation of the airstrip (estimated by U.S. engineers at four days) a week behind schedule. As a response, a completely new airstrip had to be built and the first aircraft arrived on 15 February.[18]:306 PAVN resistance was almost nonexistent and American casualties were light; with no previous allied presence around Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese had seen no need to maintain large forces in the area.[3]:82 However, General Sutherland believed that the advance to Khe Sanh had been a race between American and PAVN forces, and the U.S. had won.[3]:82
In order to preserve the security of the upcoming South Vietnamese operation, General Abrams had imposed a rare press embargo on the reporting of troop movements, but it was to no avail. Communist and non-American news agencies released reports of the build-up and even before the lifting of the embargo on 4 February, speculation concerning the offensive was front page news in the U.S.[4]:72 As had been the case during the Cambodian campaign, the government of Laos was not notified in advance of the intended operation. Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma would learn of the invasion of the PAVN occupied portions of his supposedly "neutral" nation only after it was under way.[24]:630
Offensive [ edit ]
By early 1971, North Vietnamese troop strength in the Base Area 604 area was estimated by U.S. intelligence at 22,000 men: 7,000 combat troops, 10,000 personnel in logistical and support units, and 5,000 Pathet Lao, all under the command of the newly created 70th Front.[4]:66 There were differing views on what the expected reaction of PAVN to the offensive might be. General Abrams believed that unlike Cambodia, the North Vietnamese would stand and fight for the Laotian Base Areas. As early as 11 December he had reported to Admiral McCain that:
strong infantry, armor, and artillery formations were in southern Laos...formidable air defenses were deployed...the mountainous, jungle-covered terrain was an added liability. Natural clearings for helicopter landing zones were scarce and likely to be heavily defended. The bulk of the enemy's combat units were in the vicinity of Tchepone and PAVN could be expected to defend his base areas and logistics centers against any allied operation.[20]:235-6
A prescient CIA study released in December 1970 echoed Abrams' concerns and was supported by a 21 January memorandum which "was remarkably accurate with respect to the nature, pattern, and all-out intensity of [PAVN] reactions."[19]:321
MACV intelligence, on the other hand was convinced that the incursion would be only lightly opposed. Tactical air strikes and artillery preparations would neutralize the estimated 170 to 200 anti-aircraft artillery weapons believed to be in the area, and the threat posed by PAVN armored units was considered minimal. North Vietnamese reinforcement capability was set at 14 days by two divisions north of the DMZ, and it was hoped that diversionary operations would occupy them for the duration of the operation.[4]:72 Unfortunately, when North Vietnamese reinforcements did arrive, they did not come from the north as expected, but from Base Area 611 and the A Shau Valley to the south, where eight regiments, all supported by organic artillery units, were within two weeks marching range.
The North Vietnamese were expecting some sort of operation as early as 26 January when the text of an intercepted radio message read "It has been determined that the enemy may strike into our cargo carrier system in order to cut it off...Prepare to mobilize and strike the enemy hard. Be vigilant."[20]:241
The tactical air strikes that were to precede the incursion and suppress known anti-aircraft positions were suspended two days prior to the operation due to poor flying weather. After a massive preliminary artillery bombardment and 11 B-52 Stratofortress missions, the incursion began on 8 February, when a 4,000-man ARVN armor/infantry task force consisting of the 3rd Armored Brigade and the 1st and 8th Airborne Battalions, advanced west unopposed along Route 9. To cover the northern flank, ARVN Airborne and Ranger elements were deployed to the north of the main advance. The South Vietnamese 39th Ranger Battalion was helilifted into a Landing Zone (LZ) known as Ranger North ( ) while the 21st Ranger Battalion moved into Ranger South ( ). These outposts were to serve as tripwires for any communist advance into the zone of the ARVN incursion. Meanwhile, the 2nd Airborne Battalion occupied Fire Support Base (FSB) 30 ( ) while the 3rd Airborne Brigade Headquarters and the 3rd Airborne Battalion went into FSB 31 ( ). Troops of the 1st Infantry Division simultaneously combat assaulted into LZs Blue, Don, White, and Brown and FSBs Hotel, Delta, and Delta 1, covering the southern flank of the main advance.[25]
The mission of the ARVN central column was to advance down the valley of the Se Pone River, a relatively flat area of brush interspersed with patches of jungle and dominated by heights to its north and the river and more mountains to the south. Almost immediately, supporting helicopters began to take fire from the heights, which allowed PAVN gunners to fire down on the aircraft from pre-registered machine gun and mortar positions. Making matters worse for the advance, Route 9 was in poor condition, so poor in fact that only tracked vehicles and jeeps could make the westward journey. This threw the burden of reinforcement and resupply onto the aviation assets. The helicopter units then became the essential mode of logistical support, a role that was made increasingly more dangerous due to low cloud cover and incessant anti-aircraft fire.[26]
The armored task force secured Route 9 all the way to Ban Dong (known to the Americans as A Luoi), 20 kilometers inside Laos and approximately halfway to Tchepone. By 11 February A Luoi had become the central fire base and command center for the operation. The plan then called for a quick ground thrust to secure the main objective, but South Vietnamese forces had stalled at A Loui while awaiting orders to proceed from General Lãm.[25]:38 Two days later, Generals Abrams and Sutherland flew to Lam's forward command post at Đông Hà in order to speed up the timetable. At the meeting of the generals, it was instead decided to extend the 1st Division's line of outposts south of Route 9 westward to cover the projected advance. This would take an additional five days.[25]:43
Back in Washington, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and the Joint Chiefs tried to refute claims by reporters that the South Vietnamese advance had stalled. At a press conference, Laird claimed that the halt at A Loui was simply a "pause" that was giving ARVN commanders a chance to "watch and assess enemy movements...The operation is going according to plan."[27]
Response [ edit ]
Counteroffensive [ edit ]
The North Vietnamese response to the incursion was gradual. Hanoi's attention was riveted on another diversionary maneuver being conducted by a U.S. naval task force off the coast of the North Vietnam. This force conducted all of the maneuvers necessary for the carrying out of an amphibious landing only 20 kilometers off the city of Vinh.[19]:338 Hanoi's preoccupation with a possible invasion did not last long. Its B-70 Corps commanded three divisions in the incursion area, the 304th, 308th and 320th. The 2nd Division had also moved up from the south to the Tchepone area and then began to move east to meet the ARVN threat. By early March, Hanoi had massed 36,000 troops in the area, outnumbering the South Vietnamese force by two-to-one.[4]:76
The method chosen by PAVN to defeat the invasion was to first isolate the northern firebases by utilizing anti-aircraft artillery. The outposts would then be pounded by round-the-clock mortar, artillery, and rocket fire. Although the ARVN firebases were themselves equipped with artillery, their guns were quickly outranged by PAVN's Soviet-supplied 122mm and 130mm pieces, which simply stood off and pounded the positions at will. The defensive edge that could have been provided by the utilization of tactical B-52 bomber strikes was nullified by the close-in tactics of the communist forces.[26]:262 Massed ground attacks, supported by artillery and armor would then finish the job.
As early as 18 February North Vietnamese forces had begun attacks by fire on bases Ranger North and South. On the following day the attacks commenced against Ranger North conducted by the 102nd PAVN Regiment of the 308th Division supported by Soviet-built PT-76 and T-54 tanks.[25]:63 The ARVN held on tenaciously throughout the night. President Thieu, oblivious to the previous nights attacks, and who was visiting I Corps headquarters at the time, advised General Lãm to postpone the advance on Tchepone and to shift the focus of the operation toward the southwest.[4]:78 By the afternoon of the 20th, the 39th ARVN Ranger Battalion had been reduced from 500 to 323 men and its commander ordered a retreat toward Ranger South, six kilometers away.[28] Only 109 survivors reached Ranger South by nightfall. Although more than 600 PAVN troops were estimated as killed during the action, casualties in the three-day fight totaled 75 percent of the ARVN battalion |
You’ve heard of Tshombe. He’s the worst African that was ever born. The lowest type that was ever born. He’s a murderer himself. He’s the murderer of Lumumba, the former prime minister of — the first and only rightful prime minister of the Congo. He’s an international — he’s a murderer with an international stature as a murderer. Yet the United States government went and got Tshombe in Spain, and put him as the head of the Congolese government.
This is criminal! Here’s a man who’s a murderer, so the United States takes him, puts him over the Congo, and supports his government with your tax dollars. Now — they hired him to occupy the position as head of state over the Congo — a killer! He is a hired killer himself! His salary’s paid by the United States government. And he turns — his first move is to bring in South Africans, who hate everything in sight. He hires those South Africans to come and kill his own Congolese people. And the United States, again, pays their salary.
You know, it’s something to think about. How do you think you would feel right now if some Congolese brothers walked up to you — and they look just like you, don’t think you don’t look Congolese. You look as much Congolese as a Congolese does. They got all kinds of Congolese over there. How would you feel if one of them walked up to you and asked you about what your government is doing in the Congo. I was asked that when I was over there.
But they don’t have to come to me like that, ’cause they know where I stand automatically. And for one time I’m thankful to the press, for letting everybody know where I stand. They — but you have no explanation. Your tongue stays in your mouth. And then you have to become — you have to go to the extreme to convince them that you don’t go along with what the United States government is doing in the Congo.
And they justify the usage of Tshombe as the present head of state by saying that he’s the only African who can unite — or bring unity to the Congo. Has he brought unity to the Congo? But, see, this is their game! And their real reason for wanting Tshombe there was so that Tshombe could invite them to come in. Now, what African head of state would have dared to invite outside powers? So they put Tshombe there, and as soon as Tshombe got there he invited them to bring paratroopers from Belgium in the United States’ transport planes to try and recapture Congo.
This is all a cold-blooded act on the part of your Western powers, namely the Western powers here in the United States — interests in the United States, in England, and France, and Belgium and so forth. They want the wealth of the Congo, plus its strategic geographic position.
The step-by-step process that was used by the press: First they fanned the flame in such a manner to create hysteria in the mind of the public. And then they shift gears and fan the flame in a manner designed to get the sympathy of the public. And once they go from hysteria to sympathy, their next step is to get the public to support them in whatever act they’re getting ready to go down with. You’re dealing with a cold calculating international machine, that’s so criminal in its objectives and motives that it has the seeds of its own destruction, right within.
Part TwoFISA Court Twists PATRIOT Act To Pretend It's Okay To Spy On Americans Based On Their Constitutionally Protected Speech
from the that's-a-problem dept
the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.
that other guy
The statute prohibits the FBI from investigating law abiding Americans unless their own conduct fell outside of the First Amendment, regardless of the conduct of other people related to the investigation. I think most people, when they cite that statutory language, believe it means that Americans won’t be subjects of terrorism investigations for the First Amendment protected things they say or do.
They would be wrong. Judge Bates’ alternate interpretation allows for Americans exercising only constitutional protected rights to nevertheless be investigated under section 215 so long as there’s an independent, constitutionally unprotected basis for the overarching terrorism investigation.
The takeaway is, Americans are being investigated for their First Amendment protected activity, so long as someone’s else’s related conduct is not protected, even where the relationship between the American and the other party is too attenuated to support suspicion of aiding and abetting or conspiracy.
We've written before about how it appears that the DOJ/FBI and NSA have conducted surveillance on Americans almost entirely based on First Amendment-protected activities. Whenever that issue comes up, the Intelligence Community and its defenders insist, that they take the prohibition on surveillance over First Amendment protected activities seriously. Section 215 of the Patriot Act is rather explicit Seems clear, right? But, of course, what seems clear in the statute and how the intelligence community and the rubber-stamping FISA Court will view things often seem to differ by a wide margin. The FISA court has now released yet another heavily redacted opinion, given by Judge John Bates, concerning just such a request. You may recall Judge John Bates from his recent letters in which he pretends to represent the entire judiciary, in fighting back against any attempt to limit the NSA and the FISA Court's ability to spy on American people. Bates seems absolutely sure that doing so will let the terrorists win, which gives you a glimpse into his mindset.Thus, while depressing, it shouldn't be too surprising to find out that when a Section 215 request came to him concerning activity of a US person that was, Bates figured out a way to give the FBI the go ahead to spy on the person anyway. Because terrorism.While heavily redacted, it seems clear that Judge Bates admits that the nameless person the FBI wishes to spy on didn't do anything that went outside of First Amendment protected speech:Okay then, so all of the activities of this US person are clearly protected under the First Amendment. The law is pretty clear that the FISA Court thengrant the power to collect that individual's records. But... Judge Bates is deathly afraid of terrorism, so surely there must be a way to massage things to come up with a reason why it's okay, despite what the law clearly says. So Bates comes up with a neat little trick. He says, sure, the person of interest may only be engaged in protected speech, but(a non-American, and thus not protected by the First Amendment) is engaged in non-protected speech, and, the FISA Court will grant the ability for the FBI to slurp up the American's records and data.Because of the redactions, this part is a little more difficult to parse, but it's pretty clearly saying that even though the US person who is the subject of this surveillance request did nothing other than Constitutionally protected speech, because somewho is not in the US and not directly associated with the party in question, has some evidence of terrorist activity, that makes it okay to spy on the US person.As law professor Jennifer Granick notes in the link above, this is an extremely troubling interpretation of Section 215, basically allowing the FISA Court to ignore the prohibition on spying on people because of their Constitutionally protected speech, so long as it's somehow a part of a larger terrorism investigation.That is an immensely troubling interpretation of the law, one that appears to run counter to the plain wording of the law, as well as the basic concept of both the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. No freaking wonder Judge Bates has been so adamanthaving any sort of civil liberties advocate reviewing and challenging his decisions within the FISC.
Filed Under: doj, fbi, first amendment, fisa court, fisc, free speech, john bates, nsa, patriot act, section 215, surveillance, terrorismMillion Dollar Cash Game Season 5 Episode 1 Video
Here’s the first episode of season 5 Million Dollar Cash game (S05E01) that everybody’s been so keen to see.
Pot Limit Omaha legends Tom “Durrr” Dwan, Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies, Phil Ivey & Patrik Antonius are all sat down for what must be one of the toughest line ups assembled in recent memory. These guys are always my favourite to watch so to have them all sitting together is a real treat. Although they’re playing NLHE there is plenty of strategy to be gleamed that is applicable to all forms of poker including PLO. Composure, fearlessness and aggression to name but a few.
As soon as I have part two (should have it within the next couple of days) I’ll be posting it here so please bookmark the site and subscribe to my Pot Limit Omaha Tips Youtube Channel. Thanks a lot!Gary Johnson has won 47 of his 106 games in charge of Cheltenham Town
Cheltenham Town manager Gary Johnson will miss a "few weeks" of work to have "straightforward" heart surgery.
Johnson was not on the sidelines for the Robins' past two games and was taken to hospital at the weekend.
The 61-year-old has been Cheltenham boss since April 2015, leading them to the National League title last season.
"We look forward to welcoming Gary back once he has been cleared to return to work but, realistically, this may take some time," chairman Paul Baker said.
"The board will give Gary their full support in his recovery process."
Assistant manager Russell Milton took charge for the defeats by Doncaster and Exeter, and will continue to lead the team until Johnson returns.
Cheltenham are 22nd in the League Two table, seven points above the relegation zone.CENSUS researchers Nikolaos Naziridis and Zisis Sialveras have recently presented their research on knowledge-based evolutionary fuzzing, at ZeroNights 2015 in Moscow, Russia. The talk introduced a cross-platform evolutionary fuzzing framework, that will be released as a free and open-source tool.
The tool that was created as a result of this research is a file format fuzzer that uses evolutionary algorithms to produce new test files. The target file format is described by the user, via a simple python API which can focus the fuzzer to a specific subset of features of the target application. In the talk, we discussed the reasons we had to develop the fuzzer, along with the thought process that led us to the current list of supported features in Choronzon. We presented the tool’s architecture, its design and engineering approach as well as the problems we have faced and the solutions we came up with. Finally, we compared the different fuzzing strategies implemented in other feedback-driven fuzzers, namely honggfuzz and AFL against the techniques we used in Choronzon.
You may find the slide deck here.
The conference was a fun experience with a lot of interesting content this year. Many thanks to the organizing committee, as well as the team of volunteers for all their efforts to ease our stay in Moscow and facilitate our talk.On Saturday, Amazon started e-mailing its Kindle customers, alerting them to a possible credit coming their way courtesy of Hachette, Harper Collins, and Simon & Schuster. The three publishers were pulled into an antitrust suit in April by the Department of Justice, along with two other e-book publishers (Penguin and Macmillan) and Apple, as part of a massive antitrust case that started after the EU began investigating e-book prices. Sixteen states filed their own antitrust suits against the publishers and Apple as well.
"Hachette, Harper Collins, and Simon & Schuster have settled an antitrust lawsuit about e-book prices," Amazon’s notification reads. "Under the proposed settlements, the publishers will provide funds for a credit that will be applied directly to your Amazon.com account. If the Court approves the settlements, the account credit will appear automatically and can be used to purchase Kindle books or print books."
While the settlement still needs to be approved by the court at a hearing on February 8, 2013, Hachette, Harper Collins, and Simon & Schuster have already set up a $69 million fund to pay back customers. According to Amazon, customers can expect a credit in the range of $0.30 to $1.32 for each eligible e-book the customer bought between April 2010 and May 2012 on a Kindle. Customers can also request the credit in the form of a check.
The news of the settlement is in keeping with rumors earlier this year that three publishers were in talks to settle the lawsuits, although it was unclear which of the five were discussing the matter. Apple, Penguin, and Macmillan have not settled with the DoJ and will likely go to trial in 2013.
Amazon is clearly happy with the decision, as it notes at the end of its e-mail, "In addition to the account credit, the settlements impose limitations on the publishers’ ability to set e-book prices. We think these settlements are a big win for customers and look forward to lowering prices on more Kindle books in the future."“Balcony scene or (unseen) atop the world,” http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/nyregion/balcony-scene-unseen-atop-world-episode-trade-center-assumes-mythic-qualities.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm and published at http://www.gelitin.net/mambo/files/newspaper_articles/NYT180801.pdf
If this isn’t enough to show a MOSSAD link to 9/11, there is the corroborating evidence of Israeli involvement with the multiple arrests of Israeli nationals following the attacks in New York on Sept. 11. In an article published in the New York Post two days after the attacks, it initially identified the arrested suspects as illegal immigrants from the Middle East. They were apprehended in a white Chevy van near the Meadowlands based on a tip from witnesses who saw them “cheering” and “jumping up and down” in Liberty State Park following the attack. Port Authority police took the three suspects into custody as they drove along Route 3 in East Rutherford in the white van, which had the words “Urban Moving Systems” painted on it. After interrogating the men and searching the van in vain for explosives, the FBI turned the men over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for deportation.[5]
An article in the New Jersey paper, the Bergen Record, announced on the 12th that, some eight hours after the World Trade Center attacks, police in Bergen County detained five men who were purportedly found carrying maps linking them to the blasts. The five men, who were in a van stopped on Route 3 in East Rutherford around 4:30 p.m., were questioned by police but no charges had been laid. Sources close to the investigation said they found other evidence linking the men to the bombing plot. “There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted,” the source claimed. “It looked like they’re hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.” Sources also claimed that bomb-sniffing dogs behaved in a manner consistent with the detection of explosives. The FBI seized the van for further testing, authorities said.[6]
In order to be unbiased and report things from both sides and to make an honest attempt at invoking the dialectic in this discourse, the Israeli papers portrayed the arrests as bungling on the part of the American authorities. According to the Arutz Sheva News Service, the five young Israelis were “on the verge of collapse,” as a result of their incarceration in New York on charges relating to the Bin Laden attacks. It is interesting that the Israeli paper referred to the Sept. 11 events as the “Bin Laden attacks”. Was this a pointed attempt to blame the so-called Muslim terrorist cell al-Qaeda and deflect blame away from Israeli intelligence? According to the Israeli national paper, the suspects were arrested on Sept. 11, only hours after the World Trade Center attack, on charges of “plotting to blow up” a New York bridge. Katie Shmuel of the Galilee town of Yokne’am, purportedly told reporters of the Israeli paper that her son Yaron was in “a very critical psychological situation,” since none of the suspects had been allowed to have visitors and the conditions in which they were being held were difficult. “The Israeli Consul-General in New York was allowed to visit only after asking several times and receiving a special permit,” Katie is reported to have said. “He was allowed to talk to them only in English, and only from behind a glass partition. The Consul told me that the boys are in a bad state and that they are being held under difficult conditions.”
When asked why the five youths, aged 22-26, were being held, Katie replied, “It’s ludicrous. They were on the George Washington Bridge at the time of the bombing, and the FBI had warnings of a terrorist plot, of guys in a white van, to blow up the bridge. So when the FBI saw this van, with my son and his four friends -- one of them had a large sum of money, there were two razor knives in the van, and one of the boys is named Omer, which the FBI guys thought was Omar -- they put one and one together and got three, and immediately arrested them... For the first few days, the boys were held in an FBI dungeon, tied up, with no clothes and no food.” It is interesting that the Israeli paper uses the name Katie instead of the woman’s family name Shmuel. This seems to be aimed at humanizing the story. The fact that the suspects are portrayed as victims being held under duress also wins sympathy points. It is clear that America’s hands are being tied, since Israel is setting the American authorities up for racism and anti-Semitism charges, a ploy used by many nations claiming historical victim status. It is also interesting that “Katie” alleges that the suspects were arrested on the George Washington Bridge, when the American papers reported that the van was stopped on Route 3 in East Rutherford. The Israeli newspaper Ha’retz acknowledged on Sept. 17 that these were the same men who were seen “celebrating” and “making mocking gestures” as the Twin Towers collapsed. The Jerusalem Post reported on October 26 that the Israelis were smiling as they photographed themselves with the collapsed towers in the background.
This was followed by another arrest of Israeli nationals reported in October of 2001. Two men police described as Middle Eastern were detained by federal immigration authorities after being found with detailed video footage of the Sears Tower in Chicago. Plymouth Police encountered the men after an officer responded to a call from Pizzeria Uno on West Ridge Pike at 2:40 p.m. Thursday for a report of illegal dumping. A manager there advised the police officer that a tractor-trailer was discovered by the dumpster at the rear of the restaurant. The manager noticed a freshly dumped pile of furniture adjacent to the Dumpster. The manager then confronted the vehicle’s operator. The man, who later identified himself as Moshe Elmakias, 30, denied that he did anything wrong and fled the scene, heading west on West Ridge Pike... The manager was able to provide township police with the Florida registration number of the tractor-trailer and said that a sign posted on the side of the vehicle read “Moving Systems Incorporated,” the same company name on the van found in New Jersey.
The area was searched by township police, and the vehicle was spotted parked in front of John Kennedy Ford on Ridge Pike. An officer proceeded to make contact with the occupants of the truck. A Middle Eastern man, later identified as Ron Katar, 23, exited the sleeper area of the cab and said that the operator was across the street as he pointed toward the Don Rosen Porsche dealer, reports said. While the Mercury paper avoids identifying the nationals as Israeli, misleadingly portraying them as Middle Eastern, and in the minds of a brainwashed and misled public, probably thought to be Arabs and Muslim. To anyone the least educated, the names of the suspects are clearly Jewish or Israeli names.
Elmakias and a white female, Ayelet Reisler, approached the vehicle from the dealership, when Reisler suddenly began walking in a different direction, acting as if she were not with Elmakias. Reisler was detained and her ID checked. She had a German passport in her name and medication in a different name, according to police. Both her evasive behaviour and use of an alias were obvious red flags. Elmakias allegedly admitted to being behind Pizzeria Uno, although he said that he did not dump furniture, he was only turning around. Elmakias said he was heading back to New York from whence he had come. He said he was in Plymouth because he was supposed to make a pickup in the morning. He then pointed toward the Storage USA facility on Belvoir Road. Elmakias could not, however, provide a name or telephone number of the customer.
Township police then asked for a Motor Carrier Program Inspector. Officer Gerald Schwartz of the Whitpain Police Department responded. Schwartz discovered through his investigation that the operator’s log had been falsified and suspended the vehicle’s license for violations. Inspection of the tractor-trailer’s contents revealed a load containing household items, including furniture and boxes. Among the items retrieved was a Sony video camera. Plymouth Police Officer David McCann reviewed the tape from the camera. Police reported the tape showed footage of Chicago with zoomed-in shots of the Sears Tower. Is it possible that they were taking footage of the Sears Tower as part of a surveillance operation for a future attack?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was notified and all three subjects were taken to the Plymouth Police station. FBI Agents James Sweeney and Richard Tofani arrived at the station and proceeded to investigate both the subjects and their belongings assisted by Immigration and Naturalization Services. All evidence collected by Plymouth and Whitpain officers was then handed over to federal authorities. [7]
Also in October of 2001 was another worrying report about Israeli nationals caught in highly suspicious circumstances. Six suspects were allegedly stopped by police in the Midwest but released, despite being caught with photos and descriptions of a nuclear power plant in Florida and the Trans-Alaska pipeline.
The Federal Aviation Administration imposed new flight restrictions around nuclear plants nationwide, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission advised the nation’s 103 nuclear plants to fortify security. The FAA’s flight restrictions and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s security recommendations were in response to Ashcroft’s general alert rather than a specific threat. Ashcroft warned that Americans could be struck by another terrorist attack that week.
The incident in the Midwest apparently contributed to the new warning. In addition to the photographs and other suspicious material, they carried “box cutters and other equipment.” They appeared to be from the Middle East and held Israeli passports. Immigration and Naturalization Service released the suspects after determining that their passports were valid.
The FBI declined to comment. An INS spokesman called the report unfounded. “We have absolutely no information at this point in time to substantiate that story,” said the agency’s Russ Bergeron. It could not be learned in what state the six men were stopped or how they aroused suspicion. It was not known whether their true identities matched those on the passports, or why the FBI was not releasing their names or descriptions. This is highly suspect behaviour on the part of the U.S. authorities. It suggests pressure from Washington or Tel Aviv to not hold the suspects and to not release information about the suspects, especially their Israeli identities.
Investigators suspect the men changed cars and fled the jurisdiction, possibly to Canada. Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were “furious” that the INS released the suspects without notifying the FBI. Ashcroft and Mueller appeared Monday evening at a news conference to announce that the government had “credible” but vague information that another wave of terrorist attacks could strike Americans within a week.
Spokeswoman Rachel Scott said nuclear plants remained at the highest alert level. “We are in very close communication with all levels of law enforcement, including the FBI, to ensure we have the security measures in place to protect the plants.” The FAA restricted all flights below 18,000 feet and within 10 miles of 86 “sensitive nuclear sites.” Exceptions were allowed for law enforcement, medical and firefighting flights. [8]
Then there is the testimony of the New Jersey police officer responsible who captured the five Israelis who filmed and celebrated while the World Trade Center towers burned. He broke silence when he agreed to a Sept. 16 exclusive interview with American Free Press. The five Israelis he identified as suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks worked under the direction of Urban Moving Systems, a Mossad front company at the center of Israeli involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. Sgt. Scott DeCarlo has never spoken to the media about the details of that day except for two 30-second cameo appearances in Internet videos from undetermined sources. In fact, DeCarlo confirmed that this is the first and last interview he will ever grant in regard to this subject. DeCarlo revealed to AFP hidden details about the events of 9-11 that mainstream media venues should have uncovered ten years previously, if not for their near-total blackout of meaningful coverage where Israel is concerned. DeCarlo’s direct evidence confirms that Israel dominates foreign and domestic policy initiatives within the United States.
Although not scheduled to work that day, DeCarlo reported in for duty anyway and “was posted on the highway” to prevent traffic from entering New York City. “There was a BOLO, which is a ‘Be On the Look Out’ for a particular van, perhaps loaded with explosives,” explained DeCarlo, “that may have been on its way to destroy the George Washington Bridge.”
DeCarlo explained: “It [the suspicious van] happened to come our way, and I grabbed my sergeant [DeCarlo himself was a patrolman at that time] and said: ‘Hey, man, that’s our van.’ It wasn’t the exact license plate given reported -- it was off by one numeral -- but I said: ‘That’s gotta be it; it’s just too close.’” He continued: “The van was coming off the [N.J.] Turnpike trying to get on Route 3. Traffic was rolling at two miles an hour, so we got in front of the van on foot, weapons drawn, and stopped it.”
All five of the Israeli spies refused to exit their vehicle, so DeCarlo was forced to get physical. “We asked them to get out of the van, but they didn’t listen,” he said. “So, we... put them in handcuffs and did it as quickly as possible.” AFP asked DeCarlo why he thought the Israelis refused to follow his orders. DeCarlo was unsure, but asked this writer, “You ever have a gun pointed at your head?” The true answer to the question is that agents involved in covert ops are trained to show dumb obstinacy in situations involving domestic authorities interrogating or arresting them. They are trained not to cooperate and to never answer questions.
DeCarlo then described what happened after the spies were dragged from their van. “When we removed them, one of the guys that was rather chatty said: ‘We’re not your enemy; we’re your friend. Our enemies are your enemies,’” DeCarlo said. “At that point they said they were from Israel. They kept saying, ‘Hey, we’re on your side.’”
“We brought them over to the New Jersey State Police holding cells in the Meadowlands Stadium, and that’s the last I saw of them,” he said. The FBI reportedly took charge of the investigation from there. The five Israelis were held for ten weeks, but were eventually deported to Israel on charges of immigration violations. In November 2001, they appeared on an Israeli TV talk show discussing how they were in the U.S. “to document the event.” The fact that the agents were working for a Mossad front company, whose vans turned up in different states with agents involved in shady activities suspiciously resembling covert ops speaks volumes despite the silence of the deeply corrupt Zionist-controlled mainstream media. Understandably, Sgt. DeCarlo asked AFP to ask interested parties not to contact him. He knew his life was in danger as anyone would be if they were in his shoes. Anyone who doubts this and dismisses it as conspiracy theory is either too sheltered by privilege or is of an opportunistic nature, seeking only career advancement within a fascist corporate culture, where it is considered impolitic to question the government and the fraudulent war on terrorism.[9]
In March 2001, former Operation Gladio agent, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, stated in sworn testimony, “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.” For those unfamiliar with Operation Gladio, it was a rogue intelligence network established by NATO that undertook bombings across Europe in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. It was Gladio’s specialty to carry out “false flag” operations -- terror attacks blamed largely on communist insurgents, since communism posed the greatest geopolitical threat to Europe at the time.
The former Italian Francesco Cossiga, who confirmed the existence of Operation Gladio, told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9/11 attacks were a joint operation of the CIA and Mossad, said to be common knowledge among the world’s intelligence services. Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera: “All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”
Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, when 9-11 researcher Webster Tarpley quoted him as saying “The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.”
A widely respected former head of state, Cossiga is convinced 9/11 was an inside job, which is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies, just one more shocking confirmation ignored by America’s print and TV propaganda machine, where eighty percent of the world’s print publications are located. Despite the corporate media blackout on his startling claim, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot due to his experience and status in the world. [10]
It was later learned from two El Al sources, who worked for the Israeli airline at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, that on 9/11 an El Al flight was authorized to take off for Tel Aviv. This was hours after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all civilian domestic and international incoming and outgoing flights to and from the United States. The El Al Boeing 747 was fully loaded with passengers and took off from JFK bound for Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. The two El Al employee sources are not Israeli nationals, but legal immigrants from Ecuador who were working in the United States for the airline.
The flight departed JFK at 4:11 pm and its departure was, according to the El Al sources, authorized by the direct intervention of the U.S. Department of Defense. U.S. military officials were on the scene at JFK and were personally involved with the airport and air traffic control authorities to clear the flight for take-off. This is strong evidence that 9/11 was a combined American and Israeli operation designed to frame Muslims. The intervention by the DoD suggests that the Israeli passengers on board the flight were meant to be spirited out of the country amid great secrecy. The intervention by the DoD suggests DoD complicity and involvement in 9/11, which explains the anomalies reported at the Pentagon, which should have been protected by the surface-to-air missile defence system, which should have shot down anything approaching the Pentagon Building.
According to the 9/11 Commission report, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta ordered all civilian flights to be grounded at 9:45 am on September 11. The New York Air Traffic control centre’s audio tape of recollections of air traffic controllers made an hour and a half after the 9/11 attacks were destroyed by an air traffic control manager. He apparently did not face criminal charges for destroying physical evidence on the worst terrorist attack in American history. The Transportation Department later claimed the destruction of the tape was the result of “poor judgment”. It is called tampering with evidence and it is a crime. He was probably a dupe instructed to do it to blame an act of wilful negligence on a seeming incompetent.
The El Al flight took off two days before commercial flights were allowed to resume on September 13. September 14 was the date slated for private flights to resume. If this wasn’t enough of a security breach on September 13, a chartered Lear jet flew three Saudis, including a member of the Saudi royal family, from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky. On September 14, a chartered Northstar Aviation flight flew four Saudis from Providence, Rhode Island to Paris. On August 22, 2005, WMR reported:
Four Americans flew with ‘Air Bin Laden’ flight transporting Bin Laden family members to Saudi Arabia and Europe nine days after 911. The post-911 domestic flights of Bin Laden family members out of the United States with the sanction of the Bush White House were not the only instances where Americans have flown with the family that spawned “Al Qaeda” leader Osama Bin Laden. WMR has obtained a passenger list from a September 20, 2001 Aero Services private charter flight from Le Bourget Airport, north of Paris, to Geneva, and on to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (King Abdulaziz International Airport-OEJN). On the list are a number of Bin Ladens, as well as four Americans, including a Los Angeles Police Department officer named Jason Blum who flew to Le Bourget from Los Angeles. A previous list provided to Sen. Frank Lautenberg showed Mr. Blum departing from the Bin Laden party in Boston. The newly obtained list shows he accompanied the Bin Ladens to Paris Le Bourget. The other three Americans on the passenger list are J.P. Buonono, Joseph Allen Wyka and Ricardo V. Pascetta.[11]
Although much has been written about Bin Laden family being spirited out of the country in the days after 9/11, the El Al flight on the afternoon of September 11 is the first instance of Israelis departing the United States while commercial traffic was grounded. There have also been reports that the FBI seized FAA records concerning the events of 9/11 from the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Islip, Long Island. The ARTCC holds authority over flights out of JFK.[12] This act points to obstruction of justice by a rogue element within the FBI due to the wrongful confiscation of evidence.
Then we have Osama bin Laden’s denial of involvement. No evidence has ever been produced to implicate bin Laden. What is more interesting than Bin Laden’s denial of involvement is his assertion that the Uncle Sam is pointing one finger at him while three fingers are pointing back at Uncle Sam. “I have already said that I am not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. There exists a government within the government of the United States. That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks...The United States should trace the perpetrators of these attacks to those persons who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own nation could survive.”[13]A woman in Illinois says she bought a sex toy and didn't realize that the device collects personal information. She is now trying to sue the company.
The company, We-Vibe makes smart sex toys that allow you to connect them with an app to your smart phone to control it.
The device uses Bluetooth, and recently experts proved that it can be hacked.
The woman who tried to sue We-Vibe says her personal information that they tracked could be exposed.
The company released a statement saying they are concerned about privacy, but says you don't need to put any personal information into the app. Not even a name.
"It's the internet, you need to protect yourself." Says Kim Patterson, the owner of Enchantasys. She says it’s a reach that a hacker would want any of the information that the company tracks.
"The only thing they are really tracking right now is they are tracking the temperature of the toy, to make sure that the motors are working right.” Says Patterson. “And they are tracking which different vibrations people are using so that they know okay, this is one that someone likes let's come up with something like that that's even better."
Patterson says people need to educate themselves more about technology, and about sex in general. "The public schools have done a really bad job on educating us."
Patterson says the first priority of Enchantasys is sexual health and education. There are other types of smart sex toys they sell that are used more for exercise and women's health.Though the history of printing in Europe started in Germany, more books were made in the fifteenth century in Venice than in any other city, according to cultural historian Peter Burke (A Social History of Knowledge), who estimates the figure to have been about four and a half thousand editions, which could mean up to two million copies. The names of one hundred and fifty Venetian printers active before the turn of the century survive.
Printing with moveable type was first developed commercially in Mainz in the 1440s but by the turn of the century the centre of gravity had moved to the Adriatic. Venice, still a huge trading power in the Mediterranean though increasingly challenged by the Turkish Ottomans, printed liturgical works, Greek and Latin classics, Jewish religious texts, sheet music, chiefly for religious use, maps, atlases and scientific books; and it employed Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Arab, Hebrew and Glagolitic (early Slavic) alphabets.
The wealth of the city’s book trade supported not just printers and their ancillary staff but freelance “men of letters” and the beginnings of that shifting population of poor scholars, translators, editors, transcribers, writers and correctors of the press who would later go on in various European cities to occupy that insecure place of employment which in England came to be called Grub Street. Burke writes:
The large number of printers in Venice was one of the attractions of the city for men of letters, since the market allowed them to |
who have (surprise!) mostly fallen in line as the crisis looms. The crucial point here is that even if they’re right about interest payments — which is unclear — the government will (a) still go into default on obligations to vendors, Social Security recipients, and so on (b) be forced into spending cuts so large as to guarantee a recession if the standoff lasts any length of time.
Finally, there’s the special form of default denial coming from the deficit scolds. I noted yesterday that they cheered on the 2011 debt confrontation; they’re not quite so rah-rah this time, but as Matthew Yglesias notes, they’re still endorsing hostage tactics. From Fix the Debt:
Instead of engaging in dangerous and self-destructive political brinksmanship, our elected leaders should use this moment as an opportunity take steps to improve our fiscal condition. We urge lawmakers to stop focusing on issues unrelated to bringing down our dangerously high debt levels and instead pursue a fiscally responsible agenda that avoids default and puts in place a plan to bring down the debt as a share of the economy.
Yep, they’re still fantasizing about a grand bargain, and are endorsing hostage tactics over the debt ceiling because they believe it can make their fantasy reality. It’s kind of awesome. Everyone else is, I think, aware that Democrats will never accept a grand bargain without revenues and Republicans will never accept one with revenues; this latter point comes, in turn, from the reality that Republicans don’t care about the debt and never did, they only pretended to as an excuse to slash social insurance programs. Yet the folks at Fix the Debt imagine that somehow the debt crisis — the crisis many Republicans are insisting is no big deal — can push everyone into the sacred Grand Bargain. Oh, and that all this can happen in the next 10 days or so.
Given all the forms of debt denial, I really wonder about the confidence many people still have that there will be an 11th-hour resolution.
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digby 10/08/2013 10:30:00 AMtl;dr: They were killed by their women.
There’s been news of a very rare occurrence in Japan. A bombing. In a provincial city, at that. Utsunomiya, a town nobody knows about and nobody should really know about. Nothing going on there.
This week though, there was a big bombing. 1 dead, 3 injured. A car exploded in some park.
The media and the Internet were all talking about it. Terrorism! Must be, right?
Wait, terrorism? In Utsunomiya? No way. No fucking way. Of course it’s not terrorism. So what is it? Who did this?
This guy:
And who is this guy? A Samurai. A pissed off Samurai.
An old Samurai too. Retired. 72 year old ex officer of the Self Defence Forces. He had worked his whole life for the defense of his country. Alas, his country didn’t pay back the favor.
Kurihara Toshimasa had a schizophrenic daughter. She was going insane all the time at home, making a mess of herself and everything around her. He tried to control her anyway he thought of; to no avail. Eventually he forced her into an asylum.
His wife though had other ideas. A local cult sold her that her daughter wasn’t ill, she was just possessed or something, and they had this magic potions and rituals and stuff that could cure her of those possessions. The wife ate the whole thing up; eventually spent 500k dollars in whatever scam the cult came up with. The totality of Mr. Kurihara’s savings. A lifetime of savings. Including the retirement allowance that the army had given him. All gone.
Well eventually an argument ensued. The wife responded by suing our samurai for domestic violence. Everytime her daughter went batshit and he came to physically restrain her? Domestic violence. Sending her to the asylum against her schizophrenic will? Domestic violence. Arguing with the wife about money? Domestic violence. Evidence? None. The wife’s word.
Thing is our samurai was a bit old fashioned. He didn’t lawyer up. Why would I need a laywer? I’m in the right. Surely our legal system will recognize there is no evidence against me. Oh man. The judges gave his cultish wife everything she wanted. Divorce. Money. Property. Even the car. All to her. Our Samurai protested. “My wife tried to kill me. She assaulted me with a knife! Surely I had to restrain her”. The judges laughed. “Well if you had died we’d recognize that”.
Our Samurai had lost everything. His family. His property. His dignity. What could he do? It’s not like he didn’t defend himself. He run a Twitter account blogging about his trial. He started a blog. He went every day on 2ch (like reddit, sorta) trying to gain sympathy and attention. It didn’t work. Nothing work. Modern society is not kind to a samurai. It is however very kind to women. Even insane women.
And so he decided. He had lost everything. He was not allowed to live like a man. Then he will die like a man. On the morning of the 23th of October, he burnt down his (now his wive’s) house. 20 minutes later he sat on his car, and made it explode. His wife wanted the house and the car. Well, she won’t have them. That’s the least he could do.
People talk a lot about what a bunch of sexless wimps the modern Japanese have become.
From conquering a hemisphere to this pic.twitter.com/zvTHasLPPC — Walēd (@thelateempire) October 17, 2016
Now you know why. Humans are rational. Everything is rational. Gnon is always there.Think about “the end of Europe.” Do you suppose it is more likely that such a thing will be brought on by military aggression à la Russia’s de facto annexation of Ukraine, or by the TV appearance of a bearded singer performing in drag?
I ask because
Victory for Austria’s bearded transvestite Conchita Wurst at the Eurovision Song Contest prompted an outpouring of anti-gay anger from Russian politicians and stars on Sunday. … “There’s no limit to our outrage. It’s the end of Europe. It has turned wild. They don’t have men and women any more. They have ‘it’,” nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky told Rossiya-1 state television.
In case you’re not familiar with the Eurovision Song Contest, it’s an annual sing-off in which countries compete for the cheesiest best song and overall presentation. Each country’s jury awards points to all contestants but its own. It has been a famously ridiculous entertainment extravaganza for decades, a large percentage of viewers tuning in with a kind of tongue-in-cheek appreciation for the inherent campiness and gaudiness of the event.
One measure of how nutso the Eurovision Song Contest is: Israel, which has of course never been a part of Europe, is a frequent participant, while Turkey, which at least is partially located on European soil, is not.
Anyway, Russians in high places are appalled by Conchita Wurst‘s win.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter that the Eurovision result “showed supporters of European integration their European future: a bearded girl.” … “Fifty years ago the Soviet army occupied Austria. We made a mistake in freeing Austria. We should have stayed,” added the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, known for his outrageous statements.
Good to know that in terms of hateful invective, American politicians and pundits have nothing on their Russian counterparts.
By the way, it probably didn’t help that Russia’s entry, the Tolmachevy Sisters, only came in at number seven.Bookmaker Paddy Power is to team with gay rights charity Stonewall in a bid to battle homophobia in football.
The resulting campaign will see all professional clubs across England and Scotland sent rainbow laces for players to wear to highlight their support for the ‘Right Behind Gay Footballers’ campaign during next weekend’s fixtures.
A social media element will also see fans asked to use the hashtag #RBGF during the build-up to the matches themselves.
A spokesperson for Paddy Power, stated: “We love football but it needs a kick up the arse. In most other areas of life people can be open about their sexuality and it’s time for football to take a stand and show players it doesn’t matter what team they play for. Fans can show they are right behind this by simply tweeting using the #RBGF hashtag whilst all players have to do is lace up this weekend to help set an example in world sport.”
Activity will begin from today (16 September) and will include billboard and newspaper ads, editorial columns and celebrities and footballers targeted through social media for support.A debate over the decriminalization of heroin and cocaine has erupted again in Great Britain after a private statement by the one-time head of the Royal College of Physicians was leaked to a drug-reform campaign group and the media. Sir Ian Gilmore, the former president of the Royal College of Physicians, made the statement about his feelings on the country’s drug policies in a private bulletin to the members of the college. In it he called for a change in tactics, decriminalizing illicit drug use and treating addiction as a health problem not a criminal problem. The two-line statement, which was leaked to Transform, a drug-reform campaign group, was private, Gilmore said in a telephone interview Wednesday with the Star. But he was “happy” to defend it. “My position is since 1971 successive governments have pursued a policy that we should be a society free of hard drugs, stop them from getting into the country and prevent growth in production and if people use them put them in prison,” said Gilmore.
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“My point is that it has not succeeded and it is time to have a debate about a more pragmatic approach and treat heroin addiction as a health problem rather than a criminal problem.” Gilmore made the statement after a recent analysis in the British Medical Journal that convinced him the country’s drug policy for Class A drugs such as heroin had failed, he said. The editorial said the prohibition of drugs was “counterproductive,” made public-health problems worse, and stimulated organized crime and terrorism.
His call for a re-thinking of the drug laws in Great Britain comes on the heels of comments made by the chairman of the Bar Council of England and Wales, who said last month it was “rational” to consider “decriminalizing personal drug use.” Gilmore believes that more money should be put into medical resources to deal with heroin addiction, for example, rather than spending money on trying to stop the production or importing of drugs. He also made the point in his statement that in the United Kingdom there have been a number of encouraging trials with heroin addicts that resulted in those individuals returning to work because they were no longer committed to criminal behaviour to support their habit. As a physician he has seen all too clearly the medical complications – HIV and hepatitis C – that come from heroin addiction and the use of dirty needles, he said. “I’m not suggesting anyone go down to the street corner and buy heroin.”
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Rather he would like to see a regulatory framework set up to allow these drugs to be controlled by law. “It’s not a radical approach,” he said. “Many others have said it.” Many British politicians and opposition members have expressed that view privately, Gilmore said. But there are huge pressures on government to adopt and continue a tough-on-drugs policy. Keith Vaz, the chairman of the House of Commons home affairs select committee, has said in the Telegraph that the legalization of drugs “would simply create the mistaken impression that these substances are not harmful, when in fact this is far from the truth.” But Gilmore rejects the position that his position sends a message that Class A drugs aren’t dangerous. “That’s not our intention,” he said. “Heroin ruins lives, he said. “If there was a change in the way addiction was managed, it would also have to come with an information campaign.” In 2000 a Royal College of Physicians report, with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said there were no easy answers to the problem of drug misuse in society. At the time the report said “three-quarters of the U.K.’s expenditure on drug-related problems is devoted to enforcement and international supply reduction, but that there is little evidence that the money is well spent,” according to a statement on the Royal College of Physicians website. The report also identified a need for more investment in research to understand the ill-effects of drugs and in-treatment programs for addiction. The authors called for a public debate on the issue. In a statement the Royal College of Physicians said it plans to review the findings of the report with the Royal College of Psychiatrists under the leadership of its new president. Gilmore’s statement has been praised by Transform, saying his statement was the “nail in the coffin” on current drug laws in Britain, the Telegraph said.On Friday, Alabama joined the lengthy list of states who are well on their way to recognizing same-sex marriage, albeit via forced orders from a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Callie Granade struck down the state’s ban on gay marriage recognition, passed by the voters 2006, as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. The judge subsequently stayed the ruling for appeals.
The decision did not sit well with the infamous Justice Roy Moore, religious conservative chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. People may remember Moore being previously removed from the post as chief justice back in 2003 after refusing a federal order to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments out of a judicial building. After a failed run for governor he got re-elected back into his old job by voters in 2012.
Moore has sent a letter to Republican Gov. Robert Bentley telling him to ignore those federal judges and their claims of supremacy and continue to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages. He quotes both the Bible and a letter from Thomas Jefferson worrying about federal court decisions stripping states of their powers. Moore concludes, "I ask you to continue to uphold and support the Alabama Constitution with respect to marriage, both for the welfare of this state and our posterity. Be advised that I stand with you to stop judicial tyranny and any unlawful opinions issued without constitutional authority." Read the full letter here (pdf).
The Supreme Court agreed to take up cases from four states where bans have been upheld. When they consolidated the cases and granted the petition, the court said they would be tackling two questions, both connected to the 14th Amendment: Does the 14th Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex; and does the 14th Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state?
It’s safe to assume that should the Supreme Court decide in favor of the gay couples, Moore will classify it as one of those "unlawful opinions issued without constitutional authority." Whether he would ever be in a position as the state’s chief justice to actually defy the decision in any meaningful way like he did with the Ten Commandments memorial is another question entirely, though.Charles Krauthmammer on Friday said if Godzilla appeared on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Al Gore would blame it on global warming.
Such marvelously happened when the discussion on PBS's "Inside Washington" turned to the nation's crazy weather (video follows with transcript and commentary):
GORDON PETERSON, HOST: It’s been a terrible winter. If global warming is the problem, why are we having such a tough winter? Well Al Gore told Gail Collins of the New York Times there’s about a four percent more water vapor in the air now in the atmosphere than there was in the ’70s because of warmer oceans and warmer air, and it returns to earth as heavy rain and heavy snow. That’s what Al Gore says.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming…
[Laughter]
…because the spores in the South Atlantic Ocean, you know, were. Look, everything is, it’s a religion. In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.
Krauthammer as usual was spot on.
Consider that last Sunday, climate alarmist extraordinaire Joe Romm blamed the Egypt crisis on global warming.
There's absolutely nothing these zealots won't blame on climate change, and there's nothing they will ever admit refutes it.
Bravo, Charles. Bravo!Aquifers, underground water formations that provide water to millions of people around the world, contain water that has filtered there over hundreds of millennia. Using an atom trap built at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to date the water in a deep South American aquifer, scientists tracked the rate at which helium pooled in the aquifers. The results suggest that helium is trickling into the aquifer from deeper underground, where it is carried to the surface with the flow of water.
The only place where helium is made on Earth is underground, where deep veins of uranium and thorium give off atoms of helium as they decay. This helium eventually makes its way to the surface, where it escapes into the atmosphere and ultimately into outer space.
The Guarani aquifer underlays large parts of South America; it supplies water to more than 15 million people. Scientists found helium pools in this aquifer and is released to the atmosphere when the water reaches the surface. Image by Marko Perendija.
Geoscientists did not know, however, exactly how this helium gets to the surface. It can filter through rock, but extremely slowly, and the amount of helium in the atmosphere doesn’t match our estimates of how long that would take.
Some scientists have suggested that helium is released from deeper underground during violent tectonic events like earthquakes or even from underwater volcanoes; but others thought groundwater might be a more likely route.
Scientists knew the rate at which helium is naturally produced in the aquifer. They just needed to know how old the water was to calculate how much helium would be naturally created during that time span. If the groundwater carried more helium than the aquifers produced themselves, the source for the extra helium would be further beneath the surface.
Luckily, a group of Argonne researchers led by physicist Zheng-Tian Lu have pioneered a dating technique that uses a very rare isotope called krypton-81. Water picks up this isotope while above ground, but not while below ground; if you know how many atoms of krypton-81 remain in a sample of water, you can tell how long it’s been in the aquifer. And krypton-81 can date much further back than carbon dating—up to a million years or more.
The atom trap uses lasers that vibrate at the exact same frequency as krypton-81 atoms to count individual atoms. (The team has already used it to track how fast aquifers refill and to date ice in glaciers, among other uses).
Hydrologists from the International Atomic Energy Agency and their collaborators collected samples of water from various spots around the Guarani aquifer in South America, a massive reservoir that stretches beneath Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and extracted all the dissolved gases. Then the krypton was separated out, and finally the samples came to Argonne to have their krypton-81 atoms counted.
International Atomic Energy Agency hydrologist Luis Araguas-Araguas records data as a machine extracts gases from water samples taken from the Guarani aquifer in South America. The green LED on the front panel indicates the temperature of the water (in this case, 40. 9 °C, or 106 °F). “ Generally, the deeper the groundwater, the hotter it is,” said Argonne scientist Wei Jiang, who coauthored a study to track helium as it moves from underground to the surface. Photo by Wei Jiang, Argonne National Laboratory.
The researchers found much more helium than should have been produced in the aquifer itself during the time the water spent there, which indicates that the helium has been filtering up from below and pooling in the aquifer.
“The difference in helium was a factor of 10—quite significant,” said Argonne physicist Wei Jiang, who coauthored the paper. “This gives us the first solid data for the groundwater scenario.”
According to the paper’s rough estimate, about half of the helium produced in the crust makes its way to the surface via aquifer.
“So the helium in your party balloon has very likely been carried around in groundwater,” Lu said.
Scientists are interested in the global helium cycle because it and other gases are clues to the unseen and mostly mysterious goings-on underneath the Earth’s crust.
The study’s findings are also helpful to understand aquifers, which provide drinking water and irrigation to millions of people around the world, including half the population of the United States.
“The International Atomic Energy Agency works with its international partners to improve our understanding of ground water systems so that we can better protect and manage this vital freshwater resource,” said Pradeep Aggarwal, who led the study.
The work was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science; the development of the krypton-81 dating instrument was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.
The paper, “Continental degassing of helium-4 by surficial discharge of deep groundwater,” appears in the Dec. 1 online edition of Nature Geosciences. The lead author was Pradeep Aggarwal of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as IAEA scientists Takuya Matsumoto and Luis J. Araguas-Araguas. Other authors included Argonne physicist Peter Mueller, Reika Yokochi of the University of Chicago, Neil Sturchio of the University of Illinois-Chicago, Hung Chang and Didier Gastmans of the Universidade Estadual Paulista, Roland Purtschert of the University of Bern, and Thomas Torgersen of the National Science Foundation.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy.
The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.Married at First Sight is back! On season 5 of Kinetic Content’s hit social experiment show, three couples meet for the first time at the altar just minutes before exchanging vows. The newlyweds (whose wedding portraits were taken by Mike Staff Productions) are alternating each week blogging exclusively about the ups and down of marriage for PEOPLE. Check back after every episode for the latest in their road to (possibly) happily ever after! This week’s blog comes from 26-year-old business manager Nate Duhon and 31-year-old Sheila Downs, a director of operations for a local school district in Chicago.
Nate’s Take
This episode picks back up with the conversation between my mother and I. My mother is having a difficult time accepting the way Sheila and I got married because of how much of a risk was involved. My mother, being the strong-willed individual that she is, had no problem voicing her concern.
It was somewhat frustrating to hear some of her views because in all that I’ve done, she has always been supportive. In this case, it feels the complete opposite. Nonetheless, I love my mother with all my heart and I appreciate her trying to adjust to the decision Sheila and I made.
We cap off the episode with a rooftop party with all of our friends. We had a great time with unlimited food and unlimited drinks. Now, toward the end of the party, I was convinced to ask Sheila’s male best friend what their relationship looked like and what does a ”male best friend” really mean?! By no means am I insecure nor has Sheila done anything with him to make me feel insecure, but at the moment I was more than tipsy and was easily influenced by the convincer. In retrospect, I look back and say that’s not Nate-like, but in life you live and you learn. The goal is to do better and not repeat similar mistakes.
FROM PEN: Vanessa Grimaldi Talks About Her First Impression of Fiance Nick Viall
Sheila’s Take
It’s no surprise that Nate’s mom was having a tough time letting go of her son. I knew from our first interaction that she wasn’t going to come to terms with there being another woman in Nate’s life any time soon. Was that ideal? No, but what part of marrying a stranger is ideal? I often reminded myself that we chose this. Our friends and families didn’t, so if they agreed to come along on this crazy journey, then the least we could do was give them time. So take your time, Mama Duey, I’m not going anywhere!
You can only stay in your love den so long before people alert the authorities, so Nate and I decided to finally come out and play. Now before you start the revolution (please put down the torch, it’s scorching my eyebrows), my husband was indeed invited to come to dinner with Donnay and I. I am many things, but I am NOT a woman who would ever make my husband feel excluded or threatened by another man in any way. Nate couldn’t make it, but he sent me with his blessing (and a film crew of about 10 people). At dinner, I couldn’t help but gush about how great my husband was and although Donnay was still a bit apprehensive about me marrying a stranger, he was happy that I was happy. After all, that’s what brothers are for.
Now let’s fast forward to the rooftop party. Everybody was having a great time, the libations were flowing, and the Duhons were hosting their first official party. Although the timing couldn’t have been worse, Nate was encouraged to discuss my friendship with Donnay. Nate’s judgment was clearly impaired and before I knew what was happening, there they were standing in the middle of the room having what should’ve been a private conversation. Obviously, Donnay was mortified. He came to the party, like our other friends, to support us and have a good time. Once Nate called his friends over, I had seen enough. Married or not, I wasn’t about to let one of my dearest friends get railroaded when he did absolutely nothing wrong. If my husband had a concern, cool, we could work together to address it; but not like this. Looking back, I could’ve definitely been more patient with Nate. He was given terrible advice and although his execution left a lot to be desired, his intentions were pure. I was frustrated with production who instigated that situation, I felt bad for my friend who suddenly became a pawn, and I was disappointed in myself for allowing it to happen. As the party wrapped up, I was ready to go. Nate felt terrible and attempted to apologize; but the damage was done. Nate and I left together, but for me, the seeds of mistrust were planted and I was suddenly very leery of the production process and determined not to let there be any more casualties in this process.
Married at First Sight airs Thursdays (9 p.m. ET) on Lifetime.Though Hurricane Irene ravaged much of the Eastern Seaboard, it also provided a bit of relief in one place: the Great Dismal Swamp.
A wildfire has been burning in the unforgiving forested marshland in southeastern Virginia since early August, charring more than 6,300 acres at the national wildlife refuge.
But when Hurricane Irene tore its way through North Carolina and Virginia, it drenched the area with about 15 inches of rain and helped douse some of the stubborn fire.
PHOTOS: In the path of the storm
The blaze went from being about 35% contained to 90% contained over the weekend, said Catherine Hibbard, spokeswoman for the multi-agency effort fighting the blaze, officially known as the Lateral West fire.
“We’re very thankful, but it’s a double-edged storm,” Hibbard said. “It caused a lot of damage, but it’s good that it dumped a lot of water on this fire.”
Firefighters had been forced to battle not only the extremely difficult terrain, but also the particular nature of a swamp fire. Flames ignited patches of abundant marsh peat -- soil made of partially decayed organic material, such as trees and grasses. The peat smolders and leaves no visible flames to fight, even as it smolders underground.
Crews had been pumping water into the swamp from a nearby lake to flood the smoldering peat, but had trouble reaching certain hot spots.
The hurricane ended up dousing the more intense fires, but left other obstacles for crews, Hibbard said. The remaining hot spots have proved difficult to reach because of flooded roads and fallen trees.
RELATED:
Terrain hinders fire crews in Great Dismal Swamp fire
Irene death toll hits 42, as recovery efforts are amped up
Tropical Storm Katia grows, expected to become hurricane this week
-- Stephen Ceasar
Photo: Burned and unburned areas of the Great Dismal Swamp after Hurricane Irene passed. Credit: Rob Ostermaier / Daily PressNeither the job losses nor the president’s prodding was enough to prompt much of a response from the Republicans. But by Friday evening, it appeared that a small number of G.O.P. senators, enough to assure Senate passage of a revised (and watered-down) stimulus package by a very slim margin, had come aboard.
But only a small number. Even as the report of an agreement was being circulated, Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, was bad-mouthing the package on CNN. “This bill is a disaster,” he said.
It’s been clear for years that the G.O.P. is a party without a heart. But its pointless obstructionism, its overall lack of any serious response to what is a clear national economic emergency, seems to indicate it’s also a party without a brain.
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Republicans in Washington have behaved like a milling crowd standing in the way of firefighters trying to respond to a devastating blaze. The best that can be said for the party is that a few senators seem to have been able part the crowd enough to let the rescuers begin to inch forward.
President Obama addressed Republican inflexibility on Thursday night when he said at a gathering in Williamsburg, Va., “Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis.” He added that without swift action on the stimulus bill, “an economy that is already in crisis will be faced with catastrophe.”
The report of January’s enormous job losses came roughly a dozen hours later. It was the latest in a long and hideous pattern of employment woes, much of it resulting from the G.O.P.’s obsession with destructive supply-side economic voodoo.
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On the front page of The Times on Friday was an article that said the number of women on the nation’s payrolls is poised to pass that of men for the first time in American history. This is not because women have been doing so well, but because men have been doing so poorly.
As I was reading the article, I thought of all the guys who used to listen to Rush Limbaugh while driving to or from work but are now tuning in from their living rooms because the benefits of the G.O.P.’s right-wing, tax -cutting ideology never trickled down to them and they are now jobless.
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“Since the start of the recession,” as Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, points out, “the U.S. economy has shed more jobs than the total population of Chicago.”
The Republicans still don’t get it. Most act as if they don’t understand that in this radical economic downturn the demand for goods and services has fallen off a cliff, and that government spending is needed — and needed quickly — to replace a large portion of that lost demand.
The goal is twofold: to alleviate some of the enormous suffering (something that is easily understood if you have a heart), and to revive the battered economy (equally easy to understand by anyone with a brain).
Senator John McCain echoed many of his Republican colleagues on Friday when he indignantly asserted, “This is not a stimulus bill; it is a spending bill.”
It was an objection that had been addressed by an incredulous President Obama on Thursday night. “What do you think a stimulus is?” the president asked, his voice rising. Spending, he said — to laughter from his audience — “is the whole point.”UTSA raises $180 million in first-ever capital campaign, exceeds goal by more than $60 million
(Oct. 6, 2015) -- The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has received gifts and pledges of $180 million dollars in its inaugural capital campaign, We Are UTSA – A Top-Tier Campaign, exceeding its original goal by more than $60 million. Launched in 2009, the capital campaign’s initial goal was $120 million to support student scholarships, faculty and research initiatives, campus activities and community outreach programs. In early 2013, the university surpassed that goal and, with two years left in the campaign, set and exceeded a new goal of $175 million.
UTSA President Ricardo Romo announced the conclusion of the capital campaign and its $180 million fundraising total at his annual State of the University address today, calling the accomplishment “a major milestone in our advancement toward Tier One designation.”
“When we started this campaign, we knew UTSA had momentum, but the groundswell of support that we received from the San Antonio community has far exceeded what we could have imagined,” said Romo. “San Antonio wants a Tier One university. It believes in UTSA. And it is committed to supporting our students, faculty and researchers so that excellence thrives at our university and in our city.”
Nearly 33,000 donors contributed almost 73,000 gifts to the campaign, which raised $62.6 million for student scholarships and fellowships, $43.8 million for faculty support, $19.1 million for UTSA research centers, institutes and outreach programs, and $50.1 million for student life and facilities enhancements. Another $4.5 million was raised for other university priorities including presidential scholarships.
“No other university in our region educates, influences and impacts more people than UTSA,” said Tom Frost, UTSA capital campaign chairman and chairman-emeritus of Frost. “The success of this campaign reflects San Antonio’s commitment to creating a world-class city backed by a world-class quality research university.”
UTSA began planning for its capital campaign in 2008, conducting feasibility studies and gaining support from community and business leaders. An initial $2.5 million gift from the Valero Energy Foundation supporting business and engineering students launched the campaign in 2009. A year later, UTSA received its largest private gift in the history of the university, a $22 million estate gift bequeathed by former schoolteacher Mary E. McKinney. The gift is supporting undergraduate scholarships in perpetuity.
In spring 2012, UTSA kicked off the public phase of its campaign with $94 million already raised toward its $120 million goal. In 2013, it reached $120 million and then increased the goal by $55 million. As the capital campaign concluded this fall, UTSA had received more than $180 million from its supporters.
“UTSA is making San Antonio a Tier One city. With the support we have received through the capital campaign, we are producing tomorrow’s business and community leaders. We are making breakthrough discoveries in science, engineering and cybersecurity,” said Marjie French, UTSA vice president for external relations and chief development officer. “We have more than 30,000 donors who, through their generosity, are making it possible for UTSA to transform the lives of students, faculty and researchers who are making meaningful contributions to society. We are so grateful for their support.”
Campaign Impact: Student Scholarships and Fellowships
UTSA raised more than $62 million for student support through We Are UTSA – A Top-Tier Campaign, creating hundreds of undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships.
A number of the new scholarships are already supporting students from underrepresented populations. Nearly half (48.4 percent) of UTSA’s students are Hispanic. More than 45 percent (46.2 percent) will be the first in their families to earn a college degree. Seventy percent are eligible for financial aid. Many work full-time to support themselves and/or their families while they are in college.
The McKinney estate gift, received in 2010, was initially valued at $22 million and has grown to a value of more than $30 million today. So far, it has funded four-year undergraduate scholarships for 170 high achieving students, including Boyd Garriott '14, a UTSA alum who majored in economics and is now attending Harvard Law School. While at UTSA, Garriott was active in the Student Government Association and interned in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 2011, a $500,000 gift from the Kudla Foundation created the Nancy and Frank Kudla Endowed Fellowship in Information Assurance and Security. College of Business alumni Frank Kudla '85 and Nancy Kudla '87 created the endowment to support graduate student research and education in cybersecurity. To date, the fund has supported four graduate students including Michelle Maasberg, a doctoral student conducting insider threat behavioral research. A former Navy helicopter pilot and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Maasberg is using the Dark Triad, a group of personality traits including narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, to help develop a model to identify workforce insiders. She has presented her research at a variety of top information technology conferences across the country.
Additionally, the $62 million that UTSA raised in this area enabled the creation of 70 new endowed scholarships and 32 new graduate fellowships.
Campaign Impact: Faculty Research, Recruitment and |
it Bharat-centric." Bharat is the Hindi word for India.
"The problem is that they are equating India to Hindus. What about the India that houses the Muslims, Christians, Jains, Sikhs and other religions? India's defining character is its diversity - including religious. That will be subtly and efficiently destroyed by introducing religious content in school books," said Sveta Joshi, a former professor at Delhi University who has done extensive work on the 2002 religious riots in Gujarat.
One of the nine books in question urges students to visit Hindu pilgrim places like Jagannath, Badrinath and Rameshwaram to "cleanse themselves".
"Students who are slightly older do question the lack of any Muslim or Christian places of worship," Solanki, the elementary school teacher, said.
"Four of the nine books are titled Prerna Deep, they are meant to have short biographies of 'inspiring Indians'." Dalit, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist heroes are mentioned prominently. The mention of Muslim and Christian heroes is almost negligible though," said Jani of Gujarat University.
Questioning perspectives
Since 1952, when it founded the first Saraswati Shishu Mandir (nursery school) in Gorakhpur in northern Uttar Pradesh state, the RSS, the ruling party BJP's mother organisation, has always had schools that propagate its ideology. In subsequent years, the RSS founded Vidya Bharati, an umbrella body for thousands of educational institutions based on Hindu values, from the nursery to the post-graduate levels.
"Until now, the Hindu system of education was running parallel to the regular NCERT curriculum, which was formed collectively by eminent scholars from all walks of life. But now, the danger is that they want to merge the two," said Jani. "The Sangh ideology is slowly becoming the state ideology," he adds.
India's defining character is its diversity - including religious. That will be subtly and efficiently destroyed by introducing religious content in school books. - Sveta Joshi, former professor, Delhi University
"If children are taught from a young age about Hindu supremacy and glory, they will not question it at a later stage in their life," said Lila Visariya, a scholar at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research, at a conference organised in Ahmedabad last month.
Achyut Yagnik, founder of the Centre for Social Knowledge and Action, said that the "saffronisation of education" began in Gujarat slowly and subtly since the BJP established power in the late 1990s.
A report by NCERT states: "While communal perspectives have been present in textbooks in earlier periods too, studies done of textbooks rewritten from this perspective, for example in Gujarat, highlight their ready potential to contribute to a culture of divisiveness between religious communities …"
Gujarat was witness to gory religious riots in 2002, which killed about 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. Religious faultlines in the state, however, go back several centuries.
Last year, the Committee for Resisting Saffronisation of Textbooks protested against the textbooks in another Indian state, Karnataka, which, they said, strengthened stereotypes of Muslims and Christians and subdued the voices of women, Dalits and non-Vedic traditions. The textbooks remain unchanged.
"If anyone has problems with any of the books, I urge them to go to court," said Harshad Patel, the media coordinator for Gujarat BJP. "Let them do what Dinanathji did. Get the court to pass orders to withdraw the books," he told Al Jazeera.
Follow Raksha Kumar on Twitter: @raksha_kumarCame home from work, opened my mailbox, and there it was! A beautiful package with a wax sealed christmas card, a car decal, and an ornament! The ornament is handmade and is very cute. I love it and it now has a home on my tree. I never received a wax sealed envelope before, so I took great care in opening that letter and saving the bit of wax. As I read the card from you guys, I realized I read it wrong the first time, and that it said happy Christmas and merry new year. This struck me as odd and really unique. I Love it. Even the wax seal said it! The Take a hike car decal is very much appreciated as well! My husband is out there now putting it on my crappy daily driven Malibu. This gift definitely got me in the Christmas spirit and it will be bragged about at the annual office lady Christmas party. Thank you to the Woods Family, and Khori I love how you spell your name! Very cool. Happy Christmas and The Merriest of New Years!!!!!
Xx Haylee_juneRick Santorum narrowly won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, but only claimed 1 percent of the vote in Monday’s contest | AP Photo Santorum drops out, endorses Rubio 'He is the new generation,' Santorum says about the Florida senator.
Rick Santorum on Wednesday dropped out of the Republican primary race, and immediately threw his support behind Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
“We are suspending our campaign,” Santorum said on Fox News’ “On the Record,” explaining that his family and allies decided their time is better served being advocates for someone better positioned to win the White House.
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That person, Santorum said, is Rubio. “I don't endorse lightly,” the former Pennsylvania senator said, calling Rubio a “tremendously gifted young man” who not only understands the importance of family but also has the fortitude and smarts to face the threat of Islamic State.
“He is the new generation,” Santorum said.
So thankful & grateful for your support. Just not our year. So today please join me in supporting @marcorubio pic.twitter.com/VhgHo9trNp — Rick Santorum (@RickSantorum) February 4, 2016
He was the second GOP candidate to drop out on Wednesday — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul also declared that he was suspending his presidential bid, saying he would instead focus on his Senate reelection.
Santorum’s announcement ends a 2016 run that never matched the strength or enthusiasm of his previous bid for the nomination in 2012, when he finished second. His campaign suffered from weak fundraising and similarly feeble poll numbers.
Santorum never found himself averaging at or above 5 percent nationally. As a result, the former Pennsylvania senator never secured a spot on the main stage of any of the Republican presidential debates.
Santorum shrugged all this off, saying that his moment would come and urging voters to focus on his policy positions. He regularly boasted of being featured in Islamic State propaganda, suggesting the terrorist group was afraid of a Santorum presidency.
“The only person that’s been listed in ISIS magazine as an enemy of ISIS is me. And you know why they listed me? If you go back and read the article that was in the April edition of ISIS magazine online, it wasn’t because I was criticizing or taking on the Muslim religion, or I was pontificating on what we need to do to make Muslims like us,” Santorum said in December in an interview with Breitbart News Radio. “The reason I was identified as an enemy was because I identified who they are.”
The bluster did not translate into real votes. Santorum, who had narrowly won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, claimed only 1 percent of the vote in last Monday’s contest.
Santorum’s campaign struggled internally, too. At the start of the cycle, key members of his 2012 presidential campaign opted to go to other teams. That included Alice Stewart and J. Hogan Gidley, who joined former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign. Both were top 2012 Santorum campaign press operatives. Michael Biundo, Santorum’s 2012 campaign manager, became the chief New England strategist for Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential campaign.
It got worse in the late summer of 2015, when multiple top staffers left Santorum’s campaign to start a pro-Santorum super PAC. Campaign manager Terry Allen, Santorum campaign Iowa coordinator Jon Jones and Allen’s son-in-law, Steve Hilliard, who had been the campaign’s digital strategist, all jumped ship. Those departures came when it was clear Santorum was having a money problem.
“There’s no campaign that ever has enough money, that’s just the nature of campaigns,” Allen said at the time. “But my decision to leave was because this is the most efficient and effective way to help the senator, and it became very obvious, and you see more campaigns figuring it out.”
Regulatory filings released last Sunday that Santorum ended the year with a paltry sum in his bank account — just $42,919.Article 48
"I hereby pledge to vote only for candidates, in the next General Election, who support the reintroduction of Article 48 (Direct Democracy) into the Irish Constitution."
The founders of the Irish Free State thought it wise to include a provision, Article 48, in the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State that made the people the ultimate rulers of Ireland by giving them the direct powers to make, mould, amend and repeal their own laws.
This fundamental democratic right was taken away from the people of Ireland without their consent in 1928. What follows is a brief history of Article 48 and how the hypocrisy and power hunger of Irish politicians resulted in a fundamental change to the "Republic" as envisaged by the founders of the state. A short video, the "History of Article 48" is narrated by Professor Dermot Ferriter, Modern Irish History, University College Dublin. In addition, below you can read a more detailed account of the ""History of Article 48" that includes links to the relevant Dáil debates.
History of Article 48.
What follows is a brief history of how direct democracy was first introduced to the Irish constitution in 1922 and subsequently removed from the Constitution in 1928 without the consent of the people of the Ireland.
Following the Irish War of Independence, representatives of the Sinn Féin government and the British government signed an agreement on 6th December 1921 known as the Anglo Irish Treaty that brought an end to the conflict.
In January 1922, the Provisional Government of Southern Ireland was established with Michael Collins as its Chairman.
"Give us the future... we've had enough of your past" Michael Collins, Anglo Irish Treaty negotiations, London, 1921
One of Michael Collin’s first acts was to establish a committee to draft the Constitution of the Irish Free State. Collins appointed himself as Chairman and Darrell Figgis, a member of the executive of Sinn Féin, as deputy Chairman of the committee.
The Constitution Committee convened in the Shelburne Hotel on St Stephen Green and on 15th June 1922 the draft Constitution was published and submitted to the Dáil for its consideration.
Darrell Figgis, highlighted the importance of Article 48 in his book “The Irish Constitution Explained” published in 1922.
"For it is a sound rule that the people are generally better than their representatives - wiser of counsel, more disinterested of judgment - and it is therefore provided in the Constitution that there shall be an Assembly of Representatives, but that the people may require of that Assembly that laws be referred to them for final decision, or that laws be made to suit their desire." Darrell Figgis, Deputy Chairman, Constitution Committee, The Irish Constitution Explained (1922)
Article 48 of the Constitution was inspired by the post First World War constitutions in continental Europe that were designed to foster an active association of the people with law making. The full wording of Article 48 was as follows;
Article 48 "Article 48. The Oireachtas may provide for the Initiation by the people of proposals for laws or constitutional amendments. Should the Oireachtas fail to make such provision within two years, it shall on the petition of not less than seventy five thousand voters on the register, of whom not more than fifteen thousand shall be voters in any one constituency, either make such provisions or submit the question to the people for decision in accordance with the ordinary regulations governing the Referendum. Any legislation passed by the Oireachtas providing for such Initiation by the people shall provide (1) that such proposals may be initiated on a petition of fifty thousand voters on the register, (2) that if the Oireachtas rejects a proposal so initiated it shall be submitted to the people for decision in accordance with the ordinary regulations governing the Referendum; and (3) that if the Oireachtas enacts a proposal so initiated, such enactment shall be subject to the provisions respecting ordinary legislation or amendments of the Constitution as the case may be." Article 48, Constitution of the Irish Free State, 1922.
In introducing Article 48 to the Dáil on 5th October 1922, Kevin O’Higgins, the Minister for Home Affairs in the Provisional Government, stated the following in support of the direct democracy provisions;
"In moving the adoption of this Article, I may say it will still further associate the people with the forging of the laws of the country, and it puts the power in the hands of the people of even initiating legislation. If a large section of the people feel that a certain law is desirable; and if Parliament fails to introduce the desired legislation, power is given here to the people to initiate legislation themselves. It is the direct complement of the Referendum, and pretty much what can be claimed for the Referendum can be claimed for the Initiative—that it keeps contact between the people and their laws, and keeps responsibility and consciousness in the minds of the people that they are the real and ultimate rulers of the country." Kevin O’Higgins, the Minister for Home Affairs in the Provisional Government, Dáil debate, 5th October 1922
The Constitution of the Irish Free State including Article 48 was adopted by an Act of Dáil Éireann on 25th October 1922. Kevin O’Higgins, speaking in the Dáil that day, highlighted the importance of the provisions of Article 48 in the Constitution that enabled the Irish people to make, mould, amend or repeal their own laws.
"This Constitution should be prized by the people. It was won in toil, in danger, and in stress. It was negotiated on the cliff's edge, and it gives to Ireland the care of her own household. It puts into the hands of the Irish people the making and moulding, and the amending or repealing of their own laws." Kevin O’Higgins, on the passing of the Constitution of the Irish Free State in the Dail on 25th October 1922.
However, the Cumann na nGaedhael (forerunner of Fine Gael) government failed to enact the required laws to give effect to Article 48 of the new Constitution.
Almost six years later, on 16th May 1928, Eamon De Valera, the leader of the Fianna Fáil party, submitted a petition with over 96,000 signatures to the Dáil to bring about the direct democracy provisions embodied in Article 48. In introducing the petition to the Dáil De Valera stated.
"Remember that this power of direct legislation is an old one. In the early democracies you had it. It is now being reverted to because of the people's distrust of some of the representative assemblies. It is because representative government has not worked out as it was hoped it would that you have these two checks, this form of direct legislation by the people." Eamon De Valera, Leader of Fianna Fail, Dáil debate, 16th May 1928
The Cumann na nGaedhael government’s response to De Valera’s petition was to introduce the Constitution (Amendment No. 10) Bill, 1928 to remove entirely Articles 47 and 48 from the Constitution. It had the power to do this under Article 50 which allowed the Constitution to be amended through ordinary legislation in its initial eight years.
Opposing the removal of Article 48, Eamon De Valera argued passionately for its retention.
"One of the reasons why I am anxious for it is one of the reasons put forward here when it was accepted by the Provisional Parliament. At that time it was stated that it associated the people with their own laws; it gave them the feeling that they were the ultimate power, the ultimate rulers in the country; it gave them an interest which they would not otherwise have in legislation, and in the laws generally. It gave the people an opportunity of considering certain questions in a way in which they would not be discussed or considered at general elections at all." Eamon De Valera, Leader of Fianna Fail, Dáil debate on 7th June, 1928
However the Cumann na nGaedhael government prevailed and so the bill to remove Article 48 was passed on 28th June 1928. In the Dáil that day the leader of the Cumann na nGaedhael government, W.T. Cosgrave, declared that:
"….. the Bill entitled the Constitution (Amendment No. 10) Bill, 1928, which has this day been passed by Dáil Eireann, is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace and safety. …… on the ground that it is undesirable and dangerous" W. T. Cosgrave, leader of Cumann na nGaedhael (forerunner of Fine Gael), President of the Executive council (Taoiseach) from 1922 to 1932, Dáil debate on 28th June 1928
Ironically, less than 6 years earlier, W. T. Cosgrave, as Chairman of the Provisional Government, had supported the inclusion of Article 48 in the Constitution. Now, however, with the reins of power firmly in his hands, he instigated and defended its abolition.
Fast forward to 1937, De Valera, now leader of the Fianna Fail government, proposed a new Constitution of Ireland to replace the Constitution of the Irish Free State. Although only nine years earlier De Valera had championed the direct democracy provisions contained in Article 48 of the 1922 Constitution he failed to reintroduce these provisions in his new Constitution. Now that De Valera had power firmly in his hands he did not want any possible interference from the people of Ireland by means of petitions.
The 1922 Constitution reflected a very positive view of the role of direct democracy, wherein the people could initiate proposals for laws or constitutional amendments. As the centenary of 1916 approaches, surely the time come for the Irish Republic to revisit the democratic vision of the founders of the Irish Free State?Children with untreated excessive daytime sleepiness were twice as likely to be struck or nearly hit by a car, even when looking both ways before crossing. (credit: Garry Hunter/Getty Images)
– According to a recent study, tired children are more likely to get hit by a car when crossing the street.
The study, which was conducted at Children’s of Alabama hospital, found that children with untreated excessive daytime sleepiness were twice as likely to be struck or nearly hit by a car, even when looking both ways before crossing.
Researchers used a virtual reality lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to simulate crossing a street with traffic.
“In our study, sleepy children were much more likely to become a victim of a pedestrian accident involving a motor vehicle,” Dr. Kristin Avis, a children’s sleep expert, said in a news release obtained by the Alabama Media Group.
Excessive daytime sleepiness covers disorders such as narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia.
Researchers compared data of 33 children between the ages of 8 and 16 with EDS to 33 children who did not have EDS of the same age.
“This finding extends previous reports documenting the harmful effect of sleep deprivation on transportation safety of adults and adolescents,” the authors said in the study. “In particular, this study provides initial evidence to suggest that untreated EDS may be associated with increased injury risk to children in pedestrian settings.”
According to the hospital, treatment of pedestrian accidents involving kids have jumped in the last five years. In 2013, 41 trauma patients hurt in a pedestrian accident were treated at Children’s of Alabama. So far in 2014, Children’s has treated six patients involving pedestrians and automobiles.
Avis along with Karen Gamble, an assistant professor of psychiatry at UAB and David Schwebel, a professor of psychology at UAB received a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Development and from the Kaul Pediatric Research Institute at the Children’s of Alabama Foundation.
The study was published in the February issue of SLEEP.
(TM and © Copyright 2014 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2014 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)Every weekday Colin Powell cycles the separated lanes on Adelaide and Richmond Sts. Every day he is forced into car and truck traffic by at least one vehicular bike-lane invader. “I have never ever seen a cop writing a ticket. Are they patrolling?,” asks Powell, wondering if better separation of the lanes — more flexible posts and planters — would be a more effective deterrent.
A cyclist is forced to go around a car parked in a bike lane on Richmond Street in Toronto. Taxi drivers are especially skilled at the cat-and-mouse game, according to parking enforcement officers. ( Todd Korol / Toronto Star )
The small but growing downtown network of separated “cycle tracks” are hailed by politicians, beloved by the booming ranks of cyclists who use them, and treated as a convenient pull-over shoulder by some motorists. Powell, a U of T PhD student, has braked to chastise some drivers. Responses, he says, range from “Sorry” to “F--- off” to “Get a job!” The Star rode the length of the Richmond, Adelaide and Simcoe Sts. lanes, asking parked drivers why they do it. We got similar responses, along with arguments that it’s okay for a brief time, and we just all need to get along.
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Powell is far from alone in saying he never sees lane invaders ticketed but Brian Moniz, a parking enforcement supervisor, says his staff have issued more than 6,500 $150 tickets this year.
Officers ticketing cars blocking other cars as part of Mayor John Tory’s traffic blitzes are expected to get lane blockers as well. Each day one officer roams downtown looking specifically for the invaders, he says. Officers operate under a “target” system, expected to write a certain number of tickets per shift. That makes a row of illegally parked cars that are not jeopardizing anybody’s safety more enticing than a lone lane invader forcing multiple cyclists into traffic. Moniz insists that is not a problem, saying officers are expected to target a “fair composition” of parking offences. The problem, he says, is that drivers take off while the officer is writing the $150 ticket, or leave between the time a cyclist reports them and the officer arrives. Taxi drivers, he says, are especially skilled at the cat-and-mouse game.
A document-shredding truck parked on Adelaide St. W. with a ticket for parking in a bike lane. Cyclists who use the protected bike lanes downtown say they rarely see vehicles ticketed for the infraction.
Moniz believes officers being able to issue a ticket without “affixing” it to the car — by recording the licence plate and other details for a ticket mailed to the car owner — will be what makes everyone safer. The city expects to start using the provincially granted power next year. “That’s the best thing that we could achieve in order to change behaviour for the enforcement of this offence,” he says. “If they knew that even parking there momentarily meant they could get a ticket in the mail, eliminating that cat-and-mouse game, I think it would change public behaviour with these bike lanes and people would get the message.”
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Powell isn’t so sure. Couriers and mobile document shredders will still block lanes as long as they are physically able, he says, with any increase in tickets chalked up as a cost of business. But it isn’t only cars and trucks forcing cyclists into traffic. The Star encountered multiple sections of lanes, particularly on Adelaide, where condo construction has invaded bike lanes. Kyp Perikleous, director of transportation services, said developers must make a case for taking over any lane of traffic. The blockage, for a short a time as possible, must be approved by councillors on a community council. “Maintain the safe flow for cyclists is very important,” he said, adding developers pay between $26.35 and $105.41 per month for each square metre of blocked roadway. “It’s not something that we like to do.”
A construction truck blocks a protected bike lane on Adelaide St. W.
Tickets issued in Toronto for illegally parking in a bike lane: 2015 to November: 6,530 2014: 6,807 2013: 6,719 2012: 12,956 On-street bike lane construction: 2015: 10 km added, 2 km upgraded to separated cycle tracks 2014: 14.4 km added, 5 km upgraded to separated tracks 2013: 2.3 km added, 2.9 km upgraded to cycle tracks 2012: 3.8 km upgraded to cycle tracks 2011: Removal of 15.7 km for a net loss of 14.5 kmWhat’s missing from N26? The company has been slowly but surely building a new bank account from the ground up. This time, the company is trying to recreate the insurance product that you typically get with a Visa Premier or MasterCard Gold. So N26 is launching the N26 Black card.
The startup has been working with an insurance company directly and is now able to provide the same kind of insurance contracts that your bank provides when it tries to sell you a premium MasterCard (Gold, World Elite, etc.). Soon, N26 users will be able to upgrade their cards to an N26 Black card. This is more or less the same card with the same features in the N26 app, but it comes with insurance coverage from Allianz.
For €5.90 per month with a one year commitment ($6.40 per month), you get more or less the same kind of coverage that you get with a premium MasterCard or Visa card in a traditional bank. Allianz will cover the hospital expenses if you need to go to the hospital while traveling abroad. The insurance company will also pay back expenses if your flight has been delayed by more than 4 hours. And you can also expect a compensation if somebody steals your phone.
As the full documentation of the insurance isn’t live yet, we don’t know yet if there will be some sort of ski insurance and rental car insurance. Customers also expect an insurance on these fronts with their premium payment card but it could be included.
The nice thing is that you’re not forced to pay for an insurance product you don’t need. If you don’t use your N26 account that often, you can still choose the free N26 card. Customers in Germany, Austria and Ireland will be able to get the N26 Black card in early November. French, Italian and Spanish customers will follow a couple of weeks later.
Interestingly, the startup obtained a full banking license this summer. The company plans to switch its 200,000 customers to its own banking infrastructure in the coming weeks. It means that customers will get a new card and a new bank account number.
So N26’s user base will have the option to get a new basic MasterCard or the new N26 Black card. It seems like a smart move to launch the premium offering right before all customers request a new card. It’s going to improve the conversion rate to the N26 Black card.Our Solution
A toilet based (clip-on) sensor, designed to be user friendly, utilizing a unique proprietary optical setup, a data acquisition board, connectivity and a mobile phone app. It automatically scans every ‘exit’, hands-free and seamless to the user; capable of identifying even minute traces of blood in stool. Unlike current chemical diagnostics kits which are used once a year in labs, the new senor will perform hundreds of measurements per year, improving accuracy and compliance.
The OutSense platform is also useful for other GI conditions such as management of irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, Colitis, as well as for lifestyle & personalized nutrition.
For the first time in human history, technology can allow people to have their excretions scanned automatically and immediately receive actionable insights based on the underlying chemical and physical composition. This will give new ways to improve healthcare and wellness, monitor diets and personalize nutritional needs.EXCLUSIVE / The European Commission is preparing an update of its low-carbon economy roadmap for 2050, acknowledging that the bloc’s current target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions at least 80% by mid-century are insufficient, EURACTIV.com has learned.
With the 2019 European elections approaching, the Juncker Commission is stepping up preparatory work to lay down its legacy for the next EU executive.
Less than a year after it tabled a landmark package of clean energy laws, which is still making its way through the EU institutions, officials are now busy preparing the next document that will shape the bloc’s energy and climate policies for the years to come.
“Meeting the Paris goal of keeping climate change well below 2°C – and aiming for no more than 1.5°C – requires bold action, including reaching climate neutrality this century,” said a source involved in the update of the EU’s 2050 low-carbon economy roadmap.
“This is about much more than meeting quantitative targets,” the source told EURACTIV on condition of anonymity. “Achieving our long-term goals means putting in place today the enabling conditions for the transformation to a low-carbon society and avoiding a lock-in to the status quo.”
Several energy industry sources who met in recent weeks with Miguel Arias Cañete, the European Commissioner for climate action and energy, confirmed that the EU executive was preparing to launch a public consultation with a view to updating its low-carbon economy roadmap in 2018.
Jill Duggan, Director of The Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group, said: “News that the EU is setting its sights on achieving zero emissions by 2050 is very welcome. The science tells us this is necessary and it’s imperative that politicians respond by putting policies in place that give businesses the certainty they need to invest and adapt.”
First published in 2011, the 2050 low-carbon economy roadmap laid the foundations for the EU’s climate and energy policy in the years ahead, charting a path towards a reduction of at least 80% in the bloc’s emissions by mid-century, in line with international commitments.
The roadmap does not impose legally-binding objectives on EU member states. But it did set the direction when the time eventually came to adopt hard legislation.
For instance, it translated into an EU-wide target of cutting domestic emissions by at least 40% by 2030, an objective endorsed by EU heads of states and governments ahead of the UN conference on climate change in Paris. The objective has since been cast in stone as part of the EU’s nationally determined contribution to the Paris Agreement.
EU leaders adopt 'flexible' energy and climate targets for 2030 EU leaders Thursday night (23 October) committed by 2030 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40%, and increase energy efficiency and renewables by at least 27%.
“Time to build on this legacy”
The 2050 low-carbon economy roadmap “was a major undertaking back in 2011 and put the EU ahead of the game when it comes to long-term planning,” said the source involved in updating the document.
“But we also know that now is the time to build on this legacy,” the source added.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends that developed countries as a group reduce emissions by 80-95% by 2050 in order to keep global warming below 2°C, an objective that appears in the EU’s low-carbon economy roadmap.
However, this may soon appear insufficient.
Scientists have warned that, under current pledges made as part of the Paris Agreement, the world would still be facing 2.3-3.5℃ of warming by 2100. Research published recently in the Climatic Change journal warned that it is already too late to meet the 2°C target and recommended using sophisticated geo-engineering technology to suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Dangerous global warming unstoppable without geo-engineering, says study The international community has already missed its chance to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, according to a new study by Switzerland-based researchers. But a solution to the problem could lie in geo-engineering technologies.
Aiming towards 100%
“To limit global warming to any level, we ultimately have to completely stop CO2 emissions and ramp down other greenhouse gas emissions,” argues Malte Meinshausen, a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
“If we want a zero-carbon economy in 2050, or at least one that is close to zero-carbon, we need to make zero-emission investments today, because it takes a long time to turn over the existing investment stock,” Meinshausen wrote in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature last year.
Asked about the EU’s future emission reduction objective for 2050, one well-placed industry source replied rhetorically: “How much higher can you go than 95%?,” he said, adding the new roadmap “will aim towards 100%”.
Whether the 100% figure will be mentioned in a range of different scenarios or as the main reference objective is still unclear, however.
But assuming carbon-neutrality does become an EU goal for 2050, officials are now starting to lay the groundwork.
“To prepare the analytical foundation for the EU strategy, the necessary scientific and modelling base is currently being put in place by the Commission,” said the source involved in updating the roadmap, adding this would be made in connection with a 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that will chart pathways to keep global temperature increase below 1.5°C.
The Commission’s work in this context will include “in-depth analysis of the economic, social and environmental transformations needed to inform the political debate in the context of the development of the mid-century strategies,” the source said.On a separate note, it's been almost a week since I've ran! Yoga has taken over my life. I downloaded Yoga Studio (has a lotus flower logo) on my phone (I'm in no way affiliated) and I am obsessed! I did yoga in a studio yesterday and then after work came home and did one on the app too. You should check it out! Also, my compass pose is improving! Hurray!
Creamy Spiced Cauliflower Soup
Serves 6
Notes: I like to freeze unused canned coconut milk to use later. In fact for this recipe, I used frozen milk that I thawed. Or, place in the fridge and use over oatmeal or in smoothies. Be careful, turmeric stains everything.
Aromatics:
1 Tbsp. olive or coconut oil
2 medium yellow onions, diced
1 bay leaf
1 1/4 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. ground turmeric
1/2 tsp. ground coriander
1/8 tsp. ground cardamom
dash of ground black pepper
sprinkling of crushed red pepper flakes
4 garlic cloves, minced
Sustenance:
4 1/2 cups vegetable broth
1 large head of cauliflower, roughly chopped to the same size
Conclusion:
1 cup canned coconut milk
1 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar
fresh dill (for garnish - optional)
In a large soup pot, heat the oil over medium-low. Add all the aromatic ingredients, except for the garlic. Saute, stirring occasionally until the onions become translucent, about 10 minutes. Then, add the garlic and saute another few minutes.
Add the sustenance ingredients and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to a simmer and allow to cook for about 15 minutes, until the cauliflower is tender.
Remove from heat and transfer carefully to a blender. Blend on high (allowing steam to vent) for a few minutes, until silky and smooth.
Transfer back to the soup pot and stir in the coconut milk and vinegar. Bring back to heat over low, ensuring it doesn't boil
Serve hot and topped with fresh dill and ground black pepper, if you like.The 53 Deepest Dives on How to Succeed at Productivity, Personal Development, Business and Life
Coach Tony Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 29, 2017
For the last few months, I’ve been the experimental “personal development editor” for Medium Members. Medium gave me a budget to go “find articles that actually change people’s lives.” It’s $5/month for everything below plus every other topic Medium’s been producing for Members.
So I went looking for authors that had done more than read about someone else’s success. Every article below is based on applied experience that led to a big success. Then, as the editor, I hammered every author to explain every step of the process that got them that success. If you read one of these articles, there should be zero missing steps — just follow what they did.
Below are everything I’ve published so far. This is my sales pitch for why you should sign up for Medium’s Membership right now.Image caption When race officials realised Kathrine Switzer was running the marathon they reacted angrily and tried to remove her from the race
The city of Boston is staging its annual marathon. Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to officially run the race 45 years ago, despite stewards trying to physically force the 20-year-old off the road. Here she recalls how a female runner caused such a fuss.
Anything long like 800m, or even longer, God forbid, was considered dangerous, de-sexing and de-feminising for a woman.
[It was thought] that their uterus might fall out and their legs would get big, and maybe they would grow hair on their chests.
Running made me feel free and powerful. It was what I wanted to do, so I did it.
Kathrine Switzer Has run 35 marathons
Won 1974 New York City Marathon
Campaigned for the women's marathon to be included in the Olympic Games, which happened in 1984
I asked my coach, Arnie Briggs: "Do you think I'll be welcome at Boston? Maybe it's against the rules."
We got out the rule book, but there was nothing about women being forbidden in the marathon.
It was just assumed that no woman in her right mind would want to run a marathon and they wouldn't be capable anyway. So Arnie said: "Fill out the form".
We were milling around together doing our warm up exercises, so all the guys saw that I was a woman. But obviously the officials didn't.
I was nervous |
travelling to find three little girls:
Papylick puts Smaly and Redy in two boats made out of nutshells 34
CHAPTER IV
Smaly and Redy are not well received: They are thought to be
made of painted cardboard: How the Despoiler fell into the
water and left a foot behind him: Mistigris sticks a fish-bone
into the back of the Despoiler: Judgment is passed on the two
strangers: They will be banished at nightfall: The walls of
the three gardens are discussed 38
CHAPTER V
Redy and Smaly watch the review of the troops: Smaly and the
Mother of the Crow discourse about soldiers: The Chief Contractor
distributes the food, and the Wigs pass through a curious
[Pg vi]little door: The Soy powder makes the provisions grow 59
CHAPTER VI
The Sugar-Cane Prison arrives: The Rats water it with Soy
fluid to keep the canes growing as fast as the Prisoner breaks
them down: The time for siesta draws on, and Smaly and Redy
go into the house of the Historian 73
CHAPTER VII
The Flying-Fish announces the hour of three, and the World
falls asleep: The Hen makes six hard-boiled eggs: Smaly and
Redy begin to read the manuscript of the Historian 82
CHAPTER VIII
Redy and Smaly read of the childhood of the Prisoner 95
CHAPTER IX
The elder Flying-Fish loses one eye, and the Hen finds it:
The Historian wakes up, and Smaly and Redy run out of the
house: The Healer mends the paw of the Confectioner 100
CHAPTER X
The Wigs all imagine they suffer from headache: The Rats come
to the Healer to be cured of the ravages of hot Soy: The Chief
Contractor has to make himself ill eating the musical instruments 111
CHAPTER XI
The young girls dance for the Rats, then play a curious game
of tennis: They fail to understand Smaly's point of view 122
CHAPTER XII
The Mother of the Crow tells of the life and death of Djorak
in his own country 127
CHAPTER XIII
Smaly and Redy are taken to see the Fleet: The Prisoner arrives
and the Wigs fly in terror: Smaly and Redy at last have speech
with the Prisoner 146
CHAPTER XIV
The three daughters of the Prisoner are installed in their gardens 161
CHAPTER XV
Smaly and Redy effect the rescue of the three young girls:
Djorak joins them and they all partake of a delightful picnic:
Smaly blows the Soy powder over the country of the Wigs:
Then the six friends go home 170
[Pg vii]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
Facing page
Fritilla and the Red Flying-Fish Frontispiece
The City Curious 16
They were known as the "Wigs" because of their Large Perukes 24
These Creatures did not resemble Anything that Redy and Smaly had seen up to then 32
Laptitza and Papylick 64
Some of the Dances were very complicated 96
Kisika in her Sedan-Chair 128
The Picnic which followed was an Unforgettable Repast 160
IN BLACK AND WHITE
PAGE
Redy 2
Smaly 3
In this Land all the Birds wore Hats and Spurs 4
Redy's Hands were crying with Fright 6
But he found he, too, had a Beak 7
They sang and danced 8
[Pg viii]Neither the Latch nor the Hinge bore any Trace of having been bitten 10
Looking for the Key 11
Kangaroo-Confectioner 13
To carry the Last Curl as though it were the End of a Train 16
They made one want to Dance 17
With the Spoon which every Wig carries hung from his Belt 19
These Horses, however, were made of Sugar 20
The Sponges 21
To return to a Mere Shapeless Thing once again 23
A Traveller told us 24
Nevertheless Smaly and Redy started to help him 26
The Grub was really the doorkeeper 27
"We wish to have three girls" 28
The Crow lifted him up 29
The Crow 30
The Mother of the Crow 31
"She sees only one side of men, birds, and things" 32
The Short-Legged Man 35
Papylick 36
Opening the Nuts and displaying the Two Little People 39
Leading by the Hand the Chocolate Grub 40
The Birds with their Legs encased in Cutlet Frills 41
The Eggs running along 42
They were Gentle and Pretty Pigs 43
A Most Splendid Feast 44
The Despoiler 45
Which is in this Country a Great Sign of Mirth 46
He fled hastily 47
Mistigris 48
The Young Stork 49
[Pg ix]Every One uttered Cries of Indignation 50
"You can roll the cord" 51
The Chief Contractor replied 53
Children were built of much fewer Slices of Cake than the Grown-ups 54
These Creatures will eat the Top off the Walls 55
Anger 56
It seemed to them that Men grew upwards and not towards the Ground 57
Some very Elegant Mice 58
One Half expressed Severe Authority, the Other was All Gentleness 60
He decided that they must have a Similar Review every Week 62
They had all put on Thick Gloves 63
Wigs, who were putting the Soldiers back in their Boxes 64
President of the Republic of Pasenipus 65
To conduct her Back to her House, which was in a Cosy Nook in a Great Tree of Coral 67
The Confectioner 69
"Nevertheless it's so narrow that only one person can go through at a time" 70
The Song went on 71
Running hard with their Little Short Legs 73
Soy Mill 74
Soy Reservoir 75
Carrying away every Object that they could lift 77
The Prisoner 79
The Prisoner never ceased to break the Sugar-canes 80
The Pet Flying-Fish, which every Wig Family possesses and cherishes 83
The Amount of Cake and Pudding eaten Annually in the Country 84
[Pg x]The Elder of the Fishes 85
The Hen 86
This Care which the Confectioner took of Fritilla was by no Means unnecessary 88
The Smaller Flying-Fish 89
Dropped them through a Hole in his Beak 90
Was sitting with One Ankle across the Knee of his Other Leg 91
The Despoiler, who was always afraid that Some One would find out that he was only made of
Cardboard, never slept in Public 93
"Instead of cutting his toe-nails as we do with the help of a long-handled
pair of scissors and a telescope" 96
The King 97
The King's Daughter 98
The Healer 103
Born with the Idea of One Day being a very Big Man 104
Between them was fastened a Comfortable Arm-chair 106
There were Newsboys selling Accounts of the Latest Disaster to the Wigs 108
The Healer had finished his Mending 109
Mathematician 111
Migraine 112
Wrapped their Handkerchiefs round their Heads 112
"I, too, hope so," said his Wife, who had just come in 113
Nearly all had One Leg which was much Longer than the Other, or a very Long Arm 115
His Elongated Tail was tied to the Queue of his Wig 116
"But only look at our arms and legs" 117
Even more than they feared the Flies 118
Rewards 119
The Dwarf had pulled on a Pair of Boots 120
[Pg xi]The Accordion-Players began 123
Tennis 124
The Ball hung up thus 125
Tea-Cosy 128
"We're waiting for the sun to go down" 129
Servants out Shopping followed it with their Laden Baskets on their Arms 131
He thrust his Face into Roses covered with Dew 132
The Executioner bandaged his Eyes 133
Next he took some Old Cardboard Boxes 135
Opened them and shut them again 136
His Young Son was there 137
The Brindled Rabbit 138
His Little Paw shoved a Folded Slip of Paper through the Opening 139
Then they sang a Comic Duet 140
Then they questioned a Black Toad 141
And fish in the Little River in the Afternoon 142
The Thin Long Arm of the Historian 143
Extracting Fish-bones from the Back of the Despoiler 147
They bore a Large Copper Cauldron 148
The Admiral was a Triton 149
The White Dolphin with Pink Eyes 150
An Extremely Curious Fish 151
"A band of our rats will each morning copiously water our
fleet" 153
Wigs were busy writing their Names 154
A Red Flag 155
"I have destroyed a hundred times passing over it in my
prison" 157
"I was caught stepping right over their silly old dry canal [Pg xii]with one stride" 158
The Manufacturer of Cardboard Boxes 159
A Sentinel who looked like a Dragon-Fly 163
The Gardens were arranged after the Same Principle as the Windows in the House of the Historian 164
A Little Red Feather, which she had picked up in the Market-Place 166
Next the Despoiler approached 167
The Wife of the Chief Contractor presented Kisika with a Beautiful Fan made of Paper Lace 169
Directly they saw the Flying-Fish enter 171
Their Two Little Heads appeared Side by Side 172
Smaly standing on the Point of his Toes 173
So during Three Days the Young Girls were busy making the Stairs 175
The Red Flying-Fish carried a Large Hat and Mantle in its Claws 176
Carrying as many of the Presents as they could 177
Wigs themselves would have melted away directly they passed the Frontier 178
They hung out of the Windows 179
[Pg 1]
THE CITY CURIOUS
CHAPTER I
Smaly and his wife Redy set forth in search of three little girls: They are bewitched so that their noses turn into beaks: Smaly eats the latch of a door and Redy eats the hinge: Redy's fingers weep tears: They meet with a Confectioner who resembles a Kangaroo.
Smaly and Redy were husband and wife, and they lived together in a little white house. This house had three rooms upstairs and three rooms downstairs; and each room was so pretty that it gave one joy to see it. Smaly and Redy were very proud of their house, and were never so happy as when they were putting it to rights. Every day they did something to one or other of the rooms, changing the position of the furniture or the pictures.
One day, while Smaly was walking in the town he saw three mirrors in a shop window, and he thought they would be just the thing to hang up in the three bedrooms; so he bought the mirrors and went home with them in high glee.
In the meantime, Redy, his little wife, also had an idea to beautify the bedrooms, so she went out into the garden to pick some flowers.
Smaly hung a looking-glass in each of the three little bedrooms, then he carefully closed all three doors and, going downstairs, sat himself by the[Pg 2] hearth. A fire was burning there, for the spring was still young in the land.
While he sat there, smoking, lost in the most delicious daydreams, his pleasant little wife Redy came in with her arms full of flowers. She took three vases from the dresser, and began to arrange the flowers in them, holding her head on one side like a bird.
When she had put each flower exactly as she wished, she gently shook Smaly's elbow. He jumped up, took two vases without a word, while she picked up the third. They disposed a vase in each of the three little bedrooms, and stood back to admire the effect; which, indeed, was quite charming.
Suddenly Redy gave a sigh.
"It's all very well," said she, "but there's no one to live in our pretty rooms."
Smaly sighed, too. "That's just what I was thinking," said he. "Oh, Redy, how nice it would be if we had three little girls to live in our three bedrooms, so that they could admire your flowers and look at themselves in my pretty mirrors."
"Let us wish for them," said Redy, and she folded her hands together on her apron and chanted:[Pg 3]
"We wish to have three girls,
Fine, sweet, pink, and good
They shall have more pudding than they like,
And a green, green, and rosy garden."
Smaly repeated the poem in his turn, but Redy had to prompt him, for he had a very bad memory.
They waited for some time, but nothing happened, so they said the verse over again, and this time Smaly repeated it without any mistake; but still nothing happened.
"Wishing does not seem to be much good," said Smaly despondently.
"Wishing never is any good," answered Redy, "unless one does something more than wish. If we want to find our three little girls we must set out and look for them."
"Yes, but where?" asked Smaly.
"As for that," answered his little wife, "I do not know any more than you, but that verse we chanted just now is a magic verse, and we shall find the way. We will get ready to start to-morrow."
So the very next morning they set off on their search for the three girls who would fill the white house with joy.
Redy had dressed herself in her best. Her green gown[Pg 4] was trimmed with black and emerald leaves, and her stockings and little cocked hat were green to match. In her basket she thoughtfully placed two apples.
Smaly faced the world in his beautiful dark violet coat, on his head a tall hat of the same colour. A belt of yellow leather clasped his waist. In his buttonhole he stuck a sunflower to show how happy[Pg 5] he was. His best boots shone upon his feet. In the big pocket of his coat he placed a couple of fresh rolls. The rolls and the apples were their provisions for the journey. For weapon, in case of attack, Smaly carried a thin red stick.
For a long while they walked and walked. They crossed many countries which everybody knows. At last, however, they found themselves in a strange land, a land of which one hardly ever even hears—a land which was even odder than these two odd little people.
In this land both men and beasts lived upon nothing but sweetmeats and pastry.
In this land the sun shone longer than it does with us, because it often stopped for a while to rest during the course of the day.
In this land all the birds wore hats and spurs.
In this land an orchestra of swallows played always at noonday.
In this land earthworms wore spectacles on their noses and swords at their sides.
In this land such things as bricks, iron, wood, stone, and steel were unknown.
In this land, after one had finished dinner, one ate the plates and dishes, for they were made of sugar.
In this land nearly every inhabitant was made of slices of cake, held together with pudding, sweetmeats, nougat, and chocolate.
In a word, there were to be found in this curious[Pg 6] country a great many things that were strange and wonderful and good to eat.
Smaly and Redy knocked at the door of this wonderful land, but for some time no one came to answer them.
"Bother this door!" said Smaly, at last, kicking at it with his new boots, and hitting it with his red cane.
"Why, it's made of chocolate!" cried Redy, who had sucked her fingers after touching it.
"I will eat the latch away!" decided Smaly.
"And I'll eat the hinges," said Redy.
She seized a hinge and he tore off the latch.
The next moment the tears were pouring down their faces.
"Oh, oh, it's burning me!" cried poor Redy.
"It must be made of red pepper and spice!" wept Smaly.
They had certainly burnt their tongues. They held hands and ran away, uttering little moans of pain. The path took an abrupt turn, then another, then a[Pg 7] third, and yet a fourth, till it had described a complete circle. Smaly and Redy found themselves once again opposite the door.
There was no longer any way out, for a thick hedge now surrounded the two travellers, and they found themselves in a sort of green arena. Quite a pretty arena, but all the same, it was rather alarming to find themselves there, without a word of warning.
And the thick green hedge around the arena grew with such a horrible rapidity. Very soon it was so high that the place became as dark as night.
Smaly, in his alarm, had seized both Redy's hands in his, and now he suddenly noticed that they were all wet. For one dreadful moment Smaly thought they must be wet with blood, but the fact was that poor Redy's hands were crying with fright.
For a little while Smaly and Redy wept bitterly, but they soon grew too tired to cry. They shut their mouths firmly, and tried to leave off sobbing when they left off weeping, but their sobs kept on and on in spite of them, for[Pg 8] all the world like a tap that keeps on going "glug-glug!" when one has forgotten to turn it off.
Smaly put up his hand, meaning to lay it gently over Redy's mouth.
She no longer had a mouth—in place of it was a fine large beak, painted an elegant blue. Filled with horror, and sure that their end had come, Smaly thought to print on Redy's cheek one last kiss of despair.
But he found he, too, had a beak, with which he could do nothing but peck. They stood staring at each other's beaks. They did not yet know that the beaks were invisible to all save themselves and the birds.
They sat down on their heels like Turkish princes, and their sobs went on and on, sounding like the lament of thousands of insects, and still the green hedges around them went on growing, till it seemed that the two poor little people were at the bottom of a profound green funnel, brimming with darkness, in which their moaning sounded like the wind in the chimney of a winter's night.
"Oh, oh, my Redy, we're in a pretty pass!" murmured Smaly, and Redy knew that he was feeling almost mad with fright, so that at once she felt mad with fright also. Now Redy had heard that mad people sing and dance, and so she at once began to do both, dragging Smaly along with her. They sang and danced till they had no breath left, and then they wanted to drop down and rest, but[Pg 9] found they had to keep on and on in spite of themselves. The dance of terror, and the song with which their little little sobs and moans mingled, continued there at the bottom of the green funnel. There was more noise than there is at midday in Oxford Circus.
The pepper from the latch of the door began to burn again in Smaly's mouth, and reminded him that after all there was a door out of this horrible place. He began to feel about for it in the darkness. When he found it he uttered a sharp little cry, which, like the moans and the singing, refused to die away, but went on echoing in the green funnel, so that by now there was a noise like a tempest, for all the world as though the whole sea had been imprisoned in a box—and a box too small for it.
Smaly uttered this cry because he had discovered[Pg 10] that the latch was once more in its place on the door, although Smaly had thrown it far away after biting it. Redy's hinge also was back in its place. Neither the latch nor the hinge bore any trace of having been bitten, but felt smooth and solid to the fingers.
Smaly and Redy became even more terrified than before, so that their hearts felt like two little lumps of ice in their breasts. And then a very odd thing happened to them. Their beaks opened of themselves, and these words came out of them—words which Smaly and Redy had never thought of saying:[Pg 11]
"Where is the key?"
Nothing answered them.
Then they found themselves on their hands and knees looking for the key.
"Where is the key? Oh, Reckybecky, where is the key?" the beaks demanded, entirely of their own accord.
Immediately a little grille opened in the door, and a voice said:
"Upon this side are honey, tea, and sugar! On your side are pepper, ginger, and allspice!"
"And on this side there are also the beaks of birds!" replied Smaly, alarmed at his own temerity; "and here also are the hands which weep! And the horrible moanings! And——"
He was interrupted by a gentle laugh. This laugh sounded like a little peal of crystal bells. And as the laugh went rippling on, the hedge began to shrink and shrink, and the moans and sobs died away.
[Pg 12]
The hearts of Smaly and Redy were beating like a couple of alarum-clocks. The gate had a little grille in it and they peeped through this grille to see what creature it was whose silvery laughter had the power to charm away both the high hedge and the weird moanings. Although the creature was several yards away they could see quite clearly his large, rosy eyes edged with grey rims. They saw the creature as distinctly as one can see the actors on the stage when one looks through opera-glasses.
They saw that the rosy grey-rimmed eyes were set in a face of the green of a pistachio-nut. The hair was the vague blue of cigarette smoke. The head looked as though it were sculptured out of mother-of-pearl. Later, they discovered that it was a mingling of ice-cream and jelly, for the creature himself was a confectioner.
He was a confectioner... and yet Smaly could have wagered his beautiful new boots that he was more of a kangaroo than anything else. For though this confectioner wore an apron and a fine green waistcoat, yet undoubtedly his chess-board trousers and embroidered stockings covered the powerful hind legs of a kangaroo. The long paws were shod with a species of pattens, so big they seemed like miniature tables, and these pattens were painted scarlet. Slung all about him, the Kangaroo carried as many pots and pans as a travelling tinker. He was adorned as well by spoons of bamboo, and from his belt hung ebony-handled knives, while jam-jars and flagons, filled with preserves and essences, dangled[Pg 13] about him. The most tender mauves and translucent greens glowed through the glass of the flagons.
Smaly studied the good-natured face of this personage, and asked him simply:
"Who are you?"
Then the Kangaroo-Confectioner said a surprising thing. He replied:
"I am the Architect."
The moment he had spoken he put up his hand and shut his mouth, to prevent the sound of his words going on and on in the curious air of the place, which seemed to hold sounds suspended as water holds the fronds of weeds.
Smaly looked at him dubiously.
"You say you are an architect...[Pg 14] and yet your occupation appears to me to be much more that of a confectioner, a super-confectioner."
The Kangaroo seemed overcome with a nervousness; his smiling face creased itself into a thousand little lines of distress, his eyes looked vacant, his manner became flustered. Evidently he was struggling with his emotion. When he had sufficiently recovered he planted his long feet more firmly on their scarlet pattens, and, taking a deep breath, chanted as follows:
"With jam I build the walls,
And with jam I fill the tarts,
With honey-cake I tile the roofs
Which crest the pastry towers.
The chairs are made of barley-sugar
And the tables and napkins are not of custard,
Nor of mustard nor of treacle,
But I weave them of thin macaroni.
"I am the Builder Architect,
Who makes the cottages and the tarts,
Who knows all about chairs and farms,
Who makes the castles and the biscuits
With chocolate and nice cornflour.
"Where I am—honey, tea, and sugar!
Where you are, pepper, ginger, and allspice!"
But, since the word "allspice" continued to reverberate through the air, the Confectioner shut his mouth smartly with his finger and thumb.
[Pg 15]
CHAPTER II
Smaly installs himself upon one of the Kangaroo's paws: The two little people see some of the inhabitants of this peculiar country: They meet some sugar horses, and they see also a fish which flies and some sponges which walk: The Wigs imagine that Smaly is made of suet: The ebony and crystal spectacles: The Mother of the Crow.
Smaly saw that there was no reason to be afraid of this strange creature so he crawled in through the grille of the gate and sat down upon one of the Confectioner's enormous paws. Redy made haste to follow him. No sooner was she settled than a number of strange little beings appeared as though from nowhere and clustered around her, pointing curious fingers at her while they chatted amongst themselves.
These little beings were the inhabitants of this strange new country. They nearly all wore gigantic wigs, and sometimes these wigs were so long that they needed a page to carry the last curl as though it were the end of a train.
The more Redy looked at these funny little people the greater was the amazement that appeared upon her face.
Smaly also was astonished; but he would have died sooner than let his astonishment appear.[Pg 16]
These curious little beings, who were known as the "Wigs" because of their large perukes, were even smaller than Redy and Smaly. At first sight they looked rather like those stiff little coloured figures you may see in Egyptian drawings at the British Museum, but no Egyptians were ever dressed as these people were. Their vividly coloured clothes were composed of mosaics of caramel and jam, with insertions of fruit and cake. Each one wore on his head a hat made of preserved fruit or of a whole bun or little cake. Shoes seemed to be very much a matter of individual taste in this land, for every inhabitant wore a pair of a different colour, shoes so gay that the mere sight of them made one want to dance. There was one woman in particular who wore upon her head a cake in the form of a little tower, who had the most charming mauve shoes with red soles, upon which Redy felt her eyes always returning enviously.
[Pg 17]
The Wigs for their part had not gathered together merely to look at the little strangers. With brightly coloured sponges some began to mop up the dew which still clung to the leaves of the hedge, while others with little pieces of blotting-paper set to work to dry each blade of grass at the side of the road. This seemed such a useless thing to do that Smaly would have liked to ask why they were doing it, but he felt too shy, so he contented himself with winking at Redy. Then he glanced up at the Confectioner.
"Tell me—why has Redy got a beak?" he asked, and before he could be answered began to suck his finger. He sucked it because a drop of[Pg 18] sweet preserve had fallen upon it from one of the Confectioner's pots.
"Has Redy got wings as well?" asked the Confectioner, thoughtfully taking a spoonful of the same preserve and offering it to Redy.
"No," said Smaly.
"Then she can't have a beak," replied the Confectioner triumphantly.
"Do you mean to say you don't see her beak or mine either?" asked Smaly in astonishment.
"Never in my life have I seen a beak upon any creature that had not wings as well," replied the Confectioner stolidly; "therefore it doesn't exist."
"A beak, a beak, a beak, not exist, not exist, not exist," said all the echoes one after the other.
Smaly decided to wait until the Confectioner spoke again; but it was Redy who broke the silence in an unexpected manner.
She walked away from the Confectioner and stood looking at him scornfully from a little distance.
"An architect!" she said. "You say you are an architect, but when we called 'Reckybecky' you opened the door, therefore you are Reckybecky, nothing but Reckybecky."
The Confectioner, who was a simple soul, stared at her very disconcerted. "Reckybecky," he repeated in a sort of stupefaction. "Reckybecky, am I really nothing but that?"
"You are Reckybecky," repeated Redy firmly.
"Dear me, I never heard that before," said the Confectioner. "I wonder if you can be right.[Pg 19] Then if I am Reckybecky I suppose I am not an architect at all," and he covered his face to try and think more clearly.
The two little people watched him timidly, wondering what was going on in that bent head. Suddenly the Confectioner raised his head and flung his pots and pans, his spoons and his knives, on to the ground on either side of him.
Most of the pots broke and fragrant streams of beautifully coloured preserves spread here and there over the uneven ground. Immediately dozens of Wigs pounced upon the wreckage, and while the jams trickled hither and thither amongst the grass these creatures tried to scrape it up again into jugs and basins, and even into their caps, with the spoon which every Wig carries hung from his belt.
At some distance off a procession had been passing which had hitherto paid no attention to the crowd round the gate, but now this broke up and various persons quitted its ranks to try and scrape up some of the precious preserves. These creatures did not resemble anything that Redy and Smaly had seen up to then. At first sight they all appeared to be riding[Pg 20] little horses; horses draped like those which we see in old pictures of tournaments.
These horses, however, were made of sugar, and very soon Redy and Smaly perceived that they were simply worn round the waists of the Wigs, whose two feet ran along the ground beneath the draperies where the four feet of the horses should have been.
Smaly could not help thinking that to have a horse like that would be rather fine if you could not afford a real horse of your own; but Redy was occupied in admiring the fine costumes of the Wigs who owned the horses.
These cavaliers were splendidly clad in green, white, rose, grey, and black. One, in particular, wore rose-coloured boots, and his horse was made to resemble a blue roan. Its mane was like a cocks-comb, cut in scarlet points.
All these things Redy and Smaly managed to observe without showing undue astonishment; but[Pg 21] neither could resist a little cry of surprise when they saw flying through the air a large fish. This fish, who wore a ring through his nose, had also come to take part in the unexpected feast.
Finally, even the Sponges, which the Wigs carried in their hands, and with which they had been drying the hedges, jumped out of their hands. Each Sponge unfolded little legs and started running towards the jam.
And now a strange thing began to happen to the Confectioner. The poor fellow was evidently in great distress because Redy had told him that he was not an architect, but only Reckybecky.
Redy and Smaly had never in all their lives seen any one so cruelly upset.
He seemed to be melting before their eyes and becoming transparent. He did not cry; but seemed rather to be transformed into a sort of damp and clinging fog. "Just as though he were 'dissolving in tears,'" thought Smaly. And he stared curiously at the Confectioner who every moment became more cloud-like than ever.
But suddenly the vague outline of a hand, which was all that remained[Pg 22] of him, struck the vaguer outline of his forehead as though an idea had come to him. Once more his face assumed a clarity as though it were made of mother-of-pearl, and he cried out:
"Reckybecky!"
This name reverberated round and about like a clap of thunder. It went on and on, making such a noise that all the little Wigs left off scraping up the jam and scampered away.
Redy felt afraid. Smaly jumped off the patten on which he had remained perched during the eclipse of the Confectioner. As to the latter, he endeavoured to shut his mouth and stop the noise from going on echoing; but he was not very solid again as yet and found some difficulty in doing it. At the end of the long avenue of sugar-trees Redy could see little groups of people gathered together looking about them to try and discover whence came this noise.
The Confectioner succeeded in shutting his mouth, and then turning towards Redy he opened it again, and remarked firmly:
"You are a stupid little thing."
Then turning to Smaly he said, with that confidential accent which one adopts when singling out the most intelligent person of a company for one's remarks:
"No, I cannot be Reckybecky, for somebody else is Reckybecky, so there!"
The Confectioner seemed extremely relieved by this remarkable solution.[Pg 23]
[Pg 24]
"Reckybecky must be the doorkeeper," he added firmly.
"The doorkeeper?" asked Smaly and Redy.
"Certainly, we've had a doorkeeper for years, and one day a traveller told us that since we had a doorkeeper it was necessary we should have a door, and then the Despoiler, who is the wisest of all of us, except the Mother of the Crow, decided that since we had a porter who was made of chocolate, we must have a gate made for him, and that the gate should be made of chocolate to match."
Smaly and Redy turned to look back at the door; the grille by which they had entered had disappeared, and everywhere the chocolate had become solid once again.
"I will show you the doorkeeper soon," promised the Confectioner, "but for goodness' sake don't tell him that you know he's a doorkeeper. He thinks he's simply a chocolate grub on his way to become a chocolate butterfly; in fact, we have nominated another doorkeeper to take his place if this ever comes off. This other person isn't really a doorkeeper either, but there's one thing he can do, and that is, he can make the latch and the hinge grow again when somebody has eaten them." The Confectioner looked at Redy and Smaly very severely when he said this.
[Pg 25]
They both felt extremely embarrassed.
With his nail, which looked exactly like a horn salt-spoon, the Confectioner scraped the inner side of the door just beside the latch, and Redy and Smaly saw the chocolate grow again as rapidly as he scraped it away.
The Confectioner gave a little exclamation of annoyance, and began to hunt for his magic ring amongst all the things he had thrown to the ground; but he could not find it. This ring had the power of preventing both plants and things from growing, and without it the Confectioner was unable to prevent the chocolate door from replacing itself as fast as he scraped it away. Nevertheless Smaly and Redy started to help him, and they all three scraped so hard that they caught a glimpse in the interior of the door of a tiny creature sitting in a niche. This creature was a grub about the size of a nut. Round its waist it wore a key as big as itself, and on its head a fur bonnet, which nodded forward to its chest.
"It's asleep," said the little man to the little woman.
At this moment a Crow made of bilberry preserve[Pg 26] and liquorice hopped up to them. This Crow was the doorkeeper who was yet not the doorkeeper; and who had been nominated in the place of the grub. The grub was really the doorkeeper; but always refused to admit it.
The Crow, who seemed convulsed with rage,[Pg 27] seized Redy in one claw and Smaly in the other, preparatory to throwing them outside once more.
At this dangerous moment Smaly once again found his beak crying out of itself. This time he heard it say that he wished to speak to the Chief Contractor.
The Crow lifted him up by his waistband, and gazed at him with his big bright eye like a magnifying-glass, then he dropped him.
"Why, it's made of suet!" he cried in disgust.
He turned his eye upon Redy, who appeared to him much better looking with her delicate little blue beak, which had a bloom on it like a grape. Unlike the Confectioner, the Crow was perfectly well able to perceive the beaks of Smaly and Redy, for he himself was a bird, and to no one save a bird or each other were their beaks visible.
And that is why you who are reading this book, and who are not birds, cannot see their beaks either, unless you make a great effort.
Redy, who saw that the moment had come to explain what they wanted, |
Connected Discourses of the Buddha, click here.Swedish voters in the European Parliament elections have punished the parties of the centre-right government coalition and in particular Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s Moderates, which only got 13.5% of the votes.
The Moderates have lost about 5% of the vote since 2009. They came third in the elections after the Social Democrats (24.5%) and surprisingly, the Environment Party, which took 15.2% of the Swedish votes. The two left-wing parties are hoping to form a new Swedish government after the general elections in mid-September, together with the Left party. The Parliament elections have been called ‘a clear indicator’ of what politicians and political parties can expect from voters in September.
Other government parties such as the social-liberal Centre Party and the liberal People’s Party also lost support.
Far-right wins one seat
The Feminist Initiative (FI) party won 5.3% of the vote and one seat and the far-right, Eurosceptic Sweden Democrats took 9.8% of the votes and two seats.
Sweden’s far-right party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), for a long time looked to be the election’s biggest loser, expecting to get about 3.3%. Party leader Jimmie Åkesson had to encourage SD voters to ‘step up’ on Sunday, stressing that a bad election will create a negative sentiment just before launching the next campaign, aimed at the general elections. The tactic worked as the party as the party gained 6.5% of the votes.
Åkesson told Swedish TV that he expects even more votes after the final count, as voters do not always want to admit in polls that they vote for the far-right.
“This is the best election we have had. We usually don’t do well in polls so we expect to get even more,” he said.
FI party leader Gudrun Schyman added, “This is amazing. This shows that the movement is moving ahead.”
Neither FI or SD will disclose at this time which groups they want to be part of in the Parliament. The FI is likely to go for the European United Left–Nordic Green Left parliamentary group while SD has previously suggested joining the group European Alliance for Freedom founded by the French MEP Marine Le Pen from the National Front and the Dutch leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV) Geert Wilders.
The overall turnout in Sweden was 51%, up 6% since 2009.The Lighter Side of Mass Murder
Picture a necrotic, sinister, burned-out wasteland — a vast, dull mound of rubble punctuated by moments of bleak emptiness and, occasionally, smoking. Those of you whose imaginations alighted instantly on the Late Christopher Hitchens have only yourselves to blame, for I was referring to Fallujah. The “city of mosques” was sacrificed in November 2004 during an all-American war movie: the MacGuffin, an obscure yet deadly figure known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who, predictably, “escaped” with his wily confederates into the deserts.1 Before the operation, the city was bombed to “encourage” its evacuation, and shortly thereafter sealed off — any male of fighting age (ten years old and upwards by present occupation standards) was prevented from leaving. During that operation, white phosphorus was used against civilians since, as one US soldier explained, anything that walked or breathed was considered an enemy combatant. It is reasonable to suppose that some of the melted bodies discovered had suffered agonizing deaths as the material sizzled their flesh to the bone. Others may have been more lucky — if they inhaled the substance, it will have blistered their mouths, throats, and lungs, suffocating them to death before they had to suffer the pain of flesh melting away both inside and outside. It is indeed hard to overstate what was pitilessly inflicted on Fallujah: a hospital deliberately bombed;2 another occupied;3 more than half of the houses damaged or destroyed;4 150,000 people obliged to flee to live in rough tents on the outskirts of the city as they were bombed and their water and electricity cut off;5 those returning to the devastated city were to be subjected to forced labor.6 While the US military only admitted to having killed 1,200 insurgents,7 initial civilian tolls were as high as 800.8 Lately, Iraqi NGOs and medical workers have estimated as many as 6,000 deaths, mostly civilians.9 In the face of all these facts, Christopher Hitchens remarked: “the death toll is not nearly high enough... too many [jihadists] have escaped.”10
You may have noticed this supererogatory relish in Hitchens’ rhetoric before. Here is another sample, regarding cluster bombs:
If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops... then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.11
There is much more of this merriment. Here he is again: “Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.”12
And on those jihadis who appear to occupy a special place in his imagination:
We can’t live on the same planet as them and I’m glad because I don’t want to. I don’t want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murders [sic] and rapists and torturers and child abusers. It’s them or me. I’m very happy about this because I know it will be them. It’s a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it’s also a pleasure. I don’t regard it as a grim task at all.13
Something is decidedly up here. The formal disavowal involved in the unctuous recitation that one is only, ever, targeting the bad guys doesn’t quite convince. There is too much joy involved in the murder of designated foes, just as there was too much liveliness in his celebration of Bin Laden’s “world-historical mistake” in attacking the twin towers.14 Jacqueline Rose was perhaps the first to notice this. In May 2002, the psychoanalytic theorist found herself in a debate about the “war on terror” sponsored by the London Review of Books. Christopher Hitchens was sitting next to her, and so she had ample opportunity to catch the flavor of his effluvia as they issued forth.
First, Rose noted the apocalyptic language that had been aroused by 9/11. By way of comparison with Hitchens, she offered to the audience some indistinguishable statements from Blair, Sharon, and Bin Laden, all marked by their extraordinary millenarianism and Manichean tone. The “extraordinary proximity” of this language was alarming, as was the fact that such apocalyptic language provides, copiously, the agar on which fundamentalism breeds. Rooted in a fear, it “thrives on the possibility of annihilation.” Second, she suggested that what Hitchens referred to as “civilization” (Western society) might well be problematized, given its extraordinary propensity for barbarism, past and present. Thirdly, she noted the decline of democratic possibilities within Western societies as a result of the “war on terror.” Fourthly, and most importantly, she ventured that 9/11 had ripped apart the American fantasy of invulnerability and immortality. Freud famously said that it is very difficult to imagine one’s own death, but this does not stop us from imagining that of others with extraordinary ruthlessness. Hence, a man might say to his wife, “When one of us dies, I think I shall move to Paris.” This is a homicidal impulse, one that operates on the level of unconscious fantasy life. Because our fantasy of immortality has been torn asunder, someone else must die. For reasons of ideological coherence and public relations, those Others must always be the bad guys, but die they must.15
“Someone else” happened to be several thousand people in Afghanistan. Note that Hitchens immediately followed Rose’s latter point by suggesting that a Human Rights Watch report would be released that would “mantle” the cheeks of those who believed the stories of massive civilian casualties with “a blush of shame.” That report, as it happens, did not exonerate the US or say anything specifically exculpatory. What it in fact said was:
The U.S. air strikes against Taliban military targets entailed an undetermined number of civilian casualties, at least some of which resulted from mistargeting. The air strikes also contributed to the humanitarian crisis, with thousands of Afghans fleeing their homes. Their flight swelled the ranks of hundreds of thousands who were already internally displaced because of drought, war, and conflict-related violence.16
There were such varied reports about the civilian death toll in Afghanistan that you could take your pick, of course, but why highlight a report to support your point when it doesn’t say what you claim it does? Possibly, Hitchens doesn’t expect to have his references checked. It would explain a lot.
However, when “someone else” became Iraq, Hitchens blinked. He was in favor of a conflict with the Hussein regime, although not necessarily an invasion, as he told Salon in late 2002.17 And then, in short order, he was in favor of an invasion. There will be no war, he said, so “bring it on.” And while he had angrily declaimed to Tariq Ali at the LRB debate that he did not classify the Iraqi regime as fascist for cheap points, he did in fact tell Mirror readers that Saddam was Hitler (and Stalin as well).18 What have we been waiting for, he wondered? He has weapons and underground chambers — just you wait.19 When “just you wait” became “never mind,” Hitchens found other reasons to continue toward his doom.
Kurds, Imperialism, and Muslim-baiting
Hitchens had a history of support for “humanitarian intervention” to fall back on, when all else failed. If the war wasn’t about WMDs, it was about Saddam’s links with Bin Laden. And if it wasn’t about that, it was about the Kurds. For Hitchens, the Kurds provide a crucial ideological quilting point in relation to Iraq, in which support for imperialism can be suffused with the drama of revolution. About this, a curious myth abounds, which appears to have been generated by Hitchens. The myth is that he was in a jeep with some Kurds in 1991 following the Gulf War, who allegedly evinced some warmth for George Bush Senior, and in the course of that exchange he changed his mind about the war on Iraq. Conflict with Saddam, from then on, was both inevitable and devoutly to be wished.20 That is hardly thrilling political fiction, but fiction it is. As noted before, he in fact opposed the invasion of Iraq as late as 2002, and he had criticized Clinton for bombing Iraq in 1998’s Operation Desert Fox.21 As Dennis Perrin, a friend of Hitchens, writes:
He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the [story about his conversion therein] is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush’s “mad contest” with Saddam, much less opined that “co-existence” with Saddam was “no longer possible.” I have a tape of him debating Ken Adelman on C-SPAN in 1993 where he’s still critical of the Gulf War, and again no mention of wanting to overthrow Saddam. As late as 2002, when I asked him directly if he did indeed favor a US invasion, he waffled and said that W. would have to convince him on “about a zillion fronts” before he could sign on.22
It is tempting to conclude that the main function of the Kurds for Hitchens is to cover his guilt, and shame, and embarrassment about allowing himself to be made a conduit for lies in the service of mass murder — but it is a considerable stretch to believe that Hitchens is capable of guilt, shame, or embarrassment these days. However, if Hitchens did not come to support an invasion of Iraq until very late in 2002, he did begin to express a fondness for interventionism back in 1993.23 He had supported Thatcher over the Falklands war, by his own account as a means of dislodging the Argentinian junta; and he became more and more in favor of intervention in the former Yugoslavia and also supported the restoration of Aristide in Haiti, something he supposes that the Clinton administration was forced into and subverted over. Hitchens also claims to have demanded that Britain intervene in Cyprus to defend it from an attempted partition by Greek and Turkish incursions. The argument bears a certain consistency — if imperialist governments are not moral agents, it is not too much to hope that they might be. We should “demand that the government acts according to its proclaimed principles.”24
In Kosovo, he was less consistent than perhaps he would like to admit. While he was later to deploy the now familiar line that “if the counsel of the peaceniks had been followed” something dreadful would have happened, he was initially less sanguine about the American strikes. On ethnic cleansing by Serb forces, he said: “[T]he cleansing interval... was both provoked and provided by the threat of air attacks on other parts of Yugoslavia.” About the responsibility of the warmongers for the fate of Kosovars, he added:
[T]he “line of the day” among administration spokesmen, confronted by the masses of destitute and terrified refugees and solid reports of the mass execution of civilians, [was] to say that “we expected this to happen.”... If they want to avoid being indicted for war crimes themselves, these “spokesmen” had better promise us they were lying when they said that.25
It was, he feared, another imperial carve-up. Later, he proceeded as if he had never said any of this, or at least never really thought it, even though it happens to be true: the NATO attack drastically worsened the situation of Kosovars. Needlessly so, since Western leaders had needlessly thwarted a deal26 that would have saved Kosovars from death and expulsion, not to mention preventing quite a few Serbs from being pounded into pink mist. That much is empirically established, and yet it is precisely at this point that Hitchens begins to be immune to inconvenient facts. Prime Minister Blair was acting out of principle, he later supposed, while Clinton was a war criminal for having bombed El-Shifa and sites in Afghanistan (something that Blair supported).27
Shortly thereafter, the oleaginous Clinton was replaced by the astonishingly inept Bush after a campaign in which the Democrat candidate could hardly find a word to say for himself, his sole simulation of passion and commitment being a bestial tongue exchange with his censorious wife in front of the television cameras. With Bush and his team of appointees from the Nixon and Reagan years in charge, Clinton would not be at the helm when the 9/11 bombers struck. Initially, those horrors inspired an uneasy response from Hitchens. He was at first critical of President Bush’s instant war cry, and even dared in the worst climate to offer a bit of criticism of US foreign policy,28 but it was not long before the torrent of bile was unleashed. If the left couldn’t drive Hitchens further to drink, it could at least set the fluid rushing in the opposite direction. They were guilty of “self hatred” and “fascist sympathies.”29 Rebuking those who thought that the root causes of the attacks included demonstrably baleful aspects of US foreign policy, Hitchens said:
The grievance and animosity predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone the occupation of the West Bank. They predate the creation of Iraq as a state. The gates of Vienna would have had to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds.30
Aside from being extraordinary ahistorical babble, this inaugurated Hitchens’ period as what Alex Cockburn calls “the hammer of Islam.”31 Let us pause only briefly to consider why. Only an intellectual midget or a racializing essentialist would suppose that modern political Islam has anything to do with traditional Islamic societies under the Caliphate. Hassan al-Banna may well have bemoaned the fall of the Ottoman Empire, but this was neither uncommon even in Egypt which had temporarily freed itself from that orbit before being occupied by Britain, nor did it signify ideological continuity with the traditionalist ulama. Nor was the Ottoman Empire governed particularly stringently according to theological propositions. Rather, military power was pre-eminent, as it was with coeval empires and polities, while the theorising of Islamic scholars was largely its circumstantial by-product. You may as well compare Ariel Sharon with Moses as compare Al Qaeda with the armies of the sultanates and the caliphate. Yet, this is the kind of mindless distillation that arises when “understanding” and analysis are eschewed. Indeed, Hitchens showed exactly what he thought about Muslims, when, in reaction to the French uprising, he told right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham that “[i]f you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka.”32 He is happy for others to do his talking from time to time, as when he approvingly cited Abdulrahman al-Rashed claiming that “[a]ll the World Terrorists are Muslims.”33 This article went on to aver that “[o]ur terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture.” Daniel Pipes was as delighted as Hitchens was, although those Muslims who have never committed a terrorist act and would never contemplate doing so would have had good grounds for feeling insulted. On the matter of empirical evidence, evoking Islam as an explanation for modern terrorism — particularly suicide bombing — must tickle the FARC or LTTE, but academic studies tend to suggest that Islam is far less important than geopolitical considerations.34 That’s the sort of fact that it pays to ignore if you don’t want to be slandered by Hitchens as an apologist.
Coterminous with Hitchens’ shift on imperialism was a definite move to the right. He ceased, for instance, to call himself a socialist. He began to reminisce about his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, and expatiate on the virtues of capitalism. Capitalism was more revolutionary than its opponents, he suggested. In fact, Hitchens went so far as to say that he regretted not having voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and that he had actually wanted her to win. Unemployment, union-bashing, homophobia, and nationalism are of little consequence in this equation, since the “radical, revolutionary forces” were led by the Right, who broke the “political consensus.” This is a fairly consistent theme for Hitchens, inasmuch as he needs to believe that whatever his position is on a given topic on a given day, it is contrary to whatever the consensus is. Hence, opposing the Iraq war became “respectable,” indeed “establishment” — to support this ridiculous claim, Hitchens hallucinated that Ariel Sharon may be against the war.35 In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens urges his young reader to live “at a slight angle to society,” which means to be idiosyncratic rather than tendentious. This contrarianism is a fetish, and it is one that encases in amber the burning polemical zeal of a former radical, a soixante-huitard. In the wake of a detumescent revolutionary fervor, and with the associated political vision largely gone, we are left with an opportunistic polemicising in which no matter how much one’s opinion alters, it remains permanently in opposition, permanently contrarian. And this delivers the hammering Hitchensian irony in which the most consummately bourgeois opinion acquires the mould and fashion of resistance.36
Tortuous Rhetoric
Indeed, something of that can be detected in the anfractuous rhetorical strategies Hitchens has deployed. On weapons of mass destruction, he first channelled Cassandra and then rejoined the chorus and suggested that it wasn’t about WMDs in the first place (only to bleat more about it when some new wafer-thin “evidence” emerged37). The torsions of posture and tone are, at times, astonishing. Hitchens terrified Mirror readers by advising them of all the nasty things that Saddam was getting up to — the mukhabarat were busying themselves destabilizing other countries and weapons of mass destruction were being readied. Little of what Hitchens said in the run up to war was accurate, and what was accurate was rarely worth saying since it was widely acknowledged. Within a couple of years, he was telling the intellectual amoebas of the Weekly Standard that Bush and Blair had ruined a good case for war by trying to frighten people instead of enlightening them.38 Enlightenment in Hitchens’ hands, however, radiates disaster triumphant. Here is a man who dared to introduce a set of essays written during the war with a monograph entitled “Twenty-Twenty Foresight.”39 In what did this foresight consist? Well, for example, following a series of surgical strikes, “a massive landing will bring food, medicine and laptop computers to a surging crowd of thankful and relieved Iraqis and Kurds.”40 Laptops. He actually said laptops. Similarly: “Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely.”41 Further, “War requires that two countries pit their armies against one another for indefinite combat. I’m willing to bet you now that there will be no such engagement in Iraq.”42 There would be no war, so “bring it on.” They brought it on alright. And I still wonder if the man who spent so much time slandering opponents as fascist sympathizers, who accused Naomi Klein of “swooning” for “theocratic fascists,”43 and who said “Ha ha ha to the pacifists” really ever thought he would find himself begging others to “stop the taunting.”44
To disarm critics of Bush’s pre-war lies, particularly his claim to have been doing all possible to avoid a war when in fact he was readying one from very early on, Hitchens said that after all this was merely a continuation of the Iraqi Liberation Act, passed unanimously by the Senate in 1998, and of a post-9/11 policy of changing the balance of power in the region.45 As it happens, the Iraq Liberation Act specifically precludes invasion,46 and, although I happen to know Hitchens was made aware of and acknowledged this, he nevertheless repeated the claim during his “debate” with George Galloway in New York.47 In a later article, he suggested that the Act had not mentioned invasion, whereas in fact it had mentioned it — to specifically preclude its use.48
Hitchens specializes in retailing myths about Zarqawi these days, too. I think his first mention of Zarqawi was in February 2003, when Colin Powell brought him up. He averred that the “presence of al-Qaeda under the Iraqi umbrella is suggested chiefly by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a senior bin-Laden aide and an enthusiast for chemical and biological tactics,” while “most US intelligence officials now agree that it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the pro-al-Qaeda gang, Ansar al-Islam, is fighting to destroy the independent Kurdish leadership in the northern part of Iraq that has been freed from Saddam Hussein’s control.”49 The interesting thing about this is that Hitchens didn’t even get it right in hindsight. He continues to insist on the Baghdad-Bin Laden connection (via Baghdad and northern Iraq)50 despite ample refutation, of which we might mention the fact that Zarqawi’s supposed presence in Baghdad was speculation, an “inferential leap” in the first place;51 that both British and German intelligence cast doubt on the story at the time;52 that even George Tenet, when testifying to a Senate Committee that Zarqawi had been in Baghdad, nevertheless said that he was neither under the control of Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein; that Zarqawi was an opponent of Al Qaeda at this time;53 that Ansar al-Islam leader Mullah Krekar denied having ever met Zarqawi and that his group was opposed to Hussein and did not associate with Al Qaeda;54 that, according to the International Crisis Group, the potency of Ansar al-Islam was drastically inflated by the PUK for its own reasons.55 There is considerable doubt about whether Zarqawi is alive, has two functioning legs, and is really in Iraq. Whether Zarqawi is a myth or a monster, the only story that obtains here is that there is no story. Saddam and Zarqawi never did have their Baghdad nuptials, however convenient the tale is for pro-war storytelling.56
On WMDs, he keeps trying. Of late, he was been amplifying claims made in the New York Times that Saddam’s key weapons sites had been systematically “looted” — probably, Hitchens darkly intimates, by Saddam’s goons. The curious thing to note about these claims is that Hitchens has either lost the capacity for scepticism or just doesn’t care to apply it in this case. Saddam’s best weapons plants are supposed to have been raided and stripped in a systematic fashion, perhaps by his cronies, unchecked by US soldiers. If the US had thought its evidence on WMDs was up to anything, it would have guarded those plants just as zealously as it guarded the Ministry of Oil.57 These weapons were the primary justification for the war, and one would expect that the US military would be eager to ensure that whatever was there was recorded and displayed — if they really believed their intelligence to have been up to anything. Further, the story’s backbone is composed of claims made by Dr. Sami al-Araji, presently operating as a minister under the US occupation. Not only are the claims not remotely credible, they come from a source with an obvious and declared interest in the matter.
Aside from WMDs, Hitchens’ most cherished blind spot is that he cannot and will not stand for the notion that there is a resistance movement in Iraq which is domestic, grassroots, and increasingly popular among Iraqis. He would not be alone in this, since the very suggestion is generally obscured by moralizing cant. Of late, he tried saying, inter an awful lot of alia, that:
Where it is not augmented by depraved Bin Ladenist imports, the leadership and structure of the Iraqi “insurgency” is formed from the elements of an already fallen regime, extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned.58
This happens to be entirely and exclusively nonsensical. The Iraqi resistance is notable for many things, and one of them is that there is not a leadership or indeed much of a structure to speak of. Intelligence reports suggest a movement that is cellular, decentralized, and disarticulated.59 Moreover, it is composed not of Ba’athists and Zarqawi loyalists, who are “lesser elements,” but rather of “newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalists offended by the occupying force, and others disenchanted by the economic turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting.” For this and other reasons, the notion of a movement directed from above by an axis of Bin Ladenists and Ba’athists simply isn’t persuasive.60
Nor is it true to say, as Hitchens does, that the resistance is primarily composed of “gangsters” who “pump out toxic anti-Semitism, slaughter Nepalese and other Asian guest-workers on video and gloat over the death of Hindus, burn out and blow up the Iraqi Christian minority, kidnap any Westerner who catches their eye, and regularly inflict massacres and bombings on Shiite mosques, funerals, and assemblies.”61 Statistics from the most reputable sources suggest that, although there is certainly an element that behaves in an abominable fashion, the bulk of resistance attacks are overwhelmingly directed against US troops, not civilians.62 According to figures from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent Washington think-tank, attacks on US military forces account for 75% of attacks, while civilian targets comprise a mere 4.1% of attacks. The Department of Defense figures show a consistently similar trend. A lot of the demonization of the resistance is also related to unconscious fantasy life, with Iraq perhaps reduced in many minds to an imaginary menagerie, a hothouse full of savage, exotic animals leaking blood indiscriminately. If the resistance are like that, of course, so much the easier to enjoy a joke about mass murder, so much the easier to dream of their erasure from the face of the earth. But Iraqis, who have to live with the occupation, have a more positive attitude toward the resistance than they do toward the interlopers who have so far imprisoned, killed, tortured, beaten, and raped them, generally appropriating every vile method of Ba’athist dictatorship and making it their own. How many Iraqis support resistance attacks? According to a secret Ministry of Defence poll, 45% of them — that includes Kurds. How many Iraqis support the occupation? Close to zero, with 82% strongly opposed to it.63 How many Iraqis reported an improved opinion of Moqtada al-Sadr after he fought the Americans in Najaf? 81 per cent.64 What we have in Iraq, in other words, is a grassroots guerrilla movement, one which has arisen because of the brutality of the occupation, (rather than the other way round), and which is growing in number and support.
Yet if Hitchens cannot face easily accessible facts about the resistance to the occupation, he still insists on the stupid disavowal of what the occupation has done to Iraq. He advertises that he pays no attention to the casualty figures (is oblivious to the evidence in other words), yet becomes hysterical the second anyone mentions the Lancet report. When it was raised in New York, he described it as “polticized hack-work,” a “crazed fabrication,” whose conclusions had been “conclusively and absolutely shown to be false.”65 To justify this claim, he referred to a piece by Fred Kaplan, a notoriously ill-informed piece that rested on a ridiculous misunderstanding about confidence intervals.66 The least one can say is that the Lancet report is not hack work. It is an extensively peer-reviewed epidemiological study. Its method of cluster sampling and extrapolation have been used in other parts of the world, for instance in the Congo, and recently in Sudan.67 Those figures were lauded as “reliable estimates” — by Christopher Hitchens.58 It is obvious to me, as it should be to any passing insect, that this is as transparent an instance of self-deceit on Hitchens’ part as one is ever likely to encounter. He doesn’t care about the casualty numbers, but he would like you to understand that they aren’t so very high, and can’t be, and anyone who says otherwise is a fraud.
In Place of a Conclusion....
Norman Finkelstein was probably guilty of understatement when he wrote that Hitchens, while redoubtable as a left-wing polemicist, only invited doubt as a right-wing one. It’s worth quoting some of what Finkelstein wrote:
To prove that, after supporting dictatorial regimes in the Middle East for 70 years, the U.S. has abruptly reversed itself and now wants to bring democracy there, he cites “conversations I have had on this subject in Washington.” To demonstrate the “glaringly apparent” fact that Saddam “infiltrated, or suborned, or both” the U.N. inspection teams in Iraq, he adduces the “incontrovertible case” of an inspector offered a bribe by an Iraqi official: “the man in question refused the money, but perhaps not everybody did.”... Hitchens maintains that that “there is a close... fit between the democratically minded and the pro-American” in the Middle East — like “President for Life” Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan... ; that Washington finally grasped that “there were ‘root causes’ behind the murder-attacks” (emphasis in original) — but didn’t Hitchens ridicule any allusion to “root causes” as totalitarian apologetics?; that “racism” is “anti-American as nearly as possible by definition”; that “evil” can be defined as “the surplus value of the psychopath” — is there a Bartlett’s for worst quotations?; that the U.S.’s rejoining of U.N.E.S.C.O. during the Iraq debate proved its commitment to the U.N.; that “empirical proofs have been unearthed” showing that Iraq didn’t comply with U.N. resolutions to disarm; that since the U.N. solicits U.S. support for multilateral missions, it’s “idle chatter” to accuse the U.S. of acting unilaterally in Iraq; that the likely killing of innocent civilians in “hospitals, schools, mosques and private homes” shouldn’t deter the U.S. from attacking Iraq because it is proof of Saddam’s iniquity that he put civilians in harm’s way; that those questioning billions of dollars in postwar contracts going to Bush administration cronies must prefer them going to “some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein” — is this dry or desiccated wit?69
Hitchens expended a great deal of energy responding to that particular essay precisely because it was so cutting (and so thoroughly deserved). I cite these passages because in them Hitchens’ present absurdity is expertly encapsulated and because Hitchens, in his punch-drunk yet extensive reply, could not dream up a word to say about them.70
Yet it is not just that Hitchens has slyly detached himself from those aspects of reality that he cannot bring himself to accept. It is not merely that he has moved so far to the right that he has internalized the virtues of aggressive American militarism and rapacious American capitalism. Or that he has become a calumniator, a ridiculous liar, and a back-stabber. It is not even the unpleasant confluence of the way in which his literary flair has declined in proportion to his political nous. On the strength of the evidence, his left-wing convictions weren’t all that invulnerable from the start, while he has never been terribly shy of supporting gunboat diplomacy. This is not a noble mind overthrown, although there may have been some kind of regime change post-9/11. What is most alarming is that Hitchens has a new audience: he purveys his deranged fantasies about killing more and more evil-doers for the mass ranks of Republican twenty-somethings. Malodorous macho assholes who nevertheless like to think that their myopic nationalism and sociopathy has something to do with liberation and freedom — or just, indeed, something. This is his audience today — a collection of barely post-pubescent neophytic imperialists, and bumpkin billionaires who read the Weekly Standard. The sort of degraded, hallucinatory nonsense that this poetaster of genocide exudes these days ought not to be exposed to daylight, never mind offered up as intellectual sustenance for a class of powerful men. Hitchens can’t change, of course, and he will just have to live with the thought of what a hideous figure he has become. Or, more probably, die with it, perhaps suffocating on the impacted faecal matter that is perpetually welling up inside him. Let’s just say that when that tumescent cadaver finally explodes, the left should be grateful to think of what new friends he will surprise.
1 News reports later announced that locals were in fact the core of the Fallujah insurgency: Associated Press, “Two Locals Were Core of Fallujah Insurgency” (24 November 2004). There is no clear evidence that Zarqawi was ever in Fallujah: BBC, “Inside Besieged Falluja” (18 October 2004). Major General Richard Natonski never expected Zarqawi to be there, as he explained: “We’re not after Zarqawi. We’re after insurgents in general” (Associated Press, “General Praises Assault’s Speed,” 14 November 2004)
2 BBC, “US Strikes Raze Falluja Hospital” (6 November 2004).
3 Richard A Oppel Jr., “Early Target of Offensive Is a Hospital,” New York Times (8 November 2004).
4 Ann Scott Tyson, “Increased Security in Fallujah Slows Efforts to Rebuild,” Washington Post (19 April 2005).
5 Jim McDermott and Richard Rapport, “Investigate Alleged Violations of Law in Fallujah Attack” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (11 January 2005).
6 Anne Barnard, “Returning Fallujans Will Face Clampdown,” Boston Globe (5 December 2004).
7 Sgt. 1st Class Doug Sample, “Fallujah Secure, But Not Yet Safe, Marine Commander Says,” American Forces Press Service (18 November 2004).
8 Early estimates from the Red Cross were that 800 civilians had been killed: Dahr Jamail, “800 Civilians Feared Dead in Fallujah,” Inter Press Service (16 November 2004).
9 Cited in Mike Marqusee, “A Name That Lives in Infamy,” The Guardian (10 November 2005).
10 Mike Ludders, “Columnist Hitchens Lectures on Political Dissent” (about Hitchens’ speech at Kenyon College, Ohio, 15 November 2004), The Kenyon Collegian (18 November 2004).
11 Adam Shatz, “The Left and 9/11,” The Nation (23 September 2002).
12 Edward Herman, “Christopher Hitchens And The Uses Of Demagoguery,” ZNet (22 September 2002).
13 “An Interview with Christopher Hitchens (‘Moral and Political Collapse’ of the Left in the US),” WashingtonPrism.org (16 June 16 2005).
14 “I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time” (Christopher Hitchens, “A War to Be Proud of,” Weekly Standard 10.47 |
Jiji Press. Some of the money was also allegedly used on an “expensive custom-built bed”, Jiji added.
Karpelès was arrested in August in connection with the loss of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of bitcoin when the exchange collapsed.
At the time, a spokesman for the Tokyo police said French-born Karpelès, 30, was suspected of accessing the exchange’s computer system in February 2013 and inflating his cash account by $1m.
He has denied the charges, saying he had intended to pay back the money, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.
In January this year, Yomiuri said that, contrary to reports from Mt Gox, the vast majority of missing bitcoins from the company’s stash were stolen by an insider, with just 7000 bitcoins, or 1% of the shortfall, attributable to hacking attacks from outside the company.Bruce Arena, former manager of the United States, believes that the national team should look inward instead of attempting to mimic European culture.
The USMNT is managed by German Jurgen Klinsmann and he's brought many foreign-born footballers who have an American parent onto the squad.
“I believe an American should be coaching the national team,” says Arena. “I think the majority of the national team should come out of Major League Soccer. The people that run our governing body think we need to copy what everyone else does, when in reality, our solutions will ultimately come from our culture.
“Come on,” he says. “We can’t copy what Brazil does or Germany does or England does. When we get it right, it’s going to be because the solutions are right here. We have the best sports facilities in the world. Why can’t we trust in that?”Rochdale made it 10 home wins in a row as they closed the year with victory over Shrewsbury in League One.
First-half goals from Ian Henderson and Steven Davies proved enough to keep Keith Hill's men in fourth place while Ivan Toney's late strike was no more than consolation for the struggling Shrews.
Shaun Whalley was denied an early goal when he lost out in a one-on-one with Dale goalkeeper Conrad Logan and the home side took advantage of that let-off by taking a fourth-minute lead.
Shrews defender Mat Sadler's attempt to play the ball forward struck the shins of Davies and rebounded in behind the visitors' backline, sending Henderson scampering through on goal and he finished clinically.
Dale's second goal of the night in the 28th minute came in controversial circumstances.
Davies challenged Jayson Leutwiler to a high ball which the goalkeeper appeared to have caught until it was hooked out of his grasp by Henderson, leaving Davies with the simple task of converting from close range.
The referee was duly surrounded by red and black shirts protesting and there was an air of confusion about the stadium for a few seconds before the realisation the goal was to stand.
Toney's 86th-minute effort raised the visitors' hopes briefly but Dale were good value for the three points.
Report supplied by the Press Association.President Trump says he is worst-treated politician in history
President Trump says he is worst-treated politician in history
Donald Trump has claimed that "no politician in history" has been "treated worse or more unfairly" than he has.
The US President was speaking on the day he faced calls to be impeached over his handling of the sacking of former FBI director James Comey and his relationship with Russia.
Offering "advice" to new recruits at a coastguard graduation ceremony in New London, Connecticut, he quickly turned the focus on his recent difficulties.
:: Analysis - Defiant Trump facing a battle for survival
"Over the course of your life you will find that things are not always fair," he said.
"You will find that things happen to you that you do not deserve, and that are not always warranted, but you have to put your head down and fight, fight, fight!"
'Did you share classified information with the Russians?'
Warming to his theme, Mr Trump added: "Never, ever, ever give up - things will work out just fine.
"Look at the way I've been treated lately - especially by the media.
"No politician in history … has been treated worse or more unfairly.
"You can't let them get you down. You can't let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams.
"I guess that's why we won.
"Adversity makes you stronger - don't give in, don't back down and never stop doing what you know is right.
"Nothing worth doing ever, ever, ever came easy."
:: Could Donald Trump be impeached?
Image: Mr Trump jokes with Sergei Lavrov (L) and ambassador Sergei Kislyak
Earlier, Vladimir Putin said he was willing to hand over a transcript of a discussion between Mr Trump and senior Russian officials.
The US President allegedly disclosed highly classified information about "terrorism and airline flight safety" while meeting foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador Sergei Kislyak at the White House last week.
However, Mr Putin said Mr Trump did not pass over secrets and dismissed the scandal as "political schizophrenia".
The Russian President added that he was "concerned because it's hard to imagine what the people who produce such nonsense can come up with next".
Is it fair to compare Trump with Nixon?
Questions over the discussion come amid reports Mr Trump asked former FBI director James Comey to drop an investigation into ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn and his ties to Moscow.
The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Jason Chaffetz, has said he will ask Mr Comey to testify next week.
Mr Putin added: "What surprises me is that they are shaking up the domestic political situation using anti-Russian slogans.
"Either they don't understand the damage they're doing to their own country, in which case they are simply stupid, or they understand everything, in which case they are dangerous and corrupt."
Congressman demands Donald Trump's impeachment
The latest controversy, only a few months into Mr Trump's presidency, has brought a call for his impeachment from Democratic congressman Al Green in the House of Representatives.
Earlier, in an interview with ThinkProgress, Mr Green said that following the dismissal of James Comey, Mr Trump "is demonstrating that he has the power to dismiss people summarily, with impunity, unless he's impeached".
Mr Green added: "The president committed an impeachable act when he fired Comey and indicated he considered the Russia thing when he did it.
"This will follow the president for as long as he's in office - the impeachable offence will still be there."
James Comey firing 'a slap in the face' for FBI
On Tuesday, national security adviser General H R McMaster said the intelligence sharing was "wholly appropriate" and based on "open source reporting".
Despite reports Mr Trump shared the information in a way that would have allowed the Russians to work out its origin, General McMaster asserted the President "in no way compromised any sources".
He said: "The President wasn't even aware of where this information came from - he wasn't even briefed on the source or method of this information either."
There is no suggestion Mr Trump committed a crime as he has the authority to disclose even the most highly classified information at will.
However, he has been accused of acting unwisely and jeopardising long-standing intelligence-sharing agreements by sharing information without consulting the ally that provided it.Most every town has its “malfunction junction,” or assorted traffic headaches that drive people crazy. But as officials in Rutland recently found out, trying to fix those trouble spots can be an even bigger headache.
Woodstock Avenue is what you’ll take if you’re driving between Rutland and Killington. It’s part of U.S. Route 4, with four lanes, big trucks, a local high school and lots of densely packed businesses.
“This particular stretch of road is in the top 25 percent of crash locations in the state of Vermont,” explained Ted Shattuck, a retired physician. He’s also an avid bicyclist who’s on the steering committee of the Rutland Area Physical Activity Coalition.
Standing on the sidewalk, Shattuck said there are about 50 accidents a year on this stretch of road.
“Unfortunately there hasn’t been much emphasis on safety along this road or safety in our calculations," he said. "So I think people who walk, bike, who drive this road, their safety needs to be considered, and the recent trial that we had demonstrated a dramatic drop in accidents.”
For the past month, Rutland experimented with a new traffic pattern designed to calm the flow of cars and reduce accidents. Instead of four lanes, traffic was reduced to three with a shared left turn lane in the middle and bike lanes on either side.
Proponents happily point out that accidents on the road have dropped 66 percent with the new design.
But many local businesses complain that their revenues and accessibility have also plummeted.
Nancy Greenwood, a realtor who works on Woodstock Avenue, said the new design has made it very difficult to get in and out of businesses.
“It took six minutes to get out of Pizza Hut the other day just to come back to my office just up the street.”
And considering all the truck traffic on Route 4, a major east-west highway, she worries about the safety of those in the bike lanes.
Jeff Wennberg, Rutland City’s commissioner of public works, is a member of the city’s board of highway commissioners. The three-member board voted two to one last week to return the traffic pattern to the original four-lane configuration. Wennberg said he actually liked the new design, but said he couldn’t vote to keep it because there hadn’t been adequate public education.
Proponents happily point out that accidents on the road have dropped 66 percent with the new design. But many local businesses complain that their revenues and accessibility have also plummeted.
“The majority of bicyclists were going the wrong way on the road and then we had people using the bike lanes for pushing baby carriages and skateboarders,” Wennberg said. “It was absolutely horrifying to see the misuse of what became an attractive nuisance with these bike lanes. And it was a situation where in my mind that I couldn’t justify a reduction in fender benders for an increase in fatalities and that’s clearly what we would have had had we continued on the existing course.”
Ted Shattuck and other proponents of the new traffic pattern have been trying to get city officials to change their minds, going so far as to stage a protest Friday outside city hall. But Wennberg and fellow highway commissioner David Allaire, who voted against the new design stand behind their decision.
Wennberg said repaving the road will start Sunday, part of a $9 million series of road upgrades through the city, and delaying the start of the project or changing it at this point would simply be too costly.Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - also known as Lou Gehrig's disease - is a condition that gradually attacks nerve cells that control our voluntary movement, leading to paralysis and death. In the US, a reported 30,000 individuals are living with the disease, but now, scientists have identified a fault in protein formation, which could be the origin of this condition.
The researchers, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have published their study on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nobody knows for sure why ALS occurs, and there is currently no cure.
The researchers of this latest study, led by Su-Chun Zhang, senior author and neuroscientist at UW-Madison, say previously, a genetic mutation was discovered in a small group of patients with ALS, prompting scientists to transfer that gene to animals for drug treatment testing.
However, this approach has not yet worked. As such, Zhang and his team decided to study diseased human cells - called motor neurons - in lab dishes. These motor neurons are what direct muscles to contract, and Zhang explains this is where failures occur in ALS.
Discovery centers on faulty proteins inside motor neurons
The researchers created motor neurons in their lab, shown in this microscope photo; green marks the nucleus and red marks the nerve fibers. The team identified a misregulation of protein in the nucleus as the likely origin of ALS.
Image credit: Hong Chen, Su-Chun Zhang/Waisman Center The researchers created motor neurons in their lab, shown in this microscope photo; green marks the nucleus and red marks the nerve fibers. The team identified a misregulation of protein in the nucleus as the likely origin of ALS.Image credit: Hong Chen, Su-Chun Zhang/Waisman Center
Zhang was the first scientist to ever grow motor neurons from human embryonic stem cells around 10 years ago, and he has recently been transforming skin cells into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which are then transformed into motor neurons.
He explains that the iPS cells can be used as models for disease since they have many of the same characteristics as their donor cells.
"With iPS, you can take a cell from any patient, and grow up motor neurons that have ALS," Zhang explains. "That offers a new way to look at the basic disease pathology."
For their latest study, the researchers have focused on proteins that erect a transport structure - called a neurofilament - inside the motor neurons.
They say the neurofilament moves chemicals and cellular parts - including neurotransmitters - to far sides of the nerve cell.
Zhang explains that the motor neurons, for example, that control foot muscles are around 3 ft long, so they need to be moved a whole yard from the cell body to the spot where they can signal the muscles.
As such, one of the first signs of ALS in a patient who lacks this connection is paralysis of the feet and legs.
'Findings have implications for other neurodegenerative disorders'
Before now, scientists have understood that with ALS, so-called tangles - misshapen protein - along the nerve's paths block the route along the nerve fibers, which eventually results in the nerve fiber malfunctioning and dying.
The team's recent discovery, however, has to do with the source of these tangles, which lies in a shortage of one of three proteins in the neurofilament.
Zhang explains that the neurofilament plays both a structural and a functional role:
"Like the studs, joists and rafters of a house, the neurofilament is the backbone of the cell, but it's constantly changing. These proteins need to be shipped from the cell body, where they are produced, to the most distant part, and then be shipped back for recycling. If the proteins cannot form correctly and be transported easily, they form tangles that cause a cascade of problems."
He says their discovery is that the origin of ALS is "misregulation of one step in the production of the neurofilament."
Additionally, he notes that similar tangles crop up with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases: "We got really excited at the idea that when you study ALS, you may be looking at the root of many neurodegenerative disorders."
Zhang and his team also observed that this misregulation happens very early, which is why it is highly likely that what they found is the origin ALS.
"Nobody knew this before, but we think if you can target this early step in pathology, you can potentially rescue the nerve cell," he says.
And as if this discovery is not exciting enough, the team also found a way to rescue the neural cells in the lab dishes, and when they "edited" the gene that orchestrates formation of the blundered protein, they found that the cells suddenly looked normal.
They report that they are currently testing a wide range of potential drugs, which brings hope to the domain of ALS research.
The CDC have a National ALS Registry, where patients with the condition can complete brief risk-factor surveys to help scientists defeat ALS.An expert in Pediatric Medicine has testified the 9-year-old daughter of Dr. Fakhruddin Attar and his wife Farida had Female Genital Mutilation performed on her.
The state has taken the parents to court to end their parental rights after the two were criminally charged with assisting another doctor in performing FGM.
These are the first cases to be charged in the United States since it became a federal crime.
Dr. Dena Nazar testified in a hearing before a Referee in Oakland County that she examined the 9-year-old girl at Kids Talk, a child advocacy center and found several physical indications that FGM had been performed. She concluded the scarring and fused tissue were not from any medically necessary procedure.
The Attar’s are charged in connection with Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, who is also charged by the feds with performing FGM on two 7-year-old girls brought here from Minnesota earlier this year.
Those procedures were allegedly done at Dr. Attar’s clinic in Livonia.
All are members of a Muslim Community known as the Dawoodi Borha based in India and attend a Mosque in Farmington Hills.
Two other parents are also facing having their parental rights terminated.
The Attar’s case now moves to a Judge in June.
They are locked up in federal detention and their daughter is living with grandparents. She can talk with her parents on the phone, but it must be in English and they can’t discuss the parents’ trouble.
They were not at the hearing today, but arrangements are being made for them to attend court sessions at the next level.TALLAHASSEE — After years of controversy, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is ending its relationship with Youth Services International, a for-profit firm with state contracts totaling about $90 million to run seven juvenile lockups.
Now, critics of the Sarasota-based company, known as YSI, are looking ahead to the next round of contractors to oversee the facilities.
"The Department of Juvenile Justice has to do an incredible job of vetting the applicants," said Rep. Dave Kerner, D-Lake Worth. "And now the applicants know that people are watching. If they produce the same type of work product that [providers] have in the past, we will be all over them with lawsuits and lobbying DJJ to cancel their contracts — and I think that's very effective."
The department announced last week that it had reached a settlement with YSI that includes ending the company's contracts. That came after criticism of the firm by local communities and a whistleblower lawsuit, alleging, at least in part, that YSI made false claims about providing services and even food to juvenile offenders.
Under terms of the settlement, the firm has agreed to pay $2 million to the state and the lawsuit will be dismissed.
"While Youth Services International believes there is no merit to this lawsuit, it made the decision to settle the case in an effort to put the four-year litigation in the past and avoid the future cost and distraction of a continued legal defense regarding this matter," a company spokesman wrote in an email.
The settlement calls for new contractors to be in place by Aug. 31, and Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Christina Daly has pledged that there will be no interruption of services.
"She assured me that the transition will be smooth," said Sen. Rob Bradley, a Fleming Island Republican and member of Senate committees dealing with policy and funding for juvenile justice. "She also assured me that there are competent vendors to take their place and provide appropriate services."
The whistleblower lawsuit contended the company made repeated false claims "in order for the defendants to receive tens of millions of dollars in payments under contracts entered with the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice that the defendants were not entitled to receive … [including] numerous monthly invoices claiming payments for services that had not been performed as required under contracts with the state of Florida."
Plaintiffs alleged such falsifications — of safety checks, staff training and timesheets, case-management plans and mental health and rehabilitation records — were a daily occurrence at YSI facilities.
They also alleged the company instructed facility administrators to leave required positions unfilled so as to reduce staffing levels below contract requirements "and would hold back or refuse to provide adequate funds … to purchase required items such as adequate food, clothing, cleaning supplies and other basic necessities."
The plaintiffs were six former YSI employees. One, Antwyon Carter, had some monitoring responsibility for several of the firm's Florida lockups. Four others had worked at the 118-bed, maximum-security Palm Beach County Juvenile Corrections Facility or its predecessor, Thompson Academy. The sixth worked at YSI-run Broward Girls Academy.
In legal documents, YSI acknowledged that the plaintiffs had worked for the company but contended they did not have "sufficient knowledge to form a belief" to support the allegations.Mack Wolford, a flamboyant Pentecostal pastor from West Virginia whose serpent-handling talents were profiled last November in The Washington Post Magazine, hoped the outdoor service he had planned for Sunday at an isolated state park would be a “homecoming like the old days,” full of folks speaking in tongues, handling snakes and having a “great time.” But it was not the sort of homecoming he foresaw.
Instead, Wolford, who turned 44 the previous day, was bitten by a rattlesnake he owned for years. He died late Sunday.
Mark Randall “Mack” Wolford was known all over Appalachia as a daring man of conviction. He believed that the Bible mandates that Christians handle serpents to test their faith in God — and that, if they are bitten, they trust in God alone to heal them.
He and other adherents cited Mark 16:17-18 as the reason for their practice: “And these signs will follow those who believe: in My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
The son of a serpent handler who himself died in 1983 after being bitten, Wolford was trying to keep the practice alive, both in West Virginia, where it is legal, and in neighboring states where it is not. He was the kind of man reporters love: articulate, friendly and appreciative of media attention. Many serpent-handling Pentecostals retreat from journalists, but Wolford didn’t. He’d take them on snake-hunting expeditions.
Last Sunday started as a festive outdoor service on a sunny afternoon at Panther Wildlife Management Area, a state park roughly 80 miles west of Bluefield, W.Va. In the preceding days, Wolford had posted several teasers on his Facebook page asking people to attend.
“I am looking for a great time this Sunday,” he wrote May 22. “It is going to be a homecoming like the old days. Good ’ole raised in the holler or mountain ridge running, Holy Ghost-filled speaking-in-tongues sign believers.”
“Praise the Lord and pass the rattlesnakes, brother” he wrote on May 23. He also invited his extended family, who had largely given up the practice of serpent handling, to come to the park.
“At one time or another, we had handled [snakes], but we had backslid,” his sister, Robin Vanover, said Monday evening. “His birthday was Saturday, and all he wanted to do is get his brothers and sisters in church together.”
And so they were gathered at this evangelistic hootenanny of Christian praise and worship. About 30 minutes into the service, his sister said, Wolford passed a yellow timber rattlesnake to a church member and his mother.
“He laid it on the ground,” she said, “and he sat down next to the snake, and it bit him on the thigh.”
A state forester, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said park officials were unaware of Wolford’s activities. “Had we known he had poisonous animals, we would have never allowed it,” he said.
The festivities came to a halt shortly thereafter, and Wolford was taken back to a relative’s house in Bluefield to recover, as he always had when suffering from previous snake bites. By late afternoon, it was clear that this time was different, and desperate messages began flying about on Facebook, asking for prayer.
Wolford got progressively worse. Paramedics transported him to Bluefield Regional Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. It could not be determined when the paramedics were called.
Wolford was 15 when he saw his father die at age 39 of a rattlesnake bite in almost exactly the same circumstances.
“He lived 101 / 2 hours,” Wolford told The Washington Post last fall. “When he got bit, he said he wanted to die in the church. Three hours after he was bitten, his kidneys shut down. After a while, your heart stops. I hated to see him go, but he died for what he believed in.”
According to people who witnessed Mack Wolford’s death, history repeated itself. He was bitten roughly at 1:30 p.m.; he died about 11 that night.
One of the people present was Lauren Pond, 26, a freelance photographer from the District. She had been photographing serpent handlers in the area for more than a year, including for The Post, and stayed at Wolford’s home in November.
“He helped me to understand the faith instead of just documenting it,” she said Tuesday. “He was one of the most open pastors I’ve ever met. He was a friend and a teacher.”
The family allowed her to stay near Wolford’s side Sunday night, and she’s still recovering from having witnessed the pastor’s agonizing death. “I didn’t see the bite,” she said. “I saw the aftermath.”
In an interview with The Post for last year’s story, Jim Murphy, curator of the Reptile Discovery Center at the National Zoo, described what happens when a rattlesnake bites.
The pain is “excruciating,” he said. “The venom attacks the nervous system. It’s vicious and gruesome when it hits.”
But Wolford refused to fear the creatures. He slung poisonous snakes around his neck, danced with them, even laid down on or near them. He displayed spots on his right hand where copperheads had sunk their fangs. His home in Bluefield had a spare bedroom filled with at least eight venomous snakes: usually rattlers, water moccasins and copperheads that he fed rats and mice. He was passionate about wanting to help churches in nearby states — including North Carolina and Tennessee, where the practice is illegal — start up their own serpent-handling services.
“I promised the Lord I’d do everything in my power to keep the faith going,” he said in October. “I spend a lot of time going a lot of places that handle serpents to keep them motivated. I’m trying to get anybody I can get involved.”
His funeral will be held Saturday at his church, House of the Lord Jesus, in Matoaka, just north of Bluefield.
Julia Duin, a contributing writer for The Washington Post Magazine, wrote the original article about Mack Wolford.New Delhi: The Supreme Court has indicated it might recognise the execution of 'living will' in cases of passive euthanasia, as right to die peacefully is part of fundamental right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution.
The apex court, however, said there should be adequate safeguards and implementation of living will would be subject to medical board's certifying that the patient's comatose state is irreversible.
A five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra reserved its verdict on a plea seeking recognition of 'living will' made by a terminally-ill patient for passive euthanasia.
Living will is a written document that allows a patient to give explicit instructions in advance about the medical treatment to be administered when he or she is terminally ill or no longer able to express informed consent.
Passive euthanasia is a condition where there is withdrawal of medical treatment with the deliberate intention to hasten the death of a terminally-ill patient.
The apex court had recognised passive euthanasia in 2011 in Aruna Shanbaug's case by which it had permitted withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from patients not in a position to make an informed decision.
The bench, also comprising Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, said that Right to Life does not mean right to die but a dignified life would certainly include right to die with dignity, as advance directive would take effect once a medical board affirms that the patient comatose state is irreversible.
"One cannot say that you have a right to die, but you have a right to dignified death. If we recognise the right to dignity in death, then why not dignity in dying," the bench observed, adding that life must be preserved but not prolonged in suffering.
It said that living will may be there as right to die peacefully is part of a fundamental right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution, provided there are adequate safeguards.
It also said if a medical board certifies that the health of the patient is irreversible and cannot be kept alive without artificial support, then the living will's role may come in.
Additional Solicitor General P S Narasimha, appearing for Centre, opposed recognition of 'living will' and said the consent for removal of artificial support system given by a patient may not be an informed one and without being aware of medical advancements.
He cited examples of various countries in disallowing creation of living will by patients.
Narasimha said a draft bill, based on the guidelines framed by the apex court in Aruna Shaunbag's case, is under the government's consideration.
He said the decision whether to remove life support or not, can only be taken by a medical board after examining the condition of a patient.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for petitioner NGO 'Common Cause', said safeguards are needed while taking a decision by medical boards to withdraw life support of a patient.
Senior advocate Arvind Datar, appearing for an intervenor NGO 'Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy', said that the apex court has recognised the distinction between the active termination of life and the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment with the latter firmly recognised as an expression of autonomy, bodily integrity and right to life.
He urged the court to declare that advance directives are an extension of the right to refuse medical treatment and the right to die with dignity and recognition of the legal validity is necessary to give effect to the rights of incompetent patients under Article 21 of Constitution.
Article 21 provides that "no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law."
The bench then observed that it is to be decided whether mercy killing can be declared as a right under article 21 of the Constitution or not and said that the advanced directive was a subject to the medical boards interpretation.
The bench expressed its inclination for constituting medical boards across the country in each district and said it should be obligatory.
On Tuesday, the government had opposed granting legal validity to "living will" in cases of passive euthanasia, by telling the apex court that it could be misused and may not be viable as a good public policy.
The bench was hearing a PIL filed in 2005 by the NGO, which said when a medical expert opines that a person afflicted with a terminal disease has reached a point of no return, he should be given the right to refuse life support.
On January, 15, 2016, the Centre had said the 241st report of the Law Commission stated that passive euthanasia should be allowed with certain safeguards and there was also a proposed law --Medical Treatment of Terminally Ill Patient (Protection of Patients and Medical Practitioners) Bill, 2006.
It had said that on specific occasions, the question of withdrawing supporting devices to sustain cardio-pulmonary function even after brain death, shall be decided only by a doctors' team and not by the treating physician alone.
PTIEvery day, Hillary Clinton comes up with another excuse for why she lost the 2016 presidential election.
And every day, she also comes up with another person or group of people to blame. If you're keeping score at home, so far she has blamed former FBI director James Comey, Russia, computer bots, Wikileaks, Bernie Sanders, Facebook, Joe Biden, fake news, Twitter, voter ID laws, the vast right-wing conspiracy, sexism, Barack Obama, ageism, Anthony Weiner, white women, xenophobia, black people, the electoral college, the DNC, misogyny — is that all? Wait, also all those Americans too stupid to vote for her, and women who were cowed by their men — for her crushing defeat.
Now she is striking out at any woman who didn't support her and instead backed Donald Trump. She just can't fathom how any woman would continue to support him.
"When I see women doing that, I think why are they publicly disrespecting themselves? Why are they opening the door to have someone say that about them in their workplace? In a community setting? Do they not see the connection there?" Clinton said in an interview on AM Joy.
She thinks sexism is alive and well, although she acknowledged that she lost white women's vote — even after the mainstream media tried to ensnare Trump in a sex-type scandal.
Last week, Clinton claimed that she lost the election because women — in particular, white women — caved to pressure from the men in their life, and voted for Trump, The Daily Wire reported.
The quintessential modern feminist Clinton says women were too scared to stand up to their husbands, boyfriends, and fathers, who told them to vote Republican, and since, clearly, women have no agency or ability to think for themselves, they listened.
Clinton made the outrageous claim in an interview with NPR, where she also blamed the so-called "Bernie Bros" for bullying Democratic women into avoiding the more moderate Clinton in favor of progressive (Socialist) Sanders.
“Women will have no empathy for you because they will be under tremendous pressure — and I’m talking principally about white women — they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers, and husbands, and boyfriends and male employers, not to vote for ‘the girl,'” she said.
“And we saw a lot of that during the primaries from Sanders supporters, really quite vile attacks online against women who spoke out for me, as I say, one of my biggest support groups, Pantsuit Nation, literally had to become a private site because there was so much sexism directed their way," she said.6803
КАВПОЛИТ Автор статьи
"Если вы не хотите, чтобы террористы устраивали взрывы в Москве, давайте развивать республику", – сказал на полях Петербургского международного экономического форума глава Дагестана Рамазан Абдулатипов.
"Прошлый год мы впервые прожили без терактов. Когда в некоторых министерствах озвучиваются сомнения насчет подпрограммы [по Дагестану, в рамках госпрограммы развития СКФО до 2025 года], я говорю: если вы не хотите, чтобы террористы устраивали взрывы в Москве, давайте развивать республику. Поэтому нужно создавать рабочие места, современную промышленность и сельское хозяйство, падение которых ранее составило до 70 процентов. Это все нужно восстанавливать", – цитирует Абдулатипова ТАСС.
По словам руководителя региона, финансирование отдельной подпрограммы по Дагестану увеличится на 25-30 процентов, до 217,1 миллиарда рублей за счет привлечения частных инвестиций.
"Подпрограмма рассчитана на 167 миллиардов рублей - это не очень много, по сравнению с другими регионами: всего 16 миллиардов в год. Мы планируем дополнительно к этой сумме привлечь 25-30 процентов частных инвестиций. Это редко кто делает, но мы намерены идти таким путем. Если не будет поддержки, мы не сможем сохранить позитивную динамику развития республики, а это очень важно для страны. Необходимо, чтобы Дагестан восстанавливал роль форпоста России на южных границах", – сказал Абдулатипов.
Глава РД уточнил, что средства планируется направить, в первую очередь, на создание логистических центров АПК. "Дагестан занимает первое место в России по производству овощей, но нет холодильных систем, нет упаковочных предприятий, систем доставки до покупателя. То же самое касается мяса, мы производим 20 процентов баранины в России, но при этом нужны мясоперерабатывающие комбинаты", – сказал он, добавив, что третья приоритетная отрасль - строительные материалы.
"Планы у нас большие и, кроме того, у нас есть для принятия этой подпрограммы несколько очень важных аргументов, которых не было 2,5 года назад: по темпам развития экономики и индексу промышленного производства мы вышли на первое место в РФ, по темпам сбора налогов – на четвертое. И хотя объемы, конечно, у нас меньше, это означает, что республика выходит на позитивную динамику", – заключил Абдулатипов.
Напомним, Дагестан может стать первым регионом Северного Кавказа, который получит собственную подпрограмму в рамках госпрограммы развития СКФО. Соответствующий проект постановления подготовил Минкавказ России.Absurdly Lucky Couple Invites Adele To Their Wedding Mid-Show; She Says Yes!
Anyone who has attended one of Adele’s massive sold-out shows lately knows the British star is really going for that “everywoman” vibe, which translates to lots and lots of talking in between belting out power ballads.
For the purists who just came to hear her sing, it’s a little much. To everyone else, it’s pure heaven — lighten up, purists! She’s having her moment.
Related: WATCH: Adele Makes This Seattle Drag Queen’s Dream Come True
Adele’s latest crowd-pleasing audience interaction took place at the Staples Center in Los Angeles (one of eight sold out gigs at the venue), where she called on a cute engaged gay couple to join her, testing the pair’s bladder control while suddenly face-to-face with the queen of soul-pop in front of thousands of people.
And while it’s notable that neither of them peed themselves (way to go!), what’s even more remarkable is that she then RSVP’d a ‘yes’ to the wedding.
Related: Adele Helps Gay Couple Get Engaged
“I’m gonna go,” she told them and the crowd. Then they nervously blurt out that the date is set for September, and she replied, “Oh I’m free. Can I come? I’d love |
MBER 2005; pages 35-51
Cover Story, pages 35-46
ASPARTAME - The Shocking Story of the World's Bestselling Sweetener
Aspartame is the most controversial food additive in history. The most recent evidence, linking it to leukaemia and lymphoma, has added substantial fuel to the ongoing protests of doctors, scientists and consumer groups who allege that this artificial sweetener should never have been released onto the market and that allowing it to remain in the food chain is killing us by degrees. PAT THOMAS REPORTS
Once upon a time, aspartame was listed by the Pentagon as a biochemical warfare agent. Today it's an integral part of the modern diet. Sold commercially under names like NutraSweet and Canderel, aspartame can be found in more than 5,000 foods, including fizzy drinks, chewing gum, table-top sweeteners, diet and diabetic foods, breakfast cereals, jams, sweets, vitamins, prescription and over-the-counter drugs. This means that there is a good chance that you and your family are among the two thirds of the adult population and 40 per cent of children who regularly ingest this artificial sweetener.
Because it contains no calories, aspartame is considered a boon to health-conscious individuals everywhere; and most of us, if we think about it at all, think it is safe. But independent scientists say aspartame can produce a range of disturbing adverse effects in humans, including headaches, memory loss, mood swings, seizures, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's-like symptoms, tumours and even death.
Concerns over aspartame's toxicity meant that for eight years, the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) denied it approval, effectively keeping it off the world market. This caution was based on compelling evidence, brought to light by numerous eminent scientists, litigators and consumer groups, that aspartame contributed to serious central nervous system damage and had been shown to cause cancer in animals. Eventually, however, political muscle, won out over scientific rigour, and aspartame was approved for use in 1981 (see timeline for details).
The FDA's about-turn opened the floodgates for aspartame's swift approval by more than 70 regulatory authorities around the world. But, as the remarkable history of the sweetener shows, the clean bill of health given to it by government regulators - whose raison d'être should be to protect the public from harm - is simply not worth the paper it is printed on.
DECEMBER 1965
While working on an ulcer drug, a chemist at pharmaceutical manufacturer GD Searle accidentally discovers aspartame, a substance that is 180 times sweeter than sugar, yet has no calories.
SPRING 1967
Searle begins safety tests, necessary for FDA approval.
AUTUMN 1967
GD Searle approaches eminent biochemist Dr Harry Waisman, director of the University of Wisconsin's Joseph P Kennedy Jr Memorial Laboratory of Mental Retardation Research and a respected expert in the toxicity of phenylalanine (which comprises 50 per cent of the aspartame formula), to conduct a study of the effects of aspartame on primates. Of seven monkeys fed aspartame mixed with milk, one dies and five others have grand mal epileptic seizures.
SPRING 1971
Dr John Olney, professor of neuropathology and psychiatry at Washington University in St Louis School of Medicine, whose research into the neurotoxic food additive monosodium glutamate (MSG, a chemical cousin of aspartame) was responsible for having it removed from baby foods, informs Searle that his studies show that aspartic acid, one of the main constituents of aspartame, causes holes in the brains of infant mice. One of Searle's researchers, Ann Reynolds, confirms Olney's findings in a similar study.
FEBRUARY 1973
Searle applies for FDA approval and submits over 100 studies it claims support aspartame's safety. Neither the dead monkeys nor the mice with holes in their brains are included in the submission.
12 SEPTEMBER 1973
In a memorandum, Dr Martha M Freeman of the FDA Division of Metabolic and Endocrine Drug Products criticises the inadequacy of the information submitted by Searle with particular regard to one of the compound's toxic breakdown products, diketopiperazine (DKP). She recommends that marketing of aspartame be contingent upon the sweetener's proven clinical safety.
26 JULY 1974
FDA commissioner Dr Alexander Schmidt grants aspartame its first approval as a 'food additive' for restricted use in dry foods. This approval comes despite the fact that his own scientists found serious deficiencies in the data submitted by Searle.
AUGUST 1974
Before aspartame can reach the marketplace, Dr John Olney, James Turner (attorney, consumer advocate and former 'Nader's Raider' who was instrumental in removing the artificial sweetener cyclamate from the US market), and the group Label Inc (Legal Action for Buyers' Education and Labeling) file a formal objection to aspartame's approval with the FDA, citing evidence that it could cause brain damage, particularly in children.
JULY 1975
Concerns about the accuracy of test data submitted to the FDA by Searle for a wide range of products prompt Schmidt to appoint a special task force to examine irregularities in 25 key studies for aspartame and Searle drugs Flagyl, Aldactone and Norpace.
5 DECEMBER 1975
Searle agrees to an inquiry into aspartame safety concerns. Searle withdraws aspartame from the market pending its results. The sweetener remains off the market for nearly 10 years while investigations into its safety and into Searle's alleged fraudulent testing procedures are ongoing. However, the inquiry board does not convene for another four years.
24 MARCH 1976
The FDA task force completes its 500 page report on Searle's testing procedures. The final report notes faulty and fraudulent product testing, knowingly misrepresented product testing, knowingly misrepresented and'manipulated' test data, and instances of irrelevant animal research in all the products reviewed. Schmidt says: '[Searle's studies were] incredibly sloppy science. What we discovered was reprehensible.'
JULY 1976
The FDA forms a new task force, headed by veteran inspector Jerome Bressler, to further investigate irregularities in Searle's aspartame studies uncovered by the original task force. The findings of the new body will eventually be incorporated into a document known as the Bressler Report.
10 JANUARY 1977
FDA chief counsel Richard Merrill formally requests the US Attorney's office to begin grand jury proceedings to investigate whether indictments should be filed against Searle for knowingly misrepresenting findings and 'concealing material facts and making false statements' in aspartame safety tests. This is the first time in the FDA's history that it requests a criminal investigation of a manufacturer.
26 JANUARY 1977
While the grand jury investigation is underway, Sidley & Austin, the law firm representing Searle, begins recruitment negotiations with Samuel Skinner, the US attorney in charge of the investigation. Skinner removes himself form the investigation and the case is passed to William Conlon.
8 MARCH 1977
Searle hires prominent Washington insider Donald Rumsfeld as its new CEO to try to turn the beleaguered company around. A former member of Congress and defence secretary in the Ford administration, Rumsfeld brings several of his Washington colleagues in as top management.
1 JULY 1977
Samuel Skinner leaves the US Attorney's office and takes a job with Searle's law firm. Conlon takes over Skinner's old job.
1 AUGUST 1977
The Bressler Report is released. It focuses on three key aspartame studies conducted by Searle. The report finds that in one study 98 of the 196 animals died but weren't autopsied until later dates, making it impossible to ascertain the actual cause of death. Tumours were removed from live animals and the animals placed back in the study. Many other errors and inconsistencies are noted. For example, a rat was reported alive, then dead, then alive, then dead again. Bressler comments: 'The question you have got to ask yourself is: why wasn't greater care taken? Why didn't Searle, with their scientists, closely evaluate this, knowing full well that the whole society, from the youngest to the elderly, from the sick to the unsick. will have access to this product.' The FDA creates yet another task force to review the Bressler Report. The review is carried out by a team at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and headed by senior scientist Jacqueline Verrett.
28 SEPTEMBER 1977
The FDA publishes a report exonerating Searle of any wrongdoing in its testing procedures. Jacqueline Verrett will later testify to the US Senate that her team was pressured into validating data from experiments that were clearly a 'disaster'.
8 DECEMBER 1977
Despite complaints from the Justice Department, Conlon stalls the grand jury prosecution for so long that the statute of limitations on the aspartame charges runs out and the investigation is dropped. Just over a year later Conlon joins Searle's law firm, Sidley & Austin.
1978
The journal Medical World News reports that the methanol content of aspartame is 1,000 times greater than most foods under FDA control. In high concentrations methanol, or wood alcohol, is a lethal poison.
1 JUNE 1979
The FDA finally establishes a public board of inquiry (PBOI), comprising three scientists whose job it is to review the objections of Olney and Turner to the approval of aspartame and rule on safety issues surrounding the sweetener.
1979
In spite of the uncertainties over aspartame's safety in the US, aspartame becomes available, primarily in pharmaceutical products, in France. It is sold under the brand name Canderel and manufactured by the food corporation Merisant.
30 SEPTEMBER 1980
The FDA's PBOI votes unanimously against aspartame's approval, pending further investigations of brain tumours in animals. The board says it 'has not been presented with proof of reasonable certainty that aspartame is safe for use as a food additive'.
1980
Canderel is now marketed throughout much of Europe (but not in the UK) as a low-calorie sweetener.
JANUARY 1981
Rumsfeld states in a Searle sales meeting that he is going to make a big push to get aspartame approved within the year. Rumsfeld vows to 'call in his markers' and use political rather than scientific means to get the FDA on side.
20 JANUARY 1981
Ronald Reagan is sworn in as president of the US. Reagan's transition team, which includes Rumsfeld, nominates Dr Arthur Hull Hayes Jr to be the new FDA commissioner.
21 JANUARY 1981
One day after Reagan's inauguration, Searle re-applies to the FDA for approval to use aspartame as a food sweetener.
MARCH 1981
An FDA commissioner's panel is established to review issues raised by the PBOI.
19 MAY 1981
Arthur Hull Hayes Jr, appoints a five-person commission to review the PBOI's decision. Three of the five FDA scientists on it advise against approval of aspartame, stating on the record that Searle's tests are unreliable and not adequate to determine the safety of aspartame. Hayes installs a sixth member on the commission, and the vote becomes deadlocked.
15 JULY 1981
Hayes ignores the recommendations of his own internal FDA team, overrules the PBOI findings and gives initial approval for aspartame to be used in dry products on the basis that it has been shown to be safe for its proposed uses.
22 OCTOBER 1981
The FDA approves aspartame as a tabletop sweetener and for use in tablets, breakfast cereals, chewing gum, dry bases for beverages, instant coffee and tea, gelatines, puddings, fillings, dairy-product toppings and as a flavour enhancer for chewing gum.
1982
The aspartame-based sweetener Equal, manufactured by Merisant, is launched in the US.
15 OCTOBER 1982
The FDA announces that Searle has filed a petition for aspartame to be approved as a sweetener in carbonated beverages, children's vitamins and other liquids.
1983
Searle attorney Robert Shapiro gives aspartame its commercial name, NutraSweet. The name is trademarked the following year. Shapiro later becomes president of Searle. He eventually becomes president and then chairman and CEO of Monsanto, which will buy Searle in 1985.
8 JULY 1983
Aspartame is approved for use in carbonated beverages and syrup bases in the US and, three months later, Britain. Before the end of the year Canderel tablets are launched in the UK. Granular Canderel follows in 1985.
8 AUGUST 1983
James Turner, on behalf of himself and the Community Nutrition Institute, and Dr Woodrow Monte, Arizona State University's director of food science and nutritional laboratories, file petitions with the FDA objecting to aspartame approval based on possible seriousadverse effects from the chronic intake of the sweetener. Monte also cites concern about the chronic intake of methanol associated with aspartame ingestion.
SEPTEMBER 1983
Hayes resigns as FDA commissioner under a cloud of controversy about his taking unauthorised rides aboard a General Foods jet (General Foods was and is a major purchaser of aspartame). He serves briefly as provost at New York Medical College, and then takes a position as senior scientific consultant with Burston-Marsteller, the chief public relations firm for both Searle and Monsanto.
AUTUMN 1983
The first carbonated beverages containing aspartame go on sale in the US.
17 FEBRUARY 1984
The FDA denies Turner and Monte's requests for a hearing, noting that aspartame's critics had not presented any unresolved safety questions. Regarding aspartame's breakdown components, the FDA says that it has reviewed animal, clinical and consumption studies submitted by the sweetener's manufacturer, as well as the existing body of scientific data, and concludes that 'the studies demonstrated the safety of these components'.
MARCH 1984
Public complaints about the adverse effects of aspartame begin to come in. The FDA requests that the US agency the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) begins investigations of a select number of cases of adverse reactions to aspartame.
30 MAY 1984
The FDA approves aspartame for use in multivitamins.
JULY 1984
A study by the state of Arizona Department of Health into aspartame is published in the Journal of Applied Nutrition. It determines that soft drinks stored at elevated temperatures promote more rapid deterioration of aspartame into poisonous methanol.
2 NOVEMBER 1984
The CDC review of public complaints relating to aspartame culminates in a report, Evaluation of Consumer Complaints Related to Aspartame Use, which reviews 213 of 592 cases and notes that re-challenge tests show that sensitive individuals consistently produce the same adverse symptoms each time they ingested aspartame. The reported symptoms include: aggressive behaviour, disorientation, hyperactivity, extreme numbness, excitability, memory loss, loss of depth perception, liver impairment, cardiac arrest, seizures, suicidal tendencies and severe mood swings. The CDC nevertheless concludes that aspartame is safe to ingest. On the same day that the CDC exonerates aspartame, Pepsi announces that it is dropping saccharin and adopting aspartame as the sweetener in all its diet drinks. Others quickly follow suit.
1 OCTOBER 1985
Monsanto, the producer of recombinant bovine growth hormone, genetically engineered soya beans, the pesticide Roundup and many other industrial and agricultural chemicals, purchases Searle for $2.7 billion.
21 APRIL 1986
The US Supreme Court, headed by Justice Clarence Thomas, a former Monsanto attorney, refuses to consider arguments from the Community Nutrition Institute and other consumer groups that the FDA has not followed proper procedures in approving aspartame, and that the liquid form of the artificial sweetener may cause brain damage in heavy users of low-calorie soft drinks.
16 OCTOBER 1986
Turner files another citizen's petition, this time concerning the risk of seizures and eye damage from aspartame. The petition argues that medical records of 140 aspartame users show them to have suffered from epileptic seizures and eye damage after consuming products containing the sweetener and that the FDA should ban aspartame as an 'imminent hazard to the public health'.
21 NOVEMBER 1986
The FDA denies Turner's new petition, saying: 'The data and information supporting the safety of aspartame are extensive. It is likely that no food product has ever been so closely examined for safety. Moreover, the decisions of the agency to approve aspartame for its uses have been given the fullest airing that the legal process requires.'
28 NOVEMBER 1986
The FDA approves aspartame for non-carbonated frozen or refrigerated concentrates and single-strength fruit juice, fruit drinks, fruit-flavoured drinks, imitation fruit-flavoured drinks, frozen stock-type confections and novelties, breath mints and tea beverages.
DECEMBER 1986
The FDA declares aspartame safe for use as an inactive ingredient, provided labelling meets certain specifications.
1987
An FDA report on adverse reactions associated with aspartame states the majority of the complaints about aspartame - now numbering 3,133 - refer to neurological effects.
2 JANUARY 1987
NutraSweet's aspartame patent runs out in Europe, Canada and Japan. More companies are now free to produce aspartame sweeteners in these countries.
12 OCTOBER 1987
United Press International, a leading global news-syndication organisation, reports that more than 10 federal officials involved in the decision to approve aspartame have now taken jobs in the private sector that are linked to the aspartame industry.
3 NOVEMBER 1987
A US Senate hearing is held to address the issue of aspartame safety and labelling. The hearing reviews the faulty testing procedures and the 'psychological strategy' used by Searle to help ensure aspartame's approval. Other information that comes to light includes the fact that aspartame was once on a Pentagon list of prospective biochemical-warfare weapons.
Numerous medical and scientific experts testify as to the toxicity of aspartame. Among them is Dr Verrett, who reveals that, while compiling its 1977 report, her team was instructed not to comment on or be concerned with the overall validity of the studies. She states that questions about birth defects have not been answered. She also states that increasing the temperature of the product leads to an increase in production of DKP, a substance shown to increase uterine polyps and change blood cholesterol levels. Verrett comments: 'It was pretty obvious that somewhere along the line, the bureau officials were working up to a whitewash.'
1989
The FDA has received more than 4,000 complaints from consumers about adverse reactions to the sweetener.
14 OCTOBER 1989
Dr HJ Roberts, director of the Palm Beach Institute for Medical Research, claims that several recent aircraft accidents involving confusion and aberrant pilot behaviour were caused by ingestion of products containing aspartame.
20 JULY 1990
The Guardian publishes a major investigation of aspartame and delivers to government officials 'a dossier of evidence' that draws heavily on the transcripts of the Bressler Report and demands that the government review the safety of aspartame. No review is undertaken. The Guardian is taken to court by Monsanto and forced to apologise for printing its story.
1991
The US National Institutes of Health publishes Adverse Effects of Aspartame: January '86 through December '90, a bibliography of 167 studies documenting adverse effects associated with aspartame.
1992
NutraSweet signs agreements with Coca-Cola and Pepsi stipulating that it is their preferred supplier of aspartame.
30 JANUARY 1992
The FDA approves aspartame for use in malt beverages, breakfast cereals, and refrigerated puddings and fillings and in bulk form (in large packages like sugar) for tabletop use. NutraSweet markets these bulk products under the name 'NutraSweet Spoonful'.
14 DECEMBER 1992
NutraSweet's US patent for aspartame expires, opening up the market for other companies to produce the substance.
19 APRIL 1993
The FDA approves aspartame for use in hard and soft candies, non-alcoholic flavoured beverages, tea beverages, fruit juices and concentrates, baked goods and baking mixes, and frostings, toppings and fillings for baked goods.
28 FEBRUARY 1994
Aspartame now accounts for the majority (75 per cent) of all the complaints in the US adverse-reaction monitoring system. The US Department of Health and Human Services compiles a report that brings together all current information on adverse reactions attributed to aspartame. It lists 6,888 complaints, including 649 reported by the CDC and 1,305 reported by the FDA.
APRIL 1995
Consumer activist, and founder of anti-aspartame group Mission Possible, Betty Martini uses the US's Freedom of Information Act to force the FDA to release an official list of adverse effects associated with aspartame ingestion. Culled from 10,000 consumer complaints, the list includes four deaths and more than 90 unique symptoms, a majority of which are connected to impaired neurological function. They include: headache; dizziness or problems with balance; mood change; vomiting and nausea; seizures and convulsions; memory loss; tremors; muscle weakness; abdominal pains and cramps; change in vision; diarrhoea; fatigue and weakness; skin rashes; deteriorating vision; joint and musculoskeletal pain. By the FDA's own admission, fewer then 1 per cent of those who have problems with something they consume ever report it to the FDA. This means that around 1 million people could have been experiencing adverse effects from ingesting aspartame.
12 JUNE 1995
The FDA announces it has no further plans to continue to collect adverse reaction reports or monitor research on aspartame.
27 JUNE 1996
The FDA removes all restrictions from aspartame use, and approves it as a general-purpose sweetener', meaning that aspartame can now be used in any food or beverage.
NOVEMBER 1996
Drawing on data compiled by the US National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results programme, which collects and distributes data on all types of cancer, Olney publishes peer-reviewed research in the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology. It shows that brain-tumour rates have risen in line with aspartame consumption and that there has been a significant increase in the conversion of less deadly tumours into much more deadly ones.
DECEMBER 1996
The results of a remarkable study conducted by Dr Ralph G Walton, professor of clinical psychology at Northeastern Ohio Universities, are revealed. Commissioned by the hard-hitting US national news programme 60 Minutes, it sheds some light on the absurdity of aspartame-safety studies. Walton reviewed 165 separate studies published in the preceding 20 years in peer-reviewed medical journals. Seventy-four of the studies were industry-funded, all of which attested to aspartame's safety. Of the other 91 non-industry funded studies, 84 identified adverse health effects. Six of the seven non-industry funded studies that were favourable to aspartame were from the FDA, which has a public record of strong pro-industry bias. To this day, the industry-funded studies are the ones that are always quoted to the press and in official rebuttals to aspartame critics. They are also the studies given the greatest weight during the approval process and in official safety reviews.
10 FEBRUARY 1998
Monsanto petitions the FDA for approval of a new tabletop sweetener called Neotame. It is around 60 times sweeter than aspartame and up to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar. Neotame is less prone to breaking down in heat and in liquids than aspartame because of the addition of 3,3-dimethylbutyl, a poorly studied chemical with suspected neurotoxic effects. Strengthening the bond between aspartame's main constituents eliminates the need for a health warning directed at people suffering from PKU.
13 MAY 1998
Independent scientists from the University of Barcelona publish a landmark study clearly showing that aspartame is transformed into formaldehyde in the bodies of living specimens (in this case rats), and that this formaldehyde spreads throughout the specimens' vital organs, including the liver, kidneys, eyes and brain. The results fly in the face of manufacturers' claims that aspartame does not break down into formaldehyde in the body, and bolster the claims of aspartame critics that many of the symptoms associated with aspartame toxicity are caused by the poisonous and cumulative effects of formaldehyde.
OCTOBER 1998
The UK's Food Commission publishes two surveys on sweeteners. The first shows that several leading companies, including St Ivel, Müller and Sainsbury's, have ignored the legal requirement to state 'with sweeteners' next to the name of the product. The second reveals that aspartame not only appears in 'no-sugar added' and 'light' beverages but also in ordinary non-dietetic drinks because it's three times cheaper than ordinary sugar.
8 FEBRUARY 1999
Monsanto files a petition with the FDA for approval of the general use of Neotame.
20 JUNE 1999
An investigation by The Independent on Sunday reveals that aspartame is made using a genetic engineering process. Aspartame component phenylalanine is naturally produced by bacteria. The newspaper reveals that Monsanto has genetically engineered the bacteria to make them produce more phenylalanine. Monsanto claims that the process had not been revealed previously because no modified DNA remains in the finished product, and insists that the product is completely safe; though scientists counter that toxic effects cannot be ruled out in the absence of long-term studies. A Monsanto spokeswoman says that while aspartame for the US market is often made using genetic engineering, aspartame supplied to British food producers is not. The extent to which US brands of low-calorie products containing genetically engineered aspartame have been imported into Britain is unclear.
MAY 2000
Monsanto, under pressure - not least from the worldwide resistance to genetically manipulated food and ongoing lawsuits - sells NutraSweet to JW Childs Associates, a private-equity firm comprised of several former Monsanto managers, for $440m. Monsanto also sells its equity interest in two European sweetener joint ventures, NutraSweet AG and Euro-Aspartame SA.
10 DECEMBER 2001
The UK's Food Standards Agency requests that the European Commission Scientific Committee on Food conducts an updated review of aspartame. The committee is asked to look carefully at more than 500 scientific papers published between 1988 and 2000 and any other new scientific research not examined previously.
9 JULY 2002
The FDA approves the tabletop and general use of Neotame. The 'fast-track' approval raises eyebrows because, historically, the FDA takes at least 10 years to approve food additives. Neotame is also approved for use in Australia and New Zealand, but has yet to be approved in the UK.
10 DECEMBER 2002
The European Commission Scientific Committee on Food publishes its final report on aspartame. The 24-page report largely ignores independent research and consumer complaints, relying instead on frequently cited articles in books and reviews put together by employees or consultants of aspartame manufacturers. When independent research is cited, it is generally refuted with industry-sponsored data. An animal study showing aspartame's disruption of brain chemistry, a human study linking aspartame to neurophysiological changes that could increase seizure risk, another linking aspartame use with depression in individuals susceptible to mood disorder, and two others linking aspartame ingestion with headaches are all dismissed.
The report's conclusion amounts to a single sentence: 'The committee concluded that.there is no evidence to suggest that there is a need to revise the outcome of the earlier risk assessment or the [acceptance daily intake] previously established for aspartame.'
As with the FDA, there are concerns about the neutrality of some of the committee's members and their links with the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), an industry group that funds, among other things, research into aspartame. ILSI members include Monsanto, Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
19 FEBRUARY 2003
Members of the European Parliament's Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy Committee approve the use of sucralose (see page 50) and an aspartame-acesulfame salt compound (manufactured in Europe by the aspartame-producing Holland Sweetener Company and sold under the name Twinsweet), agreeing to review of the use of both in three years' time. At the same time, a request by European greens that the committee re-evaluate the safety of aspartame and improve the labelling of aspartame-containing products is rejected.
MAY 2004
The feature-length documentary Sweet Misery is released on DVD (see http://www.soundandfuryproductions.com). Part-documentary, part-detective story, it includes interviews with people who have been harmed by aspartame, as well as credible testimony from advocates, doctors, lawyers and long-time campaigners, including James Turner, HJ Roberts and renowned neurosurgeon Dr Russell Blaylock. (UK orders: Namaste Publishing, info@namastepublishing.co.uk.)
SEPTEMBER 2004
US consumer group the National Justice League files a $350m class action lawsuit against the NutraSweet Corporation (the current owner of aspartame products), the American Diabetes Association and Monsanto. Some 50 other defendants have yet to be named, but mentioned throughout the lawsuit is the central role of Donald Rumsfeld in helping to get aspartame approved through the FDA. The plaintiffs maintain that this litigation will prove how deadly aspartame is when it is consumed by humans. Little progress has been made so far in bringing the action to court.Journalist who refused to pay fine into 'bankers' slush fund' wins day in court BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A journalist who refused to pay a speeding fine as an act of civil disobedience has won his day in court. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/republic-of-ireland/journalist-who-refused-to-pay-fine-into-bankers-slush-fund-wins-day-in-court-28609238.html
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A journalist who refused to pay a speeding fine as an act of civil disobedience has won his day in court.
Des Nix (62) of Foxfield, Raheny, in Dublin, refused to pay an €80 fine to the State, which he believes is now "a slush fund to pay gangster bankers".
He got it for allegedly driving his car at 63kph in a 50kph zone, at Tonlegee Road, north Dublin, on October 28 last.
But Mr Nix, pictured, who worked as a reporter for 22 years with 'The Irish Press' and as a sub-editor with the Irish Independent, wrote to gardai to tell them: "I am returning this speeding ticket unpaid as a gesture of civil disobedience."
"I refuse to pay any fine connected to it on the basis that the Exchequer is now primarily a slush fund to pay gangster bankers, elitist judges and greedy politicians."
He appeared at Dublin District Court yesterday, where he faced a possible maximum fine of €1,000.
But the case was struck out because the prosecuting garda was not in court.
Mr Nix asked if his expenses would be paid but the judge told him he was "doing well as it is".
Mr Nix told reporters: "I regard these bankers and bondholders as gangsters if they take money from people who never had dealings with them.
"It is unacceptable that the government should act as their bag men."
Belfast TelegraphGregg Phillips, who spurred Trump’s calls to investigate election results, was accused of lying in government job applications and has faced ethics allegations
The conservative activist cited by Donald Trump as an authority on voter fraud owes the US government more than $100,000 in unpaid taxes, was once accused of lying about his qualifications, and has faced several allegations of ethical impropriety.
Gregg Phillips’s unfounded claim that three million people vote illegally in the US was championed in a tweet by Trump on Friday morning, as the new administration prepares to launch what he says will be a major inquiry into the integrity of American elections. The president tweeted:
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Look forward to seeing final results of VoteStand. Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!
Phillips, 56, became popular among Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential campaign for his strident statements on Twitter and his development of an “election fraud reporting app” that allows people to use their cellphones to report alleged wrongdoing.
He claims to have been building a database of all voter registrations in the US with location details since 2009, but has declined to make his findings public.
How a dubious tweet about illegal votes found its way to Trump's megaphone Read more
While he has posted online about excessive government spending, Phillips owes the federal government $100,961 in unpaid income taxes with his wife, according to a lien filed by the IRS in Manatee County, Florida, in 2014. An official at the county clerk’s office said the outstanding sum had not been paid. In a text message on Friday, Phillips said: “I am in a disagreement with the IRS over income taxes. The amount owed is less than $50,000.”
Phillips also had a colorful and lesser-known career in Mississippi and Texas state politics over the past few decades, in which he was accused of exploiting positions that he held in the administrations of both states for financial gain.
The former stockbroker and Republican fundraiser described those years differently in a tweet posted last November. “I’ve torn down govt in two states, eliminated 20k jobs, & saved $5 billion,” he said. “Requires enormous stones.”
After Phillips served as chief fundraiser on his successful 1991 election campaign, Kirk Fordice, theRepublican governor of Mississippi, nominated him to be executive director of the state’s department of human services.
Aged just 33, Phillips was confirmed despite an investigation into his background by state legislators finding several red flags. While Phillips reportedly said on his job application that he majored in “finance” for his degree, records from the University of Alabama showed that in fact he majored in transportation, according to multiple press reports from the time. On Friday, Phillips said: “My degree is a bachelor of science in commerce and business administration.”
Phillips also said that he was registered to vote in Madison County, Mississippi, but he did not appear in voter rolls, according to the reports. He did not file a statement of economic interests by the deadline required in state ethics law. Having been critical of “deadbeat fathers”, Phillips was himself accused of failing to pay child support. The allegation, made by his ex-wife’s new husband in an interview with a newspaper columnist, was denied by Phillips. A Republican state senator reportedly pressured investigators to drop this issue.
State investigators then wrote another scathing report on Phillips after he resigned from the job in 1995. Phillips had immediately taken an $84,000-a-year job with a corporation to which his department had previously awarded a state workforce training contract worth $878,000.
The legislature’s watchdog committee said: “His actions relative to the contractual arrangement create the appearance of impropriety and could constitute a violation of state ethics laws.” No action was taken against Phillips. On Friday he said: “I was fully cleared by the MS [Mississippi] ethics commission of any wrongdoing.”
Amid reports that Phillips was in line to be appointed head of the human services department in his home state of Alabama, the Birmingham News in October 1995 urged Governor Fob James to look elsewhere. “He can find better than Phillips,” the newspaper said in an editorial. Noting that auditors had discovered mismanagement in his Mississippi department, the article said Phillips held “shaky qualifications and a suspect track record”. He was passed over for the position.
In 2003, Phillips took a job as the second-in-command in Texas’s own human services department, where he was put in charge of a drastic privatization of many services. An investigation by the Houston Chronicle in 2005 alleged that Phillips had been involved in awarding tens of millions of dollars worth of state contracts to companies with which he was personally linked.
In only the most striking example, the newspaper found that two clients of Enterject, a lobbying, services and training company that Phillips co-founded, were given $167m in state contracts. Phillips told the newspaper he had “severed all ties” to his company when he went to work for the state. Yet the reporters found that, in fact, he remained “actively involved” with Enterject and that his wife was the company’s chief financial officer.
The Chronicle also found that Enterject was given a $670,270 contract for processing immigrant paperwork from the Texas Workforce Commission. The commission’s executive director, Larry Temple, had been Phillips’s deputy in Mississippi. Phillips again denied any wrongdoing.
After he left the Texas state administration, Phillips’s new company AutoGov won a no-bid contract worth at least $207,000 in public funds to work on fixing the error-plagued computerized welfare system that Phillips had implemented. The Dallas Morning News described the problematic setup as “the state’s biggest privatization fiasco”.
In his response on Friday, Phillips did not answer questions about his time in Texas.Last night on the Fullstack Network stream, we built a twitch chatbot that controls an RC car using Node.js and a Raspberry Pi. The idea is that we wanted to have a car that can move around following commands sent from a chatbot over the internet (twitch chatbot in our case, but can be any chatbot). Our base car is just one of the cheapest RC car you can find on amazon which only cost $28 like this one http://amzn.to/2tnyIqW
Nothing special about it, it comes with a remote control just like any regular RC car. The key is that there is just one button per movement. Unlike more expensive cars where you can also control acceleration. Of course the car itself has no internet connection capability, at its current form |
- and eventually failed. Many a dodgy CAD house saw its cost-cutting measures end in ruin. Autodesk support forums and newsgroups were flooded with strangely unregistered users moaning about the "bug in their version of 3D Studio." A rectified "100 percent cracked" version appeared soon after, but the damage was done. The Myth of the Bad Crack was born, and the pirate groups' reputations tarnished.
But the pirates bounced back. They always do. And there's no reason to think that there's any way to stop them. Software security people are at an intrinsic disadvantage. Compare their job to that of securing something in the real world that's valuable and under threat - a bank, say. Typically, only one set of armed robbers will hold up a bank at a time, and they'll get only one crack at it. Imagine an army of robbers, all in different parts of the world, all attacking the same bank at the same time. And in the comfort of their own homes. Not just once, but over and over again. Imagine that each set of robbers is competing against every other, racing to be first in. Imagine, too, that some of the robbers are so technically adept that they could have built the alarms, the safe, and even the jewels themselves. And that they have cracked more than 30 banks with the same protection system. And that they're learning from all their failures, because they're never caught. No security could realistically resist such an onslaught. It may be that the only way to avoid having your software cracked is to put no protection whatsoever on it. No challenge, no crack.
Popularity only feeds the frenzy. Doom is a good example. In 1993, id Software distributed the original shareware version of its nasty-guns-in-nasty-dungeons masterpiece on bulletin boards, CompuServe, and a then-little-known system called the Internet. Downloaded by more than 6 million people worldwide, Doom was a trailblazer in the world of modem marketing. The shareware gave you a third of the game: if you liked it, you had to buy the rest on disks. Millions did.
Doom and its makers became a dream target. Weeks before Doom II's release, the sequel was available on the Internet - not as shareware, but warez. And not just as a teaser, but the whole damn thing. "Yeah, that was leaked," says Mike Wilson, id's then-vice president of marketing, now CEO at Ion Storm. "Can't tell you how much that hurt." The leaked copy was rapidly traced - rumors abounded that the version was a review copy fingerprinted to a British PC games magazine - but too late. It was already on Usenet, doing the rounds on IRC, filling up FTP sites. The pirates were in ecstasy and id was left with recoding the final retail release, to ensure future patches and upgrades would not work on the pirated version. Then they shut the stable door. No more external beta testing; no more prelaunch reviews. "We assured ourselves it would never happen again," says Wilson. "No copy of our games would leave the building."
Nice try. Quake, Doom's much-anticipated follow-up, turned up on an FTP server in Finland three days before the shareware come-on was due to be released. The pirate version was a final beta of the full game - complete with eerily empty unfinished levels and bare, unartworked walls. Within hours, it had been funneled to sites all over the globe. IRC was swamped with traders and couriers desperate to download.
"Somebody actually broke into our then poorly secured network and started to download it right before our eyes," Wilson recalls. "We managed to stop the transfer before he got all of it. We traced the call, got his name and address. He was pretty scared, but, of course, it was some kid. We didn't pursue that one. It hurt, but not enough to put some little kid in jail."
When the legitimate Quake hit the stores last year, it was initially in the form of an encrypted CD, which let you play a shareware version for free but would only unlock the rest on receipt of a password, available for purchase by phone. The encryption scheme, an industry standard called TestDrive, was eventually cracked by a lone European pirate called Agony. And id's crown jewel was now available, courtesy a 29K program. "In order to unlock the full version, you are supposed to call 1-800-IDGAMES," Agony gloated in a posting. "Hahahahahah."
"We knew it was going to be hacked," says Wilson. "We of all people knew. But we thought it was safe enough, certainly safer than Doom II." And, truth to tell, it didn't matter too much. The gap between the game's release and the warez version becoming widespread was enough for id to sell the copies they expected. "Copy-protection schemes are just speed bumps," laments Wilson.
Nobody really knows how much actual damage cracking does to the software companies. But as the industry rolls apprehensively toward the uncertain future of an ever-more frictionless electronic marketplace, almost everyone thinks piracy will increase. "The level of activity out there is overwhelming. We know that we have to take action to take control of it. We will continue to bring a critical mass of prosecutions," says Novell UK's Smith. He doesn't sound all that convinced.
Somewhere back on the US East Coast, Mad Hatter has a final swig of ginger ale and settles down to bed with his wife, White Rabbit. She thinks his obsession is a wasted resource, but didn't complain when he installed the latest version of Quicken on her computer - a cracked copy, of course. "We are all family men, married with children, day jobs, dedicated accounts, and multiple phone lines," Mad Hatter says. "Our kids have been looking over our shoulders for years. They will be the next couriers, the next warez gods."UPDATE, Monday, 1:14 p.m.: Woman charged with illegal wiretapping by Springfield police for audio recording of arrest, released on personal recognizance
SPRINGFIELD— A Chicopee woman apparently got a little too loud and belligerent while drinking on Chestnut Street Sunday morning, and refused to cooperate with police when they asked her to quiet down. When she was about to be arrested, police say the woman activated the voice recording feature on her smart phone, hid it in her purse and surreptitiously recorded the entire arrest. Now she faces the unusual charge of unlawful wiretapping.
Springfield Police Capt. Harry Kastrinakis said 24-year-old Karen Dziewit of Chicopee was drinking in front of 140 Chestnut Street shortly before 2 a.m. Sunday when police were called to assist a security officer at that address. Police said Dziewit was screaming and yelling and disturbing the tenants of the buildings, and she refused to stop her tirade when police asked her to.
She was arrested. But, before she was taken into custody, she apparently started the voice recorder in her smart phone and put it in her purse.
She was taken to police headquarters for booking and as officers inventoried the contents of her purse, they found the phone actively recording the entire process.
Dziewit was charged with unlawful wiretapping, disorderly conduct and an open container violation. She will be arraigned in Springfield District Court on Monday.Home burnt to the ground by flaming snake after woman douses snake with gas and sets on fire
// March 31st, 2013 // News
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While cleaning around the outside of her house, a Texas woman was frightened by a snake that slithered across the yard. Thinking on her feet (or not), she doused the snake with gasoline and instructed her son to grab a match and set the snake on fire. The flaming snake fled into a pile of brush located next to her home, setting the brush on fire which quickly spread to her home.
The woman called Texarkana 911 services:
“We were trying to kill a snake with fire. It done caught the house on fire!”
The woman’s house was completely destroyed by the fire. A nearby neighbors house also suffered significant damage.
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16-Year-Old Girl Bleeds To Death After Alleged Gang-Rape In PunjabStory highlights Sgt. 1st Class Corey Hood, 32, of Cincinnati died Sunday after being injured Saturday
He collided in midair with a Navy skydiver during a maneuver, CNN affiliate WLS reported
(CNN) A member of the Army Golden Knights parachute team died Sunday after being injured during a performance at the Chicago Air and Water Show, authorities said.
Sgt. 1st Class Corey Hood
Sgt. 1st Class Corey Hood, 32, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was hurt Saturday when he collided in midair with a member of the Navy Leap Frogs team during a group maneuver, CNN affiliate WLS reported.
After Hood's emergency chute opened he struck a building on North Lake Shore Drive and fell to the ground, a spectator told WLS.
Hood, who had survived five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, died Sunday afternoon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
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Read MoreThe President’s revised Executive order, designed to protect our nation from foreign terrorists, continues to face attacks in numerous federal courts. Today we took direct action in federal appeals court.
The Executive order temporarily pauses entry into the United States of refugees and nationals from six unstable and/or terrorism-infested countries: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The clear purpose of the Executive order is to allow time for needed improvements to the immigration and refugee screening processes from these countries – to ensure terrorists are kept out.
ISIS and other terrorist groups have been publicly calling for jihadists to infiltrate and attack America through our porous immigration and refugee programs. This Executive order was intended to prevent these kinds of attacks. But now several federal district judges have labeled this Executive order to keep America safe a “Muslim ban” and ruled that it violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
This just simply isn’t true. This Executive order is a clearly constitutional exercise of the President’s authority to protect America under the law.
Last month, the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ) filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Virginia, to defend the constitutionality of the revised Executive order, the enforcement of which was preliminary enjoined by a federal trial judge in Maryland.
Today, the ACLJ filed another friend-of-the-court brief in defense of the Executive order. This brief was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, California. The Ninth Circuit is considering the government’s appeal from an injunction a federal trial judge in Hawaii entered to halt the enforcement of the Executive order on a nationwide basis.
As we did in the Fourth Circuit, we argue to the Ninth Circuit that President Trump has broad power to exclude foreign nationals from entering our country on the basis of national security reasons. When the Supreme Court has considered constitutional challenges to immigration-related actions of this sort, it has declined to subject those actions to the same level of scrutiny applied to non-immigration-related actions. The revised Executive order is a valid exercise of President Trump’s authority that courts should not disturb.
Further, the revised Executive order satisfies traditional Establishment Clause scrutiny since it has a secular purpose—defense of national security—and was not motivated by anti-religious considerations. We clearly articulated why the Executive order does not violate the Constitution but in fact lawfully exercises the President’s constitutional and legal authority to defend America from the very real threat of terror.
The ACLJ’s brief was joined by over 205,000 members of the ACLJ’s Committee to Defend Our National Security from Terror.
The ACLJ will continue to keep you posted on this case and our other efforts to defend our national security.Both men are yet to feature in pre-season due to injury and while neither is serious, head coach Pulis is unsure whether either will be ready for the season opener with Bournemouth on August 12.
Defender McAuley is still trying to shake off a thigh problem sustained while on international duty with Northern Ireland.
Midfielder Morrison is, meanwhile, suffering with a knee injury. The 31-year-old’s preparations were further hampered when he missed the Premier League Asia Trophy following the death of a close friend.
“Moz has missed out as well as McAuley,” said Pulis. “They are the two we’ve got problems and issues with.
“By the time the season starts they’ll be closer. Whether they’ll be able to start we’re not sure. We’re hoping by the time the season starts they will be around about fit.”
Morrison had been named in the squad for Wednesday’s friendly at Walsall but did not feature in the game.
Striker Jay Rodriguez and defender Ahmed Hegazi remain the club’s only signings to this point of the summer and Pulis has made no secret of his need to add numbers to what is now a worryingly threadbare squad. Yet the boss has been encouraged by the impact of both new boys.
Rodriguez, who joined from Southampton in a deal which could eventually be worth a club record £15million, scored his second goal in three pre-season appearances when he bagged the only goal in Wednesday’s 1-0 win at Burton.
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Hegazi, meanwhile, was named man-of-the-match at the Pirelli Stadium after an assured performance at the back.
The Egyptian international was something of a surprise signing when he moved to The Hawthorns from Al-Ahly earlier this month, initially on a one-year-loan deal. But Pulis has been impressed.
“Hegazi has been a real bonus for us. He looks a good player,” he said.
“They were very good at Burton, the two of them. Jay never stopped running.
“His energy and the fact he’ll score, he’s always scored right through his career, gives us that extra bit.”
“Hal (Robson-Kanu) played and scored at Walsall so there’s good competition there. But we need more all over the place.”Got five Benjamin Franklins stored under the mattress? You're doing pretty good then.
Nearly half of Americans don't have more than $500 saved up, according to a recent study by CreditDonkey.com, a credit card comparison company. Of the roughly 1,100 Americans polled, 41 percent reported having less than half a grand of readily-accessible savings at hand.
With the country struggling to recover income lost during the recession, the study isn’t the first to make clear the desperate state of so many Americans' finances. Back in March, it was estimated that less than a third of American workers had savings of $1,000 or less, according to a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
That lack of savings means most Americans have little in the way of a backup plan when things get tough. Indeed, over two thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a survey by the American Payroll Association found last month.CARTERET -- Mayor Daniel Reiman attended a golf fundraiser last week hosted by a non-profit aimed at supporting "unfairly" charged police officers, which was formed a week after his brother, a Carteret cop, was arrested on charges of assaulting a teen.
The Blue Shield Benevolent Fund Inc. hosted the golf outing on Oct. 16, attracting nearly two dozen donors, the majority of which have ties to Carteret or contracts with the borough, according to the list of sponsors obtained by NJ Advance Media.
The certificate of incorporation for the advertised 501(c)3 non-profit says it aims to educate the public on the risks officers take in the field while also providing "financial assistance and other support to law enforcement officers within the State who are unfairly charged either civilly, criminally or administratively, for actions taken in the line of duty."
Ronald Gardner Jr., who is the longtime treasurer for Daniel Reiman's charity trust and is on the Carteret payroll, created the non-profit on June 16 with Mark Razzoli and Judith Valdes, according to state records.
The mayor's youngest brother, Joseph Reiman, was charged with assault and three counts of official misconduct on June 9 in the violent arrest of a teen first reported by NJ Advance Media. The indicted officer has since been suspended with pay and the state and local PBA are expected to cover his legal fees, according to people with knowledge of his defense.
Two sources with knowledge of the outing said they believed some of the money raised was earmarked for the mayor's brother and Daniel Reiman had been actively fundraising for the event.
The charity's chairman, Razzoli, said though, he and others involved in the non-profit haven't decided where the raised money would go.
Razzoli, a recently retired Jersey City officer, said he created the non-profit to improve community relations and he planned to hold events like "Coffee with a Cop" to educate the public on the risks officers take.
Reiman, who was not listed as a sponsor, was seen at the golf outing with his other brother, Charles, who is also a Carteret officer, NJ Advance Media confirmed. Calls to the mayor, who has previously said that he does not get involved with his brother's matters, were not returned.
Razzoli refused to say whether or not Reiman was involved with the non-profit.
A brochure for the golf outing obtained by NJ Advance Media lists a $200-per golfer fee for a round and a price of between $200 and $5,000 for a sponsorship.
Gardner, who incorporated the non-profit, also serves as treasurer for the borough's Municipal Port Authority where he collects an annual salary of $2,000, state records show. The Carteret native works for Hodulik & Morrison, P.A., an accounting firm that has provided auditing services for the borough.
In 2011, Gardner incorporated a political non-profit, H. Truman Social Club Inc., with Reiman, state Sen. Joseph Vitale and two other Carteret men, Eric Chubenko and Henry D'Orsi, on the board of trustees, state records show. No additional records on the club could be found. Gardner has incorporated only one other non-profit, for condo complex association in South Jersey, state records show.
Gardner did not respond to requests for comment.
The new non-profit's secretary, Valdes, is the ex-girlfriend of the 40-year-old mayor, sources say, and property records show the two bought a house together in Carteret in March.
In addition to his post as mayor, Reiman serves as the treasurer for the county's Democratic organization where he is an influential politician and a fierce fundraiser, according to numerous sources. Razzoli is the chairman of the party's local committee in Old Bridge and is running as a first-time candidate for a township council seat.
The Carteret Democratic Organization, which sources say is controlled by Reiman, donated $500 to Razzoli's campaign on June 12, according to NJ Elec records. The local political party organization gave money to one other candidate in Old Bridge on the same day.
The outing attracted donations from politicians and law enforcement associations, but the majority of sponsors were law and engineering firms and others that have contracts with Carteret, including T&M Associates. The Middletown-based engineering consultant has had a number of contracts in the borough and donated more than $55,000 to borough election war chests over the last decade, state records show.
Calls were made to the 22 sponsors and the three who responded said they did not know much about the non-profit beyond what was described in the outing's brochure.
Carteret Councilman A.J. Johal, who was appointed to the council by the local Democratic party in March of 2016, was listed as a sponsor, as well as his small chain of Central Jersey gas stations, Racestar Inc. Johal declined to comment on the outing.
New Jersey Turnpike Commissioner Raymond Pocino also received a brochure for the outing and requested a $500 donation from the union fund he founded, according to a representative who answered the phone at the Laborers Eastern Region Organizing Fund.
State Senator Raymond Lesniak was listed as a sponsor. Lesniak, though, said he did not sponsor the event. He said he paid $200 to play a round of golf on an invitation from Razzoli but did not attend.
Razzoli said he was unsure how much money the event raised.
Craig McCarthy may be reached at 732-372-2078 or at CMcCarthy@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @createcraig and on Facebook here. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tipsSeriously brilliant news today, Philadelphia.
This summer, Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River Waterfront will be home to not one, but two awesome alfresco destinations.
On Memorial Day weekend, Spruce Street Harbor Park will re-open, and the brand-new first-for-Philadelphia RiverRink Summerfest will debut with the city’s only outdoor roller skating rink — yes, roller skating at Penn’s Landing!
Without a doubt, the installation of Spruce Street Harbor Park last summer and RiverRink Winterfest this winter were both resounding successes.
And we truly couldn’t be more thrilled about the return and expansion of the waterfront’s summertime placemaking installations.
Blue Cross RiverRink Summerfest
For the first time this year, the area that housed winter’s Blue Cross RiverRink Winterfest will transform into a warm-weather edition with an outdoor roller rink, a boathouse-styled Lodge, a play area for kids, tons of food and drink options and summer events throughout the season.
Opening Memorial Day weekend on Friday, May 22, Blue Cross RiverRink Summerfest will be free and open to the public every day all the way through the end of September.
The roller rink will be set against a summertime landscape — think summer camp on the Delaware River — and skating will be a ticketed activity (as ice skating was in the winter) with skating tickets that will be available for purchase in advance online or on-site. As during the winter, all Independence Blue Cross cardholders will receive free skating admission.
Plus, the new roller-skating rink will feature all brand-new skates for rental, a hockey-grade flooring system and a landscaped island in the center of the rink to provide shade and seating.
Surrounding the rink, the Summerfest space will become a family-friendly hangout with natural landscaping outside, a wraparound porch and a boathouse-themed Lodge serving summertime-appropriate food and drink from the Garces Group and other Philadelphia restaurants.
It’s definitely worth noting that Summerfest and Philadelphia’s first outdoor roller rink wouldn’t be opening without the support of Independence Blue Cross, the organization also responsible for Philadelphia’s new bike share program, Indego.
Spruce Street Harbor Park presented by Univest/Valley Green Bank
Spruce Street Harbor Park on the Delaware River Waterfront was an absolutely amazing addition to Philadelphia’s alfresco summer scene in 2014, and we are psyched to see the riverfront park return in 2015.
Developed by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, the temporary summertime village considerably upgraded the good times on Penn’s Landing with a floating restaurant, weekend beer garden, hammocks, shuffleboard, colorful LED lights and so much more. Throughout the summer, Spruce Street Harbor Park drew half a million visitors and was lauded as one of the best places to visit in Philadelphia.
This summer, Spruce Street Harbor Park returns Memorial Day weekend on Friday, May 22 with an expanded schedule — it’s opening a full month earlier this year! — the return of the boardwalk, more hammocks, more seating, more tables, tons of colorful LED lights and new planted greenery that repurposes materials from Sol LeWitt’s installation Lines in Four Directions in Flowers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
On the water, the floating barges dubbed The Oasis return for 2015, too, with expanded restaurant offerings from Garces Group, in addition to more food options and locations thanks to new team-ups with additional Philadelphia chefs (those details are still to come).
The park will remain free and open to the public with hours every day this summer thanks to the generosity of Univest Corporation and Valley Green Bank, a division of Univest Bank and Trust Co. Pretty cool.
The two waterfront parks are both easily accessed via bike, foot and public transit. This summer, there will be increased signage in the area and more bike parking. Plus, Philadelphia’s new bike share program, Indego, has plans to install a station near Spruce Street Harbor Park at Foglietta Plaza.
Remember, these two daily attractions only add to the annual happenings of the full Delaware River Waterfront summer season, which includes the Tall Ships Philadelphia Camden (June 25-28), Art Star Craft Bazaar (May 9-10), the PECO Multicultural Series (launching June 6) and so much more.
Spring may have just arrived, but now we can’t wait for the start of summer.
Philadelphia, get ready to roll.
Blue Cross RiverRink Summerfest When: Open daily, Friday, May 22-September Where: Penn’s Landing, 101 S. Columbus Boulevard Cost: Free admission; skating pricing to come More info: www.delawareriverwaterfront.comRio 2016: Kim Brennan wins Australia's sixth gold medal of Olympics in women's single sculls
Updated
Kim Brennan has won Australia's sixth gold medal at the Rio Olympics, taking the title in the women's single sculls in rowing at Lagoa on day eight.
Brennan - who collected bronze in the same event in London as well as silver in the women's double sculls - led nearly from start to finish and produced a convincing victory in a time of 7 minutes and 21.54 seconds.
It is the first time Australia has won gold in the women's single sculls and the victory adds to the three wins in the men's event achieved by Bobby Pearce (1928, 1932) and Merv Wood (1948).
Brennan's husband Scott also won gold for Australia with David Crawshay in the men's double sculls at the Beijing Olympics.
American sculler Genevra Stone finished second to Brennan in Rio in 7:22.92 and China's Duan Jingli took the bronze medal in 7:24.13.
Brennan, a two-time world champion, said it was a proud feeling to win Australia's first gold in the women's single sculls in light of the rich history it enjoyed in the sport.
"I think it's quite special the tradition we do have in rowing," she said. "It's nice to broaden that to a different boat class."
Brennan hit the front early in the first leg, and established a 2.69 second lead over Jingli after 500 metres.
She increased the lead to 3.72 seconds at the halfway mark as Stone began to come through to challenge for second.
Brennan still led by three seconds at the final mark, and she held her form perfectly to take the title.
The win provides Australia with its only gold medal at the rowing regatta on the final day of competition.
Australia also won silver in the men's quad sculls and fours.
Brennan to consider rowing future
Brennan, 31, is unsure about her immediate future in rowing.
She is a lawyer by profession and an administrative role in the newly established women's AFL competition has been mooted.
Brennan wanted Australia to remain strong in the single sculls should she decide to retire.
"I hope that if I do step away I think there are a lot of young girls coming through who can hopefully fill my shoes," she said.
Brennan was a late starter to rowing, having forged a successful junior track and field career.
She won silver in the 400 metres hurdles at the 2001 world youth championships in Debrecen but was forced to quit track and field because of injury a few years later.
Brennan, whose father Max Crow played almost 200 senior matches in the then-VFL during the 1970s and 80s, switched to rowing and in 2006 was a member of the Australian crew who claimed bronze in the women's eight at the world championships in Eton.
She made her Olympic debut in Beijing when she was 22, four years before her twin medal success in London, and had been the form single sculler in the build-up to the Rio Olympics courtesy of winning the 2013 (Chungju) and 2015 (Aiguebelette) world championships.
Topics: sport, olympics-summer, rowing, brazil, australia
First postedI'm pleased to announce the availability of criterion, a new library for measuring the performance of Haskell code.
Compared to most other benchmarking frameworks (for any programming language, not just Haskell), criterion focuses on being easy to use, informative, and robust.
Here's a canonical benchmark-worthy function, which has the desirable properties of being both small and slow:
import Criterion.Main (defaultMain)
fib :: Int -> Int
fib 0 = 0
fib 1 = 1
fib n = fib (n -1 ) + fib (n -2 )
To compile a program that will benchmark our fib function, we write a trivial main entry point:
main = defaultMain [
bench "fib 10" $
-> fib ( 10 +n-n)
, bench "fib 30" $
-> fib ( 30 +n-n)
, bench "fib 35" $
-> fib ( 35 +n-n)
]
Criterion itself is trivially easy to install.
$ cabal install criterion
Once it's installed, we build the application we intend to benchmark.
$ ghc -O --make Fibber
If we run the Fibber program with the --help option, it prints a large amount of help output. The most interesting options early on are -t, which displays raw timing information, and -k, which turns the timing information into a chart of the probability distributions of timings. So for immediate gratification, we can run Fibber like this:
$./Fibber -t win -k win
The win argument to each option means "display these charts in a window". For this article, I used the png argument instead, to get nicely sized images that I could simply drop into WordPress.
$./Fibber -t png:450x175 -k png:450x175
Here's an example of raw timing information:
Notice that the times on the Y axis are labelled with their units, in this case microseconds. On the X axis is the run count.
Timing information is somewhat nice to have, but much more useful is an indication of which times occurred most frequently. The traditional way to display such information is with a histogram. Histograms are pretty awful, since a histogram with an incorrect bin size is either misleading or useless, and bin sizes have to be chosen by hand. Much more useful is a kernel density estimate:
This is a chart of the estimated probability densities of timings. We observe a big hump at about 5.23µs, with a few small outliers further out. This suggests that it usually takes about 5.23µs to evaluate fib 10.
Meanwhile, in our console window, our Fibber program has printed a lot more information. Here's how it starts:
estimating clock resolution... mean is 9.956511 us (80001 iterations) found 3711 outliers among 79999 samples (4.6%) 3505 (4.4%) high severe
The first thing that Fibber does is measure how long it takes for the system clock to tick. It will then run our benchmarked code enough times that the resolution of the clock will not introduce a significant error.
Indeed, our first benchmark shows why this is important: if fib 10 takes 5.23µs to evaluate, but the clock ticks once every 9.96µs, we clearly can't just evaluate fib 10 once, and subtract the start from the end time. Sometimes it will appear to evaluate instantaneously, since the clock won't have ticked, and sometimes it will appear to have taken about 10µs, since the clock will have ticked exactly once. Both answers would be worse than useless.
Instead, we evaluate fib 10 many thousands of times in order to get the measurement error introduced by the resolution of the clock down to a few parts in ten thousand.
We also use something called the boxplot technique to develop a quick sense of the quality of our data. In this case, a few percent of our numbers are significantly off from the mean of the sample.
Once we've characterised the system clock's period, we figure out how expensive it is to actually use the clock.
estimating cost of a clock call... mean is 923.3224 ns (58 iterations) found 4 outliers among 58 samples (6.9%) 1 (1.7%) high mild 3 (5.2%) high severe
We adjust our timing measurements to take the cost of clock calls into account, even though in practice this makes almost no difference to the numbers we report. (If you're measuring an event that occurs on a millisecond-to-second time scale, you wouldn't expect a one-microsecond difference to perturb things much!)
The last part is the most interesting. We automatically figure out how many times we need to evaluate fib 10 :
benchmarking fib 10 collecting 100 samples, 1911 iterations each, in estimated 995.8188 ms
In this case, we evaluate fib 10 1911 times and measure the cost of this, then repeat this measurement 100 times. We print an estimate in advance for how long the measurements will take, so that if you're benchmarking something expensive, you can go for coffee or whatever. (If you can fetch coffee in 995.8 milliseconds, more power to you!)
Why do we measure so many times? Because we're going to do some statistical analysis of our measurements to see whether they are trustworthy.
bootstrapping with 100000 resamples
The bootstrap step takes a second or two, and this is where the interesting stuff takes place. The performance of real-world applications doesn't follow some kind of tidy statistical pattern such as the normal distribution, especially when people are measuring in realistic, noisy environments.
If you run a time-consuming benchmark on your laptop, you're likely to want to switch to your web browser, watch a video on youtube, check your mail, and so on. Your CPU might slow down because it's overheating, or your laptop's ACPI subsystem might change the CPU frequency to conserve power.
In other words, there are lots of things that might perturb our benchmarking results, some of which we can't see or control, but then again they might not occur or might not be important, and our numbers could be fine. How can we tell?
We use a statistical technique known as the bootstrap, with which we take some sample data and perform some number crunching to tell us interesting things. Specifically, we can use the results of the bootstrap to tell us whether the outliers in our measurements (timings that are far from the mean) are perturbing our numbers in a significant way.
The first thing that the bootstrap tells us is the mean and standard deviation of our measurements, along with the 95% confidence intervals for those values.
mean: 5.232800 us, lb 5.222862 us, ub 5.262482 us, ci 0.950 std dev: 79.86726 ns, lb 31.06332 ns, ub 173.0716 ns, ci 0.950
It then reports on the outliers in the measurements, and most importantly, tells us whether they are important.
found 7 outliers among 100 samples (7.0%) 3 (3.0%) high mild 4 (4.0%) high severe variance introduced by outliers: 0.993% variance is unaffected by outliers
I ran the above example on my laptop when it was idle, so the timing measurements are fine. Boring!
What about a more interesting example? I measured the performance of fib 35 :
collecting 100 samples, 1 iterations each, in estimated 88.14368 s
While this executed, I ran a stupid but computationally expensive task in another window:
while true; do for ((i=0;i<20;i++)); do md5sum cufp.odp >/dev/null & done for ((i=0;i<20;i++)); do wait done done
This shell script grinds over a largish file repeatedly, but does so using 20 processes at a time. It reliably drives the load average on my laptop up to 8. What did it do to my measurements?
As the timing numbers suggest, I ran my CPU-chomping script twice while taking measurements. This had a noticeable effect not just on the timings, but on their probability distributions too:
Those are two fairly large humps, which certainly seem like they should give cause for concern. What does Fibber report on the console?
mean: 1.566470 s, lb 1.333717 s, ub 1.855111 s, ci 0.950 std dev: 1.324608 s, lb 1.114684 s, ub 1.510580 s, ci 0.950 found 23 outliers among 100 samples (23.0%) 22 (22.0%) high severe variance introduced by outliers |
calculators, textbooks have a price that’s artificially inflated based on its use case.
It wasn’t always that way—at some point, the way textbooks were produced fell out of whack with the expectations of students. Priceonomics suggests that the major upward shift in prices for college textbooks occurred sometime in the 1970s, and since then hasn’t stopped.
What happened in the ’70s? Let’s ask someone from the ’70s: In a 1975 piece for the The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, journalist Phillip Whitten, who spent time running his own publishing firms, said that shifts in the uptake in textbooks, driven by a desire to standardize curriculum as well as to make things easier for students, led to a significant increase in the use of textbooks during this period.
But textbook companies of the era didn’t have it easy. In his piece, Whitten crunched the numbers of a hypothetical textbook, one sold for $12.50 but generally offered to college stores at a wholesale price of $10. (In today’s dollars, the book would have sold for $44.73 before markup by the bookstore—not a bad price, actually.)
In Whitten’s example, the book sold 50,000 copies, netting half a million dollars in sales, but was offset by a variety of costs, including royalties, marketing, and manufacturing. Still though, the book made $79,000 in pre-tax profit, a solid 15.8 percent margin. But he noted that the game for publishers was generally not that easy, due to the existence of both fixed and variable costs.
“If Sociology in Modern World had sold 20,000 copies, we would have lost $75,000; had it sold 10,000 copies—and there are many texts that do not do even that well—our loss would have been greater than $126,000,” Whitten wrote.
(How does that compare to the modern day? Priceonomics writer Zachary Crockett, who spent time working for a textbook publisher, breaks down the math similarly to Whitten, though these days, publishers tend to make $40 in pure profit on a $180 book—a 22 percent margin.)
(Photo: Connie Ma/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Whitten closed out his essay noting that the publishing space had been getting increasingly competitive, and implied that only a few large publishers will survive.
Educational publishing, for the remainder of the 1970s, will not resemble at all the halcyon days of the late 1960s. In a time of economic retrenchment and static enrollments, only those publishers who can develop techniques to reduce their financial risk will survive; and only those publishers who can learn to produce quality books consistently, with the maximum innovative pedagogical features permitted by existing constraints, will prosper. It is a worthy challenge.
Instead, what happened was something different: College publishers figured out that, to improve their margins, all they had to do were two things: raise prices and release new editions of the same text, forcing students to buy new textbooks even if, in many cases, they didn’t need them.
Another factor? Improved printing technology, which led to more visuals.
In the 1960s, for example, it was somewhat uncommon for a textbook to have much in the way of pictures. Some books, like Knopf’s History of the Modern World, had just a handful of pictures in their nearly 1,000 pages.
But by the 1980s, this changed, a change that at first was seen as generally positive for students, according to a 1986 study done by Georgia State University researchers Brenda D. Smith and Joan M. Elifson. The duo noted the picture-free material tended to be comprehended just as well as material with pictures, but students preferred the more vibrant option.
“Student preference proved to be overwhelmingly in favor of pictures,” the researchers wrote. “Of the 145 students, 119 chose the passage with pictures, while only 26 chose the passage without pictures.”
Soon enough, if you were a textbook publisher, you couldn’t get away with just two colors anymore, and the number of pictures in textbooks increased dramatically between the 1960s and 1980s, and, with that, of course, also costs.
(Photo: wohnai/CC BY 2.0)
And, perhaps surprisingly, the forces driving prices up have won out against some powerful forces driving them down, like the increase in paperback books and the rise of the used book trade.
In fact, it was 1933 when Princeton University, in the midst of the Great Depression, launched its Student Loan Library as part of an effort to help students struggling to make ends meet.
The library, made up of used books from students who had read them in prior semesters, represents one of the earliest examples of the used book trade in colleges, one that picked up a few years later, when New York University students launched a used bookstore—the result of an outcry after four students were arrested for “peddling without a license.”
As for paperback books, college professors were more supportive of them for literature than their K-12 peers.
“Many teachers and college administrators report that paperbacks have had a noticeable effect upon the reading habits of students,” New York Times scribe Edward A. Walsh wrote in 1960. “The world of books suddenly appears more inviting. Students crowd bookstores to buy required volumes, stay to browse among the tastefully designed offerings and come away with several additional purchases whose colorful appeal they could not resist.”
(Fun fact: Paperback books used to receive a lot of the same criticism that e-books currently do.)
Both of these factors helped, but only so much—as anyone enrolled in a university can tell you.
Last year, two separate incidents occurred that raised the ire of textbook critics. In some ways, they kind of dovetail into one another.
The good professor, punished: Last October, Alain Bourget, an associate math professor at the California State University at Fullerton, received a formal reprimand after choosing not to give his students the $180 textbook recommended to him by the school, instead offering a cheaper $80 option, supplemented by online offerings. The school said this broke the rules, because he veered from the book every other introductory linear algebra course was using at the school. He fought the reprimand, but failed. (His hometown paper treated him like a hero.)
The economist who’s made bank from a single book: Harvard University Economist Gregory Mankiw was raked over the coals by The Oregonian last year for the high cost of his tome Principles of Economics, an introductory book that sells on Amazon for $333.35 and can be rented on Chegg for $49.99. The absurdity of Mankiw’s book, which exemplifies many of the economic disparities covered in the book, was further highlighted by writer Richard Read’s story. When asked if he’d ever write an open-source textbook, Mankiw had this to say: “Let me fix that for you: Would you keep doing your job if you stopped being paid? Why or why not?” A fair point—until you realize that Mankiw has, by some estimates, made $42 million in royalties from this book alone.
What’s fascinating about the second example is that the professor that brought the book to Reed’s attention, Mike Paruszkiewicz, notes that he assigns the book reluctantly, though he admits that he wouldn’t if it wasn’t easy to rent it out or acquire prior versions for cheap.
But it’s worth asking—if professors know these textbooks are absurdly expensive, why assign them? Well, the answer involves a couple of factors, basically: Many professors simply don’t know the prices of the textbooks, and, far less frequently, sometimes the professors themselves wrote the book. (The American Association of University Professors, while not opposing it entirely, discourages this practice.)
The former case is generally more common than the latter—with the Daily Texan noting earlier this year a case of a German book increasing in price from $90 to $200, catching both the professor and students off-guard. Though this, too, highlights a another factor: a limited number of options, as five major publishers control 85 percent of the market.
When I was in college, I remember feeling like a genius because I spent a lot of time looking around Amazon and eBay, finding copies of the textbooks I needed, sometimes for ten cents on the dollar. It felt good to get one over on the man as I ate my Life cereal with rice milk.
My eBay victories came during the brief window after the launch of Napster, which introduced a lot of students to the power of the ethernet pipes in their dorms, but before the launch of the last big innovation in textbooks—the rental marketplace Chegg.
(Sure, electronic textbooks exist and they look snazzy, but they’re a bad deal.)
But will textbooks ever move to the Napster model? Probably. In fact, it’s already happening.
OpenStax, a nonprofit project of Rice University, has been working to both release open-source textbooks and to tailor-make books for professors that can be sold at college stores for much lower costs.
Community colleges, whose students feel the pain of textbook costs more acutely than students at larger schools, have been quick to jump on the open education resource model, which is spreading more and more.
“The educational materials and publishing industry in five to 10 years will be completely remade,” OpenStax’s Richard Baraniuk told University Business in 2014, ”just as the music industry, the newspaper industry and the computer software industry were completely remade by the internet.”
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.SARASOTA, Fla. -- Standing in the bullpen in Aberdeen, Maryland, that day, the kid on the mound had no idea that he was about to stumble onto a pitch that would draw comparisons to the great Mariano Rivera. All Zach Britton was doing was trying to figure out how to throw your basic, all-American cutter.
It was 2007. He was 19 years old. His ERA was climbing. And the future closer for the Baltimore Orioles wasn't even sure he wanted to pitch for a living.
But then it happened.
He threw a pitch that was supposed to zig left, like cutters are supposed to zig. Instead, it didn't merely zag right. It plummeted toward earth as if he'd just dropped a boulder off a bridge. It was a life-changing moment.
But how was the guy who threw it supposed to know that? All it felt like was yet one more pitch he couldn't master.
"He said, 'The ball's supposed to go the other way,'" Britton's pitching coach at Class A Aberdeen, Calvin Maduro, recalls. "He was like, 'The ball's sinking -- not cutting.' I said, 'Man, keep that.'"
Keep what? It's one thing to throw one pitch that does something totally unexpected. But could Britton defy the laws of physics and make it move that way twice?
"We did it for maybe 10 minutes," Maduro says. "It just kept happening."
It just kept happening, all right. For a decade. Ten years later, Zach Britton is still holding the most unique pitch in baseball all wrong -- and riding it to places no relief pitcher has ever gone.
Shades of Mariano
Orioles closer Zach Britton posted a 0.54 ERA in 2016 by throwing a single devastating pitch 92 percent of the time. Sound familiar? Amazingly, Britton stumbled upon the unhittable sinker that has made him a star. Elsa/Getty Images
Which is more amazing: that America's foremost ground ball machine is coming off a season in which he had a 0.54 ERA, the lowest by any relief pitcher in history with 50 or more innings, or that he did so by throwing just that one pitch, the man-eating sinker, 92 percent of the time?
Ask his manager if it's possible that his closer could be even better this season, and Buck Showalter snaps: "No. Not even possible." He thinks he just witnessed "the best year by a relief pitcher ever."
But ask the manager if he thinks Britton needs to vary his patterns so he doesn't have to rely on the same pitch 92 percent of the time, and Showalter cocks his head to give That Look.
"Right now, he can do whatever he did last year," Showalter says. "And I'm OK with that."
Doesn't logic say that what Zach Britton does shouldn't be possible? How can any pitcher have a pitch so unhittable that he can haul it out pretty much every time he throws a baseball and have a 0.54 ERA to show for it -- in the AL East?
"I don't remember anything like that," Britton's bullpen amigo, Darren O'Day, says, "except for No. 42 in pinstripes."
No. 42 in pinstripes, of course, was a fellow named Mariano. He got slightly famous for firing cutter after cutter after cutter. For 19 seasons. That's going to lead him to Cooperstown someday. So it isn't that there's no precedent for a guy spinning the same darned pitch all night and still shaking hands a lot.
But when Britton hears his name in the same sentence as the Great Mariano, his eyes spin, almost in embarrassment.
"Wow," he says. "That's pretty tough company to keep, right?"
"Just do this for another 18 years," someone says.
"You know, I try not to think of it that way," Britton replies. "I think he's a good reference point, though."
"We should make him go back a couple of steps and maybe grip the ball a little bit different, so we can have a chance."
Rivera is a better reference point than you'd think. Over the past eight seasons, ESPN Stats & Info could find only two pitchers who threw any pitch, in any full season, as much as 92 percent of the time. One was Britton in 2016. The other was Rivera in 2009, when 92.9 percent of the pitches he threw were cutters. Somehow, it worked out OK for both of them.
But there was a long time, Britton admits, when even he didn't think it was a good idea to throw his best pitch that often. Then his former pitching coaches, Dave Wallace and Dom Chiti, convinced him otherwise.
"I felt like I couldn't throw that pitch 90 percent of the time," Britton says. "I thought I needed to mix in something else. Otherwise, I was going to get too predictable. And their whole philosophy behind that was: Does it really matter if they know what's coming if you execute the pitch you want to?"
Britton went from featuring the sinker about 67 percent of the time in 2013 to more than 90 percent in each of the past three seasons. The results were mind-blowing. He allowed just 32 balls in the air all of the past season. Even the hitters don't understand how that can happen.
"It's kind of a different at-bat because you know exactly what you're going to get," says Tampa Bay's Steven Souza, who is 1-for-6 against Britton, with three strikeouts and (what else?) a ground ball single. "And still he finds a way to make you look kind of foolish sometimes. It's something I can't explain, really.
"We should make him go back a couple of steps and maybe grip the ball a little bit different, so we can have a chance."
Ground control
Who has the better ground game: Zach Britton or Ezekiel Elliott? Britton's 80.2 percent ground ball rate last year wasn't just great. It was historic. Data on ground ball percentage goes back only about three decades, but what other pitchers in that time induced that high a percentage of ground balls over that many innings? None.
Shaun Marcum once got 13 fly ball outs in relief in one game (in 2013). Britton just allowed 13 fly balls all season. Incredibly, that comes to one every other week. You can tell it's a rarity if even the guy on the mound admits that he gets disoriented when somebody manages to hit one in the air.
"There was a stretch last year," he says, chuckling, "where I hadn't given one up in a while, and I remember a guy flew out, I think, to [Mark] Trumbo, and I was kind of searching in the air for it. Matt Wieters came up to me after the game and said, 'What were you doing?' And I was like, 'He swung, and I was looking on the ground. And then I looked up, and Trumbo was catching it in the air.'"
How does he do it?
What's the secret to baseball's most devastating pitch? Even other pitchers can't figure it out.
"Anybody who comes in contact with Zach has asked, 'Hey, how do you throw that? I'd like to try it,'" O'Day says. "But it doesn't work for anybody else."
What's O'Day's best theory for why that is?
"You see how short his arms are?" Britton's setup man jokes. "The guy can't reach the bottom of his pockets. There's something funny going on."
In truth, it's all in the grip and the wrist. Britton wasn't permitted by the proper authorities (i.e. his manager) to demonstrate the grip in public. But he tried to explain it.
"It's pretty similar to a traditional curveball," he says. "You're holding that one seam. When I show people, they say, 'Oh, that's how I hold my curveball.'... But rather than turn it over, I'm just keeping my hand back behind the ball and trying to drive it down through the catcher."
"You see how short his arms are? The guy can't reach the bottom of his pockets. There's something funny going on."
At 96 mph, that pitch is exploding on the hitter much faster than a curveball or cutter would. Then it drops through an invisible trap door. Meanwhile, hitters can never be certain if the next sinker will move the same as the one they just whiffed on. They should know the guy throwing it isn't always sure, either.
"I'm still trying to figure out sometimes, when it goes a certain way, how I can know when it's going to happen," Britton says. "I feel like it's three different pitches in one sometimes."
There is one that "goes straight down" and a second version that "will run away from a right-handed hitter" and a third that sometimes cuts -- just not necessarily on purpose. Britton has figured out the first two. But the third "is one I'm still trying to keep in my back pocket," he says, "and use that one and know what's going to happen."
"I'm sure," he says, with another laugh, "the catchers would like that."
Rinse and repeat?
What does a fellow do for an encore after he just had the greatest season in relief pitching history? Hey, good luck, because no matter what column you looked at on the stat sheet, Britton was putting up numbers last year that don't seem doable on a PlayStation.
Leadoff hitters got three hits off him all season (3-for-24). No. 3 hitters batted.111 (2-for-18). Cleanup men went 5-for-28 (.179) with one extra-base hit. He faced 26 hitters with a runner on third -- and gave up one hit. With men in scoring position, the opposition went 5-for-59 (.085), with zero extra-base hits. How unhittable could one man be?
Since the dawn of the modern save rule, no relief pitcher has had an ERA lower than 1.00 in consecutive full seasons. Only Wade Davis (1.00 in 2014, 0.94 in 2015) came close.
For the record, the best back-to-back seasons of Rivera's career were 2008 and 2009, when his ERA was 1.40 and 1.76, respectively. But the 2016 winner of the Mariano Rivera Award gladly sought him out for advice anyway.
"I had the chance to talk to him at the World Series game when I got the Rivera Award," Britton says. "Kinda just picked his brain a little bit. He just told me: 'Command. No matter what you do, always work on commanding it, because at the end of the day... you've got to be able to command it to sustain success.'"
In a spring in which he has been able to pitch only sparingly because of an oblique issue, Britton has worked mostly to recapture his feel of the pitch that got him this far. After years of honing it, he now feels "it's just kind of part of who I am. So when I pick up a baseball, I find that grip."
Who could have imagined, when Britton stood on that mound in Aberdeen 10 years ago messing with a cutter, that it could have led him to this? Not the guy who taught him this career-altering pitch -- by accident.
"No, no, no, no, no," Calvin Maduro says. "I just knew at that time that that thing was nasty, and it was going to the other way from where it was supposed to be going. But I never thought it would be like that. And I'm sure he never thought it would be like that, either."BATON ROUGE, La. (WGNO) – The Louisiana State Bar Association makes a stand to relax marijuana sentencing laws.
“Down here, they act like you committed murder if you put a weed in your mouth,” say Morris while smoking a spliff in the Marigny.
The state level team of lawyers supports efforts to keep pot smokers out of jail.
“They are endorsing the idea of lessening the sentences for marijuana possession,” says state Senator. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans.
The Louisiana District Attorneys Association and the State Sheriffs’ Association remain advocates for marijuana laws on the books now.
However, Morrell hopes the Bar Association’s support will bolster momentum for his marijuana bill, which never made it out of a Senate Committee last session, “I intend to bring this bill back next year.”
Back in the Marigny, Morris recalls his arrest for possession of marijuana, “Straight to jail. Non-stop. I can tell you that much, it wasn’t right. Got thrown in the same holding next to violent offenders. I don’t think nobody should be going to jail for marijuana.”
Three marijuana retail shops are expected to debut selling legally in Washington State Tuesday July 8th.
“Colorado and everywhere else you go and buy weed with a credit card,” says Morris.
“Why is Louisiana treating second and third offense criminal as felonies?” questions Morrell, who argues prosecution and incarceration money paid for by tax payers could better be used elsewhere.
“Had my bill passed this year turning marijuana into a misdemeanor, it would have saved the state of Louisiana twenty million dollars a year.”
Meantime WGNO crosses paths with well-known New Orleans artist Conan, propped on his the corner of Chartres and Frenchmen Streets smoking out of a pipe, “Yes I am indulging in illegal activities.”
As Conan takes a puff, a mounted NOPD patrol rides past, “I like sharing a buzz with somebody. Hey,” calling to his friend Sonny. “You want to take a hit off this man?”
“Damn right,” says Sonny, a musician, arrested once in Florida for possession. “I got busted. They found a pound stuffed in the bottom of my golf clubs.”
Conan doesn’t flinch when an NOPD patrol car rolls past.
“If a cop were watching, he could throw you in jail,” I say to Conan.
“Well, I’ve already been kicked out of jail.”
“Crime has fallen in-half in Denver,” says Morrell. “Violent crime has plummeted,”
He says Louisiana should wait and allow other states to work out kinks in marijuana laws first, “And these places turn out to be meccas of free money and low crime, we should totally revisit that. But right now it hasn’t been long enough to have enough data to show one way or the other.”Overwatch, the hit new shooter/MOBA released by Blizzard has been taking the internet by storm lately. (That is, until the internet collectively lost its damn mind over Pokemon Go this past week[1].) As of mid-June, they had already accumulated more than 10 million active players, no mean feat considering that it was released less than two months ago.
Since the beginning of its development, one of the major talking points that has been emphasized in press pieces is that Blizzard was trying to design with an eye to diversity. Like the piece on Kotaku proclaiming that Blizzard wanted to “do women better”, which showed Widowmaker displaying a whole lot of ass cleavage:
Meanwhile over on Polygon, there was a piece with the headline: “Blizzard wants its diverse fans to feel ‘equally represented’ by Overwatch’s heroes“. Which, by the way, only featured quotes from a press conference given by Blizzard, and which completely failed to mention any of Blizzard’s previous problems with representation in their games to date. (*cough* Hearthstone *cough* Worldofwarcraft *cough*)
I’ve written about Overwatch before. (In fact, people talking trash about my Overwatch posts are still a reliable source of occasional traffic spikes from Reddit, which is a bit surprising two years later.) And the game’s recent release, along with the fact that it seems diversity is still being used as a talking point to promote the game – as evidenced by this piece published just 3 days in advance of the release, made me think that it would probably be worthwhile taking a second look at Overwatch to see how it’s shaped up.
Overwatch Characters and Gender
The last time I wrote about Overwatch, 6 out of the (then) 14 characters that had been announced were female, however, 1 character – Bastion – was genderless. If you don’t count Bastion, that made for a roster that was 46% female – not too shabby. At the game’s release, it featured 8 female characters out of 21 characters that have a gender – which was only 40%. However, as of yesterday, a new female character was announced – Ana – which brings the ratio up to 9 out of 21 gendered characters, or 42%.
So, you know. It’s not fifty-fifty, which is disappointing from a game that says it wanted to “do women better”. How hard would it have been to make one of the weirdo characters, like Winston or Zenyatta, female? And sure, 42% is still a damn site better than almost every game I’ve ever bothered to review numbers for on this blog. But I tend to think that to “do women better”, you should at the very least reflect their levels of representation in the actual world. And we won’t even talk about how there are ugly or weird looking male characters, but all of the female characters except for one are in their mid-20s and have flawless skin – except for Ana. And even then, the only concession to her age is white hair and maaayyybbbbe a hint of an eye wrinkle.
It’s worth noting that all of that completely ignores the issue of queer and nonbinary gender identities. Since the canon doesn’t say otherwise, it has to be assumed that all 21 of the gendered heroes are cisgender, which is – again – disappointing from a game that seems to be trying to sell itself, at least in part, on the diversity of its character’s designs and backgrounds.
But overall, those turned out to be minor irritants compared to the embarrassing levels of racism (with a sprinkling of ableism) in the hero backstories and alternate character designs. Hooray!
Character Backstories
Lucio
So out of a lineup of 22 characters, you have exactly 1 black person – Lucio. And YES I get that there are other characters who are visible minorities – Symmetra, Pharah, Hanzo, etc. But what about McCree and Soldier 76, who are both from the United States? Or Tracer, who is from the UK? Or Widowmaker, who is from France? Or Mercy, who is from Switzerland? All of these are countries with diverse populations! Black people live in all of these countries! Coding all of the Western first world nations as white is problematic as hell. (And no, Widowmaker does not count as a PoC because she’s blue.)
So with all of that in mind, it is doubly problematic that Lucio – the only black guy – is a black guy from the slums. And sure, he’s from the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. And sure he was “fighting the man”. But the core concept was “black DJ from the slums who stole things”. And when your go-to backstory for the only black guy is “poor thief”, that is super fucking problematic. The stereotype of black people as thieves and criminals is the reason why real actual black people get profiled by police and followed in shops and stores. And the fact that the video games industry is more than 87% white makes all of this even more problematic.
So. You know. What the actual fuck, Blizzard?
Reaper
Similarly, Gabriel Reyes AKA Reaper is the only Latino in the game (you know, despite the fact that it actually would have made more sense to make McCree Latino instead of making him white). And what’s his backstory? Well, according to the Overwatch wiki:
Reaper admits to being a high-functioning psychopath, having a passion for murder and vengeance and is willing to kill even without a solid motivation. —Overwatch Wiki
And this is shitty for pretty much exactly the same reasons that making Lucio a black thief from the slums is shitty. When news coverage of Latin@s is 1% of total coverage, despite the fact that they make up 13% of the US population? And 66% of that coverage is about Latinos as criminals? Making THE ONLY LATINO in your game an actual fucking psychopathic murderer is shitty and racist.
Symmetra
Symmetra’s backstory and concept doesn’t read as racist to me, although I’ll admit to not being conversant enough with those particular stereotypes to be able to spot something that’s not completely obvious. However, where her backstory does fall down is a WHOLE LOT OF FUCKING ABLEISM. And sure, it’s obvious that it’s at least well-meaning ableism? But there is a lot of hinky mental health and neurotypical stereotyping going on. Again, according to the Overwatch Wiki:
Symmetra may be on the autism spectrum as implied in A Better World[1]. In it, she says it used to “bother her” when people would ask where she fit on the spectrum; further, she appears to have what could be described as obsessive-compulsive disorder, namely her preoccupation with “perfection”, such as when she can’t resist fixing a crooked picture or how she notices the perfection of a child’s face. Traits common to OCD are also associated with autism.[2] —Overwatch Wiki
For fuck’s sake.
First, if you want to have a character who is on the autism spectrum, EITHER DO IT OR DON’T. Don’t say well she miiiiiiight be, but then maaaaaybe not. Because what the fuck is wrong with having a heroic character who is autistic? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Second, fixing crooked frames or noticing a perfect face isn’t OCD – unless you spend your entire day checking and re-checking and re-checking every picture frame to make sure it’s straight, or obsessively scanning people’s faces looking for flaws, to the detriment of actually getting anything done. OCD is an anxiety spectrum disorder, emphasis on the disorder. If it doesn’t interfere with your daily life and ability to function, then it’s not OCD. Being particular about how things are placed or wanting things to be just so? That’s not fucking OCD, and it’s really shitty trivializing OCD that way.
Character Designs: Racist Tropes and Culture as Costume
Mercy
So I’ve written before about how it’s really problematic making the character who is coded as “angel” blonde. But you know what’s even shittier? Making your angel character blonde, then having an alternate skin named “Devil” and giving that skin black hair.
Not following why that’s problematic? Well, allow me to quote myself:
Here’s another one I wish I didn’t see as often as I did. If you’re writing a race that has inborn magic powers, immortality, supernatural sexiness, preternatural senses, or is otherwise superior to normal boring humans, DON’T have the defining trait of that race be a real world racial trait. Wait. No. I’m going to be more explicit. DON’T MAKE THEM BLONDE. Because that is some creepy white supremacy shit right there – ESPECIALLY when combined with the Evil Darkies [aka: the trope of making evil races have dark skin] mentioned above. That’s not to say you can’t have superhumans! … you can keep 100% of your magical superhumans and still have them not suck. Case in point, World of Warcraft. The good elves are purple and the bad elves are blonde. (Granted, there’s still an awwwwwful lot of fail of just about all types in WoW. But this is, at least, one small thing that they did manage to get right.)
When you tie the idea of “good” to traits that are White and “evil” to traits that are Not-White, THAT IS RACIST.
The irony is that Mercy’s other alternate skins depict her as a Valkyrie, which honestly I like about a million times better than either her default skin or her “Devil” skin. Boobplate aside, they did a great job of translating the character concept into a design appropriate to the character’s cultural background.
Zenyatta, Roadhog, and Pharah
Zenyatta is a bit of a tricky case in that he is a robot (who is gendered as male) monk who is never explicitly called out as being a Buddhist monk. But his backstory says he wanders the Himalayas, and the Saffron robes as well as descriptions of Zenyatta’s approach to philosophy make it pretty clear that he is supposed to be a Tibetan Buddhist (robot) monk. And, you know what, cool. There could be some cool elements about robots deciding to investigate humanity and ending up identifying as a particular gender and culture.
What is definitely uncool is tying Zenyatta strongly (if implicitly) to one culture, and then using other cultural costumes as alternate looks:
Look. This is a theme that I’m going to come back to for the next few designs, but I would think that after the stink that gets raised on the internet and social media every October, people would start getting the hint that using cultural attire or cultural dress for the sake of looking “cool” is not okay. Culture is not costume.
This gets even more problematic when Native and Aboriginal cultures are the ones being used as costume, because there is a global history of white people oppressing Native and Aboriginal peoples and then appropriating their culture.
Take Roadhog, whose has two alternate skins that show him in Maori dress:
And. Man. Here’s where I admit that things get real fuzzy and hard to tease out. Because while it’s not commented on officially, it’s possible that Mako is of Maori descent:
“It is highly likely that Roadhog is of New Zealand Maori heritage due to his real name (Mako) and alternate skin titled “Toa” which is the Maori word for “Warrior”.” – Overwatch Wiki
And honestly, I keep going back and forth on whether this is problematic or not. Roadhog’s pale skin reads more “white” than “Maori” to me. But then, the long struggle of Metis and non-status Native Canadians to be recognized as “legitimately Native”, makes me feel like that might not be a valid criticism. Except, Roadhog is said to come from the Outback of Australia – and the Aborigine people of Australia and the Maori of New Zealand are two different peoples – or at least as far as I’m aware.
So. I think for me the tipping point, the deciding factor of “is this okay?” is the fact that there are so many other examples of stereotyped depictions and appropriative costumes. This isn’t a singular misstep in a game that otherwise did its homework and tried to be respectful. Because if it was, you wouldn’t have something like Pharah and her alternate skins:
Pharah is explicitly, canonically Egyptian. And yet two of her alternate skins are explicitly North American Native – titled “Raindancer” and “Thunderbird”. And that is just such an obvious, straight-forward case of “what do we do for a cool alternate look for Pharah?” “I dunno, make her Native?” that I just can’t even.
Symmetra
And here’s the last example, the reason why I’m really not inclined to give the Blizzard development team a lot of slack on the question of “did they mean to be offensive” or not. Symmetra, who comes from India, has two alternate skins – which cost a lot of credits to unlock – that depict her as the Hindu goddess Kali:
It’s hard to overstate how gallingly tasteless and appalling this is. Hinduism isn’t like the worship of the ancient Egyptian gods. While using Ra as a skin for an implicitly Tibetan character is tasteless, it’s nowhere near on the same level of awful, because you’re talking about a dead religion. There are somewhere around 1 billion Hindu people on the planet, which makes this roughly equivalent to having a male character who can “level up” into Jesus. And obviously, game developers would never consider making Actual Fucking Jesus an unlockable skin, because that would be disrespectful. But because Hindus are mostly brown people, that makes having Actual Fucking Kali – who is a god that real actual people actually worship right now – somehow okay? No. Just. NO.
Conclusion: Overwatch has problems, but it’s still better than the rest of AAA gaming
As horrible as all this stuff is, Blizzard at least gets the absolute minimum of points for trying. Which is something that the rest of the AAA game industry is emphatically not doing, as evidenced by yet another year of Scowly McWhiteGuy being mostly the only thing on offer at E3.
So. You know. Reluctant kudos for trying? But “slightly less racist than the rest of the AAA game industry” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement that Blizzard should be proud of.
[1] I am unspeakably bitter that Pokemon Go has yet to be released in CanadaThe company behind an infamous anti-Trump dossier also worked "on |
TheSky https://t.co/r7LWD0zz13 — (((Carina Kolodny))) (@carinakolodny) October 8, 2016Description
On May 8, 1974, Penn Central freight train OV-8 collided with the counterweight of a lift-span drawbridge on the Cuyahoga River at Cleveland, Ohio. Shortly before the collision, the eastbound train had been traveling at 33 mph on a main track equipped with automatic block signals when the DB operator contacted the traincrew and advised them that the route was clear ahead. Then, the operator remembered that a boat had been awaiting passage and, without informing the traincrew, he opened the bridge. The train passed the red home signal of the DB interlocking without braking and struck the counterweight of the open bridge about 600 feet beyond the signal. The two crewmembers in the lead locomotive unit died as a result of crash injuries. The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the failure of the locomotive crewmembers to obey a wayside signal indication to stop and the concurrent opening of the drawbridge by the DB operator after he had advised the oncoming traincrew by radio that the route was clear. Contributing to the accident was the absence of specific rules that either prohibited such a radio message or described the circumstances under which such a radio transmittal could be accepted as an operational control. -- Abstract from United States Department of Transportation Accident Report: Investigations of railroad accidents 1911 - 1993, File Number RAR-75-3The Big Hill murder and the colonial death penalty
John Waugh
Capital punishment in colonial Victoria had a secretive, penultimate stage that has received comparatively little attention from historians. After a judge sentenced a prisoner to death, the governor of Victoria, advised by government ministers assembled as the Executive Council, decided whether, and when, the sentence would be carried out. The governor had the power to commute the sentence to a term of imprisonment, or even to grant a free pardon and release the prisoner. In reaching their decision, the governor and ministers had few constraints. They followed whatever procedure they chose, and relied on whatever grounds seemed appropriate to them. Their proceedings were confidential, ministers being bound by an oath of secrecy.
The minutes of the Executive Council are a source for the exercise of the prerogative of mercy that has had little systematic use by historians. In some cases, particularly in the 1850s and 1860s, the minutes record revealing details of confidential debates about whether to commute particular death sentences.
This article is a case study of the way the decision to commute a death sentence was reached. The Big Hill murder attracted intense public interest in 1860 and generated extensive records. These document the processes by which the governor and ministers decided to exercise the prerogative of mercy and commute the death sentence of a convicted murderer; they also record the prisoner’s later attempts to clear his name. The case shows how commutation of a death sentence was influenced by official perceptions of the degree of certainty with which guilt was established, and illustrates the processes that authorities used to reach, and reassess, that conclusion.My last piece touched on the lack of experience on the Sabres blue line. It was something that wasn’t addressed at the trade deadline, and I honestly believe it’s something that accounts for defensive brain farts like when Carolina was able to quickly tie the game after each Sabres goal last night.
Yes, I would be writing this even if the Sabres had won.
The interesting part of it, for me at least, is Andrej Sekera. He has really improved his game as of late, but he is still very inconsistent. He picked up two assists last night, increasing to 5 points in 3 games. At the same time, he had of plus/minus of zero last night as he was on the ice for the second tying goal and the OT winner by Carolina. So what exactly is Sekera going to become?
I want to point out right now that what becomes of Andrej Sekera is extremely, extremely important for the future of the Buffalo Sabres. His development or lack thereof, his roster spot or trade value, will be second in importance only to Tyler Myers’. The reason? He was touted as a dynamic, offensive, but responsible player in the AHL. He showed very little promise through his call-up stints to the majors. Sekera was a nasty -11 in 69 games in 2008-09 recording only 19 points.
He’s also played the 4th most games among the defense. With 216 regular season games played. That’s less than half of Shaone Morrisonn’s 467 games played. For reference, Steve Montador leads the D with 504 GP (Lydman had 720…wonder why our defense has been inconsistent and prone to breakdowns?). It’s taken Sekera this long to start playing like a real NHL defenseman, and he’s played 3 whole good games in a row. Excuse me if I’m not getting over-excited.
The issue is dependence. Consistency. Boring, easy, quiet hockey. Mike Robitaille once said that the less you hear a defenseman’s name, the better he’s playing. Having flashes of potential is a nice perk for a blue liner, but if it comes at the expense of defensive duties and proper positioning…well, your Vezina Trophy-winning goaltender may just have the worst year of his career. Whoops.
So Sekera can go one of two ways. With the proper guidance and mentoring, these latest offensive flashes show that he could become the next Brian Campbell. If he can learn to pair up his confidence going on the rush or pinching with knowing when to make the safe, easy, slow pass out of his own zone, he could be an All-Star. He really could. Without that teaching he can become the second coming of Dmitri Kalinin (I just got a nose bleed when I typed that).
The trick is he needs a silverback veteran to show him how to play the safe game, but somebody who will be able to handle it if Sekera takes a chance offensively. Andrej needs a kind of blue-line father figure who will teach him the delicacies of slowing down the game when the other team is attacking, but will also give the kid the nod to go on the rush. Brian Campbell had Teppo Numminen, a veteran who was paired with him and practically made him the All-Star he is today. Seriously, I really hope that Teppo gets a very expensive Christmas gift every year from that red haired wonder, because Brian Campbell earned that $8 million contract because of the Finn.
Sekera doesn’t have a Numminen. Sekera doesn’t have somebody on this team who has played anywhere close to 1,000 games, and he doesn’t have a partner who can teach him. He’s usually paired up with Tyler Myers, a younger, less experienced player. Sure, Myers is a prodigy, but he’s not what Sekera needs to become a great player himself.
Hopefully this is addressed in the off-season. I’m sure we’ll see the Kalinin side of Andrej in the next few games, and then his confidence is going to take a huge hit and who knows what’s going to happen. Right now if he has a bad game he might start kicking himself, and without a stabilizing veteran there to tell him to show him that it’s okay, he’ll find himself in the press box very quickly.We have already heard the song by Taylor Swift for the upcoming Hunger Games soundtrack, but a new track has been released. The song, “Our Engines” by the incredible band, The Decemberists, was revealed and is one that will be feature on the official soundtrack. The song is gorgeous (like most of their songs) and I think it will fit in well with the rest of the soundtrack.
The novel the movie is based on was written by Suzanne Collins and is followed by sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay.
The Hunger Games is set to be released on March 23, and will be followed by three more films based on the two books that proceed the novel.
In case you need a refresher here is the official synopsis of the novel and first film:
In the ruins of what was once the United States, the nation of Panem, hosts a brutal game of life and death called The Hunger Games. A competition in which contestant, or tributes, from each of the 12 districts compete to the death until only one is left alive to be the victor. Each district must give up one girl and boy to the Games each year. The Games serve as a reminder to the 12 districts of the unsuccessful rebellion that happened 74 years prior. The story follows Katniss Everdeen, who becomes a tribute to the games after she takes the place to spare her sister Prim. She competes in the games against the other distri, as well as Peeta Mellark, the boy tribute from District 12, who has secretly loved Katniss since childhood, and who once did her a kindness she never could forget. Haymitch Abernathy is a drunk and the only living victor from District 12, mentors both Katniss and Peeta before and during the Hunger Games.
You can hear the new song by the Decemberists below:
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Like this: Like Loading...Exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen did not order the coup in Turkey, a leaked document from EU intelligence services says.
The document, written by the EU’s intelligence-sharing unit, Intcen, also says a post-coup purge of supposed Gulen supporters led by president Recep Tayyip Erdogan was designed to deepen his grip on power.
Erdogan had prepared the post-coup crackdown well in advace (Photo: Reuters)
The revelations shed light on the EU’s reaction to the failed coup, and show how Europe's intelligence agencies regard Gulen as the “master” of an “anti-Semitic and anti-Christian” movement.
They also put an unwelcome spotlight on Intcen.
“It is likely that a group of officers comprising Gulenists, Kemalists, opponents of the AKP, and opportunists was behind the coup. It is unlikely that Gulen himself played a role,” the document said.
“It is unlikely that Gulen really had the capabilities and capacities to take such steps.”
Kemalists are secularist Turks who oppose the Islamist views of Erdogan’s AKP political party.
The EU intelligence report said individual Gulenist military officers, who did not rank above lieutenant or captain, might have felt “under pressure” to join the coup attempt in July because they knew that Erdogan had anyway planned to go after them in August.
The report said his “upcoming purge” would have seen them being prosecuted for terrorist offences.
The EU report said Erdogan was trying to dismantle Gulen’s movement in Turkey because it was his “one and only real rival” in his bid to rule the country via “a full presidential system”.
It also said he “exploited” the coup to launch a wider “repressive campaign against the opponents of the AKP” for the sake of “personal ambitions”.
It said that the MIT, Turkey’s intelligence service, began compiling lists of “troublesome individuals” years ago.
It said the lists also contained the names of “civil activists” who took part in anti-Erdogan protests in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in 2013.
“The huge wave of arrests in the days following the coup attempt was already previously prepared. The coup was just a catalyst for the crackdown prepared in advance,” the intelligence report said.
Lukewarm EU
Intcen is a branch of the EU foreign service in which seconded intelligence officers from EU states share information.
It filed the six-page report, entitled Turkey - The Impact of the Gulenist Movement, on 24 August last year to senior EU officials and to member states’ ambassadors in Brussels.
The classified document was first uncovered by The Times, a British newspaper, on Tuesday (17 January).
The views in the leaked document, also seen by EUobserver, were repeated almost word for word by Johannes Hahn, the EU commissioner dealing with Turkey, in his reaction to the coup.
He said at the time that it looked “like something that had been prepared. That the lists [of alleged Gulenists] are available [so soon] after the events indicates that this was prepared and that at a certain moment it should be used”.
Subsequent EU statements were also lukewarm toward Erdogan.
The bloc called for restraint, especially when his purge spread to opposition MPs and the media, prompting furious responses from the Turkish president.
The master
The EU leak comes at a time when Turkey is asking the US to extradite Gulen.
Although the intelligence report exonerated him over the coup, it did not paint him in a favourable light.
The report said teachings published in his name “on the surface … propagate tolerance”, but “at the same time, Islamic scholars expert in usage of language and symbols recognise that they are expressly anti-Semitic and anti-Christian”.
It said Gulen was the “master” of a “worldwide” structure that had branches in some 100 countries in Europe, north and South America, Asia, and Africa.
It said his “orders” were “enforced” by “special imams” and by “convinced” followers who “infiltrated” state institutions.
It said Gulenists had 160 elite schools around the world where they groomed students.
It said the best students were offered special teaching sessions, called Houses of Light, “in the evening … in apartments, to small groups without state control”.
Leak fallout
The leak is an embarrassment for the EU foreign service at a time when it is trying to galvanise EU security cooperation.
The Intcen report was marked “confidential”, meaning, in the EU’s own literature, that it could prompt "formal protest or other sanctions" by non-EU countries and "damage" EU "security or intelligence operations" if it got out.
The document did not reveal its sources, and used formulas such as "according to intelligence", but it was marked “not releasable and not to be disclosed to third states and international organisations”.
It was meant to be sent via encrypted channels or kept in paper form in “secure conditions”.
Its disclosure could harm EU-Turkey and US-Turkey relations at a time when Erdogan is building closer ties with Russia.
It could also harm Intcen, if member states stop trusting the EU office to keep their secrets.Mike Pence Criticized HIV Activists While President of Antigay Think Tank
Did he really object to an HIV-positive 12-year-old addressing the Republican convention?
Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence was the president of an antigay think tank that criticized the inclusion of HIV-positive speakers at the 1996 Republican National Convention.
From 1991 to 1994, Pence ran Indiana Policy Review, a conservative group that has a journal of the same name. Two years after he stepped down from the post, the current governor of Indiana claimed that the ’96 convention was an “endless line of pro-choice women, AIDS activists and proponents of affirmative action.”
“[They] may have stuck a chord with the Washington press corps,” Pence wrote. “They bombed, however, in Peoria.”
Held in San Diego, that year’s Republican convention featured Mary Fisher, who was a Republican White House staffer during the Ford administration. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush tapped Fisher as a representative on the National Commission on AIDS. Hydeia Broadbent, a 12-year-old girl living with HIV, joined Fisher onstage for the address. Fisher had spoken movingly at the 1992 convention as well.
But according to Pence, Fisher didn’t represent the values of the Republican Party.
“The sad truth is that the Republican Party for all its success in generating media praise for the convention failed to present the personalities or principles of interest to its base constituency, the modern Reagan coalition,” he wrote, adding: “Like it or not, traditional Pro-Family conservatives make up the bedrock of modern Republican electoral success.”
Right Wing Watch, which reported on Pence's writings, does grant that he likely wasn't targeting Fisher or Broadbent personally: “It is doubtful that Pence’s objection was to these specific 'AIDS activists.' His objection was likely that at the time, HIV/AIDS was still viewed as a gay issue. Pence clearly did not consider LGBT individuals part of the 'pro-family' party he envisioned the GOP to be.”
During Pence’s tenure, Right Wing Watch notes, the Indiana Policy Review “published several anti-gay pieces.”
In August 1993, Col. Ronald Ray, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, published an article markedly similar in tone to Pence’s remarks about the convention. Ray wrote in defense of the military's ban on service by gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, arguing that allowing them to serve openly would endanger the military.
“Homosexuals are not as a group able bodied,” he wrote. “They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle.”
The piece further claimed that gay people are pedophiles, stating that “the love between man and boys is at the foundation of homosexuality.”
Another antigay article included “The Pinked Newsroom.” Published in the December 1993 issue, Indiana Policy Review denounced The Wall Street Journal for attending an LGBT job fair to recruit new staffers.
The publication further argued that gay journalists must disclose their sexual orientation in reporting — to prevent them from pushing a pro-LGBT agenda. “The more extreme of the gay movement consider themselves members of a sexual determined political party,” the journal stated.
This isn’t the first time that Pence’s anti-LGBT history has come to light.
During his 2000 run for Congress, Pence proposed gutting funding for HIV patients in favor of conversion therapy, the dangerous and widely discredited practice of “curing” same-sex desires. “Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior,” Pence wrote on his campaign website. The GOP platform at the 2016 Republican convention supported the use of "ex-gay" conversion therapy.
As the governor of Indiana, Pence would sign the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 2015 law that made it legal to deny services to LGBT customers based on one’s “sincerely held religious beliefs.” That law was “fixed” following a $60 million boycott of the state.You Are Not Allowed To Know
By Preston James PhD
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO HAVE BELIEFS ABOUT IT BUT YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED BY THE POWERS THAT BE (PTB) TO KNOW FOR SURE
You are NOT allowed to KNOW anything for sure about this Secret Space War because these facts are deeply and narrowly compartment-ed under “Beyond Black” National Security Classifications (Aka NATO Cosmic Top Secret). Only a very small number of folks have received these security classifications and it is these folks alone that have access to these very narrow compartments based on an absolute “need to know” only.
DO NOT EXPECT ANY OFFICIAL USG DISCLOSURES ON THIS TO BE FORTHCOMING SOON
Do not expect American Intel or any DOD contractors (where most such secrets are now held) to be disclosing any actual facts soon about this Secret Space War. And without specific factual disclosures which are “christened” by the major mass media at the USG’s direction, we can only make good guesstimates after reviewing RUMORS from reasonable sources to form reasonable BELIEFS.
YOU ARE FREE TO BELIEVE WHAT YOU WANT TO BUT YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO KNOW FOR SURE
Thus we are not going to be allowed to KNOW anything for certain about this Secret Space War until the USG provides actual scientifically reproducible facts and the major mass media validates them publicly. Be assured this is not likely to be happening soon. Here’s why. The USG has a long post WW2 history of a complete secrecy lock-down. It has kept several huge secrets that are so sinister that if revealed would be so alarming to the American People that such disclosures could seriously threaten any current regime’s power base. In the past when serious secrets were revealed in special Congressional Hearings such as those relating to MK-Ultra, Iran Contra, human Radiation Experiments and the like, these stories received little traction in the major mass media and thus were not validated or Christened, preventing them from wide recognition among the populace.
If there was a major story disclosed by the USG and broadcast and published by the major mass media on the presence of an ongoing Space War between earth based humans and Extra-terrestrials consisting of high tech battles between anti-gravity craft of ours and theirs, this story would immediately go viral and could shake society to its very foundation. The ruling regime knows this and would expect such a huge disclosure to completely debase their power.
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THE USG HAS WHAT IT CONSIDERS TO BE GOOD REASONS FOR THE CONTINUED COMPLETE SECRECY LOCK-DOWN OVER THIS SECRET SPACE WAR
There are numerous other considerations the USG has for maintaining this complete secrecy lock-down such as what would occur if the public found out for sure about this Secret Space War but this one is believed to be the greatest concern: an expected complete loss of credibility of all those officials and Congress-persons involved in withholding the truth from the citizens who work hard to provide tax money to pay for these secret programs. Can you imagine the difficulty any sitting US President, Congress-person or Official would have trying to explain to the American People that the US Military has a high tech Space Command with anti-gravity craft (AGCs) and orbital space platforms with high tech plasma cannon weaponry but still cannot defeat it extra-terrestrial enemies or provide low cost or free energy to the masses.
And of course let us not forget the numerous rumors from retired formerly high placed USG or DOD officials that have claimed that the USG has been hijacked by an alien group that the USG formed a special treaty with back in 1954 referred to as the “Grenada Treaty” which has ultimately led to the USG now being under control of an Alien Agenda which is against the interests of the People of the United States.
Since we are now denied access to the actual facts of the matter, our best shot for figuring out and guesstimating the truth is to evaluate and vet the many rumors out there on this Secret Space War and select those from the most reasonable sources which seem to make the most sense overall based on what we do know about current levels of technology and anecdotal stories told by folks we respect who are not crackpots and who make no money off such claims, sometimes receiving derision, harassment or great loss instead.
THE MAJOR MASS MEDIA KEEPS THE LID ON TIGHT FOR THE “SECRET SHADOW GOVERNMENT” (SSG)—-MUM IS THE WORD!
Of course there is always the possibility of some type of large catastrophic occurrence which the USG would have great difficulty covering up, such as a highly visible low altitude plasma cannon shootout between anti-gravity craft over a large urban area in the early evening with thousands of witnesses and cameras rolling, followed by a crash of a large alien craft with ET bodies seen and photographed by numerous eyewitnesses. This kind of unexpected catastrophic disclosure would most likely blow the whole matter open and bring about a cataclysmic reorganization of government and society at all levels. Even if high officials running the Secret Shadow Government (SSG) turned and took a massive amount of internal documents, photos and evidence to the major mass media, the media would quickly suppress it.
As William Colby, former Director of the CIA said before he died that the CIA had control of every major newscaster and news outlet in the free world, one way or another (this program was called Operation Mockingbird). And of course we know the SSG specializes in lies and false narratives to the public since Bill Casey, another later Director of the CIA once said that he would consider the CIA information control program a complete success when everything the public believed about government was a falsity perpetrated by them. It is well known that the SSG protects its greatest secrets with a bodyguard of lies.
This article will provide what the author has identified as reasonable rumors for you to evaluate and perhaps use them to come to your own BELIEFS about this Secret Space War or whether it even exists at all.
THE ROSWELL CRASH STARTED THE COMPLETE SECRECY LOCKDOWN OVER UFOS, ET’S AND ANTI-GRAVITY CRAFT AND THIS RESULTED IN A USG NATIONAL SECURITY STATE RUN BY A HIDDEN AND SECRET SHADOW GOVERNMENT (SSG)
The Roswell crash and the recovered anti-gravity craft and ET bodies sent shock waves through the US Army Air Corps high command and the top leaders of American Government. The first reaction of the base commander was to release the truth to the American people, but this was quickly reversed by the high command of the US Army Air Corps and General Ramey. A special study committee was quickly set up to plan a system of dealing with this without allowing government power to be destroyed and while still responding effectively. This decision to cut the American people out of the equation was not unilateral and there was a split among leaders with those favoring complete secrecy winning out.
Actually Roswell was not the first knowledge the USG had about anti-gravity craft. Before VE Day in Europe, a secret agreement was reached between American and British Intel, and Nazi Intel. In exchange for a good portion of all the confiscated gold, jewelry, art work, other valuables and refined plutonium and anti-gravity technology, American and British Intel would grant complete immunity to certain high ranking Nazi Intel and scientists which would then be brought to America under Operation Paperclip. During this time American and British Intel had signed a mutual technology sharing agreement between themselves to establish parity even though America would get most of the high Nazi technology which included anti-gravity.
And right after WW2 there is the whole matter of Admiral Byrd and his two later US Naval expeditions to Antarctica, Operation Highjump in 1946 with James Forrestal and Operation Deep Freeze in 1955-56. Both of these expeditions have remained shrouded in mystery due to extreme secrecy but there have been numerous rumors and even one South American Newspaper report about battles with anti-gravity craft and certain admissions by Admiral Byrd.
THE SECRET SHADOW GOVERNMENT (SSG) RUNS THE CEREMONIAL VISIBLE GOVERNMENT (USG) AND BASICALLY CALLS ALL THE IMPORTANT SHOTS
The Secret Shadow Government (SSG) is the “Powers That Be” (PTB). It has now become quite clear that the emergence of this secret Shadow Government is largely due to the American and British intel gaining knowledge of Nazi anti-gravity technology and the recovered crashed alien UFOs and ET bodies at Roswell and two other sites in the American Southwest. The visible USG has been kept in place to serve as a ceremonial government, but most senior Senators and representatives, especially those heading Intel Committees know that most power lies within the Secret Shadow Government rather than in the elected officials. The best available description of the Secret Shadow Government (SSG) has been assembled by Richard Boylan, Ph.D. http://www.bilderberg.org/secret.htm. For example, take Homeland Security, a new Multi-Billion dollar police state agency set up under mysterious circumstances to run all American national security and intel right after 911. Who really runs Homeland Security, that is a good question?
Just recently TSA’s director told Congress that it had no jurisdiction over his agency. http://tsanewsblog.com/7778/news/the-tsa-as-we-know-it-is-dead-heres-why/ If Congress has no jurisdiction after passing laws authorizing it, then who in the heck does? The answer of course is that the Secret Shadow Government (SSG) runs it just as it runs the Secret Space war and US Space Command. As long as the SSG keeps a complete secrecy lock-down in place on UFOs, anti-gravity and other free energy technology and exerts complete control over all politicians and bureaucrats one way or an other (we’ll get into the “other” ways later), it will remain impossible for the American People to have much say in how their country is run or how their money is spent. And there is always the question who really runs the SSG? Is it the CEO’s of the member organizations and defense contractors making it up, a sort of super board of directors, or is it something else, like the “Council of Twelve”?
WHO REALLY RUNS THE SECRET SHADOW GOVERNMENT (SSG) AND SETS THEIR AGENDA?
Are these select leaders of the SSG being unduly influenced by an Alien Agenda? Did they sign a treaty in 1954 with entities that outsmarted, conned, seduced and compromised them with treachery and mindkontrol? Is the SSG now being controlled by an Alien Agenda, thus placing America under the control of an Alien Agenda. Did those who formed the SSG align themselves with one group of alien beings (those they thought were good but turned out to be bad) in order to gain technology to fight another group they thought were exceedingly evil. And in the process were they folks conned and compromised and now involved in a Secret Space War with strange and conflicting coalitions which have compromised the integrity of these top officials who run the SSG?
ONE ASPECT OF THIS SECRET SPACE WAR ARE THE NUMEROUS DEEP UNDERGROUND BASES THAT HAVE BEEN BUILT AND MAINTAINED IN RELATIVE SECRECY
There are numerous well founded rumors that the USG has been building massive Deep Underground Bases (DUMBS) for many years starting right after the Roswell crash and some of these bases are claimed to be connected by high speed bullet trains. And there have also been numerous other well founded rumors that the Russians have been building massive underground bases for many years too. After WW2 ended it was discovered that the Nazis built numerous underground factories where they developed anti-gravity and high technology rocketry and research on nuclear weapons. At the end of the war they had refined a fair amount of plutonium which they provided to the Americans for use against Japan as part of a secret treaty clause when they negotiated Operation Paperclip. Here is a couple of photos of some smaller tunnel building machines sold commercially, not the USG nuclear powered ones used to build their numerous DUMBS. http://metaldragon-productions.com/Secret_Bases3.htm
THE GRENADA TREATY OF 1954. IS IT REAL? AND IF SO HAVE THERE BEEN JOINT EFFORTS IN THE SECRET SPACE WAR BETWEEN THE SSG AND AT LEAST ONE ALIEN FACTION?
There have been numerous rumors from solid sources over many years that President Eisenhower signed a Secret Treaty with Aliens at Holloman Air Force Base in 1954 (some experts claim 1953, some 1956 and some claim the first treaty with aliens was in 1947). This particular treaty has been alleged to have been called the Grenada Treaty. As the rumors go, the USG was approached by benevolent ET’s and offered anti-gravity and other high technology to be able to fight effectively against a larger sinister alien force which was capturing and using humans for food and which planned to invade the earth in mass and eventually destroy all the human inhabitants. Allegedly these evil aliens were threatening the good ones too and the good ones needed human help to reconstruct their impaired genetics. The treaty provided for a transfer of anti-gravity, plasma cannon, and mindkontrol technology to the SSG in exchange for allowing these aliens to grab and take genetic samples from certain selected human subjects. The required conditions were that these abductions must be done in a low key fashion with no pain, the subjects could not be harmed and that their memories had to be erased.
After a couple years it became clear that the supposed “good aliens” were not exactly abiding by the treaty. As the story goes, one of their craft crashed and was recovered and this had numerous human body parts from dissection of humans, creating an immediate crisis among the SSG controllers. After careful consideration it was decided that the best thing to do was continue cooperating with these aliens even though they were technically violating the treaty in order to keep obtaining their high technology while working hard to develop this advanced technology into weapons capable of shooting down the aliens in their anti-gravity craft and eventually defeating them. But in order to do this these SSG controllers found that they had to agree to work closely with these aliens and adapt their “alien agenda” to institute a NWO Globalist system as soon as feasible because the aliens were demanding that they get control over out of control nuclear weapons to minimize risks of an all out nuclear World W3.
IS ADVANCED MINDKONTROL THE TRADEMARK OF THE “ALIEN INVADERS” THE SSG IS FIGHTING?
In the process of working closely with these aliens, it has been rumored that some of these SSG controllers became victims of advanced mindkontrol and shifted allegiance to the “dark side”, accepted their alien agenda and thus became evil in the process and began serving as an extension of these aliens. It has been rumored that other SSG controllers branched off somewhat into another group and worked to develop their own “agenda” which is not an alien agenda but is rumored to be a rearguard action to resurrect the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and extract control back away from the aliens that hijacked it by imposing their “Alien Agenda”.
AN HISTORIC SPLIT IN THE SECRET SHADOW GOVERNMENT (SSG)?
A split in the SSG has been rumored to have resulted in the infamous conflict between its two major control sub-groups, the Aquarius Group and the Committee of Twelve Group. Allegedly the USAF was linked to Aquarius and the USN to Comm 12, but definitive proof has not emerged publicly as to whether this is true. This conflict has been rumored to have been a factor in the cruise missile attack on the naval intel section of the Pentagon where the 2.3 trillion dollar accounting losses were being investigated. And strangely enough this particular section of the Pentagon had recently been “hardened” with very expensive special construction to provide extra protection from any air attack.
RUMORS OF LARGE ORBITAL SPACE PLATFORMS
There have been repeated rumors that the SSG has large “orbital space platforms” which contain some of the most advanced weapon system imaginable including plasma cannons and can serve as orbital “refueling and resupply centers” for the SSG’s fleet of anti-gravity craft. It has also been rumored that there has been continued and intense competition for space based weaponry between the USN and the USAF, with each entity feeling they should be the primary US Space Command Force and both operating separately controlled nuclear powered orbital space platforms.
Certainly it is hard for the average person to accept or even consider the idea that the USG could have formed treaties with alien beings who have anti-gravity craft and advanced weapon systems. There is an excellent audio with Veterans Today Senior Editor Gordon Duff in which he provides some very interesting information which supports these claims and makes it much more difficult to reject such claims out of hand. Senior Editor Duff is no lightweight, is a seasoned Marine Combat veteran, has worked in the Intelligence Consulting business worldwide for many years, and has established high credibility so there is good reason to pay attention when he states his beliefs on such matters.
http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/114043/Alien_Secrets_and_the_Military/ If his beliefs are accurate, then there is a Secret Space War going on right now and some nations are working together to respond accordingly. So far it looks like the evidence that is available fully supports his claims. Any other interpretations just do not seem to fit the evidence.
ARE THERE ADDITIONAL ALIEN TREATIES WITH OTHER FOREIGN COUNTRIES SUCH AS RUSSIA AND CHINA?
One question which has not received much attention is whether or not other countries such as Russia, China or others have made specific special treaties with Aliens and have their own special “alien agendas” which are somewhat different than the US SSG. Some experts have claimed that there are well founded rumors that the Nazi scientists had formed a treaty and alliance with an alien force prior to WW2 and received a great deal of advanced technology in exchange for adapting a specific Alien Agenda for a world fascist takeover. Some believe that the current SSG push for a Global NWO is an extension of this treaty and the SSG is really serving as the “Fourth Reich” of the rich and powerful international corporations. These same folks have argued that only the German military surrendered and not the Nazi party, and it merged with the USG to form the SSG under operation Paperclip while at the same time operating a parallel “breakaway” society in secret underground bases in Antarctica.
IF THE SSG HAS FORMED TREATIES WITH ALIEN ENTITIES, HAS THIS RESULTED IN AN ALIEN AGENDA BEING IMPOSED ON THE USG AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT? AND WOULD THAT EXPLAIN THE CREEPING POLICE STATE TYRANNY BEING IMPOSED ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WHICH VIOLATES THE CONSTITUTION?
What, you say, the SSG controllers have become evil and imposed an alien agenda on the whole USG that is evil? Impossible. Not so fast if you really think this through. Ask yourself if you think that the USG has been acting in the interests of the American people after the end of the cold war. The answer is an astounding NO. Creating unprovoked, illegal, unConstitutional wars for corporate profiteering, trafficking massive amounts of illegal drugs into the USA to raise off the books money for black operations and sacrificing the lives and health of thousands of wonderful American Soldiers for these illegal unprovoked wars is disgusting. And provocation and involvement in such wars is a complete betrayal of the trust that has been placed in the military high command to prevent needless wars and sacrificed lives and health for mere corporate war profiteering and shadow SSG agendas.
ARE FALSE FLAG ATTACKS, STAGED WARS AND THE NWO GLOBALIST PLAN PART OF AN ALIEN AGENDA IMPOSED ON THE SSG WHO IN TURN HAS IMPOSED IT ON THE USG?
Planning and instituting numerous false flags inside America such as the first trade center Bombing, the Murrah Building and the 911 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon is certainly a huge threat to America’s real national security. Our real national security is not the personal security of those who invoke secrecy as a false cloak of every crime imaginable to hijack our great nation. How about Ruby Ridge and the needless mass murders of women and children at Waco? But you say no, that the USG would never do these things, it is inconceivable. But how then do you explain all the illegal Mideast wars for profit and the TSA rape squads that molest innocent air travelers. Or the “No Fly” or watch lists that one can be placed on with no oversight or any appeal process available? This is nothing less than the complete destruction of the “rule of law”. Oh yes, it’s all necessary because there is a terrorist hiding under every rock, thus necessary for our |
, his championship victory over NaNiwa at MLG Providence marked the last time he won an important PvZ series, and right now he's another one of those Zergs who must live in constant fear of various two-base all-ins. The upside for Leenock is that he's continued to be a tremendous ZvT player, a very good ZvZ player, and his ZvP has improved a lot when he can get to the mid-late game.
There's a certain amount of irrational faith in putting Leenock this high, considering his very middle of the road tournament production in 2012. It's because Leenock's first year as a player was marked by slow, steady growth that saw him work on his weaknesses to go from being a dangerous all-in user to an overall great player. He still has a lot of room to grow, and it's way too early to stop believing.
#:8 TSL_Polt
Last MLG, seeded players had the privilege of picking their opponents and Polt was picked dead last, which speaks of how feared he is. MMA even choose MC, opting to play his worst matchup, rather than face Polt, a man who has given him nightmares in the past. And peoples' fear and reluctance to picking Polt was proved well-founded, as Polt eventually beat the favorite of the tournament, DRG, and went on to place 5th/6th.
But Polt is not without his faults and flaws. He failed to win against Losira in the GSTL, even when he got to pick a favorable map and then got into a favorable position on that map. And he has made it clear that he currently struggles against Zerg, citing the new Zerg buffs as the reason. Still, Polt is one of the most consistent Koreans in foreign tournaments and the bet that Polt will make it incredibly far in this tournament is just about as safe as the bet that he will produce good games with his friend and nemesis Stephano when they meet for the 200th time this MLG.
#7: Empire|viOLet
viOlet's story has to be among the best in Sc2. Mediocre, one-time Code S korean moves to Texas, becomes way better than he ever was in Korea. Now, he's just short of getting his next chance back in Code S, this time as a foreigner-conquering seeded player. viOlet really does have talent though; while he can sometimes do things a bit weirdly, and sometimes his map vision and multi-task aren't the best, viOlet has a killer instinct, a knack for always finding the one thing he can do to take the game. He's done well against macro-passive oriented players, timing attack oriented players, and agressive, micro-focused players. As MLG Spring Arena showed, he has no troubles with ZvZ and ZvT. At Red Bull Battlegrounds, he showed some weakness in ZvP, but his losses to Squirtle were in close, epic games. There's not much doubt now that viOlet has improved, or that he has the Stephano-like mentality that allows him to improve in less than ideal situations. The top end of this MLG won't be too different from the Arena that viOlet won, although the brackets might not align quite so well. But with the right draw, it could all happen again for viOlet.
#6: MǂStephano
The foreigner hope, Stephano is clearly the one chance that a non-Korean could take the Spring Championship home. He's in the pools, he's playing just as well, if not better than ever, and as long as he doesn't sabotage himself physically, he should be in the final few competitors. There are few at MLG who can match Stephano in any match-up. His group is easy; only Polt should test him. How far can Stephano go after that? As far as he wants to go, really. The biggest challenges will doubtless be MC, who beat him at Red Bull Battlegrounds, MMA, who made him look silly the last time they played, DRG, who is DRG, and MKP, who is simply untouchable sometimes. But beyond that? It'd be a big upset to see Stephano go down.
#5: SlayerS_MMA
#4: SK_MC
Due to Mvp winning the previous Code S championship despite the fact that he was the underdog (and played like the underdog) in pretty much every single round, former multiple-champions have been granted nearly infinite credit from the bank of esports. That's why MMA and MC are still up here at #5 and #4, despite the fact that their most recent results haven't been so hot.
In particular, MMA suffered the humiliation of being eliminated from MLG Arena II by GoOdy, something that would have warranted banishment from the Power Rank for any other Korean Terran. However, since MMA won MLG Columbus 2011, GSL October, the Blizzard Cup, IEM Kiev, and Iron Squid, he has enough past credit built up to survive maybe three or four losses to GoOdy before he defaults.
It's a more familiar situation for MC, who almost seems to enjoy putting on a facade of meekly getting eliminated from one tournament only to kick ass and enrich his coffers at another. Already this year we've seen him follow a disappointing showing at the Blizzard Cup with a championship at HomeStoryCup IV, and an early elimination from MLG Winter Arena with more gold at the IEM World Championship. If we're to believe this is cyclical, then MC should be due for a quiet MLG after taking home the championship at Red Bull Battlegrounds... but who knows what could happen?
#3: MYM.MvPDongRaeGu
#2: TSL_Symbol
DRG would be a safe choice for second in our power rankings. In the last four MLGs, DRG has placed in the top 2 in three of them. He has recently won a GSL. And he has shown he can devastate entire GSTL teams by himself, a feat that no player has yet matched. Until now.
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, TSL was a struggling team with a huge Zerg lineup filled with players that were, for the most part, indistinguishable. But one day, rather abruptly, Symbol decided he had had enough of it, got up, separated himself from the pack, and became one of the best Zergs in the world. No one has more momentum going into this MLG as much as Symbol, as in the last few months, he’s taken 2nd place at Iron Squid, 2nd place at MLG Spring Arena II Korean qualifier, and 2nd place at MLG Spring Arena II in addition to qualifying for code S.
But more recently, Symbol achieved something even more legendary, something only DRG had achieved before him. He became a “True Ace” for his team, a player with the ability to single handedly carry his entire team on his back, regardless of how much his teammates faltered, failed, and conspired to lose the series. He is the hero that TSL needs, and if he's the one they deserve, then they must have rescued a burning bus full of orphans in their past lives. And on his way to leading TSL to GSTL glory, Symbol has taken out a total of nine players in two matches, including Moon, Oz, Byul, Alive, Losira, Nestea, and MVP, an incredible run for anyone. In fact, in just these last 3 months alone, Symbol’s record versus champions include 3-0 vs MKP, 4-1 vs Nestea, 2-2 vs MVP, 2-0 vs Jjakji, 2-2 vs MC, 2-0 vs Stephano, 4-4 vs Polt, and 4-4 vs MMA.
The only notable GSL champion Symbol has not yet butt heads with is DRG, the player with whom he now contends for the title of best Zerg in the world. This MLG will be a test for both players. We will have an opportunity to see which is stronger, DRG’s consistency or Symbol’s seemingly unstoppable momentum. And whoever comes out the other end will have a very good claim to the throne of the swarm.
#1: MarineKingPrime
At the top, there's MarineKing. He does lose sometimes, against PartinG and TaeJa in the GSL, or to DRG at MLG Arena #1, or even cross-server to Bly (the last of our PR, interestingly) in the IPL TAC. But in terms of results, and in terms of how they look in achieving those results, MKP probably has the best claim to the #1 in the world spot. His six kill in the KSL finals, erasing the entire stacked Startale line-up, was an incredible feat. But without a GSL championship, we can't quite give the crown to MKP just yet. He's the favorite to take it all here. If he wins, if he takes his second straight MLG championship, then the title is his. But lose, and then the title of best in the world is up in the air again. A few of his rivals for the throne are in attendance at MLG. MKP has a target on his back. Can he hold out?
We'll see.
*The Power Rank only takes players competing at MLG Spring Championship into account. The official MLG player list was used as a reference - some players may cancel or be absent from the tournament.Clide gifted SlayerS one GSTL all-kill before evaporating into thin air (the most likely theory is that he was employed as Mrs. Artosis' midwife). We have no idea how good he is now, except that he must be impressing everyone in the SlayerS house to deserve a trip to Anaheim.So, you guys have been in Korea for a few months? Let's see what you've got.We still can't believe you eliminated MMA at Spring Arena II.Will probably beat some Korean at PvT.In some ways, it's a little surprising that Bly is here. Known for a while as one of Europe's up and coming zerg players, his qualification for MLG Arena was a bit of a surprise regardless. But when he got to New York, the Ukrainian proved he belonged, edging BlinG and HuK, both with long attrition ZvPs on Tal'Darim. Another eye catching result came just this Wednesday night in the IPL TAC, as Bly sniped MarineKing on the way to a three kill of Prime that nearly brought Acer the victory. That's pretty impressive for a zerg who is still hardly known outside of Europe. Still, Bly sits on the edge of our rankings thanks to his generally weak ZvT and average ZvZ (European ZvZ has, however, matched up against Koreans better than any other foreigner MU). But hand Bly a ZvP, the match-up he told me he 'never loses', and it's certainly the case that he could topple some of the mid-range Korean protosses at Anaheim.Congrats Sheth! You're the best American Zerg!Now if only that meant something. Give us a sec, we need to go cry in a corner.See #33.Beastyqt isn't always in attendance at European LANs, so this trip westward is a big fish out of water trip for him. But it's well deserved; the Serbian terran is one of the best players in Europe and surely one of the more underrated. In this writer's individual rankings, Beasty placed quite a few places higher, but he sits this late in the rankings because he's never been able to deliver on his promise at LANs before. Maybe something about the MLG atmosphere will make it click, but offline events have always been a point of struggle for Beasty. TvZ and TvT are where he's most comfortable. In these two match-ups, he could do some serious damage, perhaps even against some of the well-known Koreans. But TvP remains an Achilles heel, and Beasty has developed something of a reputation for BM among Europe's protoss players. Beasty could certainly go far; he has the talent. But for an event like this, he needs the mentality, and a decent amount of bracket luck would go a long way.One of the hardest players out there to rank, like Socke, you never look good predicting where DeMusliM will end up. On one hand, look at who he's beaten. (NesTea! HerO!!) On the other, tournaments just don't seem to work out for DeMusliM in the sense of high finishes. Take IPL4, where DeMu was beaten 0-2 by MoOk, then went on to beat Zenio and CatZ 2-1 each, before losing 0-2 to Scarlett. Such is a DeMusliM tournament. Great wins against strong players, followed up almost immediately by crushing defeats against people you figured he could've beaten. Perhaps this sounds harsher than it should. I think DeMusliM is right on the edge of the 'elite player' catagory. Moreso than almost any other foreigner, DeMusliM lives and dies by the mindgames. He deploys cheese and abusive strategies with no remorse. Sometimes they work, feeding off of previous macro matches, or laying the ground for them. DeMusliM can go on killing spree when you least expect it. Sometimes the mindgames don't work, DeMu never gets that edge, or gets it turned against him, and it all goes to hell. So what will this be for DeMu? Depends on the match--ups of course. We know already that DeMu can beat the best in the world, especially in TvZ and TvT, but there are several top PvTers at Anaheim. They'll be tough.CrazymovING is another token Korean recruited to a foreigner team to give the team more depth. He is a fan favorite, as his hit and run tactics make for extremely entertaining games. Most notably, he took Hero to the brink in the first round of Code A by making nothing but mutalisks and zerglings. Last time at MLG, we saw him take 17th-20th, but in today's stronger player pool, he'll have to really put on his moves if he wants to get high enough to show off his trademark demented displacement on stream.With his Red Bull Battlegrounds invite, it's probably no longer accurate to refer to Illusion as 'up and coming'. The brightest talent to come out of the Americas since Sheth, (and Scarlett's up there too) Illusion hasn't actually *won* anything, but his skill has been obvious despite the result. Beating coL.GanZi in Austin was a big win, even if he couldn't manage to advance from the group. At IPL4, we ought to remember his run in killing off three Code S players before being eliminated short of the money. All of these performances have understandably given Quantic confidence in his abilities, and he'll be off at Anaheim with high hopes. At MLG, of course he'll again need to put together a heroic performance just to get anywhere near the final rounds, but then again, so will everyone else. Illusion has the motivation, the momentum, and the skill to make it happen. I have a feeling we'll be rating him even higher next time around.After taking the moral high ground in all those US immigration debates for years, I'm starting to understand the entire "they took our jobs!" mentality. It looks like both Golden and Sleep will be in the states for the time being, and they will surely win their fair share of online cups and knock plenty of Americans out of MLG open brackets before getting beaten by better Koreans. Luckily for us Americans, we have decades of experience in bringing over talented foreigners to our side, as they are usually unable to overcome the allure of our women, money and freedom. Rotterdam and viOLet were first, maybe these two will be next.Socke is a player who will make your predictions look bad. Being in the pools, he will certainly finish in a higher position than this number puts him at. At the winter championships, Socke went on an improbable run, thrashing PuMa, DeMusliM, CrazymovING, and TheStC before finally losing toHuK. At Spring Arena, Socke beat IdrA and ThorZaIN before barely losing to DongRaeGu. With numbers like that, putting Socke so late seems a bit weird. But Socke is is never an opponent who really strikes fear into the heart of his opponents. He's the personification of'solid'. He rarely makes dumb mistakes, doesn't rage, freak out, do random crap, or lose confidence. His PvT is super solid, and MLG has had nothing if not a lot of terrans. His PvZ looks very sure at Arena as well, and given current trends, perhaps that may prove more useful than normal. PvP then is the weak point for Socke - recent losses to Insur and Sickness in the IPL TAC attest to that. But PvP is PvP, and anything can happen there. So will Socke win or threaten to win? Probably not in the near future. But will he continue to rack up high finishes and a few upsets? Count on it.After Heart, Choya is our #2 candidate to do surprisingly well while everyone scratches their heads. While no one thinks that Choya will go very far into the championship bracket, the mere fact that he's remained a relevant player while fulfilling the responsibilities of being FXOpen's head coach is seriously impressive. He's been a valuable sniper for FXO in the GSTL, showing a level of strategic preparation that has often made up for his mechanical mistakes. If those GSTL performances are anything to go by, Choya could definite upset some of the more famous players with well planned builds.While his Korean teammates are busy preparing for Code S, Zenio travels to the Anaheim to take a shot at an MLG title. There is a reason that Zenio isn't at home, practicing with his counterparts; he is not yet on their level to compete in Code S. In contrast to successful Zergs such as DRG or Stephano, Zenio's play always seems to be adapted on-the-fly. If you watch a lot of Zenio games, you will find that there is a lack of consistency, a lack of pattern, and a presence of chaos. This has the potential to confuse his opponents, but you can help but wonder if Zenio this lack of a fixed, well-practiced style is what's holding him back. Food for thought, at the very least.Impressive at MLG Spring Arena, Grubby has been busy transcending 'The Grubby Line' even as we coined the term. The WC3 legend of course has more experience and a better mentality than almost anyone else in big tournaments, and lately his gameplay has been improving constantly as well, even at a high level. One of the keys for Grubby is his skill in PvP, which saves him a lot of unnecessary mirror match-up grief. But having mastered the art of PvZ timing pushes and lategame PvT control, Grubby really has no obvious weak spots. You still have the sense that he can just be killed through brute force; that players like DRG, MKP, or viOlet can simple out-muscle Grubby, or that he can be thrown off his game by an unknown opponent like Inori did at Arena. But if the Grubby line delineated the barrier between players who could beat the best and those who couldn't,Grubby has gotten better since, then another good run from the Dutchman may be in the cards. He's in the pools as well, which is a massive advantage.There are two sides to Ret. On one hand we have the Ret that won the Red Bull Lan in Orlando, the Ret that beat Mvp in macro games, and the Ret many have called one of the most talented foreigners to play this game. Or he could be the Ret that disappointingly lost to the same all-in twice against Parting at the Red Bull Battlegrounds, the Ret who recently lost to Grubby 1-7, or the Ret that often times fails to meet our incredibly high expectations of him. Ret has the potential to go incredibly far in this tournament, but at the same time, there is the possibility he will once again drop out with little more than a whimper.One thing I will say is that Ret's ZvP will be incredibly scary at this MLG. In the past few months, Ret has shown amazing ZvP, capable of hanging with the top Korean Protoss. But there are always small holes in his play that cause him to lose disappointingly. At Dreamhack Stockholm, Ret had an easy win versus Genius on Daybreak if it were not for neglecting to spine his 4th. At the Red Bull Battlegrounds, against Parting, Ret just seemed to have a lack of knowledge on how to hold a particular all-in. And although Ret played amazingly versus Squirtle and took him to the wire at the Battlegrounds, he made small, but key mistakes in the late game. If he's found the solutions to these problems, Ret should be stronger than ever.Inori looked pretty good last MLG Arena, where he defeated Thorzain, Losira, and Grubby, almost upsetting MC along the way. But more recently, he failed to deliver when his team needed him in the GSTL. Twice Inori was sent out against Zergs on favorable Protoss maps, and twice he returned to the bench with his tail in between his legs, begging for Symbol to avenge him. But this is MLG, and neither Inori nor the other members of the Team SCV Life will have someone else to clean up their mess. It will be up to Inori and Polt to show that TSL doesn't stand for Team Symbol's Lackeys.Alicia was once the great Protoss hope, the next big thing, and the one prophesied to bring balance to the force. Since then, he has done nothing but disappoint us and these days, his good performances, such as earning third in the MLG Arena qualifiers, are the exception rather than the norm. He also hasn't qualified for GSL in a while and now may only be the fourth best Korean Protoss on SlayerS-EG behind Puzzle, Crank, and JYP, as shown by SlayerS' player choices in the GSTL. Alicia is also not known for making huge upsets as some other people around this level, so expect him to place solidly in the middle of the pack.I had SaSe higher, (way higher, actually) but as consolation for dropping him a bit, I get to do his write-up. At the Red Bull Battlegrounds, we saw every side to SaSe; the unstoppable PvT that defeated both TaeJa and ThorZaIN, the fragile PvZ that fell to Sheth, and then tenacious PvP that wasn't quite good enough against MC. Every time you see SaSe play, he's impressive. His attention to detail in the little things, his ability to create unique solutions to gameplay problems; these are the things the things that define the Swedish protoss. Sometimes if you watch without paying attention or listen to an inexperienced commentator, you'll miss the little things that it feels like only SaSe is out to perfect. Often overshadowed in results by the brute-force style of NaNiwa, it's the finesse of SaSe that's really special. I put SaSe in the group of six foreigners that I think could hold their own in Code S. The results he achieves; getting the farthest of any foreigner in the IPL4 Open Bracket, making it into the money of the MLG Winter Championship, (teammate NaNiwa did marginally better in a much easier group, and was placedrounds father forward, go figure) and losing to the eventual champ at RB Battlegrounds, aren't as well known. But if you look at the details it's clear Quantic have a special player. The bracket advantages don't lie with SaSe yet again, but you can be sure he'll make the most of what he's given.Lucky did quite well for himself in a bygone day and age where Protoss players didn't really know how to take their third safely, deal with muta-ling backstabbing at all, or make good decisions in base trade scenarios. Now that Protoss players have become better in general, Lucky has lost his specialty match-up and fallen back to the middle of the pack. Despite this, Lucky still retains some characteristics that help him get just a little bit further that you would expect in tournaments: he's not afraid to go all-in, and he handles base trades more intelligently than most.Choose your starter:Ryung might have the most unique skillset of all the players competing at MLG Anaheim. His TvT is truly top class, and he could easily knock out title contenders like MKP, MMA, or Polt. Ryung's TvZ isn't quite as good as his TvT, but it will be good enough for him to play evenly against anyone short of DongRaeGu or Symbol.Unfortunately for Ryung, all of this comes at the price of being very weak at TvP. In particular, Ryung has trouble surviving past the first ten minutes against opponents who are aggressively inclined, and several of our beloved foreigners have built up their vs. Korea confidence at his expense.With the right brackets, Ryung could very well make it far in the tournament, and with some VERY good luck, he could even win it all... Nah, he'll probably get eliminated by Gatored in losers' round seven.Huk's hopes in this tournament should solely depend on one thing: Can he dodge Heart? Heart's aggressive play and tendency to all-in you at any given point seems to be a Kryptonite for Huk and a source of constant frustration. In the last three MLGs, Huk met up with Heart a total of four times and lost 1-2 in all four series. For all the hearts Huk consistently makes both in-game with probe waypoints and out-of-game on his chest, it's a bit ironic that the human incarnation of Heart would be such a consistent thorn in his side.JYP’s situation is similar to what it was when he first joined EG. He is a fairly solid player, able to take games and series off of the best. He was even called upon as Slayers’ last player in the GSTL, beating a Zerg and a Protoss, when Slayers knew the opposing team had no strong Terrans left. Which brings me to JYP’s biggest weakness, his abysmal 22% winrate in PvT. JYP is notorious for having the single worst matchup in all of top tier Starcraft 2 pro-gaming relative to his other matchups, worse than MMA's TvP, Ryung's TvP, and Mana's PvZ combined. While his PvT skills have definitely improved since his early days in TSL, they'll still be a huge hindrance to him getting far in this tournament. And who knows what will happen if he manages to match up against Ryung; perhaps neither player will be able to win and the games will drag out indefinitely.ByuL came on my radar after he joined Fnatic and immediately took home a three kill in the KSL. An fairly unheralded member of the family, ByuL recently gained a lot more attention after four killing LG-IM in the GSTL While not the most exposed and notable participant, everything I've seen from ByuL suggests that he is a one of the more fearsome players in attendance at Anaheim. Comfortable with a bunch of styles, (and being a recent BW switch, his cheese is well aged) with good mechanics, I put him higher on my list. But again, it's hard for some editors to put unknown talent above known mediocrity. ByuL may not perform up to his GSTL level, he may be jetlagged, nervous, or just plain not up to the level of competition at MLG. But those are factors that we can't account for. In the short while that he's been playing SC2 full-time, ByuL has been gaining ground extremely fast, and at the point where he can take down three Code S players in a row, that's damn impressive."Best foreigner after Stephano" is a prestigious title these days, and at this tournament, Thorzain gets it largely because he's the last foreigner to win a tournament. Thorzain has shown he can take games off top Koreans, but at the same time he's shown he's not immune to middle tier Koreans and top foreigners, as he was knocked out of MLG Arena last month by the Protoss one-two punch combo of Inori and Socke. Combine this with his tendency to lose to Sase in many international tournaments, and we can see that it's hard to say he's clearly better than the other top-tier international players. His once touted TvP has fallen to become his worst matchup and his source of ruin in many tournaments.Still, if anyone can solve a matchup weakness, it's Thorzain. His analytical and meticulous approach to the game inspires confidence in his ability to patch up any seemingly glaring weaknesses in his play. We saw this at the Red Bull Lan in Orlando, when he no longer wished to bethe spoon Terran and worked to incorporate consistent drops in his play, and at DH Stockholm, where he overcame his 1 - 10 record against Polt to win the championship. As long as the EG curse has not fully set in yet, expect Thorzain to excel, spooning those his path into a slow and methodical death.Poor Ganzi. He always produces good results (Code A winner, round of 4 GSL, consistent MLG placements), but his un-flashy play combined with his unassuming personality doesn't make for many fans. He's also not particularly strong or weak at a certain matchup and doesn't have huge quirks in this play, which doesn't make for many good storylines. You can probably expect Ganzi do well again at this MLG, but will his games blow you out of the park and will he follow up his wins with outlandish ceremonies? Probably not.It's disappointing to think that the Oz of the present might really be the player he is ultimately destined to be. After showing some great all-around ability to make the top four of GSL November, Oz has plateaued like he wants to define the word. His good but not spectacular play has made him a Code S regular who just lacks a littlecompared to the real title contenders.GSL is the environment where Oz has played his best so far, and he's actually done even worse in foreign tournaments. Besides a 4th place finish at Winter Arena, he's been surprisingly unremarkable for a former GSL semi-finalist and someone who was considered a top five Protoss player in the world (no other top 16 finishes at foreign tournaments). Oz will still be around by Sunday, but probably not past lunch.PuMa, PuMa, PuMa. What to say about PuMa? We know he's good, in fact, more than anyone else, we know just how good he is. We know his highs, but we also know his lows. So strong in foreign events, PuMa has met with nothing but futility in Korean ones. And as events like MLG and IPL have started looking more and more like the GSL, PuMa's results have dipped. With PuMa, there used to be a feeling of inevitability: the foreigners would stand aside and PuMa would take his cash. But now with this level of Korean competition... does PuMa really seem inevitable anymore? Or even a favorite? From history, we know that PuMa will probably stomp the foreigners he faces, and that should be enough for a solid finish. His talent is clear, and he has explosive potential that puts him up at this high ranking. But when he faces the cream of the Korean crop, as is certain, he can't be expected to advance much farther than that.He's back! Hopefully, we'll get a chance to interview Losira at MLG Anaheim and ask him where the hell he's been.After two great silver-medal performances at MLG Columbus 2011 and GSL July, Losira quietly disappeared like a Starcraft documentary. He mentioned in a recent interview after regaining Code A status that he simply allowed himself to get lazy, which led to an instant drop off in form. It's been almost a year since he's been a relevant player, and it would be interesting to hear the details on how his mentality changed during that period.In any case, Losira looks like he's about 85% of the way back to being the player we remember him as, and he's getting better fast. He stormed through Code A qualifiers, has been stomping people in online tournaments, and is LG-IM's best team league player. His 4-kill over TSL in the GSTL should count as his unofficial "I'm back!" announcement, even though it was immediately responded to with a "so what?" from TSL_Symbol as he reverse all-killed LG-IM.Here's a fun bit of trivia from IPL4: Smix gained more new fans than aLive. Yeah, it was that kind of tournament. And yeah, I guess aLive is that kind of player (I feel like I should remind everyone that he did happen to win the entire thing).IPL4 deserves some blame for somehow putting together a tournament format where the second place player was actually BETTER than the first place player, but at the same time aLive just had some really bad timing. Mvp had already monopolized all the fans of brutally efficient, often cheesy, play-to-win style macro Terrans, and there was really no reason for anyone to follow a similar player with three less GSL championships.While aLive's championship run didn't affect his reputation like it would have for other players, it did affect his play in a fairly normal way: he went into the oft-seen post-championship slump. After returning to Korea he lost to Leenock in Code A, and then proceeded to get bruised and beaten in a tough Up/Down group. He also failed to contribute much to FnaticRC as their Ace in the GSTL, leaving it to Moon and Byul to rack up the wins instead.aLive has been a consistently excellent Terran player for most of 2012, so we're confident he'll get out of his rut sometime soon – maybe even at this very tournament. Now, getting people to give a damn about his results? That's another problem altogether.Heart owes a lot to MLG and Complexity. Before MLG, Heart was a relatively no name, with no real results to speak of. Then, Complexity took a gamble, picked him up, and gave him the opportunities to travel abroad to show his skills. It turned out that MLG was the perfect fit for him as in the three MLGs he attended, he achieved 3rd, 3rd/4th, and 5th/6th in each of them.Heart’s tendency of all-ining more games than not may be his reason for his success. In MLG’s hectic format, players don’t have a full week to prepare for a few games as in GSL. Thus, an opponent doesn’t have time to carefully plan his build for a specific map to be safe versus all-ins and account for all possibilities. Players have to resort to more generic unpracticed builds. This is where Heart gets you. First, he throws you off with his all-ins at any point in the game, giving you the sense he is capable of any sort of play. Then, he hits you with his perfectly capable macro play, usually in game 3, when you’re on edge, trying to account for any and all plays he could possibly throw at you. By this point, most players will have succumbed to the pressures of both the gauntlet that is MLG and Heart himself. So to any players unfortunate enough to match versus Heart: Don’t underestimate him, because at MLG, you’ll be playing on his turf.Since setting the Starcraft II world alight in November of 2011, Leenock has reverted back to being a talented young player who still needs to work on his game. In particular, his championship victory over NaNiwa at MLG Providence marked the last time he won an important PvZ series, and right now he's another one of those Zergs who must live in constant fear of various two-base all-ins. The upside for Leenock is that he's continued to be a tremendous ZvT player, a very good ZvZ player, and his ZvP has improved a lot when he can get to the mid-late game.There's a certain amount of irrational faith in putting Leenock this high, considering his very middle of the road tournament production in 2012. It's because Leenock's first year as a player was marked by slow, steady growth that saw him work on his weaknesses to go from being a dangerous all-in user to an overall great player. He still has a lot of room to grow, and it's way too early to stop believing.Last MLG, seeded players had the privilege of picking their opponents and Polt was picked dead last, which speaks of how feared he is. MMA even choose MC, opting to play his worst matchup, rather than face Polt, a man who has given him nightmares in the past. And peoples' fear and reluctance to picking Polt was proved well-founded, as Polt eventually beat the favorite of the tournament, DRG, and went on to place 5th/6th.But Polt is not without his faults and flaws. He failed to win against Losira in the GSTL, even when he got to pick a favorable map and then got into a favorable position on that map. And he has made it clear that he currently struggles against Zerg, citing the new Zerg buffs as the reason. Still, Polt is one of the most consistent Koreans in foreign tournaments and the bet that Polt will make it incredibly far in this tournament is just about as safe as the bet that he will produce good games with his friend and nemesis Stephano when they meet for the 200th time this MLG.viOlet's story has to be among the best in Sc2. Mediocre, one-time Code S korean moves to Texas, becomes way better than he ever was in Korea. Now, he's just short of getting his next chance back in Code S, this time as a foreigner-conquering seeded player. viOlet really does have talent though; while he can sometimes do things a bit weirdly, and sometimes his map vision and multi-task aren't the best, viOlet has a killer instinct, a knack for always finding the one thing he can |
voters was down — sometimes dramatically so — in most states that have voted thus far. Meanwhile, the share of people who are somewhat or very liberal is way up.
This year, around 60 percent of Democratic primary voters said they considered themselves "somewhat" or "very liberal," up from around 45 percent in 2008 (once again, among states with sufficient exit polling data for both years).
So interestingly, though voters on both sides are less moderate than in the last contests, Democrats this year have more decidedly moved toward the "very liberal" end of the spectrum. Republican voters, meanwhile, are way more "somewhat conservative" than in 2012, but don't appear to be more "very conservative."
So what happened?
One thing to keep in mind: Republican turnout across the board is higher this year. That means there are still a few more moderate and liberal Republican primary and caucus voters this cycle than there were in the 2012 primaries — it's just that the number of somewhat conservative Republicans shot up way more.
Likewise, Democratic turnout is down almost entirely across the board. Interestingly, even with the sharp drop off in turnout, multiplying the exit poll data by the turnout numbers suggests that the raw number of "very liberal" Democratic voters is, in fact, up slightly from 2008. However, the number of moderate and conservative voters dropped off steeply. And even though the share of "somewhat liberal" voters is up, the raw number is also down.
But anyway: all of this could mean that a bunch of moderate and conservative Democrats who voted in 2008 stayed home this year, while a lot of those somewhat and very liberal Democrats from 2008 came out again. Likewise, it could mean that the Republican wave of turnout is driven largely by a bunch of "somewhat conservative" voters who weren't there in 2012.
And looking at the results so far, there are simple explanations to why this might be happening. The very-liberal Bernie Sanders is probably driving some of the turnout among very-liberal voters. It's likewise possible that the somewhat-conservative Trump is behind the bump in somewhat conservative voters in Republican primaries (while Ted Cruz does better among very conservative voters, and John Kasich gets more votes among moderates).
But then, it might not just be candidate-driven: it's possible that lots of people have simply become more conservative or liberal than they were four or eight years ago. This is also to some degree plausible, as there is evidence that Americans are getting more polarized.
In other words, there's a chicken-egg question here, with no clear answer — chances are, they're both right. To the degree that voters are more polarized, they're gravitating toward more extreme candidates. And Sanders and Trump also both happen to be very good at energizing people to turn out and vote for them.Introduction
Play Style
New Cards
Note: Playing with Shade of Naxxramas Shade Shade : Playing withis still something being worked out due to the newness of the card. My general strategy is to hedge on the cautious side with him. You should never unstealth yourto attack the face unless you have a clear plan to lethal in one to two turns. Unstealting to trade is usually what you want to be doing. That said, don't waste your Stealth attacking into a Deathrattle minion: you can get better value offby waiting to kill a bigger threat.
Can't touch this.
Sequencing
This is your best card,use
it to curve out efficiently.
Matchups
Handlock
Zoo
Hunter
Miracle Rogue
Follow HyperX:
This was a new Strifecro deck -- popularized by Kolento -- and when I first saw it, I decided to try it out and ran it to rank 11 (EU) by the end of Season four. Prior to this, my opinion of Druid was that it sucks if it misses its early drops. While I still think this is true, the new two and three mana minions in Naxx -- and in this build -- have shored up this weakness.Playing this deck gives me flashbacks to the Mage deck of Test Season 1. That Mage deck was stripped down to an efficient core and asked a question of its opponents: "here's my plan, can you stop me"? I finished rank one with the deck back in the day.This deck mirrors that Mage in that it consistently executes an incredibly strong game plan. The only weak matchup is Handlock which could be helped by adding reactive cards inand/or. Those cards, however, would hurt the deck in other matchups. Sure,can still do work against decks -- such as Warrior -- and a BK can take down a, but this deck is better off not diluting its main plan.Another reason why this deck needs to commit to its plan is the lack of draws due tos being played instead ofs. This, in turn, forces you to play all-in style since you usually only have a couple of cards in your hand by turn six. Your goal is to play something every turn and end the game on turn nine at the latest.The most important concept with the deck is that you spend your Coin andto ensure you never miss a minion on turns two through four: mulligan accordingly. You should always throw back thes and all cards costing four or more cost aside fromin Warlock matchup. Keep onlys, two drops, and three drops. If you have all of this already, you can consider keeping abut evenis mostly only useful against aggro. With Druid, and this deck in particular, it is very important to snowball the board in your favor.Spend yourand Coin wisely.I was not a big fan of thewhen the card came out. In a deck with double, however, the card is extremely strong. The synergies withonly continue when you consider's Deathrattle spiders. These tokens quite often result in eight, or more, extra damage for three mana. These fresh Naxxramas cards have opened up more plays for. In the past, you were more often forced to save the Roar to combo with. Now, however, all bets are off.is another card which has proven to be amazing. While it is not so good on later turns, as your opponent might cast spells such asorto kill it, there was a hole in the Druid's curve at three mana and this card is definitely more than filler.Having just the twos at three mana used to result in a lot of hero-power passing or trying to saveto push out a five-drop.was a decent card since you just would play it on three in most matchups and never look back. The problem with this line was that it would get a 1-for-1 at best. Theis much more resilient than any of our other options.Coining or Innervating a shade is often a good play; however, there are exceptions. While this card is one you really want in your starting hand, if you have a two drop and no other three, save your coin for a later turn. The Stealth on this minion is amazing. Aside from Hunters withs ands, the card is guaranteed to survive the early turns. Keep thes in mind against Hunter, you don’t want to trade this for a mad scientist. Hunter is one of the few matchups where you might want to play aover the, with its spell immunity, is incredibly sticky. Many decks, however, cannot support theas well as Druid. Taunting it up is incredibly strong if you expect your opponent will not play the. Cutting thes does, however, come at a cost. Withoutthere won’t be any Spell Powers, and the only draw effects in the deck now come from thes. As a result, this deck is pretty bad at top decking games. On the plus side, the deck is strong enough to end most games before it comes to that.feels to me like even more a Miracle killer thanAll I’m gonna say aboutis that the card is broken, but it might not get nerfed because it is a bomb against combo decks such as Freeze Mage and Miracle Rogue. Those solitaire decks are hated by a lot of people, and while Blizzard have stated that if a card is in every list they would nerf it, this one might stick around as is.There is one important thing in common with thes, thes,, ands: they are extremely tough to remove completely, and even if they survive only as 1-1s, they will still get stuff done in combination withWhen playing this deck, it is important to hit your minions on curve. As such, there is some redundancy at each slot on the curve. If you happen to draw multiple minions of the same cost knowing which to play first can make or break a game.At the two drop slot, we have the two token makers ofand. On turn two,is generally the correct play because it adds more power to the board. Later in the game, however, a case can be made for casting theif you happen to have both and two mana left over. The Creeper is more resilient later in the game and holding yourgives you an out to drawfor maximum value.At three,andare our options. Sincegets better over time, it is usually the priority. As mentioned above, however, this choice gets more complicated when playing against Hunter. In the Hunter matchupmay be correct if you don't have other minions to protect fromor you haven't seen anys.Five mana is the other place where we have some redundancy. This is also the slot where the call is the closest. Unless you specifically need one or the othermodes -- Charge to act as removal or Taunt on defense --is often the correct play. The reason to playfirst is twofold. Firstly, he is the more resilient minion; and secondly, the Charge mode onhas more synergy with your other finishers. The common theme between your five drops is that by this time you are setting up for yourso you need to have your guys stick around.Given that the minions in this deck are so hard to remove; therefore, your board is difficult to keep clear for most slow decks and yourbecomes deadly. If the slow decks, such as Warrior, can manage to keep up early they should doing fine. The good news, however, are that the draws that can keep up with us are very specific. Most slow control decks have completely dead cards against this deck which are aimed at other types of decks: reactive cards and high-cost legendaries are no help against our board.Handlock is one of the hardest matchups because they have the strongest board clears in the game. What makes it worse is the element of playing arounds while setting up for lethal. Addingwould help, but I would still not recommend it for ladder. There simply aren’t enough Handlocks around, however, to make this matchup an issue.If you do face Handlocks, I would just accept it as difficult and try to land an early kill with. The key to victory here is to take calculated risks. Often it is impossible to play around board clears ands so you will need to just pick a line and go for it.Zoo can be a bit tricky too. Cards such asands make their trades very effective. The trick to this matchup is recognizing that the Zoo player is actual in the control role. The role of the Druid player is to swarm the board and go wide with your threats. While the matchup is somewhat draw dependent, the Zoolock's edge is that their minions are better while yours are harder to remove.A good Zoo player must recognize that you have the better finishers. As such, Zoo must keep your board clear because they can't outrace aor well-timed. Overall, if you can outpace Zoo's ability to trade you should be able to take the game.Hunter is a good matchup. Granted,/ Unleash sounds scary because inevitably we will have many minions out on turn five. The truth of the situation, however, is that the number of cards they draw is irrelevant. The games against Hunter are so short that how much they can do with the big draw is limited by mana.The more important aspect of the matchup is making smart decisions in what to buff with. The best plan is to spread the Health boost and try to keep your minion Health consistently high. Mad-Scientists and twoHunter can be a bit tricky sometimes; however, the games still boil down to Druid being the aggressor. Without any ability to heal, Hunter is at clear disadvantage with going into the match.Miracle Rogue could've been a difficult matchup if it wasn’t for ourand Spetral Knights. As I mentioned earlier,can be extremely painful for them.is the best they can do against you, but there’s only onein almost all Rogue decks. Naturally, therefore, the key to this matchup is finding a safe opening for yours. You should be able to apply enough pressure to force their hand, but keepingout of combat with other minions is key. If you can resolve aand buff it with, the game is over.This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
Terrorist car bomb in southern Turkey kills two
Turkey furious at EU parliament’s vote to end accession talks
Terrorist car bomb in southern Turkey kills two
Aftermath of Thursday’s car bombing in Adana in southern Turkey (AFP)
A terrorist car bomb attack on Thursday on a government building in the city of Adana in southern Turkey killed at least two people and wounded dozens of others. The bomber fled in another vehicle, but was captured after police opened fire on the vehicle.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but Turkey has suffered numerous terrorist attacks in the last year, perpetrated either by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is recognized as a terror group by Turkey, the US and the EU or by the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh).
Turkey responded with air force warplanes that destroyed a number of PKK targets in southeastern Diyarbakir province in Turkey, the PKK stronghold. Turkey’s military said that six PKK members were killed, and that Turkish soldiers seized weapons and explosive substances in a warehouse following the airstrikes.
In addition to being targeted by numerous terror attacks, Turkey was targeted by an attempted army coup with tanks and jet fighters on July 15 that left 246 people dead and more than 2,000 wounded.
The seeming endless bombings and other attacks on Turkey have increased nationalist feelings and increased the popularity of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Daily Sabah (Ankara) and Middle East Eye and AP
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Turkey furious at EU parliament’s vote to end accession talks
The European Union parliament on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to call for an end to EU’s talks with Turkey to join the EU. The vote is non-binding, and may be ignored by the people in Brussels who are negotiating with Turkey.
Despite the symbolic nature of the vote, it has infuriated Turkish officials and people, who see a European Union not only unsympathetic to the coup attempt and repeated bloody terrorist attacks – all of which they believe would be completely intolerable to Europeans if the same things occurred on EU soil – but as even more sympathetic to the coup plotters and terrorists than to Turkey.
Despite the coup attempt and terrorist violence in Turkey, many Europeans have been appalled at the massive purge that Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pursuing – arresting around 150 journalists, detaining more than 2,300 judges and prosecutors, suspending or dismissing almost 130,000 public employees, and arresting Kurdish members of parliament, accusing them of supporting the PKK. And many people point to the fact that Erdogan shut down the country’s largest news organization, Zaman Media, months before the coup attempt.
There has always been a fairly high level of mutual xenophobia between Europeans and Turkey, some of it dating back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. The negotiations for Turkey to join the European Union, which began over ten years ago, have only increased the mutual xenophobia, as the EU made set one condition after another that the Turks considered unreasonable.
Within the last few weeks, Erdogan has suggested that Turkey might reinstate the death penalty, which was lifted in 2003 as one of the EU’s conditions. Reinstating the death penalty would certainly kill any chance of Turkey joining the EU, and Thursday’s symbolic vote by the European parliament may be considered a warning shot.
The EU needs Turkey as an ally for many reasons. One reason is the EU-Turkey refugee deal, which has cut the number of Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees entering the EU by around 90%. That deal is now hanging by a thread. Another reason is that the US and Nato need Turkey’s Incirlik air base for air operations in Syria.
Long-time readers are aware that Generational Dynamics predicts that in the coming Clash of Civilizations world war, the US will be allied with India, Russia and Iran, while China will be allied with Pakistan and the Sunni Muslim states, including Turkey. This prediction seemed fanciful when I wrote about ten years ago, but we’ve seen it come true step by step. The Barack Obama administration has been cozying up to Iran, and now the Donald Trump administration appears poised to cozy up to Russia. In the meantime, countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which used to be close allies, have become increasingly distant from and hostile to the US. So the trend lines continue to move in the direction of the ten-year-old prediction. Daily Sabah (Ankara) and VOA and Daily Sabah and Russia Today and Daily Sabah
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KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Turkey, Adana, Diyarbakir, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria/Sham/the Levant, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, European Union, Incirlik air base
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Receive daily World View columns by e-mailTHE nation's newest senator is a conservative "constitutional revolutionary" who believes states ought to be allocated High Court places and the right to initiate amendments to the constitution.
Dean Smith, the son of a policeman and a housewife from the Perth suburb of Mirrabooka, was the first person in his family to attend university. He has been a member of the Liberal Party since 1987 and is "emphatically" opposed to a republic. He is gay but opposes gay marriage.
"I would not be a status quo senator," Mr Smith, 42, said yesterday before flying to Canberra for his swearing in.
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He will fill the Senate spot of Judith Adams, who died in March of breast cancer aged 68.
He has been chief of staff to Bronwyn Bishop and was senior adviser to John Howard for the 1998 federal election campaign.
Since last year, Mr Smith has been owner and partner of lobbyist firm Smith & Duda Consulting.
Mr Smith said Western Australia's declining share of GST galvanised the issue of states' rights.
"I want states to have the ability to initiate constitutional amendments. I want High Court seats allocated to a state," he said.
"I want to see the authority of states reasserted."
Mr Smith is liked by some of the Labor politicians who have known him. Former WA Labor Party secretary Bill Johnston, now the state MP for Cannington, said they met 25 years ago when Mr Smith was a leader in the Young Liberals and he was a unionist. Mr Johnston described Mr Smith as an intelligent person who always "thought things through".
Mr Smith lives in Perth's inner north in the electorate of Defence Minister Stephen Smith, whom he described as a good local member.
The senator-elect is the eldest of three children whose parents run the Mirrabooka Swimming Club. "I count myself very lucky to have been able to come home from school and there was mum," he said yesterday.
He said he learned a lot from the reaction of his father Alan, a Vietnam veteran, and his mother Judy, when he told them more than 20 years ago he was gay.
"It taught me unconditional love, that they would still love me," he said.
Mr Smith said he understood some people would not approve of or agree with his views on gay marriage, but he held those views sincerely and for reasons that were important to him.
"I don't support gay marriage, and a lot of people are surprised to hear that, but that's just an example of people following stereotypes," he said.
"Marriage is a term that is attached to tremendous symbolism -- it is heavily laden with cultural values.
"I do absolutely believe in equality before the law, but I don't think the debate about gay marriage necessarily delivers that."Dolphins may have humans matched on almost every other prerequisite for planetary dominance, but they can’t finish the job because they lack hands.
“Unfortunately, they won’t ever mimic our great metropolises and technologies because they didn’t evolve opposable thumbs,” said Susanne Shultz, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Manchester.
Schulz is an author on a new study finding that dolphins’ social behaviour is basically an aquatic version of human society. Along with other whales, dolphins give themselves names, they have language dialects, they raise children as a group and they care for their elders.
“Many cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are also organized in hierarchical social structures and display an astonishing breadth of cultural and prosocial behaviours,”
Published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the study was not meant to gauge dolphins’ fitness for global domination. Rather, it’s a neurological study meant to figure out how humans got so smart in the first place.
The researchers were probing what’s known as the “social brain hypothesis,” a 20-year-old theory holding that humans evolved their giant brains as a result of living in complex social groups.
In the high school-like dynamics of a prehistoric tribe, cleverer members were more likely to have sex, keep the tribe safe and generally avoid getting their heads bashed in.
While other animals lived in simple pecking orders, early humans dwelled in a complex political world of alliances, manipulation and cooperation. As a result, goes the theory, the human species was organized in such a way that it favoured the quick evolution of increasingly witty members.
This is opposed to, say, lobsters, where being a charismatic genius doesn’t have quite the same genetic returns.
By analyzing the social dynamics of whales and dolphins, researchers wanted to find out if cetaceans might be locked in a similar cycle of evolving ever-giant brains due to their convoluted social lives.
The researchers profiled a cross-section of cetaceans, and assigned them a “social repertoire” score based on the sophistication of how they organized themselves. If a whale species had ever shown the ability to predict the mental states of others, for instance, their score got a boost. Baleen whales, by contrast, had their scores docked for speaking languages that were much more simplistic than orcas or dolphins.
Scientists then controlled for other possible brain-enlarging factors such as geography or the richness of the animals’ diet.
Their conclusion was that the more complicated a whale’s social life, the smarter they became.
“Our analyses demonstrate that cetacean brain evolution is best explained by the demands associated with maintaining and coordinating cohesive social groups,” it read.
Interestingly, whales weren’t particularly smart when, 50 million years ago, their dog-like ancestors first returned to the sea. It was only after forming into sleek aquatic mammals and banding into complex pods did the animals transform into the superintelligent beings we know today.
According to this study, it is no accident that large brains, “cohesive social bonds” and a penchant for complicated political maneuvering all seem to occur in the same species.
Lead author Kieran Fox, a Stanford University neurologist, said in a statement that scientists have often concluded that dolphin brains are not sophisticated to handle the “higher cognitive and social skills” of human society.
“I think our research shows that this is clearly not the case,” he said.
• Twitter: TristinHopper | Email: thopper@nationalpost.com22 June 2003 | msalifa
touching film; probably based on an actual event
This is a very moving film, most likely based on an actual event. The Carmelite priest,Lucien Bunel (1900-1945, "Pere Jacques") was founder and director of the Petit College d'Avon, near Fontainebleau. He was arrested on Jan. 15, 1994, accused of hiding 3 Jewish boys among his students, and was deported to the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp. He died in Linz, Austria on June 2, 1945. Malle's film depicts the intense trauma of Jewish children who were separated from their families and forced to take on a new identity in hiding, always afraid of being found out. They also faced the dilemma of how to maintain their Jewishness in the setting of a Catholic school. So, not just another war movie, this film depicts some of the real struggles facing hidden children, many of whom were saved by courageous Christians in Europe.Pete Rose, baseball's banned-for-life hit king, has something else in common with Donald Sterling, the NBA's newly banned-for-life owner:
Their recent significant others aren't even half their age.
Rose, 73, has a 34-year-old fiancee, Playboy model Kiana Kim.
Sterling, 80, was dating V. Stiviano, 34, until late April when TMZ leaked a private conversation she'd recorded in which he made racist statements that led to his ban from the NBA for life and the league trying to force him to sell his franchise, which he plans to fight in court.
Unprovoked, Rose jokingly took a jab at Sterling on Monday before making a one-night return to professional baseball to manage in an independent league game.
When asked if he had advice for Sterling on how to handle his ban, Rose responded, "All I can say about Donald Sterling is my fiancee is a lot better looking than his girlfriend."
That was no swing and a miss for Rose, who took his cut during a pre-game interview with reporters from the batting cage at The Ballpark at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport, Conn.
In 2013, Rose and Kim, a native of South Korea, starred in a TV reality series on TLC, “Pete Rose: Hits & Mrs.” The show was canceled after a six-episode first season.
Banned from baseball in 1989 for betting on Major League games, Rose made a successful return Monday night, managing the Bridgeport Bluefish to a 2-0 victory over the Lancaster Barnstormers in an Atlantic League game.
Rose also coached first base for the first five innings of a game which drew a standing-room-only crowd of 4,753 – 153 more than capacity.
A former Cincinnati Reds and Phillies star, Rose's one-night job was his first professional game since he lost his job as Reds manager in 1989.
Rose was permitted to be a guest manager for the Bluefish because the Atlantic League is not affiliated with Major League Baseball.
Beforehand, Rose also poked fun of a one of his players, former major leaguer third baseman/outfielder Joe Mather.
"I got on a couple of guys," Rose said. "One guy hit four straight balls to center field. I said, 'What are you practicing, sacrifice flies?'"
Monday wasn't all fun for Rose, who was saddened with news that Hall of Famer and fellow 3,000-hit club member Tony Gwynn died at age 48 after a four-year battle with cancer.
All the while, Rose did a little campaigning to have Major League Baseball lift his ban.
"If I'm ever reinstated, I won't need a third chance," Rose said. "Believe me."
WATCH: Playboy model Kiana Kim, Rose's fiancee, promote her calendar before a 2010 radio appearance in Philadelphia on 97.5 The Fanatic.In the first 48 hours after Devin Kelley opened fire at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 26 people, neither the FBI nor other law enforcement agencies asked for Apple's help in unlocking Kelley's iPhone or linked accounts —possibly missing a critical opportunity, according to one report.
If the iPhone had Touch ID enabled, investigators could have used Kelley's fingers to unlock the device, Reuters said on Wednesday. Investigators have officially refused to identify Kelley's phone, but sources for the Washington Post have claimed it's an iPhone.Touch ID normally forces users to enter their passcode after 48 hours if they haven't unlocked a device in the interim. Trying to brute-force a passcode lock risks the device self-erasing after too many failed attempts.In a statement to BuzzFeed's John Paczkowski, Apple said that it "immediately reached out to the FBI" after learning about the seized phone from a Tuesday press conference. At the time the head of the FBI's San Antonio office, Christopher Combs, complained that encryption was making it impossible to break into the phone."We offered assistance and said we would expedite our response to any legal process they send us," Apple continued.The phone is now sitting at an FBI lab in Quantico, Va. The agency's best hope at retrieving data may be submitting a court order for Kelley's iCloud account, since Apple has a policy of obeying such orders and supplying necessary decryption keys. If Kelley had iCloud backups turned on, his data could include photos and text messages.Want to teach your kids about the dangers of reverse racism? Show them Zootopia.
"Reverse racism is a phenomenon in which discrimination, sometimes officially sanctioned, against a dominant or formerly dominant racial or other group representative of the majority in a particular society takes place, for a variety of reasons, often initially as an attempt at redressing past wrongs. More often than not, reverse racism is in the form of giving special benefits or opportunities to people who belong to a group which has been under-privileged in the past. In effect, you are essentially committing a racist act by giving preference to one person over another because of their race, religion, or ethnicity, rather than their personal merit, skills, or knowledge."
Gazelle: "This is not the Zootopia I know. The Zootopia I know is better than this. We don't just blindly assign blame. We don't know why these attacks keep happening, but it is irresponsible to label all predators as savages. We cannot let fear divide us. Please, give me back the Zootopia I love."
Judy: "So that's it: prey fears predator and you stay in power? It won't work!"
Bellweather: "Fear always works. And I'll dart every predator in Zootopia to keep it that way."
"Real life's a little bit more complicated than a slogan on a bumper sticker. Real life is messy. We all have limitations. We all make mistakes, which means, hey, glass half full, we all have a lot in common. And the more we try to understand one another, the more exceptional each of us will be.... Look inside yourself and recognize that change starts with you. It starts with me. It starts with all of us."
In 1945, George Orwell publishedan allegorical novel that used animals to depict issues in his society. Disey's recent movie(orfor my U.K. buddies) is a modern-day, in a sense.was an allegory of George Orwell's society, just likeis an allegory of our society. Both deal with issues relevant to the societies they were written for. Of course, the film is first and foremost a cute kids' movie, but it deals with some very complicated and intense themes for a kids' movie about talking animals. After watching it once or twice, most people, including older children, will realize that it's about racism, discrimination, racial profiling, etc., but did you know that it actually touches on a much more complex aspect of racism? That's right,. For those who don't know, reverse racism (or reverse discrimination) is the term used to describe when a race or group of people that has a history of being oppressed turns and attacks or oppresses their former oppressors. To learn more about what reverse racism is, feel free to check out my stamp:Also, here is a helpful Wikipedia page that describes what it is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_… Some people are bringing up minorities as an issue here, because prey animals in Zootopia outnumber predators 10 to 1. I think that's beside the point, though, because the filmakers behind Zootopia didn't base the ratio off of blacks and whites, they based it off of real life prey animals to predators ( www.awn.com/animationworld/zoo… ). Besides, it's not just minorities who have been oppressed in the past. Native Americans, for example, were oppressed by whites even though they once outnumbered the whites in North America. The British once oppressed India, even though English were the minority in India. In WW2, Germany, allied with the other Axis powers, oppressed the entire world. Germany was not and is not a world majority. Today, many Germans now face racism and hatred for a crime that some of their ancestors committed. White Germans, white Gypsies, and others, all experience racism today for different reasons. Racism and reverse racism is not about who's a minority, it's about who's oppressing who. Racism is racism not matter who it's against, and as Zootopia shows us, ANY form of racism is WRONG. All these terrible situations are mirrored in Zootopia, even if in a playful, kid-friendly manner.From the day it hit theaters,was wildly popular, and for good reason. The film is full of hilarious jokes, the animation is stunning, the voice acting is fabulous, and its overall message is a good one of love and acceptance. Sure, it got some backlash from Christian fundamentalist groups because of its infamous naturalist club scene, but let's face it: the scene is only about 3 minutes long, it's about animals (not people), and hey, let's be honest - the scene is actually kind of making fun of nudist colonies. I personally would not have put a scene like that in a kids' movie, but it really isn't that bad, and it's easy to skip if it really bothers you that much. If you want to miss out on a great movie because of 3 minutes of sort of questionable material, that's your loss.opens with a scene from Judy Hopps's childhood where she puts on a play with her friends about how she wants to become a police officer. In her play, she expresses her happiness that predators and prey live in harmony, but also describes how predators used to oppress prey animals by eating them. The opening play clearly lays out the undercurrent of predator supremacy in the Zootopian world. Bringing the racial tension to the forefront is Gideon Gray, a heavy-set fox who shouts out "Bunny cop! That is the most stupidest thing I ever heard!"After her play, Judy sees a group of sheep and rabbits (prey animals) being bullied by a fox and a weasel (predators). When she stands up for them, she in turn gets attacked. The fact that Judy and the sheep get bullied for being prey animals in a town populated almost entirely by prey animals shows that the "predator supremacy" undercurrent is still quite strong.Take the words "sheep" and "bunny" in this scene and replace them with "n***er," and suddenly it becomes a scene from the 1950s.The scene ends with Judy putting her hat back on and saying "I don't know when to quit," implying that the movie will be about protecting prey animals from aggression and oppression from predators.Judy grows up and trains to be a police officer, where she finds that being a rabbit puts her at a disadvantage, not only just because she's physically small, but because the other animals don't believe a bunny is capable of being a cop. She faces racial discrimination. Instead of giving into it and giving up, she just tries harder.Judy earns her badge and enters the Zootopia Police Department (ZPD). All the other animals are large, and mostly predators. She hopes to get an interesting assignment, but instead gets stuck with parking duty because Chief Bogo doesn't believe she can handle anything else. In this scene, Judy even tells Bogo that she's not a "token bunny," further pushing the idea that prey animals in Zootopia allegorically represent oppressed minorities, (even though ratio of prey to predators is based off of real life wildlife.)Against Bogo's wishes, Judy practically assigns herself to find a missing otter, one of 14 missing animals. She talks to Bellweather, a small sheep who tells her that "us little guys need to stick together," further implying that prey are oppressed by predators. In her search for the otter, she meets Nick Wild, a red fox with a knack for conning other animals out of their cash. She also finds out that the otter disappeared not because he was kidnapped, but because he had "gone savage." She and Nick also read about "Night Howlers" being involved with the disappearances, which she falsely assumes to be wolves.When they find the otter, Judy and Nick also find all the other missing animals. They'd all gone savage, and Judy takes a video of Mayor Lionheart talking to a badger doctor, where they make the connection that the only animals going savage are predators. Mayor Lionheart expresses fear about how Zootopia will react to their mayor, who is a lion, a very fearsome predator. The mayor is arrested for hiding the evidence (0:45 in the video below.)After all that is brought to light, Bellweather the sheep is made the new mayor. She puts Judy, the smallest prey animal on the force, in charge of public relations for the ZPD, just like how we are beginning to see people of minority races get jobs simply because of their race. Judy is interviewed by the press and reveals that the only animals going savage are predators. She says that it "may have something to do with biology," unintentionally framing all predators as savages. Notice how she mentions how predators acted "thousands of years ago." This is very similar to how anti-white groups argue: they constantly bring up the enslavement of blacks, a crime which took place over a century ago, and of which all the perpetrators are long dead.The scene linked to here is probably one of the most explicit scenes in the movie about reverse discrimination.Zootopia is "gripped by fear." Prey animals react in near violence to predators. Predators all over the city get labeled as "savages." Many, such as Benjamin Clawhauser the cheetah, lose their jobs or are forced to work out of sight. When a peace rally is held, prey animals protest against it. Zootopia is ripped apart from the inside out.Do we see anything like this in our society? Isolated acts of violence against a formerly oppressed group of people inciting massive riots, protests, chaos, racial tension, fear, violence, etc.? Something like, I don’t know, *cough*blacklivesmatter*cough*?One prey animal, Gazelle, speaks out against the reverse racism.Judy looks at the changes happening in Zootopia, and says "I tried to make the world a better place, but I think I broke it." She gives up her police badge and leaves the ZPD. She returns home to her |
Ernst Schwarz: Deutsche Namenforschung. Band 1: Ruf- und Familiennamen, Band 2: Orts- und Flurnamen, Göttingen 1950.The Bitcoin currency has even been created to allow the online exchange of goods and services with a higher level of privacy and anonymity.
Backlash
If the growing demand for these new services is an indication of a backlash, it is seemingly being driven largely by a new generation of online consumer who, oddly enough have lived their entire online lives in the public and are not old enough to remember a time when every detail of our personal lives was not shared online.
Sarah Perez at Techcrunch wrote an interesting article titled “The Rise Of The Ephemeralnet” where she proposes that “Web 3.0” will be defined by the trend toward anonymity and secrecy. She suggests that while Web 2.0 caused a major shift in behavior by enabling user generated content to be easily shared, posted and embedded, the next major and disruptive shift may be a rebellion against the unintended violation of privacy it caused. For the current generation it was new and adventurous to share more and more details with an ever growing online network of friends. However, for the next, who has grown up with their lives plastered across their parents’ Facebook page, the new and rebellious act may be to undo all of the posts and remove all of the photos, wiping the slate clean in an effort to live more private lives.
My Take
I agree that the growth in ephemeral services is a trend. However I don’t agree that this is a trend that will define Web 3.0. I think that’s going a bit far, especially with an Internet of 50 billion connected things looming on the horizon.
I think that these services represent a growing niche accompanied by an increasingly sophisticated segmentation of online behavior where consumers switch to services that are private when they are doing something that they want to remain private.
As much as one might like to believe that users will rebel against services like Gmail that read private emails in a never-ending quest to improve ad targeting, that just hasn’t happened. Depending on whose numbers you believe Gmail became the most widely adopted email service in 2012 and public social networks like Facebook and Linked continue to show strong growth. Google even announced yesterday that it will now let anyone who finds you on Google+ email you, even if they don't have your email address.
That’s because consumers get enormous value from services that enable you to discover lost friends, get directions to your next appointment or promote your services and have largely accepted the exchange of privacy for convenience and cost. Perhaps we will see a huge backlash that will undermine the very economic foundation that supports Web 2.0, but it's more likely that we'll just see segmentation into (at least) three categories of services that will be used depending on what you are trying to do:
Public -Linkedin, Twitter, Website and Blogs will continue to be used for hanging your shingle, building networks and promoting your business.
-Linkedin, Twitter, Website and Blogs will continue to be used for hanging your shingle, building networks and promoting your business. Private (or Semi Private) - Sites like Path, Flickr and even Facebook will continue to enable you to limit sharing of more personal updates with friends, family and social groups.
- Sites like Path, Flickr and even Facebook will continue to enable you to limit sharing of more personal updates with friends, family and social groups. Anonymous – Services like Whisper, Burner, and Gryphn, among others, will be used for more private and “sensitive” communications.
The idea of anonymous online social networking isn’t new. For years, chat rooms, virtual worlds and MMOGs like World of Warcraft have allowed users to assume anonymous and even imaginary personalities to interact online. What we are seeing now is a mainstreaming of these types of applications into easier to use web and mobile applications.
I suppose the real question to ask is really whether ephemeral services can really be trusted to protect your privacy or whether security breaches like the one recently experienced by SnapChat will erode the trust needed them to continue to thrive.Buy Photo From the book Cannabis Cocktails, a photo by Glenn Scott of the Mezzrole Cocktail from Mixologist, chef, and writer known as the Cocktail Whisperer, Warren Bobrow. June 6, 2016, Morristown, NJ (Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)Buy Photo
MORRISTOWN – A Morris County author just released his fourth cocktail book, but this time he’s substituted the bitters for something a little different.
Morristown “Cocktail Whisperer” Warren Bobrow’s “Cannabis Cocktails, Mocktails, and Tonics: The Art of Spirited Drinks and Buzz-Worthy Libations” debuted earlier this month, and is a guide to adding marijuana to mixed drinks.
Bobrow, 55, said he was partially inspired to create the book by a family background in the pharmaceutical industry.
“My grandfather made a well-known brand of ‘snake oil’ that was in every medicine chest in America,” Bobrow said. “It did nothing, but it made him a wealthy man.”
Bobrow said that history also inspired his first book “Apothecary Cocktails: Restorative Drinks from Yesterday and Today.”
Bobrow, who grew up in Morris Township and went to Morristown-Beard, said he was raised with an emphasis on natural healing. Which is why he enjoys creating cocktails he says have natural healing methods, something he said marijuana can add to a drink.
“Cannabis is vilified but can be used as healing,” Bobrow said. “Cannabis may well be the only ingredient that actually did anything (years ago).”
Bobrow said he always planned to write a marijuana-themed cocktail book, as it mixes two things he knows well. A chef with a background in wine and history with marijuana, Bobrow said he has a palate for flavor that makes him the right person to pen this book.
“I’ve used pot since I was 13 years old. And I don’t like to drink traditionally, though I work with liquor,” Bobrow said. “Cannabis for me is easier to control. It treats me nicely, plays very nicely. And it also plays well with alcohol.”
Bobrow wrote “Cannabis Cocktails” in about three weeks, taking another month to develop the 75 different cocktail recipes.
While the book may create some controversy for its subject matter, Bobrow said edibles like “pot brownies and candies” are much more dangerous than adult cocktails, as they appeal to a younger audience.
“Adult cocktails are serious. It sends a different message,” Bobrow said. “This is not a book for someone looking to get high quick.”
Bobrow stressed that all of his research and experimenting for the book was done in U.S. locations where marijuana use was permitted.
“I didn’t do any of this in New Jersey. I do not have a cannabis card, so I don’t touch anything in New Jersey. I wouldn’t dare,” Bobrow said. “New Jersey is slow to the party, things haven’t changed a lot since the 1700s. As far as cannabis is concerned this is a very conservative area and that’s not changing.”
For anyone planning to utilize the book in New Jersey, Bobrow stressed to get a medicinal marijuana card and go through the proper channels.
“This is a very specific book. In New Jersey to use it legally you have to be part of the medical cannabis community,” he said. “I know it’s illegal (in New Jersey) and (readers) know it’s illegal. But of course I can’t control what people do with it.”
Still, he hopes readers take his work seriously.
“I didn’t make the book to be a stoner book,” Bobrow said. “These are legitimate cocktails that happen to have cannabis as an ingredient. I stress in the book not to take more than one (drink) per hour.”
Two recipes he singled out from his collection were the Thai-Spiced Ginger Beer, made with an ounce of medicated simple honey syrup, and the Mezzrole Cocktail, a bourbon drink that uses half an ounce of cannabis-infused vermouth.
The recipes are all his own, and while the cocktails work with all variations of marijuana, specific strains are recommended for each. For the Thai-Spiced Ginger beer, he selected the strain “Tangle,” while he believes the Mezzrole works best with a “Sativa-Indica” hybrid.
Bobrow said the book was thoroughly vetted by the legal team of his publisher, Fair Winds Press, before launching June 1.
“A book like this hasn’t been published before,” Bobrow said, adding it’s already been translated to French and Dutch. “I know it’s going to do well, it’s just a matter of how and where.”
Bobrow said he is working on a fifth cocktail book, which he said will be a compendium of his previous works.
Go to http://cocktailwhisperer.com/ to learn more about Bobrow, “Cannabis Cocktails,” and his other books, which are available for purchase online through major booksellers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Staff Writer Michael Izzo: 973-428-6636; mizzo@GannettNJ.com
Buy Photo Recipe for Thai-Spiced Ginger beer from Mixologist, chef, and writer known as the Cocktail Whisperer, Warren Bobrow, author of Cannabis Cocktails in his Morristown home. June 6, 2016, Morristown, NJ (Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)
Buy Photo Mixologist, chef, and writer known as the Cocktail Whisperer, Warren Bobrow, author of Cannabis Cocktails in his Morristown home. June 6, 2016, Morristown, NJ (Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)
Buy Photo Mixologist, chef, and writer known as the Cocktail Whisperer, Warren Bobrow, author of Cannabis Cocktails in his Morristown home. June 6, 2016, Morristown, NJ (Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)
Read or Share this story: http://dailyre.co/1tk0i7DCharles A. Lindbergh Jr. was the first child of celebrity couple Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, herself an accomplished aviator.On March 1, 1932, nurse Betty Gow put 20-month-old Charlie to bed at 7:30 p.m. on the second floor of the Lindbergh home near Hopewell, N.J.; when she went to check on him at about 10:00 p.m., she discovered that the crib was empty Charles Lindbergh recalled his reaction when he saw his son was missing: “I went upstairs to the child's nursery, opened the door, and immediately noticed a lifted window. A strange-looking envelope lay on the sill. I looked at the crib. It was empty. I ran downstairs, grabbed my rifle, and went out into the night.”Lindbergh could not find the intruder or his son. When he opened the envelope, he found a ransom note reading:“Dear Sir,Have 50,000$ redy 25000$ in 20$ bills 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5$ bills. After 2-4 days will inform you were to deliver the Mony.We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Polise the child is in gut care.Indication for all letters are singnature and 3 holds.”Local and state police were called to the home. They found muddy footprints and a ladder used to gain access to the nursery. However, the footprints could not be measured, and there were no fingerprints in the room. Instantly an impregnable wall of interrogation, prying eyes and blue steel was thrown around New Jersey's borders as city police and State troopers of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania began stopping cars at all bridgeheads, ferries, and at the mouth of the sub-Hudson Holland Tunnel,” wrote Time. “By morning a gigantic posse of police, troopers, U S. Department of Justice operatives, Coast Guardsmen, American Legionaries, Quiet Birdmen, civilians was combing an area from Boston to Baltimore. There had never been such an intensive search party since Booth shot Lincoln.”San Antonio’s stark inequalities in academic opportunity and achievement are rooted in the city’s history of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic discrimination, Christine Drennon, Ph.D, Texas geographer and associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University, told 150 city and school district officials, teachers and non-profit leaders who met Wednesday at Sam Houston High School.
“Historically, we created a racially, ethnically, and economically differentiated landscape,” Drennon said, “and then we applied a set of standards to the entire thing, regardless of geography, and with that, it had a lot of unanticipated consequences.”
Drennon delivered her talk, “A History of Public Education in San Antonio,” at the annual meeting organized by Teach For America, a national non-profit that recruits, trains, and places teachers in low-income schools. Historical census data analyzed by Drennon tells the story of how San Antonio came to be the most economically segregated city in the country, with one of the most inequitable distributions of student success.
Like many U.S. cities, she explained, much of San Antonio’s urban development in the early 20th century was rooted in developer policies that restricted wealthier neighborhoods to white families. This pushed Hispanics and blacks into areas with smaller, more haphazardly planned housing on San Antonio’s West Side and East Side.
To make matters worse, from the 1930s to the late 1960s, non-white neighborhoods were locked into poverty when federal red-lining barred their access to lending institutions.
Scott Ball / Rivard Report
“We didn’t do this because people liked to live with people they looked like – you know, we hear that all the time,” Drennon said. “We did this with policy. This was the United States policy that produced this very differentiated landscape of who looks like what and how much money is going in there.”
At the same time, as school districts increasingly became independent, district funding became localized, sheltering wealthier, predominantly white districts from tax obligations to the county, while excluding poor, non-white districts from desperately needed revenues. While most U.S. cities have locally funded suburban districts, San Antonio districting is unusually fragmented, with 18 independent school districts represented within the city’s boundaries.
The result, Drennon said, is a deeply entrenched legacy of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic segregation that continues to define the city. The effects are profound and far-reaching. Not only do the neediest schools have the smallest budgets, but the students they serve face an array of poverty-related issues and a dearth of community resources.
“The legacy is still there in our inner city schools,” she explained. “The legacy is still there with our inner city kids.”
Drennon, who grew up in an inner-city community in Utica, New York, has been researching urban geography and the connection between education and community development at Trinity since 2002. She received the Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association and SAGE. As research director for the Promise and Choice Neighborhood Planning Grants for the City of San Antonio, her work has had a vital impact on neighborhoods on San Antonio’s Eastside.
Keeping our history in mind, Drennon argues, allows us to more effectively address the real issues that low-income and minority students face.
While more equitable funding for low-income schools and accountability to higher academic standards are essential, these policies alone are inadequate because they fail to address the discriminatory history that created the city’s inequity in the first place. Policy-makers and education leaders also must consider the broader challenges that students growing up in poverty face, such as increased financial stress at home, higher mobility, and inadequate access to adequate nutrition, healthcare, and mental health facilities.
Closing disparities in academic outcomes also requires an awareness of the diverse non-cognitive skills and cultural tendencies these students adapt in response to their circumstances.
“We’ve created inequality, we created it through policy, we inhabited it, we took ownership of it, we live it, but then we try to treat the whole thing the same,” Drennon said. “And when stuff isn’t equitable, we wonder: ‘Well what’s wrong with you?’ We don’t think about some of the legacies that are actually built into the system.”
Following the presentation, approximately 30 city, school, and community leaders from across the city met to ask questions and share their perspectives. Across the board, there was a shared interest in collaborating across district and neighborhood boundaries.
“It’s really important that not only our educators, but our whole community, understand our history and understand how our neighborhoods have evolved,” said Ana Acevedo, education policy administrator for the City of San Antonio. “We have these different districts, and we have these different neighborhoods, but how is it that we all work towards improving our city as a whole?”
Others voiced a need to increase funding for schools as well as other programs with an indirect impact on academic performance. Several shared their surprise in the origins of San Antonio’s communities and its long-term effects.
“I’ve been in San Antonio off and on my whole life,” said M’lissa Chumbley, vice president of the Northside Independent School District board of trustees. “Learning how these areas were created and about the (racial and ethnic) deed restrictions, I never had any idea that we had any of that, and that helped to lead to some of what we’re seeing.”
The struggle to close performance disparities in San Antonio’s economically disadvantaged population – approximately 65% of students in the city – has broad effects on the city’s education level. For example, only 18.8% of students in San Antonio who take the SAT – roughly 66% of the overall student population – achieve a score that demonstrates college readiness. In other words, the vast majority of students even considering college are unprepared, lowering the city’s overall workforce productivity.
San Antonio compares unfavorably with other cities where a higher percentage of the workforce has college degrees, which has a major impact on the city’s economic development and its competitiveness.
With a better sense of the historical context that led to these statistics, however, Drennon believes we can bridge these gaps in San Antonio and serve as an example to the rest of the country.
“It matters a ton,” she said. “Partly because they’re kids. But it also matters because the demographics of San Antonio are the demographics of Texas in 10 years and the United States in 20 years. So how we educate people in this city matters. People are watching.”
Top image: Trinity University Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Christine Drennon presents the history of public education at Sam Houston High School. Photo by Scott Ball.
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After the School Finance Ruling: What Does it Mean for Texas?Local developer planning 10-story upscale apartments on the River Walk
Local developer Keller Henderson plans to build a 10-story upscale apartment building along the River Walk. Local developer Keller Henderson plans to build a 10-story upscale apartment building along the River Walk. Photo: Courtesy Photo: Courtesy Image 1 of / 129 Caption Close Local developer planning 10-story upscale apartments on the River Walk 1 / 129 Back to Gallery
Local developer Keller Henderson plans to demolish a row of buildings on East Commerce Street to build a 10-story upscale apartment building along the River Walk.
The Historic and Design Review Commission will vote Wednesday on the project, named "The Floodgate" after a nearby bridge and floodgate over the river. It will have seven floors of residential space and three of retail space, including restaurant space on the River Walk, according to HDRC documents.
RELATED: The San Antonio-area's most expensive hotel suites can go for over $10,000 a night
The project would remake a grungy stretch of East Commerce close to City Hall that houses a hot dog shop, a payday lender, a convenience store and a vacant storefront. A few doors down, Esquire Tavern owner Chris Hill plans to build a 24-story Canopy by Hilton hotel.
The building's most distinctive feature is a passageway running through it, connecting East Commerce and the River Walk, with retail space on the sides. It will also have an automated parking system, according to the HDRC documents.
Two of the buildings targeted for demolition are designated as historic landmarks, but their original facades were replaced in the '50s and '60s, and they've fallen into such disrepair that they're no longer commercially viable, Henderson said in a letter to the HDRC.
HDRC staff called the project "very attractive" and recommended giving it conceptual approval, but said that a stone wall on the site should be incorporated into the new building. Henderson will also need permission from the city arborist to remove a fig tree growing from the wall.The 1924 Democratic National Convention, held at the Madison Square Garden in New York City from June 24 to July 9, 1924, was the longest continuously running convention in United States political history. It took a record 103 ballots to nominate a presidential candidate. It was the first major party national convention that saw the name of a woman, Lena Springs, placed in nomination for the office of Vice President. John W. Davis, a dark horse, eventually won the presidential nomination on the 103rd ballot, a compromise candidate following a protracted convention fight between distant front-runners William Gibbs McAdoo and Al Smith.
Davis and his vice presidential running-mate, Charles W. Bryan of Nebraska, went on to be defeated by the Republican ticket of President Calvin Coolidge and Charles G. Dawes in the 1924 presidential election.
Site selection [ edit ]
The selection of New York as the site for the 1924 convention was based in part on the recent success of the party in that state. Two years earlier, in 1922, thirteen Republican congressmen had lost their seats to Democrats. New York had not been chosen for a convention since 1868. Wealthy New Yorkers, who had outbid other cities, declared their purpose "to convince the rest of the country that the town was not the red-light menace generally conceived by the sticks". Though "dry" organizations that supported continuing the prohibition of alcohol opposed the choice of New York, it won McAdoo's grudging consent in the fall of 1923, before the oil scandals made Smith a serious threat to him. (McAdoo's candidacy was hurt by the revelation that he had accepted money from Edward L. Doheny, an oil tycoon implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal.) McAdoo's own adopted state, California, had played host to the Democrats in 1920.[1]
The primaries [ edit ]
McAdoo swept the primaries in the first real race in the history of the party, although most states chose delegates through party organizations and conventions, giving most of their projected votes to local or hometown candidates, referred to as "favorite sons".
Ku Klux Klan presence [ edit ]
The Ku Klux Klan had surged in popularity after World War I, due to its leadership's connections to passage of the successful Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[3] This made the Klan a political power throughout many regions of the United States, and it reached the apex of its power in the mid-1920s, when it exerted deep cultural and political influence on both Republicans and Democrats.[4] Its supporters had successfully quashed an anti-Klan resolution before it ever went to a floor vote at the 1924 Republican National Convention earlier in June, and proponents expected to exert the same influence at the Democratic convention. Instead, tension between pro- and anti-Klan delegates produced an intense and sometimes violent showdown between convention attendees from the states of Colorado and Missouri.[4][5] Klan delegates opposed the nomination of New York Governor Al Smith because Smith was a Roman Catholic and an opponent of Prohibition, and most supported William Gibbs McAdoo. Non-Klan delegates, led by Sen. Oscar Underwood of Alabama, attempted to add condemnation of the organization for its violence to the Democratic Party's platform. The measure was narrowly defeated, and the anti-KKK plank was not included in the platform.[4]
Roosevelt comeback [ edit ]
Smith's name was placed into nomination by Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a speech in which Roosevelt dubbed Smith "The Happy Warrior".[6] Roosevelt's speech, which has since become a well-studied example of political oratory,[7] was his first major political appearance since the paralytic illness he had contracted in 1921.[8] The success of this speech and his other convention efforts in support of Smith signaled that he was still a viable figure in politics, and he nominated Smith again in 1928.[9] Roosevelt succeeded Smith as governor in 1929, and went on to win election as president in 1932.
Results [ edit ]
The first day of balloting (June 30) brought the predicted deadlock between the leading aspirants for the nomination, William G. McAdoo of California and Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, with the remainder divided mainly between local "favorite sons". McAdoo was the leader from the outset, and both he and Smith made small gains in the day's fifteen ballots, but the prevailing belief among the delegates was that the impasse could only be broken by the elimination of both McAdoo and Smith and the selection of one of the other contenders; much interest centred about the candidacy of John W. Davis, who also increased his vote during the day from 31 to 61 (with a peak of 64.5 votes on the 13th and 14th ballots). Most of the favorite son delegations refused to be stampeded to either of the leading candidates and were in no hurry to retire from the contest.[11]
In the early balloting many delegations appeared to be jockeying for position, and some of the original votes were purely complimentary and seemed to conceal the real sentiments of the delegates. Louisiana, for example, which was bound by the "unit rule" (all the state's delegate votes would be cast in favor of the candidate favored by a majority of them), first complimented its neighbor Arkansas by casting its 20 votes for Sen. Joseph T. Robinson, then it switched to Sen. Carter Glass, and on another ballot Maryland Gov. Albert C. Ritchie got the twenty, before the delegation finally settled on John W. Davis.
There was some excitement on the tenth ballot, when Kansas abandoned Gov. Jonathan M. Davis and threw its votes to McAdoo. There was an instant uproar among McAdoo delegates and supporters, and a parade was started around the hall, the Kansas standard leading, with those of all the other McAdoo states coming along behind, and pictures of "McAdoo, Democracy's Hope", being lifted up. After six minutes the chairman's gavel brought order and the roll call resumed, and soon the other side had something to cheer, when New Jersey made its favorite son, Gov. George S. Silzer, walk the plank and threw its votes into the Smith column. This started another parade, the New York and New Jersey standards leading those of the other Smith delegations around the hall while the band played "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching".
First ballot [ edit ]
Fifteenth ballot [ edit ]
Twentieth ballot [ edit ]
McAdoo and Smith each evolved a strategy to build up his own total slowly. Smith's trick was to plant his extra votes for his opponent, so that McAdoo's strength might later appear to be waning; the Californian countered by holding back his full force, though he had been planning a strong early show. But by no sleight of hand could the convention have been swung around to either contestant. With the party split into two assertive parts, the rule requiring a two-thirds majority for nomination crippled the chances of both candidates by giving a veto each could—and did—use. McAdoo himself wanted to drop the two-thirds rule, but his Protestant supporters preferred to keep their veto over a Catholic candidate, and the South regarded the rule as protection against a northern nominee unfavorable to southern interests. At no point in the balloting did Smith receive more than a single vote from the South and scarcely more than 20 votes from the states west of the Mississippi; he never won more than 368 of the 729 votes needed for nomination, though even this performance was impressive for a Roman Catholic. McAdoo's strength fluctuated more widely, reaching its highest point of 528 on the seventieth ballot. Since both candidates occasionally received purely strategic aid, the nucleus of their support was probably even less. The remainder of the votes were divided among dark horses and favorite sons who had spun high hopes since the Doheny testimony; understandably, they hesitated to withdraw their own candidacies as long as the convention was so clearly divided.
Thirtieth ballot [ edit ]
As time passed, the maneuvers of the two factions took on the character of desperation. Daniel C. Roper even went to Franklin Roosevelt, reportedly to offer Smith second place on a McAdoo ticket. For their part, the Tammany men tried to prolong the convention until the hotel bills were beyond the means of the delegates who had travelled to the convention. The Smith backers also attempted to stampede the delegates by packing the galleries with noisy rooters. Senator James Phelan of California, among others, complained of "New York rowdyism". But the rudeness of Tammany, and particularly the booing accord to Bryan when he spoke to the convention, only steeled the resolution of the country delegates. McAdoo and Bryan both tried to reassemble the convention in another city, perhaps Washington, D.C. or St. Louis.
Forty-second ballot [ edit ]
Sixty-first ballot [ edit ]
As a last resort, McAdoo supporters introduced a motion to eliminate one candidate on each ballot until only five remained, but Smith delegates and those supporting favorite sons managed to defeat the McAdoo strategy. Smith countered by suggesting that all delegates be released from their pledges—to which McAdoo agreed on condition that the two-thirds rule be eliminated—although Smith fully expected that loyalty would prevent the disaffection of Indiana and Illinois votes, both controlled by political bosses friendly to him. Indeed, Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts expressed the sentiment that moved Smith backers: "We must continue to do all that we can to nominate Smith. If it should develop that he cannot be nominated, then McAdoo cannot have it either." For his part, McAdoo would angrily quit the convention once he lost: but the sixty-first inconclusive round—when the convention set a record for length of balloting—was no time to admit defeat.
Seventieth ballot [ edit ]
Samuel Moffett Ralston
It had seemed for a time that the nomination could go to Samuel Ralston, an Indiana senator and popular ex-governor. Advanced by the indefatigable boss Thomas Taggart, Ralston's candidacy might look for some support from Bryan, who had written, "Ralston is the most promising of the compromise candidates." Ralston was also a favorite of the Klan and a second choice of many McAdoo men. In 1922 he had launched an attack on parochial schools that the Klan saw as an endorsement of its own views, and he won several normally Republican counties dominated by the Klan. Commenting on the Klan issue, Ralston said that it would create a bad precedent to denounce any organization by name in the platform. Much of Ralston's support came from the South and West—states including Oklahoma, Missouri, and Nevada, with their strong Klan elements. McAdoo himself, according to Claude Bowers, said: "I like the old Senator, like his simplicity, honesty, record"; and it was reported that he told Smith supporters he would withdraw only in favor of Ralston. As with John W. Davis, Ralston had few enemies, and his support from men as divergent as Bryan and Taggart cast him as a possible compromise candidate. He passed Davis, the almost consistent third choice of the convention, on the fifty-second ballot; but Taggart then discouraged the boom for the time being because the McAdoo and Smith phalanxes showed no signs of weakening. On July 8, the eighty-seventh ballot showed a total for Ralston of 93 votes, chiefly from Indiana and Missouri; before the day was over, the Ralston total had risen to almost 200, a larger tally than Davis had ever received. Most of these votes were drawn from McAdoo, to whom they later returned.
Numerous sources indicate that Taggart was not exaggerating when he later said: "We would have nominated Senator Ralston if he had not withdrawn his name at the last minute. It was a near certainty as anything in politics could be. We had pledges of enough delegates that would shift to Ralston on a certain ballot to have nominated him." Ralston himself had wavered on whether to make the race; despite the doctor's stern recommendation not to run and the illness of his wife and son, the Senator had told Taggart that he would be a candidate, albeit a reluctant one. But the three-hundred pound Ralston finally telegraphed his refusal to go on with it; sixty-six years old at the time of the convention, he would die the following year.
Seventy-seventh ballot [ edit ]
Eighty-seventh ballot [ edit ]
One hundredth ballot [ edit ]
One hundred third ballot [ edit ]
Governor Charles Wayland Bryan
The nomination, stripped of all honor, finally was awarded to John W. Davis, a compromise candidate, on the one hundred third ballot, after the withdrawal of Smith and McAdoo.[13] Davis had never been a genuine dark horse candidate; he had almost always been third in the balloting, and by the end of the twenty-ninth round he was the betting favorite of New York gamblers. There had been a Davis movement at the 1920 San Francisco convention of considerable size; however, Charles Hamlin wrote in his diary, Davis "frankly said... that he was not seeking [the nomination] and that if nominated he would accept only as a matter of public duty". For Vice-President, the Democrats nominated the able Charles W. Bryan, governor of Nebraska, brother of William Jennings Bryan, and for many years editor of The Commoner. Loquacious beyond endurance, Bryan attacked the gas companies of Nebraska and bravely tried such socialistic schemes as a municipal ice plant for Lincoln. In 1922 he had won the governorship by promising to lower taxes. Bryan received little more than the necessary two-thirds vote, and no attempt was made to make the choice unanimous; booes were sounding through the Garden. The incongruous teaming of the distinguished Wall Street lawyer and the radical from a prairie state provided not a balanced but a schizoid ticket, and because the selection of Bryan was reputed to be a sop to the radicals, many delegates unfamiliar with Davis's actual record came to identify the lawyer with a conservatism in excess even of that considerable amount he did indeed represent.
Full Balloting [ edit ]
(1-20) Presidential Ballot 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th 20th J.W. Davis 31 32 34 34 34.5 55.5 55 57 63 57.5 59 60 64.5 64.5 61 63 64 66 84.5 122 McAdoo 431.5 431 437 443.6 443.1 443.1 442.6 444.6 444.6 471.6 476.3 478.5 477 475.5 479 478 471.5 470.5 474 432 Smith 241 251.5 255.5 260 261 261.5 261.5 273.5 278 299.5 303.2 301 303.5 306.5 305.5 305.5 312.5 312.5 311.5 307.5 Cox 59 61 60 59 59 59 59 60 60 60 60 60 60 60 60 60 60 60 60 60 Harrison 43.5 23.5 23.5 20.5 20.5 20.5 20.5 20.5 20.5 31.5 20.5 21.5 20.5 20.5 20.5 0 0 0 0 0 Underwood 42.5 42 42 41.5 41.5 42.5 42.5 48 45.5 43.9 42.5 41.5 40.5 40.5 39.5 41.5 42 39.5 39.5 45.5 Silzer 38 30 28 28 28 28 28 28 28 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Ferris 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 6.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Ralston 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30.5 30.5 32.5 31.5 31.5 31 31 31 30 30 31 30 Glass 25 25 29 45 25 25 25 26 25 25 25.5 26 25 24 25 25 44 30 30 25 Ritchie 22.5 21.5 22.5 21.5 42.9 22.9 20.9 19.9 17.5 17.5 17.5 17.5 17.5 17.5 17.5 17.5 17.5 18.5 17.5 17.5 Robinson 21 41 41 19 19 19 19 21 21 20 20 19 19 19 20 46 28 22 22 21 J.M. Davis |
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This Queen-sized bed measures 60 by 80 inches (measured from bulge to bulge) and rises to 22 inches from the floor. It deflates completely for storage and it includes a duffel bag with shoulder strap. It has a 600 pound weight capacity.English is not my native language, so I might be misinterpreting your first sentence. But are you saying that I'm having a big mouth because I wasn't there?
Well, it wasn't meant to come across that way at all. The message is: Strong people are useful people. Little 70kg manlets or girls who didn't learn to fight back are not. If you are an activist, you need to have a plan to defend yourself and others. This does not necessarily mean that if you resort to violence that it should be devastating. But you can't just throw punches and expect nothing to come back. You cannot outrun everybody, so be safe. When confronted, it's a nice feeling to know you do stand a change. I'm always worried about you skinny comrades out there. I want all of you not only courageous, but strong enough to defend yourselves.Disney Will Alter Song in 'Aladdin' : Movies: Changes were agreed upon after Arab-Americans complained that some lyrics were racist. Some Arab groups are not satisfied.
The altered lyric, however, did not satisfy Arab groups. It was "nowhere near adequate, considering the racism depicted in 'Aladdin,' " said Don Bustany, the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Disney said the change was made only after the studio obtained approval from the estate of the late lyricist Howard Ashman and from his collaborator, composer Alan Menken. Both won Oscars for their work on "Aladdin."
In a rare instance of a major studio changing a film after its release, the Walt Disney Co. said Friday it will alter two lines of the lyrics in the animated musical "Aladdin," which some Arab-Americans have criticized as racist.
The altered lyrics, which were written as an alternate version by Ashman, are:
Oh, I come from a land
From a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam.
Where it's flat and immense
And the heat is intense,
It's barbaric, but hey, it's home.
Disney distribution president Dick Cook said the change was made after meetings with members of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, but "it was something we did because we wanted to do it. In no way would we ever do anything that would be insensitive to anyone. So on reflection, we changed it."
The new lyrics will be seen on the home video format, which will be released Oct. 1, and in any subsequent theatrical release of the film. "Aladdin," with a U.S. box-office gross of $207 million since its release last November, is the most successful animated feature ever and is a highly anticipated product for the home video market.
Albert Mokhiber, president of the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said Friday that the committee also sought to have the word barbaric removed from the lyric and will continue to press for that. Disney has said the word was used in all versions of Ashman's verses and will not be changed.
Cook said, " 'Barbaric' refers to the land and the heat, and not to the people."
"The changes were the right thing to do," he said, "but we are still one word away from being pleased. We remain concerned that (Disney Co. Chairman) Michael Eisner has yet to respond to our letter or to meet with us."
Mokhiber said the message to him "is that we are not worthy of his time or attention. Certainly I think it would be different if the situation involved African-Americans or Jewish-Americans."
Bustany said: "There still remains the very sleazy, burlesque character in the prologue and the scene where a merchant is going to cut off the hand of Princess Jasmine because she took an apple from his stand to give to a hungry child.
Cook said "Aladdin," which is loosely based on the stories of the "Arabian Nights" should be judged as "an entire work where the hero Aladdin, and the Princess Jasmine also are Arab."This is another case where introducing the ideals of the project are best left to the artist:
“From the deeper and most ancient past of the Mesopotamic Culture, those who live heavens and subsoils, Gods and Demons, fight one against the other to reach the Eternity, sustaining the entire balance of the Universe; spreading their ancestral message to the mankind through Lalartu, the Greatest Herald, the one who is the Spectre Essence, the Mask Carrier of Fecundity, the Traveller of the Heavens Gate Kadingir, Itinerant Spirit of the Twelfth Planet. Amongst the outermost loneliness, the emptiness and spiritual dismay, the ancient and secret forbidden language with the unpronounceable name, will guide you throughout an introspective and emotional journey across Occult and Ancient Connections, Esoterically and Rituals Boundings, Cosmogony and Cosmology, Universe and Earth, where the Highest and Heavenly Angers, the Strongest Energies which reign the semisphere of the Underworld, will arise through the darkest and deepest sensations of the Self and the Soul, of the Everything and the Nothing.”
Call that rhetoric, rantings of a madman, or personally just plain interesting; the music suits these dark ideals quite well. Kadingir is the pendulum swinging between violent night terrors and eerie visions. The album is a pretty even 50/50 ratio of exquisite dark ambient tracks and more straight-forward black metal aggression. This results in a fair amount of dynamice and a truly immersive experience. The harsher parts seem harsher while the quiet moments all the more anxiety-inducing. As a result, it is best played from start to finish.
That being said, there are plenty of solid tracks to sink one's teeth into. The first thing that really struck me about the heavier moments is the vocals. The guitars do a good job of creating imposing melodies on firey tremolos and doomy chord progressions, but it is the unholy ripping of the screeches and grunts that took me in its clutches. I have said time and again that presence is crucial when it comes to crafting a black metal release that stands out in the sea of pretenders. Titaan lives up to its name in this respect. This is apparent from the first proper track, "Nis Ilim Zakaru," and exemplified even further on "Titaan."
So it was the vox that got me started, what made me stick around? Again, it has a lot to do with the eb and flow of styles. Aside from the reverb-heavy distortion and drumming, Titaan utilizes everything from ambient noise to acoustic guitars to Emperor-ish symphonics to additional percussion. Transitions between can be smooth and foreboding, or stark and disconcerting as with the sudden jump to the repeated mantra and timpani(?) strikes of "Itima." In line with the artist's ambitions, I really do feel as if I am being taken on a journey through time and space and encountering various layers of belief and mythology.
Ultimately, Kadingir is a mind-contorting trip I recommend taking. If you find yourself unsure of the ambient bits, a nice starting place might be the infinitely more aggressive "Sebet Babi," which almost reaches the brutality of Gloom, albeit still awash in a blackened, cavern-like aesthetic. That should get you going, but I assure you that the breaks in between add volumes to the overall effect. So here's to starting 2016 strong with the first rock solid BM release to pass my ears. Get cracking.Kostya Novoselov, one of two scientists instrumental in discovering graphene, has made a breakthrough with the so-called revolutionary material that could herald the arrival of flexible, transparent and more efficient electronic devices.
The Nobel laureate led a team from the University of Manchester in developing LEDs engineered at an atomic level that could be used in the next generation of smartphones, tablets and televisions.
"As our new type of LEDs only consist of a few atomic layers of 2D materials they are flexible and transparent," said Freddie Withers, Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.
"We envisage a new generation of optoelectronic devices to stem from this work, from simple transparent lighting and lasers to more complex applications."
What is graphene? Graphene is a one-atom-thick material made of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice that is 200-times stronger than steel, more conductive than copper and as flexible as rubber. It has been touted as a "wonder material" by scientists for its remarkable properties and vast range of uses, which include everything from flexible smartphone screens to artificial retinas.
Graphene was first isolated by Novoselov and his colleague Andre Geim in 2003 but attempts to find commercial applications for the one-atom-thick material have proved notoriously difficult.
The material's unique properties hold huge potential and the latest discovery could help it fulfil its promise of revolutionising the electronics industry.
Novoselov's team built heterostructures - layers of 2D materials stacked on top of each other - to enable functionality of the material and explore new possibilities for graphene-based optoelectronics.
"By preparing the heterostructures on elastic and transparent substrates, we show that they can provide the basis for flexible and semi-transparent electronics," Novoselov said.
"The range of functionalities for the demonstrated heterostructures is expected to grow further on increasing the number of available 2D crystals and improving their electronic quality."
Novoselov's research is published in the journal Nature Materials.My body shut down after we lost Game 7 of the World Series.
Literally.
It was a physical thing. I just kind of got sick. I actually had to wake up that next morning after we lost and head back over to the field to have a fluids IV put in.
But even before that, things had started happening so fast after the game ended that it was tough not to be a little thrown off by it all. You hear about what it might be like after a World Series–deciding Game 7 from players who have experienced it before. And you think you understand what they’re saying at the time, but when you lose Game 7 of the World Series, at home, after being up three games to one, there’s a lot to process.
Going into that game, you know it will be the last one of the year no matter what, so there’s no taking it easy. You leave it all out there on the field. You exhaust every last bit of energy and willpower you have.
And then … you lose.
When you walk back into the clubhouse, you’re just so emotionally and physically spent. And almost immediately there are people telling you that you have five minutes to get your act together before the media arrives.
Five minutes. Five.
At the time, I distinctly remember thinking, How am I possibly supposed to do this? But that obligation comes with being a professional. So you decompress as fast as you can and take a second to think about what you might want to say to get your words right.
And before you know it … you’re giving an interview while your mind is still trying to process the whole situation.
But everything moves so fast, and things begin to overlap. While I was answering the first few media questions shouted my way, I remember doing my best to give my responses, but my mind was somewhere else.
I was thinking, Holy crap, I can’t believe we just did that. I can’t believe that we had a 3–1 lead in the World Series and we didn’t win.
Taylor Baucom/The Players' Tribune
It probably sounds weird, but I almost feel like my body knew I was in the World Series last November, and as soon as there were no more games left it just kind of collapsed on me. I had these crazy stomach pains that started the morning after Game 7 and wouldn’t go away, so that’s when I headed back over to the field for the IV. I also became sick the following few days as well.
Awesome.
And, you know, that’s just the physical side of it.
After a series like that, you need to kind of take some time to mentally regroup — just for your own sanity. While you’re trying to do that, though, you can’t help but think back and second-guess certain things. You think, What if I would’ve hit that one pitch that I let pass? Or, What if I had shifted a step or two more to the left?
It’s tough to get your mind off it, in all honesty. And everywhere you go, you’re reminded of that series, which makes it even tougher to get back to normal.
It also doesn’t help when you were born and raised in the city of the team that just cost you a world championship.
Chicago’s my hometown.
It’s where I live when I’m not playing baseball.
So, yeah, tough break.
People would joke with me, saying, “Admit it, you’re kinda happy the Cubs won!”
Are you out of your damn mind?
Be that as it may, there was no way I was going to head back there right away. Are you kidding me!
For those first few days, I holed up at my town house in Cleveland and just laid low in the man cave. It’d be: movie, TV, order food, movie, movie, movie, order food, TV. There was no way I was watching sports. I didn’t leave that room except to go to the bathroom and to grab my meals.
When I finally did head back to Chicago, it was different. In past years, I’d go out and have fun on the weekends — meet up with friends, have dinner, maybe hit a bar. This offseason, I just couldn’t do it. I knew I was gonna see that blue W everywhere, and now that I’m a little more recognizable, it was a given that I would have to deal with hecklers.
I knew I didn’t need some drunk idiot coming up to me and talking s*** about something he watched on TV when he doesn’t understand how much that series meant to me … how much I had put into trying to win it all.
No thanks.
I think I went out maybe three or four times all offseason.
And when I did, or when I was on social media, or at the gym, it seemed like the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was how we lost after being up 3–1.
As much as you prepare yourself for that, and plan out in your head how you’re going to handle it, sometimes it just doesn’t happen the way you think it will.
After I had been home for about a week, I needed to fly out of O’Hare on a super early flight, and this guy at the airport screamed at me, “Go, Cubs, Go!” It wasn’t a big deal, really. But I’m not a morning person, and it was 6 a.m. You’re not gonna get my PC response to say the least. Nor is that guy going to get an apology from me.
I just didn’t handle it well. I think I may have cursed at him. I’m not proud of that, but I’m a human being. You know? And that was my response at the time.
After it happened, I was like, If that’s how you’re gonna handle it, it’s probably better just to avoid people altogether.
So I went out a few times during the winter with family and good friends — who were always super supportive and showed me love — but that was pretty much it. Other than that, I kept to myself a lot this offseason. And, of course, when I was alone I found myself constantly thinking about what had happened in that series.
If I’m being honest, there is something different about being up 3–1 in a series. Usually players don’t want to talk about this, but there’s something there. Jason Kipnis
As thousands and thousands of “super intelligent and highly respected” Internet trolls have reminded me during the past six months, my team blew a 3–1 lead in the World Series and lost Game 7 at home.
At this point, “3–1” is thrown around like some sort of punch line, but if I’m being honest, there is something different about being up 3–1 in a series. Usually players don’t want to talk about this, but there’s something there.
Until that point, you’re so locked into playing each individual game and winning as many of the early ones as possible, that there’s really not too much distraction. You’re just kind of grinding, and keeping your head down, and doing your job.
But after you go up 3–1, it’s just … different.
To some extent, I almost feel like we thought, Oh my God, we have three chances to win one last game. Three chances! This is awesome!
When you go up 3–1, I think that’s the first time when you start to actually kind of come up for air and think, like, Holy crap, we might actually do this! So there was some of that. I could try to pretend there wasn’t, but I’m just being honest. We aren’t robots. We’re human beings, and I think it’s human nature to sometimes start looking ahead at the big picture.
I mean, come on … how could you not get at least a little bit excited in that way being up 3–1? How could you not start thinking about what might be?
I don’t think it changed the way we played. We knew that last win was going to be the hardest one to get. We didn’t coast. We didn’t get careless. And we definitely didn’t talk about it with each other — we’re just like the fans when it comes to worrying about jinxing things. We continued to fight as hard as we could. It just didn’t break right for us.
And, by the way, if you ask me … it wasn’t due to some 17-minute rain delay. Because of how the game turned out, there’s been so much discussion about what those guys in the other clubhouse did during that time. But in our case there was no big team meeting where we said we loved each other or anything like that. Maybe we should have, who knows.
I mean, credit to them if that’s what they needed, because they got it done in the end. But for us, guys were still just running off the momentum that had shifted in our favor after Rajai’s home run. So our players were taking swings in the cages, stretching, staying loose — just doing what you normally do during any rain delay.
We felt like the game had swung in our favor at that point. And, sure, when you look back at it now, that break in the action definitely cost us momentum. It seemed like after Chapman gave up that bomb, they were kind of in shock. Maybe they were back on their heels a little bit, and I’ve seen it happen to teams that I’ve been on. You’re almost in so much shock that you’re numb the rest of the way, expecting to lose. We knew Game 7 would be a reason enough for them to stay in it, though.
It certainly wasn’t a great break for us. But we had our shot to win it just like they did.
It didn’t work out for us. But, you know, that’s all in the past now.
And thinking about the past isn’t going to help us bring a world title to Cleveland this season.
I feel like this team is really just getting started.
It’d be one thing to lose a World Series like that with a team of mostly older guys or players who were about to become free agents — kind of knowing that your window of opportunity is closing. But it’s different when you’re a younger team, or when you’re actually in the process of adding pieces for future seasons.
Make no mistake about it, as players, we’re never going to fully get over that loss. Everyone on that team is going to remember last year for as long as they live. But I do think it helps you to move forward when you know that there’s a bright future ahead.
And, believe me, Tito is making sure we’re looking forward. As soon as we all arrived in Arizona, he brought us together for a team meeting. The first thing he told us was how proud he was of the run we made last year.
“It proves that you guys have what it takes to win a world championship,” he said, before telling us to turn the page. “I don’t want to be a team that’s sitting around in the middle of June talking about how we let a World Series slip away from us last year.”
We’re all professionals. We got the message.
This is a new season. A new team.
And, to be honest … we’re a better team this year than we were last year.
The possibility of having a full, healthy lineup this season is really exciting to me. (I say that as I start out on the DL. *Sigh.) Getting Michael Brantley back, adding Edwin Encarnación, there just aren’t any easy outs on this team. Then you think about our rotation with a healthy Danny Salazar and Carlos Carrasco, a drone-free Trevor Bauer … we have a team that could push some people around this year.
Now, of course, that means there are some expectations for this year. And you know what? Great! We wouldn’t want it any other way. We want to be mentioned among the best teams in the game. We invite that kind of pressure. And we’re going to do everything in our power to show the world that we belong with the big boys. But to take that next step and bring a World Series title back home to Cleveland, we’re going to need some serious help from Indians fans.
We saw a ton of blue shirts, and hats, and jerseys — especially during Game 7. And I’m not going to lie … it hurt a little bit. Jason Kipnis
We’re a better team when our fans are behind us 100% — when Progressive Field is packed to the gills, and when that place is LOUD!
It’s as simple as that.
We feed off our fans. We rely on you guys to have our backs and to lift us up when we need a little something extra to get a W. When that stadium is vibrating and everyone’s out of their seats, screaming their heads off, we can feel that energy. And it makes a world of difference. Ask any athlete. The fans are the key ingredient to home field advantage!
But the opposite is true, too.
During the World Series last season, a lot of Cubs fans made it into our stadium.
A lot.
As players, we saw a ton of blue shirts, and hats, and jerseys — especially during Game 7. And I’m not going to lie … it hurt a little bit. When you get to a Game 7, you definitely want to have a really solid home field advantage. And for that last game, it almost seemed like it was 50-50.
Now, that kind of thing happens all across the country — especially when the Cubs are the opposition. And you’d expect die-hard fans of a team that hadn’t won the World Series in 108 years to buy up lots of tickets for the deciding game.
And don’t for a second think I’m trying to tell you how to spend your hard-earned money, or don’t get how important that money might have been to your family. You guys are absolutely in your rights to do that. I can’t even sit here and say I might not have done the same.
For the longest time, all I would hear about were the ’90s teams and the consecutive sellouts. Some of the older guys that I was fortunate to play with would tell me how much they hated coming to Cleveland as a visiting player because of how tough it was then. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. You guys came with it during the playoffs! And all I want is for us to get back there together. Let’s make sure that Progressive Field is the loudest stadium in the league this season from the home opener on. Let’s make it impossible for fans of other teams to infiltrate our place. Every time an opposing team comes to Progressive, I want them to know they’re a long way from home!
And let’s do big things this year together!
The Indians haven’t won a World Series since 1948. That’s a long time to wait. It’s too long. I have old-timers coming up to me all the time telling me how much it would mean to them if we could win it all. And as someone who was around for some lean years early on in his career, I’d love nothing more than to help make that happen — for us to be the team that brings joy to all the fans who have been waiting decades to celebrate a world championship on the shores of Lake Erie.
I’m hoping all of Cleveland feels the same way, and is ready to make a run at history this year … starting today. Don’t wait until September, or the playoffs. Come along for the ride from the very beginning.
I promise you … if we do what I think we can do this season, it will be all the more sweet to look back on and tell your grandkids about if you were a part of this thing from Day One.
Because when it happens, and it will happen one day, I don’t want to say the Indians did it. I want to say Cleveland did.The German Bundesliga showcased some key match-ups on matchday 10 with the Revierderby taking the limelight while midtable battles ensured constant changes in the table. From the fireworks of the Ruhr valley to the goal scoring exploits of Gladbach and Hoffenheim, The Hard Tackle looks into the key aspects of this weekend.
Marios do it for Bayern
Impact substitutes play a crucial role in a managerai??i??s tactics in the later stages of a game when they come in to catalyze changes. Bayern Munichai??i??s Mario GAi??tze is no impact sub and can walk into any starting line-up, but he has so far been used largely as an impact sub by Guardiola ever since his return from injury. Least to say, the young German international has done really well. He changed the game when he came on in the beginning of the second half last week against Mainz, involving himself in assisting 3 goals while against ViKtoria Plzen he was instrumental in controlling the midfield play while also helping himself to a goal.
Bayernai??i??s home fixture against Hertha Berlin saw two substitutes making telling impacts on the game as the Bavarian giants got away with a 3-2 win over the men from the capital in a thrilling encounter. Guradiolaai??i??s men started the game without the injured Dante and his absence was quite felt as the game progressed. The aging Daniel Van Buyten took the place of the Brazilian center back while Boateng returned to the line-up. Up front, MA?ller led the line in place of the benched Mandzukic with Ribery and Robben flanking him.
Hertha BSC have been this seasonai??i??s surprise package, foxing sides with their blistering counter attacking and a determined approach to play. They showed just why they sit in a Champions League spot as they kicked off against Bayern with a display of their customary pace and aggression. Bayernai??i??s astray passing and the slowness of the backline helped the visitors as they took a surprise lead through Adrian Ramosai??i??s headed effort 5 minutes into the game. Things got from bad to worse as Toni Kroos and Arjen Robben limped off from the field in the 24th and 26th minute with groin injuries. But such is Bayernai??i??s bench strength this season that Guardiola had no trouble replacing the duo with two Marioai??i??s, GAi??tze and Mandzukic with MA?ller moving to the right wing of the 4-1-4-1. The Croatian Mario made an instant impact 3 minutes later heading in home a Ribery cross to beat ex-Bayern custodian Thomas Kraft to make it 1-1. Unfazed Hertha kept up their pressure on a slow Bayern defense and a surprisingly lethargic midfield to stay level going into the break.
Just as in last week, Bayern had the sucker punch ready after the break. Mandzukic used his head yet again, this time to meet a Schweinsteiger cross that was played from pretty much the same area as Riberyai??i??s was. Leading the game, Bayernai??i??s other Mario GAi??tze made with 3-1 when he met a Rafinha cross with his head.
Much to the attacking credits and determination of the visitors, Hertha made it 3-2 minutes later as Ai??nis Ben-Hatira latched on to a cross for the gameai??i??s first non-headed goal. The introduction of Javi Martinez to partner Schweinsteiger in the midfield stemmed the flow of Herthaai??i??s attack for the rest of the game as Bayern maintained their lead at the top of the table.
Dortmund earn bragging rights
The Revierderby, arguably the most fiercely fought derby in Germany between the men from the Yellow side and Blue side of the Ruhr valley was largely a one sided fair with Kloppai??i??s Dortmund taking it 3-1 at Gelsenkirchen. With the excitement of the derby brewing amongst the spectators, the game started around 10 minutes late with flares being thrown in the ground. Last season, it was the Royal Blues of Schalke who inflicted a double blow as they took both the derbies games, but the 2013-2014 season hasnai??i??t seen the best of starts for Kellerai??i??s men. Following a midweek defeat to Chelsea in the Champions League, Schalke were immediately put on the back foot by visiting Dortmund.
It took 14 minutes for Kloppai??i??s side to stamp their authority as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, starting the game on the right wing in place of Polish Jakub Blaszczykowski, opened the scoring with a tap-in after Reus put the ball across the face of the goal. The build-up of the goal reminded fans of a vintage Dortmund as Mkhitaryan and Grosskreutz were involved in some slick passing before finding Reus at the edge of the box. Dortmund kept up the pressure through Reus and Aubameyang with both the attackers missing their chances. At the other end, the home side hardly created any, but a Subotic foul on full back Fuchs inside the box gave the Royal Blues the opening they need. Ex-Dortmund man Kevin Prince Boateng stepped up to the spot only to see his effort saved by the excellent Weidenfeller.
Despite Schalke getting more into the game after the missed penalty, Nuri Sahin doubled Dortmundai??i??s advantage after the break with a 20 yard pile driver past a hapless Hildebrand. Jens Keller has utilized his sideai??i??s teenagers quite a bit this season and it was one of them who brought the score down to 2-1. Max Meyer who came on as a substitute for defender Christian Fuchs in the 61st minute, has scored 2 goals this season and he added his third soon after coming on. But the thoughts of a comeback were only momentary for the home side as Dortmundai??i??s own substitute Blaszczykowski restored the 2 goal advantage 12 minutes later. A shift counter attack by Dortmund saw Mkhitaryan in the Schalke half with the ball and his cross found Kuba who made no mistake in finding the back of the net. Draxler had couple of chances saved by Weidenfeller as the game ended 3-1 in favour of the Yellow and Blacks who had plenty of reasons to celebrate on their 20 mile way back home.
Hoffenheim and Gladbach hit four
Hoffenheim were probably cheated on matchday 9 as Leverkusen won 2-1 that included that much talked about ai???phantom goalai???. With their appeal for the game to be replayed still undecided, the ai???Village sideai??i?? decided to make amends and dished out a hiding to Hannover 96 who are always tough opponents at home. Hannover defender Marcelo and his backline were in for a bad day at the office as Hoffenheim were awarded a penalty in the 10th minute. Sejad Salihovic made it 1-0 for the visitors and the lead was doubled minutes later as Herdling bundled his chance in. Hannover, after the double blow early on gradually started getting into the game with Hungarian midfielder Huszti and forward Biram Diouf channeling much of the attacks.
11 minutes into the second period, Hannover finally broke Hoffenheimai??i??s resistance as Salif SanAi?? scored to get things back to 2-1. Brazilian attacker Roberto Firmino has been in brilliant form this season for Hoffenheim, scoring 8 of the sideai??i??s 25 goals so far and he really came into the game midway into the second half. His twin strikes, two minutes within each other sealed the game for the visitors. The two sides sit 9th and 10th in the table equal on points.
After some miserable showings last season, Favreai??i??s Galdbach are back into the mix for European spots as they convincingly beat Eintracht Frankfurt by 4-1. The win is Gladbachai??i??s in matches and puts them 4th, 9th points behind Leverkusen and Dortmund.
Stefan Aignerai??i??s 15th minute strike for the visitors was sandwiched between two Gladbach strikes from Arango and Wendt. The left sided pair proved to be a constant thorn to Frankfurts backline as Jung and co found it difficult to contain the duo. On the other side of the pitch, Hermann was unlucky not to put the home team 2 goals up as Trapp pulled out a brilliant save to keep the score as it is going into the break. The second period was much the same with Gladbach launching attacks at will. Hermann made it 3-1 on the hour mark and 6 minutes later, Gladbachai??i??s impressive Brazilian scored the 4th to round off a brilliant evening for Favreai??i??s men.
Elsewhere
Hamburg won 3-0 at Freiburg with goals from Beister, Lasogga and talisman Rafael Van der Vaart while Wolfsburgai??i??s 20 year old Arnold inspired his side to a 3-0 win over Werder Bremen. Olic and Perisic were the other scorers for Wolves as they climb up to 6th in the table after the win. Bundesligaai??i??s first game on Friday saw Stuttgart being held by NA?rnberg while Japanese attacker Okazaki scored a brace for Mainz in a 2-0 win over Braunschweig. Simon Rolfes and Emre Can were on target for Leverkusen as they saw off Bavarian side Augsburg by 2-1.
Random Five
Matchday 10 saw 32 goals being scored.
All of Bayern’s goal came from headers with 4 headers being scored in the 3-2 scoreline.
Roman Weidenfeller has a 50 % record in saving penalties this season.
Bayern Munich extend their unbeaten run streak to 35 games in the Bundesliga
Survival experts NA?rnberg have drawn 7 of their 10 games.
GOAL OF THE WEEK
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at all — for starters, I travelled only to Rajasthan and Agra and Delhi. And with only two weeks and change, I had barely a chance to dig for anything all. In those few weeks, however, these are the things that stood out.
Travel to Northern India: The Great
1. The food.
Every province of India has different dishes and culinary traditions. Punjabi food versus Rajasthani food versus Bengali food — so many variations of spice and taste and preparation. Much like China and other countries spread over such a staggeringly large geographic landscape, local specialities abound. So much food. So good.
I’m writing this from Montreal, dreaming of paneer (cottage cheese, usually cooked in a rich gravy of cream and spinach or spices) and lassi (shaken yoghurt, served either sour or sweet) and so much more.
For celiacs, please see my gluten free guide to Northern India for more tips on how to eat safely while travelling in Rajasthan or the surrounding regions as a celiac
2. The Indian head nod.
I have no photos of this, but the Internet does, of course, have a GIF. The head nod or head shake or “Desi-nod” (as the label might be) is well-documented in travel blogs and magazines alike. There is a whole section of the book Shantaram about it, how the nod can mean yes, or ok, or no, or a mere acknowledgement of your presence. And it never, ever grew old. From little kids to auto-rickshaw drivers to people in hotels or market stalls, it is a minimalist affirmation of whateverness, and it is glorious.
3. Kids (or their parents) wanting photos.
A highlight no matter where you go in Rajasthan or Delhi or Agra: people want you to take their photo. This is a highlight not because of the superficial act of capturing someone else, but because it creates a temporary but immediate bond between you and that person, usually resulting in some serious giggles. From tiny villages to bigger cities, kids would run up and ask for a photo, then ask to see it, then give me a thumbs up or a high five and then disappear. My memories and my photos are full of these sequences, not just from kids but their parents, equally excited to see their kids on camera.
4. Goats.
Those who have travelled with me know that I get irresponsibly happy around goats. In Jordan I had a group of baby goats following me into the desert, in Mongolia I stopped the car consistently to take photos of the goat-and-sheep grazing herds and in India I was extremely happy with the amount of goats in the county. Goats might not make a “great” list for everyone but they did for me.
5. Dodging cows.
I grew up helping the farmer across the road from my dad during haying season weekends, often disappearing into the barn to stare at the cows. I suppose it is no surprise, then, that I would not take issue with the volume of cows in India. I will be posting a photoessay of cows — how could I not? — but cows get their mention here, as they were all incredibly different. From the calf whose ears we scratched in Jojawar after dinner to the bull who made a run for us in Jodphur, dodging cows was an important part of our trip and definitely added some interesting narrative to our dinners.
6. Women and girls asking tons of questions and wanting photos.
I previously wrote about travel as a woman and how it allows you to straddle both worlds, interacting with women but also with men abroad. In India, the women were especially curious, coming up for photos, coming to ask questions about what I thought about my weeks in the country, asking me what India was like compared to other countries or my own. Many illuminating and thought-provoking discussions were had in just a short time in the country. I’m grateful for the kindness of these women who wanted to share their own life stories with me, despite my brief visit to their cities. (And for my mum who decided that every time someone came to ask for a photo with me, she would take one of her own.)
7. Total chaos.
I am a city person. I love Saigon because of the frenetic energy and the inevitable push to keep your eyes ahead, searching for the next wonderful thing to eat. India was also frenetic, and chaotic. For those who don’t like cities, I’ve been told the South is a bit less chaotic — I have yet to visit, but this was the advice I received. For those like me who take energy from the bubbling mess of noise and movement, you will enjoy Northern India. From Delhi to Jaipur to the night markets of Jodphur, all of the whirring and yelling made me feel like I was in a stop-motion video of my own, standing still while everything and anything swirled maniacally around me. If that sounds like a nightmare, you’re not alone — my mother wasn’t so thrilled with the chaos herself.
8. Spice heaven.
In my Ode to Spices post I wrote about why spices mattered to me and how they were a gateway to eating richly, despite a diagnosis of celiac disease. India is ground zero for spices and herbs and dried flavourings, and I in no way got my fill during my short trip there. So much more to explore and taste and learn.
9. Colourful saris.
Against the dusty landscapes and neutral sandstone and marble, saris stood out. Though the type of sari differed depending on the city, the vividness did not fade. It made me look at my wardrobe and sigh — what is with all the black I was toting around? From embellishments to simple veils to more elaborate matching pieces, they all stood out as incredibly beautiful.
10. Incredible architecture.
I’ve said this to others but I want to repeat it here: in the face of the most complex, intricate architectural wonders, one cannot help but think “damn, my country is so young.” That’s what comes to mind when I see the forts and gates and Mughal mosques, the palaces and havelis and winding walls tracing the tops of hills. If anyone wants to be reminded of the immediacy of the present, go to India and open your eyes. It will make you feel teeny tiny in the grand scheme of things, within seconds.
While the Taj Mahal is the most famous of the places we visited, the sandstone forts, glowing red, were what stood out to me. Caught in the last hours of sunlight they were impossible to miss, impassive and impressive, a testament to their necessity (keep people out) and constructive skill. I only visited the North, of course, and other parts of the country have different architecture. But from now on when I think Rajasthan my mind will immediately leap to ochre and archways.
11. Sunsets galore.
Fact: sunsets are better in far-away places.
12. Moustaches (and hennaed moustaches and beards).
So many ‘mos, so little time. Amazingly complex moustaches, curled up and oiled and flamboyant. And in addition, many of the beards of Muslim men in Northern India were hennaed as well, dyed a bright orange. Friends in India noted that Muslim men are not permitted to use non-natural dyes, so opt for henna. (If anyone can confirm this, please do in the comments!)
13. Pudin Hara.
When I first arrived in India, readers (both Indians and foreigners) left comments on my fan page about the food, urging me to pick up some of these magic green pearls. Made from concentrated mint and herbs, they are meant to be taken after a meal to alleviate upset stomach and heartburn. And they work, oh boy do they work. By the end of my trip I had everyone around me hooked on them. As one of my readers noted, “you will burp up mint instead of curry”. Even if your stomach is upset, this is a great way to end a meal. And, they are on Amazon! At $3.54 for 10 pearls, a lot more expensive than the $0.24 for 10 in India. Still, I can’t complain — this stuff is magic.
14. Saunf.
Fennel seeds, called saunf in India, are served after a meal with sugar, sometimes coated in sugar and other times in a bowl like the photo below. Occasionally they are in packets with rose petals and anise seed and fenugreek too, adding an additional punch of flavour. I grew up with the after dinner wintergreen mints, those powdery pink disks that were found in a bowl in front a restaurant’s cashier. Why do we use wintergreens when we can just use fennel? The fennel settles your stomach, gives your mouth a fresh liquorice burst and is simple, so simple. I came back to my mum’s in Montreal and immediately drove to the bulk store to get a big bag of fennel. Paired with those Pudin Hara tablets, I’m guaranteed minty, anise-y goodness for months to come.
15. Hangsies with my mum.
The last time I took a trip with my mother was when she visited me in France. I was living there to study, doing a masters in Aix-en-Provence. We rented a car and we drove and drove and drove — 2000km total in a few weeks time, looping up toward Paris, to Arras, back down to Provence and through the winding hairpin curves of Eze and Gordes and other tiny towns. The trip was beautiful but it was a logistical nightmare; I insisted on driving, we got lost a lot and we often ended up negotiating those curves in the dead of night.
This time the logistics were out of my hands, and though I snuck my mum away to eat street food when I could, we were taken from A to B without my input — possibly a good thing. After all, years of travel aside, I tend to leave things to the last minute, which doesn’t make people comfortable. When asked, my mum says she liked India more than she expected to. She will write something herself, but overall she had a great time and did not once get sick from the street food. Moreover, we got to spend time together for 3-weeks straight, she celebrated her birthday in Bangkok, and she got a glimpse of what my post-law life is like. She has always been supportive, but also remained a bit baffled about how I met people, how I ate and what I did. These weeks in India and Bangkok gave her far more input into those choices, which benefits all of us in the long run.
16. Havelis.
Because of the trip we chose (Land of the Maharajas), we ended up staying in older heritage guesthouses, called havelis, instead of hotels. This meant on one hand that we were isolated at times and with no choice for food — though happily these havelis had chefs that not only made great meals, but let me into the kitchen — but also that we were staying in places rich in history. Each had a story, and someone to go into that story and how India and its property ownership has changed over the years. While not a full picture — it was just a few weeks after all — the heritage houses and their accompanying narratives made the trip more personal for me and for my mum, a historian.
17. Autorickshaws.
I made the mistake of calling these tuk-tuks on Instagram and was quickly reprimanded. Auto-rickshaws, the tuk-tuk-esque machines that carpet cities in Northern India, are the taxis you always wanted but didn’t know existed. With raucous drivers, hilarious editorial and — as expected — some serious haggling needed to get the price you know you want, they were a lot of fun.
18. Chilli and lime to ward away bad spirits.
Like the blue nazar boncugu in Turkey, chillies and limes are meant to ward away evil. Strung vertically and occasionally plastic, they were found hanging from the grill of trucks just above the ground, over doorways in havelis, over awnings in shops and on the rearview mirrors of cars and buses. A totally unexpected quirk, once I noticed them I started seeing them everywhere.
19. Visiting Northern India during a national holiday.
We were in town during Navratri, a 10-day festival that culminates in a big celebration called Dussehra. As a result, much of the area was on holiday. This meant that not only were we visiting Indian shrines and temples and monuments, but so was just about every school child in the vicinity. It made for great interaction with curious kids, the opportunity to photobomb a class portrait (and get scolded for it by the teacher, while the students laughed in the background) and watch Indian tourists visit their country’s own famous places. A lot of fun.
20. Frangipanis everywhere.
They smell fantastic and they are just about everywhere in Northern India. No complaints.
21. Bhujia.
Chickpea flour treats, seasoned with cardamom, chilli and other spices and served everywhere from Bikaner to Jaipur to Delhi, both in bags and — as you can see from the photo below — in bulk and by weight. As a celiac these are safe for consumption, and spicy as hell. Loved it.
22. Truck decorations.
Like jeepneys in the Philippines, Indian truck drivers take decorating seriously. Two of many different colourful options from the trucks in the north, below.
Travel to Northern India: the Bad & the Ugly
A few things that lingered were less positive than the list above.
1. Effects of tourism gone wrong.
In a few of the smaller villages, the children would come up and ask for photos and just sit and stare. In some where tourism has grown in recent years, however, they would either come up and say “boom boom?” while making lewd hand signals, or ask for money, or ask for pens, or ask for chocolate.
As with any developing country, I don’t bring any of those things — if I want to buy pens, I go to the school and ask how I can contribute supplies to the school directly. Candy, no — those teeth are important! But this is from years of travel and reading and of course sometimes the things we do that we think are good, or make a positive impact, can do worse when we leave. I’m not pointing fingers at any one group or tourism generally, but it does make me sad when people don’t think about the effects of their so-called generosity after they’ve left.
Also, what’s with sticking your camera in people’s faces? It’s one thing to have someone come and ask for their portrait to be taken, or for you to ask them first. It’s another to do what this woman did, just walk up and shoot a photo and leave.
2. Men peeing everywhere.
Not ugly in a “can’t they go somewhere else?” way, because I know full well there is a serious lack of public toilets. I, too, had to pee often and had trouble finding a place. (Perhaps I’m just jealous that dudes can pee anywhere they want?) Either way, every time I turned around, there was a guy peeing. The photo below was me trying to capture the railway tracks. I had no idea Peeing Man #24523532 would be captured too, as I didn’t see him. But there he was. It’s not just India. The same goes for Vietnam — there was a tree near my old apartment that we referred to as “The Peeing Tree” — but it’s still an “ugly” merely because of the stench and the risk of coming into contact with peeing dudes at every turn.
3. Garbage everywhere.
Again not limited to India, but in a country with so many people it makes sense that there would be an exponential amount of waste. Plastic bags are no longer allowed in Delhi (soft fabric ones were given instead) but the garbage, oh the garbage. Piles and piles of it, sitting on the ground. In Chandelao, the owner of our haveli got into a heated discussion with townspeople when they wondered why I wouldn’t dispose of my plastic tea cup on the ground, explaining that it would just create more dirt and potential problems. They genuinely fought him on his arguments, not seeing the problem. That’s quite common in other countries I’ve visited — e.g. the woman on the train in Myanmar who waited to throw her styrofoam out of the window in the country, because “people won’t see it”. (She had no idea it would never biodegrade.) I don’t have solid answers (education about lasting effects of plastic is a good start, and I know that is being implemented), but garbage definitely merits mention because it is so un-ignorable.
4. Cow Dung
A lot of cows means a lot of cow dung. Enough said.
5. Aggressive touts.
My mum met a guy in a quiet part of the Jaipur market who, seemingly out of nowhere, wanted to know why tourists keep saying no to him when he comes up to sell something. She responded that in our country it is not customary for someone to come up expecting to sell something, that if we wanted something then we would go and find it ourselves. Confused, he responded “but how would you know it is there?”
Ah, the touts. We were warned, of course, and we were for the most part sheltered from them since we were part of a tour. But in the bigger tourist centres, anywhere in the world, you will find aggressive salespeople and you will be exhausted by the end of wading through them. Everyone needs to make a living, of course. But India’s touts, notably in Agra, were more aggressive than I had seen in other places.
6. Teenage boys.
This is by no means limited to India, but pretty much the same everywhere. Teenage boys, THE WORST. In Myanmar, when people were thanking me for wearing the longyi and/or giving me food “because you are Burmese-sized and need to grow” the teenaged boys would yell “where are your jeans, lady?” In India, people were universally welcoming with very few exceptions, most notably the teenaged boy who tried to run my mum over in Jaipur, and the teenaged boy who tried to run me over in Jojawar. (Me, to his friends after he peeled off in a cloud of dust on his motorbike: “Your friend suuuuuucks”.) I am sure there are lovely teenaged boys the world over, but the contact that has stood out regardless of destination hasn’t been terribly positive. Still, the good news is that they grow up eventually, right? ;)
7. Rat temple.
I was glad to visit the rat temple but I was not glad when the gentleman behind me kept flinging rat food on my bare feet so that the rats would come and scurry over them. NOT COOL, RANDOM MAN. Not cool.
The temple, homage to Hindu sage Karni Mata, is filled with thousands of rats. Smaller than what we are used to in North America, they resemble field mice with scrawnier tails. The temple was built in the 1900s and was filled with pilgrims who were coming to pay homage to Karni Mata in the hopes of prosperity and health. No shoes are allowed in the temple so I had a pair of socks that I quickly discarded upon leaving the premises. I’m not afraid of rats, but I have to say that in the thousands they just don’t feel so cuddly. It was a fascinating stop near Bikaner but still gives me the shivers when I think of it.
8. Monkeys.
Monkeys, oh monkeys. Perhaps because I am not large enough to be a threat, perhaps because they know I am not remotely fond of them — regardless of why, they make a beeline for me. I carry a safety whistle because monkeys have already made me a target, and they’ve also stolen water, dug through my bag for food (though there was none) and thrown away my shoes at a temple. I know one cannot stereotype one monkey for all monkeys but I have to say, not a fan. And there are a LOT of monkeys in India.
* * *
And thus concludes my introductory post for India. Brevity is clearly not my forte. But I wanted to give some overview of the things that stood out, even after years of travel, and the things that lingered.
I’ve not touched upon the more contentious issues of gender norms and treatment of women. I did not spent enough time there to speak to those complicated subjects, though I highly recommend people read this smart, researched piece from Amartya Sen.
If you want to read some books about India, I would highly recommend the following:
EDIT: Many of you have written asking about my camera. I am using a micro-4/3ds camera from 2011, the Olympus E-P3 camera. (I’m small, and I didn’t want to lug around a DSLR.) I’ve paired the camera with an excellent 20mm “pancake” Panasonic lens, perfect for macro food photography. Since I forgot my other lens when I went to India, all of the photos above are with that 20mm lens :)
-Jodi(Note: I published a follow-up to this post on March 6, 2014.)
The March 2014 edition of the Ensign (which is the official monthly magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) is already available online. The cover article, called “What is the Lord’s Standard for Morality” is stirring up headlines like Controversial LDS Article Raises Concern Of ‘Rape Culture’ and attracting vociferous rebuttals like Morality? We can do much better than this.
The article is by and large a tame restatement of the basic moral principles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as they relate to sex. These standards are pretty much identical to the basic moral principles of all traditional faiths. Quoting from the article:
The Lord’s standard of morality is not so much a list of do’s and don’ts as it is a principle, which can be expressed as follows: The procreative power is to be exercised in the marriage relationship for two key reasons: (1) to bind and strengthen ties between spouses and (2) to bring souls into the world. These uses have the blessing and endorsement of the Lord.
Despite the fact that the principle is more than “a list of do’s and don’t’s,” the article goes on to clearly stake out the practical implications of this principle in plain English: Don’t have sex outside of marriage, including homosexual sex at any time. Don’t try to get around the “no sex before marriage” on a technicality, i.e. don’t even fool around. Don’t masturbate. Don’t look at porn. Dress modestly. The ongoing controversy illustrates the necessity of these clarifications.
It’s no surprise that these standards would be ridiculed and dismissed by pop culture. If the world at large doesn’t hate you, then you’re doing something wrong.1 There’s nothing new or noteworthy about the idea that religious fuddy-duddies and goody-goodies are silly in the eyes of the world. What’s surprising to me, however, is the amount of push-back coming from within the Church. The most problematic paragraph comes from the section about modesty, and reads as follows:
The dress of a woman has a powerful impact upon the minds and passions of men. If it is too low or too high or too tight, it may prompt improper thoughts, even in the mind of a young man who is striving to be pure.
The outrage comes from thinking that goes something like this: if you say that the way women dress controls how men think and feel, you are making women responsible for men’s actions. In fact, this is the very logic used to defend rape culture: women who dress immodestly are “asking for it”. Therefore, the Ensign is now perpetuating rape culture.
Let’s deconstruct this reasoning.
First, to say that “the dress of a woman has a powerful impact upon the minds and passions of men” is not the same as saying “women control men’s thoughts.” In every other human interaction, we’re perfectly capable of understanding that a person can influence you without controlling you.2 If someone cuts you off in traffic, they are going to have a “powerful impact” on your mood. That’s a fact. But your reaction to that provocation is still your decision and therefore your responsibility. That’s another fact. These two facts, (1) that someone can influence you and (2) that ultimately your behavior is still your own responsibility are two facts that people seem to have no problem accepting simultaneously until the discussion turns to modesty. Then suddenly we get this bizarre notion that we can’t say “women have an influence on men” without saying “everything men do as a result is a woman’s fault.” That bizarre notion makes no sense, and doesn’t appear (explicitly or implicitly) in the article.
This article doesn’t claim that women are responsible for men’s thoughts. That’s the accusation, and it is false. Men are still responsible for their own thoughts, but it would be nice if women would dress modestly to help them out. Just as people are responsible for keeping their tempers in control, but it’s generally considered common courtesy not to provoke people unnecessarily. Let me reiterate: if I say “Be nice, because it will help other people not lose their temper,” it doesn’t mean that I’m saying it’s your responsibility whether or not some random stranger loses his or her temper. Even though we interact with each other, we are ultimately responsible for our own behavior, and that’s it. The Ensign shouldn’t need to specifically call this out, because it’s right there in the 2nd Article of Faith: “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins.”3
Allow me to observe, at this point, that not only does the article not blame women for men’s mental purity, but it never even gets remotely close to discussing rape. That’s… not even in the ballpark. Let’s be really, really, really clear. An Ensign article making the entirely obvious observation that men respond to the way women dress is not “rape culture”. A young girl being brutally raped by football players and then being harassed when she appeals for justice until her family is driven out of town and their house is burned down, that is rape culture. CNN reporters who talk about what a tragedy it is for rapists to be found guilty of rape and deprived of their promising futures, that is rape culture. Everyone talking about the fictitious death of Manti Te’o’s non-existent girlfriend while totally ignoring the actual suicide of “Lizzy Seeberg… not long after being intimidated by Notre Dame football players for reporting a sexual assault by one of their teammates,” that is rape culture. Chris Brown being accepted back into polite society (with a few notable exceptions), that is rape culture. Roman Polanski being embraced by his peers after his crimes? That is rape culture. Woody Allen being defended after the very credible allegations of his crimes? That is rape culture. Ray Rice having a fine and dandy career after video emerges of him dragging his unconscious fiancee out of an elevator (because he knocked her unconscious) that will be rape culture if that’s how the story ends. Even if you think the Ensign article is wrong and misguided, putting it in the same category as these (horrifically numerous) examples of rape culture is like comparing every bad thing that happens to the Holocaust. It trivializes real evil and makes you look like a fool.4
I understand that there are more moderate criticisms as well, such as the fact that modesty standards often seem to be unequally applied to women vs. men. They appear to be unequally applied because they are unequally applied. They are unequally applied because of the fundamental reality that females are on the supply side and men on the demand side of the sex equation. That is common sense which everyone who is not motivated by politics can see, but it is also (in case you’re skeptical) scientific fact. Men and women approach sex differently5 but it is men who are primarily motivated by visual cues and also who want to have sex more frequently and more casually. (Once again, these aren’t just random assertions. There is data.) A gender-blind approach to sexuality would be no more reasonable than a gender-blind approach to professional sports. If the WNBA did not exist, how many women would make the cut to play pro basketball against men? Zero. Pretending gender differences do not exist when they do in fact exist may be politically expedient, but it does not actually serve the interests of equality.6 If you’re looking for symmetry, this is where you will find it: women are encouraged to dress modestly (partially for their sake, partially for the sake of men) and men are encouraged7 to stop watching porn (partially for their sake, partially for the sake of women). There is equality, but not sameness, in the Lord’s standards for sexual morality. Make no mistake: that is the core outrage which this article perpetuates in the minds of its critics. Mormonism espouses a view of humanity in which gender matters, and therefore believes that men and women owe certain obligations to each other in a complementary relationship. The modern world espouses a denialist political ideology in which gender has no deep or lasting significance that we do not create for ourselves.
It is also no great surprise to me that so much of the outrage at the article is coming from professional therapists. The article invites that response when it leads off with a bold statement that God, and therefore the Church, is the ultimate arbiter of sexual morality.
Some years ago my father, an attorney, was trying a lawsuit. For his authority, he cited only one case—a California Supreme Court case issued many years before. His opponent cited a number of lowercourt decisions of more recent vintage. The judge said to my father, “Mr. Callister, don’t you have a more recent case than this?” My father looked at the judge and replied, “Your Honor, may I remind you that when the supreme court speaks on a matter, it only needs to speak once.” The judge nodded with approval. He was reminded that the supreme court trumps all lowercourt decisions, how ever numerous or recent they may be. So it is with God our Father—He needs to speak only once on the issue of morality, and that one declaration trumps all the opinions of the lower courts, whether uttered by psychologists, counselors, politicians, friends, parents, or would be moralists of the day. [emphasis added]
In fact, the reaffirmation that the Church has the final word on these matters may be the only truly novel claim made in the article. Everything else is a restatement of traditional beliefs. This one is hardly surprising, but it is fairly novel. So it’s natural that psychologists and counselors would lash out in response. It’s a turf war: who gets to define moral standards for sexuality? The Church? Or the APA?8
Let’s take a look at the claims made by one counselor in particular, as a representative of the apparent conflict between General Authorities and counselors. Natasha Helfer Parker, in her article Morality? We can do much better than this… has a bullet-list of issues with the Ensign article. She starts by claiming that the article leaves no room for personal revelation. This is obviously not true, as personal revelation is always necessary in addition to official pronouncements and even scripture. That is a fundamental and constant principle of Mormonism. It does not need to be restated in every article. However, in this particular case, I’m wondering precisely what revelation she has in mind. Is she suggesting that if you pray and ask, God might just tell you to go ahead and have sex outside of marriage? There are often shades of gray and complications with applying moral principles, but the “no sex outside of marriage” one is about as universal and clear as it gets.9
She next takes the article to task for calling masturbation “self-abuse” because “this is not an appropriate clinical term.” She may not have noticed, however, the Ensign is not a clinical journal. The inability of experts to understand that specialized terminology must give way to common vernacular in non-specialized contexts is faintly amusing. It reminds me of the time that an outraged medical doctor told my father (a professor of English) that it was unfair for PhDs to be referred to as “doctor” because medical doctors had to study harder and did so much more good. My dad smiled, and reminded him that hundreds of years ago when college professors were already using the term “doctor,” the medical professionals of that day were known as “leeches”. Perhaps if he wanted a unique title, he could try and resuscitate that one?10
Most of the rest of the bullet points rely on the same tired strawman approach of insisting on seeing a viewpoint you don’t like in its most crude and absolutist form. But the most sinister criticism she levels is the one that comes at the end of the bullet list, although it’s a sentiment that pervades the entire piece, and that is this: “The way that sexual standards are presented in this type of talk is unrealistic and sets people up for failure.”
Well now, we wouldn’t want to set people up for failure, now would we? Contrast this sentiment with Paul’s simple statement that: ” all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”11
If not all have sinned, than the Atonement is not necessary. If the Atonement is not necessary, then Christ is superfluous. If Christ is superfluous, then the Gospel is a joke. What good news? We have no need of a savior. We just lower moral standards to the lowest common denominator (or maybe pray for an exemption) and then everyone gets to heaven on their own merits. This well-intentioned call for lowered-standards is sadly anti-Christian. The entire message of Christianity–not just Mormonism, but all Christianity–is that none of us can live up to God’s impossible standards. She faults this Ensign article, but it was Jesus himself who said “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”12 Maybe we ought to just hand Parker a copy of the New Testament and a red pen and let her tell us what Jesus should have said.
I will say at least this much for Parker: the fact that she couldn’t even get to the end of one article without cutting out the beating heart of Christian faith provides a very clear example of just how important it is that the business of articulating eternal standards stay in the hands of the General Authorities.
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EmailIn 2010, Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland, announced that his government was aiming to power all of Scotland with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Just a few months later, they kicked it up a notch or five: Scotland would seek to run entirely on renewable power by 2020. Most of that would come from ambitious onshore and offshore wind farms, as well as some smaller wave and tidal power projects—and there are 7 GW of such clean energy projects already completed or underway.
By the end of 2011, it looked as if all was going to plan, despite the requisite naysaying from skeptics. Here's Triple Pundit on Scotland's progress thus far:
2011 was an epic year for Scottish energy companies. The Department for Energy and Climate Change released figures recently demonstrating that the renewable energy sector saw more than £750 million of investment last year. Currently seven gigawatts (GW) of renewable projects are operational, under construction or approved... several projects are in the pipeline to eventually deliver 17 GW of power with an estimated investment of £46 billion... [Scotland] is already well on its way to hit its interim target of 31 percent.
And 2012 looks to continue that trend, especially as Salmond announced a new partnership with the United Arab Emirates, and Masdar, the Abu Dhabi clean energy company, today at the World Future Energy Summit. The two governments agreed to lay out an action plan this year that would allow them to pool resources and technology to accelerate cleantech development, initially focusing on offshore wind and carbon capture and sequestration.Salmond acknowledged that one of the primary challenges to meeting the 2020 goal was finding ways to bring the costs of offshore wind projects down.
"The costs of offshore wind will have to be reduced by 20% to be competitive," he said at a press conference today. Efforts to analyze and improve the supply chain will be a top priority, as will examining transmission challenges inherent in efficiently transporting electricity over long distances. Salmond repeatedly emphasized the need to commercialize offshore wind to make the technology available for wider deployment (and granting Scotland a foothold in one of the next generation's most promising industries).
"The real prize is the technologies that we are refining together," he said. "The result is to demonstrate the feasibility for deployment of those technologies around the world."
Other challenges to the burgeoning renewable sector are strictly political in nature: Salmond has been leading a push for Scottish independence, which has led the likes of Citigroup to warn investors of backing energy projects in the region. But Salmond dismissed such concerns today, asserting that there was great "strength in confidence in the renewable sector", and pointed to a great potential for foreign investment.
Scotland's push to become a leader in marine renewables (they're also seeking to deploy as much as 2 GW of wave and tidal power) is not just laudable, but could prove visionary indeed. The effort could prove a major boon to Scotland's economy, where wind could become a $30 billion dollar industry, according to forecasts from Scottish Enterprises. As such, it's no surprise that the plan is raising high hopes in the renewable energy industry – and, no doubt, in Scotland.Location: Ballroom
Co-Existence through Democratic Autonomy and Self-Governance: The Kurdish Case
The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Representative Office in the U.S. and Kurdish Policy Research Center (KPRC) invite you to a special presentation:
Friday, April 29, 2016 9:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
The National Press Club, Holeman Lounge
529 14th St NW Washington, DC 20045
Opening Remarks by Deniz Ekici, Executive Director, Kurdish Policy Research Center (KPRC)
The Crucial Role of Kurds in the Fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria
9:30am – 10:45am
Moderator:
Yousif Ismail, Director of Media and Policy at the Washington Kurdish Institute WKI
Speakers:
• Omar Saeed Hasan Saeed, Commander of the Sengal Resistance Units (YBS)
• *Redur Xel |
35.96 3 8 47.86( 182) 0 0 | 0 0 | 34.97 216 | 36.27 211 | 35.45 216
217 Prairie View A&M AA = 35.36 5 5 33.68( 238) 0 0 | 0 0 | 33.26 222 | 34.33 219 | 38.81 206
218 Drake AA = 34.88 7 4 27.37( 248) 0 0 | 0 0 | 31.90 227 | 31.58 228 | 42.59 187
219 Elon AA = 34.06 1 11 52.29( 154) 0 0 | 0 0 | 34.39 217 | 35.26 216 | 29.09 228
220 Dayton AA = 34.00 8 3 24.29( 252) 0 0 | 0 0 | 31.19 228 | 31.83 227 | 39.89 204
FINAL College Football 2014 through games of 2015 January 12 Monday - National Championship Game
RATING W L SCHEDL(RANK) VS top 10 | VS top 30 | GOLDEN_MEAN | PREDICTOR | ELO_SCORE
HOME ADVANTAGE=[ 2.77 ] [ 2.78 ] [ 2.69 ] [ 2.94 ]
221 San Diego AA = 33.98 9 3 31.51( 243) 0 0 | 0 0 | 28.83 231 | 28.39 231 | 45.50 174
222 Hampton AA = 33.92 3 9 44.09( 206) 0 0 | 0 0 | 35.22 214 | 34.61 218 | 28.92 231
223 Georgetown AA = 33.88 3 8 43.77( 207) 0 0 | 0 0 | 32.12 225 | 32.99 223 | 36.71 214
224 Pennsylvania AA = 33.67 2 8 47.43( 185) 0 0 | 0 0 | 33.64 220 | 34.26 220 | 31.13 223
225 Norfolk State AA = 33.57 4 8 41.73( 219) 0 0 | 0 0 | 33.70 219 | 33.10 222 | 33.48 220
226 Towson AA = 33.13 4 8 43.52( 210) 0 0 | 0 0 | 33.06 224 | 32.73 226 | 33.17 221
227 Central Connecticut AA = 32.83 3 9 41.89( 217) 0 0 | 0 0 | 33.17 223 | 32.96 224 | 31.02 224
228 Howard AA = 32.79 5 7 39.55( 223) 0 0 | 0 0 | 33.41 221 | 32.81 225 | 30.85 225
229 VMI AA = 32.62 2 10 51.42( 163) 0 0 | 0 0 | 31.96 226 | 33.93 221 | 28.82 232
230 Florida A&M AA = 30.22 3 9 40.70( 222) 0 0 | 0 0 | 29.31 230 | 31.19 229 | 27.81 235
FINAL College Football 2014 through games of 2015 January 12 Monday - National Championship Game
RATING W L SCHEDL(RANK) VS top 10 | VS top 30 | GOLDEN_MEAN | PREDICTOR | ELO_SCORE
HOME ADVANTAGE=[ 2.77 ] [ 2.78 ] [ 2.69 ] [ 2.94 ]
231 Rhode Island AA = 29.39 1 11 51.30( 166) 0 0 | 0 1 | 30.30 229 | 29.61 230 | 26.41 237
232 Alabama A&M AA = 28.94 4 8 35.80( 234) 0 0 | 0 0 | 27.86 232 | 28.20 232 | 30.76 226
233 Incarnate Word AA = 26.25 2 9 50.85( 169) 0 0 | 0 0 | 24.83 233 | 25.57 233 | 28.30 234
234 Jackson State AA = 25.56 5 7 32.44( 240) 0 0 | 0 0 | 22.76 235 | 24.33 234 | 29.64 227
235 Marist AA = 24.93 4 7 30.63( 244) 0 0 | 0 0 | 22.50 236 | 23.52 235 | 28.98 230
236 Texas Southern AA = 23.77 5 6 31.78( 242) 0 0 | 0 0 | 20.60 239 | 22.03 237 | 28.76 233
237 Cornell AA = 22.43 1 9 42.94( 212) 0 0 | 0 0 | 23.15 234 | 22.77 236 | 19.36 246
238 Campbell AA = 22.17 5 7 30.13( 246) 0 0 | 0 0 | 21.47 237 | 20.34 239 | 25.39 238
239 Austin Peay AA = 21.88 1 11 53.79( 145) 0 0 | 0 0 | 20.12 240 | 21.34 238 | 23.91 240
240 Ark.-Pine Bluff AA = 21.13 4 7 35.70( 235) 0 0 | 0 0 | 17.16 244 | 16.74 244 | 29.03 229
FINAL College Football 2014 through games of 2015 January 12 Monday - National Championship Game
RATING W L SCHEDL(RANK) VS top 10 | VS top 30 | GOLDEN_MEAN | PREDICTOR | ELO_SCORE
HOME ADVANTAGE=[ 2.77 ] [ 2.78 ] [ 2.69 ] [ 2.94 ]
241 Butler AA = 19.69 4 7 30.25( 245) 0 0 | 0 0 | 19.58 241 | 17.31 242 | 23.12 241
242 Delaware State AA = 18.84 2 10 39.48( 224) 0 0 | 0 0 | 20.70 238 | 17.22 243 | 18.82 248
243 Robert Morris AA = 18.81 1 10 44.21( 205) 0 0 | 0 0 | 14.76 247 | 16.32 245 | 24.87 239
244 Valparaiso AA = 18.43 4 8 27.34( 249) 0 0 | 0 0 | 17.41 243 | 17.69 241 | 20.13 245
245 Morehead State AA = 17.62 4 8 32.03( 241) 0 0 | 0 0 | 15.38 246 | 15.74 246 | 21.94 243
246 Nicholls State AA = 17.13 0 12 53.71( 146) 0 1 | 0 1 | 17.52 242 | 18.50 240 | 10.33 249
247 Stetson AA = 16.87 5 7 27.21( 250) 0 0 | 0 0 | 13.55 250 | 13.82 249 | 22.98 242
248 Miss. Valley State AA = 16.28 2 9 35.97( 233) 0 0 | 0 0 | 14.56 248 | 14.22 247 | 20.43 244
249 Columbia AA = 14.01 0 10 46.33( 195) 0 0 | 0 0 | 15.84 245 | 14.09 248 | 9.30 250
250 Houston Baptist AA = 13.24 2 9 46.74( 189) 0 0 | 0 0 | 9.55 251 | 10.34 251 | 19.18 247
FINAL College Football 2014 through games of 2015 January 12 Monday - National Championship Game
RATING W L SCHEDL(RANK) VS top 10 | VS top 30 | GOLDEN_MEAN | PREDICTOR | ELO_SCORE
HOME ADVANTAGE=[ 2.77 ] [ 2.78 ] [ 2.69 ] [ 2.94 ]
251 Savannah State AA = 11.99 0 12 45.48( 199) 0 0 | 0 0 | 14.17 249 | 11.76 250 | 7.54 251
252 Davidson AA = 6.32 1 11 29.02( 247) 0 0 | 0 0 | 5.56 252 | 6.24 252 | 6.44 252
253 ***UNRATED*** __ = -90.00 8 78 0.00( 0) 0 0 | 0 0 | -90.00 253 | -90.00 253 | -90.00 253
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________This past offseason for Goran Dragic was anything but the norm.
He welcomed a newborn daughter, Viktoria, to the world and didn’t play for Slovenia at EuroBasket despite doing so in the past. With all the changes in his usual summer routine, the point guard had a little bit of a slow start to the year.
But now?
Well, it was only a matter of time before he’d figure things out.
It’s no secret that Dragic is at his best when he’s racing down court in transition like a speeding bullet. However, he’s picked up the pace in more ways than one, averaging 14.7 points, 4.4 assists and 3.6 rebounds on 54.2 percent shooting in his last seven games.
The 29-year-old is also doing damage in the half court by aggressively attacking the basket and either finishing plays himself or creating for his teammates. In particular, he’s been impressively adept at driving baseline and kicking out to shooters on the wings and corners. That action has allowed him to probe his dribble at times and take mid-range jumpers when the defense expects the drive.
“I’m at [my] best when I’m aggressive and I’m attacking,” Dragic said. “I need to find the open areas to get in and try to make plays for me or for others. When you’re attacking, then they’re so afraid that you’re going to score that you bring the defense’s attention and then you can make those plays [on the] outside.”
Other than Dragic being more aggressive, he’s also built chemistry with Chris Bosh. In fact, 45 of the point guard’s total assists this season have gone to Bosh. As a result, Bosh leads the league in total points scored as the roll man off pick-and-rolls. Obviously not every pick-and-roll he runs involves Dragic, but they do work together often.
As evident by the numbers, the pick-and-roll (or pick-and-pop) has been effective for the two. Look no further than in Monday night’s game against the Pacers when Bosh converted a three to give Miami a 93-92 lead with 1:03 left in regulation.
“This is the tip of the iceberg. I understood that coming into the whole situation,” Bosh said after a recent practice. “It’s like, ‘Alright yeah, we want to run pick-and-pop, we just can’t do it for the whole game.’ We just hit them in certain situations. He is our point guard, so we’re going to have to get him open. I knew it was going to be a part of what we were going to do, but a very small part.”
With the HEAT about to embark on a six-game road trip winners of three of their last four games, it’s encouraging to have Dragic back doing what he does best. Before Wednesday night’s game against the Knicks, Coach Spoelstra lauded the Slovenian for his demeanor both on and off the court and pointed to that for his recent resurgence.
“I think, more than anything, you just see a more comfortable basketball player and that’s what we anticipated,” Spoelstra said.
“It happens on its own time. He’s such a caring player. He’s a competitive, fierce guy out on the court, but he wants to be a good teammate [and] he wants to fit in. For us, that is important, but the other side of the coin is just as important. He has to be aggressive. He has to be in attack mode. I love his approach every single day. He just comes in with an attitude to get better, how can he help the team win and then you start to see results from that work.”They may face an uphill battle given the numbers in the Senate (not to mention a Democratic President), but it doesn't look like the House Republicans will be softening their opposition to the FCC's new net neutrality rules anytime soon. Following a full vote on an amendment to a spending bill in the House of Representatives last month (which just died in the Senate yesterday), the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology has now passed a new measure that, if it ultimately adopted, would completely overturn the FCC's new rules. The measure now heads to the Energy and Commerce Committee but, as before, it's unlikely that anything will change in the Senate even it ultimately passes in the full House -- that certainly won't stop opponents of the rules from trying, though.Voters turn away from Gillard, Abbott
Updated
A new opinion poll shows both Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott are less popular than the leaders they replaced.
The Nielsen poll published in today's Fairfax newspapers says 39 per cent of voters would prefer Kevin Rudd as Labor leader instead of his successor.
And former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull is more popular than the man who replaced him: 31 per cent of those polled preferred Mr Abbott as Liberal leader while 37 per cent preferred Mr Turnbull.
The Coalition holds an election-winning 54-46 per cent two-party preferred lead over the Government.
But of some consolation to the Government is the fact the two-party figure is steady despite the carbon tax announcement since the last Nielsen poll.
The poll shows 47 per cent of those polled approved of Ms Gillard's performance while 47 per cent disapproved.
When Ms Gillard replaced Mr Rudd, his approval/disapproval result was poorer - the Nielsen poll at the time showed only 41 per cent approved of Mr Rudd's performance while 52 per cent disapproved.
Mr Abbott's approval/disapproval score is only slightly better than Mr Turnbull's last Nielsen result in late 2009.
Then 41 per cent approved of the job Mr Turnbull was doing and 51 per cent disapproved; now 43 per cent approve of Mr Abbott's performance and 52 per cent disapprove.
Nielsen spokesman John Stirton says both leaders are struggling.
"Politics has always been tough, but over the last year or so it's been much more combative than usual," he said.
"Voters generally don't warm to that sort of approach - it tends to drag both leaders down. And that's really what we're seeing now."
He says Ms Gillard's pre-election promise that there "will be no carbon tax" under her government is coming back to haunt her in the form of rising disapproval figures.
"What that tells us is that she is taking a hit probably over the carbon tax and the broken promise, or the perceived broken promise," Mr Stirton said.
Mr Rudd sought to play down his surge in popularity, saying "polls come and go".
"It was a great honour to serve as Prime Minister of Australia. It's a great honour to serve as Foreign Minister of Australia, and I have really nothing further to add."
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says the Government is not tackling climate change "because it's easy or immediately popular".
He conceded, however, the carbon tax represents "difficult politics".
"Tony Abbott, of course, is good at scare campaigns. He's wrecked action on climate change once before. The Government is determined that he not wreck it again," Mr Combet said.
"He's on the record as saying the science is 'absolute crap'. He's now trying to pretend that he respects the science, but it's all deceitful."
Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt says the figures are in response to the Ms Gillard's broken election promise on the carbon tax.
"I think the Government is suffering because the Prime Minister is fundamentally unreliable - there is a real view that the Prime Minister is out of her depth," he said.
Asked on Perth radio if he would have expected his approval to rise, not fall, Mr Abbott said his job was to hold the Government to account and to prove a "credible alternative".
"Now, some people think I do OK. Some people don't. But I just try to get on with the job," he said.
Topics: federal-government, government-and-politics, abbott-tony, gillard-julia, australia
First postedBike polo may seem like a modern phenomenon to most, but it has a long and colourful history. The first recorded game took place in the Scalp, in Wicklow, Ireland, on October 4th, 1891. It was organised by Richard J. Mecredy, a former national track champion, and the first set of rules were printed in The Irish Cyclist magazine that same year.
Richard J. Mecredy
One of the first recorded games took place on Bray seafront, and before long the game had grown in popularity and made its way to England. The first international match between Ireland and England was held in 1901 with the Irish winning by a margin of 10 -5.
Bike Polo, Bray Seafront, Bray Head in background
The game became so popular it was included in the 1908 Olympics in London as a demonstration sport with Ireland beating Germany 3-1 in the final to take gold. It was hoped bike polo would make it into the 1912 games as an official competition but this never came about and the sport went into decline as Europe descended into war. It grew again in the 1930’s with regional leagues being set up across England and France, but the advent of the Second World War marked another decline.
1938 Phoenix Park bike polo
Post-WWII the sport began to boom again, with new nations taking up the mallet. India and the USA soon became new superpowers in the sport. The Cycle Polo Federation of India was set up in 1966 and the Bicycle Polo Association of America founded in 1994.
2006 Phoenix Park bike polo
While grass polo is still played the world over, the modern ‘hardcourt’ version of bike polo began in Seattle around 1999 when a bunch of bored bike messengers fashioned some makeshift mallets and started knocking a street hockey ball around. This style of play quickly spread through the messenger scene of the United States and in 2008 the first North American Championship took place. As of this year in addition to the many national championships there exist World and European, Australasian and South American hardcourt championships with hundreds of teams playing regularly in cities across the globe.
The Equipment
The first grass polo bikes were traditional fixed gear bikes with very short wheelbases. The bikes ran a very light gear to assist in maneuverability and sprinting, with heavy duty wheels to withstand the rigours of the sport. The mallets were made from the same material as horse polo mallets, bamboo cane with a wooden head, but with shorter shafts. The riders wore no protection. Modern grass polo allows for freewheel bikes but many teams prefer to still ride the traditional fixed gear bikes. The ball is generally a small inflated ball, like a miniature football.
Traditional polo bike, mallet and ball Traditional polo bike, mallet and ball
Hardcourt polo bikes began as messenger’s work bikes, usually 700c fixed gear bikes with no brakes, although this was more down to the proliferation of those bikes in the scene than any hard and fast rules. As the sport grew framebuilders began to design bikes specifically for the purpose, and the technology developed.
Modern polo bike Modern polo bike
Most hardcourt players now run singlespeed freewheel bikes, again with a very low gearing to assist with maneuverability and sprinting, they also run a front brake, with some manufacturers even offering disc brake protective covers to allow riders to have maximum braking power without fear of damaging the rotors. Many riders also install protective wheel covers to avoid damage to spokes during a game.
Hardcourt polo mallets started out as second hand ski poles modified to accept a section of thick pvc pipe at the bottom. As time went by these were professionally manufactured and there now exist many small companies specialising in the production of hardcourt mallets and mallet heads. Hardcourt polo uses street hockey balls.
The Rules
There have been many variations of grass court rules over the years with Ireland, France and England having their own. A team generally consists of 6 or 7 players, 4 or 5 of whom can be on the pitch at any one time. Games are played for 30 minutes and are divided into 4 chukkars of 7.5 minutes.
Hardcourt rules have evolved into teams of three players as the courts are generally much smaller than grass polo pitches. The game continues until a team has reached 5 points, or the game has gone on for a certain amount of time, 12-15 minutes. The ball can be played with any part of the mallet but goals can only be scored with either end of the mallet head, otherwise it will be disallowed as a ‘shuffle’.
London Invitational 2012
Where to play
Most major cities have hardcourt polo teams with a fairly comprehensive list available at Leagueofbikepolo.com. Most groups will have beginners games and offer a lend of a mallet for your first few games until you get the hang of it. If you don’t have a local group then just get a bunch of friends, find an empty basketball court/car park/piece of wasteland, and do it yourself! It’s a great sport that is easy to pick up and tough to master. Get on your Funked Up bike and give it a go!A Librarian's Real-Life, Practical Guide to Managing a Successful Career written by Tiffany Eatman Allen (MSLS '00), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science alumna and director of Library Human Resources at University Libraries on the UNC at Chapel Hill campus, and Susanne Markgren, digital services librarian, Purchase College, SUNY is now available for pre-release. Information Today, Inc. for publication in Fall 2013.
The authors collaborated on the book that presents a compilation of advice points and tips provided to those who interacted with them via their popular advice column, "Career Q&A With the Library Career People," which they've operated for more than ten years.
"The book came about for a number of reasons," said Allen. "First, we thought it was something that needed to be written—a book that covers different stages of a librarian’s career, not just focused on getting into the profession, or just being middle management, etc. It’s intended to cover the lifetime of a career in libraries. Second, we were just coming up to the 10th year of writing the Career Column together where, over the years, we’ve been asked lots of questions and given out lots of information. We thought the book would be a nice way to celebrate that milestone as well as bring together a lot of the information we’ve shared over the last decade."
One of the features of the book is the "Voice of Experience" areas where people share their specific experiences about managing a career. Several from the SILS community, including students and alumni, have contributed their experiences in the "Voice of Experience" sections. Contributions from SILS alumni Rich Murray (MSLS '99), Billy Cook (MSLS '12), Pam Sessoms (MSLS '94) and Sarah Falls (MSLS '05) are included in the book. Others with a North Carolina connection include Jennifer Ward, formerly of the UNC at Chapel Hill University Libraries; Carol Hunter, deputy university librarian and associate university librarian for Collections and Services; Laura Blessing, director of Human Resources, North Carolina State University Libraries http://books.infotoday.com/books/Career-Q-and-A.shtml.
The foreword author is Dr. Loriene Roy, with quotes from: Kim Dority, Maureen Sullivan, Lauren Pressley, Janine Golden and Jason Kucsma on the back of the book.
"From searching for that first library job to getting ready for retirement, Career Q&A addresses the key LIS career issues you're likely to face, and does so in Markgren and Allen's signature style: realistic, honest, funny and smart. I can't wait to recommend this book to my students."
—Kim Dority, Rethinking Information Work and LIS Career Sourcebook
"Librarianship is an exciting and rewarding career choice that offers variety, diversity, flexibility and room to grow. In Career Q&A, Susanne Markgren and Tiffany Eatman Allen examine events, transitions, struggles, and advances that encompass and define a librarian's career, answering a range of important questions library professionals face as they move through the various stages of their working lives."
For more information, visit the Web site: http://books.infotoday.com/books/Career-Q-and-A.shtml#ixzz2bJLy3nEjRed Ed: I don't do God, I don't even believe in Him (but I WILL get married and I'm embarrassed my name isn't on child's birth certificate)
Ed Miliband has become the latest Labour leader to say he does not believe in God.
The new party leader followed the example of Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot in declaring his lack of faith.
‘I don’t believe in God personally but I have great respect for those people who do,’ he told Radio Five Live.
‘Different people have different religious views in this country. The great thing is that we are all, whether we have faith or not, by and large very tolerant of people whatever their particular view.’
Mr Miliband announced his atheism despite making much of his family’s Jewish origins in his keynote speech at the party conference and citing his parents’ escape from Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain as the reason for his involvement in politics.
'Embarrassed': Ed Miliband on Daybreak this morning
Grilling: The new Labour leader turned down the chance to propose on air
With dwindling congregations across the country, his laissez-faire attitude to religion might play well with today’s faithless youth.
However, political leaders who admitted a lack of faith have found Number 10 Downing Street beyond their reach.
Both Mr Kinnock and Mr Foot – an associate of the National Secular Society – foundered at the polls.
Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, once said: ‘We don’t do God’ during an interview with Vanity Fair.
However Mr Blair, who stormed to three election victories, was an avowed Christian who even prayed with his ally, President George W Bush. Mr Blair converted to Catholicism on leaving Number 10.
In a separate interview, Mr Miliband admitted that he is ‘very embarrassed’ about failing to register as the father of his child.
He confessed he had blundered by not going to his register office to place his name on the birth certificate of his son Daniel, now 16 months old.
Mr Miliband, 40, who has yet to marry his partner Justine Thornton, told ITV’s Daybreak programme: ‘I’m really embarrassed about this.
‘What happens is if you are partners, rather than married – as we found out after the event – is that when Justine went to register Daniel, she came back and said, “You will never believe it, I can’t register you. You have got to go along to the council offices and make sure you do it”. I am really embarrassed I haven’t.’
Mr Miliband pledged to register as Daniel’s father when the couple’s second child, due in November, is born.
‘We have got a second one on the way and I am going to make sure I do two for the price of one.’
He also said that he and Miss Thornton would marry ‘eventually’.
But asked whether he wanted to propose on live TV, he said: ‘I think it’s better to do it in person, really. I don’t think it would exactly bring out my romantic side to propose on Daybreak, but thanks for the offer anyway.’
Poll Does it matter that Ed Miliband does not believe in God? Yes No Does it matter that Ed Miliband does not believe in God? Yes 10338 votes
No 15327 votes Now share your opinion
Mr Miliband faced questions about his private life during a media blitz following his maiden speech as leader at the party conference in Manchester.
This and the fallout of his victory over older brother David dominated his interviews despite his attempts to focus more on policy and his vision for the party.
Ed Miliband is also desperate to shake off his 'Red Ed' tag and claims he is too Left-wing and yesterday enraged the unions by declaring he would not back 'waves of irresponsible strikes'.
His personal set-up has caused consternation since he became the first major political leader in British history not to be married to the mother of his children.
Expecting: Ed Miliband and partner Justine Thornton before his keynote speech in Manchester yesterday
She met Ed Miliband at a party in 2004, when he was still a backroom political adviser and yet to be selected to fight a seat for Labour in the 2005 general election.
She was at the new leader's side as he delivered his maiden speech - although she eschewed the now traditional move to appear on stage and instead just walked in and out of the conference hall with the politician.
He insisted on Daybreak that voters were 'pretty relaxed' over whether or not politicians were married, and said that the important issue was whether a couple provided a stable home for their children.
He said: 'I have a huge belief in the importance of stable family and I think it is so important to say that. What really matters to me is Justine and Daniel and the second son that we have on the way.
'Stable families come in different forms. We happen not to be married. We will get married eventually, but I think it is really important to say that different people can provide stability to their kids - which is the thing that really matters - and to themselves in different ways.'
'I don't think they care one way or the other what people do in their lives, as long as they show responsibility to each other.
'That's the most important thing. I am someone who is responsible and someone who is very, very close to my family.'
He added: 'My love for Justine is very profound and we are a very close unit and we are very much looking forward to the birth of our second child.'
WHY DON'T THEY DO GOD?
Family: (From left) Marion, her sister Hadassa, David, Ralph and Ed on holiday in 1987 Both Ed and David Miliband have now categorically stated that they do not believe in God.
David was among Gordon Brown's Cabinet ministers in 2007 who said they had no faith.
When asked at the same time, his younger brother insisted religion was a 'private matter' but today he too said he was an atheist.
Their stance stems from their Left-wing secular upbringing by parents Ralph, a celebrated Marxist sociologist and Marion Kozak.
Marion is a Polish Jew who fled the Holocaust, taking shelter in a convent and with a Catholic family before arriving in England.
Ralph Miliband also fled, leaving Belgium with is father in 1940 on one of the last boats out of the country.
The son of Polish Jewish emigres, Ralph was only 16 when he fled Belgium with his father and came to London.
He went on to study English History at technical college, where he became a Marxist and appears to have fully turned his back on religion.
Ed Miliband said yesterday that his 'faith' was founded on family, friendship and opportunity and seeking to improve society.
This appears a clear reflection of his father's Marxist ideals. Karl Marx (right) famously said religion was the 'opium of the people'.
The German philosopher was an atheist and saw religion as an illusion that was used to uphold the social status quo. He felt it was a crutch for the poor that did nothing to address their real, social and economic problems.
His famous quote in full actually reads: 'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
'The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.' Marion Kozak, the daughter of wealthy Jewish parents, miraculously escaped Nazi Germany and was sent to Britain by a Jewish organisation in 1947. She arrived unable to speak English and with almost no formal education but still reached university at a normal age.
Ralph died in 1994 and both sons are extremely close to their mother and for years, the three all lived very close to each other in north London.
The Jewish Chronicle still claims Mr Miliband is the first member of their faith to lead the Labour Party despite his professed atheism.1 Clean Hand Job - PT 2 The conclusion of the courtroom drama of the century! After Ace is arrested for theft, the gang must defend his rights in a no-holds-barred courtroom brawl! Will they succeed? And what's up with Ace's hand? Find out in this exciting episode of Ace... Free View in iTunes
2 Clean Hand Job - Pt.1 The courtroom drama of the century! Ace is accused of a crime and it's up to Ivan and the team to prove his innocence. Move over Perry Mason. Stand down, Judge Judy. There's a new courtroom drama that's coming to grab you by the throat! As a... Free View in iTunes
3 Clean Taprooms, Taverns & Timewarps After Elvis's favorite television chef is kidnapped, Ace and the gang must seek out clues to ensure his safe return. What they find, however, is a wild adventure that might just take them to a little place called Tasty Town. Ace... Free View in iTunes
4 Clean Ace Tucker Space Trucker Christmas Spectacular In this new holiday classic, April tries to show Ace and Ivan the true meaning of Christmas, but in real Ace Tucker fashion, things go horribly wrong. Get the Ace Tucker Space Trucker Novel! http://novel.acetuckerspacetrucker.com Get Ace Tucker Space.. Free View in iTunes
5 Clean Cowboy Up Season 2, Episode 2: COWBOY UP As agents of the Temporal Continuity Bureau, Ace and the gang get their very first T.C.B. assignment! On their way to the Rostokian Deep-space Livestock Platform, they meat a being who aims to drive them into the sunset... Free View in iTunes
6 Clean LOT LIZARD! Season 2, Episode 1: Lot Lizard! Ace Tucker returns in the exciting Season 2 opener! Trucking is what Ace Tucker and Ivan Chimpanov do best. When an assignment from the Temporal Continuity Bureau sends Ace and Ivan to a crappy backwater planet, a... Free View in iTunes
7 Clean Bonus Episode 4: Interview with Gem City Podcast Check out my interview with the Gem City Podcast where I discuss music, comic books, Ace Tucker Space Trucker and more! Get the Ace Tucker Space Trucker Novel! http://novel.acetuckerspacetrucker.com Get Ace Tucker Space Trucker merchandise!... Free View in iTunes
8 Clean Bonus Episode 3: WXYZPDQ Ace and Ivan tune into an Earth radio station and listen to 30 minutes of uninterrupted rock. Now you can buy the album at http://musicof.acetuckerspacetrucker.com Get the Ace Tucker Space Trucker Novel! http://novel.acetuckerspacetrucker.com Get Ace.. Free View in iTunes
9 Clean Bonus Episode 2: Music of Ace Tucker Space Trucker Infomercial Ace and Ivan tell you about a great new music album. The Music of Ace Tucker Space Trucker! http://musicof.acetuckerspacetrucker.com Free View in iTunes
10 Clean Bonus Episode 1: Interview with Juliet Fromholt In this special supplemental episode, I talk with Juliet Fromholt about all things Ace Tucker Space Trucker. Plus, at the end, I hint at what I have cooking up my sleeve for Season TWO! And, there's a funny little special offer for all... Free View in iTunes
11 Clean Chapter 17: Finger Licking Good (Season One Finale) In the super-charged finale of season one, Ace Tucker becomes the hero he was always meant to be. The future of humanity and the galaxy itself are at risk during the final showdown between Ace and the Shiny Man. Who will win? And what does the... Free View in iTunes
12 Clean Chapter 16: CTRL ALT RE |
="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" data-wp-preserve="%3Cscript%20src%3D%22%2F%2Fajax.googleapis.com%2Fajax%2Flibs%2Fangularjs%2F1.2.25%2Fangular-route.js%22%3E%3C%2Fscript%3E" data-mce-resize="false" data-mce-placeholder="1" class="mce-object" width="20" height="20" alt="<script>" title="<script>" /> <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" data-wp-preserve="%3Cscript%20src%3D%22angular.js%22%3E%3C%2Fscript%3E" data-mce-resize="false" data-mce-placeholder="1" class="mce-object" width="20" height="20" alt="<script>" title="<script>" /> </head> <body ng-controller="mainController"> <div> msg: <%= msg %> session: <%= JSON.stringify(session) %> recievedTroughSocket: {{recievedTroughSocket}} <button ng-click="sendWithSocket('hello server')">send something</button> </div> </body> </html> [/html]
views/public/angular.js
[js]var fenixApp = angular.module('fenixApp', ['ngRoute']); fenixApp.factory('socket', ['$rootScope', function ($rootScope) { var socket = io.connect(); console.log("socket created"); return { on: function (eventName, callback) { function wrapper() { var args = arguments; $rootScope.$apply(function () { callback.apply(socket, args); }); } socket.on(eventName, wrapper); return function () { socket.removeListener(eventName, wrapper); }; }, emit: function (eventName, data, callback) { socket.emit(eventName, data, function () { var args = arguments; $rootScope.$apply(function () { if(callback) { callback.apply(socket, args); } }); }); } }; }]); fenixApp.config(['$routeProvider', function($routeProvider){ $routeProvider //route for home page.when('/', { templateUrl : '/', controller :'mainController' }) }]); fenixApp.controller('mainController', function($scope, socket) { $scope.recievedTroughSocket = "still waiting for data..."; $scope.sendWithSocket = function(msg){ socket.emit("something", msg); } socket.on("greetings", function(data){ console.log("user data: " + JSON.stringify(data)); $scope.recievedTroughSocket = data.msg; }); });[/js]
clicking on button will send to server string specified in sendWithSocket function argument, you can change string to object if you want to send more data. Server will output something like this:
[html]client[38] sent data: hello server[/html]
Personally I like this setup (plus mongodb), you can use jade if you don’t like ejs, also you don’t need to use angularjs, you can strip down this code to bare bones and just go with node and socket.io. You can also try templating js files in case you need more control over what you want to expose to clients.
For example you can transfer angular.js from public folder to some other folder in views and name it angular.ejs just edit the route for it like so:
[js]app.get('/otherFolder/angular.js', function (req, res) { res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/javascript'); res.render('otherFolder/angular', {someData:"to pass to ejs"}); });[/js]
That’s it, have fun.BOUND and beaten, with multiple stab-wounds to the chest, the body of Robert Serra, a 27-year-old member of parliament for Venezuela’s ruling party, was found at his Caracas home on the night of October 1st. His female assistant, María Herrera, had also been stabbed to death. Even in a country with one of the world’s worst homicide rates, the brutal murder of Serra and Herrera caused public revulsion. But some were just as shocked that, almost before the blood was dry, many leading government spokesmen, including President Nicolás Maduro, were already attributing the crime to “hired killers” working for the opposition.
Political assassination is extremely rare in Venezuela, despite the country’s bitter political polarisation between the followers of the late President Hugo Chávez and the opposition, mainly represented by the Democratic Unity (MUD) alliance. MUD leaders immediately condemned the murders and called off a planned demonstration to avoid stirring up animosity. As evidence for its claim, the government pointed to an opposition legislator’s remark in parliament, just days before the murder, that government members’ “days (were) numbered”. Diosdado Cabello, a bellicose former army officer who serves as president of the National Assembly, said he felt “threatened” and filed a complaint with prosecutors. The opposition member, who says he was referring to an electoral dénouement, has prudently asked for leave of absence.
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President Maduro has twice vowed to present “within hours” the conclusions of police investigations which would supposedly vindicate his claim of an opposition plot. But even though two suspects, including one of the dead man’s bodyguards, have been arrested, the president has so far failed to fulfil his promise. With most of the media either in government hands or cowed into toeing the party line, crime reporters have been forced to tell the story in 140-character episodes. Thus far, it seems to be a saga of robbery and betrayal by insiders. Criminologists find the modus operandi hard to reconcile with the theory of a political “hit”. But the government, trailing badly in opinion polls with a crucial parliamentary election coming up next year, may feel the need to rally the troops by playing up the ruthless nature of “the enemy”.
A further twist to the tale came almost a week after the double murder, when the centre of Caracas was brought to a halt for several hours by a supposed gun-battle between police and what were officially described as “gang members” wanted for murder. Five of the latter died in the shoot-out, some of them allegedly executed by police. Their relatives and comrades, however, dismissed the accusation that they were crooks. Whatever their crimes may have been, what is clear is that they were members of the euphemistically named “collectives”, a term now virtually synonymous in Venezuela with groups of civilian gunmen working as enforcers for the government.
The most prominent of them, a former policeman by the name of José Odreman, appears to have been a close associate of Robert Serra, although police have denied that the incident had anything to do with the murder investigation. But Odreman had been filmed and photographed with many leading chavistas, including President Maduro himself. Speculation is now rife as to whether factions within the government are at odds over reining in the armed collectives, whose “social cleansing” activities are often combined with common crime and who may even have been involved in the Serra case. While the police, who answer to the interior minister, General Miguel Rodríguez Torres, may have good reason to disarm and neutralise gangsters—whatever their political allegiance—some government ministers continue to see the collectives as an essential element in the defence of the revolution. But such is the opacity of the regime, and so close to asphyxiation the independent press, that each fresh revelation only seems to further complicate an already tangled tale.Republican presidential candidates Ben Carson, Donald Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush during the CNN Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday. (Mark J. Terrill / AP)
Are they fools or fascists? Probably the former, but there was a disturbing cast to the second GOP debate, a vituperative jingoism reminiscent of the xenophobia that periodically scars Western capitalist societies in moments of disarray.
While the entire world is riveted by the sight of millions of refugees in terrifying exodus attempting to save drowning and starving children, we were treated to the darkly peculiar spectacle of scorn for the children of undocumented immigrants and celebration of the sanctity of the unborn fetus.
Marching to the beat of that mad drummer Donald Trump, the GOP candidates have taken to scapegoating undocumented immigrants, in particular the young, blaming them for all that ails us. Most of the GOP contenders appeared as a shrill echo of the neo-fascist European movements of late, adopting the traditional tactic of blaming the most vulnerable for economic problems the most powerful have caused.
Forget the collateralized debt obligations and other Wall Street scams that continue to cripple the world economy—as the Federal Reserve Bank noted Thursday in postponing a threatened increase in interest rates—or the massive shipment of jobs abroad by leading companies like GE. Instead, blame the folks who cook your food, raise your kids and pick the grapes from the vineyards for all that has gone wrong.
None of the candidates—not even Marco Rubio, who admitted to a Spanish-speaking grandfather who emigrated from Cuba, or Jeb Bush, who is married to one of those Mexicans now tarred as criminals—had the courage to cite the overwhelming evidence from the Congressional Research Service and other impeccable sources of these facts: Undocumented immigrants are far less likely than the general population to commit crimes, and they pay more in taxes and uncollectible benefits than they receive in public assistance.
No candidate mentioned that the supposedly porous border with Mexico has never been more tightly controlled, that in 2013 the Obama administration set a record for deportations, and that the 9/11 hijackers all had valid documentation, with our ally Saudi Arabia providing documents for 15 of the 19. Even Trump has yet to come up with the name of a Mexican terrorist who crossed our southern border.
How odd to hear candidates who generally trumpet a pro-family, pro-Christian sensibility speak so cavalierly about ending the birthright path to citizenship affirmed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Their indifference to the suffering of the stranger in our midst stands in sharp contrast to Jesus’ extolling the virtue of the Good Samaritan. The attack on immigrants comes at an inconvenient time, when Pope Francis is about to visit the United States with his message of compassion for millions of refugees pouring into Europe after being dislocated in Mideast nations the U.S. claimed to be concerned with liberating.
It was a bit refreshing that Rand Paul, Ben Carson and even Trump reasserted their initial opposition to the Iraq invasion, so there is a slight possibility that a GOP candidate might challenge Hillary Clinton, the hawkish big-money candidate of the Democratic Party, on her Senate vote for the war.
Paul had the good sense to observe, “Every time we have toppled a secular dictator, we have gotten chaos, the rise of radical Islam, and we’re more at risk.” But, as Trump noted, Paul’s caution on imperial hubris, his opposition to crony capitalism and his principled critique of NSA spying have reduced the Kentucky senator to low-single-digit support among likely primary voters.
Unfortunately, the lone female candidate, fast-rising Carly Fiorina, was the most militaristic contender, even returning to the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) insanity of the Cold War in calling for ramping up the nuclear triad in apparent preparation for a war of human annihilation with Russia.
“Let’s talk about the future,” Fiorina demanded before drowning in the swamp of the past. “We need the strongest military on the face of the planet, and everyone has to know it.” And that means, she said, 50 Army brigades, 36 Marine battalions, 300 to 350 naval ships, and “we need to upgrade every leg of the nuclear triad. …”
For those not steeped in the full nuttiness of Cold War thinking, the triad of bombers, subs and missiles was necessary to have sufficient military assets to survive an all-out Soviet nuclear attack so we could make the radioactive rubble that was left of the enemy bounce higher than their surviving forces could inflict on our rubble.
While we desperately need to break the glass ceiling, it is tragic that we are offered two women who could compete quite effectively for a Margaret Thatcher award.In the battle of the wheels, there’s finally a winner, and it’s 27.5-inchers—by a knockout.
The bike industry has embraced the “new” size, which is said to offer the flickability of the old 26-inch standard and almost as much rollover potential as the larger 29er. It’s the best of both worlds.
Or, if you’re a detractor, it’s a compromise: Critics say it lacks both the agility of the nimble 26er and the obstacle-devouring rollability of the 29er. Be that as it may, bike manufacturers are pushing out 27.5-inchers faster than a Pez distributing its delicious candies. Recent launches include the new GT Sensor, the Turner Flux, the Ibis Mojo HDR and the Santa Cruz Bronson.
The 27.5-inch standard, known in Europe as the 650B, was just one of the trends and toys I spotted hanging out with industry insiders and cycling correspondents at Bike PressCamp in Utah. (Yeah, yeah, I know: It’s a tough job.)
Unlike the early days of 29-inch wheels, when more than a few bike companies were left at the trailhead wondering where everyone went, everyone’s on board this time. Manufacturers are eagerly embracing the wheel size out of the gate. Wheel builders Reynolds, Enve, Easton, and Mavic are all making carbon rims. Tire companies like Continental, Hutchinson, and Maxxis have jumped on the bandwagon as well.
Wheels and tires are two-thirds of the transition, but the final piece of the puzzle is suspension—and here, too, everyone’s gearing up for the middleweight fight. RockShox and Fox have forks entering the ring, and smaller players like Marzocchi, Manitou and SR Suntour are in the game, too.
That isn’t to say 29ers are down for the count. Trek and Specialized have new big-wheeled bikes coming next year, joining rigs like the Ibis Ripley and Niner’s new Rip 9. In fact, the only thing we didn’t see much of at PressCamp was the 26er.
The other big trend we’re seeing is road bikes that take disc brakes. And with the recent release of SRAM disc brake ready Red gruppo there is no stopping the trend. As anyone who’s spent time on dirt knows, disc brakes offer vastly superior stopping power in all conditions, and all but eliminate the concern of overheating your rims on long descents. Traditionalists may scoff, but we’re already seeing such bikes from scrappy upstart Culprit, as well as established brands like Specialized, Bianchi, and Colnago.
Similarly, Orbea has announced the Avant, which can handle big, fat tires, fenders and a rack. That makes it ready to roll over just about any type of road you can find—which seems pretty awesome. The bike industry is pretty convinced we are all going to want a do-it-all “gravel bike” in our stable. (Or at least it’s convinced that it can convince you of that fact.)
Here’s more of the cool stuff we saw at PressCamp.
Above: Fezzari Timp Peak, $5,399
Fezzari is the biggest little bike company you’ve never heard of. This Salt Lake City outfit sells directly to consumers, and it has a fiercely loyal following. According to the company, 57 percent of its sales are return customers or referrals from satisfied shoppers.
The Timp Peak offers a full carbon frame and suspension rocker, full Shimano XT component group and a drop-sucking 6-inches of travel. And you know it’s got the wheel size du jour, 27.5. All for an impressive $5399.A leaked draft of the US Department of Interior’s four-year strategic plan calls for massive fossil fuel extraction from public lands, with no mention of climate change impacts.
The document was leaked to Adam Federman, a reporting fellow with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.
“The heart of the blueprint... is oil and gas drilling, and the speeding up of everything that goes into opening up public lands for development,” Federman explains. “It's also important to note that this is happening against the backdrop of an aggressive regulatory rollback.”
The strategic plan makes no mention of climate change or climate science. Federman finds this odd, considering that “the realities of climate change are really front and center for the Department of the Interior.”
“The department is made up of 10 agencies, including Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Land Management and the US Geological Survey, all of which do extensive climate change research and manage some of the impacts of climate change,” Federman says.
Despite this, the department has begun aggressively undoing and obstructing the work of its own scientists on climate change. Joel Clement, one of the top climate scientists at the department, was one of many who was reassigned within the department in order to minimize their role. Clement was moved from his climate science position to an accounting post in the office that collects royalties from the fossil fuel industry. He has since resigned and become a whistleblower.
“[Clement] had raised the alarm about the impacts of climate change on Native communities in Alaska, where coastal erosion and rising sea levels are literally threatening people's livelihoods,” Federman explains. “So, that's something that the Department of Interior has to confront. The fact that this report omits any reference to climate change indicates that they're planning to, I guess, ignore it.”
Like other federal agencies, the Department of Interior has also engaged in scrubbing references to climate change from its websites. Several sources within the department told Federman that avoiding references to climate change in research papers or press releases is now “an unspoken policy.”
The new strategic plan reveals just what the Trump administration means by “energy dominance,” Federman says. “It means they are essentially offering up anything and everything, onshore and offshore. We have upcoming lease sales in December in Utah, New Mexico and several other Western states in which they are just putting everything on the table. The BLM used to defer a lot of acreage when it was in areas that were considered sensitive, because of endangered species or critical habitat, and they seem to be not doing that at all anymore.”
Early signs, however, are that the fossil fuel industries seem reluctant to invest in new projects right now, given the relatively low price of oil and the “bleak outlook for the future of coal,” Federman points out. “One of the big moves of the administration and the department was to lift the moratorium on federal coal leasing... but what we've seen since then is that many companies have actually withdrawn their lease applications for new mines on federal land,” Federman says. “Obviously, the price of oil is fluid and things could change very quickly.”
The new document also contains an unusual new section not seen in previous Interior strategic plains.
“One of the six mission areas, as they're called, is ‘Protecting our People on the Border,’” Federman explains. “It talks about how Department of Interior manages something like 40 percent of the southern border. … Department of Interior itself would be stepping up its partnership with law enforcement agencies and aggressively policing immigration and also drug smuggling.”
This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.
From Living on Earth ©2017 World Media FoundationOur discussion touched on various countries. One of them was Uruguay, where a social democratic government of the moderate left not only offers an example of economic responsibility and democratic continuity, but stands at the vanguard on such sensitive issues as the legalization of marijuana. Brazil, the giant of the region, primarily owes its development in recent years to the linear succession of three presidents who represent a reformist and modernist left — a former Marxist theoretician (Fernando Henrique Cardoso), a radical union leader (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), and a former guerrilla fighter (Dilma Rousseff). Colombia, a country ravaged by the drug trade, leftist guerrillas and rightist paramilitaries, has reduced the level of violence and will probably soon sign a peace pact with the FARC, its oldest guerrilla organization. Chile, in spite of the political scars left by the coup against Salvador Allende and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, is reaping some of the fruits of its republican traditions over the past two centuries.
Mr. Vargas Llosa argued that the “21st-century socialism” proposed by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is not an attraction for the younger generations, that no one dreams any more of being Che Guevara. To make the point, he noted the country’s economic crisis — and the workers’ resistance to a regime that spreads lies, depletes the nation’s oil resources and tolerates corruption deep within the army. Such conditions, he contended, of course cannot endure for long, and must be fought by building strong institutions that uphold and respect the rule of law. He was hopeful that this could be done, all the more that today Latin America enjoys “a consensus on democracy and the free market, whether in its liberal or social democratic form.”
My position was somewhat different. I believe that Latin American populism — from Chavism to contemporary Peronism — is still a constant temptation amid the poverty and inequalities of Latin America. An affection for the policies of Eva Perón marks the populism of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina; much more wildly, the spirit of Hugo Chávez apparently speaks to Venezuela’s erratic president, Nicolás Maduro, by night in dreams and visions — and sometimes by day through symbols, like the chance appearance of a pigeon during one of his speeches. (Venezuela is a particularly sad case because of the stifling of civil liberties there, an alarming trend about which the Organization of American States, shamefully, has had nothing to say.)
And what of Mexico? I explained how entire regions of the country are in effect occupied by organized crime. The euphoria that accompanied the transition to democracy after the defeat of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 2000 election has faded and been replaced by considerable discord. After the poor record of the two governments under the conservative National Action Party (PAN), the return of the PRI to power has been seen by some as a regression. The left, which might well have won a turn in power in the 2012 elections, preferred a radical to a moderate candidate who could have appealed to a much larger slice of the political spectrum and been able to institute liberal reforms, much as the Brazilian left has done.
In the past year, the government of the PRI president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has succeeded in getting progressive legislation through Congress. In theory, the measures can serve to modernize the economy and further its growth, but many Mexicans are angry and see the government as merely a servant of national and international capitalism. The coming year will be decisive. Will these reforms be productively and honestly implemented? No less than the survival of Mexican democracy is at stake.How far are you willing to go to express your nerdom? For Andy Mai, Creative Director of Gravity Mobile, he’s willing to tattoo his love for all things tech all over his body!
Mai showed off his tattoos at the recent 2012 TechCrunch Hackathon in San Francisco. He pointed out his favorite tats, and his future plans for turning his left arm into something robotic or looks like it came out of the movie Tron.
While he may not be bionic, Mai is hopeful as he’s expressing his desire to be the bionic man of nerdom. His nerdiest tattoo is the power button on the back of his neck. But be careful pressing it. “I get turned off or turned on depending on who you are,” said Mai who is very selective about what geek representations he inks on his body. “In the past I’ve debated Internet ports or USB jacks, but that will probably be obsolete in the future.”by
Tom Hanks is today’s Everyman good guy movie star – an honest, trustworthy and stand-up white man just like Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck and, yes, even John Wayne. In the recent film Bridge of Spies, one of those “inspired by true events” obfuscations, Hanks plays a certain James B. Donovan. In the movie, Donovan is an insurance lawyer lured into defending Soviet spy Rudolf Abel back in the good old days of the Cold War in order to prove that this is the land of justice and due process. Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg, appears to be headed into Oscar territory.
Sometimes it pays to read the book on which an “inspired by true events” movie is based. If a discerning filmgoer were to read Strangers on a Bridge, Donovan’s account of the events portrayed in the movie, one would discover that Donovan was no mere insurance lawyer, but was involved in the spy business up to his ears long before Abel was arrested in 1957. Donovan was in fact the General Counsel of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. The OSS was set up during the war as the chief intelligence agency for the United States to coordinate espionage and counterespionage, including black propaganda and the proverbial special operations. That must have been some interesting lawyering.
The OSS morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after the war. Donovan states matter-of-factly in his book that he drafted a “postwar plan for a central intelligence agency, to carry on after our OSS was disbanded. When Major General William J. [‘Wild Bill’] Donovan [the director of the OSS, no relation to our protagonist, James B. Donovan] directed me, as his general counsel, to draft such a plan, he repeatedly stressed the necessary differences between secret intelligence and counterintelligence on an international level and the constitutional bounds of domestic law enforcement within the United States. He believed that any attempted unification of such powers in a single government agency would be dangerous in a democracy, since the temptation to ‘efficient’ methods of investigation inevitably leads to creating a Gestapo.” We all know how that worked out.
After the war, Donovan was a prosecutor at Nuremberg, which is acknowledged in Bridge of Spies. Donovan must have at least noticed that the Nuremberg trials were shut down to facilitate the recruitment of Nazi war criminals into the U.S. intelligence network, but that is not acknowledged in either the film or Donovan’s book.
Both during the war, after the war, and up through Donovan’s activities around the Abel spy trial, he “held a commission as a commander in Naval Intelligence.” As late as 1967, Donovan wrote that criticism of the CIA and U.S. intelligence programs was the result of “a brand of addle-pated thinking.”
Donovan was upfront with Abel about his history with the intelligence community, and “had the feeling” that Abel “felt at ease with me because of my OSS background. He had found someone with whom he could ‘talk shop.’”
Abel was ultimately convicted in 1957 of spying, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Five years later, in 1962, Abel was traded for the captured CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down in a U2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. Donovan served as the U.S. negotiator for to execute this trade.
In the movie, Donovan is a reluctant recruit as the negotiator. In Donovan’s book, he is the instigator. Donovan describes a proposal he made for a trade, even before Abel’s trial, a proposal that he made in a personal meeting with then-CIA chief Allen Dulles. That proposal did not fly, but when the Powers exchange was proposed several years later, Donovan “readily agreed” to go to Berlin and negotiate the deal, and clearly relished his role in the affair. The book describes these negotiations in depth, although Donovan notes that “there have been certain necessary deletions and alterations of detail, for reasons of security.”
Donovan published his book in 1964, just two years after the Abel/Powers exchange. Dulles gave the book a rave review in the New York Times Book Review. “Unique in the strange history of the Iron Curtain… Enthralling… A truly remarkable account of how the author fulfilled his stewardship as a lawyer and as a negotiator. He has done us a real service in writing this engrossing and forthright book.” Back in those days, no one published such books without CIA approval beforehand.
Dulles, of course, had been infamously sacked as head of the CIA by President John Kennedy in 1961, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But by 1964, when Donovan published his book, Kennedy was dead and Dulles was still in the thick of the spook world.
Donovan’s book was reissued in 2015, in advance of the movie, with a new foreword by another spook, Jason Matthews. According to Matthews’ website, he is “a retired officer of the CIA’s Operations Directorate.” He also writes fiction, and appears to be popular with the spy novel set. Despite his credentials, Matthews notably gets Abel’s sentence wrong, stating that he got 45 years when in fact he got 30. Donovan died in 1970, and consequently did not get a chance to proofread Matthews’ foreword.
Both Matthews and Bridge of Spies director Spielberg appear to have a thing about the Rosenbergs, who figure into the story in an important way. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and for allegedly giving away the “secret” of the atomic bomb. In the movie, one of the early signs of trouble is a line from Hanks (playing Donovan) unfavorably comparing the Rosenbergs to Abel, claiming that if Abel was a spy he was only serving his country, while the Rosenbergs were traitors who had betrayed their country.
It is a tenet of bourgeois ideology that working class people owe their loyalty, first and foremost, to their country, not to their class brothers and sisters around the world. Donovan’s comparison of Abel to the Rosenbergs is grounded firmly in this logic. Of course, the bourgeoisie hold themselves to a different standard, to the solidarity of profit wherever they can get it. Today, that is called “globalization.”
Bridge of Spies fails even to acknowledge that there has been extensive debate about whether or not the Rosenbergs were actually guilty of spying for the Soviets, or that there was a significant, worldwide mass movement in opposition to their execution even during that period of McCarthyism and Cold War repression. Over the intervening years, many have come to believe that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy, largely based on alleged evidence from CIA documents that were released to the public in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. More recently, the Grand Jury testimony of David Greenglass was declassified. Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, was the chief witness against the Rosenbergs. Some brother. Greenglass’ Grand Jury testimony clearly confirms that he lied his ass off at the Rosenberg trial, with the full cooperation of the prosecution.
But to Matthews and Spielberg the Rosenbergs were just traitors, no doubt about it. Due process and all that be damned.
Curiously, Donovan seems to take a more nuanced view of the Rosenbergs in his book. He makes the same comparison to the Rosenbergs’ alleged betrayal of their country to Abel’s alleged service to his country, but never pronounces the Rosenbergs guilty. He instead repeatedly notes the crimes for which they were “convicted.” These are the words of a man who was intimately familiar with black propaganda. Donovan even notes that “at the Rosenberg espionage trial, defense counsel had made a mistake which plagued him at every step of his appeals, by thanking the trial judge for the ‘fair’ manner in which he had presided.”
Matthews’ foreword, like the movie, appears to be “inspired by true events” rather than the true story it purports to be. He spins a tale of the “most successful HUMINT (human intelligence) operation in the twentieth century… the Soviet Union’s penetration of The Manhattan Project and the acquisition of U.S. atom secrets in the 1940s and 1950s… designated ‘Task Number One’ by Joseph Stalin.” Despite this purple prose, Matthews notes that “debate continues regarding which and how many top secrets the Soviet Union actually filched, and whether the information materially helped the Russians.” He further claims that the alleged Soviet intelligence agents never shared their “purloined atom secrets” with Soviet scientists. “Rather,” Matthews writes, Soviet spy chief “Lavrentia Beria mostly used U.S. data to slyly corroborate the theoretical and design work of Soviet scientists.” Matthews cites no sources for any of this.
According to Matthews, Abel was sent to the U.S. by Moscow in 1948 to “re-energize… the network of atom spies.” The Rosenbergs were “important network couriers and spotters” who were “arrested thanks to the confession and testimony of another network source, David Greenglass.” That’s the same Greenglass who perjured himself at the trial, at the behest of the prosecution, and got his sister executed. Abel was the “central controller known to many of the couriers [but]… the jailed Rosenbergs steadfastly would not cooperate with the FBI, not even in exchange for their lives.”
You can believe Matthews’ scenario, or not. But Donovan doesn’t go there, or anywhere near there. According to Donovan’s account, not a word about the Rosenbergs was ever spoken at Abel’s trial, by either the prosecution or the defense. Matthews’ foreword would be better read as an afterword, so his tale doesn’t cloud Donovan’s story, and can be read as the revisionist history that it is.
The Rosenbergs did figure into the trial in an oblique way, but one so comical that Matthews does not even bring it up. The chief witness against Abel at his trial was a drunkard named Reino Hayhanen, who claimed to have been Abel’s spy buddy until he defected and turned snitch. Among other things, Hayhanen testified that he and Abel had buried $5,000 in a park somewhere so it could be picked up by “Agent Stone’s wife.” Agent Stone’s wife was allegedly Helen Sobell. Helen Sobell was married to Morton Sobell, who had been convicted as an alleged accomplice of the Rosenbergs and sentenced to 30 years in prison. So the headlines in the newspapers on the day Hayhanen first testified about the burial of $5,000 read “LINK ABEL TO ROSENBERGS.”
But the very next day, under further questioning, Hayhanen testified that “Agent Stone’s wife” never got the $5,000 – because Hayhanen went back to the site where he and Abel had allegedly buried the money. “I digged them out and I kept them myself,” he explained in his broken English.
Spielberg’s movie leaves Hayhanen completely out of the picture. “Inspired by true events” indeed. Matthews cites Hayhanen as the turncoat who fingered Abel, but conveniently doesn’t go into any of his trial testimony, which also included a confession that he was a bigamist and his acknowledgement that he had signed a document claiming that he had never been a spy. Donovan writes that Hayhanen was “killed in a mysterious automobile crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike” four years later.
Adding to the comedic aspect of the Abel spy case, Abel’s arrest was imaginatively portrayed in the 1959 Warner Brothers movie, The FBI Story, starring old reliable Jimmy Stewart, directed by Mervin LeRoy, with the full cooperation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. If Donovan ever saw this movie, he must have gotten a good laugh.
Both Bridge of Spies and Donovan’s book tell the tale of the appeal of Abel’s conviction, an appeal that Donovan took all the way to the Supreme Court. The court upheld the conviction on a narrow 5-4 vote.
Donovan’s book ends on an ironic note that is missing from the movie, a coda to the failed Supreme Court appeal. A few days after Abel had been traded to the Soviets for Powers, Donovan emerged from his Georgetown church, and ran into Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. Brennan had written the opinion for the four dissenters. The majority opinion had been written by Justice Felix Frankfurter.
“Please do me one favor,” Donovan asked of Justice Brennan. “Present my highest personal regards to Mr. Justice Frankfurter and tell him I finally have found an effective way to set aside a judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Spoken like a true spook.The Xbox One captures game footage at 720p and 30 frames per second, Microsoft has confirmed.
That's irrespective of the source resolution, Marc Whitten, chief Xbox One platform architect, told IGN.
Xbox One launch title Forza 5, for example, outputs at 1080p and 60 frames per second, but Xbox One's in-built DVR captures clips at 720p and 30 frames per second.
As revealed last month, Xbox One records the last five minutes of your gameplay. For times when you can't stop playing (such as in the middle of an online session), Microsoft allows you to capture and immediately save the last 30 seconds of gameplay for editing later.
"The first thing you'll see with our game DVR is the integration of our Upload service on the console," Whitten explained.
"This service allows you to manage, edit, and share your content. Your clips are stored in the cloud. Also, you'll see games making'magic moment' videos of your gameplay based on the game DVR functionality - all seamlessly integrated.
"You'll be able to see these clips in the Xbox One Guide, in your own game DVR collection, and when you are looking at gamercards on the system. You'll also see games take advantage of this platform capability and do interesting things to integrate captured game footage into the game experience itself."
Meanwhile, Whitten confirmed that Xbox 360 Avatars will transfer over to Xbox One, and include new options, such as the ability to do full-body HD gamerpics.
"We've moved from the 64x64 gamerpics on Xbox 360 to a full 1080p," Whitten added. "They are beautiful, and you are going to see some really cool hero moments, like when you login to see personalised views of your games and other content."Sam Forencich/Getty Images
The Chicago Bulls' up-and-down, turbulent 2015-16 season might be more than an anomaly or a team struggling with effort.
Perhaps they have gotten |
on the core radius r o, rotation frequency Ω, and the thickness D of the core rotating shell where convection occurs via ∝ D5/9 Ω7/6 (Olson and Christensen, 2006; López-Morales et al.,2011), which implies that tidally locked planets and moons in wide orbits may have weak magnetic shielding.
Climatic thermostat
A more reliable global thermostat that impedes ice ages and snowball states would prevent an existing ecosystem from experiencing mass extinctions, which would decelerate or even frustrate evolution. There should exist atmospheric and geological processes whose interplay constitutes a thermostat that makes a planet superhabitable.
Triggered by the recent discoveries of super-Earth planets in or near the stellar HZ, recycling mechanisms of atmospheric CO 2 and CH 4 have been proposed for potentially water-rich planets (Kaltenegger et al.,2013).7 These planets are predicted to be completely covered by a deep liquid water ocean on top of high-pressure ices and without direct contact with the rocky interior. On such worlds, an Earth-like carbon-silicate cycle cannot possibly operate, as there would be no CO 2 weathering. Alternatively, lattices of high-pressure water molecules could trap CO 2 as guest molecules, a chemical substance known as carbon clathrate, and provide an effective climatic thermostat by moderating the H 2 O and CO 2 levels in water-rich super-Earths. A similar clathrate mediation has been shown possible for CH 4 instead of CO 2 (Levi et al.,2013), that is, methane clathrate. Clathrate convection could be an effective mechanism to transport CH 4 and/or CO 2 from a water-rich planet's silicate-iron core through a high-pressure ice mantle into the ocean and, ultimately, into the atmosphere (Fu et al.,2010).
Surface temperature
On worlds with substantial atmospheres, in other words with surface pressures P at least as high as those on Mars (where 1 mb≲P≲10 mb), surface temperatures will generally be different from the thermal equilibrium temperature given by stellar irradiation and planetary albedo alone (Selsis et al.,2007; Leconte et al.,2013). The biodiversity, or the richness of families and genera, seems to have multiplied during warmer epochs on Earth (Mayhew et al.,2012), indicating that worlds warmer than Earth could be more habitable. A slightly warmer version of Earth might have extended tropical zones that would allow for more biological variance. This is suggested by both the “cradle model” and the “museum model” used in evolutionary biology. The former approach suggests that rapid diversification occurred recently and rapidly in the tropics, while the latter theory claims that the tropics provide particularly favorable circumstances for slow accumulation and preservation of diversity over time (McKenna and Farrell, 2006; Moreau and Bell, 2013).
However, warming Earth does not necessarily yield increased biodiversity. Warming on short timescales causes mass extinction, which can currently be witnessed on Earth. Only a planet that is warm compared to Earth on a billion-year timescale or a world that warms gently over millions and billions of years could have more extended surface regions suitable for liquid water and biodiversity.
On the downside, with fewer temperate zones and no arctic regions, an enormous range of life-forms known from Earth could not exist. Above all, a world that is substantially warmer than Earth might have anoxic oceans. On Earth, oceanic anoxic events occurred in periods of warm climate, with average surface temperatures above 25°C compared to pre-industrial 14°C (GRID-Arendal, 1995), and resulted in extensive extinctions like the Permian/Triassic around 250 Myr ago (Wignall and Twitchett, 1996). While the concatenation of circumstances that led to extinctions during hot periods is complicated and may reflect problems of Earth's ecosystem, it cannot be excluded that a world moderately warmer than Earth could be superhabitable. A colder planet, however, can be assumed to be less habitable, as less energy input would slow down chemical reactions and metabolism on a global scale.
Biological diversification
An inhabited planet whose flora and fauna are more diverse than they are on Earth could reasonably be termed superhabitable, as it empirically shows that its environment is more benign to life. An evolutionary explosion, such as the Cambrian one on Earth, could occur earlier in a planet's history than it did on Earth—or simply long enough ago to make the respective planet more diversely inhabited than Earth is today. Alternatively, evolution could have progressed faster on other planets. Jumps in diversification or accelerated evolution can be triggered by nearby supernovae and by enhanced radiogenic or UV radiation.
Multihabitability and panspermia
Stellar systems could be more habitable than the Solar System if there were more than one terrestrial planet or moon in the HZ (Anglada-Escudé et al.,20138; Borucki et al.,2013). If, for example, the Moon-forming impact had distributed the mass more evenly between Earth and the Moon, then both objects might have been habitable. Alternatively, in a hypothetical Solar System analogue in which only the orbits of Mars and Venus would be exchanged, there could exist three habitable planets. With the possibility of massive moons about giant planets, there might also exist satellite systems with several habitable exomoons. Such stellar systems could be called “multihabitable.” Impacts of comets, asteroids, or other interplanetary debris might trigger exchange of material between those worlds. This exchange could then induce mutual fertilization among multiple habitable worlds, a process known as panspermia (Hoyle et al.,1981; Weber and Greenberg, 1985). Worlds in multihabitable systems, whether they are planets or moons, could thus be regarded as superhabitable because they have a higher probability to be inhabited.
Localization in the stellar habitable zone
Recent work emphasized that Earth is scraping at the very inner edge of the Sun's HZ (Kopparapu et al.,2013; Wordsworth and Pierrehumbert, 2013). Terrestrial worlds that are located more toward the center of the stellar HZ could be considered superhabitable. These objects would be more resistant against transitioning into a moist or runaway greenhouse state (at the inner edge of the HZ) than Earth is.
Age
From a biological point of view, older worlds can be assumed to be more habitable because Earth experienced a steady increase in biodiversity as it aged (Mayhew et al.,2012). This diversification indicates that non-intelligent life itself is able to modify an environment so as to make it more suitable for its ancestors.9 A stronger claim has been put forward by what is now known as the Gaia hypothesis, which suggests that the global biosphere as a whole can be regarded as a creature controlling “the global environment to suit its needs” (Lovelock, 1972). Whether considered as a global entity or not, Earth's ecosystem obviously influences global geochemical processes, which has perpetually led to an increase in biodiversity over billions of years. As an example, note that after the Great Oxygen Event about 2.5 Gyr ago (Anbar et al.,2007)10, which was likely induced by oceanic algae, Earth's surface became more habitable, allowing life to conquer the continents about 480–360 Myr ago (Kenrick and Crane, 1997). Therefore, older planets should tend to be more habitable, or superhabitable if inhabited.
Stellar mass
The mass of a star on the main sequence determines its luminosity, its spectral energy distribution, and its lifetime. The Sun emits most of its light between 400 and 700 nm, which is the part of the spectrum visible to the human eye. This is also the spectral range in which plants and other organisms perform oxygenic photosynthesis. On worlds orbiting stars with masses ≲ 0.6 M ⊙ (known as M dwarfs, Baraffe and Chabrier, 1996), these forms of life might not have the capacity to properly harvest energy for their survival because their stars have their radiation maxima in the IR. However, Miller et al. (2005) found a free-living cyanobacterium that is able to use near-IR photons at wavelengths >700 nm. This discovery, as well as the ability of the oxygenic photosynthetic cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina to use chlorophyll d for harvesting photons at 750 nm (Chen and Blankenship, 2011), suggests that—of course provided that many other conditions are met—oxygenic photosynthesis on planets orbiting cool stars is possible. Discussing the results of Kiang et al. (2007a, 2007b) and Stomp et al. (2007), Raven (2007) also concluded that photosynthesis can occur on exoplanets in the HZ of M dwarfs. Ultimately, the transmissivity of the planet's atmosphere needs to be appropriate to allow an adequate amount of spectral energy to arrive at the planet's surface.
We will not go deeper in possible extremophilic life—extremophilic from the standpoint of an Earthling—and, for the time being, consider M stars as less likely hosts for superhabitable planets. However, these reflections show that stars slightly less massive than the Sun could still provide the appropriate spectral energy distribution for photosynthesis.
Stellar UV irradiation
Stellar UV radiation can damage deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and thus impede the emergence of life. Today, Earth has a substantial stratospheric ozone column that absorbs solar irradiation almost completely between 200 and 285 nm (UVC) and most of the radiation between 280 and 315 nm (UVB). During the Archean (3.8–2.5 Gyr ago), this ozone shield did not exist, yet life managed to form. We can assume that terrestrial planets with anoxic primordial atmospheres would be more habitable than early Earth if they received less hazardous UV irradiation.
M stars remain very active and emit a lot of X-ray and UV radiation during about the first billion years of their lifetime (Scalo et al.,2007). The activity-driven XUV flux of G stars, such as the Sun, falls off much more rapidly, but their quiescent UV flux is enhanced with respect to K and M dwarfs. What is more, while the UV flux of young M stars is generally much stronger than that of young Sun-like stars, quiescent UV radiation from evolved M dwarfs may be too weak for some essential biochemical compounds to be synthesized (Guo et al.,2010). Thus, they do not seem to offer superhabitable primordial environments. K stars offer a convenient compromise between moderate initial and long-term high-energy radiation. This is supported by considerations of the weighted irradiance spectrum of complex carbon-based molecules, indicating that planets in the HZs of K main sequence stars experience particularly favorable UV environments (Cockell, 1999). This indicates that K dwarf stars are favorable host stars for superhabitable planets.
Stellar lifetime
With a planet's tendency to be superhabitable increasing with age, the star must burn long enough for existing life-forms to evolve. Stars less massive than the Sun have longer lifetimes, and planets or moons can spend more time within the HZ before they transition inside the expanding inner edge (Rushby et al.,2013). Against the background of the two previous items and accounting for the relatively stable spectral radiance once they have settled on the main sequence, we propose that K dwarfs are more likely to host superhabitable planets than the Sun or M dwarfs.
Early planetary bombardment
The nature of Earth is closely coupled to its bombardment history. From the lunar-forming impact (Cameron and Ward, 1976) to the LHB (Gomes et al.,2005), the impact history influenced the surface environment, delivery of organic molecules and volatiles (Chyba and Sagan, 1992; Raymond et al.,2009), and spin/orbital evolution of Earth. This means that the history of Earth's evolution is closely coupled to the orbital dynamics of the planetary system. It is possible that the LHB itself is responsible for Earth's habitability, since it helped deliver water and other volatiles to Earth's surface from farther out in the Solar System.
While the exact cause of the LHB is uncertain, the debate has focused on effects of a continuous, though gradually tapering, history of impacts versus a spiked delivery of material caused by changes in orbital dynamics (Ryder, 2002). Either way, the system architecture played a large role in determining the extent of these impacts (Raymond et al.,2004). Is it possible that a system with more dynamical instability early in a planet's history would result in a longer, more extensive LHB, or—in the case of a stochastic LHB—a sequence of LHB-type events? Such a history could have little effect on the ongoing evolution of marine or subterranean microbes yet result in a richer volatile inventory for the host planet or moon and even encourage multihabitability by enhancing transfer of material between planets in the same system.
Planetary spin
The initial spin-orbit misalignment, or obliquity, and rotation rate of a planet are largely due to the random events that lead to a planet's formation (Miguel and Brunini, 2010), but the subsequent evolution is tightly coupled to orbital dynamics. Conventional wisdom suggests that Earth is an “ideal” habitable world, since it has a large—and presumably rare—moon to stabilize its tilt relative against the orbital forcing from the Sun and other planets (Laskar et al.,1993). However, there are a couple of assumptions in this: (1) that a stable spin is required or even desired for a habitable planet and (2) that this effect is not mitigated by the crucial role the Moon has had on the evolution of Earth's spin rate. For example, studies have indicated that Earth's rotation axis could be stable without the presence of a massive satellite (Lissauer et al.,2012) and that such stability is perhaps not desirable (Spiegel et al.,2009; Armstrong et al., unpublished). In the latter case, planets with a large tilt can break the ice-albedo feedback at locations farther from the star, keeping the planet from entering the snowball Earth stage (Williams and Kasting, 1997), and systems with varying tilts could provide slow but steady changes in ecosystems that encourage evolution of life.
It is uncertain whether any given spin rate is desirable for life, as long as it helps keep the surface uniformly habitable, while radical changes in such a spin rate might be detrimental. Did the existence of the Moon encourage life to evolve by changing the diurnal and tidal cycles, or was this an impediment to evolution? Could moderate changes of a world's obliquity or rotation rate even force life to adapt to a broader range of environmental conditions, thereby triggering more diverse evolution? Ultimately, is it possible that a terrestrial planet without a massive moon, or a planet more subject to changes in spin, could be superhabitable?
Orbital dynamics
It is occasionally claimed that Earth is habitable largely owing to its stable, circular orbit. However, climate studies indicate a range of dramatic shifts in climate due to subtle changes in Earth's orbit. These oscillations of obliquity, precession, orbital eccentricity, and rotation period—mainly driven by gravitational interaction with the Sun, the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn—are known as Milankovitch cycles (Berger, 1976; Hays et al.,1976). The very stability of our orbit, in these cases, makes such events treacherous, as Earth may experience only subtle changes again to help rectify the problem. In fact, it is entirely possible that such stability might put the brakes on biological evolution. Planets with eccentric orbits would still provide a range of seasonally viable habitats while perhaps acting as a “vaccine” against life-threatening snowball events. Tidal heating in planets or moons on eccentric orbits may even act as a buffer against transition into a global snowball state (Reynolds et al.,1987; Scharf, 2006; Barnes et al.,2009). Planets with large swings in eccentricity can also influence the planetary tilt, which has its own, perhaps positive, impacts on the habitability of a planet. We thus claim that moderate variations in the orbital elements of a terrestrial world need not necessarily hamper the evolution or inhibit the formation of life. Consequently, we see no terminating argument that Earth's configuration in an almost circular orbit with mild changes in its orbital elements should be considered the most benign situation. Planets that undergo soft variations in their orbital configurations may still be superhabitable.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere of an exoplanet or exomoon is essential to its surface life, as it serves as a mediator of transport for water and, to a lesser degree, nutrients. Atmospheric composition and the gases' partial pressures will determine surface temperatures and, hence, have a key role in shaping the environment and providing the preconditions for formation and evolution of life.
Just as an example of how an atmosphere different from that of Earth could make an otherwise similar world superhabitable, note that (i) enhanced atmospheric oxygen concentration allows a larger range of metabolic networks (Berner et al.,2007); (ii) variations in the atmospheric oxygen concentration seem to constrain the maximum possible body size of living forms (Harrison et al.,2010; Payne et al.,2011); and (iii) there are no known multicellular organisms that are strictly anaerobic. Today, Earth's atmosphere contains about 21% oxygen by volume or partial pressure (pO 2 ). Limited by runaway wildfires for pO 2 >35% and lack of fire at pO 2 <15% (Belcher and McElwain, 2008), a range of oxygen partial pressures is compatible with an ecosystem broadly similar to Earth's. Obviously, atmospheric oxygen contents can be much greater than on Earth today, and worlds with oxygen-rich atmospheres could be entitled superhabitable, because of items (i)–(iii).
While atmospheres less massive than that of Earth would offer weaker shielding against high-energy irradiation from space, weaker balancing of day-night temperature contrasts, retarded global distribution of water, and so on, somewhat more massive atmospheres could induce positive effects for habitability. Again, this indicates that planets slightly more massive than Earth should tend to be superhabitable because, first, they acquire thicker atmospheres and, second, their initially extended hydrogen atmospheres can envelop gaseous nitrogen and thereby prevent its loss due to nonthermal ion pickup under an initially strong stellar UV irradiation (Lammer, 2013).
Some of the conditions listed in this section are already, or will soon be, accessible remotely (namely, orbital and bodily characteristics of extrasolar planets or moons), some will be modeled and thereby constrained (such as orbital evolution and composition), and others will remain hidden and induce random effects on habitability (climate history, radiogenic heating, ocean salinity, former presence of meanwhile ejected planets or satellites, etc.) from the viewpoint of an observer. This list is by far not complete, and it is not our goal to provide such a complete list. However, it is supposed to illustrate that a range of physical characteristics and processes can make a world exhibit more benign environments than Earth does. Given the amount of planets that exist in the Galaxy, it is therefore reasonable to predicate that worlds with more comfortable settings for life than Earth exist.
Earth might still be rare, but this does not make the emergence and existence of extraterrestrial life impossible or even very unlikely because superhabitable worlds exist.
4. Conclusions
Utilization of any flavor of the HZ concept implies that a planet is either in the HZ and habitable or outside it and uninhabitable. Resuming our considerations from Section 2, our results are threefold: (i) Extensions of the HZ concept, which include tidal heating, show that planets (“super-Europas” in our terminology) can exist beyond the HZ and still be habitable. (ii) Fed by tidal heating, moons of planets beyond the HZ can be habitable. (iii) Intriguingly, none of all the discussed concepts for the HZ describe a circumstellar distance range that would make a planet a more suitable place for life than Earth currently is.
Terrestrial planets that are slightly more massive than Earth, that is, up to 2 or 3 M ⊕, are preferably superhabitable due to the longer tectonic activity, a carbon-silicate cycle that is active on a longer timescale, enhanced magnetic shielding against cosmic and stellar high-energy radiation, their larger surface area, a smoother surface allowing for more shallow seas, their potential to retain atmospheres thicker than that of Earth, and the positive effects of non-intelligent life on a planet's habitability, which can be observed on Earth. Higher biodiversity made Earth more habitable in the long term. If this is a general feature of inhabited planets, that is to say, that planets tend to become more habitable once they are inhabited, a host star slightly less massive than the Sun should be favorable for superhabitability. These so-called K dwarf stars have lifetimes that are longer than the age of the Universe. Consequently, if they are much older than the Sun, then life has had more time to emerge on their potentially habitable planets and moons, and—once occurred—it would have had more time to “tune” its ecosystem to make it even more habitable.
The K1V star Alpha Centauri B (α Cen B), which is a member of the closest stellar system to the Sun and is supposed to host an Earth-mass planet in a 3.235-day orbit (Dumusque et al.,2012), provides an ideal target for searches of planets in the HZ and, ultimately, for superhabitable worlds. Age estimates for α Cen B, derived via asteroseismology, chromospheric activity, and gyrochronology (Thévenin et al.,2002; Thoul et al.,2003; Eggenberger et al.,2004; Miglio and Montalbán, 2005; Bazot et al.,2012), show the star to be slightly evolved compared to the Sun, with estimates being 4.85±0.5 Gyr, 6.52±0.3 Gyr, 6.41 Gyr, 5.2–8.9 Gyr, and 5.0±0.5 Gyr, respectively. Radiation effects of the stellar primary Alpha Centauri A have been shown to be small and should not induce significant climatic variations on planets about α Cen B (Forgan, 2012). If life on a planet or moon in the HZ of α Cen B evolved similarly as it did on Earth and if this planet had the chance to collect water from comets and planetesimals beyond the snowline (Wiegert and Holman, 1997; Haghighipour and Raymond, 2007), then primitive forms of life could already have flourished in its waters or on its surface when the proto-Earth collided with a Mars-sized object, thereby forming the Moon.
Eventually, just as the Solar System turned out to be everything but typical for planetary systems, Earth could turn out to be everything but typical for a habitable or, ultimately, an inhabited world. Our argumentation can be understood as a refutation of the Rare Earth hypothesis. Ward and Brownlee (2000) claimed that the emergence of life required an extremely unlikely interplay of conditions on Earth, and they concluded that complex life would be a very unlikely phenomenon in the Universe. While we agree that the occurrence of another truly Earth-like planet is trivially impossible, we hold that this argument does not constrain the emergence of other inhabited planets. We argue here in the opposite direction and claim that Earth could turn out to be a marginally habitable world. In our view, a variety of processes exist that can make environmental conditions on a planet or moon more benign to life than is the case on Earth.
Appendix A. Usage and Meaning of Terms Related to Habitability
Discussions about habitability suffer from diverging understanding of the terms “habitability,” “habitable,” and so on. Recall that a planet in the stellar illumination HZ, as it is defined by physicists and astronomers (see Section 2), need not necessarily be habitable. It is thus precipitate, if not simply false, to state that the planet Gl 581 d is “habitable, but not much like home” (Schilling, 2007). Analogously, a world such as a tidally heated moon outside the HZ need not necessarily be uninhabitable. Claiming that “Being inside the habitable zone is a necessary but not sufficient condition for habitability” (Selsis et al.,2007) can be wrong, depending on the meaning of the word “habitable.” If that statement means that habitable planets are in the HZ by definition, then the sentence is tautological. If, however, it means that a planet needs to be in the HZ to provide liquid surface water, then it can be proven wrong.
Confusions from blurred pictures are not restricted to the qualitative. As an example, quantitative problems occur in discussions about the occurrence rate of planets similar to Earth that orbit Sun-like stars. The parameter η ⊕ has been introduced to quantify their abundance. Unfortunately, different understandings of η ⊕ occur in the literature. It has been used as “fraction of stars with Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone” (Howard et al.,2009), “the fraction of Sun-like stars that have planets like Earth” (Catanzarite and Shao, 2011), “the fraction of Sun-like stars with Earth-like planets in their habitable zones” (O'Malley-James et al.,2013), “the fraction of habitable planets for all Sun-like stars” (Catanzarite and Shao, 2011), “the fraction of Sun-like stars that have at least one planet in the habitable zone” (Lunine et al.,2008), the “frequency of Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone” (Wittenmyer et al.,2011), the fraction of “Earth-like planets with M sin i=0.5–2 M Earth and P<50 days”11 (Howard et al.,2010), “the frequency of habitable planets orbiting M dwarfs” (Bonfils et al.,2013b), “the frequency of 1<m sin i<10 M ⊕ planets in the habitable zone of M dwarfs”12 (Bonfils et al.,2013a), “the frequency of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone…of solar-like stars in our galaxy” (Jenkins, 2012), and “the number of planets with 0.1 M ⊕ <M p <10 M ⊕ in the 3 Gyr CHZ (a<0.02AU)”13 (Agol, 2011). The latter two definitions stand out because Jenkins (2012) restricts η ⊕ to the Milky Way, and Agol (2011) introduces η ⊕ as a total count, and yet he uses it as a frequency.
Intriguingly, (i) as it is not clear whether a planet must be similar to Earth to be habitable, (ii) as the definitions diverge in their reference to the stellar type, and (iii) as it sometimes remains obscure what “Earth-like planets” are in the respective context, none of these understandings is equivalent to at least one of the others, except for the Howard et al. (2009) and Wittenmyer et al. (2011) explanations. As a consequence, different estimates for η ⊕ must occur. Although physical, observational, and systematic effects play a role, a quantitative divergence of estimates for η ⊕ will remain as long as there is no consensus about the meaning, that is, the usage of this word or variable. This problem is not physical, but it is a logical consequence of the diverging understanding of η ⊕. Imagine a situation in which all the authors of the mentioned studies sit around a desk to discuss their values for η ⊕ and the implications! If they were not aware of the meaning/usage drift of “their” respective η ⊕, then their dialogue would founder on a language problem.
The crux of the matter lies in the meaning of any of these terms, which again depends on the context in which any term is used. Following the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Philosophische Untersuchungen (Wittgenstein, 1953), many logical problems occur when terms are alienated from their ancestral use and then unreasonably applied in other contexts. Ultimately, as astrobiology is an interdisciplinary science, it is exposed to those dangers of confusion and contradiction to a special degree. In this communication, we shall not infringe the use of language and terminology but unravel possible perils. In other words, we ought to be descriptive rather than normative (Wittgenstein, 1953, Section 124). To answer the question of whether a planet is habitable, it must be clear what we understand a habitable planet to be. And following semantic holism, a doctrine in the philosophy of language, the term “habitable” then is defined by its usage in the language.14
Appendix B. An Algebraic Approach to Superhabitable Planets
Astronomers have developed an inclination to evaluate habitability in terms of geocentric conditions. Expressions such as “Earth-like,” “Earth analog,” “Earth twin,” “Earth-sized,” and “Earth-mass” are often used to evaluate a planet's habitability. Although being a natural body of reference, if other inhabited worlds exist—and obviously some scientists assume that and look for them—then it would be presumptuous to claim that they need to be Earth-like or that Earth offers the most favorable conditions. We can use set algebra to discern and display planet families. This somewhat unconventional approach would allow us to identify Earth as one sort of a habitable and inhabited world and to become acquainted with superhabitable worlds.
Appendix B.1. Set theory
Consider a set T of terrestrial planets. We assume that any solar or extrasolar planet will either be an element of T or not. Planets have been detected with masses of about 5–10 Earth masses, and they likely constitute a transitional regime between terrestrial and, as the case may be, icy or gaseous. They may still have their bulk mass in solid form but also have a substantial atmosphere. Nevertheless, we use a sharp classification here for simplicity. We concentrate here on the genuine terrestrial planets. As an example, Earth (e ⊕ ) is a terrestrial planet (), whereas Jupiter is not.
The elements of T are the terrestrial planets: (see Fig. A). Some of these planets will be habitable and thus be an element of the set of habitable, terrestrial planets (dotted area). The complement of this set is the set of uninhabitable, terrestrial planets (blank area). There are no planets that are both habitable and uninhabitable. Hence, the union of H and U is equal to the terrestrial planets:. Beyond, there will be a set of Earth-like planets (vertically striped area). Our intuition, trained by the usage of the term “Earth-like” in literature, in talks, and in conversations, suggests that Earth-like planets are habitable. For the time being, we prefer to take a more general point of view and allow Earth-like planets also to be uninhabitable. E thus overlaps with U in Fig. A. Yet, to be inhabited, a terrestrial planet must also be habitable. Thus, the set (green area) of inhabited planets is a subset of H, that is,. Note that the equality is only valid if all the habitable planets were indeed inhabited. It is reasonable to assume that there exists at least one terrestrial planet that is habitable but yet uninhabited. Thus, we can securely state.15 With Earth being Earth-like, habitable, and inhabited, we have. Finally, we propose that there exists a set (horizontally striped area) of terrestrial planets, whose elements (i.e., superhabitable planets) offer more comfortable environments to life than Earth does. From a statistical perspective, this statement reads as follows:
FIG. A. Set of terrestrial worlds T and subsets. The set membership of Earth is indicated with a symbol. This graphic visualizes our claim that habitable planets (H) need not be Earth-like (E) and that there may well exist a set of superhabitable worlds (S). The cardinality of S may be greater than that of E, and the fraction of planets inside S that are actually inhabited (I, green) may be greater than the fraction of Earth-like, inhabited planets. For this purpose, S is depicted to be larger than E, and () is chosen to be smaller with respect to E than () with respect to S. (Color graphics available online at www.liebertonline.com/ast)
Alternatively, with p being the probability of a planet to be inhabited:
In Fig. A, we insinuate sentences (1) and (2) by plotting the relative area of () to S larger than the relation of () to E. An equivalent sentence to (2) is
where |X| is the number of elements, or “cardinality,” of X.
Sentences (1)–(3) say nothing about the absolute number of inhabited worlds from sets E and S, which corresponds to the size of the areas of E and S in Fig. A. Perhaps there are only two superhabitable planets in our galactic neighborhood, both of which are inhabited, and it may be that there are 100 Earth-like planets in a similar volume, of which, say, 10 are inhabited. Then still (2) is true because p(s)=2/2=1>p(e)=10/100=0.1. But there would be 5 times as many Earth-like planets with life than there are superhabitable inhabited planets.
In debates about habitable planets, it is subliminally assumed that there are more Earth-like inhabited planets than there are non-Earth-like inhabited planets:. However, the numbers, and are truly not known, say for a local volume of 100 pc about the Sun. There are only the following constraints: and {CoRoT-7 b, Kepler-10 b, 55 Cnc e, Kepler-18 b, Kepler-20 e, Kepler-20 f, Kepler-36 b, Kepler-42 b, Kepler-42 c, Kepler-42 d, Kepler-62 c, and others}|16 (Léger et al.,2009; Batalha et al.,2011; Cochran et al.,2011; Winn et al.,2011; Carter et al.,2012; Fressin et al.,2012; Muirhead et al.,2012; Borucki et al.,2013). More terrestrial planet candidates are known, but they lack either radius or mass determinations (e.g., Gl 581 d, GJ 667 C b to h, GJ 1214 b, HD 88512, and Alpha Centauri B b).
The possible existence of S has fundamental observational implications. Were it possible to describe S and predict the characteristics of its elements s, as we attempt in this communication, then the search for extraterrestrial life could be made more efficient. Assume two planets were found; one () being Earth-like and another one () being a member of S. Then it would be more reasonable to spend research resources on rather than on in order to find extrasolar life. And intriguingly, could be less Earth-like than. Ultimately, a superhabitable world may already have been detected but not yet noticed as such.
Appendix B.2. The principle of mediocracy
The principle of mediocracy claims that, if an item is drawn at random from one of several categories, it is likelier to come from the most numerous category than from any of the other less numerous categories (Section 1 in Kukla, 2010). As an example, consider the cardinalities of two sets A and B were known; |A|<|B| and Ø, where Ø is the empty set. Further, is the set of all elements. Then if an arbitrary element were drawn, it would be more likely to come from B than from A. This is all the principle of mediocracy states. In this reading, it comes as a truism. Note that the proportion of A and B, that is, the prior |A|<|B|, is known, and it is the probability for the drawing that is inferred:.
In a second reading of the principle of mediocracy, and this is the one subliminally applied in modern searches for inhabited planets, the functions of the prior and the drawing are reversed. Here, (which in our example from Section B.1 is Earth, e ⊕ ) has already been drawn. It is recognized as an element of a certain set (), and it is claimed that this set is more abundant than the other one. In the terrestrial worlds scenario (Section B.1), this ventured conclusion reads “”. We paraphrase it because it is not justified. Given that we have almost no antecedent knowledge of E, Ē, and I, this claim is not logical.17
What is more, it is not logical to state that the choice of e ⊕ has been random; humans have not chosen Earth by random from a set T (Mash, 1993). To make things worse, even if we could have chosen e ⊕ randomly from T, and if our assumption were correct, then what could we conclude from only one drawing? Numerous drawings, in other words observations and knowledge about inhabitance of many Earth-like and non-Earth-like planets, would be required to reconstruct the prior with statistical significance. Hence, Earth cannot be justified as a reference for astrobiological investigations with the principle of mediocracy. The claim “” remains arbitrary, and current searches for life might not be designed optimally.
To conclude, the principle of mediocracy cannot explain why Earth should be considered a particularly benign, inhabited world. When applied to our set of terrestrial worlds, the principle simply states that a randomly chosen world most likely comes from the most numerous subset of worlds. In this understanding, the cardinality of the subsets of terrestrial worlds is the prior—it is known before the drawing—and the probability of affiliation with any subset can be predicted. Yet, concluding that inhabited worlds are most likely Earth-like is not logical, because, first, the roles of the prior (here, the inhabited worlds) and the drawing (here, Earth) are reversed and, second, Earth has not been drawn (by |
view shared by the vast majority of the 154,500 online votes at time of publication.
The Humanist Society insists the poll has "backfired", while The Alpha Course reckons it's the victim of an online sting. Spokesman Mark Elsdon-Dew added: "I don't think this is indicative of people's faith in this country."
The Alpha Course is endorsed by daredevil TV bloke Bear Grylls (seen in the screen grab). Grylls is no stranger to exploring in a relaxed setting, having been rumbled for bunking down in hotels during the filming for his Channel 4 show when he was supposed to be kipping in the gutted carcass of a polar bear he'd killed with his bare teeth. ®ROME (RNS) Computer users in the Vatican apparently have an illegal taste for the German heavy metal band Scorpions, the coming-of-age dance film “Billy Elliot,” the television comedy series “Camp” — as well as more, ahem, adult content — according to information from Netherlands-based company TorrentFreak.
TorrentFreak is a news site that focuses on file sharing and intellectual property issues, but may be best known for its occasional reports on the illegal peer-to-peer downloading of files.
Video courtesy of thecultbox. via YouTube
http://youtu.be/jhyktCYtc1g
The Vatican is not the only place guilty of illegal downloads, based on data gathered by the company: the U.S. Congress and even some of the Hollywood studios waging war against illegal file sharing have hosted their fair share of illicit downloaders.
TorrentFreak founder and director Ernesto Van der Sar said that because of the small number of downloads and the Vatican’s tiny population, it is difficult to draw conclusions about whether the number of illegal downloads at the Holy See are unusually high or low. But some conclusions can still be drawn.
“Keep in mind that with numbers this small, what we are seeing could be the work of as few as three or four individuals,” Van der Sar said. “One thing that stands out, though, is the lack of downloads of recent content. Usually, you see a lot of downloads of the latest blockbusters or new television series. But there is almost none of that at the Vatican.”
Van der Sar said estimates are that pornography makes up between 10 and 20 percent of all peer-to-peer downloads worldwide. And that’s the case in the Vatican, as well, where someone downloaded a XXX offering called “Flexy Teens Naked Gymnast,” for example, and another called “Lesbian Hair Salon.”
Photo courtesy of Pablo BM from Plymouth, England, via Wikimedia Commons
In addition to Scorpions’ “Very Best Greatest Hits” and Will Smith’s sci-fi adventure “After Earth,” other illegal Vatican downloads include the video game Football Manager and the two-year-old comedic crime thriller “Seven Psychopaths” plus — perhaps more appropriately — the pilot episode of “Save Me,” a television series about a girl who thinks she’s God, and a documentary on Leonardo da Vinci.
KRE/AMB END LYMANCBC Manitoba's Future 40 showcases some of the brightest young minds and influential change-makers under 40 working to make this province better for future generations.
We received more than 170 nominations in the 2017 instalment, and last week a panel of judges selected 40 finalists. Those finalists will be announced online in rounds of 10 each day between Monday and Thursday.
Select finalists will also be featured on CBC's Information Radio with host Marcy Markusa, Radio Noon with host Marjorie Dowhos, Up to Speed with host Ismaila Alfa and the Weekend Morning Show with Nadia Kidwai. A handful of finalists will also appear on the supper-hour television cast of CBC Winnipeg News at 6 p.m. CT.
The first group of 10 includes a bisexual Christian pastor working to support LGBT members of the faith, an Indigenous graphic novelist, and eight other business people, technology whizzes, teachers and activists.
Here's your first round of Future 40 finalists:
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Age: 40
Category: Community, social activism and volunteerism
Jamie Arpin-Ricci is nominated in the community, social activism and volunteerism category. (Submitted by Rebecca Baxter)
Pastor Jamie Arpin-Ricci has been serving marginalized groups in Winnipeg's West End for 15 years. He lives with post-traumatic stress disorder and provides supports for those living with mental illness — including through an affordable-housing complex.
But about half of his time with the church these days is devoted to helping LGBT believers navigate the challenges of being out and Christian.
The 40-year-old pastoral leader at Winnipeg's Little Flowers Community church has been open about his own sexuality with those close to him for some time, but it was the shooting at Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Fla., in 2016 that inspired him to publicly come out as bisexual and share his beliefs.
The shooter targeted and killed dozens of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender-diverse people in what was until very recently considered the worst mass shooting carried out by a single person in modern American history.
"People were facing death and violence just for being themselves," Arpin-Ricci said, adding his decision to share more about who he is had negative consequences.
"I received a lot of pushback from more traditional Christians in my life and had some of my donor base for our ministry cut off as a result. That's obviously never fun to receive those kind of calls."
They need to at least have a safe space to ask the questions and receive impartial and fair answers in a place where people aren't going to judge. - Jamie Arpin-Ricci
But Arpin-Ricci also started to receive phone calls and emails from LGBT Christians in Winnipeg and all over the world wanting advice.
He does a lot of one-on-one counselling and co-launched a support group for LGBT Christians and their allies. He also helps out with groups online that are fighting for same-sex marriage rights in Australia.
Arpin-Ricci says a resurgence in ultra-conservative views and Christian fundamentalism south of the border underscores the need for all religious groups to ask fundamental questions "about what it means to be people of faith in a world that recognizes more diversity."
"People could in the past just dismiss it and say, 'Well, we're not like those Westboro Baptist Christians.' But at the same time that's a pretty bad measure of how Christian you are in response to this issue," Arpin-Ricci said.
As for young believers in Winnipeg who might be questioning their own sexuality or gender, Arpin-Ricci has this to say:
"I say this — even if they're not sure if they want to accept who they are initially, they need to at least have a safe space to ask the questions and receive impartial and fair answers in a place where people aren't going to judge, and that's fairly rare. And as clichéd as it sounds, I would also tell them it does get better. The world is getting more and more supportive.... The resources are increasing."
Anyone interested in accessing Arpin-Ricci's LGBT support group and care services can reach out through the Little Flowers or Generous Space Ministries websites.
(Nominee profiles below were provided by nominators.)
Jennifer Storm
Age: 30
Category: Arts, culture and entertainment
Jennifer Storm is nominated in the arts, culture and entertainment category. (Submitted by Murray Sinclair)
Jennifer Storm is an award-winning writer, editor, and visual artist who has influenced a generation of young Indigenous women. She wrote her first novel, Deadly Loyalties, at the age of 14, and released the graphic novel Fire Starters in 2017. She is Manitoba's leading Indigenous female graphic novelist.
Jennifer has worked in education for over a decade, recruiting Indigenous students to the University of Manitoba and doctors to work with northern Indigenous communities. She received an Aboriginal Circle of Educators award in 2014. A tireless volunteer, she mentors and supports young writers and particularly young Indigenous women in the arts. She's a true role model and leader in our community.
James Lavallee
Age: 20
Category: Sports and recreation
James Lavallee is nominated in the sports and recreation category. (Submitted by Dené Sinclair)
James Lavallee is a proud Métis, elite sprint kayaker and science student at the University of Manitoba.
James competes for the Junior National Kayak Team and has been named to the RBC Olympian team after a strong performance at the 2017 Canada Summer Games this past summer.
James has recently been awarded the Tom Longboat Award as the top male Indigenous athlete in Canada.
Aly Raposo
Age: 23
Category: Community, social activism and volunteerism
Aly Raposo was nominated in the community, social activism and volunteerism category. (Submitted by Liz Millward)
Aly was presented a YMCA-YWCA Young Women of Distinction award for 2017.
The 23-year-old is finishing her bachelor's degree at the University of Manitoba. She works tirelessly to raise awareness about, and to destigmatize, mental illness, including holding the relevant authorities accountable for inadequate levels of services and suggesting priorities for improving provisions for mental health.
She set up the U of M Active Living Centre gym initiative, working with a diverse group of students to successfully extend gym hours to accommodate women, transgender and non-binary folks.
Aly founded the very first U of M Women's and Gender Studies Student Association. She also co-organized Love Shouldn't Hurt: Breaking the Silence on Domestic Violence, a day-long series of events at the U of M to raise awareness about domestic violence. The event raised more than $1,000 in donations for the women's shelter Alpha House.
Andrew Kaplan
Age: 37
Category: Teaching and health care
Andrew Kaplan is nominated in the teaching and health care category. (Submitted)
Andrew has been shaping the lives of students in many different ways throughout his career. Mr. Kaplan's energy and passion act to inspire and educate his students both in the classroom and in the variety of programs he supports. He helped start his school's first gay-straight alliance group, which won the Sybil Shack Human Rights Youth Award.
Andrew is also the vice-president of the Manitoba Speech and Debate Association and helps to foster and support a program that instills the values of critical thinking, understanding of political landscapes, thoughtful listening and critical response.
He has travelled all around the world as a debate coach for Gray Academy and this fall is co-hosting the International Independent Schools Public Speaking Competition, one of the largest English international public speaking tournaments in the world.
Alexandra Froese
Age: 37
Category: Science and technology
Alexandra Froese is nominated in the science and technology category. (Submitted by Charlene Berkvens)
Alex is an outstanding Manitoban who works tirelessly to help protect, study and propagate burrowing owls while engaging Manitobans in efforts to conserve this federally listed endangered species in Canada.
She has built the Manitoba Burrowing Owl Recovery Program, which aims to reintroduce owls, perform research and collect valuable data on wild and captive owl populations, and raise awareness about grassland conservation efforts focused on burrowing owls.
Alex has dedicated countless hours, days, months and years to working with landowners to install artificial nest burrows and establish good owl-nesting locations in southwestern Manitoba.
She has fundraised and applied for grants that have kept the MBORP in operation for seven years while finishing her wildlife biology master's degree.
Carli Rossall
Age: 30
Category: Community, social activism and volunteerism
Carli Rossall is nominated in the community, social activism and volunteerism category. (Submitted)
After chasing her own demons from Toronto to New York to Vancouver, and finally settling on Vancouver Island, Carli has transformed her personal and professional life.
Since getting clean from addiction, she left a promising journalism career to return to school and become an addictions counsellor and recovery advocate. Before returning to Winnipeg Carli was working on the front lines of B.C.'s opioid crisis — at nights as a harm-reduction counsellor at a safe consumption site, and by day as a counsellor at a public access methadone clinic in Nanaimo, B.C.
Carli currently works as an addictions counsellor for Jewish Child and Family Services of Winnipeg. She has launched the "Don't Just Say Don't" campaign, a free workshop for educators and students aimed at changing the way we talk about the disease of addiction.
Carli also writes fearlessly and honestly about her own struggles for multiple publications in an effort to end stigma and bring pride to the recovery community.
Jackie Swirsky
Age: 38
Category: Community, social activism and volunteerism
Jackie Swirsky is nominated in the community, social activism and volunteerism category. (Submitted by Allan Appel)
Jackie is the winner of a 2016 silver Nautilus Book Award for her children's book Be Yourself, which empowers children to be proud of themselves and to be accepting of all people no matter what their style. She is a dynamic, passionate presenter regarding gender diversity.
Jackie was also a consulting advisor for the development of Supporting Transgender and Diverse Students in Manitoba, an education and training document in the Winnipeg School Division.
She shares her message of acceptance at schools, human rights committees, conferences, camps and universities, and has developed a course through the Seven Oaks School Division.
Jonathan Foord
Age: 33
Category: Science and technology
Jonathan Foord is nominated in the science and technology category. (Submitted by Michael Cantor)
Jonathan has worked to design and implement Winnipeg's first Transportation Management Centre, rapidly introducing unprecedented citywide tools and unprecedented capabilities.
Driven by the desire to improve peoples' lives, his vision is much larger and extends to improved planning, better and faster emergency response to save lives, and much more. His revolutionary and visionary work is attracting international attention and he was recently invited to speak at the Waze Global Summit, livestreamed from the Google offices in New York City.
Cities around the world are now looking to Winnipeg and seeking insight from Jonathan on how they too can start to realize rapid transformation of their transportation systems. He is redefining transportation on a global stage, and doing it from Winnipeg.
Alexa Joy Potashnik
Age: 24
Category: Community, social activism and volunteerism
Alexa Joy Potashnik is nominated in the community, social activism and volunteerism category. (Submitted by Kendra Magnus-Johnston)
Alexa Joy has established herself as a potent political activist, a vigilant community leader and a talented beatbox performer. She is the founder of Black Space Winnipeg, an organization that creates safe spaces for Winnipeg's black community. Alexa recently completed her bachelor of arts in human rights at the University of Winnipeg. While in school, she volunteered as the racialized student commissioner, advocating for students of colour across Manitoba.
Alexa's current commitments include serving on the OurWinnipeg community advisory committee, working for Jazz Winnipeg and hosting a radio show called Raw Colours. Alexa is in the midst of redeveloping Raw Colours as a podcast and artist network to foster connection and support for artists of colour.Norway’s environment minister Vidar Helgesen warns that assault on forest protection jeopardises aid payments to Brazil through the Amazon Fund
By Fabiano Maisonnave in Oslo
Michel Temer, the embattled president of Brazil, will find no respite from his problems on a visit to Norway on Wednesday.
As he toured the Scandinavian nation to drum up investment for his struggling economy, Temer was reminded that Norway’s major foreign aid support is conditional on protection of the Amazon rainforest.
In a leaked letter preceding Temer’s Oslo visit, Norway’s environment minister Vidar Helgesen criticised a recent rise in deforestation and moves by Congress to cut environmental protections.
“I believe that it is important to express concern when concern is due,” wrote Helgesen, addressing his Brazilian counterpart, José Sarney Filho.
“As you are aware, a set of policy measures that have caused strong public reactions in Brazil are making their way through Congress, including the revision of the environmental licensing criteria and the roll back of of protection of significant tracts of the Amazon. In parallel, budgets for key institutions that provide vital services for forest protection, are being cut, and their mandate to operate effectively is put under pressure.”
Norway is in a special position to deploy such strong diplomatic language. Brazil is the largest recipient of its foreign aid. Since 2009, Norway has pledged $1.1 billion to the Amazon Fund, which has financed anti-deforestation and sustainable development projects such as an agroforestry management and production project with the Ashaninka people and satellite monitoring.
“The big picture of the last decade is very positive. Brazil has set an example to the world in combating deforestation. Now, we are seeing a worrying development in the last couple of years. We’ve had a very good and frank dialogue with Brazilian authorities about what can be done to get back on track,” Helgesen told this reporter on Monday in Oslo.
While he said environmental policies “are entirely up to the Brazilian government,” the Norwegian minister added aid payments are based on results. “If deforestation is reduced, there is money coming from Norway. If deforestation increases, there will be much less money, because it’s about honoring results of nationally-based policies.”
Although data is not yet available for this year, Norway’s payments through the Amazon Fund are likely to be significantly cut, following a 29% deforestation increase in 2016.
On Tuesday, Temer vetoed a bill from Congress that would have reduced protections across 1.4 million acres of land, much of it in the Amazon. Observers suggested he was trying to improve his image for Norway, after the plans sparked an international outcry.
That reprieve for the forests may be temporary, with Sarney Filho announcing on Sunday he was developing another bill to deregulate a different area. Farming and mining interests continue to wield significant influence in Brazil’s politics, lobbying for the right to expand operations into forested areas.
During Temer’s state visit to Norway, the two environment ministers meet for the second time this year. There was a previous meeting in Brasília in March.This week, Tesla invited journalists to an announcement at the company's base in Hawthorne, California, in which Elon Musk is expected to give details about a new product unrelated to his line of electric cars. Tesla’s next big thing is widely believed to be a stationary battery, which will power homes, offices, and industrial spaces with stored energy.
Reports from The Wall Street Journal suggest that Tesla will devote as much as 25 percent of the capacity of its new $5 billion gigafactory, currently being built in Reno, Nevada, to the production of large battery packs for homes and businesses.
One of the most difficult things about energy distribution is that demand fluctuates dramatically during the day as households use more electricity in the morning and evening and hardly use any during the day while most people are at work. That problem can be multiplied with renewable energy sources, which suffer from supply fluctuations as well—energy is in abundant supply when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, but production drops off as the weather changes. Cost-effective heavy-duty batteries could help store excess energy and smooth out the issues caused by resource inefficiency.
Still, just because Tesla has had success building car batteries doesn't guarantee it will have success in the stationary battery industry. Venkat Viswanathan, an assistant professor for mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, told Ars over the phone today that cost effectiveness has to be at the forefront for a company trying to sell energy storage units.
"A car battery needs to be compact, it has to be light, so it can be more expensive than a battery for a stationary market, [where] space is not a constraint and weight is not a constraint," Viswanathan said. Especially for businesses looking for economies of scale, alternatives like compressed air energy storage will compete with stationary batteries in cost.
For individual homes, however, it might make more sense to invest in a battery, but again, cost will be a major issue when space isn't a factor. Tesla's lithium-ion batteries, which will be produced in partnership with Panasonic at its gigafactory, will have to compete intensely with products using cheaper electrodes and electrolytes. (Lead-acid batteries are one example, but several companies and research centers are also experimenting with materials that have advantages over the tried-and-true).
Tesla has already built stationary batteries for homes in partnership with SolarCity, a solar panel company that has Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a chairman. SolarCity says it has installed 300 Tesla-branded energy storage units in homes so far. Traditionally, people with solar panels on their roofs sell the excess electricity made during the day back to power companies and then buy power from power companies at night. With a battery pack, a house equipped with solar panels can be more self-sufficient.
"Tesla's long history of research and development has enabled a cost-effective, wall-mounted storage appliance that is small, powerful and covered by a long lasting full 10 year warranty,” SolarCity’s website says of the Tesla battery unit being used in the pilot program. "The actual battery unit is about the size of a solar power inverter, and will be mounted on the wall in your garage or near your electrical panel.”
Viswanathan told Ars that buying a battery for energy storage won't make sense in all markets, but in some places, like Hawaii or Scandinavia, where solar and wind energy penetration is high, it could make economic sense for a household to buy a stationary battery. "There’s lots of people who are far removed from the grid, and the stability of the grid is not guaranteed," Viswanathan told Ars. "I would imagine even places like Japan and South Korea might benefit from something like this. In those places such a product makes perfect sense, especially if you’ve already gone halfway there by installing solar panels."
The WSJ says that SolarCity told California regulators last year that it cost $23,429 to install a stationary battery in a home. The solar power company is letting its pilot participants pay the battery off in monthly installations over 10 years. In leveraging the economies of scale that come with operating its gigafactory, Tesla may be able to reduce the cost of stationary batteries.
Still, stationary batteries haven't become widespread yet, in part because there's been little demand for them from households, and in part because developing deploying units to store energy is expensive. Thus far, governments have largely stepped in to spur further research. In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that the California Public Utilities Commission will require three of the state’s largest electricity providers to install 1,300 megawatts of storage capacity by 2024. It also noted that PG&E has received several million dollars in grants from the state to conduct experiments to further energy storage.
The stationary battery market is also not a sector that Tesla will go into unchallenged—LG Chem, Samsung SMI, and AES Corp all make stationary batteries too, according to Bloomberg.
Despite what we know about what Tesla may announce tomorrow at 8pm PST, there are still many unknowns. What will this next run of batteries cost? How much energy will they be able to store? Will Tesla announce any partnerships that will help sell stationary batteries to homeowners satisfied with their service on the traditional power grid?
Viswanathan told Ars he'll be watching to see what Musk announces regarding the battery's warranty—"If I'm a homeowner... I would expect a much bigger warranty" than Tesla gives on its vehicle batteries, he said. Also, he said, he'll be curious about the battery's projected cost: "the costs are going to come down substantially year after year," Viswanathan told Ars. "The number I would be interested in is what the target number is three years down."
Ars will look for answers to all these questions and more tomorrow night at Tesla’s event, so stay tuned!Who can say what to whom in Australia? In this six-part series, we look at the complex idea of freedom of speech, who gets to exercise it and whether it is being curtailed in public debate.
Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act – Australia’s federal hate speech law – has tended to dominate public debate about free speech for the last few years. This has meant other important laws that restrict free speech in broad ways are being overlooked.
While the 18C debate has raged, important new restrictions on freedom of speech have been introduced in Australia. These have flown much further under the radar.
These restrictions should concern us, because they have a wide-ranging impact on the freedom of speech that is essential to democratic deliberation.
Free speech does the work of democratic governance by providing the people with the information they need to govern themselves, to hold their representatives accountable, and to decide which policies to accept or reject.
Citizens need to be able to convey their opinions to government and engage in criticism of policy. Government needs to accept this criticism, even vehement criticism, as part and parcel of governing in a democracy.
The first law that impinges of freedom of speech is the introduction in 2014 of a new power for the attorney-general to declare an operation a “special intelligence operation”, including retrospectively. Once such a declaration has been made, it becomes a crime for journalists to report on these operations.
There is no public interest disclosure exemption under this law. So, even journalists reporting on activities that a government might be undertaking illegally or corruptly can still be prohibited.
In 2015 the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor conducted a review of the impact of this law on journalists. It concluded the law created uncertainty about what journalists could publish. Although the government agreed to its recommendations in 2016, those changes have not yet been implemented.
Second, a new prohibition introduced in the same legislation on the copying or disclosing of information gathered by employees of a range of intelligence organisations also contained no protection for the disclosure of illegal activities.
In both the US and Europe, mass data collection and retention procedures that were defended by governments as compliant with the law, including stronger human rights laws than Australia has, have subsequently been found to have been undertaken illegally.
In 2015, the federal government introduced a new law prohibiting “entrusted persons” employed in asylum seeker detention centres from disclosing protected information.
The exact meaning of who the law applies to is unclear, but the passage of this legislation led the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants to cancel a planned visit here in September 2015. This decision was made on the ground that the law would discourage people he wanted to speak with from being able to freely disclose information to him.
This law has recently been challenged by former employees of the detention centre on Nauru. They have spoken out about their experiences of detention centres after the release of the Nauru files.
The move to curb freedom of speech in some areas is not restricted to the federal government. State governments, for example, are moving to pass new legislation to shut down the peaceful right to protest.
In 2014 the Tasmanian government enacted new anti-protest legislation. The law was used against anti-logging protesters who were objecting to the clear-felling of native forests in January 2016. Veteran environmentalist and former Greens leader Bob Brown has launched a legal challenge to that legislation in the High Court.
In 2015, Western Australia attempted to follow suit and is currently pursuing the enactment of a new anti-protest law. In New South Wales, the government gave an undertaking in 2014 to do the same thing – and in 2016 it passed a new law to increase police powers in relation to protests.
Governments at both federal and state levels are implementing new speech-restricting laws with unnerving frequency. In 2015, Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs warned of laws being passed by successive governments that “violate fundamental freedoms”.
These kinds of overreaching laws restrict the kinds of speech that are vital to democratic accountability. Any threat to the exposure of government activities that are corrupt or illegal, and the protection of the right to protest, should be a cause for concern for those with a genuine interest in protecting the vital freedom of speech that is essential to a functioning democracy.Accomodation Getting Around Getting Here Services Sights
Welcome to gibraltar.gi Print this page When you first see the Rock of Gibraltar, whether it is from the air, from the sea or from either the Costa del Sol or the western end of the Bay, it is its impressive stature, towering isolated above the surrounding countryside, that causes the greatest impact. It has had this effect on people for many thousands of years. Gibraltar is a beacon which signals the position of the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow neck which separates Europe from Africa and provides the only link between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.
This beacon which attracted the early inhabitants had many advantages as a home. Being limestone, the Rock which is geologically very different from the surrounding landscape, is riddled with caves. Over 140 have been discovered so far. Those which had openings to the outside world made perfect shelters. The climate was also colder than today which meant that the sea level was lower: off the eastern cliffs of the Rock a large, flat, sandy plain stretched out towards the distant Mediterranean. It was full of good hunting. There were many rabbits, red deer, wild cattle and horse along with now extinct species of elephant and rhinoceros; on the cliffs there were ibexes, wild mountain goats. The scene was close to paradise for the early inhabitants of Gibraltar. The hunting was so good that it attracted other predators, especially hyaenas, leopards and lions. So these people must have forayed with caution.
So why is Gibraltar, a lump of limestone, so different from the surrounding countryside? It all has to do with events which took place long before any kind of human had appeared on the face of the earth. The first thing to remember is that limestone is made up of millions of small shelled animals which have died and settled in the sea bed; slowly these shells harden and become rock. So another point to remember is that when you walk on the Rock you are stepping on an ancient sea bed!
Imagine then, for millions of years, a mass of limestone is growing under the sea. This is happening around 200 million years ago. The continents look nothing like they do today. Dinosaurs roam the land. Slowly over millions of years the continents assume their present shape. As Africa barges into Europe, the land folds and forms mountain chains like the Alps. Other chunks are pushed out of their position. One piece is thrust westwards and comes to rest where Gibraltar is today. It is very different from the surrounding countryside which is made up of younger rocks.
For now it remains as a narrow peninsula stuck to the end of the Iberian Peninsula, linked to it by a narrow isthmus. This isthmus, covered by buildings and a runway, is sandy. You can still see this sand on the surface in places, often littered in marine shells from a more recent past when the sea separated Gibraltar from the rest. This would have last happened during the latest warm period of the glaciations, probably around 120 thousand years ago. Many still refer to Gibraltar as an island. Historically, biologically, even politically it has been an island even in recent times, but physically it is a peninsula.
For the person interested in natural history, whether it is on land or sea, Gibraltar is incredibly rich and full of surprises at any time of the year. It is a combination of geographical location, climate and a unique history, together with the preservation of areas of habitat, that has made it a tiny paradise for wildlife. PicturesAn aerial view of the Poverty Point earthworks, built by the prehistoric Poverty Point culture, located in present-day Louisiana
Poverty Point culture is an archaeological culture that of a prehistoric indigenous peoples who inhabited a portion of the lower Mississippi Valley and surrounding Gulf coast from about 1730 - 1350 BC.[1]
Archeologists have identified more than 100 sites as belonging to this mound-builder culture, which also formed a large trading network throughout much of the eastern part of what is now the United States.
History [ edit ]
Artist's reconstruction
Preceding the Poverty Point Culture is the Watson Brake site in present-day Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, where eleven earthwork mounds were built beginning about 3500 BC. Watson Brake is one of the earliest mound complexes in the Americas.[2] Next oldest is the Poverty Point Culture, which thrived from 1730 - 1350 BC, during the late Archaic period in North America. Evidence of this mound builder culture has been found at more than 100 sites, including the Jaketown Site near Belzoni, Mississippi. The largest and best-known site is at Poverty Point, located on the Macon Ridge near present-day Epps, Louisiana.
The Poverty Point culture may have hit its peak around 1500 BC. It is one of the oldest complex cultures, and possibly the first tribal culture in the Mississippi Delta and in the present-day United States. The people occupied villages that extended for nearly 100 miles (160 km) on either side of the Mississippi River.[3]
Poverty Point culture was followed by the Tchefuncte and Lake Cormorant cultures of the Tchula period, a local manifestation of the Early Woodland period. These descendant cultures differed from Poverty Point culture in trading over shorter distances, creating less massive public projects, completely adopting ceramics for storage and cooking, and lacking a lapidary (stone-carving) industry.
Earthworks [ edit ]
Map of site with 2008 structures
Swale with a flowing stream
Circular structure
Ridges
Mounds
Bayou Marçon waterway at left, ridges at right
Although the earthworks at Poverty Point are not the oldest in the United States[4] (the earthworks at Watson Brake were built about 1900 years earlier), they are notable as the oldest earthworks of this size in the Western Hemisphere. In the center of the site is a plaza, a constructed and leveled, flat, open area covering about 15 hectares or 37 acres (150,000 m2). Archeologists believe the plaza was the site of public ceremonies, rituals, dances, games and other major community activities.
The site has six concentric earthworks separated by ditches, or swales, where dirt was removed to build the ridges. The ends of the outermost ridge are 1,204 metres (3,950 ft) apart, which is nearly 3/4 of a mile. The ends of the interior embankment are 594 metres (1,949 ft) apart. If the ridges were straightened and laid end to end, they would compose an embankment of 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) long. Originally, the ridges stood 4 feet (1.2 m) to 6 feet (1.8 m) high and 140 feet (43 m) to 200 feet (61 m) apart. Many years of plowing have reduced some to only 1 foot (0.30 m) in height. Archeologists believe that the homes of 500 to 1,000 inhabitants were located on these ridges.[5]
This was the largest settlement at that time in North America. The site also had a 50 feet (15 m) high, 500 feet (150 m) long earthen pyramid, which was aligned east to west.[6] A large bird effigy mound, measuring 70 feet (21 m) high and 640 feet (200 m) across, is also located on the Poverty Point site.[7]
On the western side of the plaza, archeologists have found some unusually deep pits. One explanation is these holes once held huge wooden posts, which served as calendar markers. Using the sun’s shadows, the inhabitants could have predicted the changing of the seasons.[5] This great building project demanded a sustained investment of human labor, the organized skill and the cultural will to sustain the effort over many centuries.[8] One authority calculated that it would take more than 1,236,007 cubic feet (34,999.8 m3) of basket-loaded soil to complete the earthworks. That would mean 1,350 adults laboring 70 days a year for three years.[9][10]
Artifacts [ edit ]
Decorated clay items
Female effigies, clay
Atlatl weights and carved stone gorgets
Baked loess objects used in cooking, dating from 1650 and 700 BCE
Archeological excavation has revealed a wealth of artifacts, including animal effigy figures; hand-molded, baked-clay cooking objects; simple thick-walled pottery; stone vessels, spear points, adzes, hoes, drills, edge-retouched flakes, and blades.[11] Stone cooking balls were used to prepare meals. Scholars believe dozens of the cooking balls were heated in a bonfire and dropped in pits along with food. Different-shaped balls controlled cooking temperatures and cooking time.
Crude human figures, forming another category of artifacts, are thought to have been used for religious purposes. Points made of imported gray Midwestern flint were also found. In addition, plummets were fashioned out of heavy iron ore imported from Hot Springs, Arkansas; they served as weights for fish nets.[12] Many of the raw materials used, such as slate, copper, galena, jasper, quartz, and soapstone, were from as far as 620 miles (1,000 km) away, attesting to the distant reach of the trading culture.[9]
The Poverty Point culture developed a tradition of making high-quality, stylized, carved and polished miniature stone beads. Other early cultures in eastern North America rarely used stone to make their beads, opting for softer materials such as shell or bone. The beads depict animals common to the Poverty Point culture's environment, such as owls, dogs, locusts, and turkey vultures.[13]
See also [ edit ]He knows a thing or two about power and ambition, has seen them up close as a friend of Margaret Thatcher’s and captured them in the novel that gave him his literary breakthrough nearly 40 years ago.
Jeffrey Archer, who returns to the Edinburgh Festival to mark the 100th edition of Kane And Abel, said he sees Thatcher’s steely determination in another leading woman in the Conservative Party – but it isn’t Theresa May.
Archer said Ruth Davidson was “unquestionably a star” and claimed he singled her out as exceptional in her early days leading the Scottish Conservative Party.
Davidson is increasingly being spoken of as a kingmaker behind the scenes in the Conservative Party, and last week broke with May’s policy on immigration in a move seen as boosting the Prime Minister’s pro-EU rivals in cabinet.
“She’s a one-off,” Archer said. “She’s her own woman, and they like that and admire that. She’s unquestionably a star. I did say to Lord Sanderson about five years ago – he used to be chairman of the Conservative Party in Scotland – we were at a cricket match, and I said, ‘I like the look of this Ruth Davidson,’ and he told me: ‘Keep your hands off, she’s ours.’”
Archer, who entered the House of Commons and became a peer alongside Thatcher, said: “I see the same ability to believe in herself, and stick by it. She doesn’t strike me as someone who wavers. |
policies that have divided Europe.
Mr. Passos Coelho, a center-right leader, was ousted after lawmakers voted to reject his new government’s program, 123 to 107.
The prime minister had been held up as a model proponent of the belt-tightening prescriptions pushed by European Union officials in Brussels, international creditors and countries like Germany.
Ahead of the vote, the country’s finance minister had warned members of Parliament that a turnaround in economic policy could have dire consequences at a time when Portugal’s debt continues to be rated as junk by three of the major credit rating agencies.Correction appended, Oct. 26
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ran into trouble on the quiet car on an Amtrak train Sunday.
Christie was leaving Washington D.C. on the 9:55 a.m. Acela train when the incident, which was first reported by Gawker, occurred. According to one passenger on the train quoted by Gawker, the Republican presidential candidate repeated phrases like “this is frickin’ ridiculous” and “seriously?! seriously?!” while holding a McDonald’s smoothie.
But a Christie spokesperson said the Governor was not kicked off the car, and instead left on his own, and apologized on the governor’s behalf.
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“After breaking the cardinal rule of the quiet car, the Governor promptly left once he realized the serious nature of his mistake,” said Christie spokesperson Samantha Smith. He “enjoyed the rest of his time on the train from the cafe car.”
Another passenger backed up the Christie campaign’s version of events in a series of tweets, arguing that the Gawker story was inaccurate.
Correction: The original version of this story misstated the circumstances surrounding Christie’s departure from the quiet car. It has been updated to include a comment from the Christie campaign and a witness who said Christie quickly left the car upon realizing his location.
Write to Justin Worland at justin.worland@time.com.This marks the first time ever Jackson has appeared in the Madden NFL franchise, and fans will have the opportunity to add Bo to their team in Madden Ultimate Team (MUT), as well as utilize his skills in Madden NFL Mobile.
Anyone logging into Madden Ultimate Team or Madden NFL Mobile between December 22 and January 1 will receive a unique Bo Jackson Item, with boosted stats, to use on their squad for a limited time.
Fans will also enjoy a custom Ultimate Team Solo Challenge in Madden NFL 15 that showcases Bo’s legendary speed and power.
Those attending the PlayStation Experience in Las Vegas Dec 6 -7 are in for a special treat, as they’ll have a chance to be the first to try Bo and experience his unrivaled skill set for themselves.By |
History is one of the most important aspects of our society. Why do you think we take the time to study it? We feel like we can learn from our ancestors, move on from our past mistakes. But for Olivia, Peter, Walter, and Astrid, what the world of 2036 considers history is still their present. The world that they left behind 20 years previously is all history now. And if the Observers win, all of it will be obliterated. But as “The Recordist” shows, even if you make the smallest impact, history will remember you…no matter what some omnipotent bald people might try to do.
“The Recordist” is a return to the Fringe of old, with a plot that only slightly enhances the storyline, but is perfect fodder for well acted (if slightly overwritten) monologues about science, life, and (in this episode) courage. Usually, Fringe knocks these out of the park, and “The Recordist” was no different. Both the Olivia-Peter conversation and the conversation between the archivist and his son were touching…although extra points have to be given to the Olivia one.
Olivia’s explanation for her failures as a mother made sense, and so does Peter’s quick words of comfort that she’s not. I don’t know how this happened but, somewhere along the way, Olivia and Peter became a great couple. I think most of the credit has to be given to Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson, who have great chemistry together and really sell the pair’s relationship. I want this couple to actually be happy together, which is more than you can say about a lot of TV relationships.
The other aspects of this episode outside of the two monologues were definitely weaker, though. Don’t get me wrong; I liked “The Recordist,” and found myself emotionally touched and empathetic in the way that no other show but Fringe (and in its heyday, Lost) can make me feel. Maybe its a combination of the always wonderful score and the aforementioned monologues, but this show does a really good job of just getting to me. Edwin’s sacrifice at the end of the episode was great, as was the son’s monologue that closed out the whole episode. But despite those things, this definitely felt like a weaker episode of Fringe.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Following the two very plot heavy episodes, maybe it was a bit nice to return to a more Monster of the Week type one. Judging how we’re already a fourth way through this season (gasp!), this might be the last chance we get for a while. So yeah, “The Recordist” didn’t do anything particularly special plot wise, but in terms of building up the world of the future and psyche of the people that inhabit it, it was a decent effort.
Loose Ends:
The history machine was a pretty cool way for Fringe to show of its FX budget…what’s left of it, anyways.
Walter taking credit for finding the first tape, and Astrid’s face following it was hilarious.
Walter trying to use his old bong was also pretty funny, but any moment involving Walter and drugs is.
Why is it that Peter feels nothing about his current condition in life? I guess when you find out you’re from another universe and that you alone have the power to decimate one of them, and by doing so you will be erased from EXISTENCE, skipping two decades in the future is no big deal.
“Definitely not dwarves.”
Well everyone, sports is once again screwing us over, as Fringe takes a break next week. Check back in two weeks for our thoughts on what seems to be a pretty plot driven episode, “The Bullet That Saved the World.” Ohhh, cryptic!
-MatthewORLANDO, Fla. -- Orlando Magic forward Hedo Turkoglu was suspended 20 games by the NBA on Wednesday after testing positive for steroids.
The NBA said Turkoglu tested positive for methenolone, an anabolic steroid. He began serving the suspension Wednesday night when the Magic hosted the Atlanta Hawks.
Turkoglu took full responsibility for the positive test and apologized to the Magic organization, fans and fellow teammates. He said he took medication from a trainer in Turkey this past summer to help him recover from a shoulder injury and mistakenly neglected to check it against the NBA's list of banned substances.
"As a player this is the worst situation that you want to be in," Turkoglu said. "I'm just sorry to put the organization in this situation.... I should have double-checked and researched and shouldn't be in this situation."
He is the eighth player suspended for performance-enhancing drugs under the NBA's drug testing policy. He is the second Magic player to be suspended under the policy in four years. Former Magic forward Rashard Lewis was suspended 10 games in 2009 after testing positive for an elevated testosterone level.
Turkoglu said he was tested by the league in December and learned of the suspension Tuesday night. General manager Rob Hennigan said Turkoglu informed the team of the positive test a week ago.
Turkoglu sat out the Magic's past three games for what the team said were flu-like symptoms and a sore back. Hennigan said those ailments were legitimate and unrelated to the positive test.
It is the latest in a string of bad news for Turkoglu during the past year.
He missed 10 games at the end of last year's regular season for a fractured bone above his eye and then missed 28 straight games at the start of this season after breaking a bone in his hand. He's appeared in just 11 games in 2012-13 with only one start.Decision On Gay Scout Leaders To Come By October, Group's Head Says
Updated at 5:45 p.m. ET
Robert Gates, the president of the Boy Scouts of America, tells NPR his organization will have a decision on its ban on gay adults no later than October. His comments come a day after he told the Boy Scouts that a ban on gay adults was "unsustainable."
NPR's Scott Simon asked the former CIA director and former defense secretary whether his comments in Atlanta meant it was now "OK for Scout leaders to be gay?" Here's Gates' reply:
"No we haven't made that decision yet, but what I said was that I believed our present position was unsustainable and that we are going to need to move promptly to re-examine it. "I think that we will have a decision not later than October, but so far there has been no change. We need to reach out to our sponsoring institutions and talk with them about the potential change. We need to talk with donors and others so there's a process to be gone through here, but I think that it's inevitable that we have to change the policy and that's what I recommended, and we'll see as I say not later than October if the rest of the movement is in agreement with the position. But I think that change is the right thing for our movement."
Gates tells NPR his approach would allow churches that sponsor Scout units to exercise their religious freedom and ensure that leaders in troops they sponsor, or units that they sponsor, reflect the faith of the sponsoring institution.
"There would be a First Amendment protection for their right to do so, but from the National Council's standpoint gays would be permitted in units that want to have them," Gates said.
Some 70 percent of Scout units are sponsored by churches.
In his comments Thursday, Gates told officials in the national organization that the U.S. is changing and "we are increasingly at odds with the legal landscape at both the state and federal levels."
"The one thing we cannot do is put our heads in the sand and pretend this challenge will go away or abate," he said. "Quite the opposite is happening."
The BSA voted in 2013 to allow gay members, but not scoutmasters.MARK KARLIN, EDITOR AT BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: 401K 2012)
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Lost in the coverage of America's tale of two economies (the 1% who have recieved 95 percent of the financial gains since they busted the economy in 2008 -- and the rest of us), is that seniors are especially hard hit by the disparity between so-called savings account interest (currently.01 percent at most banks) and inflation.
Yes, there still is inflation. It is relatively modest, but is still there and has a palpable impact on those on low fixed incomes - such as Social Security. According to a website that covers inflation:
Over the longer period from December 2012 to December 2013, the US inflation rate rose 1.5 percent. That increase compares to the 1.2 percent advance in the 12 months ended November. Inflation in 2012, as another comparison, rose 1.7 percent. Noted specifically by the Labor Department, it is the first time that inflation has been under 2 percent for consecutive years since 1997-98.
Wrapping everything up, core annual inflation in 2013 rose 1.7 percent, which is the same 12-month increase noted in each of the prior three CPI reports. The total in 2012 was 1.9 percent.
Yes, it is true that Social Security recipients received a 1.7 percent increase in 2013 payments. But given that the banks (ostensibly based on the overnight interest charged by the Federal Reserve) are only paying - in general -.01 percent interest on what are falsely called "savings accounts," seniors are losing money.
Furthermore, Social Security recipients were not even given an inflationary adjustment in 2010 and 2011 -- and according to CNNMoney, the spending patterns of seniors are in areas that experience a higher rate of inflation:
But it's not clear that these adjustments really cover the increasing costs faced by retirees, who have different spending habits than the overall population.
For example, seniors spend more on health care than the younger population, and government figures show the cost of medical care rose 2.5% over the past year.
And senior citizens may not benefit as much from falling gas prices. Most don't commute to work, so the 2.4% drop in gas prices over the last year won't much of a savings to them.
In addition, seniors periodically are threatened with Congress and the White House agreeing to a lower yearly adjustment based on an economic formula known as the Chained CPI.
This overall issue of most of America's seniors losing the value of their savings every year (and for most elderly Americans retirement savings don't amount to much) has been brought up before on BuzzFlash at Truthout, but the situation for senior citizens who aren't reaping a fortune from record stock market gains (the 1%) is still as perilous as it has been.
An article on MSNMoney points out:
U.S. Treasury yields are at least 2 percentage points under what they would be otherwise because of the Fed’s low-rate policies and stimulus programs, said William Ford, former Atlanta Fed president who wrote a 2011 paper estimating the impact on savers of monetary easing. That reduces their income by at least $280 billion annually, his analysis shows.
“The costs of low interest rates are being ignored,” Ford said in an interview. “It is killing savers, elderly savers who are living on life savings that have been conservatively invested....”
Americans face a “crisis,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and a former research director at the Boston Fed. “Five more years of low interest rates are going to make providing one’s self with an adequate retirement income extremely difficult.”
The financial crunch probably will reduce consumer-spending growth in the next decade and also could hurt career prospects for younger generations, said Steven Ricchiuto, chief economist of Mizuho Securities USA Inc. in New York.
“Simple, it is a drag,” he said. Either they cut spending to boost saving or “they will just be forced to work longer, making it harder for young people to get jobs or move up the ladder.”
The bottom line is this: 1% of seniors are flying high off of record breaking stock market prices and dividends, while 99% are losing ground each year to inflation.
To top it off, the seniors are giving money to banks, in essence, at no interest, for the banks to reloan out at interest rates of 30 percent or so on some credit cards, for example.
It amounts to financially mugging the people who really built America with the sweat of their labor.
The suits with rolexes are flying to private island resorts and stashing money in the Caymans while our nation's seniors are clipping coupons and rationing their change.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.John Ruhs, the Bureau of Land Management’s director in Nevada, helps oversee 37,700 wild horses and burros roaming federal lands in the state, more than three times the number the agency has determined the ranges there can sustain.
Nevada bears the worst of a problem trampling the West, with more than 72,000 horses occupying BLM-managed lands as of March, almost 300 percent more than the 26,715 the agency says it can control in an environmentally sustainable manner.
The crush of horses, Ruhs says, has dwindled the stock of essential plants and has damaged streams and banks, harming the food and water sources for horses and other animals that share the land.
To manage the overpopulation, Ruhs wants Congress to lift restrictions on his agency to give it more flexibility to euthanize horses — not just when they’re old and sick — and sell more of them for private use, without dictating what the buyer can or cannot do with the animals.
Ruhs says he would not take the responsibility lightly.
He is an avid horseback rider and horse owner, and a few years ago, he had to face the choice of euthanizing one of the horses he rode hardest, an animal he cared for over 25 years that had lost all its teeth.
“I care about this animal,” Ruhs told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a difficult choice, but that's what you do when you are responsible for the animals in your care. It doesn't matter what kind of horse it is. I am very passionate about my horses. I care about them and I hate to take a drastic action. But you have to at times.
“What’s happened over time is our tool box has shrunk, our ability to manage the wild horse population the way the law intended is hindered by Congress, and what we end up with is a population that every four years doubles in size,” said Ruhs, who in March became BLM’s acting deputy director of operations, the top civilian position at the agency. “We’ve created an environment where one living entity there [on public lands], the population of horses, continues to increase. That won’t change unless you take a management action to limit that population growth.”
Ruhs is the behind-the-scenes face who would be tasked with implementing a Trump administration proposal to allow euthanasia of healthy wild horses on federal lands and the unrestricted sale of those animals.
The plan is part of President Trump’s 2018 budget request, but Congress is split about whether to fulfill the proposal.
The Senate introduced a fiscal 2018 Interior-Environmental Protection Agency spending bill last month that includes language prohibiting BLM from selling without restriction tens of thousands of excess horses on federal rangelands and banning the agency from euthanizing animals that have been unsuccessfully offered for adoption more than three times.
That language is consistent with provisions Congress has tucked into appropriations bills in recent years, to the satisfaction of animal rights activists who consider the sale of wild horses and less restricted use of euthanasia inhumane.
“Euthanasia means mercy killing,” said Suzanne Roy, president of the American Wild Horse Campaign. “Killing tens of thousands of healthy horses is not euthanasia. That's mass killing. That's slaughter.”
The House’s fiscal 2018 Interior appropriations legislation, by contrast, contains a section that would lift restrictions on BLM to sell or, in specific circumstances, euthanize excess wild horses. The two chambers must reconcile their bills, so the fate of the horses is not clear.
The author of the House provision, Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, has stressed that it would block horses from being made available for sales that would result in their “processing as commercial products, including for human consumption.”
But Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., who supports the Stewart amendment, is clear what the provision would mean.
“At its core, with this amendment, we will kill horses,” Amodei told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “I don’t use that or say that lightly. I have nothing against horses. I don’t want to kill horses. I know they make movies about horses, and not cows. I get that. They are an iconic symbol of the West. But I’ve got news for you, horse advocates. Policy makers, unless we are willing to get behind a policy and stop saying we won't kill one horse, at some point, we will have to start slaughtering horses because the overpopulation is so out of control. I don't support the status quo.”
In the early 20th century, as many as two million wild horses roamed the West, but commercial slaughter reduced the population.
In 1971, Congress gave BLM the authority to manage, protect, and control wild horses and burros on federal land, calling the animals “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” and preventing them from being slaughtered.
But horse populations have soared, partially because they have no natural predators, BLM officials say.
So, Congress has amended the law through the years, authorizing BLM to remove excess wild horses and burrows from the range. Under that process, BLM rounds up hard-to-reach wild horses with a helicopter and transfers them to private ranchers who the agency contracts with, at a cost of nearly $50 million per year.
The BLM removed 3,320 wild horses and burros in fiscal 2016. One amendment to the law, from 2004, directs the BLM to sell “without limitation” horses that are more than 10 years old or have been passed over for adoption at least three times.
Since 2005, the agency has sold more than 5,900 horses and burros, the agency says.
But Congress has restricted that authority during the appropriations process each year, ordering BLM not to sell any horses to slaughterhouses or “kill buyers.”
Making excess horses available through adoptions is always the first option, but the BLM struggled to find adopters during the economic recession. BLM officials say the agency placed about 7,500 horses in adoption at its peak in the early 2000s. The agency adopted out 2,912 horses and burros in fiscal 2016.
Ruhs says with limited demand for adoptions, there isn’t a large enough market for horses to be sold for commercial use because of the restrictions imposed by Congress.
“We do sell some horses, but the volume is pretty limited,” Ruhs said. “The sale is our last resort. We want more freedom in what that looks like. We just need the ability to sell more horses with less restrictions.”
Animals rights activists, however, favor other options they consider more humane and politically viable.
“The only way to get at the population problem is to manage reproductive rates,” said Roy of the American Wild Horse Campaign.
Her group and others call for setting aside more land for preserves and increasing the use of contraception. The BLM says it uses the best available fertility control vaccine, known as porcine zona pellucida (PZP). Since 2012, it has applied the drug on more than 1,000 horses.
But the vaccine is effective for a year at a time and using the drug is costly and onerous, the agency says.
Neda DeMayo, president of Return to Freedom, a nonprofit that operates a sanctuary with more than 500 wild horses and burros, says BLM can do better.
“We have used the fertility control vaccine since 1999 with 91-98 percent efficacy at sanctuary locations,” DeMayo said. “For a fertility control program to work, you need to actually use it broadly and correctly. Over time, we would see results and save millions of dollars a year in roundup and holding costs."
Ruhs says BLM is doing what it can, with what it has.
“It's extremely hard on us to not be able to manage wild horses the way we need to manage them,” Ruhs said. “Right now, there are just not that many options available to us.”The Washington debates about the Syrian chemical weapons, and whether there is an Obama “Plan B” by which the United States may yet bomb Syria, seem deaf to what really happened last week.
Russia delivered Syria, its ally, to international negotiations concerning those weapons and their renunciation. This has possibly opened the door to some way to resolve the Syrian civil war. Moscow is now responsible for what its client, Syria, does. All the more is Russian President Vladimir Putin required to deliver a cooperative President Bashar Assad if Moscow continues to insist that the U.S. renounce military action, even if Syria fails to fulfill the obligations which it has accepted.
This means Syria must produce the list of locations where its chemical weapons are stored so that the United Nations and the inspectors of the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons can locate, seize and neutralize Syria’s stocks of chemical munitions. If Assad fails to do so, Russia is responsible and must take action to ensure that Syria fulfills the responsibilities that it undertook when it signed the international convention banning chemical weapons.
Syria has subjected itself to international law in this matter. That is highly significant. Washington doesn’t seem to understand the importance of Assad’s submission to international law. The U.S. has itself become so indifferent, and even so defiant of international law, that it fails to grasp that the rest of the world wants to see the Assad government submit to it — and the U.S. (and Israel) do so as well.
The U.S. administration, however, is acting as though Syria has surrendered to the demands of Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama, and is accountable to Washington and not to international law or the U.N., or even to its Russian ally and guarantor.
Washington is acting as if the U.S. has the right to administer punishment if Syria fails to do what Washington wants. What right? Not a legal right without a Security Council resolution. To attack on its own, as regional hegemon? That’s the way Washington has been behaving in the Middle East. The results have not been a great success.
The U.S. acts as though the Russians have no important role yet to play in this affair. They actually have played the capital role, and the U.S. should be grateful and attempt to extend this kind of mutually supportive international cooperation into the future. Does no one in Washington grasp this?
The new Geneva conference planned at the end of this month may offer the key to a solution of the Iranian as well as the Syrian problems. Or do American politicians really want eventually to go to war with Iran because of its unproven threat to Israel, despite the risk of any attack’s spilling over into something much bigger?
I think not. I think the polls of the American electorate on Syrian intervention have made it plainer than plain what American citizens think about still more wars in the Middle East, or anyplace else. I think the Congress has also made clear that it is tired of constitutionally dubious wars waged on the whim of presidents.
Putin must see to it that Syria conforms to its promised identification of where the chemical munitions are located and hands them over to the international community. He must do this if he wishes Russia to continue to occupy the role of a responsible international peacemaker.
Washington’s official and unofficial hawks must also use their influence with the Syrian rebel groups, who need to recognize that this chemical warfare incident — whether government-inspired or a rebel false-flag operation, as the Russians and some others still think — is likely to prove fatal to their cause. Their cause has been internationalized and now belongs on a conference table in Geneva, as does the supposed Iranian nuclear threat.
As I have written before in this space, Iranian possession of a nuclear weapon has no utility whatever other than to create an apparent balance of terror between Iran and Israel. The Israelis know that. The gross exaggeration of their supposed danger is simply an effort to get the U.S. to destroy Iran as a major Mideast power, as it did with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, thus sparing nuclear Israel the effort and the dishonor.
The U.S. has acquired the very bad habit of thinking that ultimately it (with Israel) is the strategic owner of the Middle East. This has lasted for a half century. The truth is that the Middle East (and Israel) have owned the U.S. for 50 years — to the misfortune of both.
Visit William Pfaff’s website to learn more about his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy.” www.williampfaff.com © 2013, Tribune Content Agency, LLCIf you thought the Zeiss f/0.7 lenses we shared yesterday were impressive, check out this crazy piece of glass: it’s the Carl Zeiss Super-Q-Gigantar 40mm f/0.33. It’s what some people call the fastest camera lens ever made.
Is that claim true? Well, yes and no… but mostly no.
The lens went up for auction back in 2011 at the famous WestLicht Photographica Auction, where some of the biggest transactions in the camera world occur. It was billed as “the world’s fastest lens ever made,” had an opening bid of €6,000, and an estimated price of up to €16,000. It ended up selling for €60,000, or close to $80,000.
Poke around on the web, however, and you won’t find any sample photographs captured with this lens. Why? Because the lens was never designed for real world use, and was never functional.
Even in the auction, WestLicht states that the 1960s lens was a “unique lens made by Carl Zeiss for Public Relation purposes […] for Contarex Bullseye.” Italian website Nadir Magazine has more of the backstory.
The lens was born in the 1960s during a time in which camera companies were aiming for larger and larger apertures, just as companies these days are gunning for more and more megapixels. Canon had just released its 50mm f/0.95, and photographers became fixated on the speed of lenses on paper rather than their performance in real world situations.
Zeiss Ikon public relations guru Herr Wolf Wehran decided that he wanted to draw attention to his phenomenon by creating a product poking fun at the fast glass fad.
Prior to Photokina in 1966, Wehran visited a buddy of his in the Zeiss lens design department. The two found an old condenser lens sitting around, and used it to create a Contarex-mount “frankenlens” using various found pieces. Along the way, they arbitrarily decided that their lens would have a focal length of 40mm and a maximum aperture of f/0.33.
The lens was given the name “Super-Q-Gigantar.” The “Q” stands for “Quatsch,” which translates to “nonsense” in German.
And that’s how the “fastest lens ever made” came to be.
P.S. At the time of this post, Wikipedia lists the Super-Q-Gigantar under “fast lenses’ in its article on “Lens Speed.”
Image credits: Photographs courtesy of WestLicht PhotographicaArmenian Americans (Armenian: ամերիկահայեր, amerikahayer) are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia.[2] The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the United States following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, the Adana Massacre of 1909, and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1950s many Armenians from the Middle East (especially from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Turkey) migrated to America as a result of political instability in this region. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons.
The 2014 American Community Survey estimated that 461,076 Americans held full or partial Armenian ancestry.[1] By 2016, the number has risen to 467,890.[3] Various organizations and media criticize these numbers as an underestimate, proposing 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenian Americans instead. The highest concentration of Americans of Armenian descent is in the Greater Los Angeles area, where 166,498 people have identified themselves as Armenian to the 2000 Census, comprising over 40% of the 385,488 people who identified Armenian origins in the US at the time. The city of Glendale in the Los Angeles metropolitan area is widely thought to be the center of Armenian American life.[4]
The Armenian American community is the most politically influential community of the Armenian diaspora.[5] Organizations such as Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and Armenian Assembly of America advocate for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the United States government and support stronger Armenia–United States relations. The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) is known for its financial support and promotion of Armenian culture and Armenian language schools.
History [ edit ]
Early history [ edit ]
The first recorded Armenian to visit North America was Martin the Armenian from Iran. He was an Iranian Armenian tobacco grower who settled in Jamestown, Virginia in 1618.[7] In 1653–54, two Armenians from Constantinople were invited to Virginia to raise silk worms.[7] A few other Armenians are recorded as having come to the US in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but most moved as individuals and did not establish communities. By the 1770s over 70 Armenians had settled in the colonies. The persecution of Christian minorities under the Ottoman Empire and American missionary activities resulted in a small wave of Armenian migration to the US in the 1830s from Cilicia and Western Armenia. Hatchik (Christopher) Oscanyan, a Constantinople American missionary school student, arrived in America in 1835 to pursue higher education. He later worked for the New York Herald Tribune and became the New York Press Club president.[8] Many Armenians followed him and went to the US for education.[9]
During the Civil War three Armenian doctors—Simeon Minasian, Garabed Galstian, and Baronig Matevosian—worked at military hospitals in Philadelphia.[10] The only Armenian known to have participated in hostilities was Khachadour Paul Garabedian, who enlisted in the Union Navy. A naturalized citizen from Rodosto, Garabedian served aboard the blockade ships USS Geranium and USS Grand Gulf as a Third Assistant Engineer and later an officer from 1864 until his honorable discharge from the Navy in August 1865.[11]
An Armenian family in Boston, 1908
The number of Armenians rose from 20 in 1854 to around 70 by the 1870s. In the late 1870s, small Armenian communities existed in New York City, Providence, Rhode Island, and Worcester, Massachusetts. By the late 1880s, their number reached 1,500. Many of them were young male students of the American Evangelical Missions spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. About 40% came from the Province of Kharpert. Before 1899, immigrants were not classified by ethnicity, but rather by country of birth, obscuring the ethnic origins of many Armenians. After 1869, however, Armenians from the eastern regions of the Ottoman Empire were registered as "Armenian" in American records. The number of Armenians who migrated to the US from 1820 to 1898 is estimated to be around 4,000.
First wave of immigration and the Interwar period [ edit ]
Armenians began to arrive in the US in unprecedented numbers in the late nineteenth century, most notably after the Hamidian Massacres of 1894–96, and before, during and after the Armenian Genocide. Before this mass migration to the US, the number of Armenians in the country was from 1,500 to 3,000, and mostly consisted of unskilled laborers.
Over 12,000 Armenians from the Ottoman Empire went to the US throughout the 1890s. This period witnessed cultural contact between American and Armenian through Armenian nationalist dissident organizations within the Ottoman Empire and intense activity of American missionaries in the region who were sympathetic to the Armenian cause,[20] making the long road of migration somewhat more bearable. With the exception of Fresno, California, which had land suitable for farming, the earliest Armenian immigrants mostly settled in the northeastern industrial centers, such as New York City, Providence, Worcester, and Boston. Armenian emigrants from the Russian Empire were only a minority in emigration from Armenian lands across the Atlantic (about 2,500 moved in 1898–1914), because Armenians were treated relatively better in Russia than in the Ottoman Empire. Once in America, some Armenians organized political parties to serve various causes in America and in the homeland.[9] Turkish Armenian migration rose gradually in the first decade of the 20th century, partly due to the Adana Massacre of 1909, and the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913. Before the start of the World War I, there were already 60,000 Armenians in the US. As more Armenians fell victim to the genocide and more Armenians were deported, the Armenian American community grew dramatically.
According to the Bureau of Immigration, 54,057 Armenians entered the US between 1899 and 1917. The top listed countries of origin were Turkey (46,474), Russia (3,034), Canada (1,577), Great Britain (914) and Egypt (894). Immigrants were asked to indicate which state they were going to settle in; for Armenians, the most popular answers were New York (17,391), Massachusetts (14,192), Rhode Island (4,923), Illinois (3,313), California (2,564), New Jersey (2,115), Pennsylvania (2,002), Michigan (1,371). The largest Armenian American communities at that time were located in New York City; Fresno; Worcester, Massachusetts; Boston; Philadelphia; Chicago; Jersey City; Detroit; Los Angeles; Troy, New York; and Cleveland.
According to estimates, around 77,980 Armenians lived in the US by 1919. An unprecedented number of Armenians entered the country in 1920, but the Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe barred many other Armenians from emigrating to the US.[7] Most of the post-World War I immigrants were women and children, in contrast to the prewar immigration, which was predominantly young and male. Like Italians, for whom this practice was known as campanilismo, Armenian communities were often formed by people from the same village or town in the Ottoman Empire. This practice almost entirely disappeared after World War II.
In total, 81,729 Armenians entered the US from 1899 to 1931.[27]
Discrimination toward Armenians was visible, and many Armenians struggled against overt discriminatory and housing restrictions. Although four Ottoman-born Armenians were the first ones to get the legal recognition as "whites" - instead of "Asiatics" - as early as 1909, the discrimination most Armenians faced in their day-to day life didn't get any better.[28] The Armenians living in |
shoot me again.”
Q.
There’s no room for a mistake with a 4×5. Maybe it should be an Olympic sport: photographing moving events with a 4×5.
A.
I always remind people that every four years it’s the photographers’ Olympics, too. You have the best photographers in the world, all in one place, shooting the same thing.
You know what happens on the last Saturday night of the Olympics, right?
Q.
They have a closing ceremony.
A.
No, that’s Sunday night. Saturday night, at the end of the last event at track and field, we put all of our equipment down in one of those carved-out paths on the side of the track, and some photographers run a lap. I’ve done it five times now.
Q.
What’s your time?
A.
My time is… pretty much, I finish before Sunday. 400 meters. Five New York blocks.
Q.
Do you train for this?
A.
You know, not really, other than just the previous two weeks of shlepping heavy gear.
David Burnett/Contact Press Images
Follow @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.Anthony Cacace is ready to get his hands on the British Super-featherweight title on Saturday night.
The Belfast puncher challenges British champion Martin J Ward on the Chris Eubank jnr versus Arthur Abraham undercard at the Wembley Arena in London with the vacant Commonwealth title also being on the line.
And Cacace says he would loved to have had the clash in his some city.
“I wanted to have it in Belfast, but what can you do? Martin Ward didn’t want it.
“He was offered more money and he still didn’t want it. There was nothing I could do but go there.”
“I don’t mind travelling. I travelled most of my amateur career. As a professional I’ve travelled and boxed everywhere.
“It’s no issue, as long as everything’s kept on a fairly even level. Obviously if it’s a close fight I’m not going to get the nod, but I don’t mind.
“I’ll just have to go over to London and smash him up.”
And Cacace says it is a compliment that Ward didn’t seem to keen to come to Belfast.
“I don’t really look at it like that, but Ward obviously didn’t want to come here because he thinks it could be a good fight, a close fight, and that I could get the decision – that’s definitely part of the reason.
“He’s a quality fighter, no doubt about it. He’s not where he is for nothing, but I believe I’m just as good.
“He’s got quick feet and good hands, so I know I will have to be on my game that night.”
The 28 year old has fought at home just four times as a professional, and not since February 2015, something he desperately wants to change.
“I 100% want to be defending it here in front of my home crowd.
“No one outside of boxing knows me, which is something I need to work on – and the only way to work on that is winning titles and I am determined to do that on July 15.
“I am ready for the challenge that lies ahead.”The Iranians know about resistance, or so they say. They know that any occupying force will be faced with resistance. They’ve supported “resistance forces” in the region for decades. Today, they’re on the other side of the equation. Iran has become an occupying force in the region, according to statements by its own officials, and therefore, it will now face resistance—in this case, an aggressive and sectarian one.
But Iranians will not lose, simply because they won’t be fighting on the ground. What Iran is looking forward to is the following: a deal with the US that will see sanctions lifted (or at least a significant part of the sanctions), a blind eye to its growing influence in the region, and eventually a supremacy that allows it to make major changes to the current geopolitical map of the Middle East.
Any resistance to Iran in the region will not really stop it, because it simply will not be fighting with and losing Iranian lives. Iranian lives, it would seem, are too valuable to be wasted in sectarian clashes. These sacrifices are rather for Arab Shiites gathered from all over the Middle East and Asia to help Iran build its realm. Arab Sunnis will fight Arab Shiites until the whole region is destabilized. Why should Iran care? A destabilized Lebanon has always played to its advantage, and a destabilized region will pay dividends—Iran has nothing to lose.
If the Iranian economy recovers after the deal, the region will drown in yet more blood and state institutions will be further undermined and weakened. Iran will have the financial means to boost its militias in the region. The reality imposed by Iran on the ground contradicts all assurances given by the US to its regional allies. Iran is an occupying force by proxy, and will not abandon its ongoing pursuit of hegemony.
Earlier this week, Ali Younsi, advisor to President Hassan Rouhani on religious and minority affairs, stated that Iran is now an empire with Baghdad as its capital. This statement came while Iraqi forces, led publicly by Hadi al-Amiri but privately by Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani, appeared to make gains against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Tikrit.
The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) quoted Younsi as saying that “[Baghdad is] the center of our civilization, culture and identity today as it was in the past,” in a reference to the Persian Sassanid Empire that ruled before Islam. “All of the area of the Middle East is Iran; we shall protect all of the nationalities in the area because we consider them to be a part of Iran.”
On Syria, Hossein Hamdani—the IRGC commander currently serving as advisor to the Syrian government and overseeing Quds Forces operations in Syria—revealed that his country has been indoctrinating youths in the war-torn country to fight under the IRGC. On Tuesday, Al-Arabiya cited Hussein Hamdani as saying: “The IRGC has begun to establish new religious groups in Syria called ‘Kashab’ among young Alawites, Sunnis, Christians and Ismailis.”
Iran’s militias in Iraq and Syria are not about to leave any time soon. Even if ISIS is defeated in Iraq and the FSA dissolves in Syria, Iran’s militias won’t leave. They are here to stay.
As such, every strategy to defeat ISIS is a bad strategy unless it takes the post-ISIS scenarios into consideration. And a regional strategy that includes Turkey is a must—if Sunni extremists are allowed to fight the Iranian occupation exclusively, the war will only proliferate. Without a long-term plan, extremist groups will find a way to survive—under ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, or whatever banner they find suitable.
ISIS will probably be defeated, but the militants will morph into something new. It doesn’t matter: ongoing sectarian rifts will continue to make extremism tenable. So, the choice now is between Sunni militants aggressively trying to liberate Syria and Iraq from the Iranian occupation; and a regional, unified army structured by regional states with a clear and comprehensive strategy.
Iran’s strategy is to dominate by destroying state institutions and intensifying sectarian bloodshed. This domination, however, will have no capacity or will to rebuild, because it does not take into consideration the demography and historic sensitivities of the region.
Hezbollah was once described as a state within the Lebanese state. Today, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen have become small states within the Iranian empire. This isn’t just a choice of words used to make a point: this is reality, and it will get worse when Iran’s economic troubles are alleviated.
A deal that gives Iran such power will result in the following:
First, the perception of the US in the region is changing. The majority of Sunnis now see the US as taking sides in a sectarian fight; an Iranian ally. Obama, in this sense, is perceived as interventionist.
Secondly, democracies like Lebanon, or potential democracies in the region, will slowly deteriorate because Iran will not acknowledge state institutions or tolerate freedom of speech. This has been confirmed many times in Lebanon and in Iran itself.
Third, liberal and civil groups or individuals will lose legitimacy in the region and civil society will crumble amidst sectarian bloodshed.
Is this what the US really wants the region to look like? If the nuclear deal is really worth so much blood, death and madness, then all the values we thought we shared with the US are now inexplicable.
See, the question now is not whether there will be a deal to stop Iran’s nuclear program. The problem is more fundamental: values are being shattered and people are being betrayed.
Hanin Ghaddar is the Managing Editor of NOW. She tweets @haningdrRio 2016: Australia's Matildas lose 2-0 to Canada in awful start to Olympic campaign
Updated
The Matildas' Olympic campaign has got off to an awful start following a 2-0 loss to Canada at Arena Corinthians.
Australia endured a disastrous start as a defensive mistake saw Janine Beckie steal in to slam home the opener after just 20 seconds of play - the fastest goal in Olympics history.
Canada was reduced to 10 players after a straight red card for Shelina Zadorsky, and the Matildas proceeded to dominate the rest of the half thanks to the numerical advantage.
But instead of tiring in the second stanza, Canada improved and won a penalty following a handball in the box from Clare Polkinghorne.
Matildas goalkeeper Lydia Williams came up big for Australia, saving Beckie's tame penalty.
But Canada deservedly doubled its lead through star forward Christine Sinclair, who beat the stranded Williams to the ball to slot home into an empty net from distance.
Despite having 22 total shots on goal to the Canadians' eight - and 12 shots on target compared to four - Australia could not manage to get the finish it required to get back in the game.
Striker Michelle Heyman said the team did not do enough with the player advantage.
"It is a bit unlucky playing against 10," she said.
"[I'm] a bit disappointed in myself I think I created a couple of good opportunities and I should have put them away."
Coach Alen Stajcic and his side will have it all to do as the Matildas' next opponent is world number two side Germany on Sunday morning (AEST).
"It is heartbreaking and devastating the result of today's match," Heyman said.
"But I think we will have a little think about it and try and forget about it tomorrow so we can just try and focus on the next game."
Germany is in the driving seat of Group F after beating Zimbabwe 6-1.
Topics: olympics-summer, soccer, sport, brazil, canada, australia
First postedThere's been much focus on MongoDB, Elastic and Redis in terms of data exposure on the Internet due to their general popularity in the developer community. However, in terms of data volume it turns out that HDFS is the real juggernaut. To give you a better idea here's a quick comparison between MongoDB and HDFS:
MongoDB HDFS Number of Servers 47,820 4,487 Data Exposed 25 TB 5,120 TB
Even though there are more MongoDB databases connected to the Internet without authentication in terms of data exposure it is dwarfed by HDFS clusters (25 TB vs 5 PB). Where are all these instances located?
Most of the HDFS NameNodes are located in the US (1,900) and China (1,426). And nearly all of the HDFS instances are hosted on the cloud with Amazon leading the charge (1,059) followed by Alibaba (507).
The ransomware attacks on databases that were widely publicized earlier in the year are still happening. And they're impacting both MongoDB and HDFS deployments. For HDFS, Shodan has discovered roughly 207 clusters that have a message warning of the public exposure. And a quick glance at search results in Shodan reveals that most of the public MongoDB instances seem to be compromised. I've previously written on the reason behind these exposures but note that both products nowadays have extensive documentation on secure deployment.
Technical Details
If you'd like to replicate the above findings or perform your own investigations into data exposure, this is how I measured the above.French farmers will harvest the least wheat in almost three decades after rains and an overcast spring damaged crops in the European Union’s biggest producer, Offre & Demande Agricole said.
Output of soft wheat, used for bread and chicken feed, will total 28.2 million metric tons this year, the farm adviser said in an e-mailed statement Monday. That would be down 31 percent from a year earlier and the least since 1988, EU data show. ODA had previously forecast a crop of 30.4 million tons.
France had one of its wettest springs and early summers of the past 50 years, delaying the start of the harvest and fueling concerns about crop disease. The country’s wheat is in the worst condition in at least five years, with just 40 percent receiving the top ratings, crops office FranceAgriMer said last week. The reduced harvest may cut the biggest EU exporters’ trade balance by 3 billion euros ($3.35 billion), according to ODA.
The impact will leave “a hole in grain growers’ treasuries and the entire French industry,” the adviser said. “The shock to the French farmers will be felt all the way to the final buyers.”
Wheat Yields
The forecast was lowered following feedback from a network of more than 1,000 farmers. Crops are worsening in northeast areas and yields aren’t improving in the best soils north of Paris, it said.
June rainfall in the north and northeast was as much as 2 1/2 times above normal, while sunshine hours from central to northern France were 40 percent to 50 percent fewer than usual, according to Meteo-France. Excess water drowned roots and caused fungal diseases on leafs and grain ears, while a lack of sun reduced the number and size of kernels, according to crop researcher Arvalis.
The ODA’s forecast compares with last year’s record crop of 41 million tons. Farm adviser CRM AgriCommodities said last week that the harvest may dip below 30 million tons. That’s lower than estimates from German commodity trader BayWa and France’s Agriculture Ministry.
Algeria, Africa’s second-largest wheat buyer after Egypt, typically imports most of its grain from France.Pandora’s box and the hotchpotch of Spanish anti-terrorism
The morning of Tuesday the 16th of December has surprised us with a wave of house raids and arrests. Surprised us? We are not going to lie. Let’s start again. The morning of the 16th of December has NOT surprised us. The autonomous Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, and the Guardia Civil and judiciary powers of the Audiencia Nacional stormed more than ten houses and a few anarchist spaces in Barcelona, Sabadell, Manresa and Madrid, with house raids, arrests, confiscation of propaganda material and information, to also use the occasion to enter and plunder, with the entire riot police team of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Kasa de la Muntanya, a squatted place that has existed for 25 years.
According to the media, which as usual are proving their role as police spokespersons, the goal of these arrests is to break up “a criminal organisation with terrorist goals and a violent anarchist character”. Although it seems easy to repeat an often used phrase, we will do it anyway: the only criminal organisation that terrorises people with its violent character is the State and its tentacles: the media, the juridical apparatus, its repressive bodies and its politicians, whatever spectre they belong to.
Why did the repressive action not surprise us? Because we were expecting it.
It is not about pretending to be oracles or something, but about being able of reading between the lines, and sometimes literally, the things that happen. As it happened with the arrests of other comrades last year, since a long time they have been busy orchestrating waves like last Tuesday’s against libertarian and anti-authoritarian milieus, and even though the different razzias weren’t that big they do show a prospect of similar situations.
Operation “Italian style”
Since a few decades the anarchist milieu in neighbouring Italy experiences every now and again, and in the past years with more regularity, macro-operations that are similar to the one on Tuesday. Not only because of the format of the spontaneous razzias and house raids in several houses, also because of the use of names that are easy to remember and carry a certain dark humour, as in this operation, called Pandora because this case, as the media repeats after its juridical sources, “was a box that despite the numerous frights it has given us could not be opened”. By “numerous frights” they refer to several actions that took place throughout the entire terrain of the Spanish State in the past years. To come back to the Italian operations, one only has to remember a few names that came up in the past years, such as Operation Thor, referring to the accusation of a series of attacks with hammers on cash machines and other offices; Operation Ixodidae, referring to the technical name of the family of ticks, as the fascists called the communists and anarchists; and others, such as Ardire, Cervantes, Nottetempo, etcetera.
Apart from the procedure and list of names another factor that reminds us of the neighbouring country is the role of the media, which also helped us to see what was coming. Since three years, or perhaps a little longer, the Spanish media have started a campaign to prepare the ground in such a way that operations like these are not only possible but also predictable. Pointing out milieus, and sometimes even spaces or people with their full names, collectives, etcetera, constructing a fairly bizarre caricature of an internal enemy, is indeed nothing new, although in the last years the focus was on a very specific character: the “violent anarchist”, the “insurrectionalist”, the “against-the-system [antisistema] who infiltrates social movements”, etcetera.
The Chilean fiasco
The year 2010 was a glorious year for the Chilean State. Besides Sebastían Piñera, businessman and fourth richest person in the country, being chosen president, it orchestrated a policial, mediatic and juridical operation against the anti-authoritarian milieu resulting in more than a dozen house raids and arrests, known as Operation Salamandra and popularly known as “Caso Bombas”, as it was based on the investigation of a series of attacks with explosives that took place in the preceding years, and through the police imagery the creation of an hierarchical macro-structure of a supposed network that was responsible for all these explosions: a circus that did not only weaken the reputation of the State, besides the fact of rendering it ridiculous, but that also proved the clumsiness of the investigation procedure, like the falsifying of proof, blackmail or pressurizing in order to obtain informants or “repentants”, chance, etcetera. The process ended with the acquittal of all the accused and a desire for revenge of the Chilean State toward the milieu and those under investigation.
A year after the end of the “Caso Bombas” farce the Spanish and Chilean ministries, judges and cops are working together on a new case, this time on this side of the ocean. Mónica Caballero and Francisco Solar, both ex-suspects in the “Caso Bombas” case, are arrested in Barcelona, where they are living at that moment, suspected of placing an explosive at the Basílica del Pilar in Zaragoza, planning a similar action and belonging to an alleged terrorist organisation. At this moment these comrades are in preventive detention awaiting a trial of which we do not know when it will take place, and we also do not know whether their proceeding will change due to this new repressive wave.
The situation is more or less known to everyone and if we can be sure of one thing it is that the recent arrests serve to give shape to a case that on its own would not stand.
Coincidence?
A few hours before the arrests on Tuesday the Spanish government made known, through its media, that “the ministries of Interior Affairs of Spain and Chile are opening a new phase of enforced collaboration in the struggle against anarchist terrorism”. Last Monday, the 15th of December, the Spanish minister of Interior Affairs Jorge Fernández Díaz was in Chile to meet the vice-president and Chilean minister of Interior Affairs Rodrigo Peñailillo in the La Moneda palace, the government seat in Santiago de Chile. “In the struggle against terrorism, Chile will find a solid ally in Spain”, bragged the Spaniard, whilst being decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of Chile, “the greatest distinction of the country in civil merit” according to the media, a trophy that the Chilean State in this case handed out for the police work and as a reward for the arrests of comrades Mónica and Francisco last year.
Besides praise and rewards, businessman Fernández sold a bit of his own: policial and juridical training, different kinds of repressive material, etcetera.
And what will come…
What is the next repressive step? We don’t know. At this moment not much is known about how our comrades are doing, of what exactly they are being accused, what repressive means they are subjected to, whether they are in preventive detention or not, etcetera.
What is certain is that this operation is not a fact standing on its own, but another shackle in a chain. A repressive chain that at times is cruel, and at times subtle, in which since the new laws (one only has to think of the recent Mordaza law) several things are incorporated; the hunt on people without papers through every time bigger racist razzias, the police brutality, until the aspiration to manage the misery and administrate the repression, which, all things considered, is what the State does, with a pseudo-left (with Podemos at the lead) that more and more becomes a clearer parody of itself. Evictions, beatings, fascism, juridical and punitive hardening of every kind, nationalist and social-democratic illusions, is what today will bring us. Something worse does not have to be expected, the worst has never left.
The array of opportunities of the Spanish anti-terrorism is a hotchpotch in which everything can be put. It is there, in sight, to remind us that for the State, struggle equals terrorism. It functions as a scarecrow. Do we let ourselves be frightened?
The State and its servants say to have opened Pandora’s box. In Greek mythology Pandora is the equivalent of the Biblical Eve. With the characteristic misogyny of both mythologies, Pandora opens her box as Eve eats her apple, liberating all the evil that it contains.
We are capable of creating our own story and ridding ourselves of their shit mythology. Our history is different. The “box” that this repressive operation has opened urges us to act, to be careful, to be alert in regards to what their next step will be. It makes us think, again and again, of the world we want, and the distance of that world to this one. It makes us see the urgency of acting, of going forward.
The locked up comrades are part of different projects, spaces, collectives, etcetera, and it is very important that these do not decline, that the ruin (in every sense) to which these kind of situations lead does not create powerlessness and a feeling of paralysis.
We always say that “the best solidarity is continuing the struggle”. Right, but what does that mean in practice? We also repeat in unison that “when you touch one of us you touch all of us”. This has become clear through the reactions and protests that took place in several places, just like the unconditional warmth of the comrades on the outside.
We can be certain of one thing, and that is that the locked up comrades can feel this warmth which goes through the iron bars and isolation, because it is the same warmth that they knew to give at other occasions.
Barcelona, 18th December 2014
Dutch, German, French, Italian translationsProducing JFK events is "labor of truth" (love too!) and a vehicle to help keep alive in all Americans the loss of a great president.
The board of Conscious Community Events and all the JFK researchers, speakers, authors we have met over the years - not just the speakers of this conference - believe the "WHY AND HOW" THE ASSASSINATION HAPPENED is of vital importance to Americans and citizens of all countries. We understand that John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination was the beginning of a new "regime" of thug aristocracy created for "we the few and the rich".
Please support our educational endeavor, not only by purchasing a ticket, but telling all your friends about our ONLINE CONFERENCE. Share it on Facebook, send it out on Twitter, be sure that you bring it up at the BBQ or Memorial Service you are attending (you can always purchase and watch another day). Most importantly tell your children and grandchildren. Help them to understand the significance of JFK's life and the assassination that changed America.
Our goals for this event are to inform the generations of Americans born after the assassination about the hostile takeover of America on November 22, 1963. To keep alive the memory of a loving father, a veteran, and the last great American President. And to celebrate the life of a man who held his election as the leader of our nation, and representative of its people, in the highest regard.
We have not forgotten you or any other veteran who has given their life for this county.
Happy 100th Birthday Mr. President.
Please support iVolveTV, Conscious Community Events and speakers of this conference by purchasing your ticket NOW.
We need to raise enough funds to pay the TV studio, camera crews, speaker expenses, etc.By Mac Jaehnert
There are few feelings as uplifting as the beginning of Spring. The sun shines brighter, the snow continues to fall, and the music of chirping birds can be heard for miles around. Fortunately, for the next two weekends, Breck will be giving the birds a breather and letting some professionals crank out the tunes. And the best part? All this great music is free!
The Bud Light Concert Series features free concerts with some of the hottest acts in the country in a gorgeous outdoor atmosphere at the base of Peak 8. On Saturday, April 6, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones will ring in the season with their eclectic ska rhythms and catchy horn section. Sunday, April 7, brings the reggae-infused stylings of The Dirty Heads. The following weekend, Breck hosts local favorites 3OH!3 on Saturday, April 13, as well as a much-anticipated performance by reggae and hip hop sensation Matisyahu on closing day, Sunday, April 14. All concerts will be held on an outdoor stage from 2-5pm in the Peak 8 base area.
In anticipation of this epic concert series, I decided to find some of my favorite tracks from these artists that best reflect the spirit of Spring Fever.
1) The Mighty Mighty Bosstones – Impression that I Get
With a toe-tapping, upbeat rhythm, rapid-fire lyrics and a sweet horn solo, it’s no surprise that “Impression that I Get” became one of the Bosstones’ signature tracks. This familiar track evokes the fun-loving feelings of Spring and brings a smile to audiences no matter the season.
2) The Dirty Heads – Spread Too Thin
With so many events to chose from during Spring Fever, it could seem like you’re spreading yourself a bit too thin trying to avoid missing out on any of the festivities! Fear not, the Spring Fever website details all the concerts, competitions, and parties so you can pack the most into your Spring Fever celebration.
3) 3OH!3 – You’re Gonna Love This
You’re gonna love this jam from Colorado natives 3OH!3 just like you’re gonna love getting down with some of the greatest music, food and atmosphere when you’re partying on top of the world at 10,000 feet above sea level!
4) Matisyahu – Sunshine
Don’t forget your shades and SPF50! Breck basks in sunshine year-round, but during Spring Fever you’ll definitely want to come out to experience the warmth and light that many of us have been missing out on all winter long.
5) Dirty Heads (feat. Matisyahu) – Dance All Night
Question: What’s better than the Dirty Heads or Matisyahu?
Answer: How about the Dirty Heads AND Matisyahu, together on the same track! While the concerts will all end at 5pm, you are absolutely encouraged to dance all night.
Need any more reasons to come check out the Bud Light Concert Series at Breck’s Spring Fever? Visit our Spring Fever website for more details on concerts, events, parties, and competitions throughout the end of the season!
Want to listen to more music from the bands of Spring Fever? Check out the Spring Fever Pandora Station.
-Mac JaehnertWHEN IT WAS released back in 1993, the first-person shooter Doom became a hit with PC gamers.
Its speed, visuals and violence won it many fans and its multiplayer modes like deathmatch came at a time where PCs were able to connect over a network (and on the web as it grew in popularity).
The last time new levels were created for it was in 1995 when The Ultimate Doom was released, but fast forward 21 years and one of its creators, John Romero, has released a new level that’s free to play, using only the shareware assets from the original.
Offering it through a Dropbox link, the level can be played without having the original game installed. Romero says the game took several hours over a two week period to build and called it “a warm-up”, alluding to the reboot that’s being developed for PC, Xbox One and PS4.
1993 was a very different time for games. When Doom was released, it was on floppy disk and required 8 MB of RAM to run. The decision to make it shareware was a way to encourage people to pass it on and get more playing it, helping it grow in popularity.
Since then, it remained popular with fans who continue to play it online. Others have designed and created their own levels after the source code was released in 1997.Pep Guardiola, coach of Bayern Munich, spoke today in the press conference before the second leg of the Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid (1-0 win for Real in the Bernabéu in the first leg), to be played tomorrow in the Allianz Arena in Munich.
Pressure
We’re in the semi-finals. We’re players and I’m the coach for this sort of game. I’m keen to enjoy a good atmosphere in the Allianz and try to get to Lisbon.
Players out
None. They were all fine after the game against Bremen, just Van Buyten had a mild niggle.
Madrid against Osasuna
I think the same as before. Madrid are a great side, they were and continue to be. We’ll try to do it.
Ribery
It’s not necessary for the coach to say how important he is for the team and his teammates. It made me happy to see him playing with energy, confidence and above all anger against Bremen. That’s what he needs, to get angry. With the referee, with the fans, with whoever. Like that he plays with the aggressiveness we need. But it doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow, he’ll be there for us and he’ll do what he can for the team. He always fights for the team, that’s why people love him and why he’s one of the greatest in Bayern’s history. We need him.
How Madrid will approach the game
I don’t feel comfortable giving an opinion. Ancelotti will do what’s best for his side and the players will adapt to that. It doesn’t matter which players come out, they’ll all be running to get to the final in Lisbon. It’s true that they have great individual qualities.
Philipp Lahm
I’ve often said he can play in 10 positions; the only place I can’t play him is in goal. He always pays attention to the details, wherever he plays, tomorrow included. But the most important thing is that, wherever he plays, he always plays well.
Madrid’s counter-attacks
They’re a team that run incredibly, they are so fast. When you lose the ball you need to get back fast, but the further they are from our goal the better. Possible we’ll need to use some of our other weapons too. Of course they can attack tomorrow without a problem. A coach needs to take lots of options into account and Madrid have the qualities for that. You can already see it in the League where they are dominating. They’re a great side.
Offensive tactics from Ancelotti
He’s a coach with good taste and I like his philosophy. I also know his players and their mentality isn’t to sit back and defend for 90 minutes. Another thing is that you force them back, which is what we’ll try and do tomorrow. We also have fast players up front, but they are still so dangerous.
Season
If we don’t win the triple it’ll be tough. When I’m with my team and we analyse the fact that we’ve won the Bundesliga and we’re in the final of the Copa, we think it’s been a good season. The main thing is to enjoy the smaller wins in the League, if not you can’t advance. I know what this club has won, but if I always think about that and that nothing will be enough, then we’re on the wrong track. That said, I can adapt.
Possibility of being in Lisbon
We’re close to it, but we’re behind on the scoreboard. I’ve also read and heard that Madrid are in the final and that they’ve already won it. We see it differently. We’re behind on the scoreboard and we’ll try to score.
Inferno in the Allianza
We can’t do it on our own. In the Bernabéu the fans lifted Madrid up, but I’m sure our fans will do the same. The coach doesn’t have to ask, I know they’ll do it. It depends on the dreams of everybody, that’s why I think we’ll be together tomorrow and we’ll try. But at the end of the day, it’s our footballers who have to play. The fans can’t score, that depends on the players. Germany has a very well mannered society, they don’t break the law, they welcome travelling fans, no matter where, they’ll welcome you too (in reference to the Spanish).
Lesson from the game in Bremen
The first half we played like civil servants, in the second we lived our football. Tomorrow depends on desire. A final is at stake and we need to want it as much as possible.
Unsettled
No, I’m fine. I’m happy to be here, which isn’t easy. It’s an honour. I ask Bayern to enjoy the moment. In the last few years they’ve nearly always reached the semis or the final, but it’s really tough to get here. We’ve got to have the dream of flying to Lisbon, that’s the most important thing. You can talk about details, but what makes the difference is the passion.
Possible final against Chelsea
I’m not thinking about that, my concern is the rival tomorrow.
Racism suffered by Dani Alves
It’s everywhere and it’s a lack of respect. The blame at the end of the day is society’s. Dani is a great guy.
‘BBC’ attacking trident
In the end it doesn’t matter who plays, the individual quality of the Madrid players is amazing. They are all direct runners. That said, I’m sure they’ll play Bale and Cristiano because they are very important to them.
Possession without being direct
I’m not looking for excuses. I love having the ball, as a player and as a coach. To have the ball in order to attack more than the other side, but at the end of the match in the Bernabéu, Madrid won. We had more corners, we ran more, we had more shots, but we lost. So their arguments prevailed. Still, I want to keep having the ball to create more chances. That’s what we tried last time and I admire my players for being brave and going to the Bernabéu to control the match as we did. I’d like to play the match again with a little more intensity. We tried to control the match with possession, because the only thing that matters in football is the ball.
Need to change
I like how we dominated, but we need to be more aggressive up front. At the same time you can’t allow Madrid to hit you on the counter, so we need to find a balance. I’ll sleep tonight, I’ll talk to my players and later we’ll decide.
Criticism
The one thing I can’t do is something I don’t believe in. I also can’t ask my players to do it, because I’d be betraying them and they’d note it. Your job is to judge me, but I’m here for that. I have to accept the criticism, that’s the same everywhere. The only thing we have to think about and ask for is that we score goals tomorrow, it doesn’t matter how, in order to be able to go to Lisbon.'The conscience of the world': Lars Iyer on Wittgenstein Jr
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Lars Iyer launches his novel Wittgenstein Jr at the Bookshop on Thursday 28 August, in conversation with Ray Monk. David Lea asked him a few questions about his book.
In describing your books to customers, I find it difficult to convey how, along with everything else they are, they are also extremely funny. I have the same difficulty with Thomas Bernhard. How explicit an influence has he been on your work? And would you like to mention any other influences?
I’m glad you found the novels funny! Thomas Bernhard is a kind of figurehead for many authors, I think. I’m reminded of what Henry Rollins said of Mark E Smith in a documentary about The Fall:
He really is that guy you really hoped you could be. If you were in a band, you really don’t want to care what people think, but you do. And you really want to crank out a record every nine months, but you can’t. And you’d love to keep surprising people and baffling your critics by every third album turning out your best music.
Bernhard’s reclusiveness from the literary scene, his intransigence, the barbed acceptance speeches he gave for literary prizes, make him an exemplar. He |
Obama is intentionally destroying country. He adds that anyone actually looking into or studying the matter can easily see that Obama’s actions are the execution of a carefully conceived and orchestrated plan on how to bring down the United States by turning it into a Socialistic/Communistic style of government. Click here for the actual bullet point step by step list Obama is following to the tee!
LISTEN TO A GENERAL AND ADMIRAL ACCUSE OBAMA OF TREASON BELOW!
The question both generals in the video above dance around but never directly answer, is whether the military can seize an out of control President. “Technically,” unless the military was to overstep its constitutional bounds, removing Obama for even the most heinous crimes still involves a process, and the military cannot step in. Then again, ”technically,” Obama can’t keep “going around” Congress either, so the reality of what could happen remains anyone’s guess if people are pushed too far.
On the issue of Whether a Sitting US President Can Be Arrested or Not, lots of different scenarios can be examined, but the article below by Conservative Papers answers the question in a pretty condensed manner. To answer, Can A Sitting US President Be Arrested, they write:
Technically, no. If the president commits a crime he will be charged. If he is convicted, he’ll be impeached and the vice president will take office. From there, the president will be tried again, this time he will get a sentencing with it. While in office the President has a security detail called the Secret Service that isolates a President from ANY threat that may come their way. If any law enforcement official dared to approach them, they could easily keep him safe from the lawman and any legal action he may want to take against the president.
The present executive branch of government has repeatedly displayed its disregard for the law of the land and has done many things outside of Constitutional Law.
The only time an arrest of a President has ever come close to happening is the Watergate scandal with Nixon, but he resigned before charges were ever brought forth. The House of Representatives has the power to impeach the president but then the Senate must convict them before any punishment can be handed out.
Once a president is impeached tried and found guilty of a crime can they be arrested, we have found one and only one person that has been specifically given the power within our government to arrest the president. The Senate Sergeant at Arms has the power to arrest anyone that violates Senate rules. The proof is in the following government website where it states: “The Sergeant at Arms is authorized to arrest and detain any person violating Senate rules, including the President of the United States. http://www.senate.gov/reference/office/sergeant_at_arms.htm
The Constitution isn’t silent about why the president can be removed it states: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
From this we can see that the only way to remove a president is by impeachment AND conviction of treason, bribery, high crimes or misdemeanors. This also hints to the fact that the president cannot be arrested until he has been convicted by the Senate.
It would seem conceivable that the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms can then officially arrest and imprison him. He cannot be removed from office until after he is convicted and no sitting president will ever be imprisoned as long as he has the power of the Presidency at his disposal. Logic would then suggest that no sitting president can ever be arrested until he is removed from office.
On the issue of whether or not Obama has committed treason, there is an almost never ending list of examples that he has, many of which are included in the links at the bottom of this post. Just so there’s no confusion about HOW Obama has committed TREASON, or WHY anything is possible if Obama keeps pushing the American people, Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution states:
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.”
Since liberals have an uncanny knack for what they call “reading between the lines,” I’ll further elaborate on Treason a bit. At any other time in history, Obama and his band of clapping seals would be locked up in mental wards for hallucinating and seeing things that are not there, but in the @ss backwards country we are living in today, someone being able to see what is not there is not frowned upon. So, let’s move on…
Just so there is no confusion, “the mere attempt to provide support” is TREASON. Forget for a moment that there is a long list of admirals and generals who have accused Obama of Treason, or conspiring with the enemy, because an argument could be made that they were bitter over being fired, along with 300+ other high ranking officers (most listed by name here), or bitter with Obama plunging the Middle East into chaos after their men fought, bled, and died there.
In the video below, Top Obama Appointee and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael Flynn, told al Jazeera that Obama “knowingly and willingly armed ISIS,” making him a TRAITOR! To be clear, another instance of Obama’s “mere attempt to provide support,” on one occasion consisted of Obama Actually Warning ISIS With Leaflets Before Bombing Them.
Below, General Flynn says Obama knew he was helping ISIS grow, but decided to do it anyway. For those who don’t know, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency is an appointed position by the President, so one of Obama’s OWN PEOPLE is ratting him out. General Flynn is hardly the only person to accuse Obama of treason. In the video after General Michael Flynn, Four-Star Navy Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons Also Blasts Obama For Treason, and Reveals Obama’s Plans.
In the video below from January 28, 2015, Four-Star Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons (U.S. Navy, Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, had some stunning accusations he laid down against Barack Obama.
The comments were made during a press conference on how to combat radical Islamic extremism.
He states that under the leadership of Barack Obama the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated all of the National Security Agencies of the United States.
Furthermore, Lyons said that Obama is deliberately unilaterally disarming the military and spoke to the need for the new GOP controlled congress and Military leaders to stand up to the administration and uphold their oaths.
His remarks are scathing toward a sitting U.S. President… yet the media dismisses them.
In the final video, Admiral Lyons shares about Obama’s treasonous activity on Fox News too. He explains how Obama has allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate EVERY level of our government, even the intelligence agencies. Admiral Lyons also says we had PLENTY OF ASSETS in theater that could have gotten to Benghazi, but they were never deployed.
The list of lawless and treasonous activity, as well as those who’ve accused Obama of treason goes on and on, and you can read more about that list in the links below. Right now there is a war going on, especially before a presidential election. The war is for information.
PASS THIS ALONG SO OTHERS KNOW THE TRUTH!
THE VOICE OF REASON is the pen name of Michael DePinto, a graduate of Capital University Law School, and an attorney in Florida. Having worked in the World Trade Center, along with other family and friends, Michael was baptized by fire into the world of politics on September 11, 2001. Michael’s political journey began with tuning in religiously to whatever the talking heads on television had to say, then Michael became a “Tea-Bagging” activist as his liberal friends on the Left would say, volunteering within the Jacksonville local Tea Party, and most recently Michael was sworn in as an attorney. Today, Michael is a major contributor to www.BeforeItsNews.com, he owns and operates www.thelastgreatstand.com, where Michael provides what is often very ‘colorful’ political commentary, ripe with sarcasm, no doubt the result of Michael’s frustration as he feels we are witnessing the end of the American Empire. The topics Michael most often weighs in on are: Martial Law, FEMA Camps, Jade Helm, Economic Issues, Government Corruption, and Government Conspiracy.Under President Trump the US GDP Surpasses $19 Trillion for the First Time Ever
Guest post by Joe Hoft
Under President Trump the US economy is on fire. The stock markets are registering new all time highs once every four days!
On Friday again the ‘DOW’ reached another all time closing high. The DOW has increased 19% since the November 2016 election. The NASDAQ and S&P 500 are other major American stock indices that have reached all time highs since President Trump was elected.
The rationale for the excitement in the markets is supported by underlying fundamental measurements of the economy. One of the main economic indicators of a robust economy is GDP (Gross Domestic Product). According the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA):
GDP is one of the most comprehensive and closely watched economic statistics: It is used by the White House and Congress to prepare the Federal budget, by the Federal Reserve to formulate monetary policy, by Wall Street as an indicator of economic activity, and by the business community to prepare forecasts of economic performance that provide the basis for production, investment, and employment planning.
Yesterday the BEA released its analysis of second quarter 2017 GDP:
Real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the second quarter of 2017 (table 1), according to the “advance” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP increased 1.2 percent, (revised up from the original 0.7 percent growth.)
Under President Trump the second quarter annual GDP growth rate nearly doubled the rate from the President’s first quarter. Also, according the BEA, the US GDP surpassed $19 Trillion for the first time in US history under President Trump.
According to the BEA, at the end of 2016 the US GDP stood at $18.9 Trillion. At the end of the first quarter the US GDP rose to $19.1 Trillion. At the end of the second quarter the US GDP grew to $19.2 Trillion (all in current dollars). Under President Trump the US GDP has grown by more than $300 Billion in just two quarters.
Eight years ago President Barack Obama’s GDP results were not nearly as impressive.
As a matter of fact, in the first two quarters under President Obama, the US GDP shrank. At the end of 2008, the US GDP stood at $14.5 Trillion. At the end of President Obama’s first quarter in office the US GDP shrank to $14.4 Trillion and by the end of Obama’s second quarter in office the GDP shrank to $14.3 Trillion. President Obama’s economy shrank by more than $200 Billion in his first two quarters in office.
Percentage-wise President Trump also way outperforms President Obama in his first two quarters in office. Under President Trump the US GDP has grown by 1.2% in the first quarter and 2.6% in the second quarter. Under President Obama the US GDP shrank by an unheard of 5.4% in his first quarter and by.5% in his second quarter in office in 2009.
With these increasing GDP numbers it’s no wonder the stock market is excited about President Trump’s economy!Canadians would be appalled if a place of learning was named in honour of King Leopold II, the genocidal Belgium monarch who oversaw the slaughter of millions in African people in the Congo. Or if, say, a medical school in Canada was named for Dr. Josef Mengele, the evil Nazi doctor who conducted horrific medical experiments on Jewish twins at Auschwitz.
Think these hypotheticals are too extreme? Well, there is a school in Toronto named for the man whose ideas helped create atrocious residential schools where Indigenous children were beaten, raped and abused. Tell those children that Egerton Ryerson should have a university named after him.
There is a certain irony to the fact that many people are insisting the university stay true to its legacy and keep "Ryerson" in its name, when the whole point of the residential school system was to eradicate Indigenous languages, suppress culture, forcibly integrate children into a primarily Anglo society and break the bonds among our families and communities. As someone who witnessed this firsthand as a student at the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ont., I can attest to its effectiveness.
Acknowledging our past
In a recent CBC column, Angela Wright argued that Ryerson University should not change its name, suggesting that doing so would eliminate an opportunity to talk about the "ugly" aspects of Canada's history.
"If given a new name," she wrote, "Ryerson University would no longer have to make a statement about or acknowledge Egerton Ryerson's legacy and influence. The conversation would disappear." Wright also suggested that changing Ryerson's name would "scrub" the institution of its history.
In fact, changing Ryerson's name would do little more than rescind the name of a man who was an integral part of one of the most shameful aspects of Canadian history. It will in no way eliminate the conversation about or study of residential schools. Rather, it will simply forge a new identity for the institution based on respect and acknowledgement of the suffering of Indigenous peoples.
Other places — indeed, entire cities — have changed their names with minimal fuss. "Bombay" was changed to "Mumbai," for example, to erase some of the legacy of British colonial rule. In Canada, "Frobisher Bay" was changed to its original Inuktitut name "Iqaluit." And Germany long ago scrubbed Nazi symbols and names from its buildings and institutions, but that hasn't prevented it from making the history of the Holocaust and the Third Reich a vital part of every school's curriculum. We can do the same here.
"Canada" itself is a Mohawk word referring to a town or community, and it reflects a fundamental part of our nation's identity: that we are a collection of communities with respect for our various histories, languages and cultures. We are willing to adapt to the new, and to reconcile with our past, however controversial or uncomfortable.
I'd suggest Ryerson be renamed using an Indigenous word, since we already use Indigenous words for places like Ontario, Toronto, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Renaming should reflect the need to speak honestly about our common experiences and our past. The name "Ryerson" should not be part of our future.
This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.It is a very badly kept secret that Green Bay Packers general manager Ted Thompson believes that the core of an NFL roster should be built through the NFL draft. Thompson has many critics who believe that his lack of moves in free agency are prohibiting the Packers from getting back the Super Bowl, something they haven’t done since the 2010-2011 season. Call it stubbornness, arrogance, or just his beliefs, but that is what the Packers live by, building their franchise through the draft. Today will take a closer look at what the 2017 Green Bay Packers Draft Class might look like.
To help guide us through the possibilities for Thompson and the Packers we discussed some scenarios with Daniel Parlegreco of DTP Draft Scout. Parlegreco is the author of the very popular DTP’s 2017 NFL Draft Guide. Parlegreco has studied hours and hours of tape of this year’s draft prospects and knows this class inside and out.
Forecasting the 2017 Green Bay Packers Draft Class
LWOS: The Packers have some key holes on their roster going into this year’s draft. Right now, they have big holes at offensive guard, outside linebacker, running back, and possibly cornerback. What kind of depth is there at these positions in this year’s draft?
DTP: Edge rusher, offensive guard, running back and cornerback are four of the deepest positions in this year’s draft. I am confident there are going to be multiple starting players at every one of these positions on day three of the draft. There is a strong possibility that the Packers could get four starters out this draft.
LWOS: Many believe that the Packers top two needs going into this draft is at outside linebacker and offensive guard. With outside linebacker being such a vital piece in their 3-4 defense, it is a high probability that outside linebacker is the number one need, if so, which prospect might be available for them when they go on the board at 29 in the first round?
DTP: The four prospects that I believe will be around when the Packers select in the first round are Auburn’s Carl Lawson, Missouri’s Charles Harris, Wisconsin’s T.J. Watt and Kansas State’s Jordan Willis. If the first two mentioned are there, it is a no brainer. Watt and Willis, I believe are second round prospects.
LWOS: One player you mentioned is Wisconsin’s T.J. Watt. A lot of Packers fans have seen his name mentioned as a strong possibility for the Packers at 29. Do you believe Watt is worthy of a first round grade? Many have compared him to current Packers linebacker Clay Matthews, do you feel that is a worthy comparison?
DTP: Personally, I do not. From the tape I have reviewed on him, I give him a second to possibly an early third round grade. Because of his bloodlines (he is the younger brother of Houston Texans standout defensive end J.J. Watt), I believe he will be over drafted. The same thing happened to current Oakland Raiders quarterback Derek Carr, but instead of him being over drafted, he was undervalued because he was the brother of former Houston Texans quarterback David Carr. T.J. only had one big season at Wisconsin, which might scare off some teams from spending a first round draft choice on him.
LWOS: If the Packers decide to bypass the outside linebacker position with their first pick, is there a prospect that might be able to contribute in their rookie season that will be available in possibly the third or fourth round?
DTP: Absolutely. There are a plethora of prospects that will be available early on day three that will have significant impact at outside linebacker. Just a few names to remember for that area are Alabama’s Ryan Anderson, Pittsburgh’s Ejuan Price, Washington’s Joe Mathis, TCU’s Josh Carraway, Louisville’s Devonte Fields, Illinois’s Carroll Phillips, and Houston’s Tyus Bowser. I believe all of these players will have an opportunity to have an impact in their rookie season.
LWOS: One player who has been getting a lot of attention lately, who seems like he would be a Ted Thompson guy, is Youngstown State pass rusher Derek Rivers. Might Rivers be able to play outside linebacker in a 3-4? What round do you believe Rivers might go in?
DTP: Rivers has been shooting up the draft boards as of late. He is likely to be a second or early third round draft choice. He has played almost exclusively as a hand on the ground defensive end for Youngstown State. He has the ability to stand up as an outside linebacker, but I’d imagine his height and length will make him more appealing to teams that run a 4-3 defensive alignment.
LWOS: With starting right guard T.J. Lang signing with the Detroit Lions this off season and the Packers seeming not to have anyone on their current roster to fill his spot, it appears guard might be a position they look at with their first pick. You have Western Kentucky’s Forrest Lamp as your top guard in your draft guide, do you believe that he carries a first round grade? If so, will he be available at 29 when the Packers select?
DTP: Yes to all the above. Lamp might be the safest player in this year’s draft. Much will be made about his shorter then normal arm length, but when you watch his tape you can see it never affected him. He’s a stud and probably a perennial Pro Bowler on offensive line at the next level.
LWOS: Thompson and his staff rarely select college offensive guards. Instead, they select college offensive tackles and ask Packers offensive line coach James Campen to convert them to guard. Are there any prospects who played tackle in college that would be better fitted to play guard at the next level? If so, who are these prospects?
DTP: This year’s draft has a lot of prospects that fit in that category. Temple’s Dion Dawkins, USC’s Zach Banner, Kutztown’s Jourdan Morgan, and Florida’s David Sharpe are a few that come to mind. All could flourish at guard in the right system at the next level.
LWOS: The top two running backs on the Packers roster are converted wide receiver Ty Montgomery and recently re-signed Christine Michael. Both aren’t big bodied running backs. With Eddie Lacy now in Seattle, is there a running back in this year’s draft who could fit that bill for the Packers? It is rare that Thompson and his staff grab a running back in the first two rounds, is there a prospect who would be available in the third round or later that could be a fit for the Packers?
DTP: One prospect who would be a fit and that has been rising up draft boards is Pittsburgh’s James Connor. He has that type of size and ability the Packers are looking for. He has also shown that he can overcome obstacles, after dealing with cancer while at Pittsburgh. Another running back I really like is Oklahoma’s Samaje Perine. He’s a big bruising back that is faster than his 40-yard dash time suggests. He plays with incredible balance and vision. If he falls to the fourth round, he would be a steal for some team.
LWOS: With Julius Peppers and Datone Jones departing as free agents, the Packers defensive line is missing a player who is physically imposing. A prospect that grabbed scouts’ attention during Senior Bowl week is Villanova’s Tanoh Kpassagnon, who is a physical monster. Is he able to play inside in a 3-4 alignment? In what round do you see him coming off the board?
DTP: He would seem to be a perfect fit at defensive end in the Packers 3-4 alignment. He’s raw, but he really flashed at times at Villanova last season. He’s a borderline second or third round selection. I feel he will probably go in the third because he is so raw. But as they say, you can’t teach size.
LWOS: In recent drafts, Thompson has waited to select an inside linebacker until the fourth round. Some believe the reason behind this is that when he selected former linebacker A.J. Hawk with the fifth overall pick, Hawk never played up to his draft status. If Thompson does look at inside linebacker in this year’s draft, who might he look at?
DTP: I really like Ohio State’s Raekwon McMillan in that role. Other possibilities are LSU’s Kendell Beckwith and Northwestern’s Anthony Walker, Jr. A possible sleeper could be Lindenwood University’s Connor Harris.
LWOS: Finally, Thompson is known for taking unknown prospects that not many fans have heard of. Is there a player from a smaller school who could grab Thompson’s attention?
DTP: I’ll give you two names to remember. Damontae Kazee from San Diego State is a slot corner that could be available in the fifth round. His 40-yard dash time wasn’t very good, but he is a much better player on film then how he tested out. He’s going to be an outstanding, if not elite, slot corner at the next level. The other name to remember is Jerome Lane from Akron. He is a big, bruising wide receiver that has similar characteristics, physicality and toughness as Arizona Cardinal’s Larry Fitzgerald. He isn’t a great athlete but he is going to be a really good football player. I project him going some time in day three of the draft.Image copyright Greg Norton Image caption It took Koen Norton an hour to reel the fish in
A Canadian boy has caught a 486lb (220kg) tuna in Naufrage Harbour, off the coast of Prince Edward Island.
Koen Norton, 10, is hoping to secure the International Gamefish Association record for largest tuna caught by a child 10 years old or younger.
He was on his family's charter boat when he caught the massive fish on Sunday, using a fishing technique called "stand up" involving a harness.
Norton has been fishing since he was about five.
"He's talked about this record for quite a while," his father Greg Norton, who runs a fishing charter boat business, told the BBC. "We waited until he was 10 because it gave him the advantage of being as big as he could be. We go fishing every chance we get."
Koen Norton said it took him an hour to reel in the massive tuna.
"It was fun," Koen told the BBC. "It was just amazing how it felt when I was fighting it. When I hooked him, I could tell he was going to be a little bit of a fight."For researchers trying to untangle the roots of the current epidemic of asthma, one observation is especially intriguing: Children who grow up on dairy farms are much less likely than the average child to develop the respiratory disease. Now, a European team studying mice has homed in on a possible explanation: Bits of bacteria found in farm dust trigger an inflammatory response in the animals’ lungs that later protects them from asthma. An enzyme involved in this defense is sometimes disabled in people with asthma, suggesting that treatments inspired by this molecule could ward off the condition in people.
The study, published on page 1106, offers new support for the so-called hygiene hypothesis, a 26-year-old idea that posits that our modern zeal for cleanliness and widespread use of antibiotics have purged the environment of microorganisms that once taught a child’s developing immune system not to overreact to foreign substances. “This gives us a tantalizing molecular mechanism for understanding the epidemiological evidence,” says pediatric immunologist Stuart Turvey of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was not involved with the new work. But others caution that the finding is probably far from the only explanation for why early exposure to microbes can make kids less allergy-prone.
About 20 studies in Europe and elsewhere have found that children raised on farms have relatively low rates of allergies and asthma. Some researchers suspect a key reason is that the kids breathe in air full of molecules from the cell wall of certain bacteria, called lipopolysaccharides for their fat-sugar structure. Also known as endotoxins, these fragments—from dying bacteria in cow manure and fodder—cause a temporary low state of inflammation in the lungs that somehow dampens the immune system’s response to allergens, the thinking goes.
Pulmonologist Bart Lambrecht and immunologist Hamida Hammad of Ghent University and Flanders Institute for Biotechnology in Belgium and their collaborators wanted to probe the mechanism for endotoxins’ protective effect. They first showed that injecting the molecules into the noses of 6- to 12-week-old mice every other day for 2 weeks protects the rodents from developing asthma later, in response to dust mites. In the endotoxin-exposed mice, the epithelial cells lining the lungs made lower levels of proinflammatory molecules called cytokines when they encountered the dust mites; the mice also had fewer dendritic cells, the immune sentinels activated by cytokines.
An enzyme made by the epithelial cells, called A20, seemed to play a role in reducing these inflammatory responses. In mice engineered to lack the gene for A20 in their lung epithelial cells, endotoxins did not protect the animals from asthma. The team got similar results when they repeated the mouse experiments with farm dust, which includes not just endotoxins but other potentially inflammatory fragments from bacteria, fungi, and plants as well.
The Ghent team then tested bronchial cells from healthy people and found that exposure to endotoxins lowers the levels of the same inflammatory molecules studied in the mice. The levels didn’t drop as much in cells from people with asthma, and their cells also made less A20 protein. Finally, the researchers found that among nearly 500 farm children, those carrying a mutation that lowers A20 activity were five times more likely to develop asthma.
Until now, Lambrecht says, most explanations for the hygiene hypothesis assumed it acts directly on the immune system’s T cells. The new finding shows that with endotoxins, “it’s not happening in the immune system. It’s in the structural cells of the airway,” Lambrecht says. “We need this environmental exposure to cool down the epithelium so it knows what’s dangerous and not dangerous.” He points out that A20 plays a similar restraining role in the gut of a newborn, helping it tolerate the beneficial microbes that contribute to digesting food. The new study suggests that a drug that boosts A20’s activity could help protect children with a family history of asthma from developing the disease, Lambrecht says. (Dosing children with endotoxins is risky because the mechanism is apparently finely tuned; large exposures promote asthma.)
Others who study the hygiene hypothesis caution that the newly uncovered mechanism does not entirely explain the protective effect of dairy farm life. Drinking unprocessed milk also seems to ward off asthma in kids, points out Gary Huffnagle of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor—and that effect is unlikely to involve the lung epithelium. What’s more, endotoxin levels are not that much higher on farms than in cities, suggesting “it’s too simple an answer,” says asthma genetics researcher William Cookson of Imperial College London, who thinks changes in living microbial communities in the lungs and gut may be just as important.
Harvard University immunologist Richard Blumberg would also like to see the Ghent team show that the protective response lasts from birth into adulthood— experiments that Lambrecht’s group is now planning. For now, says Blumberg, the new study is “another important layer of our community’s search to understand the biology behind the hygiene hypothesis.”Audrey Tilve, euronews: Paul De Grauwe, you teach at the London School of the Economics and the University of Leuven. You’ve been following the Greek crisis closely. If in the end, Greece leaves the euro, would that bring about a financial disaster?
Paul De Grauwe, London School of Economics: It would certainly be a disaster for Greece. But your question is on whether it would be a disaster for the eurozone. In the short term, I think that it’s manageable. We have now a range of tools which can be used to stem the kind of contagion that could happen. The problem is the long term. If Greece leaves the single currency, that means that monetary union is not permanent and so that means in the future, when there are new economic shocks, such as a recession, the questions will be asked. Where is the weak point? Which country could leave? That would destabilise the eurozone.
euronews: I’d like you to comment on some figures that you know well: the countries most exposed to Greek debt. Germany (is exposed to the tune of) 56 billion euros. France 42 billion. Italy 37 billion. Do these countries have any chance of getting this money back?
Paul De Grauwe: It’s not a 100 percent chance. In fact, one needs to focus on the fact there has already been some losses. So the amounts we’ve seen are nominal amounts. There have been implicit restructuring. The maturity of the debt has been extended; the interest rate cut. If we calculate the actual value of what Greece has to pay in the future, we come to a figure that clearly less than the amounts lent. So there have already been losses but the government don’t dare to say it to their taxpayers.
euronews : So some debt has already been lost?
Paul De Grauwe : Yes, about 50 percent of Greek debt has been lost,according to my calculations.
euronews: What’s the point of all that if we don’t tackle the key problem in Greece today.It’s the inability or at least the huge difficulties that Greece has in collecting taxes. The malfunctioning of an administration where there is corruption and cronyism. Why has there been no progress there in the past five years, since Europe put Greece on financial life support?
Paul De Grauwe: There has been progress in some areas. There has been a reduction in the number of civil servants, reforms of the pension system.
euronews: There is no land registry. Ship owners aren’t taxed.
Paul De Grauwe: There is a whole lot of things to do. These things have to be done but the most important issue is the fact that the austerity imposed upon Greece has pushed the economy into the abyss.
euronews: What would take for Greece to be able to survive without help and become economically viable?
Paul De Grauwe : First of all, stop with austerity which hasn’t worked. It has reduced the ability of Greece to pay its debts, unemployment.
euronews: Will that be enough? What industry is there in Greece? It imports a lot.
Paul De Grauwe: Greece had growth rates in the past, so of course, one part of that growth was unsustainable, but before that Greece saw growth. To say Greece can’t grow doesn’t make sense.MARK GOTTFRIED MINGLES. Gliding through his own backyard, the basketball coach shakes hands, passes out beers and talks hoops -- North Carolina State-by-god Wolfpack hoops. His guests, for the first time in a long time, are drinking up their pride in the Pack program with as much enthusiasm as they throw back the beer. It has been a while. Not since they've had a drink but since they've been able to discuss State basketball without apologies, excuses and then a drink. It is late summer. Gottfried's second season in Raleigh is nearly two months away, but buzz from the Pack's unlikely run to the Sweet 16 and the program's first 24-win season since Jim Valvano's 1987-88 squad continues at a low hum. And Coach has been busy.
He is still tweaking his new up-tempo offense (well, new to the Pack) that helped put NC State into the NCAA tournament, and he persuaded his best players, guard Lorenzo Brown and forward C.J. Leslie, to put the NBA on hold and stick around for one more year. That means NC State brings back four starters. He also signed three McDonald's All-Americans -- the most in school history. All of this has led to near-ridiculous expectations. The Wolfpack rank among the top 10 teams on most preseason lists and sit atop the ACC coaches poll as the favorite to win the school's first conference title since that same Valvano squad. What's more, Leslie is the ACC preseason player of the year, and guard Rodney Purvis is preseason freshman of the year.
The attention is overwhelming, but it comes at a time when there is also an overwhelming enthusiasm for the opportunity to take back Tobacco Road -- or at the very least to become relevant again. "We have the potential for a great future," Gottfried says. "But we still have work to do. To get there, we need to do a better job of embracing our past and the people who got us here. Those blue schools down the road have always done a great job of that. Now we will too." And that institutional knowledge, and the chance to tap into it, is what has him glad-handing in the backyard.
At 6'2", Gottfried is not a short man. But here on his own turf, just a few minutes from campus, his head barely reaches the shoulders of most of his 70-plus visitors -- essentially every former Pack player who has ever mattered. He has called them home to Raleigh to make a promise, to tell them that they can trust him to rebuild their program and their pride, but only if they're willing to circle the wagons and help out.
There's 7'2" Tommy Burleson, who battled Bill Walton before winning the 1974 title. There's
6'11" Thurl Bailey, who boxed out Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon in 1983. From David Thompson to Tom Gugliotta to Julius Hodge, the legends look down on Gottfried and slap him on the shoulder with a "Keep it up, Coach."
"Thanks, guys," Gottfried replies to each and every alum, then follows with his familiar refrain: "But we still have a lot of work to do."
"There's a pride in this program that's never left," Thompson says with a marked intensity. "But for a long time, we've had to hang that pride on the past. Now, in just one year, Mark has given us a great present and hopefully a future that we can be just as proud of."
Then the original Skywalker, who was just named to NC State's inaugural Hall of Fame class, softens his eyes and smiles. "He's turned it around so fast, honestly not a lot of people know how. Everyone wants to ask him, but they also don't want to bother him. They know he has a lot of work to do."
Gottfried is looking back in order to move forward. John Loomis for ESPN The Magazine
THE WORK IN question takes place each day in the newly overhauled Dail Basketball Center. The building's interiors, like Gottfried's backyard barbecue, embrace the program's past. "That area by the front desk, that used to be the coffee station," Gottfried says as he walks toward his office. "I like this view much better." He pauses to look at a floor-to-ceiling museum case packed with several of NC State's 17 conference championship trophies. Many of those gold cups had vanished, stashed away in storage closets. Gottfried found them and sent them off to a trophy shop to be polished and to have the gold basketballs refastened. "It's a great feel around here," says associate head coach Bobby Lutz,
a North Carolina native and one of three assistants with head coaching experience. His office walls, like his co-workers', are adorned with framed photos of both the current team and red-and-white-draped superstars of teams gone by. "It's all very Back to the Future, isn't it?"
It is. So are the game plans drawn up in those offices, then run ad nauseam on the practice floor below. Last season's much-ballyhooed offensive jolt -- the one that generated 72.9 points per game, with all five starters averaging double digits -- is regarded among many NC State loyalists as a groundbreaking, forward-thinking, fast-break |
you realize how much of that talk has been empty chatter — slivers of the talk we should’ve been having. More than anything else, it builds a profound, almost overwhelming case that O.J.’s acquittal in 1995 may have been one of the biggest civil-rights victories of the entire decade. The verdict was just cause for all that national celebration from African-Americans, even if he was guilty. Shit, especially if he was.
O.J. does not pretend, by the way, that O.J. was innocent; if the detailed history of Simpson’s brutal abuse of Nicole wasn’t enough, a horrifying 15-minute segment in which former prosecutor Bill Hodgman coldly lays down precisely how Simpson butchered Nicole and Ron Goldman will remove any lingering doubts. But it reminds us of the evil of Mark Fuhrman — who appears in the film, older but mostly unchastened — and also of how he was less an outlier in the LAPD than a symptom. The movie sees all sides with a clarity most Americans lacked at the time … and have lacked since. The verdict might have been bullshit. That doesn’t mean, in its own way, it wasn’t a grand victory.
And what about the men who won it? In O.J., we see Simpson as the awkward civil-rights hero he was — a man who scrupulously avoided, for his whole career until the murders, the political struggle that ran parallel to his rise, famously saying, “I’m not black, I’m O.J.” (When he was first escorted to jail, on seeing all the African-Americans who showed up to support him, he said, “What are all these n—-rs doing in Brentwood?”) We also see how Johnnie Cochran, far from being an opportunist, truly believed that putting the LAPD on trial on the largest stage possible was the most important work of his life. Which, despite a long and laudable career before O.J., it probably was.
In the Seinfeld era, Cochran was seen by white America as a cartoonish grandstander. In Ryan Murphy’s pageant version, Courtney B. Vance mostly restored his dignity, with a few delicious comic flourishes. But as we see in the documentary footage, the real Cochran didn’t need any rehabilitation. Nor did his “grandstanding.” Edelman convinces us of this by focusing almost as much on the LAPD as he does on Simpson. We get the full history of the city’s scabrous racial politics, from the southern blacks who came to Los Angeles expecting acceptance and discovering something far different, to the Watts riots, to the death of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, to former LAPD chief Daryl Gates’s horrific racial attitudes, including his infamous claim that more black men were dying from chokeholds because their arteries “do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.” It all exploded with the Rodney King riots, which were less about King and more about the seeming impossibility that a black man could ever win anything in a court of law in the city of Los Angeles. If O.J.— with all his lawyers and all his money — couldn’t beat that system, what hope would there ever be for anyone else?
The joke, of course, is that while African-Americans were all celebrating O.J.’s eventual acquittal, whites were mortified by it. “Blacks are extraordinarily skeptical that the system can be fair, while whites see the system as essentially color-blind,” the political scientists Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley, authors of Justice in America: The Separate Realities of Blacks and Whites, have said. In their research, “while about 25 percent of whites disagreed with the statement that the ‘courts give all a fair trial,’ more than 60 percent of African-Americans disagreed.” O.J. is full of footage of blacks and whites reacting to the verdict in diametrically opposite ways, and the genius is that you absolutely understand why both sides were sort of right.
The film is also, in a quiet way, an argument for our times — and even, if you can believe it, a tribute to the way we talk to and understand each other now. Marcia Clark and the prosecution didn’t just underestimate how much race would be a factor in the trial — top to bottom, from their reliance on Fuhrman to their jury selection to just about everything Christopher Darden went through during the whole trial, they didn’t even seem to recognize that race would matter. It was something that white people, well-meaning and otherwise, simply could not understand, because it was something they hadn’t been exposed to. I was in college in central Illinois when the verdict came down, and like every white person I knew — and I almost exclusively knew white people — I was appalled that O.J. had been acquitted and baffled that anyone would celebrate it. But I’d understand it today.
And the reason I’d understand it is that, like everyone else, I hear from so many more voices now — so many more people of color, people who understand what life in L.A. has been like for black people for decades. We often think the social-media era closes each of us off into ideological echo chambers — which is, in part, true. But what’s echoing within those chambers are often contrary opinions, circulated via outrage. A midwestern white Republican in 2016 might not have much sympathy for Black Lives Matter, but he’s not shocked when the death of a civilian in a police shooting is followed by protests. Obviously, sometimes — most of the time! — we use this ability to have a voice as a way to scream at one another. When we see it all day, every day, it can look like nothing but ugliness. But that doesn’t mean that’s not, in its own way, a sort of progress. Marcia Clark damn sure wouldn’t be so surprised today, at least.
*This article appears in the May 2, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.
Now Watch: LeBron James Cheering On His Kids On The Basketball Court Is A Thing To BeholdThe Fire’s splashy $4.5m move for the former German international seems to share many parallels with ill-fated veteran signings of the past
The notion that Major League Soccer is a retirement home is well established, if no longer factually correct. Once inhabited by the likes of, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard and Robbie Keane, the league is keen to highlight a changing landscape.
During the off-season the average age of foreign players signed was just 26 years old. Contained within that group was a number of young Designated Players, including: Albert Rusnak, Miguel Almiron, Josef Martinez and Cristian Colman.
Bastian Schweinsteiger joins Chicago Fire from Manchester United Read more
It would seem MLS clubs are now eager to build their own stars, and have shifted their focus towards on-field contribution rather than marketing potential. The Chicago Fire believes they have ticked both of those boxes with the acquisition of Bastian Schweinsteiger from Manchester United.
“We make decisions for soccer reasons,” general manager Nelson Rodriguez told reporters on Tuesday. “We make decisions to try to win games on the field. We make decisions to try to build a championship program.
“In this case it would be foolish to deny there are a lot of ancillary benefits to having a personality, a character and a history that comes with somebody like Bastian Schweinsteiger. But this is a soccer decision.”
Understandably, some fans are having a hard time believing that. From the moment the club announced the deal, fans and media alike were scrutinizing it. At 32 years old, Schweinsteiger is most certainly a veteran midfielder. When asked about the former German international’s age, Rodriguez drew comparisons to Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Tom Brady all winning titles in their 30s as well as Chicago favorite Michael Jordan.
The subtle difference of course is that those athletes did not slow down entering their 30s. Jordan played 82 games in his final NBA season, and 60 the year before that. Unfortunately, Schweinsteiger’s time at Old Trafford was also littered with niggling injuries.
When fit, he has been used sparingly this season by Jose Mourinho. Schweinsteiger has accrued less than 150 competitive minutes across appearances in the Europa League, FA Cup and League Cup, with his last Premier League appearance for United came a year ago on Monday, during a 1-0 victory against Manchester City.
“He will be much better prepared and conditioned in case his future decision [is] to leave the club – he will be prepared to go to competition,” Mourinho said last year after reintroducing the German to first-team training. “If he stays with us he becomes one more option.”
Admittedly, the former Bayern Munich midfielder’s résumé is a fantastic read. However, he is departing a league that seemed ill-suited for him at this stage in his career. Schweinsteiger’s technical ability has not diminished, but the often end-to-end nature of the Premier League highlighted his lack of mobility all too often. It is in part why Man United sought to break a British transfer record to sign Paul Pogba in the summer, with the Frenchman capable of dominating not just technically, but also physically.
The fact many draw comparisons between MLS and the English game should perhaps have dissuaded the Fire from making a move for Schweinsteiger.
Furthermore, if you speak to fans of the Fire, a veteran defensive midfielder would not be top of their priority list following the off-season signings of Dax McCarty and Juninho. Instead the club is in need of a defender or a player capable to slotting in at the number 10 role behind Nemanja Nikolic.
Speaking on Tuesday, Rodriguez did not rule out playing Schweinsteiger in a more advanced role, but ultimately refused to specify where he saw the German fitting in on the field. “There’s a current trend that the only way to be a successful number 10 is to go to Argentina and find the number 10 fairy tree that bestows you a South American 10,” Rodriguez said. “I’m not saying Pauno is going to play him at number 10, but there’s a lot of different types of playmaker that can impact the game.”
Rodriguez went on to cite Andrés Iniesta and Luka Modrić as examples of such players that can create from deep. A fair point, it does little to mitigate the fact that on the surface Schweinsteiger seems ill-equipped for MLS. Granted, the German will provide a professional presence in the locker room and perhaps even increase the club’s global image. However, at $4.5m it appears an expensive risk to take, especially when you consider how settled the team has looked during the early parts of this season (Saturday’s defeat aside).
A transfer that seems to share many parallels with ill-fated veteran signings of the past, Rodriguez was keen to stress that Schweinsteiger’s arrival was part of the Fire’s three-year plan.
Yet, even he could not ignore the marketing and exposure benefits Schweinsteiger brought with him. The hope now will be that unlike those failed veterans before him, Schweinsteiger’s benefit does not end with marketing and ticket sales. “This decision was made by Pauno and me,” Rodriguez said. “And we should be judged by that.”(CNN) "There was nothing left to do to me. They did everything."
It was an ordeal that nightmares are made of.
A 20-year-old Yazidi woman, who says she was held as a sex slave by ISIS, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview that her captor was a fighter who told her he was from the United States.
The victim, who asked to be called "Bazi" (not her real name) is now in the U.S. to testify to Congress about her allegations against the American -- and to push the FBI to press charges against the man she said went by the name of Abu Abdullah Al Amriki (Abu Abdullah the American).
CNN cannot independently verify the woman's story. The human rights group Hardwired assisted her in coming to the U.S.
Her captor "was very white," Bazi told Amanpour in Washington. "He was a little bit taller than me, with a black beard, black hair. I also saw his own family. He had a wife and two children, a son and a daughter."
That family, she said, still lived in the United States; he claimed he was able to visit them several times. He claimed he had been a teacher in America, and showed her pictures of his family, she said.
Bazi told Amanpour she was captured by ISIS when the extremist group overran the city of Sinjar in Iraq, in August 2014. She was taken to Raqqa, Syria, which ISIS claims for its capital. There, she was auctioned off as a slave along with 10 other girls.
The American, she said, sold off the nine other girls and kept her for himself.
'Before raping me, he would pray...'
JUST WATCHED The Yazidi activist working to free ISIS captives Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH The Yazidi activist working to free ISIS captives 02:47
In the hands of a member of ISIS, the punishment for not being a Muslim was horrible.
"He was talking in a bad way about the church," Bazi said. "He said, 'I wasn't awake in my life... until I was converted to Islam.' He said this is the right path for me and for everyone to live on this planet, to become Muslim."
"He was telling us we should go back to the Prophet's age, where we force everyone to become Muslim. Everybody should be a Muslim -- either be a Muslim or die."
The American, however, seemed content to keep Bazi as a slave for his sexual pleasure -- albeit one, as a non-Muslim, that required him to cleanse himself after the act was done.
"Before raping me, he would pray for like fifteen minutes or half an hour. And after that, even if it was 2 a.m., 3 a.m., after raping me, he would go take a shower and pray again."
After several attempts, escape
Despite the horrors she faced, Bazi said her thoughts were with the other girls.
"The first time he raped me, he tried to rape the other girl who was with me, but I told him since I felt I'm already raped, I don't want the other one [to be raped]. So I became responsible for the other one.
"I told him, you do this to me, you can have me. Please don't hurt her and don't do anything to her.
"I told him to treat her as a servant for him, because he was sheikh, an emir, so he would just have her as a servant.
"So I convinced him the whole time until we were able to escape from his house."
Her eventual escape came after several failed attempts. She told Amanpour that on her successful attempt she managed to make it to a nearby shop and call her family.
JUST WATCHED Yazidis share their lives through their lenses Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Yazidis share their lives through their lenses 03:00
Her family knew people in ISIS-held territory who worked to get girls out of Syria.
"I was never able to even think about getting out of there, since -- although I tried many times, all the time I was aware that I will fail. And so even now, I don't believe how did I made it."
"Everybody talks about this subject because it's sensitive," Bazi said. "But when it comes to the action, nobody does nothing."ATLANTA — In a dramatic conclusion to what has been described as the largest cheating scandal in the nation’s history, a jury here on Wednesday convicted 11 educators for their roles in a standardized test cheating scandal that tarnished a major school district’s reputation and raised broader questions about the role of high-stakes testing in American schools.
On their eighth day of deliberations, the jurors convicted 11 of the 12 defendants of racketeering, a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison. Many of the defendants — a mixture of Atlanta public school teachers, testing coordinators and administrators — were also convicted of other charges, such as making false statements, that could add years to their sentences.
Judge Jerry W. Baxter of Fulton County Superior Court ordered most of the educators jailed immediately, and they were led from the courtroom in handcuffs. Judge Baxter, who presided over a trial that began with opening statements more than six months ago, will begin sentencing hearings next week.
“Our entire effort in this case was simply to get our community to stop and take a look at our educational system,” District Attorney Paul L. Howard Jr. said, adding, “I think because of the decision of this jury today that people will stop. I think people will stop, and they will make an assessment of our educational system.”Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET
Dear pot-smoking frisbee golfers.
I know you all smoke pot because I've just seen Aaron King, an Iowa police officer, say it is so. The evidence emerged from King being filmed with a cell phone during a routine traffic stop.
It all started innocently enough. King apparently stopped the car because its headlights were not turned on.
The video, now on YouTube, shows King was quite happy being filmed during the stop. Which meant he was quite happy being heard uttering sentences such as: "OK. I need you to answer me a question. Why is it that everybody that plays Frisbee golf smokes weed."
The driver, Scott Beckwith, had a frisbee golf set on the back seat. Does that automatically identify him as a pot smoker?
Beckwith was remarkably sanguine during the troubling exchange.
For King wouldn't let the frisbee golf thing go. He insisted: "It's everybody, man. You can't tell me you've never smoked weed before."
When Beckwith offered, "I'm not going to tell you one way or another," King retorted with a knowing, "See, there you go. How much weed do you have in the car today?"
King proceeded with another clever question -- well, he must have thought it clever: "You understand you're free to go and everything but you wouldn't have a problem with me looking through your car?"
Wouldn't everyone let a rabid anti-frisbee golf police officer into their car?
Beckwith responded: "No what I'm saying is I would say I have a problem with you searching my car because you're profiling me based on being a disc golfer."
King persisted by suggesting that because Beckwith wouldn't tell him if he'd smoked pot before, that was a "yes" to him. This is an interesting interpretation of innocent until proven guilty, or not offering self-incriminating commentary.
Ever since cell phones became efficient means of filming, the police have been subject to their activities being recorded. Some don't like it. One San Diego officer referred to a Samsung Galaxy phone as a "
A Long Island officer tried to make trouble for someone washing their car in their own driveway. More serious filmed incidents have included the choking to death of a non-resisting man in New York.
Not for a moment does this prove that all police officers have nefarious intentions. Somehow, people don't often post videos of officers behaving well. The police are like soccer goalkeepers, their every mistake magnified.
Moreover, it's not as if it doesn't work the other way -- sometimes, citizens behave appallingly, which is just one reason why police forces like the NYPD are experimenting with wearable cameras.
But if King's actions are in any way customary -- and some will say that they might be -- it's not surprising that the ease with which the police can now be filmed makes for sometimes disturbing viewing.
In this case, King let Beckwith go. Moreover, WHO-TV reports that Ankeny, Ia., Police Chief Gary Mukulec apologized for the incident. He said: "The officer engages the driver in a line of questioning that is foolish and not representative of the Ankeny Police Dept.'s training or interactions with the public."
King's behavior is reportedly now being treated as a personnel matter. The fact that he knew he was being filmed, yet still pursued the line of questioning, suggests that he truly thought he'd succeed in his attempts to search the car.
How many police officers might have used the same types of argument to make illegal searches?
Some might find a certain sadness in the fact that Beckwith told King clearly and calmly: "I don't trust police officers."Nealy was given a separate trial due to questions about an immunity agreement the government gave her several years ago in an unrelated political corruption case. The government says the agreement was narrow and did not shield Nealy from criminal liability in the Price case.
The prosecution told Lynn it will evaluate its stand on Price's confiscated property.
The government seized $229,590 in cash from a safe in Price's home in 2011 and $230,763 that he earned from a land sale to a developer, claiming they were ill-gotten gains. Fain said half of the money found in the safe was hers.
A civil forfeiture case involving that property was put on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case.
U.S. Attorney John R. Parker issued a statement that said, "I will be convening with the prosecution team over the next several days regarding where we go from here, consistent with the court's timeline."
Walt Junker, the lead prosecutor on the case, declined to comment as he left the courtroom.
Mills said that he’s not sure how the U.S. attorney’s office makes its decisions but that he “would think logically that they will not proceed” with the tax counts against Price.
But he noted that an FBI agent said during the trial that about 150 FBI and IRS agents worked on the case. “So there’s no telling how many millions of dollars they have invested in it,” he said.
Evidence problems
During the nine-week trial, Lynn warned prosecutors that she felt they did not prove anything fraudulent about payments Nealy sent to Price by mail for vehicles she allowed him to use. Lynn had planned to dismiss those counts if the jury came back with guilty verdicts on them.
Price, a polarizing and outspoken figure who has fought for equal opportunities for black companies and workers, has represented his constituents for over 30 years in southern Dallas County.
He's the "most significant political figure" ever to be prosecuted in the city, according Matt Orwig, former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas. Price faced the prospect of losing not only his job and reputation but also his freedom. Now there’s nothing stopping him from continuing his work for the county.This was a real dream I had last night.
I was in Washington DC. My father and brother, both staunch Republicans were with me. We were touring the the monuments on the Mall. That was when someone announced that the Republicans and Democrats had come to a deal on raising the debt ceiling.
Great news! said my father.
Fantastic news! said my brother.
What? I asked. What was the deal?
They agreed to finally fix Social Security and Medicare, I was told.
Fix how? I asked.
Something about vouchers, my father said. All I know is it won't affect my benefits.
And I get my tax rate cut to 25%, said my brother, a highly compensated senior executive for a telecom mega-corporation (which in fact he is in real life, not just in my dreams).
But what about me? I said. [Wife's name here] and I are unable to work because of our disabilities.
You're the ex-lawyer. You tell me, said my father.
Last I heard the Republicans in Congress had passed a budget to eliminate health care reform...
Great! said my Dad. Last thing we needed was that socialist atrocity, Obamacare.
But Dad, I said, if heath care reform and medicare is eliminated, I won't be able to get the same health care coverage from a private provider that you receive from the government. Like you, I have a history of heart disease and I also suffer from a rare autoimmune disorder. [My wife's name here] is a pancreatic cancer survivor who suffered brain damage and loss of cognitive function because of her chemo treatments. Our daughter has ADHD and had asthma as a child.
Those are pre-existing conditions. Under the health care reform law, private insurance companies can't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. Eliminate health care reform and medicare and no insurance company in the world will insure your beloved granddaughter, your daughter-in-law or me, your son, for those health issues, if they will insure us for anything at all. All the vouchers in the world won't help me.
Well son, I'll be dead by then. You'll just have to figure it out on your own. I'm sure the free market will figure something out. Private companies are far more efficient than Government, you know. They have to be.
I don't think you understand, I said. Insurance companies are making massive profits by denying claims. A lot of of them spend more than 30% of their revenues on "administrative costs" like excessive salaries for their top executives.
The free market is doing a lousy job of providing health care right now. The insurance companies' managed care schemes and the virtual monopolies health insurance companies have in most parts of our country created a system that has dramatically increased our health care costs far in excess of what other developed nations pay, all of which have universal health care coverage.
We pay around 16% of our GDP on health care because of that and if current trends continue in a few years we will be paying nearly 20% of our GDP for health care. Only universal health care (preferably a single payer plan like Medicare for all) offers any chance of getting those costs under control while providing decent health care to all our citizens. Right now, over 50 million people are uninsured, many of them mothers and children...
Oh that, can't be true, interrupted my Dad, or I would have heard about it from Fox News. Look, let me tell you about how much I have to pay under Medicare...
Dad, last I checked you pay less than $3000 a year on heath care compared to what I pay which is over $20,000 out of pocket the last two years, even though we are still covered by [my wife's] ex-employer's health care plan since she is technically a retiree. But that company could slash retiree's health care benefits anytime they like.
Well, that's not really my problem son. I paid taxes to the government for years and I earned the benefits I get.
You paid far less for social security taxes and medicare taxes than I did Dad. President Reagan raised the rates on both Medicare and Social Security taxes a few years before you retired. And your employers all those years paid one half of your FICA taxes. I was a partner in my law firm until my disability and had to pay the full amount of FICA taxes.
My Dad was tired of arguing with me. Look son, this isn't really my problem. Why don't you ask your brother for some help should you need it?
Hey, said my brother, don't look at me. I have my own family to look out for. I shouldn't have to pay for a bunch of lazy do-nothing unemployed people like you. No offense intended, but you shouldn't have gotten sick when you did. You know I always told you that your health would have been better if you had just been more positive about things. A positive mental attitude can do wonders you know.
Besides, he continued, I don't have time right now to worry about your problems, I have much bigger ones of my own. I worry that the Tea Party people in Congress will think their leadership gave up too much to Obama in these negotiations. If they don't approve the deal I have to find out a safe haven for my investment portfolio if the the debt ceiling isn't raised.
Maybe I should switch the money I have in T-Bills and put it into Asian stocks in China and South Korea. What do you think?
That's when I woke up to my alarm going off. Funny thing, but I heard on NPR that President Obama is meeting with the Republicans today regarding the debt ceiling negotiations. I sure hope the President and the Democrats don't make my nightmare become a reality, this year or the next, by "compromising" with these right wing zealots, like Paul Ryan, to do away with my social security and medicare benefits.by Allen St. Pierre, Former NORML Executive Director
Reading a puff piece on one of the most disingenuous anti-cannabis activists in America, Dr. Andrea Barthwell of IL and VA, made my eyes roll as the contradictions and hypocrisies kept coming out–like a parade of clowns in one’s mind.
From Crain’s Chicago Business Illinois
——-
Andrea Barthwell, 55, provides medical consulting, forensic work and lectures for clients as president of Encounter Medical Group P.C. in River Forest and founder and CEO of EMGlobal LLC, based in Arlington, Va. What she prescribes: News from alternative sources such as www.projectcensored.org and www.reddit.com. “Members post stories from a variety of media; it tells you what people are thinking and talking about.” Scouts Chicago Tribune, New York Times and USA Today for health-related human-interest stories; traveling three weeks a month, reads medical articles via laptop. An M.D. and former deputy drug czar under George W. Bush, follows A&E’s “Intervention.” Tweets relevant articles as @DrAGB: “I’m an addictionista.” A prominent opponent of legalizing marijuana, she consults for a company developing a drug that’s a marijuana extract “because drugs are tested under the highest scientific standards and subject to FDA approval; the crude plant is not.” Follows the issue via the Marijuana Policy Project, Naperville-based www.educatingvoices.org and www.norml.org, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Finds comfort in Alexander McCall Smith’s series, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” based in Botswana. “A smart mystery and no loose ends; everyone winds up happy.” Creates iPod playlists for writing, reading and cooking. In the mix: “Anything Motown; Ludacris, Andrea Bocelli and Corinne Bailey Ray. She can moan like nobody else.” Finds new music at www.pandora.com. “That’s how I discovered Amy Winehouse.” Works crossword puzzles and studies “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Guitar.” “I got a Martin acoustic guitar last Christmas; I’m guarding against Alzheimer’s.”
Here we go…Dr. Barthwell has made a career and a lot of money advocating that the American public should be drug tested en mass, all children should be randomly drug tested, students should lose their loans upon a simple cannabis arrest; as well as the mass arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations of cannabis consumers.
She has testified against medical access to cannabis and that the American farmer should be prohibited from cultivating industrial hemp.
She is one of the relatively few physicians in America that believes that the criminal justice system is preferable to decriminalization. Then again, it is so much easier to make money when the government does most of the dirty work, creates prohibition-related industries, like the ones that literally bring the clients to the money-makers in handcuffs, such as private prisons or to so-called ‘addiction specialists’ like Dr. Barthwell (since the late 1990s, most of the clients of addiction specialists like Barthwell are forced into their offices after being presented with the Hobson’s Choice by the government post-arrest of either going to jail or to visit–and pay!–the Dr. Barthwell’s of the world).
But here is where the ironies and contradictions just have to make one laugh at the absurdity found in some of the self-interested players in cannabis prohibition like Barthwell–a prohibition profiteer to rival any street level drug dealer.
Taking these laugh points on in sequential order…
Dr. Barthwell recommends projectcensored? The Projectcensored that recently featured the harms and costs of cannabis prohibition arrests as a highly censored mainstream media topic? Dr. Barthwell recommends reading the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and USA Today…but, does she actually read them as, ironically, all of these paper’s editorial boards (and most every columnist) traditionally support both decriminalizing cannabis and medical access to the plant.
One of the specific ways Dr. Barthwell makes money off of cannabis prohibition these days–post doing so on the taxpayer’s expense while at the ONDCP for years–is to work for pharmaceutical companies that are trying to develop cannabinoid-based pharmaceuticals where she essentially argues that ‘pills and suppositories (possibly consisting of pure THC!)’ are A-OK, but a physician-instructed patient is a criminal if they use the whole plant material; patients should have no access to whole-smoked cannabis. Period.
Dr. Barthwell claims to monitor opponents like NORML and MPP as well, and that she recommends an extreme anti-cannabis organization called www.educatingvoices.org. The folks at Educating Voices (Dr. Barthwell’s home state anti-cannabis organization in IL) should be happy she visits their webpage, because according to the webpage ranking site Alexa.com, almost nobody visits their webpage.
If the marketplace of ideas and equal access to information means anything at all, cannabis law reform webpages are much, much more popular than anti-cannabis webpages.
Dr. Barthwell’s recommendations on music are also ironic to the point of absurd. Ludacris? Dr. Barthwell wants American youth to listen and watch Ludacris? The same Ludacris who performs a cannabis-loving rap song in an industrial cannabis cultivation farm that is as bright as the center of the sun?
Amy Winehouse? Do I need to write more?
By all means Dr. Barthwell, more people should buy and support the musical careers of cannabis consumers like Ludicris and Ms. Winehouse!
Lastly, Dr. Barthwell jests that she’d like to possibly stave of the affects of Alzheimer’s by learning how to play a newly acquired Martin guitar.
I have a suggestion: Why not take guitar lessons from a notable NORML supporter, who happens to own and performs almost daily on the world’s most famous Martin guitar, who has penned over 2,000 songs and could surely help you possibly stave off the affects of Alzheimer’s with his ever-present medicine, who has been known to share from time to time, town to town…The Democratic base is not so open-minded. Hours before Trump announced his pick, thousands gathered outside Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn home demanding the Minority Leader filibuster the choice. “Welcome to the resistance,” one union organizer announced on a megaphone to cheers. The organizers behind the “What the f***, Chuck!?” demonstration also delivered Schumer protein bars so the most powerful Democrat in the country “can regain his strength,” as they put it in their Facebook invite.
Ultimately, only five of the 48 senators in the Democratic caucus announced Tuesday night that they would oppose Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday night that Democrats will insist Gorsuch will not be confirmed with a simple majority but will use the filibuster to require 60 votes.
Most Senate Democrats released respectful statements about ensuring a “thorough and fair process” to fill the seat held by the late Antonin Scalia, a conservative Republican. That seat has been open for almost a year after Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did not allow so much as a hearing for Garland in the final 10 months of the Obama presidency.
A loud, active, and growing segment of the Democratic Party’s grassroots want all-out warfare against any nominee who isn’t Judge Merrick Garland — President Barack Obama’s nominee for the seat — while most Democrats in Congress have been far more reserved in their rhetoric.
As Donald Trump nominated the conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night, the Republican Party presented a unified front praising the choice. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, descended into an increasingly familiar muddle of conflicting messages about how they will oppose the Trump administration.
Read more
As Donald Trump nominated the conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night, the Republican Party presented a unified front praising the choice. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, descended into an increasingly familiar muddle of conflicting messages about how they will oppose the Trump administration.
A loud, active, and growing segment of the Democratic Party’s grassroots want all-out warfare against any nominee who isn’t Judge Merrick Garland — President Barack Obama’s nominee for the seat — while most Democrats in Congress have been far more reserved in their rhetoric.
Most Senate Democrats released respectful statements about ensuring a “thorough and fair process” to fill the seat held by the late Antonin Scalia, a conservative Republican. That seat has been open for almost a year after Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did not allow so much as a hearing for Garland in the final 10 months of the Obama presidency.
Ultimately, only five of the 48 senators in the Democratic caucus announced Tuesday night that they would oppose Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday night that Democrats will insist Gorsuch will not be confirmed with a simple majority but will use the filibuster to require 60 votes.
The Democratic base is not so open-minded. Hours before Trump announced his pick, thousands gathered outside Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn home demanding the Minority Leader filibuster the choice. “Welcome to the resistance,” one union organizer announced on a megaphone to cheers. The organizers behind the “What the f***, Chuck!?” demonstration also delivered Schumer protein bars so the most powerful Democrat in the country “can regain his strength,” as they put it in their Facebook invite.
The disconnect between some Democratic representatives and many of their voters may be emblematic of the more fundamental disconnect between Washington and the country that became a central theme of the 2016 presidential race, both in Trump’s rise and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Many activists have already said they will follow Sanders’ lead and take on the Democratic Party establishment in the next election. That could mean lawmakers receive primary challenges in 2018 if they decide not to distinguish themselves sufficiently from Trump. If Democrats accede to their base’s wishes for resistance, congressional dysfunction could escalate to levels not seen in generations.
That’s because any compromise with Trump is a form of appeasement to many of these grassroots organizers and they are willing to work to make those Democrats pay. “Senate Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat in plain daylight,” Dan Cantor, the national director of the Working Families Party, told VICE News as he steamed about Garland, a sentiment echoed by MoveOn.org, Center for American Progress, and other groups of the left.
Cantor helped organize with other progressive groups over 100 protests across 42 states Tuesday, including the one at Schumer’s home as part of #ResistTrumpTuesday’s. “Democrats should listen to the people in the streets, grow a spine, and do everything threy can to block Trump’s nominees.”
Not a single Democrat has voted against all of Trump’s nominees even though the party’s base is calling for them to do just |
feather transplant, told reporters.
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The first flight was a success, but the center says the owl has some more rehab before it can be released into the wild, KSTP says
The Raptor Center is unsure when the owl will be released, but when it is, it may be in northern Minnesota, WCCO says.
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Because the U of M’s Raptor Center is internationally known for replacing bird feathers, an East Coast rehabilitation center reached out to center officials for help with the owl. The U of M performed the feather transplant, which is called imping, to replace its damaged wing feathers.
The Raptor Center saves flight feathers from bird patients that don't survive. Because feather shafts are hollow, these replacement feathers can be fitted, inserted and glued using a piece of bamboo as a connector between the bird and the new replacement feathers.Copyright by WTNH - All rights reserved
Karla Santos, News 8 Intern - BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (WTNH) - A new fuel cell being installed in Bridgeport will power up to 5,000 homes, and bring additional jobs to the area.
Fuel cell energy currently powers 15,000 Bridgeport homes. As of Friday, the city's short-term goal is to get 19,000 powered homes.
Mayor Bill Finch explained why this project means so much for the people of Bridgeport.
"Green Energy Park will bring clean energy to thousands of Bridgeport homes. This project is creating 21st century jobs, bringing millions of dollars in revenue for Bridgeport, and ensuring our kids and grandkids breathe cleaner air."
The project will create over 90 jobs, and the new fuel cell is projected to provide energy to 5,000 households, according to a release from the city.
This week, the project has been progressing, it has a new foundation in place, and the elements of the fuel cell have been installed. Workers are now in the phase of assembling and placing along the pieces of the fuel cell.
In July, the service entrance equipment will be installed, and that will connect Bridgeport's energy grid to the fuel cell. City officials say that energy should be produced, and the cell should be finished by the fall.
Mayor Finch also discussed how Bridgeport is a leader in this particular technology.
"Bridgeport has North America's largest fuel cell. These projects aren't just good for the environment. They are good for our economy. They create jobs. They help reduce asthma and breathing ailment rates for kids. They grow our tax base. And, it's proof that our city can heal from the sins of our past and move toward a cleaner and more prosperous future."Hillary Clinton has revealed how she felt'stalked' by her Republican opponent Donald Trump during that second televised debate.
In her first interview since last Sunday's debate, the Democratic candidate told Ellen DeGeneres that she was left feeling 'weird' by the incident in which Trump lurked behind her on stage.
She said kept feeling a 'presence' behind her, and said : 'I felt, whoa, this is really weird. He would literally stalk me around stage and it was so odd'.
Clinton confirmed what body language experts and viewers were quick to notice - with thousands taking to Twitter Sunday evening to suggest his behavior was 'predatory'.
Body language author Janine Driver referred to his movements as a 'pre-assault indicator' and said: 'He's like a dog who's starting to get anxious and being backed into a corner'.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks with Ellen Degeneres during a commercial break at a taping of The Ellen Show in Burbank, Thursday
Hundreds of viewers pointed out the Republican's 'creepy' behaviour on social media after he was seen stalking Clinton around the stage and 'looming' over her
Clinton said Trump would 'literally stalk me around stage and it was so odd'.
Comedian Sarah Silverman wrote: 'He's physically trying to intimidate her by standing right behind her this is cray #debate.'
Mike Schauer wrote: 'Trump spent the night lurking behind Clinton like the sexual predator he is.'
Looking forward to the elections and guarding against complacency, Clinton said she didn't want anyone to 'think this election is over' because it has been so unpredictable.
'I'm not taking anything for granted. We've got to work really hard for the next three and a half weeks because, who knows - who knows what can happen?' Clinton said.
Clinton vowed to defend Americans she says have been attacked by Trump on Thursday, telling donors at a fundraiser that the campaign's negative tone might make some people retreat to the Internet to watch soothing cat GIFs.
Without mentioning allegations of sexual assault against Trump, Clinton said, 'disturbing stories just keep on coming' about him.
Trump's intimidating body language during the St Louis debate did nothing to stem mounting concerns about the candidate's attitude towards women
Donald Trump was accused of 'trying to intimidate' his rival Hillary Clinton by lurking inches behind her during the US presidential TV debate on Sunday
But she offered herself as a buffer to his insults of immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims and the disabled.
'There's hardly any part of America that he has not targeted.
'Now it makes you want to turn off the news.
'It makes you want to unplug the Internet or just look at cat GIFs,' Clinton said to laughter.
'Believe me, I get it. In the last few weeks, I've watched a lot of cats do a lot of weird and interesting things.
'But we have a job to do and it will be good for people and for cats.'
Clinton delivered her most extensive remarks about allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump days after a video showed him bragging about kissing women and forcing himself on them without their permission.
She also referenced reports that Trump's team may aggressively try to use her husband's past infidelities against her — beyond their decision to bring four former Bill Clinton accusers to last weekend's second presidential debate.
'His campaign is promising more scorched earth attacks. Now that's up to him. He can run his campaign however he chooses.
'And frankly I don't care if he goes after me. I signed on for this.
'But I will defend and stand up for every other person or every other group,' she said.
Clinton urged voters not to become wary of the negative tone of the campaign.
'I think some people are discouraged by it, feel that they don't want to even get involved by voting because it's so abhorrent to them,' Clinton said.21 APR 3302
An Alliance spokesperson has announced that the campaign to establish a new outpost received the wholehearted support of the galactic community. The spokesperson confirmed that significant quantities of robotics, semi conductors and auto fabricators were delivered to Noti Dock, allowing construction of the new station to begin.
Harlyn Tavistok, a member of the Alliance Assembly who has been overseeing the campaign, released a brief statement to the media:
"We are extremely grateful for the public's support, which has been integral to the success of this campaign. Construction of the new outpost is scheduled to begin at once. Soon we will have a valuable new resource in the sector."
But the success of the campaign has been overshadowed by criticism from Imperial and Federal commentators, who questioned the purpose of the new outpost. Some have asked whether the Alliance's avowed intention to'maintain awareness' is in fact an allusion to monitoring Imperial and Federal activity. Others have speculated that the outpost campaign might be the first phase of an expansion initiative.
Harlyn Tavistok declined to address the rumours.Michael Simari
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Subaru is recalling 32,400 Imprezas to replace the passenger-airbag occupancy sensor, according to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
On 2012 Impreza models (but not the WRX or WRX STI), the sensor in the passenger seat can switch the airbag off when an adult is seated or switch it on when no one is present. The problem has to do with a capacitance sensor Subaru introduced for that model year that gets tripped up if someone uses a cellphone or other electronic device while seated, if their clothes are damp, or if they touch a grounded part of the vehicle such as the seat-adjustment lever. Even a cellphone left on the seat can cause the airbag to activate improperly. Water on the seat can also cause the airbag to be disabled, even after an adult sits down.
Most occupancy sensors detect weight, not electrical capacitance, and Subaru said its sensor was not programmed properly to filter out such conditions. It has since been reprogrammed for later model years after a technical service bulletin was issued in May 2012. This recall is not related to the airbag itself or the Takata recall, which includes older Imprezas from 2004–2005. Subaru confirmed to us that it used Takata airbags only from 2003–2005 and only for the front passenger. The 2013 BRZ and 2013 Impreza are equipped with the same occupancy sensor as the 2012 Impreza, but there have been no disclosed complaints by either NHTSA or Subaru, and those models are not part of this recall.
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Subaru agreed to the recall only after NHTSA opened an investigation in June following 26 owner complaints. Since May, Subaru said it had paid more than 2500 warranty claims related to the sensor problem. Dealers will replace the sensor with a new one at a later date.The campus organization Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine have today issued a statement strongly criticizing their university president and demanding that Brandeis also sever ties with its Israeli partner college, the Technion.
The Al-Quds statement also adds insult to injury by shamefully lumping together (as if there was some kind of comparison to be made) the Holocaust (referred to by Nusseibeh, in the classic style of Holocaust revisionists, as a mere massacre) and the occupation of the West Bank.
Like Brandeis, I support collaboration between Western and Palestinian universities. But appeasing or appearing to support anti-Semitic and racist rallies by students, makes such collaboration virtually impossible.
The Al-Quds presidents statement is very revealing. It is carefully written so as to barely mention the rally itself, suggesting it was a fringe event (when in fact it is the third student rally praising suicide bombers to be held on campus this academic year). Like the other rallies, the Nov. 5 rally was clearly produced with some financial and logistical backing which calls into doubt the notion that it was a fringe event. Rather than being sorry that such a hate-rally took place, the Al-Quds presidents statement makes it sound like he is only really sorry that they were caught.
But the fact that in his new statement yesterday, Al-Quds President Nusseibeh (described as a moderate by Haaretz and the New York Times) not only fails to properly condemn the Fascist-style rally, but says it is all the fault of the Jews for having the temerity to ask for Fascist rallies not to be held on the main square on campus, has left Brandeis no choice but to take the difficult decision to suspend relations with Al-Quds.
As I wrote last week, a better outcome would have been for Brandeis to work with Al-Quds to ensure that this kind of activity never happens again, and for the Al-Quds president unequivocally to condemn this kind of behavior to his students. It seems clear that Brandeis would also have preferred this.
He says he regrets the refusal by Al-Quds President Sari Nusseibeh to unequivocally condemn the Islamic Jihad rally in his new Arabic-language statement, and called Nusseibehs statement unacceptable and inflammatory. Lawrence says Brandeis will re-evaluate the relationship as future events may warrant.
In it he says: While Brandeis has an unwavering commitment to open dialogue on difficult issues, we are also obliged to recognize intolerance when we see it, and we cannot and will not turn a blind eye to intolerance. As a result, Brandeis is suspending its partnership with Al-Quds University effective immediately.
Having criticized Brandeis University President Frederick Lawrence last week for his initial disappointing statement on the issue, he should be highly commended for making this much more robust new statement.
This is a follow-up to my previous three dispatches on the Fascist-style rally held on the main campus square at Al-Quds University in east Jerusalem on November 5. The rally lasted for almost three hours and people at the university tell me that up to 1,000 students attended or watched it at some point during it.
AL-QUDS SEEMS ONLY TO BE SORRY THAT THEY WERE CAUGHT OUT
Campus scenes on Nov. 5 at Al-Quds University. The Western-funded university authorities have on at least three occasions so far this academic year tolerated these kind of displays by students.
STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
Brandeis University suspends its partnership with Al-Quds University effective immediately
Nov. 18, 2013
http://www.brandeis.edu/now/2013/November/al-quds-response.html
Brandeis University President Frederick Lawrence announced today that Brandeis has suspended its partnership with Al-Quds University effective immediately. Brandeis will re-evaluate the relationship as future events may warrant.
The decision stems from recent events at Al-Quds University, including a campus demonstration on Nov. 5 and a statement about the demonstration, which the president of Al-Quds University issued last night.
The Nov. 5 demonstration on the Al-Quds campus involved demonstrators wearing black military gear, armed with fake automatic weapons, and who marched while waving flags and raising the traditional Nazi salute. The demonstration took place in the main square of the Al-Quds campus, which was surrounded by banners depicting images of martyred suicide bombers.
Immediately after he received reports of the demonstration, President Lawrence contacted Al-Quds President Sari Nusseibeh and requested that he issue an unequivocal condemnation of the demonstrations. President Lawrence also requested that the condemnation be published in both Arabic and English.
Last night (Nov. 17), President Nusseibeh sent an email to President Lawrence with an English translation of a statement posted in Arabic on the Al-Quds web site.
Unfortunately, the Al-Quds statement is unacceptable and inflammatory. While Brandeis has an unwavering commitment to open dialogue on difficult issues, we are also obliged to recognize intolerance when we see it, and we cannot and will not turn a blind eye to intolerance. As a result, Brandeis is suspending its partnership with Al-Quds University effective immediately. We will reevaluate our relationship with Al-Quds based on future events.
The partnership with Al Quds University was initiated with the best of intentions for opening a dialogue and building a foundation for peace. Over the years, our partnership has been extremely productive in many respects, including student and faculty exchanges that have advanced the cause of peace and understanding.
Brandeis welcomes students of all faiths and nationalities and is home to students from more than 130 countries, including every country in the Middle East. We are proud of our deep roots in Middle Eastern studies as well as our internationally recognized programs in Peace, Conflict and Coexistence Studies.
While recent events make it necessary for us to suspend our current relationship with Al-Quds, we will continue to advance the cause of peace and understanding on our campus and around the world.
STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF AL-QUDS UNIVERSITY
Letter to our dear students from the President of the University
Call them to the path of your Lord with wisdom and words of good advice; and reason with them in the best way possible.
-- Allah the Almighty is Truthful.
Quran, 16:125
My Dear Students of Al-Quds University,
The university is often subjected to vilification campaigns by Jewish extremists with the purpose of discrediting its reputation as a prestigious academic institution with a unique, humane calling: to strive to instill noble values in its students; to spread the spirit of democracy and openness toward other world cultures; and to present the genuine face of the Palestinian people, calling for peace against the extremism and violence to which we ourselves are subjected as a people denied our rights under occupation.
These extreme elements spare no effort to exploit some rare but nonetheless damaging events or scenes which occur on the campus of Al Quds University, such as fist-fighting between students, or some students making a mock military display. These occurrences allow some people to capitalize on events in ways that misrepresent the university as promoting inhumane, anti-Semitic, fascist, and Nazi ideologies. Without these ideologies, there would not have been the massacre of the Jewish people in Europe; without the massacre, there would not have been the enduring Palestinian catastrophe.
As occurred recently, these opportunists are quick to describe the Palestinians as a people undeserving of freedom and independence, and as a people who must be kept under coercive control and occupation. They cite these events as evidence justifying their efforts to muster broad Jewish and western opinion to support their position. This public opinion, in turn, sustains the occupation, the extension of settlements and the confiscation of land, and prevents Palestinians from achieving our freedom.
My Dear Students of Al-Quds University,
Your university has a proud place on the academic map of the Palestinian and the Arab worlds. And this pride is not only because we have made more progress than other universities in the fields of faculty research and publication. Nor is it only that your graduates are making great achievements for society and knowledge that exceed the achievements of others. This pride is also due to the honorable values that every student should carry, shape, and spread among society. This is a message of noble human values: freedom, democracy, and pluralism. This is a message of equality among people without consideration of status, class, race, gender, religion or any other quality. This is a message to build hope and a better human future. This is a message of justice and love and peace. This is a message of dialogue and forgiveness, of mutual respect, a message of high ethical standards. A message against hatred, against violence, against extremism, and also a message to make use of reason in every way and make reason dominant over passionate outbursts and to keep passion contained in the breast.
My Dear Students,
Your university makes the maximum effort to create an environment for you that allows you to act freely. Practicing this freedom is the basis on which to foster a better society.
But freedom is connected to the whole group of values that I mentioned above. It means respect when you are dealing with others. It means mutual respect among students, of students for their teachers and of teachers for their students. Any attack on teachers violates the principle of freedom. If you try to force your position on others without persuading them, that also is a violation of the concept of freedom. To express any position or opinion in a way that inspires hatred against others violates the concept of respect, which is one of the fundamental elements of freedom for example, if anyone tries to impose a position on others by force, by verbal threat, or by violence.
And while the university strives to provide an atmosphere of freedom, it is at the same time committed to preventing breaches by those who do not respect its principles and also holding accountable those who violate them, be they students, faculty or staff. Whoever harms another individual or group is also harming the university, its image and its reputation; this is an abomination. The word for a university campus (haram) connotes a sacred space for free and open discussion, the exchange of ideas, and the expression of contradictory views. A university campus should provide peaceful coexistence, safe from reactions that occur in the surrounding community, alongside scientific investigation and knowledge incubated in the university.
So we call upon you, for the sake of your society, for the sake of your university, and for the sake of yourselves, to hold firmly these values, for a world with degraded principles is like a beast that may be skillful in its tasks but reaps nothing but havoc upon the earth.
www.brandeis.edu/now/2013/November/pdfs/al-quds-statement-11-18-13.pdf
* You can comment on this dispatch here: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia. Please also press Like on that page.
The previous dispatches on this issue can be read here:
* Scenes yesterday afternoon from a moderate Palestinian university
* Al-Quds: Fascist-style rally by our students last Tuesday was totally unacceptable
* Update: Al-Quds photos receive attention from Netanyahu through to Al Jazeera
Update November 20:
I noted in previous dispatches on this subject, that the mainstream media have all-but-ignored this story. One can only presume political reasons play a part in their decision.
But the latest developments have been reported today and yesterday in many prominent blogs and websites, for example, here:
* Jonathan Tobin at Commentary (who is always worth reading)
* The Investigative Project
* Before it is news
* HonestReporting (if you scroll down)
* BBC Watch (if you scroll down)
And in Israeli newspapers, for example:
* Haaretz (with interesting readers comments)
* The Jerusalem Post
* Maariv
* Israel National News
* In the education press, for example in the Chronicle of Higher Education
* Or in the Jewish press, for example in The Forward
* Or in Spanish
* Or in French (which notes that Aucun média classique français n'en a parlé...)
* Or in Hungarian
* While mainstream media are still ignoring this story, readers continue to highlight it in the readers comment sections for example, here in the leading German paper Die ZeitHarry Reid, the former Democratic Senate Minority Leader, thinks Elizabeth Warren should run for president in 2020 — and he told Warren as much before he retired last year.
Buried deep in a story about the future of the Democratic Party’s opposition movement in the Donald Trump era, the New York Times Magazine’s Charles Homans set the scene:
Shortly before Thanksgiving, he summoned Warren to the minority leader's office. When she arrived, the room was littered with art supplies; on an easel was a half-finished portrait of Reid that would be unveiled at his retirement party the following month. Its subject was preoccupied with the future of the party to which he had dedicated decades of his life. Reid told Warren she needed to think seriously about running for president in 2020.
Warren was already floated as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in the runup to the 2016 presidential election. A progressive senator from Massachusetts — and trusted ally of Reid’s — Warren, the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, seemed to bridge a gap between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton factions of the Democratic Party. (Matt Yglesias made the case for Warren in 2015.) At the time, her critics ultimately deemed her too inexperienced on foreign policy to make a successful run for president in 2016.
Warren’s presence grew on the national platform regardless. She didn’t endorse either Sanders or Hillary Clinton during the primaries, but became a strong Clinton surrogate during the general election, making the Democratic nominee’s vice presidential shortlist. During the campaign season, Warren took up the mantle as the anti-Trump attack dog, and gave scathing speeches calling Trump a “small, insecure money grubber,” and has been among the leading Democratic voices calling for Trump to release his tax returns.
Still, she remains a fighting voice among Democrats facing unified Republican control of the federal government. And after joining the Senate Armed Services Committee, she’ll have more foreign policy experience and classified briefings on her résumé by the next Democratic primary.At today’s Metro Board meeting, agency CEO Art Leahy announced that pre-revenue testing for the Expo Line will begin this coming Monday.
The testing is intended to simulate actual service with trains running on a regular schedule, but with no customers on board. Trains will be operating between the Expo Line terminus at 7th/Metro Center and the La Cienega/Jefferson station while work continues on the final station in Culver City.
Although train testing has been ongoing since last spring, there will be a greater frequency of trains running on the Expo tracks at many hours of the day. It is important for pedestrians, motorists and cyclists to remain vigilant around Expo Line tracks and obey all warning signs and traffic signals. Safety is everybody’s job, people.
No opening date for the Expo Line has been announced. I know many of you are eager for the line to open — so are we — and we’ll let you know as soon as there is something to report.
Like this: Like Loading...Even just a decade ago, major pieces of legislation in the U.S. Congress would be just a few dozen pages long. But today, it seems like every time Congress passes an important bill it ends up being over a thousand pages long. In fact, the final version of the new financial reform law was over 2,300 pages. Overall, as we wrote about extensively in a previous article, this much-ballyhooed new law does a whole lot of nothing, but it turns out that lobbyists and special interests were able to insert a few nasty surprises that we are just now finding out about. But it was the same thing with the health care reform law. It was only after it was passed that most of us learned that it contained a provision that will force U.S. small businesses to collectively produce millions more 1099 tax forms each year. Now small businesses from coast to coast are screaming bloody murder about that provision but it is too late – the law has already passed. Unfortunately, there are some surprises in the recently passed financial reform law that are nearly just as bad.
So just what are those surprises?
Well, first let’s talk about what the financial reform law does not do. The financial reform bill was supposed to “fix” Wall Street and the financial system, but it did not do much of anything….
-It does nothing to address the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
-It does not eliminate “too big to fail”.
-It does absolutely nothing to eliminate the horrific bubble in the derivatives market.
-It does nothing to reform the organization most responsible for the recent financial crisis – the Federal Reserve. In fact, this new law actually gives the Federal Reserve even more power.
But it does create a ton of new paperwork and a bunch of new government organizations.
Oh goody!
But was there any major law that Congress has passed over the last several years that did not increase the size and scope of government?
That is a good question.
In any event, let’s get to some of the nasty surprises contained in the new financial reform law….
*Barack Obama has been running around touting how this new law will “increase transparency” in the financial world, but it turns out that a little-noticed provision of the new law exempts the Securities and Exchange Commission from virtually all requests for information by the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.
Not that the SEC was doing much good anyway.
But now the SEC’s incompetence and the nefarious actions of those they are investigating will be hidden from public view.
So what makes the SEC so special that they get to block the public from seeing their records while other government agencies still have to comply with FOIA?
Talk about ridiculous.
But there is actually another little surprise contained in the new law that is even more nasty….
*Another little-noticed section deeply embedded in the financial reform law actually gives the federal government the authority to terminate government contracts with any “financial firm” that fails to ensure the “fair inclusion” of women and minorities in its workforce.Halo 2 has always been a special game for me. It was the first real game I couldn’t wait for, from counting down the days to release, to reading every little piece of news about it from various gaming magazines. I can’t count the times I watched the E3 single player demo and was left awestruck each time. Back in 2004, the hype was just surreal thinking about the game, and although we still get blockbusters games today, something about Halo 2 back then made it bigger than the rest.
Ten years later, with multiple Halo games released over two new console generations, the anniversary of Halo 2 is upon us. Many expected Halo 2: Anniversary to be announced, but I don’t believe anyone expected the rumors would be true that four Halo games would be bundled in a single package. Thankfully, the rumors ended up being true, and we were graced with the announcement of Halo: The Master Chief Collection at E3 2014.
A few years back we were treated to Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Overall, it was a good update, but it did have some faults that did bother Halo fans, from the lack of true Halo 1 multiplayer, to various minor technical issues. It was a good package that served the Halo community well, but at the end of the day it was missing something that made the game special for a lot of players, myself included. Now, with Halo 2: Anniversary, the issues present in Combat Evolved Anniversary are gone and we are treated to an amazing game that is well deserving of it’s $60 price tag.
For a lot of older Halo fans, Halo 2 is considered the pinnacle of their Halo history, as it was the first Halo game to have Xbox Live. However, there is no denying that the campaign was also something special. Yes, the abrupt ending gets me a little mad, but even with that fault it’s still one of my favorite campaigns in the Halo series.
When I first started Halo 2: Anniversary, one of the first things that threw me off was how good the game looked in Classic mode after all these years. It isn’t until you start flipping back and forth between the Classic and Anniversary mode that you will recognize the incredible work Saber Interactive and 343 Industries have done retouching the campaign levels in every facet to make it look like a next-gen title on the Xbox One. There were countless times where I would look into the background scenery or skyboxes of levels, truly amazed at how far the game has come two console generations later.
While the game does look amazing, I do have some gripes regarding the new and improved art direction. At times in the campaign it would be too dark for me to see in Anniversary mode, and I would have to revert to Classic to get my bearings again so I could continue on the levels path. This happened enough in the campaign that it would get annoying at times. Believe me, this wasn’t a TV or settings issue, but a misstep in the art direction. Perhaps 343 could look into some sort of update to fix this, but in it’s current state it did interrupt my experience.
I also experienced a few other technical issues, ranging from audio being out of sync with animations, and AI not behaving properly in scripted dialogue sequences. After a quick checkpoint reset, these bugs seemed to smooth out or go away. I don’t believe these were fluke situations, instead, they were just times the game’s remastered audio or graphics ran into issues. I cannot say that I am surprised when you are running two game engines at the same time, which is no easy feat. These bugs are only minor issues, but again, they stood out enough to draw away from my experience playing the campaign.
To reiterate once again, this is a 10 year old game. A.I. has come pretty far since 2004, so there were situations in the campaign (which I played on Normal) where enemies didn’t notice me at all or responded to combat with mind-numbing reactions. I’m definitely glad they didn’t touch the A.I. in the long run; I wanted to play it how I remembered it, but if you are new to Halo or have become acclimated to recent triple-A franchises in gaming, try to lower your expectations when it comes to Halo 2: Anniversaries combat.
Now, onto the best part of Halo 2: Anniversary campaign, Blur Studios’ cinematics. You’ve probably seen the lifelike screenshots and videos in recent months, and yes, they are that damn incredible. While playing the campaign, I felt like a kid again while watching these; I knew the scenes from playing the campaign for years. It was just amazing to see how well they turned out both visually and audibly. I would love to see future Halo games and projects utilize studios such as Blur to continue creating incredible and immersive cinematic sequences such as these.
As for the remastered soundtrack, the work that Skywalker Sound has done with Marty O’Donnell’s classic pieces is also very well produced. They do sound different enough at times to become noticeable, and I caught myself hanging around levels listening to the re-done work to hear the differences. At the end of the day though, nothing tops Marty O’Donnell’s original score for the Halo 2 soundtrack, and to this day, it still remains my favorite of the Halo soundtracks.
The Halo 2: Anniversary campaign is a treat for any Halo fan, and is an absolute must-play. Being packaged with its new and classic multiplayer, with three other Halo games in their entirety all bundled into one deal, it makes it the best video game bundle since The Orange Box in 2007.
Disclaimer: Unfortunately the multiplayer playlists and matchmaking were not live for The Master Chief Collection as of Thursday night. I felt it would be best not to review the multiplayer as I’ve only played a handful of customs. Expect to hear impressions of the multiplayer from our Staff in the coming weeks.
Discuss Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Halo 2: Anniversary on our forums now!
Halo 2: Anniversary Campaign Review – Written by Ray “CyReN” SmithA Scarborough pastor who mixed God and Mammon fleeced investors of $8.2 million, the Ontario Securities Commission has found.
But while the investors’ money has disappeared, Marlon Gary Hibbert funneled $673,000 to himself and his wife, Verna, and another $483,848 to charities run by him or by family members.
That was in addition to $67,017 that went to “personal expenses, including Visa payments, school fees, hotels and gym memberships.”
“By virtue of Hibbert’s deceptions and untruths, many investors lost their entire investment,” wrote OSC commissioner James D. Carnwath.
“To date, they are owed more than $8.2 million in principal, to say nothing of promised returns of more than $13 million.”
Hibbert was founder of Dominion World Outreach Ministries.
He told investors he was using a web of different companies to trade in foreign exchange and securities.
They had names such as Ashanti Corporate Services, Kabash Resource Management Inc. and Power to Create Wealth Inc. (Panama)
The companies and their supposed investments left a trail of financial devastation in their wake.
There was, for example, T.S. (The commission identifies the victims only by their initials.) She is the mother of two boys. Both are blind, one is autistic. Neither T.S. nor her husband had any background in investing.
She wanted financial security for her oldest son, “who would probably never be able to work.”
T.S. and her husband gave $60,000 to Hibbert in 2007, thinking the money would be used by his firm Power to Create Wealth to trade in foreign currency. The money was from the estate of T.S.’s mother-in-law.
The next year, they got a letter saying the company had moved to Belize and had been renamed Ashanti. “The letter caused some uneasiness for T.S.,” the OSC reported.
In 2009, T.S. asked for some of her money back but was repeatedly put off (though the company claimed her investment had grown to $113,690).
At an investor’s meeting in Scarborough in 2010, Hibbert said he could repay only the principal. The only money T.S. received was about $12,500 in interest payments.
T.S. told the commission “she wanted to put an end to Hibbert living off other people’s money.”
Other victims had more financial savvy.
H.F. was an ordained minister, but had also been an insurance salesman for 25 years.
He was told he’d get 8.5 per cent on his money, and eventually invested $33,000. He never got it back.
He said he was devastated that a pastor would take his money. “I put my money into a man of God’s hand,” H.F. told the commission.
“I never would have done that if he was not counted as a man of God … I think that’s why it’s so painful to all of us.”
Yet another investor lost her house after entrusting money to Hibbert, forcing her to move into a small apartment with her husband and three children.
While using the personal touch with some investors, Hibbert also sought a wider audience.
He also made a video clip for one of his companies, Power to Create Wealth Inc., promising investors an annual return of 79.4 per cent.
Through all this activity, the OSC found, Hibbert has never been registered to trade in securities.
Carnwath minced no words in his judgment.
“Hibbert deceived investors by misappropriating their funds to his own use,” he wrote.
“Hibbert lied to investors by telling them he was successful in trading in foreign exchange.
“He lied to investors by providing monthly statements … which did not reflect actual trading results.
“As a perpetrator of the fraud … Hibbert had subjective awareness that he was acting dishonestly.”
Hibbert couldn’t be tracked down Thursday.
There was no ministry to be found at the address on Midland Ave. listed as the home of Dominion World Outreach Ministry, and the ministry’s phone number was not in service.
The expansive building given as the ministry’s address houses numerous businesses, including a driver’s school, mortgage centre, embroidery shop, sportswear maker and kung fu academy.
The OSC said Hibbert lives at an address in Markham.
Property records show that Marlon Gary Hibbert and Verna Hibbert bought the house at that address in 2006 for $521,116. It was put in Verna’s name alone in 2009.
When reached by phone at the address on Thursday, a woman who did not identify herself refused to comment about the investigation and asked not to be bothered.
Marlon Gary Hibbert is also listed as president of The Life Centre Word of Faith Ministries Inc., with a head office on Victoria Park Ave.
OSC staff say they’re not aware of any criminal charges being laid.
A hearing will take place to determine penalties, but no date has been set.
Calls to the Toronto Police Service financial crimes unit were not returned.
With files from Peter Edwards and Jennifer PagliaroDouble uh oh. That Justice Department investigation into Apple's music practices? It got a bit broader, with word out this weekend that the DOJ is concerned about more than just digital music. |
the information available to our governments and thus make this great change possible.
But if we offer our friendship, who assures us that we will be paid the same way. Many scientists, including the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, believe that alien beings could pose a threat and suggest doing everything possible to prevent contact.
If alien beings were aggressive, warlike, come here … Is resistance going to be useless? How does life escape from planet Earth? Easy … an epidemic! Simple, no UFOs, no lethality from the sky, no explosions, nothing of all this, we can do this because the aliens could not. To think that we will be able to elaborate a defense mechanism, or to have defenses against companies traveling in interstellar space, it’s ridiculous!
Whether they are friends or enemies, if extraterrestrials landed somewhere in the United States, it is possible that they will be welcomed by the government, or by military personnel wearing protective clothing, in search of harmful pathogens and radiations. And then everything would come … again … SECRETED!
Roswell, the origin of everything? Original article by Alessandro Brizzi.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
To open the video click on the image, good view from your Alessandro Brizzi.
Like this: Like Loading...People flood into local gun stores before lawmakers vote on stricter gun laws. (Published Tuesday, April 2, 2013)
New Gun Laws Vote is Good for Business
Today, Connecticut lawmakers plan to vote on possible new gun control laws that could be some of the toughest in the country.
This was a big concern for gun owners, and thousands of them rushed to gun stores to stock up on guns and ammunition that could soon be illegal.
“They’re insane, I’ve never seen them so busy before,” said Shari Reilly
She bought high-capacity magazines at three different stores, from Norwalk to Newington, and she was irate over the possible changes.
“Beyond words, I’ve been calling and emailing all my representatives,” Reilly said.
State lawmakers could vote to ban those magazines sometime on Wednesday.
Reilly said she depends on those magazines to protect her family.
“I don't train for someone who is breaking into my house. If I miss, am I stuck because you limit me to seven rounds or 10 rounds?" she wondered.
Gun stores did everything they could to sell the weapons that many legislators want to ban.
“Oh yeah, they're livid,” Reilly said.
The proposed gun laws include immediate background checks for all gun sales and a expanded assault weapons ban. Magazines over 10 rounds would be banned too and every magazine will need to be registered.
“It’s about time we have some practical legislation that reduces the amount of damage that could be done in our communities,” said Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra. a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
He backs the plan, especially after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the recent violence in his city.
Gun advocates disagree and think the possible gun ban is beyond unfair.
“When you clamp down where basically everything is restricted, it feels like you’re infringing on second amendment rights,” Shari Reilly explained.
Lawmakers plan to vote on this tomorrow. If passed, the Governor will have to sign the bill into law.
Malloy has said if the bill passes, he will sign it.Among the few saving graces of the New York Court of Appeals was its stand-alone protection of constitutional rights. Not that it was some long-haired hippie throw-back to the Warren Court, but that there was a long tradition of the top court refusing to trot in lock-step with the United States Supreme Court when it came to finding novel excuses to ignore the Bill of Rights, or the local flavor, Article I, § 12 of the New York Constitution.
Say bah-bye, as the Court of Appeals, in an opinion by one of its newest judges, Leslie Stein, capitulated to one of the most doctrinally bizarre and incomprehensible decisions ever issued by the Supremes, Heien v. North Carolina. So much for New York protecting constitutional rights. So much for New York defending its own Constitution. And reason? Be damned.
Lest anyone forget the brilliance of Heien, the Supreme Court held that a police officer can possess probable cause not only for a mistake of fact, which is disturbing enough, but for a “reasonable” mistake of law.
The phrase “objectively reasonable” is a rhetorical device to soothe the fevered brow, as its incantation elevates the cop’s screw-up to a special plane, when it means nothing more than a judge, who will rule as a proxy for the objectively reasonable person, says, “meh, I guess anybody could make that mistake. Law is hard. Law is confusing. Can we really expect police to know the law they are charged to enforce?” Yes. We can.
Or, more accurately, yes, we could, but not after People v. Guthrie, in which the Court found it objectively reasonable that a village cop didn’t know which stop signs were lawful within his own village, because it’s so very, very hard for police to know the details of the laws of the tiny village (population: 9,145) they’re expected to enforce.
In a peculiarly crafty move, the Court of Appeals tries to create the appearance that this isn’t a monumental swing away from black letter doctrine and its once-admired embrace of reason by referring to a 2008 opinion, People v. Estrella, which said…well, since it’s only one substantive paragraph long, here’s the decision in its entirety:
The courts below did not err in declining to suppress the cocaine recovered from the defendant’s car. The record supports the finding that the officer who stopped the car reasonably believed the windows to be over-tinted in violation of Vehicle and Traffic Law § 375 (12-a) (b) (3). The officer was not chargeable with knowledge that the tinting was legal in Georgia, where the car was registered.
Boom. The case addressed whether a New York police officer was charged with knowledge of Georgia law, and concluded he was not. Some, lawyers for instance, would find it remarkably easy to distinguish the duty of a police officer to know, or at least be charged with the knowledge of, the laws he is authorized to enforce from the laws of every foreign jurisdiction. No sweat.
But not the Court of Appeals, which ironically (and gymnastically) went on for pages discussing the significance of the one substantive paragraph decision of Estrella. It’s hard work contorting a simple decision into one undermining a state’s traditional jurisprudence.
Similarly here, we are not saying that it would have been objectively reasonable for the arresting officer to have claimed ignorance of the requirement in Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1100 (b) that a stop sign in a parking lot be registered to be valid. We are saying that the stop was nonetheless constitutionally justified because the officer was not chargeable with knowing each and every stop sign that was registered under the Newark Village Code.
Each and every stop sign? All ten of them? All 100 of them? Isn’t that precisely what he’s expected to know, given that he’s got a gun and might shoot to kill someone in the course of a stop? This is way too much of a burden for cops?
As pointed out by Judge Jenny Rivera in dissent, the Guthrie decision, like Heien, provides no incentive for police to, you know, know the law they’re paid to enforce. “Meh,” says Judge Stein:
Contrary to the dissent’s concerns that our refusal to expand the mistake of fact/mistake of law distinction to the context of traffic stops provides a disincentive for police officers to know the law (Dissent Op at 7-8), a rule that even objectively reasonable mistakes of law cannot provide a basis for a traffic stop would do little to protect the rights of the accused or encourage officers to better learn the law (see generally Robinson, 97 NY2d at 351). As the Supreme Court explained, the requirement that the mistake be objectively reasonable prevents officers from “gain[ing any] Fourth Amendment advantage through a sloppy study of the laws [they are] duty-bound to enforce” (Heien, 135 S Ct at 539-540).
Because the Supreme Court said so is not an argument based on logic, guys, but an appeal to authority. But as long as the Court of Appeals is abandoning any pretense of offering a rational basis for its ruling, beyond Heien said so, the final insult is its punt on why “ignorance of the law” is no excuse for you, but a complete defense for cops:
Finally, there is no unfairness in forgiving a police officer’s objectively reasonable mistake of law while refusing to allow an individual to “escape criminal liability based on a mistaken understanding of the law” (Heien, 135 S Ct at 540). Neither the Supreme Court nor this Court have held that “the government can[] impose criminal liability based on a mistaken understanding of the law;” rather, “just because mistakes of law cannot justify either the imposition or the avoidance of criminal liability, it does not follow that they cannot justify an
investigatory stop” (id.).
Well, there ya go. “It does not follow,” because... (id.). The vapidity of this decision, more than being facially transparent from the Court’s exhaustive discussion of a one-paragraph opinion in a laughably distinguishable case, is an embrace of the nightmarishly dismissive Supreme Court decision in Heien, that substitutes the “close enough” of horseshoes for the rigorous demands of law.
As Judge Rivera notes:
Society relies on police officers to enforce laws based on what the laws say, not on an officer’s mistaken belief. Excusing an officer’s mistake of law removes an incentive to learning the law. While the realities of police work rightly justify tolerance of an officer’s mistake of fact, there is no similar basis to accept or excuse an officer’s error regarding what the law permits and forbids. *** Since police are entrusted with authority to safeguard all members of our society, we should not adopt a rule that rewards an error concerning the legitimacy of the officer’s exercise of such power.
But that, of course, was back when a citizens’ constitutional right to be left alone was valued more highly than a cop’s right to be ignorant of the laws of the jurisdiction that paid his salary and which he was authorized to enforce. The dissent argues:
We expect an officer to know the law of this state with precision because that law is the source
of the officer’s authority.
Apparently, it’s just too hard to expect cops to exercise their power based on what the law actually says, and instead they deserve a New York tummy rub for doing their job based on the law’s feelz. After all, they have a shield, gun and bullets, and it’s just too much of a burden to demand they only use them consistent with their precise lawful authority.KISS'Gene Simmons recently made headlines for declaring the death of rock 'n' roll in an interview with his son Nick for Esquire Magazine. But while his reasoning and point were well thought out, there have been some dissenters. One of those is Foo Fighters, who weighed in on Simmons' declaration with a tweet.
To refresh, Simmons stated, "Rock did not die of old age. It was murdered. Some brilliance, somewhere, was going to be expressed and now it won't because it's that much harder to earn a living playing and writing songs. No one will pay you to do it."
Simmons added, "'Don’t quit your day job' is a good piece of advice. When I was coming up, it was not an insurmountable mountain. Once you had a record company on your side, they would fund you, and that also meant when you toured they would give you tour support. There are still record companies, and it does apply to pop, rap, and country to an extent. But for performers who are also songwriters — the creators — for rock music, for soul, for the blues — it’s finally dead. Rock is finally dead.”
As for Foo Fighters, they simply responded to the comment with the following tweet, saying "not so fast" to the God of Thunder:
Foo Fighters have been doing their best to keep rock alive, championing the cause at more pop dominated award ceremonies, addressing some of the things that to kill the spirit of rock in online commentary and even dedicating their latest album and HBO series to exploring some of the great music scenes of America.
The band's 'Sonic Highways' album arrives Nov. 10, with the HBO series preceding it on Oct. 17. The group just teased three intimate U.K. club dates this week to coincide with their larger performance at London's Invictus Games' closing ceremony. Foo Fighters are also booked for Las Vegas' Life Is Beautiful festival Oct. 26 and New Orleans' Voodoo Music + Arts Experience on Nov. 2.In the summer Shakespeare course I’m teaching now, I’m constantly working to figure out what my students are able to do and how they can develop. Can they grasp the contours of Shakespeare’s plots? If not, it’s worth adding a well-made film version of the next play to the syllabus. Is the language hard for them, line to line? Then we have to spend more time going over individual speeches word by word. Are they adept at understanding the plot and the language? Time to introduce them to the complexities of Shakespeare’s rendering of character.
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. There is the basic melody that you work with. It is defined by the syllabus. But there is also a considerable measure of improvisation against that disciplining background.
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Something similar applies even to larger courses. We tend to think that the spellbinding lecturers we had in college survey classes were gifted actors who could strut and fret 50 amazing minutes on the stage. But I think that the best of those lecturers are highly adept at reading their audiences. They use practical means to do this — tests and quizzes, papers and evaluations. But they also deploy something tantamount to artistry. They are superb at sensing the mood of a room. They have a sort of pedagogical sixth sense. They feel it when the class is engaged and when it slips off. And they do something about it. Their every joke is a sounding. It’s a way of discerning who is out there on a given day.
A large lecture class can also create genuine intellectual community. Students will always be running across others who are also enrolled, and they’ll break the ice with a chat about it and maybe they’ll go on from there. When a teacher hears a student say, “My friends and I are always arguing about your class,” he knows he’s doing something right. From there he folds what he has learned into his teaching, adjusting his course in a fluid and immediate way that the Internet professor cannot easily match.
Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn’t matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.
Not long ago I watched a pre-filmed online course from Yale about the New Testament. It was a very good course. The instructor was hyper-intelligent, learned and splendidly articulate. But the course wasn’t great and could never have been. There were Yale students on hand for the filming, but the class seemed addressed to no one in particular. It had an anonymous quality. In fact there was nothing you could get from that course that you couldn’t get from a good book on the subject.
A truly memorable college class, even a large one, is a collaboration between teacher and students. It’s a one-time-only event. Learning at its best is a collective enterprise, something we’ve known since Socrates. You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.Up to 15 orbital launches are set to take place during a very busy December, not counting the opening mission of the month that resulted in the loss of the Progress MS-04 cargo ship that was set to dock with the ISS over the weekend. This month is likely to include the highly anticipated return to flight of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Busy December:
The month began with a failure on December 1, as a Soyuz U rocket tasked with lofting the Progress MS-04 resupply ship to the International Space Station (ISS) suffered an unspecified fault during third stage flight, 382 seconds into the ascent.
The anomaly resulted in an early shutdown of the stage. However, the Progress did separate from the stage and even deployed its KURS antenna – as planned – but was not inserted into the required orbital parameters, resulting in the craft being dragged back to Earth for a destructive end to its short life in space.
The Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos, has already deployed a State Commission-level investigation.
On December 5, the next launch involved Arianespace’s Vega rocket out of French Guiana. Launch occurred at 13:51 UTC.
Designated VV08 in Arianespace’s launcher family numbering system, Vega was tasked with the launch of the Göktürk-1A observation satellite.
The mission – to deploy what will be Turkey’s first governmental satellite for Earth observation – took 57 minutes, with Vega placing its passenger into a Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of approximately 700 km. The Launch Readiness Review (LRR) was passed on Friday.
Two launches are on the cards for December 7, opening with an ISRO launch of its PSLV-XL rocket at 04:54 UTC.
The Indian rocket is set to launch the Resourcesat 2A satellite – which is cited to be the only passenger, although a graphic of the spacecraft within the fairing suggests several CubeSats may riding uphill with the primary payload.
Focus will switch to the United States later in the day, as the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV prepares to loft the eighth Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS-8) mission for the U.S. Air Force.
The launch is set to take place from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-37B, with the window opening at 23:53 UTC – with the flow receiving a boost via the milestone of a Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) that took place last month.
WGS-8 will mark ULA’s 70th national security launch since the company was founded 10 years ago. This will be the sixth flight in the Delta IV in her Medium+ (5,4) configuration – which has been the set up for all WGS missions conducted so far by ULA.
Two days later, launch action moves to Japan.
With additional focus due to the loss of the recent Progress vehicle, the Japanese will launch the latest HTV resupply vehicle to the International Space Station (ISS), following several delays to its launch date.
HTV-6’s launch was set to take place in early October. However, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) decided to postpone the launch after a leak was found during processing on the cargo vehicle.
Those issues appear to be behind them as the December 9 launch date was confirmed, with a T-0 at the iconic Tanegashima Space Center set for 13:26 UTC.
This mission is vitally important to the orbital outpost as it will include six lithium-ion batteries that will replace 12 aging nickel-hydrogen power packs.
While HTV-8 is in orbit chasing down the ISS, the Chinese are set to launch its Long March 3B with the first meteorological satellite in the Fengyun-4 series.
The December 11 mission will set sail from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, although a T-0 won’t – as per usual with the Chinese – be known until closer to the launch date, usually when the NOTAMs are released.
The following day will see the welcome return of Orbital ATK’s Pegasus rocket.
The launch of NASA’s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) spacecraft is scheduled for a window that opens at 13:19 on December 12.
Being an air-launch vehicle, Pegasus will be carried under the belly of the Stargazer L-1011 aircraft, with the duo conducting their first leg when they took off from California and arrived at Cape Canaveral on Friday.
CYGNSS will produce measurements of ocean surface winds throughout the life cycle of tropical storms and hurricanes, which could help lead to better forecasting of severe weather on Earth. The mission, led by the University of Michigan, will use a constellation of eight small satellites.
*Click here for a full global launch manifest*
December 16 is arguably the flagship day of the month, with two rockets with large fanbases set to launch from opposite ends of the United States.
First up will be ULA’s Atlas V, tasked with the commercial launch of the EchoStar 19 spacecraft.
Launch from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-41 is scheduled to take place within a window that opens at 18:22 UTC. Atlas V will be launching in her 431 configuration, with the tail number AV-071.
EchoStar XIX will be the world’s highest capacity broadband satellite, dramatically increasing capacity for internet service in North America. EchoStar XIX will join EchoStar XVII and SPACEWAY 3 for HughesNet.
This launch will be Atlas V – and ULA’s – final launch of what has been another successful year.
Potentially notable is the length of the launch window, which is set to close at 20:22 UTC, just 14 minutes from the opening of the launch window for the next mission of the day.
That will involve the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for the first time since the stand down relating to the loss of the rocket during a Static Fire test on September 1.
While the launch of the Iridium NEXT mission has been provided with a December 16 launch date, with a T-0 of 20:36 UTC, the schedule is dependent on the closure of the investigation relating to the Static Fire accident that claimed the lives of the Falcon 9 and her AMOS-6 passenger.
The announcement of the launch date provides some confidence that green light from the FAA is imminent. Both the spacecraft and launch vehicle are at the Vandenberg launch site and are undergoing processing to be ready for the mid-December target.
Indeed, SpaceX is also thinking ahead, with the next Falcon 9 now on a road trip to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for what is currently expected to be a NET (No Earlier Than) January 8 launch date of the EchoStar 23 satellite.
Two more launches from Asia will follow the Iridium launch, should schedules hold.
The first will involve the Chinese launching its Long March 2D rocket on December 19, set to launch with the TanSat (CarbonSat) satellite from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. As the name of the satellite suggests, the spacecraft is involved in a new carbon monitoring mission that will involve international cooperation.
This will be followed by a Japanese launch of its Epsilon rocket from the Uchinoura Space Center. The December 20th launch has a T-0 of 11:00 UTC.
The Exploration of energization and Radiation in Geospace (ERG) spacecraft will orbit Earth at distances ranging from 30,000 km (19,000 mi) to 300 km (190 mi) above the Earth – tasked with a mission to study the Van Allen Belts.
Arianespace will conclude their hugely successful year with an Ariane 5 ECA dual-payload launch out of the Kourou Space Center.
Also launching on December 20, with a launch window ranging between 20:30 to 21:45 UTC, this mission is designated Flight VA234 in Arianespace’s launch family numbering system.
The mission involves JCSAT-15, the third SSL-built satellite for SKY Perfect JSAT to launch this year. This bird is a 10-kW satellite that will replace the N-SAT-110 satellite which is currently located at 110 degrees East longitude.
The second passenger is Star One D1, the largest satellite ever built for Brazil’s Embratel Star One, and is to be positioned at 84 degrees West for a planned operational lifetime of 15 years.
International Launch Services (ILS) will join the end of year party with a launch of the Russian workhorse, Proton M.
The December 22 mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan involves the Proton M and Breeze M combination providing the ride uphill for the EchoStar 21 spacecraft. T-0 for this mission is 16:26 UTC.
The launch of this spacecraft – formerly known as Terrestar-2 – will end a long wait for this bird to finally reach space.
Another three launches may also take place before the year is out, with the Chinese currently showing a December 26 launch target for its Long March 2D to launch Gaojing-1 and 2 (SuperView-1 and 2), potentially followed by a Kuaizhou-1A rocket out of Jiuquan with several unidentified satellites and then a Japanese SS-520 rocket with the TRICOM-1 (3U CubeSat) mission, which is still classed as late December – albeit subject to change.
(Images via ULA, JAXA, SpaceX, ILS, Arianespace, Orbital ATK and CNSA).Introduction
Florida energy magnate William Koch in April 2013. Larry Neumeister/AP
Billionaire businessman William Koch once operated green energy plants on multiple continents and had a reputation for being more politically moderate than his better-known brothers, Charles and David — the principal owners of Koch Industries, Inc.
But William now rejects the “apocalypse of global warming.” He says investing in alternative energy is “foolhardy.” And ahead of the 2012 election, he criticized President Barack Obama for trying to “socialize” the country.
Koch is putting his fortune where his mouth is and is also using his companies’ funds to do so. He has spent millions of dollars to aid politicians he sees as more business-friendly and to fight the Obama administration’s moves to combat climate change, which could mean costly new regulations for Koch’s expansive Oxbow Carbon LLC business network.
Unlike his brothers who have favored politically active nonprofits as their vehicles of choice to back conservative causes, William Koch has poured resources into super PACs, with millions of dollars coming straight from the corporate treasuries of his firms. Meanwhile, donations from his company’s traditional political action committee are at an all-time high — as are Oxbow’s lobbying expenditures.
“Energy companies see a threat to their bottom line and they are taking action,” political analyst Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics told the Center for Public Integrity. “Whatever way they can influence the process, that’s what they’re going to do.”
At the vanguard
Very few large companies took advantage of the more liberal campaign finance system that emerged following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010 the way Koch’s Oxbow Carbon LLC did.
The decision allowed corporations to use treasury funds to pay for expenditures that call for the election or defeat of a candidates — or give them to intermediaries, like super PACs.
In 2012, Oxbow was at the vanguard, contributing millions to Republican super PACs — more than nearly any other company. Oxbow, along with Huron Carbon LLC, another of Koch’s companies, contributed $4.35 million to GOP super PACs, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal records.
The vast majority of that sum — $3.75 million — went to Restore Our Future, the main super PAC supporting Republican Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful presidential bid. Meanwhile, $500,000 went to a group that backed former Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., known as the America 360 Committee.
Another $100,000 went to a Florida-based organization called Freedom PAC, which spent money on behalf of then-Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Connie Mack IV.
Through Oxbow spokesman Brad Goldstein, Koch declined an interview for this story. But earlier this year, Koch told Massachusetts-based CommonWealth magazine that “a lot of our business is influenced regularly by government, too damn much by government. And so we have to play in that game.”
In 2011, Goldstein told The Village Voice that the Obama administration “has made it extremely difficult for businesses to operate.” Koch himself used even stronger language in a 2012 interview with the Cape Cod Times. “I think Obama’s trying to socialize this country,” he said.
Koch also argued to CommonWealth that the renewable energy industry is only profitable when big government gets involved: “The alternative energy business is uneconomical unless you get a government subsidy or a government-enforced contract,” he said.
Political giving by William Koch and his companies By Chris Zubak-Skees
Oxbow Carbon LLC
$3.4m Oxbow Carbon LLC America 360 Committee
$550,000 America 360 Committee Freedom PAC
$100,000 Freedom PAC Huron Carbon LLC
$1m Huron Carbon LLC William Koch
$1.6m William Koch Oxbow Carbon and Minerals
$5,000 Oxbow Carbon and Minerals Oxbow Power Corporation
$55,000 Oxbow Power Corporation Oxbow Carbon and Minerals PAC
$215,700 Oxbow Carbon and Minerals PAC Democratic Candidates & Groups
$829,200 Democratic Candidates & Groups Treasure Coast Jobs Coalition
$100,000 Treasure Coast Jobs Coalition Restore Our Future
$4m Restore Our Future Republican Candidates & Groups
$634,500 Republican Candidates & Groups $2.8m $1m $743,300 $500,000 $404,700 $250,000 During the 2012 election cycle, Koch’s support for the GOP surged. Prior to that, nearly two-thirds of his giving benefited Democrats. Source: Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission and Center for Responsive Politics, from January 1989 through June 2013.
Florida-based empire
Oxbow Carbon LLC, which is described in government records as the “holding company for all Oxbow business,” has interests in natural gas, coal, petroleum coke and sulfur, among other natural resources. (Petroleum coke is a byproduct of oil refining, which is used to manufacture steel and aluminum, and Oxbow is one of the leading companies in the industry.)
Its corporate headquarters are in Palm Beach, Fla., but its operations span the globe. Including its subsidiaries and related companies, Oxbow’s annual sales exceed $4 billion, and it employs more than 1,000 workers worldwide.
A related company, Oxbow Mining LLC, owns and operates the Elk Creek coal mine in Colorado. And another Koch company, Oxbow Carbon and Minerals LLC, has sold significant amounts of coal over the years to both the U.S. Department of Defense and Tennessee Valley Authority.
This relationship prompted controversy when Koch’s companies began giving millions of dollars to GOP super PACs, as federal contractors are prohibited from making such donations.
When the Los Angeles Times raised questions about the contribution ban faced by federal contractors, Goldstein, the Oxbow spokesman, maintained that Koch’s companies were on the right side of the law.
“I can say without equivocation that Oxbow Carbon LLC is not a federal contractor,” Goldstein wrote in an email to the Times.
In this 2001 image, some of the past skippers of the America’s Cup yachts, with the trophy, William Koch is second from the right. Martyn Hayhow/AP
William Koch shows his art collection on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2005. Chitose Suzuki/AP
Billy the Kid and Katy Perry
Koch, who is the 92nd-richest person in the United States according to Forbes, is Oxbow Carbon LLC’s founder, president and chief executive officer. While he may not have the same profile in political circles as his brothers — who are tied for fourth among the richest Americans according to Forbes — he’s arguably more colorful.
The 73-year-old chemical engineer earned a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an avid collector of art, fine wine and Western memorabilia. He once paid $2.3 million at an auction for the only verified photograph of frontier outlaw Billy the Kid.
In 1992, Koch won the America’s Cup, the highest honor in sailing, and he has been awarded the title of honorary admiral in the state navies of Kansas, Nebraska and Alabama. Last year, for his wife’s 50th birthday party, he hired pop star Katy Perry to perform for a private party at their Palm Beach house.
Additionally, Koch has moved a ghost town he purchased to property he owns outside of Aspen, Colo. For years, he has been pushing for a land exchange with the federal government that would secure even more privacy for the family and guests he plans to entertain there. He recently founded a college preparatory school called the Oxbridge Academy of the Palm Beaches. And he has spent millions of dollars opposing a wind farm project off the shore of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod, where he also has a home.
In 1980, Koch narrowly failed in a bid to win control of the family oil business, which had been established by his father in Kansas in the 1920s. A few years later, he sold his stake and started his own energy corporation. But he later charged that he had been underpaid and brought a series of lawsuits against Koch Industries and his two brothers, beginning in 1984.
Fortune called the struggle “perhaps the nastiest family feud in American business history.” The last court case was settled in 2001, but in a 2012 interview with Forbes, Charles Koch still declined to refer to William by name.
That year, Forbes ranked Koch Industries the second-largest privately held company in the U.S., while William Koch’s Oxbow ranked 96th, as it pumped millions into the nascent GOP super PACs.
Ahead of the 2012 election, Koch, himself, personally donated $400,000 split between three Republican-aligned super PACs, including $250,000 to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future.
But Koch hasn’t always been so enthralled with the GOP. For years, he backed Democrats as often as Republicans.
Not including his recent super PAC donations, Koch has contributed more than $1 million to federal candidates, parties and political action committees since the 1990 election cycle, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of data maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Of that sum, nearly two-thirds went to Democrats, including $400,000 to the Democratic Party of Kansas during the tail end of Bill Clinton’s presidency when “soft money” donations of unlimited size to parties were legal.
Lobbying expenditures by William Koch’s companies Source: Senate Office of Public Records, includes expenditures by Oxbow Carbon LLC and Oxbow Carbon and Minerals LLC; 2013 figure reflects total lobbying through June 30.
Lobby shop headed by former Cheney aide
Oxbow Carbon LLC maintains an office in downtown Washington, D.C., in a building along Pennsylvania Avenue about halfway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House. From there, Karen Knutson — who served as the deputy director of Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive energy task force during the Bush administration — leads its lobbying operation.
Knutson, who did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story, is also a former chief of staff for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska — the ranking Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Two other lobbyists who have passed through the revolving door between government and industry appear in Oxbow’s most recent filings: Caroline Martin Szeremeta, who once was a legislative aide to former Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.; and Kathleen O’Connor, who served in the White House’s office of legislative affairs under President George W. Bush and whose Capitol Hill work experience included a stint as an aide to former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.
In addition to its in-house lobbyists, Oxbow retains the lobbying services of Heather Podesta & Partners, including the firm’s namesake, Heather Podesta, one of D.C.’s most recognizable lobbyists.
Last year, Oxbow spent $1.6 million on lobbying — a record for the company. That’s up from $510,000 in 2011, and up from $30,000 in 2009, the year Obama took office. This year, it is on pace to again post some of its highest totals.
During the first half of 2013 alone, Oxbow spent $620,000 lobbying Congress and the Department of Interior on a range of business concerns. Among them: Koch’s desired land swap in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, as well as proposals related to greenhouse gas regulations, coal leasing on federal lands, fracking and tax reform proposals affecting the energy industry, according to federal records.
Donations by Oxbow Carbon and Minerals PAC Source: Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission reports of political action committee contributions to federal candidates and committees; 2013-2014 figures reflect donations made through June 30.
PAC also leans right
While Koch’s companies were at the forefront of super PAC activity following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, they only recently began giving money through traditional political action committees. Traditional PACs, unlike super PACs, are limited in what they can raise, but they may donate directly to candidates’ campaigns.
Oxbow Carbon LLC itself does not sponsor a political action committee, but Koch’s Oxbow Carbon and Minerals LLC does, having established a corporate PAC in 2007. Since then, it has been extremely active.
During the 2012 election cycle, the PAC doled out $112,000 to candidates and committees, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of federal records — that’s more than twice as much as it gave to politicians before the 2010 midterms and about seven times as much |
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